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“It won’t work,” he lied, the remnants of that dream gnawing at the edges of his mind’s eye. The drip of his blood, and the chasm it opened.

“May I see?”

Her hand touched his, small against his long fingers and knobby knuckles. He knew better than to turn the grimoire over. Gwen was learning more every day, and the time would come when she’d be able to decipher his scribbling with little effort. So, he wasn’t sure what compelled him to push it into her reach other than the untenable urge to dare fate.

See it. Get mad. Cut me off.

Stop me.

“What does this mean?” Gwen pointed to a drawing of three small stars that crowned several different sigils.

“It’s an alchemical symbol, representative of raw Netherflame. The stars are always positioned at eastern, western, and northern points.” Orpheus placed his finger to the page and tapped another sigil, an inverted triangle shaded solid. “This one here is an earthly symbol, this and the one for water are well-recorded by the alchemists of the fifteenth century, though it was first discovered by Cleopatra herself, the original alchemist.”

“Cleopatra? The Egyptian queen?”

“The very same. She set out to transmute base materials into gold. Though she was unsuccessful, her research launched centuries of study and efforts by subsequent mages.”

“Alchemists,” Gwen said. “I learned of them. But why gold?”

Orpheus blinked. The gaps in Gwen’s knowledge were…appallingly quaint.

“Gold is the most powerful modality for Netherflame, of course. Spells work better, smoother, more efficiently through gold.”

“Duh,” she breathed, shifting closer to his broken leg, careful to avoid touching, like she understood how badly it hurt. “We use silver though, why is that?”

“Well, it’s easier to come by, and a sturdier material. Gold is very soft. Silver, less so.”

“And iron?”

“It dampens magical effects and can outright mute them in large quantities.”

“But your collar is silver…”

Orpheus swallowed, aware of the presence of the metal ring around his throat for what felt like the first time in days. “Iron may possess an innate dampening property, but it cannot be used as a modality, and nothing compares to a sigil forged with intention.”

Or one reinforced by a sorcerer’s blood.

Gwen thumbed at the edge of the paper and a little fold she’d worn into a crease. “Do you think that’s my problem, then? I don’t have the right intention?”

Orpheus considered, but the key to Gwen’s magic didn’t seem to be a lack of intent.

“These holes you make, are they the only spells that have ever worked for you? That you’ve made from scratch, that is, not reworking an existing spell?”

“Pretty much.”

“And how do you create them?”

Gwen pursed her lips, arms folded atop the table while she stared at his grimoire. “First one happened on its own, I didn’t even realize I did it. This was way before the chasm closed, and that’s how I found Soot. He came waltzing right through it. I thought he’d done it, but then it happened again when he wasn’t around, and I figured out how to control it.”

Wait, did Gwen not cast a spell? Use a sigil?

“You simply…will it?” Orpheus asked.

Gwen shrugged. “Why? Is that wrong?”

Of course it wasn’t wrong. It was curious. Like his own ability to shape Netherflame: carve images from the fire with the nudge of his mind, move it through space by sheer force of will. Perhaps every mage possessed a personal manifestation of their magic, something unique to them that sets them apart. Orpheus had never encountered a recorded account that supported his theory, but then again, he wasn’t entirely sure which wizards from history were real and which were the fiction he’d only recently confronted.

“It’s not wrong. As much as I know about magic, there is much I don’t. And the differences between the way my magic worked and yours does are bound to exist.”