The hood fell away. The moon whispered out of the clouds overhead and threw a soft, pale light over both of them.

Jess’s lips parted and he let go, because the girl facing him, the girl he’d almost killed, was Morgan Hault.

EPHEMERA

From On Further Nature of the Elements, a late work of the great Archimedes, collected from that master Scholar in the first years of the Great Library. Available on the Codex.

I have many times been asked to explain the nature of the divine fluid of quintessence, the unseen barrier through which all things must pass to change form. I direct your study to the minerals of the earth. The baser metals are found below the surface, in the darkness and silence, and are lumpen and unformed. The finer metals and minerals—silver, gold, all precious ores and gems—are found in an organic structure of life. They grow, treelike, slowly through many years, rising up through the invisible richness of quintessence, and are transmuted from the base to the precious as they rise toward heaven.

All things live. That which begins as inorganic becomes organic through the divine power of quintessence. And so we must learn to control this unknowable element, to discover how to make metals, minerals, the organic and inorganic alike transmute and transfigure, above and below the earth.

This knowledge is obscure, but it must be sought. It must be codified, taught, and revered, for only through this great work will the secrets of the world be revealed.

And those who seek it, I call Obscurists, who will cast the light of quintessence upon the darkness.

Let us now discuss how the principle of First Matter may be used to create new forms, with the help and guidance of the gods.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Morgan seemed too pale, he thought, and at the same time she seemed ethereally beautiful. Her unpinned hair cascaded down over her shoulders in messy, springy curls, and she was dressed in a plain dark dress that reached down to the tops of leather boots. The only jewelry she wore glittered in the moonlight: the gaudy, engraved collar that circled her throat. The golden collar of an Obscurist.

He dropped his knife to his side and wanted badly to put his arms around her; everything in him said it was the right thing to do.

But he knew it was wrong from the tension in her body, the flash in her eyes. Still, for one dizzying instant he imagined holding her and kissing her, and the feeling of her lips under his seemed as real as breath. The smell of her, roses and spices, washed over him in a flood.

Jess took an indrawn breath that seemed to fill him with her presence, her reality.

“You’re here,” he said. “You’re really . . . here.” It seemed impossible. No, it was impossible, by any imagining; she couldn’t leave the Iron Tower. If she could have, surely she’d have run away, not come here.