And yet, Roslyn’s hands weren’t shaking.
He opened his eyes. The study was dim, lit only by the lamp on the desk and the faint ambient glow the artifacts produced when they were agitated. The curtains were drawn, and he couldn’t see any light through the heavy fabric, which meant it was still deep night. The muffled sounds of the assault had stopped — no more fireballs hitting the walls, no crack of lightning, no concussive impacts he could feel resonating through the floor.
The silence was far from comforting, however. It only meant that the Van Horns had pulled back, and the Van Horns didn’t pull back unless they were regrouping for something worse.
“They’ve stopped,” he said, his voice sounding thin and weak in his ears.
“About twenty minutes ago.” Roslyn’s tone was the one she used during difficult healing sessions, calm and focused, stripped of everything except professional attention. She didn’t look up from her work. “I think they expected to get through the study wards on the first try. When they didn’t, they backed off.”
That made some sense. “They’ll be assessing the ward structure, looking for weaknesses in the independent layer.” He tried to sit up straighter, and the movement sent a flare of pain through his left side that made his vision blur at the edges. Now he could feel the burns, the tight, damaged skin pulling across his ribs and shoulder, the deeper tissue beneath still hot with the kind of injury that would take days of healing to address properly. “Karl will be probing. He’s patient enough to take his time, and his gift is better suited to analysis than brute force.”
For the first time, Roslyn’s calm mask slipped, and her mouth compressed. “Stop talking about ward analysis and let me work.”
He subsided, mainly because the effort of forming sentences was far more difficult than he’d expected. His magic was failing. The channels Roslyn had spent weeks rebuilding were fraying under the strain of the fireballs and the lightning and the desperate, reckless output he’d poured into defending the threshold. The scarring around his heart had tightened again, compressing tissue she’d so carefully loosened over dozens of sessions, and the compression was restricting the flow of magical energy through him in a way that his body was interpreting as a slow, systemic shutdown.
It appeared he was dying. Not in the dramatic, immediate way that made for good stories, but in the incremental failure of systems that had been pushed past their capacity too many times, the gradual dimming of something that had never been given enough time to recover. This same progression had occurred in the void, when the days had stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, and his body had begun its slow retreat from functionality. He recognized the pattern well enough, just as he might recognize a route he had traveled before.
The difference was that in the void, he had been alone.
Roslyn’s magic found the tightest knot of scarring and began to work it loose. The sensation was peculiar; not exactly painful, but deeply uncomfortable in a way that resisted description. It felt like someone was carefully unsticking two surfaces that had been pressed together too long, a slow separation that required patience and care and an intimate knowledge of how the tissue was supposed to function.
She had this knowledge. Over three weeks and dozens of sessions, she’d learned his magical architecture so thoroughly that she understood it better than he did in some places, had found the self-taught patches and the improvised workarounds and the places where necessity had produced solutions that were either brilliant or foolish, depending on one’s perspective.
He closed his eyes again and let her work.
The first time he slipped, he didn’t even realize it was happening.
One moment, he was in the study, conscious of the chair beneath him and Roslyn’s hands on his chest and the quiet hum of the artifacts in their containment. The next, he was somewhere else — not the void, but a memory that had the void’s same quality of cold and isolation. The transition between the two states was so seamless that there was no boundary to hold onto, no moment where he could have said, Here is where I stopped being present and started being elsewhere.
“It was so cold in the void,” he said. The words slipped out without him thinking about them, spoken in a voice that sounded distant even to his own ears. “People visualize darkness when they think of such places, but it wasn’t dark. It was gray. Gray and cold, and the cold didn’t come from outside. It came from the absence of everything that produces warmth. No sun, no friction, no chemical reaction. Just the void, and me, and the shard in my hand.”
Roslyn’s magic didn’t falter. He could feel it moving through him with the same steady rhythm. Some part of him registered that she was listening, but the part that was talking wasn’t the part that cared about being heard. It was the part that had held these things in silence for so long that the silence itself had become a kind of pressure.
“I counted the days,” he went on. “Three hundred and seventy-two. I scratched marks into the non-surface of the void with the edge of the shard. I knew that was an entirely irrational behavior, since the void had no surface to scratch and the marks disappeared within hours. But I made them anyway because the alternative was to stop counting, and if I stopped counting, I’d have to acknowledge that time in the void wasn’t time at all but a kind of ongoing present tense from which there might never be an exit.”
He paused. During that pause, he could feel the boundary between the study and the memory thinning, the way a dimensional barrier thinned under sustained pressure.
“I kept my suit buttoned the entire time,” he said. “Three hundred and seventy-two days in a place where there was no one to see me and no reason to maintain any standard of appearance, and I kept every button fastened. The waistcoat, the jacket when I still had it. The jacket went first, used as a pillow, which was a concession that took me forty days to make, but the waistcoat stayed buttoned. I told myself it was discipline. I told myself that a man who allowed his standards to slip in one area would find them slipping in all areas, and that the void was merely a test of character I intended to pass.”
Roslyn’s hands shifted position, moving from his sternum to the burned tissue on his left side. The change in her magic’s focus — from the deep scarring to the surface damage — pulled him partially back to the present. He blinked, and the study reassembled itself around him in fragments…lamp, desk, bookshelves, the dark shapes of the curtained windows.
“It wasn’t discipline, though,” he said, his tone quieter now. “It was the only thing I could still control.”
She said nothing. Her magic continued its careful work on the burns, and the silence she offered wasn’t the empty kind, not the silence of someone who had nothing to say or the silence of someone who was waiting for him to finish so they could respond. It was the silence of someone who understood that what she was hearing required no commentary, only a witness.
He closed his eyes and let the memory take him again.
The next time he surfaced, the light in the study hadn’t changed, which meant either very little time had passed or the curtains were doing their job too well. Roslyn was still working. Her magic had a slightly different quality now; it seemed thinner, more careful, the way a surgeon’s touch changed when the tissue being repaired was delicate enough to be damaged by too much force.
She was tired, he realized. He could feel it in the way her energy moved through him, the faint tremor in it that wasn’t quite visible in her hands but was present in the magic itself.
She was draining herself to keep him alive, and the knowledge of that reality settled into him with a weight that was worse than the cold.
“I used to dream about this house when I was homeless,” he said. He wasn’t entirely certain whether he was speaking aloud or simply thinking in a direction that happened to produce sound. “Before I found it, I mean — years before. I used to dream about a house where I could put things. Where the walls were thick enough and the wards were strong enough that the objects I’d collected would be safe and where I would be safe. It would be a place where no one could come in and take any of it away.”
His voice had lost its usual cadence, the measured precision that usually characterized his speech. What emerged instead was unguarded, the words falling in the order they occurred to him rather than the order he would normally have chosen.
“I slept in cars mostly. And shelters, when the weather was bad enough that sleeping in a car seemed foolish even by my standards. Libraries during the day, because libraries don’t require an explanation for your presence there, and because they had books, which were the one form of companionship I could tolerate.” He paused, and something shifted in his chest that wasn’t the scarring and wasn’t the burns but was located in the same general vicinity. “I had two artifacts with me during that period. The obsidian shard in my waistcoat lining, and a brass letter opener that had been my first acquisition. It was a small thing, minor in power, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it behind. I told myself I was protecting it. In reality, I think it was the closest thing to a pet that I was willing to acknowledge.”
