Note: Ah, updating in a hurry is never a good thing for me as I'll invariably miss something in the proofing process, but I don't have very much time tonight as I'm taking myself to the theatre to see Women of Troy! Albeit not with KD, but still, I can imagine! I'm so excited! And I am going home for the weekend tomorrow, so I'm excited about that too! Enjoy the chapter!

Pandora's Box

Twenty-Five

Mildred closed the compact mirror, letting it rest in the palm of her hand. It was such a small, seemingly insignificant item, and yet the power it wielded was extraordinary. Not magical power per se, but the power to control Mildred's emotions. Thanks to the brief conversation she had just shared with her form-mistress, her heart was pounding in her mouth and adrenaline was coursing through her veins. She was scared, and although the older witch had tried to hide it, Mildred could tell that she was afraid as well. Who wouldn't be, in such a position? Once again, Mildred found herself thinking of Miss Hardbroom's headstrong courage in the face of such adversity, a courage that she wished she could share, but she simply was not ready to. She had not been able to watch, she'd had to break off the conversation before she had seen her potions teacher disappear, for fear of witnessing a terrible event. Part of her felt terrible for abandoning the other woman, the one of them who ostensibly needed the moral support, but she knew that had something untoward had happened, she simply would not have been able to cope. She was only seventeen, she reasoned, and whilst she was going to have to grow up when she went to Weirdsister in the autumn, there was a limit to how much she could mature in the space of a few short days. She had already had to face up to some very uncomfortable truths since the catastrophic chain of events surrounding the opening of the Void had begun, and she was not sure how much more her mind could take.

She looked up from the small metallic circle and directly into yet another mirror, this one unenchanted – the mirror on her bedroom wall. A petrified young woman, eyes red-rimmed with unshed tears and fear stared back out at her, appraising the long graduation robes that she had donned just a few moments before. No-one knew if graduation was even going ahead in the tenuous circumstances, but Mildred had not yet had the chance to wear the ceremonial gown, and perhaps an unconscious part of her had had the grim thought that she wanted to be able to say that she had worn it once before she met with her doom at the hands of the Devil. She shook her head, and her reflection mimicked her. The image seemed wrong, something missing, and it wasn't the mortarboard that was still hanging on her wardrobe. This was not the way she had pictured herself looking at the moment she qualified. Her smile was missing. Without it, she was simply a scared little girl wondering what was going on elsewhere in the world, wondering whether she would ever see her form-mistress again, wondering whether she would ever see her headmistress again, wondering if she would ever see her family again. The plaits weren't helping, so Mildred pulled them out, combing through her wavy tresses with her fingers, but this served only to make her seem bedraggled, overwhelmed with emotion.

Suddenly there was the sound of running footsteps outside her door and someone knocked frantically. Fresh fear bubbled up at the back of her throat as she called out to the perpetrator.

"Come in."

The door opened and Miss Drill's face appeared around the frame.

"Mildred," she panted. "You've got to come, it's Miss Hardbroom."

"What's happened?" asked Mildred, all manner of doomsday scenarios running through her imagination as she followed the PE teacher through the corridors of the school towards the staffroom, each one more frightful than the last. She had a vision of the potions-mistress lifeless on the staffroom floor having managed to come through the ice mirror at terrible expense, and she could not hide her sigh of relief when Miss Drill's next words proved her prophecy wrong.

"She's… the staffroom mirror," said the teacher, and Mildred's racing heart became a little slower as she wondered over Miss Drill's lack of preposition. Would one say that a witch was in a mirror? Or on it, like on the phone? "She asked me to come and get you."

"Is she ok?"

"She seems a little shaken, but fine otherwise."

Mildred managed a small smile, only Miss Hardbroom could come through an ice mirror and out the other side with her composure intact. By this time they had reached the staffroom and Mildred rushed in with no pre-empting. There in the mirror, most definitely alive and unruffled, was Miss Hardbroom.

"You're alright!" Mildred exclaimed. "You came through the mirror! It worked!"

"Yes, it did, but there's a small problem. Mildred…"

Mildred had already guessed at the flaw that might be hindering them at that moment, and she didn't know why she had not thought of it before.

"Where are you?" she asked, interrupting her teacher for what was possibly the first time in her time at the school. "Where did the mirror come out?" The panic rose in her throat once more; what if Miss Hardbroom had found herself trapped in just another strange limbo realm, unable to return to either the crumbling world of the Devil or the living world?

"I'm in Della's house," said Miss Hardbroom, almost airily. "Mildred…"

"Della's house?" Mildred repeated. "How… why?"

"I don't know!" By now the teacher's voice was showing signs of exasperation. "Mildred, that's not the most worrying thing on my mind right now!"

Mildred felt her head spin as Miss Hardbroom flipped the cheval mirror that she was speaking through over and she found herself staring through a window at the purple swirling vortex of the Void, the same that she had seen in the dungeons when she, Miss Drill and the Chief Wizard had found the terrible source of the rumbles shaking the castle. This time, however, it was more powerful by tenfold, the eddying clouds seeming to move with a frenzied speed and a life of their own. Sparks of raw, golden magic shot through them like forked lightening across storm clouds, each bolt crackling like thunder that Mildred could hear even through the mirror. This was not a portal, a manifestation; this was the real thing, the gaping maw of the Void, waiting to swallow up everything in its path. Mildred's stomach churned again, not solely due to the sudden flipping motion of the image bringing her back face to face with Miss Hardbroom.

"The Void," she choked. The teacher nodded.

"Mildred, I need your help. The Void needs to be closed, it's getting closer and it will simply absorb everything in its way if we let it continue."

"How do you close the Void?" Mildred asked, aware of how her voice was rising to a shout to match her form-mistress's yelling over the noise of the vortex in the distance.

"I don't know, that's the main problem. But there's another thing. Mildred, I can't use my magic."

Mildred's veins turned to ice.

"What?" she asked, taking a step back. If Miss Hardbroom was devoid of her intensely powerful magic for whatever reason, then their fight against the Void was as good as over. She was unconsciously acknowledged by all as the school's definitive combatant, be the spells offensive or defensive, and if she was unable to protect them from the terrors of the Void then who could? Mildred was sure that she would not be able to take up the mantle, and she wondered why Miss Hardbroom had asked for her assistance.

"I think it's because I'm so close to the Void, it's blocking me from casting."

Mildred saw a faint shimmer glow around the deputy-head's silhouette for a second before vanishing as the witch obviously tried to disappear and transport herself back to the castle in that way.

"Nothing I do is working Mildred. If I can get far enough away from the Void then perhaps we stand a chance."

Mildred realised what her teacher was asking her to do and nodded to the request that had not been made, making a pass over the mirror and returning it to its original state with a muttered spell before running from the room.

"Where are you going?" asked Miss Drill, following on after her. "Mildred, it's not safe out there!"

"I'm going to get Miss Hardbroom!" Mildred called back after her. If magical spells could not work as a means of transport, then perhaps a broomstick would. After all, like the mirror, it was already enchanted and inherently magical; no spell or potion was required to activate its power. Her only problem was time. It took at least half an hour to fly to the town from the castle, and Mildred suspected that the adverse flying conditions created by the freak winds and clouds from the Void would only serve to increase the duration of her journey at a point where time was of the essence. There was, however, a ray of hope. Mildred cast a spell to summon her broom from the shed outside, and it sped through the thankfully empty corridors of the school and into her hand as she rapped frantically on Enid's door. Her friend, also attired in her graduation gown, opened it, a perplexed look spreading over her features.

"Millie?" she began, but Mildred cut her off.

"I need you to turbo-charge my broom," she said. "It's an emergency," she added on seeing Enid raise her eyebrows. "I have to save Miss Hardbroom from being eaten by the Void."

"Right." Enid said nothing more in response, and Mildred couldn't blame her, the sentence was quite something to digest. She went back into her room and Mildred followed. During the last few weeks of term, Enid had been working on a series of potions and spells designed to 'bend the rules' slightly, and making broomsticks travel faster was one of the, in her words, more successful things. Mildred had yet to experience the effects, despite Enid assuring her that they were perfectly safe. The smaller girl rummaged around in her chest of drawers before coming up triumphant with a small bottle of a livid green potion, which she proceeded to sprinkle liberally over the brush of Mildred's broomstick, waiting for it to soak in before handing it back to its owner.

"All you have to do is lean forward," she said. "Then the potion will do its stuff."

Mildred thanked her friend, who yelled 'good luck' down the corridor after her as she set off for the main doors at a run. She'd barely registered leaving the ground before she was over the castle boundaries and, swallowing all her previous misgivings about Enid's magical capability when it came to experimental potions, she leaned her broom forward slightly.

It took off like a cat with a singed tail; Mildred had never travelled so fast in her life before, and as the trees faded to blurs beneath her, she realised with a jolt that Enid had not told her how to stop. Angling the nose of the broom towards the ground merely caused her to go into a dive without losing speed and Mildred had to pull up sharply before she ploughed into the ground. Within five minutes she was over the town, almost level with the jaws of the Void…

Suddenly Mildred did not have to worry about stopping the effects of the potion as her broom screeched to a halt of its own accord before spiralling dramatically out of the sky. Her theorising about the effects of the Void on already magical objects was proved spectacularly wrong as she tumbled through the air, and she remembered with a jolting heart the briefest moment of static interference that had ghosted across the mirror as she had broken off the contact. Magical implements were just as susceptible within the Void's sphere of influence as magicians themselves. Mildred tried her hardest to maintain some form of control as she descended in free fall, finally coming into land on the street, stumbling and grazing her knees and palms as she did so. She got to her feet, staggering slightly, and looked around at her surroundings, giving a muted moan on realising that she was completely lost, in a part of the town that she had never seen before. She shook herself crossly and began to run in the direction opposite to the one that the ominous sounds of the Void were coming from. There was no time to lose, but as she careered down unfamiliar street after unfamiliar street with a stitch beginning to bite at her side, panic started to creep through her thoughts. She paused, hunching over to get her breath back, the dark, empty roads filling her with a previously unrecognised dread, both of the Void itself and any mysterious unknowns that might be lurking in the shadows.

"Mildred!"

Mildred had never been so glad to hear Miss Hardbroom's voice, and she looked up to see her teacher running towards her from a side street.

"Miss," Mildred began, but she was panting too much to continue.

"Mildred, we've got to move!" exclaimed Miss Hardbroom as she reached her pupil, pausing only momentarily to help her upright again before taking her wrist in one hand and holding up a bunch of red silk skirt in the other to enable her to run. Mildred, marvelling at how the older woman could be so fleet of foot when running over hard asphalt with no shoes on, allowed herself to be dragged along for a few moments before a rushing sound caused her to look behind her and see just what they were running from so frantically.

The Void was upon them, moving slowly down the street, causing the windows of the houses on either side to explode as it passed between them, bearing down upon the running figures faster and faster until Mildred felt glass fragments shower down into her hair. She looked from side to side for an exit, an escape route, but there was nowhere to hide. Their only salvation would be to reach the end of the road.

Mildred prayed that they could reach it in time.

Note2: Dun dun dun! Stay tuned, folks! And don't forget to review!