The Price of Power

They went into the between-space at midnight.

Not because midnight was significant to her the way it had once been—the transformation no longer happened, the body no longer split, midnight was just an hour like any other except that the veil was thinnest then and the between-space most accessible. Practical reason. She was done with midnight, meaning anything she had not chosen for it to mean.

Kael, on her left.

Lysander, on her right.

Mira, behind them with her rolling pin and the expression of someone who had decided that wherever her best friend was going,g she was going too, and no amount of explaining the specific danger of between-space travel was going to change that.

Seraphine, slightly apart from the group, which was appropriate—she had chosen to come, and Lira had not refused, and the specific quality of her presence was still complicated and was also, undeniably, useful.

Morgana, who had informed Lira at the last moment that she was coming, spoke in the tone of someone who was not asking.

Six of them, then. Standing in the deep part of the Whispering Woods where the veil was thinnest, in the hour when it was thinnest, about to step through into the space that existed between everything.

"Once we're in," Lira said to all of them, "stay close. The between-space is disorienting in specific ways—your sense of direction will be unreliable, your sense of time will be unreliable, and if you go more than about twenty feet from me, you may find it very difficult to find your way back."

"Twenty feet," Mira said. "Right."

"I mean it, Mira."

"I heard you. Twenty feet. I'm not going further than arm's reach from you,u and I don't care how interesting something looks."

"Nothing will look interesting," Seraphine said. "It will look wrong. Everything in the between-space looks wrong in ways that are difficult to describe until you've been there." A pause. "I've been there."

Everyone looked at her.

"The Void is adjacent," she said, without particular emotion. "Three hundred years. I know what the between-space looks like."

The silence that followed had a specific texture.

"Alright," Lira said. "Stay close, do not engage with anything that approaches unless it approaches me specifically, and if something happens that separates any of us from the group—" She looked at Lysander.

"Follow the light," Lysander said. "Lira will be producing connection energy continuously. It will be visible in the between-space as light. If you're separated, move toward light."

Lira looked at Kael.

He looked back. In the Shadow Realm's permanent twilight, ht his expression was the still one, the controlled one, the one she had learned was not absence of feeling but presence of it so complete it required management.

She reached over and took his hand.

Not because she needed the contact. Because she wanted it, which was a distinction she was practicing making.

He held her hand with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting three hundred years to be able to do exactly this in exactly this kind of moment.

"Ready," she said.

"Ready," the rest of them said, at various intervals, with various degrees of conviction.

She opened the veil.

The between-space was exactly as Seraphine had described.

Wrong.

Not dangerous-feeling wrong—not the corrupted wrongness of Void magic or the threatening quality of an attack. The wrongness of something that had not been built to accommodate human perception. That existed in a form that human senses processed as best they could and arrived at something that was not quite any of the categories they had been built for.

It looked like the space between one moment and the next stretched out until you could walk through it.

Colors that were not colors. Distances that did not obey the usual agreements between points. Sounds that arrived slightly before or after their apparent sources. The cold of it was absolute and also somehow not a temperature—more like the sensation of being in a space that had never contained warmth and did not have a framework for it.

She produced light.

It came easily—the integrated magic, both shadow and the warmth she had discovered in the merge, combined. She let it flow from her hands in a sustained, steady stream, enough to illuminate the immediate area, enough to be visible as a beacon to anyone behind her.

Kael's hand tightened once.

She looked back. Everyone was still there—Lysander close on her right, Mira precisely at arm's reach as promised, her rolling pin visible and her expression set with the specific determination of someone who has decided that being frightened is not the same as stopping. Seraphine was pale and recognizing this place in a way that was visible in how she held herself. Morgana, with her hands clasped before her and her expression doing exactly nothing, which Lira recognized as Morgana at her most focused.

"Forward," Lira said, and moved.

The between-space had geography.

Not the kind she understood from either realm—not landscape or architecture or any of the structures that living things build. More like the geography of intention. Certain areas felt purposeful. Others felt incidental. She moved toward the purposeful ones, following the sense that was not quite any of her existing senses, the integrated version of whatever Elara and Nyx had both developed over their respective existences.

She felt the Unraveler before she saw it.

The specific quality of its damaged state—the pulse from the wedding had struck it significantly, she could feel the disruption in the way it moved through the between-space, sluggish and misdirected rather than the corrupted predatory quality it had been building toward. The damage was real. Weeks to recover, Seraphine had estimated, possibly longer.

It registered her presence.