The first person to fully materialize was a woman maybe a little younger than my grandmother, with fiery red hair gone silver at the temples and eyes the color of storm clouds. Her presence felt like standing too close to a bonfire, warm and fierce and slightly dangerous. When she spoke, her voice had an accent I immediately recognized as Irish.
“Emily Thompson,” she said, and there was something like respect in her tone. “We felt the call. The old fire, waking after all these years.”
“Brigid Callahan.” My grandmother inclined her head in greeting. “It’s been a long time.”
“Too long. The last gathering was before either of us took up our mantles.” The Irish woman’s gaze shifted to me, and I felt the weight of her assessment like a physical pressure. “This is the one? The child who merged with the phoenix?”
“My granddaughter,” my grandmother said. “Sidney Lowell. She’s holding the portal open from the other side.”
“Holding it open?” Brigid’s presence sharpened with interest. “With what anchor?”
“A man,” my mother said softly. “A good man, who loves her.”
“Interesting.” Brigid circled me — or rather, her consciousness did, flowing around mine like water around a stone. “The resonance is strong. I can feel him even from here, burning steady as a lighthouse. Where did you find such a one?”
“He found me, actually.” I thought of Ben, still kneeling in the clearing with his hands clasped around mine, pouring everything he had into keeping me tethered to the physical world. “It’s a long story.”
“Stories can wait.” These words came from a new voice, calm and precise, with the stillness of deep water. A man with dark hair and serene features stepped forward, his consciousness as controlled and disciplined as a master calligrapher’s brushstroke. “The portal will not hold forever, and there is much to discuss.”
“Kenji Tanaka,” my grandmother said, introducing him. “Guardian of the Aokigahara threshold.”
“The corruption has reached our borders as well,” Kenji said, addressing me directly. “Three of our lesser portals have already failed. The sickness spreads faster with each passing day.”
More figures were emerging from the mist now, their presences adding to the growing chorus of power that surrounded us. A family who moved together, their consciousnesses so intertwined that it was hard to tell where one ended and another began — three generations, I realized, like my own. Their combined presence had the weight and patience of mountain stone.
“The Quispe family,” my grandmother said. “Guardians of the threshold at Machu Picchu. They’ve protected that portal since before the Spanish conquest.”
“The corruption has touched us as well,” the eldest of them said, a woman with silver-streaked dark hair and eyes dark with centuries of knowledge. “Our ancestors spoke of such a sickness long ago. They called it the Withering. It nearly destroyed the network then.”
“How did they stop it?” I asked.
“Fire,” she said simply. “They found the source and burned it out.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Fire…the Dragon’s solution, the cauterization that would destroy Silver Hollow and everyone in it. Was that the only way? Had humanity faced this threat before and found no better answer than destruction?
“There were guardians who died in that burning,” my grandmother said quietly, as if reading my thoughts. “Portals that were lost forever. But the network survived. The question is whether we can find a better way this time.”
More guardians were gathering now, emerging from the mist in ones and twos and small family groups. A pair of twins from somewhere in Scandinavia, their consciousnesses so perfectly matched that they seemed to speak with one voice. An elderly man whose presence felt ancient and deep as the roots of mountains — African, I thought, although I couldn’t have said from where on that vast continent. A young woman from India, her consciousness bright with barely contained power, flanked by an older man who carried himself with the bearing of a warrior.
By the time the last of them had materialized, I counted nearly twenty guardians gathered in the mist around us. Twenty families who had kept their secrets as carefully as mine had kept ours, who had protected their own portals while the rest of the world remained ignorant of the web of magic that connected them all.
And all of them were looking at me.
“You called us here,” Brigid Callahan said, her strong, clear voice carrying across the assembled group. “Through fire and will and a bond that burns brighter than any I’ve seen in three generations of guardianship. So tell us, Sidney Lowell — what would you have us do?”
The weight of their attention pressed against me, and I fought the urge to shrink back, to defer to my grandmother the way I always had when things got too big for me to handle. But this was my portal. My town.
My fight.
And I was the one who had called them here.
“The corruption is spreading from Silver Hollow,” I said, hoping that my voice conveyed the conviction I felt burning deep within. “A man named Julian Gregory is drilling into the ley lines, extracting dimensional energy for his own purposes. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or maybe he just doesn’t care. Either way, he’s poisoning the network, and if we don’t stop him, the Dragon will do it for us.”
“The cauterization,” Kenji said.
“Yes. We have until the Winter Solstice. Seven weeks to shut down Gregory’s operation, heal the damage he’s done, and convince the Dragon that humanity isn’t a threat that needs to be burned away.”
“A tall order,” the eldest Quispe woman remarked.