Caitlin Kittredge - The Mirrored Shard

Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”

I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.

What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.

I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city. How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.

“I thought they weren’t so bad,” I said. “The Old Ones. I thought letting them go was just returning the universe to its natural state. They’re not evil, Conrad. They’re just … alive. A different sort of alive than us, but not malicious.”

“But, if I believe you, they’ve done this.” Conrad’s face was pale and drawn, and he made a sweeping gesture. “It’s them, all of this. All the dreamers and the strangeness. They’re returning to the Iron Land, right? And their influence is driving the entire world insane. How is that not so bad, exactly?” His brow had that crease in it, the one that meant he blamed me, and I couldn’t argue with him.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” I mumbled, but even to my ears, it wasn’t convincing.

“I can’t …” Conrad rubbed his hands across his face, and I waited. I’d hoped he’d forgive me, or at least understand. I’d had to do something. What had happened when Tremaine tricked me had to be undone. “I can’t,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sorry, Aoife. I’m done.”

“What do you mean?” I rose as he did, panicked, watching him back away from me. “Conrad, don’t.…”

“You did this,” he said. “It’s because of you that our father is like this. You tried to make it better, and I get that, but you’ve made it worse.”

“Conrad—” I started, but he raised his hand.

“Don’t talk to me, Aoife,” he said. “Don’t try to make this right. I can’t count you as part of my family. We can’t ever repair this.” He started back toward the house. “What’s done is done. I expect you to be out of Graystone by the morning.”

I could have screamed at him, or run after him and demanded that he hear my side of things, but I just stood there and watched him go. Conrad was even more stubborn than I was.

And he was right. I’d thought that the Old Ones weren’t the evil that the Rationalists preached or the saviors that the Star Sisters, their worshipper sect, insisted they’d be when they returned. When I’d been in the dreaming place, the center of all the worlds, I’d seen them and felt their touch in my mind. It still burned there, as if the mere contact had scarred the channels of my conscience with acid. But I hadn’t felt malice, simply ancient intelligence. Yet to human beings, with their fragile makeup, who was to say the two weren’t one and the same? The Old Ones’ return could simply be too much for the fragile barriers between worlds, and it could signal a fracture that would make them all collapse, one after the other, like dominoes.

I hadn’t known what I was doing, not really, or what I’d set in motion. I’d been trying to save my family, myself. Everything I knew. Trying to put the world back the way it was. What I hadn’t understood was that it couldn’t be that way any longer. I wasn’t the Aoife Grayson who’d left Lovecraft all those months ago, and the world wasn’t the world I’d abandoned for Thorn.

So I let Conrad go, and let the dull ache sit in my chest like a stone while I tried to think of what to do.

Dean was the only thing I could save, at this point. The Old Ones were vast beyond my imagination. There was no way I could send them back, even if I knew how to access the small nucleus of the dreaming world where I’d found them. Crow, king of dreams, who controlled that place, would not welcome me back. We hadn’t parted on good terms, to say the least. He’d spent millennia keeping the Old Ones at bay from Iron and Thorn and all the living worlds, and in one fell swoop, a changeling who didn’t know what she was truly doing had opened the floodgates, released these ancient, implacable things to do whatever it was they planned to do upon their return to the living parts of the universe.

So it had to be Dean. The Deadlands were my destination now. At least I wouldn’t have to go back into the house to get my things. I doubted that, in the place where the dead went, I’d need clothes or food or anything except what was on my back.

I walked around the edge of the reflecting pond, into the ragged hedge maze that made up one whole side of Graystone’s property. The thing hadn’t been cared for in years, and there were large gaps in the hedgerow that you could pass through, rendering the maze useless.

At the center was a statue, one of the heretical bits and pieces that the Graysons had kept out of view of the Proctors when the Rationalists took control. It depicted a woman holding a fallen soldier, a cowl covering her face. I scrubbed at the oxidized copper plaque until I could read CUCHULAINN AND THE MORRIGAN. I had no idea who they were supposed to be—magicians, I guessed, or old gods renounced by the Rationalists.

The crows sat all over the statue, and they didn’t move at my approach. I was close enough to touch the largest one, and it stared at me with glassy black eyes, never blinking, never moving.

I retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.

It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.

I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.

My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.

I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling in my stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.

Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.

I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.

I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.

Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.