The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(117)

Her voice when she said that last was the closest thing to the old Alice that he’d heard since she woke up.

“I had so much power. So much power. After a while I realized I could let myself slip backward in time. It was easy. If you think about it you’re moving through time all the time, one second forward every second, but you don’t have to. You can just let yourself stop. I could almost do it even now—it’s as if you’re on a rope tow, up a ski slope, and you just let your mittens go slack, let the rope slide through your fingers, and you slow down and stop. There goes the present, rolling on without you, it’s gone, and just like that you’re in the past. It’s a wonderful feeling.

“But you can’t change anything, you can only watch. I watched the Chatwins come to Fillory. I watched people be born and die. I saw Jane Chatwin have sex with a faun!” She snorted with laughter. “I think she was a very lonely person. Sometimes I just watched people read or sleep. It didn’t matter, it was all funny. It never stopped being funny.

“Once I let myself go all the way back, all the way to the beginning of Fillory. The beginning of everything, or this everything anyway. It was as far as you could go. You bumped up against it, like you’d reached the end of your string.

“You couldn’t call it a pretty sight, the dawn of creation. It was more like the corpse of whatever had come before. Just a big desert and a shallow, dead-looking sea. No weather, no wind, just cold. The sun didn’t move. The sunlight was . . . unpleasant. Like an old fluorescent light that a bunch of flies had died in. Looking back now I think the sun and moon must have collided and melted together into one single deformed heavenly body.

“I watched the sea for a long time. You wouldn’t think a body of water that big could be so still. Finally a big old tigress came loping down to the water. Her ears were notched, and she’d lost an eye and it had healed shut. You could see her padding along from a mile away. I thought she must be a goddess.

“She came down to the edge of the water. She looked at her reflection for a bit, then she went trotting into the water, up to her shoulders. She stopped then, and shuddered, and sneezed once.

“Obviously it was distasteful to her, but she did it anyway. She seemed very brave to me. She kept on going until she was totally submerged. And then nothing. She had drowned herself. I saw her body float up to the surface, on its side, slowly turning in place in the slack tide, and then it sank again for good.

“For a long time after that nothing happened. Then the water kind of gathered itself into a wave, and the wave threw up two big curly shells on the shore. They lay next to each other for a while, and then another wave came and left behind it a sheet of foam. The sand underneath them kind of stirred and shook itself and it sat up, and that was Ember. The foam was His wool. The shells were His horns.

“Ember went trotting down the beach until He found a couple more curly shells, and He nudged them around for a bit till they were next to each other and then stood next to them so that His shadow fell over them, and then the shadow stood up, and that was Umber. They nodded to each other and then went trotting together up into the sky.

“They took turns licking at the big moon-sun in the sky until it split into two things again, and then Ember butted the sun in one direction and got it moving, and Umber butted the moon, and the whole business started again. And that was the beginning of Fillory.

“But mostly I didn’t give a shit about shit like that. Do you know what my favorite parts of the past were? I liked to watch myself sleep with Penny, because it hurt you. And most of all I liked to watch myself burn. I liked to go back to when I died and hide in the walls and watch it happen. Over and over again.”

“Could you see the future?” Eliot asked.

“No,” she said, in the same lightsome, detached tone. It was all the same to her. “Something to do with timelines and information flow, I think.”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Quentin said.

“If I could have I sure as shit wouldn’t have come back here.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“At first I couldn’t even get to Earth, but something changed. The barrier softened and I could. I found out by accident: I liked mirrors—I liked looking at myself without flesh—and then one day I touched one and went through into a weird space inside it. It was in between, like the Neitherlands. Mirrors within mirrors took you farther down, deeper and deeper, and at some point they became mixed up with the mirror-spaces of other worlds. I spent months in there. It was cold, and empty, or almost—I met a lost bird once, fluttering around, trying to get out. When I came back up it was into this world, not Fillory.

“I didn’t mind. Brakebills was interesting. Lot of magic there, and a lot of mirrors—it had a very complex mirror-space. I thought I might find my brother there, but I didn’t. But I found you, Quentin. You were a scab I wanted to keep picking. You hurt me, even then, and pain was something I enjoyed.

“And the people were interesting. I could tell Plum was connected to Fillory, though I’m still not quite sure how. I was so sure you were going to f*ck her.”

“Why does literally everybody think that?” Plum muttered.

“And then you tried to make a land!” She was speechless with silent laughter for a few seconds. “Oh my God, it’s so pathetic! You—Quentin, you could never make anything! Don’t you see? How could somebody like you create something that was alive? You’re a hollow man! There’s nothing inside you. All you could make was that cold, dead mirror-house.