“I did… something… with orange.”
“You carved out the space for the chamber, sealed it airtight on every side, then made a permeable wall of orange luxin that you stuck your hands through repeatedly. You burnt sub-red in that chamber until there was no air in it at all, and then you created the chamber itself with a monomaniac’s total fixation. That cell is perfect, a perfect sphere shining and crystalline, a marvel with the beauty of ten thousand flame crystals larger than anyone else has ever drafted. A perfect cell that no man will ever see.”
“Because as soon as he fell through the trapdoor, he’d bring in air with him. He wouldn’t have time to even see the fire that would consume him.”
“Or if he miraculously lived through the inferno, he would then asphyxiate, as you built the trapdoor to seal airtight behind an intruder.”
That was right. He’d done that to keep it from being an actual bomb.
“You’re being awfully helpful,” Gavin said. The darkness was getting to him, even with this comforting voice.
“You made me different from the others. Don’t you remember?”
Gavin didn’t. Not enough. But the dead man knew that, didn’t he?
“You assumed that if father caught you, he would throw you in here. Because why would Andross Guile try any half measure?”
“So I made an escape route?” Gavin said.
“Naturally, I thought about it. For a long time.”
“I built escapes for the others.” Most of them. “Why not this one?”
“Perhaps I planned to. Perhaps it was too hard. Perhaps I wanted one prison that I might use for someone else—father, perhaps—from whence I knew no one could escape. Or perhaps it was that madness in me. That fixation. Perhaps I couldn’t bear to build an almost-perfect prison.”
“‘Perhaps,’ ‘perhaps’? Stop that!” Gavin said.
“Then you tell me,” the dead man said.
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“This doesn’t take memory. I’d bet you haven’t changed as much as all that.”
The dead man didn’t goad him after that.
It took a few minutes, standing in the darkness, feeling it soak into his bones, feeling the terror rise like water flooding the cell, covering his toes, then his ankles.
Gavin cursed aloud. “How young and stupid was I?”
The dead man didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
Why do men walk to the edge of a chasm? Is the view so different, right at the edge, than it is two steps back?
They walk to the edge because it scares them.
I wanted this here because it frightened me. I, a veritable lord of light, was ashamed of being afraid of the dark. So I made my own cell, my own greatest terror, and I put it under my own house. But its existence wasn’t enough. It had to be inescapable. A cell without locks isn’t scary enough for a brash fool. It’s only as scary as the threat is real.
There were many kinds of suicidal madness. There was only one name for the kind of madness that puts a gun to its own head when it has no intention of pulling the trigger: youth.
All these years of the terrors in the night and the sudden paralyzing panics that I dismissed as foolishness and cowardice and nonsense. All these years, I was sitting on this egg of darkness, all the time, waiting for it to hatch.
Shit.
“So what’s the tally?” Gavin asked, impatient with his old self as all proud men are impatient with the proof of their past imperfections. “Tell me about you.”
The dead man chuckled low. “Direct, still direct. As if we don’t have all the time in the world. Very well. You made me last of all the dead men. You made me with the black luxin that destroyed you, that obliterated so much of the Dazen Guile who had been. You didn’t craft my personality to punish you, though. No additional torture is necessary in a black cell. You made me to hold all the memories you hoped to lose. Finally, Dazen, you made me to comfort you.”
So the young me wasn’t heartless. Brash and irritating and irritatingly competent, but not always thoughtless. But this was a palliative comfort. A hierarchical comforting, wasn’t it? Old me saying sorry, but I’ve clearly bested you, future me. Because I can’t imagine you ever reaching the heights of perfection again that I have reached now.
Fuck you, young, arrogant me. “What if I don’t want your comfort?”
“Then we reach an impasse far more quickly than the old you expected we would. Hmm. Funny. The old you was the young you. Regardless, the young Dazen desperately wanted to share, to justify himself, to be understood. He thought you would be the only person who could understand him.”
“‘The young Dazen’?” Gavin asked. “Like you aren’t him?”
“A will-casting like me is… quite special. I’ve been in here for almost two decades. I’ve aged. Learned. So no, I’m not exactly young any longer.”
“A will-casting doesn’t age. It only decays.”
“Depends on how well they’re made. All magic fails eventually, yes. Will-castings deteriorate regardless of how well drafted. Me? I’ve aged. I’ve been aware of the passing time, and I don’t know that I would thank you for it. I’ve wanted someone to talk with for a long time, and I’ll only appreciate it more if there are big differences between us now. I’ve talked to myself enough. You will wish to talk. Now, or soon. I know, because I am you.”
“And if I don’t want your truth?” Gavin asked.
“My truth? Is this the madness speaking? There is no my truth or your truth. You have forgotten the truth; your forgetting it doesn’t make it cease to exist. I am here to remind you of it, so that perhaps in the last days of your life, you might reconcile yourself to who you have been, and die with a measure of peace.”
“You’re gentler than I would have been, back then,” Gavin said.
“Clearly not. But I do tire of your obstinacy, old man.”
Gavin waited in the darkness for a long time. It was impossible to tell how long, though. He felt his way around the chamber. Had he already done that? It felt as if he had. Maybe he only had all those years ago.
It was shaped exactly like the others, from the trickle of water down the wall to the hole in the bottom of the floor for his waste. Of course, in the darkness, the cell could be roofless for all he knew. It might extend only as high as his upstretched hand could reach, and he would never know.
That would be the kind of bitter joke young Dazen might have played.
So he moved around the cell, as methodically as he could in the total darkness, and jumped, slapping his hand against the curvature of the wall as high as he could.
“I could mock you for this,” the dead man said. “But I don’t find it foolish, despite how it looks. I rather admire your tenacity instead. I’m glad I didn’t lose that as I got old.”
“‘Despite how it looks’?” Gavin said. “Can you see in here?”
“A figure of speech only. I can hear you slapping the wall, and it’s what I would do. Would have done? Will do? I’m not really sure how to address us.”
“I would have thought I would only put the vile parts of me into this cell, into the black,” Gavin said, though he hadn’t really intended to talk to the thing.
“My control of black wasn’t that precise. It’s more of a battle axe than a scalpel. And as you might not recall, I had very little practice. Handling black is analogous to the other colors but far more difficult. And I wanted me to be a comfort to you. Can’t be all vileness and hate and do that.”
Only I would try to do surgery with a battle axe.
Only I would nearly succeed.
“The others,” Gavin said, still jumping and measuring the wall. He planned to go around at least twice, just in case he missed a spot on the first round. “The others said I was the Black Prism. Is that true?”
The dead man sighed. “So it worked, to hide that from you for all these years?”
“So the answer is yes.”
“Yes,” the dead man admitted.