The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

He felt weightless and empty. He’d stopped being who he was, but he wasn’t sure yet who he was going to be next.

Instead he smelled the smells of autumn rain in the suburbs: mulch rotting, wooden decks swelling, wet dogs, hedges breathing.

He was ready. The whole business of getting kicked out of Fillory had been good for him. It made him tougher, more grounded in reality, to the point where he could deal with getting kicked out of Brakebills. He was basically homeless, and getting increasingly less respectable, but he knew who he was and what he had to do.

A long, heavy tranche of cloud lay above the horizon, utterly still, its outline etched finely against the sky, like the silhouette of a breaking wave cut out of paper.

“Look at it all,” Janet said. “Just look at it. It’s almost like the world isn’t ending.” “Almost.”

Plum let her mind spin off its axis. Her brain wasn’t up to thinking about the future right now, or about the past. It wasn’t functioning on that level. So she hung out in the present, second by second.

she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.

But people are slow to recognize anger in little children, and children never recognize it in themselves, so it comes out in other ways.

What was he going to do? He wanted to shout at her: Wake up! Remember who you are! I need to talk to Alice! But the thing about monsters was, you couldn’t talk to them about it, because they wouldn’t admit they were monsters in the first place.

The loops were getting stranger, the time lines were in a Gordian knot, the thick was plottened beyond all recognition.

He’d wanted to create something, make something new, be somebody new, but it was becoming apparent that he couldn’t, not until he’d dealt with something old. Not until he’d cleared his debts and laid his ghosts to rest.

As far as she knew Whitespire’s towers had never stood still before, even in the dark times, the worst times.

This time they could take the direct route, the express train: hippogriffs, the fastest fliers in the fleet. You couldn’t use them all the time. They were independent bastards, valued their freedom, practically libertarians, and they were very fussy about their feathers too, which you always ended up pulling out a few, it was impossible not to. But desperate times, etc. They were better than the pureblood griffins anyway—those things were just anarchists. Chaotic neutral all the way.

There were a few seconds of silence, then it was answered from off to the south by a piercing silver trumpet tone, the same note a fistful of octaves higher. Then six or seven notes followed in unison, from all points of the compass, even out to sea, shifting between major harmonies and clashing tritones. Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat.

Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.