1-3 E

I felt nothing on the way home. Tree branches snagged in my hair and scraped across my face, but I couldn’t even bring myself to flinch. Drops of blood dripped from my cheeks, streaks of red carried down by tears that left stains which wouldn’t just scrub away. The bag on my back kept threatening to fall, held by a single strap as it was. The other dangled after being yanked off when it caught on a tree.

I tripped more than a few times. Trying to walk in the woods without looking at the ground did that. Navigating properly wasn’t worth tearing my eyes off the palm of my hand. The pain from it drowned out everything else.

The statue had left a mark even after I’d finally thrown it away. Blackened and charred flesh sketched out an utterly foreign symbol that screamed into my mind whenever my eyes touched it.

“BETRAYER.”

Sickly grey light pulsed out, practically blindingly magical. The flesh around it was red and raised like a fresh tattoo. Even though I was staring at it and it was perfectly still, it felt like something was writhing under my skin. Pushing and clawing in tune with the scraping branches and rustling leaves left by an unnatural wind that blew into my face no matter where I turned.

Teresa might’ve said I was in shock. But Teresa was gone. Whisked off by the Fae, left in what sounded like a living Hell for nine months. Dead at the end, if I couldn’t save her. And it was All. My. Fault.

I had to give them something worth more than a soul. How the fuck was I supposed to do that by reading fucking books? I…I’d never solved something like this without her. Tere had been the only reason I’d gotten into college, much less gotten our scholarship. We made it through Mom’s death and boarding school because we were together. Doing this alone was overwhelming.

So was what I’d done.

Eventually the trees started to thin out. Then the forest itself ended at a ring of ground that shone with its own inner light. In the middle was the house. I had to pull out of the magic even further, letting the aura around my hand fade away, to keep from being blinded. Sigils and runes decorated every window and door, with sheets and lines of light blaring out. The old weathervane at the top held a tiny star in its halo. A transparent version of the vane, sharing the form of an angel, turned to follow me as I approached.

It still wasn’t enough to make me feel. Neither was the porch, when I tripped on the stairs and ended up smashing my nose into it hard enough bleed. This time, I didn’t get up. Glowing words stood out a few inches in front of my eyes as I gave into the exhaustion, but it just wasn’t worth reading them.

~-~-~-~

I woke up coated in a cold sweat. The dream had been far, far too real. It had to be magic.

There’d been a hill. Slick ash coating a slope of gravel that wouldn’t hold weight without starting a landslide. Frantic leaping from boulder to boulder while something with too many teeth and matted grey fur scrabbled along the stone. I woke up before it could catch me. Catch her.

The blonde hair had been Teresa’s. The ash, the clouds, the inhuman laughter in the distance…was that what she was going through? It made me want to break down into tears again. Instead I just left my face on the wood and wallowed in my misery, kept company by the faded pain in my hand.

What eventually forced me to open my eyes was that I needed to piss. Badly.

That problem solved itself in the worst possible way when I opened my eyes to find the statuette right in front of my face. It didn’t show her on the ground, anymore. Now it showed her running, her eyes wide with terror and staring deep into mine. The reflexive response, other than the uncomfortable warmth spreading from my waist, was to smack it away and into the side of the house.

The words were still there on the porch, but I couldn’t focus on them. Even after passing out everything was fuzzy. I had to deal with that and with the mess I’d made before anything else. A shower, clean pants. Those were somewhere to start. Small steps, like when I was first dealing with depression years ago. Achievable tasks, small goals.

Opening the door revealed another highly improbable obstacle to dealing with things; a skeletal bird stood at the bottom of the stairs. It was holding a stylus in its beak and standing in front of a scratched-up iPad. The mirror behind it showed a winged woman in a grey dress where I should have been.

I took a deep breath and ignored the mirror-lady as she started to say something. “Shower first. Then clean pants. Then food. Then you can deal with the bird and the bloody-fucking-Mary.”

Both tried to follow me as I went up to my room on the third floor. The skeleton got stuck outside when I slammed the bedroom door in its face. The thing in the mirror followed me into the bathroom. Its words were just more noise, up until the mirror fogged over with steam. Then it was quiet.

The jacuzzi tub Grandad had installed in my bathroom after I’d begged him looked so tempting. I didn’t deserve it though. Instead I went into the garishly green tiled shower that I’d thought was a good idea when he’d been renovating. The water was hot enough to burn, but at least it was something I could feel. That was an improvement.

The shower was longer than it should’ve been. For several long minutes the water sluiced off in a disgusting mixture of blood and ash. After that it mostly ran clear, scalding me in places and leaving a stinging pain around all my relatively fresh cuts and scratches. It took a conscious effort to get out before I did more damage to myself.

The mirror stayed empty when I wiped it off, no weird grey lady in sight. The statue showing up on the sink was another thing to add to the list. The bejeweled silver and wood moth tied into my somehow perfectly dry hair probably deserved to be there too. At this point I wasn’t expecting it to stay away when I ripped it out and threw it into the trash. I wasn’t even surprised when my hair flopped down, suddenly soaking again.

A few more breaths went by before I opened the bathroom door. “Shower’s done. Clothes now, then food, then the freaky bird skeleton. Talk to the lady in the mirror, because one of those apparently being here my whole life isn’t any weirder than the rest of this shit. Then the cursed statue and the hair thing. Then saving Teresa.”

The bird was outside. It started pecking at my foot. “Not now. Let me eat something, then I’ll deal with whatever the fuck you want.”

The mirror lady popped up a few times on my way to the kitchen, but nothing she said registered. Twenty minutes later I still felt empty. The macaroni hadn’t helped all that much, but at least I had a full stomach.

The bird had dragged its tablet to the foot of the table by then and gone back to pecking me. “Ok, fine, your turn now. What’s with the tablet.”

It tapped on the power button. A low battery indicator popped up.

“You want me to charge it?” It threw its whole body into a nod. “I guess it would be kinda hard to grab a charger with a beak, eh?”

It scratched at the floor. A few minutes later I had it plugged in with one of my old Apple chargers. The freaky little skeleton kept trying to turn it on before it had enough charge to finish booting up. “What exactly are you, anyway? I mean, you’re obviously something Grandpa had. But, y’know, why? Are you one of those taxidermy skeletons or whatever they’re called he had in the study?”

The skeleton obviously didn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting at this point. “If he literally just kept you as a pet and you’re barely even magical I swear I’m going to scream.”

The lady popped up in the mirror again while the bird started tapping apps with its stylus. I had the time to take a better look at her, now. Her wings were the same shade of grey as her dress, which itself wasn’t in any kind of flattering cut. It was almost like there wasn’t anything solid under it, just a sheet of fabric dangling from her shoulders. Her eyes were unfocused. Probably. Focusing an eye that didn’t have a distinct pupil or iris didn’t seem possible. Her hair hung in a limp curtain behind her even as she inclined her head at me. Everything about her just seemed to be faded out, including the rest of the colors in the mirror.

“So, can you actually talk? Or do we have to do sign language? Need me to do that breathing on the mirror thing where you trace words out backwards in the fog? Maybe I say your name three times and you can come out and kill me?”

“I can speak, yes. There are multiple unaddressed matters relevant to the Archive and greater ward scheme, Lady Blackleaf.” Her face didn’t shift at all as she spoke, not even the slightest hint of emotion outside the movement of her lips.

“…what?”

Her face twisted into a frown for a fraction of a second then snapped back to a blank mask. “Inter-Archive transfers are suspended following Lord Blackleaf’s relinquishment of ownership. Scrying and other exterior communications remain suspended until the arrays are reconfigured. Current information is three months, twelve days, six hours, thirty-seven minutes, and three seconds outdated. Several minor alerts concerning non-hostile approaches by persons marked of interest also await acknowledgement. Previous notifications failed due to the Ladies Blackleaf failing to acknowledge them.”

Her face screwed up again. “Two additional major alerts have been triggered by the presence of two uncatalogued Faerie artifacts that register as quasi-curses. A minor geas also appears anchored to Lady Blackleaf.”

She was acting more like a machine than a person. Spirit? Demon? “Lady Blackleaf?”

“Yes, Lady Blackleaf, your title. As current mistress of Blackleaf Manor the courtesy falls to you. Ownership of the Blackleaf Archive, as well as Lord Blackleaf’s various outer holdings and hereditary titles, are implied.” She frowned, just the slightest downturn to her lips. This time it didn’t vanish. “Again, Archival business cannot be conducted without the Lady Blackleaf’s approval.”

Okay. This…this was probably weird. Not that big of a surprise though. Of course there was a bunch more secret stuff that Grandpa had just forgotten to tell us about.

“So how do I fix everything?”

“Acknowledgement has cleared minor alerts. The primary warding and communication arrays require reconfiguration to the Lady Blackwell’s mana signature before lifting lockdown protocols.”

“And how do I do that?”

“The relevant matrices are located, respectively, in the primary and secondary artifice zones within the Archives. Workroom and Orrery access status remain unknown. Secondary translocation access is offline until the lockdown is lifted. Tertiary physical access within the Manor is confirmed active; please make firm contact with the main bannister and await activation.”

Fuck it, why not. Worst that could happen was me dying from listening to the creepy mirror woman that kept glitching out. Moving back to the entryway, I grabbed onto the railing.

There was a tingle in my hand. Then the bannister lit up with a network of glowing runes and everything disappeared. With a lurch like when we’d entered the Roads, my surroundings blurred into a smear of colors. When they snapped back into place, I was standing on a platform with my hand resting on a pedestal.

The room I’d ended up in was dark at first. After a few seconds, clear strips of crystal in the ceiling lit up with a soft yellow light, revealing a room lined with workbenches, blackboards, and scrawled diagrams. Two physical doors led out from opposite sides, each massive and barred like something from a medieval movie. The entire room was lined with mirrors, an identical sheet of polished silver hanging every few feet.

“Translocation to primary artifice zone successful. The relevant array is anchored to the sapphire within the false-silver matrix.” She popped up in one, then shifted around the room nauseatingly quickly as a few of the diagrams and obviously magical creations powered on. Her body never seemed to move or turn, just popping from one to another.

A quick glance found what she’d described. There was only one blue gemstone in the room; a sapphire the size of my fist covered in silver filigree that rose from the floor like a tree. It pulsed like a beating heart, dim light flashing through the metal every couple seconds. The mirror lady had said something about rekeying it to my mana signature…touching it probably couldn’t hurt, right?

The surface of the stone was cold, like grabbing metal that had sat in a freezer. The air around it thrummed with power and bristled with ethereal lines that I could only see from the corner of my eye. Messing this up bad enough would probably make it explode, with how charged the air felt.

“You do want me to push my magic into this thing, right? It won’t blow up if I try to?”

“Correct. The array will scan your mana signature, physical, and metaphysical condition. Once it is satisfied you are unharmed and free of relevant compulsive magic, it will lift the lockdown and return control to you. Barring any changes you direct, the settings will return to the Lord Blackleaf’s. Extraplanar wards will be relaxed to allow entrance of contracted entities, physical deflection wards will be deactivated, defensive spells will return to discretionary control, and the translocation access will be unlocked, thus allowing transportation of Archive material to anywhere within the Manor. Once the process is repeated on the communication array the scrying links with other Initiative sites will be reactivated, quaternary access sites will reactivate, and inter-Archive transfers will recommence.”

She acted like a chatbot. No filters on what she put out and not entirely relevant responses. It honestly wasn’t that surprising that some big overseer spirit managing whatever Grandad had going here would act like a computer program; artificial logic was apparently the same between electronics and arcane crafting.

Putting aside the nagging feeling that I was missing something, I focused and felt warmth flow into my freezing hand. Behind the background glow the air itself seemed to have I could see tendrils of magic tracing my arteries as they travelled to my hand. When they touched the stone, everything froze over with a glaze of frost. After a few terrifying heartbeats where the pressure bore down on me even harder than before, the stone lit up with a brighter glow and the frost liquified. It eventually settled into a pattern of pulses that matched my heartbeat even after I pulled away.

“Configuration successful. Lockdown lifted, transfer to the Lady Blackleaf completed.” A few of the devices and arrays scattered around the room dimmed. At the same time, the doors at either side of the room opened. “Please proceed to your right. The communications array is the central pillar within the secondary artifice zone. Contact with any portion of the surface will be sufficient. Please refrain from disturbing anything within the room. It is…fragile.”

The room was dark. A monolith, just barely luminescent, stood in the center. It was off-white, mottled with yellow, and dotted with barely visible pores. Ribbons of the material stuck out from it like spokes, connecting to shadowed artifacts and creations on the edges of the room. There was a faint, off-tune humming in my ears and symbols danced in the corner of my eye, just drifting through the air.

“Uh, is this place safe?”

“The secondary artifice zone is restricted solely to the Lady Blackleaf, previously to the Lord Blackleaf. Similar restrictions apply to all Archive-adjacent planar holdings and pocket dimensions. Several autonomous hexes, curses, and evocations are keyed to react to any other entities. It is quite safe here.”

That…that wasn’t helpful at all. It probably couldn’t be worse than staring into microwave and watching stuff pop, right? Just the magical version of that. Maybe my eyes would start glowing, that would be cool.

There was a straight path in from the door to the pillar, across a wooden floor that just seemed like a flat and uncut surface lined with wings as thick as I was tall. The humming got louder the closer I got to it. The glow was more intense, too. Not brighter since it didn’t seem to actually light anything up. It was like a blacklight, but it only outlined the pillar and its projections. Practically everything I wasn’t directly focusing on was covered by symbols once I reached the column. Each was moving past so fast I couldn’t even try to make out the actual shapes, much less if any of them were words.

My hand settled onto the surface.

It felt…dry. Like just touching it sucked off the last of the water from the frost. Dry and warm, but not the good kind. More of a lukewarm garbage bag full of juices than a rock sitting in the sun. Almost as if there was something liquid just under the surface, even though it was solid to the touch. With the Sight, all I saw was darkness where it stood. Not even textured blackness, just a hole in reality shaped like the pillar. One that practically sucked the energy right out of my hand and into itself. Then it started taking more, pulling the scintillating bands of color out of my core and letting them dissipate into the void.

Not good. Not good at all.

My hand wouldn’t come free. Not when I yanked back and wrenched my arm. Trying to push off just got my other hand stuck too. They started to sink in while my vision started to go fuzzy. The symbols started to run over everything, feeding the pounding pain that had set in deep within my skull and leaving me fainter and fainter…

…then I was somewhere else and toppling backwards from the sudden lack of resistance. A web of branches filled what central bits of my vision weren’t still covered in the black fuzz of impending unconsciousness. The branches looked leafless, at first. Like they were bare and set against a starless sky. Then a ball of light drifted by and brushed against them and the whole assembly started to sway and rustle. There were leaves, but they were so deeply colored that they might actually have been pure black.

Somehow I processed all of that before I hit the ground.

And then I realized there were a lot more of those lights moving around, shuffling between larger branches and protrusions I could barely see from this angle. Some were carrying what looked like books.

My vision finished clearing up. The dizziness and the headache didn’t go away, but my heart started to beat normally again. Barely.

Then, way too late, I realized I wasn’t falling. I’d been hanging in the air this whole time. It took some creative flailing to get my feet back onto the ground, but once I did I managed to take a look around that wasn’t at such an abnormal angle. The floor was still that weird grown-looking wood like that last room had been. I was on a raised dais, a circle surrounded by wooden railings, save for where a half-dozen steps went down to the actual floor. Dark water gurgled quietly through channels in the wood, each one covered with a sheet of translucent glass. At least, it was probably water. Glass columns filled with it rose at random out of the ground and speared up through the leaves to vanish from sight, the fluid inside flowing in ways that water shouldn’t do.

Guess that answered my questions about the title…

Between the pillars and on the flat ground surrounding the dais were a bunch of tables. Mostly long and rectangular, each sprouted straight from the ground. Cushioned chairs sat in neat rows against each and a few glass-paned display cases held thick books bound in leather. The tables went on as far as I could see. The way everything more than thirty or so feet from me faded into a grey fog kind of overshadowed that, though. It wasn’t like a regular fog, though. The glowing balls of light didn’t make everything around them shine; they just disappeared the moment they reached the edges. No sign that they were coming or going, when I couldn’t directly see them.

The lady in the mirror popped up on one of the entombed pillars of liquid as I walked near it. It might’ve been the lighting here, but she seemed less faded. She was actually smiling, though her face was still directly in the uncanny valley.

“Apologies. That array is partially vampiric in nature; any unpleasantness should remain temporary despite the unfortunate delay in removal caused by the reconfiguration.”

Hopefully it would stay temporary. I felt drained, so much that my hand had stopped hurting. How the fuck was I feeling even emptier inside than before, and why the fuck had Grandpa used something that literally sucked the life out of people in his magic cell phone tower?

“Where am I now? What is this place?”

Her face actually came alive and she started to gesture and pace, her wings fluttering behind her. “This is your birthright, ma’am. The Blackleaf Archive: the oldest, largest, and most esoteric collection within what is currently known as the Americas. Established from the personal treasury of Lord O-…” she stuttered and the entire image blinked out. Then she showed up on another column and continued like nothing had happened, “Olaf Aufrey, it has grown over centuries of operation to become a prestigious institute focused on the preservation and expansion of arcane and historical knowledge. A charter member of the Alexandrian Initiative, it is linked to other Initiative sites by restricted teleportation matrices and shielded scrying routes.”

She reached out and touched the reflection of one of the light balls. It winked out here, but then she was holding it in her hands inside the reflection. Her face turned pensive. “Reintegration of sections of my functions that were severed when the arrays shut down will be…difficult. Despite the other Archivists’ best efforts, there has been…degradation. I apologize in advance for any personality shifts and performance issues that will occur in the coming months as I recover.”

Well, she was a bit more personable now. “Well, uh, I’m glad you’re getting better, but if this is some kind of library, where are all the books?”

“The books are stored in specialized preservation zones and warding arrays. Less-valuable and non-unique specimens are stored in the stacks, accessible both by translocation and physical transit through the Gloom. While it is perfectly safe to explore while I am active, I would not suggest it. The Archive is rather extensive. For a corporeal entity, transit between layers and locating specific volumes will also be difficult. I am personally capable of bringing you any artifact or other catalogued material upon request. Do you have one, Lady Blackleaf?”

Shower, pants, food, the bird, and now her. All done. That left saving Teresa and finding out about the weird statue and jewelry.

“Bring me something about the Fae.”

“There are currently eight hundred fifty-seven thousand three hundred and twelve nonfiction volumes that pertain in some way to the Fae. An additional…”

Fuck. This would be harder than I thought. Had to treat it like a multi-variable search… “Stop, stop. Bring me, uh, the first twenty nonfiction books with reference to all of: Ash, curses, souls, and bargains. Order by relevance, not word occurrence.”

Seven books materialized on the table in front of me immediately. “The remaining materials are being collected by the wisps, ma’am. If you have any other requests, you need only call for me.”

“How?”

“Simply saying my name anywhere within the Archive or the wider Manor will suffice.”

“What is your name, then?”

“It’s…” her smile vanished and everything about her seemed to freeze in place. Everything but her hands; they’d clenched into fists and torn the wisp she was holding into a shred of fading sparks. Her image winked out completely, but her voice still echoed out around me.

“I believe as a child that you once referred to me as Scully.”