The Tourbillion

Probability Distortion

It was Alice who had revealed him. She was working through a phosphoromancy sequence, shaping the air into lenses above the faun's scarred table, sending little tendrils of light to weave through the clock-tree roots in the ceiling. Quentin had wanted to distract her, to coax her to bed in the little earthen room the faun had given them. He brushed her hair back and kissed her neck. "What's up Vix? Still at work?"

"I'm altering Goethe's penumbra, I think it could be used to cloak us from the Beast," she said, adjusting her glasses. A gray moth fluttered towards the light. The shadow divided itself, splitting in two, then splitting again and again, until it seemed to devour the room. The Beast showed itself, stepping lightly from the mirror. In that moment it could have simply killed them, but that wasn't what it wanted. It wanted Penny's button. A single movement of its finger tore the glass box from Penny's jacket. The glass deconstructed itself and the Beast held the button up to the light. The moths slowed for a moment and Quentin thought he could see its face. It smiled as it began disassembling the real.

It made an opening, a portal above them which screamed with accelerating force. The ceiling had become fluid; Quentin and the others were pulled through it, up towards the collapsing maelstrom of light. He screamed but his voice was lost in the roar. He held to a branch of the clock tree and reached towards Alice as she floated past. Their hands touched for a moment but she was gone, falling upwards into the vortex. Quentin's hand had slid down the branch as the portal's gravity increased. He held a little clump of the tree's acorns in his fist as he plummeted into the sky.

Now he carried the acorns in his frayed suit jacket pocket as he walked quickly towards the Gravesend safehouse. It turned out to be a burned-out Russian diner beneath the overpass, a painting of a smiling pierogi leering through the broken window. Quentin dissipated the ward and swung the door open. Shards of afternoon light illuminated the dilapidated booths, where knots of goth kids struggled through mutilated versions of Popper's practical exercises. The bouncer walked towards him brandishing a stick (a wand?) and Quentin pushed him back into a chair with a gesture.