It was true. The effect of the Bermuda Triangle, the Northern Lights and the Luminiferous Ether moving across the Atlantic was being felt far and wide. And they were getting closer. There were tornadoes and tidal waves and freak events. In one child’s back garden a snowman had been swept into the blizzard, dismantled, and then put back together again. The only difference was that his carrot nose had been put back the wrong way around.

The sky glowed with the otherworldly colors of the Northern Lights. It was having fun, putting on a great show for everyone, probably for the last time. The Luminiferous Ether was also feeling a bit fin de siècle and had started granting spells haphazardly as it came across them. Even silly spells, like the one from Maddie, age fourteen, to please make Oliver fall in love with her. And the one from her mother, Evie, who’d introduced Maddie to this concept of asking the universe for what you want in the form of a simple spell. She’d asked for a complicated jumble of things over the years: better skin, a great body, a fulfilling career, love, glamor . . . All this was now to be granted despite Maddie and Evie having between them about the same amount of M-currency as a small pot of live yogurt.

Raven pushed her broomstick into the sky. It was darker up there than she’d ever seen it. Beyond the Northern Lights and all the dramatic weather was . . . Wait. Something up here felt familiar.

Raven flew higher: higher than she normally would.

“What are you doing?” asked Neptune.

“I can sense . . . It’s hard to describe,” said Raven, “but I think I have a friend up here.”

“A friend?”

“Okay. Well, not exactly a friend. I’ve never met it. But I’ve written to it quite a lot. . . .”

The Luminiferous Ether had come out of its usual dimension and was rampaging through ours like a kind uncle who has drunk too much sherry. The peculiarities of space and time meant that the Luminiferous Ether had manifested in three dimensions as something that resembled a stick of rock, although approximately three miles high and thirteen feet across. It was an unstable-looking pink on the outside, with an extraterrestrial green stripe spiraling down it.