Nowhere Stars: Volume 1 by Anemone

Author:Anemone [Anemone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-22T23:00:00+00:00

Where We Come From 3-1

New Claris is quietest on moonless nights, beneath the stars’ pale light, but a city is never completely empty and still. It’s never lifeless. I mean, unless it’s abandoned out in a wasteland with no plants or animals for miles or something. Which this one isn’t yet.

Anyway.

Stepping onto the university campus south of the hospital is a sudden sharp change from the city’s glass-and-greenery spires. The college is much older, one of those historic parts of the city that wasn’t redesigned after the war, and made up mostly of great limestone buildings designed to look somewhere between old churches and small castles. Taken with the grounds between them, all gardens and groves rather than manicured grass, they look like a loose grouping of stately homes spread around a thinly-forested woodland. Being here feels like crossing into another, older world, and the distant lights barely illuminating it lend it all a sense of unreality almost like the one that comes with using magic.

It’s easy enough to find what I’m looking for. I make my way to one of the tall buildings dotted with still-lit windows and filled with points of human life, which I can sense as faint scents of fresh rain. There, I circle around, past the front door and its porchlight that briefly lights up as I pass, and sit against the wall beneath a dark window. I take a card from my orbit, float it up a little, and narrow my focus until…

My sight spins and spins in vertical loops that make me feel the way I imagine roller coasters feel. It’s awful. When it stops, I’m looking down at myself, seeing the world from the card’s perspective.

Irakkia left me with one small prize, the power to see through my magic. Sort of. Only one card at a time, everything becomes a bit blurry at a distance, the image is flat the way seeing through one eye is, and it completely replaces my actual sight until I return to myself. Not my other senses, though. Last infusion day, I tried to escape the pain by fleeing into a card and staying there. No such luck. At least I can still control myself, it’s just pretty hard without using my eyes. And makes me a bit nauseous. Maybe this would be more useful if I hadn’t scavenged it from torn scraps, but there’s nothing for it now.

Anyway, my goal here doesn’t call for anything complicated. Starting with the window above me, I bring the card close enough to look around inside. Empty. I move to the next window up and repeat the process, skipping ones where the lights are still on, until I find a room where someone is lying in their bed. It’s too dark to see clearly, but their essence feels clean. Healthy.

So I reach out, touch their soul, and inhale, drawing a sip, a small, careful sip, from their strength. They toss under the covers as deep green mist spirals out from them and down into me.

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