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A moment’s concentration, a flutter of his lashes, and Xander had taken command of the arcane engine. The machine whirred to life as it siphoned his stores of arcane essence, his energies coursing deeper and stronger than perhaps any of the others who’d tested the device before him.

No offense meant to Beatrice and the masters, of course. I was head over heels in love with this man, after all.

The curls of his hair rose and tumbled, whipped by the eldritch breeze radiated by the rapidly shuffling pages of the crystalline book. Xander took a long, slow breath, then exhaled all at once.

Electricity leapt from the arcane engine in sparks and tangling arcs, an amplified expression of his Volta spell. Terra came through in swirls of dust and pebbles, plumes of flame erupting to represent Ignis, a chilling breeze that carried the diamond dust of snowflakes and ice as a manifestation of Glacia.

And with each magnified version of his little magics it struck me that I knew the names of all those spells because of the time we spent with each other, the small slice of Grayhaven he’d brought back home to me. The same place that had kicked off our silly rivalry had now become the very thing to bring the two of us so close together — never mind that it had a crazy magical goddess masquerading as its principal.

Sure, I’d never be able to cast spells on my own, exactly as Old Giuseppe had said. But between the two of us, Xander could do wondrous things. We’d already done wondrous things, saved the Black Market, maybe even the world. All of my insecurities and anger from before the time we started dating seemed so insignificant and stupid now. Together, Xander and I truly could make magic.

More than the magic, this incredible elemental fireworks display, what stood out the most was the sweet sound of Xander’s laughter. Our eyes met, his gaze filled with joy, but above all else, pride.

“It’s working, Jack! All that effort and it’s finally working. This is amazing.”

All those years his family had tried to force him into Incandescence when all it would really take to push him to his potential was a work of artifice. All those years of resentment and spite, and here was the answer all along, a machine to safely enable even greater feats of magic.

And then Xander began to scream.

“What’s happening?” I cried out. “Preston, Giuseppe? The engine. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Giuseppe shouted back, flipping frantically through loose pages from the schematics. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”

Beatrice shoved me in the shoulder. “Turn off the machine. Pull Xander away from it. Do something, Jack. Do anything.”

My heart lunged, falling into the pit of my stomach. Plumes of radiant energy leapt from Xander’s body in a dizzying, sickening array of colors, his elemental magic mingling dangerously, braiding with strands of raw arcane essence. Was it even safe to touch him? What if this worked like electricity?

Why didn’t I have any of the answers?

“We can’t just unplug the damn thing,” Preston said, his voice trembling even as he tried his hardest to stay calm. “It’s connected to the spire, taking extra energy from the sun. We fiddle with it and it might blow.”

“Just fucking do something,” someone shrieked. I couldn’t make out who had said it in the chaos, but they had the right idea.

I approached the arcane engine, grimacing as sparks and rays of pure magic slashed at my skin. I walked onward, trusting in my prismatic talent to spare me from the worst of the damage. I had to do something. Anything. Xander was in excruciating pain, his eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his face, his mouth open, jaw strained.

And still I looked on stupidly, not knowing what I could say or do. Hubris. That was all it was, artificers pushing too hard and too far, never truly understanding the intricacies of arcane essence, endangering others in the process. My own fiancé, the love of my life.

Disabling the engine sounded like the simplest thing to do, except that I still didn’t know how badly Xander would be impacted by the sudden disruption in the arcane circuit. I gritted my teeth as I took the last few steps to the control panel, approaching the dais even as shards of ice and jagged rock shredded my skin.

We were so excited — too excited to create and complete the first artificing project the Black Market had seen in too long a time. And yet we hadn’t bothered with the most fundamental of precautions. Did Mom and Dad ever document any of the dangers? Surely they must have tested this thing inside and out — something Preston and Giuseppe and I had apparently failed to properly do.

My fist clenched as I reached Xander at the control panel, my bleeding skin yearning for the Gauntlet’s protection. And its destructive power, too. I’d left it at home, didn’t once think that I’d need it. A single Blast or Break would have been all it took to stop this. A destroyed arcane engine we could put back together again. Xander — gods, I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t risk it.

Damn the engine, damn the art of artifice, damn it all to the deepest hells. We could smash the machine, leave it in smithereens on the ground, forgotten, never to be rebuilt again. Maybe we never should have rebuilt the Halls of Making to begin with. Standing barely a foot away from Xander, my hands hovering so close by, aching to do something, to touch him despite the danger, I whispered.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Cut the circuit!” Niko screamed. He lifted his hand, preparing to cast a spell. “If you won’t break this thing to stop it, I will.”

Lobelia flung her arm across his body, blocking the way. “No! The shock would kill him.” She turned her gaze on Xander, and then on me, her eyes reddened and wet. “Ripping him away won’t help. He has to burn out his essence.”

Her mouth pulsed open and shut, like she’d meant to say more. “He has to suffer” seemed like the only thing to fill in the blanks.

All that time and energy I’d put into keeping Xander far away and safe from Incandescence, and here I was snuffing his soul out with my stupid toy. All those obstacles we encountered rebuilding the Halls of Making, all these challenges — maybe there was a reason. We should have left the past in the dust. Should have left it in the dirt. I hadn’t helped or saved Xander at all. I only made his candle burn out faster.

“Jack,” he said, his voice trembling. “I think I’m dying.”

My heart twinged from the pain of it. Damn the consequences. If Xander had to suffer, then the least I could do was suffer with him. I drew closer, gritting my teeth against the searing agony of the elements, reminding myself that this was nothing compared to what he was going through, the sensation of his own arcane essence incinerating him from the inside.

I pressed my chest against his back and wrapped him in an embrace, my hands on his heart. I could barely hear the warning, protesting cries of our friends above the storm of raging fire and ice and thunder, but it didn’t matter. They could pry my lifeless body from Xander’s skin if they dared.

I hadn’t expected Xander to relax so suddenly under my touch. Not relax, exactly, more that he was leaning against me, perhaps for support. And then I understood: this was actually helping. My presence was absorbing some of the forces being released by the combined might of the arcane engine and his own magics.

But would that even be enough to keep us both unharmed? The very touch of Xander’s body against mine burned, every inch of his exposed skin blazing hot as metal, a horrific, magnetic force binding our bodies as one, this awful arcane electrocution.

My instinct was right. If anyone else had tried to touch Xander — if anyone tried to remove us from the machine now — they would perish under the elemental assault. I couldn’t fathom how Xander had survived this long at the control panel himself. His Grayhaven conditioning must have made him more resistant to the elements, a durable conduit for channeling magic.

“We taught him well,” a familiar voice whispered in my ear. My skin crawled at the sound of it, a queasy sensation rippling throughout my body as a hand settled on my shoulder.

“Hecate,” I whispered, my voice hoarse, a dry, painful rasp in my throat. Sudden anger flared through my blood. Maybe it was the chaos of it all, the madness of standing in this swirl of unbridled magic. “The explosion. The guild. Then, and now. Did you do this?”

A second hand clutched my other shoulder. Two copies of the goddess stepped forward, flanking me and Xander, each duplicate laying more hands on my body. In my peripheral vision I could see the bitter derision in her smile.

“You are so brilliant, Jackson Pryde, and yet so foolish for accusing us of an act so heinous. You lay the blame at the feet of a goddess when this contraption of yours is solely the fault of clumsy human hands.”

I grunted at the bright heat of Xander’s body in my arms, burying my forehead in his hair for the comfort I couldn’t find, that I didn’t deserve. “Then you’ve come to watch us die.”

All three copies of the goddess laughed. “You are a fool indeed, fleshling. No. We have come to stop this. We see no benefit in an incident that would slay our brightest pupil and destroy this entire dimension.”

A little too late I noticed that my body didn’t burn so badly wherever Hecate’s hands touched me. Was she absorbing the excess energy? She really had come to help. But that last part —

“Destroy the Black Market? The arcane engine? You’re exaggerating.”

I cried out as Hecate’s fingernails dug into my skin, thirty all at once, as sharp as talons.

“The problem with you humans is how you so quickly forget your history. See how proud you are with your progress, making this machine better the second time around. And yet for all you’ve achieved, you never bothered to understand why it so crucially malfunctioned the first time.”

My blood ran cold. The first time? Mom and Dad built this machine before, then. This was the very invention that had wiped out the Halls of Making. The arcane engine created the blast that killed all those artificers, flattened the guild grounds, scrambled Whitby’s memory.

And I’d so happily, confidently offered it as a wedding present to the man I loved.

Tears clotted my voice as I answered the goddess. “The old artificers, they didn’t know. And I didn’t know, either. Help me, please, Hecate. Help me help him.”

Xander twitched within my grasp, a low whimper in his throat as he leaned limply against my torso. The strength had been dragged out of him. I could sense it, the absence of his will. All that remained was his physical body as a conduit, a rag that had been thoroughly wrung out.

“Help him.”

Hecate’s touch grew lighter, but all three pairs of hands never left my skin. “That is why we are here, fleshling. Together we will weather this arcane storm, soak up the damage so that Xander Wright won’t have to go it alone. You still have a wedding to attend to, yes?”

A strange, awkward chuckle bubbled out of my throat. “We do. I’m sorry for everything, Hecate. I never should have doubted you. If you hadn’t come, then — oh, gods, Xander. I’m so sorry.”

My tears dripped somewhere in the tangle of Xander’s hair, my mouth so close to his nape. I brushed my lips against his skin, hoping that the familiar contact would help somehow. He twitched again, falling deeper into my arms, his hands never separating from the arcane engine.

“We worry for tears later, fleshling. We worry for apologies when this is all over. Now, focus. You’ve done too fine a job of rebuilding this infernal machine. These energies are immense. Accept Xander’s pain so that he won’t have to.”

Ribbons of lightning and fire danced in a frenzy around us, but even with my minimal understanding of magic I could sense that the knotted snarl of Xander’s spells was finally subsiding. His essence was running out, and not a moment too soon. The wind whipping through the Halls of Making was dying down, as was the strange whistling noise. It reminded me of a kettle about to burst.

Any longer and we might have truly put the Black Market and its people in danger. Any longer and the magic would have burned out fragments of Xander’s soul, his psyche, maybe even his body. If it hadn’t been for my own power to absorb energy — if it hadn’t been for Hecate — even imagining it filled me with dread.

It happened faster than I’d expected. The magic receded into wisps, then dissipated entirely, leaving nothing but faint traces of mist swirling about our feet. Xander slumped to the base of the platform, his hands finally slipping from the crystal book. The guild grounds had already gone silent, but there was screaming once more, mainly from Beatrice and Sedgewick.

“His hair,” they were saying. “His hands.”

Smoke curled in tendrils from the tips of Xander’s hair. My stomach churned when I saw why they’d been so surprised. Over half of it had now turned stark white, not the sprinkled salt and pepper from before. And his hands, in horrible contrast, his palms — his skin where he’d touched the control panel had turned inky black, from the base of the wrist all the way to the fingertips.

“Gods above and below,” I stammered, sinking to the floor to join him, only just preserving enough of my strength to hold myself up, to hold myself together. “Oh, gods, Xander. What have I done?”

Our friends rushed up to meet us, a cacophonous murmur of people trying to help, of people crying, of the masters, most of all, barking orders and instructions at the others, through telepathic connections to their subordinates.

Lobelia’s voice trembled as she called for herbalists and healers. Kaoru, if I heard him right, was summoning a fleet of his best scribes, commanding them to draw wards to contain whatever magical radiation still remained at the Halls of Making.

But Vikhyat stood by the arcane engine, staring grimly at its smoking chassis, at the crystalline control panel that now had two blackened imprints of Xander’s hands on its surface.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered in his ear, brushing locks of his now snow-white hair away from his face. “Xander, are you there? I love you. I’m so sorry.”

“He’ll be fine,” Beatrice said, her hand on the back of my head, this chain of feeble reassurance. “He needs rest. Plenty of it. But he’ll be fine. Right, Preston?”

A huge lump went down Preston’s throat as he swallowed. I’d never seen him so pale and so sullen. “We should have worked on it more. I’m sorry, Jack. I should have known better.”

I shook my head. “Wasn’t your fault. Don’t blame yourself.” I placed one hand on Xander’s chest, trusting the rhythm of his breath to give me comfort. “I should have known better than to try and build something my parents had left behind. There was a reason they left that schematic in there. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be touched.”

My bottom lip ached the longer I bit into it. Was it the right time to tell them what Hecate had told me?

Wait. Hecate. The others hadn’t responded to her presence. The Black Market was a magical place, but women with solid black eyes who teleported instantly and multiplied themselves still weren’t a very common sight. I raised my head, craning my neck left, then right.

And just as I’d expected, the goddess was already gone. I could have sworn her hands were still on my body. She’d only made herself known to me, then. I’d only frighten and confuse the others if I started spouting the mad knowledge she’d brought me.

“I could have sworn we got everything right,” Giuseppe said softly. He wrung his hands together, red eyes staring glumly at Xander’s sleeping face. “We followed everything in the schematics to the letter. All the instructions, all the precautions.”

And then it hit me. Giuseppe was there for the first explosion. An artificer’s invention could take all kinds of shapes. Anyone could take the insides of the Gauntlet or my boots of hovering and install them into another suitable object, hypothetically achieving similar effects.

A waistcoat that channeled energy, for example, or a hat of hovering, as impractical as it sounded. The insides stayed the same, mostly, but the exterior could be anything. The final product could vary so wildly that the possibilities were endless.

The crystalline control panel in the shape of an open book — that was never part of the original schematic, only a customization we’d decided to implement. Preston and I couldn’t be expected to recognize the arcane engine in its current form, but Giuseppe had collaborated with my parents in the past. Someone who worked on the same internal mechanisms must have remembered.

I watched him carefully as I asked my question. “So this wasn’t a problem back then, Giuseppe? In the days of the old guild. The first time you worked on this machine?”

Preston frowned. Vikhyat finally turned his attention away from the arcane engine, setting his dark sights on Old Giuseppe’s face. With a slow blink and a confusion so earnest it could have broken my heart, Giuseppe answered.

“The first time?” He scratched the back of his head. “Gods above and below, Jackson. I don’t know what you mean.”