The halls of the Alchemist’s inner library were flowing with the scent of burning incense sticks. Mustafá herself had never really cared for the mystical ambience so many other magicians favored, all the smoke and mirrors, the flashy silks and the sparkly crystal balls, but she couldn’t really deny their use when it came to matters of the soul. She despised working on her own decaying, dwindling flame, but she knew that it was a process she needed to repeat every three months or so.

To ignore it for longer proved not only damaging to her health, but also terrible for her mental faculties; and as much as she was willing to sacrifice her own well being for the pursuit of her craft, her mind was something she was not willing to compromise. So, after spending some time watching her hermit crabs and reading a few old books, she decided it was finally time to feed the hearth of her soul some fuel.

So there she was, in the very center of her beloved library, right where many bookshelf hallways converged into a perfectly circular section. She sat cross legged on the secret spiraling circle she had designed specifically for this purpose, runes long forgotten by the world now traced on the floor's dark rock, accompanied by exactly eight candles positioned in an octagon contained within the circle. This configuration alone was enough to make the air feel dense.

It got even worse when Mustafá actually lit the candles. The energy, normally thin and flowing in the air, now began to converge on the circle which the alchemist sat upon; vibrating octarine light seeped through the carvings like water through the cracks of a ship breaking down. Bubbling, foaming, rising like fat drops of magic from the floor to the ceiling…it was a dangerous sign. If the mage didn’t keep a close eye on the balance of energy, on how magic flowed around her and through her, it could easily overwhelm and break through the tears in reality she was making.

She was used to this process, to the risks that it entailed, but not even she was prideful and foolish enough to ignore them or take them for granted. Every time she borrowed energy from the Infinite to rekindle her own life force, she was risking not only ending her own life, but many others as well, in an explosion beyond anything mankind had seen so far.

It all could be so, so much easier if she simply sacrificed a few lives. Five beloved pets, a dozen pieces of cattle that no one cared for. One or two humans.

But no. She refused in principle, not out of love for humanity but out of… of…

Fear.

She would never admit it to anyone but herself, but despite being as irresponsible and unethical as the people with the cloaks would say, she had set her own limits at consuming the souls of others.

She had seen what this path led to, how the sensation of extinguishing a life and stealing it from the very Cycle of Existence changed a person, usually for the worse.

Mustafá was her own person. With all the flaws and hardships that implied. She would not be consumed by such base cravings and feelings. She would remain herself to the day she died.

At least, this is what she had been repeating to herself for centuries now.

“... I am… stalling?”

The alchemist finally catches herself thinking in such morbid directions, just wasting precious time she could be using in the ritual. The effects of her soul’s decay were definitely getting to her.

With a deep breath, the mage stretched and repositioned herself within the circle-octagon. She held her hands together and held the air inside her lungs until her head felt light, and only then she let go with a slow, deep whisper…

The words she spoke were fast, crisp, and practiced. Her lips moved at great speeds as she recited the incantation in the Language of the Gods.

Such knowledge had also been lost with time… maybe for the best.

The energy of the world, precious flowing mana, changed direction and began swirling around the mage, just as her lungs grew emptier and emptier as she held the ludicrously long words on her lips.

Then, she paused.

This was the trickiest part of the spell. Before all that mana could escape, Mustafá took another deep breath, forcing it deep into her lungs. A literal breath of lifeforce was absorbed by her body. Her soul, a mere smouldering ember by then, suddenly burst with amazing power right then, turning into a pyre so big it was almost visible as a pale blue aura around the woman.

In that instant she was one with everything, she was breathing just like the planet did, feeling the pain of pollution and disrepair aching on her body like a thousand cramps that almost forced her to curl, but she resisted it. Right as it was about to become unbearable, as sweat dripped down her dark skin, she began the new incantation. The one that severed this connection.

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Slowly, gently, she cut the threads that now bound her to Jericho itself, and the pain subsided. She had succeeded, once again stealing a negligible part of the planet’s life for herself. Somewhere in the world a flower shriveled too soon, a tree lost some of its leaves…

Now, came the convenient but oh-so-unpleasant side-effect. Right as energy stopped flowing, and the liquid octarine light of the circle itself stopped dripping upwards, Mustafá had to open her eyes. With a hurting body and an unprepared psyche, she forced herself to go through with it; once she opened even the slightest of ways, it was too late: magic forced her eyelids open in its escape from her body.

It felt like torrents of thick, luminous water, pushing out of her eyes and spilling all around her before dissipating. While this all happened, Mustafá was temporarily granted the gift of prophecy.

And the visions of the North Pole would begin once again.

She saw the mist rising after the final smite of the Gods striking Jericho’s frozen soil, and then: shadows of many sizes and shapes began to form from the darkness that had accumulated in this world. All the fear, the ill will, the anger and the sadness of an entire world manifested in the shape of creatures humanity had not seen since the dawn of the Age of Silence.

All of them hellbent on the destruction of the world that had banished them.

After that, there was little that could be done. Sleepers were not equipped to deal with such a menace, the secret of magic would be revealed and thus, the sorcery of man would lose its light.

She saw people of all nations joining and trying to face this danger together, a little too late for it to be truly a factor.

The world would be set aflame, and then consumed by Oblivion.

The visions had become foreboding and repetitive with time, Mustafá had analyzed each one carefully in her mind at this point, trying to find clues to stop the coming of this catastrophe: The Second Sacrifice.

Nothing had changed this time… except that, for an instant, it did. Mustafá herself trembled, as she saw another figure abandoning the mist, a small figure wearing an old black and white dress, a cape and a witch hat a little too big for her own head. The figure smiled, addressing the observing mage directly.

“H… Humiko…!?”

The alchemist instinctively reached out. The woman in her visions held a finger to her lips for a moment, asking for silence, before pulling something from under her cape. An old, weathered leather book. Simple at first, but then under the right light, the weavings of a particularly powerful magic could be seen.

Mustafá stared at it intently, memorizing its form, the patterns in the old cover, every crack on its back…until suddenly, the vision was no more.

She was lying on the floor once more, the candles snuffed, the floor still a mess of raw, slowly fading octarine light. The alchemist slowly stood back up, cleaning the tears and the sweat off her face and taking a deep, clean breath. Her throat was sore, burning, but she knew it would fade as well.

This wasn’t the time to dwell on the pain of her physical vessel, especially not now that her soul was burning as brightly as any other. She would be fine no matter what, so all this time was better used to comprehend her vision. What was Humiko doing there? Was this a way to communicate from beyond the veil of Death? It was not unheard of that a few particularly enduring souls could leave messages and even create new ones on the other side.

But it was also not impossible for visions to be tainted with the thoughts of an individual, and thanks to a certain undesirable, she had been remembering her old friend these days. There was a non-zero possibility that this vision had been a fluke. After all, when Humiko died, she had taken all the tomes the huntress had accumulated and added them to her own collection! And none of them resembled the book she had seen.

… Did they?

Damn it, now she had to perform a full-on scan to make sure she was remembering correctly.

The strange book in her vision could have been an invention of her subconscious, a mere fabrication, a hallucination! Or it could also be a sign, a message left by Humiko in preparation for the Second Sacrifice.

The possibilities were, again, non-zero.

So, she had to prepare for all possible scenarios. She had not survived this far making assumptions!

And so, as her body recovered its energies and her legs stopped trembling, she went straight to the section of the library where the tomes written by Humiko Suzumura had been sealed. There were quite a few, each a treasure trove on how to face the few remnants of supernatural activity left in the world after the Great Exodus

Manuals on the calming of angry spirits, the costumes of a few supernatural communities, the antidote to many a magical ailment. This was the kind of folk knowledge that had once been abundant around Jericho, now completely lost due to the actions of the Brotherhood.

All for the sake of keeping humanity on ‘the right track’.

“Bah.”

Mustafá was still a bit emotional from the encounter with wild magic. At least, more emotional than usual… she had to shrug off the impulse of swearing loudly in contempt of the Brotherhood’s creed.

She understood it and was aware that technology would have never advanced as much as it did if not for them. But she still found it lacking and restrictive. Worst was the absolute disrespect they felt for her. They treated her like a geriatric mess, a dementia-riddled ancient remnant of the old world, too powerful to be erased, so instead they chose to keep her busy with their trivial chores and inane questions…

Sigh. Best to try and focus on the job once more.

One by one she took the precious, old books… all of them had the same leather binding, but none of them looked quite like the one the alchemist had seen in her vision. They all looked older, much more weathered, without the intricate patterns that one tome had had. They were not as protected as that tome had been.

She took a few hours to look over each book in the Humiko section, amplified by the time-warping effects of the L-Space… and yet she found nothing, not a single one fit for her search. With another grumbling sigh, Mustafá decided to simply let go of all work for the day and returned to her ‘cage’, the old apartment where she was kept.

Back in her room, she looked around herself. She felt restless, not even in the mood to observe her crabs. Instead, she simply floated over to the tiny round window, unique in the whole room, to observe the city of Obuda.

Life was still going, so simple, so rushed, so uncaring of the impending doom encroaching around them… Mustafá watched, and she wondered.

“Should I feel envy of the Sleeper? She who does not know a thing and simply goes by the motions of life without a worry about the true matters of this world?”

She meditated on it for a moment.

She then decided that no. She would much rather be a mage.

But it did get tiresome sometimes.