Sophie opens the door, and steps into the flood.

What an impossibly beautiful piece of magic.

This isn't what Nico wanted, at all. He was trying to re-learn all the old, lost arts, trying to understand what the old Greek scholars hinted at, what the Roman public stoned Simon Magus for knowing.

But why stop there? Why not create something new and glorious, far beyond anything the old masters could imagine?

I have to find out how she did that.

One limitation of alchemy, he's realizing now, is that only alchemists do it. People learn by inches, pan for tiny secrets through tailings of the ancient masters. They learn to manipulate their own energies, to control themselves, because that's the only thing you can teach an apprentice. They're all melted down by the same fire, because it works, and even people like Nico who find their own ambitions later are shaped by that first deforming pour.

But this person isn't an alchemist. He saw that over and over, and rejected it because he couldn't believe that anyone else could achieve something so astonishing. It's possible that she's just pure talent, some unlikely lineage with connections to the spirit world that let her survive what others couldn't. But it's also possible that she knows something, something that let her blunder her way into an entirely new place without any of the training everyone thinks is necessary.

I have to know what she knows.

Unfortunate, then, that he's set up a trap to kill her, and that if it fails she'll probably try to kill him.

Sophie's thoughts are floating. She feels powerful, unstoppable, but somehow delicately balanced. It's like water skiing, with herself as both skier and boat. As long as she keeps pulling forward, she thinks, and doesn't lean against the force she's channeling, she'll be all right.

What's happening outside?

When you step out onto the driveway the water recoils from you like you bit it, until you're standing in a circle of perfect dryness four feet across. It's still trying to slip around you to sneak into the garage. Above you, your aura reaches so high into the sky that you can't even see the place where it's transforming rain into mist. On this block of Glen Ridge Road, the storm is canceled.

Sophie smiles a little. That's nice, but probably pretty wasteful. She needs to set herself against the flood, not the whole storm all at once. We fight, she tells herself, but one foe at a time.

She'll try something simpler, first.

"Focus," she whispers. "Be the needle that joins up earth and sky."

As you hoped, the rain shield contracts, from a sphere to a narrow cylinder. It reaches up and up, you feel resistance as it touches the heavy clouds...and then it breaks through, into a space you can barely feel. But you still can't see the sky; your own aura is shining too brightly.

The water reacts. It rears up, then collapses sideways into itself in a roiling spray. Just for a instant you think you see a face in the water, and you hear a roaring voice.

"τί εἶ? τί δὲ μεταξὺ ἐμοῦ τε καὶ τοῦ διδασκάλου ἕστηκας?"

Yes. This water...isn't just water, is it. There's air in there too, far too much, pulling it about and whispering to it under its choppy surface. Something of earth, too, she thinks, like the wooden garage door behind her.

But no fire. That, today, belongs to her.

If it speaks, perhaps it can listen.

"Turn away. Go back to wherever that devil found you, and leave these people alone!"

"ὄπισθέ σού ἐστιν," the waters reply. "ἔκστηθι, ἢ ἀποκλυσθήσῃ!"

I don't think it understood me. Well, so; she didn't understand it, either. It sure sounded hostile, though. She wasn't expecting to have a real enemy, but she's glad. It makes things easier, gives her something to focus on.

She breathes out, and rotates the impossible new part of herself forward.

"Rise up among my enemies."

The water begins to bubble and roil, then suddenly parts, rushing wide around her under the car and into the garage.

"No."

Sophie spreads her hands, like she can maybe draw the fire wider by pulling on it. She wants to cover the whole garage, cover the whole front of the house. But low, so low, no taller than Sophie is, and mostly toward the street. She doesn't want to purge all the water behind her, after all. Kyle is mostly water. And so, she surprises herself to realize, is she, even now.

Your aura tends to expand uncontrollably in all directions as it gets further away from you; you can somewhat manage to keep it low right around you but it roars up high toward the edges. The overall effect is to make yourself a valley, surrounded by rising slopes of quivering flame.

At first it seems to work: the water hisses, recoils from the house and pulls together, swelling higher and higher until it's a single blob taller than Sophie, then taller than the house behind her. Little ripples run down its surface as the rain nurtures it.

It does not know what it is.

It does not know what faces it.

But it knows what it wants to do.

The shining thing, the horrible eroding light, is between it and its charge.

So: snuff the light out.

It rushes forward.

Sophie steps forward to meet it, exhilarated. Yes. Give me everything you have.

There's a roar like a waterfall. The attacking flood unites with your aura, and the air around you is thick with steam. But your shield holds, and the water retreats, visibly smaller.

It doesn't know what it is, but it knows that it failed.

It has to try again.

. . .

The light is wide, but there's a shallow point in the middle. A vulnerable point? If the light is broader now, it must also be thinner. Mustn't it?

It begins to roil, gathering strength.

She'll take another step forward. "You can't beat me. Leave, or I'll destroy you." It's so, so thrilling to issue threats of destruction like that, knowing that she can back them up.

But she has to be fair. She has to give whatever-this-is a chance to run away. "Go!"

"οὐδαμῶς!"

The water roils a little more, then stretches out into a geyser, up and over the wall of light.

Hah! Nice try, but no.

Sophie pulls her aura back in, to make something tight around herself like she's had it all day.

Ah, but that wasn't by choice. The fire doesn't want to contract. It wants to expand, without limits or bounds, and even before it was doing the best it could.

It obeys you somewhat, flowing back into a simpler sphere shape, but slowly, so slowly. Too slowly.

There's a sharp cold shock as the water pours through your hair, down your back, and suddenly your aura is gone.

The waters rush forward. The spirit can't feel pain in any human sense, but it knows how close it came to destruction earlier, and it understands revenge. It presses in, trying to fill her mouth and nose, trying to quench her as completely as it can.

Sophie strikes out frantically, trying to swim to the surface, trying to grab for the state of mind she lost. She's so cold. She'd forgotten, already, what it was like to be cold. She huffs her breath out, trying to push the water from her nose, but then she's got no air left.

No. Forget the physical. She just needs to re-forge the connection she had before, the sense of stable balance between her two halves.

Or what she had before that.

Or anything at all.