The tether came first, binding Nathan to the circle, tying him to this world. Then the battery, raising magic into the circle first, before directing it into a concentrated point. Oxygen for his metaphysical lifeline. Then the containment to keep the magic stable on the other side. All if it was modeled on the old magic, as close to blending with the nature of the summoning as we could make it. And piece by piece, it came together.
When it was time to open the portal, the shadow had either lost patience, panicked, or realized what we were trying to do. It flowed around the edge of the circle, spreading and expanding until everything inside was obscured. If Nathan was dead in there, we wouldn’t have known.
I caught Lucas look for Nathan as he cast, his expression worried. To my other side, Hunter’s face was pinched with concentration and concern.
All we could do was keep going. Like Nathan said. No matter what happened.
This was the part I dreaded most. I let the guttural words bubble up from inside. The jerky motions of the ancient magic came as natural as a well-practiced dance—as if I wasn’t so much casting the spell as trying to get out of its way. I couldn’t even hate how it felt for the magic to come so clearly. All there was, was the spell. My Path. Just like before, it was hard not to be elated by the feeling of magic that came so easily that I could practically breathe it.
“…lugaldimmu essu atate…” Magic swelled and flowed and pierced something inside the circle. Some skin that resisted. Creation itself. Different than before, but not entirely. That had been a calling, a kind of prayer to the Abyss. This was more forceful. Not a beckoning, but an invasion, and when I hissed the final word and thrust my hands forward toward the circle, pressed together, I felt the barrier between our world and that un-world part.
I gripped two sides of the tear and tore them wide.
Inside the circle, the shadow swirled, retracted, and folded in on itself. When enough of it cleared, a lightless disc of black hung in the air before Nathan. The shadow flowed into him, into his open mouth, his eyes, his ears. It was running, hiding itself, just like we knew it would.
Nathan got to his feet, swaying, as the last of the shadow vanished into him. For a moment, he stared blankly at the ground, frozen. I held the portal open, magic coursing through me like ice water and lightning. He had to go in. That was the next part. He had to go in and do the rest of the ritual there. If he didn’t…
He looked up at me, and I saw his eyes. Black, from edge to edge, all the white gone. The corner of his lip twitched up.
Something was wrong. “Wait—”
Before I could close the portal, Nathan turned and dove through it. My chest tightened, and for half a second everyone around the circle except Hayes stopped chanting.
“No!” I shouted at them. “No, keep going, keep the circle closed.”
They picked up again, but I could see on their faces the doubts. Nathan had gone through. He was in the Abyss. But I could feel the tether, feel the sheathing spell that would keep it connected. Now, we just had to wait for Nathan to do his part. To free himself from the shadow.
My arms shook. The magic began to thin, and without its full strength it was a matter of will to keep the portal opened. Worse, the longer it stood wide, the more I could feel pressure building from different angles. The terrestrial world itself, furious at my affront—and something from beyond. The nature of the portal was specific, the spell crafted to prevent anything crossing over that wasn’t invited, but this was one of those variables we just couldn’t predict. The portal itself was a membrane where abyssal and terrestrial magic touched, and where they mingled the rules weren’t consistent. There was no math that could prove how they were affected one another.
“How long is it supposed to take?” Hunter shouted quickly between repetitions of the spell.
“He’s been in too long,” Hayes barked. “Amelia—you have to close it. He’s lost.”
“No,” I shouted back, blinking a stinging drop of sweat from and eye, “just… just give him time!”
Something slammed against the portal from the other side. I barely managed to hold it, opening myself to magic until I thought my skin would peel. My bones vibrated with it, and when the strike came again, I felt it in my joints, like something had struck me physically.
“What’s happening?” Lucas asked. “Amelia?”
“I… I can’t…” I couldn’t hold it open. Not from here, not from the outside. Not against whatever was pushing against it. If I closed it, there would be no opening it again—Nathan would be gone. Trapped there forever. It would be my fault. I was the one that failed.
“Stop,” I told them. “Stop casting!”
All of them stared at me, horrified as their lips and hands continued to move.
“You have to… I need a window, just count to five!” I winced as another blow struck the portal and nearly drove me to my knees. Maybe it was Nathan. Maybe he couldn’t get back out. “Count!”
The other five magicians all stopped, their hands still in the starting position of the sealing spell. They were quiet. I counted.
One.
The sound from the portal was piercing, a tearing kind of wail that ripped at my ears and scraped over my skin like sandpaper. Whether it was a real sound or not, I didn’t know—maybe it was just the friction between the two dimensions, clawing at one another like cats.
Two.
The shimmer in the air faded slightly. I nudged a toe over the edge of the circle, and felt only a slight resistance, as if the air there were thick but not impenetrable.
“Amelia?” Hunter asked.
Three.
I stepped over the line, my hands still spread, careful not to step on the fine lines of the circle’s inner diagram.
“No!” Isaac shouted. “No, Amelia—don’t do this, Nathan wouldn’t—”
Four.
“Seal it back up,” I told them. I paused at the threshold of the disk. This close to it, I couldn’t hear myself think, but I could feel the magic thick and pulsing around me. “I’ll be back.”
Lucas started to move, taking a step toward me.
Five.
I leapt. Into the black.
Into the Abyss.
Amelia
I looked down at my hands. I had hands. I was standing on something, as well. Nothing that I could see, or even really feel—there was just a sense of beneath. A ground of some kind.
It wasn’t cold there, or hot, or… anything. I could only barely feel my body, and it was more of a sense of shape than skin, and bones, and muscle. Like everything was numb.
“Nathan?” I called out, but there was no echo, as if the sound of my voice was confined to my own head. The tether, though—I could feel magic. I could feel it vibrating and almost hear it like a neon sign, buzzing just beyond what I could see.
A voice answered me.
It wasn’t Nathan.
Welcome home, daughter.
The voice was all around me. Inside me. It was the fabric of the place itself. The voice wasn’t feminine, or masculine, or anything at all except the words themselves, forming all around me with the same certainty that I would say my own name with. I knew who it was. What it was. Fear gripped me, permeated through me, as if I had become only that.
I have something that belongs to you.
In the darkness ahead of me, I could see Nathan. He was within arm’s reach, or maybe a hundred miles away, or on the other side of the universe for all I could tell. His hands moved sluggishly, his lips moving. He was trying. He was working the spell.
Do you want him back?
“I’m not making any deals,” I told Az-Harad. “If you don’t give him back, I’ll close the portal. We’ll all be stuck here, and your Harbinger plan is over.”
Dear one, Az-Harad crooned, you are my beloved. How could I deny you anything? I wish only to give you everything. If you want it, take it with you.
“You know damn well why we came here,” I said. “You infected him. I
f you want to give me what I want, then what I want is for you to take it out of him. Your… shadow.”
Your sibling, Az-Harad corrected. As much a part of me as you are.
If I had a real stomach there, I might have thrown up at the way the Dreadmother said it. I felt something where my cheeks should have been, a brief burst of sensation like the back of a hand caressing me. I flinched away. “I’ve told you what I want.”
So you have. See. It is cleansed.
Nathan jerked, and his face was momentarily obscured by black smoke as the shadow poured out of him and vanished into the emptiness of the Abyss.
Have I pleased you, daughter?
The portal was all around me, a pressure that seemed like it would squeeze me deeper into the Abyss. Without a sense of space to measure it, I couldn’t tell which direction it was. It was in all directions, maybe. I had to get to Nathan, get him back out, before I couldn’t hold it anymore.
You weaken, Az-Harad whispered. Senseless struggle. What need have you, my beloved, my Harbinger, of such withered power? Do you not know what I have given you?
I tried to will myself toward Nathan. He was so close, in one frame of reference, but the moment I tried to reach for him he was far away. “I don’t want it, whatever it is,” I told the outsider. “I didn’t ask for anything from you. I never will!”
Won’t you? She questioned, and as she did the void around me rippled, twisted, broke into a thousand, million images that rose and fell out of sight.
People screamed, all around me. I saw Cambridge, Laura’s house, twisting open like some kind of flower as it groaned. Black rot spread from beneath it, traveled over the ground and caught a woman running down the sidewalk. It spread up her legs, and her flesh split and cracked, and tendrils sprang from the cracks like worms, until she sloughed off her skin and a mass of writhing worms burst free of the body and slithered across the broken road to envelop someone who’d fallen over a jagged ledge of concrete.
I tore my eyes away, but that only turned my attention to Rosewilde. The walls of the academy cracked, and an inky mass leaked from it and into the sky. It began to tear chunks of the sky out of place like chipped paint, and beyond it a billion red eyes blinked against the light before they descended and flooded the mountains. Black stained the landscape, consuming trees, the earth, everything in sight.
It didn’t matter which direction I looked. There were countless visions, each arising from the Abyss like snakes, each moment a shimmering scale leading to a gaping maw where the end waited. Timelines. Laid out bare, and without a physical brain, a nervous system to limit how much information I could absorb at a glance it threatened to drive me insane. All I could do was close my eyes, but even that didn’t keep the images out.
The worst of them were of me. I stood in Sinclaire’s temple, my arms outstretched, my eyes black, my skin peeling back to reveal a void beneath. I smiled as I tore the world to pieces and let everything in the Abyss into creation. In another, I was on a mountain top. In another I was older, lines marking my face, weeping black ichor as I opened a passage in the midst of a vast wasteland. Sometimes I was at home, in Laura’s house. Sometimes I was in the middle of Cambridge. Sometimes I was with Hunter, and Lucas, and Isaac, and Nathan. They stood behind me, their hands raised with mine, their eyes black like mine.
Az-Harad showed me endless variations. Every one of them led to the same place.
You were always mine, beloved, Az-Harad sang. My chosen, my precious one. You were… always.
I saw myself—here, in the Abyss, suspended among the writhing timelines. Just as I was when I entered the portal. Wearing jeans. In a lab coat. My hair cut short, or all the way to my waist. Endless timelines, all showing the same event. It struck me as I watched them play out, as they burned themselves into my consciousness—I was always going to end up here. One way or another… this was always going to happen.
“No,” I rasped, “no… you don’t… I make my own fate! All you have are lies, Az-Harad! And I won’t accept them. None of them! Give him back to me, now!”
The visions winked out of existence as if they’d never been.
Take him, Az-Harad offered, and return. You have so much more work to do, my sweet one.
I saw Nathan again, twisting around in the darkness, his hands moving slowly as he tried to cast something, tried to draw on the magic we’d packaged up for this little trip, but failing. I reached for him, but he was too far. Az-Harad was toying with me. I pushed against the Abyss with all my will, tried to leverage myself against the edges of the open portal.
You reach for that which is far away, Az-Harad whispered. This is your domain, precious child.
As much as I hated the feeling of the outsider’s voice, it touched some instinct inside me. Nathan wasn’t separated from me at all. There was no space, no distance here. Only perception.
I stopped reaching. I opened my hand and closed it around Nathan’s wrist.
With the same instinct, I stepped through the portal.
The world reappeared around us. It was disorienting. Gravity dragged against my limbs. Magic rushed in, filling an emptiness that I hadn’t noticed inside the Abyss, but now that I could feel it again… it was like being able to breathe, or drink water again, or feel my own blood flowing in my veins.
“Amelia! Nathan!”
I couldn’t tell which direction the voice was coming from, or who it belonged to. Hayes? Lucas? Hunter? I swiveled my head around.
“The portal!” They shouted. “Amelia, you’re through; close the portal!”
I didn’t understand the words at first. I looked around, trying to make sense of it. Up, down, left, right—directions, distance. The floor was too close to me, my arms were too short—or too long, and it was too far away. Christ, I couldn’t have been in there for more than a few minutes, maybe an hour? It had felt like forever.
Nathan had been there for a year. Or, had he?
“The portal!”
That was Hayes. Time and space reoriented in my brain. Names, faces, voices all slipped back into place. So did magic.
I looked behind me. The portal loomed over Nathan and me, a solid disc cut out of the world. The edges began to fray. Tiny filaments of abyssal black slowly worming away from the portal and into the surrounding reality. Except I wasn’t holding it open. I dropped the magic entirely or tried to. Some force pulled at it, dragged at me from the inside.
“I… I can’t,” I wheezed from the ground.
Strong hands found my shoulders and pulled me to my feet. Nathan turned me to face him, peered into my eyes. “Amelia. You can.”
There was a pulse that struck the air. Both of us staggered. Around the circle, so did the others.
“What…?” Hayes’ casting faltered. She stared past us, at the portal, her eyes slowly widening. “No…”
Nathan and I turned together. Deep in the black, pinpricks of red glinted to life. A howling wind picked up, pouring out of the void as the swarm of red eyes came rushing toward us from an infinite distance away.
“I saw this,” I breathed. “I—Nathan, I—“
“Focus,” he snapped. “Together. Move, Amelia!”
He turned to face the portal and raised his hands. His hands swept around, fingers clawed, and he chanted the words to close the circle, and the portal. Once I was able to push through the shock and terror, I joined him. It took us another repetition to get in sync, and then our voices melded until they felt like one sound, vibrating between us. Our movements were so identical, I could almost feel his limbs in place of my own, some kind of optical illusion or maybe the way the magic resonated between us.
And a bit at a time, the edges of the portal smoothed. The current of magic waned. It began to close.
And then it stopped.
Nathan’s voice rose, maybe to cast more forcefully, and maybe out of the same panic I felt. We glanced at one another long enough to try and exchange some signal, a silent oh, shit that we both felt. Something was
pushing back, holding the edges of the portal wide open, trying to make way for the hungering hoard that sped toward us. We got through three more chants, three more wild, ancient dances before it became clear that there just wasn’t magic enough to do it. It had to be the circle; we were inside it instead of out.
Nathan turned to Hunter. “You have to let us out. Drop the containment, we can’t close it from the inside.”
Hunter nodded, dropped his hands and stopped chanting.
“No!” Hayes snapped. “Mister Webb, resume you chant.”
I turned to her, horrified. “Headmistress, we—“
She raised her voice in the chant as Lucas, Isaac and Serena stopped. It wasn’t enough. Hayes on her own was a powerful magician, maybe strong enough to stem the flow of magic over the circle. There was grim determination in her eyes.
Worse—there was someone on the stairs behind her.
“Pepper,” Aramus Klein said, his accent unmistakable, “give the order.”
They were going to shut it down. Close us in here, or whatever the failsafe was. I caught Lucas’s eye, and looked down at the edge of the circle. He didn’t nod or acknowledge me. He just acted. His hands came together and slammed into the ground as he dropped to a knee and shouted a spell that was simple, short, and direct. A most destructive magic.
The ground shuddered. The veins on Lucas’s neck bulged as he exerted himself, and a crack formed before him and spread across the ground into the circle.
Magic broke free like a snapped rubber band. It struck everyone in the cavern except Nathan and me, who were tugged at by other forces as the portal was unleashed. Magic welled up, coming within reach, and Nathan didn’t miss a beat as he spun and began the closing sequence again.
He will fail, that horrible voice came again, just inside my ear, between my eyes, in my bones. It is too late. It is as I showed you, dearest. Your siblings come to join you. To prepare the way for me.
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 28