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“We need the chasm reopened.”

The chasm. Netherflame. Magic released again.

“That’s a terrible idea,” he whispered, a buzz filling his head.

“Just a crack, enough to bring Sanctuary back to life, not release Hell all over again.”

Orpheus shook his head while imagining it. A city of violet light, fueled by magic. A city to write stories of, worthy of the legend granted so many others that had come before. Shambhala. Atlantis. The El Dorado of their age.

What a sight it would have been.

“I can’t,” Orpheus insisted while the desire to see exactly what Atticus proposed rooted deep inside him. “You know how much power it took to open it the first time around.”

“And yet it was you who closed it, my clever mage. What if it could be done?”

“The world is healing.” And that alone should be enough. Why else would he have risked his own life to close the chasm? To reopen it now would be…

What? Disastrous?

“Is it really healing, though?” Atticus mused. “The rest of the world may have suffered when the chasm was open, but Sanctuary thrived. Magic, thrived. Isn’t that what you want? A place you can actually belong? With other people like yourself? People who understand and appreciate what you can do? Who can learn from you?”

“We already agreed I’d teach Gwen.”

“I’m not talking about Gwen, Orpheus.”

He…wasn’t?

“Are there others?”

Atticus shrugged, expression hardened but not steely. “I suspect so. My wife claimed as much. Children with strange gifts, inexplicable abilities. Gwen is simply…”

Who Sanctuary was able to save.

Orpheus imagined them, a generation of natural-born mages, the intended heirs of a ruinous world—what the hermits had been searching for, and then given up on, and decided to create in him.

Was that why Lore killed everyone she could from the Rim?

“Sanctuary would make a fine location for Earth’s first mage school, don’t you think?”

Like the steam rising from the water, the idea emerged, still nebulous and out of reach, but there, if he wanted it. Not freedom. Not release. But a purpose. A place.

“I’ll try,” he whispered through the droning buzz, world tunneling so it was only him and the water, sigils winking in the ripples, the light of the lanterns replaced by a violet-tinged fire. “I’ll try.”

Somewhere beyond his awareness, he heard Atticus release a breath.

Chapter XXII

The Student

Two days later, his robes were returned. Orpheus woke to them folded in a neat pile next to a tray of bread and dried fruit, a notecard perched on top.

Apologies, but they were in need of extensive repairs. —A

Orpheus shook the garment out and immediately dropped it.

They were his robes—or rather, a memory of them. He recognized the fabric, freshly laundered, the tears repaired and the stains scrubbed clean. But they’d been tailored into a kind of opulence Orpheus had not yet earned. The shoulders were padded and pinched into points, the collar heightened, a layer of inky black feathers peeking out from the seams where his sleeves hung. The silver runes remained, but where they’d begun to fray someone had meticulously repaired them, sigils standing out in the dim light of his cell.

Robes fit for a real sorcerer, he thought when he put them on. He didn’t have a mirror to see himself in, but the fit was good and the tailoring comfortable, and the gratefulness that churned in his gut lent an unexpected warmth to the chill of his prison.