Except, ugh, that was a lie. It wasn’t their help, not really. It was the time I had because I didn’t have to desperately watch my own back every second of the day. It was the energy I had because I wasn’t constantly scrabbling to build mana. And it was their help, too, only their help and the time and the energy all came from the same thing, and that was Chloe’s help, Chloe’s bountiful generosity, and I didn’t like it. Except of course I did like it loads, I was just bitter and sullen about it, too.

But I couldn’t manage being bitter and sullen on the day I turned the page and found myself looking at a gorgeously calligraphed heading that I didn’t need to translate into Being the First Stone upon the Golden Road to understand what it was saying: This one’s really special, with the Sanskrit incantation set in a finely bordered window on the page, every character flavored with gold leaf and paint in the main curves. Even at a first glance I could pick out bits of all the other spells I’d gone through so far: the phase-control spell, the water-summoning spell, another one I’d just finished working through that was for dividing earth from stone; they were woven together and invoked as part of the overall working.

I didn’t just stop being sullen. I stopped worrying about mana, about what was going to happen when and if my cover was blown; I stopped working on my midterm assignments and ignored the rest of my classes entirely. For that whole week, in every waking minute that I wasn’t actually stuck in session or killing mals, I was working on the sutra. Even during meals I had my head in a dictionary.

I knew it was stupid. My midterm assignment for the Myrddin seminar was a long involved piece of Old French poetry that was sure to contain at least three or four useful combat spells I could probably use during graduation. Meanwhile Purochana’s great working was on the scale of architecture and probably needed an entire circle of wizards to cast anyway. The Golden Stone sutras were meant for building enclaves, not killing off mals: it would only do me any good if I lived long enough to get out of here.

But if I did—then I could offer it to groups like Liu’s family, like the kibbutz that Ibrahim’s friend Yaakov was from: established communities of wizards who wanted to set up their own safe, sheltered places. The Golden Stone sutras probably weren’t the best way to build enclaves anymore, otherwise more of the spells would have survived into the modern day, the way the phase-control spell had, but it would be a sight better than having to mortgage your entire family to another enclave for three generations just to get access to the spells, much less for the resources you’d need to use. And Purochana’s enclave spells probably weren’t going to be as expensive as the modern spells, either. No one was building skyscraper enclaves back in ancient India: even if you’d imagined one, you couldn’t exactly call your local builders and order some steel girders and concrete.

So my golden enclaves wouldn’t be as grand as a top modern-day enclave, but who cared? It would still keep the mals from getting to your kids, and if you had that, if you had safe, at least you’d have a choice. A choice that someone could make without being Mum. You wouldn’t have to suck up to enclave kids and bribe them. They’d still have advantages, they’d still have more hand-me-downs and more mana, some people would still court them, but it wouldn’t be everyone, desperate to survive. They wouldn’t get piles of free help just for dangling the slim hope of getting into their alliances and the even slimmer hope of getting into their enclaves.

I liked the idea; I loved the idea, actually. If this was how I’d bring destruction to the enclaves of the world, I was on board with my great-grandmother’s prophecy after all. I’d take Purochana’s spells and spread them all over the world, and I’d teach people how to cast them, and maybe they wouldn’t like me, but they’d listen to me anyway, for this. They’d let me stay in the enclaves I helped them build, and I’d make it part of the price that they had to help others build them, too. Either they’d donate resources, or they’d make copies of the spells, or train teachers—

While I was busy putting the world to rights in my spare time, what I wasn’t doing was any of my other schoolwork. I completely forgot the midterm assignment for my Proto-Indo-European seminar, and I would have been well on the way to outright failing if it hadn’t been for Ibrahim; when I remembered it on the Monday night before the due date, with less than one hour to curfew, he brokered me an emergency trade with an enclaver from Dubai that he’d got friendly with. He and I had sat near the Dubai kids in the library for one evening last term. They all still gave me dirty looks if we passed in the corridors, and he’d made one good friend and four nodding acquaintances. Story of my life. But now I got to benefit, because when I yawped in alarm, that night in Chloe’s room, Ibrahim said, “Hey, Jamaal’s probably got a paper for that.” It turned out that Jamaal was the youngest of five, and had inherited a priceless collection of hand-me-down papers and schoolwork for nearly every class he might possibly have taken, and more besides. I handed over a copy of the paper I’d written about the water-summoning spell and got back a nice, solid essay handed in for the PIE seminar of ten years ago.

I still had to rewrite the essay in my own handwriting, and while I was doing that, I got annoyed at some of the dumb things it said and ended up changing about half of it, staying up until all hours. I fell asleep on my desk and had to work on it the next day during my independent study. Afterwards I shuffled into the PIE seminar, full of unjustifiable resentment, and as I stuffed it into the submission slot still yawning, an eldritch vapor wisped out and went straight into my wide-open mouth.

Forget any preconceived notions you might have of gigantic Cthulhian monstrosities. Eldritch-category mals are actually relatively fragile. They hunt by driving people insane with enchanted gases that fill your senses with the impression of untold horrors, and while you thrash around screaming and begging everything to stop, the mal creeps out of its hiding place and tries to hook your brains out through your nose with its partially embodied limbs.

The problem with using this clever tactic on me was that there really isn’t an untold horror that the human brain is capable of experiencing that’s worse than being enveloped by a maw-mouth. So the vapor made me flash back to that particular experience, and I reacted just as I had at the time, which can be summed up as me yelling die immediately you horrible monstrosity with enormous and violent conviction. Only this wasn’t a maw-mouth, it was just a drippy ectoplasmic cloud, and I slammed it with the full force of a major arcana murder spell like someone trying to light a match with a flamethrower.

My handiest killing spell doesn’t kill things by destroying their bodies, it just goes straight to extinguishing life on a metaphysical level, so that’s what spilled over. More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression that I shoved it entirely out of reality, and I then went on from there to try and insist that a whole lot of the stuff around it should also stop this absurd pretense of continuing to exist.