Chapter Nineteen #3
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 here and 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 felt something 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.
The now Maggie found herself in was not her own, not at all. It was hers. It was all hers.
She saw the world through unsteady toddler eyes, the warm light of a parent picking her up in their arms. Maggie must have felt so loved, so safe, when she was this small, too, but knowing it was nothing like feeling it again.
Before she could grow too comfortable in the sensation, though, it was gone.
Then everything was tinged with an adolescent rage that Maggie hadn’t felt in years but that she put on like an old, worn coat. It felt good. Righteous. It felt strangely like home.
Then she felt the echoes of a dim bar, of a hand on her thigh, whispered words in her ear, and a fluttering, fleeting sense of possibility before it crashed into heartbreak.
This went on and on and on—through first love and first grief, to the expansive love for children and the sweet love for grandchildren, the sudden loneliness of a dying spouse, and more and more and more.
The threads of love and loss and joy and anger and so much love tangled in a confusing, comforting knot.
It was overwhelming. It was not hers. And she couldn’t escape it.
She tried to draw herself out of it. She tried to reach for the parts of her that she knew were Maggie.
She grasped for the threads, but they were brittle and fraying, and she remembered that thought she’d had in 309.
Will I ever see the world again? It was no longer a small voice, instead growing bigger and bigger until she was sure she was lost in this unsettled woman’s memories.
And then there were hands on hers, lacing finger through finger, tethering Maggie to someone, to somewhere.
There was the vague notion of her name being called through the ether.
She was tugged forward into real and out of the unsettled’s memories, but then she fell back into a childhood memory of red-hot embarrassment.
A whispered voice in her ear. Was it real or not real?
Strong arms gripped her back and beneath her legs.
She was being lifted, like a child off to bed, her head snug against something soft and hard at once.
There was a beat, beat, beat beneath her ear, and it filled her with a feeling so much like home that she nestled into it.
This was real, she was certain. She heard a light sound, like a gasp, a quickening of the beat, and then Maggie again knew nothing.
When Maggie woke, she was curled on her fainting couch.
The lights were low, only Taliesin’s desk lamp glowed, and she had something thrown over her to keep her warm.
Breathing in, she smelled Taliesin’s cologne, and she felt the tattered fabric of his tweed jacket, threadbare and soft.
It made her think of the soft beat of his heart, going fast at her touch, at the way she’d nestled in his arms as he cradled her head against him.
Not just now, in the pall. But once before, too.
And it was then, finally, that the Beltane spell faded away. Maggie remembered everything.