Chapter 11

It looked like water but burned like fire. Leylin moved his hands and legs and tried to stay afloat. He felt pain like ants crawling over his body. A ring of angry red fire was eclipsed by darkness. The wind was devoid of colour yet darker than the darkest black. Being trapped head-to-toe in a black steel cage, watching a vine snake its way up the bars to reach the sun and realising "he can't be caged." Everything smelled like turpentine and sulphur at the same time. A sense of hopelessness and paranoia subsumed his existence. The pain and darkness overloaded his senses. He could no longer comprehend this experience. All his ideas simply dissolved in the presence of overpowering sensory experience. His legs felt like an anchor. The struggle to maintain control seemed futile. The pain and exhaustion subsumed his conviction. He couldn't struggle anymore and gave up. His legs stopped moving as he started to sink. His body drowned in the fiery liquid as his mind slipped into helpless despair.

Leylin closed his eyes; he was finally dying, or was he dead? Liam, Leylin, it didn't matter. He overestimated himself. He lay there face down, listening to silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.

A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him that he must exist, must be more than disembodied thought, because he was definitely lying on some surface. Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too. He lay in a dark mist, though it was not like a mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapour; instead, the grey vapour had not yet formed into his surroundings. He thought it was less mist and more ash as it burned his body. There was an eerie feeling; he felt that this place was wrong. "No, It is not the place that is wrong," Liam thought. "It is me."

He watched even as his whole body burned as the ash coalesced into a world. Liam was surprised to see himself.

He was walking down New york's Third Avenue and knew he was unhappy. So why not? He had painstakingly put together all of the ingredients for happiness. He had a higher GPA than was previously thought to be possible. He got his dream job, working in the Alps. Sure, he didn't get his girl anyway, Jaime was Jack's, and he did get other women.

He had known Jack and Jaime forever and had been their third wheel since then. He loved Jack, too, in a different way. Liam had thought he was over it; was he not, he thought.

He had so much going for him, but happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think of anything else to do. Why had he done all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, and made the sacrifices?

He had thought he had led a happy life, so why does he feel sick? Why did his happiness seem so false, like he had deluded himself into believing he was happy?

He saw his old life and his new one and wondered why he deluded himself. He felt an epiphany.

"Everything is Pain," He thought.

What does one do with a realisation such as "Pain is everything"? He asked aloud. "Is a platitude that is so deeply felt still a platitude?" "A platitude is what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion," he decided. "Saturating that dried husk with emotion allows you to see it for what it is: the most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight."

"What is it that makes a magus a magus" he wondered. "Is it because they are intelligent? Is it because they are brave? Is it because they are special?"

No, he thought they were magus because they were unhappy. A magus is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. A magus is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

Most people carry that pain inside them their entire lives until they kill it with other means or it kills them. But magus they discovered another way: a way to exploit the pain. To use as fuel for light and heat. Learnt to break the world that has tried to break them.

"There are no free meals in this world," he thought. All magic has costs. It would be naive to believe one can burn pain and create fairytales. The power to bend reality is not free. Burning pain won't create fairytales, but it can conjure nightmares.

"Were there magus on earth?" He pondered. How would he even know if he wondered?

Even in this world, most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're eaten alive by longing and dead before they die.

Would he share the knowledge of the power to bend reality with anyone? No, he guessed

"The Magus of this world are fools; they wield the fire of gods to light a candle," he thought. The pain increased until he could no longer hold on.

He closed his eyes suddenly, and the world vanished. The dark mist engulfed the world as he stood in a desolate land where shadows seemed brighter than the light. The crimson sun, eclipsed by darkness, poured down angrily. Terror gripped him as a primordial being stirred. He didn't fear death because he knew it was an old friend. He had forgotten about fear since his rebirth, but now he remembered. The ground cracked, and he was engulfed in darkness. His last thought is that fire consumes him as he closed his eyes and fell for eternity till infinity.