The world around her dimmed to almost total darkness, and Grace's eyes were drawn to the only remaining light beyond her little circle. It was a sickly green glow on the top of the ridge she had fallen down, and silhouetted against it she saw a massive wolf-like shape poised on the edge. As she watched, frozen, it was joined by a second and then a third and a fourth.

"Aren't you going to run?"

She heard the words as if they were spoken next to her ear, sibilant and whispering, and she twisted round sharply. There was nothing there.

She heard chuckling laughter in the wind, and she looked back at the ridge, where the wolfish shapes were standing their ground. Why weren't they rushing at her?

He's trying to scare you, Grace told herself. But perhaps he didn't need to try.

She didn't know whether to run, breaking the circle and leaving herself defenceless, or to stay and fight, where his magic would almost certainly overwhelm hers. Both courses felt hopeless. The book couldn't tell her enough to let her fight someone who knew how to wield possibility.

The voice sounded again in her ear, and she could swear she could feel his breath on her cheek.

"My creatures and I haven't fed off a girl-mage in so long, we've almost forgotten how one tastes."

One of the wolf-shapes on the hill howled, and the evanescents made a hissing noise of pleasure. Grace shuddered, revulsion running through her. She pulled the book out again, searching for help from it even though she knew it was useless.

It was almost pitch dark now, and she squinted at the cover, unable to tell which way round she was holding it. But the book glowed gently and she was reminded of the way Dad's car turned the interior dashboard lights on once it got dark.

She flicked the pages at random. She didn't really know what to look for, but it fell open on one of the later chapters and she glanced over the pages.  They illustrated and explained the symbol of shielding, and it seemed to grow larger and larger as she looked at it.

"Right," she said, feeling like she knew what she had to do. She replaced the book, swung her pack onto her shoulder and picked the rowan-wood staff up with her right hand. In her left she still held that little glass vial.

She wasn't even sure that what she was planning was possible, but she was going to do it anyway.

Isn't that the point of this world? She thought to herself. Everything is possible...

At the same moment that she raised her staff, the cold mage grew tired of waiting. The dogs bounded forwards, baying. The sickly green glow increased and then seemed to solidify around a tall, black figure which stood on the top of the ridge and looked down at her.

She had to act quickly. Holding out the rowan-wood staff towards the snow beneath where the evanescents now stood, she traced it swiftly through the air in the shape of the symbol of fire. It left the shape burning in the air, and she willed it forwards and downwards.

Fire bloomed in a roaring circle, spreading from the floating symbol and increasing to become a great cone of heat. It melted the snow for fifteen feet around in the same instant that Grace flung her left hand out and scattered salt into the misty shapes.

She kept shaking it back and forth, seeing those wolf-shapes hurtling down the slope behind them but carrying on anyway because it was working. Wherever the salt touched the evanescents they seemed to hiss and boil, and became liquid, and within a few seconds they were nothing but pools of water which were rapidly soaking into the ground.

"Six down," Grace muttered to herself, "sixty to go."

She heard an angry hiss from the cold mage, and looked up at him. He was still standing on the crest of the ridge, his tall, green-glowing figure looming up there. She would deal with the wolves first, then.

She seemed to have empty ages whilst they tumbled towards her, time to watch as the closest of them neared her circle of fire and were illuminated. She saw that they were hairless, glistening monstrosities. She had time to nod to herself and lift her staff above her head, picturing a page of the book in her head which had burned itself there as she had looked at it again and again with disgusted fascination.

Flesh Wolves. Constructed creatures made out of dead flesh. Their bodies burn with acid, the book had told her, and she might have guessed that last part, anyway.  She made the first to curves at the top of the symbol of shielding. The writer seemed to expect that she would carry acid with her for just such a situation. Of course she had none, but she did have the rowan wood staff and two symbols.

The symbol burned as she closed it off, but she only saw it with the edge of her vision. She was already moving the staff out in front of her to draw the second symbol.

Conjuration, she thought, as she drew the same mark which had brought fire blossoming to life. The symbol that creates things and brings them into being. She remembered its meaning now, so clearly that it seemed as if she had known it for years. She had used it for fire before, but now she would use it for something else.

She hurled her staff forwards. The symbol raced into the air, trailing a green cloud behind it. The cloud grew and spread impossibly quickly, spilling heavy rain even as it did.

The flesh wolves screeched when the downpour hit them. Some fell to the ground, and when the others tried to run, they tripped and became a tangled mass of writhing shapes. She watched the rain pour down and dissolve them, listened to their screams and the sound of the water drumming on the shield she had created over her head,  and felt a little ill.

Within a minute, there was no trace left of the wolves. The rain eased, and then stopped, leaving steaming pools in the places where there had been snow.

"One left," she said quietly, her eyes snapping back up to that looming figure on the hill.

The form began to float down the steep bank towards her, and she couldn't help stepping backwards as he approached. She was afraid, so much so that she couldn't seem to think about anything except her pounding heart. She had beaten those creatures, but she knew they were nothing compared to the man who had created them. She didn't even need the book to tell her that.

The voice sounded close by her ear again, but this time it wasn't an arrogant whisper. It was a spitting hiss of rage.

"You think you can save yourself by destroying them?"

Grace felt something close around her neck and lift her off the ground. She couldn't breathe, and it was so tight it felt as if her windpipe was being crushed inwards.

It was pure panic which brought her hands up to scrabble at her skin, but her fingers found nothing to pull at, just her own flesh. It was only as she heard it thud into the snow that she realised she had dropped the staff, the one thing that might have saved her.

The mage drew close to her, raising her up until she was level with his eyes. They burned a diseased green in a pallid face, but her vision was growing grainy and began to fall away at the edges. She could only see those eyes, burning into hers.

"You're nothing but a toy to me, little girl," he said, and opened his mouth to say more, but Grace brought her right foot swinging sharply up and into his groin with all the strength she could find, and the words turned into a strangled whimper.

She felt the invisible force release from her neck, and she fell to the snow, gasping through a throat that felt like it was half closed-off. Her vision was still grey and swimming, but her hand found the staff and she pushed herself to her feet and swung it at his head.

She felt the impact through her hands, and watched him stagger to his knees, stunned. She knew she had only moments before he gathered enough of himself together to cast a spell at her. So she turned and ran again, her throat screaming and raw and her legs weak and shaky. But she was free, and she wasn't going to let him trap her again.

Her vision began to clear as she fled through the trees, and she realised that the darkness was beginning to lift too as the mage's spell faded. She could see clearly a few feet in front of her, enough to keep her moving.

There was a feeling of air against her cheeks, and she looked back through the trees at the mage. He was standing again, his hands in front of him, and the air seemed to be drawn towards him.

Faster, she told herself. But before she could turn back to watch where she was going, he made a strange strangled sound and the wind stopped abruptly.

She slowed, trying to see what had happened, and then realised that she couldn't afford to slow down when he could kill her from hundreds of metres away. She turned forwards again, and seemed to see in slow motion as the ground opened before her into a foaming white river. She told her legs to stop, but they were spinning uselessly in air, and she was falling into the whiteness of the water.

As she fell, the feeling of time stretching out came back to her. Whole minutes seemed to go by as she watched the water come towards her, and she thought about the one or two people who stumbled into High Peaks river every year and died because their heart stopped beating. Not all of them had been that old. And then she thought about Benjamin and felt a huge, angry sadness well through her at the thought that she might not get to save him.

Then she was in the water. The shock of the cold was like nothing she had ever known. She chest seemed to spasm at the same time as her mouth gasped for air. Water sloshed into her mouth and down her throat. She kicked towards the surface to cough it up and try to breathe in air instead. She had barely got her mouth above the water when she felt a reverberating blow on her head. Everything faded away.