Fractured Magic: Chapter Seventeen

CW: Brief reference to suicidal ideation and allusions to police violence.

Roman wandered through a silent forest, his feet treading lightly. An overcast sky stretched above, visible through leafless branches that shot like lightning into its gray expanse. Following the line of the branches down to their trunks, Roman saw they were scraggly and blue, nothing like the trees around Gallontea. Still, he knew them well. He knew this wood, knew this path. He knew where it led.

Dead leaves lined the trail under a dusting of snow, autumn’s life wrung from this wood by winter’s icy grip, and Roman’s breath clouded in front of him in bursts. He couldn’t feel the cold, not in this dreamscape, but he reflexively pulled his coat tighter as he continued along the path, toward the last place in the world he wanted to go. The dream compelled him forward, an invisible thread reeling him in like a fish on a line.

Before he was ready, a dark shape loomed out of the fog. It became a lonely cabin as he walked closer, one made from the same dark blue wood as the forest: the wood of the ibal tree, found only in Troas. The cabin stood as Roman had last seen it, prior to its demolition, its windows boarded shut and its door broken off the hinges. The entire thing construct tipped precariously to one side, and the messily-thatched roof had begun to collapse inward.

Roman stepped into the clearing. No grass grew on the frozen ground that led up to the cabin. Nothing lived in this cold place anymore. Roman took another step toward the door, but a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye — the rustle of a skirt, the wave of a hand — stopped him. When he turned, all he saw was the woods, its sickly trees affording little coverage for anyone hoping to hide.

Someone laughed behind him and he spun again, surprised to see a figure on the porch. She raised a hand to beckon him closer, but Roman couldn’t move.

“Catalina,” he breathed.

Catalina Rosario smiled. Or rather, this distorted dream version of her did. Roman had forgotten his mother’s face; it happened so long ago, now, that what had once been a world-shattering revelation had simply become a fact of life. The Catalina that stood on the porch was a blur, her features warping and shifting whenever he looked away. Only two things remained constant, two things he could never forget: her voice, always close to laugher, and his eyes, lighter than his own. They were the honey-sweet tones of sunshine streaming through a bottle of whiskey.

“Amaimon!” she called, no longer looking at Roman. Roman started at the sound of his birth name; it had been decades since he’d heard it. But Catalina wasn’t speaking to him. She ran down the steps, past Roman, and scooped a child into her arms. The child stared at Roman over his mother’s shoulder, golden eyes boring into Roman’s black ones.

Catalina’s clothes were all wrong, Roman noticed. His sleeping mind had put her in a modern Gallontean gown, all dark wool and structured drapery, but in life, she’d always worn traditional Corinidan dress. Even years after leaving her home to live with Roman’s father, years in cold, subdued Troas, she wore off-shoulder bodices, bright colors, and flowing skirts whenever the weather permitted.

“Well?” she asked, leaning back to examine her child’s face. The word, asked in a language nearly dead in Calaidia, had bittersweet nostalgia rising in Roman like bile. “Amaimon Roman Rosario, didn’t you miss your mother?”

“Yes,” the boy said seriously. “Don’t go away anymore.”

Catalina laughed and made no promises. She often went on trips, ostensibly across the sea to visit family, but she had never brought Roman with. “When you’re older,” she used to say, when he asked. “Can I make it up to you, sweet child?” she said now, to the grumpy boy in her arms.

Amaimon considered this. “Tell me a story?”

“As you command,” Catalina said, wide eyes dancing with laughter. The boy seemed to know he was being made fun of and squirmed to be put down. “Hush. Be still, now. Must you be so serious, love? I’ll tell you your story.”

Roman remembered many moments like this. His mother knew many stories for someone her age, more than Roman knew even today, and was good at telling them. She spoke to Amaimon softly, sweetly, using her free hand to make grand gestures. The pair faced Roman now, oblivious to his presence. While Catalina smiled, Amaimon wore the same blank-faced expression he’d started with. Catalina was right; Roman had always been a stern child. He’d only learned to stop taking life so seriously when doing so just made him want to end it.

“I want to be like him,” Roman’s younger self said. “Like the hero in the story.”

Roman gave an amused snort at the same time as Catalina. “Don’t be foolish,” she said, teasing. “You can be better.”

When Catalina and Amaimon started toward the open doorway, Roman braced himself for what came next. He’d had this dream before, enough to have it memorized, enough that he’d grown numb to it. This was where it all fell apart. Shadows shifted in the doorway as a person stepped onto the porch, their features all shrouded in shadow aside from the snakeskin boots on their feet. In the past, Roman had tried to warn his mother, tried to scream and shout or intercept this stranger’s incoming attack, but he’d always failed. This time, he only watched.

But before the stranger could surge out of the shadows, pain crashed through Roman. Caught by surprise, he grunted and fell to his knees, his lungs caught in a vise, his breath stolen away. Fire scorched his insides, his heart pumping that burning heat through his body with its every beat. It hammered against his ribcage, trying to escape.

This was a dream. He shouldn’t feel anything. He shouldn’t be doubled over in agony, vision going white as unconsciousness crashed toward him. None of this should be happening, but this pain felt entirely real. Distantly, he heard the dream carrying on without him: Catalina screamed. Amaimon cried. A warbled, distorted voice shouted. Roman tried to look, but his muscles were locked tight. Then, suddenly as it began, the pain vanished. Roman stayed on the ground, folded in on himself, for a moment longer.

“Wake up,” he said to himself, a desperate plea.

Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. When the waking world evaded him, he pushed himself up on shaky arms and saw that the scene had changed: the cabin had rotted, the sky darkened, the forest flooded with mist. Black ribbons of something alive and writhing shivered through the surrounding air, and some old memory tugged at Roman’s consciousness at the sight, urging him to remember.

He was distracted, though, by what lie at the bottom of the stairs: Catalina Rosario, Amaimon kneeling at her side with hands covered in blood. As he did each time he’d had this dream, Roman stumbled to her other side, felt for a pulse, and found nothing. She stared, sightless, at some point in the distance, so Roman gently closed her eyes.

When he looked up again, Amaimon was gone. Instead of gold, black eyes met Roman’s, Egil kneeling in the place where his younger self used to be. “Get lost,” Roman snapped without thinking.

Egil only tipped his head to one side, watching Roman calmly. “What did you do to her?” he asked.

“I didn’t do anything! I don’t even remember her dying!”

“If you don’t remember, then how do you know?” Egil pressed.

Roman stood, Egil watching him with surprise. He’d dreamed the same dream for years and years; he knew the script, so where now did this improvisation come from? Normally, he stayed at Catalina’s side until he woke, watching her chameleon features change her into every person he’d ever lost, every person he’d failed. He considered it his duty to witness them all, to remember their faces the way he couldn’t remember Catalina’s.

But this time, he stormed past Catalina into the house, hearing Egil pick himself up and follow. He didn’t know what he expected to find — some lingering sign of the figure with the snakeskin boots, perhaps. Those boots were all he could remember from that day, beyond the sight of his mother lying dead in the grass. He used to think that if he could just remember that stranger’s face, all would become clear. It was a child’s dream, an attempt to make sense of a traumatic event.

And either way, he found no sign of the mysterious figure. Instead, inside, he found only darkness, cobwebs, and a half-remembered interior he wasn’t convinced truly belonged to the house he’d grown up in.

“I don’t know what you expected,” Egil said from somewhere behind him, echoing his thoughts. Roman stopped in the kitchen, looking out wide, broken windows into the darkened forest. They’d been boarded before, hadn’t they? He watched the mist swirl through the trees.

“Are you running again?” Egil asked. When Roman ignored him, he heard Egil heave a sigh. “How like you. I thought we were done with that.”

Angry, hurting, Roman drew his sword and spun to attack Egil, freezing mid-swing when he found a red-headed maranet woman standing behind him instead. She looked down her nose at him, expression dripping with contempt.

“Not going to do it?” she asked. When he didn’t move, she stepped up to his blade, letting it rest against her pale neck. “I hope you do a better job of killing me than I did of you.”

Carefully, Roman withdrew the sword and returned it to his sheath. “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

Evelyne Corscia sneered. “Always afraid to do what it takes. Keep it up and you’ll never find her.”

“Find who?” Roman asked, but Evelyne didn’t answer. He followed her gaze to something over his shoulder: the forest outside the wide window, where a pair of glowing crimson eyes and a twisted smile faded back into the mist.

Roman sat up, his tangled limbs caught in the sheets and making him panic until he realized where he was: in a trailer in Gallontea, thousands of miles away from Troas and his childhood home. He reached for the other side of the bed, for the warmth of a lover to reassure him he was there, that this place was real, but he was alone.

At that realization, Roman fell apart. He wrapped his arms around himself, hoping that might stop the shaking, might protect the raw edges of his soul, exposed like a ripped-off scab after this awful day, after Evelyne and those barracks, after that dream ripped him apart and left the pieces to flutter in the wind.

He still felt echoes of that pain from the dream, aching in his lungs when he drew in breath. Without thinking, he dug a thumb into his injured palm, wincing as he did. It was an effective reminder: this pain was real. The dream was not.

In time, the shaking subsided and only the pain in his hand remained. Roman sighed and scrubbed at his eyes, unsure when these tears began to fall. Only once he’d pieced himself back together did he push himself out of bed and go to find Dinara. Just as he was about to leave the trailer, a faint thump from above made him pause. Forcing a casual smile onto his face, he climbed onto the trailer’s handrail, then up to the roof. Sure enough, there Dinara sat, knees hugged to her chest, the moon hanging large and bright behind her like a luminescent frame.

“Star gazing, Di? You might’ve invited me along,” he said, keeping his tone light and hoping it was too dark for her to notice his red and puffy eyes.

She turned at the sound of Roman’s voice, expression still unguarded. In it, he saw all of her thoughts and fears and doubts laid bare. If he could see all that, he knew there was no hiding his own sorry state. “What are you doing awake?” she asked.

Roman made his way along the roof to sit beside her. “I’m always awake at strange hours of the night. You know that.”

“I didn’t wake you?”

“You didn’t wake me.”

Dinara reached up to touch his still-damp cheek. “You had one of your nightmares again,” she guessed, letting her hand fall when Roman leaned out of her touch.

“I’m fine,” he said reflexively. In the face of all his lies, though, he owed Dinara some truth. He wanted to tell her some truth. He wanted to tell her about his mother, about how she haunts him and has haunted him since childhood. About Unity, about Egil, about the Oracle of Damael. About all the people he’d trusted and hurt and lost. But if he said any more, he might cry again, so he shrugged instead. “I’d ask you why you’re up, but I think I already know.”

Dinara looked away, the moonlight catching on her curls.

“You’re thinking about today?” he pressed.

“Yesterday, technically,” Dinara said, looking up at the sky. “It’s morning.”

“Yesterday, then.”

Dinara sighed. “I’m thinking about a lot of things,” she said, pointedly. It was clear she wanted Roman to offer something up in return.

“I don’t mean to be evasive.”

“Evasive is putting it mildly, Roman! I feel like I’m worlds away from knowing you. I just want to know you.”

Roman followed her gaze to the stars. He tracked the constellations until the warning tingle behind his eyes subsided. “You know me better than almost anyone else.”

“That’s not comforting. It’s sad.”

“Perhaps,” Roman agreed, feeling a familiar loneliness creep in. “Dinara, if you really want to know, I can—”

“Tell me about last time,” Dinara said, not even waiting for him to finish. “When you had to flee Gallontea.”

Roman’s mouth snapped shut. While Dinara waited for him to continue, he stared out over the quiet camp, lost in thought. Eventually, he said, “I worked for Unity, but not by choice. While they never put me in a cage, I couldn’t leave, all the same.”

“Why not?”

Roman laughed. “An easy question to ask, but not to answer. It was psychological, mostly. They beat me down, taught me not to dream of freedom. I was supposed to be grateful — they saved me from the gallows, and because of that, they felt I belonged to them.” He watched Dinara, cataloging the changes in her expression when he said, “I had killed someone.”

There was fear there, in her eyes, and Roman knew with utter certainty that they wouldn’t make it to morning. Not together.

“It was an accident,” he explained. Digging into the haze of old memories, he continued, “I was friendless and homeless, and I came to Gallontea naively thinking I could find a job, maybe save enough to finish my education. I had no idea what I was walking into, and the police then were even worse than they are now. A week into my stay, a group of them accosted me while I was trying to find somewhere to sleep. They were beating me, and I just...reacted. I was so sure they were going to kill me. I killed one, wounded two others, and was arrested immediately after.”

Ignoring Dinara’s horrified expression, he continued, “Then Unity recruited me, promising everything I’d ever wanted. I stayed with them a long time, until I learned to hate them and everything they stood for. When I met Ivey by chance, I convinced him to help me. The rest is history.”

“History,” Dinara repeated. “What about the Oracle of Damael? How does she fit into this?”

“Dinara,” Roman said, gently, “This isn’t a world you want to be a part of.”

Dinara sighed. “Maybe you’re right.” Tears swam in her eyes, but her cheeks were dry. Her voice was even as she asked, “Where does that leave us, Roman? If you can’t tell me about yourself, and I can’t hear it? I’ve always felt like there was something missing, with you. Something you were holding back. I thought I could draw it out, but yesterday, you were more yourself than I’ve ever seen you. If you can’t be that with me...”

Roman rubbed his eyes. He was tired. “I know. You deserve better.”

“Maybe. But so do you.”

Roman wasn’t so sure.

“You’re still welcome to travel with us,” Dinara said, though her heart clearly wasn’t in it. “You’re part of the family. That won’t change.”

“No,” Roman said, making it easier for both of them. “I need to stay in Gallontea.”

“Oh,” Dinara said.

Roman pretended not to hear the relief in her voice. When he smiled at her, it was almost genuine. “When the Players leave, what will you do? Where will you go?”

Dinara frowned, surprised at the question. It was assumed she’d stay with the Players, like she’d always done, but Roman saw the question shake her, ignite possibilities behind her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, seemingly surprised at her own answer. “Maybe I’ll try something know.”

Roman’s smile really did turn genuine, at that. “Whatever you do, you’ll be great.”

Dinara’s answering smile faded quickly. “What about you? After today, everyone will be looking for you. Isn’t Gallontea the last place you should be?”

“I’m tired of running,” Roman said. He owed Dinara truth, after all. It was easier to give it now that he needn’t fear her reaction. The worst had already happened. He rested his chin on his knee and stared up at the sky. “When I worked for Unity, the things I did for them shattered me. You’ve glimpsed the broken pieces, but you’ve no idea how bad it really was. Even after years, I’m a badly patched vase one shove away from shattering all over again. All this time, I’ve been so focused on not letting them hurt me that I missed them doing the same harm to others. Much as I want to tear them apart, brick by brick, I need to help Orean first.”

“Be careful, Roman,” Dinara breathed. “Don’t underestimate Unity.”

“I won’t,” Roman promised. Raising her hand to his lips, he kissed her for the last time. “I’ll leave you be. I won’t be able to sleep anymore tonight, anyways. I’ll come back for my things tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Dinara tried to say, but no sound came out. “Goodbye, Roman.”

Roman didn’t bother climbing down from the trailer, just jumped, landing easily on the balls of his feet. As he walked away, an echo of his dream pain returned, like a fire burning over his heart. He embraced it, let it wash over him.

Thank you for reading! I am SO excited for the next arc of Fractured Magic. Roman is so badass, and his and Leandros' orbits circle closer and closer to each other then explode on violent impact lol.

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