“Be quiet,” Frieda said, her voice pitching upward. “You’re a bore. Boring, screeching Fifer. That’s my name for you.” She pinched the scatterclip and held it up.

Fifer refrained from rolling her eyes at the ridiculous woman. Instead, seeing the move, she glanced at Simber and gave a slight hand signal. The cat blinked in response.

Without another word, Frieda wound up and threw the single scatterclip hard at Fifer, shouting the verbal component correctly this time. “Die a thousand deaths!”

On cue, Simber dove in front of it. It struck his side and bounced off, doing him no harm but shielding Fifer from the deadly hit and giving her a chance to aim with a weapon of her own. Simber swooped up and out over the wall.

Just as swiftly, Fifer raised her hand, needing no component for her plan. “I have a name for you, too,” she said. She grimaced, her heart heavy and thumping wildly, and pointed firmly at Frieda Stubbs. As the woman gasped in anger and reached for another clip, Fifer shouted a phrase that hadn’t been uttered in many years, first used by none other than her hero, Lani Haluki. “Evermore nevermore!” The power left her fingertips. Fifer ran straight for the nearest window and dove out of it.

The spell hit the head mage. She froze, shocked. A second later she slumped over. Her body deflated like a balloon. Soon all that was left of her was a flat rubber shape that slid and fell backward off the wall. Her head mage robe slipped off and caught the wind. It floated down to the beach. In that instant, everything in Artimé went black. And everyone who remained in every part of the mansion was flung together into the gray shack, all squashed on top of one another.

Regrouping

Fifer rolled to a stop on the hard ground where the lawn used to be. She scrambled to her feet and turned to see that the mansion was gone. An old, roofless gray shack stood in its place.

Shouts rose up from inside it as people fought to get out. More yelling came from the corral, for the mansion roof that had covered the dissenters had turned into the much smaller roof of the gray shack and had fallen in on top of everybody, trapping them under its weight. The pen’s log walls disappeared in a puff of smoke, for even the jungle trees were magical and had disappeared, with every vine and root going with them.

Nearby, Florence froze in place. And Simber, in mid-flight, came crashing down. He bounced and skidded on the harsh cement for twenty yards toward Quill, coming to a stop at the startled dragons’ feet.

The sudden loss of the magical world caused terrible confusion, and people everywhere, covered in splinters of lumber and pieces of shingles or trapped beneath the roof, were certain they were close to death. Gorgrun and Quince rose up in confusion and began flying around in circles overhead, unsure what was happening but wanting to stay off the ground in case that disappeared too.