It would be sad to leave the workshop when she took full orders; even if she stayed here, it would have to be torn down so another Apprentice could make her own. She would miss it far more than a pretty face or a head full of hair. Madeline supposed it was the one good thing about having her Sealing so long delayed.
The guides had reappeared and were waiting to assist her in her casting. They were silent shadows that served the four elements once more instead of her personal quartet of nannies.
Soon I will be Sealed, and there will be no more of their questioning me.
Madeline took off her headgear and seated herself at the high table in the corner. She took a centering breath and cleared her mind of the chaos and emotion from the cottage. When she was even again, she reached for the weathered wooden cup on the ledge above it, murmured a prayer, and cast the runes.
Even before the magical images came fully into focus in her mind, Madeline knew something was wrong, but as the distinct shapes and colors began to form, she curled her fingers against the wood, uneasy as she read the message spreading out before her. She saw a small faint light first, surrounded by a dark, vicious shadow that curled at the edges of the picture in her mind. She saw one who should have been released long ago, but something kept the victim pinned in place. The shadow wished to claim its prize, to destroy it. But there was another ring around the faint light, keeping it at bay. Charles, she thought, but it was a guess, not a reading, so she let the idea go. She waited and watched for the rune picture to create more images in her mind.
But the picture never changed. The shadow kept coming. Over and over the shadow rolled across the shrouded victim in the center, tearing at him, maiming him, stripping him bare, but over and over again he remained.
Madeline frowned, gathered the runes, and cast them again.
The shadow remained, but this time there was a new shape in another corner of the scene. This one was glittering and gold, though it had a sickly gray sheen, like a parasite. It was no danger to the host, but like cruel children with a wounded animal, it poked at the figure with sticks, raining pebbles on its head and sand in its eyes. It urged the gold shape at the one plagued by shadow.
Then the shadow broke without warning, and more images appeared. There were four shapes, like the four guides of the four elements, except they were white, not gray. They turned to Madeline and spoke.
“The past returns to the present.
The lost one is broken in two, and two again.
Danger.
The old ones stir. Their reckoning is at hand.
Danger, danger.
All that was will end. A new day will dawn, or all will die.
Danger. Danger. Danger.”
Madeline’s head began to ache from the sheer volume of images and scenes. The old ones? The lost one? A reckoning? What was this danger?
All will die?
The four shapes faded, and Madeline sank back in her chair, staring helplessly at the strange, scattered runes, their colors and patterns still shifting before her eyes. The reading was no help at all. It didn’t explain anything, only gave more puzzles. It did not explain why Charles was here. It didn’t verify or deny Jonathan. It gave her nothing she needed to know.
“I need to go deeper,” she said aloud.
One of the guides materialized behind her. It took no form again this time, but she could still feel it, and when it placed its hands on her shoulders, she felt the weight and the warmth of its touch. Madeline’s breath caught as the guide entered her body, aligning to her energy centers, rooting her firmly to the ground. She felt the hum of her body’s response, but the guide held her fast as it lifted her up.
The first thing a novice witch learned was that the world had layers that only magic could reveal, and it was to these places that Madeline traveled now. She left the earth and rose up into the Plane again, to the place where she had gone to do her meditation with the runes. But this time the guide was with her, and the experience was different. Madeline felt the tight, sensual pull of her spirit and body stretched to their absolute limit, and her spirit broke free. With her body tended and her spirit tethered by the guide, Madeline tossed the runes again, but this time when the stones flew, she let her spirit body form go with them, stepping out into the very colors of the runes. She memorized the patterns and the visions she saw.
Then she took a step farther and went out into the Void.
She knew something was wrong immediately. She should have seen the same images replayed with new layers with more depth, but there was nothing. For a moment she stood there, confused. The Void was a great grid of life, the map of the whole world laid out neatly and succinctly. All the answers were here if one knew how to look for them, and Madeline did. Except this time, her answers were not here. Madeline looked again, expanding deeper. A faint glimmer in the distance caught her attention, and she smiled.
There
it was. She didn’t understand why the answer was so far away from where she was, but it didn’t matter: she’d found it. Madeline gathered her spirit and stepped out into the light.
And in the span of a heartbeat, everything changed.
The Void was, in essence, just what its name suggested: a great black field of nothing save the answers laid upon it, but until you knew how to read those, it simply looked blank. Novices spent many years growing accustomed to it, and it had always served as the great weeding out of those unsuited to the trials of a witch, for stepping into the Void with a spirit body was much like walking on a spider’s thread many miles above the highest star. It took great concentration to ignore the sensation of being smashed and expanded at once, to dismiss the pounding, screaming silence that slammed against nonexistent ears. But balancing in the Void was essential to understanding the grid, the map, and the answers. There were no mistakes in the Void, the Morgan had said. Only deaths. There was no law or logic in the Void; it could not be managed or controlled, and neither could anything inside it. It was full of answers, yes, but also lost souls and banished beasts, and they loved little more than to trick those who had stumbled in into giving them their souls, their minds, and in the case of witches, their magic.
But in this place where Madeline was, in this one step farther, there was no grid, no orderly map of the universe, and not even a single monster. They wouldn’t have dared come out. The pressure and pull ebbed and tugged, and the silence shuddered against Madeline. It was as if the Void was not a field of space but instead a living thing, and it was a living thing that was very upset.
Madeline frowned. But this made no sense! The Void was not alive. It wasn’t even localized! If this view of the Void was wrong, the whole world was wrong. And that couldn’t be right, because every witch would notice. But what was even stranger was that Madeline’s guide somehow did not seem to feel this place, not its wrongness, but not even its very existence. If it had, it would not have allowed her in. Madeline didn’t understand. Where were the patterns of the universe, laid out and mapped for her to read? The place they were supposed to be was nothing more than jumbled pieces of string, quaking for fear of being knit—it
made no sense!
A figure materialized before Madeline, and when she saw who it was, she drew back.
“You,”
she said, her spirit voice echoing in the empty space.
The glowing man in white from beneath the tree waved at her. Except, standing this close, she could see who he was. It was Charles.
“Hello,” he said, waving cheerfully. A bench materialized out of thin air, balancing on absolutely nothing, and he sat at one end of it as he gestured to the other. “Sit,” he urged, as if they were good friends happening to meet one another at the park. “We have a few things to discuss, you and I.”
Chapter Four
whitbi
earth
Earth is the fourth element of creation.
Earth is tangible: it has touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste.
Earth is heavy.
Earth is slow to move, but once it rouses itself, it is difficult to stop.
Madeline stumbled back, too stunned for a moment to do anything else. Then she came to her senses and tried to ride backward along her thread, back to her body, away from the specter before her. It wasn’t Charles—it could not be Charles—but she couldn’t tell what it truly was, and so it was very dangerous. But she was already too late. Whatever this was had cut off her way back. She was still grounded, and the guide tethering her would not know anything was wrong, but Madeline could not retreat or contact help. She was alone with whatever beast of hell this was before her.
It was difficult to hold on to her panic, though, when the beast looked so cheerful and so familiar.
“You aren’t Charles.” Madeline aimed a finger at the apparition. “You aren’t Charles, and I know you aren’t, so don’t even pretend. Just tell me what you want and let me go.”
She could tell just by looking at the beast that its power was so beyond hers that she couldn’t so much as make a scratch in it. Her spirit body was at best a net of blue stars taking an echo of her human body’s shape; the White Charles was completely substantial. But he didn’t challenge her or even mock her. He only held up his hands in easy surrender—a gesture, she noted with ill ease, very much like Charles’s own.
“Ho—easy, Miss Elliott. I can see there’s no fooling you, so I won’t even try. But forgive me for staying this way. I’m a bit pressed, and I don’t want to waste time.” He crossed one leg over his knee and laced his fingers around it. “So. You’ve come here for answers. I’m sorry to say, the Void won’t be much use for you. It’s been buggered something terrible. But if there’s anything you’d like to see, I am happy to assist.” He pulled a watch out of his pocket and frowned at it. “Though I advise you to move quickly. We honestly are in a devil of a time crunch. Not me, obviously, but your guide will suspect, and you are still tethered and therefore bound by time.” He grinned. “I worked that one out on my own, you know. I’m very proud of that.”
Madeline frowned at him; he didn’t make any sense, but that wasn’t why she frowned. It was just…he was so
like
Charles.
“You can’t be Charles,” she said, though with less conviction.
He nodded. “Yes, yes, we’ve already agreed to that. Honestly, Maddie, don’t dawdle. Go on. Ask me what you need to know.” He waved his hand in an encouraging motion. “Come,
come
. Start asking me things.”
Madeline opened her mouth and closed it several times, so stunned she didn’t know quite what to do. “W-what is wrong with the Void?”
The White Charles grinned and clapped his hands. “Well done! Right to the point. The Void, my dear, is wrong. It was shifted out of joint long ago, and it will remain this way for some time to come, because the reality that supports it is in a state of chaos.”
“But how?” Madeline asked. “And what do you mean, long ago? I’ve been coming to the Void for ten years. It’s been fine up until now.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Charles said. “You were looking at the illusion of the Void that witches before you created. For the answers you sought tonight, you needed the real thing. And that is how you have found me.”
This conversation made less sense the more time Madeline spent inside it. “If this is true, if the Void we know is an illusion, why can’t the guides sense it?”
“Because to them, nothing is wrong. It is, in fact, the same to them as it always has been—which is to say, it is as messed up as this. The witches nowadays do not go very far. They look at surface patterns and only seek those they wish to see. You wanted truth, and this is the place of truth. This is the deeper place. The true place, which reveals what many people in the world often suspect: it’s complete chaos, and no one is driving the coach. It has, in fact, been this way for a long, long time.”
Madeline looked around at the chaos, shaking her head. “I don’t understand. Why can I see it, but they cannot?”
The White Charles’s eyes twinkled—because this was the Void, the twinkle was literal. “Oh come now, Maddie. You’ve always known you were special.”
Madeline blushed and put her hands on her hips. “You mock me?”
“Nonsense!” The White Charles sat up, looking almost hurt. “You
are
special! You told me how they didn’t promote you, how they made you wait, and how they are making you wait even now. Testing you, they say, when you both know full well you’re the most naturally powerful witch they have ever seen.”
Madeline drew back, suddenly uncertain. “How do you know all this? What do you mean, I told you?”
“Bugger,” he swore, then rubbed his cheek as he stood. “Look. Forget that, then. You can see it because you are very powerful. Why didn’t you before? Because you let them tell you what to think. You accepted their boundaries of the world. But tonight you sought answers their boundaries did not contain, and without even meaning to, you stepped over them and into this place: the true place.”
“And you just happened to be here?” Madeline said, still wary.
“Oh, stop being so fussy,” he snapped, waving his hand in dismissal. “You want an excuse? Fine. Obviously this is just some sort of dream or projection; you saw me just a bit ago and so you imagined me and used me—or an idea of me—as a way to talk to yourself in the Void.”
“Or you are a very clever demon,” Madeline shot back. “Or worse.”
The White Charles sighed. “Maddie, it’s
just me
.”
“You reek of power,” Madeline said, almost whispering. “Like nothing that should be. Like—I don’t know what. But I know you shouldn’t be.”
His grin was sheepish and charming, and pure, pure Charles. “Every bit of it I know how to use, I learned from you. Now stop this dithering, Madeline. What does it matter? If I’m that powerful, I’m just going to eat you or do whatever demons do. If I’m just a projection, why are you wasting time when you could be asking about
him
?”