The witch paused after picking an item off the menu, seemingly at random. "What if I asked you to draw…the Aquarian Convergence in foam?"
The barista's brain dutifully attempted to process the order and then threw an error. The Aquarian what?
Shaken out of his morning rhythm, the barista hesitated. It was as if for the first time he finally noticed the young witch in brown, wearing thick-framed red glasses.
Her dress was covered in sewn wisps of geometric shapes and projections, so artificial and asymmetric that they resembled runes.
She popped out against the background of Ministry wizards dashing off to work, or loitering against the glass walls, chatting. A dash of color on a dull, uninteresting world.
He felt a pang in his heart, already anticipating the regret of parting ways after he delivered her order.
A sleepy-looking wizard opened the office door to see her, standing brightly with coffee in hand.
"Hello Mr. Montross. I'm the new student."
He made no reply as she offered her free hand in greeting.
"Ms. Shelley. Try to think of me as…a hedge Arithmancer."
The classroom was nearly empty while Montross spoke. After all, he was one of the first dimensionalists, and few were currently qualified to study in the new field.
"We wizards are not solo effecters of Nature's transformations. Any work we do, we do with an invisible but potent partner. There is an Anima in our wands, recognition in our Patronuses, the semblance of personality in our portraits of the departed. Someone remembers our words of power and, like a switchboard operator, hooks them up to the nodes of the world that need changing."
"Some of us think we knew this partner, but our memory of her nature was destroyed long ago. A precious few of us think we have rediscovered her. It's certainly useful to theorize that she exists, because of the implications she has for magical intelligences."
He gestured with his wand. Squeals filled the air as a piece of chalk wrote by itself on the board.
"Sophia."
"That is the name we gave to her. Wisdom, the mother of all magic herself."
They sat together in one of the café booths after hours. He was supposed to be cleaning up, but instead he held his cup to his lips, pretending to drink as he watched her sip. The thought of Shelley enjoying his coffee warmed him more than any beverage could.
"The truth is we can project our magic through any sufficiently tuned magical object."
She held up her bronze key. It was a long, plain instrument, with an unusually smooth surface. Its bow was a flat disc with a flowerlike crescent bitten out.
"In our world, we craft our partners with fragments of Sophia, sentient objects reliant on human artifice. But in the Outside, you can find things like this just…lying around."
She beckoned at him. In response to the invitation, he touched the honey-colored metal. It was warm, like the side of a freshly poured brew.
He had thought himself jaded. Initiated into the secrets of wizardry, a world hidden beyond the ken of mere Muggles, and yet still a mere service worker. But the thing in front of him whispered of perverse places, making implicit threats against his comfortable reality.
"The Outside? By that you mean…"
Her eyes lost their focus, as if drawn to a faraway place.
"Have you ever wandered through a…swirl of chaos, and suddenly, out of nowhere, come across a library? With a cozy little armchair with the stuffing poking through, just your size? Imagine that no one put that armchair there. The books are written by wizards who never existed, filled with unrefined…raw concept your brain tricks itself into interpreting as text. No one will find this place when you leave, it'll fade back into the aether."
"Wow," he said. "All that, conveniently crafted by chaos, just for you. It's a little spooky."
She shook her head. "It's the loneliest feeling in the world."
The wizard Montross nervously adjusted his smudged spectacles. As if suddenly noticing their soiled state, he took them off as if to clean them but just as quickly replaced them self-consciously on his nose at an angle.
It didn't take an Arithmantic projection of how lopsided his glasses were for Shelley to read his fear. She wondered if the newness of the field was not the only reason why dimensionalists were so few.
"In America, there was an old Salem witch who laid the groundwork for our field. It turns out there are geometric angles and certain formulae that, if you build or draw them in reality, weaken space, causality, all that stuff that reality is made of. You can then poke around inside and transport or project yourself to strange places outside our flow of time."
"It's only incredibly dangerous."
"Most of this was kept a secret until the middle of the twentieth century, when MACUSA Department of Anomalies investigators learned that the Keziah Mason had been surviving for two hundred years outside space…by feeding vampirically on unsuspecting Muggle victims she'd reach back in to hunt. That's a whole sordid affair I won't go into here."
"Going out there is a little, shall we say, inimical to human existence, and there are all kinds of nasty things waiting to eat us, so we've been cautious in our explorations so far."
"You know full well that to survive out here for long you WILL need a sponsor. I can offer you my considerable protection."
She eyed the black figure warily. "I don't doubt your power, O dark one. But I'm no fool. What'll this cost me?"
"A mere trifle. Sign." He gestured. Straining her eyes, Shelley made out an immense tome, wreathed in shadows by the twisted angles of space.
"I'm sure I won't regret this," she said, trying to sound wry.
It was a bad idea. She was so sure of it. She KNEW it.
She found herself walking over to the book anyway. Its pages fell open in sultry invitation.
Letters, dried nearly black, took up the top line of the page.
NAHAB
A.K.A, Keziah Mason. The old Salem witch had taken a secret name, this the MACUSA interrogators had scourged from her broken mind, and Shelley had in turn wormed out from one of them over hard liquor.
The black figure didn't have to say anything – Shelley understood. The pact to be forged was not to be in her human name, but a new name, a secret name, taken in darkness, of her own free will, to embody her new life from this point onward.
Idly, Shelley flipped through the earlier pages. Most of them meant nothing to her. She could feel her memory of the names blur and warp as she continued backwards in the tally of self-damned, as if they leaked furtively out of her probing mind, resisting attempts to apply her habitual Arithmantic analysis to them. Past a certain point, the names were in runes she could no longer decipher.
At the beginning, the crumbling, yellowed page held only one name. To her surprise and dread, she could read it.
SOPHIA
Shelley knew immediately what she had to do. Her heart thumped in her chest, with the prospect of gaining power, yes, but more so the possibility of unlocking a cosmic riddle few even knew existed.
Who else would ever come this far, let alone have the chance to make this choice?
Sacrifices would have to be made, even at the cost of herself.
Maybe there was some part of her that might once have hesitated. If so, walking too far into the night had worn that part of her away, while something else crystalized over her soul in its place.
A blank page appeared for her. She drew her key, whispering an incantation. Its teeth scratched the surface, and she felt it bite her as it left a trail in blood.
She would follow in their footsteps. A heritage she felt proud to continue.
The word she scrawled read…
IDRISS