The first time she appeared on the other side of the wall, she was bookless – those physical laws had bested her once again! She observed the spell-sealed door for a minute, then tapped the stone with a finger, disintegrating the entwined threads of magic and allowing physical access to the room beyond. It would destroy the sealed atmosphere, but opening the door was the only way to take the books out – if only physical matter could be made as incorporeal as a faerie!

On her way back to the surface she had to unseal the first door too, breaking the time vacuum for good. As the stone door slid open, air from outside world forced its way into a world that had spent so long apart from the corrupted outside. A shame, but they weren’t doing any good hiding down there, were they? And these strange books could contain incredible secrets or details on potential threats the town could face from the Underworld! The thought that, somehow, she may have broken a seal on some trapped demon lord or another did play on her mind a little, but she ushered it away with Water faerie logic: if an entity had been trapped down there, she would have felt it.

Noticing the glow of sunrise creeping through the cracks in the church, Phantasia dumped her discoveries alongside her school books and scrambled up the wall. Phasing through everything got boring fast, so she’d taken to physics-defying feats of athleticism whenever the opportunity arose – it was good practise too! With an arcing leap off the wall she sailed over one wooden beam and propelled herself off another, through a hole in the sloped ceiling and onto slates of the church roof.

Every morning, as the sun came up, she made sure to ascend the spire and watch as the human world stirred to life. A cool autumn breeze rustled her hair as she took in the sights of the silent, sleeping world, now freed from the tyrannical regime that held it in a strangle hold. She could see the ruins of Godhand’s manor on the north-eastern outskirts, the remains of its twisted tower jutting out like long, bony fingers grasping for life. A week before, the area stuck out of the town’s aura like an infected wound, filled with malice and self-righteous affirmation, but now the grit in that wound – a shadow-demon gorging on the worshipper’s emotions – was gone and the order scattered. Without them, the stain on the leylines had diminished, but other blots remained: to the south-west, past a river of derelict streets, the chimneys of abandoned industry rose up to challenge the height of the church, their lands a mire of weakened, corrupted mana; to the north, a stream of contamination spread from the centre of the town, flowing through the gallery appropriated by the Hawks and spreading out through suburbs of rich, white houses with solar-panelled roofs and tendered gardens.

The east side of Torsten was the least intimidating. An arc of houses running around to the southern side were in a state of constant renovation, connected by arid, cracked roads and separated by the occasional strip of green park. Torsten Academy sat on the far east border of the town, a short distance from an ocean of trees reaching back for miles. In contrast, to the west, nestled between the Industrial Zone and the former territory of Godhand, sat the Academy’s less-eccentric equivalent, Torsten High School, before rolling plains of parched, brown wastelands that led into the depths of the continent. She couldn’t spot any sign of human civilisation in that direction – that was were the vagrants and wandered and demons prowled – but there were several settlements to the north, among the swamps and mire of flooded land, and the roads leading south passed through distant spots of life on their way towards the murky metal mountain some hundred miles away – the city of Malkuth. Five miles high and ten miles across, Malkuth was where the majority of the continent’s population gathered to shelter from the harsh realities of the world.

Chapter 26
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