Chapter 1
Idrift among the art stands, hardly seeing, just filling time. There is so much of everything at Emerald City Comic Con—the brightly colored art, the crush of people and noise—that nothing registers, and I might as well be invisible.
It’s an echo of how I’ve felt for years, since I was returned to this low-magic dimension against my will.
Because the one thing this place doesn’t have is magic in the air.
Really, I am tryingnotto look at all the imaginings of magic and power and action around me, because it reminds me of what I could once do in truth. The only thing I ever wanted.
I’m only here at all because my much younger teenage sister needed—according to our parents—a chaperone to attend. But she’s watching a high-demand panel, so I’m out here, surrounded by the memory of when I could feel magic everywhere, saturating the air, and believed I always would.
So it takes me an extra second to realize that, suddenly, Ican.
The air itself turns electric, crackling against my skin. For people who can sense magic, you can almost smell it, like fire in the air without smoke.
But there’s also a tug of awareness to my left, a kind of—not pressure, more like when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and bathes you in light.
A portal opens up right in the middle of the aisle, a gleaming white rip in space, fritzing around the edges like static.
I plant my feet and face it, while people around me stumble away—still pulling out their phones, of course.
Then a severe old bearded white man, shrouded in a heavy robe and bearing a wand, walks through, flanked by four others I don’t recognize in coordinating crimson uniforms that mark them as mage guards.
A man I never thought I’d see again, and he looks as if no time has passed at all.
But then, he has access to all the magic a world can hold and more than a century’s worth of skill to use it, while our world has next to none.
My heart is pounding. Even though I know better—surely, ten years after my mentor broke his promise to me, I know better—part of me can’t help hoping this is it. He didn’t abandon me after all, and he’s been working all this time on a way to bring me back forever to High Earth and all its magic.
But enough of me does know better, that betrayal suddenly as fresh as the day I first believed it, that I do not bow as I did once.
“Sierra Walker,” my once-mentor in the ways of magic and power greets me warmly, like maybe I’m too stunned to remember the protocols.
I remember everything.
“It has been too long,” he says.
It’s like he’s punched me right in the chest, and it’s suddenly hard to breathe.Heis the reason it has been so long.
As neutrally as I can manage, because maybe it really is time for me to go home—why else would he be here, now?—I say, “Much too long, Grand Magus Evram. What brings you to Low Earth?”
Low Earth, the Earth lowest in the diamond configuration of connected dimensions, the Earth with low magic.
Because all our magic gets funneled to High Earth, and from there what’s left goes all the way up to Bright Earth where the angels live above us all.
(Not angels in the religious sense. But when they’re beautiful and golden and powerful with awesome wings... the colloquial human name stuck.)
People around us are yelling questions, crowding for videos, while more are watching the show play out. Most think it’s a stunt. Probably the grand magus is using the typical translation spell activated when dealing with Low Earthers, as if he’s forgotten I speak his language, which means everyone around us can also understand what’s being said, if not what it means.
The four guards spread out to establish a perimeter around me and the grand magus—because he of all people is powerful enough to not need their protection; they’re functionally decorative—and suddenly I can hear again.
A transparent bubble surrounds us, so instead of my feeling like I am looking in on the world, the world is in fact clamoring to look at me.
I’m encased in magic, and for the first time in a decade, I’m not invisible.
Then the grand magus says, “I have a puzzle for you, Sierra.”
As though nothing has changed. This is how Evram would bring me new training problems—“a puzzle for you, Sierra,“ “a challenge,” “a game”—and I, excited to go deeper into magic, to prove that I deserved to live in a world where I could use magic all the time, would win every single time.
