Chapter Text
The Seelie Queen has always been, unambiguously, one of Alec’s least favorite people in the Downworld. Once upon a time, Magnus broke up with him for her, sort of. They’re not exactly friends.
But he’s a practical man, and she has something he needs.
It’s been a long road for him, getting to this point, and as Alec looks up from where he’s kneeling to stare up into the childlike face of one of the most powerful beings in the known world, he knows that it’s only going to get worse from here.
“Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says lightly, her eyes gleaming. “What a pleasant surprise.”
When she nods at him, he rises from the ground, brushing earth off of his pants. “I apologize for not warning you of my intent to visit, my lady.”
He hadn’t been able to justify the risk of such a message being intercepted, of word getting out, not when he was all but certain her curiosity would get the best of her if he just showed up anyway.
“It’s quite all right. I’m sure you wouldn’t be here if it were not important.”
He doesn’t like her tone, the way her voice curls around the word important, but then that’s nothing new. Alec does his best to level her with a steady stare and keep his breathing and heartbeat even, determined not to show any signs of either the nervousness or the anticipation that are both roiling in his gut.
“It is important,” he acknowledges. “But it’s important only to me. This is a… personal call. I’m not here on behalf of the Institute, or the Clave.”
He does precious little on behalf of the Clave these days, but while he knows the Seelie Queen is probably well aware of that fact, he doesn’t exactly want to say it out loud. Not here.
The Queen leans forward, an amused, cruel curiosity dancing in her eyes. “A personal call, Nephilim?”
“Yes, my lady. I — there is a favor I would like to ask of you.” He curses himself for the brief stumble, but the Queen seems to have hardly noticed, skipping down out of her throne and moving with disturbing grace to stand in front of him, until she has to jut her chin sharply upward to look him in the eyes. When she speaks, her voice is soft, sharp, and twisting.
“And what is it that you have come here to ask of me?”
This, at least, he knows exactly how to answer; he’s been planning this moment for quite some time. His lips twist into an almost predatory smirk.
“Eternity.”
—
Alec had needed to be incredibly careful in his research. If he’d slipped up, even one time, and left the wrong book lying around, or left his notes where they could be found by anyone other than him, or shown too much interest when asking a faux-casual question, he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone would have figured it out. And by ‘someone,’ what he really means, of course, is Magnus — though Izzy or Jace finding out would have been bad too. But them, he could’ve dealt with; he knows his siblings better than anyone, and while he knows they would have been beyond pissed at first, he also knows they would have gotten over it, come to understand his point of view. That certainty is part of why he feels like he can do this at all.
The real problem is that in their initial anger, he has no doubt that either one of them would have gone straight to Magnus. And while he loves Magnus more than he ever could have imagined loving anyone, and knows that Magnus feels exactly the same way about him, he also knows that Magnus would never, ever have stood by and allowed him to go through with this. Even though it’s his choice, his burden to bear, his risk to take.
So Alec had kept very careful watch over all his notes and materials, hidden the books well, feigned disinterest even as he asked probing questions, and overall done his best to not let anyone know that he was actively researching the Fountain of Youth.
—
He’s never seen the Queen more delighted, which is almost enough to make him want to call the whole thing off.
“The ritual consists of three steps,” she explains, voice light and lyrical even as she talks of deep, wild magic, the likes of which Alec has never really seen. Most of the court has left them at her order, leaving just her, Alec, and some of her most trusted advisors, most of whom Alec recognizes by sight, even if he doesn’t know their names. They are walking together in a tight little knot, though Alec has no idea where they’re going and hasn’t found it prudent to ask. “First, of course, you must find the water.”
Alec nods; that part is the same in every single text he could find, even the Mundane ones, though it appears in slightly different forms depending on the source. In some cases, there’s a map or a path to follow, or a guide to help the seeker along their way. In others, it’s more of a stab in the dark, searching blindly through the wilderness for as long as it takes until the Fountain is finally revealed.
As he follows the Seelie Queen down a narrow dirt trail covered in a layer of rotting leaves, Alec is pretty sure he knows which of those options is going to turn out to be real.
Sure enough, the Queen says, “No one knows its location — it moves, you see. So the quest to find it is yours, and yours alone.”
“And the second step?” Alec asks, even though he’s pretty sure he knows about this one, too. There was less consensus, but it was possible to eliminate some of the stories as outliers, or at least as particularly unlikely.
The Queen smiles sweetly at him, though, and suddenly he’s very sure he knows what the second step is.
“Drowning,” she says simply.
Alec nods grimly; the legends were right about that one as well, it would seem. Some versions — especially the Mundane ones, which mainly seemed to depict the Fountain as a gentle spring, set into a lush meadow, with frolicking maidens washing each other in its sparkling waters — viewed it a little more kindly, more of a bathing process than actually drowning. But most of the more reliable Downworlder sources had said drowning, specifically, and Alec knows enough about faerie magic to know that if there’s a worse, more cruel version of events, that’s probably the one that’s correct.
He takes a deep breath in and slowly lets it out through his nose. “And the third step?”
“Well,” the Queen says, and pauses in picking her way down the path. The others all halt the instant she does; Alec takes one step farther, and even that feels like a defeat, but manages to contain his motion relatively neatly. “The third step, Alec Lightwood, is where the real trouble lies.”
Alec knows that already. The reason he knows is because the third step is the one on which the legends and stories truly differ — no one can seem to come to a consensus on what it is, which makes him incredibly nervous.
“What is it?” he grits out, trying his best to contain his tone. He’s made his decision; not knowing the specific risks means that he’s had to assume the worst up until this point, and he’s already decided exactly which kinds of things would be dealbreakers, and which wouldn’t.
The first list is much shorter than the second one.
The Queen smiles at him again, which really pisses him off more than it creeps him out at this point. “The third step is the return.”
He waits for her to continue, but she seems to be convinced that that’s a complete summary. Damn it. He fucking hates trying to get information out of Seelies — there’s a reason he usually lets Izzy handle this — and the Queen, of course, is the worst of all. Alec takes another deep breath: in through the mouth, out through the nose. Careful, slow, not too loud or harsh.
“What does that entail?” he asks as blandly as he can.
The Queen hums, a sweet, amused sound that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and starts walking again.
“The return is the most challenging aspect of the ritual,” she explains, and Alec tries not to worry about how… enthusiastic she sounds. “After the drowning, it is said that the soul is reborn. You will be without memory or knowledge. Only a strong tether will allow you to return to your own life.”
She falls silent, and Alec takes a moment to carefully consider that. It’s still an incredibly vague and unhelpful and ominous description, and it doesn’t really tell him what the risks are — he has to assume death, but in what sense? Will his body be returned, or will he simply disappear?
But then he thinks about the mention of a tether, and while he doesn’t know precisely what that means, the idea fills him with a calm certainty.
He nods, drawing himself back up out of his thoughts, and says, “How do we start?”
The Queen laughs with pure delight.
“We have already begun, Nephilim,” she informs him, and Alec once again has to try incredibly hard not to roll his eyes. Fucking of course they have. “Myself and my council will accompany you to the heart of the Wander-Wood, and then we will leave you, and from there you must find the Fountain yourself.”
They walk in silence after that; Alec is lost in his own thoughts, and the Queen and council certainly don’t seem interested in making idle conversation. The Wander-Wood, as they move steadily deeper and deeper into it, grows darker, the undergrowth more tangled, and even Alec’s deeply ingrained instinct to keep track of where he’s going and know the way out of any given place soon gives up the ghost. He’s hopelessly lost well before they ever reach their destination, but, well, he suspects that that’s the least of his current concerns.
He thinks of Isabelle and Jace, who must have noticed that he’s gone by now. Time moves differently in the faerie realms, of course, so it’s impossible to truly know, but it’s more likely than not. He thinks of their worry, their anger, whenever they finally find the messages he’d left in each of their rooms, explaining that he hasn’t been kidnapped or attacked or otherwise spirited away against his will — that this is his choice. What his choice is, for that matter, at least in the abstract; if he had been to specific, he’d have run too large a risk of them tracking him down and trying to intervene, and he couldn’t — can’t — allow that.
He thinks of the Institute; he’d left paperwork on his desk, and sent copies off to the Clave as well, explaining that he needed to leave on an ‘emergency diplomatic mission’ for an undetermined period of time in a non-specific location, and naming his siblings as co-Acting Heads until he returns. If he returns, which he tries not to think about. But he can’t quite help the pang of guilt at the thought that he’s essentially abandoned his post; there will be fallout to deal with when he returns, probably extensive fallout, but he also just plain feels bad about dereliction of duty. Not nearly bad enough, though, to so much as pause, because he…
He thinks about Magnus.
Alec thinks about the way his voice twists around the words “I will love you forever,” how he knows without even the slightest hint of doubt that Magnus means it. He thinks about the way Magnus has refused to even talk about marriage for more than a few minutes at a time — not because he doesn’t want to, but because he wants to more than anything; he just refuses to actually do it until Alec can have the wedding Magnus claims he deserves, in Idris and all in gold, even though Alec would skip town to marry him in an Elvis chapel in Vegas in half a heartbeat. He thinks about what it feels like to wake up next to him in the morning, how he’s never quite felt as safe as he does with sunlight seeping in through the curtains and shattering across Magnus’ cheekbones. He thinks about these things, and he’s more certain than ever that he knows exactly what the Seelie Queen means by a strong tether.
The exact odds of his success are probably impossible to calculate, but he’s well aware that they can’t be high. It doesn’t matter. Alec thinks of Magnus and firmly decides that there’s nothing — nothing — that he will allow to stand in his way.
—
He loses track of how long they’ve been walking pretty quickly; he doesn’t grow tired or even hungry or thirsty, which he’s sure is probably tied into the inherent magic of the Wander-Wood — a compulsion to keep him moving until he’s lost. It’s working in his favor for now, though, because he doesn’t want to stop. The itch to keep moving, to find, burns under his skin until it’s an effort to control his pace and stay in step beside the Queen. Based on the amused glance she sends his way, she can tell.
The Wander-Wood pulls at him, urging him to leave the path — even though ‘path’ is really pretty generous; it’s barely there at this point, just the slightest hint of a trail where it looks like maybe, just maybe, someone else has beaten the undergrowth down a little bit by walking here before. For all that he’d rather be walking next to pretty much anyone else, the advantage to being here with the Queen is that her presence seems to be all it really takes to keep that urging, the whispering voice at the back of his mind that says surely what he’s looking for is just off through the trees a bit, from actually taking over; every time he catches sight of her in the corner of his eye, or hears her humming lightly as she picks her way over a fallen branch, the Wander-Wood seems to fall away a bit, sinking back in the presence of its ruler.
Though maybe that’s just his Shadowhunter upbringing talking. Somehow, Alec doesn’t quite think that something as old and deeply dark as this forest can really be controlled by anyone, not even the Seelie Queen, not if it doesn’t want to be.
When the Queen finally draws to a stop and softly says, “We’re here,” it seems sudden, shocking. Alec really, genuinely doesn’t know how long they’ve been travelling for, or even what time scale he should be guessing at — has it been days? Weeks? It feels like much more than a few hours, but he can’t really know, that’s part of the effect. Surely the Queen wouldn’t leave her court unattended for too long. Surely she and all her closest advisors haven’t been here with him for much longer than a few days at most.
But no matter how convincingly he manages to rationalize it, he can’t know. Alec tries, mostly in vain, not to let that terrify him.
He looks around carefully, trying to get a sense of his surroundings, trying to look for anything that might tell him where to go from here, how to find what he wants. Of course, there’s nothing so simple as a sign saying “Fountain of Youth This Way,” or even anything that seems to indicate the presence of a body of water of any kind. They’re standing in a tiny clearing, with nearly impenetrable and pretty much identical-looking swaths of forest on all side; with Alec, plus the Queen, plus her council, the little glade is pretty cramped. There are flowers around the edges, their petals glowing in the perpetual half-light of the faerie lands, but something about them seems almost sickly.
“This is where we must part ways, Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says, and his attention snaps back to her. She’s watching him with a neutral expression on her face, but a curious gleam in her eyes. “From here, you must seek your way alone.”
Alec nods slowly, looking around the clearing once more. “Once I find the Fountain, do I just… jump in?”
The Queen hums. “No, there are certain… ritual considerations which must be observed in order for the Fountain to have its full effect. Don’t worry. Once you’ve found it, I will join you there, and bring aides to help you prepare.”
“Join me?” His brow furrows. “How?”
“I may not know where the Fountain is, but I will always be able to tell where you are, Nephilim, so long as you remain in my realm,” she tells him airily, and Alec might already be going a little bit insane in these fucking woods, because that’s actually kind of comforting. “When it is time, I will be able to find you.”
There’s not all that much he can do in response to that except nod. The Queen smiles serenely at him, then gestures to her council, and they move toward the edge of the clearing in unison, preparing to follow her back towards the court proper.
“Good luck to you, Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says, and is gone.
“Thank you,” Alec calls after her, stiffly, but by the time he manages to force the words out of his throat she’s long since disappeared into the trees. His words echo back at him in a way that makes him shudder.
He takes a deep, steadying breath. Okay. Well. There are a few options here, he tells himself, and mostly it’s even true, and not just something he’s desperately repeating in his head to try and pretend that he has even a modicum of control over this situation. He could always take the route of just… stepping out, and seeing what he can find. But that sounds dangerously close to — well — wandering in the Wander-Wood, and that never, ever ends well for anyone.
Except, he supposes, for whatever fae creatures inevitably eat the people who get lost in the Wood. So that option is not his favorite, to say the least.
But barring that… He has no map, no guide, not even a cryptic hint from the Seelie Queen. She’d said she didn’t know where the Fountain was, so that must be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t know how to find it. He curses himself for not thinking of that sooner — the fucking Wood has been messing with his head already — but, well, it’s too late now, and besides, even if she does know how to find it, there’s no guarantee she’d tell him. Actually, she probably wouldn’t, so it’s really a moot point anyway.
That does lead him down another train of thought, though. True, no one knows where the Fountain actually is — least of all him — but that doesn’t mean he has to just wander blindly and hope he trips and falls into it. There has to be a method. There has to be something.
Sighing, Alec sits down in the grass in the middle of the clearing — he’s less likely to wander off that way, he supposes, if he gets deep enough into his own thoughts to fall prey more easily to the magic of the Wood — and begins to catalogue, for approximately the one billionth time, everything he’s been able to discover about the Fountain of Youth.
It’s in the faerie lands, specifically the Seelie realm. It is, in fact, a body of water, and probably a rather large one, if the few fae writings he’d found on the matter were to be believed. It is a focal point of intense magical power — deep, old, wild magic, nothing as (comparatively) tame as the ley lines Alec is more familiar with, but something far darker than that and far more difficult to control.
If it were connected to the ley lines, then he could track them using runes and hopefully be lead right to the Fountain, but he doesn’t have Clary’s skill with runes, nor any complex grasp of magical theory, so he has no hope of trying to modify a rune to let him see the eddies of wild magic instead.
Even still, he thinks, the magic is probably his best lead. His heart pangs with a thought of Magnus; no doubt he would have had a stroke of brilliance and figured out some way to tap into the wild magic and lead Alec straight to the Fountain by now. And, far more importantly, if he were here Alec would be able to press up against his side and know that he’s not just out here alone in the woods.
—
He sits there in the clearing for an unknown amount of time, seconds and minutes and perhaps hours slipping away. Surprisingly, the Wood doesn’t seem to be having much effect on him — he’d been expecting the pull to increase once he was no longer walking side-by-side with the Queen herself, but it’s still just a quiet whisper in the back of his mind. Somehow, even when his thoughts begin to drift — the exact sort of opening the magic of the Wander-Wood would usually seize in order to take hold, if anything he’s ever learned about it is true — the urge to get up and see what there is among the trees is easy enough to catalogue as the Seelie realm’s patented brand of mental manipulation and subsequently ignore.
Alec frowns slightly, shifting his stance on the forest floor. He longs, briefly, for a notebook, or anything, really, that he could write on; having some way to physically track and catalogue his knowledge and try to decipher the tidbits of legend and myth swirling around in his brain might not actually help at all, but at least he’d be able to feel like he was doing something productive, rather than just sitting on the ground in the heart of the Wander-Wood.
Rubbing a hand over his face, he indulges in a put-upon sigh. “Fucking Seelie magic,” he mutters, and flops back to lie down in the grass.
He runs through what he knows yet again. Large body of water. Wild magic. Like the ley lines, but not. He scrubs a hand through his hair roughly; if only, he thinks again, if only it were the ley lines, or if only he knew the first fucking thing about where to find wild magic —
Alec goes abruptly still. Turns his head, very slowly. Looks out into the Wander-Wood.
Fucking Seelies. Of course.
The Wood itself is wild magic; that much should have been relatively obvious after spending this much time (however much time that actually is) in it, really, even if Alec hadn’t had lectures about the basic features of the faerie lands throughout his childhood and adolescence as a basic part of his training. Which, of course, he had.
He’s going to have to beat his head against a wall later — as soon as he can find a wall — but that can wait for now.
It only takes a few moments for the high of his epiphany to dim, though, under the grudging realization that this knowledge… doesn’t actually help him all that much. Yes, the Wood is seeped in — is made of — wild magic, presumably the same wild magic that pools in the Fountain of Youth, and yes, now that he knows that, he’s certain, somehow, that the Queen bringing him here specifically must have more significance than she’d let on, but that doesn’t actually get him any closer to knowing where to start looking for the Fountain, because the sum total of his knowledge of magical theory could still fit in a thimble. Being surrounded on all sides by wild magic doesn’t mean he has the slightest clue what to do with it, or how to use it to figure out where he needs to go.
Okay, maybe the thimble thing is a bit of an exaggeration — he is madly in love with the High Warlock of Brooklyn — but still.
“How the fuck am I supposed to…” he grumbles to himself, but he doesn’t finish the thought, just sighs and shuts his eyes against the sight of the faerie sky.
In between one moment and the next, in the space of a heartbeat, as he lets his body relax into the grass, something about the world slips sideways and feels abruptly wrong.
Alec doesn’t even realize the source of his own sudden unease at first. The silence is so instantaneous and absolute that his mind scrambles for several seconds to try and identify what’s missing from his senses, even as he feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Then, all at once, it clicks: the pull of the Wander-Wood, the whispering voice trying to draw him out into the trees, is gone. Completely gone.
It’s so unexpected that all he can manage to do is lie there frozen in shock, the unexpected quiet ringing in his ears.
And then, suddenly, the silence breaks.
All you need do is ask, Nephilim.
Slowly, so slowly, Alec sits up, wishing more than anything for the familiar weight of his bow against his back, even if he’s well aware it would be useless here. He had surrendered it to the care of the Seelie Knights as a sign of good faith, a decision which now strikes him as especially naive.
“Who are you?” he asks; it isn’t meant to be a whisper, but the clearing around him is still so quiet — the words, he realizes, had been spoken directly into his head. He’s really the one who’s broken the silence.
As he stares around, wide-eyed, the trees of the Wander-Wood seem suddenly to shiver and glow, and Alec realizes that he has his answer.
“How is this possible?”
It’s a stupid question — magic, obviously, wild magic — but this time he gets an actual answer.
Only at my heart can you come to seek true answers, the Wander-Wood tells him, and maybe it shouldn’t, but it completely stuns Alec, to know that all those souls who’ve been lost among these trees, stories stretching back across all of existence about people who go into the woods looking for something and never come back out — the thing that all of those people were searching for really was here all along. He wonders how many of them have ever found it.
Alec suddenly has a slightly better understanding of what Clary must have felt like standing face-to-face with Raziel.
He tries to make his mouth work, but nothing comes out. He’s… completely wrung out, blown away. Speech is currently far, far outside the realm of possibility.
The Wood, apparently, is capable of taking pity on people — and that, on top of everything else, threatens to truly shock Alec into catatonia — because the words You seek the water bloom across Alec’s mind.
“Yes,” he manages. “Yes. But I… I don’t know how — I know that if I could reach the, the magic, I could track it. Like — you know, like the ley lines, almost. But I don’t know how.”
All you need do is ask, Nephilim, the Wood says a second time, and Alec fights to breathe.
“How?”
The same magic runs here, the Wood tells him, and all at once something rushes under Alec’s skin and he can see it. Magic — it can only be magic — pulses, iridescent, in every direction. It shimmers off of everything, every leaf and rock and twig, sand it swirls through the air, all-consuming.
But, the more his eyes adjust, the more Alec realizes that there are… veins, arteries, flowing away from where he stands at the heart of the Wood. They disappear off into the trees, in all different directions, and Alec takes a deep breath in and he can almost taste them, like electricity crackling on the back of his tongue.
His heart seizes desperately — there are still so many, how will he know which ones lead to the Fountain? — but as soon as his destination crosses his mind, he can smell seawater, and he turns automatically to face one side of the clearing, where there are violets growing around the bases of the trees.
“Why are you doing this?” he gasps, unable to stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth, because if this is real, if it’s not some sort of trick, then he can’t think of any possible reason that the Wander-Wood would be helping him unless it wants something in return, or unless it gets something out of this situation, and Alec doesn’t know what he even has to give.
The magic weaving through the trees hums.
Because you are here, the Wood tells him simply. And all those who come here, to the very heart of me, discover the path to what they seek.
Alec frowns. “But I’m only here because the Queen… because she…”
Why would she bring him here? She must have known about this — she has to have known, there’s no way she didn’t — but he’s not used to the idea of the Seelie Queen being helpful, and frankly, the idea terrifies him. He’s absolutely positive that there will be a catch, he just doesn’t know what it is yet.
Regardless, the Wood says when Alec’s voice trails off, fear chilling his veins, you are here.
There’s certainly truth in that, Alec supposes.
He takes a deep breath and clambers to his feet on unsteady legs. Okay, he tells himself. This is fine. It turns out that the versions of the legend where there’s a guide to help the questing party on their way had had it right after all, and the Queen had just… mislead him a bit, all while really practically handing him a map. That kind of nonsense is hardly unlike her.
Carefully, he steps forward, toward the violets and the salty tang of seawater. But then he hesitates; having taken even one step away from the center of the clearing, from the heart of the Wander-Wood, he can hear the normal whispering just barely beginning to start up again, and somehow he knows that whatever the fuck this odd encounter has been, it’s almost over now.
So, uncertain, he clears his throat and says, “Uh, thank you,” before stepping somewhat more confidently out towards the trees — towards, he knows, the Fountain.
He barely catches the You are welcome, Nephilim that floats after him, but he doesn’t quite manage to miss the way it sounds… amused. He’d be much happier with this whole situation, he grouses to himself, if ancient and powerful fae creatures would stop finding him funny.
—
The whispering pull of the Wood does grow stronger as he moves steadily away from its heart, but not enough to really constitute a problem, not now that Alec has a path to follow. Slowly, many of the veins of magic start to disperse, until he’s just following one pearlescent strand and the smell of salt and violets through the trees.
The Wood grows periodically denser, and less dense; the air around him gets darker, and less dark. Alec still has no grasp of time, nothing to mark his passage — the Wood’s gift hadn’t helped with that; most of the magic of the faerie lands still affects him — and exactly how far he’s gone is equally mysterious. The smell of the water doesn’t seem to be getting any weaker or stronger. Though there’s just that one tendril of magic beneath his feet, it’s steady. He tries not to let the less-than-comforting ignorance that comes with being in the faerie lands bother him too much and. With the new distraction of watching the magic stretch out in front of him like a fine rope, he mostly succeeds.
Just because he knows which way to go doesn’t mean the going is easy. The path of the magic isn’t winding; it cuts straight through the forest, not concerned with which direction would make the journey easiest for, say, a Shadowhunter hell-bent on attaining immortal life. Alec fords streams, clambers over fallen logs that seem almost impossibly large, and, at one point, scales a short cliff. Still, in all of that time and through all of those strenuous activities, even when he breaks a sweat, he doesn’t hunger or thirst, even though instincts not attuned to the faerie lands are screaming at him that he should have long since keeled over from dehydration.
He follows that lone tendril of magic for what seems like an impossibly long time before he finally sees what he deems to be progress.
The smell of the water still hasn’t grown stronger, but, after an unknowably long time, he spots a shimmer through the trees, and then another, and another, and slowly they grow closer together and he understands: other veins of the same wild magic he’s tracking, starting to converge. His pace quickens, and his heartbeat with it. The magic will meet, he knows, at the Fountain.
More and more and more magic pours through the trees, until the trail he’s following is twice as wide as his armspan, and finally the smell of salt water grows so strong he can taste it on the back of his tongue, and it’s joined by the sweet scent of the violets growing so thickly that he can’t help but crush them underfoot, and he doesn’t realize that he’s cresting the final hill until he does it and sees the water spreading out before him, the tree line abruptly ending, a rough, choppy sea reaching out for the horizon and beyond.
The Fountain is far from the idyllic imagery he’s spent almost a year poring over; its surface is harsh, as though beaten by a nonexistent wind, as though constantly ready for the break of a storm. The water itself is almost pitch black, and there’s no way to tell how deep it is, though he supposes it doesn’t really matter. It could be no deeper than a puddle and it would still fill his lungs, force out all the air. If a nexus is a point where two ley lines cross, then this — the water, the Fountain — is to a nexus as a breath of air is to a star. Its power, even to someone completely incapable of shaping or even really seeing or feeling magic without outside assistance, is undeniable, breathtaking, and horrible. Alec has been in the presence of great and terrible power before, but this — this is like nothing else in this world or any other.
He shuts his eyes for only a moment before he starts to descend.