I stood on the edge of the cliff. I did not look down, because I did not want to face the vertigo. Vertigo, I remembered that film. It was the last one we saw for the film history class Sam had dragged me into. It had a nice story, and honestly, I was just glad to see a movie with color. But standing at the edge of this cliff, what came to mind wasn't the movie itself, but an interview with its director.
Hitchcock's famous 'bomb under the table,' was something I'd begun noticing in a lot of movies and TV series that I enjoyed. There are two ways to have a bomb under the table in your story. You could either tell the audience that there is a bomb under the table, or you can just have it go off, suddenly. Hitchcock argued it was better to have the audience know that there was a bomb under the table, even if the characters in the story did not know about it. In fact, perhaps it was better if the characters were ignorant but the audience was clued in, because it would create something that Shakespeare himself loved: dramatic irony.
But real life wasn't a movie. We experience life in the first person, and are limited to our perspective. If I was a character in a movie or play, standing on the edge of this cliff, refusing to look down, perhaps the audience might know what was down below. Perhaps they would know, by means of a chorus or narrator, if I would survive this fall. The spectators who did not think of me as 'I' but as 'he,' might know if 'he' was meant to succeed in his experiment, but 'I' could not know the future. All I could know was that it was a long way down and Hitchcock was wrong to choose a ticking bomb for his example, when vertigo was a much scarier expression of the same concept. There is uncertainty with vertigo. There is tension, anxiety, and fear, with vertigo. You can defuse a ticking bomb, but when the timer turns to zero, the bomb either goes off or it doesn't. Falling from a height like this, however, would be a story all the way down. Would I survive or would I die? All alone in these mountains, searching for my next spell.
It was evening. I surveyed the horizon, where a golden sun was kissing the earth. I wanted to have this spell done before the sun went down completely. And so, I took a deep breath, bent my knees, and braced my feet on the crumbling edge of the cliff. I steeled my resolve and fell.
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Wind whipped past my face. It whistled into my ears, calling me crazy, calling me suicidal. But I ignored it. My heart jumped up into my throat, screaming with its beats for me to cling to the cliff-side. My subconscious mind tried to tell me to cast an air magic spell, but my rational mind crushed all feelings of fear, and pushed back against adrenaline and exhilaration.
I gathered my energy and let out a cry.
Nothing happened.
I bit my lips. The ground was fast approaching. In the golden light of the setting sun, I could see the hard rocks below. They seemed to be speaking to me. They were saying something like 'this was the worst spot to jump off a cliff,' but what did they know, they were just rocks.
I gathered my energy and tried again. Still, nothing.
My beating heart grew louder. My lips were dry and cracked. My lungs were empty and I couldn't breathe, at least, not easily. But still, my thoughts were clear and my mind was focused. I knew what I had to do. I knew that this spell was based on something real, even if my motivation was a little more romantic than usual.
Perhaps the problem was my pose. I stretched my limbs apart until I was spread like a starfish. It was tough fighting against the air to keep myself in position, but I had a feeling this was it. This was what I had been missing. This would help me complete the image in my head. The ground was too close. This was it.
I gathered my energy and tried one last time. There was no air in my lungs, so I could only scream in my head as I gave it my everything. I couldn't hear my own thoughts between the whistling wind and my thumping heart and the crazed voice of my subconscious that was trying to tell me that I was going to die.
My body lurched like I had been sucker punched in my gut. I coughed out air that I could not spare, and felt bile lurking near the top of my throat. I clenched my teeth, took a deep breath in from my nose, and coughed a bunch of times as my body was flung back into the air.
My body fell back down, forcing me to gather some more energy to cast my new spell, and I felt the same punch in my stomach and went flying up. For a few minutes, as the sun began to clear the horizon at last, my body kept going up and down through the air like a yo-yo.
Up, down, over and over, until the last light of twilight was gone from the sky and the moon lorded over me. It did not look happy. Neither did the red star. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a bird whistle. It sounded mad.
I laughed.
I laughed so hard I started to cough again, but I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop laughing when I was flinging my body across the sky with magic. Magic that should have been impossible according to the rules of this world. Magic that would have given me an unassailable advantage against the Ikons if I had come up with it in time. I stretched my hands apart once again and laughed into the wind. My body stopped lurching as much, and despite the ache in my gut, the burning in my throat, and the pain in my limbs, I kept going. I kept going until it was clear that I wasn't being flung around anymore.
I was flying. Really, really flying. I wasn't gliding through the air or flinging my body around with magic hands. I wasn't even using air magic to push my body up and through the sky. I was using magic that directly relied on the principles of movement and flight. Sure, it was manipulating the air in a special way, and some might say that was a kind of air magic, but it didn't feel that way to me. I wasn't using air magic to fly, I was using something else. It had to be flight magic. A new spell, made all on my own, and that shouldn't be possible for me as I was right now.
I hadn't done a bunch of experiments to build up the mathematics, the theoretical mechanics, and other fields of knowledge and learning that would be necessary to achieve something like this. Of course, I hadn't jumped off a cliff without doing some preparation, but those preparations hadn't given me other spells that I could use to create flight magic or experiments that I could use to make sure I wouldn't end up flat as a pancake. No, I had gone straight from thinking about what it would take somebody to be able to fly like this, to testing it out with my own body.
And that was a big deal. A very, very big deal. I laughed out loud as I flew over the forest and into the sky that I used to only be able to look up at. This was the domain of the moon, the stars, and the birds. Those three used to rule the sky, but here I was, intruding on their turf.
There were still birds who could fly higher than me, faster than me, and could keep going longer than I could. The red star still blinked far in the distance, and the moon was much larger than my tiny elfin body in the sky, but this was a start.
This was the first step. It was also the third spell that I had made in the mountains, and it wasn't going to be the last. But the time for the rendezvous was approaching. I only had enough time for one more thing.
I would take one final step forward, tomorrow.