Into Thin Air

Chapter 45

Hope snuck out of her own dorm that morning, face burning with embarrassment at the memory of how she’d woken from her nightmare last night. Lizzie had held her while she cried and stroked her hair as she tried to fall back to sleep, but Hope couldn’t bring herself to look at the blonde Saltzman when she woke up again. 
Instead, she stole away to a quiet corner of the library with the two pieces of the ascendant and the latest book she was working her way through.
She couldn’t figure out how this contraption was supposed to go together. The books had been very descriptive about how to reverse the spell on an ascendant. Hope was confident that she’d be able to do that part easily. It was actually fitting the strange pieces together correctly that was stumping her. 
Maybe it’s the missing piece that’s the key to holding it all together, Hope thought.
“You deep in thought?” Lizzie asked, approaching slowly with her hands folded behind her back. It was so Hope couldn’t see the way they twisted together nervously. 
Lizzie had woken up alone in Hope’s dorm and waited a while for her to come back. When she didn’t, she began to wonder if she had done something wrong. Lizzie tried her best when Hope woke up screaming but it seemed like nothing she said or did helped Hope at all. 
“Uh-huh.” Hope nodded vaguely, eyes glossy but still glued to a page in the book. It had a drawing of an ascendant but not theirs. “I think I know everything there is to know about ascendants.” Hope leaned back in her seat, rubbing at her eyelids. “If I just had all the pieces and could put the damn thing together, I’d know exactly how to reverse it.” She forced a grateful smile. “At least, thanks to you, I have two out of the three pieces.”
“Well … what if we used those two to do a locator spell?” Lizzie sat down across from Hope excitedly, practically tripping over her feet in her haste to get there. She stared intensely at Hope, eagerly awaiting her response.
“A locator spell on an inanimate object?” Hope brushed it off. “Is that even possible?”
Lizzie shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Neither one of us is a conventional witch. I mean, I’m a Gemini siphoner and you’re a first-born Mikaelson witch. If anyone can, it’s us.”
“Magic doesn’t work like that.” Hope gave her another smile, but this one said to Lizzie that she was naïve and pitiful rather than a good addition to her team. “I’ve seen - and written - a lot of obscure spells, and I’ve never heard of anything like it. It has to be a living thing. There has to be a life force.”
“Well what if the magic in the ascendant was the life force?” Lizzie didn’t actually believe the words she was saying. She was making it up as she spoke, desperate to not look like an idiot in front of the Hope Mikaelson. “No, think about it. It’s a prison world. It has to have a constant source of magic, right? To keep existing?”
“And the magic flow that keeps that world alive would work like a person’s blood flow.” Hope nodded along. 
“All we would need is a tiny bit of the prison world magic from the pieces that we do have in order to track it.”
“That could work.” Hope scrambled for a piece of paper and a pen. “Could you siphon the magic from the pieces?” 
“Siphon it? No problem.” Lizzie rested her chin in her hand as she watched Hope scribble furiously. “But to hold enough magic like that … Well, very bad things happen to siphoners who take more than they can handle.” Lizzie grimaced as she remembered her mother's warning of what could happen if she or Josie overdosed. “I would need some sort of container to put it all in.”
“I might have just the thing.” Hope slammed her book shut. “Come with me.”