Great and Powerful

“My worst is going to have to wait for tonight,” Alice replied, carefully closing him back again. Based on what he’d told her, staying open like that was uncomfortable at best. “It needs to be done at midnight, during a full moon. I’m going to need to find more candles. It requires quite a few of them.”

Candles lining the edge of a circle, which she was going to have to prepare, too. But it was hardly safe to leave a spell sigil just sitting around in her study for anyone to walk in on. She’d draw it tonight.

“I think we should both try to get a bit of rest in. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. From what I can tell, you just keep repeating the spell until it begins to work. But in your case, I feel like we should be able to see some sort of change rather quickly.”

If Weiss could pull a grimace he probably would have.  But what passed as his face was immobile.  Only his voice and the few movements allowed to him could convey his mood.  It was something both advantageous and as well as terrible.  There was always two sides of any situation. 

“You should rest.  You’re the one putting in the effort.” Sure he did rest to a certain degree but not to the extent that a human needed to.  He didn’t really have the functions that a living person needed to recover.  His was magic, pure and simple. 

“That’s only because I’m not cursed like you are,” Alice murmured, her expression falling. “You…you lost everything, and it’s probably all due to my family. I want to help you, but nothing is working. You don’t know who cast the spell, even, or if you do, it won’t let you say.”

Alice gathered him into her arms, resting him half on her lap and half in her hands.

“There’s one more I want to try. It seems like it’s one of the most powerful. If it doesn’t work, then…”

Her voice faded out. What, then? Did they even know?

“…then we can…try something else. I don’t know what, exactly, but…we’ll think of something.”

Weiss knew who had cast the spell.  He could see Nightshade’s face, hear his voice.  For a moment he was back in that terrible moment when he had lost the last vestiges of what he had been.  His people were gone, his kingdom wrecked.  All he had left was knowledge that Alice had been promised to him. 

But he could say nothing of that.  The curse that bound him into this shape kept him from uttering a word of the one that had punished him. 

“Do your worst then, Alice.” His cover opened again, the pages falling to either side and revealing the arcane knowledge written on their surface.  “Unless you’re too weary then we can wait.  I guess.” 

Alice’s gut twisted, but the question also made her curl her hands into fists. “You know I’m trying to help you, surely, yet it seems that you still find it amusing to throw it back in my face. Fine then. I’m just a cackling villain waiting for you to lose yourself, so I can slide you into a bookshelf. Would that make you happy, Caerwyn?”

She gave him a glare, one that slowly and steadily drained from her face. She exhaled, raising a hand to the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes.

“…I’m sorry. I know…I know that isn’t what you meant, I’m just overly sensitive. I’m just…I’m angry this isn’t working, and I don’t know what else to do to help.”

“Admit it you were always more fond of books than people.” He shot back. 

They were both at the end of their tempers.  Weiss hadn’t meant to throw her aid back in her face.  It wasn’t an intentional slight on his part, but as usual he had spoken before he considered every consequence. 

Perhaps that was an indication of how comfortable he was with Alice.  Or maybe what little tact he had learned was slipping as surely as his memories of being human.   He couldn’t even remember what it was like to enjoy the simpler pleasures in life.

He finally sighed, seeming to relax although it was impossible to see how he managed it.  He didn’t have muscles to pull it off the same way a human might.  “I’m sorry.  You’re doing what you can.”  He grudgingly admitted, not out of a derision of Alice’s skill but more out of the hopelessness of the situation. 

Alice sucked in a breath, exhaling. “We haven’t gotten through all of them yet. You can’t say for sure. Magic is unpredictable.”

Though she had to privately admit she couldn’t guarantee they’d work, either. Obviously.

“You came all the way here, and now you want to leave? Where do you expect to find answers?” Alice asked tiredly. “If you leave now, the king will declare you a phony for sure, and you’ll go right on forgetting.”

“He’s going to declare me a fake regardless.” Weiss’s pages fluttered in anger.  He was losing more and more of himself each day and staying here was doing nothing.  Alice was trying to help him, he recognized that but there wasn’t any progress. 

“All he cares about is taking what is mine and he doesn’t have to do a thing except wait until I lose all sense of who I was...am...something.”  He turned to look up at the young woman. 

They’d spent a week just going through the curse-breaking techniques listed in his pages, or, rather, three of them. They were tedious at best, and frustratingly complex at worst. So far, there hadn’t been a wink of improvement.

“I don’t know what else to do,” Alice said, cleaning up the chalk from the latest sigil. “We don’t know what spell was used on you, and not even I can get an audience with my father. What more is there?”

Meeting her father was useless.  He would just put more stumbling blocks in front of him, eager to absorb the Expanse into his own kingdom.  Weiss couldn’t help but feel a towering resentment towards the man. 

“The answers aren’t here.” He growled.  “We’ve already determined that and your father is useless.”  Perhaps he might have been more diplomatic if he wasn’t so irritated but the time for politeness was long past for him. 

“It’s idiotic to keep going this way.”  Yes, he was grumbling but it was rather frustrating.  He was still a book and he was losing his memories faster than ever.