ok but the idea of vanishing is so interesting
because where do they go?
when vanishers are vanished, they're not sensible. they don't move things, della vacker entered a river without moving the water.
How on earth does this make sense?
Unless vanishing is not about light. Not about what eyes can see, or ears can here, but rather about a reality that overlaps our own, a secondary dimension that coexists, unsensible, unseeable, unhearable to the average creature.
But vanishers can access it, see it, move through it.
they walk among shadows, among our reality, and the reality that exists alongside it. they're in that reality, one with it, and all at once they can see and hear everything, from the ghosts of simple souls that scuttle in their beetle shapes across the floor, mice making little pathways. vanishers have vanished. they exist outside the world we all see and feel and know. How else could their talent work? How else can the world stop seeing, feeling, and knowing them, all at once.
I think the first time vanishers manifest, it's horrifying.
I think Biana screams, so loud it echoes, but her parents don't notice. Her mom doesn't look up. Her father's eyes are glued to his book.
Her body is completely gone, her entire self see-through in front of her, and she runs for her brother, because her parents have never been able to see her, not really, so maybe it's just some advanced tactic of isolation, she could see that.
She reaches for her brother, her brother would look at her, he'd see her, she knew he would, she was real--
She screamed his name, and he didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't move in the least.
When she stretched her hand out and it passed through her brother's body, instead of hitting him on the side of his head, she felt ice settle inside of her.
Her breath caught in her chest.
Biana, for a moment, is horror-struck, like she's fallen asleep and living a nightmare. She knows what she does doesn't matter, what they do will never have anything to do with her, but the fact that she's screaming, and they don't even look up is horrifying. She pounds her fist on the door but her hand sinks through it, and for a moment she wonders if she's dead.
If this is what death feels like.
If invisibility, this feeling of being lost, the silence that she was screaming to, the tiny ghosts, those were ghosts, creeping over her feet--
She screamed, again, long and hard, and her voice chipped and cracked and splintered---
And the world snapped back into what it was supposed to be, all the color put back to rights, and the tiny ghosts vanishing, and her father leapt to his feet, anger blazing in his eyes.
"What happened?" he demanded, his voice sharp, and Biana was choking on her own breath, her arms wrapped around herself, her own reality.
"Everything was wrong," she choked, tears burning down her cheeks, "And there was ghosts, and no one could hear me scream, and I-- I didn't exist, Father! I wasn't real!"
"No," She answered, still sobbing, "Father, it really happened, I tried to touch Fitz and my hand went through him."
Fitz blinked, his eyes wide. "Are you feeling okay?"
"No!" She said, her voice in shards, "I'm not! I was invisible!"
Her mother finally looked up.
"Maybe you were," she said, calmly.
Biana nearly exploded. "I couldn't have---"
"You've got vanisher blood in your veins, Biana. It could be your talent."
"Not necessarily," her father said, actually looking impressed. "You could show up even Fitz. Very impressive, if it actually happened."
Biana's tears finally slowed. Better than Fitz? Very impressive? Her eyes went wide and her heart beat faster.
"Can you do it again, Biana, Dear?" Her mother asked.
She blinked. Bit her lip. Nodded.
"I can try," she said, her voice a hopeful blur of words.
And then, she shut her eyes, and stretched out her mind towards the invisible.
What she knew was there, but couldn't see.
And no one else could see her.
Biana Vacker was a vanisher.
And as her parents and brother gasped and tried to find her in the space she'd left, her mother grinning and her father looking proud, she found herself grinning into the world that only she could see.
