The first time is always a lie. I was warned by my mentor. He knew better than to lie to me.
The Dark is not malleable and the Light is not always present. The ever-glow fades along the splines of the fractal diffusions of beams and the absences alike. Among the beams, structured like pillars of a god’s imagination, the Light does not shift like the Dark does. One is trained to remember that darkness is only an absence of light, but that too, is a lie.
It breathes. It has form, it has function. It insinuates itself into everything; it slithers. The Dark has speed. The Dark has mass. The Dark exerts its force on all the objects of creation, saying no, you may not exist here, you may not be so close to us. Your proximity is not possible.
For in all our great competition, the Light binds us. It pulls us together across those vast distances. Light is the source of life, of dreams, of all the things that ever have been and ever will be. It is the source of your imagination on your distant planet, as it is for me, undergoing the Trial of the Illumin.
So the first time one tries to manipulate beyond the ever-present glow, the wellspring of Light, the first time one pulls on its threads to form something new, we expect this magical experience to be brought into being. One moment nothing, the next, your purpose, glorious and unbound. But as a result, you discover what the Dark is. The Light shutters and splits, your fingers and mind’s eye pulling them apart, watching the fractals twist away from your grasp, like water splashing around the fount of a dam’s release, furious and rushing. And behind it, the Dark comes. It slides in behind the power of the Light being wrested through the power of your action, and it fills the gaps.
The absence of Light allows the Other to come. Every protégé that attempts the forming meets some semblance of the Other. Some are terrified by the brush of its presence, others are humbled, and others still go mad by the touch and collapse into themselves like dying stars.
I expected the Other to witness my power and allow my forming, but my mentor could not prepare me. How could he? Every experience is at once shared among the many of us that succeed, but at the same time, unique for each of us. You may go mad, but will lose your eyesight? You may be terrified, but will you suffer from sleep terrors for the rest of your life? You may be humbled, but does that mean that your forming is less potent? I discarded these thoughts and assured myself that I would be different. Because I was better, smarter, more determined than the other acolytes.
Another lie.
I had finally perfected my presence and control. So I felt justified in my confidence. Did I consider that I may just be arrogant? Full of bluster that was wholly unwarranted? I did, but only for a moment. I worked hard for this.
I stood upon the central dais, bathed in the light of the morning sun flowing through the east windows. I nodded once at my mentor and his mentor before him and followed the protocols to in acknowledging the committee of Elders and my lackluster peers in turn. I steadied myself with a deep breath and began to form. I infused my will into the space before me, bearing the power to exist between my palms, feeling the light suffuse and shift between the creases of my skin. The light became alive as it was gathered, and I culminated to the forming, where I could impart my will within it, creating nearly anything that I could imagine. As an Illumin, I knew that I could craft nearly anything at this moment. It was what came next that all had gathered to witness in the Gathering Ampitheatre. Each person within would ask themselves, will this Acolyte shatter under the stress of mastering the Art? Or would something unexpected happen? Something rare?
I took my breath in deeply, steeling myself for what came next. I knew the lesson. So many acolytes were told that the Light merely parted and behind it was the veil of the universe, nothing more. Again, that was a lie. My master knew what came after. The pain. With the pull of the Light, the parting of the curtain, one could observe all of creation and be brought to your lowest form, a basic speck of nothingness against the overwhelming crush of everything. The masters stood by to save you. That was their real purpose in being a witness, to pluck the speck from the crush and allow them another day, another try in the future.
They did not want an Illumin to die. This was not the old ages, the time before where Illumin were warriors among many tribes, and those that came and tested the Dark were allowed to die if they were not strong enough. Nor was it a time of war, where so many were lost in the tribulation against the Shallow. Every Illumin mattered, no matter their skill or ability.
I could feel their eyes on me.
They would be asking themselves, ‘What would happen to Arin? Arin, who had struggled so much at the beginning, fighting for progress every step of the way, learning every skill with dedication and hard work, but never finding anything easy, and yet still an insufferable ass? Will he succeed when he had struggled so?’
I was not a savant at the craft, and every win was dearly fought for. But in this, I had excelled. My peers would stumble or come short, but I would meet each new obstacle as I had met the first, and the challenge would be what it was the first time. I would scale it, cross it, and then dismiss it behind me. My mentor had realized early on that I was both the least talented and the hardest working, and that meant I was also the steadiest. I knew I was and I reminded myself of it again. This was it. The moment the Light would part in my greatest act of Forming, and the Other would reveal itself to me. I was the greatest Illumin that had ever been, not because of any latent talent, but because I had tirelessly worked for it.
But I knew who I was. At least I thought I did.
I was wrong.
The power was suffused fully within my palms, and I could feel the criticality pulsate in my pores, the reverberation of the light ready to be worked. I pushed my will between the waves of light, and pulled them apart as if I was pulling curtains asunder, ripping them aside in a foolish rush to witness what was beyond.
The light… one moment… light, the next…
“…Arin.”
The voice was my own. I could hear it in my own ears. I panicked thinking I had said my own name, and I clamped my mouth shut so that I would not follow a path to madness.
“I am Arin,” the voice repeated.
Again it was my own, but my teeth were sunk into my lips, so I knew I had said nothing. I wanted to let my eyes dart towards my mentor, but I knew that they would not see me. I was in the dark.
By the Creator, I was in the Dark!
“…am Arin.”
“I am Arin,” I replied, loosing my lips, feeling the blood rush back to where I had clamped down.
“As am I,” the voice replied. Still my own, there was no mistaking it for someone else’s. I knew my own voice as I knew my own face.
“How can you be me?” I tested.
“How can you ask irrelevant questions?” It immediately shot back. There was no malice, no ill intent. It was a patient voice, one filled with the aspects of waiting to see where this interaction led. The timbre and intonation was my own, as if it was my voice.
I wished I had some perspective. Where was I? How long had I been gone? Had I already failed the Trial?
“What are you?” I tried instead.
“I am you. I am the you that has been, could have been, that may have occurred, that could possibly still come to be. What are you?”
“I am an Acolyte, striving to be a Master. I am adept at the presence of…” I answered.
“That is what you do, what you have done. It is not who you are.”
“I am who I am, but I know that is not an answer in itself. I know that I am all these things, and they help define who I am, but I am not only a sum of them,” I answered thoughtfully. “I am… I pretend to be who I hope to be someday.”
“That is who you are, indeed. And now, you wonder what I am. I will answer one question, as I do not suffer fools.”
“You are the Other.”
“That is not a question. And I would say you are the Other.”
“What is the Other then?” I added.
“I am you. I am the possibilities of your existence, summed, averaged, and divided across all the potential that could ever be. All across the scale of possible fates and circumstances, a reflection comes to be, a presence that carries thought. You call it life, and in its potential, fate itself becomes a dark mirror.”
“You are not an absence,” I followed.
“I am the counterpoint that allows you to exist. As you are to me. Without the balance, who would you be?”
“I do not know how to answer,” I tried. I felt like I had given a different answer though, as if something unspoken had occurred, and I wasn’t sure what it was.
The light was immediately back, as if it had never left. But I was not in the hall. My mentor and the committee did not stand nearby within the Light of the Ampitheatre. I was on the edge of a great field, the twilight was gentle in its soft glow, alighting off of cloud and mountain, reflected in waters of a lake at my feet.
I had never seen this place.
“We are at an inflection,” the voice said quietly. “The balance.”
I spun in place, but there was no one behind me or beside me.
“You will understand. For every Illumin, there is an Absentia. One creates by destroying, the other destroys by creating, and in this, we are partners. Look down.”
I looked at my feet and saw myself looking back. But it was not me. As one looks at a twin, or a reflection in distorted glass, sameness coupled with difference, an abstraction of recognition that failed to take root. It was the Other. I raised my hand and pulled the light to the fore, feeling my will come into focus, and a flower came to being within my grasp.
In the reflection, my darker form raised his hand, and where I had light, he had dark, and in it, a flower took shape, and in doing so, my flower faded until it was nothing but a memory.
“Remember this. For there will be a time when you will be tested and the bridge you stand on now will be needed.”
“How do I find this bridge?”
“Remember who you are,” the voice replied. “The one whom you pretend to be.”
“This is a lie.”
“You know it is not.”
I cringed inwardly as I realized I could feel the Other’s mind, as if it was my own. “I understand now why some go mad. The duplicity of this, but shared. Open to each other so… intimately.”
The Other sighed. “The ones that go mad merely brush the balance of minds. Imagine, coming so close to connect, feeling the promise of it, and then falling away, never to touch the skein between our realities. This is what drives them mad. Not the connection itself. You and I are the first pair to make this contact such as this for nearly a thousand years. You may not know of it, but the last time an Illumin and Absentia connected like this, our worlds were perilously close to collapse.”
My mind raced. I was one of the most well trained, one of the most studied, yet I felt as if I knew little of what the Other spoke of. But I did remember the tale of the Tribulation, an entire generation of Illumin lost, the burning of the Archiva, the terrible force that consumed our kind. It had a name. The Shallow.
The Illumin had barely survived, only the very oldest and the very youngest persevered.
“The Shallow is coming back,” I said.
“Yes,” Arin-that-was-not-Arin nodded emphatically. “It is on its way.”
“It was defeated. Was it not? Strewn to the cosmos?”
“As our bodies hunger over time and weariness calls us to sleep, our realities pull on the Shallow. Our existence compels it to exist. My mentor believes it is a correction that has come about countless times to control self-aware intelligence.”
“How do you know all this? And I do not? Yet I feel you in my mind, as if we are the same skin…” I ran a hand over my forearm and I could the Other’s touch, and yet, I could feel my own touch in the duplicative sense of self within. “Shouldn’t we know the same things?”
“I think we are of the same spirit, side by side, but shaped by different circumstances and realities. We are the same, but we are not? Does that make any sense? I am the Arin that could have been as you are the Arin that could have been, a mirror between us. An equation that is balanced. Perhaps there are other realities, but we are are the only ones, or only the ones that matter. Like twin siblings can come from the same parents, and yet they are not the same.”
“The Shallow burned my world, a curse, a pestilence that can not be forgotten. What proof do I have that it is returning?” I asked. “What can I do or say that will allow my mentor, my teachers, my leaders to know? What can be done to prepare?”
“Nothing,” the Other shrugged. “Our worlds will burn again.”
My heart dropped into my stomach, I could feel weariness eating at the back of eyes, the thin ribbon of hope fleetingly leaving my fingertips. “Then it is futile.”
“No Arin. We are proof it is not. We are bridging a gap, and this reality here, were we both exist at once… this reality is proof that it is not futile. For our kinds to survive…”
“We have to bring them all into the folds. Where the Illumin and Absentia are something else,” I replied.
“How?” The Other asked me.
I shrugged with a soft chuckle. “Magic?”
He returned the smile that I was already offering, and he turned away. The whole of the plain, the stars, everything surrounding me, was pulled into a single point stretching into an infinite tunnel.
I sunk to the floor of the dias, all of my senses flooded by the normality of the school around me, the masters whispering furiously nearby, my peers gloating at my apparent failure. They surely thought I had been overwhelmed by the Other. How long had it been? A second? A hundred? A turn of a quarter-glass? I had no idea, and I was furious.
Lies. The history of my world was a lie. Why would the masters forget the Tribulation? Why would they abandon the duality of connecting with the Other? The truth to be discovered within it?
I did not know how to explain it, but I felt the connection still to my Other self, stretching through the layers of reality, an entanglement between two opposites that made us both more than we were before. With it, I felt his voice in my head.
‘Show them,’ the Other whispered deep within.
I stood shakily, and pulled on the Light again, my palms reverberating with the power, the undulating waves of shifting energy shattering and reforming, and I felt the difference. It was effortless… everything that had come before was a mere fraction of how it felt now. I felt a sun within me, and it was because the Other was with me.
The synergies of harmony. I realized this was power. Unbridled, unfettered, and unseen power.
I lowered my palms realizing I no longer needed the focus. I no longer needed the tricks, the ceremony, the blind movement of a long scripted theater act. The gallery fell silent on the master’s side, and the other students started to whisper, than chortle, then outright laugh. Glee was being had at the apparent failure of one of their own.
I wanted to shout, ‘why do we tear each other down? The Shallow returns. Our world will burn!’
Instead of shouting, instead of defending myself, I knew the power had to speak for me. I closed my eyes and formed a small flower in front of me. It was not the forming that I had learned, it was the forming that was expected. No different than standing at the edge of the lake with my Other, feeling the forming blossom through me.
The hall fell silent as what they expected happened. There was probably some confusion on how I was forming with my hands at my sides. Parlor tricks and theater… no longer needed.
I imagined that single flower turning into a circle of flowers floating around me.
The hall started to murmur.
I imagined that circle of flowers duplicating rapidly into a sphere, completely surrounding me.
There were shouts of fear and surprise, the murmurs were shifting towards muffled arguments.
I imagined the sphere of flowers, each flower coalescing into a small sun, each with the fury of flares and magnetic maelstroms.
The hall fell to silence again. That alone was unprecedented. They were used to the aforementioned parlor tricks and slight of hand. A single flower was impressive, a true display of talent. A ring of flowers was strange. A sphere, not just strange, but wildly different. The shift from flowers to miniature suns transforming in real time, that was an event nearly immeasurable, perhaps lost to history if anything like it had been formed before.
I imagined a representation of myself, formed of the suns, each expanding and coalescing into an image of who I thought I was, and imagined that version of myself putting their hand out in a mimicry of the forming, and produce their own flower. I felt my Other laugh deep within, then whispering, “Ah, the one who you pretended to be. Clever.”
I let the light fade and opened my eyes.
Every set of eyes was locked on me. Every mouth was agape. Some masters looked happy. Others appeared to be inexplicably angry. Most seemed curious. Across my peers, it was nothing but absolute shock. This was a display of forming that they had never been exposed to, taught about, or imagined. They had witnessed true magic.
The first clap was tenuous at best, but it ramped quickly to thunderous applause. I had their attention at least.
The Shallow was coming. What could I say? What could I do? The world is going to end?
By the Gods, the world is going to end. I had to lead this moment with brave words. A compelling call to action!
Instead, I fainted.