You lift the mushroom to your lips and the room contracts: the walls breathe, the sea’s hiss becomes a drum under skin. The taste is dark — soil, iron, something old and bitter — and a warmth spreads behind your eyes that is not comfort but a loosening. Sound thins; the Magus’s face slides into a smear of moonlight and then fractures into a thousand small mirrors. You fall backward without falling, suspended between memory and the thing that bends memory.
Images come fast and bright as struck flint. You are in the desert again, but the air is close and sweet rather than dry. The sun is low; distant music threads the heat like a ribbon. Margaret is there — not dragged, not pleading, but swaying to a tune only she seems to hear. Her smile is small, a neat thing folded away from anyone else’s grief. She wears a shawl the color of rust; your hand remembers its weight. She hums a line of nonsense and lifts her face to the sun. Around her, sand moves like slow water; the world bends sightlessly away from the truth.
You watch as a younger you — fresh from a cell, raw and trusting — reaches for her and is met with the feathered lightness of her palm. She lets your hand go the way a glass slipper slips from a foot; there is no struggle. You see the moment as if it had been staged: she turns toward laughter in the dunes, toward a caravan’s music, and steps into the circle of dancers. You remember the story she fed you later: that they took her, that she was torn away. The memory unravels under the drug’s clarity. She did not resist. She moved with the music.
The visions do not stop there. They peel back like thin skin. You see a sheltered room in a city you once loved: servants whispering, a hurried knock, a folded note placed into a trembling hand. Margaret reads, lips forming words you do not hear. Her face does not crumple; it arranges itself into a mask of proper sorrow. Later, alone in the courtyard under a dull moon, you imagine the grief that should have broken her. Instead you see the same small smile, the careful tilt of eyes that measure and set aside. She rehearses a hand upon a sleeve, a breath, the cadence of consolation. The truth is a bright hurt: she learned, she knew, and her sorrow was measured — enough to perform, not enough to drown her.
You see other things braided into the vision: the Magus’s way of watching you together with Margaret, a passing look exchanged in market alleys, the hurried counsel of men in green and silver when no one thought to listen. Nothing is malicious in the images; the revelations are plain, domestic, colder for being ordinary. Betrayal here is not a blade in the dark but a turned back, a slip into comfort while kingdoms burned.
The room tilts. The Hall of Aldebryn dissolves into shimmering heat; Margaret’s face blurs. You feel a hand close around you — hot, desperate, not hers. Rage and abandonment sharpen in you like a tool. You see Margaret removing her mask in the moonlight; behind it sits a complacent smile that fits her like a coin in a palm. The mushroom shows you everything with brutal, lucent honesty: the ease with which she folded sorrow into acceptable grief; the way her love, if love it was, had patient margins.
You stand up within the dream — or the dream forces you to stand — and the world narrows to a single motion. Your hand finds the dagger you keep by the window, a thin thing whose metal knows old oaths. You do not remember reaching for it; only that in the vision your fingers close and the motion is inevitable, clean as a sentence. You move toward her as one moves toward an answer that has been hiding all along. The room contracts to the space between your bodies; her mask is off; the complacent smile becomes an accusation.
You strike.
The act happens as if through gauze. There is impact, a sound muted as cloth, the dull slackening of a body’s posture. In the hall of the vision she staggers, surprise and then a look that is not of pain alone but of a very specific, private astonishment — the discovery that the script has been broken. You hold her; her face is warm; her breath comes shallow and then still. The mushroom’s truth folds back on itself like a knife.
The spell snaps. The Witch is gone. The violet cloak and the bowl are empty on the table, as if the whole came-and-go had been a conjuration for the single purpose of opening a wound. You are on your knees amid the hush of the ruined study. Margaret lies where you last saw her in the vision — crumpled, small, her hair fanned like seaweed. Her eyes are closed, pale in the dim. Your hand is numb around the dagger’s haft. Everything is unbearably loud: the clink of a goblet overturned, the distant cry of gulls, the thud of your heart.
You are suddenly, painfully, fully awake. The question that the mushroom raised in symbols now stands in the sober light, enormous and accusing. Did the drug grant you truth, or did it sharpen some long-brewing madness until you could finally do what your suspicion had been whispering for months? Have you struck a traitor in a justified, terrible moment of justice — or have you killed your wife because a hallucination stitched together slivers of jealousy, fear and exhaustion into conviction?
You hold the dagger like an accusation. Its metal is cold; it reflects in the tiny, exact way only metal does: you and the knife and the darkened room. Your hands tremble; the air is thin with salt and something else — the iron smell of panic or the tincture of the mushroom’s fading echo.
There is no clarity to be had here that the drug might not have adulterated. The Witch’s promise — that truth waits and truth cuts — is both fulfilled and undone: you saw what you saw, but who can swear to the veracity of a vision? You could claim the dream as proof: tell the courts and the squires that the Magus gave you revelation, that Margaret’s hand was never clean. Would any tribunal accept the testimony of a man who confessed to using sorcery? Would vengeance wrapped in the cloak of righteousness wash your hands of blood or only mark them with madness?
You stand, though your legs feel like they belong to someone else. The city outside is asleep; the servants in their rooms will wake to a new morning that you can no longer enter unchanged. You think of the choices that remain like knives set on a table: concealment, confession, accusation, flight, self-destruction. None are free of peril — moral, legal, mortal.
To confess is to stake everything on a mind that might be judged unstable. To fabricate a narrative of treachery is to risk civil war and to become what you condemn; you could burn her memory as a traitor and frame your deed as necessary, but you would be a writer of lies and a murderer of a woman who loved you in some true small ways. To flee is to abandon the realm to Claudius’s designs and live a life pursued by rumor and vengeance. To end your own life would be to escape the burden, but it would also silence any hope of vindication or atonement and steep your name in infamy that could unmake everything you once hoped to restore.
You sink into a chair, the dagger clattering to the floor like a small, obscene bell. The sea’s sound breaks through the windows, the same eternal tide as when you first arrived. You think of the forefathers and the oaths, of Moravice and the pen you once raised in defiance, of the kidnap and the music and the Magus who sold you knowledge for a taste of mushroom truth. Somewhere beyond these walls, Claudius moves his pieces with imperial patience.
There is one course that holds something fragile and dangerous: do not decide in the first hour. Secure the body, call no guards who might spread the news to unwanted ears. Send for Varek, your scout who knows how whispers travel and how to keep them quiet. Hold this moment safe and slow and gather what proof you can without declaring your hand. If the vision granted anything, it left threads — markets where Margaret met men, letters, servants who knew more than they said. Find them. Corroborate what the mushroom showed before you turn revelation into law.
You do not know yet whether you are righteous or mad. You do not know whether the truth you witnessed would stand in a court of men or be dismissed as the fever-speak of a man who invited sorcery into his blood. But you know one other thing: whatever path you choose, it will be walked as a man who has already crossed a line. There is no unmaking this hour.
Outside, the gulls wheel. Inside, the dagger lies on the floor, a cold answer to a question too large for the room. You move to pick it up again — not to strike, but to hold evidence, to weigh the balance of blood and story. The rest will be careful steps: to listen, to find witness, to bury or to proclaim. You breathe: a single, deliberate thing. The city will demand an answer. The self you were will demand another. You are left, finally, with the smallest and most terrible choice of all: to be judged by the law of men, or to make law yourself.
A sudden clatter echoes through the hall — boots on stone, the metallic scrape of armor. Someone has summoned the guards. Probably the Witch. Your heart hammers. You freeze for a fraction of a second, weighing your options. The choice hangs heavy, the sound of approaching footsteps growing louder, closer, a drumbeat of inevitability.
….
You try to flee the scene, vanishing into the night while the city sleeps.
….
You steel yourself, composing your expression, and prepare to explain — or conceal — what has just occurred.
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