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After Sanja was in the same aisle for the third time, she considered asking an employee where the book signing was. She didn’t like being a bother to customer service, but she was honestly too old wander around a store this small. At some point she had to woman up and talk to someone and not quiver in the corner like a teenage girl nervous to meet her favorite romance author.
It was while she was stuck in the corner where she was sure the employees said the table was, did she hear someone approaching her with intent. Turning around she saw a young man with glasses approach. “Hello, can I help you?” he said. His eyes flickered downwards to look at the book she was holding at her side and back up at her face.
“Ah yes, I’m looking for the book signing of Z. Witchborn? I was told they were in the corner of this bookstore,” she said. Hopefully this employee would be more clear.
“Oh yeah, this store put the signing at a weird place, follow me,” he said.
Walking along one of the bookshelves the man lead her to the center of the store. Once he got to a gap of the row of bookshelves, the man turned into the gap, and then started walking between the bookshelves, forming a makeshift aisle. Walking through with wood barely not brushing her shoulders, Sanja and the man escorting her came out to a larger alcove with a small folding table.
“Why did they have to put this book signing in such a small alcove?” Sanja said. She couldn’t even imagine how a line of people would be able to form for this.
The young man sighed. “As far as I can tell, without being outright intrusive, is that the owner felt embarrassed having a romance author book signing so,” he walked around the table and plopped down into the chair, “they stuck me back here.”
Sanja’s head whipped to him. “You’re Z. Witchborn?” she asked. “I wasn’t expecting you to be a, well, you know-”
“A man?” he asked dryly.
“A young man,” Sanja clarified. “The way you write Hatice’s arc was, well, very relatable.” From Sanja’s experience, she’s never met someone in Witchborn’s demographic able to understand her as an older woman.
“Well, isn’t that the thing about people like us?” Witchborn asked. “That we can empathize with others much easier?”
Sanja swallowed. “So it’s true? That you’re an actual . . . empath?” she asked, trailing off into a whisper with the last word.
[And more,] a voice in Sanja’s head said.
It was strange, it wasn’t something she was expecting, or had experienced before, but she didn’t startle. She felt her lips tug upwards involuntarily.
“So all the techniques Hatice and Moira use in the book are real?” She asked, sitting down in the tiny chair sitting across from Witchborn.
Witchborn nodded.
Sanja swallowed. Her next question jumped out of her throat before she could stop it. “And-and the symptoms of it?”
Witchborn gave a rueful smile. “I suppose you want a diagnosis?”
“Oh, well, I’m sure that you get this from everyone, but I found some parts of Hatice’s characterization, well, relatable. That isn’t to say that I assume I’m great a telepath like Hatice became but-”
“It’s not a question of greatness, it’s what you are,” Witchborn interrupted. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself.”
Sanja felt a part of herself twinge in annoyance at being interrupted (she couldn’t help but notice how the interruption had a tinge of regret and embarrassment for being so rude), but answered his question anyway. “Well, I’ve always had migraines in populated areas,” she said. “And I’ve always been told I have a good intuition. I can always tell if someone is lying or what emotions they have while talking, but, well, I always assumed that it was just practice or guesswork, or something mundane.”
Witchborn did not speak up when she paused for him. He just nodded his head and let her continue. Sanja couldn’t help but look down, she was talking to this young man in his twenties as if he were her senior. Well, she supposed he was, in this one regard.
“Overtime I thought that the compliments about my insight were a bit much, it only really became apparent something was noteworthy after me and my husband adopted our daughter,” she said. “She was an infant from the Holakor massacres,” Witchborn flinched, “and, well we were both trying our best to be mindful of her needs. But everytime she cried I was the only one to always guess her wants, just based on the sound. Overtime I started to suspect my husband was trying to ignore her on purpose, there was no way he couldn’t understand. A baby’s emotions are obvious after all. Eventually we had a big fight and my husband proved he wasn’t intentionally ignoring our baby. I didn’t really understand the significance until later when, well, I read—” she cut herself off and motioned with the book in her off hand. Confirming to Witchborn that it was indeed a copy of “Silk Beyond Borders.”
Witchborn just nodded. “Well, you don’t have to worry about projecting, because you are in fact an empath.”
Sanja did everything in her power to not just collapse into the chair in relief. Sitting down in it she asked, “Are you sure? Was there something in my story that let you know for certain?”
Witchborn shrugged. “There was a lot I could identify, either personally or from other empaths but that wasn’t what told me you were an empath.” He reached a hand across the table and said, “May I? I promise this will be noninvasive.”
Sanja swallowed and took the hand. Once her skin made contact with his the walls and shelves surrounding her faded away into darkness, just leaving herself, Witchborn, and the table they sat around. Slowly, pinpricks of light like distant stars came to life around them.
[This is what normal minds look like to me,] he said in Sanja’s mind. And then, from above her head, two bright spheres of light came to life. It was hard to tell what their size was but she had to guess at least bigger than the church back home. [And these, these are what empathic minds look like. They are bright and strong and reaching out to others just like my own, except for perhaps some are less trained than others.]
Sanja smiled at the way he described it. She wished she knew what this was like all the time.
Witchborn’s hands retreated from her’s and he said, “I could feel your mind before you entered the building. I would hazard a guess that you couldn’t find me because you were subconsciously moving directly towards another ‘Open’ mind as it were, which wasn’t helpful with the path being so obtuse.”
Sanja now looking at her hands folded in her lap she asked. “Do you think I could be good enough to sense the same way?”
“Possibly. With the right guidance you will be bale to develop your own abilities, but you also might connect them to different senses. I primarily use sight, and others I know primarily interpret empathic signals through touch, or taste, and one woman I met feel emotions through her senses of temperature and motion. However you connect with others will be based on how you personally work.”
“ . . . and do you have any recommendations on how to get the ‘right guidance?’” Sanja asked. Hatice in the book gave some hints as to how one could work on it on their own, but Sanja would love to have a personal mentor. Being from a frontier town she was just taught how to use the shield spell to defend against wildlife in a class comprising the whole population. The idea of one-on-one tutelage with someone that was invested in her success was enticing.
“Well,” Witchborn said, pretending to think about it hard, “There is one option nearby that I could recommend at the very least.”
When Sanja heard the option she was so excited to get there, to get proper tutelage in what she was, who she was, that she was halfway there before she remembered to get the signature that she came to Cyoria for.
As Zorian signed another one of his romance novels he had to stop from grumbling. Spear of Resolve owed him big for this. If he was going to write romance to make mind magic less scary and improve the web’s reputation, couldn’t they have at least given him a more dignified place to sign his books?