In Which Mackenzie Gets In Touch With Her Feelings

The first time I woke up on Sunday, I was alone.

I was okay with waking up alone in general, but I felt the absence of anyone else in bed pretty strongly. It was the first thing that I noticed, followed by the absence of everything else. The shock of that woke me up a little bit more, and I realized I was confused… everything was right where it was supposed to be. The bed, me, the pillows, the blankets, the bed curtains… well, I couldn’t speak for anything outside the bed curtains, but everything inside them was in order.

As soon as I’d realized that, though, I started to have the weirdest conviction that things outside little space of my bed weren’t… that they weren’t in their proper place, that they weren’t even there. To my sleep-fogged brain, it seemed like I couldn’t trust that anything I couldn’t see or touch directly to exist, and even the things I could touch didn’t seem quite real.

It was like I existed at a step removed from reality. I knew that I was awake without a shadow of a doubt, but somehow nothing about the world felt real around me. For a moment I wondered if I wasn’t dreaming again, or still… but the conviction that I wasn’t dreaming was too strong.

Then I wondered exactly why I would be so convinced I was awake, if that conviction wasn’t part of a dream?

It took me a minute or so of lying there being vaguely terrified of what I would or wouldn’t see when I actually got up to figure it all out… when I did, I still felt strange, but I was relieved to understand why.

In my dream, I’d been more aware of everything around me than I’ve ever been, awake or asleep. I’d been able to feel it was a dream, and the sudden absence of that feeling was exactly why I was so sure I was awake now. The lack of all the other sensations I’d been experiencing were why I felt such a distance from the world.

I could feel the blankets on top of me and the sheet beneath me. I could feel the relative coolness of the air on the side of my face.

I couldn’t feel any of these things, though, not in the way I would have felt them if I had been asleep.

It had been the owl-turtle thing’s training program, which over the course of one night had instilled in me the bare basics of the skills I needed to use my mental gifts… as minor as they were… within my own head. I’d felt so connected and so in control, even if that control was only slightly less illusory than the things I could control with it.

It was weird and disorienting to wake up and find myself back in a body of flesh and blood, in a world made up of elemental material instead of thoughts and dreams. With careful concentration and some minor acts of divination I could open myself up to the objects of the real world, feel their elemental makeups and the intrinsic properties I’d manipulate as an enchanter… but even the magic skills I’d been developing for more than a year couldn’t compare to the feeling of… of… feeling… that I’d had in my dream.

Was this how telepaths felt all the time? Was this what it was like to be a subtle artist? I had some gifts when it came to magic, some serious natural advantages, but I had a feeling that the deftest wizards in the world must look like lumbering clowns trying to push and pull energy around compared to people like Dee and Teddi, who could pluck gently on cords of pure thought.

The owl-turtle thing had told me that I didn’t have enough oomph to be a telepath. The power that I had could be used to give form to thoughts within the confines of my head. It could in time give me a potent form of defense against mental intrusions, but I’d never be able to experience the same kind of awareness when I was awake that I’d had in my dream .

I couldn’t do anything to change that… but I could do more with what I had. I’d never been too attuned to the senses that I had. Years of keeping my head down and hoping not to be noticed, hoping that whatever was going on around me would have nothing to do with me, had trained me not to notice people or things. I could work on that… the best effort probably couldn’t undo the damage of a decade of keeping my eyes to the ground, but I could only go up.

I could get more in touch with my magic, too. I was studying the energy-intensive field of enchantment, but I had energy to spare and it wasn’t like opening myself up and reading things cost that much. If I could make it second nature, it would be practically free… and while I couldn’t imagine what practical benefit I’d get from having a mystic sense of my bed clothes, but at least I’d know they were there.

Why not? I’d been keeping my head up more, anyway. I wanted to be more than just a line enchanter, and that meant I’d need to be a wizard in the truest senses of the word. Why not start working on it now instead of waiting for that level of easy mastery to develop on its own?

Maybe today was the today to start opening my eyes and other senses. I was already working on a new look, maybe it was time to start a new way of looking at things, too. Maybe this was the day to do so.

It was kind of funny… given how much of my life I’ve spent thinking I needed a drastic change, it’s maybe a little bit weird how rarely I’ve ever woken up and thought to myself anything like ”I can’t take much more of this,” or even something more positive like ”Today is the day. Today’s going to be different” or ”Today’s the first day of the rest of my life.”

It’s not that I haven’t thought those kinds of things on a fairly regular basis, at various points in my life. It’s just always been something I’ve had to work my way up to. Even at the worst, most monotonous or most oppressive point of my young existence, I never woke up feeling the overwhelming need for a change. It had always taken a few moments at the very least for reality to catch up with me and remind me about what I even needed to get away from so badly.

But since I had the idea in my head… why not today? Why not right now? Judging by the quality of the light and how quiet it was, it had to be pretty early, and that meant I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be or anything else I needed to do. I closed my eyes and breathed in, trying to be aware of my breathing but also aware of the air.

What I breathed in was no more elementally pure than a random shovelful of dirt was pure elemental earth, but I could feel the air in that air, and once I did that I could feel the strand-like currents that connected it to the air around me. The environs of the bed was not quite a completely closed system, of course, but I had only the dimmest awareness of anything outside the curtains.

Still, dim awareness was an improvement over no awareness… it was reassuring just to have some kind of connection to my surroundings. I couldn’t walk around with even this kind of low-level elemental divination going on, of course. It took too much of my concentration, and even if it might theoretically possible to get a sense of the shape of one’s surroundings and the people and other obstacles within it by mapping out the air currents, I didn’t really have a clue how to interpret what I was “seeing”.

It was a start, but just a start.

Being aware of the air also made me aware of the scents that it carried. I wasn’t surprised to find traces of Ian, Amaranth, and Steff in the bed that they all shared with me at times. I wasn’t surprised to recognize them. The scents of a human man, a field nymph, and a half-elf were all pretty distinct from one another. I was a little surprised at just how strong the traces remained, in their absence. After my moment of existential doubt, it was comforting to find I was surprised by proof of my absent lovers.

I really didn’t mind waking up alone, most of the time that it happened. I loved going to sleep in a big warm pile… short of the room actually being on fire it wasn’t possible for it to be too hot for me to sleep, and even that wasn’t for certain. As a half-demon, I was literally in my element when it came to fire.

But until the weather got cold enough for it to be a rude shock, waking up by myself still felt pretty normal to me. I was also in my element in a more figurative sense when I was on my own. That had less to do with being a half-demon than… okay, being a half-demon probably did have a bit to do with it, after all. . I might have been an introvert before, but it had taken my “turning” to turn me into an outcast.

That, and my grandmother’s constant intervention.

There’s something about shared faith that even when people might not agree with the strictest or most extreme practitioners about all the particulars, they don’t like to disagree with them. The average small-town Khersian couldn’t hope to live up to my grandmother’s standards for the faith, and probably wouldn’t even try… but let Martha Blaise stand up in front of the assembled masses to declare those standards, and most of the congregation would nod along, because of course.

Not of course anything in particular.

Just of course.

Anybody who cared as much about the Librum as she did must know more than most about its contents. Anybody who talked about Khersis as much as she did must understand his will more perfectly than others.

These sorts of things were the unspoken assumptions that often guided the normally devout in dealing with the zealous. Sometimes it was maybe less a matter of actually believing that holier-than-thou automatically meant wiser-than-thou and more a matter of not caring enough to want to argue with a fanatic, but what did it matter what they believed or didn’t believe in their hearts if the end results were the same?

No one had ever spoken up in my favor, not where it could do me any good. Nobody had ever spared me any kind words, so I’d grown up knowing that I was a half-demon, and knowing with the simple and unwavering strength of childhood belief that this made me a monster. If I hadn’t done anything particularly evil yet except exist, that was half luck and half the unceasing vigilance of my guardian.

I couldn’t blame my grandmother for all the prejudice I’d faced growing up, just the relentless uniformity of it. She’d held a lot of sway in the community. She’d made sure that I couldn’t escape her beliefs at school or anywhere else I had the power to go on my own. The average smalltown Khersian probably wouldn’t be able to live up to her standards for the faith and wouldn’t try, but they also wouldn’t disagree with someone who was so passionately and zealously sure of their reading of the Librum as she was.

Outside her sphere of influence, a lot of people still didn’t like half-demons. There’s a difference between “a lot of” and “all”, or even “most”… since I’d left home and come to school, I’d encountered plenty of people who shared the attitude she’d promoted, but I’d also met people who didn’t care, or thought it was cool, or who were happy to use it as an excuse to pick on me in a way that made it clear that they didn’t actually find me the least bit threatening or dangerous.

Even after I’d started to shake her upbringing on a conscious level, I’d still tended to find myself closer to agreeing with the people who saw me as a threat than the people who found it cool. What did being a half-demon get me, besides a lot of grief?

Most of the effects of being half-demon were social. I’d spent half my childhood thinking I was human and half knowing I wasn’t, and I could honestly say that there wasn’t a lot of difference on the inside. Most of the change in terms of my day-to-day life had been in how people reacted to me.

Among the actual physical differences… there were some things that could be called plusses, though they were heavily seasoned with minuses.

There was the connection to fire, which I could exploit for elemental magic, but which definitely was dangerous when not carefully controlled. I was supernaturally strong, but that also fell into the “dangerous” category.

I never got tired from things like carrying a heavy book bag around, but the upper limit on what I could lift and carry was way higher than I’d reasonably need to call upon in a day.

I was invulnerable to mundane harm, but anybody who wanted to kill me had no shortage of ways to do so. We lived in a day when magical education was pretty common and where magical weapons were mass-produced, and of course I lived in a highly religious nation where the dominant religion was highly anti-demon. Being invulnerable to mundane harm basically made it harder to kill myself when I tripped into something… and being protected from harm didn’t protect me from hurt, which meant I could still be in a lot of pain if I managed to do something like fall down a flight of stairs or something.

The only really solid net gain I got was my energy reserves, which were considerably deeper than than those of a fully mortal practitioner of magic. I definitely benefited from that, but it was hard for me to really appreciate something that was just normal to me.

The most important legacy of my demon heritage in terms of actual impact was the hunger. I could go forever without eating “mortal” food, though it affected my body in different ways if I did or didn’t. It was also possible that as long as I was getting solid food I’d never actually die from not feeding my demon side with virgin human blood… my best theory was that I could never more than “half starve” as long as one appetite or the other was being sated.

The dangers of even postponing one monthly feeding, though, were too strong to be ignored. Even if I never used my demon strength consciously, even if I gave up on magic completely, I still wouldn’t be able to go more than a month without getting that reminder.

Other than that? Like I said, most of the differences were social, and they weren’t exactly pleasant.

Once I stopped consciously maintaining my connection to the air to follow other chains of thought, my hold on it slipped away bit by bit. I was still breathing slowly and deeply, though, and so I gradually became as aware of the sound of my own breathing as I had been of the motion of the air around me. It was a quiet morning in the dorm, which meant I could hear individual sounds more distinctly.

A door opened and closed somewhere on the floor above me. Water was running, somewhere. There was a chime out in the hallway as one of the lifts stopped on our floor, though there was no sound of anyone getting off.

I was just starting to fall back into sleep when I heard the sound of the door opening. Amaranth was my first thought, since the other key to our room belonged to her, but I realized almost right away that was wrong… it was Steff. Not even a second later, the motion of the door opening carried her scent into the room and I drifted off knowing I’d been right.


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19 Responses to “Chapter 94: Making Sense”

  1. Asimov says:

    I highly enjoy the imagery of “lumbering clowns”

    Current score: 0
  2. Asimov says:

    I highly enjoy my mental image of “lumbering clowns”.

    Current score: 0
  3. Zathras IX says:

    As a half-Demon
    Mackenzie’s in her Element
    When it comes to Fire

    Current score: 0
  4. Burnsidhe says:

    Starting with “It was kind of funny…” there are two paragraphs with an inconsistent tense; What Mack says is in the present, but nearly everywhere else, it’s in past. “I have” instead of “I had.”

    And it’s excellent that Mack’s starting to use her senses more. She’s got fairly good ones.

    Current score: 0
  5. William Carr says:

    I don’t know why, but this was more compelling than usual.

    Maybe it’s because Mack and I are in the same headspace at the moment.

    Current score: 0
  6. CMEast says:

    I loved this one! Seems like real, solid self-improvement – I feel like she has just ‘ leveled-up’! I hope we see this resolution to attain greater awareness in later chapters.

    Current score: 0
  7. Luke Licens says:

    “and even if it might theoretically possible to get a sense of the shape of one’s surroundings”

    There seems to be a missing ‘be’.

    Also, semi-duplicate passages. Not sure if it’s for emphasis, or an editing leftover:

    “There’s something about shared faith that even when people might not agree with the strictest or most extreme practitioners about all the particulars, they don’t like to disagree with them. The average small-town Khersian couldn’t hope to live up to my grandmother’s standards for the faith, and probably wouldn’t even try… but let Martha Blaise stand up in front of the assembled masses to declare those standards, and most of the congregation would nod along, because of course.

    Not of course anything in particular.

    Just of course.

    Anybody who cared as much about the Librum as she did must know more than most about its contents. Anybody who talked about Khersis as much as she did must understand his will more perfectly than others.”

    “The average smalltown Khersian probably wouldn’t be able to live up to her standards for the faith and wouldn’t try, but they also wouldn’t disagree with someone who was so passionately and zealously sure of their reading of the Librum as she was.”

    Current score: 0
    • 'Nym-o-maniac says:

      I think that the “of course” was intended to be left there. Not “of course [whatever]”, just of course.

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      • Silver says:

        The “of course” duplication was almost assuredly intentional and for emphasis; there wasn’t any one specific thing they agreed with, they agreed with the entirety on general principle, because… of course they did.

        The discussion about the “average smalltown Khersian” was possibly intentional and possibly an editing slip-up, which was what I think Luke was getting at.

        On the whole, an interesting chapter. Mostly recap of what we already knew (if we were reading along since chapter 1) but a good refresher, and interesting that Mack is no longer intentionally ignoring her senses that are possibly demonically-boosted (like her night-vision).

        Current score: 0
      • Gruhl says:

        I think what Luke Licens was refering to is the two sentences starting with ‘The average smalltown Khersian …’ and then continues with a slight variation. I’d say it was a repetition for emphasis and the only ‘error?’ I found in it is calling it ‘small-town’ in one and ‘smalltown’ in another. Now english isn’t my first language, but I think that in it, all three of ‘small town’, ‘small-town’ and ‘smalltown’ is correct, but switching between them just makes it look inconsistent.
        Well, apart from that, regardless of which, editorial oversight or intentional emphasis, I like it.

        Thanks for a nice chapter.

        Current score: 0
  8. anon y mouse says:

    “and while I couldn’t imagine what practical benefit I’d get from having a mystic sense of my bed clothes, but at least I’d know they were there.” – no ‘but’, maybe?

    Current score: 0
  9. William Carr says:

    I don’t know if it’s too much Ranma 1/2…

    But I just had the image of a Magical Beast that could temporarily banish Mack’s Demonic side. Like Gold Kryptonite, just temporarily instead of permanent.

    Suddenly, it’s all-human Mack. No super-strength, no near-invulnerability; also no craving for virgin blood and no sulphur BO.

    She’d be suddenly fragile, unable to withstand “rough” treatment.

    The memory of eating blood would suddenly nauseate her.

    But Blessings would have no effect and Khersis Himself might suddenly take an interest in her.

    And maybe… her Mother’s Gift would flare up brighter without the Demonic interference.

    Current score: 0
  10. Elaborate says:

    duplication: “deeper than than those”

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  11. Um the Muse says:

    I’ve experienced this. Suddenly waking up to becoming more aware of one’s own senses, especially through breathing exercises and quiet meditation. It’s a great, uplifting feeling, and you captured it well.

    Current score: 0
  12. Rafinius says:

    Does this mean that she will finally acknowlege her enhanced sense of smell, hearing and especially seeing? She has an amazingly useful dark/low-light vision if my memories don’t fail me. Till now she just acted as if that’s normal.

    Current score: 0
  13. Joshua says:

    Typos: In the “Characters” list at the end, “Mazkenzie” should be “Mackenzie”.

    Duplicate period in “a bit to do with it, after all. . ”

    Three short quoted passages have their open-quotes facing the wrong way, starting with ”I can’t take much more of this,”

    Current score: 0
  14. Stonefoot says:

    First: I’m not questioning (in universe) the sincerity of Mack’s grandmother, Brimstone Blaise. We have sufficient evidence that she was doing only what she believed she had to.

    This description, however: “Anybody who cared as much about the Librum as she did must know more than most about its contents. Anybody who talked about Khersis as much as she did must understand his will more perfectly than others.” brings up real-world experiences. I was, initially, going to use examples involving religion, but that isn’t necessary. My experience indicates that when people use an ‘argument from authority’ the usual reason is that there are no other effective arguments. With no facts or logic to support ones position, one falls back on ‘argument from authority’.

    I’d say any ‘argument from authority’ can safely assumed to be false, until proven otherwise, and anyone who makes an ‘argument from authority’ can be assumed to be talking nonsense whenever their lips are moving.

    (Sorry for venting. I’ve had some fairly nasty experiences that this brought back to mind.)

    Current score: 0
    • JS says:

      What you say is true but you only have to look to Fox News and the people who blindly listen to Glenn Beck to see what Alexandra was referring to in that paragraph.

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    • Mickey Phoenix says:

      So true! And if anyone disagrees with that idea, I’ll just say, “Stonefoot said it, I believe it, that strikes it.”

      🙂

      Current score: 0