"In fairytales, spells can be learned and magic controlled at will," Elis said. "The truth is much more enigmatic. With practice, I was able to achieve control over time, but for me, magic has always been cankerous."

He shifted in his chair, as if steeling himself for a story.

"Growing up, I was always in pain and thus a very angry child. My mother liked to tell me that when I was a babe, I'd cry and scream until I turned beet red and passed out. My earliest memories are of my worst days, when it felt like bugs scurried beneath my skin and chewed on tender tissue, and my head split with such aches that all I could do was curse the pain. On those days, my parents tied me to the bed and kept a rag stuffed in my mouth between meals--now, don't get the wrong idea, they did this to prevent me from hurting myself. Healers from all over tried to stem the pain, they bloodlet me, gave me drugs, pumped my body full of solutions--nothing worked.

Elis pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and his spectacles trapped the lantern light, two crescent moons of white light.

"I was in the kitchen with my mother one evening, slicing apples for tarts while she kneaded the dough. My head was pounding as usual, and my mother brought up a fight I'd had with some neighbor kids out in front of the house earlier that day. I was always fighting. It was the best distraction, the only time my pain and subsequent rage budged, even the slightest. She was trying to help of course, as only mothers do, but when you're a child, you don't want to hear such things. You want to hear them even less when it feels as if someone is driving an anvil into your head. I can't recall her exact words, only the building pressure pulsing under my skull. I slammed the knife down into the cutting board. Shut up, I screamed, and it was like a cork popped. I felt such a sudden rush of relief, it brought me to my knees. All my pain was gone, like that," he said, snapping his fingers.

"To this day, I don't know if it was something I actively did, or if I had so much pent up energy that my body could no longer contain it.

"My naiveté as I sat on the floor seemed to last a lifetime. I couldn't comprehend what my eyes were seeing, a horror in direct contrast with my mind steeped in such undiluted bliss; the entire kitchen, everything was slick with red, the floors, the walls, the counter, the dough and apples, me—I could taste the blood, smell the overwhelming stench of iron. Where my mother had stood was a pulpy mess of entrails. I had never seen someone turned inside out, but I knew it had to be her; it had taken her place, though I couldn't fathom how. I crawled on hands and knees, I poked and prodded until I fingered the largest piece I could find, what I later learned was a vertebra."

Skin crawling, Mat strived to not let his face shatter.

"The cuts were surgically clean," Elis said airily, as if the expert precision with which he could undo a body both puzzled and awed him.

"My father came in and found me caressing what was left of her right cheek. I paid him little mind—I could not avert my eyes from her one, still sitting in its socket, the eyelid shorn away—until he shook me. 'I didn't mean to,' bubbled at my lips, a quick and clumsy admission. All the fear my father had ever had for me, toward me perhaps, culminated in that moment, and he wrapped his hands around my neck, grunting with the effort it takes to smash a windpipe."

The tinker went quiet, the lull nearly enough to quit Mat's breathing.

"It was survival," Elis said. "My arms were too short and weak to push him away; I grabbed at his hands, and he started to burn. The look on his face—we smelled it before he felt the pain. He released me, frightened more than anything, I think. I ran out the door and never looked back.

"I was seven."

Mat thought he might be sick. "Why are you telling me this?'

"Because today, you brought me a secret. Your biggest, I'd wager, and you have wanted to know the mechanics of mine ever since you stumbled into my shop unobserved that day and caught an unfiltered glimpse. Now you know my origin story. My mother's death was the catalyst. After that, I knew that whatever writhed inside me meant I couldn't stay anywhere for long. You see, at this time, humans and fairies still lived in peace, but apart. We knew what magic was, but mortals born with it? That was unheard of, unspoken of anyway."

That's impossible.

"It wouldn't occur to me for orbits that I had to be the result of my mother's unfaithfulness."

That would make him more than a century old.

"Back then, I knew only that I had a weapon I knew not how to control but had to use, lest it leave me in another violent burst. I adopted outlets, strove to keep it at bay, and it drove me mad at times. I tried to end my own life, more than once, but the animal inside would not let me die, and in fits of delusion, I thought myself a god, the resurrection of some cursed creature long dead, but I could never create, only manipulate."

Magic has never left Snow in a violent burst. Eli's frozen and bloody corpse sprung up in his mind's eye. Has it?

"The one thing I brought organically into this world required no magic at all. Elsie," he said fondly, like he had never uttered a sweeter word.

Mat felt a wholly inappropriate and humorless chuckle tickle his throat. "The chameleon?"

"My daughter."

Mat looked quizzically at the lizard, its eyes swiveling at a fly buzzing about its head.

"I named the chameleon after my daughter," Elis said amusedly. "I happen to be a sentimental old sorcerer and the names I favor are few."

Mat winced as Elsie's tongue shot out and nabbed the bug. It didn't quite make it all the way into her mouth; a single wing peeked out, still aflutter.

"You've seen the airship," Elis said. It wasn't a question.

The swift change in subject puzzled Mat. Anyone living in or around Myst had seen an airship.

"Yes," Mat acknowledged. "Saw one last night after a lengthy hiatus."

"It's a single ship."

"How can you know?"

"Because I put it in the sky. My daughter's its captain."

Mat's gaze latched back onto the mural.

"For reasons now known to you, I am not an easy man to live with. My daughter was the only one for whom I ever went to great lengths to maintain a consistent, if not relatively normal, existence, though I admit, I had little desire to raise her among humans," he added, giving Mat a look as if communicating, No offense. "The airship was a prime solution. After the Great War, remaining fuel stores were used to blow up the ships. All but the one. (And who's to say why? Maybe there wasn't enough fuel. Maybe it comforted them to keep a Gone World relic, a reminder that they hadn't always lived in the dirt.) I and a small band of cohorts returned the monolith to the sky, our magic the source for fuel and sustenance. We wanted for nothing. What safer a place is there than one that need never touch the ground? For awhile, our lives were simple, dare I say happy even. But Elsie is human, and my magic took a toll on her in a way I hadn't anticipated."

He paused, as if indecisive about how to continue. Mat had so many questions but was afraid to disrupt the narrative.

"She made me a different man—a better man, but a lesser sorcerer. I tried to shore that part of me away and express my energy in the most human-like ways, a feat made much easier once I no longer needed to hide my abilities from the human eye. My obstructing, as she called it, did not sit well with her. She wanted me to use it, to teach her, a feat I told her time and again was not possible, but she didn't believe me. She got older, and what began as teasing turned to resentment. I thought her tantrums cute as a child, but she grew into a vindictive adult. Under her orders, the ship began landing under the guise that she wanted to see the world, but I quickly discovered she was luring hosts aboard the ship for so-called experiments, trying to create what I refused to give."

Mat blinked, and he was back in his mother's basement. "Alchemy." The word slipped out of him like a fat slug.

Elis nodded. "A leap that I explained to her is not possible, the stuff of fantasy. We began to fight about the small things; it was a familial routine I knew well from my childhood. I wore it like an itchy glove. This familiarity cost me her, for I thought too little of it until it was too late.

"By the time I realized my mistake, she had usurped my cohorts' loyalties, developed a self-sustaining colony and had decided I was a burden she would no longer bear. My last night aboard the ship, she called me to the control room to put me on the stand without a trial before them all—to 'dig out the cyst in our midst,' she said. 'What use is a weary magician? The world weakens down below while those with all the real power refuse to share it,' but she's wrong. Nations—hell, planets rise and fall, and it's not for lack of solutions. Mortals are doomed to repeat their mistakes. History, if nothing else, has taught us that. I had given up on the politics of sandcastle kingdoms long ago, but I had underestimated my daughter's desire to join the fray, to return and force a new era, one where magic isn't only accepted but celebrated and revered.

"Standing before her in that moment, I had nothing to say, nothing that I hadn't already said. She opened a hatch in the floor—a mechanism of fright all aboard had taken to calling the sky door—and I fell out into the night."

Mat recalled the blip that fell from the airship that Snow had been so eager to see and the Mystians' stories of the one before that had been neither bird nor human. All his worst fears were aligning.

"I made no conscious effort to save myself. But as you might recall, death had always been a nemesis hell-bent on denying me solace. I heard my body hit like a thunderclap and blacked out. I woke to a pain that only a soul trapped in a shattered shell can know and knew then that death had forsaken me yet again.

"I won't bore you with the details, but obviously I healed," he said, gesturing toward his body. "Who says death doesn't have a sense of humor?"

The body that plummeted to earth on the outskirts of Myst hadn't lived to laugh.

"Where did you fall?" Mat asked. It seemed like the obvious next question though the logic of it all sounded asinine in his ears.

"The Burnt Forest. I awoke in that flowery crater."

Synapses firing, Mat got up and moved back through the aisles, squeezed through the gap and again stood before the mural. A howl blew around the empty space between his heart and stomach as Elis appeared at his shoulder.

"What is that?" Mat asked, pointing at the ripple in the sky.

He shrugged. "Portal to another dimension?"

The howl morphed into a growl.

"I have never seen flowers in the Burnt Forest, or anything living, as a matter of fact," Mat lied, accusingly.

Elis nodded as if he had expected as much. When Mat stared at him pointedly, he continued: "I think the Burnt Forest much like a labyrinth alive; it has a conscience, but not in the way a human would understand. Almost every Mystian has at least one peculiar story of the woods. Perhaps not all of it is here," he said, putting a finger to his temple. "Maybe anything can only be found once the forest thinks to give it up."

Mat snapped: "And you didn't think to take the portal to the other dimension for a looksy?"

"Oh no, even sorcerers have their limits, my boy."

He's making fun of me.

Doubt about the old man's credibility had calcified in Mat as Elis recited his story, and it remained, no matter how hard Mat tried to chisel it away. And yet, he could acknowledge his duplicity of reason: he had accepted the anomaly of Snow, who was he to outright deny any other possible deviations from a natural world that had once been stooped in magic until humankind had stripped it away? Mat's brain struggled to fill in the gaps, and it didn't help that the old man seemed to find this mental warfare amusing.

There's something he's not saying.

Elis took Mat's silence as clearance to continue: "I have lived to see that the logistics of creation and destruction and all that lies between don't always have a strict set of rules.

"Again death denied me eternal solace, but for the first time," Elis said, twitching his fingers in slight but precise gestures, "I had to urge my body to perform."

Aloys flew over the top of the bookshelf, and for a moment, the lantern light fractured on its scales and it looked as if it was on fire, before it settled on a dimly lit shelf, its claws splintering wood. It wiggled its scaly rear in the air, cat-like, and spit a ball of fire at Mat who took an instinctive step back. The ball burst into a puff of smoke in his face.

Brooding, Mat shied away from the serpent when it took flight and tried to regain its perch on his shoulder. Undeterred, Aloys descended and dug its claws into his coat, then gave a satisfied shake, its scales clinking together.

Mat chewed on the question he needed to ask, anticipating the answer he did not wish to hear.

"What does this all have to do with Snow?"

Elis took too long for comfort to answer. "Unless there is more than one young woman with skin the color of milk, hair the shade of an old crone's and the eyes of a wolf, that girl's brother came to me many orbits ago, weeks before you came in to ask about a gift and went home with my phonograph. He had been one of the eager hopefuls in Elsie's cohort of mad scientists and had made the mistake of bragging about that girl, evidently not thinking Elsie would demand proof. He was wrong. The ship landed with the understanding he would go and bring back the girl, but he somehow shook the guards sent to accompany him and, having heard about me from his time aboard the ship, came to me and asked me to take her in."

Mat's heart was pounding harder than a starving knave knocking at a king's kitchen door.

"He thought this place safe. I assured him it's not; I am not the sorcerer I once was but am now an old man who can perform little more than parlor tricks."

Lies.

Mat winced as the dragon tightened its grip.

The magic feels incredibly real to me.

"An escapee on the run, he was very adamant he couldn't keep her. His familiarity with the airship and my daughter was enough to convince me that his tale was true, and I chose to believe the rest he couldn't possibly prove."

Throat closing, Mat said: "And the rest?"

Elis hesitated but hurried on when Mat's countenance crinkled with impatience.

"As I said, Elsie began recruiting people, not only bodies for her experiments, but scientists, paranormal fanatics—butchers, more like—and challenged them to create bodily vessels for the magic she had yet to harness."

"Chimeras," Mat said, never having dreamt that the horrors from his childhood had any other place in the world than his mother's house until now.

"Yes. The airship is now an incubator for these perverse experiments. A special case, the girl's brother came to Elsie with a success story."

Mat felt as if his toes were curling over the precipice of a carnivorous pit.

"He was not prepared for all that Elsie had planned and tried to persuade her there is no magic, only science. He lied, of course, though perhaps unknowingly. As I said, it conspires in us all differently and it's very possible he did not know his own—"

"Did you know?" Mat seethed. "Did you know all along that she was the girl staying with Gran and me?"

Elis' face creased with sympathy. Mat wanted to punch him.

"I suspected.

"He didn't bring her the day he came seeking refuge but detailed her unique pedigree. When I turned the corner today, I knew her to be one and the same," he said, sounding almost predatory.

Finding it hard to breathe, Mat wiggled back through the gap with Elis close behind.

Greeted by Snow pelting toward him, Mat bit back a curse as she pivoted too late and ran into the shelves in her hurry to escape the black mosaic dragon that had taken pursuit. Mat's protective instincts flared, but the look on her face as she darted past was pure joy.

"He did not tell me all he did to her," Elis continued once Snow had disappeared around the corner.

Mat fumed, disgust bloating his stomach. The tinker continued to ramble, but Mat tuned him out. The glazed, lusty look that comes with transcending what is deemed possible was one Mat recognized.

"You denied them. You turned him away," Mat interrupted, trying his damnedest to keep his voice steady, wondering whether Elis was somehow responsible for Snow ending up on Gran's porch, whether the only Mystian with any experience in alchemy had been hand-selected to raise the girl. "How the hell did she end up at Gran's?"

"He led me to believe they lived not far from here. I suspect it was not her brother's intention to dump her on your doorstep but that he ran out of time to find a better hideaway than the secluded hovel over the hill."

Yes, let us save the maiming for the loved ones.

"Elsie doesn't grant passengers leave." He didn't elaborate, the purposeful omission nearly as worse as anything he could have said.

"When you came in inquiring about a gift for a cousin—the granddaughter of your gran's sister whom I know died barren, without children—I suspected the brother had survived long enough to burden you with his secret."

"You could have warned me then," Mat said, voice breaking. "Seven orbits ago."

"Secrets not ours are the greatest burdens," he said calmly. "Since the sky door, I've tried my damnedest to maintain a simple existence."

Mat's anger coiled and his face broke into a scathing smile. Coward. He speaks to me like I'm a child throwing a tantrum. I wonder if he looked at his daughter with the same haughty misgivings when she started slicing and dicing her passengers.

Elis mistook his brooding for apprehension over his own situation.

"It's not your fault. You've been made a pawn in this nasty little game. That girl's brother never did her any favors, but he doomed her the day he stepped foot on that airship."

"She's not collateral damage!" Mat shouted.

Aloys took flight with a screech, then bit Mat's neck.

"I'm sorry," Elis blurted as Mat recoiled with an oath. A swift gesture from Elis and Aloys burst into shards of glass that clinked on the floorboards. "I did not prompt him, it's preventative."

Mat didn't think he could stand to be in this man's presence much longer and blazed on: "Why hasn't Elsie landed the ship, why aren't her people running around, looking for Snow?"

"They may be. Evidently, she still does not know the girl's whereabouts."

It seemed to Mat that every one of the old man's velvety words rippled with the air of a treasonous lie.

"Does she know you're alive here in Myst?"

"No. How could she?"

"Then how could her brother find you so easily?"

"My repeated dances with death have given rise to a rumor among the guards that I still kick and breathe. They gabbed about the point of my general descent and the Burnt Forest hugs only so many humble hamlets this side of Helithica. A recluse old man was found out in no time. Elsie has no reason to look for me. She has no reason to think I'd take in the girl. Maybe even today she thinks he must have smuggled the girl aboard a boat destined for the other side of the world."

"So much time has passed. Maybe she's forgotten Snow," Mat said, but any hope in him had long curdled.

"My daughter has a steadfast memory. It's more likely many someones have occupied her time, that she's since discovered other noteworthy specimens—"

"Don't talk about her that way."

Elis stifled a sigh. "Surely you see now that you cannot keep her."

"She's not some damn mutt," Mat muttered and turned away, his head feeling like a carcass bloating with an explosive pressure as Elis continued to spout off about the dangers of being an accessory.

Mat cut the corner into the main aisle, stepped over the dancing rabbits, pushed the flying sail ships aside as he strode by, and punted a hamster that ran out in front of him after a pink rubber ball Snow had tossed.

"Mat!" she chided as the critter shot into the throng of velveteen rabbits.

"They're just toys!" He grabbed her by the hand and dragged her toward the door. "Let's go."

The red dragon swooped down, blocking their path. Mat punched it to the sound of glass cracking, his hand all the bloodier for the effort as the affronted serpent hissed as they strode by.

"Wrap up," he said curtly and began stuffing Snow's hair into her hood.

"What's wrong?" she asked, before Mat messily wrapped the cloak about her face. He looked back as he opened the door. The clamor had quieted but not for lack of magic. The toys watched them, their cheer gone. Elis was nowhere to be seen.

When Snow dawdled on the threshold, Mat shoved her out into the sun and shut the door hard behind them. Snow shoved him back. Granting her one uncovered eye a dismissive glare, he stalked off into the field.

She grabbed his arm, bringing him to a halt. "What happened?"

"I won't discuss it here."

She let him go with a sudden urgency. "I forgot the book."

Before Mat could stop her, she hurried back through the door.

He waited in the doorway as Snow disappeared down an aisle, all the toys now lifeless, strewn about the room where they had fallen. Elis stepped out from behind the last case of shelves, watching as Snow darted back to the door, the favorite book of the one who had ordered her brother's murder, if Elis was to be believed, tucked under her arm.

Remembering her manners, she turned back and thanked the old man.

"You are very welcome," Elis said, managing a smile.

"Come on," Mat said, stepping aside to let Snow pass.

Elis came to the door and Mat thrust himself between him and Snow.

"You could have put an end to it. You could have stopped her."

Elis seemed to think on that, but not for long. "Even the wicked love their wicked children."

It seemed silly to keep to the shadows with the threat from the sky so ripe in Mat's mind, so they didn't. Stalking through backyards, Snow wrapped her cloak tighter around her head, that single golden eye roving between alleys and the backs of houses beginning to talk.

Myst was waking up.

Between hovels, they could see Mystians in the street—sweeping up the charred remains of hay men, picking up empty liquor bottles, and helping their less sensible neighbors to their doors. Mat's breath snagged in his chest when a man leaned on his broom to watch them pass, but he didn't call out, didn't raise a hand in greeting. Who wants to exchange gratuitous pleasantries while nursing a hangover?

Snow hustled to keep up with Mat's long strides, ever his diligent shadow.

"Are you going to tell me what happened or make me play the guessing game?" she asked once they had left Myst behind.

Mat uttered an oath and came to a sudden halt, looking as if he had only now noticed her at his side. "Be careful, would you?" he chided as he tucked stray strands of her hair back into her hood.

"I could say the same to you," she spat, pulling out of his reach.

He gritted his teeth and resumed his march up the hill, the possibility that Gran might spot them be damned. But then he stopped, the foreboding that had been with him swelled until it felt like he might throw it up. We can't go home. We shouldn't continue putting Gran in danger. Even then, he scanned the greying horizon above the sea for a spec of ink. He clenched his hand to stop its shaking. There's nowhere else to go. Gran needs me. She'd never leave the farm--

Again, Snow grabbed his arm. "What should Elis have put an end to?"

Mat opened his mouth to argue, but she beat him to the punch: "I am not a child anymore. Everything we do, we're in together. So, spit it out."

Flushed with emotion, he dared not speak and instead glared down at her. The wind coming off the sea whipped their cloaks—unfurling hers, white tendrils wriggling free to lash at her determined face. This time, when he moved to hide her away, she batted away his hand.

He could smell the salty current, feel it pulling in his chest and stinging his eyes.

"How much did you know about your brother's extracurriculars?"

The salt must have been burning her eyes, too; a tear escaped, and she quickly wiped it away.

"What does my brother have to do with the tinker?"

Mat searched her face, a vision of perplexity. She doesn't know, he decided, unsure if he wanted it to be true.

Mulling over how much to say, how to say it, Mat bit his lip until it bled. The old man could be lying. He's not. There was no way to explain it all away, like everything was all OK and hadn't changed the moment Elis had laid eyes on her, but what infuriated Mat the most was that it was Eliwood that had spoiled it all before Mat had even met Snow. All their progress--all her progress, had been contained inside this bubble Elis had been poised over with a needle for seven orbits. They had all but ignored her past, treated Eli's violent end as little more than misplaced punctuation, a period that was now smudged and bleeding and demanding attention.

"Did you know that your brother had gotten in with a dangerous crowd and by the time he wanted out, it was too late?"

Face unchanged, she said: "That's no surprise, is it? He was murdered."

Not knowing what he'd expected her to say, but knowing it hadn't been that, his mind choked. "Well," he sputtered, "Elis is pretty certain that the ones who killed your brother are after you."

Her mouth opened in a silent O. "How can Elis know?"

"Because your brother went to him and begged him to take you in before he settled for Gran, but Elis doesn't know the whole story, he can't—"

"Why? Why did Eli ask Elis to take me in?"

The salty air kept pulling in his chest, and he was suddenly aware of how exposed they were, standing on the hillside under open sky and couldn't help a quick survey of the clouds. In this together, right? Rewards, risks, dead brothers, deadbeat sorcerers and all.

He told her everything Elis had said, from the sorcerer's crash course in terrible parenting to her brother's stake in the daughter's grand scheme to create a superrace aboard the Episteme. "He told Elsie about you and she wanted to see for herself. He refused and escaped. I imagine you know the rest. Elis thinks she's still looking for you."

She kept a trained eye on him until the very end, then looked out at the sea, throwing itself against the crags down the beach. Mat could smell a storm riding in.

This time he grabbed her by the shoulders and leaned in close until all he could see was wet gold. "It was a mistake to go to Elis. My mistake. I thought I could trust him. I was wrong."

A cosmic mistake that could not be undone.

His hands dropped. The clouds put them in shadow, and her face lit up as lightening split the sky, making the atmosphere crackle. A new fear burrowed into his mind like an earthworm through giving soil.

Mat picked up his voice to trump the wind: "Promise me you won't go back there, that you won't go see Elis." She refused to meet his gaze until he gripped her face. "Promise me."

I promise, she mouthed, the words whisked away by a gale.

The sky opened and rain fell. Snow shoved the book under her cloak and they ran.