Chapter 2 #2
Ah. So they had arrived at the topic he’d been preparing to address, only she had gotten there first. That wasn’t precisely ideal, but perhaps it was inevitable, given that she had apparently spent fourteen hours sitting next to him in a house full of objects that any witch with any kind of functional gift would have been able to sense.
“Artifacts,” he said. “Magical objects, most of them constructed centuries ago, during a period when witch-kind was considerably more experimental and considerably less cautious than it is today. Witches and warlocks used to push at the boundaries of their gifts, to try to create things that would amplify or store or redirect magical energy. Some of those experiments worked…and many of them worked too well. The objects that resulted were too powerful to use safely and too dangerous to leave unattended.” He paused, aware he was delivering something uncomfortably close to a lecture but unable to stop himself.
What he was explaining to the healer was the central truth of his life, and he couldn’t allow it to be reduced to a summary.
“The majority of them are dangerous…some of them catastrophically so. And almost no one in the witch community today even knows they exist, because the knowledge of how to create them was deliberately suppressed centuries ago.”
One brow lifted ever so slightly, but otherwise, she didn’t seem to react. “How many?”
“One hundred and two, at present,” he replied.
“The count has varied over the years as I’ve acquired new items and, on rare occasions, successfully neutralized existing ones.
Some I found abandoned in places where their creators had left them — attics, cellars, sealed rooms in old houses.
Others came to me through intermediaries who understood what they had and were frightened enough to want to be rid of it.
A few I took from people who had no idea what they were holding and were one curious moment away from killing themselves and everyone around them. ”
The healer absorbed all this without visible alarm. He supposed her apparent calm could be attributed to the way she must have already sensed the artifacts. After all, she’d had fourteen hours to adjust to the situation. “And they’re all warded individually?”
He nodded. “Each one is contained within its own set of wards, calibrated to the specific properties of the object. The house itself has — had — a secondary layer of general protection that served as a failsafe.” A pause there as he thought of the best way to explain what was happening to his home’s magical guards.
“That secondary layer is what the dimensional static from my return has been degrading.”
“I felt that. The static, I mean.” She was quiet for a moment, and he could almost see her putting the pieces together, possibly the same way she might assemble a clinical analysis.
“If you die, the individual wards lose their power source, which, it seems, is you, and the artifacts breach containment.”
“Simultaneously. The resulting discharge would be” — he considered and rejected several adjectives to describe the fallout of the wards’ collapse, ultimately deciding on something that was probably far too understated — “significant.”
A muscle in her jaw tightened, but she still seemed calm enough as she asked, “How significant?”
“Significant enough that it would be impossible to hide the damage from the civilian authorities,” he told her.
“Several of the items in the basement vaults, if they were to discharge simultaneously in an uncontrolled manner, could affect an area more than several square miles. And the secondary effects — dimensional thinning, residual magical toxicity — would persist for years.”
A few seconds passed as she stood there and looked at him.
He couldn’t read her expression with any certainty, but he thought he detected something that might have been a grudging reassessment.
Not respect…he wouldn’t flatter himself that she’d moved from hostility to respect over the course of a single conversation…
but it looked to him like a recognition that the situation she’d been pulled into was far more complex than she’d initially assumed.
“So you’re telling me,” she said, eyes narrowing ever so slightly, “that you’ve spent years collecting the most dangerous magical objects in existence and storing them in a house with no backup plan, and the only thing preventing some kind of magical catastrophe is you staying alive to keep the wards in place. ”
When she put it that way, the situation did sound rather foolish.
“I prefer to think of it as a calling,” he replied, and decided to leave it at that. There was no need for her to know, let alone understand, all the myriad factors that had brought him to this place.
Those blue eyes narrowed even further. Her lashes were long and thick, and he assumed they must be natural, or surely her mascara would have smudged or run by now.
“It feels more like criminal negligence to me,” she remarked, “but I suppose the distinction is academic at this point.”
The healer reached for his wrist again to check his pulse. He allowed the contact, although the pressure of her warm fingers on his skin made something flutter inside him, a reaction he attributed to a prolonged absence of human touch and nothing more.
“I need to do a full examination,” she went on. “Chest, temples, the secondary pulse points at your ankles and the base of your spine. I have to map the scarring so I can develop some kind of treatment for you.”
Those words made a flicker of surprise go through him. “You intend to stay.”
Now she raised a well-arched eyebrow. “You kind of made sure of that when you yanked me here.”
He didn’t hear any bitterness in her voice, which surprised him somewhat.
However, there wasn’t any warmth, either.
What he detected was a sort of flat pragmatism, as if she’d assessed her options and determined that, since she couldn’t change her circumstances, then she would simply have to work within them.
“Your wards won’t let me leave,” she continued.
“Also, I don’t have my phone, and even if I could somehow get past those wards, I don’t even know where I am, although I know it’s somewhere near the ocean.
So yes, I’m staying. I’m going to treat you…
mostly because if you die, the situation you’ve just described will kill a lot of innocent people who have nothing to do with whatever grudge you’re nursing against my family. ”
He gazed back at her and said coolly, “It isn’t a grudge.”
Once again, her brows lifted. “I really don’t care what you call it. The end result is the same.” She rose to her feet then and moved behind his chair. “I’m going to place my hands on your temples. Try not to be difficult about it.”
Easier said than done. The examination required her to touch him over and over again, and each point of contact sent her magic deeper into his system than the emergency stabilization had reached.
Her fingertips at his temples were the worst…
or the most revealing, which he supposed amounted to the same thing.
From that position, her gift seemed to trace not just the physical damage to his magic from his extended time in the void but the very patterns of how he used his gift, the habitual channels he’d worn smooth over decades of warding work, the places where he’d pushed too hard for too long.
Her touch wasn’t painful, but it was invasive in a way he found almost unbearable — not because of the magic itself, but because of what it revealed.
She was seeing him. Not the curated version he presented to the world, the one that could put on alternate appearances as the situation required, but the damaged thing underneath.
When her palms pressed flat against his chest, he felt his breath catch before he could prevent it.
The void scarring there was dense and concentrated around his heart, and her powers moving through it felt like warm water flowing over a burn.
The relief was so immediate and so acute that he had to close his eyes and pray that his face revealed nothing of what he was feeling.
Her hands circling his wrists came last, and by that point, he’d retreated so far into his own defenses that he was narrating the history of the astrolabe in the East Gallery in a voice that sounded like a man giving a museum tour while trying to ignore the way his house was burning down around him.
As she worked, he kept his eyes fixed on a point slightly above the bookshelves and maintained his commentary throughout, since silence would have been an admission of vulnerability he wasn’t prepared to make.
To keep that silence at bay, he told her about the artifacts — their provenance, their properties, the care required to keep them safely contained.
He described the warding techniques he had developed over decades of trial and error, the way each object required a unique containment solution because no two artifacts responded to the same magical frequencies.
And he explained, with more detail than he knew was strictly necessary, the theoretical framework for dimensional energy storage and why the objects in his collection were so much more dangerous than ordinary enchanted items.
He spoke about all of this because talking about the collection allowed him to pretend that this was an intellectual exchange between equals rather than a medical examination of a dying man by the only person who could possibly save him.