Page 90 of Liminal

We’ll cross that hurdle when we come to it.

“You may as well sit down,” I grumble, as the Arcanaeum summons a sheet of paper to the desk and a pencil begins to sketch the runeform out in neat, exact lines. “I’ll work on this?—”

“Dakari said you die every night.” Galileo takes the seat I’ve offered him, dragging the grimoire forwards. “How? Are there other ghosts involved? We saw?—”

“Echoes. There are no other ghosts here. The Arcanaeum has its own…quirks and desires, but aside from that, there’s only me.” It chafes to talk about this, but I try to temper my tone. He is only trying to help, after all.

“I am sorry, for what it’s worth,” he mutters, poring over the pages with his left hand while leaving his right side exposed for my study. “Invading your privacy like that wasn’t my finest moment.”

“You still did it.” I can’t quite keep the snappiness out of my voice. “I would have rather taken some secrets beyond the grave.”

“There is nothing to be ashamed of. You were young.”

“Only five years younger than you.”

“You weren’t raised as an arcanist, nor given anything more than a rudimentary understanding of the world you were joining. They took advantage.”

Yes. They did. On that, we agree.

We lapse into silence as I finish up the sketch, putting it side by side with the one I copied from Ammie’s grimoire. Like this, the differences are plain.

“The constellations are completely different,” I murmur to myself. “I don’t even recognise this one.”

The warping of the original is a testament to how old the magic really is. Even then, it seems extreme, almost like Ammie designed the spell to change with each new victim, making any long-term efforts at breaking it useless.

“I gave up,” Galileo says, glancing over my shoulder at the pages. “My attempts recently have been focused on divination.”

“Seeing the future,” I recall, with no shortage of amusement. “An odd backup plan.”

He nods jerkily. “If I can create a spell that will allow me to see the outcome, I might be able to change it. Or if I can see a future Ó Rinn breaking the ensorcellment, I’ll be able to do it sooner.”

Both unreliable outcomes based on questionable understandings of the nature of time—the one thing which is immune to all magic. “Surely others have tried before?”

His throat bobs as he swallows. “Yes. The most reliable attempt was a hundred years ago, by an uncle of mine. He’d already lost his home to a fire and was striving to prevent the same from happening to his unborn child. All he managed to glean was that the answer to our problems would be found ‘beneath a sky of false stars.’”

Which is a torturous non-answer, but his glance at the ceiling speaks volumes.

“You think he meant…this room?”

I only redecorated it a little over a year ago, just before Galileo became a patron. Before that, the ceiling was filled with sun-catchers.

“It’s the only solution I could find that hadn’t been explored before. I had a cousin who tried investigating the sewers beneath the Hollywood walk of fame, but that didn’t go well for her.”

Blinking, because that means less than nothing to me, I cover my confusion by beginning the process of dissecting his runeform into its base constellations. Just because he failed, doesn’t stop it being the only reliable method I know for nullifying ensorcellments. My legs drift upwards behind me until I’m lying in midair while I work, but Leo doesn’t comment.

Unfortunately, the moment he realises I’m done with my sketch, he shrugs his shirt back over his shoulders, removing the view I’d been sneaking glimpses at over the top of the paper.

Damn, is it too cold in here?I bite my lip, realising that the chill of my presence probably doesn’t help matters, then scold myself for noticing in the first place and turn back to the charts.

We’re both silent as we focus, and for a moment—just one foolish moment—I pretend that things are how they were before North walked into the Arcanaeum. I take comfort in his proximity like I used to, before I knew about the schemes that never sleep beneath his skin and the true deceptiveness of that hawkish gaze.

Twenty-Six

Kyrith

“BOSSSS!”

“Keep. Your. Voice. Down. In. My. Arcanaeum!” I snap for the hundredth time, rubbing my temples.