Feeling restless, I slipped into warm clothes, grabbed my staff, and crept down the stairs. No one was up yet. I needed something to do—anything to burn off my nervous energy. I pulled on my boots and stepped into the backyard. It was covered in a fresh layer of snow, perfect and untouched. Our neighbor’s dog, Lucky, pressed his face against the window to stare at me. The golden retriever wagged his tail excitedly. At least someone was happy to be awake this early.

I had to get faster at opening gateways. Eleni had been asleep for a thousand years, and she still understood her godling magic better than me. Well, mostly. She was still accidentally enchanting people. That said, she made an excellent guardian in training. She could not only open a gateway at the snap of her fingers, but she could open multiple gateways at once. Maybe it was different with her because she was half celestial and half aziza. She had magic from both sides. I had to up my game.

“I’ve got this,” I said, hyping myself.

As I tightened my grip on the staff, the symbols glowed one by one against the morning fog: the sun, a leopard with raised paws, and a river. I am the guardian of the veil. Sometimes I didn’t feel like a guardian, not when I had unknowingly let the Lord of Shadows trick me into permanently damaging the only thing that protected our world from his wrath.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy,” I said to the staff, and it glowed ever brighter as the other symbols began to pulse. “But I can’t always rely on you to channel my powers.” Like my math teacher, Ms. Vanderbilt, would say, Practice makes perfect. Though she was talking about algebra, it was time to put that to the test.

I set the staff on the porch, in a spot safe from the snow. The wind whipped across my face, and my teeth chattered, but I pushed that distraction aside. I focused on the space between the backyard and the garage. “It’s now or never.”

There were two ways to travel across great distances. One was via a gateway, which made the speed of light seem like moving in slow motion. You could get to places fast, but not instantly. If I wanted to get from point A, let’s say the backyard, to point B, let’s say Azur, at almost the exact same moment in time, I needed a wormhole. A wormhole bent space like folding a sheet of paper, so the two points were side by side.

Wormholes were trickier to make because you could accidentally destroy a planet or a whole galaxy if you didn’t know what you were doing. Even Eleni had never tried to bend space. I would be sticking to gateways, thank you very much.