“I could hunt anywhere I liked from here, now, couldn’t I?” Edna said. “No assistance necessary. And so many interesting bric-a-bracs.” Her voice was disturbingly hollow—a wide glass jar that had been gradually emptied and was now ready for refilling.

“Okay,” Serena said softly. “Okay. No more panic. No more running.”

Emrys glanced at his friend. The fear had finally left Serena’s expression, replaced by a look he liked even less.

“I’m sorry, Emrys,” Serena murmured. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “For everything. Maybe if I’d just accepted all this from the beginning, things would have been different.”

Emrys followed her gaze to the glittering shield on its pedestal—the relic she’d been studying the night before. He felt her posture shift as she prepared to run for it.

“No,” Emrys rasped, shaking his head and tightening his grip. “Serena, no. Don’t let go. I can’t help you if you let go!”

“Always trying to help the unhelpable,” Serena said with a sigh. “It’s your most annoying quality.”

But when her eyes finally found his, they were bright with tears.

“Tell Hazel I didn’t make it easy.”

“SERENA, N—”

The world distended again, time swelling as Serena wrenched herself free of his grip. Emrys’s plea stretched like starlight crossing the cold expanse of the universe, a pinpoint of heat and brilliance pulled so taut it lost its shape. Its purpose.

The plea floated listlessly, suspended in a frozen infinity.

Until, as a hand latched hard onto his ankle, time snapped violently back into place.

“—OHHH!”

Emrys was wrenched from his feet, his head cracking against the reliquary’s marble floor. The world exploded into a white-hot supernova of pain, Emrys’s field of vision suddenly full of shimmering stars.

The reliquary had changed.

Many of the plinths were toppled, their dangerous artifacts spilled haphazardly across the floor. The rug at the center of the sitting space now appeared to be on fire, and the warm, comfortable hues of the room were replaced by flickering shadows.

Emrys’s head swam. His eyes barely caught a hazy shape in the background. An enormous pale mouth opened wider than any human mouth should, and inside it …

Inside it …!

“EMRYS!”

Emrys realized that someone was screaming his name—had been screaming it this whole time. His eyes focused on Serena: on her fearful gaze, and the hand gripping his ankle, and the legs that were half-swallowed by a gigantic gullet now writhing from the darkness.

His eyes unfocused again. His head hurt so much. As his thoughts spun, he caught glimpses of the reliquary: a toppled bookshelf, an oaken table scored by flames, and above it all, a pristine hourglass untouched by the carnage. Slowly counting—slowly, slowly.

Emrys raised his hand toward the hourglass, as if he might grasp it from even this far.

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t focus.

You have an unquiet mind.

Serena! Serena needed him! But what could he do for her? He wasn’t a sorcerer. He couldn’t speak ancient languages or calculate otherworldly equations. He was just a weird kid who’d stumbled onto a facet of the world that was so much bigger and darker than even he’d ever dreamed of.

That word again.

The weird is ours to wield.

“EMRYS!”

Serena screamed his name again. She was being eaten alive and there was nothing he could …

It wants to tell a story—a strange story—and true mastery is just about letting it tell that story through you.

The stars twinkling in Emrys’s field of vision began to stretch, pulling into glittering strands that hung in the air like smoldering spiderwebs.

Wield the weird.

Wield the weird.

The phrase looped through Emrys’s addled thoughts, again and again. Slowly, he realized he wasn’t just thinking the words—he was saying them, unconsciously repeating the phrase like a mantra …

“Wield … the … weird.”

Or like an incantation.

All across the room, the glittering strands shivered with excitement. Something was coming—they sensed it. Something momentous.

“Wield …” Emrys said, his voice heavy with strange authority. He pictured the Atlas and its blinking eye. Willed the relic to help him save his friend.

“ … the …”

The strands brightened. The light was dazzling, ecstatic. Emrys could feel them parting—a curtain pulling wide.

“WEIRD.”

The air between Emrys and the hourglass warped like twisted fabric. It was as if that small weft of reality were just a layer of silk that could be easily swept aside by a deft hand. Alien colors shimmered between its folds, light peering through from some other impossible source. The colors were beautiful and awful—they whispered to Emrys of forbidden questions with terrifying answers. A torrent of eldritch energy poured over the hourglass, tongues of eerie brightness licking the bulbs.

The glass cracked.

As slowly as the red sand poured down, a single line spread up from the lower bulb, across its narrow throat, and toward the golden rim.

Then, with a sound like a hundred voices screaming, the glass shattered. A sea of red sand spilled onto the reliquary’s marble floor. It poured from the broken relic, whipping through the space with the ferocity of a sudden storm until the air was full of crimson whirlwinds. Emrys’s spell and its strange energies were completely consumed.

Now there truly was screaming, he was sure of it. Emrys saw bizarre figures rising in the storm, dozens of humanoid shapes molded from red sand. They lurched unhurriedly past him, reaching for something or someone beyond his field of vision.

Serena’s grip was yanked from his ankle—but this time the world didn’t stop.

“Serena!” he screamed.

“Emrys!” she called back over the din.