The sky tore open without sound.

One moment Mira was standing in the Thornwood—the familiar purple canopy of the Veil Continent stretched above her in its perpetual dusk, the silver-barked trees humming their subaudible harmonic to one another, the air thick with the taste of ambient aether—and the next she was falling. Not the way bodies fall, with wind in the ears and stomach in the throat. She fell the way light falls: instantly, without resistance, as though the space between here and there had been folded flat and she had slipped through the crease.

She landed on her hands and knees in something cold and slightly damp. The ground was not soil. It was not moss, not stone, not any substrate she could name from the old vocabulary. It felt inert. Dead, almost. She pressed her palms flat against it and felt nothing—no current of ley-light, no hum of ambient magic, no whisper of the living world that every surface in the Veil carried in its grain like a pulse. In the Thornwood, even the rocks were alive. Even the mud remembered rain.

Here, nothing remembered anything.

She stood slowly. Her black traveling cloak was torn at the left shoulder where she must have caught it on something during the crossing—or perhaps during the landing, though she had no memory of catching it. There was a scratch along her forearm that welled with blood the same dark, near-black shade it had always been, but something about the way it moved seemed wrong. Thinner. As though the blood itself had grown less certain of itself. Or perhaps that was her imagination.

She looked up.

The sky was not the Thornwood sky. It was not anything from the Veil at all. It was blue—blindingly, impossibly blue—and there was a great yellow light hanging in it that was too round, too steady, too close. It burned her eyes. She had never seen a sun before. The Veil had no sun; it had only the great amber glow that emanated from everywhere and nowhere, the ambient light that was not light so much as it was the visible form of magic itself. This yellow thing was aggressive. It had opinions about where it should shine and it made them known. She had to look away.

There were trees, but they were the wrong trees. In the Veil, the trees were silver-barked and their leaves were the color of deep bruises—indigo, violet, the occasional arterial red. Their roots drank from ley-lines and their branches sang in harmonics too low for most human ears to detect. These trees were tall and straight and covered in broad green leaves that rustled in a warm breeze without any of the harmonic resonance that should have accompanied them. No tree in the Veil moved without speaking. These trees said nothing.

She was alone.

Mira closed her eyes and reached for the ambient magic that should have surrounded her—the freely available aether that every witch drew upon for even the simplest workings. A light, if she needed light. A wind, if she needed wind. The ability to simply know the shape of the ground beneath her feet without looking. She found nothing. Not nothing as in depleted, not nothing as in forbidden. Nothing as in absent. As though the concept of magic had simply never existed here, had never been invented, had never even been imagined.

She opened her eyes. Her heart was beating very fast.

In the Veil, she would have called this sensation by its proper name—anxiety, a misalignment of the body's aetheric field caused by a threat to the self—but here, without magic to measure herself against, it was only a feeling. A tightening in the chest. A quickness in the pulse. A sense that the body knew something the mind had not yet translated into language.

She stood there for a long time. The sun—yes, she had decided it was a sun, a crude and aggressive version of the amber glow—moved across the sky in a way that seemed impossibly fast. In the Veil, the light changed so gradually that you could watch for an hour and swear it hadn't moved at all. Here it raced. The shadows shortened. The warmth intensified. Time, she realized, moved differently here. Faster, or at least more honestly. In the Veil, time was something you could borrow from, store, stretch. Here it simply passed, indifferent and absolute.

It took her three hours to find the road. In the Veil, she would have simply opened a path—she would have folded space or called the wind to carry her or used any of a hundred other methods that required only a gesture and a thought. Here, she walked. She followed the strange silent trees until they thinned and the ground beneath her feet changed from that dead substrate to something harder and grey and man-made.

A road. An actual road, made of some dark flat material, marked with pale lines down the center. She knelt beside it and pressed her hand to its surface. It was warm from the sun. It had absorbed the heat and now released it slowly, the way a stone would, the way anything dead and inert would. It did not know she was touching it. It did not care.

She stood and looked along its length in both directions. In the Veil, roads were alive—they remembered every foot that had ever pressed them, every cart wheel, every hoof. They whispered their memories to those who knew how to listen. This road had no memory. It was only a road.

She began to walk along it, because walking was the only thing she knew how to do in a world without magic.

The road curved and descended, and eventually she saw lights below her in the gathering darkness—many lights, clustered together in the way that settlements were clustered in every world she had ever known. The yellow-white glow of them was unfamiliar but comprehensible. People made light. She understood that much. The Veil had its amber glow, but even there, people made their own light for their own purposes—candles for intimacy, lanterns for guidance, the cold blue fire of concentration for working. Light was light, whatever world you were in.

The walk down took another hour. By the time she reached the first building, she was exhausted in a way she had never been exhausted before—not physically exhausted, though her legs ached and her feet were sore from the unaccustomed walking, but existentially exhausted, as though the act of being in a place where she could not use magic had drained something essential from her body. As though being unable to do the simplest thing—a light, a wind, a knowing—had cost her more energy than any spell she had ever cast.

She reached for her magic again, instinctively, the way you reach for a wall in the dark. The same nothing met her. The emptiness was total.

The building at the edge of this strange settlement was large and flat-roofed, with enormous windows full of golden light. She could see people inside moving around tables, holding objects, laughing. She watched them through the glass for several minutes, trying to understand what they were doing. It looked like eating, but the food was different—the colors wrong, the smells absent or present in ways that made no sense. In the Veil, food knew it was being eaten. It resisted slightly, then surrendered. Here, food just sat there, dead like everything else.

A woman walked past her on the sidewalk, glanced at her, looked again, and then stopped.

"Oh my God," the woman said. She was perhaps thirty, with red hair pulled back and wearing a heavy coat despite the warm air. Her face was kind in the way that some faces are kind—not soft, but open, with lines around the eyes that suggested she had used those lines often. "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

Mira stared at her. The words were in the Old Tongue—or almost. The language here was close enough to what she spoke that she could understand most of it, though the pronunciation was flattened and strange, as though the words had been pressed flat under a heavy weight and only partially restored.

"I am lost," Mira said. It was the truest thing she could think of.

The woman's face softened. She reached out and touched Mira's arm—a gesture so simple and unthreatening that it nearly broke something in Mira's chest. In the Veil, no one touched a witch casually. Witches were dangerous, and their power demanded a certain distance. Touching a witch without invitation was like reaching into a fire without gloves—you might get burned, and even if you didn't, the fire would notice you. But this woman touched her as though she were just a person. Just a lost woman on a sidewalk who needed help.

"Come on," the woman said gently. "There's a place I can take you."

Mira let herself be led. She was too tired, too empty, too far from everything she understood to do anything else. The woman walked her to a corner and held up her hand—a gesture that caused a large metal box to slow and stop at the curb. Mira had never seen a car before. She had no frame of reference for the sudden roar of its engine or the way it exhaled when the woman opened its door, or the smell of exhaust and hot metal and something else, something almost organic, that the car emitted like a living thing pretending to be a machine.

"I'm Elena," the woman said, climbing in after her. "What's your name?"

"Mira," she said.

"Mira," Elena repeated, as though tasting the word. "That's beautiful. Where are you from?"

Mira looked out the window at the rushing lights, the strange buildings, the vast and incomprehensible human world that had opened beneath her like a trapdoor. She thought of the Thornwood, the silver trees, the purple sky that never changed, the life she had known for thirty-two years—longer, if you counted the centuries of accumulated memory that every witch carried from her bloodline. She thought of how she had always felt slightly apart from that life, slightly ordinary beside her extraordinary magic, and how now, without the magic, she was simply ordinary in a world that had no magic at all.

"Very far away," she said.

And for the first time in her life, she understood that very far away might mean forever.

The car stopped outside a large building with a sign that read HARBOR HOUSE in letters that were backlit and faintly humming. Elena led her inside, where another woman—older, broader, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck—looked up from a desk and said, "Elena, who's this?"

"Found her on Fifth Street. Says she's lost."

The older woman looked at Mira with the practiced assessment of someone who had seen a great many lost things in her time. "You have somewhere to go tonight?"

Mira shook her head.

The woman nodded as though this were the answer she had expected. "I'm Ruth. I run this place. We call it a shelter. It's for women who don't have anywhere else to sleep tonight. You can stay here. There's food, there's a bed, there's a shower. We'll figure out the rest in the morning. Does that sound all right?"

Mira nodded. She did not know what a shelter was, but she understood bed and shower and food, and at this moment, those words were enough.

Ruth led her down a long corridor to a room with six beds in it, four of them occupied by women who looked up briefly when she entered and then looked away again, the way people do when they have learned that looking too long at a stranger can mean trouble. One of them—a woman with grey-streaked hair and a face that had been weathered by decades of something difficult—gave her a small nod. Mira nodded back.

Ruth showed her which bed was hers. There were sheets, clean and white. There was a thin blanket. There was a small locker where she could keep her things, though she had no things to keep, only the clothes she stood in and the torn black cloak that smelled, faintly, of the Thornwood—of aether and amber light and the subaudible hum of living trees.

"You look like you've had a rough night," Ruth said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Mira said, because it was true.

"You'll feel better after some sleep. Breakfast is at seven. Elena will be back in the morning to talk to you, if you're willing. She's good at figuring out next steps."

Mira lay down on the bed. The mattress was hard and the springs protested faintly beneath her weight. It was nothing like the beds in the Veil, which adjusted to your body, which remembered the shape of you. This mattress did not know she was lying on it. It did not care.

She closed her eyes. She reached for her magic one more time—not to cast anything, just to feel it there, just to confirm it was still hers even if she couldn't use it. The nothing met her again. Total. Complete.

But beneath the nothing, in the deep place where the reserve lived—the personal magic that every witch carried from birth, the finite amount that defined how powerful she could ever become—she felt something else. A faint, almost imperceptible tremor. As though something inside her were slowly, very slowly, beginning to drain.

She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. In the Veil, she had learned to measure time by the movement of light, the cycle of aether, the subtle shifts in the ley-lines. Here, she had no such measures. Here, time was only clock-time, and she did not know what clock it was, or what time it showed.

She thought: I have five years.

She did not know where the thought came from. It arrived fully formed, a certainty without explanation, as though something deep inside her already understood the arithmetic of her new situation. Five years. She had five years of magic left, and then she would be ordinary. Truly ordinary. As ordinary as the dead road and the silent trees and the indifferent sun.

She turned on her side and pulled the thin blanket over her shoulder. Across the room, one of the women was breathing deeply, already asleep. Another was coughing—a wet, rattling cough that spoke of something wrong inside her chest. The grey-streaked woman who had nodded at Mira was sitting up in bed, reading something by the light of a small battery-powered lamp, and she glanced over at Mira with an expression that was neither kind nor unkind, just watchful.

Mira closed her eyes again.

Somewhere, very far away—farther than the distance between here and the Thornwood, farther than the distance between any two places she had ever known—a door was closing. She could not hear it. She could not feel it. But she knew, with the same certainty that had told her five years, that the door was closing, and that she was on the wrong side of it.

The question that kept her awake, long after the light in the corridor had been turned off and the room had fallen into a darkness that was almost but not quite like the Veil's perpetual dusk—the question that kept her awake was not how do I get home. That question would come later, when she was rested enough to think in terms of solutions.

The question that kept her awake was simpler than that, and therefore harder:

What do I do now?

She did not know. She had never not known. In the Veil, even in the worst moments, there had always been a next step—a spell to try, a teacher to consult, a path to follow. Here, in this world of dead roads and silent trees and aggressive suns, there was only this: a bed in a shelter, a body that was slowly losing its power, and the absolute absence of anyone who could tell her what came next.

She lay in the dark for a long time.

Then, slowly, she began to breathe the way the other women were breathing—asleep, surrendered, trusting that morning would come whether or not she was ready for it. It was the first unmagical thing she had ever done: gone to sleep without knowing what would happen when she woke.

It was, she would realize later, the beginning of everything.