There was a numb sort of peace to the aftermath of a cataclysm. I’d felt it before, at the raid that froze my village solid, when I’d stepped out into a world of white over red. Emerging from the cramped, stinking theater after what felt like years but was likely less than an hour felt the same way. Aimes’ lecture hall was leveled, the clock tower was a broken spire, and the once-gamboling hearth dragons littered the floor like fallen stars.

But it was over.

The teachers were already cordoning off certain areas as too dangerous to enter—here was where a riftmaw had scarred the face of reality, there was where Iola’s sickness-spell had poisoned the very land—but there was still plenty of room for the students to spread out. Still, Lucet and I held onto each other until we found a quiet corner with only a few blast marks and wearily collapsed.

“I’m numb,” Lucet finally said.

“I know.” I’d heard that battle-shock was the death of witches, and now I knew why: in my rattled, distant state, the emotions that normally swirled within my soul were a distant, ethereal thing, too thin to be touched, much less formed into a spell.

“They’re going to side with Iola,” she said.

“I know.”

“We can deal with that later,” she decided.

I leaned against her and closed my eyes. “I know.”

An Academy official who I didn’t recognize passed by, paused, then shook their head and kept going. I heard them calling out names—searching for students who had either been killed or taken, I assumed—until their voice was swallowed by the falling snow.

Somehow, we fell into an uneasy sleep, lying against each other in the shadow of a ruined building.

When I next awoke, Lucet was gone.

###

Rebuilding came slowly, and then all at once. One day, we were attending speeches and funerals and swearing we would never forget; the next, we were looking for housing and lining up for food.

That was how I found myself at the House of Warp and Weft.

The House of Warp and Weft had, if nothing else, good marketing. "Roomy, especially when you're not looking. 3.2 bed -1.3 bath, on average. Pet included." It made me feel slightly better about the whole situation. I wasn't exactly looking forward to staying in a house that had once belonged to a witch of space, but it wasn't as if I had a choice.

Rooms for rent near the Silent Academy for Witches were always a sparse commodity. Especially now that a demon had rampaged through the school, stealing a tenth of the students and destroying most of the dormitories, a good place to stay was in high demand. And since I'd pissed off the witch in charge of redistributing housing, I'd been shoehorned into getting what Witch Aimes lovingly and oddly specifically referred to as "a house suitable for hormonal boys who try poaching an elf's girlfriend in the middle of a demonic invasion."

So two days after the demonic attack had ended, I found myself with a suitcase of my clothes in front of the House of Warp and Weft.

"You know, you could always crash at our place," Jiaola said from beside me. The old man had one arm in a sling; he'd only survived the demonic incursion thanks to a last-minute warning from an oracle. "I know your soulsight is still developing, but trust me—there's a lot of magic twisting this place around."

I shook my head. "I like my privacy, and at least this place is dirt cheap. Plus, I'll be pissing off Witch Aimes for every night I stay in her pet hellhouse without going crazy."

Jiaola's lips quirked. "I may know a thing or two about making statements by where you choose to live," he said. He clapped my shoulder. "Stay safe."

I bumped his fist, wished Lucet was here, and stepped across the threshold into the House of Warp and Weft.

###

I could handle the infinite staircases. I could handle waking up in a different room than I fell asleep in. I could even handle the occasional time that I opened a door and saw myself from behind, looping off into infinity like a house of mirrors. I'd stared into my own soulspace and witnessed the Witch of Warp and Weft herself bending space into a weapon. The House was manageable in comparison.

But what I couldn't handle was the rift.

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I'd grown up in the Redlands, where the rifts in the sky spat the very elemental destruction that had killed my father, and I knew the signs of a rift when I saw one. For one, the spell animating the house just didn't end. It had been twenty years since Witch Aimes had accidentally turned the house into a psychedelic nightmare land; spells simply didn't last that long unless there was a rift powering them.

And if I was living on top of a rift, I needed to know, now, before things started coming through the rift.

Then again, if the rift had truly been somewhere in the House for over twenty years, things had already had plenty of time to come through.

Great.

I'd already reported my suspicions to the Silent Academy for Witches, but they gave me the "that's nice, dearie, now go back to bed" expression they always had whenever an uppity Redlander thought they had a say in the workings of magic. So I took it upon myself to investigate.

I got utterly lost on the first day, walking for half an hour in a straight line without making any progress. On the second day, I brought snacks and a picnic blanket, and just waited for the House of Warp and Weft to rearrange itself whenever I found an obstacle I couldn't understand. By the third day, I was starting to see the familiar patterns of the magical energies around a rift—the constant, uneven spew of energies that twisted space had a source, and I was slowly but surely charting my way to that source.

On the fourth day, the source found me.

"Witch Aimes created this place through the sheer power of her arrogance," a voice from behind me mournfully whispered. "You must be her successor, if you believe you can reach its heart."

I turned around to see... it had to be from beyond the rift, because there was no way something with its biology could have been born in realspace. Its arms were noodly, elongated things that pooled around its hulking, tree-trunk legs. Its chest was bloated and twisted, and its bizarrely normal-sized head looked like nothing more than another lump of disgusting flesh.

It also looked inexplicably similar to my Theory of Magic teacher.

I snickered. I couldn't help it. The part of me that had grown up next to the rifts was screaming at me to run, but the disgusting, corpulent entity looked like Witch Aimes, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing.

"You really are a witch of arrogance, then," the entity said. "To laugh in the face of an angel."

Angel. For rifts' sake, it called itself an angel. That, too, was such a Witch Aimes move. I reined in my laughter, and the rational half of my brain kicked in. Well, maybe a rational third or fourth, because if I had a working sense of logic, I would've just bunked at Jiaola's instead of living in this nightmare plane to spite my teacher. Whatever the entity was, it was probably the "pet" that had been in the stupid little advertisement Witch Aimes gave me, so she knew it was here—and, as a result, that it wasn't going to kill me. Aimes' sense of morality was as twisted as her old house, but she didn't let her students die.

"Sorry, sorry. You just... reminded me of someone I know," I said.

The angel tilted its... wobbly-bits. "Interesting," it said. "I am comprised of the memories of the dead. For one such as you to know one such as me..."

Huh. I hadn't had permission to access the restricted texts on soulspace entities—but now that I thought about it, being able to interview one myself was a step above what I would've found in the Silent Library anyway. "What do you mean, the memories of the dead?"

"It is beyond your comprehension," the angel placidly said.

Wow, it even spoke like Witch Aimes. I rolled my eyes. "So was this clownhouse, but I still got used to it. C'mon, throw me a bone."

The angel hesitated. "You... are the first since the Witch of Warp and Weft herself to remain here for so long without being driven mad." It considered something, hesitant, then said, "Very well." The angel stepped to one side, casually twisting the floor into a blackboard, and once again I was reminded of Witch Aimes. Whatever else the angel was, it was also... a teacher, of sorts. "As you should know, all magic stems from emotion."

I nodded. "Happiness for light, passion for heat, freedom for wind."

"And arrogance to twist space," the angel added. It used spatial distortions like a stick of chalk, raising bumps in the floor-blackboard into the shape of letters. I suppose that made this an angel of arrogance, then. "But if magic stems from emotion, the question naturally follows: from whence does emotion flow?"

From whence. How annoying. In the spirit of that, I tried, "From... interacting with the world?"

The angel of arrogance clicked its many tongues in disapproval. "Close. Emotions come from how you perceive your interactions with the world. In other words, emotions stem from memories."

I nodded. That tracked with the kind of high-level witchcraft I'd seen Witch Aimes display, wielding the memory of a spear instead of the physical thing in combat with a demon.

"The collection of memories one accrues over a lifetime is the source of a witch's power, and is commonly known as the soul." The angel of arrogance created another blackboard, outlining a body with a core of thoughts and memories in its center. "But by the first law of thaumatology, souls cannot be destroyed. So the question then arises: where does a soul go when its body perishes?"

I am comprised of the memories of the dead, the angel seemed to whisper in my memory.

My eyes widened. "They go here," I said. "They become angels and demons and everything in between."

The angel... seemed to approve. Its mouths curved upwards, at any rate. "Precisely." It started to say something else, but then cocked its head, as if listening to a song only it could hear. "I must go," it said. "The rift at the heart of this house... disgorges entities. My duty is to unmake them before they can reach the world outside."

Of course Aimes had coerced an angel of arrogance into serving as a glorified watchman. I only half-nodded, my mind already racing.

Demons were comprised from the memories of the dead.

That meant that there was a chance, however slim, that someone who had died could be brought back. Someone who had been killed when I was just a child.

Someone who'd been killed with forgiveness on her lips.

I bid the angel of arrogance farewell as I retreated to my room, my thoughts racing.

They said the House of Warp and Weft drove its inhabitants insane.

But my mind felt the clearest that it ever had.