1st 5 Pages March Workshop - Ziegler

Name: Allison Ziegler
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Title: Aeternium

The afternoon sun barely cuts through the coal-smoke sky above Allegheny City. All is bathed in a yellow, gaslight glow. Spidery Crawlers whistle with white steam as they drag trundling carriages down city streets on eight clink-clanking legs. They carry the city’s elite—cinch-waist ladies and coat-tail gentlemen who can afford such luxuries as travel by Crawler-drawn carriage. The trolley squeals by, full to the brim with less fortunate commuters, their arms and faces sprouting from the windows of the cable-bound car. On the sidewalk, newsboys shout in short trousers and low hats. Men laugh, women chatter, people argue and shout.

Hazel Congelier darts through a liquid mass of people. She sneaks a glance at her pocket watch—three forty-six. You’re late! the delicate hands whisper. She quickens her tap-tap-tapping feet just a little, woolen skirt swinging around her booted ankles. She isn’t terribly concerned about her lateness, but her master will be. An inky-black cat of delicate proportions weaves between rushing legs. He matches Hazel’s pace.

Hazel ducks into a gateway at the center of the busy block, pushing her way past a gaggle of well-dressed working girls and into the relative calm of the alleyway. Three doors down, three doors down. Knock three times, use the spell. One, two, three. Hazel stops at a white door in chip-paint disrepair, nestled in a vestibule safe from prying eyes. It is one of many secret doors. They are scattered across the city, but they all lead to the same place. Magic has little regard for geography.

Hazel’s diminutive feline shadow watches her as she roots through her shoulder bag. She produces a rumpled sheet of paper with a single word written on the page—“open.”

At least, it would look like a single word to most people. To Hazel, there are swirls of visible energy woven into ink and paper, a framework for a spell. Her fingers run over the page, and sparks fly from her fingertips to her wrists, tracing golden pathways over her freckled hands. It’s a passive reaction, born of the crackling magic that a spell caster ignites in the spells that are so ready to magnify it. This single-page spell is a tiny, flimsy thing, nothing like the massive, ancient tome that her master uses. This is a toy for a silly girl not yet empowered with a book of her own, a toy that she didn’t even make herself. Hazel knows the Church wouldn’t find it so insignificant if they caught her using it. She glances over her puff-sleeve shoulder, half expecting a hulking police officer or red-face priest to stare at her from the entrance of the alleyway.

There is no one. Hazel is safe.

The cat watches her expectantly. His name is Soren, and he is Hazel’s familiar. Their illicit partnership is the reason Hazel can do magic, the reason sparks fly from her fingertips, the reason she will be able to go through this white door. All of the energy needed for casting spells buzzes between them. It makes her a target. It also makes her powerful, or at least potentially so. Hazel has never felt particularly powerful, not in the way that makes Sunday morning church-goers quake in fear.

Hurry, Soren says. We’re late.

Soren hates to be late. Hazel is almost never on time. It’s a point of friction between them.

She grabs at the magic that hovers over her bond with Soren, and the letters on the page glow yellow, casting opaque light into the sooty shadows of the afternoon alleyway. Hazel raps the door three times and takes three…deep…breaths.

“Open,” she says. The world goes black for a split second, and Hazel wills the spell to take shape. In an instant, it’s over. The door opens, and Hazel steps through.

She finds herself on the other side of reality, faced with an indoor bazaar, a hidden city in miniature for the fantastic and wonderful and magical things that the outside world has declared undeniably and wholly evil. Dozens of tents and makeshift structures line the walls and make cramped alleyways, stacked three high in the empty warehouse. Each one is a shop or a residence or a simple meeting place. Dancing, self-suspended fireballs cast merry light across the wooden walkways and colorful awnings and hodgepodge ladders that fill the space. The air here is clean, and the magic users and familiars that roam its creaky corners breathe deeply and speak freely.

A large wooden sign, hanging on the nearest second-story platform, reads “A SANCTUARY FOR FAMILIARED CITIZENS.” Hazel grins broadly and takes a moment to absorb this place, called simply “Sanctuary” by those in the know. She’s been here before, on a visit to the city. That was four years ago. Four schools ago, four homes ago, four lifetimes ago. Or is it five? The various lives and identities of Hazel Congelier blend a little at the edges lately. She’s beginning to believe all those lives add up to one life, all those Hazels add up to one Hazel. All of the transitions and changes are just punctuation in her story. Maybe. She’s not sure.

We’re late, Soren reminds Hazel. This is no time for sightseeing or philosophy.

Hazel bites back her irritation. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t mean she has to like his rushing—or his prying into her thoughts. He has a bad habit of occupying the corridors of her mind when she would rather he stayed firmly in his own skull. Especially since Hazel has great trouble poking around his mind at all. He is a mystery and she is an open book—Hazel finds she gets the poor end of the juxtaposition.

Still, Hazel brushes past a hook-nose crone with a saleswoman smile and her hawk familiar with a talon full of talismans. A group of pinstripe-suit men wave wands and pull scarves out of hats, and she ignores them, too. A pair of identical, salt-and-pepper women with identical small-white-dogs stand at mirror image stalls, one labeled “Magical Remedies,” and the second labeled “Magical Maladies.” Hazel sweeps by them, despite her curiosity, despite her tendency to stop and watch and linger. She’s late, after all, and Soren has just become annoying enough for her to care about punctuality.

So Hazel picks her way to the back of Sanctuary’s ground floor, all the way to the largest structure in this warehouse city. There, a bricked and fully roofed building stands beside all the slap-dash civilization that surrounds it. On its front is a massive mural, painted in blinding-bright colors. In it, a dragon waltzes in a rumple-front ball gown with a monocled turtle, each holding massive mugs of frothy beer. The top reads thusly:

THE DRUNKEN DRAGON: FOR WHEN A TIPSY TURTLE JUST ISN’T ENOUGH

I forgot how garish it was, Soren says. He bristles as they walk through the door. He doesn’t trust whimsy.