The last thing Alden remembered was the golem's fist connecting with his chest. Everything after that was a hazy, muffled blur. His reality finally snapped back together after who-knew how many hours had passed. Alden found himself looking up at the ceiling of the back room in Boris' shop, laid out on a fold-out bed built into the wall.
"Hey," someone called out softly. Alden rolled over, feeling pain spiking in his ribs as he did. Hailey was laying on her side in a similar bed across the room. She actually didn't look too bad, but she was mostly covered in a blanket. Her expression said otherwise.
"Did we win?" Alden asked, trying to lighten the mood.
Hailey grimaced. "Wasn't us, but yeah, I think someone on our side did. We're still alive, so that means we probably won, right?"
"Yeah." He looked around the small room. There was a door back into the main bookstore, though he didn't remember a door in that part of the building before. Maybe his memory was too muddled. He might have a concussion for all he knew. The room they lay in was equipped with plenty of medical supplies, and the beds were firm and rigid. With how he felt, he didn't see any need to get up for a while.
He didn't want to run into any more horrors outside.
"You okay?" he asked, before realizing that if they were both laid out in makeshift hospital beds, she probably wasn't okay.
"More or less." Hailey shifted around a bit in her bed and winced. "I got knocked out. Dude was fast."
"Yeah," Alden sighed. "How did he do that? It wasn't movement magic. It was like he was in fast forward or something."
"It was something new, that's for sure. I've never seen anything like that." Hailey frowned. "It doesn't really fit any of the seven affinities."
"There's seven?" Despite everything, Alden was still curious about how magic worked. Rika had instilled in him that it was a consistent, almost mechanical art—in spite of the name.
"Actually, we—me and Jessica, I mean—we think there's eight. Because of the symbol on the paper."
"Oh. There wasn't a symbol on the one I read."
"Huh. Well, it must have been a different page. Anyway, it's like a weird, curved, two-layer star with eight points. Seemed important, and we already knew for sure there were seven, so we figured it's gotta be eight." Hailey screwed up her eyes as she tried to remember them all. "Movement, self-enhancement, mental, knowledge, elemental, nature, and creation. There's one more, and after what we just saw, I'm pretty sure that was it."
"Something that lets you run across a room instantly like a crazy blur," Alden muttered aloud. "Like in fast-forward... time control? He sped up time for himself?"
"You've gotta be kidding me," Hailey muttered.
"What?"
"That's what I guessed it was. But I was joking." She sighed. "I bet it doesn't let you go back in time though."
"Well yeah. We'd probably already know if it did. Someone would have used it to go back and prevent a lot of this, probably. Unless we're the first to ever discover it and no one's ever gone back before?"
"Too complicated for a concussion," Hailey groaned. "New topic, please."
Alden wanted to dig into it more, but Hailey looked like she was dealing with a heavy migraine. Hailey being one of the few people he'd actually spent any time with in Rallsburg, he decided to try to get to know her better. She was brave, and cool, and way less harsh than Rika. He cast around his skull for a topic, and landed on the first thing he knew they had in common.
"How did you awaken?"
Hailey shrugged awkwardly with just her left shoulder, while the right was still pressed against the mattress. "Same way everyone else does, I guess? We found a page and read from it. Was it any different for you?"
"No, but it was kinda crazy. That weird blackness and how it felt like you were gonna choke and die, until she shows up and saves you. Why aren't more people talking about that?"
"Uhh, I have no idea what you're talking about."
Alden was shocked for a moment, til he remembered the other oddity in Hailey's memory from their encounter upstairs. He sat up slightly, ignoring the spike of pain in his shoulder from the bandaged cut. "I forgot! You never met her!"
"Never met who now?"
Alden briefly explained his own awakening in detail—which, as he understood it, was the same basic process everyone went through according to Rika. Hailey's expression told him it was entirely new to her.
"So you never met her until we went upstairs. That doesn't seem possible. How are you alive?"
"We just read it and it told us that we'd found magic. Not, told us told us, but you know what I mean."
"Yeah..." Alden frowned. "Do you still have the page you used?"
Hailey hesitated. After a moment, she pointed at her leather flight jacket, which was hanging off a chair near her head. A rolled up piece of parchment floated out of a front pocket and into her hand. It wasn't a copy like Rika had shown him, but it wasn't a tiny ripped and charred Scrap like the one from the Council meeting. There was no damage to it at all, only a frayed edge from where it had been ripped out of the Grimoire.
"It's a full page," he breathed. He knew it was significant, even with his own limited knowledge of magic.
"That's important?"
"Yeah. Everyone else has ripped up little Scraps or broken copies. I think since you have an original, you didn't need help." Alden's mind was processing fast, deciphering a piece of the puzzle he'd been mulling over. "So that means the three Gods were probably the same. They're so powerful, and so are you and Jessica, because you all awakened from the real thing. Could I see it?"
"I uhh..."
Alden realized what he'd just asked. "Sorry, no, you don't have to. That was dumb."
Hailey shook her head. A moment later, a light gust of wind had the page gently coasting across the room to meet him. He caught it easily.
"That was really cool. You've got amazing control," he added.
She smiled. "Thanks. That's nothing though compared to flying."
Alden smiled back at the memory. Feeling a bit apprehensive, he leaned over and looked at the parchment in his hand. It was thick, rich-feeling paper with a real sense of age about it. His eyes found a familiar gliding, unfocused sensation as they slid across each set of indescribable words. He could feel the words echoing in his skull like a song on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't repeat them, or tell exactly what they meant. All he understood was that it had the vague sensation of an introduction—a prelude to actual magic. It was from the very beginning of the book, or at least the beginning of a particular section. It had nothing to actually teach him.
Disappointed, Alden grasped the page with his own magic. Instead of the gentle glide and flutter of the wind, he simply floated the parchment back over to Hailey. His movement looked totally unnatural compared to hers, but it got there all the same. She plucked it out of the air and he let the magic release. To his mixed satisfaction, it had taken far less effort than he remembered—but it wasn't suddenly trivial, like so much of the magic from Hailey or the Gods seemed to be. He was getting better, but only through practice and work, not a sudden grant of power.
"That was good. I can never move stuff steadily. You're way better at that than me." Hailey rolled up the page and tucked it into her jacket once again. "So did you get anything?"
"No," he said dejectedly. "I don't think it works like that. It probably has to be right when you awaken."
"That sucks. I'm sorry," she said sincerely.
"It's okay." He paused. "I don't think you should tell anyone else about this."
"Huh?"
"If people knew you had that, and knew they could be crazy powerful by reading it, you'd be chased down and probably killed for it." Alden shuddered, remembering the drama over the single Scrap at the council, and the flashes of memory from the golems attacking them upstairs. "Even if awakened people can't use it, they'll still want it for their friends, or to keep other people from it."
"Right," Hailey said, nodding. "Not saying a word, sounds good." She frowned. "Guess I should get my story straight for the future then, about awakening and all that. Could you tell it to me again?"
Alden described his own awakening in as much detail as possible. Hailey nodded along and asked questions, trying to get everything down as if her life depended on it. Which it might, Alden realized with a sickening feeling. He didn't want her to get hurt, or Jessica. They both seemed like genuinely good people, and didn't deserve what had happened to them.
"Okay," he said finally, after Hailey had repeated the story back to him well enough that it sounded right. She'd added a few touches that he hadn't experienced, but they seemed plausible. He'd believe it. Another possibility occurred to him. "You know, we could just destroy it."
Hailey hesitated. "I guess, but I... don't want to. I mean, yeah, it's brought me a ton of grief, but it did some good too. My life wasn't really going anywhere before, to be honest. I was way more caught up in my social life and throwing parties and not recognizing who my real friends were. Cutting myself off for a year lost me a few friends, yeah, but it also got rid of a lot of crap. Helped me understand what was important and how to be responsible and stuff. If it weren't for Jessica, I'd probably not regret any of it."
"What happened to her? I don't really know what 'ritual' means yet," Alden said with a twinge of embarrassment.
"Rituals are a different way to do magic. Instead of casting spells by just grabbing at your energy and throwing it around like you normally do. You stop and focus, draw out energy from more than just yourself or a gemstone or two. There's stuff with drawing symbols on the ground and using different reagents and so on. It lets you do the more permanent, powerful stuff."
"Like, say, making your body full of electricity?" Alden asked.
"Uhh, yeah, I guess? Is that was Rika did?" He nodded. "Thought she was just trying to show me up or something by shocking me over and over. Huh." Hailey laughed. Alden had noticed something about her—when she laughed, it was never a giggle. It was always a full-throated chuckle or even more. It always sounded genuine, too. Alden enjoyed it, especially compared to Rika's mocking cackles or Viper's low rumbling snorts of derision. They were both bitter, cynical people. Hailey sounded like she was just honestly happy.
"Anyway," Hailey continued. The laugh faded, but she didn't drop into full dispirited gloom like she had in the past. "If you disrupt a ritual, bad things can happen. Not sure why, and I definitely don't want to screw around enough to figure it out. But that's the gist of why Jessica can't talk anymore."
"That's awful," Alden said, wishing he had something more useful to add.
"Yeah. But we're living with it. Jessica and I can still work things out, and we're still best friends. We'll figure it out someday." Hailey smiled. "In the meantime, we've figured out plenty of other things."
"Like flying," Alden prompted.
"Hell yeah like flying!" Hailey laughed. "I can make it all the way up to the clouds if I want to. Or I can just ride down on thermals for hours while listening to music. It's super relaxing."
"Sounds amazing. Doesn't that get tiring though?"
"Eventually, yeah. Especially if there's no updrafts or anything to help me get up high before I start gliding." Hailey shrugged. "It's worth it though, every time."
"So are they really wings?" Alden hadn't seen anything actually coming out of her back, but he'd seen more than enough magic by now to never assume they couldn't simply be invisible or something.
"Nah, not really. If they were, I probably couldn't do it, since that wouldn't be my affinity. It's more like that's how my mind sees it, you know? Like it's how my brain makes sense of it. I'm actually using air to move myself around. It just moves things in the way wings do, I guess. They're always there ready to go like they really are sticking out of my back, but it's all just air. Elemental magic, if you wanted to stick it in one of the categories."
"So you're an Elemental affinity."
"Yeah. I take it from your smooth move earlier that you're a telekinetic?" Hailey asked.
"Movement, yeah. I'm not very good though."
"Don't be silly. You've only been doing this for what, a week?"
"Less," Alden said, though it had felt like so much longer. The longest week of his life.
"You'll get better. I wasn't flying until almost a year after I awakened. Just keep at it, you know?"
Alden sighed. "Right now, I don't know that I even want to stick around. This town has gotten crazy."
"No kidding," Hailey agreed. "At least it's probably over though."
"Guess so. Where is everyone, anyway?"
"I dunno. I woke up here, same as you."
Alden frowned. "Boris must have patched us up, then. But where's Rika, or Grey-eyes? Where's Boris, actually?"
"You want to go out and look for them?" Hailey asked. She started to prop herself up, but winced again and laid back down. "Nope, nevermind."
"I don't want to just leave you here."
"Hey man, it's cool. I'm not gonna die here or anything." Hailey looked thoughtful. "I'm a little curious though, why are you and Rika together? She doesn't really seem like your type. Not together together!" she added hastily as Alden's mouth opened. "I mean, you two have been spending every moment together since you got here, right? Just seemed a little weird."
"We ran into each other twice in a row, almost right away. It just sort of happened," Alden replied. "She told me everything I wanted to know and didn't treat me like I was an outsider, so I decided to follow her."
"Well, she's got a point there. Us outsiders should all stick together."
Alden grinned. "She doesn't take crap from anyone and she's smart and funny. She's powerful and she's been helping me with my stuff even though she's got tons of her own problems. So yeah, I've been sticking with her."
Hailey laughed and gave him a knowing smile. "Man, you've got a huge crush on her."
"Yeah, no kidding." Alden wasn't embarrassed to admit it. It was obvious even to him at this point. He decided to turn things around though, since they were treading familiar ground. "What about you though? You and Jessica are super close."
Hailey's mirth died, and Alden regretted his choice of topic. "Sorry."
"No, it's cool," Hailey sighed. "Jess and I weren't actually best friends when this all started. I was jealous of her actually."
"Of her talent?"
"No, because I thought she was trying to steal my boyfriend." Hailey's mouth twitched slightly. "I was completely wrong there, but anyway, months went by before we were actually really friends." Hailey launched into the entire tale without warning. She seemed eager to get it off her chest, and Alden was happy to listen. Anything to distract him from the growing anxiety that no one was ever coming to the room to check on them.