“She blindfolded me for all our lessons. She said that it would help me to learn more quickly. It was a few weeks after starting that she told me that it was time to venture on my first journey to look into that other place.

“By then, of course, after all I had learned—the warnings, the cautions about the smallest mistakes, the grim stories of small things gone horrifically wrong—I was properly terrified.

“Sophia believed in safety through preparation. We drank teas in the morning to cleanse our auras lest they snag on the veil and trap us. We took powerful herbs in the afternoon to dull our senses to the world around us so we would not fail to see the dangers lurking in the dark world. In the evening we began the soft chanting to condition our minds to open. The whole day, of course, in addition to the tea and herbs, we had been laying out spells and conjuring various forms of wards and protections. As the sun went down, we banked the fire. She said that flame was an anchor to this world and that if anything went wrong it could light our way back through the eternal night.”

Isidore lifted an arm, gesturing around the room. “This is the reason, even though I am blind, that there are candles lit in here.” She smiled just a bit. “That, and of course so that others don’t stumble and fall on me.”

Magda wasn’t able to appreciate the humor. “So once you were ready, then what?”

“Sophia had me cut my finger and use blood to draw a Grace around where we were to sit on the floor before the hearth.”

Though Magda was not gifted, she had certainly spent a lot of time around the gifted. She had also been married to the First Wizard. She knew full well the significance of drawing a Grace in blood. A Grace connected Creation, the world of life, and the world of the dead via pathways of magic.

“I remember that it was an overcast, windy night, and dark as pitch,” Isidore said in a tone half to herself, as if drifting back to that night. “The black world outside the two tiny windows of Sophia’s home seemed foreboding and oppressive.”

Isidore looked to be trying to return from her haunting memory. She paused to wave a dismissive hand. “None of the details would matter to you. Not being gifted, you likely wouldn’t understand most of it anyway. The important thing is that we had to invoke the darkest forms of magic to summon up the darkness of the underworld. Then we drew spells with Subtractive threads that brought about the parting.”

“The parting?”

“In the veil to the underworld,” she managed with difficulty.