Chapter Two - Teresa

“I really can’t believe we’re doing this.”

I wobbled for a second as my shoe slid down the hill, clutching the bulging backpack that might as well have been full of bowling balls to my chest so I didn’t fall over. I knew she wasn’t mocking me, but watching Tam literally skip ahead with her awkwardly-shaped-but-incredibly-light pack felt like she was rubbing it in.

“You agreed that we needed to finish this before classes start! Grandpa was very clear that this is the only way we’d be able to manage it. It’s not like we have any clue what a magical battery would look like or how to use it without blowing ourselves up. And we just don’t have the time to figure out what foods count as magical and eat nothing but them for months at a time.”

“I know, I know. I read the same book of insults and rewritten rituals as you. Just because I agreed doesn’t mean that I think this is smart.”

“C’mon, I know you read those stories about other worlds. Just think of it like that.”

“I’m supposed to be whisked away by a doddering old mentor with a ridiculous hat and a giant staff, not…”

Tammy, inconsiderate brat of a sister that she was, couldn’t resist cutting in there with, “Wow, kinky.”

Pointedly talking over her and ducking down to avoid a branch and hide my blush, I went on. “- NOT walking on a hill in the middle of the woods when it’s almost a hundred degrees outside. Stupid dirt and stupid hill and – I can’t believe I’m saying this – stupid magic. This had better be worth it or I’m going to cry.”

It had taken almost a month to gather what we needed after the book literally fell into our laps. Well, to figure out it was our only option, parse what we actually needed from the bits grandad hadn’t crossed out and what he’d written in, and then talk ourselves – mostly me to be honest – into committing to finding and going through a portal to a place mentioned in multiple books.

The Roads.

Well, it was…probably a place. Maybe a catchall term? Most of the books were vague and just glossed over it as being used to travel, or for important-but-exiled mages to hide in some of the biographies. I still wasn’t sure about it – at least one book had used the term interchangeably with the Faerie Woods, and that was a scary thought. We didn’t know enough to be doing this.

But Tammy wasn’t wrong either – we needed to get this done now, before classes started. And it was our best shot. The book, even with Grandad’s notes, wasn’t very clear about what the ritual was supposed to do, but it was a lot, and important. We had more than enough instructions that I was sure we could pull it off, and it wasn’t supposed to take too long.

From the notes – the hardest thing left to do would be finding our way there. But Grandad had mentioned where the closest ‘portal’ – that wasn’t the word, and neither of us knew how to pronounce the term he’d actually used – into the Roads was, and Tam recognized the thicket on the creek he’d described. Apparently we wouldn’t be able to actually see it until after the ritual, and that was what made it so important. Perception.

We’d actually be able to see what we were doing once this worked.

If this worked, I reminded myself as I nearly slid down into the water. Again. Maybe not going any further wouldn’t be so bad. Who needs magic to work in a lab anyway? Alchemists? None of them have gotten famous in centuries. I’d like to see an alchemist win a Nobel Prize. Or keep the EPA and OSHA from busting down their doors. Stupid alchemists.

Spite kept me moving at this point. I’d decided that I was definitely an indoor wizard.

“Tere, you’re rambling again.” Oh, maybe I wasn’t just complaining in my head. “Also, alchemists are apparently a pretty big deal. Didn’t I tell you how a group apparently poisoned Napoleon badly enough that his corpse didn’t even rot? Plus, turns out most sane magicians don’t want to work with things that could physically blow up in their faces.”

Stupid alchemists.

My top was glued to my back with sweat and my limbs felt like jelly by the time we got to the bend in the creek and the overgrown thicket. I insisted on a break on some nice shady rocks across from the apparent hole in reality. Tam ran track – the most athletic thing I ever did was bowling…

“Catch!”

…and apparently getting hit in the collarbone by a smushed brownie and a water bottle.

I spent the next few minutes, between bites, staring at the trees while my sister took both our bags and started rifling through to triple check that we had everything. Or at least, I tried to watch them.

“Hey, look at the trees.”

She turned for a few seconds, then went right back to the bags. I threw a rock at her and missed, horribly. So, I threw a handful of them next.

“Bitch! What was that for?”

“You’re supposed to be looking at the trees, remember?”

She flipped me off, then turned to look again. A few seconds later, she turned back. I saw her brows furrow as it finally hit, but then she smiled. “Wow, that’s weird. Not how I thought it would be, but this has gotta be the right spot.”

“So will we just walk with our eyes closed?”

She raised a finger – not the middle one this time – then frowned. Eyes clenched shut, she turned to it again and made her ‘I’m either constipated or focusing’ face. It took longer, but she still ended up turning back to me and shaking her hair out like a wet dog.

“Uh, I’m not actually sure if that’ll help. Great.”

“Well, we know the spot. Worst case we hold hands and take a few tries.”

A few more minutes of watching her try to deal with whatever it was that kept us from focusing too much on something magical that wasn’t, well, us passed before we went down to the final checks.

We had the knives. Tam’s gold, my silver, each as long as our palms and etched with curving lines that I was around 80% sure were just decorative. Both of them had come from a drawer in the study and been thoroughly cleaned, at my insistence.

Then salt. Chalk. A compass. A paired mortar and pestle we’d gotten from Amazon, plus the uprooted corpse of one of Tam’s plants to grind up. Some expensive bread from a bakery and a slightly-squished carton of whole milk that hadn’t quite made it through Tam’s jaunty gait unscathed. Jade from my collection, ceramic bowls, big beeswax candles from one of the old chandeliers, and bottles of springwater – two of each. Earth, Water, and Fire.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“The air is supposed to be our breath, right?”

Tam sighed, “For the last time, yes. We don’t need balloons. If you’ve still got the diagrams and references, we should be good. Well, for the ritual at least. Hopefully the magic ash doesn’t cause infections.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” I shuddered and felt my face heat up. The knife clacked against the rock dangerously close to my thigh in the process.

One of the only things we’d pieced together about the Roads was that whatever they were, there were biomes. And around here, nearly everything went to the Ashlands. It was short on useful details, as everything was, but it was supposed to be like the aftermath of a forest fire. Blankets of ash, everywhere.

And the ritual needed us to be naked and on the ground.

Another shudder and I tried to stop thinking about it. The written arguments about whether it was attracted to places that had a history of fires or whether the connection to it caused them were interesting and all, but I did not like the vague theories about it all being connected to what areas were controlled by the Ashen Court.

At least we had a stream on this side. Being wet was better than making the walk home with ash in my underwear. Just the thought of that chafing…

Ugh. Why couldn’t Grandad have mentioned that oh, this part of the ritual didn’t matter and it was just a pervy old wizard deciding they wanted their apprentices naked?

But he hadn’t, so we’d be following through with it. Just to be safe.

“Ready?” Tam called over as she got up to stretch. She’d probably been waiting for me to get out of that mental tangent. It was a bad habit of mine when I was stressed.

Shouldering my bag again, I nodded and took her hand.

The first three tries were false starts. We ended up keeping our eyes open to avoid walking into trees, but the branches kept catching on my bag and we kept ending up walking back out to the stream without going all the way through. As we pushed deeper, it got worse. The branches felt like they moved just to get in the way and the air felt heavier, harder to breathe. The sun coming through the leaves faded away as the canopy overhead thickened, long shadows lurching with each step we took in the little light coming in from the edges.

I’d have sworn that one of the last trees I could see clearly had a face in the bark, its mouth set in a grim line.

Then I felt Tam stumble. A second later, my arms hit something way too diaphanous and yielding to be a branch. Like a bubble popping, we passed the point of no return and went through. I’d seen a root right where I’d been stepping, but after a brief moment of intense vertigo, it was gone and my shoe slapped down onto powder-covered stone.

It literally kicked up a cloud of silver and black dust, not that I cared. It didn’t even matter that my balance suffered and I almost fell – all I could focus on was the nearly monochromatic landscape of blacks and greys and pale, washed out colors. There were still trees, but they were charred husks.

For every one that still had branches and limp, crinkled leaves were a dozen – no, a hundred – that were charred husks. The cracks in the miraculously standing charcoal were nearly covered by a layer of silvery powder, the ash tainted with black grit and chunks of carbon. There was nothing even remotely green, even the ghost of the color missing from around us.

Overhead – at the same time close enough to touch and far enough that it hurt my eyes to stare, a blanket of thunderclouds roiled in ominous, windless silence. A pale, diffuse light drifted down from them without even the faintest hint of a hidden sun. In the distance, unbelievably massive trunks speared up into sky.

My head was spinning, taking it all in. The air here – it felt familiar. Not wrong, or heavy, but different from outside. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it smelled like Grandad. Like the dusty rooms in the house, like being in bed as a kid and drifting off to the raspy rustle of leaves. Each breath left me feeling lighter, like a step could carry me further. Or like I wasn’t quite tethered to the cobblestone road we’d stepped out onto, one that definitely didn’t exist before we came through.

Tam got over her wonder first, dropping my hand as she sat her bag in the ash. She brushed the fringe of hair back from her face, looked around, and then flung out her hand.

It ignited.

Streamers of liquid fire almost as long as my hair sprayed out, sizzling and dying in showers of sparks almost before they could hit the ground. Where each spark died, new ash fell into place, swirling angrily around her feet and starting to rise higher. The air had been still as we came in, but now a wind started to blow, coming in from all sides.

“Uh – maybe you should stop?”

Her eyes stayed on the fires. They were brighter here, more colors than just yellow and orange flickering through them as they died. With what looked like a lot of effort, she looked away and shook out her hand. The streams sputtered, then slowly faded out. The gyres at her knees fell away, reluctantly, as the wind stopped blowing.

“This. Is. So. Cool.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think this burnt down place likes it when you use fire, so…”

“Y – yeah, I guess so.”

She looked a bit stunned. A lot stunned when, in my own impulsive test, a blast of wind from my hand cleared a massive cone of space next to us, the ash blowing away and sending a fine mist up from the black, stagnant version of this place’s creek that it revealed.

The ripples on the water faded too fast, and it didn’t reflect the clouds even before the ash settled back into a crust atop it.

Magic here was just…so easy. I could still feel an almost electric buzzing in my wrist, like it wanted to keep doing that. But I held myself back – the burst had been enough to ground me again. The thin point of pressure in my head faded so much faster than it did on Earth, but the not-quite dizziness that replaced it wasn’t much better.

“We should get started. I don’t think we should be here long.”

Tam agreed. So we got to work. With smaller, more controlled bursts of my wind, we cleared away a circle of weirdly smooth dirt, off the path but just a few steps from the spot we’d stepped through. The bags marked it out so we wouldn’t be lost.

Tammy drew in the diagram in lines of salt and chalk as I laid out our references, flipping open the dog-eared pages to what we’d marked beforehand and laying them out on her side. She was the reader – I’d just be repeating it.

We couldn’t figure out the cardinal directions – our compass spun like crazy – so we ended up guessing. The complex circle of radiating lines and simple symbols came together fast, and inside it the dizziness faded a little.

Next were the two trapezoids, back-to-back, right in the center. From the center of each, a rough diamond stretched out, not quite touching either part of the rest. At each point a circle was drawn, connecting the shape to our sitting area and the outer rim. While she was filling those in, I prepped everything.

The poor plant went into the mortar and pestle with a few drops of the dark, still water. Ground together, it left a blackened sludge with a consistency like tar. There was definitely more in the mortar than there should have been, the extra weight and volume giving me a headache if I thought too long about it. I could already feel ash working its way between my toes before I sat it outside the circle and started laying out the other components.

Jade, green and glittering, in the circle against the edge. A candle to our respective lefts, unlit, and a bowl of springwater to our rights. These, I noticed – did – reflect the clouds.

Then I was left with nothing to do as Tam finished the drawing and double, then triple checked everything. This was something we really didn’t want to mess up, so every mistake she found got erased and then painstakingly drawn back in.

“Ok, I’m calling it! We’re ready. Now we’ve just gotta, y’know, get naked and get in the circle.”

“This is exactly why I’m never joining a sorority,” I deadpanned.

Tam snorted, then shucked off her shirt fast enough that I didn’t even have time to turn. Ugh. Sisters.

“Less talking, more stripping. Just be glad we don’t have to paint ourselves with that gunk.”

“Small blessings.”

I could hear her stuff landing in whumphs of fabric on her back, but I was a lot more careful sitting mine down. A lot slower, too. Neat folds that definitely weren’t just an excuse not to think about this, nope. There was already ash creeping back into the cleared area I was sitting them in, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

I was just getting my shorts off as I heard her knife clink against the mortar.

“Hurry up, this isn’t the kind of ash I want to get close and personal with.”

Smearing the black paste onto the knife was surreal. It shouldn’t have stuck to the metal, but it did. And somehow, the engraved lines on it stayed clear, dully shining in the faint light.

I was shaking a little as I settled into my own trapezoid. The ash burned in my throat as I breathed it in and the ground had a sickly, lingering heat that never seemed to fade. Tam patted me on the back through a coughing fit until I held out a shaky thumbs up.

We were as ready as we’d ever be.