Chapter Text
Somewhere in Ireland, 1901
Unspeakable Carlita Randall cursed as her foot slipped on yet another loose patch of gravel. The path up the mountain was thin and treacherous, and entirely too dangerous for one person to navigate alone. Listening to the breathless complaints from her companion tramping well behind her, she nevertheless wished she had left Unspeakable Eora Bradley at the Ministry of Magic.
Eora Bradley was the newest addition to the ranks of the Unspeakables and was perhaps one of the most irritating people Carlita ever had the displeasure of meeting. Eora was from a smaller, lesser-known pureblood family, though she still expertly exhibited the entitled attitude that was common in most of the original purebloods. Despite her status as a fresh recruit, she held no issues with doling out orders to her fellow Unspeakables like she was the Minister of Magic herself. She was rude, worked poorly with others, and had a temper that rivaled that of even the most excitable Hungarian Horntail.
Still, Carlita could not deny that Eora was one of the most intelligent witches she had ever come across.
Not that she would ever admit something like that out loud, of course. The last thing Eora needed was someone stroking her already enormous ego.
Carlita huffed and hiked her thick skirt up above her ankles, pointedly ignoring Eora’s demands to rest on a nearby rocky outcrop.
“It is entirely too early in the morning to be traipsing up the mountainside in search of a myth,” Eora moaned.
Privately, Carlita agreed. The sun had barely begun to peek above the horizon, and the sparse vegetation dotting the ground was damp with early-morning dew. To make matters worse, they were in the middle of one of the harshest winters in recent memory, and even the warming charm enchanted into her robes could not keep the cold from biting deep into her bones.
Altogether, it was shaping up to be a miserable start to her day. She wanted nothing more than to be curled up in front of her fireplace, nursing a warm cup of tea. She had a mission to carry out, however, and if there was one thing Carlita Randall was known for, it was her capability to see things through.
The reason for their task was simple enough, if not incredibly inconvenient. Approximately six months ago, Head Unspeakable Ali began receiving reports of a mysterious rift of magic disappearing and reappearing all over Western Europe. Preliminary tests performed by Angelo Coil, an Unspeakable who specialized in identifying independent, random events of magic, indicated that the rift was a harmless irregularity that would eventually fade with time. A lengthy report was promptly written and filed neatly under “Threat Level: Baby Acromantula.” Despite the obvious misnomer, as Acromantulas are incredibly dangerous regardless of their age, the subject was promptly forgotten with no plans for anyone to ever revisit it.
That is, until Unspeakable Coil supposedly fell into the rift and never returned. It took an embarrassing amount of time for someone in the department to notice his absence, but by the time it was finally brought to Head Unspeakable Ali’s attention, the rift had relocated.
Fast forward to a few months later, and there was now a string of disappearances of muggles and wizards alike, all coinciding with areas where there was a significant spike in magical energy, similar to what Unspeakable Coil had claimed was displayed by the rift. The main problem lay within the fact that no one had ever actually seen or studied the rift besides Unspeakable Coil, who like all good witches and wizards of the time, was a complete and utter madman. Hence Eora’s claim that they were chasing a myth; there was no proof that the rift even still existed, much less that it was the thing causing the disappearances.
Still, it was a coincidence that Head Unspeakable Ali was loathed to ignore, which of course led to an urgent (although highly confidential, as all things concerning Unspeakables were) quest to locate and suspend the rift. Thus far, there had been little to no progress in finding it. The only thing that they had established with some degree of certainty was that it seemed to react negatively to sudden acts of magic, especially apparition. If someone apparated within 5 kilometers of where the rift was reported to be, it would immediately move to another location. There was also no discernible pattern to how the rift relocated, meaning that most of the time, the Unspeakables were operating purely on the conjecture of locals and blind faith.
The tip that Head Unspeakable Ali had received last night was the most substantial to date, from a squib farmer who claimed he had seen the rift with his own two eyes.
So here Carlita was, at the crack of dawn, in the dead of winter, with her least favorite Unspeakable, trekking up a mountain face in the middle of Northern Ireland in search of this so-called “rift.”
“Unspeakable Randall, I demand that we stop immediately. I think I’ve twisted my ankle,” Eora squawked.
Carlita rolled her eyes. “Eora, we’ve almost reached the location of the rift. Besides, what will we tell Head Unspeakable Ali if it relocates while we rest?”
“I don’t care what we tell the Head Unspeakable! My ankle hurts and I am not moving from this spot until you agree to stop!” Eora huffed, crossing her arms delicately across her chest and stamping her foot on the ground. Immediately, her face twisted into a grimace of pain.
Carlita felt a little bad; maybe Eora really had injured her ankle. Still, their mission was incredibly time-sensitive and Carlita had no intention of stopping, hell or high water be damned.
Carlita mustered up all of her remaining patience before saying, “Perhaps next time, you should consider wearing proper hiking shoes instead of the latest designer boots.” Which apparently wasn’t much.
Eora’s left eye twitched in response. Recalling Eora’s infamous temper, Carlita almost regretted trying to provoke her.
“Look,” Carlita continues, gentler this time, “the rift is supposed to be just over this next ridge. It’ll be less than a ten-minute walk, and we really cannot afford to stop right now.”
Eora’s ears turned bright red in ire, and for a moment, Carlita thought she looked as if she really might explode. Her hand unconsciously inched towards her wand.
Eora’s eyes followed her hand’s movement before taking a deep breath. “Fine,” Eora snapped, looking away in irritation.
Carlita breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed her stance. With a brief look back to confirm Eora was following her, she continued walking.
True to Carlita’s word, they reached the top of the ridge in a little less than ten minutes. Carefully making her way to the edge of the precipice, Carlita found herself peering over the edge into the valley down below.
It was a steep drop, and despite really never having been afraid of heights, Carlita could nevertheless feel her knees quiver in unease. Beside her, Eora inhaled sharply.
“Are you sure we can’t just use magic to get down there?” she asked. Carlita politely ignored the tremble in her voice.
Carlita cleared her throat. “Quite sure.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Eora abruptly narrowed her eyes and peered into the distance. Pointing excitedly, as if she’d suddenly forgotten all of her previous grievances, Eora exclaimed, “Look! There it is!” Carlita followed Eora’s line of sight and sure enough, sitting unsuspectingly in the middle of the lowland was the rift. From this far away, she could only make out a tall, stone archway resting upon a smooth dais of stone. It didn’t look like much, but in Carlita’s experience, the most dangerous things never did.
Looking around, Carlita noticed a thin, rugged trail to the left of the ridge that led directly down into the valley. It was incredibly steep with tall weeds and small bushes covering most of the path, but Carlita figured it was their best chance of reaching the rift without using magic. She nudged Eora away from the edge of the cliff towards the trail.
“Come, before it disappears again.”
“I just can’t believe it’s actually real,” Eora marveled.
The head of the trail was framed by two small cairns that were stacked precariously and both leaned slightly to the left. Carlita passed through them carefully and then crouched low to help maintain her balance while she crept down the slant.
“This is incredibly undignified,” Eora sniffed, before promptly following suit.
“Do you have the stasis runes prepared for when we reach the rift?” Carlita inquired as she stepped over a loose rock.
“What do you take me for, an amateur? Of course, I have them prepared. The real question is whether or not they’ll work,” Eora replied.
“I thought you fancied yourself a genius, Eora. Why wouldn’t they work?”
“I haven’t been able to examine the magic that this rift operates on. For all I know, it could require a stabilization rune that hasn’t even been invented yet. I may be a genius, but even my genius has limits, Unspeakable Randall.”
“That’s... surprisingly humble. For you.”
Eora hummed in agreement, and that was the end of it. The rest of the trek was spent in companionable silence. By now, the sun had risen well into the sky, and the temperature was starting to warm from the early-morning rays. The melodic trill of a wren echoed through the valley. The day no longer felt as bleak as it had before.
Carlita could almost imagine she was on a peaceful daybreak excursion, were it not for the loud crunch of Eora’s feet on shale serving to remind her where she actually was.
Turning to peer at her companion, Carlita raised her eyebrows. “If you stomp any louder, you’re going to scare the rift away,” she teased, in a rare moment of playfulness.
Eora scoffed. “Please. As if you aren’t already making enough noise for the two of us, trampling down the path like a pregnant heifer—”
Eora cut herself off with an indignant screech. Carlita could only watch helplessly as Eora’s ankle gave way on her next step, sending her careening forward into a hard collision with Carlita. They tumbled down the incline in a messy tangle of limbs. Sharp rocks jutted into Carlita’s back every time she hit the ground, ripping into her robes and cutting into her skin. It was a rough descent, and if she wasn’t so concerned with breaking their fall, Carlita would undoubtedly be embarrassed by her flailing limbs.
Eora was fairing no better, grappling at loose pebbles, trying desperately to slow her momentum. After what felt like forever, they finally came to a stop at the base of the slope, winded and covered in an amalgamation of new cuts and bruises. Eora had landed several meters ahead of Carlita, and she groaned in pain as she turned to lie on her back.
Carlita took a moment to catch her breath and then looked at her colleague pointedly. “What were you saying about a pregnant heifer?”
“Shut up,” Eora hissed.
Rolling her eyes, Carlita stood up. Only Eora would try to save face after something like that.
“Can you walk?”
Avoiding Carlita’s gaze, Eora slowly sat up and brought her injured ankle to rest upon her opposite knee. She rolled her ankle once clockwise, once in the opposite direction, and then once clockwise again. She then brought the tip of her foot up until it was perpendicular to the ground, and then moved it back until it was parallel.
Finally relaxing her foot, she sniffed haughtily. “No.”
Frustration welled in the pit of Carlita’s stomach, but she pushed it down determinedly. It wasn’t like Eora could help that she had an injured ankle. Not for the first time, Carlita desperately wished that the rift wasn’t so sensitive to magic. She had almost been a medi-witch before she became an Unspeakable, so she could’ve healed Eora’s ankle with little fanfare.
“Well,” she said, hooking her arms underneath Eora’s, “up you get.”
Carlita pulled Eora to her feet, ensuring her lame foot didn’t touch the ground. She slung Eora’s arm over her shoulders and moved her own arm to wrap around Eora’s waist. “You’ve still got to lay the runes. If I get you up onto the dais, do you think you can manage?”
Eora nodded. Carlita adjusted her grip and started pulling Eora towards the rift. It was awkward, with Eora hopping on one foot and the drastic difference between their heights, but they managed. This close, she could just barely pick up the smell of the lavender soap that Eora used to wash her hair. Without realizing it, she began to turn her head to follow the scent. Momentarily distracted, she almost didn’t notice when Eora spoke.
“Do you hear that?”
Carlita pulled her gaze from Eora’s golden hair and cleared her throat awkwardly. “Ahem… hear what?”
Eora’s eyes were fixed on the rift. “The whispers.” Carlita followed her gaze and wrinkled her eyebrows in bewilderment. She couldn’t hear a thing, although Eora seemed oddly disturbed by whatever it was that she was experiencing.
“No,” Carlita replied, careful to keep the tone of her voice level. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Step up right here.”
Eora shivered violently and then startled so badly that Carlita almost dropped her. She watched as goosebumps pimpled on the pale skin of Eora’s neck. Still, Eora recovered quickly and stepped up onto the dais, all the while tightly clutching onto Carlita’s robes. Carlita had a feeling it wasn’t only serving to help her keep her balance.
“Where do you think we should place the runes?”
“On the archway,” Eora replied, yet she made no move towards it.
Carlita nudged her gently, and as if snapping out of a daze, Eora roughly pushed her away and hobbled closer to the rift.
Carlita couldn’t find it in herself to be offended. Eora was clearly shaken by something, even if Carlita had no clue what it was. She trailed behind Eora carefully.
Once Eora reached the archway, she ran a shaking hand over the surface of the stone. Up close, the rift looked ancient, as if it had been teleporting all across the world since the beginning of time. The stone was cut in a manner Carlita was unfamiliar with, and at a closer look, she could see small symbols carved all along the archway.
“Eora, do you recognize any of these symbols?” Carlita asked, running her fingers delicately along the whorls and curves in the design.
When she didn’t hear a response, Carlita turned to Eora and repeated her question.
Eora was searching through her bag as if she had never heard her speak. Concern began working its way through Carlita’s body. She used her free hand to tap Eora’s shoulder.
“Eora?”
“Hmmm?”
“My question, did you hear me?”
Eora looked up and briefly gestured toward her ears. “Sorry, the voices. It’s hard to hear anything over them.”
Then, with a small aha, Eora pulled out several small rolls of papyrus from her bag. On each roll of papyrus was a series of runes, drawn painstakingly in charcoal. Carlita had never done particularly well in runes, so she could hardly tell where one rune ended and another began, but she trusted Eora.
Eora handed Carlita three of the six rune scrolls and then pointed her toward the left side of the arch. “Place those there, in a reversed triskelion configuration. And don’t play stupid, I know you know what that is.”
Rolling her eyes, Carlita bit back her admittedly predictable protest that she did not, in fact, know what the reversed triskelion configuration was. If the rift exploded because of a misplaced rune, it would serve Eora right for her sanctimonious, presumptuous, arrogant-
“Sometime within the next millennia, Carlita.”
Carlita grumbled under her breath but nevertheless moved towards the arch. She deposited the runes in a rough approximation of what she thought a reversed triskelion looked like, occasionally glancing over to Eora’s own formation to verify her work. The stone of the structure was coarse underneath her touch and hummed with a strange energy. Although not unpleasant, Carlita was still loathed to expose herself to the feeling unnecessarily. She swiftly placed the final rune and took one last surreptitious glance at Eora’s design. Pleased to see that they were completely identical, Carlita stepped back and waited for her partner to finish.
Pausing in her progress, Eora glanced over briefly to examine Carlita’s arrangement, and almost immediately sighed in vexation. “That’s a partial hexafoil, not a reversed triskelion. Move the uppermost rune two centimeters down and one-third of a centimeter to the left.”
“One-third of a centimeter?” Carlita griped. “Of course, Eora. Please allow me a moment to retrieve my limited-edition, Pythagorean magical ruler so I can move this rune one-third of a bloody centimeter. You can’t actually be serious.”
Eora awarded Carlita with a deadpan look. “I’m entirely serious, and if you’d managed to pass ancient runes, you’d know that.”
Carlita personally thought that that last comment had been a bit gratuitous, but to be fair, she had been equally as sardonic. She internally shrugged her shoulders. Fair enough, she supposed. Doing as she was told without further comment, probably to the great pleasure of Eora, Carlita then proceeded to remove an ornate silver knife from her pocket in preparation for the next step of the ritual.
“May I activate the runes?” Carlita asked.
Eora nodded her head in assent and in an incredibly uncharacteristic move, plugged both her ears with her fingers. “The voices,” she elaborated when Carlita looked at her questioningly.
Carlita winced in sympathy. If these so-called voices were bothering Eora enough for her to break her normally steel-like composure, then she needed to work fast. An ill-at-ease Eora never meant anything good.
The silver dagger was a cool weight in her hand. While beautiful, it was incredibly ostentatious, and although she was sure Eora had explained it before, Carlita still didn’t understand the purpose behind the gaudy ruby embedded in the pommel. She cast a cursory glance at her appearance reflected in the surface of the gem before tightening her grip on the handle.
Using the knife, Carlita carved a smooth laceration across the tip of her index finger. As the blood began to well up on the surface of her skin, she delicately pressed the incision across the central rune in the first formation, and then, the second.
Almost immediately, Carlita could feel the framework of runes take hold. The air surrounding her became eerily still and quiet, pervaded only by the sound of her and Eora’s breathing. The overwhelming fog of energy that had previously enclosed the rift faded away into a much more agreeable sensation, enough to where Eora was finally able to uncover her ears.
Curiously, the curtain of raw magic draped across the arch continued to flutter unaffectedly, despite the distinct absence of a breeze. However, it was undeniable that the runes had achieved exactly what they were meant to.
Surprised that Eora wasn’t shouting her success from the rooftops, Carlita drew her attention away from the rift to peer at her companion. Meeting the other woman’s gaze, she was shocked to find that Eora’s eyes had glazed over in a filmy silver as if she were possessed by something otherworldly. Moreover, for reasons beyond Carlita, she was limping towards the entrance of the fissure, showing no signs of pain as she bore weight on her bad ankle.
“Eora,” Carlita laughed nervously, “what are you doing? Is there something wrong with the configuration?”
Carlita knew full well that there wasn’t a thing wrong with the configuration; the runes wouldn’t have mobilized otherwise. She was only trying to capture Eora’s attention, and by extent, prevent her from committing whatever madness she was clearly considering.
Receiving no response, Carlita edged towards Eora discreetly. There was no need to agitate her into doing anything rash.
Well. Anything rasher.
“Eora…?” she tried again, reaching a hand out to grasp her shoulder.
Impervious to Carlita’s concern, Eora took the final, damning step across the threshold of the rift.
Feeling like a broken record, Carlita screeched Eora’s name once more. Using her outstretched hand, she grasped the scruff of the other woman’s coat and harshly yanked her backward, causing Eora to lose her balance. Going down with her, Carlita wrapped her arms around Eora tightly, taking the brunt of the fall.
“What are you doing?” she hissed into her ear. Carlita watched over Eora’s shoulder as she blinked sluggishly, appearing to have finally come out of her daze.
“I…” Eora’s voice cracked, “don’t know. I apologize.”
Carlita breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s alright, I suppose. Are you okay? Did you see anything?”
“Yes, I’m alright. And as for what I saw…” Eora paused, sounding deeply unsettled. “I’m not exactly sure what I saw.”
Her face was devoid of all color, her lips bloodless. In Carlita’s arms, Eora shivered violently, although whether it was from the cold or from fear, Carlita couldn’t tell. Probably a healthy mix of both. Besides looking as if a stiff breeze could knock her dead, Eora also seemed to be the farthest thing away from willing to talk about what had just happened.
Knowing better than to push, Carlita instead uncurled herself from her position along Eora’s back. She smoothed her hands along Eora’s arms to ease her shaking, and then stood up.
She held her hand out expectantly. “Transportation rune, if you please. We are clearly in over our heads. This needs to be moved to the Ministry, immediately.”
“Of course,” Eora agreed. With a flourish of her hand, she produced the final rune necessary to accomplish their mission.
Carlita snatched it from her grasp with little fanfare. Admittedly, she was behaving a tad impatiently, but after such a series of unusual events, she was more than eager to hand this problem over to someone more qualified.
She hoisted Eora up with her free hand and together, they quickly made their way off the dais.
She continued to drag Eora along with her until they stood at the base. Once they were a safe distance away from the entrance of the Veil, Carlita allowed herself to take one last moment to consider the magical anomaly. The entire situation had unsettled her much more than she wanted to admit and to make matters worse, she couldn’t really put her finger on why. The only thing that she could say with any degree of certainty was that now, more than ever, the fissure seemed to exude an aura of danger. Even still, she couldn’t find it within herself to deny the beauty of the structure.
“You know,” Eora suddenly spoke, her head tilted to the side, “this doesn’t really look like a rift to me. More like a…”
Eora paused for a moment, tapping her index finger consideringly against her chin. “A schism, wouldn’t you say?”
Carlita scoffed in disbelief. “You almost died, and you’re worried about naming the thing that tried to kill you?”
“I was just asking your opinion. No need to become upset.”
“I’m not upset,” denied Carlita, despite being unbelievably, incredibly upset. Eora looked at her knowingly.
“So…?”
Carlita shrugged her shoulders. “I really don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say what you think. About calling it a schism, I mean. Perhaps the schism. It sounds delightfully ominous, right?” Eora looked entirely too pleased with the prospect.
Simply because it was the principle of the thing, Carlita shook her head in disagreement. “The schism would be a neat name, sure, but honestly… I think it should be called the Veil,” Carlita declared, before activating the transportation rune and disappearing in a blink.