Work Text:
"Do you remember your life before you came here?"
He remembers fragments of colors. A shard of not-quite-blue. A flash of what could be white. Nothing substantial, nothing of any meaning at all. His world began with Tiara, and he suspects that it will end with her as well. "No."
"Nothing?" Tiara tilts her head. Gold curls fall into big, blue eyes, colors more vibrant than in any of his memories. She shifts and the silk and crinoline of her dress shifts with her. "What about a name? Friends? The place you lived?"
"Nothing," Graham says.
She frowns and he wonders if he said something wrong.
"Nothing," she murmurs, and she looks away.
But nothing is an abstract concept, difficult for either to grasp, and easy for both to turn away from.
The Origin of Partners
Except republished from Advanced Analysis of Intermediate-Level Magic
And she summoned from nothing a being to serve her,
A being to guide her and to aid her,
And henceforth she was not alone.1
'Summoned from nothing' is, of course, untrue, although it might appear that way to people with no knowledge of the subject matter. Partners are summoned using a complex ritual when a young shaman is deemed able enough to undertake it, under the watchful eyes of several elders. Partners are pulled, in way that is almost violent, from a world separate to ours, a world of which we have very little knowledge. Of course we are aware of our own world and of the world of humans, which we are tasked with watching over, but what of the world of our partners? It is a mystery to us.
Partners do not have a corporal form of their own when they are summoned; it is the task of their shaman to give them one.2 This is the most difficult part of the summoning ritual. A large misstep or lack of power or concentration means that a partner may take on an incomplete form, a form incapable of housing their essence, a form that will keep them in a painful limbo between this world and their own. In these cases, the humane decision is to eradicate them completely so that they don't have to live that kind of existence. Smaller mistakes might result in a complete but grotesque form or a mental deficiency in the partner.3
Partners, once summoned, feel an instinctive pull to serve their shaman. This is, of course, a result of the summoning ritual. We instill this sense into them to make them more amenable to their roles in our lives, because while we call them partners, the relationship is not actually equal. Partners supplement the power of their shamans. They provide support in battle. If they are found to be lacking they are sent away, and a different partner is summoned.
Another part of the summoning ritual is the locking away of the partner's memories. A partner will not be able to tell you what their world is like, what their lives were like, or even what they looked like. Any memories of their world are buried deep in their mind in a vault they can not access for as long as they remain in our world. This may seem cruel, but it is a cruel necessity. Partners will not be able to serve their shaman well if their thoughts are clouded with their old lives and loved ones. Indeed, they may not even want to.
Partners are, of course, sustained in this world be the magic of their shamans. If something happens to interfere with that magic, in most cases the death of the shaman, the partner's body is destroyed and its essence sent back to its own world. One curious discovery is that it is possible, although rare, for a partner to be summoned more than once in its lifetime to serve two different masters. These partners often retain some memories of their former experience in the shaman world, even though they can't remember their own world.4
1 Queen Lore translation.
2 A Guidebook to Other Worlds by the esteemed Ciela posits that partners might not even have corporal forms in their own world. "The form of their existence," Ciela writes, "might be one we are unable to understand or even conceptualize."
3 This mental deficiency can be analogized with brain damage. It is a trauma that affects the partner's mental facilities, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways. Medical Considerations of Failed Summoning Rituals and Suggestions for Future Success.
4 In-depth interviews with such partners are transcribed in full in The Obscuridatum. It was found that partners don't retain specific memories, such as who their shamans were or what assignments they were tasked with, but they did retain general knowledge about the shaman world and battle tactics.
Tiara shuts her book, sick of reading for now. The old pages crinkle and stick together as her hand moves over aged leather. How horrible, she thinks, and she's not referring to the text. Things are what they are, the elders sometimes say. This is our world. These are our traditions. How horrible that she never thought to question them until now.
Japporo scampers up onto the desk and nestles underneath Tiara's hand. She notices that Tiara is oddly contemplative, and it worries her. "Is there something wrong, Tiara? You seem lost in thought."
Tiara asks a question she has asked before. "Do you remember your life before you came here?"
"What a foolish question," Japporo says, and she laughs as much as a ferret can laugh. She wonders why Tiara is wasting time with such idle thoughts.
Tiara smiles. The words are different, but the answers are basically the same. Tiara's fingers ruffle the fur around Japporo's neck before moving to settle on the stone around it. Big, red, and smooth. Graham's stone. The only part of her former partner that remains here. She presses a fingertip against its surface and feels the warmth bleed through to her skin.
She can feel her magic bubbling inside her, magic the elders say only comes along once in a million years. She can change the way things are. She has the power.
"Would you like to?" she asks.