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“But you’ve figured out what they do?” Thomil said.

“It wasn’t easy. The trial and error, all the different variations I’ve been through, you wouldn’t believe!”

“No, ma’am.” Thomil looked over the masses of notes and used spellpaper spilling off the tables. “I believe it.”

“Anyway, after all that fiddling, I finally wrestled all Stravos’s cryptic little flourishes into spellograph-friendly characters”—Sciona brandished the page of notes on which she had aggressively circled her final version of Stravos’s imaging lines—“and I got this!” She lifted both hands triumphantly to the shapes of the Otherrealm before her.

“You see? Those complicated, Stravos-exclusive lines clarify energy sources to perfection! No blur, no spotty variations in brightness, no ambiguity at all. They just needed to be transcribed and translated for the spellograph just so.”

“Incredible…” Thomil was still staring into the coil, the shifting light pulsing white in the gray of his irises. “How does it work?”

“Well, it’s quite a bit longer than a standard mapping spell.

There are more layers to it, including something Stravos calls a ‘pooling layer.’ Now I just have to decide what we even call this take on the Stravos Method since it’s so heavily reliant on Kaedor lines for compatibility with the spellograph. Maybe Kaevos? Stravdor?”

“Stravdor?”

“Shut up—We’ll workshop it later.”

“Have you told anyone yet?” Thomil asked. “Archmage Bringham?”

“No, no. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

Sciona beamed. “Because I’m not done. I haven’t made my final stride.”

“Your final stride?”

“This”—she gestured to her divinely clear mapping visual—“is Stravos-level clarity filtered through the grayscale lens we apply to all modern mapping spells. For my final experiment, I’m going to do what we debated earlier: I’m going to remove those Faene-ordained lines that cloud the lens.

Thomil!” She gripped the Kwen’s shoulders and shook him—or would have had his body not been so damn solid.

“We’re going to open a clear window to the Otherrealm! A Freynan Mirror!”

“So, you’ve decided that you’re alright with that?” Thomil said, and if Sciona didn’t know better, she would have said he looked proud of her. “Modifying sacred spellwork?”

“Well, I’m not modifying, exactly, am I? I’m just restoring it to the way it was once upon a time in the Age of Founders. What could be holier than that?”

“And how do you know that a place like the Otherrealm can actually be seen?” Thomil asked. “How do you know our human eyes can take it?”

“I don’t,” Sciona whispered through an irrepressible grin. “Would you like to find out with me?”

“Damn it, Highmage Freynan… Of course, I do.” And bless him; behind the veneer of calm, he looked almost as excited as she was. They had, after all, been working on this project together for the better part of three months. Here was the fruit of all their labor.

For once, Sciona typed a spell slowly, making sure she thought each line through to perfection and inserted her adjustments just so. Heart in her throat, she activated the mapping spell, and an image flared to life inside the coil.

In color.

“All the gods!” Thomil breathed. “It is a window!”

“It is a window!” Sciona’s voice cracked with emotion. “A clear, clear window!” She was practically screaming, uncaring who heard her, bouncing like a child as she clutched Thomil’s arm.

The Otherrealm wasn’t a sea of floating lanterns or a garden of never-before-seen colors, as some texts speculated.

It was a rolling expanse of snow, breached in places by evergreen bushes and cut through with animal tracks.

Sciona had only ever seen snow at a great distance, on the peaks of the Venhold Mountains.

She hadn’t realized that up close, it would catch the light of the moon and sparkle like alchemical diamond dust. An unfamiliar creature bounded from the cover of one bush to the next, and, Feryn be praised, the image was so clear, Sciona could have counted the hairs on its bushy tail.

Thomil had gone still, his head tilted, and when Sciona stopped bouncing to look at him, there was a strange expression on his face.

“It’s…”

“It’s what?” she asked when he trailed off.

“Why does it look so real?” A note of unease had crept into his voice. “If this is another realm, why does it look just like ours?”

“Does it?” Sciona had never seen any field in the mortal realm that sparkled like that, but then again, she had never seen snow cover the ground.

“It looks like the Kwen.”

“What?” Sciona said as Thomil’s arm went tense beneath her touch. “Why would—”

“The Forbidden Coordinates….” he murmured beneath his breath. His brows knit together. “I always thought… Do you have an action spell ready for testing, ma’am?”

“Yes. Of course.” It was the simple, low-risk pushing spell she usually used to test an unknown sourcing method.

“Could you do something for me, Highmage Freynan? Could you siphon?”

“Sure.” Sciona had obviously been planning to test her new spell anyway.

Releasing Thomil’s strangely rigid arm, she put her hands to the spellograph, targeted a dense evergreen bush, and hit the siphoning key.

The bush lit up bright white—beautiful Godly flame—and then unraveled like a ball of yarn thrown to the wind, leaves and fine splinters spiraling outward.

Sciona had opened her mouth to exclaim in wonder when—

Crash!

The image vanished as Thomil hurled the spellograph from the desk. It smashed into the nearest bookcase and broke. Screws and keys scattered in all directions.

“Thomil!” Sciona cried out over the ping of metal components across the lab floor. “What are you doing?”

Thomil was pale, shaking. His gray eyes had gone as wide as if he’d just seen Hell itself.

“What is it?”

“That…” He pointed a trembling finger to the bent remnants of the mapping coil. “That was Blight!”