Once Marlen was gone, Ennette collapsed into the wingback chair and sank so deeply into it her chin was resting on her chest. Up until now, she’d been riding on adrenaline and the wills of the other people around her.
The apartment that Marlen had given her was almost comparable to a modern apartment in its amenities, if not its style. When she asked about the lighting and power systems, he explained that everything was run and sustained by magic crystals designed to recharge under the influence of one of the Tower’s many formations.
He showed her the lines of mana stone inlays that connected to devices and powered them when certain surfaces touched, similar to how Ennette’s phone charging dock worked back home. In this case, the connections weren’t flexible like wires, but it seemed that the material only reacted to a like material, so it was safe to use as a building material as well as a design feature.
All of the magic devices were powered that way, with mana stone patterns that served as both form and function, with each line glowing a different color to indicate that energy was being used and where. Red was for the kitchen. Blue was for the bathroom. Green was for the main room. There were more, too, for other places in the room. If there was a problem, there was an area by the door where she could remove blocks to cut off the power supply to any given route just like a circuit breaker.
The magic devices themselves weren’t much different than any other electrical device that Ennette knew back on Earth. Mostly crafted out of stone, wood, various kinds of metal, and other more unfamiliar magic-based materials, they all had buttons and settings that didn’t need half as much explaining as Marlen had given her—though she suspected that he was being overly cautious because there was either no way for him to know that she had plenty of experience with appliances, or because there were features that she would need to be able to use magic to activate.
Alone and as safe as she could reasonably expect to be, her body slumped and her mind caught up with her emotions.
What on Earth is going on? She wondered as she stared wide-eyed at the wall. There was no way in Ennette’s mind that any of this could be real, and yet everything she saw and felt seemed to confirm it.
What happened to her family on Earth, then? Did she die? Was this the afterlife? That’s usually what happened in these types of novels, wasn’t it? They died or ended up in a coma, right?
Ennette took a bunch of her carrot-colored hair and stared at it. She was still a red-head, at least. The length was right. The texture was right. She touched her face and rubbed her eyes. Everything felt like it was in the right place.
Pushing herself out of the chair—which took far more effort than it should have—Ennette made her way to the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She definitely was in her own body—still Ennette Williams. Her eyes were still green, freckles were still splattered across her nose and cheeks, and even the pimples she’d had before she’d gone to bed were in the same places.
Splashing water on her face, Ennette leaned over the sink and focused on her breathing.
Alright, Ennette, she thought to herself. Pull yourself together.
She couldn’t do anything about the things she didn’t know; she could only deal with the things she did.
So what did she know?
Tapping the light off in the bathroom, Ennette went to the desk and went through drawers and the things that Marlen had left her to start with. Picking one of the nicer glass pens and a couple of sheets of paper, Ennette drew three columns, labeling one as what she knew, one as what she could know, and one as what she didn’t know at all.
She knew this was Gaiuel, the world of The Lady of the Golden Star.
She knew this was the Northern Tower of the Varsal Kingdom.
She knew she couldn’t go home right this second.
The trouble she realized as she wrote those points down, was that there was so much that she didn’t know, that she didn’t actually know what she did know—and she’d have the same problem in the ‘didn’t know’ category.
So she crumpled up the first paper into a ball and threw it behind her.
Starting a new paper titled The Lady of the Golden Star, Ennette began to write down all the things that she knew about the book. Laria, Rhaltz, the Dark Magician, and the other love interests; each had their own sections laid out with everything that Ennette could remember.
Not for the first time in her life, she was thankful that she had such a good memory, but it wasn’t infallible. Her timeline, in particular, was fuzzy at best—especially when she tried to fill in the parts from before the story took place. She knew at least parts of the character’s backstories had speckled the text to help support the character development, but it was usually in large swaths and otherwise irrelevant to the story at large.
Laria, being the protagonist, had the most information on Ennette’s list. She was roughly seventeen when she joined the Tower and had only joined the Northern Tower because her father was doing his best to hide the fact that Laria Eldrannan was once Laria Carpenter. From there, Ennette knew that she graduated fairly early after developing her omni-affinity into a powerful light affinity. It was only after that that she earned her place at the Imperial Tower and met Rhaltz for the first time.
Maziar, on the other hand, had the least amount of information available—by the author’s design, of course. The readers weren’t meant to sympathize with the Dark Magician; he was just an obstacle on the path of Laria and Rhaltz’s happy ending. It was often alluded to that the Dark Magician had no heart or emotions; he was just a shell, they said. A shell for the power of the Darklands turned sentient.
But the Maziar she’d met today was none of those things. Was it just the fact that he was young? Or was there more to the story?
And why hadn’t Laria ever mentioned that she’d known him in the novel? Why hadn’t anyone mentioned it? Even the Grand Wizard, who was apparently his mother, had neglected to bring up Maziar’s past.
Ennette chewed the end of the pen as she looked over her list.
She moved on to a list that focused more on the magic system and the mechanics. This would be slightly easier, at least, given that Marlen had just given her a crash course in magic engineering.
One of the things that she liked about The Lady of the Golden Star was that the magic mechanics weren’t entirely pulled from gut feelings and imagination. Much of the magic system was built with science and programming in mind, and the world built around it used magic engineering in place of steam, coal, and electric power.
Just like how Marlen was explaining her apartment, magic was less ‘magic’ to them and more of an energy that could be directed the same way code tells a machine what actions to perform or how radio waves transmit frequencies.
Crystals, mana stone paths, and magic circles of varying types served as wires, connectors—sometimes displays—and it was much easier to understand the layouts when they were comparable to a circuit board.
It was as much like learning to speak a language as learning to code was, and if she wanted any chance of surviving in this world, she’d need to learn that much.
Wait, she thought suddenly, staring at the letters on the page. Lifting the paper up to get a better look, her chest tightened as she realized another very important detail. She double-checked her theory by opening to a random page of one of the books she’d been left and nearly dropped it as she confirmed it.
I can read their language, she realized, looking at logographic symbols she should have had no way of understanding. It was as if she’d picked up a book in classical Chinese or a scroll of Egyptian hieroglyphs and could read it as if it were her native language.
Ennette began to read the words on the page, careful not to listen to the words and instead focused on feeling how her mouth and tongue were moving. It was effortless—like breathing. I can speak their language. I can understand it as well as I speak English.
She just hadn’t been thinking about it.
Standing up quickly, Ennette went and picked up the balled-up piece of paper that she had discarded before and brought it back to her desk. Smoothing it out, Ennette added a new note:
She knew she could effortlessly communicate with the people of Varsal.
“And what the hell does that mean?” she asked the paper, almost hoping it would answer her.
She crossed her arms on her desk and put her head down. Out the window, the moons only served as yet another reminder of how very far from home she was. Tears welling in her eyes, she sniffled and forced herself to take deep, even breaths.
It was all too much.
Maybe I’ll fall asleep here and wake up back in my bed at home, she thought to herself. Back to her bed, with her favorite pillow and her pink fuzzy slippers. Back to her room with its baby blue walls covered with posters, sketches, and pages with her favorite quotes scrawled across them in as artistic a font as she could manage. She’d just strung up a few strands of fairy lights entwined with fake flowers and twine to hang Polaroid and photobooth pictures of her and her friends from. Her voodoo dolls would be sitting on her bookcase, looking oddly both out of place and as if they belonged there.
In the morning, her mother would call her down for breakfast. She’d be late again; she always slept past her alarm, and then it would take her most of her morning to do her makeup so she’d never get to enjoy her breakfast—she’d only be able to scarf it down.
Her brothers, Matt and Avery, would be as stupid as ever, yelling at her for taking so long in the bathroom and teasing her about her looks.
‘You’re trying too hard,’ Matt would say.
‘It’s ‘cause she likes someone,’ Avery would say. ‘Ooh, Enna’s got a cruuush!’
And then Ennette would chase them around the dining room table until their mother came in and smacked them on the back of their heads.
Her father would have been there the whole time, working at his computer with a faint smile on his face as his eyes flickered between making sure his code was in order and making sure his kids didn’t kill each other. He would finally join them for a cup of coffee, kissing his mother’s hair before telling them it was time for the bus and sending them off.
It was chaos. Happy, carefree chaos.
Yeah, Ennette told herself as her eyes grew heavier and heavier. That’s what it will be like. I just need to go to sleep, and when I wake up, it will all be okay.
But though Ennette would sleep as soundly as she could that night, when she woke, she would wake up with her head still on her new desk, still staring out into the new sky, and sob until she had no tears left.
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