We hadn't come for closure, but it's what I unexpectedly found. I couldn't have said when I'd officially given up on returning to my apartment, or when I began thinking of Meridian as my true home—our home—but by the time I woke and showered on Thursday morning we were all ready to leave the old place and never return.
Rachel and Becca packed the Jeep after breakfast, including the handful of items that Gloria had left behind, while Katherine and I gave the room a final once-over, making the space presentable before I called to break my lease. When we were ready, I sent Finn a text asking for the all-clear, and she replied immediately, then evaded a straight answer for nearly twenty minutes until Becca went behind her back and called Amy. The hob sounded thrilled, anxious to see our reaction to the new construction. On the ride back we kept our enthusiasm in check, certain the reality would break whatever expectation we tried to set.
One of Finn's white vans, followed by two semi-trailers, passed us as we neared the river. I wondered if Cuthbert, Finn's redcap foreman, was behind the wheel, and if he was ever pulled over for a traffic violation. He might marginally pass for human, but he couldn't hide the stains on his mouth and teeth which were sure to give any officer pause. He was at least partly responsible for the wellbeing of everything and everyone I cared about, and he still creeped me out.
The rough descent to our scrubby patch of shoreline heightened our anticipation and we finished the final leg of our trip in silence—punctuated by a loud gasp of disbelief.
"Where the fuck did it go?" Rachel shouted. We rolled to a stop, all eyes on the river where an island had once interrupted its flow.
Without attempting to answer, I stepped out and stared at the shore, my attention drawn to a stray leaf riding the current where our home should have been. It was impossible. I looked down at my hand, at the ring Finn had given me, just to reassure myself that the last few weeks hadn't been an insane dream.
"Thomas?" Katherine said. She'd moved quietly to my side and took my arm, unable to finish.
"I don't know," I admitted, shaking my head. Before I could say anything else, however, a pulsing light the size of a person's head stuttered into existence, hovering over the shore.
"Is that the wisp?" Katherine asked quietly. It flickered motionless, as if waiting for something. Or someone.
"At least I'm not crazy," Rachel said when she and Becca joined us, echoing my thoughts. "The magic shit is still here, but where's the island?"
"Maybe it's invisible," Becca suggested hopefully.
"Not quite," a high, familiar voice replied just before Finn stepped casually out of thin air.
"Fuck, woman!" Rachel protested, "you trying to give me a stroke?"
Finn chuckled, "Believe it or not, the surprise wasn't intentional. I planned to meet you when you got here, but there were some last minute issues with your new generator."
I braced my hands on my knees, relief surging through me. "What the hell is going on?" I asked a little rudely. I was annoyed and didn't care how it sounded.
"The fruit of an opportunity," she replied with a wink. "Follow me, there's a lot I need to show you before I go. Amy can fill you in on the details." With that, she turned around and stepped out of sight.
"Shit." Rachel muttered, then took a deep breath and walked forward. Just before she reached the spot where Finn had stood she cursed again and shook her hand violently.
"What's wrong?"
"My ring shocked me!"
I groaned and closed my eyes, fairly certain I knew what was coming. "Step back, Rach," I said. "I'll go first." The jolt from her ring must have hurt quite a bit, because she uncharacteristically obeyed, watching me instead with concern. I approached the wisp and took several deep breaths, my last encounter with it still vivid in my memory, then before I could change my mind, I thrust the hand bearing my ring into its unearthly glow.
I didn't pass out. There weren't even any fairy lights, but I felt a wrenching power surge up my arm and connect with the tangle in my brain. A strong wind hit me, followed by a distant roaring, and suddenly the island materialized in a shower of light. Only it wasn't Meridian as I had known it. There was a castle, built from heavy blocks of limestone, with banners flapping from the ramparts atop high towers. The river was much wider than it had been, and a tall, wooden ship was moored near docks that couldn't have been new. Men, women, and mysterious creatures walked about in clothing from another age. The trees were much taller, but my hawthorn was missing entirely. A woman with hair like sunshine and a vicious scar down one cheek stopped and turned toward me, her brilliant green eyes widening in surprise.
Katherine?
Before I could act, almost before I could think, the surge of power erupted and thrust me backward, breaking the spell. Katherine screamed my name and scrambled to where I lay prone on the grass.
"Oh god, Thomas! Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
"Fine," I wheezed, sitting up. The wisp was gone, and my contact with it hadn't been as bad as I expected, but before I could move or speak again, the air shimmered and Meg stomped toward us, her face twisted into a scowl.
"What the bloody hell is going on out here?"
Becca had joined Katherine and both were helping me to my feet. "I tried to unlock the—whatever this is."
"Unlock?" she asked, perplexed. "Explain."
"He stuck his hand in the floating blinky thing," Rachel said and Meg whirled on me, her eyes wide with either rage or terror.
"The ignis? Are you insane?"
"What? It was hovering there just like last time, I thought I had to—activate the security or something."
"That was a one time thing!" she shouted in exasperation. "It was the simplest way to get a manifold impression of your aura, and at least a dozen safeguards were in place to keep you from getting hurt. You never, NEVER touch a wild ignis!"
"Back off, sister, he didn't know," Rachel said, coming to my defense. Meg threw up her hands.
"Idiots! You don't understand, he could have been killed!"
"I'm sorry," I interrupted, "but what was I supposed to do?"
"Just walk forward! Your rings are all you need to get past the wards."
"Rachel got a shock when she went near the shore," I muttered, beginning to lose my own temper.
"That will happen for everyone the first time through. There are new sigils and the rings need a moment to recognize them. It just stings a little, they won't harm you."
"Information that would have been nice to have before Finn took off."
With extreme effort, Meg mastered her anger and closed her eyes, taking several deep breaths before continuing. "She told you to follow her, and that's what you should have done." Her eyes darkened slightly when she turned to look at me. "ALL you should have done. Walk forward where you know the bridge begins. You will pass through the barrier and everything will become clear."
She turned stiffly and stalked briskly toward the river until the air consumed her with a rippling glow, like the morning sun on troubled water. I looked at each of the girls—Katherine seemed oblivious to Meg's reprimand, and showed only concern for my health. Rachel was fuming, but managing to keep it beneath her skin. Becca hung her head in shame, which triggered a protective flash of ire within me.
"Let's just go," I said, and Rachel nodded, took several steps toward the water and disappeared with a half-finished curse. Becca followed, and Katherine cried out once and clutched her hand, then stepped across the threshold, leaving me standing surly and alone.
I paused, breathing deeply, trying to let go of the irritation I felt toward Finn and my resentment at Meg's scolding, but on the far side of those feelings, questions emerged. Had I peeked through whatever it was and caught a glimpse of what the Fae had been working on? I doubted it. The castle, maybe, but not the docks or the ship, or all of the people walking around like cosplayers at a Renaissance Festival. It was more like the vision I'd had after my first night with Katherine, and I certainly hadn't been asleep for it. I clenched both fists and took a cautious step, trying to ignore the sharp needle of pain in my hand as I set my foot down on the beach.
The pressure and temperature increased for an instant, as though passing beneath a vent expelling hot air, then I was through, standing on a familiar bridge, looking at our mostly-familiar home. A stone road now joined the bridge to the warehouse, branching into a perimeter path where Rachel spent her morning jogs, and a small dock had been built on the downstream side of the building. It was also several degrees warmer, and colors were slightly more saturated, but even stranger was the slight blur the now-visible "bubble" gave everything beyond it. The overall effect was a weird hyper-reality, the way Dorothy must have felt when she arrived in Oz.
"This is bullshit," Rachel murmured, shaking her head. The girls had waited for me rather than follow Meg inside. "Bitch needs to chill."
"It's fine," I said, "Meg is just looking out for us."
"It still wasn't very fair," Becca said in solidarity. Katherine stood to one side wearing a faint smile of approval, and the attention helped more than I cared to admit. I was always the one being mocked and I just accepted it as normal, a penance for what I had done to them, but that minor show of loyalty over a brief incident overshadowed every second of teasing I'd endured.
As we walked together I noticed other details. The grass was slightly greener and had been trimmed, and flowers bloomed in scattered patches. The building was less shabby, though it still appeared aged, and the brick foundation had been replaced with fieldstone. It shouldn't have been possible without tearing down the entire structure, but there it was. It wasn't the castle I had seen from outside, but it looked more than ever like a home.
"Come on, I don't have all day!" Finn called to us from the doorway. I sighed and we picked up the pace.
At first I couldn't see what had changed. It seemed bigger than I remembered and there might have been more greenery, a little more attention to the aesthetic details that made most of it look like a fairy town, but that could have been due to our time away, stuck in a drab, one-bedroom apartment.
Finn was grinning with Amy hopping around her feet. A few near-human Fae were still bustling around, packing up their gear and loading them into the last remaining vehicles.
"You're gonna love it!" Amy crowed out then trotted over and scaled Becca's overalls to perch on her shoulder. Becca couldn't keep her eyes off the stray workers, though except for their angled ears and odd proportions, they weren't particularly unusual. Finn noticed her interest.
"Elves," she said with a look over her shoulder. "They're not as good at building as the brunaidh, but they've got a crazy eye for design."
"I thought we weren't allowed to meet the Fae," Katherine said. "Wasn't that the whole point of the last three days?"
"Only part of it. You were moved for the same reason kids shouldn't hang out in construction sites, it would have been dangerous for you and inconvenient for us. As for these guys, pop a beanie on their heads and they don't attract a lot of attention so they're used to being near humans. We only need to limit their exposure to Tom for a few minutes, then they'll be gone like the rest."
She turned and headed deeper into the building. "But you're not here for them. At least not today. What we have to show you is downstairs."
"What about that?" Rachel pointed up. The center of our roof remained unobstructed and sunlight illuminated most of the building through crystalline windows, but the prefabricated office was no longer alone in the upper tier. A network of wooden catwalks connected a variety of structures, similar in design to the girls' cottages, organically spread out among the rafters like an elaborate treehouse.
"You can explore those on your own. It's just extra space for now."
"So why is the island invisible?" I asked as we fell in line behind her.
"That was unexpected. Remember when I said we'd have to hide your tree?"
"Yeah."
"The cloak was originally created to render it invisible to the contractors, the ones who don't work for me. It's an old trick, but this kind of shift in the Veil is impractical and tends to unravel quickly. It worked for Finvarra and a few others, but you're not immortal and your connection to the island isn't enough to maintain it without a powerful artifact."
"Meg can explain it better," Amy continued. "But she thought it was a waste to let the runes burn out, so like a total queen, she used your whole damn tree to anchor the spell."
"It's not quite that simple," Finn said. "The existing wards had to be modified and the generator we installed helps maintain it, but however you want to look at it, the conditions were aligned. I'm proud of the work we did here, but Meg's contribution is by far the most exciting."
"This is powered by a generator?" I said. "There's no way it runs on electricity."
"No," Amy shook her head. "The generator uses a kind of power tap, drawing potential energy from vibrations in the Veil which create a harmonic resonance in the local ley lines. We convert that into kinetic force which runs a frictionless turbine and that's how you get your power—"
"It sounds like zero-point energy," Becca interrupted, which drew shocked stares from the rest of us and a wide grin from Finn.
"Sort of," Amy corrected. "What physicists call zero-point fields are transitive probability fluctuations in the Veil, the same thing that provides visual feedback through your hagstone. The variation is so small it's only detectable at the quantum level, but it represents near infinite power."
"Are you serious?" Katherine said, her eyes bulging with excitement. "If you figured out how to make unlimited free energy you could—" she shuffled her hands, "raise third world countries out of poverty, end hunger, eliminate air pollution—"
"And create new problems you're even less equipped to handle," Finn cut her off. "Your scientists dismissed the concept of the aether in the eighteenth century, and abandoned it entirely when Einstein presented his theory of special relativity. That's intentional. The last thing you want is the scientific community fiddling with the continuum."
"Why?" Katherine asked. "We've done pretty well so far, I'm sure we could—"
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"But—"
"Katherine!" Finn said sharply, stopping short without a hint of amusement. "You are not equipped to speak on this subject." She took a breath in the sudden silence, regaining her informal posture and an apologetic tone.
"Listen. You've heard us talk about the Chaos War, the first Chthonian incursion into this world. It took place thousands of years ago when a man, a human named Zora, attempted to breach the Veil."
"I thought that was impossible."
"That's why he failed. He was born a changeling, the son of an afarit, a kind of fire nymph. Zora grew up dreaming of the day he'd inherit his father's power, but fate had other plans and he remained human. As a young adult, he began traveling the world, searching for the means to force his transformation and achieve what he thought was his destiny."
"Wait," I interrupted, "I thought it was illegal for the Fae to marry a human. How was he not in hiding?"
"That rule came later. Finvarra actually encouraged mating with humans since we couldn't increase our numbers any other way. Nobody understood the risks back then. Zora became obsessed, learning everything he could about the Veil from both Fae and human scholars until he exhausted every resource and began experimenting on his own. He impressed a lot of people as the first human able to harness the Veil. Finvarra saw him and his Order of Magi as something that could unite all races. He was a fool. Zora gathered disciples, taught them his secrets, which they recorded in a tome that only they could read."
Becca gasped. "The Glim?"
Finn nodded. "The Glim and the Nain were created to consume knowledge indefinitely, to grow with their keepers' understanding of the cosmos."
"I take it things didn't end well," Katherine predicted, and Finn smirked.
"You might say that. He led a caravan of his followers into the desert, seventy-seven men and women, for a ritual he said would ascend them all to new power. Instead, it consumed them. Zora channeled their collective will, but instead of creating a deliberate passage between two worlds, he punched a hole through all of them."
"Holy shit," Rachel said.
"Holy fucking shit," Finn corrected. "He didn't just transcend the world, he broke through to the aether itself, the canvas on which creation is written, opening a passage for the darkling horde. He was sorry when he realized what he'd done, but by then it was too late. He fought with the Fae against the incursion but before it was over, tens of thousands were dead, including Finvarra and Mab's son. The Veil was permanently damaged and there have been regular incursions ever since, though none of them have been as big as the first."
Becca looked around as if expecting a portal to open on the spot. "What happened to Zora?" she asked nervously.
"He rebuilt his order, this time with the intention of protecting the Veil, sowing false and misleading information to keep other humans off track while the inner circle looked for ways to repair the damage he caused. Over time, the Magi became the Druids. They guarded their knowledge for centuries until Mab corrupted them."
The rest of us were quiet as she finished, meeting each of our eyes in turn, then she smiled playfully at Katherine. "Do you really want to hand that knowledge over to people who deliberately split the atom?"
"Okay, so what does that have to do with making the island invisible?" I asked.
"I was getting to that," Amy said, relieved to move on. "Meg designed a shunt that diverts harmonic resonance from the ley lines, a byproduct of the generator, and feeds it into the wards. It was almost a disaster, you should have heard Finn bitching her out."
Finn shot her a dirty look. "Would you want to explain to Gold why her pets are suddenly targets for every malicious Fae on the planet?"
"That explains her bad mood," Rachel said.
Amy shrugged, "I think Meg redeemed herself pretty well."
"And then some," Finn agreed. "She spent the night creating new sigils so we could expand the effect across the whole island."
"Does that mean Tom doesn't need to be bound to it anymore?" Becca asked.
Finn shook her head. "It only amplifies what's already there. Without Tom it would dissipate almost instantly."
"Oh!" Amy cried out and turned to Finn, "that reminds me. Meg said the dioptase she requested was occluded so she substituted a quartz shard to regulate the membrane transmission. It's working, but it's not as stable as she'd like it to be and we'll have to replace it soon."
Finn squinted at her. "And that means what?"
"How the hell should I know? I gave her specs for the output module and she figured out a way to refract the planck constant so her power matrix would couple with it. I'm just happy the lights are all on and we didn't blow up half the city."
"Maybe you want to have those conversations where we can't hear you," I suggested.
"Everything's fine," Amy assured me. "The tricky parts are done, and we have safety nets in place in case anything goes wrong. Any system failure will shut down the tap and it'll revert to city power until we get the generator back on line."
"Ok class," Finn called out, "that's enough for one day. If we don't get moving we'll have to cut the tour short. Follow me."
We fell in behind as she led us to the far end of the building and behind the partition wall that separated our kitchen from the laundry. The industrial washing machines had been moved out, leaving an open space now decorated like a small, indoor park with stone benches arranged around what appeared to be a large, black birdcage suspended from the ceiling, it's iron bars intricately shaped in delicate patterns.
"We refurbished the old loading crane and moved it here," Finn said, indicating the winch mounted to the I-beams above us. She opened a gate in the side of the cage, gesturing us inside, and it wasn't until I stepped forward that I realized it rested above a wide hole in the warehouse floor.
"An elevator?"
"I thought it would be more fun than stairs."
I was clearly not the only one made uncomfortable by the cage rocking side to side as each of us boarded, and it didn't help that I could see through the mesh floor into the Stygian darkness beneath us.
"Everyone ready?" Finn called out, but before anyone could respond she held up her left hand and rapped the ring on her middle finger against the bars. The hum of electricity, the wheezing of tired machinery, and a sudden, clacking lurch heralded our slow descent into the shadows below.
Zora and the Cataclysm