Surviving Arkadia

“Symmetry,” I said. It didn’t really explain anything but it was the word that leapt out of my mouth first. And there was a symmetry here. Hot and cold, the Source and the Hunger, Arkadia and Earth. I thought that I could feel the whole shape of it but I couldn’t see how to explain it without a ball of yarn, a conspiracy wall and sounding like a crazy person.

“What?” said Asser and Jez, almost as one.

“There’s a symmetry, but I can’t explain it. I need you to trust me and I need you to remember the worst thing that’s ever happened to you and I need you to hold onto it while I talk.”

“Why would we…” Jez began but Asser interrupted him.

“Just do what she says.”

I was surprised that Asser had such faith in me. Maybe he could see something that Jez had missed.

“Fine,” said Jez, “But I shall expect a detailed explanation.”

“You got a terrible memory in mind?” I said, looking from one to the other.

“Yes,” said Jez, voice sharp with impatience. Asser just nodded.

“The children with the Fever are so hot because they’re accumulating Source inside their bodies,” I said, ready to kick myself because of how stupidly simple it sounded.

“Oh it can’t possibly be tha…” Asser’s voice trailed off mid word and I was sure he was feeling the attention of that hungry emptiness on him.

“You feel it?” I said.

“What is that… thing?” said Asser.

“Don’t know. Feels kind of eldritch though,” I said.

“What feels eldritch?” said Jez. His body language looked all wrong. He looked too casual, too relaxed. The hand holding his notebook hung down by his side and not ready to take notes. He’d even dropped his pen.

“What did I just ask you to do?” I said.

“To stop talking?” said Jez.

“No, after that.”

“Something about the worst memory?” said Jez, still seeming far too relaxed.

“That’s it. What did you pick? For your worst memory?”

“Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t say, but I had a paper that I had written on using very small summoned creatures to beat local thermodynamics plagiarised by one of my professors. He published before I did and I had to ditch my entire plan for my dissertation. It felt like such a betrayal. He won awards for a paper that I wrote. I had to take more than a year off before I could return to academia.”

I exchanged a glance with Asser and I could tell that he felt much the same as I did. “That was a terrible thing to go through and it must have been very upsetting but it’s the wrong sort of memory. You need something more visceral and less intellectual.”

Jez didn’t reply right away, he seemed hesitant. He looked down at his feet. “Okay, there might be something.”

I heard a catch in his voice.

“You seem quite emotional about this one?” I said.

Jez sighed and again I heard that unevenness in his breathing.

“I have… had a younger brother. Much younger. He was… unexpected. I was already an apprentice Scholar when he was born. I loved him but I was envious of how my parents doted on him and spoiled him. Not very envious though. He was such a sweet boy I found myself spoiling him too. He caught the Fever, right at the start of the outbreak. My parents sent him to one of the first Fever hospitals to re-open. He sent me a letter from the hospital and he didn’t seem himself in it. He complained that our parents hadn’t visited him. So as soon as I was able I made the journey back to the Isles. I went straight to the Fever Hospital. When I arrived the staff told me that he had died and that my parents hadn’t even collected his ashes. I went back home and they refused to talk about him. They’d cleared everything out of his room and removed every reminder of him. I found his portrait in the shed. My father called me his only son. I can’t tell if they’ve forgotten him or if they just can’t bear to think about him."

“I’m so sorry but you need to think about him as hard as you can,” I said.

Jez nodded and began blinking rapidly, as if trying not to cry.

“The Fever is caused by the children accumulating Source inside their bodies,” I said.

“It can’t be that…” Jez’s voice tailed off and I was sure he was feeling the same dark thing that Asser and I could feel.

“It does feel eldritch, doesn’t it?” said Asser.

“It does,” said Jez. “Why does the memory of my brother keep it from overwhelming me?”

“Maybe some memories are just too big for it?” said Asser.

“I have some ideas about the Fever and the Source and this thing,” I said. “But I don’t know enough to know if they make any sense.”

“Make notes,” said Asser, reaching for his own notebook. “We don’t know how long we can maintain clarity.”

“There’s a symmetry to it,” I said, not knowing where to start. “The Source is the hole in the world where the magic gets in. I think that hungry thing we can feel is the void outside the world that craves magic.”

I stopped, expecting one of them to ask for some of what I’d been smoking but they were both scribbling furiously and neither of them said anything so I had to keep talking. “There’s more magic in the world than there used to be because people got better at using it. Instead of storing it and then using it once, it gets channelled and used over and over. It gets enchanted onto objects and imbued into runes and distilled into potions. It gets consumed by source eaters and becomes one with them. It gets around. It has a lifespan. I don’t think that’s what happens if the Hunger gets it.”

“Yeah,” said Asser, frowning. “That Hunger does feel kind of final.”

“I think, over time, the Source builds up in the world until, roughly every 20 years or so, there’s so much that it attracts the Hunger. I don’t know if the Source hides from the Hunger or if there’s just so much of it that the kids start absorbing the excess.”

“Either works,” said Jez. “But even inside the children the accumulation of Source must attract the Hunger.”

“It must do,” I said. “It attracts Source Eaters. And Hungry People. Not sure what those are. They sound kind of like Zombies…”

“Don’t tempt fate,” said Asser, interrupting me. “We’ve enough to worry about without Zombies.”

“Isn’t that just the Ositans?” said Jez. “An army on the march for no good reason. They want the children but they won’t say why.”

My mind went to the testimony of the Sailor. “During the last outbreak the city of Ostia packed up all the sick children and sent them off to a medical camp. The few who survived said that the adults just abandoned the children and let the Fever take them. Almost like they were feeding them to the Hunger.”

“Or trying to ward it off?” said Asser. “Maybe the Hunger is where the void squid come from and nobody wants a bunch of them turning up over their city.”

That reminded me of something. “The founders stole the Source,” I said.

Jez and Asser looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues.

“Do you want to rephrase that?” said Asser.

“The founders of Moonstone stole the Source from that ruined hilltop town and used it to power the Citadel. It’s now hidden inside the Temple of the Source on the Citadel. The Chief Priest told me that the Temple doesn’t like to advertise that because the theft triggered the War of the First Founding. I thought the Founders were just being selfish but what if they were protecting the source? You don’t have to worry about a Void Squid when you’re under a dome.”

“Hard for other source eaters to reach you when the city flies,” said Asser.

“And then they built a hospital and a university right next to it,” said Jez. “It’s almost like Moonstone was founded to solve this specific problem.”

“Probably would have worked if this empty dickhead didn’t keep eating our memories,” said Asser, rubbing his forehead with his knuckles.

“Write it down,” I said, “Before we forget.”

Of course having written it down we had to share it with people. We were on our way to talk to Amris when Asser and I were distracted by the vibrating of our Tapstones. The message was from Sarah. The Mayor had called an emergency meeting of the Emergency Council, which seemed redundant to me, surely every meeting of the Emergency Council was an emergency meeting. The three of us were summoned to attend immediately. There’s no punctuation to the tap code but the message certainly felt like it would have had three exclamation marks.

We had, for the moment at least, run out of time to pursue the Hunger.