Page 136 of The Alchemists

“It’s not!” he’d screamed at her then, pulling hanks of green out of the ground, sending dirt flying across the clearing. “It’s not everywhere! If it’s everywhere, then why isn’t it in me? Why can’t I feel it!” He’d broken down then, one of many that summer, pressing his forehead and his nose into the moss, his whole body shaking until there was nothing left of him.

Magic is not a pond.

Magic is a current, and it is everywhere.

He’d never tried to find the limit of his power before. He knew other people sometimes thought of Magic as a well, as if it were something that could run dry. He’d felt the exhaustion himself—but was that him exhausting Magic, or was it something else?

Seb cracked himself open. He’d been too scared before, too desperate to hold onto the idea of what he was, to relinquish control. But he’d taken all of his darkness already and hurled it into the light. Hawthorn Bellarius was going to tell his parents about Lily? So be it. He had nothing to hide from anymore.

He felt it—Magic—rising in him as he breathed. It filled his nostrils as he inhaled, until it clogged his senses, until it was his senses. When he opened his eyes, the world shimmered with streaks of light and motes of gold, flowing, flowing, all around. He reached out for it, and it came willingly. He knew, with some deep and secret sense, that it loved him the way he loved it.

He began to cast.

LILY

It took her too long to realize what Seb was doing. The entire stadium sat silent as he began pulling power out of the air. No one moved, not even Danielson. No one used spontaneous magic in Cantrèa; there was no point. But Seb used it now. She could see light, or maybe it was Æther, flocking to him like a second skin.

Lily’s breath hitched as webs of golden light began to spread across the ground beneath Sebastian’s feet, drying the quagmire, turning it back to sand. A breeze that hadn’t previously existed in the stale air began to whisper around him, whipping the sand, running its fingers through the lock of sweat-damp hair that stuck up over his helmet. The light began to spin itself together in a spherical net of golden filaments around him. The pattern of it was both geometric and organic in a way Lily could almost understand if she stopped thinking entirely.

Watching it form, she was reminded of a movie her algebra teacher had put on in middle school one day, about the math of nature—its patterns and paths that followed a design humanity couldn’t quite find the rules for. Whatever was forming the design of this net, it wasn’t Seb. It was the geometry, she realized, of Æther.

It knit itself together, layer by layer, encasing him in a golden shroud. It looked kind of like Vexiliar’s Geodesic, only vastly more intricate. As it was nearly finished, Danielson came to his senses and hurled another attack at it. The net finished assembling itself a millisecond before Nimue’s Tears—a cloud of glinting, dagger-sharp ice shards—shattered against its surface in a shower of prismatic sparks.

Seb stood below his creation for a few long moments, his entire body vivisected by brilliant light. With a twitch of his fingers, the net disassembled like a line of code eating itself over and over, and he redrew his foil. Danielson watched momentarily, and then he began to move, his footwork erratic to try and throw Seb off guard. He looked a little scared. Lily didn’t blame him; Seb looked a little scary, lit with an Apollonian glow that seemed to be coming from beneath his skin, his body impossibly quiet.

When Seb finally moved, making for Danielson in a swirl of light, he seemed to skate across the surface of the sand. Lily had never seen any human so beautiful. If Sebastian had beamed like the sun that first time she saw him, now he was the shape of Magic itself. The air around him rippled hazily, like the heat off a bonfire.

He collided with Danielson in a blaze of scintillating light. He moved even faster, smoother, than normal—not inhumanely fast, but as if he knew everything that was about to happen, and all of it was just a dance his body had already committed to memory. Enveloped in gold, his foil hissing through the air, his eyes dark and hooded, he looked not unlike a god, or at least something more than human. Achilles, revenge screaming in his blood, as he streaked toward Hektor, must have looked something like this.

Danielson threw his final spell at Seb, and he brushed it away with his foil like it was nothing, which was impossible. The only way to block a spell with the foil was if you had a defensive spell prepared, and Seb didn’t. Sparks trailed behind his weapon. He scored a touch, then another.

Lily could literally see Magic pouring through him. She had never seen anyone use magic like this. He wasn’t even casting spells, just wielding raw Æther, calling to all of Magic itself moment to moment, and it was listening. She could see how it loved him. She could see how he loved it.

When he took off his helmet, victorious, his joy was its own universe, bursting into radiant life.

SEB

The Sebastian who’d entered the arena through the tunnel was a different person than the one who left by it. He was dizzy with elation, floating on an ebbing current that he could suddenly see with perfect clarity all around him.

Magic, he thought.

Magic had chosen him, was still choosing him. He could feel it, see it sloughing over his skin as he showered. He let himself linger under the hot water, the steam, and Æther curling around him. He pressed his skull against the tiled wall, closing his eyes as water rushed over his face. He thought of Lily, waiting for him, but he also thought of the hangers-on, and sycophants, and worst, Hawthorn Bellarius standing with his parents. He let himself slide down the wall until he was sitting, his head tipping forward onto his arms, letting the water wash over his neck until his heartbeat approached something normal.

He had won a bout that Conrad—no, multiple people—had tried to make sure he lost. But even that feeling was nothing compared to the Magic rushing around inside his blood. They had tried to shut him out, and Magic had cracked the world open for him instead.

He was so grateful to it, he wanted to cry.

He did cry, because there was no one there to judge him.

With this kind of Magic, he could solve Lily’s curse.

He would solve Lily’s curse.

That thought was the one that got him up. As he shrugged into his favorite Windermere sweatshirt, the pain returned. One moment, he was thinking about how he wished he’d brought a different outfit, with his parents here, and the next, he was doubled over, clutching the bench for support, his breath gasping as pain exploded in his side.

Seb staggered to the nearest mirror and gingerly lifted his shirt, wincing, both at the pain and the sight of his ribs. He’d forgotten about it. Lily must have taken all of the injury because his side, which had been welted and red earlier, was a gruesome, puffy purple. Multiple ribs were definitely broken.

This is too much.