The Height of the Ceiling

I didn't sleep last night.  I guess I probably should have been writing up this post in all that free time I had, but honestly, it never occurred to me.  I was just laying there in the dark for hours, too excited to sleep, too confused to sort through my thoughts.  It's all a bit beyond me still.  But the lesson is clear.

Magic is real.

I've read a lot of blogs on here, from people who went through all this stuff in the past.  I'm living with a self-proclaimed witch, and a man who I'm pretty sure has come back from the dead several times, but they're all just things I've been told or read, you know?  There was never any proof.  Sitting in my corner reading the stories of the old sages and such, well, some of them seemed too fantastic to be true.  They were wonderful and inspiring and painful and I wanted to believe them, but I didn't.  Not really.  Even after seeing Him, who cannot ever be reconciled with my...previous concept of reality, I didn't believe in magic.  And I didn't believe that humans could wield it.

Miss Cordelia had been insisting that I was a Crafter, and though she's way smarter than me I didn't honestly believe that either.  I'm not the kind of person who's special, or has any kind of skill.  But she wanted to train me and she's been so kind and she really seemed to think that if I got the skill I could help a lot of people, so I humored her.  I went along with her test.

Besides, I missed her while she was away, it was just so great to have her back.  This whole city scares me a little.

At first I kind of regretted it, following her for that test.  She took me into this awful room and I almost threw up.  It wasn't filled with bodies or anything like that, it was awful in a much more...banal way.  I can't tell you why it dizzied me so much.  Walking in there was like staring at an optical illusion for way too long, I was nauseous and my head hurt and there was this ringing in my ears.

You see, the walls were the wrong shape, and the ceiling was too high.  For the place where the room had been built and the connections of wall and ceiling to be that way, it was just impossible.  It was an impossible room, it was way too big and it was so painful I had to close my eyes and stop looking at it.

Miss Cordelia said that I had the power to fix the room so I tried.  She said to picture the room the way it was supposed to look so I did.  It was easy to figure out what was wrong in the room, and I don't even have any training in architecture.  There were just sections of the room that, when I closed my eyes, felt tight and tampered with and...well this is going to sound dumb but, they felt in pain.  Like someone had taken the room and stretched it beyond what it wanted to be.  So I helped it.

When I opened my eyes, the room was perfect.  Just how it was supposed to look.  It was an incredible kind of magic, and Miss Cordelia told me I had done that.  Me.  Gray!  I who have never done anything right!  I fixed the room!

Miss Cordelia doesn't know this, but while I couldn't sleep I sneaked out of my room and back to that one.  I measured the ceiling in relation to my height and I raised it and lowered it just to prove I wasn't dreaming.  It's just incredible.

I'm so tired, I should take a nap, but I don't want to.  I want to have another lesson.  I want to try and turn the walls purple, I bet I could do that.  I want to go and find pieces of the world that are broken and fix them.  That way the stretched out walls would stop screaming in pain and I could finally get some silence.

Catch you later,

Gray.