“So,” Max asked, “how does this work, exactly?”

Max, Kylie, Saina, Alania, Lydia and I were gathered in the medical ward, gazing out of the large glass windows at the white blanket of snow beyond and ignoring Malas, doing paperwork in the background and doing his best to ignore us in turn. Saina nervously ran a hand through her hair.

“Well. I’ve never actually done it, myself, but. My family were involved in the original construction of the Refujeyo, and initially, it was really easy to travel between Duniyasar and Refujeyo. It was set up so that a prophet could use any of these portals leading outside to get home – that is, to get to Duniyasar. All they had to do was cast their spell while walking through one of the portals. That feature was removed generations ago, of course, for security reasons. Since nobody resides at Duniyasar any more to need it.”

Kylie and I exchanged a glance. We’d once travelled to Duniyasar through one of the school’s portals… had Kylie been casting at the time? I couldn’t remember.

“Removed?” Kylie asked.

“Yes. You can’t use the portals like that any more; they magically patched over that feature. But a path was left in this portal. It’s not accessed by casting a prophecy, since my family uses the Pit now and don’t have our ancestral prophecy any more; we had to find another way.” She pulled a small knife from her pocket and cut open her finger, then drew a complicated rune on the glass door leading outside. Malas visibly winced at this wanton spread of biohazardous material over his nice clean ward.

“This will work for anyone with permission to access Duniyasar,” Saina explained. “Right now that’s mostly me and my family, but when I transfer the location to you, Kylie, you’ll be able to do it, too.”

“More opportunities to bleed,” Kylie said drily. “Looking forward to it.” But she was smiling.

Saina grinned. “This part might be a bit disorienting.” She opened the door.

There was no transition between snowtopped trees and a tower in the desert, no slow change of the landscape and no moment where one became the other. We’d been looking at the former for awhile, and then we were looking at the latter, and presumably something had happened to turn one into the other, but nothing perceptible. Duniyasar just was.

We stepped through the portal.

The building looked the same as we’d left it. Huge, red, pentagonal, and with a giant tower sticking out of the middle. We’d arrived through one of the portal arches that surrounded it, some distance from the building itself, but even at this distance it was obvious how comically oversized the facade was. I remembered climbing up the high wall to slip through a window larger than a door the last time I was there. I could almost feel the sand of that sandstorm slowly rubbing my skin away –

No, I was feeling something else. An itch, in my bones, in my teeth, in my veins, as if the sand had gotten inside my body. A kind of buzzing irritation that it took me a moment to place – Kylie’s magic. Too much of it. The feeling was uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem dangerous; at least, not yet. I probably should have expected this.

I glanced at Kylie. She, or at least Fionnrath’s Destiny, was staring blankly off into the middle distance. Should’ve expected that, too.

“It… doesn’t look like the pictures,” Max noted, frowning at the building ahead of us.

“It really doesn’t,” Saina sighed. “The neglect, honestly. This is an historical site; how did Mum let it get like this?” She started for the building, then paused as a strong, sand-filled wind began to whip about our legs. “Oh. Hang on. I need to invite you all in.” She darted over and pressed her lips to my forehead, a soothingly soft sensation compared to the pins and needles that was starting to crawls all over my skin. Then she flashed me a brief smile and repeated the kiss with each of the others in turn. The brewing sandstorm immediately died down. She turned to lead the way to the tower.

“Hang on,” Alania said sharply. “Kylie. Kayden. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying not to make it obvious that I was standing as still as possible. Every time I moved, the magic moved with me in a flow of disorienting static.

“Kylie?” Alania asked again. Kylie didn’t respond.

Lydia bent down to Kylie’s eye level and stared directly into her eyes from mere inches away, her face a mask of awe and excitement. “Fai – ?”

“You will need patience and diligence,” Fionnrath’s Destiny cut her off. “Sometimes we must wait, even though it hurts.”

“Great fortune cookie,” I said. “Is Kylie okay?”

The Destiny turned Kylie’s cool brown eyes to me, regarded me with a frankly insulting amount of disinterest given how much of its magic I was carrying, then flicked Kylie’s gaze back to the tower. “We’re not here yet,” it said.

“Then let’s get there,” Saina said impatiently, “rather than standing around in the middle fo the desert.” She headed once more for the building, and this time, we all followed her.

“So this is how the spell usually is?” Max asked Lydia as we walked.

“No. It’s usually more coherent and more integrated. But this is something. I can work with this.”

Alania and I kept hold of Kylie as we walked to guide her in the right direction. I wasn’t sure how aware she was when her spell was like this – the last time we’d been at Duniyasar, she’d been completely out of it while the spell was in control, but she’d had a lot more practice at channelling since then. Neither she nor the spell spoke as Saina pushed open the giant front door with a light touch and we followed her inside.

Max, eyes lit up with excitement, immediately pulled out his tablet for light and started inspecting everything. This wasn’t hard as the entrance room was as wholly uninteresting as it had been the first time we were here; big walls and windows, some doors leading further in, some lanterns. The only interesting thing not completely buried by sand was the small well in the middle of the room, surrounded by a perfect circle etched into the stone. Four straight channels etched into the stone radiated from the circle at different angles, leading deeper into the building.

The first time I’d seen this well, it had confused me. I now knew, courtesy of a map high up the tower, that it was one point of a pentagram, the pentagram itself presumably formed by the channels in the stone and with the tower itself in the centre. I had no idea what the pentagram was for, or what had been in the well before it had filled with sand (‘water’ was the obvious answer but after the freaking tooth castle last semester I wasn’t about to be making any tame assumptions), but I knew it was part of a giant pentagram. So, that was. Something. I supposed.

Max, of course, was fascinated with it. He stuck his head inside to inspect the bricks, until Alania snapped at him to stop before he fell in.

Saina scowled at the sand piled against the walls. “Has nobody been maintaining this place? I’m going to have to have a word with Mum about this. History is important! This is a point of power, she can’t just let it fall apart like this!”

“Where to now?” Alania asked.

“The base of the tower,” Saina said. “It’s the best place to make a contract oath. I’ll bestow ownership of Duniyasar to Kylie there, and that should make prophesying here a lot easier.”

“Hang on,” I cut in. “Ownership? You’re giving her Duniyasar?”

“Temporarily,” she said. “Don’t worry, this sort of thing is done all the time – used to be done all the time, I mean. It’s routine, and the clauses are solid. The tower will recognise her as the owner and give her appropriate control for the period of ownership – a year and a day is traditional – and then it will revert back to me. Kylie won’t be able to give it to anyone else in the meantime, and if she dies in that period it reverts back to me automatically. It’s politically secure.”

“Mmm.” It didn’t sound ‘politically secure’, but what did I know?

We headed further in. Saina, Kylie and I quickly found ourselves pulling ahead while the other three had to keep stopping to inspect random things. The halls were basically the same as I remembered from last time I was there, and we found no real surprises on our way to the base of the tower.

The room at the base of the tower, too, was how I remembered it. Circular, house-sized, and full of stone benches all facing a podium at one end, their rows broken up by an incongruous large well in the middle of the room. The lattice of mirrors around the well, dirty and broken as they were, still reflected some sunlight from the giant hole in the roof, but the lighting was dim compared to that of our tablets. I inspected some of the banners and pennants hanging from the walls while we waited for Max and the adults to catch up. We all gathered in the room, I shook Kylie’s shoulder until she stopped channelling, and Saina lead her up onto the podium and took both of Kylie’s hands in hers.

“Kylie,” she announced, “I hereby grant you this territory of Duniyasar for the period of one year and one day, granted freely under the traditional rights and conditions. Do you accept?”

“Y-yes?”

“Then it is yours.” She let her go and hopped back down. “There. Done.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “Really?”

“Well, we could do a big fancy ceremony about it if we wanted, but yes. Territorial laws older than written records are worn into the soul of this place as surely as the sand wears the stone. The details are unchanging and largely automatic. It knows the rules.”

And she was right, I knew she was right, because something had changed. The magic in my body had settled once more. It wasn’t at the low, comfortable level I’d grown accustomed to and mostly learned to ignore, but it didn’t itch any more – it was like drinking a bit too much caffeine, rather than being hopped up on adrenaline. It would take some getting used to, but it was tolerable.

“Well then,” Lydia said, clapping her hands together. “The top of the tower is the best place for a lesson, yes? Come on, Kylie.”

“I suppose the rest of us should go, then,” Max said reluctantly, casting a longing eye around the room.

“Actually, the portals back to the school are controlled from the top floor,” Saina said, “so we might as well go up, too.”

I opened my mouth to point out that Lydia and Kylie were perfectly capable of activating the portal and saving us from having to climb all those damned stairs, but Max and Alania’s faces both lit up at the prospect of further exploration, so I stayed silent. I needed as much exercise as I could get if I wanted to be in pit comps anyway.

The tower was a lot less interesting to ascend a second time. Not much had changed in a year. The tower was designed so that the thick stone stairs spiralled inside the wall, leaving an almost circular room in the middle with a big hole in the floor to let light filter down, bounced off strategically placed mirrors. This meant that only half of the wall of each room could have windows, as the other half of the wall was behind the stone holding up the stairs, which was covered in beautiful, mysteriously intact tapestries. The tower was presumably very symmetrical overall but it gave each room a sort of off-centre feeling.

We ascended through abandoned classrooms, meeting rooms, workshops, and rooms I still didn’t have the necessary context to identify, until we finally reached the top of the tower.

“So this is it, then,” Max said, not bothering to hide the awe in his voice. “The strongest point of prophetic power in the world.”