At the last of her runes, as she pressed her fingers against the window, she looked through Taliesin’s precise lines and the glass they were written on and was strangely grateful to see the real world was still outside, sunlight making its way through heavy clouds and down to the lawn below. But through the purple tinge the pall left over everything, it felt like a world Maggie couldn’t touch. A small voice in her mind asked quietly if she would ever touch it again. Would she ever feel warm sunlight on her cheek? The softest brush of clover beneath bare feet? The gods-sent relief of a breeze on a hot day? Would the world ever be hers again?
That single thought bloomed into a sadness that fell over Maggie like a shroud. She plucked her hand from the rune and swallowed the Diadhan words she had been about to say, lest she feed the pall around her, but that was all she could manage before anguish took root in her chest. She gasped. It was a sadness so profound that it hurt. It was a sorrow deeper than any she’d ever felt before.
Even though he had been on the other side of the room,somehow Taliesin knew something was wrong, because not a moment passed before he was at her side. His large hands cradled her cheeks, and he bent until their faces were nose to nose. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m—” she said, and her cheeks began to heat as she felt inexplicable tears building in her eyes. Gods below, was she going to cry in front of Taliesin again? “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, her voice meek.
“It’s the pall,” he reminded her. “It can affect your emotions.”
Melancholia.Maggie wondered why she had never given that particular side effect another thought. It had always seemed so secondary to every other symptom of pall sickness, but gods, she was wrong. Why had Taliesin never told her? It was every sad thought she’d ever had, multiplied. Every grief, expanded. Tears welled. “This is horrible,” she sputtered, her nose getting snotty. “How did you bear it?”
Something flashed across Taliesin’s features, and she could tell he went somewhere else, lost in a memory of something he didn’t share with her. “The first two times, not well,” he admitted. “It took days for the sadness to lift.”
“And the third?”
Their noses were nearly touching, and there was something comforting about the angles of his face, something warm in his amber-colored eyes. The pall fell away, if only for a moment. She couldn’t see his lips behind the makeshift mask, but she imagined they curved into a sad smile as his eyes crinkled, just a bit. “The third time, I had someone berate me about vomiting on her couch, and I forgot to be sad.”
Oh, she thought, remembering the way she had yelled at himthat day, unaware of the dread and exhaustion and sorrow that must have been plaguing him. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and the tears began to fall in a steady stream down her cheeks.
“I’m not.” His voice was so soft, but somehow it cut through the otherworldly sounds of the pall. He brushed away her tears with the calloused pad of his thumb before they could collect in the fabric of her mask. Without thinking, she leaned into his touch.
Relief. It was so immediate, her breath caught in her throat as the melancholia lightened, if only a little bit. When she looked up at Taliesin, his eyes widened slightly, as if, somehow, he felt it, too. The shock of whatever part of her had found comfort in his touch shook off more of the melancholia. She stood up straight, stepping out of his grip and rubbing her cheeks with her sleeve until they were raw. He straightened, too. “Better?” he asked.
“Yes.” Then, softer, she added, “Thank you.” They both returned to the runes they’d been repairing, completing each spell before moving on to the next. They moved through rooms 310 and 311 quickly.
The closer they got to room 312, the worse everything felt. The shroud of melancholia still weighed on her shoulders, heavy. The air felt thicker, the shadows deeper, and the moans of the unsettled had turned reverberant in her chest. Beside her, Taliesin was nervously shaking his chalk pen. “How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“I’m fine.” His voice was as tense and tight as his shoulders, and his gaze was fixed on the open door to room 312.
“This is your fourth time in the pall. Are you feeling any signs of pall sickness?”
Finally, he looked at her. “I’m fine,” he repeated, and then turned back to look at the entrance to his lab. “C’mon.”
The faefire lamps inside flashed even brighter than the ones in the hall. From somewhere within the lab, a rushing roar like a train sounded. Maggie reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. She wasn’t entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but she immediately felt another wave of calm wash over her. Taliesin’s own tense features melted, just slightly.
Then they entered the lab in room 312.
At the front of the classroom, where Taliesin must have been standing when his spell went awry, was the fissure. It looked like a crack in a screen, like the fractured starburst of broken glass. It was on the chalkboard, cutting his rune in half, but it was also floating in the air with nothing behind it. Strange light that Maggie couldn’t quite explain came from the fissure, even though she was looking right at it. It was somehow dark and light all at once. Sparks peeled off the main beam, drifting through the miasma, and Maggie felt a peculiar desire to reach out and touch one of them, but she kept her hands at her sides, balled into fists. Lavender pall slime seeped from the crack, spreading down and out from the fissure and across the floor, pulsing in a simulacrum of breath, of living.
She wanted to stare at it longer, to try to understand what she was seeing, but there was no understanding it. Her mind couldn’t comprehend the way her world had split in two and the next world was spilling through the crack. No logic, no understanding, would make it feel less horrible, less wrong. She pulled herself away from it and returned to her task at the windows with a shudder.
The same tiny cracks spread through the chalk marks in the runes here. She worked as quickly as she could, breathing fast, her lungs aching at the edge of each breath. Nausea bubbled in her stomach, and her head pounded. They had been in here too long already, but there were still six more runes to fortify.
Each stroke of the chalk paint was an effort, each utterance of the incantation drew more from her already depleted body, but they were nearly done. Just as Maggie completed her last rune, nearly whispering the incantation as her voice gave out, there was a crash, and she looked up to see a pair of shears floating through the room, colliding with a desk and coming toward her. Maggie lifted her hand to knock them away as they careened through the miasma, but in that moment, one of those tiny pearls of light that came through the fissure collided with her open palm, exploding in a burst of bright rays.
—
Maggie was hereand not here.
She couldn’t tell what was real and not real.
Melancholia bloomed exponentially into an aching, yawning despair. She felt, vaguely, the press of the floor on her side and then nothing, nothing, nothing.
—
Until she feltsomething again.
It came from the tiny pinprick of light that had flattened against her palm, creating a starburst of beautiful, iridescent shine. It was a life, small and enormous all at once. It was one of the unsettled dead, sucked into Maggie’s world by accident when the pall cracked apart what separates this world from the next.
