Long after emergency services arrived to combat the blaze at the Goss Mansion, a pair of eyes watched from a nearby grove of trees. The large albino owl stretched one talon, then the other, before ending its vigil by taking flight with a flap of its massive wings. It sailed through the plume of smoke above the smoldering ruins and then veered into the night.

Ahead of it, a shimmer appeared in the air, a sparkling slash that cut the sky and peeled apart, like a mouth opening, which the owl passed through without pause. Then it soared across a much different landscape. A purple sky dotted with blue stars that didn’t twinkle as if frozen in time. Below it stretched endless red sands, dunes rolled like waves. The bird continued until it reached a ruin of old buildings, abandoned and partially reclaimed by the desert.

A man sat on a flight of stone steps. He was sharpening a row of knives and axes, finishing one and setting each delicately, almost reverently, on the step above him. He was nude and covered in scars, the consequences of having scores of body parts replaced over his centuries of life. Upon seeing the owl, he stood up and stretched out his arm. The owl landed, its talons digging in and piercing the skin. But Ludworth didn’t care. Little blood flowed and the pain barely registered.

The stitch stroked along the feathers, first with his hand, then with his cheek. His nerve endings didn’t work well enough to feel the softness, but comfort was not his intention. It was how he read what the bird had been witness to.

“Oh, that fool. Taking on an apprentice. The master will not approve,” he said to the owl, to which it simply blinked with no reply. It was only an owl after all.

Or perhaps the master would approve, the stitch thought with annoyance as he ascended the stairs. He could make no predictions on how the Mad Magician would react to news involving Isaac. The rules applied to the former apprentice until suddenly, inexplicably, they didn’t. Ludworth despised the scores of apprentices the master took but was always rewarded as each invariably failed and perished in some manner, sometimes at his own hand. But somehow Isaac endured, prospered even, and it made the stitch hate the Mad Magician’s favorite student all the more.

Ludworth reached the top of the winding stairs and with head bowed, slowly entered the simple room at the top of the tower. His hooded master sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of books, arranged in perfectly balanced towers.

“Excuse the interruption Lord Bizot, but there’s news.” His master didn’t respond, only turned a page of the book in his lap. “Isaac news,” Ludworth specified and seethed as the name drew a reaction.

Bizot turned to look at him, his skin reflecting the candlelight like a mirror and his eyes ablaze, one red and one blue. “Oh good,” he said.

Ludworth spoke with a malicious grin, an eager snitch ratting out a rival. “It appears he may have taken on an apprentice. Or, at the very least, a partner. Or he’s acquired a bodyguard...or made a friend...” The stitch’s voice trailed off as he ran out of descriptions meant to rile the Mad Magician into the rage he’d expected.

“Has he now?” the master replied, his voice still annoyingly even.

“He’s violated the rules, yet again. This trespass is worse than his others. It cannot be allowed. Now, I beg of you, let me take his head. And hers as well, just for good measure. Enough is enough.”

“Is it? Easy, my friend. Certainly, under normal circumstances, I’d agree with you. But the tide is strange. Don’t you feel it? No, of course, you don’t, not with those deadened nerve endings. Change is coming. I can sense it, even from this damnable dimension. And change brings conflict. Do you know how to predict the coming of bloodshed?” he asked and then answered himself before the stitch could speak. “The powers that be start lining up their disposable killers. And as you know, thanks to Isaac, I’m currently shorthanded on such killers. So, for now, we’ll wait and see how things play out.”

The stitch trembled with impotent anger but knew better than to object. “As you wish.”

“Fear not. We’ll visit Isaac soon enough.” Bizot closed his book and set it delicately on one of the carefully balanced towers. “It never hurts to remind him that in all matters, great and small, he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t,” he said with a metrical cadence as if singing a nursery rhyme, and he waved a hand to conduct a nonexistent orchestra. “And that is the price and enduring consequence of his freedom.”

End of Book 1