by Rebecca Hall
He opened his hand and his eyes widened when he realised what he was holding. Not a mote of light, a sigil. It slipped through his fingers and drifted back into place. Mitch sharpened his vision and shivered, they were all sigils, every single star, every single point of light. Any doubt he might have had about this being the right place vanished. This was the Heart of Faerie. This was the Twisted Curse. He’d never thought that it would be so beautiful.
He looked at it in awe. In wonder. In growing consternation as he realised the sheer scale of the task before him. The Heart of Faerie was vast and featureless, everything mutable and constantly changing and he was supposed to break it? He didn’t even know where to begin. The centre? The edges? He wasn’t sure where he was relative to either.
Something caught his eye. A flash of hard colour, a flicker of deliberate movement, a well defined edge and he spun, peering into a dense cloud of mist. He stared into the heart of a star, the light so bright that he blinked and when he opened his eyes it was gone, replaced by a forest that dissolved and reformed into a vast abyss.
There were images all around them now, appearing in the densest drifts of mist only to dissolve as it shifted. Stars, forests, planets, alien lifeforms… The Other World, Mitch realised, all of it, not just Earth. He revised his estimation of just how big Faerie was and how impossible their task. They were just two little people, there was no way they could destroy something this large.
He opened his mouth to speak and only managed a dry croak. He swallowed a mouthful of water and tried again.
“What happens if Nikola is right?” Mitch asked. There was so much magic here that he couldn’t even feel it as anything more than white noise and the tightness in his head. If ever there was an example of being unable to spot the forest for the trees… Such a massive influx of magic on the Other World would be disastrous.
“He’s wrong,” Amelie said but Mitch was no longer sure which of them she was trying to convince.
“Where do we even start?” Mitch asked.
Amelie shrugged and walked deeper into the Heart of Faerie. Mitch followed hesitantly, he preferred walking on thin air and mist to flying even if it was just a matter of semantics, but he longed for the feel of solid ground underfoot and kept his eyes fixed on Amelie’s back.
“Maybe we should just go back,” Mitch suggested. Somehow. He couldn’t see an exit sign anywhere. Maybe Amelie would be able to open a gate back to the Other World. If not… They probably needed Nikola’s magic to get out of here but even with the bracelet Mitch’s head was pounding and Amelie looked flushed and feverish. Nikola could never withstand the sheer amount of magic swirling around them.
“We won’t get another chance at this Mitchell,” Amelie said, shaking her head. “Nikola brought us this chance, this one chance to save the world. He won’t be able to do it a second time.”
Mitch frowned at her. “What do you mean? What did he do?” He could feel his heart hammering, his thoughts of the night before coming back to him. He knew exactly what Nikola could have done.
“Morrigan and Gawain won’t let him come into Deep Faerie a second time,” Amelie said. “He won’t be able to escape them a second time.”
“Right,” Mitch said slowly, utterly unconvinced but unable to string together a proper argument with his head spinning. Was this how Nikola had felt at the Academy? No wonder he had hated it. He hugged himself and followed her deeper into the Heart of Faerie.
“You can’t read any of this can you?” Amelie asked, gesturing to the dancing lights.
Mitch shook his head. “No,” he added a second later when he realised that he was rattling his poor brain for nothing. Amelie was studying the sigils intently, or perhaps the images in the mist. Mitch wondered if there was a way to direct them but Nikola wasn’t in the Other World and it was a little too voyeuristic for him to want to check on anyone else.
“Nikola would have loved this,” Mitch said. Apart from the part where all the magic triggered a seizure anyway. Mitch doubted that there was a more complex and beautiful piece of magic anywhere. Nikola would be able to see it through his mind but his memory wasn’t perfect and the details would be missing. No memory would be able to replicate the sense of being here.
“I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful,” he said. When he’d thought of it at all he’d imagined the curse as something dark and twisted that shone with unholy light and corrupted and corroded all it touched. Instead it was awe-inspiring and Mitch knew that he’d never be able to adequately describe it, not even borrowing words from a dozen different languages. Human speech would always fall short of the mark and his memory was a poor substitute for reality when he barely understood what he was looking at. He didn’t have the proper frame of reference for this, no one did.
“Amelie?” Mitch said, running his hand through another cloud of mist.
“Yes?” She was still studying the sigils. Unlike him she could read them. Mitch had memorised dozens for alchemy and what had seemed like hundreds of permutations but there were sigils here that he’d never seen before and only one or two that looked even vaguely familiar.
“What are we breathing?” It looked like they were in space and despite the mist there was a curious lack of resistance. He’d never thought that air resistance was noticeable before but its absence was.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Amelie said, turning to face him. “Do you feel light-headed?”
Mitch nodded. For the first time since becoming a vampire he felt nauseous and vampires couldn’t even be sick.
“Maybe we’re just tired from the last few days,” she suggested, her voice utterly lacking in conviction.
“There has to be some oxygen here doesn’t there?” Mitch said, deliberately overlooking the absence of gravity or an atmosphere or any of the other things that would facilitate the presence of breathable air. They were both still breathing so there had to be something there.
“Not necessarily,” Amelie said. “We’re both creatures of magic, we can live on it for a little while.”
“How long is that?” Mitch asked, “How long have we even been here?” He looked at his watch for all the good it would do him. He had no idea what time it had been when they finally reached the end of the path.
“How should I know?” Amelie snapped. “This place is insane. It’s impossible and–” she coughed.
“We should get on with it,” Mitch said, taking a half step forward to pat her on the back but hesitating to get any closer.
“Any ideas?” Amelie asked, jumping deeper into the Heart of Faerie. Mitch followed much more sedately, ascending a set of imaginary stairs. She might be used to flying but he wasn’t. Amelie giggled.
“You can read it can’t you?” he said. It would have been her first language just as it had been Nikola’s. He grabbed a handful of mist and watched the sigils slide away, his hand tingling at the touch of magic. He blinked and stared, the enormity of what they’d found finally sinking in. People had been trying to materialise magic for centuries, it was the holy grail of the magical world.
“Would you start reading in the middle of a book and expect it to make sense?” Amelie asked. “You might as well give a five year old a manual on quantum theory.” She shook her head and coughed. Apparently her tolerance for breathing magic was lower than his even though she was less sensitive to it, but then she was half human.
“They tried to recreate it once you know,” Amelie said. “The most complex curse in the world, the pinnacle of magical achievement. They filled an entire library with notes and still didn’t come close. Seeing this… I never imagined that it was this complex.”
“Maybe we should just look for the exit,” Mitch said. Assuming that there was one, but he didn’t think that they could survive in here much longer.
“We’re not giving up until you’re free,” Amelie said, jumping to another part of the curse, seemingly at random.
“Why is this so important to you?” Mitch asked. His voice
carried unnaturally well across the nebula and he had to resist the temptation to whisper. Speaking at a normal volume seemed sacrilegious and he couldn’t imagine yelling.
“I want you to be happy.”
“Breaking the curse won’t magically make me happy,” Mitch said. “And I am happy, mostly. Well, I’m not unhappy anyway.” His life was far from perfect but he was no more or less happy than anyone else.
“Sure,” Amelie said. “You’ll be happy right until the day the curse kills you.”
“It’s an old-fashioned curse,” Mitch said. “It won’t kill me until I have legitimate grandchildren.” There was only one day a year when he could impregnate someone and it wasn’t like he was planning on getting married. He certainly wasn’t going to marry Amelie. Oberon had been right; they’d simply grown apart over the last year.
“We have to break the curse,” Amelie said. “It’s the only way.”
“Only way for what?” Mitch said, finally resigning himself to the fact that his imaginary stairs were too slow. He gulped and jumped across to where Amelie was standing.
“Nothing.”
“Amelie,” Mitch put his hands on her shoulders.
“We came here for a reason,” she said, breaking away. “If we can’t break the curse then… you don’t know what I said to him Mitch, but he never would have agreed otherwise.”
“Nikola?” Mitch said faintly, his hands falling to his side. “Amelie, what did you do?”
“It’s a secret.”
Mitch glared at her.
Amelie shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. “It’s his secret ok?”
“Fine,” Mitch said. No doubt Nikola would tell him when he was ready. Nikola told him everything eventually.
“So how are we supposed to break this curse?” he asked. “Can we just blow it apart?” It looked pretty diffuse though Mitch was reasonably sure it was the densest concentration of magic in existence.
“Brute force on a curse?” Amelie asked.
“Do you have a better idea?” Emptying a lake with a sieve during a monsoon would have been easier, at least then he would know where to start. Here he wasn’t even sure there was anything that they could diffuse the curse into. It reminded him of Sven being a smartass in physics and asking what the universe was expanding into. There was Faerie, somewhere, but Mitch wasn’t entirely sure how it interacted with the curse or if the two interacted at all outside of magical pathways.
Amelie shrugged and a wisp of mist blew apart only to remistify the second her magic stopped. It didn’t make any appreciable difference to the curse. The sigils simply twisted through the air and realigned themselves.
“Well that didn’t work,” Amelie said.
“Maybe a sigil?” Mitch suggested. He didn’t see how one sigil could possibly alter all of this but Amelie was fluent in them. Maybe she could come up with some sort of anti-curse that wouldn’t double as a blunt weapon if bound into a book. “Rhadassa perhaps?”
“So you did learn something in Alchemy,” Amelie said. “I guess one of the permutations of Rhadassa could work.”
Mitch rolled his eyes, they’d studied Rhadassa ad nauseum at the academy. The sigil for diffusion had dozens of uses from atomising students who weren’t paying attention to separating magic into its component parts.
“And if it doesn’t work?” Mitch asked.
“Err… hopefully nothing will happen.”
“And unhopefully?”
“Unhopefully we’ll be so saturated in magic that it will diffuse us.” She coughed.
“I’ll just cross my fingers then,” Mitch said.
“I can tell it to exclude us,” Amelie said.
“Oh, right,” Mitch said. He frowned. “You know, almost everything I’ve read about curse breaking says that you have to over-ride it with an external force, not float in the middle of it.” Not that they were floating and god only knew where the middle was, or if it even had a middle.
“We’ll just have to improvise,” Amelie said. She waved a hand through the mist and then seized it with her magic, twisting it until if formed the sigil for Rhadassa adjoined to a series of others in some sort of spiral that opened out into the curse. Nothing happened.
“Want to try freezing it?” Mitch asked.
Amelie shrugged, “Go ahead.”
Mitch tried and they both started to shiver in the cold. The curse remained resolutely unbroken and the magic unfrozen. The mist didn’t even seem to slow as it drifted through the shapes Amelie had outlined for it. Mitch glared at it. He’d made liquid nitrogen before. He wasn’t even sure if magic could be frozen.
Amelie sighed and released her magic, sinking down to sit on the nothing-really. Mitch tried not to think about it and gingerly sat as well, half expecting to plummet to his doom at any second.
“It’s like that joke about opening the box with the crowbar that’s inside it,” Amelie said. “Except we’re in the box as well, we just can’t get any leverage.”
“Do we try blood next?” Mitch asked. “I still have a blood bag left.” He shivered, he wasn’t nearly as good at dispersing cold as he was at making it, and began to rummage in his pack. He sniffed and Amelie made an odd choked noise. His head jerked up but she was fine, just staring at him with wide eyes, her face sheened with sweat.
“What?”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“Wha…” he raised a hand to his nose and when he lowered it his fingers were red with blood. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I suggested using blood,” he said. He reached for a tissue and then remembered that he’d left them with Nikola. He dragged a microfiber towel out of his pack instead.
“Let me get it,” Amelie said. “We don’t want your blood mixing in with it.”
Mitch nudged his pack in her direction and backed away. She pulled the bloodbag out a second later and tossed it into the air. It exploded, the blood flying through the air and taking the form of the sigils.
Once again there was a distinct lack of curse breaking.
“Now what?” Mitch asked leadenly. His nose had stopped bleeding but he’d spent enough time with Nikola to know that nose bleeds were not a good sign. Amelie was still shivering though she was soaked in sweat. He didn’t think that they could afford to spend much longer in the curse regardless of how successful their efforts were.
“We,” she gasped and coughed. “We pump as much magic as we can into that and hope it works,” she said, gesturing to the sigil of blood hanging in the air.
“Let me freeze it first,” Mitch said. The cold was already freezing the blood and it didn’t look like they had to worry about it falling and shattering, or even collapsing under its own weight. Amelie nodded and unclipped her drink bottle from her pack, drinking greedily.
The blood froze and Amelie cautiously released her magic, both of them sighing in relief when the sigil didn’t immediately collapse, though it really was too delicate to support itself.
“Ready?” Amelie asked.
“Ready.”
Together they poured their magic into the sigil to no avail. Mitch almost wished that he was surprised but he wasn’t. It was like trying to neutralise a vat of acid with a drop of water. Or maybe it was a whole ocean. Or a crystal with some crucial flaw that they were missing.
“It’s not working is it?” Mitch asked.
“It could be,” Amelie said, her voice more hopeful than convincing. “Maybe we’re just not seeing it yet.”
“Then how are we supposed to know if it’s working?”
“The world will end.”
Mitch jerked and his magic flared, shattering the sigil. He didn’t spare it a second glance, or even a first, that had been Nikola’s voice and Nikola could not be here. Nikola wouldn’t have followed them, not to the Heart of Faerie. It would probably be suicide for him. But Mitch knew the sound of his voice better than he knew his own. It was Nikola’s voice.
“We’re trying to save the world,” Amelie said, looking a
round wildly.
“Could have fooled me.” Nikola emerged from the mist, a wide smile spread across his face and his silver-grey eyes sparkling.
“Who are you?” Mitch demanded, taking an angry step forward. It wasn’t Nikola, he was certain of that. If the magic here was enough to make him and Amelie sick then it was more than enough to knock Nikola out. “I know you’re not Nikola.”
“How fortunate for me,” Not Nikola said. “Now would you care to guess?” he asked, tilting his head to one side. His curls danced, floating through the air instead of hanging around his face in a way that was oddly disconcerting without a breeze, though Mitch supposed that it made sense given the apparent lack of gravity.
“Who am I?” With the final word he jumped forward, landing almost nose to nose with Mitch. He staggered back and looked up at the not Nikola, having somehow staggered down as well.
“Michael,” Mitch gasped. It was the only name that came to mind. The only person that it could be.
“Very good,” he clapped his hands theatrically and spun away. “I can see why the poor thing likes you.”
“His name’s Nikola,” Mitch growled, taking a step forward.
“I was afraid that you wouldn’t recognise me and that would have been just dreadful,” Michael continued, ignoring the interruption. He spun back to them and suddenly he was standing less than a metre away.
The angel reminded him a little of Daniel, gave him the same sense of someone who had misplaced a few of his marbles and cracked a few more. A lot more in Michael’s case. Daniel hadn’t seemed quite so manic in the little time Mitch had spent with him. Even so it had been unsettling enough in him, even if Belle had enjoyed his company, in Michael it was little short of terrifying. Michael was more powerful and, more importantly, he was the one standing before them and he’d clearly gone through Nikola to get there.
“Why do you look like that?” Amelie asked, advancing to stand beside Mitch.