Thirty-Five || Tower of Cosmos
Mint had almost seen it coming. Almost.
But everything had happened too fast for her to keep track of, but she had felt something break. Lines in the air, coils of magic, all at once snapping and ripping apart. She had stayed behind just long enough that she could see the Book, cleaved in two, hit the carpet.
When she did, she whirled, grabbed Prima's wrist, and tore down the hallway.
Behind her, magic boiled out of the room and spilled into the hall. Tangles of energy wove and unwove, snapping at anything they could reach, whipping tentacles of wild, unbound spellwork against the walls, clawing their way through any open space they could reach– inevitably, toward her.
"What is that!" Prima shouted.
"Just run!" Mint shouted back.
And they made a valiant effort. They were almost at the doorway before the nova of energy overtook them.
It flooded the hallway, crashed over the walls, billowed into the next room over and hissed through the cracks until, for just a moment, Mint and Prima hung weightless, surrounded by a white void. Mint tried to reach for some kind of purchase, but it seemed that everything around her had simply ceased to exist. Time and space hung suspended with her. She forgot to breathe.
Then, just as abruptly, a very physical sound – a roar of collapsing concrete, the scream of twisting metal, the distant thunder of an avalanche – surrounded her, and suddenly the white space was siphoned away and she crashed unceremoniously to the ground, Prima collapsing alongside her.
She lay still for a few moments, trying to get her bearings, trying to remember how to tell her body to move. Next to her, Prima was already clambering to his feet, his gaze snapping around the room.
"Mint," he said softly. "Where are we?"
"Gimme a minute," she groaned. She still felt dizzied.
She could feel him moving restlessly at her side. She had a feeling he wanted to speak, but was keeping himself quiet for her sake. Slowly, she shifted, lifted herself up, pushed herself back to her feet. She looked around.
They were in a hallway.
Not the one they had been in, though, decrepit and broken from the passage of time. This one was wider, marked by a deep scarlet carpet. The walls around her were no longer flat, stained concrete but heavy stone and mortar. There was light, but she couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from; it seemed as though an ambient glow, slightly pulsating, had settled around them. She followed the trail of light as far ahead as she could see, but the hallway curved the further up it went until it disappeared around the bend.
It also sloped upward. She turned and looked back, and sure enough the hall followed a downward slope, curving in the opposite direction until it, too, disappeared. From her limited perspective, it seemed to be forming a corkscrew spiral around the middle of the building.
"Huh," she said.
"What happened?" Prima asked.
Mint was quiet, taking a moment to sort out her thoughts. When everything was mentally in place – much as it could be – she spoke up.
"I'm not really sure," she admitted. "But I'd guess it's some kind of... magic... something." She frowned. "Explosion. Implosion. Break? Magic break." She said it confidently, although she had just made up the phrase and she was pretty sure that if there was a term for this kind of thing, that definitely wasn't it.
Apparently, Prima knew that, too. "Those words mean nothing to me," he said simply.
But now Mint was working it out, moving backward on her own thought process, nodding to herself. "Actually, I think it's spell break," she said, "or something along those lines. It's when a piece of magic gets ripped apart or broken without being properly unwoven first. Usually it's just an isolated explosion or a minor curse or something." She started to walk. "But then again, usually Relics don't break."
Prima fell in stop alongside her. "A... a Relic broke?" he asked tentatively.
"Yeah. Yeah it did."
No mistaking it. What she had seen, what she had felt– the Book of Cosmos was more than simply broken.
"So... so what now?"
"Dunno," Mint admitted. "I've never dealt with something like this before." She scratched the back of her neck. "Guess we'll just have to find a way out?"
"What if there isn't one?"
"Then I start blowing up walls until there is."
Prima waited a few seconds before responding. "That sounds like a terribly dangerous plan, but I think I'm okay with it."
"Damn right you are."
They continued on in silence for a few more seconds, following the upward curve of the path, until again Prima spoke up.
"What– um– what about Rue?"
Mint's next step faltered slightly. She caught herself and kept going.
"He's– somewhere in here," she said. "I'm sure of that."
And she was entirely sure of that, but elaborating much more was probably not what Prima wanted to hear.
He had been right in the center of the magic break. Mint didn't know what kind of effect that would have, didn't know if it meant they had simply ended up in different places in this strange, spiraling tower or if it meant– something else. She didn't want to think about it too hard.
Now they lapsed into silence again, and this time it lasted the several minutes it took them to ascend to the top of the spiral pathway and almost walk off the end.
Mint yelped in surprise and brought herself to an abrupt stop. Prima only just stopped short of where Mint was, and only then because Mint herself happened to be in the way. Mint reached out behind her, indicating he should remain there, and edged toward the end of the pathway, making sure she was seeing things properly. The walls remained to either side of her, but the path simply terminated into empty air. She leaned over and looked down, saw the curve of the hall beneath her. Then forward, scanning the walls.
"Oh!" Prima cried, and Mint looked up.
About twenty feet overhead, the walls started to crumble, their edges fading into darkness, bits of debris and stone floating into the shadows. Gradually, the walls continued to dissolve until they disappeared entirely, giving way to darkness. The darkness continued for a long, long while, stretching vast above them. That, however, was not what had caught Prima's attention.
The night sky spread out overhead, brilliantly illuminated. Stars flared and twinkled; the colorful forms of nebulae blazed between constellations, casting brilliant color against the darkness. Orbs of planetoids and moons were visible against the celestial light, rims illuminated, their shadows blending seamlessly into the dark of the night. There was something else, too, strange masses and patterns spinning lazily in the center of the mass– asteroids, maybe? She couldn't make out the details.
"What... what is that?" Prima breathed.
"Space," Mint said. "The Book allegedly got its power from cosmic energy or... radiation or something." She furrowed her brow, her thoughts wandering. "Doll Master always figured it was something else, though– cosmic themes, but a more earthly magic locus. Never told us what his theory was, though. He did that a lot; start up an interesting conversation and then just wander off with it." She looked down to Prima. "You okay?"
"Y-yeah," he said, staring up at the vortex of stars above them. "It's... it's beautiful."
Mint looked up again, blinked, looked back to Prima. "You've never seen stars, have you?"
He shook his head. "I was always in Elroy's atelier. The first time I was outside was, well, with you guys. And Klaus and Elena and Mira have been taking me around town, but we always go back to the house before sunset so I never really got to see this."
"The real one's not this colorful," she said.
"That's okay."
She looked up for a moment, her eyes slowly trailing away from the expanse of space and back to the wall of the building. She stared at it for a moment, watching as bits of rock and debris dribbled upward, vanishing from sight into the cosmos. The wall was breaking down – slowly, terribly slowly, but she could see the edges being eaten away even as she watched.
"We can't go up," she said. "We'll have to climb back down."
Prima nodded, but didn't take his eyes from the artificial sky. Mint nudged him, and he shook himself and turned his attention to her. "S-sorry," he said quickly. "Got... lost, for a second."
"I get you," she said, "but let's get lost in the other direction, okay?"
"Yeah."
At Mint's command, they started the march anew, this time spiraling counter-clockwise and moving inexorably downward. Mint sometimes shot a glance above them until they passed beneath the stairwell and the gleaming cosmos disappeared from view. Then it was back to keeping track as they moved down – ever and always down – through the corkscrew.
Minutes passed that way in silence as they moved down the spiral, and Mint was starting to wonder if they were even moving at all. She shot a glance above them, looking to see if she could catch a glimpse of the edge of the pathway: maybe they were being snapped back through space, the way Elroy had constructed his labyrinth, and they were just passing the same patch of hallway over and over again.
Then there was a window.
An elegant window, flat on the bottom and rising to a few feet in height, tapering to a point at the top. Fine metal loops formed an ornate filigree around the window's edges, but the middle was untouched. She dashed down the length of the hallway until she reached the window and peered out.
Prima caught up to her several seconds later, his little legs carrying him to a halt at her side. He tried to peer up to the window, but the sill sat just above waist high for Mint, which meant Prima's eye level was set just at the edge of the sill. He tried to crane his neck and stand himself on tip-toe to look outside; after a moment, Mint realized again he was there, and without asking anything caught him by the collar and hauled him off his feet so he could get a better look outside.
"Oh wow," he breathed. "How did we...?"
"I don't know," Mint said.
Spreading out before them, visible through the window, was all of Old Carona. The buildings were small beneath them; even the cathedral, massive and pristine as it was, stood far below them. When she shifted just right, she could see the gleaming surface of the lake off to one side; to the other, the slope back down into the forest. They were high enough up that looking past the buildings she could see the rest of the forest – the rest of the island – spreading out before her. At the edge of her vision was the horizon, deep blue ocean meeting pale blue sky.
She scanned the horizon, scanned the forest, scanned the town, her gaze slowly working its way closer to where they now found themselves. Slowly, as she started looking more and more toward the base of the building they were in, she realized just how damaged Old Carona actually was. The fire damage and the cracked remains of buildings spilled out before her, but the nearer it came to them the more the building seemed to have collapsed. Which was odd; they had been on the side of the town that had sustained the least damage, after all.
Maybe it was her perspective. Or maybe...
Something slammed into the window.
Mint cried out and threw herself backward, inadvertently releasing Prima when she did. He hit the ground, barely managing to land on his feet, as Mint nearly backed into the opposite wall. Whatever had hit the window writhed for a moment on the windowsill, looking distinctly unlike a bird, before disappearing over the edge.
Slowly, Mint approached the window again, found a clasp, unlocked it. She shoved the window open and leaned out, looking for whatever had slammed into it.
"The hell was that?" she said, leaning as far as she dared to look down. "It wasn't–"
She stopped as her vision suddenly focused on what was below her.
The building they had been in was no more. They were standing in a tower; spreading out below her was a long shaft of brick and mortar and concrete. The tower itself was smooth-faced for a for a little ways down, but the further she looked the more erratic the architecture became; the plaster crumbled, holes appeared, bits of the tower erupted outward in poorly-conceived balconies and platforms. Yet further down she saw the base of the building sweeping outward, and although she could make out no detail from the distance it was apparent it was even more of a mess, as though somebody had slapped it together using chunks of material from–
–from the nearby buildings.
Now she saw the pattern. The base of the tower was much broader than where she was standing, emerging from the ground and the remnants of the shattered buildings in massive, sweeping curves. Nearby structures had all twisted and warped toward the tower, massive pieces torn from the sides facing the tower and haphazardly attached to the bottom. Even the earth beneath them had been partially ripped up in the formation, forming a shallow but distinct crater immediately surrounding the tower itself.
Polite words failed her.
"Holy shit."
Now it made sense. She craned herself out of the window, twisted around, tried to look up. When she couldn't quite get far enough, she started desperately weaving a short spell, pulling more air upward around the outside of the window sill to provide her with some additional support. When she was confident it would hold her, she half-climbed out the window, keeping her fingers on the edge of the frame for balance, and turned herself around to look further up the tower.
The spread of cosmos they had seen from the top of their ascent was above them, although outside the confines of the tower it faded out to a hazy disk of slowly twining clouds. At times the clouds would part and she would see a burst of stars or a flare of light twitching between them. She couldn't see the apex of the tower from where she was, but she remembered what they had seen before, the way the walls had crumbled and the remnants had drifted toward the center.
She twisted the wind and commanded it to shove her back through the window opening. Once she was through, she immediately spun around and locked it again.
"A-are you okay?" Prima asked.
"Fine," Mint said. "Were you worried?"
"Kind of, yeah."
Mint laughed, her voice coming just a little too high-pitched and breathy. "You shouldn't be. Scion of East Heaven. Magical greatness is in my veins. I'm awesome." She turned and trotted to the opposite wall, trying not to move too quickly, and pressed her hand against it. She projected her senses into the wall, feeling for the twining of magic threads, for the flow of energy. She looked for that, and she concentrated on her hand.
She heard Prima's tentative footsteps behind her. "What are you...?"
"Gimme a sec," she said quickly, and he did.
She took several seconds, actually, but by the end of it she could feel it, a subtle shift of energy, moving in a sluggish upward spiral. It wasn't just the flow of magic, either; she felt the stone shifting slightly beneath her fingers, itself on a long, inexorable journey upward. She pulled away from the wall, studied it for a moment, then nodded.
"We need to get back down," she said. "C'mon." She started heading back down the spiral hall. Prima followed immediately.
"H-hold on," he said. "What'd you figure out?"
She took a few seconds to put her thoughts together before speaking again.
"The Book's been destroyed," Mint said, "and it's kind of having a freak out about it." She pointed up. "I think it tried to throw itself into a safe zone and wound up dragging everything in the immediate vicinity up behind it– us included. The worst of it's over, I think, but it's still pulling the tower up to meet it."
"And us?"
Mint shook her head. "Doesn't seem like it. We just happened to be standing in the building when it all... um... imploded."
"So..." Prima trailed off for a moment. He continued to follow along behind Mint, his hands nervously working the hem of his shirt. "Where d'you figure the others are, if we were almost at the top of the tower?"
"Dunno."
Although having said it, she had a strange feeling in her chest that, perhaps, she did know. After all, she and Prima had been a little way down the hall when the Book's powers erupted and consumed the building; the others had practically been on top of the Book itself. Logically, they would end up where the Book was now. If Mint was right...
...then she didn't know what to do about that.
She cast a glance over her shoulder and saw Prima's expression. He was trying to keep his face blank, but his lips were pressed thin and his eyes were a little too wide and he couldn't quite suppress the shaking around his shoulders. Mint exhaled and shook her head.
"Look," she said, "we started near the top, right? And we didn't see anybody. The rest of everything is below us. If we keep heading down we're bound to run into somebody, right? And if we don't, it means they made it outside before we did."
She sounded tired and exasperated, like it was such an obvious conclusion. She didn't believe a word of it.
And, for a second, it didn't seem Prima did, either. But after her processed what she had said, and had a chance to think about it, he nodded to her. "That makes sense," he said. "Okay."
She relaxed slightly.
"Now step it up," she said curtly. "The faster we move the sooner we get down there and the sooner we know everybody's okay and the sooner I can punch Doll Master in the face. I don't want your short little legs keeping me from punching, you got it?"
At that point, they started to move quite a bit faster. Prima and his short little legs could only keep up with Mint at a brisk jog rather than an all-out run, but the upshot was that he didn't seem to get tired and it was a pace she could keep up for quite a while, especially with gravity aiding their descent down the gentle slope.
At intervals, she would see another window– or something resembling a window. She only saw two other proper windows, the same as the first one they had found; the further down they went, the more crude and slapped together they became. They still functioned – that is, they were still transparent and she could take a moment to stop and look out them and gauge their progress, so that was good – but it was easy to see that the more they passed, the more the tower itself seemed... disheveled. The nicer windows didn't sit in their frames properly; the ones that did didn't close properly; once there was one with a frame and single pane in place, leaving half the window wide open to let in the chill, thin breeze.
When she looked outside, she could see they were making progress, but it seemed much slower than it should have been. At one point she wondered if the tower's rise was still continuing fast enough to outstrip their own progress, or if anything other than the windows was ever going to change.
She did notice something else, though. A little while longer and the architecture started to crumble. The smooth stone walls began to crack and jut; holes formed in the mortar. The carpet beneath their feet started to wear and become threadbare until it became mottled with bald spots, revealing bits of stone interlaced with flat, cracking concrete below them. It took a little while, but eventually they reached the end of the carpet entirely, at which point they transitioned into what appeared to be the same building they had left.
At least, architecturally. Their path was the same as ever – a gentle slope, a lazy spiral – but their surroundings had changed. The stonework and carpet had briefly reminded her of the East Heaven palace, but now they were back in the same dusty corridor they had been in before. Mint nodded authoritatively.
"We're making progress," she said. She assumed.
"What's that?"
"I said–"
"No," Prima said quickly. He dashed a bit ahead of her and pointed. "What's that?"
She followed his gaze to a window that was just coming into view, prepared to answer, and found herself stymied.
Finally, slowly, she managed to form the words.
"Is that a rabbit?"
She ran to the window and stared. Sure enough, that was exactly what it was.
Or... not exactly. There was a little rabbit sitting on the exterior windowsill, scratching hopelessly at the window itself, its little pink nose sniffing at the crease between the two panes. Before Mint even had a chance to wonder how a rabbit had gotten stuck so high up, she could see her answer; its ears were unnaturally elongated, almost twice the length of its body, and feathered, forming a pair of awkwardly placed wings.
For all the weird and unnatural that Mint had seen in the last twenty-four hours, the mutant winged rabbit still managed to grab her attention.
"That's, ah... that's not normal, is it?" Prima asked.
"Not even close," Mint said.
Having said that, she still went ahead and pulled the window open. The winged rabbit practically fell into the tower, landing awkwardly at her feet. It pulled itself back up, shook off, and then took off at a lope down the hallway, its wing-ears dragging behind it. At intervals it tried to jump and flap them, but there wasn't enough space to catch air and it just wound up hitting the floor again. In short order, it disappeared around the bend.
Prima approached, still staring after the rabbit. "What was that?"
"If I had to guess?" Mint asked. "The magic explosion twisted more than just the buildings." She grimaced. "We need to move. More. Now"
Prima swallowed. "You think we're in danger?"
"I don't know," Mint said, her voice unusually quiet. "I don't know what else the Book can do. I've never heard of a Relic just... just breaking like this." She shook herself. "But I do know I don't want to be anywhere near it if I can help it, and I bet you don't, either." She took him by the wrist, firm but careful, and started to run down the hallway. "Come on. We're out of here."
She wound up half-dragging Prima for quite a ways, until he managed to get his legs fully beneath him and at least make a show of running behind her. She stopped checking the windows except as more than a passing glance, to make sure they were really descending. They were, but it was so infuriatingly slow–!
She nearly slammed straight into the wall.
"Woah, woah!"
She came to a screeching halt just as the hallway suddenly seemed to end, and found herself staring at a jagged piece of fractured concrete and iron that had crashed clean through the wall. Her breath came in desperate gulps, and now that she had a moment to feel it, she realized her lungs were aflame and her legs were burning. How long had she been running?
And what was she looking at.
Prima wriggled his wrist free of her grip and stepped toward the wall, edging toward one of the corners. He knelt down there, then looked back to Mint and waved to her. "Here!" he called. "There's a hole here. I think maybe we can make it wider and get through."
Slowly, she turned her gaze to him. "What? Oh. Oh, yeah, hold on."
She went to where he had indicated and saw that, yes, there was an opening where the concrete met the wall. She pulled her Halo free of her belt and motioned for Prima to give her room. Then she concentrated.
Magic – strange, ancient magic – still radiated all around them, twining upward through the walls and under the floor. She concentrated and grasped at the threads of magic as best she could, redirecting them up toward the rock. She drew the magic together into a spheroid weave of raw energy, sitting in the hole between the concrete slab and the wall. She took a few steps back, made sure Prima had done the same, and said, "Fire in the hole."
She swept the Halo in front in front of her, and with that motion the gathering of magic exploded.
She felt grit and rubble and hard-edged bits of exploded rock strike her, and waited for several seconds after it was done before opening her eyes. Debris and dust hung heavy in the air, but enough of the cloud had dispersed by the time she looked up that she could see the results of her work; the hole had been blown open and now stood wide enough for them to get through.
"Hang back," Mint said. "Let me make sure it's okay."
Prima nodded.
Mint called up a brief breeze, dispersing the remainder of the dust cloud, and then squeezed herself through the opening; the crack was wide enough to get through, but it was still uncomfortable. She wriggled through to the other side, stood up properly, and stared.
The tower had been an endless, repetitive hallway up until that point. Now it was... not.
The concrete block that had impeded them was not alone. Massive stones and bars of twisted iron stood before her, emerging from the walls or buried in the floor or jutting at strange angles from the ceiling. A window – little more than a large crack in the wall, latticed over with thin metal bars – stood nearby, letting in a shaft of light, but suddenly the strange ambient light source they had been following all the way down the tower was gone, leaving the area broken and gloomy.
And, mercifully, empty.
"Come on through," Mint called, and a few second later Prima had slipped through the opening and was making his way to her side.
"Oh, wow," he whispered. "What happened here?"
"I think this is the threshold to the other buildings," Mint said. "This is all the other buildings that got torn up and thrown in. And bits of the streets, apparently." Her eyes fell upon one of the chunks of debris, a mass of connected cobblestones that now lay diagonally through the room, one end tearing clear out the wall. A heavy crack followed up along its side; through it, she could see the rooftops below them.
"That means we're almost out of here," Prima said brightly. Tried to say brightly. Mint saw his eyes sliding toward the crack in the wall; he could see just as well as she could how high up they still were.
"We're doing a hell of a lot better than we were," she said. "Gonna get awkward, though."
They started to pick their way through the hall.
They continued like that, as the ersatz hall around them remained just as gloomy and cramped as it ever had. The detritus around them became more and more erratic, although for a long while they were never presented with anything else that entirely blocked their progress. They had to duck beneath slabs of broken wall, wriggle around pieces of torn-up concrete, eventually start working through mounds of ripped-up earth and vegetation. Sometimes there was movement in the rubble and debris, more of those odd winged rabbits burrowing their own way through the tangled tower. Windows became scarcer, or else they'd had rubble driven clean through them; darkness and dust became thicker.
And then they hit a wall.
It was composed of a massive number of slabs, all criss-crossing each other in a latticework of concrete and stone and wood and steel and shattered glass.
Mint examined it. Prima examined it. Together, they came to the same conclusion.
"We're stuck," Prima said.
"Sure are," Mint said.
"I'm... concerned," Prima added.
Mint nodded, but didn't speak. She cast her glance around the room.
"Can you blow this one up?" Prima asked.
"Not easily," Mint said. "This looks a lot thicker than what we dealt with before. I was just widening a path, not making one." She frowned. "There's gotta be a better way to... hm."
She started heading backward. Prima turned to follow her. "Where are you going?" he asked.
"Back a little way," she said. "The way this stuff's arranged... I think we can get out of the tower."
"Out?" Prima said. "But– how far are we from the ground?"
"Way farther than I'd like," Mint said, "but maybe we can follow some of this crap to another window."
She worked her way back to the last window they had passed, checking over her shoulder at intervals to make sure Prima was still there. She reached the window a few minutes later and yanked it open, leaning herself outside.
They were still well above where she wanted to be, the rooftops spread out before them. Even the cathedral spires were still below their line of vision, although – and she noted it with no small amount of relief – not much further. That still put them entirely too far up to survive a fall, though. Eighty, ninety, a hundred feet– even with an air cushion slowing their descent, they'd wind up pasted on the ground.
Well, maybe not paste. If she could slow them enough she'd just wind up a mass of broken bones and punctured organs. Awesome.
She leaned out the window, drawing a buffer of air to help keep he balance, and shoved herself out as far as she dared, her eyes raking the exterior of the tower for any sign of something she could use as a platform, something they could balance on, any means of moving from where they were. She saw a few possibilities, but they were too far out of range, and the space beneath the window she had chosen was empty. They'd have to find another point.
She was ready to do so when a shadow passed overhead. She looked up. She recognized the silhouette.
"What d'you see?" Prima asked.
"Something I never thought I'd be happy about," Mint said.
The Hexagon.
It was several storeys above them, puttering along and looping around the tower. For a moment Mint wondered what the hell it was doing there, but realized almost immediately what a stupid question that was. The tower was enormous, it had to be visible from Carona, and there was a very good chance the Book's magic break had been tangible to anybody with any magical training all the way back in town– and, just as possibly, to plenty of people with no magical inclination at all. It would have been far more bizarre if they hadn't come out to investigate.
As she watched, it started to disappear around to the other side. She had a feeling that it was just forming loops around the tower, however, and would be returning to their side in short order. She just needed a way to get Belle's attention...
She brought the Halo in front of her and concentrated.
Her magic charged through the phantomite, setting the ring ablaze with gold. She focused her energy outward, dragging the air and weaving it into a funnel, leaving an empty space in the middle. She directed the funnel upward, stretching her magic as far as she could, until the funnel of wind was – more or less – at the level she had seen the Hexagon cruising at.
"Mint?" Prima started. "What're you...?"
"Gimme a minute," she said quickly. "Gotta focus."
He went quiet. Then, opening one eye, she tilted her head toward him. "Actually," she said, her voice slightly strained, "go to the window and–" She winced. There was a distinct and highly unpleasant throbbing starting behind her temples now. "And look up," she continued. "Tell me when you see the Hexagon."
"The what?"
"Bigass flying golem. You'll know it when you see it."
He nodded and headed for the window. With a bit of effort, he hauled himself up onto the perch and leaned out as best he could, squinting against the sunlight and looking upward.
"Oh, wow," he whispered. "That's... that's really tall." Not a few seconds later, she heard a little yelp of surprise, and cracked her eye open to see again. He had apparently made the mistake of looking down.
"Focus," she hissed.
"S-sorry," he murmured.
She closed her eyes and waited for his word, holding the funnel of wind before her. Second passed; then, minutes. Maintaining the wind funnel – spinning the wind so far away from her – was rapidly starting to drain her. Sweat beaded her brow, and her breath came heavily. She couldn't break the magic, though; she did that, she wouldn't have the strength to try again. She just had to wait it out– wait it out–
Wait–
"It's coming back around!"
Mint gave it another ten seconds, just to be sure it was close by. Then:
"Hey! Down here, moron!"
She shouted it directly through the ring; her words caught in the air, the sound carrying up the thin tunnel she had created. She held on to the magic for a few more seconds, long enough that she knew the sound would reach the apex of the weave, and then finally gave out– not entirely because she had wanted to.
It took effort – significant effort – to hold a spell that long and for such a distance away from her. The back of her throat tasted like copper. She coughed and half-collapsed, grasping the windowsill for balance. A gentle weight rested across her back.
"You okay?" Prima asked.
She waved his hand away. "M'fine," she said thickly. "Just need a minute." She looked up, but the sun was too intense; she had to close her eyes and look away again. "Is she coming?"
Prima leaned out the window for a second, hanging on to Mint's sleeve for support. After a moment, he tugged at her shirt. "It's headed this way!" he said.
Mint sniffed. "'Bout time."
She heard the dull rumble of the engines, saw the light through her eyelids darken. The engines turned briefly into a roar, then became a little more muted again once they passed by the window and were no longer blowing near her face. Carefully, Mint opened her eyes and looked up.
The Hexagon's nose had bumped right up against the windowsill, its head forming a short platform to its back. On its back, predictably, stood Belle. Or knelt Belle, more specifically; she was kneeling down so she could look fully through the window, her elbow resting on her leg and her chin resting in her hand, her expression mildly irate.
"You know," Belle said slowly, "I am under no obligation to rescue you."
Mint snorted. "I don't need rescuing."
"That's fine." She nodded to Prima and held out her hand. "You're the Prima Doll, then?"
He nodded.
"Name's Belle," she said. "C'mon up. The princess might not want my help, but Mira threatened to kill me if I went back to town without you." Prima accepted her hand, and she helped him onto the back of the Hexagon.
"You talked to Mira?" he asked.
"We heard what happened back in town," Belle said. "Little bit after these two left we went out to figure out why everybody was so jittery–"
"Yeah," Mint said, looking up. She forced herself to make eye contact. "Where were you two?"
"Asleep," Belle said. "We stood vigil all night, what d'you expect?" She turned her attention back to Prima. "We intercepted Mira when she was packing up her swords and getting ready to come out here herself, and then, well..." She waved to the tower. "This thing showed up."
Mint started hauling herself up on the windowsill. "Just you?" she asked.
Belle shook her head and stood up completely. "I was taking the Hexagon around to check if anybody was in the tower," she said. "Duke and Mira are at the base. Last I saw they were checking the perimeter and trying to find a way in."
"You might not want to bother," Mint said. "It's a wreck down here."
"D'you know if they found anybody else yet?" Prima asked.
Belle shook her head. "I just saw them off and started searching around here. I'll take you back down to them, you can ask yourself." She looked at Mint. Mint, who was very, very unsteadily working her way across the Hexagon's head. Belle stepped back to give her space, but didn't offer her hand. She crossed her arms. "Do you know if anybody else is inside?"
Mint shot her a glare and went back to concentrating on not falling. After a few uneasy steps, she staggered onto the Hexagon's back and fell to her hands and knees. Her head was swimming.
"Prima?" Belle asked.
"Nobody up above," Prima said. "We walked from the top to about where you found us. If– if there was anybody else inside, they'd be below, or out."
Belle hummed in the back of her throat. "Okay," she said. "No point in me staying up here, then. We'll get you down." She looked at Mint. "And I guess you can come, too, since you're here."
"I hate you," Mint grumbled.
"Cheers to you, too," Belle said flatly. She motioned with her hand, and the Hexagon gently pushed away from the tower face and started to descend.
Belle allowed a few minutes of silence before speaking up.
"So," she began, sitting herself down on the Hexagon's back. "Anybody want to tell me what happened?"
"No," Mint said.
"I do," Prima said, "but I'm not sure I completely follow it. And, well, I didn't see everything, honestly." He looked plaintively at Mint. "Could you...?"
She wiped the back of her hand against her nose. A little streak of crimson followed her. She sighed and sat down properly.
"All right," she said. "But this is for your benefit, kid. You" – she glared pointedly at Belle – "just have the pleasure of overhearing this."
"I've been paid to ignore this pissing contest, Mint. Give it up."
She frowned and sighed.
"Rue destroyed the Book," she began, and immediately held up her hand. "And before you ask anything else, I– I do think I know where he is."
Belle was stricken for a few seconds, but gathered herself quickly, her expression hardening. "Well?" she asked. "Where?"
Mint looked up. Her gaze fell upon the spiraling mass at the apex of the tower, where galaxies and nebulae flickered in and out of visibility. She pointed.
"There," she said. "In the cosmos."