"It's not really a bank, more like a straw, the insides held within it by the same fixative that holds the stars to the heavens."
I scrunched my face up, trying to put that into modern terms. "Uh, gravity?" I guessed, then added, "What makes things fall down but keeps the moon up?"
His eyes going wide, Pierce blinked at me. "To put it in a pie, yes. It's gravity, and a potency I'm constrained to call... sound?"
I licked corn syrup off my finger, wondering how sound had anything to do with gravity, space, or anything.
"Old sound?" Pierce tried again. "The word of God, some say."
Word of God. Old sound. I'm not getting this. "Oh!" I exclaimed, brightening. "Sound! Like the big bang that started the universe!"
"Explosions have naught to do with it," he said quizzically, but I waved my fork at him.
"Some people think the universe started with a big explosion," I said. "And everything is still moving away from it. They say space is still ringing from the bang like a big bell, but we re so small we can't hear it. Like us not being able to hear all the sounds elephants make."
He didn't look convinced. "Do tell. Students of the arcane, ah, some people believe that such drops of time that are flung near enough slip back like water drops, leaving a body with the sensation of deja vu, but if they are large enough and are flung far enough apace, they're constrained to dry up and vanish, leaving unexplained lost civilizations."
His eyes were alight. I'd seen that look on college students debating such ridiculous stuff as how the world would be today if Napoleon hadn't stirred that misaligned spell and won Waterloo, or if the Turn had never happened and we'd gone to the moon instead. "Okay, I got that," I said, and Pierce pushed from the table to take his plate to the sink.
"Are you sure?" he asked as he worked the taps and squirted soap into the empty batter bowl. He must have seen Ivy and me do it a hundred times.
"I saw a movie about it once," I said, and he turned to me, eyebrows high.
"You are a clever woman, Rachel, but I'm not sure you comprehend the complexity," he offered over the sound of running water. But at my frown, he cautiously took my empty plate as I extended it and continued. "The ever-after is believed to have its origins in such a calamity," he said as he rolled up his sleeves to show nicely muscled arms, darker than that spot of skin at his throat. "It was orchestrated by the demons to kill the majority of the elven population during their yearly gathering. An almighty span of time was spelled from its course, landing it too far to rejoin yet being so considerable that it didn't vanish straight on, lingering enough such that the no-account makers of the curse could return full chisel to reality, leaving the elves to make a most horrible die of it."
"Demons," I said, and Pierce nodded. Demons and elves. Why did it always come back to them fighting their stupid war?
"Demons," Pierce agreed. "Upon banishing the elves, they flung themselves back to reality, their tracks scarring time and making ley lines."
"Demons made the ley lines?" I interrupted, surprised, and he nodded.
"And such was their downfall, for not only did the lines continue to funnel potency, ah, energy, into the ever-after and keep it from vanishing, as they had schemed, but it also fixed the demons to the very place they sought to escape. I'll allow the elves must have rejoiced for their continuing lives, even banished as they were, until the sun rose and the same demons who'd cursed them were flung back, trapping all together in an almighty wrathy state."
"Until the elves learned how to travel the lines and come home," I said, my eyes rising to his. "Witches learned to do it first, though." And then demons killed all the gargoyles who knew so no one could travel the lines hut them.
Pierce turned from me to wash the plates with careful attention. "A reasonable truth when a body knows the secret of our origin," he said, reminding me that he was one of the few people to know. "Demons created the ever-after and are slung back to it when the sun rises."
"Jenks can't stay in the ever-after after sunup," I said, taking up my cup and warming my hands around it. "He popped right out.