Ms. Joanna only smiled harder. This close, Emrys could see it failed to reach her eyes.

“I can’t believe she took my phone,” said Emrys. “Now I have to go all the way back to the portables after school.”

“If it makes you feel better, she’s a more competent disciplinarian than history teacher,” Van Stavern told him. “Her grasp of the Civil War seems rudimentary, at best.”

“How do you know that? Wait.” Emrys gasped. “Were you there?”

“Of course not!” snapped Van Stavern. “Just how old do you think I am?”

It was lunch period, and Hazel had decided to visit the media center to brush up on the periodic table. She hadn’t managed to tap into her relic’s transmutation abilities yet and seemed to think that studying chemistry would help. Emrys confessed he would rather do anything but that, so Van Stavern had suggested Emrys find a private spot where they could speak freely. Emrys had settled on the third-floor boys’ room. Nobody used this restroom if they could help it, and those who did avoided the far mirror, which was broken. It had been fixed at least twice, only to immediately break in the same spiderweb pattern. The custodial staff suspected students were to blame. The students had their own suspicions.

“You take me to the nicest places,” said Van Stavern, the spell book’s disguise abandoned as Emrys lifted it from his tote. “But this will do. With our Order diminished, the Yellow Court is sure to be emboldened—and they weren’t exactly meek before. We’d best begin your education here and now.”

Emrys’s eyes bugged out. “You mean magic?” he said. “Are you going to teach me a spell?”

“Of a sort,” answered the book. “Most spell work involves specific components and a bit of light math—”

“Aw, math?!” complained Emrys.

“But!” continued Van Stavern. “We’ll begin with a simple invocation. Something any initiate in the Order can achieve, whether or not they have any inclination for the profane geometries. Set me down, would you? If you can find a suitable surface …”

Emrys balanced the book on the edge of a sink. As he watched, awestruck, the Atlas opened of its own accord. Its pages turned as if caught in a stiff wind, quickly at first, then slowing to a stop, presumably on the page Van Stavern wanted him to see.

“Look here,” said the book. “The incantation you’ll need is right near the center of the verso page, set apart from the rest of the text.”

“Verso?” echoed Emrys.

“The left,” said Van Stavern.

“That … doesn’t even look like it’s in English.”

“It isn’t,” the book scoffed. “The forces with which the Order concerns itself are a far sight older than the English language. But you needn’t worry, I’ll guide you through it. First, set your hands upon the door over there. That’s a janitorial closet, correct? You may touch the handle or the door itself; it doesn’t matter.”

“Like this?” asked Emrys, gripping the door handle.

“Now, repeat after me,” said Van Stavern. “Ostiarius.”

“Ostiarius,” Emrys repeated, and he thought he felt a sudden breeze. He turned to look, careful to keep his hand in place. Aside from the talking book, there was nothing unusual in view. Just my imagination.

“Aperi,” said the book.

“Aperi.” Now Emrys knew he felt something, but it was almost impossible to put into words. He felt a sense of … opening. Or anticipation. Like he was in the middle of telling a joke, and the universe itself had stopped to listen, holding its breath for the promised punchline.

Van Stavern finished: “Portam.”

“Portam,” he said, and the strange sensation he’d felt before snapped away. In its wake, he felt a faint buzzing behind his right eye, and gooseflesh all along his arms.

“Go on,” said Van Stavern. “Don’t lose your nerve now. Open the door.”

Emrys turned the doorknob and pulled open the door. The closet was gone. In its place was the Blue Reliquary.

“No way,” Emrys whispered. He stuck his hand inside, then ventured a single foot over the threshold. “It isn’t an illusion?”

“Nothing so tawdry as that,” said Van Stavern. “As I told you before, the Blue Reliquary is a sanctuary to the Order—and the Order is you. Immediate access to the place can be the difference between life and …” Emrys turned to look at the book. “Well. It’s important that you’re able to access the reliquary at all times. And that incantation allows you to do just that. Anywhere you find a door, you can find an entrance.”

“Watch the doors,” Emrys mumbled, remembering the ominous line at the end of the Doomsday Archives Wiki page. Did that have something to do with this?

“What’s that?” asked Van Stavern.

“Nothing,” said Emrys. “It’s just, this is totally unreal. Hazel is going to flip!”

“So long as you keep it between the two of you,” said Van Stavern. “As you can imagine, this particular incantation lists high among the Order’s most sacred secrets. It is meant only for those initiated into our mysteries, and has been jealously guarded over the centuries, a privileged secret shared from one member to the next over the course of—young man, are you writing the Order’s incantatory arcanum onto your arm with a Sharpie?”

“No!” Emrys said, quickly lowering his marker. “Well, yes. I mean, it’s a lot to remember.”

“You’re the one who wanted to learn ‘magic,’ as you put it.” Van Stavern tutted. “So learn.”

Emrys shut the door. He expected the dull throb behind his eye to shut with it, but the discomfort persisted. It even grew. “Ow,” he said. “Is there—do I need to do something else to end the spell, or …?”

He opened the door again. The Blue Reliquary was gone. In its place was a standard janitorial closet, with paper products and a mop and … was that sand?

Red sand, it looked like, pooled on the closet floor like a bloodstain.

“I don’t feel so good,” said Emrys. He turned to the nearest sink, splashing his face with water. He looked up, intending to get a look at himself in the mirror.

But the mirror was broken. Cracked into jagged shards, like a serrated spider’s web.

And the dead-eyed face that looked back at Emrys wasn’t his.

The Shadow in the Mirror

From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project

When Gwendoline O’Rear first saw the shadow in the mirror, she thought it a trick of the light. A New Rotterdam teenager in the summer of 1954, she’d been brushing her hair in her powder room, scrutinizing her reflection for the day ahead. As she finished, Gwen stepped away to greet her family, but something made her turn back. There she saw a dark outline in the mirror, right where she’d been standing, as if her reflection had left a residue against the glass. She rubbed her eyes, and the shape disappeared.

“A curious optical illusion,” she wrote in her diary later that week. “At least I thought so. Then it kept reappearing.” Her diary describes the shadow turning up several more times over the week, and then the weeks to come. Always in her powder room mirror. Each time, it lingered a bit longer, its edges growing sharper. Though Gwen knew she should be disturbed by the apparition, she wrote of a strange fascination with it.

Such subtle colors shift within its boundaries, like an oil slick catching the light! I find them soothing. They distract me from the dolor of this monotonous life, from my endlessly needful family and the judging gazes of the other girls at school. Today it waved as I left, as if we were two bosom friends departing. Gwendoline O’Rear’s Diary, 1954