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She hesitated with a sudden unease. What if she had misunderstood?
No… The recipe was clear enough, at least to her. She’d been raised on Latin and the occult sciences—trained and honed for this. Because the Professor had believed he could use her to do this very ritual.
Professor Lachlan had thought he could use her affinity to take this power. He had stolen her life so that he could take control of the beating heart of magic for himself. But now she would be the one to claim the ritual.
What else will you claim? The thought was as unexpected as it was unwelcome.
The stones were hot against her skin, and the wind beyond the boundary had picked up speed. But within the space that her friends were holding, there was only silence.
What else could she claim? What had Thoth told her?
You could transform time. Make the world anew.
But she didn’t want a world remade. She wanted this world, with all its uncertainty. True, there was hate and fear, but as she looked at her friends risking everything, she knew there was beauty, too. And there was Harte.
Outside the silence of the circle, the storm was increasing. She felt the boundary grow more tenuous, and she turned back to the page open before her. The Philosopher’s Hand—the recipe for the mythic substance known to change lead into gold and men into gods. Five fingers of the hand, linked to one of the five elements, aligned with the five artifacts she now wore.
“With power willingly given, mercury ignites,” she read. “Elements unite.”
Newton’s writing seemed to writhe on the page, like the Book itself knew the moment was near. The individual letters shivered, glowing with a sudden luminescence as the Brink began to crumble.
She focused her affinity and poured it into the stones that lay against her skin. At first she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, but then she felt it. The spaces between the stones and the magic within them, the possibility of the chaos it held. She continued, giving herself over to it—giving her affinity to the old magic willingly—and she felt the instant the stones joined, twining with her magic as they were connected by Aether. In a single, staggering burst of cold power, they united as one, and at the center, burning like the fish in the Philosopher’s Hand, she felt her magic catch fire.
Caught in the thrall of that power, she could do nothing more than marvel at first. She understood why men had craved it—killed for it—over the eons. This wasn’t only the old magic, with its warm assurance and steady strength. This was something more. Ritual magic. Power beyond the spaces between. Power that could be multiplied and molded.
Power that you could claim.
Sound drained away, and Esta could no longer hear the wind whipping around her or her friends’ screams for her to hurry. She understood suddenly what Newton must have felt centuries ago when he’d attempted this very ritual, when he’d held the power of those stones in the net of his own affinity and saw what he could become. The awe of it. The fear as well.
But there was more. She wasn’t finished, not when the Book still held the beating heart of magic, not when Seshat still raged within Harte’s skin. It was time to finish what Seshat had started so long ago.
It was time to place the beating heart of magic back into the whole.
Esta felt power dance along her skin, as cool as silk and as sharp as a blade as she turned back to the page before her. The letters were glowing now in earnest, urging her on.
“The serpent catches its tail,” she whispered. “Severs time, consumes. Transforms power to power’s like.”
The most obscure of all the lines—the most difficult and the most important. Some myths believed the serpent was time. Others, like the Antistasi, saw the ouroboros as magic itself.
Time and magic, two halves to the balanced whole that everything depended upon. Within the Book was a piece of pure magic, held outside the threat of time. Outside the circle of the sigils was the Brink, a boundary made from the Aether—made from time. One would be consumed. The other transformed.
It wasn’t enough to just let the Book’s power go within the Brink. That wouldn’t do anything but overload the already-overwhelmed boundary. That much power? The Brink would shatter and fall—and it would take everything along with it. But there was a way to complete the ritual. There had to be.
If she got this wrong…
Her skin was singing, and her blood felt alive as she laid her hand on the open page of the Book. Focusing her affinity through the stones, she reached for the spaces between all the Book was and all it had ever been. Just as she’d found the curse sunk into Jianyu’s skin, she felt it there—the piece of old magic—pure and alive and wild in its infinite possibilities. She sent her affinity into the spaces between that magic and the world, and she tore them apart.
THE SERPENT CATCHES ITS TAIL
The stones burned against Esta’s skin as she tore the piece of pure, untouched magic from within the pages Seshat had used to hide it eons before. She ignored the sizzle of energy that felt like lightning about to strike and swallowed down the taste of blood on her tongue. It took everything she had to hold on to that power.
She understood then what Seshat had tried to do—how powerful Seshat truly must have been to accomplish such a thing as removing a piece of magic from the whole. It was like holding infinity and nothingness all at once.
The Book fell away, crumbling to ash, and the space within the sigil was transformed. She’d felt something like this sense of terrifying possibility before, when she’d slipped back to this time, but that had been nothing compared to what the Book had concealed. She could feel everything—sense everything—the world and time and the spaces between.
The area within the boundary of the sigils became filled with the power that had been in the Book and was transformed by it. Chaos bloomed with all its beauty and its terror. It felt like stepping into the heart of an atom, like standing in the middle of an emptiness that held within it an infinite number of possibilities.
Magic lives in the spaces. That’s what Esta had been taught. It was what she had always believed, but now she understood that living was too tame a word for what magic contained.
