Fallen Magic

Edward does seem ready, to judge by the intensity with which he approaches the exercise. I’ve seen it in him before, but never in this context. He moves and casts quickly, purposefully, efficiently, to the extent that he’s able to keep up with the crazy pace Electra demands of him.

But keeping up is all it is. A few minutes ago, I might have thought he was in a flow state. But now having experienced it myself, I know that he’s not without being able to explain how I know. It’s the focus, I think: he’s concentrating so hard, trying to force something that should come naturally.

And then he slips up. Quite literally: he misses a counterspell and Electra uses the same slippery-floor spell that got me earlier, sending him tumbling to the floor and sliding across it. He gets up and keeps casting, but he’s lost his rhythm and now he’s missing or messing up spell after spell. If anything, he’s doing worse than his first attempt.

“Stop,” says Electra.

Edward is dishevelled, breathing heavily, but he shakes his head. “No. Keep going.”

“If you’re trying to find a flow state – “

“Keep going,” he insists, and the intensity is in his voice now: the tone of someone who gives orders without the faintest notion that they could be disobeyed.

Electra is right, though: if he’s trying to find a flow state, this isn’t the way to go about it. It’s not something that can be reached by sheer force of will. Edward knows that approach generally doesn’t help when it comes to magic, so why –

He’s jealous of me. It should have been obvious, but it’s such a surreal thought that it took me this long to realise it. But he’s the best at magic of anyone his age. That’s how he’s always defined himself. Without that, I think he’d be lost. So I’ve unintentionally challenged the foundation of his identity by reaching a flow state before he can.

And he can’t stand that possibility, so he’s going to do it himself here and now.

Or he wants to, anyway, but it’s not working.

Electra does oblige him by continuing the exercise, but he can’t even reach the intense focus that let him manage the first minute or so. I can see him making more and more mistakes, getting more and more frustrated. I want to scream at him to stop, to not do this to himself. I want to scream at Electra to ignore him and stop, because the only way I expect this to end is a Malaina episode.

Electra doesn’t stop. If anything, she makes it harder. There’s an almost vicious look in her eye as she sends three marbles hurtling towards his face. He stumbles as they hit him, hard enough to leave bruises, but gets up and begins animating two of them to trace a complex pattern. He’s shaking, though, and I can tell he’s not far from a complete breakdown.

I can’t let this go on. “Stop!” I call. “Edward, stop, don’t do this to yourself!”

Edward snarls: an instinctive, feral sound that I never expected to hear from him. Then he says, his voice pure ice, “Don't tell me what I can and can’t do.”

The words, I realise a second later, are an incantation. Not the one he typically uses for the force-spell, but they work for that purpose: the dummy topples without his even looking at it.

Electra stops, though. “Edward – “ she says.

“Keep. Going.”

And she does. No, she doesn’t keep going. She turns the difficulty up from crazy to impossible. She barely pauses for breath between calling spells, and her offensive spells become faster and more aggressive: she’s slipping into some sort of combat mindset herself.

It’s impossible to block all her spells and keep up the animation and force-spells at the same time. Impossible – and yet Edward does it. Somehow, he’s found a flow state as well. And he seems completely relaxed, almost effortless, as he does the impossible.

I watch in horrified fascination as Electra increases the intensity of the exercise yet again. It’s as if the two of them are a pair of whirlwinds, moving and casting so quickly I can barely tell what’s going on. Edward doesn’t hesitate for a second. I’m not sure he’s the one making the questionable decisions any more.

Then the knives come out. Literally. The same blades Electra magically flung at us on that first day fly out of her robes’ sleeves and soar towards Edward at terrifying speed.

My body springs into motion before I have time to think, and I charge across the room towards them, but I already know I’m going to be far too late.

The knives clatter off a perfectly-formed, impossibly fast shield and fall to the floor.

Electra falls still and silent.

I reach Edward and crash into him, sending both of us tumbling onto the floor, our limbs tangled, the two blades lying just in front of us.

The world seems to pause for a moment.

I’m the first to react: I cast a shield, pouring as much power into it as I dare, and then snatch up the nearest knife from the ground. It won’t help much in a fight – we don’t stand a chance against Electra unless Edward can find that flow state again – but its weight makes me feel a little safer.

Electra takes several steps backwards and raises her hands, palms spread wide and empty. “I don’t intend to hurt you.”

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” I snarl. “You could have killed him!”

“That was also not my intention.”

“What? You just – accidentally decided to hurl knives at him faster than it should have been possible to block them?”

“Tallulah.” That’s Edward’s voice; it’s awkward in our tangled position for him to wrap his arm around me, but he does it nonetheless. “She wasn’t trying to kill me.”

He sounds completely certain of it. Stars, he must be mad. My best friend is a madman and my teacher just tried to kill him. Someone send help. “How do you know?”

“I just do. It’s a flow state thing, I think.”

I take a moment to breathe and let my brain catch up with everything. Electra, I realise, has seen combat before. Quite possibly with her life on the line. I’ve heard stories that veterans like that sometimes forget that they’re not in danger any more, that they can think they’re in a life-threatening situation and act accordingly when the reality of the situation is very different.

Is that what Electra did there? Did she mistake Edward for an enemy trying to kill her and act in what she believed was self-defence?

The alternative is that it was a deliberate murder attempt. But if she was trying to kill Edward, she wouldn’t have just stopped afterwards. And that would contradict whatever flow state thing Edward is talking about – I don’t know if I trust that, but it counts for something at least.

“All right,” I say. I dismiss the shield, release the knife.

“Thank you,” Electra replies. “And I apologise for my actions. I… forgot myself. Neither of you experienced Malaina episodes during that incident?”

“No,” I say, surprising myself. It all happened so quickly there wasn’t time for one.

“No,” Edward agrees. “Unless the flow state blurred into one. I can’t be certain.”

“I believe the fact that you took no aggressive action against either me or Tallulah implies that it did not,” Electra says. “Though I suggest you are very careful about entering that sort of a flow state in the presence of someone less informed about Malaina than I am.”

Yes: it wouldn’t surprise me for a second if someone believed Edward could only do those impossible things because he was deep in the grip of an active episode.

“Noted,” Edward says.

“And perhaps I should add that an incident like that dramatically increases how dangerous you could be if you did lose control. If I see sufficient evidence that that is likely, I will kill you.”

“You can’t – “

“She can. And she’d be right to do it,” Edward says grimly. “I might well be unstoppable as mala sia.”

“That’s not going to happen, Edward.”

“I hope for both your sakes it does not,” Electra says. “That dealt with… I understand if you do not want to continue lessons today, or indeed at all.”

“I… think that might be best,” I say. “At least until I’ve had time to talk to Edward alone.”

“Very well,” Electra says. “When you have come to a decision, you know where to find me.”

We don’t flee the room; we walk out at a sensible pace, as if we’re not at all afraid.

“Meeting room?” is all Edward says.

“Meeting room,” I agree.

We climb the stairs in silence, and don’t speak even when Edward unlocks the meeting room.

“Are you – “ I begin once we’re safely inside, but he shakes his head and pulls a piece of chalk from his pocket. I let him chalk and activate all the privacy wards he needs to, waiting until he finally turns to face me.

“Are you okay?” I ask again.

“I… think so,” Edward says. “You?”

“I think so,” I agree. There’s a moment of silence, and then I ask it: “What happened?”

Edward shrugs. “I don’t know. But I know enough about flow states to know how you reach one – and how you don’t. It comes from grace, from hard-earned talent. From having practiced so much magic becomes instinctive. Not from failure and frustration.”

“And yet,” I say.

“And yet,” Edward agrees. “Yours was the same, wasn’t it? I was watching, and I could almost see the moment where it happened.”

“Yes,” I agree. “Failure and frustration. I was thinking I wanted to wipe that infuriating smile off Electra’s face.”

Edward grimaces. “I’m not sure you want to know what I was thinking.”

“I could make a pretty good guess.”

“Stars, Tallulah, I’m sorry. What you did was extraordinary. I should have been focused on that, instead of, well…”

Why can’t I do that? Why is she suddenly better than me? “I understand,” I say. “And I forgive you.”

“Thank you.”

“So we’ve established that neither of us should have been able to reach a flow state then,” I continue. “That leaves Electra.”

“She reacted very differently with you and with me.”

“She was trying to teach you a lesson, before you reached the flow state,” I decide. “But that doesn’t explain… was she as, well, intense with me as she was with you? It was hard for me to tell while I was in that state.”

“Same for me. We can’t really properly compare. But I think it’s likely she was harder on me, even before the knives.”

“You think that was some sort of… flashback?” It’s the only possibility that seems remotely likely.

Edward nods. “I’ve read about that sort of thing.”

“So have I. That doesn’t explain everything, though.”

“You mean… why she had that with me and not you?”

“Yes.”

He shrugs. “Two possibilities come to mind. One, it was just a product of the higher intensity of it. And two… somewhere in her mind, she thinks of me as a threat and not you.”

To any reasonable person, Edward Blackthorn is far more dangerous than I am. Both of those explanations seem plausible – but neither of them seems particularly informative.

“I think a better question, though, is why she was so much more intense with me to begin with.”

“We agreed that before the flow state – “

He shakes his head. “I mean after.”

“Flow states aside, you’re far better than me. Maybe that carries over into you in a flow state being better than me in a flow state as well.”

Edward shrugs. “That might be a good point,” he says. “But I have a different idea.”

I don’t see it; I wait for him to explain.

“I think that she was more surprised by my reaching the flow state than by your reaching it.”

“But why – oh! The anomaly – you think that could be why?”

“I think Electra thinks that could be why. And you’ve got to admit, it’s quite the coincidence otherwise. Your magical signature has a mysterious anomaly, and you can do something magical that shouldn’t be possible – no disrespect, obviously – “

“No offence taken,” I say. “That is a good theory – except that you reached a flow state too.”

“Which is why Electra didn’t expect me to,” he says. “But yes, you’re right. It seems improbable that I have the same anomaly, but it seems equally improbable that you and I reached flow states independently in ways that look the same but are actually completely different.”

“The third possibility is that the anomaly has nothing to do with it and we both reached flow states in the same other way.”

Edward nods. “I think we need to measure my magical signature. And yours.”

“How?” I ask. “And… what do we do then?”

“I don’t know.”

Nor do I.