The Story So Far: A pariah as a woman who negates magic in a world full of it, Mara Spell-Breaker has fled persecution alongside Aallotar, a soul cursed to bestial rage and feral fury. Mara's spell-negating powers can suppress the curse, but to break it, she has apprenticed herself to the demon Sammael the Torturer, Venom of God, who saved them both from execution by Mara's father, the lord of Sjaligr. Danger is coming to the Red Mountains, a punishment for old sins, and the oracle Kalevi predicted that Mara would have a part in it. Now she and Aallotar have been sent to search an ancient ruin unearthed by an earthquake, the workshop of Sammael's creator. As things have gone on, Mara and Aallotar have grown closer and closer. With feelings now in the open, they brave the depths of the workshop and the secrets held therein. Mara has opened the door, but what awaits may be more dangerous than the strange soldiers outside.

***

The Void knew her name.

Mara froze in place, even her breath chilled to its core when the magnitude of that set in. Her mind raced as she tried to comprehend. That wasn't possible. Void wasn't alive, it was the antithesis of life. How could it speak? How could it know anything? It just...devoured. The endless, unceasing hunger of nonexistence tearing apart Creation—that was all her people's stories said of Void. Even Sammael, master of sorcery and a demon himself, had not corrected that view.

"We are not alone." Aallotar's warning voice crashed into Mara's panic like a hammer, dropping her back into the present instead of the vast, hungry possibilities stretching thin the veil of reality.

Mara nodded, swallowing hard. "It spoke."

The wildling turned her head, her concern for Mara overpowering her other fears. "What?" Whatever its source, Aallotar hadn't heard the voice.

If it could be called that. The interaction felt more like an etching on the surface of Mara's mind, a gnawing taste of what awaited at the end of all things. Mara started walking forward, every footfall echoing softly through the otherwise silent hall. Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. "You said we weren't alone? Do you think it's the ones from outside?" Mara asked to distract herself.

It was not evenly distributed, the threat of the Void. It was less here, like the shallows of a pool. Where they were going, where they needed to go, was the depths. Sammael's priceless relic would be at the epicenter. Mara knew he wanted knowledge, the more dangerous and potent the better.

Aallotar reluctantly let go of Mara's hand, but only so she could draw her sword. "I saw..." She hesitated for a moment. "There was someone far ahead, walking between the shelves. Could they get in? The door we saw was closed. Surely they would not camp in the cold if they could get in."

"Who else could it be?" Mara said quietly. "This place has been sealed for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Maybe the man in black armor made it in."

Aallotar shivered, though it wasn't clear if that was the thought of the strange prowling man they'd seen or the cold in the air here. Even without the ice and snow, the chill was palpable. It was as if the air itself sapped away all thoughts of light or warmth other than the little flashes of white light dancing in the ceiling sconces as they walked, casting hard and frequently disturbing shadows. Mara could have sworn her own shade was moving out of sync with her body, but perhaps it was just the strangeness of the angle.

They picked their way through the massive array of stone slabs. For a repository, it was strange to Mara: no books, no scrolls, no paintings, no carvings. Yet there was an order to the place, even if not immediately apparent as they made turn after turn, trying to reach the center. It was less like bookshelves and more like a maze, carefully and intentionally designed to confuse the senses. Mara couldn't really navigate it any better than Aallotar, except to follow the twisting fray of reality she could feel in her metal bones.

They walked for hours, winding their way back and forth through the maddening labyrinth of stone slabs, frequently hitting passages that wrapped around and came to an abrupt dead end. Retracing their steps wasn't easy, even with the quick marks of chalk Mara made on the stone. The place seemed endless.

"What is this place truly?" Aallotar asked as they rounded another corner into a blank wall.

"I don't think Sammael lied, but I doubt he told us everything," Mara muttered. Between the aching cold and the ceaseless backtracking, she was already sliding into exhaustion. Her wounded arm burned with pain beneath the bandage. "Whoever his maker really was, they left a hell of a path."

Aallotar steadied her with one hand, brow creasing with worry. "Are you well, Mara? You are pale."

The sorcerer didn't want to admit that she was struggling with the pull of the Void, the clawing of a world-ending hunger at doors hidden in the dark reaches of her mind. Once a door opens, it cannot be closed so easily, Sammael had warned once. He had pushed her to open them, but now she fought to keep them closed desperately. Void was everywhere here and it would devour her. If a young mage could incinerate himself with his own power of creation by mistake, what consequences awaited someone playing with nonexistence?

"Mara, please talk to me," Aallotar pressed gently, golden eyes flashing in the flickering light.

"This whole place feels..." Mara pulled in a shaky breath, trying to find a word for the surges of emotion and sensation that were overwhelming her. "...I feel like it's balancing on the tip of a needle, and all around is this darkness."

Aallotar sheathed her sword and wrapped her arms around Mara, offering her warmth and safety. "I have you."

Even if it was an illusion, the sorcerer took comfort without a second thought, burying her face in the wildling's shoulder. The smell of wood smoke and weapon oil cut through the stale air of the workshop and Mara felt the first tears bubble up. She'd experienced pain in Sammael's training countless times‌ of the extreme variety, but this was a new level of fear. Aallotar stroked her hair and held her as close as she could with armor between them. "Something terrible happened here," Mara whispered.

You imagine you are at the beginning of the story, but ‌truly you have reached its ending.

Aallotar froze in place, but Mara turned to look towards the voice. She regretted it instantly, coming face to face with her reflection—except there was no mirror, only blank stone behind a perfect simulacrum of herself. Mara raised her hand to touch the side of her own face, but the copy didn't mimic her. Instead, it smiled.

Not-Mara even had the fresh mark on her lip from a fanged nip given the night before. Every blemish, every feature, a perfect copy. It was even her voice, except for the reverberations that crawled under their skin like a thing alive, echoing the hunger of Void.

"What are you?" Mara croaked.

A representation of the infinite within the microscope of your finite minds.

"A demon," Aallotar said nervously.

Not-Mara tilted her head slightly, regarding them. No. A demon is little different from you at its core. It was created, it exists, it will cease to exist. They may pretend otherwise, but they are as bound to the circles of the world they inhabit as the flesh they presume to have surpassed. Even if every demon that ever had existed, exists now, and ever will exist, suddenly disappeared—even the one you call the Deceiver—Void would endure. It cannot be destroyed.

Mara hesitated. "Like magic? My mother used to say that was a law."

Those who worship Creation delude themselves with the notion that nothing can be created or destroyed, that they are merely rearranging things. Even those that acknowledge the reality of their own ending, the world's ending, assume another universe will arise from the ashes. A pity they have forgotten that Void in action is all around them: entropy in every system. Eventually, Creation and all its works will end.

There was no joy in that statement, no perverse pleasure. Mara's doppelgänger seemed to derive no satisfaction from it. Eternal certainty dwelt in the words, though. "There has to be a way to stop it," Aallotar said fiercely.

Mara shook her head slightly. "Kalevi said nothing could stop what was coming."

The destruction of the Red Mountains is only another iteration of beings exterminating each other. That one side clings to Creation and the other has learned to tap into Void is almost immaterial. Not-Mara shook her head. There is little interesting in the ambitions of the Princes of Iron, just as there is little remarkable about the folly of those who created them. Neither are unique or as perfect as they pretend. Each is comprised of matter that will one day be no more.

"Why are you wearing my face?" Mara asked.

The figure cocked its head slightly, a faint curl of the lips suggesting a smile. Because you are far more interesting, Mara Spell-Breaker. You are the beginning of all things and the end of all things: balanced, as you say, on the tip of a needle. The Princes of Iron teach their followers that the fear of gods is the beginning of wisdom, but what you have done is beyond what even they know to be possible.

Even though the answer terrified her, Mara had to know. "How is what I do possible? What am I? Sammael is so certain, but how does he—"

You are the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, one who has lived lives beyond counting. Did the opening of this place not tell you enough? This is your home because once you made a life here, toiling away. Sammael's reconstruction was crude at best, something he has attempted to refine with his modifications. Much of your memory had to be sacrificed to preserve the essence. Did you never think to wonder how intuitive your grasp of Void, that you could access it even without awareness? After all, he did not have to teach you how to break a spell, only how to master yourself.

Mara stared at the creature with wide, frightened eyes. "But..."

The child sleeping beneath your mother's heart was a small sacrifice to preserve the Eighth, the Mother. Sammael, so devoted, so loyal, never hesitated for a moment. In a world filled with false prophets of Void, those who seek to bend it to their whims, the genuine article is one of a kind.

The sorcerer tried to take a step back away from her double, but realized she was still in Aallotar's arms. The cursed warrior still held her tightly, trying to protect her from the creeping horror of the revelation. "Sammael made me out of his maker?" Mara whispered.

He merely hollowed the vessel and placed you within. That is hardly the same as the spark of inspiration that led you to create all demonkind.

"Mara, it must be lying," Aallotar said firmly. "This is not possible."

What did the words of power say, Mara? Her duplicate smiled in its uncanny mimicry.

"Speak only truth," Mara said around the hard lump in her throat. The binding at the door was not only on the door, she realized. It was everywhere around them. "Tell no lies."

The power waiting here is yours, to do with as you please. Chase this thread until every interwoven falsehood unravels before you like the decaying tapestry they have become. Rediscover who you are.

"Don't listen," Aallotar pleaded. "Mara, it is not safe."

Would you forever make fear your master, Mara? Or have you been running from this truth long enough?

Mara swallowed hard and pulled away from Aallotar. She turned to face the wildling, cupping the tattooed woman's face in her hands. "I need you to trust me."

Aallotar's tormented golden eyes focused entirely on her. "Ask anything else of me. I cannot lose you."

There was a very real danger that Aallotar would lose her, whether that was by Void devouring her or just robbing her of every iota of feeling. If she opened this door, there was no guarantee of anything. "Trust me and I will come back," Mara promised. "Whatever I have to do to make that happen."

The wildling's eyes filled with tears, but before she could speak or grab for Mara, the sorcerer was already stepping back and closing her eyes. The door inside herself came crashing open the moment she stopped resisting. It was not the agony she had grown used to under Sammael's care.

Clarity rippled through Mara's being as she bridged the last gap to Void inside herself, balancing as if on the tip of a needle as the emptiness came rushing in. She saw in stuttering bursts the Revealing, worlds disintegrating into dust, universes unraveling and flashing out of existence, the magnitude of the loss eroding away continents and civilizations like the tide crashing over tiny castles constructed of sand. Grief boiled up from the pit of her stomach as power crackled around her, wreathing her in the actinic white light of this place. Her double vanished like a fading shadow.

She looked down at her own hands and saw them covered not in blood, but in the black of night between stars. For the first time, she understood Kalevi's two prophecies and the vast gulf of eternity between them.  He had seen the destruction of the Red Mountains, yes, but also what awaited at the end of the universe's existence.

Mara knew that while she had a part to play in the first, it would be the second where she found her place. She also knew, distantly, that somewhere, someone was screaming her name.

Then there was only darkness.