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It was the same when she slipped through the years using Ishtar’s Key. Esta didn’t control the years. All she did was pull the layers of time apart. She found the spaces and used her affinity to open them so she could slip through. After all, what was magic but the possibility of power contained within chaos? Her slipping through time had done nothing but insert chaos into the time line.

Nibsy had been wrong. Aether wasn’t time itself. Aether was so much more than that. It was the indefinable quality of the spaces between, the substance that kept everything in balance. Her affinity wasn’t for time but for its opposite. For the chaos inherent in magic itself.

That was why Seshat had been able to remove a piece of the old magic from the whole. It was the reason she could put its beating heart into the book she’d created. Not because she could touch the threads of time but because she could move them and manipulate them by controlling magic itself. That was also why Thoth needed Seshat, why he had hunted her over the ages. Without her power, he couldn’t reach the pure piece of old magic trapped within the Book, and he certainly couldn’t control it.

But with her power…

It was why Nibsy had used the girl to put Seshat back into the Ars Arcana. He needed Seshat’s power as well.

Esta thought again of the night of the convention, of all that Seshat had told her and shown her. That night so long ago, she’d been trying to rectify her mistake. She had tried to correct the imbalance that she’d created by inventing ritualized magic.

She’d removed a piece of pure magic from the whole and infused it into the Book. But the power in those pages wasn’t inscribed. It wasn’t the stable writing of ritual. It was chaos, still pure in its possibility. A piece of magic that transcended the ordering of time.

It was why the Book could hold the stones. The magic within it was outside of time, beyond time’s reach. It was also what made the Book so dangerous. If that power was released, it could destroy time and reality itself.

Esta placed her hand over the inscription of the Philosopher’s Hand so that the symbols there floated above her own fingers. She turned her hand over, inspected her palm, and considered the burning fish in the drawing. Aether. Within herself. Outside as well.

Seshat had a similar affinity. She’d used her power to unite the stones, just as the palm united the fingers of the hand. Whole and complete, unite through the Aether that connected all things. A perfect circuit.

Had Thoth not interrupted and stopped her, Seshat would have reinserted that piece of magic back into time. But how?

She would have given up that piece of magic and the power that came with it, Esta realized. By giving everything up.

She read Newton’s inscription again: With power willingly given, mercury ignites. Elements unite. The serpent catches its tail, severs time, consumes. Transforms power to power’s like.

Power willingly given. Seshat had given nearly everything to perform the ritual. She’d placed almost all of her own affinity into the stones. Would she have given the rest? The girl had. That other version of herself had given up her entire connection to the old magic—or she’d been forced to.

Would it have turned out differently if the girl had been willing rather than coerced? Would the girl have survived, as Seshat would have survived? Or had Seshat always intended to die?

Somehow, Esta doubted it. Seshat believed that she would become something more by completing the ritual. The goddess didn’t seem like the type to martyr herself.

But Seshat had never been able to finish the ritual. Thoth had stopped her before she could reinsert that piece of pure magic in the Book to the whole of creation, and for centuries, he’d been trying to use her power to replicate the ritual she’d never finished.

Not to save magic, as Seshat had been attempting to do. But to capture and control it.

Because maybe that’s what the ritual does. “Transforms power to power’s like,” Esta read, puzzling over the words.

Seshat never would have just given up, and nothing about the goddess had ever struck Esta as purely altruistic. She wouldn’t have sacrificed her power unless she thought she’d receive something in return. Seshat must have believed she would get something from the ritual—something more than simply saving the old magic—the same as Thoth.

Esta flipped to another page and reexamined the way the old alchemist’s writing had gone from the straight, steady script to something more erratic that bordered on madness. Newton had believed the ritual was the key to the Philosopher’s Stone—the answer to endless riches and eternal life. Thoth had likely used that desire for fortune and immortality to control him, the same way he’d used Jack’s hatred.

Newton had been willing to kill for the power in the Book. He’d created the stones by sacrificing the lives and affinities of the most powerful Mageus he could find. But something had stopped him from finishing the ritual. What was it? Maybe he hadn’t been strong enough, or maybe he hadn’t been willing to give up everything—not his power and not the beating heart of magic, either.

Maybe that was the answer. Seshat had never intended to keep the magic in the Book for herself. She’d been ready to reinsert the piece of pure magic back into the whole once it was protected. She would have given it up, and in doing so, power would be transformed.

But maybe Newton had been unwilling to do that. The Order certainly had been unwilling to. They’d used the artifacts to create the Brink to keep their magic, but they never completed the ritual. Either because they weren’t able or they refused to do what Seshat had been willing to do—to give her own power over to the ritual to complete it. To give up the power of the Book as well. Power willingly given.

Maybe that was why the Brink continued to take the power of Mageus who tried to cross out of the city—because it was still waiting for the final piece of the ritual. Thoth had told Esta that time will always take what it is owed. So too, it seemed, would magic.

But it would never be enough, Esta realized. The Brink was waiting for a power that no single Mageus could contain. It was waiting for the beating heart of magic.

That was how Seshat’s ritual could still be completed. The Brink was created by the same ritual that Seshat had performed eons ago—a ritual formed by Seshat’s power to touch the strands of time, just like Esta herself could. They could use that ritual. The piece of magic in the Book could be returned to the whole, and with it the Brink could be transformed into what Seshat had always intended for the ritual to create—a space where magic could not die. Part for the whole. Like to like. Magic could be saved.

But only if someone was willing to pay the ultimate price.

But it doesn’t have to be you. The demon goddess could be used…

There was a way to control Seshat’s power—through the stones—as Thoth had always intended. If Thoth could use the artifacts, so could Esta. She could help the goddess finish what had been started eons ago without giving up her own life.