5. Mage Maya (5)
5. Mage Maya (5)
Maya's father was a painter with a fine hand.
He met her mother while painting a signboard for a play, he said.
A father who disdained magic, insisting that illusionary tricks could never deliver true emotion.
Stung by his words, her mother conjured up every frightful illusion she could muster and hurled them at him.
That, they claimed, was how they first met.
Whenever acquaintances asked if they were courting, the painter and the Witch scoffed and brushed it off as nonsense.
Still, both of them were people accustomed to drawing something from the void.
Three years passed. The blank paper took on a wash of pink, the paper deepened to richer shades, and at last they unveiled the work they would call the masterpiece of their lives.
Seventeen years had passed since that work was first exhibited.
Mrow.
Maya looked down at the mud-colored lump trying to rub its head against her palm.
The creature was mimicking, to the last detail, the behavior of a cat she had once kept.
The waddling gait, the way it craned its neck and flicked its tail — every motion brought back the kitten from her childhood.
Yet nobody would recognize it as a cat at first glance. Not from its outward appearance.
The onlookers took the grotesque shapes she produced for a playful acrobat's prank. Once the joke was over, they figured, she would conjure a proper illusion. A few even expected a performance in which the doughy exterior would split open and a real cat would spring out.
Maya defied those expectations.
A pinwheel. A wagon. A swing.
One by one, she produced metaphysical forms.
No one could guess what she had meant to create.
These shapes offered no clue — no meow, nothing of the kind.
"That is all."
The voice was cold and flat.
Only then did the crowd realize this was her best effort.
Disappointed sighs rippled through the onlookers.
Her skill was so poor that simply standing here was an embarrassment, let alone seeking recruitment.
The sightseers drifted away with murmurs of regret.
A few tossed out ruder remarks.
—With that face, why not just become an actor?
—I'm not sure she'd be good for anything beyond a doll's role.
Maya seethed at the words, but let none of it show.
She had never been one to display emotion.
She quietly gathered up her illusions.
The circus people who had openly spat venom at the other illusions simply traded wry smiles and departed without a word. No critic wastes breath earnestly discussing line and shading over a grade-schooler's doodle.
Maya gazed down at the cat trying to nestle into her hand, her eyes sorrowful.
I'm sorry. I still can't give substance to an illusion. I can't even create a proper illusion in the first place.
The cat cocked its head.
As if wondering why its owner would not stroke it.
Illusions possess neither will nor spirit.
Every action it took was her own will made manifest.
This is what he would do.
Every motion of the illusion mirrored the cat she had raised, down to the finest detail.
Maya remembered him.
His ears, his tail, his eyes, his fur, his color, his claws — she remembered everything.
Inside her head existed a perfect three-dimensional image.
Perfect down to particles smaller than a grain of sand.
Yet she could not shape it into an illusion.
An overwhelming excess of information.
And an indistinct understanding of the "Image."
Both held her fast.
Magic is a discipline that belongs to the domain of the Mystic — positioned between the material reality of substance and the conceptual world of the mind.
When a mage who commands the element of ice casts a spell to "freeze," he never thinks, lower the temperature to such-and-such below zero and congeal the moisture. He cloaks the concept of "freezing" in his mind with his will, injects magical power into it, and the phenomenon of water turning to ice manifests in reality.
Ask why it works, and there is no answer.
Even the mages who use magic do not truly understand it.
The academies periodically publish one theory or another, but no one actually thinks of those theories while casting spells in the field. That is a domain for scholars to fret over.
Magic was a discipline built on the Mystic.
Magic was a craft handed down through oral lineage.
Magic was an enlightenment reached through experience.
The "Image" that Illusion Magic speaks of is likewise a concept that belongs to the Mystic.
Maya could not grasp it.
—Miss Maya, would you care to render this as an illusion?
Her academy instructor brought out a canvas.
A breathtakingly beautiful field of wildflowers in oil colors was painted upon it.
Every gaze in the classroom converged on Maya.
This was the end-of-term exam — Illusion Manifestation.
It was only natural that all eyes would turn to the abilities of Maya, the top scorer in theory.
Plants are easier to produce than animals, but what the instructor demanded was an entire landscape.
Impossible without considerable talent.
Maya focused her magic power and shaped an illusion.
Light converged and took the exact form of what she had seen.
She opened her eyes.
The result was perfect.
But the way the instructor and the other students looked at her was strange.
As though they were staring at a peculiar specimen.
Maya tilted her head.
What she had made was perfect.
A field of wildflowers in oil colors, on a rectangular canvas.
A field of wildflowers in oil colors, on a rectangular canvas.
The two were completely identical.
She lived in a world built on reason.
She saw a world composed of information.
She understood the world through logic.
Even a single insect we see, a single grain of sand, is made of minute accumulations of data and connections unique to each individual. How could anyone view such things through the indistinct medium called "Image"?
Producing a painting was simple.
Others struggled, understanding pictures as "symbols" and rendering them, but for Maya it was an elementary task — merely inputting color data coordinate by coordinate across a two-dimensional plane. Her absurd capacity for calculation made it possible.
Conversely, she had no idea how to compute complex three-dimensional forms like a puppy, a pigeon, or a flower. Grasping the coordinates and contours of every single strand of fur, and the curves produced by their movement, was nearly impossible.
She could not understand what other people meant by "Image."
The Mystic was a concept far removed from reason.
Still, she wanted to understand.
Her father told her that her talents would shine far brighter if she entered the Delos Republic's IMT — the Institute of Magical Technology. Maya knew it well enough herself. She was aware that the field where her gifts truly flourished lay elsewhere.
Even so, she wanted to learn Illusion Magic.
From her breast pocket, she drew out a small silver disc.
It was an object used among illusion mages, containing the "Image" data necessary to replay an illusion. Recording information onto it — and reading that information to reproduce it as an illusion — was possible only for illusion mages who shared the same Mystic of "Image."
A final message from mother to daughter.
Maya wanted to replay this with her own hands.
Without anyone else's help.
Her father must have known this was his daughter's own task — which is why he never hired anyone to play it for her.
One day, without fail, with her own two hands.
Maya tucked the disc back into her clothes.
Looking around, she found the rest of the onlookers had all gone.
They were off marveling at illusions far more brilliant and intricate than anything she could produce.
A few stole glances at her face and whispered, but no one approached.
The emotionless, wintry expression she wore was frightening in its own right, and any person of common decency knew that gawking would be boorish.
It was boorish, after all.
Boorish.
Boorish...
"Heh heh. Is that really all? You won't make any more?"
Maya's fist clenched and unclenched in an instant.
A man stood across from her, a little distance from her table.
He had been watching her illusion demonstration from the start.
Even when others had read the situation and slunk away with awkward expressions amid her string of failures, he had remained planted right there, smirking at her.
Oh, that's not how you do it.
He didn't speak the words, but his face conveyed the sentiment clearly.
Maya ground her teeth inwardly.
Illusion is magic that holds meaning only when there is someone to deceive. She believed that demonstrating before a crowd, the larger the better, would aid her training.
That was why she had deliberately joined the Circus Grand Prix.
There was no better place to train Illusion Magic than here, she thought.
It held meaning, too — this was the stage where her father and mother had once performed.
She had been prepared to present her work before an audience and hear their judgment.
But what was she to make of this man laughing in her face?
No change flickered across Maya's angry features.
She merely narrowed her eyes a fraction and glared.
Even that seemed to amuse the man, who let out a chuckle.
That teasing smile truly tried her patience.
The fact that he was handsome mattered not at all.
No one places less value on outward appearance than an illusion mage.
Such things could be altered or faked at any moment.
Maya decided to ignore him and focus on her training.
What she drew out this time was a small cube of wood.
A cube was the most basic practice tool among illusion mages.
Forming a perfectly identical cube next to the original.
She resolved to steady her mind and go back to the fundamentals.
—Conjure the Image of the cube.
Image.
What in the world was that supposed to mean?
Her instructor's voice echoed in her head.
—The Image is the act of drawing meaning upon the canvas of the mind.
—A person with no heart will never reach the Image.
—Miss Maya, why not go to the IMT instead and become a magical engineer?
Shut up.
I will do it.
She shut her eyes.
She steadied her breathing.
She conjured the image of the wooden block before her.
Up to this point, she was more perfect than anyone.
Manifesting it, however, was a separate problem.
45.4 x 44.9 x 45.1 mm.
Birch wood.
Twelve growth rings.
Asymmetrical grain.
Seventeen grooves.
Four splinters.
She computed the entire volume of information, point by point.
Her head throbbed, but she endured it.
One.
A cube formed.
Two.
Another cube materialized.
She could manage this much.
But on the third — urk.
Her Image scattered, and another doughy lump emerged.
The sheer excess of information.
This was the flaw in her method — a method for creating illusions without using the Image.
Manifesting dot by painstaking dot was limited to two dimensions. Once she entered three dimensions, the volume of information she had to process swelled beyond her capacity.
"Heh heh. Are you finished?"
She raised her head.
The man was still smiling.
As if mocking her.
As if pitying her.
A smile that seemed to toy with people.
This guy is the worst.
A hairline crack spread across Maya's icy composure.