Page 146 of The Alchemists

Ah. He felt very stupid.

He hadn’t lost his magic. He had lost his Words.

No, not lost—shed them to make way for new ones.

He blinked again. Conrad raised his hands, summoning magic to kill them. Behind him, something dark and red careened down the roof.

Seb felt his mouth form Conrad’s name, found his eyes, their blue indistinguishable from black in the darkness.

As the beam released, a net of Magic flung itself out around him and Lily, sheltering them under a radiating pattern of Æther rendered visible as golden light.

As the beam released, the red something crashed into Conrad from behind.

Seb closed his eyes against the glare.

LILY

Gemma collided with Hawleyhurst just as he released the spell that would have killed them. A shield of magic, identical to the one Seb had summoned in his bout against Danielson, sprang up between them and death.

Her vision split with gold as she followed the spell. It hit the outer limit of the shield, ricocheting sideways in a fury of sparks, and hit Braithwhite instead.

She could just make out the shock in his face as he stumbled backward, hands clutched over his chest, and tripped over the lip of the roof, falling into the waiting night.

Lily closed her eyes, but she heard the sound anyway.

SEB

He couldn’t stop shaking.

He heard the noise, couldn’t stop hearing the noise of Braithwhite’s body breaking against the library steps four stories below.

He slid in and out of consciousness, hiding just under the surface of oblivion so that he wouldn’t have to remember later. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t even have to try, because his body kept trying to die and Magic kept it from succeeding.

Even now, wrapped up and bandaged in gauze and blankets, under the gaze of the doctors and healers, and Dr. Metcalf, and Professor Chant, who’d been the first on the scene, he couldn’t stop.

They gave him IVs and cocoa laced with spells. They put him to sleep because awake, he trembled so viciously his jaw locked, and the tears kept coming, and coming, and they wouldn’t stop.

SUBLIMATIO

We may only refine that which has already undergone previous transformation. By converting solid to vapor and recondensing back to solid, only the purest particles will survive. All else is left as dross in the black belly of the vessel.

Tiberius Greco

The Collected Works, Vol. XII

LILY

“Ineed to see him.” She looked between the adults flanking her bed. “Please. Please. I just need to see him.”

She begged Chant with every fiber of her being. He’d been the first on the scene, having been on the way to the library already, in the rain and the darkness, as the Elumnara dictated, to formally declare the winner.

Lily didn’t feel like she’d won anything. She felt like maybe she’d come really, really close to losing everything.

Eventually she prevailed, and they wheeled her into his room. It was lit with warm, quiet light, and only some of it was man-made. Seb lay unconscious, IVs and Metaphysical equipment coming out of him. Magic ebbed around him. She could see it hovering on his breath. What a miracle he was.

Chant helped her clamber onto the skinny bed, piling her under her own set of blankets. When she curled around Seb, his casts hard and cold and digging into her thigh, he finally stopped shaking.

She had to turn off the part of herself that kept replaying how close they’d come to irreparable disaster. Seb’s back was broken. Both of them had sustained concussions and lost an alarming amount of blood. With Windermere’s Ætheric medic, and another rushed up from the City, the wounds would heal quickly—in weeks, not months or years. The scars would remind them, though. They webbed across Seb’s back, ran in a gruesome line across her forehead. Erasing scars with magic was a difficult thing, tied to curing the trauma that had caused them. The fancy medic recommended plastic surgery and wrote her a referral for an expensive one in the City that she wouldn’t bother to call.