Hour of the Wolf (Schooled in Magic, #29), page 1
Hour of the Wolf
(Schooled in Magic 29)
Christopher G. Nuttall
http://www.chrishanger.net
http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall
https://chrisnuttall.substack.com/
Cover by Brad Fraunfelter
www.BFillustration.com
Contents
Cover Blurb
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One: Emily1
Chapter Two: Emily2
Chapter Three: Emily1
Chapter Four: Emily2
Chapter Five: Emily1
Chapter Six: Emily1
Chapter Seven: Emily1
Chapter Eight: Emily1
Chapter Nine: Emily1
Chapter Ten: Emily1
Chapter Eleven: Emily1
Chapter Twelve: Emily1
Chapter Thirteen: Emily1
Chapter Fourteen: Emily1
Chapter Fifteen: Emily1
Chapter Sixteen: Emily1
Chapter Seventeen: Emily1
Chapter Eighteen: Emily1
Chapter Nineteen: Emily1
Chapter Twenty: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-One: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Two: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Three: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Four: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Five: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Six: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Emily1
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Emily1
Chapter Thirty: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-One: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Two: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Three: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Four: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Five: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Six: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Emily2
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Emily1
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Emily2/1
Chapter Forty: Emily1
Afterword
Appendix: Emile (Male Emily)
Appendix: Slave Emily
Appendix: Empress Emily
Appendix: Necromancer Emily
Appendix: Technomage Emily
Appendix: A Few Notes on The Multiverse and Relationships Between Universes
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Cover Blurb
Emily has failed.
The world she knows is gone. The multiverse itself is becoming a playground of a mad god, a once-human monster so powerful that reality itself is breaking under his gaze and all timelines are collapsing into one. Existence as we know it is over. If the mad god is not stopped, the multiverse will simply cease to be. But how can one kill a god?
Spilt in two, trapped in her worst nightmare and frozen in a single moment of time, Emily is reality’s only hope. But as she hops from timeline to timeline, meeting strangers wearing familiar faces and travelling across worlds very different to the one she knows in a desperate bid to gather the knowledge and resources she needs to stop a god, she is pursued by a creature out of myth ...
And a nightmare that has walked beside her from her very first day of magic.
Author’s Note
As you may recall, at the end of Wolf in the Fold, Emily bilocated herself, with one Emily falling into Master Wolfe’s hands and the other being trapped in a nexus point. I have referred to the first Emily as Emily1 in the chapter headings and the second as Emily2.
These are not the only Emilys. As you read this book, you will encounter others. To reduce confusion as much as possible, I have attempted to refer to them by their titles: for example, Technomage Emily. I hope it makes sense.
Thank you for your time.
CGN.
Prologue
Master Wolfe giggled.
His awareness expanded, his mind expanding with it until he could see – and comprehend – the vastness of the multiverse laid out before him. Timelines rose and fell, mighty empires came and went in the blink of an eye; he saw giant superclusters of galaxies whirling around the centre of their universe and tiny subatomic particles, each so tiny they couldn’t be so much as perceived by anything less than a godlike being, spinning in precise formations that were both random chance and perfectly planned. The secrets of the cosmic all were laid bare before him, from the petty concerns of tiny little mortals to the immense thoughts and feelings of immortal transcendent entities. An infinity of voices ran through his mind, the thoughts of an infinity of living beings, each one real and singular and yet blurring together into an immensity that even he had difficulty comprehending. Nothing in his experience, from the day he’d become an entity of pure magic to the final challenger he’d absorbed into his multiplicity, granting the honour of eternal life as part of his very soul, had prepared him for being a god. He was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. He was ...
The power pulsed around him, an endless sea of raw energy that was magic and science and so much more. He’d thought he would become a god, a creature of raw magic in truth, but instead he was so much more. The timelines hardened every time he looked at them, randomness itself breaking under his gaze. He stared and everything solidified, billions upon billions of potential possibilities collapsing into one; he blinked, for a space of time so tiny even he had trouble measuring it, and the uncertainties rose up to overwhelm him once again. He could see everything. He defined reality merely by existing. He was all-powerful and yet he was trapped and ...
He could make a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He could lift it regardless.
His mind pulsed as it slipped into the universe, into the quantum foam underpinning the multiverse. He’d been so small, he realised dully, despite all the minds he’d absolved into his multiplicity. He’d thought himself the lord and master of all, ruler of everything he surveyed, and yet he’d been little more than the monarch of a tiny island, unaware of the vast empires surrounding his little realm. He saw himself as a tiny scuttling thing, trapped in a puddle on a beach, unaware of the ocean only a few short metres away. Waves rolled across the beach, upending everything ... his mind was swept up, the power threatening to overwhelm him once again. The sheer immensity of the cosmic all daunted him, terrified him. He wanted to pull back, to drag himself free as a swimmer might escape currents dragging him out to sea, but it was already too late. He was a newborn butterfly with godlike powers, unable to return to the cocoon. He was ...
Timelines pulsed around him, the wreckage of the former universe trapped in a flicker of time. It was fragile ... it struck him, suddenly, that the entire universe was far more fragile than he’d ever realised. His mere presence, his omniscience, was threatening to collapse the entire multiverse into nothing. He’d wondered, over the long centuries between his first meeting with Emily and the last, why so many transdimensional creatures only extruded tiny aspects of themselves into the human realm. He knew now. They could be trapped, caught within the material universe, or they could do immense damage merely by existing. They would be ...
Emily.
A ripple of discontent, of unease, ran through his mind ... and the multiverse. Everyone shivered helplessly; children screamed in the night, adults flinching helplessly though there was no cause. Random events flowered into life, great sweeping cancers of unreality that came and went so quickly few ever realised what happened, even when they recovered from the aftershocks; entire galaxies blinked out of existence, stars and their orbiting planets vanishing so completely they’d never existed at all. The entity barely noticed. Something was wrong ...
Emily.
A shock ran through the ever-expanding multiplicity. Emily had done something ... no. Emily was a prisoner, in a hell he’d made for her personally. She was there ...
No. She was missing. She was nowhere to be found.
The contradiction battered his mind. There was no longer any such thing as randomness, not to him; there was nothing that could be concealed from him. He didn’t have to look to know everything; he already knew everything. And yet, he didn’t know Emily. She was in two places at once. She was concealed within the cracks in the universe, in the Roads of Happenstance that linked timelines together; she was ... he felt a surge of pure anger, entire universes evaporating under his rage, as he realised she’d done something clever. She’d concealed herself so cleverly that he couldn’t find her, which meant ...
He was a god. He could do anything. And yet ...
His rage stilled, his thoughts calming. She had hidden herself in the one place he couldn’t see, the one place he couldn’t touch without undoing himself. Clever, he acknowledged sourly, clever and futile. She was an insect – less than an insect – against his immensity. She could do nothing but hide as he pulled on the strings of the multiverse, reshaping the cosmic all into something more suitable for his majesty. She was nothing ... and yet, he feared. An insect could sting, an insect could bite ... an insect could kill. The fact she was difficult, almost impossible, for even an omniscient being like himself to see ...
He narrowed his thoughts to a cold hardness that bent the universe to his will. He needed an agent, someone who could go where he could not. He needed a servant and he knew just where to find one. The ultimate enemy for Emily and the ultimate ally for himself. He had all the time in th e universe to find her, all the time he needed to destroy her ... a knot of time and space started to form around him, within him. He would reshape the universe to suit himself, once and for all, and then the real work would begun.
He would not rule the multiverse. He would be the multiverse.
And all creation would bear his name.
Soon.
Chapter One: Emily1
“It’s time to close, my dear.”
Emily barely noticed the librarian, a kindly older woman who had seen too much in her life to be wholly trusting of anything, as the world seemed to shift around her. The library was reassuringly solid, rows upon rows of bookshelves heaving under the weight of countless books, and yet her reality suddenly felt fragile, as if everything rested on a knife edge. Her legs trembled under her, as if they were about to send her plummeting to the floor; her body felt wrong, as if it were no longer truly hers. Sweat prickled on her forehead, a wave of fever running through her mind ... she caught hold of the book trolley, clinging onto its reassuring solidity until the disorientation passed. Everything felt wrong ...
“You look unwell,” the librarian said. Her tone was ... wrong. Not concern, but ... certainty. She spoke the truth. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”
Emily looked up. The librarian looked ... cold and calculating and yet ... Emily blinked and the vision was gone, the kindly old lady returning so quickly it was hard to convince herself she hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it was nothing more than her imagination. She didn’t feel well ... perhaps she was coming down with a cold. Or something worse. Her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything for ... hours. There was nothing to eat in the library. She would have to go home.
“I don’t think so,” she managed. Her memories were a jumbled mess. She’d barely had any sleep last night, her mother had been sick and her stepfather ... her skin crawled as he recalled his eyes leaving trails of slime all over her body, as thin and scrawny as it was. The bastard was back home, waiting for her ... she felt her gorge starting to rise and swallowed hard. Perhaps she was coming down with something. “I just ...”
The librarian turned away. “You’d best be off,” she said, curtly. “I’ll see you whenever.”
Emily nodded and forced herself to start walking towards the door. The library was nearly empty now, the remaining patrons making their way back home. Kids and adults, people with loving homes and people who had nowhere else to go ... she caught the eye of a man she knew to be homeless and shuddered inwardly, seeing her fate in his eyes. She wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the family home once she turned eighteen, she was sure, and she had no idea where she would go. There was no hope of college, no hope of finding a decent place to live ... there was little hope, even, of finding a job. Her life was over and yet it felt as if it would never end.
She paused in front of the mirror by the door, staring at herself. She was thin, her baggy sweater and ill-fitting jeans covering everything and yet not covering enough ... her brown hair hung around her face in unkempt ringlets, a reminder she hadn’t had time to wash it recently. If her stepfather went out on the weekend, doing whatever he did when he wasn’t at home, she’d wash it ... she sighed as she studied her pale complexion, feeling almost as if she were staring at a stranger. It wasn’t her face ...
Emily blinked. Another woman was staring back at her, a strong confident woman with long brown hair framing an elegant face, wearing a blue dress that flattered her curves without revealing anything below the neckline. She held a device in one hand, an odd mechanical wand, and her other hand ... light sparkled around her fingertips, a trick of the light that Emily knew was nothing of the sort. She wasn’t so much beautiful as she was ... Emily didn’t know how to put it into words. The stranger was strong and confident and everything Emily had ever wanted to be.
She blinked, again. The vision was gone. Her face stared back at her.
Tears prickled in the corner of her eyes. She wiped them away, an immense sense of loss sweeping over her. Images flickered through her mind, a beautiful blonde girl, a handsome young man leaning down to kiss her ... her lips tingled, as if someone truly had brushed their lips against hers, the feeling vanishing as quickly as it had come. She was imagining it, trying to lose herself in fantasy ... a world in which she went to Hogwarts or Cackles or one of a hundred other magical schools, a world where she was something special, a world where she had friends and a life and a future and ... she found herself on her knees, without quite recalling how she’d gotten there. The sense of loss was overpowering. She wanted to close her eyes and pretend ...
No. She forced herself to stand, brushing the hair out of her eyes. There’s no point in pretence.
The air outside was cold, stinking of cars and cigarettes and all the other horrors of modern life. She heard the librarian lock the door behind her, another sense of loss and bitterness flowing through her as she trudged home. The street felt drab, the handful of open shops badly outnumbered by boarded-up establishments that had been closed since time out of mind, their faded signs and posts blurring together into a grey post-urban nightmare. A handful of people were visible, trapped in their own moments of quiet desperation, but she felt alone. No one paid any attention to her as she walked past a bar, music echoing through the air as the patrons drank and gambled away their paychecks before stumbling home. Her mother and stepfather had argued, more than once, about his gambling ... Emily shuddered, helplessly, as she recalled hiding in her room as they screamed at each other. It had been a nightmare and yet ...
Her heart twisted as she passed a pair of prostitutes, the middle-aged women drinking and smoking as they waited for their first customers. Was that the fate that awaited her, when she was kicked out of house and home? The women probably weren’t that old, but they looked old enough to be her mother, their bodies worn down by drugs and alcohol and abuse from their pimps and johns. There were all sorts of horror stories about teenage schoolgirls selling themselves, whispered rumours passed from girl to girl in the locker room ... Emily didn’t want to believe the stories, yet there was a part of her that feared they were true. She understood, better than she cared to admit. If someone offered her a way out of the nightmare her life had become, or even just enough money to forget the nightmare for a few short hours, she knew she would be tempted. There was no point in denying it.
She glanced into a shop window and froze. A girl was looking back at her, a girl around the same age as she was with long black pigtails and ... a thrill of recognition shot through her, banished a second later as it dawned on her she didn’t know the girl. She was a stranger, a very familiar stranger ... Emily’s head spun, her knees threatening to buckle again. She was going mad. She had to be. She was being haunted by visions out of her fantasies ...
Her heart twisted as she forced herself to keep walking. The world felt weird, as if it was changing around her ... she had the sudden sense she was the centre of the world, an actress on a stage mouthing her lines as the scenery changed around her. She wondered, suddenly, if the street outside her vision even existed, the thought coming and going so quickly she knew she was being silly. She was no main character, not even an Non-Player-Character. The world would exist with or without her, the universe never noticing her comings and goings. She would live and die in a world she hated, surrounded by wealth and power she would never touch ... a land of boundless opportunity she’d never be able to access.
She would never be important. Never.
She heard someone laugh in the distance, a sound that sent chills down her spine. Chad and his friends, teenage boys whose names she had never bothered to learn ... jocks and bullies and outright jackasses, young men with a reputation for touching girls or lifting their skirts or molesting them in other ways, men who got away with it because they were good at sports or simply too big and strong for the teachers to challenge. Her cheeks flushed with shame as she turned, ducking down the alleyway to escape before they caught sight of her. She hated being so weak, hated being unable to stand up to Chad or her stepfather or every other vile creature in her life ... hated it. She wanted to blast them to atoms, but how could she? She was weak and powerless and ...
