Beth Wonders's Arc

Chapter 21 of 29

Beth's power was whole again, but half her cathedral still lay behind Frostwyn's ice. The shard glowed under her ribs. She stood at the frozen wall and pressed her palm to it. Cold bit her skin. Beyond the ice waited her anchor tree and the far rooms she needed to finish her world. She could feel the magic there, thick and unused. She just couldn't reach it. "I need what's on the other side," she said. "All of it." She couldn't thaw the ice herself. If she cracked it, the sleeping entity might wake and cross. So she scried the sealed half first. In her mirror she saw her anchor tree, and beside it a tall vase full of swirling star magic. It had drained from the tree for weeks, pooling in the crystal, glowing. Enough to power the rooms she still needed to build. Locked away where she could not touch it. The void chef uncoiled from a black-and-white checkered rug in the corner. Its star-eyes brightened. "You want the vase," it said. "Not the ice." "I can't melt the ice without waking the thing behind it." Beth turned. "But you don't need a door. You slip through seams." "I do," the void chef said. "On Tuesdays I go where I please." Beth almost smiled. The creature had helped her before, and every time she'd paid. She braced for the price. "Bring me the vase. What do you want?" The void chef drifted to the ice and pressed one starry coil against it. "Your world tastes of frost and light now. Half-dead, half-alive." Its eyes flared. "Let me taste the sealed half. The part nobody has been. That's my price." Beth's stomach tightened. The worm at the tower had craved that same flavor, and now it hunted her cathedral. Giving the void chef a taste felt like handing out a second key. But she trusted the void chef more. It had turned down a man's last memory of his father. Some things it would not take. "One taste," Beth said. "Then you come straight back." "Deal." The void chef slid into a hairline seam in the ice and vanished. Frost hissed shut behind it. Beth waited, palm still on the wall. She felt the creature move through the sealed rooms, past the tree, past the dormant thing that did not stir. Minutes passed. Then the seam split open and the void chef poured out, the tall prismatic vase balanced on its coils. Star magic swirled inside, gold and violet. Beth took it. Warmth ran up her arms. She poured a thin thread into her half-finished floor, and a purple lotus bloomed from bare stone. Then a fountain. Then a small glowing prism shaped like a planet. Her world grew for the first time in weeks. She had her stored magic back. She had also let one more cosmic thing taste the flavor everything now wanted.