by D. D. Miers
"Gilfaethwy!" Gwydion shouted, vaulting a display case and running towards him. "Don't!"
"Thanks for bringing me here," Gil said, tucking the glass into his coat and grabbing the same staff Gwydion had used to teleport earlier today. "I had no idea how I was going to break in! Till next time, brother!"
By the time he finished speaking, he was already stepping through the portal, which closed rapidly behind him, taking with him all the hope we had of ever stopping Ethan's curse.
Chapter 8
Gwydion reached the portal when it was no bigger than a dinner plate and grabbed the edges, dragging it back open with a tremendous effort that I could see was more magical than physical.
"Go through," he barked at me as soon as it was open wide enough to fit a person. "I need you to hold it open on the other side!"
I didn't question it, just ran, jumping through the portal as quickly as I could, my only thought a vague hope that it didn't lead to the Far Lands, the place with the fucked-up concept of distance. Although, I thought in the split second for which I was in neither place, there was every possibility that there were way worse and more dangerous places than the Far Lands. At least I knew how the Far Lands worked.
I landed on my hands and knees on rough red cobblestone. I got up quickly, hissing in pain at my skinned knees. I was in a courtyard in some kind of ancient city. The sky was washed out pale, and the sun was larger than it should have been and pulsed with angry red light. The buildings were all made of the same reddish brick as the cobblestone, and they all appeared to be empty and crumbling. A fountain sat in the center of the courtyard, dry and dusty, featuring a statue of a rearing lion, teeth bared, in mid-swipe.
And Gil stood in a stone arch just a few feet ahead of me, looking back at me in surprise. As soon as I met his eye, he turned and sprinted away. I resisted the urge to chase him, quickly turning back to the portal instead. I could dimly see Gwydion on the other side, the scene faded and washed out and moving in weirdly slow motion. Sweat stood on his brow as he strained to keep the portal open.
Not entirely sure I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the edges of the portal and pulled. It felt like holding a sharp sheet of glass, or electricity made solid. It hurt, a burning stinging pain, and resisted me like a rubber band stretched to its limits, ready to snap. I knew immediately when Gwydion let go, and the strain suddenly became a thousand times worse. I wasn't going to be able to hold it for long. I was pouring all my magical energy into it in a way I couldn't even properly vocalize and didn't want to think about too hard lest I stop being able to do it. Even my physical muscles were straining, trying to make up the difference. The edges of the portal shuddered and jumped, and I was positive that even if I was strong enough to hold it, this portal could not stay open much longer. The portal bucked, almost slipping out of my fingers, and the elegant scrollwork that surrounded it cracked and twisted, the fractal patterns becoming chaotic, crashing into one another and splintering off into ragged branches that tore at the air around me. One touched my arm, burning like an ember, and my hand flinched, losing my grip. I tried frantically to regain it, my fingers scrabbling on the weird sharp non-solidity of the edge. I just needed a few more seconds!
A second later, Gwydion was standing beside me, grabbing the portal to help me hold it open. I nearly sobbed in relief as some of the strain eased off, but by now the entire portal was shaking like a sheet of glass in a high wind, becoming increasingly difficult to hold. As soon as Ethan and Cole leapt through, we both let go, and the portal snapped closed with a small explosion like a firecracker, scattering sparks.
"That way!" I said, pointing to the arch Gil had vanished through. No more was said as we sprinted after the Seelie man. He already had too much of a lead.
The arch led out of the courtyard and into a broad street. There was no sign of Gil, but Gwydion didn't hesitate.
"Here!" he said, pointing ahead of us to another arch. "There's only one place he would go in the Endless City!"
We ran after him as he led us through the vast, silent city's streets and alleys and more courtyards than I could shake a stick at. Most contained fountains like the one we'd appeared near, the statues always different and following no apparent theme. There was a statue of twin rams, of a smiling six-armed man, of an apple tree, of a cube etched with unrecognizable writing, of things I couldn't identify or even roughly categorize. Was that supposed to a weirdly geometric animal or a weirdly organic object? I couldn't tell, and the further we went, the stranger the statues became.
"What is this place?" I asked, unable to help being fascinated despite the dire situation.
"The Endless City," Gwydion said. "And before you ask, no, we don't really know if it's endless. About 30,000 miles in any direction from the lion statue, explorers start going crazy or never return."
"Where are all the people?" Ethan asked.
"Never were any," Gwydion said. "We think the buildings might have just grown this way."
And that was so baffling to conceive of that I genuinely didn't know how to respond. Besides which, I was starting to get winded anyway. I'm not a big fan of running.
"There!" Gwydion barked and sprinted away from us. I caught a brief glimpse of Gil running away from him.
"I'll get him," I said, reaching out with my powers. A place like this was bound to have some death I could use. Before I could find anything, Cole stopped dead a step ahead of me, turned around as I came to a stumbling stop before I crashed into him, and slapped me hard across the face.
"Ow!" I said, drawing back to punch him, my powers evaporating. "What the hell?"
"Never do magic in the Endless City!" Cole said, shocking me out of my anger enough to notice how tense with fear he was, eyes wide. "Ever! No magic must ever touch this place!"
Ethan had come to a stunned stop when Cole hit me, but Gwydion was still running after Gil. I shook it off, though my face was still stinging.
"Explain later," I said as I started running again. "Let's go!"
I supposed if there was some reason magic couldn't be done here that explained why Gwydion was just running and not turning into a cheetah or something to catch his brother. Even not turning into a cheetah he was too fast for us to catch up. I was struggling even to keep him in my sights.
He vanished around a corner ahead of us, and I forced myself into a sprint, afraid I would lose him and equally afraid that if I had to run for much longer I would throw up and pass out.
I turned the corner and stumbled, almost falling on my face, as the city opened up into a square the size of several football fields, crammed from end to end with wells. Circular and about as high as my knee, every single one was brimming with water, which was startling to see in this dusty place. A standing stone plaque, the stone grey and clearly not native to this place, stood atop the walls of many, but not all, of the wells, carved with sigils in the same universal language of magic that Julius used in his bar.
Gwydion was a few feet ahead of us. Gil was a few feet ahead of him, running towards one of the wells marked with the stone signposts. As soon as he reached it, he dived into the water, which swallowed him without so much as a ripple. Gwydion, only a few steps behind, jumped in after him. Ethan, Cole, and I shared a look, each asking the other if we were about to jump in as well. The answer was of course yes, if only because none of us liked the idea of remaining in this place a minute longer than necessary. I squinted at the sigil as we ran towards it, trying to pick out some kind of meaning. I got a brief impression of something about the ocean, and then we had reached the well and I was jumping into the water, just hoping the sign didn't read 'warning: sharks.'
For a moment, I was plummeting down through the water, far deeper than seemed possible, and then I was rising again at a terrible speed.
My head broke the surface just as my lungs were screaming for air, and I had a brief confused glimpse of an ocean around me before a hand grabbed the back of my shirt and dragged me up out of the water.
Gwydion pulled me into what appeared to be a Viking long ship as Ethan and Cole surfaced behind me. I helped Gwydion pull them in, and we all took a moment to catch our breath. Even Gwydion looked pale and shaky, and oddly diminished with his clothing soaked and hanging off of him.
The long ship bobbed in a dark ocean, the water a deep green-black that turned emerald when the light hit it. The sky was a stormy gray, boiling with low clouds and the sound of distant thunder. More boats than I could easily count floated around us, all pointing towards the hazy shape of land in the distance. It was close enough to see a rocky beach and soft gray hills and what might have been a city. The air was full of the scent of salt and the sound of water and of the boats gently knocking against one another.
"Distant Shore," Gwydion explained breathlessly, pushing his wet hair out of his face. "It's just this. A bunch of abandoned boats and a shore no one can get to. Disappointing, really."
"Why can't anyone get to it?" Cole asked, lying on his back in a puddle on the bottom of the boat, one leg over the side.
Gwydion shrugged carelessly. "It just never gets any closer. Don't know what to tell you."
Like Cole, I just lay where I'd fallen for a minute, wet and cold and exhausted. It was the first moment of stillness we'd had since the alarm went off, and I realized when I felt the cold air on me that when Gwydion had fixed my clothes he'd accidentally forgotten to fix the hole in my tights. That might have been cute if it weren't for the situation we were in. I tugged my skirt down further self-consciously, hoping no one had noticed, but I caught Gwydion giving me a knowing look, his smile just as smug as ever despite his obvious exhaustion. I briefly contemplated drowning him, and then decided I was too tired for that. I gathered myself enough to sit up and look over the side of the boat, searching for Gil. Ethan reluctantly joined me.
"Don't bother," Gwydion said tiredly. "He's not going anywhere right now. Being in the Endless City drains us."
"There's no magic," Cole explained, still lying with his eyes closed. "They're like fish out of water there."
"They were running pretty fast for a couple of landed fish," I complained, flopping back against the side of the boat and wringing my hair out. Ethan sat down beside me, and I leaned against him, my spirits slightly lifted by the fact that he'd gone with a white t-shirt today.
"You know those Tibetan villages where the people have lived at high altitude for so long that they've developed the ability to survive with less oxygen?" Gwydion provided. "Earth is the Tibetan Plateau, magically speaking, and Gil and I have lived on Earth for a very long time."
"Read a book by a guy who sold himself to a Court Fae in exchange for the Fae schlepping him around the Other Lands," Cole said, finally beginning to sit up. He took Ethan's hand when the other man offered it and pulled himself up to sit on the other side of me. "Apparently the dude—the Fae I mean, not the human—just collapsed as soon as he set foot in the City. White as a sheet, shaking. Human guy had to drag him out. If we'd stayed longer, you would have noticed it draining you too. We're not just tired from running."
I was quiet for a minute, contemplating this. Obviously, that meant that whatever Other Land the Fae were from had a lot of ambient magical energy. If it was like oxygen to them, could they get the magical equivalent of the bends jumping from world to world too quickly?
"Hey," I said, sitting up. "That reminds me!"
I poked Cole hard in the ribs.
"Ow, what?"
"You slapped me!"
Cole had the grace to look slightly sheepish.
"You were about to do magic. I had to stop you."
"You tried to do magic in the Endless City?" Gwydion said, looking a little horrified.
"Why is that a problem?" I demanded. "And you could have stopped me without hitting me!"
"Because the Eternal City has no magic, it's been used as basically a magic prison since, like, before the formation of the Earth," Cole explained.
"There are things hidden at the far edges of the city that predate even my kind," Gwydion added. "Left by people from universes of which there is no other remaining trace."
"It's the go-to method for disposing of things that are world-endingly dangerous but can't be killed or destroyed," Cole went on. "Pretty much anything in there could tear our universe apart if it got loose, and it could get loose with just a particle or two of ambient magic."
"Okay," I said, feeling a little faint. "Clearly, the slap was deserved. But how would doing magic there set one of those things free? I wouldn't just be leaving the magic lying around."
"You would, actually," Cole said. "Remind me to lend you a book on magical energy theory. Any spell or magical ability you use sheds waste energy back into the ambient magical atmosphere. Wizardry's the most efficient, since waste energy is part of the calculations of making a spell, but it's still impossible to avoid creating any waste at all. Natural magic like necromancers and the Fae use is downright sloppy most of the time."
Gwydion looked mildly offended by this but didn't deny it.
"But then why could we use the portal to get here?" Ethan asked, frowning.
"The Staff of Abeona vents from the entry side of the portal," Gwydion said with a tired sigh. "It's one of a very sparse handful of ways of reaching the City safely. And now Gil has it."
"I'm guessing you don't have the other staff," Cole said to Gwydion, who shook his head with a bitter expression.
"The Staff of Adiona has been lost for centuries. Some idiot dropped it into an unmarked well. Now the wells are the only safe way out of the City."
"Hey," I said, getting their attention and pointing to a boat not far from ours, which was rocking. "I think he's moving."
Gwydion struggled unsteadily to his feet, shook himself out, and then jumped from our boat into another floating next to it, working his way towards the one that was moving. We followed, stepping awkwardly from boat to boat as quickly as we could. I saw Gilfaethwy sit up in the boat we were heading for, looking wet and tousled and confused. His eyes widened when he spotted us, and he struggled to get to his feet, stumbling from his own exhaustion and the rocking of his boat. He held the staff in his hand, trying to get his footing solid enough to use it.
"Oh no you don't," Gwydion snarled and jumped from the boat he was standing on, becoming a massive eagle. The eagle screamed, flying with talons outstretched directly at Gilfaethwy, who threw up his hands to protect his face. Gwydion snatched the staff with his talons and tried to pull it out of Gil's hands. Gil tried to hang on, swiping at the eagle uselessly, but a wrong step overturned his boat and sent Gil tumbling backwards into the water. The eagle soared into the air with the staff in its claws, screaming triumphantly, only to stall suddenly and then go limp, plummeting out of the air. I watched, horrified, as the eagle turned back into Gwydion halfway down. He cracked his head on the prow of a boat and landed in the water, out of our sight.
"He didn't have the energy to maintain the shape shift, the idiot!" Cole said as we scrambled towards where Gwydion had fallen in, nearly falling a thousand times ourselves as we jumped and climbed between the drifting, rocking boats. I spotted Gwydion first, floating unconscious near a flat barge, and dragged him onto it with Cole's help.
"Uh, guys, I think we're losing Gil!" Ethan pointed out.
We looked up to see Gil, having climbed onto another boat, frantically sketching shapes in the air with his hands which, as I watched, became a ragged portal, which Gil flung himself through immediately.
But we couldn't chase him, not with Gwydion unconscious in my arms, blood pouring from a gash in his head.
"What do we do?" Ethan asked me, eyes wide.
"I don't know," I replied, equally stunned. "We've got the staff. Can we use it?"
"We don't know where Gil went," Cole pointed out.
"Not to go after Gil. To go home! We need to get Gwydion to a doctor!"
"He's immortal. He'll be fine," Cole said dismissively. "He just needs magic."
&nb
sp; "Which we can't give him," Ethan pointed out. "How long will it take him to regain enough energy to heal from the ambient whatever?"
Cole started to answer, then hesitated. He swallowed hard, looking slightly worried.
I looked down at Gwydion, surprised at the level of fear I felt seeing him like this, the way my heart clenched in my chest like a fist. I hadn't known him long, and one quick fuck where we spent half the time trying to annoy or one up each other was hardly a basis for a relationship. But I was filled with dread at the thought of losing him.
"Well, fine," I said, pushing up my sleeves and squaring my jaw. "He needs magic? I can do that."
I reached into myself for my powers and past them towards the Candle. Before Aethon had hidden it, I could sense its presence all the time. Even now, though I couldn't locate it, I could still feel that connection. And hey, it had given me a shit ton of energy to let me heal Ethan before. Maybe it could do it again. Deep inside me, I could almost see the blue flame burning. Just a spark, a candle flame, but a piece of something much, much stronger. Something I could use to save Gwydion. With my heart hammering in my ears, I reached for it, and it descended towards me. I cupped my hands around it gently, like catching a firefly. I felt a thrill of wonder, thinking I had it.
Then it touched me, and I burst into flames.
Chapter 9
For a moment, I was not in my body. I was somewhere else, burning alive in the darkness. My ears were full of the clamor of a thousand bells ringing. I could not make my body scream. I could not put the fire out. The pain was so far beyond anything I could wrap my head around that afterwards I couldn't describe and could barely even remember what it felt like. I knew with absolute certainty that I was going to die. Through the staring, unresponsive eyes of my body, the distant shore suddenly seemed much closer.