The House of Shattered Wings

The mirror was a simple affair, engraved with the crest of House Silverspires. He’d seen the same in Madeleine’s bag, and a dozen others like it on the stalls of the marketplace. Reaching out, cautiously, to the khi currents in the area, Philippe found them only the thinnest thread of water curled around the glass: a confirmation that whatever was inside now lay dormant or dead. There was the hint of another thread, too; a bare trace of wood and its attendant anger: a shadow of something that had once been much stronger, a watered-down image of a flame with none of its heat or vibrancy.

He didn’t practice Fallen magic, but he’d learned enough about it; because he had to, because it was a matter of his survival. It had been a powerful spell, held together by a trigger, and it had completely disappeared—drained, all of it, straight into him when he’d touched the mirror; and perhaps elsewhere, if he’d only been the conduit for it.

It had summoned something, something that was loose in the House. He couldn’t take the spell apart or intuit what it might do, but he could try to trace it back to its source.

He reached out, and cautiously traced the threads. They might be small and innocuous, but the shards of something this powerful could still be potent. There was . . . sorrow, and the roiling anger of a just cause. . . .

Revenge, then. Someone, somewhere, had had a grudge against Morningstar, or against the House.

Philippe touched the mirror again, following the khi currents. They had decayed so much he’d have been hard-pressed to put an age to them, but such decay was the work of years, decades, which meant an old spell. A Fallen, perhaps—to whom the years would be as nothing—or a human who was old by now, with the satisfaction that his vengeance would come to pass. They had left the mirror here, hidden away—never thinking that Morningstar would never come back, that the throne would gather dust and never be touched, and that their spell would only be triggered years and years after it had been put together.

He tugged at the thread of wood, gently unspooling it from around the mirror: loop after loop of thin, shimmering green light that hung on his hands, with a sharp touch like a spring breeze. Then, breathing slowly, carefully—inhale, exhale, inhale, whispering a mantra from bygone times—he withdrew his awareness from his body, and let the thread carry him where it willed.

For a while, he hung suspended in time and space; back to a serenity he’d thought lost, doing nothing but letting the world wash over him, every sensation diminishing until he was once more in that quiet, timeless place where his enlightenment took root.

Gradually—and he wasn’t sure why, or how, or when—it all went away, a slow slide from featureless bliss into something stronger, darker; shadows lengthening over the House, until he stood in a room lined with bookshelves, the only furniture of which was a red plush armchair.

Morningstar sat in the chair. Or rather, lounged in it like a sated tiger, his wings shadowing the sharpness of his face. His pale eyes raking Philippe from top to bottom. “So good of you to come. Shall we start, then?” He inclined his head, and between his spread hands magic whirled and danced, a storm of power that pressed against the bookshelves, stifled the air of the room—cut off Philippe’s breath until it was all he could do to stand.

“I can’t—” he started, and Morningstar shook his head.

“This is power. Embrace it, or others will do it, and leave you gasping in the dust.”

Philippe shook his head, or tried to. He couldn’t seem to move, and Morningstar’s presence was as suffocating as ever—lead pressing on his chest, on his fingers—until it seemed that his nails would lengthen and sharpen, becoming the claws of Morningstar’s own hands. . . .

“Come,” Morningstar said, smiling. “There isn’t much time.”

And he found his feet moving of their own accord, his hands reaching for the magic Morningstar was offering; he took one faltering step into the room, even though his skin was being peeled away from muscle and fat, from bones and glistening veins: one step, then another, straight into the growing maelstrom. . . .

Philippe came to with a gasp. He was standing in a room he had never been to, though he recognized it instantly. It was the same room as in his vision, except that it had badly aged. He had vague memories of exiting the cathedral through a side door, following corridor after corridor; gradually leaving behind the more crowded areas until the House became entombed with dust, gray and bowed with the weight of its true age.

A thread of wood; a thread of water and fire, all curled up and dormant: a vision from the past. Memories. Someone else’s memories. He hadn’t been really interacting with Morningstar; merely seeing someone else do so, in some faraway past.