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Cadence folded her arms over her chest as Morrigan brought the notebook over. “Is this Onstald’s collection?”
“It’s not the book of Ghostly Hours, obviously,” Morrigan glanced down at the skull pattern on her notebook and grinned a little imagining old mean Professor Hemingway Q Onstald writing in such a book. “I’ve copied down records of Ghostly Hours outside Proudfoot House. If you wanted to come?”
“Do I want to come and watch legendary wundersmiths go and do awesome wundersmith things?” She tapped her index finger against her chin, pretending to think about it, “Hmmm. I don’t know. Obviously I want to come.” She bounced a little in the chair, failing to pretend not to be excited, “What’s the first one?”
Morrigan ran a finger down the column, organised by date from the first of the year to the end. “In two days there’s one in Eldritch at three pm.”
“ Cool .”
Cadence shivered as she walked through the gap. Morrigan offered her a sympathetic smile, “It feels weird the first few times.”
“So, they definitely can’t hear us, right?” They were watching Brilliance Amadeo and Rastaban Tarazed weaving decorations for… something. Probably an old holiday that wasn’t celebrated anymore..
“No, they can’t. Sometimes it feels like they’re acknowledging you or making eye contact but that’s either a coincidence or confined solely to the Tempus used to make them. I’m not entirely sure.”
“Maybe the Gob will have some theory books about it? You said that in the Devilish Court there was a massive private Wundersmith section, right?”
“Yeah.” She still felt some latent guilt about the book she’d tried to steal, and then gotten destroyed in the fight with the book bugs. It was almost impossible there was a copy anywhere else. Still, there were over three hundred other volumes for her to study. And she would. As soon as Jupiter let her go back, or she got a library card of her own. For now however, the Ghostly Hours and her apprenticeship would have to do.
When the scene faded away and they went back out through the dark gap, Cadence seemed amazed, “No wonder you’ve been obsessed with this stuff if that’s what you’ve been doing all year.”
She smiled. It was nice to be able to share something like this with someone else. She’d promised to sneak both Cadence and Hawthorne down to sub-nine to see those ones as well, but it was a lot easier said than done, and everyone was still a bit on edge at Proudfoot House after the Hollowpox.
Cadence linked arms with her and pulled her along a few streets, and she felt almost giddy. “Let’s get coffee, my treat,” she said. “There’s a really nice shop around here, they do the best bubbleberry muffins. Then you can show me what the next one is on the list.”
Age of Industry, Second Saturday, Winter of Six. Gracious Goldberry does a public demonstration of inferno.
Cadence came out of the gap with her eyes the size of golfballs. “Can you do that? With the fire.”
“I’m working up to it. Inferno is the easiest for me so far, I think.” She wiggled the finger with the inferno imprint before she realised Cadence couldn’t see the tiny flame dotting away on the pad, and it just looked stupid.
“Wait,” okay maybe she’d caught on, “Do Wundersmiths get extra imprints?”
“Uh, yes. We do. I guess. I don’t fully understand why - this is my first one - but there’s the Wundrous Divinities, and they live in the Liminal Hall, or something,” the physics of pocket dimensions were still lost on Morrigan, so considering that, she was doing a fair job explaining it to her. “I think you have to do something big to get it though. I reignited the Fireblossoms before I got this.”
“Go back to the thing about Wundrous Divinities,” Cadence said slowly. “Do you mean you met god or something?”
“One of them.”
Cadence gaped but Morrigan didn’t elaborate anymore. It was more fun that way. “I didn’t know Wundersmiths spent time with gods ,” she kept muttering under her breath as they got home.
Morrigan delved into her notebook until Squall showed up to harass her into wundersmithing stuff, and then passed out immediately after, exhausted.
“We can’t go in the park,” Morrigan said to Cadence in the middle of the winter holidays, “But there’s a ghostly hour here ,” she pushed through the gap, letting time ripple around her and solidify, “of Odbuoy planning out Jemmity Park.”
“Never heard of it. Also, odd-boy? What kind of parents name their child odd-boy?” Cadence finally looked impressed when Morrigan told her about the conditions Odbuoy Jemmity had placed on his park to deal with Hadrian Canter.
“Stick it to the man,” she said.
“But, this is apparently a really good example of weaving. Among other things, but mainly weaving, I think. Not a great idea for inferno in a strictly twelve-and-under adventure park, yeah?”
Cadence winced, “Imagine if they let Hawthorne in there. No need for inferno after that.”
Morrigan snorted but paid attention from then on to the work Odbuoy was doing. It was incredible. Wunder shows itself to summoner and smith didn’t apply when it was a ghostly hour, so she couldn’t see the strings of light she knew would be there as a fourteen year old Odbuoy Jemmity grew up an entire adventure park from the ground, muttering under his breath about rich arseholes and overprivileged pricks the entire time.
Morrigan was taking notes on technique and ideas, but she saw Cadence scribble down some of his insults into her own notebook, clearly inspired with a fascinated gleam in her eye.
At least they both got something out of this one. She felt a bit bad that Cadence usually just sat around because she obviously wasn’t a wundersmith and thus couldn’t learn from it but she did keep coming, so maybe she enjoyed them anyway in the way the basement nerds did. She supposed it was interesting in a way. A living history lesson of forbidden secret powers. Even if you couldn’t use the powers, there was still something in it.
Yeah, okay, living history about forbidden secret powers was a pretty fun way to put the ghostly hours.
Cadence came through her station door as Morrigan shivered out of bed, her pyjamas soaked through with fever sweat, hair clinging to her face and neck.
“Eugh,” she said, coming over to sit a non-contagious distance from Morrigan, “Are you alright?”
Morrigan glared at her. She wanted to say, “Do I look alright?” but unfortunately the swinging chandelier flu had gotten to her throat first and she liked the idea of it not feeling like it’d been brushed over with razor blades for the first time in three days.
At least it wasn’t contagious at this point anymore, so she felt fine moving in closer to Cadence, trying to put her head on her shoulder, but misaimed horribly and landed in her lap instead.
Cadence sighed and stroked back her hair that was going to be washed the first moment she could stand and walk without giving herself a concussion in the process.
Morrigan looked up at her doing her best to express that she was sorry that she was too ill to go see their ghostly hour through her eyes, but Cadence smiled down softly, “Go to sleep. I’ll get you some tea.”
Tea sounded nice. Almost as nice as Cadence tucking her in underneath her heavy weighted covers, and patting her forehead a little in lieu of a kiss.
She was asleep by the time Cadence returned with the cup.
Age of Monarchs, Fifth Monday, Winter of Fifteen
A fire raged in the centre of oldtown but Morrigan wasn’t alarmed. Cadence was even enjoying herself, walking in and out of the raging flamestorm, looking in wonder at the way the flames didn’t burn her even when she touched them.
Morrigan had thought Nevermoor would’ve looked more different five hundred years previously, and perhaps it did, but the fire took up most of her attention. She stared at the wundersmith Thora Ringwild, commanding inferno like she came out the womb using it, her braids whipping around her head in almost the same fashion as Morrigan fancied the fire looking around the city.
Cadence finally stopped playing with the fire and looked over at where Morrigan was looking, and then looked back at Morrigan herself, “Why is she doing this?”
“I don’t know. She’s only really been pencilled in the Book of Ghostly Hours. There’s no additional notes anywhere and she wasn’t ever covered in my classes with Onstald,” she murmured, studying how the fire played for her and danced with her rather than for her. “A lot of Wundersmith history has been lost or mostly forgotten. I suppose that must’ve been the case for her. Good thing someone made this ghostly hour then.”
“It’s amazing,” said Cadence, and instead of glitching out like normal, the Ghostly Hour disappeared all too suddenly. Morrigan was left blinking in the empty space in time, and scrambling for the exit, alongside Cadence, grabbing her hand and pulling her through the gap with her, her heart still racing from what she’d seen, and her mind practically broiling with ideas for her own use of inferno.
It was her strongest art for certain, but she would never master absolutely any of them for as long as she lived. Probably. Maybe if she lived to be as old as Griselda Polaris, but even then, there would always be more to learn from wunder, always more to do.
She didn’t know if it was comforting or not but it was never going to be over.
The wood crackled away in the hearth of Cadence’s living room, warming it for the two of them, and Morrigan yawned deeply, her head nestled between Cadence’s shoulder and the couch. That last ghostly hour had been an outdoors lecture on time stretching, evidently to interest the three young wundersmiths who’d been subjected to it by giving them a dubiously ethical exercise, something Cadence immediately dubbed the tempus flavoured version of people watching, slowing people down as they walked through the park, with quite mixed results.
Tempus seemed to be one of the harder Wundrous Arts to do at all. Weaving and inferno were both easy to do, even if they were hard to do well to start with, but tempus seemed to depend upon the wundersmith’s understanding of how time worked, and the physics of it, which Morrigan absolutely did not understand. She was probably going to have to talk to Rook and Miss Cheery about enrolling herself in classes about the physics of time, since the more technical stuff here was flying so far above her head that it might as well have been in outer space.
Still, it had been interesting, even if it gave her a headache, and Cadence and her did spend quite a bit of it laughing as a very young Brilliance Amadeo slowed a series of people down in increasingly amusing ways, like the boy getting his ice cream stolen from him by a seagull, or the way an old man’s eyes widened with anger as a ball came too close to him from some nearby playing children, giving them time to run away, and Morrigan and Cadence to study the way the colour of his face changed from a mild pink to a concerning shade of scarlett that made at least Morrigan worry a bit if he was going to burst a blood vessel.
Cadence practically fell over herself laughing when his mouth and words slowed down entirely, almost like a film on the wrong speed, and spittle flew everywhere. She spotted the tiny twelve year old Brilliance giggling from her hiding spot up a tree until a less than impressed Rastaban Tarazed came by to pull her out of it and take her back to the group while the ghostly hour faded away and Morrigan frankly felt like her brain had run a mile and left the rest of her body to suffer.
“Do you think you’re getting anything out of them?” Cadence asked seriously, her hands working black wool round and over a crochet hook.
“I think so. It’s not the same as learning from a teacher obviously but I can still see technique and pick up more than I could probably have done from a book,” Morrigan shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think they’re cool.”
Cadence didn’t say anything until she had finished the edge of the triangle and Morrigan could finally see the shape of it. A little black bird, halfway done now, needing still eyes and stuffing and feet, but definitely a bird.
“I like them,” said Cadence suddenly, pulling out some grey wool and starting what Morrigan assumed were the feet. “It’s erm… nice. Spending time with you or whatever,” she wouldn’t make eye contact with her but Morrigan got the idea.
She reached over and touched Cadence’s shoulder gently, “Yeah, it’s nice spending time with you too. Or whatever,” she added, half as a joke.
“Or whatever.”