Michelle Sagara - Cast in Chaos

In fact, the Garden itself felt like the cozy, quiet retreat of a rich eccentric. Which was, of course, what was wrong with it. That, and she could see no sign of Severn or Evanton at all. It was as if she’d taken a turn through the wrong damn door and ended up in something that looked like Evanton’s Garden, without any of its substance or life.

It was not a comforting thought.

Turning, she headed back in the direction she’d come. The door stood slightly ajar, and she stopped five feet from the narrow glimpse of hall, resting her hands lightly on her hips. She realized, as she looked at it, that there had never been a door out without Evanton, something she should have bloody well considered before she’d entered. But here it was, and it looked, from this vantage, to be the same door into the same dim hall, lined with the same bookcases, half of which were so packed they looked as if they were about to dump their contents on the poor fools who wandered by at the wrong time.

This was wrong. It felt wrong. She took a step toward the door anyway, and felt the hair on the back of her neck begin to rise. The fact that the Garden was magical was known. The fact that she felt magic only here, this close to the door, was bad. And, of course, she hadn’t yet removed the bracer that existed to confine her own magic. She had no idea—at all—if the damn thing would follow Severn home, the way it normally and inexplicably did, if she took it off and dropped it here.

Cursing in Leontine, which sounded unnaturally loud in the sudden and suspicious silence of this Garden, she pulled up her sleeves, exposing the gemstones that lay in a vertical line on the inner side of the thick, golden manacle. She pressed them in sequence, and waited until she heard the familiar click. Prying it off her wrist, she looked at the grass, the Garden, and the now-distant pond, and then she shoved it into her tunic, above her belt.

She reached out to touch the door, and her hand froze just before it made contact. The air around her hand was wavering. The closest thing she’d ever seen was a heat mirage, but heat mirages generally didn’t come with color, and, aside from the sweat the heat itself caused, didn’t cause sensation.

Something intensely uncomfortable passed through the whole of her body, like a moving, permeable wall. She grimaced, jumped back, and found that the distance didn’t cause the sensation to stop. But it did change the perspective through which she viewed the door, or rather, the hall on the other side of said door.

What had been the span of a door frame away now seemed to be visible through a long, long tunnel. The tunnel itself was not door-shaped; it seemed to have no shape at all. It was as if the frame and the world to which it was attached had been sundered, and what lay between them was a gap into sky, or cloud, or unbound space.

Walking through it to the door was almost not an option. She glanced over her shoulder at flat, empty garden, and wondered where it was, truly; it seemed, for a moment, as substantial as the space that now existed between the frame of the door and Evanton’s shop. Color was here, yes, and the grass was not dry or dead. It looked right, but everything else about it was missing.

Note to self, she thought, clenching her jaw. Do not enter Elemental Garden when magic is unpredictable right next-damn-door. On the other hand? There weren’t any shadows here; it wasn’t as if she’d walked into the heart of the fiefs on an aimless stroll. At the moment, whatever might kill her—and given the total chaos of unpredictable magic that wasn’t even her own, that could be anything—was likely to be starvation if she didn’t leave. The shelf-lined hall was not getting any closer.

Backing up, she tensed, bent into her knees, and approached the door at a sprint. Passing through the frame was easy. Getting to the other side, not so much. There was solid ground beneath her feet, but running across it was like running across soft sand; it ate momentum. She couldn’t see what lay beneath her boots; it seemed to exist without any visual component.

And that, of course, was magic; the marks along the insides of her thighs, arms and the back of her neck were now aching in that all-skin-scraped-off way. She clenched teeth, gave up on sprinting, and walked instead. She could walk quickly. The hall on the other side, however, seemed to be moving, and it wasn’t moving in the right direction.

Come on, legs. Come on. Widening her stride, she tried to gain speed; she managed to gain enough that she wasn’t losing ground. But she wasn’t gaining any, either. A pace like this, she could keep up all day. But magic in its infuriating lack of predictability probably wouldn’t give her all damn day, and if the sight of those damn bookshelves suddenly faded, she’d be stranded in the middle of a nowhere that was ancient and totally unknown.

Because she was certain it was ancient. The only place she had encountered anything similar was in the heart of a Tower in the fiefs, and those Towers had been constructed by gods. When the rest of the city had started their decline into crumbling ruins, the Towers had mimicked them—but nothing destroyed them. Nothing broke them.

They, on the other hand, were perfectly capable of destroying the people who wandered through their doors. She walked. The hall receded, as if it were teasing her. But it was the kind of teasing that caused tears and heartbreak.

“Severn! Evanton!”

Her voice was clear, strong, and completely steady; she was proud of the last one. There was no echo, no subtle resonance that indicated either geography or architecture in the distance to either side. The only clear reality loomed ahead, always ahead.

She had no idea how long she’d been walking; she broke into a run every so often, but the run was almost as slow as the walk, and it was more tiring. Her arms and legs still ached, and at length she rolled her sleeves as high as they would go because the cloth brushing her skin was almost agonizing.

It didn’t surprise her much to see that the runes were glowing. Their color, on the other hand, did: it was gray, almost an absence of color, in keeping with the rest of her environment. It made the runes seem, for a moment, like windows into the Other, and windows were not meant to grace the arms of living people. She let her arms drop back into the wide pumping swing of a brisk walk, and then stopped and lifted them again.

Severn.

No answer. No answer at all. She tried again, gazing at the only reality she could see. Silence. Turning, she dared one backward glance over her shoulder. There was no frame, no door, no Garden; the gray of this nonplace had swallowed them.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose so sharply they might as well have been quills. She turned instantly, and then stopped moving. She had taken her eyes off her destination, and the destination had, like the Garden, vanished.

Kaylin had had nightmares like this, but they didn’t usually start someplace bucolic. They didn’t usually end in a gray, empty space, either. They ended, frequently, with the voice-of-pissed-off-Leontine on the other end of an active mirror. She didn’t panic, largely because she wasn’t in pain, didn’t appear to be close to death by starvation, and, more important, it wouldn’t do her any damn good.

Instead, she kept moving forward. There wasn’t anything to move toward, anymore, and the movement didn’t appear to be doing any good, but she still hoped. And cursed. There was an awful lot of Leontine cursing where no one could hear it; she also practiced her Aerian, and her translation of either into common.

Since there was no sun, and none of the usual geographic markers by which she told time, she had no idea how much had passed. It could have been very slow minutes—and probably was—but it felt like hours. And hours. And hours. The whole lot of nothing began to wear on her nerves, and she let it. More time passed.