Dr. Sage Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dr. Sage Whitmore had been mid-sentence when the lecture hall dissolved. She had been telling her students that you never feel a liminal shift happen. She had felt this one. The floor had gone soft under her boots, her chalk had kept moving, and then she was standing on moss under a sky the wrong shade of green. That was three hours ago. Now she sat on the edge of a narrow bed inside a one-room shelter someone had walked her to, pushing her round glasses up her nose and trying to think like a professor instead of a woman who had lost her classroom. Someone here had pulled her across. Her own theory said so. Summonings left a signature on the summoner, and if she could find the signature, she could make them send her back. She just had to not die identifying them first. The door opened without a knock. The old man who had found her in the moss came in, robe brushing the sill. Aldric Silverweave. He had given her his name once and not repeated it. Behind him stood a blond fairy no taller than her forearm, arms crossed, wings folded flat. Lysander, the old man had called him. Neither looked glad to see her. "I need a name," Sage said. "Whoever pulled me here. I can undo it if I stand in front of them." "You cannot," Aldric said. "I can. Summoning leaves a residue. I've written papers on it." "Papers." He set a cup of something on the sill. "Confront the wrong practitioner and they will burn you where you stand. I will not point you at a door and hope." "Then point me at the right one." "No one summoned you, Professor." She stopped. "That's not possible. I was anchored to a lecture hall. Something reached for me." Lysander spoke for the first time. "The boundary is thinning. Aldric says so. You fell through a soft spot. No one called." "That's not how it works." "It is how it worked today," Aldric said. She stared at him. She had spent twenty minutes building a suspect list in her head. Every name on it was now useless. There was no sorcerer to confront. There was no spell to reverse. The blond fairy watched her face and did not soften it. "Then how do I get home," she said. "I do not know yet." Aldric picked up the cup and put it in her hands. "I know what tore the seam. I know it is still tearing. That is what I can tell you tonight." Sage looked down at the cup. Her hands were shaking. She had come into this room hunting a person. She was leaving it hunting a wound in the world, with no anchor, no colleagues, and one grizzled scholar who admitted he did not know the way back. "Start with the seam," she said.