Marianne glared at the message from her agent.
She’d had the gall to start out by asking if Marianne was alright; she worried this breakup was affecting Marianne more than she was letting on. The message ended with her saying she had liked the book.
None of those pleasantries mattered, however, when right in the centre of all of it were three paragraphs saying that the book Marianne had just spent the last six months of her life working on didn’t really feel like it fit with the rest of the series at all. That the main characters might be named Lake and Emund, but they weren’t really the same characters from the first two books.
Pulse thundering loudly in her ears, Marianne opened the manuscript to reread the specific scenes her agent gave as examples of what she meant.
One hand was poised on the keyboard ready to argue that the tone was different because more was happening and the stakes were higher, but that didn’t mean the characters were different.
Except, they were.
The more scenes she read, the more her anger shifted from her agent to herself, building in an ache in her shoulders and throbbing behind her eyes.
She knew she’d been messed up about how things had ended with Harlow. She just hadn’t realised she’d dumped every last one of her complicated feelings into this draft in a way that didn’t serve the story at all. So many secrets and miscommunications were unsettling the steady the relationship Lake and Emund had been building in the last two books for no reason other than her own relationship had been falling apart.
Snatching her pen and notepad off the corner of her desk, she started making notes of what she needed to do to make it right.
Before she was halfway down the first sheet of paper, it had become absolutely clear that unwinding all of the pointless knots would unravel the entire ending. She’d have to completely rewrite the last third of book, and the draft was due in little more than a month.
Even worse, the first part of the book couldn’t be spared from the rewrite. She’d taken away Lake’s enthusiastic curiosity, replacing it with distrust, and amplified Emund’s frustrations into an anger completely out of character for him.
In her fit of post-breakup pique, she’d filled her characters with her own emotions instead of letting them have their own, and left them empty resentful shells of themselves.
“I have to rewrite the whole thing!” Marianne threw down her pen and slammed her laptop shut.
She barely remembered to grab her both her jacket and her key before shoving her feet into her shoes and storming out into the night.
The sea wall was practically empty that close to midnight. The only reminder of the daytime crowds was the lingering scent of churros in the air around the vacant attractions she stomped past on her way to the beach.
When she’d moved out of Harlow’s London flat, Marianne had picked a place in a busy seaside town as a way to make herself buckle down and stick to her deadlines on this stupid book, but setting herself up to stay indoors to avoid the summer crowds also meant she didn’t have easy access to a single quiet cafe when she got stuck and needed a change of pace, unless she wanted to spend an hour on a crowded bus or train to get there. Everything in the area was teeming with tourists this time of year.
It was yet another thing she could add to the long list of stuff she’d messed up because she’d let her anger with Harlow drive her decisions in those last horrible weeks. She cursed herself and Harlow as she scrambled over the flint at the bottom of the stairs on her way out toward the water.
The dampness of the sand quickly seeped into the canvas of her shoes, and soggy feet just fuelled her frustration.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she berated herself.
This whole situation was stupid, and it was all her fault.
If she would just take a few moments to think things through before she acted, or even just before she spoke, her life would be so much easier.
Instead, she was stuck in a beachside resort town during the summer holidays with a book she hated and barely any breathing room to fix it.
Marianne had walked well past the end of the sea defences before she calmed down enough to be able to slow down and take in the view—not that there was much of one. The beach was as free of people as it was from light that time of day. The clouds blocked out the moon and the stars, making the sky and sea more of an endless dark void only broken by the whites of the waves hitting the shore.
As she gazed out at the darkness, her mind cleared enough for her to think about the broad strokes of the story that had been living in her head for nearly a decade and how it all culminated in that climactic battle scene.
Most of those original story beats could probably be saved, but she would need to find a different way for Lake to channel so much power in her final attack if it wasn’t coming from her pent-up anger.
The attack was supposed to be the equivalent of channelling the full raging power of the ocean through her body which would be overwhelmingly dangerous, even for a mage of her power level.
Sometimes Marianne really wished she had at least one magic-user friend who did some form of martial arts, so they could give her an idea of what sort of power was reasonable in an offensive spell. It would make it easier to ask someone she knew just how far she was pushing outside the bounds of reality.
Instead, all her magic-using friends were academics or artists, so she was left to trust the descriptions of strangers on internet forums or simply use her own imagination.
Then again, not having any magic ability herself was possibly more of a benefit than a hindrance because having no real basis for comparison meant she had to work out how to describe everything she imagined in detail.
She couldn’t just say something felt like using a specific type of magic when neither she nor two-thirds of her readership had any magic ability whatsoever, but at the same time, she wanted the descriptions of the sensations to feel real for her readers, even if her main character was in the middle of a decidedly unrealistic magic-robot battle in space.
Marianne’s next steps brought her a little too close to the sea. The chill of the water seeping into her shoes reminded her of the way she’d linked Lake and Emund’s magic into what was essentially a soul-bond.
What if she used that bond with Emund to move more power into the attack?
Channelling the power of two people through her body could be a better explanation for how Lake nearly burnt her out. If nothing else, it would be a much better way to build the stress and anxiety of the third act without any nonsensical miscommunication. Although, she would need to add more instances of them experimenting with that connection beforehand to set it all up properly. Exploring the complications of channeling each other’s power despite their disparate heritages could replace some of the tensions she was removing, while the sheer intimacy of the exchanges could definitely be used to ramp up others.
The tightness in her shoulders started to loosen and the throbbing behind her right eye began to recede.
It would definitely take some very focused rewriting, but she was certain making those changes would make for a much stronger end to her trilogy.
Turning around, Marianne hurried back the way she’d come. She should have brought a notebook, so she could write this plan down before she forgot it.
Marianne had just made it up the stairs and onto the sea wall when she was practically blinded by a brilliant white light and stumbled, falling to her hands and knees.
The light faded a moment later, plunging her in to darkness.
Not a single street light was left on.
Some holidaying magic-user must have gotten drunk and blown out the local power grid again.
Irritated that she wasn’t going to get to have a cup of tea while she drafted out a new outline, Marianne pushed herself upright, flinching at the sting of her scuffed hands.
She had barely gotten to her feet when a voice beside her said, “Oh no, my coffee.”
Marianne yelped and nearly fell backwards again in surprise when a shadow that had definitely not been beside her a moment ago then moved.
While she may not have been paying all that much attention to her surroundings, she was quite certain that no one else had been around.
So how was someone now standing within arm’s reach of her?
It was like they’d materialised out of nowhere.
She supposed she was at the beach during the summer. The energy of the tourist crowds often attracted young water spirits, but they typically coalesced out of the sea in the afternoons when it was busy, not the dead of the night.
And what sort of ocean spirit cared about coffee?
Before she could ask, a different voice spoke from her other side. “What happened?”
Marianne snapped round, but her unadjusted eyes couldn’t make out much more than another human-shaped shadow.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” answered the coffee spirit. “Maybe a power cut?”
“The lights for the whole venue are being run off solar batteries,” said the second voice. “I don’t know what they could have done to make them explode like that.”
Venue? Maybe Marianne hadn’t been paying as much attention to her surroundings as she thought and had stumbled into someone’s private party. That would certainly explain where these people had come from.
“Batteries? What venue?” the coffee spirit asked, sounding just as confused as Marianne.
“The Lincolnshire Sword and Sorcery Festival,” the second shadow said, bewilderment clear in her voice.
“This is Camden. I was at the corner shop getting a coffee,” the coffee spirit responded, equally perplexed. “I’ve dropped it, by the way, so be careful not to trip on the cup.”
Lincolnshire? Camden?
They were on a beach in Norfolk, weren’t they?
Fumbling her phone out of her pocket, Marianne desperately tried to get the map app open. She needed to assure herself she wasn’t the one who was mistaken, but the screen flashed up a no service warning and not a single thing loaded besides the menu.
As if to underline the weirdness of the situation, a snap and crackle like a firework proceeded a smaller flash of light that lit up the world around them, and Marianne realised that what she had taken for granted as the continued roar of the sea was actually wind rushing through the towering trees surrounding them.
The festival goer looked up at the next flash and said, “I don’t like the look of that.”
Marianne followed her gaze up to the glittering remains of a large magic circle burning in the air above them. One of the lines broke from the outer circle with another flash, crackling as it faded away.
Even with the missing lines Marianne recognised the shape. She’d only ever seen the scientific illustrations once in the middle of the night when she’d been doing research for her previous book.
“That’s a summoning spell,” she said, the words cracking around the cold knot in her throat.
Naming it made the truth more real somehow, and it left them with one urgent question.
Where were they?