Biographical Record of Catherine Chaton,

as Prepared by Samantha Wright.

Catherine was born with an innate love of the written word. plenty of people attest to having this trait, so allow me to explain what makes her case so particularly interesting that I should want to devote thousands of words to it. Her first memories were of reading a book. Somewhere, she had gotten the notion into her head that the real, important stuff that people did in life involved a great deal of reading, so she wanted to be part of that—or, failing that, prepared for when she found out exactly what it was that she was supposed to read.

Perhaps it would be best to say that a very curious mind rested behind the calm greyish-blue eyes and their thick round glasses from day one, but despite Miss Chaton’s lucid quietness, it was also a very driven mind. It was one determined to fulfil her perceived purpose in life through the best means possible: to read, however that worked. She wasn’t entirely certain on how or why it was the key to success until she began to read non-fiction: then it was clear that the purpose was the amassment of knowledge.

Of course, all of this meant that she had positively no interest in the outside world, unless that interest was expressed through the written page, and so her parents found cause to be concerned. One night, young Catherine overheard them speaking of their worries about her; speaking of how annoyed they were that her friends were to be found on bookshelves rather in the playground, and how it was inappropriate for a girl of her age to pursue such a stuffy past-time. It horrified her that they wanted to take away her closest companions, and that they saw no purpose in the furthering of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

In a sort of protest of this, she postured her reading against the world around her, and stuck her nose deeper into books. She got her first pair of spectacles at age eight, by which point her reading level was significantly higher than it would have been if she had been enrolled in a school—her parents quickly discovered that attempting to teach her anything after she became fully literate would inspire her to go off and learn it herself, then return, only to poke holes in their simplifications. She was thus largely written off as a self-directed home-schooling student, and rather than force Catherine out of her reading, her parents let her proceed to follow her desires essentially uncontrolled—though they remained, subtly, worried, and she remained, subtly, nervous.

Catherine rarely spoke to anyone—when circumstance required that she did, she would do her best to be polite and prefix her requests with explanations of why she was making them, a habit that her parents tolerated and that most others found too confusing to follow. She blamed the resultant feelings of alienation and barrier in communication on the presumption that mainstream society was oriented primarily around rejecting constructive clear-headedness, and began to suspect at that point that the only thing everyone around her seemed to be able to agree on was that they would rather take a perpetual vacation than have purpose to their lives.

The one exception to this rule seemed to be her grandmother. Well—the woman wasn’t really Catherine’s grandmother; she was an elderly baby-sitter whom Catherine’s parents had hired to look after her during the long summers when she wasn’t officially in ‘school,’ but she got thought of in that way. Minerva Templeton lived in a large, old country-house in the middle of the woods only a few minutes from town, and had been quick to come to the declaration that she could be exactly what Catherine needed to get set on the right course in life. Eagerly, Catherine’s parents agreed.

Minerva’s effect on the child was not as her parents had anticipated, however, for the old woman was something of a hermit and a bibliomane, who kept her house stocked thoroughly with books of ancient history and literature, scarcely went outside, and lived in a surprisingly mouldy atmosphere with relative ease. It was not that the books themselves were mouldy—rather, the building was; the books were simply dusty. In Catherine, Minerva had seen the potential for a scholar of importance, a subject about which she knew a great deal, being the sole surviving daughter of a small dynasty of philologists herself.

And so, Minerva told Catherine, it would be perfectly acceptable if the girl wished to have nothing to do with activities she thought of as stupid—it was quite alright to be smart; one could certainly still get by. Of course, Minerva being the only role-model around, Catherine took this to mean that one should become a hermit—and so she, essentially, did, adopting a number of the peculiar mannerisms which Minerva’s age had preserved from times when Greece and Rome still ruled the academy, as well as her gentle touch, honed from many years of handling old and delicate volumes. Minerva’s love of those ancient societies was pervasive, and Catherine became soon addicted to them, a passion that would remain with her forever.

Minerva’s library was extensive, but it was best in the basement, where all of the most interesting books were kept; including some remarkable fantasy literature, quite unlike any Catherine had ever read anywhere else, and the very best bits of her ancient collection. This area was also the mouldiest, and long days spent there for Catherine eventually began to mean that she would develop asthma from prolonged exposure to the various spores that passed through the air. The books themselves were kept in special cases that protected them from the air in the house, though their pages were heavily foxed, as if to suggest this were not always the case, but the same could not be said for Catherine’s lungs.

By this point, however, long days of nothing but unbroken reading had distorted Catherine’s perception of reality severely. She had read through Plato’s idealism—all of it—somewhere amongst her earliest of ventures into this literary under-dark, and found in it a most fruitful tool for looking at how the world worked: the notion that ideas and information could be more fundamental to the universe than everyday material things. Obviously, there were a great deal of subjects that were not conformant to this property, and she understood the precepts of science well, but there was nothing to suggest that the inner world of ideas, mathematical principles, and thoughts could not have its own groundings elsewhere—somewhere timeless; somewhere universal...

As such, her passion for the written word eventually grew until by the time she noticed that she had difficulty breathing, she believed that her body was trying to transgress the real world and enter into an existence solely written in nature, and that breathing would soon be vestigial.

The fact that her asthma went away when she was removed from Minerva’s library at the end of the summer made her only maintain this theory more firmly, since the books at home were rather feeble in selection compared to those of her adopted grandmother. The absence of this effect only made her more determined to read and thereby regain it—something that, with the disappearance (presumed death) of Minerva and subsequent bequeathing of much of her library to Catherine (by the automatic parsing of her will), the girl hoped she would finally be able to answer the call of the written word—but, of course, the books did not carry the mould responsible for her asthma, and Catherine found herself feeling as though she had been locked out of paradise.

Strange things can happen when a mind is allowed to wander freely without the world to give it a point of reference. By the time she had come back to Philosophy and read her way through Aristotle, and had given up on the idea of her asthma being intrinsically related to the depth of her study, the entirety of her youth had elapsed and the notion of going to university was now squarely on the horizon. (She was still a frail thing, however; with or without the asthma.)

This was not to say that Catherine had shed her notions about reading being the key to everything in the universe—to her, it still very much was; she still lived in books, still dreamt of transcending into the world of words and thoughts when she went to bed each night, and still avoided social interactions like the plague. A string of poor encounters with store clerks—mostly people who didn’t have the time to listen to her mumbled explanations as to why she needed something—left her even more with the notion that whatever the function and underlying nature of the social world was, she simply wouldn’t be any good at it no matter how hard she tried. Main-stream humanity simply wasn’t for her.

Being a walking encyclopædia prevented her from getting any friends after about age thirteen, when her parents first started trying to get her to reach out to other people. She simply never saw any point in any of them; and when she tried being herself, they would feel either deeply insecure or utterly bored, and would, ultimately, end up saying something rather tactless towards her. She acquired the neighbourhood moniker of “Catherine the Book-Slut” and gained the reputation of being physically attracted to anything the children of her age thought of as boring—which was not entirely true, as she detested and still very much does detest statistics, sociology, and economics, and it was dubious to suggest that she had anything of a drive for physical intimacy at that point whatsoever.

In any case, she continued to go about her daily routine consistently enough: wake up, read, sleep. She would set up goals for herself by subdividing the books which she wished to study into days’ worth of work, and then march through them until the book was no more and it was time to pick up another. Perhaps “march” is not quite the verb for how her reading progressed—for it was not brutal, nor was it plodding. It was more like she glided through the books, her eyes slipping over the words like a fountain pen slips over paper, both lubricated by the smoothness of ink. She moved quickly, but also gracefully across the page, her mind forming and recognising ideas just slightly more quickly than the author himself, creating in her a very peculiar and very specific intelligence that could, by her enormous experience, almost predict where a train of thought would lead.

It was natural, then, that university lecturers should bring her to her knees over how plodding they were. It was not that the information they were providing her with was bad, per se; merely much too slow for her tastes most of the time. She found that the textbooks themselves were detailed and thick enough to keep her going all the while, however, and so was quite pleased to simply sit herself down and work through them at her own pace, which, with her own reading and a certain other discovery that she had made at university, took just the right amount of time to fill up the entire semester.

That “other discovery” that she had made was, perhaps, a rather obvious one: Catherine discovered rather quickly during her first semester that she was actually quite skilled at (and quite fond of) writing essays, something which she had never before needed to do, although during her childhood, relatively indiscriminate reading habits had brought her to examine at least one manual for writing books and papers, out of curiosity for what it contained. She had thought that the process of writing something would be very difficult and intricate, something that only masters ever attempted, but rather pleasantly was surprised to learn that this was not particularly the case whatsoever: she had read and amassed so good an understanding of the written word herself that generating more of it came rather naturally.

And so slowly, she began to write papers and essays on her own time; at first in imitation of what she had seen in school, by adding commentary and thought on things which she had seen in the books they were reading that she thought went unaddressed, simply as an exercise, but later this evolved into writing responses to other books she was reading or had read, and, eventually, when she began to take courses in linguistics, something else entirely.

Somewhere amongst the literature, during that crucial formative stage of her course in life, Catherine had found herself not contented with simply exploring the larger ideas of the texts themselves—though she was very good at it—but also with their mechanics: footnotes of reference to translational oddities and linguistic archaisms took up a very special place in her imagination.

This came back full force when she got to linguistics and discovered that she did not simply wish to respond to what had been said about the material, but also that she was interested in the nature of the material itself. The thought of creating her own language struck her somewhere in the third year of a degree in literature, and with reluctant permission from her parents, she shifted rather drastically towards a major that would be more conducive to creativity in combination with analysis.

Of course, here we are simplifying things for the sake of discussing them. Catherine did not simply sit at her desk day in and day out pontificating what she wished, stumbling through knowledge like a dumb vagrant and only coming upon the idea of actually generating material when she was in her early twenties. She had played with the ideas of creating even a whole culture since her childhood, when she read about the ancient world and longed to respond to it, but it wasn’t until this point that she had a deep enough picture of the things in question that she could satisfy herself in creating something that felt authentically unique.

On top of that, her days had become much more hectic and involved: almost a quarter of it was taken up by the mundane chore of moving herself from home to campus and back again, an act which often required far too much awareness of her environment for her comfort. This was not to say that she was by nature extremely absent-minded—indeed, people were quick to recognise her intelligence at university, and she was rather pleased by this; to them she seemed positively graceful in how she derived new ideas from old ones in class and in her papers—but she did not much appreciate how pervasively she was interrupted by the world, and would have been much happier if she could just sit down with her breakfast—generally consisting of coffee and some baked good or another—and get lost in thought for the course of a morning, rather than having to wait for her train stop, or dodge on-coming pedestrians, or figure out where her class had moved this week (which it often did with no decency.) Suffice to say that her undergraduate career was not easy. She was, by all measures, heralded as a genius, but circumstance and pressure always made her think that she could do more if things had been a little less hectic. At least, she sometimes said to herself whilst watching other students succumb to the desires of their friends, she didn’t have to worry about social distractions.

And indeed she didn’t. The less-than-favourable experiences that she had during her teenage years were only furthered by similar small incidents at university: mostly in the format of classes erupting into laughter after a professor was interrupted by a student belching rather loudly, but the occasional cold shoulder from bureaucrats and teaching assistants and at least two cases of students’ grades being utterly ruined by a partying lifestyle went great distances to cement her disdain for the ways in which everyone around her conducted themselves. She comforted herself knowing that, at any rate, she wasn’t a part of that. There would never be anyone around to distract her or to disappoint her; there was no need. She knew what the true purpose of life was every time she ran her fingers over the supple leather cover of an old book: the art of knowledge.

Though there was something gnawing at her—like a line of text she had skipped when reading that contained the geist of a text, or perhaps that a term in a mathematical equation had been omitted, and the numbers with which she was working were no longer quite right: it kept tugging at her and drawing on her, breaking her concentration at the most inopportune moments and reminding her of some forgotten obligation unfulfilled. The trouble was, she had no idea what it was or from where it had come: it hadn’t pestered her before. But the closer she got to her objectives... the harder it stung.

Eventually, the irritation it posed grew so great that the idea of going to school started to seem daunting, and for a short span of time she receded into staying home and reading, as she had done when younger. It blocked out her confused feelings—which were not depressive in nature, though the sense of lacking was at times overwhelming and made her prone to sensations of vertigo in open spaces.

This sensation came and went over time. Through perhaps a miraculous combination of chances, it was her academic life that managed to pull her out of this stupor; a mediævalist named Agnes Fey stumbled upon Catherine as the girl was reciting a Latin assignment in class. As it so happened, Professor Fey was looking for someone to read a particularly peculiar and archaic Latin book for one of her research projects—and Catherine was the most fluent student on the campus, well beyond the handful of graduate students who had been put through their paces as Latin majors.

From this developed a sort of relationship (it might not be quite right to call it a friendship, exactly) similar to one that might be expected of a professor and her favourite doctoral candidate. Agnes proved to be an unusual woman—distinct black hair, almost white-pale skin, and a continually dark, almost scheming temperament. Her lack of interest in the goings-on of the average person made a strong impression with Catherine, who found this trait to be much to her compatibility—as did she find Agnes’s odd fondness of archaisms and mannerisms of an earlier age, which occasionally harkened back to her memories of Minerva; ones which were very fond.

But it was at the point of those archaisms and manners that the similarity stopped: Minerva had been something of a gentle, curious woman; Agnes was, at the very least, a careerist, and at times could be downright choleric, as if she had been born with an excess of black bile. Secretive, gloating, and possibly a little megalomaniacal—but she was interested in Catherine, valued her abilities and her intelligence, and that was enough to offset Catherine’s immediate reaction to any contact with others.

The work that Agnes had Catherine do was bizarre, to say the least. Agnes presented Catherine with a very old book and, simply, told her to translate it, without much thought towards the procedure for doing so or exactly to what it was that the book pertained. Catherine quickly found out, and came to realise simultaneously that it was the most interesting and preposterous thing she had ever seen: the text purported to be a grimoire—a spell-book—of rather grand proportions; one that unveiled a number of secrets of the universe and could reward its wielder with great power and privileged access.

It was an interesting notion, but one obviously not overly realistic. The book spent more time having problems with Christianity and fantasizing about realms beyond the imagination than it did actually concerned with the nature of magic, much less the spells themselves—which ended up being little more than mutations of prayers to the Greek pantheon. Not that there was anything particularly wrong about any of this—Catherine thought she saw a few prayers that she had never seen before—but the contents were far from the universe-shattering secrets that the book’s introduction suggested.

When she told this to Professor Fey, the woman was furious; Catherine couldn’t quite realise why at first, as she had hoped that this was a research project of pure and genuine academic interest—but when another book was placed before her, with similar ambitions yet different provenance, she began to grow a little suspicious.

This book proved to be ‘garbage,’ in Fey’s words, as well—it offered a mutant form of Latin from which it claimed one could cast spells, and then utterly failed to deliver upon a functional system of thaumaturgy.

As the days went on, and Catherine spent more and more time ensconced in the seven-hundred-year-old collection which Agnes insisted she slave over, the texts—which continued to be let-downs—steadily advanced in strangeness. More and more, Catherine was finding that the books were tending towards certain subjects; blood-drinking monsters and night-dwellers abounded. She kept studying them, as if it were merely a natural extension of her past explorations, breathing a sigh of fond familiarity each time she stumbled upon a thinly-veiled reference to classical myth, and wincing whenever a scribe misspelled a name from Antiquity. She felt like she was descending into darkness; perhaps as if down a long stone stair into some ancient and forgotten catacomb which had gone too long without competent eyes laid upon it, and hungered for her audience.

But the depth of this terrible mind-space of literature was vast, and Catherine could only carry herself down its stair for so long. She had been reading cramped manuscripts in proto-chancery handwriting for months now, and the peculiarly violent shapes of the letters were by now impacting on her mind with no shortage of sympathetic emotion; she began to feel weak, propelled on by Agnes’s thirst for truthful information, and rather as if the letters themselves were pricking and jabbing at her; trying to submerge her mind fully within the text they conveyed.

Eventually, on a day bleakly within the confines of February, Catherine collapsed from exhaustion, suffering from a terrible migraine brought on by thousands of hours of squinting at tiny and frequently inconsistent Latin. While she slept, a vision of her professor coming towards her gripped the young scholar, and she dreamt that Fey had crouched over her, and like so many of the mythical creatures in the terrible texts, bit her on the neck and began to drink of her blood—surely, an apt metaphor, though one much harsher than Catherine would have ever allowed herself to entertain. When Catherine awoke from this exhaustion, it was late, her neck hurt as though it had been crushed in a door, and the world seemed distant and blurry. She assumed that Professor Fey had just already left—until she discovered that said professor was standing behind her.

Agnes informed Catherine that she had been a very useful student, but that she was too weak to finish her studies in her current state—and that, thus, something had been done about it. The professor placed her hand on her own neck, and Catherine mirrored the action, only to discover that there was some kind of wound there. Then the woman smiled—and revealed a rather prominent pair of fangs.

With little further provocation, Catherine lost consciousness.

When she awoke again, Catherine was in an unfamiliar bed—ambitious in design, but very dusty—in a clammy stone room, its walls lined with weathered-looking bookshelves, stacked high with all sorts of curious bindings. It was early in the morning; weak grey light streamed in from under the curtains, and so Catherine could not make out much else. She remembered vaguely the events of the night before, which were hardly dependable memories, but she saw now that they were quite real. Before long, Professor Fey came into her room, dressed in a rather elegant—albeit also dusty—black dress, and told Catherine that she would be working in her estate’s library from now on, as it would be much more efficient if she could weed out the bad volumes directly.

Catherine said she felt weak and wearisome, and Agnes simply gave her a flask filled with a rich-coloured red liquid, and then left. This recalled to Catherine’s mind certain other things—and with some horror she discovered that her canine teeth had been elongated by nearly a centimetre. The blood smelled foul, but strangely compelling; it tasted as if it was the first food she had ever eaten. Miserable, she drank it; and when she was done, she knew what came next: the reading of the ancient, moulting collection that stood before her. No doubt Professor Fey would want her to read the entirety of these books as well, searching for any hint of magical value they might contain.

Time passed for Catherine in ways she might otherwise think to be impossible; she read more than she ever had on any day prior, and yet the faint sunlight from outside never seemed to change; always lingering on a faint greyness. She pushed through her books with careful diligence, trying not to think about her predicament, but truthfully knowing that there was nothing she could possibly do about it. Her emotions were made sluggish by her devotion to the material before her, but still there was a sense of unnervèdness beneath everything, coyly reminding her of that terrible longing that had occupied her in the days before Professor Fey’s work had arrested her attention.

But with time—and continued disappointment on the part of Professor Fey, who was no longer hiding her true intentions—Catherine found that the collection of manuscripts that the Fey estate had collected was uniformly bogus. The number of texts which she had not inspected was steadily declining, though Catherine was never certain whether to feel joy or uneasiness as that terminus approached; Agnes had grown increasingly terse, and at times the young scholar worried that she might not be kept alive (if she were even alive now!) if the collection were found to be wholly worthless.

With this, and mounting recollection of the strange empty sensation that had once gnawed at her, Catherine’s work began to slow, as she was, perhaps in little rush to feel Agnes’s disappointment with her effectively empty library. The tomes had been passed down the Fey family tree for centuries, their supposed secrets lain dormant upon the shelves; it would no doubt be devastating to Agnes to discover that her prized heritage contained nothing but whispers and dust, like the rest of the mansion.

Catherine often heard others speaking from down the corridors; she had identified that there were at least three other members of the Fey family that cohabited within whatever this building was—judging from the loftiness of the scale of architecture, however, Catherine suspected that it was at least the manor of one of the handful of castles that had been built in North America during its (brief) English ownership—though she remained ignorant of further details in both of these areas as her study door remained locked, and only Agnes ever came to visit her.

The slow-down in her work gave her the opportunity to ponder other things, as well, and before long she found herself once more lying on her bed, plucking out her hair, and feeling that there was some underlying sensation within the very depths of her soul that was still not resolved. It was a sensation yet more troublesome than the bizarre predicament which Agnes had placed her under, and which arose to her concern much more quickly now than that into which she had been transformed. Every now and then, violent imagery would penetrate her mind, as, she imagined, it did the minds of Agnes and her ilk, but Catherine always found herself coming back to this one sensation.

She sank so deep into it that her thoughts began to stray in other directions, further still from her proscribed duty. The books, each and every one of them, were utterly silly—she had developed a list of criteria to which they inevitably succumbed, though that list was by no means exhaustive, and on occasion she would stumble across a book that seemed to sneak through all of these criteria, only to slam into some obvious fault, which would then be added to the list. But what would it take to answer this question fully... to say with certainty that a book would not contain something worth studying?

A flower blossomed in her mind.

She leapt to her desk, writing:

“Were magic real and wholly linguistic in nature,” (for that seemed to be the most promising avenue thus far) “what would the minimal amount of grammar necessary to accurately describe it appear to be?”

Soon enough, below the question was the first half of a very unusual basic grammar that resembled nothing she had ever written before; it had nouns and verbs, and adjectives and particles and adverbs, but it also had mathematical operators, provisions for self-generating noun case structures, semantic meanings for different variants of graphemes, and nothing remotely resembling a phonetic system—she had required so many phonemes to squeeze in all of the information she needed that she was using the Greek alphabet interwoven with the Latin alphabet, including every obsolete letter she could find, and not-insignificant parts of the darker international corners of the present Latin alphabet—yogh and wynn were mixed in with digamma inversum and qoppa, and long s sat next to esh as if such were perfectly normal. She had avoided co-opting any vowels for use as consonants or vice-versa, but a number of diacritical marks had been invented. (She promised herself she would fix all of this later, perhaps with a nicer writing system.)

Reading over it in the dim candlelight, Catherine was gripped with the sudden realisation that she had gotten this graphic mess all wrong. Epiphany had struck, as it often did when one least expected it, and she now had an extremely good idea of how the rest of this system—no, it was a project now—this project should look.

So, her troubles now utterly forgotten, she cleaned her thick-lensed spectacles with a cloth, and sat down to manufacture a realistic phonological structure for her grammar, then to complete the grammar itself—symmetry after symmetry unfolded in her mind, until she realised that it could all be generated algorithmically; after that, the expansion of her peculiar grammatical placeholders into syllables and syllable fragments came all too naturally.

For hours and hours she slaved over the details of her wonderful system, working well past exhaustion to perfect and arbitrate and determine in advance each and every minute element of the thing which had taken up residence in her mind and would absolutely not let go. It was in this sensation, new to her, that she found she could live and thrive—and never more than now.

When she was done with her maiden voyage into the sea of imaginings, the sky was black again, and she had created ten pieces of letter-sized paper, each tightly packed on both sides with complete tables of her completely hypothetical system. It was magnificent in its detail and in its complexity, and yet also in its simplicity; the description that accompanied these tables swam and leapt in her head like some sort of sea-serpent playing the tempest to a storm, its structure set, but its nature too vast to set down on the page in full—such a task, she knew, might take weeks.

She sighed, took a sip of the red ichor which Agnes had provided to calm her nerves (she had gotten quite excited), and tried writing a sentence out—actually more of a paragraph, but the sentence corresponded to what was, essentially, the smallest functional piece of magic.

It was a statement—or the nearest analogue thereto—consisting of nothing more than something that might roughly simplify to “I know myself.” Of course, it wasn’t the most complex sort of thing to say that her system was capable of handling, but if a book could not accomplish this tiny fragment within its proposed rule-set, it would obviously false. Her imagination gathered steam quickly, however, and even as she finished writing it, she had embarked on notes for a much more challenging and comprehensive spell, as a sort of test for the completeness of her system.

She mumbled the briefer of the two to herself, letting the awkward syllables slide off her tongue. Compared to the languages which she had studied academically, it was rather like licking sandpaper—but it was rewarding to be able to revel in her own creation as she did.

She had no idea what she would do with it—most likely it was something sufficiently inventive that others might want to read about it someday, but she wasn’t particularly strong when it came to dialogues with other people, and she wasn’t exactly sure how she would get it to anyone’s eyes but those of Professor Fey—and if she did, what then? The thought of having to answer questions about it was more than a little daunting. Perhaps she would simply play with it a little and tuck it away, then come back to it if she survived this library-scouring, and see if she had thought of anything else to add.

However, the universe is not always so consistent, as physicists are constantly frustrated to discover: in Catherine’s case, right in that moment of joy which she had thought left behind in her own study at home, it had the fortune to be quite inconsistent indeed: for although Catherine believed she had simply come up with a rather nifty set of documents describing a coherent system, this system mirrored exactly in structure a very real and very much functional method for the casting of magical spells. It was not so much the shape of the letters and phonemes that decided this, of course, but rather the grammar that held them together, as understood by the author, Catherine herself. The notion of a specific and singular magical language is very inconvenient as not all of the creatures in the universe can be expected to have the same tongue, or the same sensory organs, or even the same number of dimensions in which they exist. As such, it is only the structure which remains truly fixed in nature—and amongst lesser deities and their servants, it is rare to find two wielders that use the same words.

As it turned out, what Catherine rendered was not the simplest way to express what she had meant to express within her system. Nor did it do exactly what she thought it did—for all of the complexity within it, she had a number of variables and components still which, although they were necessary to maintain symmetry, she had not assigned meanings to them.

And herein lay what makes this moment so important in the grand scheme of things: those case endings did have meaning; in the same way a lost sock has a position or an irrational number has an exact value. Catherine had chosen the values for them carelessly, and by happenstance, sent out a rather prominent beacon into the many dimensions of utter void that surrounded her in time and space.

There was a sudden popping noise behind Catherine, followed by a second shortly thereafter. Immediately, the voices of two women began bickering, which so startled Catherine that she hesitated to turn around.

Standing there was an odd sight—a strangely familiar blonde woman dressed in a strikingly elegant, patently alien dress stood opposite a woman who was entirely undressed, but made up for this by the presence of a large pair of black bat’s wings from her back, a distinctive devil tail, and a pair of horns that jutted out of her dark violet hair. It was not really clear what they were arguing about, but it was obviously of great import. The blonde woman spoke in English, but laden so heavily was her speech with strange terminology and bizarre loanwords that Catherine barely recognised it; the demoness seemed to carry on her responses in an entirely different language; perhaps the one that had donated so many of the peculiarities to her opponent’s vocabulary.

Catherine did manage to recognise the language well enough, however, to piece together that the two had decided, somehow, that it was their right to debate about her future.

Allow me to introduce myself and the woman with whom I was indeed arguing this point. Through all of the mutilations the underlying fabric of the universe could enact upon the echo which Catherine’s spell had created, by the time I heard it, it had taken on the form of a very strange sound. Of course, back then, I went by my real name—Rhetorica Rhamnusius, and, I think, like most who would have heard a sound like the one I did had they been around, I was rather concerned. (For the sake of brevity, the designation “demoness” shall suffice for myself, although in actuality I am but a long-lived mortal, and the touch of immortal blood with which I have been blessed is barely sufficient for thaumaturgy.)

The reason I was concerned was that this particular beacon strongly resembled another; one rather familiar to most of the beings that exist outside of the everyday world, the eccentrical heartbeat of a damaged magical apparatus created by the archwizardess Tetragnostica tens of thousands of years ago, in the moment of her death, to save a rather important world from its destruction.

The probability of a given beacon spell having a characteristic waveform of such a specific shape is essentially zero, as it is the result of the phonology of a magical system, rather than the grammar. Unless the caster had been Tetragnostica herself: most accidental or experimental discoveries of magic—which were inevitably by petty lords bent on enslaving their countrymen—had very radical and alien shapes that were indistinguishable from random noise until they were repeated; but Tetragnostica’s charms had a very distinctive and sophisticated shape to them, which every magically-sensitive soul knew from the pulses her great thaumaturgical singularity sent out through the permeable sub-layers of the greater universe, its reliability near that of a compass when in roughly Euclidean space.

As noble as Tetragnostica had been during her life so many millennia ago, and though the shadows of her deeds continued to generate reports that she had escaped death for years afterwards¹ it was not practical to assume that she had suddenly manifested on an otherwise non-magical planet of no particular significance only to shout “Hello... world?”

So after some pontificatory hesitation, I went to see what had happened.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that Tetragnostica herself had, in fact, beaten me to the source of this emission. She had not recorded this excursion in any of the journals she had left behind all those millennia ago, but given the peculiarity of the incident, it was not hard to see why. I recognised her instantly, of course—we had known each other, once, and been at odds, albeit in a friendly manner; I was something of a mastermind in one of the many magical fields she virtually rewrote during her career, and there had been some animosity; particularly because she never quite managed to dismantle fully my theories, meaning that there was always a special case in her new revision that relied on almost the entirety of the work of her predecessors—though the theory was certainly a useful reduction most of the time.

Current theories in the rest of the universe about how souls work suggest that, while the vast majority of minds are nothing more than the result of brains computing electrochemical reaction at their leisure, there is definitely a second class wherein the mind develops outward and beyond this basic paradigm, and becomes anchored in the greater fabric of the universe. As a general trend, this means nothing more than that the consciousness of that individual has exceeded the capacity of its own environment to support it, and rather than tearing itself apart it has gone on to develop the fundaments of a psychic presence proper, reminiscent strongly of those in the possession of deities and other immortals. However, the nature of this psychic space is a fickle one: when each mortal is conceived, it is predetermined whether or not they are to have the capacity necessary to have an opportunity to obtain this great feat of expanding consciousness by the presence or absence of a sort of supernatural brain stem, a hook into this great space, and— To make a long story short: Catherine’s psychic register had grown perilously close to that of Tetragnostica’s—an unprecedented phenomenon. It was so close, in fact, that certain attributes of Tetragnostica’s elegantly-developed mind had influenced Catherine her entire life to date.

This, then, explained the talent for spontaneously developing magic identical to that of Tetragnostica.

However, that model is still entirely theoretical—and it was far from the first to come to mind when this creature’s existence became apparent. As far as Tetragnostica—who had a habit of appearing at historical events sometimes and was not about to receive responsibility for this incident—and I were concerned, this was an utter anomaly.

Her first remark to me was that Catherine should be allowed to pursue her studies unattended, and that I had made a mistake by coming—which I heartily disagreed with: our subject had apparently been manipulated quite harshly given her present situation; a sure sign that she was far from able to look after and protect herself.

To this, Tetragnostica conceded, and for a moment I thought that the debate would not continue, until she decided to cast a small spell on Catherine which copied a mirror of her own personality onto the poor girl. She said that this would fix things; Catherine herself was now staring at us and had suddenly gone very wide-eyed, instantly becoming preoccupied with re-inspecting each minute detail of the room around her.

This was obviously an unethical act; the sort that would get one seriously fined in any regulated place. The solitary sorceress often had reason to travel well beyond those jurisdictions in her adventures, however, and so was no alien to doing things unconventionally. But it was not a point I was about to let her get away with, and so to prove it I muttered a similarly unethical spell.

With a soft popping noise, Catherine was transformed into a very much quadrupedal feline from the other side of the globe, chosen at random—the snow-leopard.

My point was, of course, that even with throwing her intelligence into things, Tetragnostica could not magically improve Catherine’s existence; she would still be at the mercy of the elements around her no matter what the sorceress wished.

While Catherine whimpered and tried to figure out what had happened to her, feeling very much not in control of herself, we continued debating. However, she was a clever girl to start with—now a very clever girl—and she had managed to reconstruct a partial chain of events. She knew she had either constructed a very much working magical spell, or that Agnes had gotten mad and this was a nightmare. With this range of possibilities in mind, she opted to maintain the former, and, getting distracted by it, started thinking about how to solve this dilemma.

All of those years of reading had gifted her with amazing skills in the handling and manipulation of language—she had figured out a tiny bit of my particular magical dialect, specifically the general structure and how negations were formed, and tried repeating the spell that I had muttered with a few carefully-placed negatory clauses.

There was a flash of bright red light, and the snow-leopard was replaced with Catherine’s original body—almost. Her ears had retained their feline shape and position, and her tail was still wholly present. She had collapsed the suspension of her own figure in a hap-hazard way, like pulling out all of the pillars from the ground floor of a building and expecting the second storey to simply come back down unscathed. It worked surprisingly well given that most novices to magic take years of training before they can even try such things.

I was more stunned than Tetragnostica was. No one—not even the gods and goddesses of magic themselves—had ever undergone such an incredible leap in understanding in such a field. My initial suspicions had to be correct—this girl was somehow related to the wizardess.

But how could this be so if the woman had never given any children? As Catherine went about the business of looking in the mirror to inspect her new and rather permanent additions, I realised that the propensity for the craft of magic which she demonstrated could not have been even hereditary. This creature was Tetragnostica, despite being unaware of it—some strange reincarnation of that great wizardess amongst wizards, echoed through the distance of time and space by some process unknowable—though the theory I earlier related to you seems now the most plausible.

Tetragnostica was about to turn to me and declare her victory when Catherine curled up into a ball and began tugging on her ears desperately. I smiled sheepishly, and restated my original position—this creature we had found was much, much too helpless and inept to be just left on her own.

I turned to Catherine then, who hissed at me weakly, and tried to explain in her language what had happened (which was an extraordinary exercise in restraint, given the imprecision of the English language.) She took it rather well, all things considering, but was still terrified enough to try and back away from me, and to edge towards the familiarity of Tetragnostica, who, in turn, smiled softly—this smile made Catherine freeze as she realised what, exactly, was familiar about the wizardess.

Minerva Templeton.

The resemblance was exact, albeit filtered through age.

Evidently, there had been more than one incident of unwritten time-travelling, and it was soon not hard to see the purpose thereof; in the months before her death, Tetragnostica would no doubt have become increasingly concerned about the fate of this successor of hers.

I explained what was to come next to Catherine—that I would stay and nurture her as an apprentice, and that she would no longer have to live in this rotting old room, nor study anything she did not particularly like; she could be free to pursue her interests on her own time, and I would enable her magical development.

The thing which had allowed her to pursue her theoretical interests so aggressively was another of Tetragnostica’s traits inborn—utter solitude. It seems that this had just occurred to her, and that she was no longer interested in maintaining that status quo. Very slowly, she was now starting to look at me as a potential way to rectify this state of affairs.

The reason Tetragnostica and I had such a friendly relationship was, in part, because we thought on similar terms, but mostly because I remained interested in her no matter how many times I found myself at odds with her. There had been something all those millennia ago, rekindled briefly now, about the way she moved and thought that had just seemed so right—and indeed they were so memorable that I saw in Catherine the similarities.

To cut to the chase: Tetragnostica had not returned my affections on the few times I had let them show. But Catherine, slowly coming out of her intellectual freeze, very well might, if I were to play my cards correctly.

This sudden sequence of events had wreaked some havoc on her sense of stability within the universe, but Catherine was slowly coming to adapt to it, even hoping that it would not end. She felt at peace the moment she realised who Tetragnostica was; that wrench on her heart which had plagued her for so many long months evaporated, revealing that it had been loneliness of the deepest order only as it vanished.

I made it as clear as possible that I was not interested in turning Catherine’s world on its head again, and that I was impressed with the depth of ambition that had allowed her to reverse the curse upon her so quickly. She stared at both myself and Tetragnostica with wide-eyed eagerness now, though mostly at Tetragnostica; alas, she was too dumbstruck by the sight of her old babysitter resurrected and rejuvenated to say much of anything.

In that moment, she felt a special sense of completeness, privy only to a babe within the womb; a sense of absolute carefree joy that only the very font of birth could manifest, of being within the grasp of the original agent of creation, whose intents were nothing other than that babe’s creation; of total, genuine care and understanding. Being born out of phase with so many universal factors, Catherine had, suffice to say, never felt this the first time around—but this reunion, sacred to her, brought on that sense of total love.

Tetragnostica smiled to the young scholar again, and bent down to place a kiss on Catherine’s forehead.

She smelled of mould.

And although she had never met Catherine before, and never read about the time she did, she understood implicitly how they had met.

The moment lingered, like the dying embers of a great camp-fire cast late into the night, and came to its conclusion in no hasty manner—as such an event should. Finally, Tetragnostica announced that the time was late, and that it was about time that I took Catherine to somewhere safer.

It was about at this point that Agnes burst into the room, wondering what all the noise was about.

The last memory Catherine had in that place was of Tetragnostica preparing to put an end to this sudden intrusion, and of the wizardess’s instruction to me: that I was to go, to take Catherine with me, and avoid looking back, for I might not approve of quite what she had in mind.

I took to the order readily, and clutching Catherine’s black-robed figure to myself, drew up a wind to smash the window, through which I then took flight and departed, carrying the shocked girl with me. The way on the other side was a courtyard, lit constantly by a number of faint blue lamps, and concealed by parapets tall enough that it remained in perpetual shadow. The sudden shift and movement was perhaps too much for Catherine, and she fainted in my arms; having her life changed so suddenly and so rapidly had taken a great deal of energy out of her.

As I flew, aimless at first, but later then seeking to move towards what a spell determined to be Catherine’s place of former residence, I came to realise the full scope of traits which Catherine had been granted by Tetragnostica, turning over in my mind the intricate latticework of syllables that had been cast upon her. It was more than just her intelligence that was bridged; there was a deeper communication, perhaps a sort of umbilical that passed on things deeper and more intimate than I had formerly realised. That longing I had felt for Tetragnostica myself so many ages ago had always been frustrated by her independence and resilience—but maybe this girl would be more receptive.

I worried briefly that I might be taking advantage of her; after all, by contrast she was only a child, though a highly developed one. But it would hardly be unbalanced if I gave back to her what she herself had sought; if I gave her the motherly warmth that Tetragnostica had radiated towards her in that moment of bonding. We could be together... and we could be happy.

Catherine would be a careful creature now; even moreso than she had been before. She would be soft when spoken towards—always as if there was something more she had to say but that she was not able to say it—and determined to reach her objectives, much like myself, when in private.

The transition to our new model of life was awkward, but eventually she got used to it; we took up residence in her dormitory at the university, confident that Professor Fey would not again become a substantial nuisance. Introducing her to my idea of living together was difficult—at first, she utterly refused to let me near her, a battle which I won by allowing her to drink from my veins, an action that caused little in the way of trouble for me (though it certainly would have were I of normal blood.) This came at a particularly important time, as Catherine had just discovered that animal blood from the local butchery was all but unbearable.

From there, it was not quite so hard to bring gentle affection into our affairs; most essentially as a means to calm her during feeding. She had a great deal of questions to ask, both about magic and about Tetragnostica, and I did my best to inform her in both areas. She was heart-stricken to learn that Tetragnostica was already dead, and seemed as a ghost for some time after hearing the news, but this gradually helped her let go, or so it seemed, and latch on to myself, instead—and, with time, our relationship blossomed strongly enough to eventually eclipse her past affairs.

She was a tiny bit bolder in social interactions now, though not in willingness to be open with others—more in her willingness to avoid others. Her soft-spoken nature had not disappeared, but rather than timidly nod her head and try to shy away from the social world, as she once believed she must do in order to escape the oppressive forces of society, she had learned in that one blessèd moment from Tetragnostica that it really was possible to simply coast through life just on loving books, and still avoid becoming a total hermit. She developed a tendency to drop curt one- or two- word answers to inquiries now instead, her sorrowful emptiness replaced with a peaceful silence; the quietness was now cosy, and not desperate. Now, she would willingly carry on conversations (albeit very tersely) with professors, of whom she had formerly been mortified, though she still utterly detested loud noises, and could be spooked by them in a very familiar way.

She became better at solving practical problems as well now, too; mostly out of an increased sense of capability, no doubt absorbed back from Tetragnostica’s reputation for adventurousness (which, in and of itself, never came back—this was good, as I was perfectly happy with Catherine staying put), but perhaps also from a broader awakening of her mental power. No problem was utterly unsolvable—though she was not always gung-ho; it seemed that a great many solutions consisted primarily of asking “Mistress,” a title which I endearingly met with that of “Pet.”

At times, we clashed, as two lovers who have aspirations inevitably will, but it was—and, really, is—always on friendly terms; no feelings ever got seriously hurt, and nothing ever got broken. Each such interaction has always ended in she lying upon the bed and myself stroking her fangs until she all but passes out from relaxation. Our relationship has been a great source of joy for us both—indeed, rather all-consuming—and I suspect, on second thought, that Tetragnostica might not mind the manner of its present conduct so much. It seems to me that, had she ever enjoyed the opportunity to get into a relationship, it most likely would have been conducted in the way ours inevitably was.

Perhaps that was the plan all along; that Tetra was even now lurking beyond the depths of the sub-spatial manifold, living out a romance she always longed to possess through this mirror of hers, not killed in her great sacrifice for the land which she loved, but instead exploring a wholly new form of existence of which even gods can but dream.

Tetragnostica never quite left our minds completely. One night, when Catherine was experimenting with some new theoretical extensions to a magic model of hers—really obscenely technical, gritty stuff of which I had never dreamed, even in my most experimental days—she stumbled upon a peculiar tachyo-thaumaturgic discrepancy that seemed to predict some very unusual behaviour for an inverse gravity field when it was cast into a sub-universal encapsulation with particularly low coherency. The problem with this was that it was exactly the sort of thing that might have been what Tetragnostica had attempted to use in the creation of her great anomaly if it were done incorrectly.

It appeared that Catherine had killed Tetragnostica.

She panicked; and had I been around, I would have stopped her most dearly and laid her fears to rest, but I was absent during that crucial moment, and so her upsetness grew in terrible ways. She had loved Tetragnostica dearly, and to come so suddenly to the conclusion that she had created the spell responsible for Tetragnostica’s fate was a little like slamming into a brick wall torn from the house in which she grew up.

To say she was horrified would not be quite appropriate. When I returned, she had already locked herself away in the bathroom with a candle and a pile of papers, trying desperately to concoct a spell by which she could revert the damage which she had supposedly done—to switch her fate with that of Tetragnostica’s, so that her loving care-giver could live on to an age of fullness.

It took some time for me to negotiate her return from the tiny room, and even then she refused to tell me what it was that had struck her; she kept her papers secret, and would say little even to me... the hours in which this was the case became days of listlessness, when it seemed the curse that had been placed upon her before her extraplanar ‘discovery’ was once more advancing, turning her paler still, and finding its way into the nooks and crannies of her heart, so that it might blacken her character, as well, as it had no doubt done to so many generations before her.

Eventually, the mad scrivenings of this phase of her came to a stand-still, her scheme complete, and she would spend her time simply sitting hopelessly, staring at things unseen, the crushing sensation in her heart still too essential to her being for her to yet reveal to me, given the infantile state of our affections for one another even then, and her native element of reclusion. She was waiting, I knew; hoping that I would be away from her for some span of time long enough that she could enact whatever it was that would bring about the release to her torment.

So I gave her what she sought and told her that I would be spending some time away, which piqued her veiled attention; of course, in reality, I returned just as soon as I departed, and crept as silently as I could to conceal myself within the dormitory in a place where she would not think to look. Finally, when she began her terrible ritual—which would, in theory, give her body to be a vessel for Tetragnostica—I leapt out and tackled her. The words fizzled uselessly on the tip of her tongue, accomplishing nothing.

Suffice to say she was miserable about it, but at least talkative—the poor, shivering creature told me the whole account of how Tetragnostica had been the best thing in her life, despite my efforts to improve it; how she felt like an intellectual hobo who was more of an echo of glorious days gone past than a being of note now, left desiccated even further by knowing that she had been the faulty agent that lead to Tetra’s fall. It tore and twisted at her soul, keeping her from the restful life that I had promised, and the only thing she could think to do was to reverse it.

To this I knew the response, and with protectiveness at full force, I gave it: Tetragnostica had been a great woman, but she had given her life knowing full well when, where, and more or less how it ended. Being a time-traveller entitled her to awareness about these things—and also the power to change them if need be—and the wizardess had not. That meant that she believed what she was doing at the time was certain and right, and that Catherine’s knowledge had most certainly not been at fault.

It had never been discerned before how Tetragnostica built the anomaly at the centre of the shattered land which it kept from flying apart; there were many great theories about it, but all in all, they ended up concluding that she was privy to a great many magical secrets that had never been dreamt of before. Seeing what Catherine had written on the page, it was painfully evident that she had known this exact secret—but it depended on so many theoretical advances long-past Tetragnostica’s time that it surely could not have been found by accident. It was certain, then, that Catherine’s theories were directly responsible for the anomaly, and that one of Tetragnostica’s other undocumented jumps—there were about three years of outings unaccounted for in her journals, thought to be merely errors in reporting travel time, but likely including also the summer spent as Minerva—had been used to obtain the information at some future date.

So Catherine really was important—both in the future and the past, and she could not possibly be blamed for Tetragnostica’s death; the spell required a great deal of energy to conduct, and it was entirely possible that the only way to get enough in time would be to obliterate a substantial amount of matter, including the caster herself. It was a grim prospect, but one that, I stressed, she took willingly. It was a deliberate sacrifice, and Catherine had no business disrupting life in order to reverse it.

Sorrowful, she collapsed in my arms. I hugged her tightly, and she whispered to me that she still felt awful that she would be forgotten as a tiny little speck in time, lasting a few centuries if lucky, while I would carry on for millennia more. To that end, I had another solution, one so crazy that it worked; that I would pass on as she did. I said it so casually that she thought it was a joke at her expense, but after a reaffirming look in the eye, she understood I was serious.

We have lived happily ever since.

If it was indeed Tetragnostica’s intent to live out a romance through us, she most definitely played her cards flawlessly—perhaps she had stolen glances at me when I wasn’t looking just as I had stolen glances at her during our tirades of debate.

I don’t need to dote on the memory of that faint possibility, however: for now I have Catherine, and in her I have come to know a love I will forever defend.

Post-scriptum. Hopefully you too, dear reader, will get to know Catherine and to love her soul, though preferably not to the extent or by the means that I have. She has decided to work steadily towards her Classics degree still, despite the occasional magically-oriented project, as it was her first love, and one she does not wish to forget. I have stuck with her, ever confident in my decision to remain—her mind is vibrant, cunning, and imaginative, and I cannot bear to be without her for more than a day. This website, a repository of the magical and classical writings we have come up with since our meeting, is the best testament to her wonderful soul I have yet seen. I can only hope your curiosity, like hers, shall not ever catch itself bored.

Footnotes

¹ Such tends to happen with time-travellers a great deal, though Tetragnostica kept very detailed records of her explorations and was thus not expected to be seen again.

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