Chapter 26
The Seventh
Professor Vael â€" she told him to call her that, not Professor Shae, Vael
was the name people who knew her used â€" talked for two hours.
He listened to all of it.
The six Patron Saints, she explained, had given humanity mana as a
structured gift. Each Saint had a domain â€" fire, ice, earth, wind,
light, shadow â€" and the school of magic associated with each domain drew
from that Saint's essence. This was the official account, taught in
History of the Saints to every Academy student in their first year.
What the official account omitted was the seventh.
There had been a seventh being present when mana was given to humanity.
Not a Saint â€" never called a Saint, not by the records that remained,
not by anything. Just the Seventh. Its domain was not an element in the
way the six domains were elements. Its domain was consumption. The
taking in of what existed and the changing of it into something else.
'Every ecological system has something that consumes,' Vael said.
'Something that takes what has ended and returns it to the cycle. The
Seventh was that â€" at a cosmic level. Not evil. Not good. Functional.
The part of the system that processed endings.'
'Why was it suppressed?' Cyan asked.
She paused. 'The official account â€" the one that's not in any textbook,
the one that exists only in the most restricted pre-Saint records â€" is
that the Seventh's domain was incompatible with a stable civilization.
Consumption of what has ended tends to blur into consumption of what
hasn't ended yet. The boundaries are difficult to maintain.'
'That's the official account.'
'Yes.' She looked at him steadily. 'The unofficial account â€" what I've
pieced together from fragments across twenty years â€" is different. The
Six Saints built a civilization on the basis of their gift. A
civilization needs continuity. It needs things to persist. It needs the
powerful to stay powerful and the systems to stay stable.' She folded
her hands. 'The Seventh's domain was an existential threat to that. Not
because it was malicious. Because it was â€" is â€" the thing that ends what
should end. And powerful, persistent systems often should end. They just
prefer not to.'
Cyan sat with that.
'The Umbros school,' he said.
'Was the human version of the Seventh's domain,' she said. 'The school
that worked with absence rather than presence. With void rather than
substance. Umbros mages couldn't generate mana the way other schools
could â€" they worked with the absence of mana, with the spaces between
sources, with the thing that existed where mana wasn't.' She paused.
'The most developed Umbros practitioners could do what you do. Draw from
active sources. Consume active mana rather than working with passive
absence.'
'Could they control it?'
'The ones who trained, yes. Eventually.' She met his eyes. 'You haven't
trained. You've been managing it by instinct, which is impressive and
also extremely dangerous. The students around you are constantly losing
small amounts of their mana reserves without knowing why. The
enchantments in this building are running slightly below capacity.' A
beat. 'You are a drain. You have been since at least the dungeon
collapse, and possibly before.'
He'd known this. Hearing it stated plainly was different from knowing
it.
'What happened in the dungeon,' he said.
'The Mark activated,' she said simply. 'Whatever the Seventh left behind
â€" the mechanism through which it expressed its domain in a mortal vessel
â€" it imprinted on you in that dungeon. The concentration of failing
dungeon mana triggered it.' She looked at his covered hand. 'The seven
lines. The pattern. That's not random. That pattern appears in pre-Saint
ruins in the Verdant Expanse. It's the Seventh's signature.'
The room was very quiet.
'What am I?' Cyan said. Not the way he'd asked it before, lying in the
dark of the boarding house. Actually asking. Someone who might know.
Vael looked at him for a long moment.
'I think you're a vessel,' she said. 'Something the Seventh prepared â€"
or left behind, or transmitted across time â€" before it was suppressed. A
continuation.' She paused. 'I want to be honest with you: I don't know
everything this means. I know what the texts say, and the texts are
incomplete, and they were written by people who were afraid.' She held
his gaze. 'What I believe is that whatever you are, it isn't what they
were afraid of. But I also believe you're going to need to understand it
before someone who is afraid of it finds out you exist.'
He looked at the bookshelf behind her. He looked at the books with their
spines intact, their titles legible, their contents accessible.
He thought about seven untitled books and one of them in fragments.
'Teach me,' he said.