Taking her hand, the Archon lead her from this small and courtly garden (“A little thing,” he dismissed it. “It is enough for me, and I am comfortable in it, but really, it is rather small”) to a great expanse of flawless lawn. It was made of moss, but a moss that came lush and thick, springy and moist to the touch and green as emeralds. It lay beneath the brilliance of regular, small, star-like objects. These hovered three to four feet above the ground, radiant and shimmering as if it gave off great heat, but was cool to the touch. Now things felt even brighter than a summer’s high noon, though the damp chill of this humid place reached tense fingers into her bones. She paused in front of one of the lights and looked to the Archon. “Can I touch it?”


    He shrugged. “It is light.”


    “It’s cool,” she said. It did have a substance, and it lapped at her fingers a bit like water. But it ignored gravity, and a small bit of it clung to a fingertip as if it were a droplet of water, only to race away skyward when it fell off her finger. She watched it race upwards, a miniature star, until it vanished from sight. “No fire.”


    “Well, when one gets to know fire well enough, one may ask it to behave. Not quite so much with the children of Light, though I can at least make cold fire.” He gestured, cold fire, and made an orb of it as she watched, with a singular gesture.


    “How are you doing that?” she said.


    He put the “cold fire” out. “It is a simple matter for even the most basic acolyte. Easier if you follow the Firemaster than if you do not, but even a secular hedge-wizard could make such a thing work.”


    Wizard, she thought, with some alarm.


    “Do you call what you do…magic?” She said this hesitantly, offended to the core of her lab-coated soul.


    A shrug. “An old word, and perhaps an ignorant one, but it will do for now.”


    She considered pursuing this concept to one law of physics or another—it had to work the way the math demanded, she was just missing a the equations—and decided that was less important than whatever lay inside the temple. And the Temple itself, beneath its tree, was stunning. It was carved, she thought, from the same milky crystal as the geode, and very elaborately done. Every green and growing thing she could think of—and quite a few she couldn’t—seemed to be represented here, as were rabbits, cats, dogs, honeypot ants, and quite a few other creatures of familiar earthly beauty. There were other things too. No Shadowbeasts (she’d know them by their multitude of eyes, she thought) but things that looked like a cross between a deer and a rabbit, or crabs with wings. The carvings worked around the great tree, masking the main core of the building.


    Funny, she thought. Everything here was curvaceous, a blending of nature and human works that were breathtaking in origin and looks. But here, down near the base of the Temple’s great tree, the building was angular. Square, she thought at first, but the angles didn’t work. Triangular, three sides…and she gasped as she realized they were great slabs made of crystal. And not that milk-white substance that captured light as much as it transmitted it. These were clear, and of a horrifyingly familiar shape.


    A large, three-sided building, made of slabs of perfectly clear crystal. The Greenhouse from Bittermoss School.


    The last place where she knew Alex had been alive.


    It had been broken apart at some point, she thought, because it was not fitted entirely together. Vines had been jammed between each huge ceiling slab, both to support it and keep the parts apart. It would have been fused when it was activated, so something must have broken it apart. Whoever had fixed it must have known what it was, because struts had been inserted here and there to keep the slabs from coming down, and these holes had given the vines purchase. She imagined they—these unseen, unknown people who had known what a Prism was--had broken it up. Some of the original texture remained, the patterns she remembered from…oh, it must have just been last week, in her living room, in a world where things like this didn’t happen. It looked a bit like the Lovre’s thrilling architecture had been shored up by some poor and desperate primitive.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    She stood there staring for what felt like eternity, and felt like one white-hot pulse flash at the same time, and she must really have stood there for a while because the Archon said, “Madam Hawk, are you well?”


    But his voice was faded and distant. “Alex,” She breathed, and then she was running. Barefoot across a walk of slate stone, ignoring a truly impressive mosaic in gray, she pelted across that wide lawn. She ignored the flowers that were all of them almost-like. Something almost like bougainvillea, something almost like hydrangea. It didn’t matter what it was almost like. What mattered was that this thing was, and it was a Prism and it was the last thing that Alex had touched before he was dragged down into this hellscape, and she was going to go inside.


    There was a barrier of golden bars, hinged like a gate. She didn’t bother waiting for the Archon to unlock it—she half expected that she was not allowed back here anyway—but ducked beneath its reaching arm. She caught glimpses of the world around her, and it was all very dark and very close, with the glimmer of well-tended fires and gold, everywhere. There were other people here, not masked like the Archon but decked out similarly, in the white silk chemise and heavy robes, and they walked with dolorous faces that turned surprised when they ran—or nearly ran—right into a frantic Hawk.


    Halls and corridors greeted her, the majority made of milk crystal slabs, each of them glowing with warmth and comfort, artifacts displayed in a way that made them things of relief and not trophies of an unknowable era. But the Prism would not glow. At least, she didn’t think it would. A glance down the first corridor found a room beckoning, its glow the tone of a comfortable place beside a fire. Not that one. She looked down another hall, where the light continued to grow in brilliance, ending in something dazzling where individual shapes melted into the glamour. Not that hall either. The third, central hallway, was dark at the end, save for a dull reddish glow, like flickering flames. That was the one. She headed down.


    She wasn’t sure what she expected. The narrow hall got eerier, cooler, the deeper in she went. The slabs of glowing crystal gave way to the same plain gray stone she remembered from the outside of the geode-nexus. She came out into a great, open, bare room. There were no artifacts. No sitting areas. The room was, of course, triangular. Five enormous statues (one to a corner, and two in the middle) loomed over the bare, clear floor. A fire burned in an elaborate hearth at the feet of the two central statues, one male and one female, with hands clasped together. Hawk suspected it was some sort of eternal flame, the sort kept by vestal virgins. Of the three remaining statues, one statue was a man, muscle-bound and caught on fire. Argon, the Firemaster, Hawk thought, and that made the woman swathed in waves Illryis and the one who looked caught in a hurricane the unfortunately named Kali’Mar. This place probably carried some fancy name like Tabernacle or sanctuary or scarcity. It certainly smelled of it. Burnt things, sweet smelling and foul, were dominated by a copper-char scent, burnt gore beneath sweet resins, fouled meat against flowers. Before the golden hearth, the central statues had a crust of darkness, and the floor was rank with the black, flaking traces of sacrifice. Hawk, raised in a world of bloodless religion, found herself facing the ancient sanguine ways with horror.


    But her eyes were fixed on none of that. The horrible majesty of this room paled in comparison to what Hawk found in its center.


    There were two small hooks in the crystal floor. Simple. Inelegant. Ancient, there was no doubt. They had been rusted down and polished back up, and rusted down again. They shone with the gleam of a thousand fingerprints, the polish of years and many hands. But they were there. And she collapsed down upon them, weeping harder than she ever had in her life, because she knew in her bones, this was something her husband had touched.


    Alex said he’d been chained to the floor in the Prism.


    Now she had the proof.