Weekly Writing – March 18 2023

The dangers involved in keeping a phylactery were many, of course. As any academy class or pearl-clutching missive would tell you, at length and with some supporting anecdotes that were even true. The benefits were always dismissed as few and uncertain compared to the precarity and dehumanization inherent in separating a piece of your soul into another container. Why seek out immortality of the soul when the names of old mages still lived on, illustrious and benevolent, in the magic they’d crafted for society’s common good during their short mortal lives?
Any apprentice could answer, of course, even if they wouldn’t do so aloud in class – because being remembered wasn’t the same as being alive, and who was all right with the idea of dying, really? Who accepted it for any reason other than being even more afraid of the alternatives?
She had never asked aloud in her classes. She had just watched the instructors tremble, telltale in the tips of grey beards, as they tried to pretend they had made peace with the idea of dying soon. What comfort would it be to know they had done the right thing, when the right thing was to cease to exist completely and never know anything again?
Better to live with doing the reckless and wrong thing. She’d decided that in her first year, but had still stayed until they’d taught her everything they would. Until her questions started to get too specialized, her chosen specialization too clear and scandalous, and then she had left before they could more urgently to persuade her of mortality’s virtues.
Now she stood staring into the empty, enspelled wooden box that should have contained the amulet in turn containing part of her, and all their voices were coming back to her. All their hoary warnings and recriminations. Part of her soul was out walking the streets in someone else’s pocket, waiting to be pawned or worse, and she would still laugh in the faces of the old professors if they tried to tell her this proved them right.
Half of them were in their graves, after all, and the other half close. While she was still young and hale and very much alive, and powerful enough, even in two pieces, to teach the thief a great deal about mortality when she inevitably found them.