There’s a saying that Death’s a gambler—one carrying no scythe, but a massive bowl full of thousand-sided dice he rolls every morning. In the Academy we know that’s not true. The true gambler is Life. Her bowl is larger, and every side of her dice has its own fringe nightmares in store.
In the three years I’ve been here, I’ve seen students skitter away from their own shadows, others gazing at walls with vacant stares, or worse, being wheeled away, spittle hanging from their lips, heads lolling to the side. It’s what playing with chance does to some people. Luckbending is not for everyone.
It certainly wasn’t for my sister, Annya.
Here’s what I hate about the things I learned in the Academy—when you have power over every outcome, there’s guilt waiting in every corner. There’s no “curse my luck” excuse when luck is in your grasp.
I learned that the hard way, sitting in the bunk bed of our dorm, feeding pumpkin soup to Annya as her once-curious and crystalline eyes stare back at me all doll-like, knowing I can’t blame anyone but me for her condition.
Sure, our motive came from a place of love. Pull the tumor out of Mom’s jaw, save her life. Who’d have thought Mom’s gums would melt in her mouth, her tongue stretch down like taffy. Who’d have thought her head would explode.
It hurt my mind. It broke Annya’s.
You can probably tell how this story ends—poor Thante (that’s me) embarks on a scholarly quest to salvage his blunder and save his sister, only to end up with exploded sister-bits all over him in some cruel cyclic turn of events. Only to be driven mad himself.
But it doesn’t end like that.
That’s how it begins.
•••
The restraints press me tight against the wooden bed. There’s a sound of jingling like tubular bells beside me, though I can’t turn my head. All I can see is the dizzying arabesque patterns of the domed ceiling. Old Master Sumit leans over me, his breath reeking of rotten teeth. When he forces my mouth open, to plunge a copper-tasting forceps inside, I don’t fight it.
“Speak the word sister,” he says, voice hoarse and aged.
When I utter the word, he clenches the forceps and pulls, something wet and worm-like slithering out of me, leaving behind a gap in my lungs and brain. A calmness spreads around me like a sheet.
“Say sister again,” he says.
I reach for the word, but all I find is a black whirlpool.
“Say brother,” he says.
I try to do as I’m bid, and all I find is void. He asks me to say love, friendship, play, smile, childhood. But my tongue knots and my brain hurts, unable to process his requests.
He shakes his head. “No good. Your life was too entangled with Annya. I have to put the word back lest you forget who you are entirely.”
He plunges the word back and my mind swells with the influx of dark thoughts. I scream until my voice is hoarse, too numb to feel the needle piercing my skin.
Three days later, he puts me in a chair, straps around my wrists, and swings a rusty pocket watch in front of my eyes.
“Face your demons head on,” he says. “Self-blame, guilt, regret. Conquer them. Forgive yourself.”
As if it’s that easy. How do I forgive myself after what I did?
You just do, I recall my sister’s voice saying. Right after the day I bumped on the lantern and set our barn on fire, back when we were children.
The pocket watch swings for the tenth, eleventh time?
How do I shut away that image? Her last smile, that final sweet moment of clarity when it seemed my reversal of mind damage had worked. Only for the smile to contort and pull back into her head. The whole of her exploding, just like Mother.
“Find an anchor,” Master Sumit says. “You need an anchor. Find it in yourself.”
An anchor. A goal to work toward. Something to pull my being forward. But what? Lest I undo what I did, I’ll be haunted forever.
The pocket watch keeps swinging. The world fades. Time slips away.
Time.
I recall my visit to Professor Ludwig’s office, pendulums swinging and gears clicking in a riot of assorted clockwork paraphernalia. Chance and time are intertwined, he said. In infinite time all probabilities become certainties.
How to capture infinity in a shape? A circle never ends and never begins. What if time was not an arrow but a circle?
“Master Sumit,” I say. “I found the solution. To undo everything wrong with my mind. To set everything right.”
The old man squints. “How?”
“I will bend time itself.”
•••
Master Sumit isn’t impressed, but the clarity of a goal ahead of me shines light through the fog, and I eventually convince him my mind is cured, and that I have no delusions of breaking the fabric of reality.
I return to my studies immediately after my release, not failing to notice the glances from other students, the worried expressions of professors. They’ll forget soon. No matter how outlandish the news, eventually no one gives a fuck.
It’s only a month before I ace my first exam—the one on Temperance. It’s midnight, and we’re assembled in the great hall, moonlight shining through the mullioned windows etched on the walls, rims adorned with carvings of skulls stuffed with dice. The long dining tables have been removed, replaced by candelabra that suffuse the air with a waxy scent.
Professor Jabari, an austere Black woman two-meters tall with a striking tattoo of a tiny anchor beneath her left eye, stands on the podium, in front of the ever-shifting great mural adorning the far wall. It now displays a scene of men and women tied to wheels shaped and colored like roulettes.
There’s only one table left, in front of the podium, hosting an assortment of pistols.
“They’re semi-loaded,” the professor says. “You know what to do.”
Clear enough. Point the pistols against our temples and bend chance to survive. Throughout the examination, my hand’s the steadiest amongst everyone. Maybe it’s nerves of steel, or maybe I craved oblivion for too long to care.
We later find the bullets were rubber, but many still ended up in the hospital wing.
I continue acing the exams and show exorbitant amounts of excellence. Around my sixth year of studies—three years since my sister’s death—I meet Vaela. She’s a Spade—highest tier before Professor level. I’m still a Diamond, and she’s assigned as my supervisor in Professor Harman’s laboratory of Mending for two years. We work on entropy reversal—or simply put, repairing physical object damage without glue.
I quickly fall in love with her. Her warm smile is a start, but what reels me in is her passion for her work. Her urge to mend things, to use luckbending for good.
One day, a student’s experiment goes awry. In his effort to mend a chair’s leg, Axel bends the wrong chances, and the rooftop comes tumbling down. Luckily, I’m there—an erudite user of Good Fortune. Every piece of debris misses them, and a huge brick lands just to the side of Vaela.
She hugs me, shaking.
Hard as it is to restrain my emotions for her, I do so for two whole years, until I’m finally promoted to Spade myself, officially no longer her student. I wait a while longer, but eventually I make a move and find my feelings reciprocated.
Physical contact is one thing, but what really solidifies our relationship is the sharing of secrets.
“You always seem as if you’re somewhere else,” she says to me one day as we lay in bed.
It’s a larger dorm I live in now, with its own bookshelf to one side, and long sanguine curtains hanging down the windows beside my bed, shining bloodred light to my waking moments. The view beyond shows the vast fields of Merthang—an orange ocean of pure autumn.
“When you focus on a task, your body is there, your powers are there, even the part of your mind required for the task is there. But it seems like a crucial component of you is somewhere else. Traveling in distant lands looking for something.”
I lean forward and kiss her.
“I guess it is. You probably know what it’s about. Everyone who’s been in the Academy four years ago knows what it’s about.”
Her eyes drift down my mouth.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, it’s okay. The wounds are there, alright. And they always ache, but I think talking about it makes no difference.”
“You miss her.”
“Of course I miss her,” I say, and my damn voice shakes. It shouldn’t shake like that anymore. I’m big boy Thante now. “I haven’t shared that with anyone, other than Master Sumit, but I think he didn’t take me seriously anyway. Probably labeled it delirium. I plan to bring her back.”
“How?”
“Time is entwined with chance. If I bend the chain of probabilistic events, twist the arrow of causality to point back on itself. It will—”
Her eyes widen.
“You plan to reverse time?”
“Why the shock? Isn’t that what we’re already doing in the lab? Isn’t mending things a reversal of time?”
“That’s not the same. Mending injuries, fixing things…that’s small scale. What you want to do is undo the history of the entire world.”
“No. Just the history of my family. Though I’d just as well undo the world’s if I had to.”
She presses her palm on my chest. “Thante…”
“Look, I didn’t share this so you could judge me. I thought I could trust you. This is—it’s important to me.”
She pulls me closer, presses my head on her chest and runs her fingers through my hair. That’s when I let go. I tear down all the walls I built around me, rip apart the facade I conjured to cover my true face.
Finally, after four years, I allow myself to weep.
•••
By the time I reach professorship level, I have mastered entropy reversal on a local scale. It’s not a simple matter. Take a broken glass, for example. To remake the glass, every little piece must fall back to its place like solving a puzzle, all the cracks undone. It’s a matter of aligning the probabilities governing the glass composition. Step one, put the fragments down on the table, in the shape of a two-dimensional glass. Step two, imagine every piece projected back into three-dimensional space, visualizing the trajectory of every little fragment from the flat table up to the glass.
Sounds hard? Well, not as hard as it really is.
My desk is now adorned with a dozen once-broken glasses, and Vaela thought to trap fireflies inside for improved aesthetics. A comforting environment, especially coupled with the sandalwood incense she gifted me. But the glasses are also a constant reminder—no matter how much I achieve, my goal is still a million miles away.
“I have to try a living thing,” I tell her one day.
She shifts the glasses around nervously.
“You knew it would happen eventually,” I say.
She sighs.
“Your lab is top in the Academy. You have achieved so much, your students look up to you and admire you. Why can’t you open your eyes?”
“My eyes are open. I haven’t lost sight of my goal.”
“No, they are not. You refuse to let go. It wasn’t fun or pleasant, what happened in the past, but it’s part of your story, part of the path that led you here. It’s not—”
“Oh, I see. So you’re proposing my sister’s death is a good thing because it made me who I am. Is that all my sister’s life amounted to? A stepping stone in my career?”
She averts her gaze. “That’s not what I meant.”
I recognize that look on her face. Guilt. What right do I have to distribute my guilt around as if it were a disease?
I pull open my desk’s first drawer, presenting the stinking carcass of a rat. “I was scavenging around the archives of the old library for information on anatomy and organic entropy, when I found it lying there in the corner.” I smile. “Felt like a sign.”
“The dead rat. Felt like a sign. Right.”
“It’s a start.”
“Thante, you know what happens to those that mess with absurd probabilities, right? Do you want to end up in the psychiatric ward again?”
I inhale deeply. It’s triggering to think about. Days in bed, waiting for time to just pass you by. Struggling to fall asleep and lying to yourself that this time you’ll never wake up. That this time, sweet oblivion will take you and you’ll finally be at peace in a dark place where none of it matters. And then you wake up screaming, realizing the nightmare is still as real as ever.
“I’ll do whatever I have to make things right.”
She draws close and kisses my forehead. “I hope it works out for you, Thante. I really do.”
•••
Every time a rat explodes in my hands, I get tremors. Annya’s face comes to me again, her last smile. Mother is there as well, but she’s faded now. Perhaps because we carried that burden together, Annya and me. Perhaps because she got to carry most of that burden and it broke her.
I experiment in secret. Don’t want Vaela to see me like this, nor my students. There’s a part of me knows I shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m wreaking havoc in my mind after so much effort to stabilize it. And then I remember my sister’s laughter, us lying beneath the stars and contemplating other worlds in the heavens. Contemplating how much we will achieve in this world, mastering Good Fortune and becoming full professors.
Perseverance, they say, is rolling a die that’s rigged against you until it erodes enough to fall on your side. The fiftieth time does it for me, after three long years. The flattened rat on the table floats into a myriad of ghostly configurations, forming ethereal rodent-like centipedes mid-air. And with a shifting of my eyes, one of the ghosts materializes. Entropy is reversed, and the rat squeaks up at my stupid grin.
I know I should be dreading the next step. Human experimentation would make the boldest cringe. But I don’t.
My heart pounds with excitement.
•••
Entropy reversal experiments on fresh cadavers is not a proposal I want to bring to the Academy’s Ethics Committee. Instead, I strike a deal with the undertaker of the local graveyard—a blonde young fellow with aspirations to join the Academy. Promise him a recommendation and a chance to take the exams. He lets me use his home basement by the graveyard for my experiments and provides a steady source of cadavers.
Now, a professor spending his entire evening in the graveyard will raise questions, but, like anything in life, being witnessed is a matter of probabilities. Absent-minded folk are like leaves in the river of chance, and most wandering students are easily swayed. All it takes is a tug at the wind or a slant of sunlight reflecting the right way. Their paths never cross mine.
I visit the old archives again to research human anatomy when a waft of stench washes over me. A long trail of rat excrement covers the floors. Sure, the place is abandoned and rarely cleaned, but I wouldn’t expect so much to have gathered so quickly.
I cover my nose with a napkin and trace the bookshelves for medical studies from before they banned human experimentation. It’s a treasury of knowledge.
My research yields fruit, and by the time a few of the more perceptive professors start noticing my absence at nights, I have done it.
I have revived a human.
•••
The revived man has decomposed, but not terribly—skin redder, belly bloated, and foam caking his lips. I might have reversed the thread of events leading to his death, but not entirely the decomposition that came after.
His stench reminds me of the time we caught a rabbit with my dad and removed its entrails. Only sweeter, in a repulsive way.
“Ma,” he says, voice raspy like stepping on glass shards. “Ma family.”
“Not quite,” I say and with a tug of my wrist unleash the threads of chance that make his heart beat.
The man crumbles before me. My heart stings, but I know I’m no murderer. If you grant someone a gift and steal it back once you realize it will do them no good, are you really a thief?
I’m a good person.
The next experiment is perfect. A young girl, found dead by the river, revived in full health and smelling of lilacs.
“Where’s mommy?” she asks, dazed and confused.
“Hush,” I tell her. “We’ll go to your mum soon. I’m sure she misses you.”
The undertaker is mortified when I come to his room with the girl at my heels. I ask him to keep it quiet, and request a log of the girl’s family. Once I reach her home downtown and knock on the door, her mother emerges, clad in a black dress. Her eyes widen and she hugs the girl tightly, tears spilling out.
There’s no terror in this woman’s weathered eyes, no curiosity to learn how the rules of the universe bent in her favor. Only relief. The same relief I crave myself.
Abruptly the look on her face shifts. She looks at me bewildered as if seeing me for the first time. “I’m sorry. Can I help you?”
I pause for a moment.
“Uh, I was just bringing your daughter back. She was—” I fumble for words. “She got lost.”
“Ah,” she says. “Thank you for bringing her home.”
I leave the neighborhood behind me, hurrying my steps, feeling as if I want to run away from something. What was that about? It’s not like I expected any payment.
Confusion aside, that look of relief stays with me the hardest. It’s time, I tell myself. It’s time to grant myself that same gift.
•••
I pull Annya’s coffin out of the mausoleum myself. Yank it open to face her remains—headless, save for the bone shards and rotting brain debris sprawled on the velvet above her chopped neck.
Ah dear sister. My brain has swollen with painful memories of your demise and I forgot the joy you once brought me. But we’ll carve new memories. We’ll bring our paradise back.
I don’t have to try hard to visualize her face as it was. That last glimpse of her haunts my every waking moment, and it’s only worse in my sleep. As if the dreamlands shape her to be more real, more grotesque.
As before, I visualize the manifold of probabilities above her, a miasma of floating bits converging to a skull, a face, a wrap of skin.
“Thante!”
I recognize Vaela’s voice from behind me, but I can’t turn to face her lest I lose my focus.
“I see you’ve been following me.”
“Yes, I’ve been following you. And there’s something you have to know.”
“It’s time, Vaela.”
My sister’s body floats in my mind, translucent copies of her rising up in the air. All the ghostly configurations of her, most distorted against all laws of human anatomy. I have to scavenge through the possibilities, until I find the right version of her.
“The girl you saved,” Vaela says. “She is dead.”
“How?”
“Her own father killed her,” Vaela says. “They caught him tossing her corpse in the river stream. Thante, he has no memory of her funeral, or of her dying before.”
“You think coming to me and spilling this nonsense will stop me? I worked too long for this.”
“Thante, I’m scared for you. You don’t know what—”
With a shifting of my eyes and a pricking of my thumbs the manifold collapses. Probabilities converge. My sister materializes, all the flesh and bone bits floating up and settling in the shape of her inside the coffin.
Annya smiles when she’s complete. That same smile that haunted me for so long.
“Thante, what—”
I pull her to my embrace, taking in the smell of her hair. The same as it was before all of this happened.
She whips her head around. “Why am I in a coffin?”
I pause.
“Uh, I think you wanted to pull a prank.”
“A prank?” she exits the coffin. The dark dress she wears is torn at the seams. “Must have hit my head. It’s a bit foggy.”
I turn my head around. “Where did Vaela go?”
“Vaela?”
“Yes. Vaela Grendelmar? We’ve been—”
What have we been?
“Brother, are you okay?”
I touch my head. Feel like someone shoved a sledgehammer in it.
“Vaela…”
“That’s the girl from Harman’s Mending class, right? The one from the incident two years ago.”
“Incident?”
“Right. Some student messed up and had the whole room crumble on them. Whole lab died. It was big news. Did you hit your head, too?”
“No, I—uh…” I rub my temples. “Have you ever felt that you had this…scattered dream so powerful it feels like a far-off memory?”
She tilts her head.
“Nevermind,” I say. “Let’s go.”
“Thante…” she says and with her thumb rubs my cheek. It’s wet. I touch below my eye and feel a single tear streaking down.
“Don’t know where that came from.” I lay my hand over her shoulder and pull her out of the mausoleum. “Let’s go. I have Mending classes tomorrow.”
“You mean Good Fortune classes.”
“Yes,” I say feeling a veil slowly lifting from my eyes. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”
•••
There’s a saying that Death’s a gambler—one carrying no scythe, but a massive bowl full of thousand-sided dice. In the Academy we know that’s not true. The true gambler is Life.
In my long time as a professor, I’ve seen many students lose their sanity, and even their lives. Professors are not immune, either. Harman still visits Master Sumit, haunted by that incident. A gory scene of death in the class where he nurtured his precious students to heal and mend things. I hope the Academy’s Ethics Committee will allow reopening of the Mending class. It has a lot to offer if used by the right hands. Finding the right hands is all there is to it.
Luckbending is not for everyone.
