Phoenix and Ashes

She had originally intended to concentrate only on her own Element, but it soon became clear that this was a bad idea. Not only were the powers and meanings of all four Elements incestuously intertwined, but after all, Alison was an Earth Master and Reggie an Air Master. To defeat the one and help the other, she had to learn about their Elements, and at that point it made little sense to skip learning about the Antagonistic Element to her own, Water.

She finally felt her eyelids growing too heavy, and set the book aside, blowing out the candle, phrases from the book still echoing in her mind as she drifted into sleep. She didn't understand them yet— but soon—soon—

. . . the first step must be into the first Sphere, the Sphere of Imagination, for Intellect must be the servant of Imagination, and not the master. . . .

Eleanor woke slowly, with the strangest feeling—as if, once she had put the book down last night, she had gone into dreams only to find that in her dreams she was still trying to come to grips with what she had read. Except that in the dream, there was something or someone helping her grasp it.

And the moment she woke, she realized that she did grasp some of what she'd been reading, and had put it together with what had been in the workbook.

In fact, that was exactly what she needed to do—start putting things together, since all things were connected, and each had aspects of the rest. The only actual starting place was the intellect, which led into the imagination. After that, the imagination led everywhere.

She'd been trying to think of all of the Planes of her mother's book—or 'Spheres,' as the Alchemy book called them—as being separate, and that things somehow passed from one to another. But it wasn't like that at all; everything was layered on top of everything else, and everything coexisted at once. The physical world that everyone saw and lived in was overlaid with all of the magic worlds. The difference between a regular person and a magician was whether or not you could see each layer.

Which was why those nasty little gnomish things in the meadow had seemed to dig their way into the ground without actually disturbing it; they weren't really digging into the ground, they were moving themselves out of the Plane of the 'real world'—which the alchemy book called 'Middle Earth,' and into one of the lower Planes, probably the Dark Earth Plane, where she couldn't see them anymore. And the Salamanders couldn't follow, both because they weren't creatures of Earth and because they weren't creatures of the Dark Ways. Every Sphere had a corresponding Dark Side, and as a Light Path magician, you didn't want to go there, unless you absolutely had to. Not because you could get hurt, but because you could get seduced and corrupted unless you were very, very careful. You couldn't go there, if you were a Light Path Elemental.

She could have, if she had known how to get her imagination to move her awareness into the Plane of Earth, because humans were uniquely able to move among all the Planes. But she wouldn't have been comfortable there, because it wasn't her Element, either.

Imagination. That was the key. Whatever she could imagine, if she could do it well enough, and believe in it, she could see.

Intellect ruled the Middle Earth, which lay between the Spheres of the Light Path and the Spheres of the Dark. It reflected both, though the balance shifted as affairs in the Middle Earth itself shifted, and as the balance of power between the Light Path Spheres and the Dark Path Spheres shifted.

Those who subscribed only to Intellect could never move beyond the Middle Earth. But those who explored Imagination and Intuition found the way into the other Spheres open to them.

And once you learned the symbolic logic of those other Spheres, you knew how to manipulate your magic, and how to counter the magic of other Elements than your own. Now, that meant that Eleanor would have a fighting chance of undoing what Alison had done to her, even if she wasn't as strong a magician as Alison. It didn't take a hammer to crack a nut; a little pressure applied at the right place would split it open. What was more, Eleanor had a shrewd hunch that Alison's spells only worked against her on this Plane. Once she learned how to move among the Planes, she could travel them relatively unhindered.

Once I learn to move among the Planes, once I really understand the Plane of Earth magic, I will find the key to break her spells! She knew that; it made perfect sense. Knowledge and understanding, not force, were going to be the keys to her shackles.

But to do that, to be able to step beyond this Middle Earth and into the rest, she would have to do a lot of work. She had once thought that preparing for the examinations to get into Oxford was hard work. This would be ten times harder. She was going to have to go completely beyond what she had always taken as 'the truth' into a whole new set of truths—and then believe in them. Well, no one said it was going to be easy.

She got up and ran through her usual chores in an absentminded fashion; her hands and body did the work, while her mind repeated some of what she thought she was beginning to understand from the books.

It might have seemed odd, but amid all those philosophical musing, she did not forget to wash all those cotton shirtwaists and linen skirts she had brought down from the attic, nor to put them up—well out of sight of the bedroom windows—on lines in the garden to dry. It seemed very strange to be doing all these intensely common and practical things while her head was buzzing with alchemical esoterica.