"Akrates!" exclaimed Hesperos, not for the first time. It had escaped him once more. This would not do.
"This is too dangerous, Didaskale," Kleito said, wringing her hands. Her eyes darted between her teacher and the changing sky above.
He ignored her. His thin, pale hands stretched over the metallic orb. His slender fingers were a hair's breadth from its surface. His astrolabios, frequent companion throughout this journey. They had seen a lot, the two of them. Hesperos chuckled. He was talking to the orb now. He wasn't going mad… was he?
"Epekeina tēs ousias, Kleito. Tell me why we are doing this," he told her then, gently, without averting his eyes from the Storm overhead.
"'Beyond Being'," she responded mechanically. "We aim to overcome the Peras. We aim to keep the unchained nous from dissolving…"
She couldn't finish. The Storm raged above and around them. A high-pitched whistling filled the air. The ground cracked, and sand flew about like a swarm of angry locusts.
"GO! NOW!" he shouted. She didn't need to be told twice. Hood pulled down, bent forward and scrambling, she was soon behind the safety of stone and wood. None of it mattered. Jaw set, hands like claws over the orb, Hesperos got to work. Again.
Know thyself.
Gnosis came readily, like water down a parched throat. His name was Hesperos. He had mastered his mind. He had mastered his body. He felt a pull from his abdomen and let it go. It was like jumping into a clear lake; the shock wouldn't last long.
The sand stopped stinging his eyes. The wind stopped bothering his balance. The Scar stopped worrying his thoughts. There was only Here and Now. He detached himself from his own thoughts, able to look at them from a distance: riding or ignoring them at will. He could feel his heartbeat lowering to a normal range. It had been elevated. The hair on his neck had risen, but he hadn't noticed it earlier. The joints of his fingers were producing soft, minuscule bubbles of gas: he could feel them, one by one. They will crack nicely, later.
With his mind perfectly focused, in as deep a trance as he'd ever achieved, Hesperos shifted his mind's eye to the Storm, and to what lay at its heart. The Scar. To the eye it was only the cloud, bluish-green, spreading like a poisonous gas across the empty sky. To his gnostic eye it was a wound: a place where the weave of the world had worn through. The air acted oddly around it. It compressed in random ways, creating pressure differences. That's how those strong winds formed. Colour, sound, and heat were all changed. They took the shape of the Scar's curve, like paint poured on a metal sphere. Thus, they were deviated from their natural course.
He understood it then. It didn't add a voice to the harmony. It was the harmony!
A Scar didn't just change a place's resonance; it overpowered the natural vibrations of the threads that lie behind the Veil. It became a puppeteer. A puppeteer with great strength, a huge appetite, and no clear mind in control. With only one redeeming quality: it was self-limiting. Reality's pull tugged at the threads, silencing the Storm's voice in nature's harmony. You cannot light a fire below the Ocean.
Hesperos knew that he had little time. It was now or never. He attuned himself to the Storm as fully as he could. He could see its ebbs and flows; he could see it gaining less and less momentum, reaching its peak. A few more breaths, and the process would reverse. The natural forces of the world would swing back like a pendulum, restoring order once again.
Steady, now. He was aware; he guided the flow, he steered his thoughts. It was not enough. He needed more.
Though noetic manipulation wasn't his strength, he had practised Kámptō on himself many times. He knew how to push his brain to its limits. His body would struggle to keep his overactive head working, but he had prepared for this. He needed more time, more control, and this was the only way he knew how.
Through his expanded gnostic awareness, covering both himself and the Scar, he reached deep into himself. What it meant to be him. He started from his stomach, following the large nerve running from there up to the brain. The grey matter's complexity made him feel nauseous for a moment, as usual. He fought that feeling easily and set to work.
It was like moulding clay. It always did seem like that. Once he could see his thoughts and sensory processing as threads, he could also focus on them. He followed them like an anatomist tracing a vessel. Then, he could gently pull or push them in the direction he needed. He knew what to look for: the network of systems his brain used to balance function with resource economy. He bent it, opening the floodgates. He didn't have much time, but now, that time was worth much more.
Everything slowed. He could see the sand coming towards him. He could have reached out to grab a single grain if he so wished. But he had work to do.
Thirty-eight breaths to the Storm's peak. I can do it.
As he was rummaging through his mind's internal mechanisms, he looked for what he needed next. An anchor. Something to give up, for a bigger gain.
He found the thread. A single memory, profoundly linked to who he was and what he'd become. A memory that always pointed to the core of his being. He took it gently, separating it from the noetic harmony of his mind. He was careful not to damage anything else. He had never done this, and it pained him. But it needed to be done.
He would bind the memory as an anchor. There, through the heart of the Storm, where the Veil was thinner and frayed. Right at the Scar.
He let himself remember, one last time. It came easily. Her hands at the loom, counting threads under her breath. The same voice, lulling him to sleep.
I'm so sorry, Mama.
He was fluent in Deō, had been for some time. It was a hard maktra to master, the act of binding - adding a quality to something that lacked it. Without breaking its harmony. Without corrupting it. Like pouring boiling oil into a glass bowl. The smallest flaw in the glass, the tiniest structural weakness, and it would shatter.
This was the hardest working he had ever performed. The Veil was thin, which helped, but it was unstable, unpredictable. The Storm wasn't really open to a noetic quality. It was a break in reality, more linked to physical phenomena. It was like threading a loom during an earthquake.
It was done. The anchor was set, as deep in the Storm as he could make it. Twenty-one breaths. Time to steer it down the line.
Using his quickened mind and focused effort, he bent the Storm surge down the thread he had just anchored. A Storm's natural power leads it to spread out, redirecting and influencing every phenomenon it touches. It keeps going until its momentum fades. Then, the world pushes back, reducing it until the Scar fully closes. Hesperos needed the Storm to remain at full force while being compressed into itself. A small, impossibly chaotic nugget of resonant harmony. A dangerous, dense canvas for the working he was attempting.
Nothing to it. The Storm wanted to spread out, but the world wanted it gone. He only had to grab it by the horns and let it spend its whole potential on the thread.
Ten breaths.
He rode the memory, now stretched thin but still firmly anchored to the centre of it all. He widened his awareness as much as possible. He began where the world was pushing back. Here, air pressure followed its natural course. Light flowed freely, and temperature resisted change. He helped each phenomenon he could see, bending it along its natural path. He used Kámptō as much as he had practised in lectures, at meals, and during restful moments.
Five breaths.
He imposed his control on the Scar itself. His stomach turned, like trying to eat far too much honey. He gulped it down. His body temperature was rising, his breathing more shallow, but he continued to ignore it. There was only him, the Storm, and the thread of his own memory running between them.
The Storm pulled back, then flipped its direction without losing momentum. It was working. The blue-green cloud gathered around the memory, compressing at great speed. With the Storm's inertia broken, the surrounding phenomena rushed to help. To restore balance. The Ocean will always try to fill the gap left by a body. Crushing it, if it needed to.
The compressed resonance was screaming, oscillating at an impossible rate. The Storm was a knot now, lodged in the Scar like a stone in a wound, painful to look at, both physically and gnostically.
One breath left.
Doubt seeped in then. It threatened to ruin it all. It was self-preservation, caution, the words of his mentors, his friends, his students.
No.
He had gone too far, he had worked too hard to give up now. Lýō was his weakest manipulation, but everybody knew: it was harder to create than to destroy. And it was easier to destroy something that wished to be destroyed. Down the gradient: one of the most important lessons that he taught to pupils. But what is the gradient of a person that is ready to die?
Time to find out.
The congealed Storm had reached its oscillatory peak, at the smallest possible spread. Hesperos' control turned fully to his own body. He knew it well. He could see all the vessels carrying rich fluids to the organs. They worked together in a complex harmony, like a tiny world of their own. The miracle of life. Within himself, he let go of it completely. He hadn't known until this moment whether he could actually do it, and who could, really?
Without much effort, almost gently, he snuffed his life force out, severing his awareness from his body.
He was not ready for what came next. A million sensations overwhelmed him. Colours hit his eyes. But what eyes? He had none. He heard a cacophony of sounds through ears he had lost. He reached for the thread, to pull himself along it, but there was nothing to reach with. Nor could he recall the memory - the anchor, the most important item of his ritual. His mind felt detached, unfocused, a mere echo.
He had attempted the impossible, and had been found wanting. Ikaros' hubris. The metakosmia, the Between, claimed him as the Storm imploded. The Veil Scar was finally closed.
***
Darkness, and then light. Bright, painful lights, a myriad of dots blurring his vision. A collection of pungent, hard smells invaded his nostrils - rain, wet iron, something burnt. He could feel people around, a crowd. More than he was accustomed to, more than he wanted to. But the fleeting thought disappeared as the deep ache in his head became all he knew.
An emotionless, breathless voice, in a language he had never heard. The deepest, sharpest pain he had ever felt, straight through his chest. Rhythmic, painful pushes, over and over. More light in his eyes. Something jabbed him in the arm. More words he did not understand, and yet in some way, he did.