POV – Azra'il
There is a fundamental difference between friendship and routine. Friendship implies conscious choice, mutual affection, and that irritating quality of making people smile when they think of one another. Routine is simply what happens when two organisms share the same space for long enough and conclude, independently, that the alternative is more inconvenient.
What Rudeus and I had developed was routine. Pure, functional, and entirely devoid of unnecessary sentimentality.
Every day after lunch, when Zenith was resting, Paul was out, and Lilia was occupied with some task that kept her conveniently away from the upper floor, the two of us convened in the loft with the undeclared punctuality of two researchers who had agreed to share a laboratory and preferred never to formalise the arrangement in writing. Rudeus went up first. I followed two minutes later. The book was always open on the same low crate. The oil lamp, always lit.
Nobody had proposed any of it. It had simply happened, in the same way that water finds the lowest available level: without drama, without negotiation, through pure physical inevitability.
〈Eos, any commentary on the fact that I am voluntarily climbing to a dusty loft for the fourteenth time this week?〉
[Only that your lungs are developing a reasonable tolerance for old wood dust. And that specimen Rudeus arrived three minutes ago and is already on page forty-two.]
〈Productive by his standards.〉
I climbed the staircase avoiding the creaking steps, pushed the door open with my shoulder, and settled into my habitual position: the lowest crate, slightly to the left of the lamp, from which I could see both the pages of the book and Rudeus's expression without needing to move. It was a strategically perfect position that he had not yet realised I had chosen deliberately.
Rudeus did not look up when I entered. He was hunched over the book with the closed concentration of someone attempting to resolve something through sheer force of will, his index finger sliding beneath a line of text that I recognised immediately as the third paragraph of the chapter on elemental condensation.
I let him finish the page. Then, because intellectual honesty is a value I carry regardless of which world I happen to be inhabiting, I said:
"That explanation is wrong."
Rudeus looked up. His green eyes regarded me with the expression of someone who had been expecting something of the sort and was still not entirely prepared for it. "What?"
"The paragraph you just read." I extended my hand and indicated the text without touching the book. "The author is confusing cause and effect. He says the incantation produces the mana. It does not. The incantation organises the user's intention. The mana already exists. These are entirely different things."
Rudeus looked at the paragraph. Then at me. Then at the paragraph again, with the mildly wounded expression of someone who had just committed that passage to memory at considerable effort. "It may be that I am misunderstanding it."
"Possibly. But the book is also wrong, so you are in good company."
He closed his eyes for exactly one second, with the admirable restraint of someone exercising active self-control. "Could you simply let me read?"
"I could. But then you would memorise incorrect information and subsequently have to unlearn it, which is significantly more laborious than learning correctly the first time. I am sparing you future effort."
"That is very generous of you," said Rudeus, in a tone that communicated precisely the opposite.
〈Eos, analysis of the flow diagram on the following page.〉
[The diagram represents mana distribution channels in a linear fashion when they ought to be depicted in a convergent spiral. It is functionally imprecise, though not catastrophically incorrect. A student following that diagram would arrive at the correct result by the wrong route, which in the practice of the local system appears to be the general standard.]
〈How reassuring.〉
Rudeus turned the page and found the diagram in question. He studied it for a few moments with the careful attention I had learnt to recognise as his genuine processing mode, without the performance of normality he employed with the adults.
"Is this one wrong as well?" he asked, without looking at me, in the tone of someone who already knows the answer and is merely confirming.
"It is imprecise. It will not kill you, but it will make everything harder than it needs to be."
"Marvellous." He propped his chin on his free hand with the posture of someone reconsidering their life choices. "So the only magic book in the house is partially incorrect."
"It is a fairly accurate portrait of the general state of magical knowledge in this world, from what I have observed thus far."
Rudeus looked at me. "You are three years old."
"And you have what, precisely, beyond a previous life of limited references and a disturbing fixation on other people's undergarments?" I looked at him with the most neutral expression in my repertoire. "The age of the body is irrelevant to the capacity for analysis. You of all people ought to know that."
The argument landed. I saw the moment it landed, because his expression shifted in that particular way of someone who is irritated but cannot formulate a reasonable rebuttal.
We returned to the book.
The question of incantation arose in the third week of routine, on an afternoon when the winter sun came through the loft's single narrow window at an angle that illuminated the suspended dust in the air as though it were something deliberately poetic, which I found irritating.
Rudeus was repeating the basic water-summoning incantation under his breath, his lips moving with the memorised cadence of someone attempting to engrave a sequence of sounds without necessarily understanding why that particular sequence works. It was a perfectly valid approach by local standards. And completely inefficient by any more demanding measure.
"Why are you memorising the words?" I asked.
Rudeus did not stop moving his lips immediately. He finished the repetition, then looked at me. "Because that is how magic works."
"The book says that."
"Yes."
"So you are assuming the book is correct on this specific point, having agreed with me that it was wrong on several others."
Rudeus's jaw made that subtle movement of someone who realises they have been cornered by a perfectly reasonable sequence of logic and does not enjoy the sensation. "The incantation makes the magic work. That is in every paragraph of the book, not just one."
"Frequency of repetition is not evidence of correctness. If it were, the superstition about children with defects bringing ill fortune would be an established scientific fact." I looked at him. "The incantation does not produce the magic. It organises the user's intention into a form the mind can process. It is a cognitive crutch. Useful for beginners. It is not the fundamental mechanism."
Rudeus looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone seriously weighing the information against the instinct to disagree on principle. "That is a theory."
"Everything is a theory before it is tested."
"Have you tested it?"
〈Eos.〉
[Technically, you have operated within magical systems that did not employ incantations in any of your thousands of documented lives. But testing the local system specifically without incantation? Not yet.]
〈Thank you for the devastatingly ill-timed precision.〉
"Not yet," I said aloud.
Rudeus raised an eyebrow. For a three-year-old face, he had developed a remarkable range of facial expression. "You are telling me you have not tested the theory you are presenting to me as fact."
"I am telling you that I have sufficient basis to consider it highly probable, and that the only way to confirm it is to test it. Which is, incidentally, how knowledge functions in any rational system." I looked at him. "Do you want to continue memorising words, or do you want to do something interesting?"
The silence that followed was not one of hesitation. It was the silence of a decision being made.
The experiment was humiliating for both of us, which I considered a point in favour of equity.
The logic was simple: reproduce the internal sensation of the water-summoning spell without pronouncing the incantation. Maintain the intention, direct the mana, omit the words. Simple in theory. In practice, we demonstrated that anything can be difficult when the body you are operating is possessed of the concentration of a small rodent and the mana channels of a three-year-old still discovering how to breathe properly.
Rudeus tried first. He closed his eyes, furrowed his brow with an intensity that appeared physically painful, and remained still for nearly a full minute.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes. Looked at his palm. Looked at me.
"It didn't work."
"I noticed." I crossed my legs on my crate. "Try again. This time without furrowing your brow as though you are attempting to move a wall by force of thought. You are blocking the channels."
"You might have told me that before."
"I am telling you now."
He tried again. With less brow-furrowing. Still nothing, but the mana around him moved differently, less dispersed, which I registered as progress and did not remark upon because he did not need encouragement, he needed data.
Then it was my turn.
〈Eos, analysis of my current mana channels.〉
[The channels are functioning within expected parameters for the body's age. The problem is not capacity, it is calibration. You are accustomed to operating with significantly larger volumes of mana in bodies with far more developed channels. It is the equivalent of attempting to play an extremely delicate instrument whilst wearing boxing gloves.]
〈Poetic as ever.〉
I closed my eyes. I located my mana and directed it through the still underdeveloped channels of this body, without the verbal scaffolding of the incantation. I felt them respond, then disperse, then respond again and disperse once more with the consistency of a flame in a crosswind.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes.
Rudeus was looking at me with the very particular expression of someone attempting not to show satisfaction and failing moderately. "It didn't work."
"I noticed," I said, using exactly the same tone he had used with me.
The corner of his mouth moved.
We continued trying. With the silent methodology of two researchers who had implicitly agreed not to comment on individual failures and to focus on the collective data. Rudeus adjusted the position of his hand. I adjusted the angle of direction. Rudeus tried visualising the water before summoning it. I tried reducing the volume of intention to better calibrate the channel.
Mana dispersed. Mana dispersed. Mana dispersed.
On Rudeus's twelfth attempt, a drop of water appeared above his palm, remained there for exactly two seconds, and then vanished.
Rudeus stared at his own hand with the expression of someone who has just witnessed something they are not certain was real.
"It worked," he said, in the voice of someone testing a sentence before believing it.
"It worked," I confirmed.
He looked up. His green eyes held that particular luminosity of a genuine discovery, the kind that contains nothing performative because it happened too quickly to be calculated. "A single drop."
"A single drop is sufficient to prove the principle."
"But you still haven't managed it."
"Not yet."
Rudeus looked at me with the expression of someone clearly weighing whether to say something. He decided against it. He looked back at his own hand and tried again.
I tried as well.
On my thirteenth attempt, I felt the channels align differently, a fraction of a second of perfect calibration between intention and direction, and a larger drop of water appeared over my palm, larger than Rudeus's, remained for three seconds, and vanished.
"Naturally," I said.
Rudeus turned his head so quickly I heard his neck make a sound. "YOU WEREN'T CERTAIN."
"I had stubbornness and determination," I said, with the serenity of someone who considers those equivalent. "On balance, it amounted to the same thing."
"That is not the same thing!"
"The results suggest otherwise."
He looked at me with an expression that moved through indignation, exasperation, and then, with the inevitability of something that cannot be sustained indefinitely, a sort of mildly amused resignation that I had begun to recognise as his default mode of operation when dealing with me.
The weeks that followed brought what I would classify, in an objective analysis entirely devoid of any unnecessary emotional investment, as one of the most functional working dynamics I had established across several life cycles.
Not because Rudeus was exceptional. Nor because I had developed anything resembling affection for the chubby-cheeked creature of questionable moral history who shared the loft with me every afternoon.
But because, for the first time in more lives than I can account for without Eos's assistance, I could say things that were completely absurd and completely true without my interlocutor calling for an exorcist.
In a world with medieval magic and a collective magical knowledge equivalent to that of a child learning to tie their own shoes, finding someone who would accept the premise that the local system was rudimentary without treating it as heresy was, objectively, rare.
Rudeus did not believe everything I said. That was reasonable. I would not have believed myself either, had I only one life and a half's worth of existence as a point of reference. But he had arrived at a practical equilibrium that I respected: when I said something absurd, he registered it, filed it in some mental folder of uncertain categorisation, and moved on without demanding that I justify every assertion individually.
It was efficient. I appreciated efficiency.
"I once studied a magical system that used hyperdimensional geometry as its channelling framework," I remarked one afternoon, when the loft light was particularly good and the book had offended me intellectually for the tenth time that day.
"Of course," said Rudeus, without looking up from the page.
I looked at him. "You did not even ask how it worked."
"I don't want to know."
"It might be relevant to what we are studying."
"Is hyperdimensional geometry relevant to water-summoning magic in a medieval loft?"
I considered honestly. "Tangentially."
"Then I don't need to know."
〈Eos.〉
[Yes?]
〈He is growing more efficient at filtering unnecessary information. That is technically a valuable cognitive skill.〉
[It is also the only defence mechanism available to someone living in close proximity to you.]
〈Fair point.〉
The following afternoon, Rudeus produced a water sphere the size of an egg, without incantation, and held it stable for nearly a full minute before losing concentration. He turned to me with the face of someone who has done something genuinely impressive and knows it and wants acknowledgement for the fact, and said, "Look. A whole sphere."
I looked at the sphere. Then at him. "Good."
Rudeus's expression descended two floors of satisfaction. "Just that?"
"For a three-year-old it is impressive."
"You are also three years old!"
I looked at him with the inexhaustible patience of someone who has had this conversation in other languages on other planets. "Technically."
Rudeus stared at me for a moment with the expression of someone who very much wants to formulate a definitive response to that and never quite manages it, because the definitive response does not exist.
He looked back at the water sphere, which had dissipated during the exchange, and began trying again with the quiet stubbornness of someone who had decided that the best available answer was to improve to the point where "technically" was no longer defensible.
It was, in my assessment, the most intelligent reaction he could have had.
〈Eos.〉
[I already know what you are going to say, and the answer is: yes, he is irritatingly competent when he applies himself.]
〈I was not going to say that.〉
[You were.]
I looked at the small, reconstituted water sphere floating above Rudeus's open palm, trembling slightly at its edges with the concentrated effort he was applying, and decided I was not going to say anything.
Sometimes silence is simply the most honest answer available.
And I was, above all else, an honest person.