Max and I got to work kicking rubbish out of Kylie’s flailing distance and making sure her robes couldn’t strangle her.

“She doesn’t have epilepsy or anything, does she?” Max asked. “She would’ve told us, right?”

“It definitely would’ve come up,” I agreed. “She kept spacing out with her spell last semester; some types of epileptic fits look like that. She would’ve mentioned if she had epilepsy.”

“Brain damage? Poison?” Max asked. “Maybe?”

“Oh god, I hope not.” I peered at her face. Her eyes were wide and blank, and most of the movement was in her mouth and throat, not her limbs. “I think she might be trying to talk,” I said.

“Stroke?” Max asked, sounding increasingly hysterical. His fingers brushed her arm, and he pulled back in surprise. “She’s really hot. Shit. It’s probably the spell. It’s too powerful, and this area is full of magic.”

“She’s trying to prophesy?” That explained the blankness in her eyes. I tried to read her lips, but she didn’t seem to be trying to say full words. Just… snatches, replaced by others. And her breathing was incredibly irregular, like she was trying to breathe both in and out at any given moment and whichever motion won was entirely random. “Shit, I think she’s trying to say several things at the same time? Is she going to catch fire?” Her lips were starting to turn blue with the lack of air.

“I don’t know!” Max said. “She needs the kuracar, right now.”

“Well, the kuracar isn’t here! Can you use your spell to breathe for her? Like with Cheryl?”

“Uh… maybe? But it wouldn’t solve anything. It’d just buy her time until I couldn’t any more, unless another symptom kills her first.”

“Can you, I don’t know, take some of the weight of the prophecy off her? Some of the magic? So she can get the prophecy out?”

“M-maybe. I don’t think I have a debt to her deep enough, but I’ll try.” Max looked terrified as he fished his fetish out of his pocket and gripped it in one fist, closing the other around Kylie’s wrist. He was motionless for several seconds, breathing deeply.

It had no effect.

“Shit,” I said.

Max looked like he was about to cry. Then his eyes caught mine, and widened. “Wait. Don’t you owe Kylie your life?”

“Yeah. She saved me from a lake monster last – wait, you can channel it into me?”

“Yes. The question is whether I can channel enough.” He put the pen fetish between his teeth and offered me his free hand. I took it.

Magic washed through me.

It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. This wasn’t the vague sensation of motion of free spells going on their way, or the slight itch of healing potion on my skin. It was euphoria and agony and disorientation all at once, a chill that spread through my veins like a drop of dark ink in water until my blood, my bones, my organs felt like something else. I fought to keep a head clear enough to focus on Kylie, who was breathing properly now but unable to get more than a syllable of any given word out at a time, and Max, face screwed up with the strain of channelling so much magic. He was definitely bruising my knuckles in his grip. Times like this were fun moments to remember Max’s poorly disguised fear of magic.

“I can take more,” I gasped, “if it’s possible for you to channel – ”

Then he suddenly spat out the fetish in his mouth, which melted, very rapidly, into a pool of silver. And the magic flowing through me dropped by about ninety per cent. Kylie stopped breathing properly again.

“Fuck,” I said. It had been working. If we’d just been able to channel a little more… we were so close!

I went to pull my hand away from Max, but he just gripped it tighter. “I just need to channel more,” he said through gritted teeth. But his spell couldn’t channel enough, not without the fetish.

“Kylie’s mirror,” I said. “Her fetish. Would it – ”

“We haven’t made it yet,” he reminded me, his voice strained. “It’s just a mirror.”

Dammit. I could take more, I could help – I could feel the way the magic fit in my body, careful to move with me rather than against me, as we fit around each other like partners perfectly dancing a dance I’d never practiced or known about before – but we had no way to channel that much magic, no bridge for it, and my stupid dormant spell was just as fucking useless for this as everything else. Kylie went rigid, but her her rapidly moving lips, and I got the sense that through the prophecies, she was trying to scream.

Could he make her a fetish now? He needed her ichor and her intent; was she conscious enough to understand it was being made, to intend it? No; we didn’t have the tools to etch the designs in silver or anything and her power would destroy any such thing as easily as it had destroyed Max’s.

Too much power; nothing to hold or control it. And I was sitting here, useless, with a heart full of a dormant –

Wait.

“Max, I have a plan. We can save her. It’s going to work, okay? I figured it out. It can work.”

“What is it?”

“You have to trust me and believe that it’ll work.”

“Fine! Just tell me!”

So I told Max the worst idea I’d ever had.

“That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Max said.

“I’ve figured it out! It’ll work!” I had figured it out, and not only did the logic make sense, but I could feel the truth of it in my bones, in Kylie’s magic flowing through me. It fit. It would work. I pulled out my runecrafting pen.

“I’m not helping you turn yourself into Kylie’s familiar!”

“She’ll die if you don’t.”

“You’ll both die if I do! You know that can’t work, Kayden; human familiars – ”

“Usually die, yes, but these circumstances are unique.” I held Kylie carefully still with my knees while I slid the sharp tip of the pen into the centre of her mage mark. “Kylie, do you understand what’s happening? We’re going to try to save you. Max can guide your hand, but we need your intent. Alright? You need to trust me that this will work.” I hoped she could hear me. If she couldn’t hear me, we had no chance.

“I most certainly will not guide your hand,” Max snapped. “This is suicide!”

“I don’t have time to explain my logic to you,” I said. I met his gaze. He was never going to forgive me for this part, but I had no option. “One of us is going to guide her hand on this pen. Who do you think remembers the right runes better? Who has a better chance of not fucking up and putting us both at more risk? You or me?”

Max glared at me with more venom than I’d ever seen in his expression before. But he snatched the pen from my hand and wrapped Kylie’s fingers around it. “You’re forcing me to kill you,” he said. “You realise that, right?”

“It’ll work. We only need the familiarity link long enough for her to prophesy. Then you can undo it.” I offered him my right arm. “I promise I’ll stay alive for a few minutes.”

“Don’t make promises you don’t know if you can keep,” he snapped. But he must have trusted me, because he could easily have broken the pen and thrown it away, but he didn’t. He set it against the back of my forearm and started to write.

I kept my arm as still as I could while the pen sliced the runes into my skin. It had been in Kylie’s face a handful of seconds ago, but we were well past worrying about blood contamination now. Was I imagining it, or was Kylie gripping the pen tighter of her own accord? I hoped so. I hoped she was participating.

Just a few minutes. I could channel the extra magic for her, let her get the prophecy out, and then we could undo the link and get out of here. And, judging by the depth the pen was cutting into my skin, I’d have a really cool scar, so that was something.

This was a process that should take a long time, with care and precision. We didn’t have time. We did have Max’s amazing visual memory and perfectly steady hand that had replicated complicated runes in class after class while I’d watched and definitely not felt jealous, and his work, while not as pretty looking as one might prefer on a familiar, was plenty functional.

I knew this, because the moment he completed the final stroke, my whole being was awash in magic.

It was a little too late to be having doubts, but I’d very definitely underestimated what Kylie was dealing with, and what this would feel like. It was a heady rush that swarmed through my entire body, leaving no room for any other sensation; it took me a full minute to adapt well enough to feel the sharp pain in my head where I’d apparently cracked it on the stone floor, or the weight in my chest where I’d forgotten to breathe. I dragged in a deep breath and it hurt like a lungful of seawater.

Kylie was talking – no, the Evil Eye was talking. I couldn’t stay aware enough of the outside world to make out the words, but I didn’t need to. The prophecy ran through my own mind, distinguishable from my own thoughts only in its perfect clarity and heavy sense of inevitability.

In a time that’s mostly been, a Hero dreamed a thousand dreams.

A goal, a wish upon a star, a kiss blown to travel far.

In a time that’s partly been, a Child screams a thousand screams.

Imprisoned in the buried heart it pushes, presses, tries to start.

In a time that’s not yet been, the Hero dies, the Child free.

Breaks mirrors, chains, and crushes pearls, to rise from the top of the world.

The Hero’s life cannot be saved. The Child will not be enslaved.

But jailers have a chance to choose just how much they wish to lose.

Safety has a simple price – a single Child sacrifice.

Prepare its heart in offering, and be the music – climb, and sing.

And that was the last thing that I was properly aware of for quite a while.