Trinity, Part III

Magic is a wild thing, not something to be controlled but only channelled. Those who think that they can control it are mistaken and will eventually pay for that mistake, as Trinity did.

To perform magic properly requires vast knowledge and is not possible for one person to know all there is. To be a true sorceress, ones quest for knowledge can never end. It is necessary to understand the world you live in in order to manipulate it. It is also important to understand that you don't know all there is to know, not even close.

Trinity had never been afraid to look at things, she peered into what most people ran away from. She thought about death, she thought about pain, she thought about hate and loneliness and fear. She tried to understand the mind of the killer as well as the victim. The things she saw scared her, they made her sad. Sometimes she would cry inconsolably. This, her teacher had told her, was the thing that would set her apart from the rest, could make her great rather than average. It was good that her teacher encouraged her in this for no-one else did.

Joia had never liked looking at darkness, she thought that it made you sick of spirit. She tried to focus on the beauty and light and good that was around her. And when she became involved with Justo, her talent for this was put to the test! In order to see the good in her marriage and in her life, she had to lie to herself. And the more things progressed, the more lies she had to tell until finally her life was constructed on a fragile tower of untruths. The energy she exerted to maintain these illusions was prodigious. Her thinking became rigid, to see one lie would mean seeing them all and seeing them all would mean that she would have to change. She would have to find her life and herself again, underneath all of the lies and she was afraid. Mostly afraid that maybe what she thought of as herself actually consisted of nothing.

A glamour-off, as you may have guessed, is a spell in which a person is forced to see the truth under the things that they lie to themselves about. It is one of the most powerful spells and Trinity shouldn't have used it. The truth can be hard and painful and can wound deeply, especially the heart of one who cannot bear it.

Trinity had used great power when performing her spell, but no finesse. The spell caused Joia to see not only the things she had avoided seeing about Justo and herself, that was only a small part of all she had been lying to herself about. She saw all other things as well.

Joia was quiet on the way home from the confrontation with Trinity. When she and Justo arrived at their house she simply collapsed into a chair and spoke no more. Justo called to her but she did not answer, it was as though she couldn't see him. And she couldn't, all she could see were the visions in front of her eyes. The visions came fast, wave after wave crashing into her so that she could hardly catch her breath, she sat with tears streaming down her face.

The things she saw were so ugly to her, if hurt her to see them. She saw that her marriage was a sham, just as Trinity had wanted her to, oh but that was the least and most insignificant thing that she saw.

The world unravelled sickenly before her eyes. She was going deeper and deeper into it, past the surface and inside. She saw the spinning orbs that make up matter and the cold empty spaces between. She saw earth and sky, the wood and the stone, the dark and the light and how they weren't really anything separate and how everything blended into everything else, how everything traded pieces of itself. She saw how people conspire to create reality and how what we call life and and law and truth are all just consensual illusions.

She saw that flesh is but dust and that death is hidden in life. She saw the futility of all the lives ever lived, and how all who had gone before were forgotten as though they never existed. She thought she could see the hopeful faces of millions of people who once thought like her, that their lives had meant something and how now even their names were not remembered. She thought of time and how it had run over everything and everyone since the beginning of the world, crushing them in its relentless forward motion and how meaningless it all was.

She sunk to her knees and saw in front of her eyes, as though seeing a vision, all of these things until the earth became a mass graveyard with uncountable corpses underneath inside of it, mixing with the earth and becoming it. She felt that nothing meant anything and that it was all different than anyone knew. She laid on the floor and moaned and shook, with her hands against her head as though she was trying to hold it together.

Justo grew frightened, she would not respond, neither to roughness or softness. He had no choice but to send for Trinity. By the time Trinity arrived, Joia had seen something she needed to see and was waking up.

She glanced around inscrubly and turned and walked out the door. She told Justo goodbye and that was the last thing that she said for a very long time. And Trinity had quite a time setting this right.