Book 7, Chapter Twenty-five – Into the Pie

The corpse of Preston Avington was gone. His coffin stood empty. Only the pendant remained, lying in a puddle of its own chain on the bottom of the wooden box. Once Pandy had recovered enough to stand on her own, she picked chain and pendant up and stuffed them into the pocket that already held the box containing the Dark stone, glad once again that she’d had Saskia make her pants with such capacious carrying capacity.

Augustus and Isidor had no memory of the corpse rising, or of Pandy entering the other coffin. They remembered walking into the room, and then Pandy was missing, and the mid-sized coffin was closed. Most people wouldn’t have immediately leapt to the conclusion that Pandy was thus inside said coffin, but Augustus knew Pandy quite well by then, and went straight to the oblong box, yanking open the lid.

Empress Glory remained unusually silent throughout Pandy’s rather jumbled explanation, but when it was over, she reached up, her hand seeming to vanish inside her chest for a moment before re-emerging wearing a black glove that giggled nervously and blinked at them from eyeballs that moved with unsettling freedom.

“I think I saw a bit of it,” she said, then hurriedly added, “Not the vision, or whatever it was, but ‘Preston’ climbing from the coffin and you getting into the other one. It… didn’t look the way you’re describing it, though.” She refused to elaborate further, but Pandy noticed that she watched all three of the silent, apparently empty and inanimate coffins with a great deal of wariness, edging ever closer to the hole in the wall.

Out in the hall, all of them could see that the sky was noticeably lighter through the gap created by the dangling front door. Isidor grimaced. “Professor Beeswick told me to have you back by sunrise. I don’t know if we’re going to make it.”

Empress Glory scoffed. “You might not, but I’m exactly where I need to be. Unless,” she turned a surprisingly vulnerable gaze on Pandy, “you want me to just pack up and leave?”

“Never,” Pandy said, with more force than even she’d expected. Her cheeks heated, but she held the other woman’s eyes. “You’re welcome here for as long as you want to stay. You can even have that dress. The white one that you-”

Glory’s beautiful brown eyes widened, and she gave a saucy wink before flipping back her hair. “You can keep it. It’s not my style anyway.” Then, laying the back of her hand against her mouth, she yawned and turned away, heaving up her pack from where she’d dropped it just outside the lab. “Could you do something about the door and… that before you go?” She flipped a hand at the gap in the wall and the debris on the floor, then entered the narrow door leading to her apartment.

Pandy stared at the mess, feeling a bit overwhelmed. She’d always been a renter, for obvious reasons, and she’d had no idea just how much time and money went into maintaining a house. No, well, she had had some idea, since that was usually the reason her landlords cited when they terminated her lease, but still…

With a sigh, she started toward the stairs heading back up to the office, but stopped as something tugged at her awareness. This time, when Nox swirled into view just behind her left shoulder, she was already looking in the right direction, and surely she imagined the faint look of disappointment on his face as he said, “You no longer need the book, my lady. That is a device for heirs and those who have not fully assimilated with their homes.”

Pandy blinked. “So I can just-?” She frowned at a piece of debris, but it stubbornly refused to either float back up into its place or melt away, absorbed back into the house’s resource storage.

Nox gently cleared his throat, looking Meaningfully at Isidor and Augustus, and Pandy sighed again. So it still wasn’t that easy, was it? Augustus and Isidor exchanged a look in their turn, then walked out the front door, both immediately shivering as their breath puffed white in the cold morning air. Once they were gone, Pandy looked back at Nox, who raised his brows expectantly.

Pandy squinted at the front door, more than half-expecting words to appear in the air nearby. No such thing happened, so she waggled a hand in a vaguely magical way and said, “Um, fix the door? With… wood?”

For a long moment, nothing persisted in happening, and then Pandy doubled over as someone dumped a photo album into her head. White doors, black doors, golden doors, doors with embellishments, doors without – they even changed in size and number, with a single double-wide door appearing as an equally valid option. Pandy pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, but the pressure of the images remained, all piled on top of each other as her brain hamsters simply gave up and cowered beneath their wheel.

“Just… make it like it was before it was broken,” Pandy gasped out, and all of the other images fell away, leaving only the dark, rather forbidding slabs of wood that were so familiar from Gacha Love. The gargoyle’s face grimaced at her from the door knocker, and Pandy quickly said, “With a rabbit on it.”

Blinking open damp eyes, Pandy straightened again, staring at the back side of the repaired doors. “There’s no way there’ve been that many doors in just two hundred years,” she told Nox, who was watching with an aura of unflappability that Pandy found mildly offensive at the moment.

“Lord Preston fed many versions of the same fixtures into the house during its construction,” Nox told her. “He wanted to be certain that he and his descendants could alter the house as needed.”

Rubbing her temples with her forefingers, Pandy muttered, “You might have mentioned that before.”

“If you had read through the rest of the Avington House book, you would have found out for yourself,” Nox said, with such a complete lack of recrimination in his voice that it was actually a bit disturbing. Pandy should have taken her commitment to the house more seriously, and spent more time and effort on fixing it up. There just always seemed to be so much to do, and so little time and Mana to do it.

“It’s all right, she’ll learn,” another voice said, and Pandy turned to see someone else watching them. The woman held a platter containing neatly-sliced cheese and what looked like sesame crackers. A cup of something the color and consistency of apple juice sat in a depression that seemed to have been made for it, the glass shining as if it had just been polished.

It was Nyssa, but also not. Beneath the little white cap, her hair was no longer iron-gray, but rather a shade of charcoal that looked like shadows. Her dark eyes danced above round, red cheeks, but she was slightly taller and slimmer, and not only did she have on two shoes, but they matched. “Cheese, dear?” she asked, proffering the platter, and Pandy, not sure what else to do, accepted a slice and popped it into her mouth.

It was delicious. There was nothing funky, moldy, strangely flavored, or non-food-based about it. Cautiously, Pandy picked up a cracker and bit off one corner. It was crispy, flaky, and everything a cracker should be, but hadn’t been, at least in this house. Pandy quickly ate the rest of it, then took another and laid a slice of cheese on top of it. “Fank ‘oo,” she said through a mouthful of crumbs as her stomach rumbled in pleasure.

“Of course,” Nyssa said and smiled, an edge of mischief to what had always before been a somewhat vapid, if kind, expression. “Now, simply imagine the hall the way you want it. It doesn’t have to be the way it was, though Lord Avington always said that was easier.”

Pandy did so, but added a door right in the middle of the broken area. The wall and door didn’t instantly materialize, but a few pictures popped into her head, each of them containing an unblemished wall with one door, two doors, or an open archway.

“What was that room when there was an archway?” Pandy asked, mentally ‘pushing’ that image forward, though she didn’t try to put it in place quite yet. The process was getting easier already, with Pandy beginning to sense which of the options would be easiest to implement… by which she assumed it used the least resources.

“That was when the current dining hall was a ballroom,” Nox said, his stiff posture relaxing slightly. He liked that option, too. “There was a smaller dining room through there.”

“Let’s do that, then,” Pandy said, and the debris in the hallway vanished, absorbed back into the house. Most of the gap in the wall remained, but the wall itself reformed around it, including wide, elegant crown molding that merged with the subtle pillars that framed the sides. It certainly didn’t match the current aesthetic of the house, which was only the ‘shabby’ part of shabby-chic, but Pandy liked it.

Peering through the new archway, Pandy considered the lab, then imagined all of the scattered debris disappearing. The room immediately cleared out, leaving an open space that was far larger than any dining room Pandy could imagine needing. She would work on that later, as well as figuring out what to do with the coffins. Would she have to keep them around so her heir could go through the same vision? Could that even happen without the lingering remnant of Preston? Those questions were for Future-Pandy, however. For now…

Turning back to the waiting elementals, she said, “It’s not good for you to have a, um, master,” her voice squeaked on the word, but she managed to push it out, “who doesn’t have Dark magic, is it?”

Nox said nothing, but Nyssa gave a gentle smile. “No, it’s not.”

Drawing in a deep breath, Pandy said, “Then if anything happens to me, Empress Glory is my… my heir. All right?” She’d planned to leave the house to Thaniel, with the idea that Suzanne could help him care for it, but now that she was linked to the building, she understood just what a bad idea that was. The house was part of her, and she was part of the house. If Thaniel, with his Light element, could even form that bond – which she doubted – it would be toxic to both him and Avington House.

Nox didn’t say anything, but she knew he wasn’t exactly happy with her choice. Nyssa just tilted her head, offered the tray, and said, “Please don’t die, my lady.”

Pandy took more cheese, then turned and walked outside, halting the moment she stepped through the door, as her own breath puffed into the air in front of her. It was thin and pale, but the small cloud caught the golden glint of the rising sun, glowing gently for a moment before it faded.

When Pandy looked up, she saw that Augustus was staring too, a look of awe on his face, followed by a kind of hope that dawned as brightly as the sun over the horizon. Pandy felt her heart beat harder as he stepped closer, raising a hand to her cheek. She still had no hair for him to brush back, but that didn’t prevent him from stroking her jaw as he tilted his head forward, resting his forehead against hers.

They stood like that, her slow, pale cloud of breath mingling with his much denser one as the sun continued to rise, warming their heads, then their shoulders as it peeked through the balding branches of the overgrown bushes and trees. And then, of course, it was six in the morning, and Pandy turned back into a rabbit.

Isidor cleared his throat as Augustus leaned down to gather Pandy into his arms. “Ah, you might want to… look up,” he said, sounding almost as awkward as the perfectly normal teenager he was underneath it all.

Reluctantly, Augustus backed up, raising his hand so he could peer into the sky, and Pandy placed her paws on his shoulder so she could stare in that direction as well. Dark shapes circled overhead, and Pandy was delighted to realize that they were not, in fact, vultures. Instead, they were Professor Beeswick’s Skyrils, once again carrying woven swings clutched in dozens of clawed feet. Realizing that they’d been seen, they swooped down, each beat of their small wings perfectly timed to avoid those of their neighbors.

With clear reluctance, Augustus grabbed the nearest swing chair and sat, holding onto Pandy with one arm, while he wrapped the other through the netting surrounding him. The Skyrils holding the swing immediately began to rise. Isidor, meanwhile, was backing away from the chair the other group of small dragon-like elementals chivvied toward him.

“No, thank you,” he said, holding onto his tortoise. “I’ll get a carriage, or-”

His words turned into a yelp as the Skyrils abandoned all pretense of politeness, dropped the woven seat, and dived at him, screeching small, high-pitched screams of glee. Talons dug into Isidor’s clothes, lifting him off his feet and into the air. He froze, eyes huge, while Tempest sent out a cloud of tiny but furious lightning strikes. A few of the Skyrils clucked at the Lightning turtle like furious chickens, dropping their burden, which resulted in the whole cloud swaying wildly to the side while Isidor yelled at them and Tempest. Then they were off, intermittent bolts of lightning arcing into the air as Isidor shouted words in a language Pandy didn’t recognize but instinctively understood shouldn’t be used in polite company.

Augustus cradled Pandy to his chest, murmuring into her fur as they flew. She couldn’t hear him over the rushing of the wind, and this time he didn’t have one of his elementals create a shield to block that wind, so she could only guess at the words. Stymied, Pandy hesitated only briefly before pulling up her stat sheet.

She was a little scared to do anything with it at the moment, but it looked completely normal as it hovered in front of her eyes. In fact, it looked exactly the way she’d expected it to look, including the fact that she now had twenty-four Life Force, rather than twenty-three. One point closer to whatever was going to happen when the VitalLink module finally went off. Something which Pandy was beginning to believe might happen very, very soon.