I didn’t grind my teeth. Not much at least. Taking a deep breath, I exhaled the annoyance creeping through me. Then I pictured my magic like a wave again. I could feel it around me. I’d extended a full circle of magic around myself. Now I imagined it all flowing back to me, like the tide rolling in.
The magic moved, a little sluggish, but it returned. The extra web of reality wound itself back into a compressed ball. The box lid slammed shut.
I looked around. Not one tear or pocket of merged space remained. I’d never used my planeweaving without damaging reality before. I looked down at the rug. It still looked rotted, but with the land of the dead at a normal density, it didn’t look as rotted as it had. I closed my shields. The frayed fabric and molded holes vanished, the rug still whole in mortal reality. The chair was too.
I stared at the chair. Shocked.
“You didn’t weave the realities flat. You just wove them together,” the Mender said, and my head shot up.
“What?”
His youthful face looked horribly put-upon. “The planes brush against each other naturally and constantly. You unrolled the layers of reality I gave you. You didn’t push anything from one to another, just spread out the reality in this space.”
That sounded accurate, but this was a lot of new information. Still, I’d definitely done something that I’d never known how to do before. And it hadn’t magically slapped me down, so a point for using my ability without harming myself.
“Yes, yes. Good. Now do it again.”
I blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Practice makes perfect, as they say. Do it again.”
I looked down at the ball of reality in my hand, still shaped like a box. Then I looked past it, at my fingers. Three of my fingertips were deep blue, the veins of polluted magic running down the full length of the fingers and into the pad of my palm. I was using an enormous amount of magic to unfurl the ball of reality.
“Oh, that is a problem,” the Mender said, his features turning to the middle-aged businessman, and he drummed his fingers on his leg. “Oh yes, that could definitely be deadly.”
The blood drained from my face. “Is that the possible future you see? When? Do you see a way to prevent it?”
The Mender glared at me. “Even if I were inclined to give you those answers, I wouldn’t. Now practice. You’ll probably pollute most of your hand, but it is important that you can do this.”
Because he wanted the souls in Faerie, one way or another. Though if he could teach me not to kill myself, maybe the changeling planeweavers being gone was not quite as devastating a blow as I initially thought. But how did the Mender know so much about my powers? “Are you a planeweaver?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “But obviously I can manipulate planes. Who do you think made that ball you’re holding? Now concentrate. You have a lot to learn. I want the souls trapped in Faerie released. We both agree that fundamentally changing Faerie is a bad plan. So you must learn to weave reality neatly, instead of walking around ripping holes and fusing spots.” His features turned younger than I’d ever seen, a teenager at most, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “And if you start thinking of me as a teacher, I’m going to charge you a second favor for this lesson.”
Right. I definitely didn’t want that.
He gave me a look that said I better get to the practicing. Taking a breath, I focused on the ball of reality again, letting my magic roll out of me like a wave. The ball unfurled, reality weaving in a small circle around me.
“Push out further,” the Mender instructed.
I did.
“Further,” he said, and though I complied, he circled his hand in a “keep going” motion.
I hadn’t moved, but I was breathing heavy. The merged patch of reality spread all around me in a circle that was about eight feet wide. My magic felt stretched to the limit. If I pushed waves of magic out further, I’d start draining my reservoir.
“Enough,” the Mender said, nodding. “You can draw it back in now.”
I did, gratefully. It was easier this time, as if the magic had already started carving its own paths through my psyche.
“Good.” The Mender’s satisfied smile seemed to be more for himself than for me. “Now do it again.”