"This place, Stonehenge, is really only the very tippy top of a much larger city. Everything except the very top of the central tower is covered in dirt, though. Luckily, what we're doing doesn't require the original structure, only it's location and symbolic value, so we're golden," Came the rambling voice of Ref from one of the nearby mirrors.

When we arrived, Erci stayed put to clean the place up a little, while Ref and I went out and got the rest of the stuff we needed.

A few full-length mirrors, as well as numerous smaller ones. a variety of wooden and copper rods. Salt, iron filings, quartz and more - all sourced from the nearby town. The candles proved a little more elusive, but we eventually found what was needed in a hardware store, so I staggered toward the packed car, arms full of waxy sticks.

"Do you have the moon calendar?" she asked.

"Indeed I do. Don't know today's date, though."

"Well then, that's useless. We'll just have to wait until nightfall. Should set everything up anyway."

And so we did. This was a prelude to the main attraction, something Ref called "The Query of Algeron" - something that was supposed to solve everything. Apparently, it was invented by a chap called 'Algeron Noi-vann' in order to escape a place he'd been stuck inside of. Most probably a world, considering the circumstances, but I was wary of knowledge-censure.

Still, I couldn't help but wonder what exactly was being "queried", and how it would solve our problem, but from the scattered commentary surrounding, well, everything, I could somewhat assemble a coherent theory. Ref gave me a sharp look when I asked her something relating to it, though, so I refrained from grilling her for now.

This first process would "refine" the liberated diamond, now sitting snugly underneath a cobbled-together assembly of lenses, mirrors and concentric rune circles, and could only be performed underneath a new moon.

"The human world lacks power," Ref had said, "Unlike, say, the fey world, where natural energies are everywhere, they are scarce and hard to access here. You humans have actually discovered a way to do this on your own, but your methods are ridiculously large and complex, for a relatively miniscule result. I believe you use them to smash atoms into each other, but I can't remember what they're called just now. Floored me when I read about it, though."

"You mean particle accelerators?" I asked, still occupied with building a frame to house the largest of the lenses, on top of the entire construct.

"That's the one! Kinda obvious in retrospect, actually. Anyway, I was saying - there was one curious result of your experiments with those accelerators, and that is the creation of antimatter. Actual antimatter! How crazy is that! I've read your theories concerning that, but lacking some fundamental truths, they were bound to be inaccurate. You seem to think that it just... happens, when that's not true at all. What actually occurs is that the particle being accelerated keeps going and going, swirling with energy. So much energy that it agitates some fundamental quantum fields, I think you call them. In the wake of this particle, these fields are... damaged. let's call it that. Much like there would be a vacuum behind a ball flying very fast through the atmosphere, except not really. Well, if there is a wake of damage there, what then? The answer is simple, and you've already experienced it before."

She looked up from her notebook, pausing the lecture.

"There's not 'nothingness', as that doesn't make sense. The particle's wake is a tear into the between-space, the world between worlds, the thing beneath your reality. An energetic blackness that seeps through, infusing the particle, until it is stopped, and the fields snap back into place. However, through a twist in physics, this infused energy does not simply vanish, it suddenly finds itself confronted with things that demand it to stop being benign energetic potential, and so it changes. Or better yet, it changes something. The thing being the particle, obviously."

"So it just turns, say, an electron into a positron?"

"Possibly. Or a pion, or a photon, or a quark, anything really. It could even cause spontaneous duplication. Or annihilation."

"Huh. So why aren't we doing this in Switzerland then?"

"Because the yield of your experiments is relatively low. Access to this energy is a byproduct, not the main goal, and it's the wrong kind besides. Consider what I've told you - this between-space's sort of power is distilled potential; form, function, even identity, but no existence. If we were to channel that into a diamond, what would happen?"

"It would change, like the electron?"

"That's a given. However, it wouldn't change into what we need. We're trying to refine our diamond, not turn it into a swiss cheese of vacuum energy. No, we need a different sort of power - the power of Light."

"Don't tell me that there's morality to this."

"Morality? No, we just need capital L Light here. The new moon condition is due to the moon's nature - a reflective element for the sun, and the night is due to the sun's nature - a single object with set symbolic values. Think about what accompanies the image of the sun in your mind, and compare it to what accompanies the image of a starry sky. I can guarantee that the stars are going to be a lot more neutral and mysterious, if you see them as a whole instead of groups of constellations."

"Is that why the first circle's runes a while back had to be charged with starlight?"

"Exactly! Starlight, at least in this world, is a much more neutral source of light compared to the sun or even its pale reflection in the moon. The moon would drown out the neutral light we need, thus this needs to be started on a clear, moonless sky - it's lucky that there aren't any clouds here, considering they don't move anymore."

With that, I finished filing down the wooden part, and slotted in our last lens. A bit of glue made sure it stuck, and I precariously balanced it on top of the construct which I now understood was going to focus starlight into the diamond.

"That's not all, obviously. right now, all we're doing is shining a beam at a gemstone. We need to channel the light, shape it and then focus it into the diamond, not just onto it. That's part of what I've been working on, actually. Here, take a look at this, and replicate it on the ground around the structure. The three red dots are the focusing array's legs, the red circle is the diamond. The rest you should copy onto the ground in charcoal."

She ripped a page out of the notebook, grabbed the reflection of a roll of adhesive tape and glued it to the inside of one of the smaller mirrors. The paper was filled with an image of three concentric circles of symbols and lines, the red parts visible quite nicely among the black ink.

"Wait, what?" I said, after what Ref had just done caught up to me. But she was already gone, probably talking to Erci or Raven. Or maybe she was sitting somewhere else.

***

Speaking of Erci, he was busy carving. I'd seen him earlier, perched on the intact part of the outer wall, chiseling away at the stones using a small device - a piece of the strange glowy crystal on the end of a wooden stick, glowing slightly with every brush - the tool seemed to melt away the stone without heat, making the task more like writing than carving. I felt a pang of 'we're defiling this place' at the sight of him going at it, but quickly squashed it. All the people whom this place was important to were gone.

I tried to look at what he was carving early on, but my vision went blurry and my eyes started shaking, so I looked away. Erci seemed to only fare marginally better, if his bloodshot eyes and steely face were any indication. Still, he methodically carved and carved, the mirror shard in his front pocket probably containing the guiding presence of the being currently occupying my reflection.

I wondered how she could manifest so far away from me, but then I remembered that it was a shard from my original mirror, and her words about how a mirror's shard was still part of the greater whole.

That night, I kept watch for the moon, spying a tiny sliver in the sky some time after the sun had gone down. Almost praying, I leafed through the moon calendar in my hands, and gave a whoop of joy upon discovering that the moon seemed to be waxing. One or more night, and it would be the new moon.

***

Throughout the entire day and night, the focusing array sat underneath a black tarp, to prevent any light from reaching and "polluting" it. That work done, I pestered Erci for his tool, and he reached into his own bag - I realized that he never told me what was in there - and pulled out a shard of crystal similar to his own. Picking out a random twig, he split the wood with his spear, stuck in the shard and then tied a bit of twine around it.

"Alright, that's done," he said, and tossed me the new tool. I copied his position for my own mirror shard, and Ref directed me to the center of the stone circle, where two spikes were jutting from the ground.

"Those two need to be chiseled. This'll be a pain, but two people work better than one, even if I have to multitask. Alright, hold the cutter like a paintbrush- no, like this- exactly. Start riiiight... there. A horizontal line around the whole thing..."

***

And so, the day was spent. By dusk, my hand was aching and I think I cried blood from my left eye at one point, but the two spikes and one of the large archways were chiselled with a beautiful pattern. Some time during the day, I discovered that looking at what I was writing became easier and easier, even if the pain behind my eyes mounted. By nightfall, I could look at it without being blinded by my eyes twitching or trying to slide off by themselves, and beheld a day's work - everything I'd carved was glowing with a very soft blue light, only visible now in the twilight. There were bands of a flowery script, geometric lines connecting in strange, but aesthetically pleasing ways (though I doubt that this was the intention), and a myriad of other symbols, runes, pictographs and shapes all over the stones, individually looking like chaos, but shaping up into a greater whole when looked at collectively.

When night fell, and the last vestiges of sunlight vanished over the horizon, Erci and I removed the tarp off our focusing array. The diamond below was glittering slightly, and we set all the prepared mirrors in their places. The light collected in the center was growing brighter and brighter, though everything around the array was also becoming colder by the second. The light wasn't actually shining directly onto the diamond, which had been removed from its encrustment, but onto the first concentric circle around it. The center was completely dark, but the diamond had started glittering with an inner light, and the charcoal circles around the array were burning themselves into the stone beneath.

"Ref says this will take the whole night. Go to sleep, I shall keep watch." The voice of Erci tore me away from the spectacle, and I nodded.

***

I didn't sleep for quite a while, looking at the diamond at the seeming center of everything this night, whose inner light was slowly but surely growing brighter and brighter.

Eventually, I did fall into a sleep - quite the unrestful one though, since the diamond's light seemed to penetrate into my dreams, superimposing everything with its glow, which took me out of sleep once it became too bright.

I woke up some time later, the diamond shining like a star in the night, the first reds already appearing in the east.

When I looked over at the focusing array, I narrowed my eyes - only to be blinded by a flash of light a few moments later.

Blinking the spots from my vision, I looked at the array, and gave a shout.

"Oh fuck, oh no, it's broken!"

The wood was smoldering in places, all the lenses cracked and scorched, and the central two coal circles burned away completely - then I saw the outer one, which was quickly dimming down until it was only a bit of discoloration on the stone.

"It's not, look! It went exactly as it was supposed to!"

Following Ref's exclamation, I looked at the center, beneath the burned out array, and saw that the diamond was gone - in its place, there was a small pile of glowing dust.

"Don't touch it! Take one of those vials, and put all of it inside using the metal scraper as a spoon. Quickly! Before the sunlight reaches it!"

Scooping up as much as possible, I filled two small vials with the luminous dust, turning myself as to allow my shadow to obscure them from the sun's light, which was quickly climbing over the nearby hills.

"Lady and Gentlefey, we've done it. We just made ourselves some stardust."

***

'Stardust', I thought, looking down at the glowing vial in my hand, back turned toward the fire as not to disturb the dust's natural light.

Which was bad, as Ref had explained earlier today. We'd disposed of the burned array three days previously, and spent all day carving the stones. My hand was sore, chapped and hurting, and I'd actually cried blood at one point, which wasn’t as serious as I initially assumed - the tool broke more than once for both of us as well.

Nonetheless, things were looking up.

We only had to finish all of this before the half moon, and then all our problems would be solved. The Query was about half finished, and we'd transitioned from symbols and lines to broad, sweeping arrays of geometry upon the stones.

One such shape, a triangle within another triangle, meant to symbolize the stability of something within itself, actually required a stone which wasn't intact - one of the fallen boulders. In a monumental effort, we used the car as a wedge, and eventually managed to raise it nearly vertically, but the car was needed to keep it in position.

"If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid", Ref had said.

***

We finished with carving a few days later. Ref called our daunting work of about a week an "acceptable base", and set us to work on the ground.

We tore out grass, removed fallen stones and trampled the earth hard on the first few days of the second week, and carved furrows of varying depth on the day after that. Once that was finished, Erci took up his carver tool once more to smooth out the furrows into channels, and took it upon myself to color the ones he'd worked on in two shades - red and white. The paint was hydrophobic and waterproof when dry, something which did not escape me, and I asked Ref about it.

The white channels would be filled with water enriched with our stardust - the red ones with blood.

Quite morbid, but it explained the overwhelming presence of white compared to the two red circles - the spots we'd be standing during the Query.

***

The night of the half moon had come. We’d finished the previous day, and everything was prepared - every symbol carved, every furrow drawn and smoothed, a cauldron of water enriched with a vial of stardust - the other vial sat safely in an inside pocket of my jacket - and the moon had begun to rise.

Half light, half dark - a symbolic balance, representing passage from dark to light - through mind, body, and soul alike.

When the last of the stardust-enriched water was drawn into its channels, the entire thing looked quite haunting - an array of alien geometry and language shining on the stones with an otherworldly light, completed on the ground by a complex geometric shape drawn in glowing water.

Erci and I were standing within our circles, one shard of the mirror in our hands... I was fiddling with my staff, tied securely to the scabbard of my very own sword, while Erci was methodically digging through his own pack, his spear leaning against his chest.

Raven was imperiously perched on my shoulder, as she couldn't have her own circle - first, because she didn't have enough blood, and second because she couldn't chant with us. The solution was to draw a tiny amount of her blood into a vial, and mix it with mine once I drew the circle.

"Alright you three, this is everything we've worked for these past few months. This is our chance, to escape the hunt, to escape whatever that shadow thing wants from us. On my mark, slice your hands and bleed into the circle around you, make sure that there's no breaks in the bloodline. If there are, you will die."

"That's reassuring," I murmured.

"Mark."

I pulled my fey blade, the gleaming silver reflecting some of the symbols on the rock behind me, as well as my own eyes - their pale brown reassuring me. My heart pounding, I slowly drew the edge across my hand and winced at the pain. I squatted down, poured Raven's blood into my hand, and then angled it down, letting our combined blood drip from my hand into the red circle around me. It flowed freely - I felt cold by the end, wrapping the prepared bandage around my jittering hand.

Idly noting that Erci had finished his own circle and was now wrapping the bandage around his own hand, I looked to the mirror shard in my non-injured hand.

"both of you, hold the mirror up to your ears. I'll whisper something to you, and you have to repeat it. State it loudly, clearly, and without any waver. This is something you've earned. This is your birthright, now."

Holding the mirror to my ear, I heard Ref's whisper.

"We query you, Algeron," Erci and I stated at the same time.

"The Arbiter of Worlds, we invoke your name." I felt a sensation of wind, and noticed my hair quivering.

"Under the guidance of one incorporeal," Something in the car began rattling.

"We have toiled." The stones began to glow brighter.

"By the power of the distant light," The glow spread toward the ground, into the shape carved into the earth.

"We have constructed this query." The windshield of the car cracked.

"These three would summon you, Algeron, to hear them." The wind picked up even more.

"Hear us." Looking up, I could see the half moon directly above.

"See us." The stars began twinkling around it, and some seemed to... flow toward it.

"Know us." The flow became faster and faster, and the moon was drowned out in the concentrated light of the stars.

"We are the last of our kind." All the stars collected into one point.

"And we desire freedom." The blazing point glowed brightly for a second, and then a beam of light lanced downward.

"Freedom from this world." The beam connected with the center of Stonehenge in a deafening roar.

"Freedom from our hunter." Somehow, our voices carried on, even through the noise.

"Grant us this freedom." The beam widened, and shifted - it looked as though glass was breaking around it.

"Fulfill your ancient duty." The distortion grew, and then solidified - the beam was now lazily warping space and time.

"Warp us." Erci and I rose into the air, the circles of blood glowing brightly under our feet.

"Twist us into shape." The glow began to wander across the ground, toward the twisting light, taking us with it.

"Remake us outside." I heard a popping, sparking noise from below, and whipped my head toward it-

"So it is done." Only Erci spoke this time, because I was petrified. My circle was broken, a myriad of tiny, sparking gaps where red light should be. How could this be? I’d dripped the mixed blood into the circle, there were no gaps!

I began to move, to twist out of the light, to shout toward Ref, but it was no use.

My red light collapsed, and I ceased to float, stumbling toward the ground. With the light gone, I felt the beam as much as I saw and heard it - it was a twisting, wrong sensation, as though reality was wounded and crying out in response to it.

Worst of all however, the beam had gravity. Its twisting of space and time must emulate the force, causing a strong pull - one too strong to resist.

And so, clutching a little bird in both hands, I fell into the beam.

And reality tore itself asunder.