Eve of Destruction by C.E. Stalbaum

would hurt you, given the chance. I know everyone is sick of hearing about it, but Kalavan really did change everything.”
    Eve closed her eyes and rubbed at her forehead. Yes, it had changed everything, and it was one of those rare events where everyone could remember exactly where they’d been when they’d first heard the news. She’d been sitting in her room pouring over a treatise on kinetic energy when the headmaster had sent out the announcement. He hadn’t waited for the students to read about the tragedy in the morning paper; he’d called an open forum to explain what had happened to everyone on campus.
    She hadn’t believed it at first, and a part of her still couldn’t. She was one of the top students in her class, and she could barely weave enough energy to heat a tub of water. The thought that somehow a single man could muster enough power to eradicate an entire island…
    It seemed impossible, but then she was still just a krata and not a real mage. She couldn’t even weave enough power to invoke the Flensing yet, not that she would have wished to if she could. From the time she was eight years old and her mother first began to teach her about the Fane, Eve had been warned about its perils. The Flensing was a constant reminder of the cost of their power, and a mage who became reckless or greedy enough could literally kill herself by weaving too much energy. Many saw it as a curse, but her mother had always told her it was a blessing from the Goddess, a shield to protect the world from those with an endless thirst for power. It was what the magi had told the public for generations, and it was why the Enclave insisted the torbos had nothing to fear.
    It was also a lie.
    “My father told me once that if the torbo masses ever really understood the power of the Fane, then the whole country would cease to function,” Eve said softly. “Their fear would turn them against us. Even the clergy wouldn’t be safe.”
    Zach shrugged. “Honestly, I’m more aghast at how few people know anything about history. It’s all there if you read closely enough. The soldiers I keep telling you about? They believed that magi were dangerous, but they couldn’t really articulate why. They could tell you that magi destroyed Vakar, but not how or why or anything specific. And on top of that, they had no concept of the Fane, not really. To them it was basically mysticism, and that made it even more terrifying.”
    Eve nodded distantly. She understood well how ignorance often lead to fear, which could then very easily be twisted into violence. But at the same time, her years at school had opened her eyes to how horrifying some knowledge could be. In the end, her father was probably right; the torbos were better off not-knowing. Especially about the Flensing—specifically, that it wasn’t quite the crippling limitation the Enclave made it out to be.
    Every mage had to draw upon her own life-force to touch the Fane, and it was that consumption that ultimately brought on the Flensing. But there was another path to power, and despite the Enclave’s tireless efforts to bury the knowledge of this technique, they had never been completely successful. Her mother had warned her about it for many years, and her instructors at the academy had begun to toss out their own subtle warnings the farther she advanced in her studies. It was essentially the giant balma in the room at any university—the thing weighing on everyone’s mind that no one was willing to talk about.
    In academic circles many of the magi referred to it is as “sundering,” but the Edehan priestesses simply called it “Defilement,” an irredeemable desecration of the Fane. It had allegedly been created by Edeh’s long-dead husband, Abalor, and his servants, called Balorites, had used it to try and destroy the Fane many times over throughout the centuries. Eve didn’t know how much of it was true and how much was Enclave propaganda, but she did understand how the