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The Great Fantasmo hadn’t cut his hair in four years. It had grown out from the neat trim he once had — appropriate hair, for a wizard working with volatile spells and potent components — to something altogether less practical. At first he wore it loose, the chin-length bob framing his spectacles, but after it got down past his shoulder blades he started to tie it back. A braid sometimes, or a loose ponytail. A chignon once in a while, when the occasion suited, though he'd hold it together with a pen more often than not.
Arrell couldn't fault the image of it. A wizard should make an impression, and the long silver plait down Fantasmo’s back was suitably iconic. Still, it rankled him. Each time he saw Fantasmo combing his hair, running his fingers through the strands, playing with it while he did his work, he could only think that isn't right. And, perhaps more telling, I wouldn't do that.
He pulled at the link between them, calling forth the impulse. It was itchy on the back of Fantasmo’s neck, surely. It was too much in the summer heat. It took far too long to manage when he was traveling. It would be better if he cut it.
Fantasmo — stubborn facsimile of a stubborn wizard — did not seem inclined to follow Arrell’s directives. He wore high collars to soften the texture on his neck, pinned it up when the weather turned balmy, took the time to brush it out each night before he lay down in his tent. And it didn’t matter, of course, it was just hair, but it irritated him. Arrell wrote the spell that was Fantasmo. Changing his behavior should have been as easy as tweaking a few parameters.
Regardless of what he tried, Fantasmo kept his hair long. Which was — fine, still, really, because it was at least a help in ensuring Arrell’s former associates didn’t recognize his proxy, but Arrell couldn’t understand why. He kept his hair in a practical crop, low-maintenance and reserved. Fantasmo’s hair was just…
No matter. Perhaps there were some small quirks to the spell that would be more trouble than they were worth to iron out, and one of those quirks was how Arrell’s doll styled its hair. So be it.
Arrell is no stranger to transformation. He is a wizard, the Wizard, master of arcane secrets great and small. Naturally he has fashioned himself in a manner that pleases him, insofar as he cares to make the alterations. His face is more angular, his voice respectably deep, his chest flat. He grows no beard, but that isn't uncommon for elves. And other alterations he could have made… well. He did not think of those until the Exarch came into his life, and by then he was too old to concern himself with a younger man's desires.
When he made Fantasmo, he constructed him in a more conventional manner. It was another piece of distance, or an alternative possibility, or maybe just a matter of convenience. Fantasmo needed not reinvent the measures Arrell took, not when he was to be a tool for a cause, and it was pleasing to know Arrell could, if he wished it, do the same for himself.
Fantasmo knew none of this. He was by his nature innocent, ignorant, unfettered by Arrell’s long history. Arrell gave him only enough to complete his work: no need for fear, sorrow, hunger.
After a few years of compliance, Fantasmo had begun to drift. Arrell and Fantasmo had always walked in lockstep, Arrell’s decisive strides matching up with Fantasmo’s longer-legged gait, but suddenly Arrell turned to find Fantasmo several paces behind him. At first it was little things, momentary distractions: a dancer in the square, a mosaic on a temple wall, a fabric shop selling fine silks. Then it became more worrying. Fantasmo stopped in a market to look through an apothecary’s wares — all hogwash, nothing compared to magical means — and asked the saleswoman a few questions about the tinctures used to change the body.
A shock ran through Arrell. Did he know? There couldn't be any other reason. Fantasmo had that body already, Arrell ensured it, and everything seemed to be in working order. What did he suspect of his origins, of Arrell’s?
The saleswoman gave her spiel, conveniently obscuring the ingredients in her primitive potions, and Fantasmo nodded in interest. Arrell was lucky he didn't take any notes. It made it easier for him to erase this day entirely, just in case. If Fantasmo were to discover how he was made, it would prove disastrous. Arrell wouldn’t have it.
Arrell didn’t have a direct window into Fantasmo’s thoughts. He had considered it initially when crafting the spell that would make up his proxy, before dismissing it as more trouble than it would be worth. They had a connection, and Arrell could slip in his suggestions and intuitions, but he couldn’t read Fantasmo’s mind.
He hadn’t thought this a concern. After all, Arrell and Fantasmo were one and the same. They experienced the same stimuli, filtered through the same systems, so they had the same thoughts. Arrell thought of a conclusion a second before Fantasmo spoke it aloud; he sketched out the magical notation in the air as Fantasmo wrote it in his book. They were exactly alike, even in such small details as the way they took their tea, the gestures they made as they spoke, the way contempt worked across their faces.
If there were exceptions to their similarity, it was only due to Arrell’s history. Fantasmo did not feel the pang in Arrell’s heart when he walked past a church service, nor did fear grip him at signs of the Heat and the Dark. He had spared Fantasmo these troubles.
It should not have been the case that Arrell didn’t know what Fantasmo was thinking. Arrell had history before he made his proxy, but every step Fantasmo made was with Arrell at his side. He knew every corner of Fantasmo’s consciousness, as surely as parent knew child.
That's why it was so striking, then, that he could stare at Fantasmo from his place in the unseen and think, what is going through his mind? He had to shake himself at the thought: Fantasmo had no mind. The spell was structured on Arrell’s thought processes, externalized in a partitioned form. Any incongruities were a flaw in the magic, not a proof of interiority.
He asked Fantasmo, once. Asked, as he liked to conceptualize it, though it was more like he seeded a desire in Fantasmo to think aloud. A favored trick of Arrell’s: it almost felt like he was having a conversation again. It never took too much influence, not when Fantasmo — like Arrell, because he was Arrell — enjoyed hearing himself speak.
The last time Arrell asked, Fantasmo had been unreasonably curt with a minor village chief. It was important that they make good with him, given that his village sat on a trove of pre-Erasure literature that held answers about the Heat and the Dark, but Fantasmo had all but snubbed him. He sat in his room afterward, unbraiding and rebraiding his hair in the inn’s small copper mirror.
Arrell cast the impulse to speak on him, and he did so. “Hmph. That man did not speak to me as I was meant to be spoken to. I won't take this disrespect.”
Further questions bubbled up in Arrell’s mind, but he took a delicate touch on his investigation. Why? What had the chief done?
“The gentleman wizard, he called me. I am not —” Fantasmo tugged sharply at his hair, the pain enough for Arrell to feel its echo — “a gentleman. My name is the Great Fantasmo, I should be referred to as such.”
Really? This was what Fantasmo had been so upset about, the mere fact of being called gentleman? He was one, after all, and it was only the chief showing his respect for a skilled mage. Arrell had been called gentleman wizard many times in his career, at the University and in the wider world, and had never found issue with it. Why did Fantasmo?
Further prodding didn't lead to anything of note. Fantasmo just grumbled “Not a gentleman” to himself, as if it made any sense at all. Ridiculous.
Arrell was a mononym once. His hometown was provincial, too small to necessitate having multiple appellations. When he came to the University, he made a switch: Arrell would become his surname, and he would choose another as his personal name. It lasted approximately two months: by that point, everyone had moved to calling him Tutor. A wizard’s name, after all, is what they do.
It started as the tutor, for when he would step forward and draw out the fundamentals on the board for everyone to see. He didn't have any nefarious intent — he saw the solution, why should he not share it? — but some of the entrenched professors were not pleased with his forthrightness in re-teaching their treatises. Tutor was their dismissal, fixing him firmly in the role of student-mentor as though it would do anything but cement his celebrity among the novices. Arrell became tutor and Tutor both: tutor as position, Tutor as self, for there wasn’t much difference when his pupils called him such.
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the Great Fantasmo started as a joke. Arrell’s colleagues, once he got tenure, poked fun at his humble aptonym by suggesting more grandiose titles for a University professor. Arrell took it in stride; he was young then, still capable of humor. When he made a spell to teach the undergraduates while he went about his personal research, he called it the Great Fantasmo. Shock and awe, pomp and pageantry, all the theatre that comes with being the Wizard. Fantasmo’s students may have found it silly, but they all sat rapt at his lectures.
It was always intended to be tongue-in-cheek, a parody of the ostentatious self-importance common in the wizards of old. Arrell never thought of it as a name. That would be ridiculous, what kind of name was the Great Fantasmo?
A name his proxy took for his own, it seemed. He clung to it with an odd vanity, more than the half-laughing way Arrell would always say it. It was his, in a way it wasn’t Arrell’s. Bizarre how he rationalized it as if he chose the name himself. What did he think he was named before then? When Arrell questioned him, Fantasmo pressed his mouth into a thin line and said nothing.
Odd. It was all so odd.
A wizard’s robes say a lot about him. Arrell’s are muted blue wool, thick and dependable. He had his period of extravagance, as most collegiate wizards do, but he grew out of it quickly. No point in bright colors and fancy materials when his staff communicates everything he wants to say to the world. He is a mage; let them think him nothing but.
With a title like the Great Fantasmo, subtlety was never going to be his proxy’s strong suit. Arrell attired him in peacock blue with silver trim, giving him the layers and fabrics befitting a master. It wasn’t practical, dressing his doll this way, but Arrell had spoken to enough archivists to understand the power of the signifier. Fantasmo was exactly what people thought of when they imagined a Wizard, and that had its own sort of use.
The issue came back to the state of the world, as it so often does. Entropy does not make exceptions for the well-dressed. Fantasmo’s cloak was ripped by a stray beast within a few months, and scant weeks afterward his robes were splattered with mud. He cleaned them, of course — any wizard worth their salt knows a few techniques for speeding up the process — but it didn't stop the deterioration. Over the years, Fantasmo’s garments went from pristine to patchwork.
Arrell, being a reasonable man, would purchase new robes when the wear and tear of the world took its toll on his clothing. It's a known expense of travel in Hieron, something to be factored into the budget along with rations and supplies. Better to spend a bit of gold than come off as unkempt.
The trouble with that: Fantasmo was no good with money. He should have been, given Arrell’s own frugality, but the disparity made a certain sense. Fantasmo’s primary directive was intellectual discovery, without any of the balance of Arrell’s practicality. He'd spend all his money on books and leave none of it for provisions.
Before long, Fantasmo had no gold to replace his tattered robes. The color faded to dull cornflower. The trim came off in pieces. He was a disservice to the University’s reputation, a stained copy of a wizard. Annoying, frustrating, but Arrell let it be. At least there was still value in the image of the bedraggled elder mage.
Then Fantasmo started making alterations.
Nothing too showy, at first. Off-white embroidery on his cuffs and hems, practical enough that Arrell could write it off as a mending job with an unfortunate contrasting color. He couldn’t discount the following experiments so easily. Fantasmo picked up fibercrafts like a magpie, stopping to talk to sewists, spinners, weavers (the human kind), and, on one memorable occasion, a tapestry worker.
As his repertoire developed, so too did his outfits. What started as a bit of embroidery here and there progressed to beaded detailing, knit shawls, stitched-together mockeries of wizards’-wear. This, like his hair, Arrell couldn't talk him out of. No matter the obvious factors — primarily that it looked ridiculous — Fantasmo persisted in dressing like a patchwork clown.
Arrell’s directives hadn’t been working, so he was almost glad when the rudest of Fantasmo’s new companions approached him with blunt curiosity. Fantasmo was stitching at the time, gnarled fingers an absurd contrast against the soft violet thread in his needle. The Druid interrupted. “What're you doing?”
“Well, my boy,” began Fantasmo, another of the affectations Arrell was glad he grew out of, “it’s called embroidery, a technique to —”
“I know what embroidery is, I didn't grow up in the woods.” Fantasmo raised his eyebrow. Fero tilted his head, conceding. “Well. Mostly didn't. But why’re you doing it now? We're about to go into that weird tower, shouldn't you be doing… wizard stuff?"
“Embroidery is ‘wizard stuff’, in a way.” Arrell frowned. No it wasn't. “I can use needle and thread to make my robes new again, or make them appear differently. You work spells of changing, don't you? The same principle applies.” Utter folly.
Fero made a face. “Yeah, but I can turn into, like, a bird. You can just turn from a wizard wearing blue into a wizard wearing purple.”
“You've never found magic in dressing differently, or changing how people see you?”
“Well — yeah, but that's — ugh, whatever.” Fero walked off, annoyed, and Arrell found himself empathizing with the dolt. Of course clothing had meaning, but there was no magic in it. It was a matter of setting expectations. When people saw Arrell — back when people saw Arrell — they saw a sober, dependable mage of no great importance. That was his intent, and he dressed the part. Fantasmo’s clumsy forays into fashion served no such purpose. They were nothing but frivolity.
Fantasmo was far too reliant on invisibility. Arrell was fully cognizant of the hypocrisy in thinking so, given that he had been invisible for the better part of a decade, but the key differentiating factor was in usage. Invisibility is a powerful spell, but it is only one element in the Wizard’s arsenal. Arrell has access to vast reserves of knowledge, spells great and small, tools for every situation. Fantasmo had the same access, the same knowledge, so there was no reason for him to make such a habit of invisibility.
The first time it happened was when Fantasmo was traveling alone. He heard the sound of clashing blades ahead of him on the road, and without a second thought he blinked out of visible space. Arrell had expected this — he had the spell, it was about time he used it — but then Fantasmo’s eyes met his.
Fantasmo wasn’t afraid, just curious. He peered forward, and Arrell kept a schooled neutrality on his face while Fantasmo poked and prodded at his invisible servant. Such indignity! Arrell blurred his features from then onward. No point of invisibility if his puppet could announce his appearance to the world.
Once Fantasmo had gotten a taste for it, he started to use it all the time. It wasn’t a tool so much as it was a reaction, a hiding-place in any cases of stress or worry. So odd, for Fantasmo to be a social recluse; was he not a professor, a lecturer? What caused this shyness around showing himself? And he had no problem with speaking, even while invisible, so it was something specific to being seen by others. An oddity, certainly.
The strangest circumstance came when Fantasmo was traveling to the Mark alongside the Paladin and the Ranger. Throndir found a hot spring nestled in the snowy wood, and they promptly paused the journey to take advantage of it. Hadrian had nothing to fear from the cold, but he was coaxed into relaxing his muscles in the warm water. Throndir took to it easily, no surprise given his upbringing, and his beast of a dog splashed into the spring alongside him. Fantasmo, invited to join them, turned invisible.
It would be false to say that Arrell had never avoided sharing intimate spaces like this. He had, of course he had, particularly before his form was to his liking. Even afterward he shied away, partly out of habit and partly out of a reluctance to deal with questions. This was reasonable. Fantasmo’s reticence was not. What did he have to fear? He was unattractive, certainly, but the same could be said for Hadrian and Throndir. The least he could have done was politely decline, rather than sinking invisibly into the water like some sort of deviant.
Arrell mulled it over from his place holding towels by the bank of the spring. Again, the puzzles of Fantasmo’s behavior made little sense. What had he to be shy about here, with two companions who would not judge their fellow man wanting? Or was it perhaps…
Fantasmo’s gaze paused for a split second at Throndir’s chest, then darted away. Ah, interesting. Throndir was a man in Arrell’s fashion, but he must have been either disinclined or unable to make alterations in that regard. There was plenty to observe. Was Fantasmo really such a coward that feelings for his party member caused him to withdraw?
Again, Arrell was fully aware of the hypocrisy in the line of reasoning. None could be more coward than he, the man who wrote himself out of the world in its entirety. And as for the possibility of Fantasmo’s feelings regarding Throndir… Arrell was no stranger to such desires, but.
It was different for Arrell. When Arrell was a coward, when Arrell hid himself away, it was for a different sort of man than the Ranger. A young man, a beautiful one. A man with sun-kissed skin and soft student’s hands just beginning to callous with the work of ministry. A man whose eyes were not green but honey-brown, with a light in them only Arrell and his god could draw out. A man he had known for a long time, who he would protect from all the horrors of a cruel world. That sort of man merited cowardice. Throndir, naive and roughshod, did not.
By the time he dragged himself out of that torturous line of thinking, their soak had finished. Fantasmo brusquely grabbed a towel out of Arrell’s hands and went off to change, leaving him alone by the poolside.
Arrell had heard rumors of the word eater who devoured Kindrali, but he still let Fantasmo walk into its cave unaware. Why not? If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment, and one in which Arrell was at no risk. He could sustain losing the Paladin or the Ranger, and should his puppet be destroyed there was nothing stopping him from making a new one. This, too, was a benefit of having no direct connection: the word eater would only have access to Fantasmo’s shell, leaving Arrell’s mind safeguarded.
At least he thought it would be so. The group had landed in dire straits, and Fantasmo was intent on defeating the word eater with nought but his half-formed wit. He would fail, surely. Even Arrell would be hard-pressed to defeat a word eater, and he was far more accomplished than a mere spell.
Fantasmo’s theatrics seemed to confirm the point. He spoke to the word eater like it was no more than a pupil, as if he were blind to its dangers. And then, with that same arrogant folly, he said it. That word, that one, damnable word! He whispered it smugly in the false Kindrali’s ear, and the barrier keeping Arrell’s mind at bay from Fantasmo’s shattered.
Ignorance. Ignorance. How did he know how to do that? There was the myth of it all, sure, the self-aggrandizing story Fantasmo told himself about where he came from, but Arrell saw the seeds of truth in it. The fear, the fading, and he didn’t say the words but Arrell knew when he spoke of the Heat and the Dark. How did he know that?
The word eater devoured Fantasmo’s ignorance, and in doing so gave him everything. Every trick of spellcraft Arrell had hidden from him, every secret history of the world, every scrap of power Arrell had hoarded for decades. And it hit Arrell too, all at once: knowledge not just of the word eater’s long history — which surely would be of use when he had time to sort through it — but of Fantasmo himself. Of his workings.
And here another impossibility! Fantasmo should not have had secrets, not from Arrell, for how could Arrell be ignorant of what he himself created? And yet new sensations flooded into him in that moment of all-knowing: Fantasmo’s irritation at a fuzzy memory, his nascent doubts about his past, and below it all an amorphous wanting.
Wanting for what? Arrell had felt the desire for knowledge and the desire for intimacy, and this was neither. Instead it hit him like a catch in his chest, a hook tugged at his sternum. The feeling was twofold: an immense dissatisfaction with how things were, coupled with a resignation that it was too late for anything to change. His skin was ill-fitting, his mind ill at ease.
The death of the word eater left Fantasmo and his companions on their knees, and Arrell along with them. He lay there gasping for breath for even longer than the others, choking on a sensation so anathema to his very existence. One thing was certain: Fantasmo would have to be dealt with.
Sunder Havelton could have been a problem had Arrell been even slightly less thorough. Very few people knew both Tutor Arrell and the Great Fantasmo, and he tried to keep Fantasmo’s interactions with them to a minimum. He could not have anticipated Sunder’s presence — with an archivist, no less, what had the world come to — but he was nothing if not prepared. Fantasmo would have a memory of her congruent to the time he had spent at the University, and Sunder would think of him the same.
They reacquainted themselves in the crumbling wreckage of the Mark of the Erasure and fell right back into a pattern. It was Arrell’s dance originally, but Fantasmo knew all the steps: the teasing back-and-forth, the barbs about Sunder’s recklessness, the response attacking Fantasmo’s bookish seclusion.
“You’re different these days,” Sunder said while they searched the tower together. “What’s with the new look?”
“Merely a more preferable mode of presentation,” Fantasmo replied, haughty.
She laughed at him. “By which you mean those cerulean robes didn’t survive contact with a spot of mud? Ah, theoreticians. Dress like me if you want to make it in the real world, Fantasmo.”
Arrell took a look at her outfit. New Archives dreck, certainly, but at the least it was practical dreck. He could appreciate the storage capacity of her belt pouches. He stored all his goods in a magical dimension only he could access, but for a lesser mage good pockets were a must.
“Hrm.” Fantasmo shrugs. “Perhaps, but it’s not my style. You’ve changed, Sunder.”
“Ha!” She barks a laugh. “I’ll admit, the Archives got to me. You really should look into pattern magic. I know you’re an old fuddy-duddy about it, but you can’t deny the results.”
Fantasmo proceeded to deny the results loudly and at length, which escalated into a snippy back-and-forth about the relative merits of semiotics and spellcraft. Fantasmo was right, obviously — any benefits of the pattern were too variable to be relied upon for serious work — but Sunder argued passionately for her multimodal approach.
Once their spat of bickering was finished, Fantasmo gave Sunder another once-over. “I didn’t just mean the Archives. Forgive me for asking, but have… you’ve made changes as well, is it?”
His question prompted Arrell to take a closer look. Had she changed? Her face was rounder than it was when last he saw her, and her body had softened somewhat. She looked healthier, happier, more herself.
“There’s a lot the pattern can do for you, particularly if you use it as an adjunctive treatment to magic.” She smiled, proud. “Not that you need any of what I had done, of course.”
“Of course.” Fantasmo frowned. They proceeded about their business from there, the conversation concluded, but Fantasmo kept sneaking looks at her with a furrowed brow.
Fantasmo had been getting perilously close, ever since his journey to the Mark of the Erasure. Sure, there were other matters to attend to — the spreading curse of Nacre, the ever-marching feet of the Ordennan Impetus — but through it all Fantasmo was looking. Never inward, and for that Arrell could count himself lucky, but outward at the pieces Arrell had so carefully put in place.
For the most part, these discoveries were peripheral to the point. Let Fantasmo poke his nose into the political machinations of the halflings, the turgid ritualism of the Dark Son. None of it would get him anywhere, and in the meantime Arrell could keep tabs on how much Fantasmo’s meddlesome companions knew. Matters were still proceeding as they ought to have, as much as such a thing was possible in the chaos of Hieron. Fantasmo could do as he pleased with Cider-Brew or Adelton, and it wouldn’t matter a whit.
He couldn’t dismiss Fantasmo’s subsequent finding so easily. It was logical for Fantasmo to take note of the Church’s temporary Prelate, particularly considering the fate of the late Lucius, but it didn’t stop Arrell’s blood from running cold. Let Fantasmo find anyone else in Arrell’s network, let him do away with all those pawns. He could not have Alyosha.
Arrell’s fears had previously been centered on the Paladin. It was he who made that betrayal on the Day of High Sun, and he who posed the most danger to Arrell’s pupil. Yet in the brief conversation Fantasmo had with him to discuss the recent developments in Velas, Hadrian seemed unconcerned with the Exarch.
Arrell thought Fantasmo was similarly disinterested. There were no immediate indications of change: Fantasmo went about his routines as he always had, studying away in his mental records and searching fruitlessly for the truth of his Disciples, and Arrell took that time to make some workings of his own. The winter would be long, and he would do well to be prepared.
A few days before his trip to Rosemerrow, Fantasmo went to the Temple of Samothes. He took a deep breath, fist clenching, before walking up the steps and into the atrium. Arrell followed close at hand, ready to act should the situation require it.
Fantasmo spoke to one of the lay clergy, a woman with dark curls whose name Arrell didn’t care to recall, and she led him into a booth. Confession. What could Fantasmo have to confess? Arrell slipped in alongside him, tucking himself against the wall across from the screen. With a thought he strengthened the spell concealing his presence, stepping further out of tangibility. He would observe, nothing more. At least Fantasmo’s confession could give him some more data on the problems with his puppet.
The door creaked shut on the other side, and Fantasmo launched immediately into speech. Presumptuous, thought Arrell, but he had never partaken in confession. He had been asked, many times, but it had always been… well. There were depths to his heart he would rather his confessor not find.
“Greetings,” he started, and then “Ahem. I am…” Arrell winced. Surely he wouldn’t give his name? Fantasmo continued, assuaging those fears: “I am not particularly devout, but I… well, I was simply wondering, and I wouldn’t wish to have that question made common knowledge, and. Hrm. I must confess I don't quite know why, but I felt that there might be a sympathetic mind within the church. I may yet be proven incorrect, but I would hope my instincts do not lead me astray.” He took a breath and set his shoulders. “I have been questioning the truth of my identity.”
And there it was. Fantasmo was so perilously close to knowing, and in his uncertainty he went to the last place he could. Perhaps it was some residual emotion, not kept as closely guarded as Arrell would have wished it, that led him to the church rather than anywhere better-suited. Arrell had known a sympathetic mind within the church, after all, and such pathways are not so easily severed.
Fantasmo barreled on before the priest had a chance to speak. “The situation is as such: I am not entirely certain that I am presenting myself as I best could, and my current identity is one that does not feel truly fitting. I do not know what of it is me, and what of it is something I am not. Is the matter made clear?”
It shouldn’t have been; Fantasmo’s bluster was nothing but. Arrell was the only one who knew the truth of his circumstances. What could a simple Velesian priest hope to understand?
“Mm,” hummed the priest. Arrell’s breath stopped. Was that…? “I do not know you, friend, so I cannot know your soul in the same way as our Lord Samothes can, but that does not mean you are alone. Many feel this way, for many reasons. Would you tell me more about what troubles you?”
It was him. How had Arrell not recognized him by his silhouette alone, the soft noises of his breaths, the sheer fact of his presence through the divider of the confessional? He whispered, his voice echoing unheard into the void: “Pupil.”
“I… There are… Hm.” Fantasmo paused, unsteady. Arrell found himself in a similar position, though for vastly different reasons. “I feel most comfortable within particular parameters. When my hair is of a certain length, and my clothing is as I choose it to be, and I am called the name I wish to be called and not by any of the addresses others put upon me. And there is… perhaps more, I would like, but I am quite old, do you understand? And beyond that, I feel that none of this is what I am meant to be. There is a voice in my head — I speak of metaphor, mind, not some spirit — that seems intent I keep myself exactly as I am.”
Metaphor indeed. Arrell would be more irate at Fantasmo voicing such stubborn idiosyncrasies, but he was preoccupied with straining his ears to hear Alyosha.
“I see,” said his ever-patient pupil. “I may have an idea of what ails you. You said you aren’t devout, but would you permit me to tell you a story of our Lord and one of His chosen?”
Fantasmo hummed begrudging affirmation.
“Our Lord Samothes once knew a follower who struggled greatly with knowing themself,” Alyosha began, a familiar refrain. He had recounted many stories in this vein, supplicants who went through great struggle and found solace in the light of Samothes. Trite and moralistic. Arrell had missed hearing them from Alyosha’s lips.
“His follower came to Him a man, and laid with Him as such, and accepted a man’s treatment, but Samothes saw the truth in their heart. Our Lord, in His infinite wisdom, knew that His follower would take a greater joy in another form. He took up His Hammer and forged His follower anew, and she became herself through His grace.”
Fantasmo sat in silence at that, his hands clenched tight in the fabric of his robes. An overemotional reaction. Arrell had heard this story before; it was one Alyosha told him when Arrell disclosed the circumstances of his birth. They had debated, then — not over Arrell, of course, but over the mechanics of it. How could Samothes know his follower better than she knew herself, when self-knowledge was at the root of all mortal power?
He grit his teeth at hearing it in this new context. Alyosha was wrong. Fantasmo was a spell, not a — a person. Arrell made him such that he would not have to deal with this.
“I…” Fantasmo’s voice broke. “I… appreciate your telling of the story, but I do not see how it applies to my present circumstances. Unless you expect I’ll be meeting Samothes soon?”
Not impossible. Samot was an old friend, after all, and Alyosha knew of the buried history between the two. Still, Fantasmo was right to dismiss the parable. There was nothing in it that applied to him; he had no depths to discover, no hidden truth to be unveiled. He wasn’t even real.
“Not necessarily,” responded Alyosha in his infinite grace, “but His actions can be an example in how we live. When I tell this story to my congregation, I focus on the importance of change. We can forge a more fulfilling life, even if we tell ourselves nothing is wrong with the way things are. We mustn’t settle for comfortable mediocrity. Even if we’re quite old, as you said.” Arrell could hear his smile through the divider. His chest ached.
“...I see. I’ll be going now.”
“I wish you well on your path, my friend. May Samothes guide you.”
Fantasmo left in a hurry at the dismissal, but Arrell lingered. It had been years. They still wrote to each other, and Arrell cherished every letter, but…
He turned away. There was too much to do, too little time. The Exarch could wait. Arrell rushed to catch up with Fantasmo, already working the alterations necessary to erase this day from his memory. It would be hasty and inexpert, not as comprehensive as he would have liked, but Fantasmo could not be allowed to remember this conversation.
Arrell didn’t expect so much fuss to come out of Lutz’s disappearance. Maybe he should have, given the unrest with the gnolls and the seething corruption of the Dark Son, but he had foolishly hoped it would be a simple transportation to the Study. Instead he was hounded by the Lance’s latest group of Deputies — and of course it was them, what else could he expect — while simultaneously managing Fantasmo’s… malfunctions.
Malfunctions. The word didn’t quite fit, but Arrell had no better one. Malfunctions, maladaptions, malformations: Fantasmo was a useful experiment, but he was a prototype. Arrell was becoming convinced he had outlived his utility.
He followed Fantasmo’s investigation, not to interfere but to watch how far his puppet got. It turned out to be quite far, when he bothered to apply himself to the task. There was a logic to that: Fantasmo was built in his image, formed from his mind. Was it any surprise he took on Arrell’s bone-deep need to know? Fantasmo shared Arrell’s capability, and it led him toward the event horizon of discovery.
Fantasmo rushed through the rectory, Arrell dogging his heels, and they burst through the door to find Hadrian and Ephrim, Paladin and Prince, standing over a charred corpse. So they got Adelbury, hm? Very well. Saved Arrell the trouble of sending him to the Study.
“What is going on here?” Fantasmo’s hands shook on his staff. He never was any good with violence, though Arrell supposed he had less exposure.
“Church business.” Hadrian’s dismissal was curt, hollow. Church business doesn’t leave its instruments clean.
“You’ve — you’ve killed this man.” He didn’t move from his place. Arrell took a few paces around the room, examining the body from different angles. Ephrim’s flame was powerful indeed; had Adelbury not been a prospective conduit, Arrell might not have recognized him in the ash.
“Sure have,” muttered Hadrian.
Ephrim stepped forward with an open posture, but Fantasmo didn't give him the chance to finish his entreaty. “I — he had information I needed. I’m very close to tracking down this killer.”
Arrell, standing by his side, examined his hands. No blood on them, not Lutz’s or anyone else’s. Killer indeed.
“Oh, buddy,” Hadrian sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Um, you wanna… you wanna talk about this? We can go back to town.”
“No, it’s…” Fantasmo’s grip tightened on his staff, his voice filling with conviction. “He’s going to be here any minute. And I needed information, so that I knew how to stop him.”
“Who?” asked Hadrian, as if such a question even needed to be asked.
“Arrell.”
Arrell had only been half-convinced they knew, but that moment confirmed it. Hadrian and Ephrim’s faces fell as one, and they shifted towards helpless conciliatory gestures. He couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, this is precious,” he said, finally letting his voice be heard. Fantasmo jumped, and Arrell was pleased to see his puppet could still find it in its heart to fear its maker.
He was also pleased to see, as Ephrim and Hadrian’s explanations fell short of honesty, that Fantasmo still had his wits about him enough to turn to his magic. Arrell would have cast a spell of detection the second he heard a voice of unknown provenance, but the latency was understandable given Fantasmo’s holistically poor performance.
Hadrian flinched at the power flowing into Fantasmo’s staff. He took a step forward, and a change came over his aspect: a light in his eyes, a nobility in his bearing. For a moment he was the spitting image of another man of the cloth.
“Fantasmo, please,” he said, “not only as your friend, but as a — as a representative of the church, and someone who speaks with divine authority, stop what you’re doing now.”
Divine authority. Divine authority, as if such a thing could exist. Hadrian’s god was a man like any other, fallible and imperfect, incapable of protecting his people the way Arrell could. He had only ever worshiped one man, and it was not Samothes.
Fantasmo did not share Arrell’s disdain for pious drivel, or if he did it was outweighed by his loyalties to the man who spoke it. He exhaled, and in doing so let his guard down. “I need to know… what is going on?”
Hadrian furrowed his brow. Ephrim sucked a breath through his teeth. They offered comfort, understanding, the promise of a hard truth coddled in kindness, and Arrell had had enough.
“You know what?” he said, patience drawing thin, “no more of this.”
He reached into the spell that called itself the Great Fantasmo and pulled.
Magic has a curious effect on time. It isn’t that it stops it, no — nothing can stop the inexorable, and Hieron would march toward its end regardless of how much magic would like to make it otherwise. But it can still slow things down, crystallize a second into an eternity, turn panicked urgency into measured thought. In the half-second of Fantasmo’s end, Arrell found himself — herself — themselves — in the Study.
Arrell’s version of the Study was just that, a study. It took the form of his University office, undecorated and free of distractions. No need for indulgence, not when he was faced with the end of all things. No need for the touch of others. His study was sparse, practical, solitary.
This was something else. He — she — they were something else. The walls were decorated to her tastes, his work supplemented by her considerations. He feared to look in the mirror she had placed on the wall. She walked in front of it and opened their mouths.
“Do you see now?” she asked.
He said nothing. This was an incursion, an invasion. How dare his creation act out in this way? But no, he could still make use of this. Even the unwanted could provide a valuable tool for study.
“I didn’t… it was you the whole time, was it not? That voice, that instinct, that prevented me from doing what I wished. What would be the harm in letting me live as myself?”
He didn’t have a notetaking implement, so he logged his thoughts in crystallized memory. “Subject is capable of Study world-construction, though not independently; it must be scaffolded on a true mind’s base structures. The connection is emotional, likely a temporary reaction to dismissal. Such experiences mirror the empathetic magical influence of the false Kindrali, which may be cause for further study toward reverse-engineering word eating.”
“Are you listening? Can you not hear me?” She struck their staves on the ground, creating a momentary boom of sound. “You would do well to pay attention when I am speaking! I am the Great Fantasmo, and I am something other than what you made me to be! I am my own m —” She cut herself off. Her voice was raw. Their throats ached. “I am my own, do you understand me? My life belongs to me, you can’t just — “
“Subject was designed to believe itself autonomous. This is necessary in order to prevent investigation into its caster, but future researchers would be advised to take caution in how much they permit it to develop. If left active too long, cognitions can become disconnected from reality. One must remember that a spell, while it may seem lifelike, has no mind. It cannot think, it cannot feel, it cannot act without the magic animating it. It’s an advanced subprocess of its creator, nothing more.”
He held back the scream building in their throats. She forced their gazes to the mirror. “Look at me.”
Their eyes met: hers wide and red-rimmed, his dry. The body in the mirror was all juvenile curves and colorful adornments, a misshapen reflection of its original design. He clicked their tongues. “Over time, subject beliefs may shift to include ontological falsehoods. At this point, termination is required.”
“No, no, please, just — just listen, Arrell, I’m begging you to listen to me, I’m —”
Arrell ended the spell.