“I met her back in university,” says Laralyn, breaking the silence.
She has been sitting on the ground here for 18 minutes, by Fel’s count; unmoving, lost in thought, lined hands resting one on top of the other in her lap. Fel, standing at her side, waits patiently for her to continue.
“We were all so full of ourselves back then, but everyone could tell she was brilliant. Always coming up with her own improvements on the formulae in our textbooks, taking seven or eight Master-level classes at once and getting perfect grades in all of them. She’d ask questions that left professors stumped, and then shut herself up in her room for a week and come out tripping over herself to demonstrate the answers to anyone who’d listen.” Laralyn smiles to herself in reverie. “Never let it go to her head, though. Always friendly, always helpful, never made you feel bad for not knowing something. We all looked up to her, could all tell she was going to do incredible things. Well…” Laralyn’s gaze returns to the present, turns to glance up at Fel.
Fel looks down at her, expression placid but attentive, as she quietly listens. Three seasons ago, Laralyn would be urging Fel to not be so stiff, take a seat, ask questions. They’re more used to each other now, and Laralyn understands that this is what’s most comfortable for Fel.
Laralyn returns her gaze forward, and continues. “Fourth semester, she mentioned a girlfriend offhand. She never talked about her personal life, and we were all dying to know more. Tell the truth, I was a little torn-up over it, I’d been nursing a bit of a crush – well, that was back before – she and I both had some things to learn about ourselves, that’s a whole other story, but all the same – most of us were just plain nosy, though. We couldn’t get anything more out of her, so one evening, a couple of us secretly followed her when she went out for a date. Awful, weren’t we?” She chuckles ruefully to herself. “We were wondering if she was headed to one of the other dorms, or out into town, but…”
She pauses, sighs, shakes her head.
“She wandered off into the woods. We kept on following, keeping quiet, getting more and more confused. Eventually, she sat down in the dirt next to a tree and just – started stacking rocks on top of each other. Stacking them, letting them fall over, stacking them up again. We were trying to figure out if this was a project, some sort of new ritual, but it – it didn’t seem like any sort of spell we’d ever heard of, none of us sensed any magic, she just didn’t look right. Eventually, Rorian came out and went over to her, to see if she was okay. She didn’t see him even when he was right in front of her, didn’t hear him when he tried to talk to her, didn’t notice him at all until he grabbed her shoulder. And after that, it was like she couldn’t tell what was what, it was all we could do just to calm her down to the point she could string a sentence together.
“We finally got her to come back with us to the infirmary. The doctors had a whole lot of questions for her and for us, but eventually they figured out what was going on. She had a physick she took regularly, some sort of blue newt tincture, a doctor’d given it to her a while back to help her sleep properly. But a small handful of people don’t handle it well – makes them see and hear things that aren’t there, remember things that didn’t happen. They gave her some replacements to try taking instead, she found one that worked well enough, and she stopped seeing and hearing things, her memory cleared up. I just wish that could’ve been the end of it…”
She turns to Fel again. “Have you ever had cause to doubt your senses or your memories, Fel?”
Fel shakes her head no.
“Myself, every now and then I’ll have a little moment where a place I’ve never been before feels strangely familiar, or I’ll think I already took care of an errand that I haven’t done yet; just little things like that, though, nothing serious, nothing really important. But suppose one day, you did find out that something big, something that mattered to you, someone you cared about, was never real at all, that your mind was lying to you the entire time. Even after you got that cleared up… would you be able to trust that anything else was real?”
Fel ponders for a moment. “No less than now.”
Laralyn nods to herself. “There you have it. But, well… Maybe she was too used to being able to figure everything out; maybe it was just her temperament; maybe these things never hit any of us the way we expect them to. She started doubting everything, questioning everything, pulling at every loose thread in case the whole thing started unraveling again. Trying to figure out how much stuff on the maps was really there, how much stuff in the history books really happened. It wasn’t even all bad, is the thing – when she told us she’d figured out she was actually a girl, started dressing differently, using a different name, she did seem happier after. It did help her, a little, in the middle of it all. Wasn’t enough, though. Still felt like the truth was going to fly away from her the moment she took her eyes off it, still needed to try everything she could to pin it down. She wouldn’t let anyone tell the tiniest polite lie in her presence, wouldn’t let anyone mistake the littlest detail of anything without correcting them then and there. She’d fill up journals writing down every single thing that happened to her, so she could check it against her memory. She’d tell us what she was seeing and ask us if it was really there, and we’d tell her, we all wanted to help her however we could. And it always was really there, and her journals always matched up, she’d gotten better, but… how did she know the journals were real, how did she know we were real?”
Laralyn sighs again, face downcast.
“She pulled away from all of us, spent more and more time just locked in her room, we wouldn’t see her for months on end. One night I was up late working on an assignment, she wandered into the common room and started talking to me, but like she was talking to herself. She said she’d finally figured it out, what she needed to do, how to fix everything. She was going to find her own True Name. One single absolute truth, one rock to cling to in the tempest, and it would all be okay. And then she wandered off before I could ask anything more.
“I didn’t know much about True Names, so I went to the library, dug into some books – every one I read, I saw on the cards she’d already checked it out before me, naturally. I found out that Nomenclation is – well, it’s much stranger magic than I’d ever realized. A True Name isn’t just a different word you call a thing, it really is something Absolute. More True than your senses, more True than your reason, more fundamentally True than reality itself. It’s all theoretical, nobody’s ever actually found a True Name as far as anyone knows, but if you could, it really would somehow cut through the entire bind of questioning what’s real. She wasn’t wrong, not really. If she found her True Name, she could perfectly understand herself, perfectly understand her mind, quell her doubts with an answer deeper than any question. Only…
“Nomenclation is powerful. More powerful than you or I can even comprehend. And it’s the most forbidden magic there is.” She closes her eyes, dredging back up knowledge from half-forgotten books. “The Archmage Aelaros II thought that if you found the True Name of one single thing, you’d also learn the True Name of anything that interacted with that thing, and so on until you had the True Names of every last thing in the world. And since the True Name of a thing gives you absolute power over that thing, learning a single True Name would turn you into a god – at least according to Aelaros. Legoda the Pale said that actually, if you could find even a tiny piece of the Truth of the world from inside the world, that’d mean the world was too big, had too much in it to keep straight, it’d contradict itself somewhere. And as soon as you learned enough True Names to hit that contradiction…” She snaps her fingers. “World stops existing, just like that. Or never existed at all, somehow? Never quite managed to wrap my head around it.
“The fact is, nobody really knows just what a True Name would do, and nobody wants to risk finding out. After I’d checked out a dozen or so books, I got called in by the Chancellors to explain why I was looking into Nomenclation. Or, well… it wasn’t really me they were after at all, it was her. When had I last seen her, had she told me anything about her research or her plans, did I know where to find her. I told them as little as I could, not that I really knew much to begin with.
“That night, they broke down the door to her room. She’d already run off, of course. A week later, I heard that they’d tracked her down, found her doing some sort of ritual with a massive circle of stones in the desert. By that point it wasn’t the university searching anymore, the Archmage Council had gotten involved and sent out Executioners, and…”
She falls silent. The two of them look at the headstone in front of them for a long moment.
Laralyn slowly eases herself up off the ground. “Thirty-six years ago today.” She dusts herself off. “We fought damn hard to make sure they put that name on there. The one Truth she found that really meant anything, in the end.”
The sun is dipping low now, painting the sky in purple and gold.
“I know she’s not here now, she wouldn’t want me pretending like she is. So I’m saying this for me: Goodbye, Iona. You deserved better. I wish we’d known how to help better. I still miss you.”
They stand there for another minute, wind starting to pick up a little around them.
“… Let’s head home now, Fel. About time we got started on dinner.” Laralyn’s face is turned away as they start on the walk back. “… Thanks for coming along.”
Fel nods. “Thank you for telling me about her.”
Laralyn turns back to look at Fel, a smile forming as a tear runs down her cheek. “Anytime, Fel. I’ve got plenty more stories if you wanna hear. Lemme tell you about our third semester Intermediate Pyromancy final project …”