Chapter Text
The streets of Chungxi, Chongqing’s local magical district, were a dizzying affair. Steps that led up and spat you out on a lower street, winding alleys that put you back the way you came in… it was standard fare as far as Harry was concerned, but Rize found it fascinating.
“So, wait- if I go in this way,” she mumbled excitedly, pointing down the street they’d just wandered down, the shops arrayed in the style of the late Ming Dynasty with deep red pillars and the roofs that swooped upward at their corners, each and every detail carved with an expert eye. “I’ll come out on top of the building we started on? How many kilometres up?”
Judging the fact that they were halfway into the mountains and were now scraping the river… “About two or three. Although, I’ve never been a good judge of distance.”
“How!?”
“To put it in simple terms, you make a gate. You stretch the road from up there,” Harry said, pointing back the way they came. “And plop the end of it down here, like folding a piece of paper so the two ends meet.”
“And you do that to… what, get around faster?”
“Pretty much.”
Shaking her head, Rize scoffed dumbly. “Madness. You’re all mad.”
“Just wait until you see my tent.” Harry grinned. “Camping never was so luxurious.”
“Your tent?”
“What, you think I’m homeless?”
“A tent still counts!”
“Not this one.”
Groaning, Rize followed along, unable to hide the fact that she was staring in awe at every passing shop, at each flying sheet of paper that whizzed through the alley of its own accord. There was the braying of some beast she’d never once laid eyes on, the chatter of shoppers and the pop and hiss of some brew spitting out of a great porcelain cauldron. It was chaos, and only grew more strange as they walked further along the street and were greeted with something even Harry had never seen before. Above their heads, the street curled, the shops stacked on top of themselves – roof to roof – such that it looked as though the local mages were walking on the ceiling of the world itself.
“That’s new,” Harry breathed, trying to work out what sort of magic could fold the street like that. Connecting one point to another was arduous work, but well studied. This was something else entirely.
“You’ve never seen this before?”
“Not once.”
Rize whistled lowly, stumbling once as she craned her head to look up and away, gasping as she pointed into the distance. “That’s us.”
“What?”
“Look. That’s us.”
And sure as sure could be, there they were, barely visible at the far, far end of the street above. Harry could, if they squinted, see Rize’s arm extended, pointing towards the two of them and back at herself.
“Impressive magic. Very, very impressive.”
“This street is a mobius strip… or something close to it.”
“Never heard of a mobius strip.”
“Looks like I get to explain something then.” Grinning, Rize had to all but tear her eyes away from her own distant figure. “So, where’s this bookshop. Also, you can read all this?”
“Translation charms, formed into runes,” Harry said, pull back their sleeve well past the elbow to reveal a deep black tattoo, sharp cuneiform etched into their bicep. “Ensures they’re always working, although I still have to pay close attention to what people say to make sure it sticks.”
Staring at the tattoo and slowly nodding, Rize took a moment to pause before speaking. “Soon as we’ve got your books you’re tattooing me.”
“It wouldn’t- actually. I think it would work for you. Ghouls have a bit of magic about them.”
“We do?”
“Everything does, to an extent. Regular humans? Not enough for something like this to stick,” Harry said, patting their arm. “But Ghouls? Plenty of magic in your blood. Why do you think the two of us have kagune? That I have to use household cleaning charms instead of regular ones to give us a quick scrub?”
“Because- you explained this before. Spell resilience.”
“And that means…?”
“That I’m magic!?”
“Sure are.”
Punching the air, Rize grinned. “Fuckin’ knew I was special.”
“You’re certainly unique,” Harry offered, smiling, as they turned off to the nearest bookshop and opened the door. “Let’s see what they’ve got for us, shall we?”
-::-
Fuck all. That’s what the shop had for them.
Same with the next, and the next, until Harry was scraping their fingernails through their hair and cursing their bad luck. Not one shop had any new literature on ghouls, nothing Harry hadn’t already scoured through in Japan or long before traveling east. Much of it was bunk anyways, with historical misrepresentations or outright lies detailing how easy it was to kill a ghoul, which in Harry’s experience was a vast oversimplification of an already difficult task.
So Harry made some inquiries which now led the two of them to the foot of an alley – because it was always an alley – with a far more sinister reputation than Chungxi.
“Gonna’ find your books in here?” Rize scoffed, her lip curled in reproach.
“You’ll find that, when it comes to mages, the most interesting books are found in dark, dank alleys.”
“Creepy trinkets, sure. I can see that. But books of all things?”
“When some books are capable of liquifying you, this is the kind of place those books are kept.”
“What the fuck is up with you people and turning each other into soup?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not one of those people anymore.”
Keeping their head on a swivel, Harry wandered into the alley with a keen eye.
There were no grand arcades here, pillars painted in startling red and carved with golden inlay. There was mold. There was filth. There were red eyes glinting from barred windows that poked out at street level.
It was perfect.
There was a menagerie, probably filled to the brim with all manner of unsettling creatures. Were they of dubious legality? Of course they were. Were said creatures more likely to tear your throat out than serve to be even a middling familiar? Most definitely.
A teahouse, of all things, that most likely catered to the local vampires if the scent of what Harry knew was blood, yet was remarkably like that of a sweet, syrupy cocktail to their newfound nose.
A butcher’s that smelled of… meat. ‘Proper’ meat and not sludge, a sign that what they peddled was as grim as the rest of the alley, and one Harry would have to stop by before leaving.
And finally, a bookshop. The blinds shuttered, the scent of dust abound, and even through the door Harry could pick up on an unworldly sort of magic, the kind found exclusively in long forgotten places, that treated humans with the distant hand of something that never quite understood what mortality meant in the first place.
“Be careful,” Harry uttered, looking at the door with trepidation. “This shop belongs to something far older than you or I.”
“Define old.”
“Centuries? Maybe even millennia… this kind of magic… you don’t find it in places like this. You find it in Roman ruins from before the fall. Whoever, whatever calls this place home is beyond the ken of all mages save Nicolas Flamel. This shop… it shouldn’t exist.”
At those words the door opened. It was hardly a crack in the seam, but the sound it made was that of a tomb being prised apart, air older than even the trees upon the mountaintops and the earth beneath their feet seeping through the gap with the rattle of a dying man.
“We’re being welcomed in.”
Slowly, Harry approached, hand hovering over the door handle. They paused, looking over their shoulder at Rize to find curiosity and worry in her gaze, jaw locked into something bordering on ferocity. Her nostrils flared, her frown deepened, and then she nodded.
Harry took a deep breath before grasping the handle and swinging the door wide, the shop well-lit despite the smell of dust. It was as if it had been cleansed between one heartbeat and the next, no sign of the decay Harry had expected, no hint of anything monstrous in the tidy rows and the long counter at the rear of the shop, a woman waiting for them beneath the flickering light of a torch. She sat behind it, chin propped up on one hand that bore fingers a hair too long, her other hand drumming silently upon the wooden countertop as though a pianist. Strange, shifting images were carved into every inch of the counter’s surface, and there was a wickedness to its edges. The warp and shimmer of it defied explanation, roiling like bubbling ocean waves, and when Harry stared too long at the twisting, many-layered patterns they seemed to grow deeper, more lively.
They blinked, looking back up at the Shopkeeper.
“Hello,” the woman spoke, hair ashen white and her eyes milky with cataracts. Her skin was pallid, translucent, the blue of her veins running spiderwebs across her cheeks. “What might this one call you?”
“Potter.”
The woman smiled, revealing thin, jagged, sharklike teeth. “But you’re not, are you? Your hands have never touched clay with intent to shape it into something beautiful. You’ve made no vases, no cups, nothing meant for drink or pretty… impermanent fancies.”
“No. I have not.”
The woman, the thing’s head was flung backwards, past the point of return, rolling along her shoulders until it lolled at a frightening angle, almost upside down. Her hair hung straight, not a single strand out of place. A solid curtain of shining white. “You’re curious. Confused. Something strange has taken you and you have come looking for answers.” She spread her arms wide, joints popping. “This one offers knowledge, if only to sate her own curiosity.”
Harry took a step forward, then another, slowly closing the distance between the two of them. “You know what I am.”
“This one knows what you were. Mageling. Warrior. So young, so troubled.” She sighed, head snapping back into place and her hands returning to the countertop, splayed out across it like the roots of a tree, wide and searching. “You are still young. Still so full of doubt. Now winter creeps through your veins. Searching. Judging. Once bitten, twice shy – you’ve felt its wrath.”
“What am I?”
“This one cannot say.” Her eyes shut, a toothless smile on the Shopkeeper’s face. “To say too much would be to decide for you, and we kin have always taken pride in choice.”
“Tell me,” Harry demanded, slamming their hands upon the countertop.
The Shopkeeper did not twitch, did not flinch nor rear back. Her smile only deepened, head swaying to a silent rhythm. “This one will not. And yet…” She snapped her fingers and between them, a book appeared. Simple, albeit weathered, it bore the signs of many a read – the paper’s edges frayed in parts, stains visible upon the cover. She plucked it from the air itself and laid it down in front of Harry, pushing it towards them with a single finger. “This one will, in a way.”
“...And this has answers.”
“Of a sort.” The Shopkeeper rose, standing, impossibly long legs pushing her higher and higher until her hunched and crooked back flattened against the ceiling and she was smiling down on Harry from above. Her arms stretched, hands pressed against the walls and her shoulders quaking, as if holding back the room itself.
Harry took a step back, snatching the book, and stared as the Shopkeeper’s head began to twist, over and over, neck crinkling and popping with every turn. Still, she smiled. Still, her eyes remained closed. “This one hopes you find the answers you are looking for. It has been much too long since your kind have wandered this place. The nights, they’ve grown short and much too bright, though your kind have always loved the moon’s soft embrace, have they not?” Her jaw hung open as she sighed, teeth rattling in their sockets. “Bright, dark. Bright… dark. It has been so long that this one cannot easily remember those wylder nights.”
A pause, hanging in the air. “This one wants you to grow big and strong.” Her eyes flew open, the deepest, darkest black Harry had ever seen. They swallowed up the room’s light, the torch behind her flickering as it fought, futile, before sputtering out into a trail of smoke. One by one the lights went, until nothing was left in the room but those eyes, so dark that they cut through the shadows and shone, aberrant, through that curtain of blackest night. The Shopkeeper’s mouth opened, a light glimmering in her throat of hardened amber, the fire swallowed up and burning in her gut.
Harry’s breath caught, and they took another step back, clutching the book to their chest. Behind them, Rize shouted something, though they didn’t hear a word of it, the whole of their being captured by the light and the Shopkeeper’s next words.
“Once you have read, go to the mountains of Wulong where the fog is thickest. There, you shall learn.”
The light in the Shopkeeper’s throat grew, sharpening into a startling white that cut through the dark, blinding. Her jaw snapped shut, the world shook, and Harry blinked to find themself and Rize standing in an empty lot, frost creeping along the stones in stark defiance of the sweltering heat that bore down on them.