Attunement Initiation
Trial 93 of Zida 706
OVERTURE
“What do they know!” said Mariuz Arbin, the painter and mage who was now about to introduce Yrmellyn Cole to the same cursed path his own life had taken at some point in the past. They had withdrawn to a room in the basement of the house, isolated and unknown as the initiation demanded.
“Don’t listen to people who tell you secrets about magic, because secrets people know about are not secrets at all. The world is full of confused chatterboxes behaving like mindless drugged maniacs on a madly spinning merry-go-round. As an artist and mage you don’t need to take part in it. You are free.”
Yrmellyn Cole nodded in agreement. It would be a lie to say that she understood what her mentor spoke about, but her life and outlook was not particularly conventional, so she found his words appealing. Mariuz Arbin was for sure the best that had ever happened to her. Not only would she learn the profession of an artist and avoid the sad fate of an aging courtesan that had started to feel like a very real threat to her lately. She would also become something else and more than what she was. The magic would make her rise above the crowd of average humans.
“Magic cannot really be described with the limited vocabulary our everyday language and its simple words provides us with.” Arbin looked at his initiate, please with the effect his words seemed to have. He was feeling more and more pleased with his choice of companion. She looked back. Her expression was serious, as the occasion demanded, but beneath the cool surface he could discern other things. There were glints of shimmering light, interlaced with gaps of fathomless darkness and the thin but steady golden ray of love for himself that was the reason for why he initiated her at all.
Arbin knew that Yrmellyn Cole would keep her word and stay with him, not due to the contract she had signed, but due to true love. This was a must to him. Her initiation to magic would unite them in their minds. They would stay forever aware of each other ever after, whether it would be as friends or as enemies. He knew too much about how detrimental the latter could be to want to take unnecessary risks ... but it was of course impossible to know in advance if Yrmellyn’s current feelings for him would survive the reconstruction of her mind the magic would inflict on her. He hoped so, but knowing the process he couldn’t take it for granted. Once the initiation had started there would be no way back. This made him procrastinate and stall for time, doing his best to conceal how worried he was.
Yrmellyn smiled. “How can it be described then?”
Arbin was grateful for the question. It gave him a reason to ramble more about the theory and so postpone practice and reality.
“It would be possible to theorize and give you a lot of information about how magic is and how initiation is, but as I said, it would be worthless. Secrets which people are able to put words on are no secrets.” He paused a bit like he was searching for words. “Each person is unique and what they experience is unique. This is the only thing I can tell you. The only person who can know what initiation means to an initiate is the initiate themselves. This resembles the experience of artwork and what it means to you. It is individual. It isn’t predictable. In their mind each person creates their own experience of a work of art and each one of us interpret it our own way. It is meaningless to try to describe somebody else’s experience of initiation by applying your own experience on them.”
Yrmellyn found it difficult to grasp what he said about magic, but if felt like the art metaphor made it somewhat clearer to her. “I see. Nonetheless, you could tell me about your own experience just as an example” she said hopefully.
“It would just be an example. One single individual case. It wouldn’t be possible to draw conclusions from it. It would only be a story, worth as much as a random fairy tale or a bunch of lies.” Truth to tell, Arbin didn’t want to tell her. His memories of his own initiation were vague but seemed horrific, like veiled flashbacks of a bad dream.
“I like fairy tales Mariuz. Lie to me now. Tell me some lies...” She didn’t say more but the end of the sentence was alive in her mind, ripe with the acid fabricated capriciousness of a courtesan who has heard it all before. Tell me some lies like the other men do. The cynical thought amused her. It was such a contrast to the seriousness of the occasion. It was so respectless and the opposite to what a serious initiate probably ought to think of. It made her feel provocative and bad. She liked it.
Perhaps a whiff of her attitude reached him, because Arbin lost his serious and lecturing style and laughed. “Art is provocative or else it’s not art” he said. “Magic ... is also something provocative, to some. There’s people who are convinced everything would be way better if magic didn’t exist. Then they could go about their everyday life without having to fear that lightning will strike them out of the blue.” He spoke like in jest, but there was a streak of arrogance in his voice. “They also fear art.”
“Tell me now, Mariuz.” Yrmellyn leaned back in the chair and watched him expectantly. “I understand that your own personal experience of being initiated is only one special case, but it’s interesting nonetheless. What happens, really?”
The mage shrugged. “I’m not sure. To be honest I can’t recall it clearly, except that there was music. There is still a tune playing vaguely in my mind, and I have been trying for a long time to find out what it was, but albeit I know it was familiar the memory eludes me and I have never heard it again.”
He paused briefly, before he continued. “Sometimes I think that tune can have be an echo of the sound of the one I was before, before magic changed me. I have forgotten him, the Mariuz Arbin of the past. He is as gone as if he has been dead for many years. That is what happens when you are initiated. After the initiation you will be different. New. Other. It is a weird feeling, to be someone else, be someone new and know that you will never again feel your former self.”
A silence followed. The fire burnt in the stove with a low crackling sound. Zida was ending. Next trial it would be Cylus and the sun would be gone. As this would in worst case be the last moments they would be on speaking terms, or even the last moments they would both be alive, they faded the room to black while they steeled themselves for what would follow.
INITIATION
Now to the bad news.
Neither Yrmellyn Cole nor her mentor Mariuz Arbin knew the true nature of magic. Arbin had been a mage for a period of time, but this didn’t mean he knew everything. He had been initiated just a few arcs before, in the hopes that magic would cure the unknown lung disease the doctors had declared incurable. “By those”, Arbin had thought as he started to look for other solutions than the conventional medicine.
One day a mage who admired his art had turned up at the painter’s doorstep. The woman had been a weird foreigner who spoke in broken common, but Arbin had been able to interpret what she said, with some effort admittedly, but he had made it. While she had rambled on about a mix of art and magic he had realized that she was a fellow artist gone mage. When she had offered to initiate him he had accepted. This was mostly because he had already tried all other ideas and felt ready to test anything that could possibly improve his situation. Needless to say that adding magic to art hadn’t cured his disease, but being an artist Arbin was fascinated nonetheless, even though the initiation had forever joined him mentally with a person he found so annoying that it sometimes felt like it would drive him crazy. He could hear her chat ... the sound of the constant chatter never stopped and he could hear it night and day until she finally seemed to die and vanish for reasons unknown to him and he could finally get some peace of mind.
He was about to give up this peace of mind now. He didn’t’ like to do it, but it had felt necessary to offer Yrmellyn Cole something she couldn’t get from most any man. He had a decent income, but he wasn’t a rich merchant and he had no illusions about how the businesslike minds of courtesans worked. He had seen Yrmellyn in action the evening they had met in a gambling house. She had been working at snaring a jeweler who was shamelessly rich and looked like an ogre (at least in Arbin’s opinion). Arbin hadn’t been one bit interested in her, until she had surprised him by looking at his artwork with genuine interest. In that moment he had seen something else than what met the eye lurk beneath her superficial laughs and professional beauty. Eventually they had made a deal. She would stay with him during the rest of his life until the disease killed him, and in exchange for this she would get education and magic.
Alas this didn’t mean that Arbin really knew what he was doing. It had for example never occurred to him that the magic could be more than just enhanced abilities to catch up impressions from the world’s manifold and complex streams of consciousness and see deeper into the properties of the motifs he painted. He thought of magic as a skill, a skill that set him apart, but essentially a skill. Perhaps it was because he had already been an artist when he was initiated that he had just integrated the changes he experienced as a natural continuation of art into making himself a kind of installation. Magic had seeped into every cell of his body and totally permeated him and his personality, but as he had told Yrmellyn a bit earlier, it was hard to really recall the former self once the initiation was done. His identity had shifted when the spark had attached itself to him, but to Arbin it was hard to discern any real difference except for being able to gain impressions.
He had no qualms for initiating Yrmellyn Cole. He saw it as a good thing, a benefit for her, something that would lift her up to a higher level of existence.
“The initiation is hard to describe” he answered when she asked for details again. “I will facilitate it, but it is you as initiate who will interact with the procedure and experience it, your way.”
Yrmellyn nodded, but she continued to inquire for more details. “I want to be properly prepared so I know what I will need to deal with” she said. “For example, is it painful?”
“It depends. It can be painful in some ways, but it isn’t a physical pain ... I think. My own mentor said it can for example unleash painful memories and feelings you didn’t even know you carried, and it’s really very individual what it is about and if it happens at all. It can also be painful to catch up impressions that can be compared to disturbing sounds, or music you don’t like.”
“So I will hear music?”
“Not really. You will experience impressions. They can manifest as for example color, light and sound and other things. You will see. But you may want to brace yourself for potential sound shocks. I will not lie. If impressions are strong there’s a possibility that they will be painful - or not - depending on how your talent to deal with them will turn out to be. As an artist who is accustomed to dealing with strong effects, even seeking them, it may be easier to handle it. You have the potential to become an artist and perhaps your kind of personal experience includes things that can support you. There are no guarantees for getting out of this totally without side effects though. After the initiation I gained an annoying piping sound that keeps haunting me inside my head.”
He was quite the lecture, Mariuz Arbin. It had not always been so, but he didn’t remember.
“I will try to describe my own role” he offered. “It will not be a literal description of course, but I can describe it in a symbolic form.”
Yrmellyn listened with increasing confusion while he rambled on without making anything clearer.
“If I understand it right you are going to sing to me” she said when she felt she had heard enough of his lengthy “symbolic explanations”.
“You are going to sing - or hum - a kind of “music”, or more correctly something I may think of as music, although it is something else. Anyways. This “music” will trigger answers from my own mind. At the pace I respond to it the magic will adapt to my mind in a manner which is personal and not possible to know in advance. If and when I potentially feel inclined to sing along I may do so. Or I can scream if I don’t like the “mind-music”. Nobody can hear it anyway, as we are here in the basement room so we will not disturb the neighbors. At the end of the process (if it succeeds) I will be a mage.”
Arbin nodded. That was what he had meant, approximately.
They seemed to be done with the speaking. It was time to start the initiation procedure. Arbin made himself ready for the first humming. He did this his own way, as he was an original artist and could hardly be expected to copy his own mentor. Improvisation was essential to the initiation. At least his mentor had told him so. Creativity “eez da keey” she had said “Dat eez, if you aren’t going to initiate magic tax collectors or other kinds of people you feel will be best to not make too imaginative”. At least this what Arbin thought he had heard her say. Broken common can be intolerably troublesome, sometimes.
He started to hum.
None of all the things Marcus Arbin had said before they started could have prepared Yrmellyn for the horror of mentally meeting the mind of the mage through the tune he was humming. In that moment she knew that there was no greater pain than to face the raw reality without the softening layer of lies that makes it bearable. The sound of the humming was loud, but it wasn’t sound itself that evoked the pain in her, but the impressions it carried and the associations they stirred up in her.
Truth.
Mind over matter.
Emotional sorrow over physical pain.
The thought cut through her like an invisible knife and she felt like it severed her from the reality she had thought she knew and replaced it with new and scarier content. Questions arose and she felt like she a whirlwind had torn her off the ground and taken her on a journey where only chaos and mayhem awaited her. How could she possibly deal with this? Why hadn’t he prepared her better and told her this would happen? Yrmellyn felt betrayed, deeply and utterly betrayed, but even more she felt the enormous pain of losing something that had been valuable to her and realize that it hadn’t even existed. Without really noticing it the courtesan had committed the most forbidden action for women like here and allowed herself to start to fall in love for real, not just sell pretense for money. Her love seemed to be as unrecruited as she ought to have expected, not only because the painter was a wizard, but because he was a man.
She hadn’t thought she had any illusions left to lose, but she had been wrong.
Luckily it was still totally dark in the closed basement room. The sound had been more than enough and it was probably better to not need to see too much. When the humming and it’s even louder answer had ended, everything seemed to calm down.
Was she a mage now? Probably. It had been something of a shock, but the worst seemed to be over, she thought to herself.
At this point she heard a special buzzing sound for the first time. It was a buzzing sound which would henceforth speak to her from the darkness between the stars at select occasions. It buzzed louder and louder and awoke what felt like a worthy answer to the humming. Then it receded and finally it faded away.
"I recall ..." Yrmellyn began to speak, but Arbin hushed her.
"Your experience is only your own. Never speak about it. Never try to describe it, because the words are not sufficient. My own mentor told me this, I have followed her advice and I suggest that you do as I have done." He had started to light candles and lanterns. They glowed like small stars in the obscure room. Yrmellyn saw him as a shadow moving through the shadows, and perhaps this was also how she looked to him.
She shut her mouth around the words, the sentences the paragraphs and all the unecessary descriptions.
The initiation was over.
“What do they know!” said Mariuz Arbin, the painter and mage who was now about to introduce Yrmellyn Cole to the same cursed path his own life had taken at some point in the past. They had withdrawn to a room in the basement of the house, isolated and unknown as the initiation demanded.
“Don’t listen to people who tell you secrets about magic, because secrets people know about are not secrets at all. The world is full of confused chatterboxes behaving like mindless drugged maniacs on a madly spinning merry-go-round. As an artist and mage you don’t need to take part in it. You are free.”
Yrmellyn Cole nodded in agreement. It would be a lie to say that she understood what her mentor spoke about, but her life and outlook was not particularly conventional, so she found his words appealing. Mariuz Arbin was for sure the best that had ever happened to her. Not only would she learn the profession of an artist and avoid the sad fate of an aging courtesan that had started to feel like a very real threat to her lately. She would also become something else and more than what she was. The magic would make her rise above the crowd of average humans.
“Magic cannot really be described with the limited vocabulary our everyday language and its simple words provides us with.” Arbin looked at his initiate, please with the effect his words seemed to have. He was feeling more and more pleased with his choice of companion. She looked back. Her expression was serious, as the occasion demanded, but beneath the cool surface he could discern other things. There were glints of shimmering light, interlaced with gaps of fathomless darkness and the thin but steady golden ray of love for himself that was the reason for why he initiated her at all.
Arbin knew that Yrmellyn Cole would keep her word and stay with him, not due to the contract she had signed, but due to true love. This was a must to him. Her initiation to magic would unite them in their minds. They would stay forever aware of each other ever after, whether it would be as friends or as enemies. He knew too much about how detrimental the latter could be to want to take unnecessary risks ... but it was of course impossible to know in advance if Yrmellyn’s current feelings for him would survive the reconstruction of her mind the magic would inflict on her. He hoped so, but knowing the process he couldn’t take it for granted. Once the initiation had started there would be no way back. This made him procrastinate and stall for time, doing his best to conceal how worried he was.
Yrmellyn smiled. “How can it be described then?”
Arbin was grateful for the question. It gave him a reason to ramble more about the theory and so postpone practice and reality.
“It would be possible to theorize and give you a lot of information about how magic is and how initiation is, but as I said, it would be worthless. Secrets which people are able to put words on are no secrets.” He paused a bit like he was searching for words. “Each person is unique and what they experience is unique. This is the only thing I can tell you. The only person who can know what initiation means to an initiate is the initiate themselves. This resembles the experience of artwork and what it means to you. It is individual. It isn’t predictable. In their mind each person creates their own experience of a work of art and each one of us interpret it our own way. It is meaningless to try to describe somebody else’s experience of initiation by applying your own experience on them.”
Yrmellyn found it difficult to grasp what he said about magic, but if felt like the art metaphor made it somewhat clearer to her. “I see. Nonetheless, you could tell me about your own experience just as an example” she said hopefully.
“It would just be an example. One single individual case. It wouldn’t be possible to draw conclusions from it. It would only be a story, worth as much as a random fairy tale or a bunch of lies.” Truth to tell, Arbin didn’t want to tell her. His memories of his own initiation were vague but seemed horrific, like veiled flashbacks of a bad dream.
“I like fairy tales Mariuz. Lie to me now. Tell me some lies...” She didn’t say more but the end of the sentence was alive in her mind, ripe with the acid fabricated capriciousness of a courtesan who has heard it all before. Tell me some lies like the other men do. The cynical thought amused her. It was such a contrast to the seriousness of the occasion. It was so respectless and the opposite to what a serious initiate probably ought to think of. It made her feel provocative and bad. She liked it.
Perhaps a whiff of her attitude reached him, because Arbin lost his serious and lecturing style and laughed. “Art is provocative or else it’s not art” he said. “Magic ... is also something provocative, to some. There’s people who are convinced everything would be way better if magic didn’t exist. Then they could go about their everyday life without having to fear that lightning will strike them out of the blue.” He spoke like in jest, but there was a streak of arrogance in his voice. “They also fear art.”
“Tell me now, Mariuz.” Yrmellyn leaned back in the chair and watched him expectantly. “I understand that your own personal experience of being initiated is only one special case, but it’s interesting nonetheless. What happens, really?”
The mage shrugged. “I’m not sure. To be honest I can’t recall it clearly, except that there was music. There is still a tune playing vaguely in my mind, and I have been trying for a long time to find out what it was, but albeit I know it was familiar the memory eludes me and I have never heard it again.”
He paused briefly, before he continued. “Sometimes I think that tune can have be an echo of the sound of the one I was before, before magic changed me. I have forgotten him, the Mariuz Arbin of the past. He is as gone as if he has been dead for many years. That is what happens when you are initiated. After the initiation you will be different. New. Other. It is a weird feeling, to be someone else, be someone new and know that you will never again feel your former self.”
A silence followed. The fire burnt in the stove with a low crackling sound. Zida was ending. Next trial it would be Cylus and the sun would be gone. As this would in worst case be the last moments they would be on speaking terms, or even the last moments they would both be alive, they faded the room to black while they steeled themselves for what would follow.
INITIATION
Now to the bad news.
Neither Yrmellyn Cole nor her mentor Mariuz Arbin knew the true nature of magic. Arbin had been a mage for a period of time, but this didn’t mean he knew everything. He had been initiated just a few arcs before, in the hopes that magic would cure the unknown lung disease the doctors had declared incurable. “By those”, Arbin had thought as he started to look for other solutions than the conventional medicine.
One day a mage who admired his art had turned up at the painter’s doorstep. The woman had been a weird foreigner who spoke in broken common, but Arbin had been able to interpret what she said, with some effort admittedly, but he had made it. While she had rambled on about a mix of art and magic he had realized that she was a fellow artist gone mage. When she had offered to initiate him he had accepted. This was mostly because he had already tried all other ideas and felt ready to test anything that could possibly improve his situation. Needless to say that adding magic to art hadn’t cured his disease, but being an artist Arbin was fascinated nonetheless, even though the initiation had forever joined him mentally with a person he found so annoying that it sometimes felt like it would drive him crazy. He could hear her chat ... the sound of the constant chatter never stopped and he could hear it night and day until she finally seemed to die and vanish for reasons unknown to him and he could finally get some peace of mind.
He was about to give up this peace of mind now. He didn’t’ like to do it, but it had felt necessary to offer Yrmellyn Cole something she couldn’t get from most any man. He had a decent income, but he wasn’t a rich merchant and he had no illusions about how the businesslike minds of courtesans worked. He had seen Yrmellyn in action the evening they had met in a gambling house. She had been working at snaring a jeweler who was shamelessly rich and looked like an ogre (at least in Arbin’s opinion). Arbin hadn’t been one bit interested in her, until she had surprised him by looking at his artwork with genuine interest. In that moment he had seen something else than what met the eye lurk beneath her superficial laughs and professional beauty. Eventually they had made a deal. She would stay with him during the rest of his life until the disease killed him, and in exchange for this she would get education and magic.
Alas this didn’t mean that Arbin really knew what he was doing. It had for example never occurred to him that the magic could be more than just enhanced abilities to catch up impressions from the world’s manifold and complex streams of consciousness and see deeper into the properties of the motifs he painted. He thought of magic as a skill, a skill that set him apart, but essentially a skill. Perhaps it was because he had already been an artist when he was initiated that he had just integrated the changes he experienced as a natural continuation of art into making himself a kind of installation. Magic had seeped into every cell of his body and totally permeated him and his personality, but as he had told Yrmellyn a bit earlier, it was hard to really recall the former self once the initiation was done. His identity had shifted when the spark had attached itself to him, but to Arbin it was hard to discern any real difference except for being able to gain impressions.
He had no qualms for initiating Yrmellyn Cole. He saw it as a good thing, a benefit for her, something that would lift her up to a higher level of existence.
“The initiation is hard to describe” he answered when she asked for details again. “I will facilitate it, but it is you as initiate who will interact with the procedure and experience it, your way.”
Yrmellyn nodded, but she continued to inquire for more details. “I want to be properly prepared so I know what I will need to deal with” she said. “For example, is it painful?”
“It depends. It can be painful in some ways, but it isn’t a physical pain ... I think. My own mentor said it can for example unleash painful memories and feelings you didn’t even know you carried, and it’s really very individual what it is about and if it happens at all. It can also be painful to catch up impressions that can be compared to disturbing sounds, or music you don’t like.”
“So I will hear music?”
“Not really. You will experience impressions. They can manifest as for example color, light and sound and other things. You will see. But you may want to brace yourself for potential sound shocks. I will not lie. If impressions are strong there’s a possibility that they will be painful - or not - depending on how your talent to deal with them will turn out to be. As an artist who is accustomed to dealing with strong effects, even seeking them, it may be easier to handle it. You have the potential to become an artist and perhaps your kind of personal experience includes things that can support you. There are no guarantees for getting out of this totally without side effects though. After the initiation I gained an annoying piping sound that keeps haunting me inside my head.”
He was quite the lecture, Mariuz Arbin. It had not always been so, but he didn’t remember.
“I will try to describe my own role” he offered. “It will not be a literal description of course, but I can describe it in a symbolic form.”
Yrmellyn listened with increasing confusion while he rambled on without making anything clearer.
“If I understand it right you are going to sing to me” she said when she felt she had heard enough of his lengthy “symbolic explanations”.
“You are going to sing - or hum - a kind of “music”, or more correctly something I may think of as music, although it is something else. Anyways. This “music” will trigger answers from my own mind. At the pace I respond to it the magic will adapt to my mind in a manner which is personal and not possible to know in advance. If and when I potentially feel inclined to sing along I may do so. Or I can scream if I don’t like the “mind-music”. Nobody can hear it anyway, as we are here in the basement room so we will not disturb the neighbors. At the end of the process (if it succeeds) I will be a mage.”
Arbin nodded. That was what he had meant, approximately.
They seemed to be done with the speaking. It was time to start the initiation procedure. Arbin made himself ready for the first humming. He did this his own way, as he was an original artist and could hardly be expected to copy his own mentor. Improvisation was essential to the initiation. At least his mentor had told him so. Creativity “eez da keey” she had said “Dat eez, if you aren’t going to initiate magic tax collectors or other kinds of people you feel will be best to not make too imaginative”. At least this what Arbin thought he had heard her say. Broken common can be intolerably troublesome, sometimes.
He started to hum.
None of all the things Marcus Arbin had said before they started could have prepared Yrmellyn for the horror of mentally meeting the mind of the mage through the tune he was humming. In that moment she knew that there was no greater pain than to face the raw reality without the softening layer of lies that makes it bearable. The sound of the humming was loud, but it wasn’t sound itself that evoked the pain in her, but the impressions it carried and the associations they stirred up in her.
Truth.
Mind over matter.
Emotional sorrow over physical pain.
The thought cut through her like an invisible knife and she felt like it severed her from the reality she had thought she knew and replaced it with new and scarier content. Questions arose and she felt like she a whirlwind had torn her off the ground and taken her on a journey where only chaos and mayhem awaited her. How could she possibly deal with this? Why hadn’t he prepared her better and told her this would happen? Yrmellyn felt betrayed, deeply and utterly betrayed, but even more she felt the enormous pain of losing something that had been valuable to her and realize that it hadn’t even existed. Without really noticing it the courtesan had committed the most forbidden action for women like here and allowed herself to start to fall in love for real, not just sell pretense for money. Her love seemed to be as unrecruited as she ought to have expected, not only because the painter was a wizard, but because he was a man.
She hadn’t thought she had any illusions left to lose, but she had been wrong.
Luckily it was still totally dark in the closed basement room. The sound had been more than enough and it was probably better to not need to see too much. When the humming and it’s even louder answer had ended, everything seemed to calm down.
Was she a mage now? Probably. It had been something of a shock, but the worst seemed to be over, she thought to herself.
At this point she heard a special buzzing sound for the first time. It was a buzzing sound which would henceforth speak to her from the darkness between the stars at select occasions. It buzzed louder and louder and awoke what felt like a worthy answer to the humming. Then it receded and finally it faded away.
"I recall ..." Yrmellyn began to speak, but Arbin hushed her.
"Your experience is only your own. Never speak about it. Never try to describe it, because the words are not sufficient. My own mentor told me this, I have followed her advice and I suggest that you do as I have done." He had started to light candles and lanterns. They glowed like small stars in the obscure room. Yrmellyn saw him as a shadow moving through the shadows, and perhaps this was also how she looked to him.
She shut her mouth around the words, the sentences the paragraphs and all the unecessary descriptions.
The initiation was over.
The End