Eleven days out of Harrow's End, and we reached what was left of the Valdris Arcane College.

  From a distance it looked intact. That was the thing that got me first. All the buildings standing, the towers still up, the walls unbroken. You almost believed it was fine.

  Then you got closer.

  Every window empty. Not broken — burned out, clean and cold. Doors hanging wrong. The specific wrongness of a place where something had passed through without caring about the architecture. And nothing alive anywhere. No moss. No birds nesting in the eaves. No seeds taking root in the cracks.

  Nothing living would settle here.

  Lyra didn't say anything when we walked through the main gate. I watched her face, and I watched her not look at the places that hurt too much to look at.

  The Archive was in the easternmost building. The shelves were still there, which was worse somehow — empty shelves where seven thousand books had been, arranged and labeled and now just gone. Not burned. Not stolen. Gone, like they'd simply been subtracted from the world.

  The basement stairs were intact. The temperature dropped the further down we went — not just cold, but warded cold, the specific chill of something protected for a long time.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  At the end of the corridor: a door glowing faintly at the edges. Silver-blue, like moonlight.

  "There," Lyra said, very quietly.

  She placed both palms on the door. The air shifted. Her face went completely focused, the way it did when she was working through a complex problem except this time it wasn't theoretical. The light at the door's edges changed slowly — silver-blue to amber, matching her eyes exactly — and then a sound like a crystal bell.

  The door swung open.

  Small room. One shelf. One object.

  The Sealstone was about the size of my fist, cut like a gemstone but made of something that wasn't stone and wasn't metal — deep grey that shifted toward silver in the dim light, with something moving inside it when you looked directly at it. Smoke, almost. Living smoke.

  I picked it up.

  The pulse was immediate. Strong. Like pressing your thumb on your own heartbeat but in your hands, up your arms, settling in my chest.

  The mark on my wrist blazed silver. Then settled to a steady warm glow.

  "It recognizes you," Lyra said softly. She was writing.

  "Yeah," I said. "Yeah it does."

  I stood in that small cold room with the Sealstone in my hands and tried to work out how I felt. This thing had been waiting here for four hundred years. Orvaine — the first mage who'd used it — had put it here knowing someone would eventually need it again.

  She'd been right.

  "How close do I need to be?" I asked. "To Seraphine. When I use this."

  "Close," Lyra said.

  "How close is close?"

  "Close enough for her to reach you."

  The stone pulsed in my hands.

  "Okay," I said. "Close."