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Death comes for Felix.
This is not how it was supposed to end—with his sword arm gashed to ribbons so that he cannot lift a spoon much less a weapon, wading through the bodies of his own men, as Remire burns down around him. The Death Knight veers his steed around, red eyes flashing with hellish glee.
“You…you have grown quite strong,” comes the unnerving voice beneath the helmet. Felix cannot believe that this was once his sword fighting tutor—that everything he had learned came from this madman. Yet despite all those spars, he could not land a single hit on the man. Even his magic crackled and dissipated into nothing, rolling off the black armor as harmlessly as rain.
This is how I will die, Felix thinks. If this is it, then at least he will die bravely: standing tall and proud, accepting of his destiny. Blood pools at his feet. His arm hangs limply. He couldn’t run even if he wanted to.
The infernal horse charges forward, smoke huffing from its nostrils.
Suddenly, spikes rip up from the earth—pointed shapes carved from immaterial darkness—and ensnare the hooves of the Death Knight’s horse. The horse whines a sharp scream as it rears backwards, so far back that it topples over. As the horse falls, it takes the Death Knight down with it.
Before Felix collapses, the pain from his arm throbbing in his ears, he seeks the source of the magic.
Lysithea.
On a typical day, the library would be the last place Felix would go after a battle, but all he can think about is the way that Lysithea’s magic cleaved through the Death Knight’s steed. Patterns of spikes repeat endlessly in his mind. How exactly did she manage that?
Felix has a talent for reason, sure, but he has never encountered such raw power before. Hanneman’s magic tends towards the elemental; Lysithea had conjured something beyond any earthly matter—she had contorted light and darkness to her will.
Once the healers slung up his arm and released him from the infirmary, Felix immediately sought Lysithea. He thought he might find her in the dining hall, poaching tarts from the dessert table to sate her post-battle appetite, but she wasn’t there. The library is his next best bet.
Sure enough, there she sits, her white hair damp and stringy from a recent bath, as she perches both elbows on the table over a book.
“You,” he said. Lysithea’s eyes flick up towards Felix. “Yesterday, an entire battalion of men could barely leave a mark on the Death Knight, but you destroyed him in a single hit.”
“So?”
“So what kind of magic was that?” Felix asks.
“The none of your business kind,” Lysithea says. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to study.”
“I’ve never seen magic like that in Hanneman’s seminars,” Felix continues. “Are you practicing some sort of forbidden school?”
“The Church can’t forbid what they don’t know about.”
“Are you saying that you made this up?”
“No! Look, you don’t want to learn dark magic. Trust me. It’s not worth your time.”
So it has a name. Dark magic. Unimaginative, Felix thinks, if aptly descriptive.
Felix crosses his arms. “Anything that helps take down enemies is worth my time.”
Instead of answering, Lysithea pulls the book up to cover her face.
“Come on, you shouldn’t be hiding something like this,” Felix says. “This could be a game-changer.”
“Leave me alone. You’re annoying me.”
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll figure it out.”
As Felix turns away to leave the library, he hears the thump of a book falling to the desk.
“On second thought, Felix,” Lysithea says. He turns back around to see her head resting on steepled fingers. “I think we can arrange something.”
“Yeah. What made you change your mind?”
“I’ll agree to teach you dark magic on one condition.” Felix nods. “I need you to help me procure something.”
“What is it? More cake?”
“If you’re going to have an attitude about this, you can forget the whole deal.”
Felix nodded. This better be worth it, he thought. “Sorry. What is it?”
And that is how Felix finds himself walking down a narrow mountain path that he shared only with Lysithea and a herd of goats. To one side, trees throng the craggy cliffs; to the other side, the mountain falls away into a ravine.
All Felix knows about the journey is that she is nervous to hike it alone. He understands why. If something were to happen all the way out here, no one would know. Felix watches the rocks for bandits or bears. Lysithea seems to have something else on her mind. Her eyes track the path in front of them.
They don’t talk. Felix prefers it this way.
An hour’s hike takes them over streams and boulders. Lysithea flinches at every crackle in the brush, but she straightens herself out just as quickly. Knowing her, she probably wouldn’t want to show a hint of weakness.
“Look, there it is.” She points to a mud hut braced under a jutting rock. Her pace quickens. Felix maintains his sense of caution. What was this place? What in the world did she come here for?
An old woman wrapped in fur pelts steps out of the hut lugging a pail. Deep lines furrow her withered face. Cataract blue eyes flit between the strangers at her doorstep.
“Are you the charmer of the woods?” Lysithea asks.
The woman wipes her hands on her apron. “Depends on who is asking.”
“I have a request—”
The woman holds up a sharp bone of a finger. “In my hut. Only you. I won’t deal with his sort.”
“My sort?” Felix scoffs.
“Soldiers.” The woman jabs her finger towards his sword. Oh.
“Are you going to be okay in there?” Felix asks Lysithea.
“Of course…but you’ll be there if something does go wrong, right?” Lysithea asks. Her voice trembles slightly. It provokes something protective inside of Felix.
“Yeah, of course.”
Lysithea smiles in appreciation before following the woman into the hut. Felix cannot possibly imagine what the girl is doing in there, but it is none of his business. He and Lysithea are only colleagues; who cares about her personal affairs?
Thirty minutes later, Lysithea emerges with a small pouch in her hands. With a crook of her finger, she bids him to follow. Felix does not see the charmer reemerge.
“Is that it?” he asks.
Lysithea nods. “We’ll begin your lessons tomorrow. But I’ll need to return every week.”
“I have to do this again?”
“If you want more than one lesson, yes. One lesson for every trip.”
So that is the deal then. Felix better learn something useful from this.
Lysithea sits on her knees in her bedroom, the shutters drawn up and the rug rolled aside. With a piece of filched chalk, she scrawls arcane sigils into the floorboards. Felix watches from the bed, admiring the swift and elegant designs unfolding from her skilled hand.
“Dark magic is a branch of reason magic,” Lysithea says, as confident as a professor, “but the glyphs operate in a different tangential language.”
Theory is Felix’s least favorite part of his reason seminars. Magic he can intuit. Summoning lightning is merely a matter of drawing from some internal well and visualizing his target. Hanneman says he has an affinity for it. Yet whenever Felix tries to learn other branches of magic, he fails to grasp the complex ordering of glyphs and incantations.
“Light and dark—or in arcane terminology, lumen and tenebris—are diametric elements—”
“What?”
“They’re opposites.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that. It seems fairly obvious.”
Lysithea huffs with impatience. “Look, if you want to use dark magic, you have to understand how it works. It’s dangerous, all right? If you don’t have the patience for theory, you don’t have what it takes to learn it.”
Felix shrugs. “I get it. I just don’t think you need all the obscure language. Is this how you learned dark magic?”
Lysithea turns back to the glyph. She does not answer immediately. She’s ignoring him, he thinks.
“Don’t,” she speaks abruptly, voice like ice, “don’t ever ask me about that again.”
The harsh quality of her voice startles Felix. Only now does he realize how hard she scrapes the chalk into the ground.
Abruptly, she wipes her hands and leans back. Her voice returns to normal, no emotion or any indication that she had been bothered.
“Anyways, we call them diametric elements because they exist on opposite sides on the diameter on a standard 3-3 glyph form. But when dealing with dark magic—” She pauses, and as her pink eyes narrow, Felix wonders if he pissed her off again. Her voice simmers with judgment as she adds: “Do you want to write this down maybe?”
“Why do you even want to learn dark magic?” Lysithea asks on their next trip to the charmer.
Felix gestures to his arm. It no longer hangs in a sling, but he must apply daily poultices to ward away infection while it heals. “I almost died because my sword arm was injured. I don’t ever want to be left defenseless like that ever again.”
“You’re perfectly good with standard reason magic,” Lysithea says. “I daresay you even have a talent for galvanic summoning. That should work in most cases.”
“Most cases, but it was useless against the Death Knight,” Felix says. “I saw what you did to him. You were more powerful than an entire battalion. You got him with one shot.”
Lysithea smiles, and her whole demeanor changes. Preening like a white dove, with a smile that could light up a dark cave.
“You really think I’m that powerful, huh?”
“Yeah, more so than warriors twice your age.”
A twinge of blush, like the pink of her eyes, rims her cheeks. He thought she would like that.
Felix’s first invocation of dark magic is a whorl of twilight blue, nebulous clouds teasing outwards like candy floss before folding in upon themselves and extinguishing with a cold shock of air. The chill spreads from his fingers all the way up to his brain. It feels as though he has been sucking on ice, the way that the pain crawls into his head behind his eyes. But unlike brain freeze, it lingers beyond a minute, searing his sinuses and building pressure towards the back of his head.
“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” Lysithea says nonchalantly. The pain is so acute that Felix’s eyes squeeze shut involuntarily. Tears flash forward behind his eyelids. He hears Lysithea crank open her drawer and rifle through it. “Here.”
She sits on the bed beside him and instructs him to take a lozenge under his tongue. It tastes of bitter and acerbic herbs, a taste that leeches out to his tongue and cheeks. After a few moments, the pain seeps into a dull throb.
So much pain for so little gain.
“It can take your body a while to adjust,” Lysithea says. “In many ways, the human body is not built to store such magic.”
“Then how do you do it?”
“I guess I’m just good.”
Felix glances down at the small tin of lozenges. “Is that what you’re getting from the charmer?”
“These?” She laughs. “These I get from Raphael. He gets headaches all the time from studying. Turns out they work pretty well for magic-induced migraines.”
“Are you always feeling like this?”
Lysithea shrugs. “Let me teach you a technique for balancing your arcane load. It won’t take away the pain, but it will help a little.” She scoots next to him. “Hold your hands out like this. In standard reason magic, you’re taught to either keep a flat hand or a cupped hand, but this is a more advanced pose. One hand faces up with a slight curve for—no, no, that’s too much.”
Felix’s hand resembles a tight bowl. Lysithea takes his hand and straightens it slightly so that the fingers are only slightly bent. Her hands are warm and soft; it heightens his awareness of his callused and dry hands.
“Now the other hand should face down at the same curve. Keep the downward facing hand slightly higher than the other.”
She takes his other hand to show him. Felix flushes as she realizes she holds both his hands. As she draws one hand slightly higher than the other, Felix find his attention drawn to her face. She sits rather close, and he can see now a raised patch of pink flesh at the base of her neck. Its shape is gnarled and jagged, unlike any wound Felix has seen before.
“How’d you get that?” Felix asks.
“Hmm?”
“That scar on your neck—"
“Shouldn’t you be focusing on your magic?” Her voice carries a hint of warning. Felix tears his gaze away.
“Right, sorry.”
Lysithea draws her hands away. Felix tries the pose, and it works well enough. But his concentration is lost as he begins to wonder just what Lysithea might be hiding in her scars.
Two more visits to the charmer pass. It has now been over a month since Remire. Felix begins to anticipate his weekly hike out to see the old woman. It takes less time now. The old woman doesn’t even see Lysithea. She just leaves the pouch out on a rock, and in exchange, Lysithea counts out five gold coins.
“Are you going to the ball?” Lysithea asks out of the blue as they walk back. A lock of sugar-white hair twists around her finger.
“Why would I?” Felix asks. He skips a rock down the lane, and it tumbles down the precipice of the mountain. “I hate dancing.”
“So? It’s not just about dancing! I bet there’s going to all sorts of delicious treats!”
“You know I don’t like sweet stuff.”
“It might not all be sweet,” Lysithea says. “But I suppose you’re not fond of fun either.”
“What do you know of fun? Don’t you spend all your time studying?”
“Maybe that is fun,” Lysithea snaps back. “What do you do for fun? Train?”
“Well…yeah.”
Lysithea tugs at her hair. “You know, there must be something…or someone…who could entice you to go?”
“Not that I can think of.” Felix asks.
“Really? You don’t have anyone you want to ask out to the ball?”
This conversation makes Felix hot and itchy. He chooses to ignore the obvious, but Lysithea won’t let up.
“I’m sure if you need a date, there are plenty of students who don’t have one yet,” she says.
“Are you trying to ask me out?”
That was apparently the wrong way to approach the issue. Lysithea’s face turns the same bright pink as her eyes, and her lips twist into a frown. Her face scrunches, and eventually, she snaps her head to the side so that Felix cannot see her face.
“Never mind,” she stammers.
Felix panics. He has never been in this situation before. “Lysithea, I—"
The hair uncurls from Lysithea’s finger. “No, I get it. I’m too young, aren’t I?”
Felix can’t disagree. It’s the truth.
They do not speak again until they reach Garreg Mach.
Felix learns that the cold, gripping pain of dark magic does not dissipate with time. Instead, he learns to control it, the same way that he learns to weave shadows between his fingers or to summon spheres of purple plasma. Just like his thunder spells prick his hairs shocks and static, so too does dark magic infiltrate his senses—seeping, sinking, spreading, sprawling.
“You have to learn how to see through the darkness if you’re going to master any spell more powerful than a mist.” The sun sinks through the window, and with the shutters close, the room is so dark that Felix cannot tell spell from shadow. “It’s not darkness like the Church preaches, which is all brimstone and oblivion. It’s more like a trance.” She flicks an orb from hand to hand.
“What happens if you give into the trance?”
Lysithea shrugs. “I don’t know exactly. The people who taught me said that you would lose yourself, but the first thing you learn with magic is willpower. Knowing your limits and not going beyond them.”
Felix concentrates on expanding the web of mist into his hands into a snake-like cloud that coils upwards in the air before him. Lysithea nods in approval.
“You’re doing better,” she says.
“Thanks,” Felix says. “But it’s slow. It still feels so unnatural. How do you deal with the pain all the time?” It’s different than the sort of pain he’s used to—the bruises and the batter of physical combat. Headaches linger. Bones throb with unnatural energy. His eyes sometimes lose focus from the strain.
“I’m used to pain,” Lysithea says. “This is hardly any different.”
Felix turns to watch her. He has taken to studying her in their session together. The white hair that blankets her back. Her rosy eyes narrowing in concentration. And the scars. The more he looks for them, the more he finds them—silver lines twining around her arms, raised puffy incisions hidden by her hair, one time a deep puncture mark on her leg.
Without thinking, Felix reaches out for her hand. Her eyes widen in shock as he pushes back her sleeve. Sure enough, the silver lines extend into scarred troughs up her arm.
“What do you think you’re doing!”
Felix snaps from it. “Sorry. I just…those aren’t from battle, are they?”
“They’re from none of your business, thank you very much,” Lysithea says. “Why would you care anyways?”
“Because we’re friends,” Felix says.
“Please. You think I’m a child who can’t take care of themselves. That’s the only reason you care.”
“It’s not. I’m worried about you. You go to an old woman in the woods to pick up something every week, but you won’t say what. You keep herbal lozenges in your drawer, and you talk about pain as if it’s something casual.”
Usually, when Lysithea lapses into silence, it is a sign of her displeasure. Now, it speaks to something else. Felix values his life, so he does not voice his thoughts, but he thinks she looks so vulnerable in this moment—not childlike but exposed, as if Felix had said something that cut her straight open.
When she speaks, it is full of brittle tension. “Well, you don’t need to worry about the charmer anymore. I’m not going. Her medicine doesn’t even work. Nothing works.”
It is the first time that Lysithea admits that she is taking medicine.
“What is wrong, Lysithea?” Felix asks.
“Nothing. Stop asking.”
“Why won’t you tell anyone?”
“You know what, since I will not be going to charmer anymore, I do not think that I shall continue our lessons.” Her head turns away. “They are nothing but a distraction to me, and you cannot respect my one request for privacy!”
“You’re sick, and you won’t tell the healers or anyone else. People can help you, you know, if you get over this stubborn need for secrecy.”
“No one can help me!” Lysithea snaps. “You have no idea what I have had to go through to learn the magic that you demand me to teach you! You are so ungrateful and obnoxious. I don’t know why I ever agreed to this.”
Felix stands from the floor. He dusts off the chalk from his pants. “Whatever. If you want me to leave, I’m not going to stick around.”
“Good!” Her voice cracks. Felix leaves the room.
That is the last time they speak for five years.
At Merceus, many years later, Felix faces the Death Knight again. He cannot help but think back to their last interaction, surrounded by the infernos of Remire, when the Death Knight nearly killed Felix. Now, he is older, wiser, stronger. In one hand, he wields the blade of Zoltan. In the other, he calls down thunder from the heavens.
The magic ripples through the black armor. The Death Knight flinches. An improvement, at least, on their first meeting all those years ago.
“You will have to try harder than that,” the Death Knight growls.
Felix ignores the taunt. He squares his shoulder. The horse rides forward. Now to try something new.
Deep inside, Felix summons a twinge of darkness. He has never tried this skill before on the battlefield, and he has only successfully done it once or twice in the training hall, but this spell is the only thing he has ever seen work against the Death Knight.
A cold sensation tingles his arms as the darkness rises up. His hands draw the shape of a glyph before the magic bursts from his hands. Immediately, he feels a thousand needles ram into his brain, and the mental agony nearly tears his gaze away from his target. Felix steels himself and steadies his concentration on the Death Knight.
Spikes break from the ground and impale the horse’s legs. They are not nearly as tall or impressive as Lysithea’s, but the magic sufficiently startles the Death Knight backwards.
The spell slips from his mind. Hit with a blast of cold shock, Felix loses control and staggers backwards. Darkness overclouds his vision. All sensation of the battlefield slides into nothingness. For some reason, he cannot feel anything. Not the sword in his hand, not the air on his face. Sounds whine to total silence.
Panics floods him. He floats in a void, bereft of any sense of the outside world. His mind reels, searching for recognition of something in the darkness. Numbness pervades his body.
He remembers what Lysithea said before about losing oneself. She never told him how to avoid it. Stupid, stupid. He had been warned about going too far. He tries to claw his way out of the void, but his hands move through empty darkness. What is this place?
Suddenly, warmth sparks along his skin. Sight returns in dots, and his extremities begin to tingle with pinpricks of sensation. His ears turn to a slight rustling, and in a matter of minutes, he has returned fully.
Lysithea sits over him, her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes crinkle with worry, but when she sees him wake up, it turns to annoyance.
“That was an incredibly dumb thing to do,” she says. “That spell is too difficult for you. If I had known that you were going to do something so stupid, I wouldn’t have stopped teaching you all those years ago.”
“The…the death knight—”
“I took care of that too,” Lysithea says.
“The battle!” Felix sits up. Wait a second, he’s not even in Merceus. He sits in a dark tent somewhere far beyond. “Where are we? How long was I out for?”
“A couple of hours. You’ve missed a lot,” Lysithea says. “But I would take it easy. And no more dark magic without supervision!”
Felix nods. He’s not sure he’ll ever use it again.
“Thank you,” he says. “I thought I had it under control.”
“You never have it fully under control,” Lysithea says. “If you start to think you do, it’ll start to control you.” Her gaze drops to her hands, which wring themselves into knots in her lap.
“Is the dark magic the reason you’re ill?” Felix asks. Lysithea shoots him an irritated look. “What? I have eyes. I can see that you’re not well.”
“The dark magic is not,” Lysithea says. “The people who taught me this skill…they did terrible things to me. Experimented on me. Destroyed my body and my health. They made me powerful in a way, but they also made me weak.”
Felix stares at her, surprised that she revealed so much so easily. But this is not the tiny Lysithea that hid in her room with her glyphs and her chalk. This one stands tall, even as she shares the most intimate details of her life.
“I don’t think you’re weak at all,” Felix says. “You’re stronger than most of the people in this army. So what if you’re ill. It’s actually pretty impressive that you fight on despite that.”
“You think I’m impressive?”
“I’ve always thought you were impressive,” Felix says. “Why do you think I wanted you to teach me how to use dark magic? I admire the way you work hard. You’re dedicated, and you don’t waste your time on nonsense. There’s a lot to like about you.”
Lysithea chews on her cheek for a moment. With her hair windswept from battle and smudged with dirt and ash, she even looks cute. Felix catches himself on the thought before realizing she’s no longer a young girl. She’s twenty, and she carries herself like a grown woman.
“You’re a tough boy to read, you know that?” she says at last.
Felix leans back in his bedroll. “Anyways, I owe you. How about I make it up over some cake? Or are you too old for that?”
“I thought you didn’t like sweets.”
“Well, maybe you can teach me how to appreciate them,” he says. "You're a pretty good teacher after all."
Lysithea’s eyes light up with delight, and a smile spreads across her face. Felix doesn’t remember if he’s seen her smile like that before. He likes it, he decides.
“You know what, Felix,” she says with a wink, “you’ve really grown up.”