A Trigger

As Eli waits for his instructor to appear, he paces back and forth, and occasionally glances back at his notebook. His flat is in complete upheaval. His collection of notebooks, usually in perfect chronological order, has been unshelved and each book lays open on some surface or the floor, empty pages open to the ceiling.

He looks at the clock again, waiting for a knock on the door.

It does not arrive for several minutes, and when it resounds in the messy flat, Eli opens the door with such forces that the hinges rattle. His former instructor faces him silently, waiting in the threshold for his former student to speak.

“What is this?” Eli says, holding up his notebook, blank but for his signature on the inside of the front cover. Each note, every symbol, has been erased.

“It is your punishment. A temporary handicap,” his instructor says.

“I need this. I cannot do anything without a safeguard. Why would you take it from me?” Eli asks, through gritted teeth.

“I did not determine your punishment.”

Eli lowers the notebook, scowling as he drops it beside the door. “Then who did? Your opponent? What can he punish me for? Is this not against the rules?”

“You interfered with your opponent’s work. You broke the rules. It is within his right to punish you.”

“She gave me permission to do it!” Eli says.

“Nevertheless,” his instructor says, calmly. “It was against the rules.”

“Then why did you not tell me? Why didn’t you give me a concrete outline of what the rules are? You are making this game more impossible for me than it already is,” Eli says.

His instructor does not move from his position, though his hands clench by his sides. “You are being incredibly dramatic about this,” he says.

“You have no idea what it is like, to watch every move I make, to calculate all the consequences at every turn I take. It is exhausting, but still it is not enough.”

Eli’s instructor replies calmly, but his eyes are narrowed. “It would not be nearly so exhausting if you did not divide your attention. Your focus is on the game.”

“A game, which you have designed specifically so I could not excel?”

“It has been designed for no such thing.”

“She continues to push boundaries, using different magics-,” he says the word to get a reaction from his instructor, but receives none. “- to test her limits and push them. How am I supposed to compete with that?”

“You are not exactly competing with her; you are proving a point,” his instructor says.

“What point?”

“You resurrects right before their eyes, which you can only do because none of them believe it is real. If they could comprehend it, it would keep them up at night. They would never allow it. She conceals her skills, which only further proves that not everything is possible and that impossible things are best hidden or left alone. She is there to push boundaries, you are here to prove that there are boundaries.”

As Eli glares at his former instructor, several birdcages suspended from the ceiling sway, drawings coos from their distressed inhabitants. The blank pages of the notebooks around them flutter.

“You are letting your emotion trump your vision,” his instructor says, over the flutter of bird wings and the rustle of paper. “You are here to prove a point, and the game is the way in which you will do so. That is all.”

“Nothing I have done since I met her has been to prove your point. I have been pushing myself to impress her. To challenge her. Everything I am doing is, in part, for her,” Eli says, his voice rising. “She tells me I can do anything, and watching her, I believe it. You have always told me the exact opposite. How am I to trust you at all?”

“Do you believe you love her?” His instructor says, and his expression is, for the first time Eli has ever seen, clearly angry. “You are setting yourself up to lose. To fail. To get hurt.”

“Because you have always been so concerned for my welfare,” Eli says. “Your first priority is winning this game to prove your point.”

“I have not cosseted you, it is true,” Eli’s instructor admits, “but you’ve received an education that betters most in the world and will enable you to do or learn almost anything else.”

“It can give me nothing that I want,” Eli says. “It is a way for you two to claim reward without suffering the consequences. You fight by proxy because neither of you can stand to be wrong.”

His instructor puts his hands behind his back and regards his former student silently for some time. “That is not true,” he says quietly.

“It is. There is nothing beneficial to anyone but yourself, in this game.”

“You are benefitting. You are learning that resurrection is not the answer to everything.”

“It is the answer to some things,” Eli says.

“Not your mother.”

“But it would work, wouldn’t it?” Eli presses. “My blood for her blood. I would only need a body to bring her back to.”

“Sympathetic magic is not sufficient for that scale of resurrection.”

“According to you, nothing is,” Eli counters.

“Resurrection does not work when the subject has been dead that long. That was one of you first lessons.”

The small glimmer of hope Eli has been harbouring is almost crushed by his former instructor’s words, but when his eyes fall to the empty notebook beside the door, his conviction is reaffirmed.

He barely glances at his instructor’s face before he slams the door in it.

His instructor lifts his hand to knock, then hesitates. When he hears nothing but silence beyond the door, he turns and departs.

Text by Lucie MacAulay