Katrina knew where Coal’s house was, even though she’d never been there before. Everyone knew. It was a large place, and ancient. Stone on the outside and wood on the inside. She’d never seen inside, but Katrina could imagine. The rumours spoke tales of blood-soaked oaken walls and hidden stone dungeons. Of vast velvet decorated ballrooms and dark damp underground wine cellars containing nectar more valuable than any man’s life. Katrina understood that much of it was probably just rumour but as any intelligent person knows, often the best way to bury the truth is to hide it in plain sight among the lies.

Katrina approached the house from the forest on the north side. It was the only side that really offered enough cover, although her horse, being both black and white, like a mis-made patchwork quilt, didn’t exactly blend in even among the shadows of the trees. She tied the pinto to a nearby tree, then travelled the rest of the way on foot.

She paused at the edge of the trees to look up and admire the beauty of the building. In the western paddocks at the back of the house she could see a few horses grazing just past the stables. Katrina knew her mother came here occasionally to exercise and keep their training up to scratch. Coal paid well for it.

Along the side of the house were planted small bushes of flowers. There were no roses that Katrina could see and she didn’t know the names of the plants that did grow there. If she had she might have stopped to pick a few. As it were she wasn’t after just a rose. No, Katrina had something much more daring in mind. She was going to take something from inside the house.

She wasn’t sure what yet. Something small, maybe just a teaspoon or something. She figured Gemma would never believe where such a thing had come from but it was more a proof for herself than it was for anyone else. As long as Katrina knew she could do it, that was all she needed. Gemma had just provided the idea for the challenge.

There was another reason for this adventure too, possibly the more important one. Coal would have charms and spells on his house, she was certain of it. That was part of what made this such an alluring task. If she was ever going to become a powerful witch, even more powerful than any sorcerer, she needed to know what sort of spells other people used, people who knew what they were doing. Who better than to learn from than an aristocrat?

Her pockets were full of charms, overflowing with magic she’d infused into them, as well as a few useful ingredients she thought she might need. In her hand she held a tiny green notebook, bound with soft leather and wrapped together with leather thread. If she could get inside and back out again without being caught then she would have proven herself among the best. If she couldn’t, well, she’d still learn something and she didn’t really believe that Coal would hurt a young girl, not when she was so confident of her own charm.

So, how best to approach this? She had some telekinesis in one charm, a pretty necklace shaped like a treble clef, but picking locks with telekinesis required quite a high level of finesse. Katrina had managed it on a practice lock only once and she was pretty sure that was purely by chance. The easier method would be to just force the doors right off their hinges. She could do that with telekinesis or the super strength she had stored in a silver dolphin hanging on a black leather thread, but neither option was subtle or elegant. She had no raw detector magic and as infuser she could only sense the raw magic that people had. Sometimes she could read refined magic in items that had been infused but only with physical contact and even then it wasn't an easy task. If there were spells around this house, they were out of reach of her magic, even more so if they were passive ones with triggers, but this was precisely what she needed to be good at. Knowledge was power. If she could not read the defenses then she could not hope to get past them and she could not hope to successfully implement her own defenses. She had all her siblings magic, the fire and ice of her sisters, invisibility from her younger brother, and healing from her older, but even the invisibility would do no good here. She was sure Coal would have thought of something like that.

What she really needed was borrower, binder, or psychic magic, preferably one of the latter two, but they were hard to come by let alone at a high enough power level. But magic could be made, not just used. She was sure of it now. It had to be close enough to what it originally was but it could be done. The sorcerers crafted intricate spells that could perform an obscure list of tasks in just the right order, almost like a computer program. People believed it was just because they were powerful or because they knew how to cast the old spells, but Katrina figured the spells had to come from somewhere. When she’d asked her teacher about spell-crafting she’d been laughed off and told there was no such thing. Where had they come from then? ‘The guardians left them’ had been the answer she had received, ‘after they split the world in two’. Katrina had scowled and said that was silly and had received two hours detention for her arrogance and impertinence, which she hadn’t even been too mad about since it had the side effect of boosting her popularity, especially among the cute boys who hung out between the stables and the bike sheds at lunch. But it was silly, for if such a thing were true then why were there spells that interfaced so well with the modern tech stolen from the human world?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Katrina had spent the last few weeks doing some testing of her own and now she was ready to put it to a real world experiment. She had her charms and her spells and each one made up a component that individually didn’t seem that related to what she wanted to do at all, but together, they would make something new. And the best part, she’d managed to incorporate her favorite magic into it. In a small cat charm, one that represented her favorite aunt, she had some measure of dreamwalking. In another charm, a simple snowflake, she had infused some mirror magic from one of Salem’s friends. With them she combined her brother’s invisibility, a poem of her own making but inspired from the spells, and a vial of animal blood. She was crafting something new and all of it came down to how she thought about it. At least that was her theory. The results hadn’t always been predictable but they’d been close enough.

Her intent was to visualise the world like a set of planes, worlds that existed parallel to one another and magic as if it were a thing invisible in their own plane but visible in another like infrared light or something. They’d learnt about that in physics class. She didn’t think it mattered if that was how it really worked or not, it only mattered that Katrina believed it. Using the dreamwalking and mirror magic as examples of real planes, she would try to create something sort of in-between. Most people thought of invisibility magic as making things invisible but it was obvious to Katrina that the opposite was also true and if she focused on that side of things, combined with the different planes idea then surely something would have an effect?

She could have tried the mindwalking magic as another alternative, even as an example plane, but she wanted to master that on it’s own first. All of the other magics she had practice with and using multiple charms at once was hard enough let alone trying to combine them.

She opened her notebook, committed the rhyme to memory, and then with the charms in her hot fists, she slipped forth from beneath the trees and made a run to the side of the stables. Along it’s side she crept, working her spell in whisper.

“A slip in space, a silver thread,

Reflected shapes, now dreamed in colour.

Another place, where I can see,

All the things laid clear for me.”

As she reached the edge of the stable, she could quite plainly see that the back door to the Coal’s house was wide open.

Katrina paused

The door was open? Had she done that? Or had it always been open? She cursed herself for not checking that first. She could feel the heat in her hands, the magic still working, but working how? She wasn’t sure. It was supposed to show her any defensive magics, make them visible in some way, but she could see nothing unusual but for the open door. As she stared at it, trying to decide if she should just venture in, a figure floated toward it from inside the house.

As it approached the open door, Katrina could make out the shape and features of what looked like a very old woman, so old and thin she was basically a skeleton. In fact the closer she got, the less she looked like a person at all. Her eyes seemed almost hollow and she didn’t walk, she glided.

The uncanny nature of it broke Katrina’s concentration and she dropped the spell. The heat faded from her fingers and suddenly she felt excessively cold and a little dizzy. She suppressed a shiver and the urge to run. She swayed a little and tried to refocus on the world around her, and the mission before her.

The figure in the doorway was now gone but the door still lay open.

The sun was high in the sky now, and it was an unusually hot day for this time of year. As the surrounding air rewarmed her skin, she found her focus, and curiosity drove her forward. Forget defensive spells, now she just wanted to know, what was that thing she had just seen? What sort of things did an aristocrat keep in his house?

She figured at this point there wasn’t much reason in skulking. If she was caught it was better to look like she was supposed to be there. Maybe she could pretend she had come to deliver a message?

The room was not as big as she had been expecting, although it looked like there might be larger rooms attached through other hallways and doors. She had expected a square room, similar to what the house looked like on the outside, but this was more ‘L’ shaped and seamlessly attached to what looked like a main hallway leading toward the front door. To her left there was a bar with stools and little kitchenette area behind it, although she could see no appliances or clutter, just white marble splattered with small black splotches, surrounding a single sink, and a few glasses in one corner, not the sort that looked like they were for water.

To her right, the bottom of the L extended into a comfy looking area with armchairs and a fireplace. At the end of the L, past the comfy area, double doors led into what looked like a large dining room.

There was a dining table in this room too, a little too large for the room. On top of it, very strangely was situated a tree that looked like it had just been torn right out of the ground and dumped there, although there was no dirt trail leading to the table that she could see. And next to the tree, encircled by an obviously intentional ring of dirt, sat the most exquisite red vase. It was patterned with thin swirly lines of gold and blue and black, not colours she would have thought went together, and yet they did.

She took a step toward it and eyed the dirt circle. Was that to keep people out or to keep the vase in? Katrina was intrigued. Or perhaps it was an atmospheric seal of some kind? The vase was covered in a thin layer of ice, as if it had recently been removed from a refrigerator.

All her plans about taking something small fled her mind. Now that she was standing inside his house, with such an intriguing object before her, Katrina’s plans evolved once more.

She took a few steps forward. She reached out a hand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” a voice asked from a corner of the room.