Shift

TWENTY-SEVEN.1

At 11:55, Carsten called for silence. Kayden didn't think he really needed to; by this point, everyone had quieted down enough that only whispers were floating through the grand ballroom. Most of the potestas in the enormous circular rune were bent over, checking their personal circles for errors with the quietest of whispers. Meanwhile, those observing the scene from against the wall—primarily sanspotestas women supporting their husbands and a few younger children—were already silent; Kayden supposed they knew only marginally more about spell castings than she did.

"The time is upon us," Carsten announced. He stood in the center of the rune in his very own spell circle besides the table set with the empty basin. His microphone had been discarded, and yet Kayden could hear his every word. "The spell will begin promptly in five minutes. I doubt I need to tell you all to pour your souls into this casting. If there ever was a spell to give your all to, this is it."

He glanced behind him to where Lira Fallon and Wheeler were standing in their own circles. The Naven illusion, meanwhile, stood outside of the rune, hands clasped in front of him.

Carsten cleared his throat. "As you may have noticed, Russ Naven will not be involved in the casting tonight."

This drew a few murmurs, but Kayden had already been briefed on this: illusions were not wizards, and therefore could not partake in a casting such as this.

The illusion spoke up and his voice was so similar to Naven's that Kayden shivered, remembering the feel of chalk on her skin. "I've been feeling ill as of late and I do not think I will be up to the task. However, I have the utmost faith in your casting abilities."

The short speech had been written in the wee hours of the morning. Kayden admitted that it didn't sound particularly like Naven, but it was the best they could do on such short notice and lack of sleep.

It seemed to appease most people though; everyone quieted down and turned back to Carsten for guidance.

The head of the Congregation glanced down at his watch just as Kayden heard noise to her right. She turned and noticed a side door only a few feet away from her. Two men in suits walked through, rolling a cart with a red cooler atop of it into the circle.

Carsten opened the cooler and pulled out a large glass sphere filled with something Kayden could only describe as brown-green goop. The sphere had a thin glass neck on top with a stopper where the liquid could pour out.

"That's the potion component," Lexi whispered to Kayden's mother. "We've been working on that for weeks."

And Blaze and I were stuck fixing it all last night, Kayden thought to herself. She glanced across the room and saw Blaze. He had been looking at her before, but now his eyes were on the great glass flask. Kayden knew he was wondering the same exact thing she was: would it work?

Carsten unstopped the flask and, with the help of the two men, poured the contents into the large basin in the center of the circle. When the flask was empty, the two men put the container back in the cooler and stepped into the final two empty circles remaining in the rune. They scanned their names for a moment and then nodded to Carsten to confirm the correctness.

"It seems we're all set," Carsten said, looking at his watch again. "Everyone, please turn your spell pamphlets to the first page."

There was a rustle of pages. Kayden was only twenty feet or so away from the nearest edge of the circle. The potestas closest to her—a man in his early twenties—held his copy with shaking hands and shifted in his spot nervously.

She glanced across at Blaze, expecting a similar reaction, but he looked strangely calm. She wondered if he truly felt that way, or if he had just gotten better at hiding his nerves.

"Ready?" Lexi asked her, taking her cousin's hand.

Kayden winced slightly; the handhold reminded her a bit too much of when Blaze had taken her hand out in the hallway. And yet it was comforting all the same. I don't need Blaze to be happy, she thought.

She squeezed her cousin's hand. "Ready."

"We start on my signal," Carsten said, a single arm raised in the air. The other hand gripped his copy of the spell tightly. "In five, four, three, two..."

He dropped his arm, and 200 voices began to recite the spell in complete unison.

Kayden nearly fell over when the first wave of power washed over her. She could vividly remember each casting she had seen in the past few weeks, from the very first one with Blaze in her bedroom all the way to Walter binding up Naven in the closet, and yet all those paled in comparison to what she was experiencing now. The air around her was vibrating, rippling her skin and sending tingles down her spine. The voices that echoed through her ear were not just musical, but strong, loud, and insistent. This was not a casting for the weak; it was a casting for the strong, for the fate of magic in the world they lived in.

Kayden saw Lexi's hand tighten on hers and yet she could hardly feel her cousin. All she could feel was the pull of the potestas' words—not just words spoken by those in the room with her, but spoken by thousands all over the world. More than ever she wanted to dance, to sing, to cry. She wanted to craft the spell with them. She wanted to give herself over to the pull. And when she felt Lexi swaying next to her, she knew she wasn't the only one who felt this way.

In unison the voices grew louder, and the rune flared, blue light rippling across the wooden floorboards. Kayden watched as the bowl besides Carsten started to boil and orange steam plumed above him. The air smelled of lavender, jasmine, oranges, and mint as well as the characteristic scents of magic: sulfur, iron, and burnt wood.

Kayden breathed it all in. The smell made her sleepy, and yet she couldn't draw her eyes away from the men and few women casting the spell. Sometimes her eyes would fall on one person in particular, and she'd watch them for a few moments, examining the curve of their lips as they spoke, feeling the weight of their words pulse through her bones. In particular, she watched Blaze. She didn't understand why he had been worried; each syllable he spoke was confident, and his own circle blazed around him in flashes of gold and green and pure white light.

Though Kayden knew that this spell was taking quite some time to cast, she never felt bored. The dancing lights, the music of the chanting and the flipping of pages, the way her skin warmed and cooled with every individual syllable... all of it enchanted her. It was all too easy to forget that this spell had a purpose, and that it was possible things could go very wrong at any point. Or that the spell could end and absolutely nothing would be fixed.

And yet the spell continued onwards without a hitch. At one point, she noticed that the thick spell packet was almost at an end. There were only a few more pages to be read, only a few more incantations to invoke. The smoke hovering in the air above them turned magenta, and then a cyan blue that quickly deepened to navy. The air smelled of incense and evergreen trees. In unison, everyone's voices rose, and the air pulsed with power.

The rune flared, tall walls of light obscuring Kayden's vision of everyone casting the spell. She closed her eyes and resolved herself to listen to the crescendo, knowing that the spell was finally coming to an end. She leaned against the wall, which was buzzing with energy, and felt the build of the spell run through her veins. She waited for what she knew would be the climax of the casting.

But then something cool brushed past her, and she opened her eyes. The light was so blinding that nearly everyone around her, Lexi and her mother included, had their eyes shut tight. And yet Kayden found herself staring at the figure that had walked past her. It was the Russ Naven illusion. He was standing just a few feet in front of her, shielding his eyes with one hand as he gazed at the casting in front of him.

Kayden was about to close her eyes again, but something made her stop. She stared at the illusion Blaze and Joseph had crafted, marveling at the detail, and yet her stomach churned. She knew it was an illusion, yet why did she feel so uneasy looking at it?

Not looking, she realized, glancing down at her arm where the illusion had brushed past. It didn't feel warm like an illusion. It felt cool, like flesh.

And that's when she saw that the illusion held a piece of chalk in its left hand, and its right hand was glowing with an eerie red light. This wasn't an illusion.

It was Naven.