The House of Hidden Things

VIII: From Nothing

Someplace

In her palm, the doorknob turned to ash and slipped through her fingers. Grains of it slide between the spaces, flowing like sand to the floor, through it.

What have they done? The whisper of her own words still reverberated behind her, through her. The empty hallways and locked rooms each took a piece from her plea. The desperate hope that somewhere there was a voice in this burning world. But the power she leeched into her plea would not be enough. The delicate voice was gone.

Another trick. Another lie. But she had fallen for worse.

The magician brushed her good hand against the place where the door had been, eyes bright at the pieces still burned into the wallpaper. The rotting wood there, flacked with ash, cracked and splintered, a single pieces slicing through the exposed skin of her only hand.

A single line of blood welled and spilled. The drop sliding down her palm towards the bones of her wrist. There was no pain. This her, the darker pieces of her, could only feel the pain as a whisper. She could only feel the pain the way she thought it would feel, the impression of if.

There had been pain once, clear and searing, but then, between one blink and the next, it had stopped. Replaced burning of another kind. A searing that was still there, but it had gone cold and dark and it clung to her like the ash on her skin. A constant that made the blood welling on her palm feel like a gentle breeze.

Unrecognizable as pain. Shapeless and vague.

The magician pulled in a breath of air and blew softly on her parted skin. A part of the pain she realized she could self inflict, the way air got stuck in lungs and the way the fire burned when she had fire touched it. Her magic flared and curled against her breath, reaching into the pool of blood now running in streams from her fingers and down to her elbow.

The magician moved further into the room standing just before an arch. She smiles slow and sharp, tipping her chin up to the ceiling before closing her eyes against the world around her. She considered the room, burning around the edges and tipped in black veined scorch marks. Pieces of ash fell from her clothes. Some dusted out of her hair and some landed in the pooling blood cradled in her palm.

Flakes of it settling in the wet as if the ash were always apart of the red blood. The magician drew her fingers into a fist. She dipped a single finger drew in the centre of her palm. The power in her veins beckoned her to complete the spell. To will her magic into being. Feeling the change, the magician sucked in a breath and drought the stained finger against the wall, feeling the house dip under her in despair at what she was about to do. What have they done?

They had left her in here, trapped her in here. Alone. Raged gripped her and thrust her forward, begging her to touch her fingers to her sigil. It had been too long since she had found another soul. It had been too long since she'd woken up in that tomb. It had been too long since she'd walked out after years of screaming into a world so akin to her own but alive and burning around her.

When the magician had woken, lying in a dead silence, in a burning house, the first thing she felt was her broken body – alive, but broken. She'd clawed, half dead, against the dark. Slitting her nails. Breaking her fingers. And when she'd stepped into house from a door no longer there all she felt, for a blissful moment, was relief.

For it is a hard thing, to kill an angel. But in that moment in the house – the other house – when she had lowered her guard and let her magic slip, and sink too far into the earth, she had let them slid the knife into her body and splinter her magic – her person – in two. She had heard her scream in the echo around her. She had felt the edge of the knife, the handle, pressed as far as it could go into the bone of her wrist. Her vision had gone white and her wrists were bloody.

Once again she was a prisoner but they had made a mistake. In their arrogance they had made a very dyer mistake. The Fold was thin and brittle and when they split her in two, a piece of her was left on their side of it. An anchor. Bloody and dying and half-mad with their binding magic, she had laughed until her sides hurt.

For it is a hard thing to kill an angel and a harder thing too hunt something that they could not see.

And all she would have to do was split herself, a fraction of the effort. It did not have to be this way.

The magician tipped her cradled fist, spilling her blood onto her shadow. Into the ashes of the cage they built for her. The walls of it bending to her will. Come find me. She spoke clearly but she only whispered the words. He would hear her regardless of how loud she commanded him.

The ashen world shuddered around her and flared, ready to taste her magic, to feed from it. Her power slide under her skin. The magicians gasped and staggered to her knees, a rush of magic under her skin lengthened into a icy burn, leaking from the open wound in her palm. Leaking her magic.

She held perfectly still, whispering. Her lips stuttering against the gnawing cold. Eyes screwed shut. Chanting. Calling. Commanding. She had doubled over, fingers on her hand uselessly cracking the wood beneath her.

The magician remained perfectly still, eye open, against the shudder of cold. She could feel more than see the swirl of magic working through her but it was the shadow moving at her back that had her smile stretching back over her teeth. The fire distorting the shadows across her face, dancing in the flames light. The sun hadn't risen here, if there was one. There was only the fire, the wood and the silence. Thick as smoke.

Under the cracking of the burning wood there was a flutter of wings and when the wings rested behind her, the shadows grew teeth.

The void in the shape of a man stepped from bruised black. A condemned soul pulled from nothing. Though her shadow moved, it did not speak. Though it had a body, it did not look aged. The soul – and the shadow inside him – bared it's teeth at her and she smiled back with her own sharp edges.

"You summoned me."

"I did." She did not look up when she addressed him. He stood behind her, waiting. It had been so long since she'd heard another's voice. She stared down at her hand, bloody and pressed into the wood floor. Where a carpet once rested, where a chair would have been. Lovely and green and warm.

She straightened, letting her hand fall at her side. She would wait if she had too, in a world that burned but she wouldn't not be idle as she waited. Dark eyes slide higher and higher reaching the ceiling where the smoke curled and moved. And feed.

Her expression was severe. Young and beautiful, dark-eyed and her hair a black curtain behind her. He could not see her expression this way for she had not yet turned to see him. She held out her hand– her only hand – and showed him the smudge of blood and ash she'd used to call him.

"I heard you and hear you and, I shall be of service." he said, in a smooth, reverberating voice. His wings tucking into his body.

The magician whispered her desires, and the condemned soul slipped from this world, into the other.