Mazeweaver, page 22
‘What’s the goal of this game, then?’ Dean asks. ‘Pop the dragons?’
‘No!’ I yell as Quantum whips his head around and ominous sparks fly out of his nostrils. ‘They’re real people, Dean. Save the dragons. Save everyone.’
‘Weird gameplay, man,’ he mutters.
Yeah, there aren’t a lot of games out there where no one gets killed. Art imitating life. But isn’t it my job to try and make life better than that?
‘It’s too big for me,’ Aliya says. ‘But you have to be able to break the curse. This is all a dream for you – you can do anything in a dream when you know you’re dreaming.’
This whole world is a projection. I can do literally anything I can imagine. So, yeah, technically I should be able to destroy the curse ... but only if I can imagine it really precisely. You can only control your own mind when you know it. When you understand deeply what’s going on, where your thoughts are coming from. I don’t know this curse. I have too much power, here: if I just dive in and start breaking stuff, I could rip apart her entire world. A curse is a nebulous concept – what if I try and destroy it but break one of the laws of physics instead? Atomic bonds, or something. Everyone dissolving into a random array of particles. Like, beyond dead. I’m not going to risk that. But she doesn’t need me to; she knows how to tell what needs breaking and what needs to be healed. It’s just too big for her to see. That’s why I’m here: to break the puzzle down into little pieces, give her a place to start.
Everything is broken, and we have to knit it back together. Heal the broken relationships. What do I know about doing that?
Not much. But I do know that you can only ever start from where you are. And all the damage in my life began with me and Dean. I thought helping him was just a small thing, and pushed him aside because I had bigger problems. But big things are made of lots of small pieces put together.
‘Dean,’ I say, ‘you’re the key to this, mate. It begins with you and me. Do you want to fix ... us?’
‘I never wanted us to be broken. I just break things because it’s what I do.’
Even though for Dean this is just a dream, and he probably won’t remember a thing about it when he wakes up, I’m still glad because it means that subconsciously at least he hasn’t given up on our friendship. Or given up on himself.
He’s reaching out to me. Not physically – we haven’t hugged since we were about ten – but emotionally. Entering a trance when fireballs are flying around is no mean trick, but I make a conscious effort to breathe out all the adrenaline and let myself sink inwards, just far enough that the external world doesn’t feel like a solid thing. It’s overlaid with webs of elemental force, shot through with vapour trails of emotional energy. A beautiful network. And it’s full of cracks.
I start where I’m at. Me and Dean, shattered pieces of a friendship. I gather them up, feeling the emotional edges where he has broken our trust. But there are jagged edges that I have created, too.
All these months, I’ve been thinking the problem is all coming from Dean – but I’ve been creating just as many obstacles. Wanting things to be simple; wanting to not have to think about what being me means. Dean makes it impossible to do that: he makes me look myself in the eye. I’ve been avoiding doing that. Surrounding myself with friends who make it easy. Nothing wrong with easy ... except when it’s a fake complacency that’s an excuse not to grow.
How can I pretend being me is easy? It’s not just about being non-binary, or even being a dreamwalker. It’s about being a teenager; being an individual in a world that tries to mould us all into parts of a commercial machine. It’s about being human. If I can’t accept how hard that is, and live with it, then how can I connect to anyone else? Being alive in this impossible world is what makes us all the same.
So, I let it in: all the mess and confusion and insecurity that is life. Let the walls come down, stop trying to protect myself by pretending the chaos isn’t there. Protect myself instead by reaching out to what holds us all together.
Dean stops being unfinished business, part of the past that I have to fix before I can move on. He becomes the present, a shared experience of pain; a pain I can feel as keenly as my own. A pain that I can’t remove, but I can embrace and accept and support until its weight becomes bearable.
Like shards of pottery reforming between my hands, the cracks heal.
Weaving
Aliya could see the rift between Luca and their friend healing, their roots of trust and memory weaving together to form a whole. It looked so simple. Such a small thing. A solution she hadn’t been able to see because she’d neglected the small things for too long. This small thing was the warp beam of a loom, the anchor she could use to weave everything together.
The dragons couldn’t fight against the anger in their minds because it wasn’t their anger: it was a parasite that had stolen their capacity for love. But she could fight it for them. If her love was strong enough she could weave it into a blanket of protection around them like Meriel had made for Quantum.
She’d always been bad at weaving.
So many hours with her mother, bent over the loom unpicking mistakes and twisted threads. So many moments of shelter in the surety of her mother’s love. A love that felt a long way from her now, because she was a shaman, an outsider. The childhood memories of her family were shards of pain, broken threads. She picked up the tattered end of those threads and reached out to find their frayed twins. She had created a distance, but a shaman was the heart of their community, the one who stood between their people and danger. How could a shaman be separate?
Luca made it look easy, but it was hard for her. To trust, to connect, to pull down all the barriers – that meant giving others the power to hurt her. But what was the alternative? To maintain her walls and keep on hurting herself. It wasn’t brave to be strong and independent; real courage was in connection.
She’d always considered Luca to be too trusting, but seeing them now, that trust appeared not as naivete but as wisdom. Real magic, coming not from rituals or elemental forces but from the power of the human heart. If Luca was brave enough to be vulnerable, then so was she. By allowing herself to be weak, she’d become strong enough to break the curse.
Aliya reached out a hand to Luca, and they grasped wrists, a stable grip to hold them steady at the nexus of the maelstrom of emotional force.
She drew the threads of her family together, lines of light and energy connecting, the physical distance between herself and her family mattering not at all as she closed the emotional distance. Her parents, her siblings ... they were part of the tapestry of her life, and she wove them into the web of light she was creating around her.
All the broken relationships ... Juna, whom Aliya had never allowed to accept her new role. To prevent Juna from placing a distance into their friendship, Aliya had pulled away first, roots withering as she held back their growth. Vali, who would have supported her all through this terrible journey if she’d let him. She reached out.
And Kai, who she knew wanted a closeness she hadn’t been willing to give. She let the door of possibility open, and with a rush of warmth, she felt him join his intention to hers and step into the weaving.
Quantum. The only one who fully understood her. The one she was most afraid of losing. The one she had already begun to push away in the expectation of heartbreak. She reached out, the roots of her love sparks of pure, bright energy.
This was the truth that Meriel had seen, which led her to sacrifice her life for Quantum’s. If he had died, Aliya’s heart would have been too damaged to break the curse. Meriel had solved the puzzle of the curse before any of them; she did like a good puzzle. The air elemental who had believed all dragons to be greedy and selfish had befriended Quantum and seen the truth of him. She had given her life not just for him, but to save all dragonkind from extinction. She had sacrificed herself because she had faith in redemption, and now it was up to Aliya to prove her belief justified.
Aliya wove them all back into a net of love.
Through Quantum, she could feel a whole host of other broken threads, his family and community a tangle of relationships shattered by anger. The dragon scale bracelet on her wrist throbbed, searing her skin, a visceral link she could use to strengthen her connection.
Over it all, the curse: the jagged copper net of anger that had torn all these people apart. Into each juncture of that net, she sent her newfound strength. It seemed such a small thing against the weight of an entire mountain’s hatred, but at each touch, the metallic strands began to corrode away. However strong the hatred was, love was always stronger. As the curse weakened, rusted and creaking, the dragons’ natural connections began to re-assert themselves, the love that had been buried by the curse finding its way to the surface.
She began to weave.
The tapestry grew around her, spreading out in a picture made of strands of many-coloured light, a web of interconnectedness from which it was impossible to separate herself. She was just one cell in the vast body of life, drawing them all together, holding that body back from death. Luca’s energy wove into the pattern, grounding her, reminding her she was an individual as well as part of the whole.
The curse snapped, the net collapsing with a scream of tortured metal. The scent of rust and blood blew away on the wind of a thousand sighs. She felt Kai catch the shape of it and invert it, turning the maze of hatred into a labyrinth, a web of kindness that felt like an apology for that first, terrible, labyrinth he had made.
Only the tapestry remained; no tangles, no broken threads. Even her mother would find nothing to criticise in this.
Aliya’s eyes blinked open. For a moment she thought she had been transported into a forest. All around, a rippling carpet of green, down the cliff-side and across the valley floor. Not trees, but dragons, huddled close together, touching wings and intertwining tails, scales in all imaginable shades of green glimmering in the light of the setting sun. An enormous family.
Her wrist throbbed. She let go of Luca’s arm and they said ‘Ow!’ as their skin pulled apart. Aliya scratched her wrist, and a charred leather cord dropped away. The cerulean dragon scale remained, a shining arrowhead fused into her flesh.
Quantum crawled onto her shoulder and she leant her cheek against his side.
‘Go and find your parents,’ she told him. He nodded against her skin and leapt away, bounding through the throng of bodies like an excited kitten.
Aliya leant back wearily, and only then became aware that Kai was standing behind her, supporting most of her weight. Extricating herself would be too much work, so she just rolled her head sideways against his shoulder until she could see Luca flopped against the rock wall, legs stretched out and eyes dropping closed.
‘Are you asleep?’ she asked. They laughed without opening their eyes. Aliya grinned. ‘Okay, that was a stupid question. I’m a bit tired. Have just saved an entire race.’
‘We have, you mean.’ Her apprentice gave her a lopsided smile.
She went and knelt beside them, her knees pressing into Luca’s thigh, and laid a hand on their arm.
Luca winced and showed her their wrist. It looked like a burn, but pale blue instead of red: an impression of the dragon scale she wore, seared into his skin.
‘Sorry.’
They shook their head. ‘Don’t be. It’s like ... a little piece of dragon in my head. I mean, it hurts, but it also feels like...’
‘Togetherness. Yes, I know.’ It felt like all the things she was so bad at expressing. Like— ‘Thank you. I can’t say...’
‘I know. I can’t say what it means to be back here ... but I can’t stay.’ Luca jerked their head towards their friend.
As if on cue, Dean said, ‘What happens on the next level?’
‘The next level is reality, mate,’ Luca told him. ‘That’s way harder. Aliya, will you be okay here on your own?’
Of course, Luca had read the loneliness she tried to hide: they knew her far too well. ‘I’m not alone,’ she said. ‘I never have been; it just took me a while to realise it.’
‘I miss you,’ Luca blurted, reaching for her hand. ‘I know you’ve been giving me space to find my own feet and all, and I did need that... but it ended up being a bit too much space. Let’s talk, this time. Like, all the time. We don’t have to only be friends when the world needs saving.’
Aliya would never say something like that ... and wasn’t that part of the problem? She squeezed their hand. ‘Yeah. I miss you, too, Apprentice.’
‘Of course you do,’ Luca said, wiping their eyes. ‘Apprentices are the epitome of cool. Now, I need to go and fix my own problems. I messed up, but I know what to do now.’ Before she could even open her mouth, they continued, ‘No – you need to be here right now. There is some serious trauma to be dealt with; Quantum needs you more than I do.’
‘Of course. I know you don’t need my help.’
Luca cuffed her on the arm. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I always need you, Sensai. But I’ve always got you.’ They tapped their head, then their heart. ‘You’ve already helped. I thought some things—some people—were too broken to fix. You’ve just proved they’re not. I just need to do what you did: ask for help. Trust my friends to be there for me.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘The apprentice becomes the master?’
‘I guess they do.’
With one last crooked smile, Luca grabbed Dean’s arm and they both dissolved into emptiness. A galaxy of swirling motes filled the space where they had been and then was gone. She touched her own heart. Never quite gone.
For a moment, the emptiness pressed in on her. Then she relaxed into that emptiness and found it amazingly full. She looked up at Kai, buoyed up by the faint echoes of the countless interconnected lives surrounding her. He swallowed convulsively, seeing something in her eyes that had never been there before.
Quantum hurtled towards her and jumped onto her knee. The edges of the vast web she had woven still pulled at her awareness; she could sense the churning ocean of relief and loss, a whole civilisation struggling to realign itself. And the bright spark of Quantum’s joy at being part of that.
‘The town elders are going to be very annoyed with you,’ he said, eyes dancing.
‘They don’t like being saved?’
‘Not by magic they don’t believe in. Not only will they be obliged to be grateful to you, but they’ll also have to change their whole worldview as well. Thoroughly frustrating.’ He sounded thrilled at the prospect.
‘They need shamans of their own to help them keep their priorities straight,’ she said.
‘There are no dragon shamans.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They just need training.’
Quantum cocked his head like a bird. ‘Do you mean me?’
She stroked his neck. ‘Oh, Quantum. I wish it was you.’
‘You already know, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t you going to try and change my mind?’
For weeks, she’d been so scared that Quantum was going to abandon her. She’d been resentful of his wings because she thought they’d take him away from her. Now that he was actually choosing to leave her side, it no longer felt like she was losing him.
‘You’ll be my best friend wherever you are. But you shouldn’t stay here out of guilt.’
They both looked out over the sea of dragons. Sounds of grief were beginning to puncture the awed hush which had followed the breaking of the curse. Some of them were starting to organise teams to clear the rubble and lay out the dead.
‘It’s not guilt. Well, maybe some; but I know the curse had multiple causes, and although I may have been one of them, I also helped to break it. No, it’s more that I can see my people clearly, with an outsider’s eye. I might not be a shaman, but I understand the balance you try to keep. I know I’m what they need.’
You’re what I need, too, she thought, but she didn’t say it, just tapped her heart again. She had him, always.
The heart of the matter
Dean looks majorly confused when he opens his eyes. Which is good, because when that wears off he’s going to segue into mortally embarrassed, and we don’t have time for that. I’m on fire. I’m burning with connection, with potential, with ... love. The whole world feels part of that. Even a twisted and destructive giant insect doesn’t deserve to be left on the outside.
‘Luca, what...? This is more of your weird shit, isn’t it? Did you hypnotise me or something?’
He leans away from me, and I realise I’m waving a razor blade around. Oops. I drop it in the bin, and Dean watches it go with haunted eyes but doesn’t move to stop me. He seems sober now, as if enforced slumber was an antidote to whatever he’d taken earlier.
‘We were just dreaming. But I have all my best ideas in dreams.’ In dreams I’m still a little bit Aliya; I have some distance from myself and all my problems. ‘Come on, mate – I need your help to end this.’
We squeeze out of the toilet stall. A guy in cool eyeliner leaning over the sink winks at me in the mirror. I don’t care what anyone thinks right now. What an amazing feeling. I wink back.
The pavement outside the club is still busy, even though it’s after midnight, everyone lit a sickly yellow; there’s a pervading scent of booze and cheap pizza. I’ve never felt so alive.
‘Call your mum and tell her you’re staying at my place,’ I tell Dean.
I phone Padma twice, so it will get through her quiet time settings and wake her up.
‘You have to sneak out,’ I tell her after she mumbles a sleepy greeting. ‘I’ve worked out what we need to do about The Mantis.’
‘What, now?’ she says. ‘Why tonight? Is it the right phase of the moon or something?’
‘I’ve no idea what phase of the moon it is.’
She sighs. ‘You’re a very disappointing witch sometimes, you know that.’
