persenche

content warning: memories of a traumatic car accident

Riley liked the idea of fleeing to a place of unreality.

There were these little copses off the path, places where you could duck under some branches into the tangle of mostly-tamed Northwest rainforest, dodge sword ferns and knots of blackberry, and find yourself mostly hidden from the world outside. Little caves in amongst the branches, bare earth and roots and ferns and jumbles of leaves and sticks.

He stood in one of these little groves, and despite being in the middle of a state park and being able to hear children playing and boat motors on the lake, he could imagine that he was alone, completely alone, far from the world.

If he were more physically capable, he would have sought out even more unreal places. He had a fantasy of becoming lost in a deep wilderness, of going so far into the depths of the mountains that there were no longer any signs of place or time, no buildings or planes or cars or roads, nothing but trees and silence. He believed places like that existed, deep in the Cascades, but his broken and barely-healed body would never let him even try that sort of adventure.

And he knew how it would end, anyway. If you could become that lost, so lost that you became untethered from time and place? If you could become so lost that you could imagine yourself stepping out of the world and into another? That basically meant you were lost enough that you would never emerge again. You’d starve to death, or die of thirst, or exposure, or animal attack, or a fall, or infection. You’d end in a messy, horrible way, reminded graphically of the reason for all the civilization you took for granted.

But he still fantasized about it. If you could find a place that could exist in any world, because it lacked all markers of this world, couldn’t you imagine any world at all to emerge into? It was the plot of a thousand novels, movies, television shows, games. Die, and be reborn. Become a hero with a destiny.

When he’d been much younger, he’d desperately longed for something like that to take him away. Transform him, remake him. The further he withdrew from the world, the easier it was to imagine being taken away to a completely new one, in a new place, with a new life.

He outgrew it like he outgrew every fantasy of his childhood. The dissociation calcified into a wall of emotional defenses. His alienation from himself stopped being a source of escapist joy, and instead became a dull and bitter resignation. This is who he was, who he would always be, and there was no magic coming to save him and remake him.

And yet, despite all that, he still sought out places like this little hollow of trees in a state park. Places where, if he was quiet, and he kept his eyes down, and he let his focus drift, he could pretend he was somewhere else. He was someone else. Someone whose life hadn’t been shattered, somewhere he could remake himself. Somewhere magic.

He had meant to sit down here in the shade, eat lunch, but he hadn’t. Trapped by the quiet and peace of the place, he was just standing there, drifting, feeling himself detach from his body, all the pains he had come to live with since the accident becoming faint and the sounds of the world around him muting themselves. He turned inwards.

In his imagination, there was an unfamiliar presence.

At first he didn’t know what he was seeing, there in his mind’s eye. It was like a retinal afterimage, a scribble of light after looking at the sun. Circles and loops and arcs and lines, pulsing in the way that an afterimage did. He tried to trace it, but it skittered away from him, the microscopic movements of his eyes causing it to dart away from his gaze.

His eyes drifted out of focus, and he swayed slightly, but didn’t fall. He’d let himself sink into a kind of trance, the sort you might experience just before sleep. It was a comfortable place to be, and he came here often, in this quiet and numbed state of detachment.

He let his eyelids slip closed, the green light of the wood copse cut off and replaced with just darkness and the glowing shape of the afterimage.

It was a circle with another circle intersecting it, forming the shape of an eye. A line scrawled down through its middle bisected it and suggested a pupil in the middle of the eye.

Pareidolia had taken over now, and he saw the shape clearly, an eye that seemed, in the dark of his mind, to be embedded within a burst of lines that reached out all around it to form a spray like the rays of the sun.

He had a memory, then, almost forgotten but dredged up by this shape. Every memory of the terrible rainy night of the accident had faded into the gray nothing of traumatic distance, but this one memory reached out of that fog of willful forgetting to seize him.

It was a shape in fire. Circles and lines. Complex and fractal.

He imagined this new shape, this eye, in that same fire. Wasn’t it similar? Didn’t it remind him of something, some moment —

The voice came to him, and it was still alien in its familiarity. The sound of an inferno consuming the last support of a roof, allowing it to cave in with a tower of sparks and embers into the night sky, forming an eye, blinded:

Sightless Gaze Behind the Eye of the Sun

That voice was not from the world Riley knew. That voice was from whatever place he’d been imagining, whatever other world he’d been fantasizing about.

His eyes snapped open. The voice had been loud, thundering, and surely whatever monstrous thing had spoken those words would be towering above him. Surely whatever had made that sound would have flattened the trees with the pressure wave of its voice.

But what he saw was not a vast being of fire, was not a collapsing forest, was not some kind of cosmic horror of terrifying proportions.

What he saw was a black rectangle, hanging in the space in front of him, in the space under the tree. The size and shape of a door. Not black as a color, but black as a hole into space, a piece of reality that was just missing. Its edges were lined with orange fire, running like liquid down its sides, as though this hole were burned into the fabric of the world.

There was no light inside the hole. There was nothing inside the hole.

Riley stood there, swaying, feeling suspended between fear and excitement. He was dreaming, he had no doubt of that; his dreams had become so vivid and horrible lately, and this was just one of them. But what would happen if he did this in a dream? What kind of dreamland would he reach if he took the obvious next step?

He’d wake up on the ground here, under the tree, having passed out while standing there lost in his own thoughts, of course. He knew this. It was pointless to imagine otherwise.

But that part of him, that careful and frightened part of him that kept him safe and kept his emotions walled away and kept him from reaching out to the people and the world around him, that part of him that told him this was a dream and that he should wake up, it was far away right now.

The burning shape in his mind was much closer.

And the burning shape in his mind wanted him to do it.

The shape wanted him to step into the hole.

It’s what it was there for.

It’s what Riley had called it for.

Step into the hole. Step through to its other side. Step through. You wanted this. You called me. You made this happen. Step through.

Step. Through.

###

You’re going to find something you weren’t expecting here.

You’re running from it, and you think this is part of that. You think this is a magical portal to another world, and you’re going to step through it, and your life is going to mean something to someone at last.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t run from this. You’re bringing it with you as you step across this threshold. In a real sense, what you’re running from is what’s allowing you to run. What you’re afraid of is exactly why there’s an orange-fire rectangle of impenetrable void-black hanging in the air in front of you.

So you step into it. You don’t really have a choice, although you try to tell yourself you were just in a trance. You were never going to turn away from magic.

You are torn between the places you’re straddling, one foot through the portal, one foot still on the ground of the park. The distance between those two places is not measured in simple meters, nor is it measured in seconds, nor any combination of the two. It’s a measurement of meaning, of consequence, of forms. And in the moment of your crossing, you are torn, and it is very nearly a literal thing, a tearing of your body into two pieces, one left behind in the originating reality, the other falling with viscera and gore into the world of the Anchor, a messy reminder that magic is not to be fucked with.

But you aren’t torn in two.

In fact, you won’t even remember that it was a possibility, that you were even at risk of such a thing. You won’t remember it because it’s only by forgetting it that you can make this crossing and still be yourself.

Well, yourself for now. Because that’s another thing you won’t remember: the way you changed when you stepped across.

The way your carefully curated mask, the character you’ve imagined for yourself, slipped askew so slightly. The moment you stopped clinging to him so desperately. The moment you lost your grip and something else took up awareness in your soul.

You know who it is, don’t you? You’ve always known.

###

Therese hit the door of Headmistress Gaveny’s office at speed, with the heel of her hand and then her shoulder. Her breath was coming in gasps from the run up the long flights of stairs; why the Tower’s builders had put the headmistress’s office on the uppermost floor of the place was a mystery to her, and every time she’d had to make a report in a hurry and had to take those blasted stairs from the Divination study, she’d cursed them for the presumption of athleticism in what was otherwise an extremely sedentary occupation.

Gaveny looked up from her desk, where a pile of paperwork was being slowly moved from an IN pile to an OUT pile, with a brief stop in a bare central zone littered with pens and covered by a desk blotter. “Therese. For that sort of entrance, this had better be–”

“He’s just opened a Portal.”

Gaveny stopped herself, reproach clearly on her lips, and Therese gulped air in the brief moment of silence she was allowed. Then the headmistress took her reading glasses off, folded them and set them down, and gestured for her to approach. “This is regarding… the same boy. From earlier in the year. The one you’ve been… monitoring.” She said it like she wanted to say ‘stalking’, but they’d had that conversation already.

“Yes. I was right.” She wanted to be triumphant but the implications of what she was telling Gaveny were far too serious for that kind of satisfaction. “He called a Sigil and he broke it and he Worked a Portal.”

Gaveny gave her a long look. “You’ve alerted Ianthe, I assume.”

Therese nodded vigorously. Her breath was still rapid but she could finally feel it starting to slow. “I stopped at the Captain’s office on the way up here. She’s assembling a patrol to pick him up.”

The headmistress stood, her chair grinding back with a shudder of friction giving way, wood on wooden floors. and began to pace. “We don’t have anything like procedures for this, you realize. I don’t even know where to begin with him.” She shook her head. “Aside from the logistical issues, how do we even do intake with–”

She left the rest unsaid, turning her eyes sharply back to Therese. The headmistress was terrifying under normal circumstances, her two centuries of life and the half-mythical stories of her rise to power leading the way when she spoke. “You’re absolutely certain he opened this Portal? It wasn’t something natural, some kind of warp, something demonic?”

Therese shook her head. “I still have the telltale Working attached to him. As soon as he touched the celestial realm and started calling the Sigil, I was alerted. It was him. It was all him.” She gulped. “What does it mean?”

Gaveny shook her head once, curtly. “It means we don’t know everything there is to know about magic, which we already knew. It also means I have to go meet with the Council, before Captain Ianthe’s team brings in this boy.”

Therese took this as a dismissal, which it was, and made some assurances of continuing to monitor the situation, which the headmistress waved her agreement to. She was already gone, mentally, working her way through the problem presented by this Riley, outlining the situation in her head for presentation to the Council, and generally doing important administrative thinking. Therese retreated back through the door, her shoulder and elbow aching from smashing them into thick and heavy oak.

Key was waiting for her just out of the antechamber, in the hall. Therese had brushed past her friend on the way up the stairs, gasping ‘no time, no time’ as she passed. Curious, Key had followed, and now she looked expectantly at Therese, who hadn’t been given any instructions as to what she could or couldn’t say, but who was naturally reticent when it came to her actual job — divination was by nature sensitive and delicate and the reports she filed were usually sealed to the Diviner or the Headmistress.

“Well?”

Therese took a long shuddering breath and expelled it, her lungs finally catching up with her, the ache in her thighs reminding her that the Tower was very, very vertical, and that she’d have to go back downstairs eventually, and then she’d almost certainly be summoned back upstairs to retell everything to the Council even though it was all in her reports. Old, cranky Magisters liked to be told things. They hated reading reports. They commissioned them but they hated reading them, and they had staff to do it for them. Even the headmistress had an assistant who briefed her, though hers was at least a celestial construct and thus less offensively a waste of a perfectly talented Adept.

“Let’s go down to the Residence. I need to get my thoughts together, and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about this in a public place.” The broad carpeted hallway outside the Headmistress’s office door ended at a broad platform that extended out over the central tower shaft. The shaft, hundreds of meters across, stretched an impossible distance up beyond the platform they were on. It wasn’t clear what was up there; there were dark places along the inner wall which suggested doors and windows, but no stair went any higher than this.

It seemed like someone ought to be able to construct some kind of Working to get up there, but aside from the inherent dangers of building Workings within the Tower, for use on the Tower itself — it was impenetrable to magic, and even touching its walls with a Working would scatter any called Sigil and collapse the whole magical enterprise — it was also forbidden by Tower law.

The place was taller inside than it was on the outside, and the sunlight that came in from the crystalline dome overhead was sometimes the wrong color, not the orange-white of the world outside the tower, but a deeper red. Like the sun was much, much older up there. And that was a horrifying thought that kept Adepts awake at night.

The Residence was further down than the Divination study, one floor above the classrooms and two above the laboratories. It also had electricity, though unreliably; it was sufficient to allow electrical lights in the halls and lamps in the rooms. Novices soon learned to keep a candle-globe handy for the regular outages when a celestial storm struck the Tower and all the power failed. But in normal weather, the soft yellow glow of the incandescent bulbs was welcome, lacking the soporific effect of dancing candlelight.

After a short discussion, they went to Key’s room. It was further into the winding depths of the Tower, and thus less likely to have anyone passing by and interrupting or, Therese was careful not to point out, overhearing.

Key’s room was divided into two spaces, with a curtain hung to separate them. The front half was a study, with a desk and bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound tomes and stacks of papers and notebooks. The back half was her sleeping area, with a heavy dark wood bed-frame piled with pillows, cushions, blankets, and presumably a mattress somewhere beneath it all. Facing it was an enormous armchair, stuffed and restuffed over endless decades of use, patched and repaired by generations of Adepts.

Therese made for the armchair and collapsed into it. Key dug herself into the pile of pillows and blankets, sitting cross-legged among them, elbows on knees, chin on hands. Waiting, expectantly.

“You know I’ve been monitoring someone in the Primary?”

Key nodded. “You haven’t told me anything about it though. I assumed it was a recruitment thing, but…” She shrugged. Normally a recruitment would be resolved quickly, with the girl either brought into the Tower for intake, or warded with a Working to keep her from messing about with Sigils. Most people chose the latter, for reasons that neither Key nor Therese could make sense of. Who wouldn’t want to learn magic? But the whole prospect was terrifying to the average person, and the brief interview in the Tower’s public areas, the brief exposure to its deep weirdness, was apparently off-putting.

“It was kind of a recruitment.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “I was doing a normal scan, undirected divination, you know, just in case something came up. This was, hm, six months ago Primary time?”

“I remember you got really weird around then, yeah.” Key wasn’t judging, and they’d already talked about it. Or talked about why Therese couldn’t talk about it, anyway. She knew Key had been waiting to hear this bit for the whole of those six months.

“Right, so that was when I first got the initial contact. Partial Sigil, celestial surge, the normal pattern. And then, okay, this was the reason I ‘got really weird’, because the target suddenly reached back and made contact with me. Saw me. It was like I was being scanned by another divination, right back along the path of my own scan.”

“Huh. That’s weird, all right. No idea how that could happen.” She had the look, eyes tipped up towards the ceiling, unseeing, as she sorted through her vast memory of the Tower’s history. “Something interesting to talk to Theory about, I guess.”

Therese had talked to Theory about it, and the results had left her more confused, not less.

Key shrugged. “I mean, it could have just been a broken-off Working? I think Aoife managed half a Working when she was first recruited. Broke a bunch of stuff at her junior high, had to be warded till the Captain could bring her in.”

Therese took a breath, held it for a moment. “Yeah, but. Even if it was just half a Working, enough for the target to somehow see me.” She paused for dramatic effect. “He could see me.”

Key took a moment to parse what she’d said, and then her eyes got big. “He.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not–”

“That’s what I thought. Gaveny said something about ‘we don’t really understand magic’ so I guess it’s possible after all?”

Key shook her head. “Listen, I’m an Archivist, okay? Not once has that ever been recorded. Not even one time. I’ve read the Indexes for three centuries of Archives, which is like, a quarter of the lifetime of the Tower. Only girls can use magic. Only girls can call and break Sigils.” She let the air out between her teeth like a hiss. “It’s like, a law.”

“You’re gonna love the next part, then.” Therese was enjoying stretching this out a bit, building drama for her friend, getting to be the storyteller for once. “So I stuck a telltale Working on him, because that’s procedure, right? I didn’t expect anything from it, because boys can’t do magic, and probably I was mistaken about all of it anyway.” She did a passable imitation of the Headmistress. “‘It is more likely, Therese, that you have been overworked or overtired.’ She didn’t expect anything from it either.”

“But I’m guessing that–”

“I’m getting there,” she said, mock annoyance at Key’s impatience. “An hour ago, the telltale went off. Like in a big way. He was calling down a Sigil right out of the fucking celestial realm. A full Sigil. Uh, the Gaze Behind the Sun’s Eye, I think,” she hurriedly added before Key’s obvious next question.

Key whistled but didn’t interrupt; the named Sigil was powerful and not really the kind of thing an inexperienced recruit could be expected to summon. Therese continued. “Yeah, and then he broke it and made it into a Working and opened a Portal.”

Key blinked. There was silence for a beat, and then she stood up. “That’s bullshit. What the hell actually happened?”

“I’m serious. This kid, Riley, he opened a Portal. Ianthe’s got a team out right now finding where he crossed and bringing him in. He didn’t just touch the celestial and give us a chance to intercept him and… I mean, I guess he did, six months ago, but anyway, he came to us. Like on his own. He stepped into the Last City somewhere, all by himself.” While Kay stood there half-risen, half-turning away, she concluded: “A boy. Made a Portal Working. With no training. And it was successful, and I watched him step through it into our world.”

And after that, there wasn’t really anything left to tell. The two women waited, Therese monitoring Riley’s emotions and sensations and tenuous connection to the celestial realm through the telltale Working she had on him, and relaying the details to Key, who took notes.

###

Riley took a step, and the darkness withdrew from around him like he’d just pushed aside a black curtain and stepped out into stage lights.

This is brain damage was his first thought. Undiagnosed traumatic brain injury from six months ago. Something they’d missed in the hospital, after the accident. He was under a tree in Lake Sammamish State Park, and then he was in a wood-paneled room that smelled of smoke and oil and solvents, and the light–

Well, the light was the same. Orange, like a fire. The light of sunset in a smoke-filled sky.

Overturned tables in the room, with thick clots of dust on them, and drifting motes in the air. This room had been empty for a very long time. Light fixtures on the walls looked ancient, like gas lamps from another era. The whole place looked like it was from another era. Thin, worn curtains filtered the orange light, and he took a step towards them.

Brain damage. A dream. A hallucination. Some kind of trauma response. Re-experiencing that excruciating broken moment on the asphalt, over and over. A horrifying thought appeared in his mind, digging like a barbed hook: what if I’m still on the asphalt, what if I’ve been there the whole time, what if none of this is real, what if this is Jacob’s Ladder —

Another step, his feet stirring dust into clouds. He sneezed, and his breath formed whorls in the drifting motes. By the table nearest, a pile of detritus had slid off its surface when it toppled, and the pile was broken metal and glass, unrecognizable, mixed with tangles of dust, a streak along the table’s surface showing where this stuff had slid. A streak of missing dust, so this had just happened.

He looked behind him, and saw a cleared area, almost a perfect circle, and his footsteps leading back through the dust on the floor to the center of that circle. Around it, radiating outwards, little streaks where larger bits of debris had been grabbed by whatever had cleared the circle (a line of orange fire, a hole in the world) and shoved out radially.

Some kind of explosion, some kind of pressure wave. His mind, unbidden, began doing the math, and he let it buzz on for the distraction. Another step towards the window and the pallid curtain and the orange light.

He reached out to touch it. It crumbled instantly to dust at the faintest brush of his fingers. Beyond, the grimy window revealed only murky shapes of a skyline and an orange sky.

Another step. He pressed his palm to one of the panes of the window. It had sixteen of them, two columns of eight. The framing of the window was some kind of dark metal. Lead? He swiped, taking the grime away, moving it to his hand, gritty and oily and thick with age and baked by the sunlight.

Beyond, the city.

The City. He could see the capital letter in the vista in front of him. Buildings endlessly jumbled out from this place, tangled streets, darkness between the rows of structures. His hand fumbled to the metal lever between the two columns of panes, turned it. The window swung open with a shriek and a shower of rusting metal. The lever snapped off in his hand, and he pushed the window the rest of the way open with his palm.

Below, a dozen stories down, the dark and sooty brick of the building seemed to reach the ground, but it was hard to tell. Bridges and walkways and balconies and arches tangled the space below the window, into murky darkness. It might be a road down there. It might be another walkway with the actual road unfathomable depths further.

The vista of the City stretched out in every direction. It didn’t seem to have an end. Just this thick tangle of urbanity like a bramble of limestone and cinderblock and red brick and wood and rusting iron. Some buildings rising above the melee of architecture were spires of churches, or clock towers, or dark metal and glass, or welded iron superstructures like little Eiffel Towers. The whole of it was incoherent, a cityscape drawn from a jumble of centuries, no building quite the style of its neighbor.

For a moment Riley thought of the Kowloon Walled City, that absurd monument to maximal urban density, that city block of solid building, only prevented from metastasizing across the rest of Hong Kong by obscure law and its own instability. This was Kowloon Walled City writ across the entire world, in every direction, as far as he could see out to the horizon.

Over everything, a haze of fog or soot or smoke, air redolent with the smell of age and ancient, long-dead fires. And the orange light, ever-present, from a sun that seemed to loom too large in the sky, pulsing through the thick atmosphere, wobbling like heat waves and distortion.

In the distance, a tower rose from the City. Perhaps a Tower, given how it dominated the skyline in that direction, broader and taller than the other buildings, rising above them, its top winking with captured sunlight, crystal or glass topping it. The Tower seemed like the climax of the City, as though everything around it existed to raise it up and support its stretch towards the sky.

He was unable to look away, unable to speak. This was beyond anything he could imagine. This couldn’t be brain damage, or a dream, or a hallucination. This was a vision of depth and complexity that his mind could barely encompass while actively looking at it, much less conjure from its own depths.

Whatever this was… he was here. He was here, in this room, in this brownstone building, in this City.

And then, from somewhere under his feet, he heard the sound of a door being forced open, of heavy boots thudding on wood.

It was far below, it was barely audible, but it was a sound that even in his state he could immediately place and assign meaning to: he was listening to the cops, and they were ascending towards him, through the building.

###

Therese had known that everything about her initial contact with Riley had been impossible. She’d asked Nora, right after it had happened, six months ago.

Nora had said, “What you’re describing isn’t possible. Unless you intentionally Work the Divination to flow in both directions, it’s passive. And you say you didn’t do that. So she didn’t see you.”

Therese said, “But if there was another Working, from the target of the divining,” and her pitch turned it into a question.

Nora shook her head. “We went through this already. You know what kind of lightning-fast reaction that would require. She’d need to have the Sigil ready, the Working planned out, and she would need to know you. That knowledge would be required to construct something compatible with your Working.”

Nora was a genius, and Nora said it wasn’t possible, and Therese wanted to believe her, because the two of them had been Novices together. But on the other hand, she’d experienced it.

“What about a passive Working, something like a trap, present on her already?”

Nora shrugged. “Is she a Magister? It would probably require a Magister-level Working to make that happen. It would need to be generalized enough to catch anyone’s divining, and it would need to run constantly. Maybe a Worked object.”

Therese realized that Nora was starting to think of this as a puzzle to be solved: how would she create a reciprocal working? Nora was in the Theory department, and the question interested her on a professional level.

Therese said, “No. This is an initial contact. And it was in a moment of extremity, panic, pain; I’m really not sure what was going on, but she was definitely in a bad situation. I’m going to check back in, set up a tracking telltale, the usual. I’m just stuck on this thing where she saw me.”

Therese was carefully saying ‘she’ and ‘her’ because she didn’t want to add the other impossibility to this conversation.

Nora said, “In the absence of more data? I think it was a coincidence of expression. She only seemed to react as though she could see you.”

Defeated, Therese said, “So what do I do with my report?”

“I’d leave out the impression you had of reciprocity. Diviner Rajavi won’t like it, and she’ll pass it to the Headmistress, who won’t like it, and she’ll pass it to Theory, and then I’ll get assigned to it and I’ll write a report that says everything I just told you, only with twice the detail and citations in the Archives.”

The whole conversation had left Therese in a tangle of embarrassment and frustration. She had worried she’d upset Nora, had somehow driven whatever wedge was between them even further in, had made her think less of Therese.

So she let her go back to work and dropped the subject.

Now, sitting in Key’s room, she considered sending a Novice to go get Nora, bring her up to the Residences, join her and Key in monitoring Riley’s situation. But what if that felt like some kind of smug ‘I told you so’? What if Nora got irritated with her again? What if the whole thing was somehow still a false alarm, and Captain Ianthe got there and found nothing but the tail end of a failed Working, or something worse?

So instead she just sat and fretted and wished she knew how to talk to Nora.

###

Having never particularly been in trouble before, Riley’s first impulse was to freeze, wait, see if the approaching thuds would lead to people who could explain to him what the fuck was going on. But this was clearly not an ordinary situation, something where being white and male and affluent would be enough to ensure he’d be safer with the authorities than not.

For instance: who were ‘the authorities’ in this place, anyway? Who was roaming these endless ruins, enforcing what laws, and on what inhabitants? Christ, for all he knew the people ascending towards him were cannibals, here to harvest him for his meat. Once you’ve accepted the fundamentally impossible first premise — I’m somewhere in the belly of an endless city, in another world — every conclusion was equally valid. Cannibals. Cultists. Aliens.

Okay, there’s two doors out of this room. One of them is opposite the window, and one of them is on the wall to the right of the window. Both are identical, paneled wood, dark and stained at the bottom as though this impossible room had flooded once, water wicking up through the wood.

The way out of this was going to involve stairs. Up or down, but stairs. He was a ways above the general scrum of the cityscape, maybe four or five floors. That’s where there might be bridges or exits or something other than impossible vistas. So there wasn’t going to be an exit on this floor, and he needed to get further down.

Stairs, stairs. A stairwell would probably be close to the middle of the building, right? That’s away from the window. He dashed across the room, his head swimming with the sudden movement, his balance off. Something about the incomprehensible arrival here. He wasn’t entirely present yet. He was dissociating, like he was detached from his body and experiences, a distant pilot observing the shape of him reach the door, tug the handle.

A short hall, with doors to either side and one at the end, the one at the end with a frosted glass pane with writing on it. The writing was meaningless symbology, no language he recognized. He hit the door with his shoulder, grappling at the handle. The thudding was getting louder.

The door opened into a stairwell, a big open thing with railings, a central shaft illuminated by a pyramidal peaked glass roof overhead. Orange light piercing through the gloom below, with motes of dust dancing through the beams. Balconies wrapping around the shaft, then a flight of stairs descending to the next, and the next. He could hear the echoing boot-falls from the shaft. This is where they were climbing to meet him.

He hit the railing with all the momentum of the forced-open door, swung his head out and over the edge to peer down. There were lights, dancing. Not flashlights, oddly? Not piercing beams from mag-lites, clustering like a fistful of lightning straws. No, these were dancing flame, and… they were spheres of fire, and the spheres were drifting slowly up through the shaft, keeping pace with the cluster of moving dark shapes six floors below.

There was a shout from below. They’d seen him.

“Stop where you are! Don’t make us–”

English, so there was that. He turned and ran for the stairs up.

Taking the stairs two at a time, his hip rapidly escalating from an ache to a howl of pain, he hit the next landing, and then the next. Four floors up to the roof. No idea what he’d find there, but maybe there was a fire escape. Maybe another building next to this one.

The door at the top of the last flight of stairs was locked, but it was also as ancient as the rest of this rusted and rotten pile. The corroded metal exploded in a shower of rust flakes as he kicked at it. Two more kicks and the hole in the center of the door was large enough to shove himself through, the ragged edges of the metal leaving bloody scrapes along his back and arm.

It was nice to know that, as part of being in a horrifying car accident that involved broken shrapnel tearing through his skin, Riley was definitely up to date on his tetanus shots.

The door opened out of one of those little rooftop sheds, onto a debris-strewn tarry surface with the pyramidal glass off to his right. Riley took three limping strides to the edge of the roof, leaning over. No fire escape, no nearby building. This was the same side as the window he’d looked out of. There was the Tower, right ahead of him. Next.

The roof edge to the right was bridged by a few planks of wood, forming a slope down to the roof of the next building, just a half-story below the one he was on. The space between the buildings was just an alley-width, just a jump’s distance. He considered as the cops, or soldiers, or whoever they were arrived at the door to the roof. They were smashing out the rest of the corroded metal to safely join him out here.

“Hold it! There’s no way down from–”

He leaped up onto the wall that formed the roof’s lip, and stepped out onto the planks.

He was two cautious steps out from the edge when he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

The planks were the same as the rest of this place, corroded by time and weather and baking orange sunlight. Maybe this was a way between the buildings a thousand years ago but now it was just splinters under his feet–

–he shoved himself forward, too much of his weight forward of his center of mass to jump back to where he started.

The planks crumbled away into a shower of wooden shards, and–

his fingertips caught the far edge. Fingertips. And he was slipping.

“Idiot!” From behind him, the voice of the cop. A woman’s voice, clipped and snarling and gravelly. “Fuck, someone get a Working–”

–then his hands slipped and he fell.

###

in the darkness, a tree
— lightning bolt
— — fractal fire
— broken glass
— — angel

A symbol scrawled in white fire, circle pierced by three parallel lines, the last one a hook that twisted into a spiral, descending —

i am the Keeper of the Final Word of Causality

yes, that, the Keeper, it blazed in her mind, it wrote itself across her soul, consuming her, making her into it

no

no i am not you–

###

Therese’s eyes went very wide. “Oh fuck,” she said, startling Key from her book.

“Therese? What’s happening?”

“He’s fucking Working again.” The telltale Working continued to dutifully report Riley’s status, and when he’d reached out for a Sigil, it had immediately gone to full alert, shocking Therese from her nervous fidgeting. “The, the Keeper of Causality, i think.”

The further from reality a Sigil was, the less sense its name made, and the more power it held. What Riley was calling up was something absurdly powerful, something with which a competent Adept could rewrite the laws of reality.

“Oh shit, what the hell is he doing with that?”

Therese scrunched her face up in concentration, her eyes clenched shut, her hands fluttering uselessly in front of her. “Falling? No, he’s… uh, he’s… what the fuck.”

“Tee, tell me–”

“I think he just turned off gravity.”

In the distance, there was a throbbing rumble. The Tower was waking up.

###

Riley was lying on his back. Above him a narrow rail of light split his view into two fields of darkness. The rail of light was hazy orange. The sky. The fields of darkness were– walls. The sides of buildings. He was lying on his back in an alley. No, a narrow rooftop; just the width of an alley. Corroded vent caps dotted the long rectangle of tar and gravel.

Bits of brick grit were raining down on him. Ow. One of them got into his eye, and he blinked furiously as tears tried to wash it loose.

Heaving himself onto an elbow, and then up onto his hand, he expected the explosion of pain. It didn’t come. Hadn’t he fallen? Hadn’t he fallen like, ten stories?

He looked around and found himself in the exact middle of a crater-like circle. The roof was buckled around him, like a pressure wave had exploded away from him. Like the circle in the dust upstairs, only more so. His head was howling in pain. His left eye, still watering from the grit, was partially blinded by a scintillating shape, like the vibrating color-field of a migraine aura

keeper

but the shape was fading, like the afterimage of a light bulb. He shook his head to try to clear it, and regretted it as pain lanced through his temples. He staggered to his feet, wobbling, barely able to balance. It was like the roof was slanted ever so slightly, at least as far as his ability to stand up straight was concerned.

A thud from behind him, and then another. He whirled around to see the black-clothed soldier figures landing gently onto the roof, as though parachuting down this narrow alley. A globe of fire followed them, casting weird flickering shadows throughout the space, picking Riley’s figure out as a massive shadow monster looming above him on the wall.

He staggered backwards, felt his headache begin to throb in time with some inner pulse, tripped as he looked for footing he couldn’t quite manage–

“No, goddammit, stop it!”

The woman’s voice was a sharp angry command, and she closed the distance to him in a flash. He could see her face through the visor of her helmet. Middle aged, lined, blonde hair ragged and mussed around her face like it had come untucked, her skin slick with sweat and her eyes bloodshot. “We’re trying to help you, Riley!”

He didn’t have time to think about how she knew his name. He croaked something incoherent in a voice that seemed to belong to an ancient old man, and a new shape of fire began to rise in his mind’s eye.

The woman backhanded him, once, right across the face. Riley spun an almost graceful ballet half-turn, catching himself against the wall. Before he could stand, she was on him, her forearm an iron bar across his throat. “No more Working, you idiot!”

He had no idea what that meant, but her arm was pressing into his throat and he couldn’t breathe. Darkness swam at the edges of his vision, and he fell down a very deep tunnel into it, unconsciousness taking him.

###

“He’s unconscious. Not dead.” Therese finally took the long deep breath her body had been ever-more-insistently demanding. “They got to him before the Tower did, I guess.”

In the gloom of the darkened room, Key was wide-eyed with a kind of attentive near-panic, gasping each time the structure around them rumbled in a celestial tantrum. They could both feel it, throbbing within their minds, the Tower reasserting its dominion over reality around it, smoothing out the tears and warps in the fabric of spacetime, redefining normal all around them.

If the Tower needed to remove someone to reclaim normal for itself, they’d be unmade. After all, they were all strangers here, in this world. They lived in the Tower by its incomprehensible dispensation, given license to scurry through its bowels by some ancient bargain no living Magister could entirely explain. The consequences of violating this bargain, the breach of celestial contract that none of them could actually read, were drilled into Novices from their first weeks in the Tower.

Do not fuck with reality here.

Yes, it might be possible to pull down the sun or tear a hole in the universe with enough application of celestial power. But the more you stretched the laws of existence, the more effort the Tower had to make to return everything to a status quo. Handy for cleaning up the mistakes of overeager Novices learning magic for the very first time.

Deadly for Adepts calling the really big sigils down to tamper with the nature of existence itself.

The electricity had gone out almost immediately, and now the room was lit by floating candle-globes that hovered in the corners, seeking the best positions to create the most dramatic shadows, as they’d been Worked to do.

Key was terrified because an awakened Tower was unpredictable, and these shudders were, while not the largest either of them had ever felt, certainly at the level of ‘the headmistress is going to call an all-hands and someone is going to get yelled at’ significance.

Therese was terrified because she was still tethered to the source of the upset by a telltale, a Working that formed a channel from this boy directly to her. She couldn’t break it off until she knew for certain he’d been captured, but her hands trembled with the effort of not ‘accidentally’ undoing the knot of celestial forces that held the Working in place.

Just wait for the all clear. Just wait for the all clear.

This was going to cause one hell of a celestial storm, she thought.

Minutes passed and began to creep towards a half an hour, and Key got up to boil some water and make tea. Neither of them had spoken again. Key had a notebook out, and a pen, and had been making scratches in the jagged mess she called handwriting. Someone would have to record all this, and she was the Archivist in the room, and she took that seriously. As she returned with two cups of steeping tea, she looked over what she’d written.

Therese let her face drop into the palms of her hands. Her temples were starting to throb with a deep headache.

Then the headache spiked, hard, and she almost dropped her teacup.

And then a voice came through her Worked telltale link; a familiar voice, strong and confident. Therese?

It was Captain Ianthe, contacting her along the telltale. The headache wasn’t hers, it was Riley’s. Fuck, she could only imagine how bad it must be for him with this much leaking through to her. Was this because he was a boy, or was it something to do with the Working he’d tried, or–

Therese. We’ve secured your target. Seems like the Tower’s not going to erase us. We’re bringing her– uh, we’re bringing him in. The pronoun was strangely shaped in the Captain’s mental speech. Unfamiliar. Not a construction any of them had a lot of cause to use.

Got it. Okay if I drop the telltale? I’m worried about the Tower, and well… whatever he did, it fucking hurts.

There was a sensation of embarrassment. I hit him pretty hard. Might be my fault. Sorry about that. Go ahead and drop it. Ianthe out.

Therese unwound the celestial knot, let the forces of her Working slip back into the larger cosmos, and slumped in relief. “Done.” She repeated everything the Captain had said for Key’s benefit, and Key carefully transcribed it all, and then looked more closely at her face. “You look like shit, Therese. You want to crash here for a bit? I’ve got to get this written up for the weekly, so I’m not going to be using the bed.”

Therese nodded wordlessly, heaved herself up to her feet.

Key tucked her in and kissed her forehead. “I’ll try to be quiet.”

Therese smiled a little. “Don’t think it will matter. I’m about… about to…”

And then she was gone, a faint snore rising from her half-open mouth.

###

You’re aware of the price you’ve been paying for each of these white-fire moments, finally. You feel the price printed into your skin, the coursing of unfamiliar blood through your veins, the swirl of emotions you don’t even have time to recognize, much less sort.

You feel like you’re on the verge of some kind of understanding, each time it happens. It’s that tip of the tongue sensation, where you know the word is right there. Only in this case, it isn’t a word, it’s an explanation. Something to tell you what the fuck is happening to you. Something that will make that white-fire tree of symbols make sense. It’s so fucking familiar, a dream you remember from childhood, something you saw once, or drew once, or… something.

But each time it’s all swept away in the noise that crashes through your mind. It’s like trying to hear the song of a siren out away on a rock, far into the sea, while you’re standing among the rocky cliffs at the shore, each wave receding for just long enough to remind you that there is, in fact, a song being sung. A note or two, no more, until the next cacophonous decibel-spike drives it from your awareness once again.

It’s as though someone is trying to talk to you. Someone familiar. Someone you know. And they’re saying things you can almost understand.

It’s that kind of tip-of-the-tongue moment. Incredibly frustrating, isn’t it? Because if the noise would just stop for a moment, you’d be able to — no, it’s gone again.

There’s a pain in your jaw, and a pain in your throat. Those are real, those aren’t a metaphor. Those, you can feel with your body and your actual flesh. Those aren’t part of the price in the same way. That’s a person who did that to you.

Though in a way, your inability to hear that distant voice is the reason you just got backhanded in the face, isn’t it? Because you’re scared, and you’re straining so hard to hear and understand, and since you stepped through that portal, your emotions have been pure chaos, and your desperation is a lens through which they’re being magnified.

And that’s doing things. Here, in this place, that’s meaningful. Your raw panic and even excitement is surging out of you, and things are responding to your unformed elemental needs. Things that are about as far from human comprehension as it’s possible to be. Not in the tentacles-and-eyeballs sense, though there’s likely plenty of that as well. These are sketches drawn on paper that penetrates reality, lying crosswise to your perceptions, aligning one way and then the next, cycling through a thousand permutations, none of them entirely visible within the world you imagine you’re perceiving.

Imagine being able to see that there are extra frames inserted, microseconds long each, between the moments of reality as you perceive them.

Imagine almost being able to see those frames, to see the universe as it might appear to someone who sees only those frames. A second movie being projected simultaneously with the one you’ve been watching all your life. And it’s always been there, the whole time.

And it is awake, and it can see you.