Fire And Rain

Aura couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in a waiting room. A room intended specifically for the act of doing nothing but sitting with your anticipation… doctors had them, she knew, but hers all made house calls. Some government buildings too, but she’d never really been to one. And of course, she’d never visited a sage before today.

Not that this could be called an ordinary appointment with a sage. She was sitting on a plush couch at the top floor of the tallest building in Starlight, sharing air only with Great Sage of Rain’s secretary, an arctic fox person with a soft voice, dressed in a lavender cardigan and skirt. It was the sort of thing Pewter would probably wear. She wondered if the two of them would get along.

The fox had introduced themself as Tartarus Berling, insisting that ‘Tart’ was fine, and they’d immediately offered refreshments and small talk. She’d requested something a little scandalous: a soda. Her mother had always refused to allow her something so unhealthy, but her mother had somehow been convinced by Aleph to stay home. The soda was a childish act of rebellion on her part, but it felt like setting the right tone. The top made a satisfying hiss when opened. She looked up at Tart, who’d taken a seat opposite her.

“So what’s it like, working for the Great Sage?” She tried to make some kind of conversation while taking her first sip. It’d been years since she’d had one, and it was sweeter than she remembered.

“It’s an incredible opportunity,” Tart answered. “The Great Sage hasn’t had an apprentice in decades. I was the one picked out of hundreds of applicants.”

It felt like they’d misunderstood the question. “Congratulations! I wouldn’t know much about it, but you must be a really good sage.” Aura mused.

The fox smiled. “Or maybe it was because I printed mine on green paper. My grades were good, but I know for a fact that they weren’t the highest of all the applicants.”

“That just means grades weren’t the only factor.”

“You’re sharp,” they said. “When I applied, I didn’t think there was any chance of actually getting the position. To me, the Great Sage was like a god— the very ideal of a sage. But he’s still a human man at his core.”

Another small drink. It really wasn’t to her taste after all. “Do you mean that he made a mistake?”

Tart smiled. “No. At least, not one that I’m fit to judge. I mean, he understood that he needed a compatible student. Neither he nor I can ever be sure that I was the best choice, but I was the choice, and I’m learning.” They shrugged a little. “That’s what the Great Sage says, anyway.”

When Aura tried to imagine choosing a single candidate from such a large pool, it seemed hopeless. On the other hand, you could always choose randomly and get it over with. She put it out of her mind for the moment and returned to her original question, worded a little more clearly. “What is he like? The Great Sage, I mean. I don’t really know him.”

With their hands, Tart stroked their own soft-looking tail thoughtfully for a moment before speaking. “He’s the most brilliant man I’ve ever met, and he has a very strong sense of responsibility. There isn’t anyone more qualified than him to help you.”

“But what’s he like? As a person?”

An entire book could not have conveyed the full nuance of how the fox grimaced. This was not a question they relished answering. “I admit, I don’t feel I know him very well outside of work. You might find him a bit intimidating.”

It was at that moment that the far door slid quietly open, noticed only when a wet thudding called attention to it. The Great Sage Aleph stood, rapping on his own door to make the noise. The room behind him was dim compared to the waiting room, and his jellyfish body seemed almost like a ghost against that backdrop.

Intimidating. Yes, he was, a little.

“I’m ready, Miss Rosycross,” he said. “Bring your drink. Come on in, and we’ll talk.”

Aura looked back at Tart, who avoided their boss’ gaze, not that eye contact was really possible through the Great Sage’s headcap. Holding her awful-tasting drink, Aura rose and followed him into his office.

It was a large, circular, humid room, but furnished not unlike her father’s office at home, only on a much larger scale. Laminated posters and charts of humanoid figures lined one wall, anatomical diagrams. Much of the wall space was chalkboards, filled with notes and formulae. The rest was occupied by a long, curved desk, scattered with screens, but only a few books. There were a few humidifiers around the walls, too. There was no shelf for the books. She guessed that they were kept somewhere else, probably to protect them from the moisture in the air.

Aleph motioned to a couch in the middle of the room made of comfortable leather, aimed towards a more spartan seat which Aleph took up next to his desk. He let his tentacles dangle past the back, though they swayed back and forth like a cat’s tail. Seeing him there, Aura was struck by the strangeness of him: a towering man, but ringed with lacy frills. An almost unthinkable gelatin body. He sat casually, with poor posture. He didn’t exactly look intellectual, but he was a foremost scholar. From what she understood, he always had been, even centuries ago. And here she was, hoping for help from him.

“I’m sorry Mx. Berling couldn’t give you what you wanted, Miss Rosycross,” he said.

“Could you just call me Aura? It puts me on edge when I get called ‘Miss’. And I wasn’t looking for any particular answer. I just… don’t know what to expect from this. Don’t be upset with them.”

He raised a hand to stop her. “If anything, I’m worried they don’t feel they can speak their mind. I’m an influential man, Aura. I command a great deal of respect. What I do not possess in abundance is friendship. …You’re finished with that, aren’t you?”

She was still holding onto the cola can, mostly full. “Oh. No, I don’t think I like it.”

“Here, then.” He reached out to take it from her. When she handed it over, he held it up as if showing it off for a few seconds and then, with a smile, jammed it quickly into his own chest. Aura jumped in surprise, but the act itself made almost no sound. The can and its contents floated inside the Great Sage’s transparent body, the metal sides slowly breaking apart before her eyes. It was very gradual, but it was happening.

“I know you’re well aware of this, but I’m quite strange,” he finished. “In this room, I don’t pretend to be quite as respectable as I do in front of the likes of your mother. But our new relationship requires that. I have to be genuine, as do you. I won’t make you swear to it or anything. I intend to win your trust the old-fashioned way.” He kicked off the ground with his foot, spinning the chair around.

Aura just stared. “Well, I’m going to try. I came here for a reason, after all. If you can help, then it doesn’t matter how you act.”

“I have no intention of letting you down,” said the Great Sage, stopping himself spinning after several turns. “Today, I just want us to talk. Get our goals aligned, get comfortable with each other. This is a long-term project, and we’re only just starting it. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” she told a half-truth. Her soul was something strange, even to the Great Sage who’d lived for five centuries. It was definitely too much to think they’d figure everything out in one day, but part of her had imagined it. Desired it.

“How have you been feeling lately?” He asked.

A good question. She’d felt more relaxed for a while, after everything had been resolved on her birthday. Even mom had seemed to calm down a bit. Only with this meeting scheduled had things started to feel more tense, like she was drifting in a thick fog, never knowing what might be coming up on her. As she explained all of that, and answered some basic follow-up questions, she watched her former drink break up and drift away into Aleph’s body. There was no sign of it before long.

“The most important thing about that night was that you expressed some of those feelings to each other,” he said when she was done. “I didn’t have to lean on your mother as much as I expected to get her to cooperate. Maybe she’s taking what you say to heart.”

“Maybe,” Aura doubted it. “It’s always been like this between us, though. She’s a good mother, really. I mean, she’s not mean to me or anything. She just worries about everything.”

“I know… though I might describe her differently. I’m quite biased.” At some point, the Great Sage had picked up a small metal object from his desk with a tentacle, and was now passing it between them, fidgeting.

“So you really control those individually? Seems really hard to keep track of.”

He grinned. “Well, I’ve had lots of time to practice. But it’s not as if I can do everything. I’ve been impressed by your mothers magic in the past, and I imagine yours is even more incredible.”

“If only it worked the way it was supposed to,” she sighed.

“That judgment comes from the outside of yourself,” he said. “The things you can’t change about yourself are what they are. Only you can decide how to work with that.”

“I know, I know. It’s not anyone’s fault,” she sighed. It was frustrating, being dismissed like that. “It’s not wrong, but it’s inconvenient. You know how to change yourself into anything you like. I have to live with things the way they are. I never asked to be born on an important day, and I never asked to be weird.”

She had sounded more upset than she intended. More truthful, really. The jellyfish fell silent, gripping his toy tightly. “I understand,” he said after a few seconds. “I’d like to ask you something: if things were different, and you could make use of a sage, would you do it?”

“I’d probably try it,” she admitted. “I don’t like being just about the only human wherever I go.”

“That’s reasonable,” the jellyfish said. His tentacles relaxed. Aura could see now, he was holding a small allen wrench. Probably one for the chair he was sitting in. “Secondly… Why is it that you can’t?”

This was a technical matter for sorcerers, and while Aleph definitely knew of the issue, it was legitimately possible he didn’t know the details. “It would weaken my magic,” Aura answered. “The flow of the world’s energy is interrupted by additions to the soul, even if you remove them later on. I’ve heard that people whose souls resist modification also have a higher level of natural sorcery aptitude, but nobody fully understands the connection.”

"Well, that explanation is much the same as what your mother’s,” Aleph replied. “Though you seem less confident.”

Aura bristled at the implied accusation. “She always talks like that, even when she’s not sure,” she said. “Everything I said is basic education for a sorcerer. I’ve read it in a dozen books.”

“Basic education,” Aleph repeated. “Sometimes, that means that the knowledge is foundational. Other times, it means that all of the inconvenient details have been stripped out. I apologize for my rudeness, Aura. It’s just like you said: I like hearing it from you more. You admit when things aren’t solved. True wisdom requires a lot of uncertainty.”

Aura frowned. “It’s alright. But all of this… it’s not the point of why we’re here, right? We’re trying to figure out my soul, not overturn all of sorcery.”

The Great Sage slumped in his chair. Mom would yell at Aura if she sat like that. Bad posture. “Your soul already defies the expectations of sorcery, Aura,” he said. “But you’re our sorcery expert. I’m the soul expert. My assumptions are being challenged, too. That means one of them must be incorrect. As Einstein disproved Newton.”

“I don’t know who either of those are.”

He clicked his tongue. Where did the air come from when he had no visible lungs? “Well, it’s ancient history.”

“Okay well, I had a cousin who decided to stop being a sorcerer, and he went and started being a… I think it was a gerboa. Anyway, he told me himself that he couldn’t work his magic anymore afterwards.” It had only been a chance meeting. Asterion was on his way through town, effectively exiled from his family and community. It was all by choice, though. He’d wished her luck, and said he was never any good at magic anyway. No future for him in the business of sorcery, he’d said. Not like Aura. She remembered how her heart sank hearing that, but she wished him well, too. What else could she do? He was braver than she could ever be.

The Great Sage nodded. “I don’t have any doubt that he was being truthful. I think that the link between the soul and sorcery is real, and it’s complex. I don’t have any intention of forcing you into anything you don’t want, either. Just in case you were worried about that.”

“I wasn’t,” she said quickly. Then she thought better of it. “Actually, I was. I didn’t really think you were trying to pressure me, but I was worried about it. I just wanted you to understand that it won’t fix anything for me.”

“I agree,” he said. With his foot, he moved his chair back and forth as he sat. The allen wrench had found its way back onto the desk at some point. “Only, I have reason to believe that there exist cases in which sorcerers have modified their soul and not only kept their potency, but actually increased it. As I said, this is a complex relationship.”

“What reason?”

He smiled. “I searched my past records, and found that I’ve had several as patients, and then cross-referenced that with the biographies of any sorcerers I found there. Even I don’t remember everyone I’ve worked with, I trust my records.”

Aura closed her eyes and thought it through. The Great Sage Aleph was about five hundred years old, and that made him older than most of the current understanding of sorcery. “When did you treat them?”

“Good instincts. The most recent was two hundred years ago.”

He actually seemed pleased that she’d found that weak point. This was a test, though why he felt like testing her was a mystery to Aura. “Well, this wasn’t as well understood back then. They might have diminished their own ability without knowing it. Not everyone loses it entirely.”

“And I found plenty of those cases, especially the further back I went. But there were still a few I couldn’t wave away with that logic. One in particular, I still remember. Given how long ago that individual passed on, I think I can tell you the name. I suspect you know it.”

“Okay,” Aura prompted. She suspected this would not be quite as difficult to ignore as he claimed. She had a better idea of what sorcerers were capable of, after all.

“Christian Rosenkreuz, it was pronounced then. Over time, a corruption occurred in his descendants. You might know his surname as Rosycross.”

Aura blinked. Her plan to argue back was obliterated in an instant. “What? You can’t mean the founder.”

“I do.”

“I know you were acquainted with him, but even my mom hadn’t seen anything saying you’d… do you have any proof?”

"None. I wasn’t keeping records at the time. It was before ‘Sage’ was even a profession.” He pulled his feet up onto his own chair, hugging his knees— if they could be called that— close.

“Then you can’t say it.”

“I can. I have. I’ve learned to pick my battles over the years, and so I don’t want to stir up any trouble in the sorcery community. Not for no gain, at least. But the truth remains the truth. Christian Rosenkreutz was of the last generation who could change their souls without expecting it to be public knowledge. There are enough individuals gifted in the sight now that you have to assume you’ll be understood by someone in a crowd. It’s a better state of affairs overall, but we did give up something important for it. That’s another reason I don’t intent this information to leave this room. I can’t force you to believe me, but I hope you can believe that I’m sincere in my beliefs.”

Aura sank back in the chair. If Aleph had wanted to lie, then he probably would have invented some of these details he was refusing to disclose. On the other hand, that could be exactly what he wanted her to think. There was no way to get anywhere just by asking, then. She had to consider why he might lie, if he was.

“Okay,” she said, “But what difference does it make for me? You already said you weren’t trying to pressure me.”

“Oh, I have no reason to believe that additions to your soul would help anything, but I do happen to know that your magical affinities are not aligning with their respective values, and neither is your soul. Seems reasonable to at least examine there being a connection. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Of course, he was right. Maybe Aura was the one who’d lost track of things. She decided to refocus herself. “Can I ask you about my soul? What’s so strange about it? Or is that too difficult for someone like me to understand?”

“I think I can give you the gist.” The Great Sage sprung up from his seat and ran quickly to one of his chalkboards, his feet making wet slapping noises the whole way. He drew a simple circle on it. “A metaphor. If a human soul looks like this, then an animal soul looks like this.” He drew a much smaller square next to the circle.

“And this is your soul.” The Great Sage drew a triangle next to the other shapes, much larger than either. Turning his chalk sideways, he roughly shaded the inside of it. “Obviously, I’m simplifying. Different species have different souls, but yours is quite a bit vaster and more complex than any animal soul I’ve seen. In some ways, its overwhelming. More than human. In other ways, though, it’s just the same. If I didn’t know you, but could see your soul, I might guess you were some unknown intelligent species.”

“What does that mean? That I’m not… a human?”

“You have a human father and a human mother. By every physical metric, you’re human.” Aleph had gradually wandered back to his seat, and he settled in slowly. “If it helps, I’ve come to regret my part in naming it ‘the soul.’ I think it was a mistake. The soul was a spiritual concept, and it should have stayed that way. We were caught up in the moment. To those of us establishing the terminology, it was a spiritual experience.”

“Well, people believed in souls back on the old planet, right? It was normal.”

“In various forms, they did,” Aleph agreed, “But it was no singular concept. It refers to something that persists of our selves after death, but it also refers to the truest essence of a person. The soul I’m speaking of isn’t either of those things.”

“It’s not?” Aura hadn’t believed that a soul was something that lived on after death. Or at least, she’d always been told that the hereafter didn’t keep any changes one made, any more than it kept hold of your favorite outfits. But as for the true self, she supposed that she’d been thinking of it in those terms all this time.

“No. The soul is nothing more than a metaphysical interface between memetic and genetic information.”

She frowned. "What does that mean?”

“Right.” Aleph paused for a moment, apparently trying to concoct an explanation. “You’ve heard of genes, though, I take it?”

“Sure,” she said. “They’re like… the things you get from your parents that… decide how you are. Like your hair colour and stuff.” Aura felt immediately that she was showing herself to be an idiot, but the jellyfish just nodded.

“That’s the basic idea. They’re sets of instructions, and they’re encoded with an an acid called DNA. It’s the same as writing a recipe down in a book. You don’t need to understand the details, but do you follow me so far?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Now, the term meme refers to units of cultural information... Ideas, concepts, characters... that kind of thing. This one is a little more difficult to understand.”

Aura could feel the rough outline of understanding, but it was hardly a clear picture. “Who even thinks of these things?” She complained.

“That’s not important,” Aleph said quickly.

“Can you give a specific example?”

“Certainly; we’ve already discussed one: the soul. I won’t pry into your personal beliefs, but religious beliefs are cultural. It’s very ordinary to inherit them from your parents, or to convert to another set, but while nobody’s beliefs are likely to be the exact same as another’s, they’re also very unlikely to be completely original. It’s the same for me.”

He stopped for a moment, processing some memory that Aura didn’t understand. He might have been thinking of his own family, just like Aura thought of hers. “I know there’s lots of different beliefs, but it’s all kind of variations on the same thing, isn’t it? It’s not always heaven and hell, but you have to be a good person.”

Aleph smiled vacantly. “The ideas of Heaven and Hell come from Christian, your ancestor, who got them from the religion he was named for. But, no, not all belief systems are like that. Not all of them believed in the separation of good and evil. And as for agreeing with what constitutes a good person? Or what happens to them? Or even what should happen to them?” He waved his tentacles, as if tossing away some heavy load he’d had wrapped up with them. “Christian thought that the world itself was good, and beautiful, and that understanding it was as close to divinity as one could get. I knew others who believed quite the opposite; that only obedience could get them to heaven.”

“Obedience to what?”

“Oh, your father, your husband, your government… it’s the ideology of cowards, but it exists, and that’s important to remember.”

“Well,” Aura thought out loud, “I suppose if I thought I knew how to get to heaven, I’d probably do anything for it.”

“And just as importantly, if you thought you knew how to get into hell, you might be willing to do anything to avoid it. But will isn’t enough. One cannot simply conform themself out of their own reality. You know that very well.”

Thinking about it that way, Aura felt like she understood, even if only a little. “Is that why you’re a sage?” she asked. “To make it so that people can… change their reality, even if its only a little more?”

The Great Sage twisted his tentacle-ponytail around his body and was still, genuinely thinking for several long seconds. “No,” he finally responded. “I did it to change my own reality. Once that was done, I found other people were providing help with that function as a service, and I didn’t think they were doing a very good job. Things like that bother me, so I worked with some other like-minded individuals to improve it. All the wild, I wanted to learn as much as I could. Christian and I were the same in that way: both truth-seekers.”

“So, you wanted to find out about people, and he wanted to find out about the natural world?”

“Those aren’t as different as you make it sound. People are part of the world, after all. And he also chose to remake himself in pursuit of a goal. We both killed the name our parents gave us for the sake of that truth.”

That was a surprise to Aura, though she’d never had any reason to think about it before. “He changed his name?”

“The name Christian Rosenkreuz belongs to a figure of myth on the old planet. As far as we know, no individual chosen to seed this world was taken from a period older than about a century before my own birth, which means that your Mr. Rosenkreuz chose to claim the title for himself once he arrived here. Not to say I ever pried into his previous identity.”

“Couldn’t he be an exception?” Aura asked. “Maybe he was the only one from however long ago that was?”

“Technically, I can’t disprove that.” Aleph rose from his seat, sliding his way back to he same board on the wall he’d used before. “So, to continue my explanation of the soul, you remember what I said, don’t you?”

With some strain, she pulled the memory from her brain. “You said it uh, turned those meme things into genes. Something like that.”

“Good memory,” he praised her as he rubbed his previous scribbles away. “The thing you need to understand is that things which exist physically also have ideas associated with them.”

“Like how owls are supposed to be wise?”

“An excellent example, but we can go even further. You have, in your mind, the image of an owl. That idea exists outside of the existence of any specific owl. Now, imagine a hypothetical person who wants to embody that wisdom associated with owls. They also like the idea of having feathers.” He scribbled a rough humanoid shape on the board. To the left of it he made a crude bird shape that Aura understood from context to be the owl in question.

"To art of a sage is this: we first learn to perceive the soul, and then learn to wrap it in ideas, like a sheet of plastic around your leftovers. We call that sheet an eidolon— an ideal.” He continued to draw, lines that went from the head and feet of the owl to those of the human, as if constructing a tunnel between them. “When an eidolon is active, the DNA changes accordingly, but retroactively. It’s as if one was born with the changes all along. You could think of it as light passing through a colored filter, although that’s more subtractive rather than additive.” He drew a spiral that moved through the owl and to the human, and he started drawing animal features on the latter— a little beak, and even some feathers. Of course, Aura lived in Starlight; she’d seen the affects of a sage’s craft many times. She was not entirely following the explanation, though she thought she had the basic idea.

“And turning this thing off changes it back?”

“More or less,” Aleph said, returning once again to his chair.

“What about someone like Mx. Undermoon, the witch? They turn off just part of theirs.”

“That requires multiple eidolons. Once you start stacking them, it gets more complicated.”

Aura wasn’t sure that Pewter would agree with being called Aleph’s friend. “I see. I guess it’s, uhm, an invasion of privacy to tell me about it, right?”

Aleph shrugged while spinning on one squishy heel. “Technically, it’s something anybody with the right skill could determine. One can’t expect privacy regarding the number of eidolons they have in this age. Still, I’m nothing if not polite, so I keep the specifics hidden. I will say, though, that being a witch adds a few more wrinkles. The average sage might have a difficult time counting the layers on Mx. Undermoon. Ah, I should ask, have I lost you anywhere along the way? Keeping up?”

“I think so.” She half-lied.

“Good. If I’m honest, I don’t consider myself much of a teacher. I’ve made a mess of it more than once. Fortunately for me, Mx. Berling is a good student. When it comes to patients, I normally just show them what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not a patient, though,” she felt the need to re-iterate. “I want to fix my soul, but not like that.”

“Fix!” He echoed her words back in a shout. For a brief second, she thought she’d made him very angry, but the energy dissipated rather quickly when he saw her face. “I scared you. I’m sorry about that. Only, as I keep telling you, there’s nothing about you that needs fixing. Only understanding.”

“Sorry,” Aura said a little too hastily. She was honestly annoyed. “I just… you’re an important person. You have everything here, and I know you work really hard for it. Me? I’m supposed to be important, too, even if it’s nowhere near as important as you, but nothing’s ever gone the way I want, even when I try hard. If I was just… understandable, I wouldn’t have that problem.”

He was silent for several seconds before responding, though Aura could almost feel his unblinking gaze under his cap. “A fair point,” he finally said. “I can’t blame anyone for wanting an easier time.” Then he was quiet again, turning back to the board to start scribbling something. Another lesson, probably.

“I’m sorry if I disappointed you,” Aura said.

“Don’t be,” he answered with his back still turned. “I have a bad habit of expecting too much of people. I keep hoping that each person I meet will be the one who can change the world. Christian was amazing, and I liked him, but I always thought he could have done more. Your mother, when she was young, could have grown up to take control of her own destiny. And me? I think Mx. Berling could be a greater sage than even myself, and that’s a rather tall order for anyone.”

Aura sighed. “So, only you live up to your standards.”

“Me? No, I’m the most disappointing one of all. I’ve had five hundred years to disappoint myself again and again. No matter how many mistakes I make, I find myself repeating them. You see, what I yearn for is someone better than me. Someone who could take all this authority and make it work.” He stepped away from the board to reveal a silly little doodle of a cartoon shark with googly eyes. It didn’t seem to be any sort of lesson, and it was so completely unexpected that Aura laughed without meaning to.

“That’s cute,” she said, to try and seem less rude.

“I have to practice new skills once in a while, or else I get bored.” He returned to his chair for the third time, only at a slow and plodding pace this time. He sat heavily. “My point is this: the only person you should care about disappointing is yourself. What is It that you want? What is it you think you can do?”

Aura thought about it. She’s been worried about the way things were for years, and that meant she’d never stopped to think about the future. She’d assumed that at some point, things would change. That she’d finally get a handle on her duties, decided by the fact that she’d been born on that one day every ten years governed by the Star of Life. At that point, she figured, everything would fall into place.

“I don’t know,” she concluded.

The Great Sage just nodded. “That’s normal. You’re young. Anyway, let’s talk about your magic a little more. When did you first feel something was unusual?”

The rest of their meeting passed without much incident as Aura recalled the banal details of her life. In the end, he said it was a very good session. Aura just felt exhausted.