And then—just like that, in that moment of confusion, surprise, and sharp awareness—you lose him. Todd Cartwright, with his extraordinary natural sense for magic, trained not in a classroom but in four decades of practical work, is old and strong and deep in the heart of this place. It was his territory first. You are not the only being ever to look at Chetwood School and decide to stake your self entire on There is something good here, there is something worth having, and I have claimed it for my own.

Todd knows what is happening at Chetwood now. He will not unknow it again. You must either accept this threat to your power or destroy him utterly. Hairline fractures will appear through the middle of your new-forged selfhood either way.

“I was there when we dragged her out of Old Faithful’s teeth the first time,” he says, wasting no time on amazement or horror at the revelation he just experienced. “She was a good kid, you know. You don’t forget the good kids. Think you’ll get her out alive?”

“I don’t know,” says Kenning. “I’m going to try.”

“Where’s your squad?”

“They wouldn’t get her out alive,” Kenning says. “Too difficult. Marshals prioritise the innocent bystanders, not the magician who caused the problem.” A faint grimace. The Marshals, as a matter of policy, are probably right. If your sworn duty is to defend the mortal world from demons, you are not obliged to feel much sympathy for those people who—intentionally or not—go around poking demons with sticks. Kenning herself does not feel a great deal of sympathy for the predicament of a possessed magician. She is acting against her own principles tonight. The trap of human feeling works as well on a mortal will as a demonic one.

“What do you need me to do?” says the old man.

“It’s got itself in deep,” Kenning says. “Something that big needs a big system to live in.”

“It’s got the whole bloody school,” says Todd. “That’s its system.”

What you actually have is several intersecting layers of complex identity-shaped spaces, one of which is—of course—the blood and bone and water and meat of Sapphire Walden’s body; another is the mental construction, I, which she has spent nearly forty years building out of personal history and social class and multiple university degrees; a third, as Todd has immediately perceived, is the highly regulated and coherent physical-social-historical institution of Chetwood School—unprecedented, for a demon to possess something so abstract, but you are not an ordinary demon, and you know very well that abstracts are still real. A fourth space you have made for yourself, for good measure, is knotted all the way through the almost absurdly welcoming tangle of mechano-magical protections built by well-intentioned Victorians to keep you out.