But the page was beginning to open up—like tightly furled buds the words began to bloom and reveal the ideas locked inside them. The concepts unfolded for him, displaying hidden dimensions and interacting with one another in unexpected ways. As they took shape they also gave up clues as to the much larger, more shadowy whole of which they were just a tiny fragment: the book that the page came from. It appeared to be a treatise on the interactions between magic and matter.

On Earth, magic and matter were distinct things: you could cast a spell on an object, and it became enchanted, but the object and the spell remained separate entities—the object was like a piece of metal on which you’d put a magnetic charge. But in Fillory, Quentin knew, or at least strongly suspected, magic and thing were somehow one and the same. Magic existed on Earth, sure, but Fillory was magic. It was a fundamental difference.

This was all very theoretical, and Quentin wasn’t that into theory. He was still a Physical Kid at heart, and he was more into practice. Under the right conditions, with enough energy, could you make something on Earth magic? Infuse it with magic, melt them together till the seams were gone, like they were in Fillory? It felt like a forbidden idea, a boundary you weren’t supposed to cross, but it was too delicious not to at least try.

He requisitioned an empty basement lab, but even with his newly enhanced magical abilities it was difficult to force the delicate abstractions of the page into the crude actual world. Either he came up with nothing, or one of the spells would release a huge wad of energy that lit up the room with icy blue light and practically blew out the wards he’d set up to keep himself from being vaporized. As a precaution he worked the enchantments inside increasingly large, heavy, gluey globes of force, like bubbles blown from a thick viscous translucent liquid, which made it hard to tell what exactly was going on.

And what would he do with it anyway, even if it did work? What good was something magic? This was a powerful enchantment, but it needed a purpose. It was an answer in search of a question. He was getting older, and it was time he thought about making something, building something that would last. But what? He couldn’t see how this was getting him any closer.