Willow slept in fits and starts those first days—each time she nodded off her flesh began to unfurl and she’d awake in agonizing pain. On the third day her psychokinetic sutures appeared to stick and she slept for twelve hours straight. When she awoke Leopold was still there sitting beside her, looking out into the distance.
Even from miles away they could see the door of silence. It was at least thirty feet tall and from their small mountainside they could see that nothing had come through it. The hills hadn’t flooded with mages or magical creatures. That either meant that everyone was dead or the portals had closed once those on the other side had seen what she’d done.
She wasn’t sure which was better.
By the fifth day she could finally sit up without wincing in pain. It seemed like a terrible oversight that they didn’t know a single healing spell between the two of them, but then again she always supposed she’d have Annabelle with her. That she was dead was almost impossible to comprehend. Willow kept pushing the thought off to deal with later, if later ever came.
What was the door doing there? What would come through, if anything? She had had the sense that something was awakening when they were closer, but from this distance it seemed like nothing at all had actually awoken. From the mountain she couldn’t even feel its terrible pressure of dread anymore. That had been a welcome change.
“What are we going to do about it,” Leopold asked a week after they’d arrived at the mountainside. He was roasting a small salamander on a spit; the juices from the amphibious magical creature smelled like burnt leaves but Willow couldn’t help but lick her lips in anticipation. She’ d spent so much essence warping the portal into a doorway that she’d been low ever since. Eating magical creatures was the fast way to topping up, which would let her body stop making up the difference by eating her fat and hard-won muscles.
She’d forgotten how hungry she used to be when she was always making up for using psychokinesis to move her body.
“I don’t know,” Willow said honestly. “I don’t even know what it is. I just… the idea just flashed into my head—”
“I know,” Leopold said and laid a hand on her arm. “It was kill or be killed, Willow. It was so close.”
Willow nodded. It had been close, closer than she’d thought. The idea that Sun Geon would turn on her hadn’t left her mind since they’d first sparred, and she always assumed that their battle would be an overwhelming victory one way or another. Either he would be so far beyond her with his centuries of martial training and foreign magic, or she would overwhelm him with the sheer magnitude of her strangeness. That they’d match blow-for-blow had never entered her mind.
“Sun Geon closed one,” she said. “Once.”
“Do you remember how he did it?”
Willow shook her head. She remembered that he delivered several strikes faster than she could see, that essence had shot into the edge of the portal, but she didn’t know where he had targeted or why. Perhaps she could go down and start smacking the edge of the doorway at random, but she wouldn’t want to be so close to the thing without knowing for sure what she was doing. It was almost impossible to move under its deadly intent.
“There’s only…” Willow trailed off, not wanting to say what she thought. She was responsible for the doorway, that she knew. She was responsible for what remained of her people, those who had foolishly followed her from Asche. If she left this thing open, she was sure that one day something would come out of it. Something terrible and impossible to behold without going insane. Something that would threaten the very fabric of their existence. That was what she felt from the door, and she doubted this feeling not at all.
“The Celestial Empire,” Leopold said and chuckled. He shook his head. “What an ostentatious name.”
“They might know,” Willow said. “Though I have little reason to believe they would willingly help us. Near the end Sun Geon told me I had helped in vanquishing his enemies. I have little doubt he would have continued his slaughter once I was dead.”
Leopold nodded. “Then we don’t ask. We take.”
Willow turned away from the door toward Leopold, shocked at the resolve and malice in his voice. The muscles in his jaw jumped and he stared hard at the black rectangle in the distance. It was her turn to touch his arm, offering comfort.
“He would have killed you,” Leopold spat. “They sent an assassin.”
“Yes,” Willow admitted. “They did.”
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They both went back to watching that dark edifice.
“How much longer until you are healed, do you think,” Leopold asked.
Willow probed her injury with psychokinesis, assessing the growing connections between tissues, veins, and organs.
“Not long,” she said.
🜛
As was his habit in the Arcanum, Leopold took detailed notes of everything of importance that happened around them. Of course Willow should have known he’d have a copy of the calculations that Sun Lin showed them for opening a portal from the experimental chamber to Sun Geon’s living quarters in the Driving Rain Sect. But given that Willow had just either killed the master of the Driving Rain Sect or condemned him to a fate worse than death, and additionally that they didn’t know exactly how far they were away from the experimental chamber anymore, the odds on opening a portal into the same place as before didn’t look good.
Luckily the theory was still sound, and there was a large margin of error. In the moments before opening the portal, the caster got a specific feeling for what was on the other side and could make adjustments to the final location before committing. They would need to figure out a good place to open the portal—hopefully in a spot where they wouldn’t be mobbed by angry sect members upon their emergence as Willow would be quite low on essence.
But it wasn’t that simple. Willow could cast the portal at any time, but they didn’t know how rare magical creatures were on the other side. In case there weren’t any and so they wouldn’t have to hide out for twenty days to let her recharge her stores, Willow and Leopold immediately began stockpiling magical creature foodstuffs. It would take her a while to hork down so much dried jerky, but it was better than waiting the better part of a month.
And still, the door was open. Nothing crawled over the hills from either their reality or some other, but the door of night still gave her a sense of foreboding. Every second seemed to be ticking down, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the end of the world.
After another week of preparation, they were as ready as they could be. A small pack on Leopold’s back made from his cloak, another on Willow’s. They stood side-by-side on the mountain with the dark doorway to their backs before a small clearing where Willow would open the portal.
“I really wish we had the chamber again,” Willow said, feeling the sweat on her palms. “It was easy for you to dispense exactly the amount of essence I needed.”
Leopold put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Willow took a breath and began building the portal spell layer-by-layer until it appeared between her hands warping the light behind it.
She felt the solidity of rock. She hadn’t felt anything when she’d portaled into Sun Geon’s chamber because there had been nothing there save him and the small room, but from the way the portal felt to her now she was in the middle of a mountain. Or under the ground.
“Shit, I don’t know which way to go,” Willow grunted. She yanked the portal to the side, not wishing to arrive on a mountaintop impossible to descend, and soon found the portal in open air.
“Now, just need to find the ground,” she said, and began to lower it. Lower and lower the anchor sank, until she felt it touch something that almost felt furry. Could it be grass? Or whatever equivalent they had to grass over there?
Every second she spent directing the spell she leaked essence, and the air was becoming uncomfortably charged. She made the decision and opened the portal, throwing the sphere away from herself and into the clearing where it stopped and bowed out into an ellipse.
Darkness on the other side. At first she thought she’d opened another doorway in the night, but she felt no sense of dread from this one. It was only then she realized in Sun Geon’s homeland it might currently be night. She sighed in relief as the portal settled into its final shape.
No hesitation, there wasn’t time for it. Leopold stepped through first, took a quick look around, then silently motioned her through. Willow took two steps and she was in a foreign land thousands of miles away. She seized control of her remaining connection to the portal and commanded it to end before it twisted itself into another doorway.
The portal behind them blinked out and they stood stock still in the darkness. Looking up, Willow could see the night sky scattered with blinking stars. She listened hard as she waited for her eyes to adjust.
Crickets. Of course there would be crickets over here. Sun Lin had been a grasshopper, or at least the magical creature equivalent, so why wouldn’t there be crickets? The cool night air blew and, taking a breath, Willow felt herself take in something she hadn’t consumed in this manner for over a month.
“This place is full of essence,” Willow whispered. She saw the outline of Leopold’s head nod in agreement, and she took another breath. Certainly not as concentrated as her cell in Andrew’s laboratory, but way higher than anyplace else. With this much essence it would be trivial to replenish her stores after a couple of hours of rest.
Leopold touched her arm and pointed into the distance. Willow narrowed her eyes and saw what he was indicating: a flickering firelight. At such a distance it was hard to tell if it came from one source or many, but one thing was certain: they weren’t alone out here in the night.
Leopold passed her a bundle of tree sprite jerky and they set off in the direction of the flickering light. The sky to their back was blotted by an enormous mountain—Willow had an inkling it might be the same mountain the Driving Rain Sect was located atop. She wanted to be as far away from that sect as possible if any of them knew the same technique Sun Geon did.
The sky lightened in the east and the sun slowly rose. Her first sight of the foreign land caught the breath in her chest and she had to stop to take it all in. Rolling hills, waving fields of grass, and precipitous mountains. It was like the countryside didn’t know what it wanted itself to be so it decided to be everything at once. The mountaintops shone like bright daggers in the morning sun as they made their way down the foothills toward what was revealed to be a small village.