A blast of force. Laura is thrown backwards and lands hard on her side—oof. She instinctively throws her arm up to shield her head from the obvious next move, the incoming deathblow.

Nothing happens. On the other side of this burning ground, you are scrabbling frantically through your pockets for your mobile phone. You never go anywhere without it—you can’t possibly have left it—

No, here it is. With an act of will you sharpen your own canine teeth to vicious points and tear a fresh gouge in your wrist. Blood spurts over your hand and over the several-years-past-its-best Android phone. The prisoned imp, swollen and overfed, balloons up to third-order size, erupting past the boundaries of its prison. Bloody slime, flecked with glass and fragmented electronics, pours disgustingly out of the touchscreen. You scoop up a handful of the imp’s sudden reification and swallow it whole. The body tries to choke and vomit as you force it down.

(Walden is so appalled by this vile sensory experience that the part of her brain which goes Hmm, what interesting spellwork is switched off completely. A shame. This is quite interesting spellwork.)

“What the fuck,” says Laura. At first she is saying it because she is watching you eat horrible demonical-mechanical blood-and-glass slime. And then it is because she can see the result.

You were holding this spell at arm’s length, pinned through your phone with a useful imp. You had to, because this is something Walden would not do.

Body, mind, institution, machine; these are the systems you inhabit. And a fifth, which is your own creation. A spell that mercilessly exploits someone else to pin yourself into the life you want. It is a cruel and unfair piece of work, but that’s just how the world is. You didn’t make it that way. And you could have used anyone, but you picked a person who—in your opinion—probably deserved it. (Deserve; that is a human concept. Quite a difficult one. You have not fully grasped it yet.)

You consume the imp, and the spell it controlled becomes yours again. Under your feet, the old dead array illuminates. It was built in a vain attempt to contain Old Faithful. Repurposing it saved you some time. You were, after all, in a hurry.

“Jesus,” says Laura, as she parses what she is looking at.

…

(Walden sees: two bodies. One is a withered mummy in faded jeans and a band T-shirt. The tousled mop of hair is starting to flake away from the dead scalp. The hands are curled-up claws. Thankfully, she cannot see his face. He is dead, he is dead. He is twenty years dead and never buried. His death binds her here, and so it binds you here. His death is long over, and it has never ended.