by V. St. Clair
He stopped with the Black Prism directly over his right eye, turned so that he was facing his father directly, and looked through it.
Colors and alignments burst to life before him, more than he could immediately process. He barely had time to register the alarming streaks of black that shot through the other bands of color before he was struck blind with a searing headache.
He cried out in unexpected pain and felt the Black Prism drop from his hand as he hit his knees, overcome with the wrongness of the alignments. He had looked through an imperfect prism once before, at the end of his first year, and recalled feeling a slight sense of unease—but that had been a prism with only mild distortion. Blinking tears from his eyes, he cursed himself as a fool for not having anticipated this: the Black Prism was a complete sin against nature, more distorted than anything he had ever attempted to look through; of course he couldn’t see through it without the stupid thing making his brain hurt. It had probably taken his father years of working with increasingly distorted prisms before he was even able to build this monstrosity, let alone use it.
Even thinking of those alignments—red, blue, black, green—made him so sick that he clutched blindly for the nearest object and ended up vomiting into the bowl of a potted plant. He had no idea what his father was doing right now, other than watching the spectacle of his agony. Was the man pleased? Alarmed? Mildly amused? Angry that all of his potted plants were going to die now, since Hayden kept puking on them?
The sound of slow, deliberate footfalls approaching made Hayden aware that his father was coming towards him, and for a wild moment he thought his father was going to ask whether he was alright. But no, he was simply picking up the Black Prism where Hayden had so carelessly discarded it, casually returning it to the eyepiece of his own circlet.
When his brain stopped hurting and the urge to vomit finally passed, Hayden turned to face his father, expecting to see the man standing near the worktable. He almost shouted when he blinked and realized that his father was standing almost directly over him, staring down with pitiless blue eyes.
“It seems that you have overestimated your abilities,” he said without emotion. “You had the greatest weapon of all time in your possession, and yet here you lie, in a heap on the floor.”
Too annoyed to be properly frightened, Hayden snapped, “That’s hardly a fair test and you know it. I doubt even you could have used that prism when you were my age. Give me one of those normal ones off of your table and then we’ll see what happens.”
Rather than get angry, his father simply tilted his head slightly, still staring down at him. Hayden wished he would step back a few feet so that he could at least sit up without knocking the man over; lying on the floor made him feel weak—but then, that was probably the point.
“All of the prisms on my worktable have some degree of distortion to them, though I suppose you could still use them, if you’re willing to risk your principles,” he allowed, gesturing back at them.
Dismay colored his tone when Hayden said, “You mean you only keep broken prims lying around the house? There aren’t any normal ones here?”
“Oh, there are a few lying around, but you’re a fool if you think I would allow them to come into your possession.” His father frowned down at him now, finally openly acknowledging the threat that he posed.
“So you are afraid me,” Hayden smiled, though nothing about the situation was humorous. If it was true that there were only imperfect prisms lying out the open, Hayden would either need to follow in his father’s footsteps—something he swore he would never do—or find a way to strangle the man in his sleep.
The dangerous look flashed briefly across the Dark Prism’s face once more, and Hayden braced himself for some sort of physical pain, tensing against his will. His father noticed, of course, and then the look was gone.
“I fear nothing—not even you,” he informed Hayden coldly. “You may have latent power, but you are nothing to me. If you did not hold something important to me you would already be dead, and the carrion birds would have picked your corpse apart wherever I left it to rot.” He said all of this without breaking eye contact with Hayden, voice growing lower and softer as more contempt crept into it.
Hayden clenched his teeth, biting back whatever stupid, unhelpful thing he was probably about to open his mouth and say out of sheer habit. How had he ever convinced himself that he was prepared to deal with this man? Somehow, in all the stories Asher had told him to prepare him for this, he had never managed to convey just how monstrous the Dark Prism had become.
Thankfully, his father seemed to think he’d made his point, because he finally backed away from Hayden and returned to his worktable, turning his back to him as though pronouncing him entirely unworthy of attention.
Fine by me.
Hayden got to his feet and was about to leave the room when he realized that it would be an admission of defeat, a sign of weakness. Even if he was simply returning to his room to regroup, it would be a loss of face, and appearances were clearly extremely important where Aleric Frost was concerned.
So instead he stayed, swallowing the cowardly voice in his head that was screaming, You idiot! Run and hide while you still can, and smother the man with a pillow when he sleeps!
He returned to his position by the window, unlatching the panes and swinging them open to let the cool air blow across his face. In another hour the sun would set completely behind the mountains in the distance, but for now the orange and pink light still cascaded across the land, as if the world were a giant prism.
In a way, I suppose it is.
“Why are you still here?” his father asked without looking up from his worktable, looking through a magnifying glass while making bold slashes of color with a red pencil. Even in a moment like this, Hayden could envy his ability to sketch alignments so rapidly and precisely, without need of a ruler.
“You never told me why you wanted to see me.”
Aleric waited until he had finished his work with the red pencil before answering. Hayden was beginning to understand that this was one of the many tactics he employed to control a conversation—forcing others to conform to his sense of timing.
“I’ve concluded that one of the primary reasons my last attempt at extracting your Source failed was because of your active opposition.”
A little surprised by the topic, Hayden forced his expression to remain neutral, focusing on the feel of the breeze across his face. Having a connection with the outside world helped remind him that there was actually something worth living for outside of this ornate dungeon.
“That makes sense,” he conceded. “I hope you aren’t expecting me to apologize for struggling to stay alive.”
The Dark Prism ignored the jab completely, as though he hadn’t even registered the words. For all Hayden knew, he hadn’t. It was hard to tell when his father was actually paying attention to him and when he was simply talking out loud to himself while Hayden happened to be present in the room.
“Your physical struggles I had planned for, but your magical opposition—”
“I didn’t fight you with magic,” Hayden interrupted. “I didn’t even know I could use magic.”
“—posed an unexpected problem,” his father continued speaking despite the interruption, with the result that they ended up talking over each other and Hayden could barely hear the last part of his father’s sentence.
I might as well be a cactus for all the respect he shows me.
Biting back frustration, Hayden tried again.
“But I didn’t have a weapon, so how could I have resisted you magically?”
His father selected a blue colored pencil, still not honoring him by paying proper attention, adjusting his magnifying glass and glancing through the Black Prism to confirm something before he returned to coloring.
“You had an affinity for prisms even then, whether you were aware of it or not,” he answered at last, exchanging his blue pencil for a black one without lookin
g up. Hayden grimaced as he saw the large black band that his father filled in on the sheet of paper in front of him, suppressing the urge to hurl at the memory of that unnatural hue.
“That doesn’t change the fact that I was prism-less at the time,” Hayden countered lightly, still watching the man carefully. Normally he would love to treat his father to the same contemptuous treatment that he himself was receiving, but in this case he couldn’t afford the luxury of petty revenge. He needed to know everything he could about the way his father thought, worked, and conducted himself, which meant studying him as closely as possible at all times.
“But I was not,” Aleric answered simply, still shading in an area of black in his notes.
It took a second for the implication to set in, and then Hayden didn’t have to feign surprise when he blurted out, “You think I used your prism to fight you off? I had never attempted magic in my life, and I somehow managed to look through the Black Prism—inverted, I might add—and find some alignment to stop you from leeching out my Source without my brain exploding?”
Well, I suppose my brain did nearly explode, come to think of it.
He had always assumed that the light-sickness that gave him amnesia and nearly killed him was a side effect of whatever magic his father had been using on him at the time, but what if it wasn’t? What if Hayden himself had caused it by using a distorted prism?
That would mean that I’ve already used a broken prism, even before I started school! Even inverted, it’s a miracle that it didn’t screw me up completely or alter my mind!
Then a more sinister thought.
But what if it did? How do I know that it didn’t have some effect on my mind, and it was just so subtle that I didn’t notice? Does that mean there’s something evil inside of me, festering, waiting to come out? Or is it like Asher said…sometimes people don’t start to change until they’ve been dabbling with broken prisms for a while, so maybe I was lucky…
His father didn’t seem to be aware of the internal debate raging inside of him, or perhaps he just didn’t care, because he kept speaking under the assumption that Hayden was hanging onto his every word, so he was forced out of his dark thoughts to avoid missing anything.
“—not a conscious decision,” he explained coolly, still focused on his research. “Under threat of death, your mind likely reached out and found a successful pathway without any intent on your part. It has been known to happen when magic-users are under extreme pressure.”
Hayden thought about that for a minute. It was true that he had discovered alignments that even Asher had never seen before, during moments of intense stress or when he was about to die. He thought back to his second year at school, during the I.S.C., when he had managed to bend light around him and repel all magical attacks. He had been trying to escape the horrible burns of that violet web, and had no idea what spell his mind latched onto. And only recently, when fighting Kilgore for information about Tess, he had panicked and found some spell that nearly made his skin turn to diamond.
“Huh,” Hayden said out loud, having new respect for his ten-year old self. “That’s good to know.”
“When I am finished making adjustments to the spell itself, your opposition may still create difficulties—though not of the magnitude we experienced previously.” His father said this as though it was bad news for Hayden in some way.
“You mean because if I was able to shut you out when I was ten and uneducated, I’m almost certainly able to do so now that I know what I’m on about?” He smiled to himself. “Seems like a valid concern.”
“I thought you would make the childish, insolent decision, and you have proven me correct.”
Unnervingly, his father didn’t look upset when he said this. Hayden could see no reason why he should still be cool and collected right now, knowing that Hayden could muck up his plans time and again.
“Look at this from my point of view,” Hayden explained. “There’s really no reason for me not to resist you. You want to drain the very life from me and leave me dead for the carrion birds to pick at, while you boost your own power immensely. Why would I want to go along with this plan?”
Aleric set down his colored pencils and closed his eyes pensively. He looked like he was searching his memory for something, though Hayden had no idea what that might be. Still, he was worried when his father finally opened his eyes and leveled his gaze at him, because nothing good ever happened when he had the man’s full attention.
“Tess?” he asked softly, as though plucking the name from thin air.
Hayden felt his face blanch, as all the blood in his body seemed to drain towards his feet. The sensation was so abrupt that he swayed a little and had to lean against the window ledge for support.
Of all things he could remember from the schism…
He wanted to kick himself for telling Hunter his life’s story, especially all about Tess.
“Yes, that was her name,” Aleric confirmed after seeing the look on Hayden’s face. “I seem to recall you speaking about her…at length. One might infer that she has special value to you.”
I’ll kill him, I have to kill him, he cannot leave this house alive, Hayden chanted inside his head, seeing red.
“Leave her out of this,” he said out loud, voice shaking with barely-controlled rage.
“Someone very special, then,” his father continued. “Perhaps I should bring her here as a means of encouraging your good behavior. If you become insolent, I could punish her instead of you—you know that I need you intact until I’ve removed your Source and the part of mine that you hold. If you attack me, she would be punished accordingly. Were you to resist my attempts to reclaim what is mine, well…” he let that thought trail off, the silence spiraling horribly between them.
Hayden clenched his fists and his jaw so hard that his teeth hurt. He knew he was not in a position to fling himself at his father and beat the man to death, but that’s exactly what his back-brain was screaming at him to do at this very moment.
“You’ve already killed her mother, and if you so much as glance sideways at her, I will make you wish you had never threatened me with her,” Hayden informed him, scarily calm.
“You are not in a position to make good on that threat,” his father explained, looking unimpressed. He turned back to his work. “I believe I will go to her tonight.”
Hayden punched the glass of the open window pane beside him, wincing as his hand scraped against the broken fragments and began to bleed. He grabbed a particularly large shard and held it up triumphantly.
His father looked mildly annoyed.
“You think I care that you broke a window? Glass can be replaced.”
“Try again,” Hayden held the shard of glass against his own throat, over the spot where only a few months ago, his father had pressed a knife. The irony wasn’t lost on him now.
The Dark Prism’s eyebrows lifted.
I’ve finally managed to surprise the man.
“If you go anywhere near Tess, I’ll end my own life and rob you of both my Source and yours. Study all you want, but you will never be able to recover what I took from you.”
His father gave him a look of grudging respect, which was both annoying and gratifying.
“But you will be dead.”
“I’ll be dead whether you get my Source or I end things myself,” Hayden shrugged, still clutching the shard of glass.
“I could stun you while your guard is down and keep you immobilized until I am ready to recover my Source from you.”
Hayden called his bluff.
“You need me awake and my Foci clear to work your magic. You can’t leave me immobilized, and I’ll only make trouble for you the moment I can move again.”
His father continued to stare at him.
“What do you propose?” he asked lightly.
“You leave Tess and all my other friends out of this, and I’ll give you what you want. When the time comes, I won’t struggle at all, and then I’ll be dead
and you’ll have your power back and I won’t care what happens to the world anymore.”
He wondered if his father knew him well enough to realize that he was lying. Hayden’s entire threat hinged on the fact that he didn’t.
The Dark Prism considered him thoughtfully for a moment, and Hayden tried not to show any visible sign of emotion. If this didn’t work, he would have to take his life now, because that was the only thing he could do to deprive his father of the extra power. Besides, Aleric would have no reason to pursue Tess or any of the others once he was dead.
After a tense moment, his father said, “We have an agreement.”
Hayden exhaled and lowered the shard of glass, dropping it to the floor and finally acknowledging that his hand hurt really badly; there were still bits of glass poking out of the skin in three places, and he began working to extract them.
The deal struck, the Dark Prism immediately lost interest in him once more, and was about to turn back to his work when suddenly he whirled around to stare at Hayden once more. He was completely alert and focused, and Hayden had no idea what he’d done to rivet the man’s attention just now.
Then he realized that his father wasn’t staring at him. He was staring out the window that was just behind him.
“What is it?” Hayden asked curiously, wondering what could command so much of his father’s attention as to make him seem almost human again.
“Something is coming,” Aleric answered simply.
Intrigued, Hayden raised an eyebrow and asked, “What kind of something?”
“Something powerful.”
Powerful enough to get my father’s attention from a distance? Maybe Asher and the others are about to storm the place…but they don’t know the details of the defensive wards!
