The Song of Broken Wings

Part One: Autumn Harmonics

Chapter 1: The Boy Who Fell

The first time Eliot Waugh saw him, the boy was bleeding music.

Not blood—though there was that too, a thin line of crimson trailing from where his fingertips pressed too hard against steel guitar strings. But it was the music that caught Eliot’s attention, notes that seemed to drip from the stranger’s form and pool in the autumn air like spilled wine.

Eliot had been drunk for three days straight, a personal record even by Brakebills standards, so at first he assumed the silvery wisps trailing from the boy’s shoulders were hallucinations. Wouldn’t be the first time his cocktail experiments had produced unexpected visual effects. But when Margo strutted out of the Physical Kids’ cottage and stopped dead in her tracks, mouth forming a perfect ‘o’ of surprise, Eliot knew he wasn’t imagining things.

The boy sat on the stone steps leading up to Brakebills’ main hall, a battered guitar case open beside him like a mouth waiting to be fed. October had come early to upstate New York, painting the campus in shades of amber and rust. The dying light caught in his hair—silver-white, though he couldn’t have been older than twenty—and for a moment Eliot thought of snow in September, of things out of season and time.

“Is he supposed to be here?” Margo’s voice cut through the strange reverie. She’d recovered her composure, arms crossed over her designer blazer, but Eliot could see the calculation in her eyes. Margo Hanson didn’t like surprises, especially not beautiful ones that appeared uninvited on their doorstep.

“Define ‘supposed to,’” Eliot murmured, taking a long sip from his endless flask. The bourbon burned, grounding him. “This is Brakebills. Half the first-years materialize in fountains or fall through the library ceiling. Showing up on the steps with a guitar is positively mundane.”

But it wasn’t mundane. They both knew it. The boy’s music was wrong—not bad, but wrong in the way that made Eliot’s teeth ache and his magic stir restlessly beneath his skin. Each note seemed to pull at something fundamental, like fingers tugging loose threads in reality’s fabric.

The stranger’s eyes opened then, and Eliot forgot how to breathe.

They were gold. Not amber or hazel or any color that belonged in human eyes, but pure, molten gold that seemed to hold the memory of stars. When the boy smiled—soft, knowing, terribly sad—Eliot felt something in his chest crack like ice in spring.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said, and his voice was worse than his music, carrying harmonics that shouldn’t exist in a single throat. “I didn’t mean to bleed on your steps. The strings here are sharper than I’m used to.”

“Here?” Margo’s voice could have cut glass. “And where exactly did you come from that has duller guitar strings?”

The boy’s smile widened, revealing teeth too white, too perfect. “Somewhere else. Somewhere the music makes the world instead of the other way around.” He began to pack up his guitar with movements that seemed choreographed, each gesture flowing into the next. “I’m Kaworu. With a ‘u.’ People always forget the ‘u.’”

“How delightfully specific,” Eliot drawled, but his usual armor of sarcasm felt thin. “I’m Eliot. This vision of barely contained violence is Margo. And you’re either in the wrong place or exactly where you need to be.”

Kaworu stood, slinging the guitar case over his shoulder. He was tall, Eliot noticed with a mixture of appreciation and annoyance. Nearly as tall as Eliot himself, but where Eliot was all sharp angles and carefully cultivated elegance, Kaworu seemed to exist in soft focus, edges blurring into the twilight.

“I have a letter,” Kaworu said, producing an envelope from his jacket pocket. The paper looked ancient, yellowed at the edges, sealed with wax the color of dried blood. “Dean Fogg is expecting me. Eventually.”

“Eventually?” Margo snatched the letter before Eliot could, breaking the seal without hesitation. Her eyes scanned the contents, growing wider with each line. “This is dated… Eliot, this is dated fifty years from now.”

“Time moves differently where I’m from,” Kaworu said simply. “Sometimes sideways, sometimes in spirals. I’ve found it’s best not to think about it too hard.”

Eliot peered over Margo’s shoulder at the letter. The handwriting was definitely Fogg’s—he’d recognize those pretentious loops anywhere—but the content made his head spin. References to events that hadn’t happened, people who didn’t exist yet, a war that would reshape magic itself.

“‘The bearer of this letter,’” Margo read aloud, “‘is to be admitted to Brakebills University regardless of standard protocols. He will know things he shouldn’t and forget things he should. He will save us all, but only if we let him fall first.’” She looked up at Kaworu, eyes narrowed. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet,” Kaworu admitted. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Chapter 2: The Sound of Magic

The Physical Kids’ cottage had seen its share of oddities. There was the semester when Josh’s spell went awry and the kitchen developed sentience, refusing to cook anything but French cuisine. The month when Alice Quinn’s equations had opened a small portal to a dimension made entirely of mathematics, forcing everyone to speak in prime numbers. The memorable weekend when Quentin Coldwater had accidentally summoned the physical manifestation of his anxiety, which turned out to be a surprisingly good conversationalist.

But Kaworu was different.

He moved into the attic room without asking, and somehow no one thought to object. The space had been storage before—dusty boxes of failed experiments and furniture too cursed to throw away—but overnight it transformed. The boxes vanished, replaced by instruments Eliot had no names for. The cursed furniture arranged itself into something almost cozy. Strangest of all, the room developed windows where no windows should be, each one looking out onto a different view: a city of glass and song, a forest where the trees grew downward, an ocean that burned without consuming.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” Quentin said the first time he ventured up, voice hushed with the kind of awe he usually reserved for Fillory novels. “Like, actually bigger. I measured. The room is thirty feet longer than the cottage.”

“Spatial magic?” Alice had climbed up behind him, already pulling out a notebook to document the anomaly. Where Quentin saw wonder, Alice saw a puzzle to solve. It was one of the things Eliot loved about her, even as it drove him crazy. “The calculations alone would be—”

“Not calculations,” Kaworu interrupted gently. He was sitting in the window that looked out onto the burning sea, tuning an instrument that seemed to be made of crystallized sound. “Just music. Would you like to hear?”

Before anyone could answer, he began to play.

The melody that filled the room wasn’t heard so much as experienced. It crawled under Eliot’s skin and made itself at home, rearranging things he hadn’t known were out of place. His magic, usually a wild thing he kept carefully leashed, purred like a contented cat. Around him, the others were having similar reactions—Alice’s hands sparked with unconscious phosphoromancy, Quentin’s fingers traced battle magic sigils in the air, and Josh had started levitating without noticing.

“Holy shit,” Margo breathed, and for once, she sounded genuinely impressed rather than calculatingly interested. “What is that?”

“The sound of creation,” Kaworu said, fingers never pausing on the strings. “Or destruction, depending on how you play it. Where I come from, we learn this before we learn words. Music is the first magic, the one that taught reality how to dance.”

“Bullshit,” Alice said, but her voice lacked conviction. Her eyes had gone distant, seeing patterns Eliot couldn’t imagine. “Magic has rules. Circumstances and hand positions and—”

“Does it?” Kaworu shifted melodies, and suddenly the room smelled like Alice’s childhood home, like bitter tea and disappointment and the peculiar scent of love turned obligation. Alice flinched, but didn’t look away. “Or did someone tell you it had rules, and you believed them because the alternative was too frightening to consider?”

He changed songs again, and this time Eliot tasted Indiana on his tongue—corn fields and judgment, the particular flavor of hate that comes wrapped in concern for your soul. He wanted to be angry, wanted to demand how Kaworu knew, but the music wouldn’t let him. It held him gentle as a mother’s arms, if his mother had ever been the type for holding.

“Stop,” Quentin whispered, but his eyes were wet. The melody had shifted again, carrying the weight of every book that had ever been more real than reality, every story that had promised escape and delivered only the reminder that you always have to come back.

Kaworu’s fingers stilled. The silence that followed was louder than thunder.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and Eliot believed him. “I forget, sometimes, that not everyone grew up swimming in the deep waters. Your magic here is so… structured. Like trying to paint with numbers instead of colors.”

“Our magic works,” Alice said defensively, but she was still blinking away whatever the music had shown her.

“Of course it does,” Kaworu agreed. “A cage works too. That doesn’t mean the bird forgets how to fly.”

“So teach us,” Margo said suddenly. Where others might have been disturbed by the emotional invasion, Margo looked hungry. She’d always been the type to grab power wherever she found it, regardless of the cost. “Show us how to fly.”

Kaworu studied her for a long moment, those impossible gold eyes seeing deeper than comfortable. “It’s not without risk,” he warned. “Your magic here is safe because it’s small. What I can teach you… it’s the difference between a candle and a forest fire. Beautiful, necessary, but absolutely capable of consuming everything you are if you’re not careful.”

“We’re magicians at Brakebills,” Eliot said, finding his voice at last. “Careful isn’t really in our vocabulary.”

“No,” Kaworu agreed sadly. “I suppose it’s not.”

Chapter 3: Lessons in Falling

The first lesson was about breathing.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Kaworu informed them, sitting cross-legged in the cottage’s living room like some kind of celestial kindergarten teacher. October had deepened into November, bringing with it the kind of cold that made Eliot grateful for his extensive scarf collection. “All of you. You breathe like you’re afraid the air will run out.”

“That’s because it will,” Josh pointed out reasonably. He’d joined their little experiment after walking in on Kaworu teaching Margo to harmonize with her own skeleton. The sound had been horrifying and beautiful in equal measure. “That’s how breathing works. Limited resource.”

“Is it?” Kaworu demonstrated, taking a breath that seemed to go on forever, chest expanding beyond what human anatomy should allow. When he exhaled, the air shimmered with possibility. “Or have you just been taught to take small sips when you could be drinking deeply?”

They spent three hours learning to breathe properly. By the end, Eliot’s lungs felt like they’d been turned inside out and scrubbed clean. His magic, usually a sullen thing that required careful coaxing, practically purred with contentment.

“Better,” Kaworu said, which from him was high praise. “Tomorrow we’ll work on listening.”

“We know how to listen,” Alice protested. She’d been the most resistant to Kaworu’s teaching, her ordered mind rebelling against his fluid approach to reality.

“You know how to hear,” Kaworu corrected gently. “Listening is different. Listening means opening yourself to the spaces between sounds, the pauses where truth lives.”

The listening lessons were worse than the breathing. Kaworu made them sit in absolute silence for hours, but it wasn’t peaceful meditation. It was active, aggressive listening—to their own heartbeats, to the cottage settling around them, to the magic itself as it moved through the world like an invisible river.

Quentin broke first, on day three. He’d been sitting perfectly still when suddenly he screamed, clutching his head.

“I can hear them,” he gasped, eyes wild. “All of them. Every spell that’s ever been cast in this room, they’re all still here, echoing. How do you stand it?”

“You learn to filter,” Kaworu said, pressing a cool hand to Quentin’s forehead. The touch seemed to dial down the volume, bringing Quentin back from the edge of whatever he’d been approaching. “Or you learn to appreciate the symphony. Either way, you can’t unhear it once you’ve started listening.”

Margo took to it like she’d been born for it. Within a week, she could identify people by the sound of their magic—Eliot’s like expensive whiskey poured over broken glass, Alice’s like equations solving themselves in real time, Josh’s comfortable as bread baking. She started changing her spells, adding flourishes of sound that made them twice as powerful and three times as beautiful.

“This is dangerous,” Alice said one evening, after Margo had used her newfound skills to essentially seduce a protection ward into letting them pass. “We’re not meant to access magic like this. There are reasons for the structures, the limitations—”

“Are there?” Kaworu was teaching Eliot to play the guitar, or trying to. Eliot’s fingers, so clever with close-up magic and cocktail mixing, turned clumsy on the strings. “Or is that just what they told you so you wouldn’t try?”

“They who?” Alice demanded.

“The ones who came before. The ones who were afraid.” Kaworu adjusted Eliot’s grip, fingers gentle but firm. “Magic wasn’t always like this, you know. Structured, categorized, safe. Once upon a time, it was wild. It sang in the blood and danced in the bones. People were magic, not just users of it.”

“What happened?” Quentin asked. He’d taken to spending most of his time in Kaworu’s attic room, drawn by the windows that looked out on impossible worlds.

“Fear happened,” Kaworu said simply. “Fear of what they couldn’t control, couldn’t quantify. So they built boxes and called them schools. They created rules and called them natural law. They took something infinite and made it small enough to hold.”

“But it worked,” Alice insisted. “We have consistent magic. Reliable spells. A whole civilization built on—”

“On a fraction of what’s possible,” Kaworu interrupted, not unkindly. “Yes, it worked. A cage works too. But aren’t you tired of being safe?”

The question hung in the air like a challenge.

It was Eliot who answered, fingers finally finding the right chord. The sound that emerged wasn’t quite music by any traditional definition, but it made the air shimmer and his magic sing.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “God help me, but yes.”

Chapter 4: The First Breaking

They should have noticed the signs. Looking back, Eliot would catalog them obsessively: the way shadows started lasting a heartbeat too long, the increasing frequency of nightmares that left physical marks, the birds that began gathering in impossible numbers, watching the cottage with too-intelligent eyes.

But they were drunk on new power, high on possibilities. Kaworu had been teaching them for a month, and each day brought new revelations. Josh could cook emotions now, serving up bowls of comfort that actually mended heartbreak. Quentin’s illusions had weight and warmth, almost indistinguishable from reality. Margo’s battle magic had evolved into something like conducting a symphony of destruction.

And Eliot… Eliot had learned to transmute more than just matter. He could take the iron weight of his father’s disappointment and spin it into golden defiance. He could transform the sharp edges of his own self-hatred into something almost like acceptance.

It was during one of these sessions, Eliot sitting at the piano Kaworu had somehow manifested in the living room, that the first attack came.

The windows exploded inward in perfect silence.

That was the wrongest part—not the violence of it, but the absolute absence of sound. Glass shards hung in the air like frozen rain, and Eliot could see his own shocked face reflected in a thousand fragments. Then the silence deepened, became a presence rather than an absence, and he understood with the kind of clarity that comes with terror that something was eating the sound itself.

“Down!” Kaworu’s voice cut through the unnatural quiet, carrying its own bubble of audibility. He moved faster than human, faster than magic, shoving Margo aside as something dark and hungry passed through the space where she’d been standing.

The thing had no true form. It was absence given shape, a wound in the world that hurt to perceive directly. Where it touched, things simply ceased—not destroyed but un-made, edited out of existence as if they’d never been.

“What the fuck is that?” Margo demanded, already weaving combat spells that dissolved before they could form.

“Hollow One,” Kaworu said grimly. He’d produced an instrument from nowhere, something between a violin and a weapon. “They feed on potential. On the possible.” His gold eyes found Eliot’s across the chaos. “They’re drawn to what we’ve been doing. To you.”

“To us?” Quentin’s voice cracked. He was pressed against the wall, hands moving in frantic patterns that produced nothing but sparks.

“To what you’re becoming.” Kaworu began to play, and for the first time since he’d arrived, his music was violent. Notes like razor wire, melodies that cut. The Hollow One recoiled but didn’t retreat. “You’re shining too bright. Singing too loud. I should have known they’d find you.”

“Less explanation, more fixing!” Alice shouted. She’d managed to create some kind of mathematical barrier, equations spinning in the air like shields, but the Hollow One was eating through them steadily.

Kaworu’s music intensified, and Eliot felt it calling to something inside him. Not his magic—something deeper, older, more essential. The part of him that had always known he was meant for more than Indiana, more than hiding, more than the careful construction of acceptable facades.

Without thinking, he joined his voice to Kaworu’s instrument.

The song that emerged wasn’t in any language he knew, but his throat shaped it perfectly. It was the song of becoming, of chrysalis and transformation, of the violent beauty of birth. Around him, the others began to add their voices—Margo’s fierce as flame, Alice’s precise as clockwork, Quentin’s rich with the power of story, Josh’s warm as fresh bread.

The Hollow One writhed, caught between its hunger and something it couldn’t consume. For a moment, Eliot thought they were winning.

Then it smiled.

The expression was wrong on its non-face, a tear in reality that showed too many teeth in too many dimensions. It had been testing them, Eliot realized with sick certainty. Learning their measure.

“Run,” Kaworu said quietly, his music never faltering. “All of you. Now.”

“We’re not leaving you—” Margo started.

“This is not a fight we win tonight.” Kaworu’s form was beginning to shine, that strange not-quite-human light bleeding through his skin. “It’s fed too recently, grown too strong. But I can buy you time. Days, maybe weeks. Enough to prepare.”

“Prepare for what?” Eliot demanded.

Kaworu’s smile was sad and knowing and terrible. “For war. For change. For the price of evolution.” His music shifted, became something that made Eliot’s bones ache with recognition he couldn’t name. “Did you think power came without cost? Did you think you could touch the infinite and remain unchanged?”

The Hollow One lunged, and Kaworu met it with a chord that shattered every piece of glass for a mile. In the confusion, Eliot felt hands—Margo’s, probably—dragging him away. The last thing he saw before they tumbled through a portal was Kaworu’s silhouette, burning like a star going nova, holding back the dark.

Chapter 5: What Breaks Must Be Rebuilt

Dean Fogg’s office had always felt like a sanctuary, all old leather and older magic. Now it felt like a tomb.

“Temporal magic,” the Dean said, polishing his glasses with shaking hands. “He’s not from fifty years in the future. He’s from…” He trailed off, looking older than Eliot had ever seen him. “He’s from a timeline that no longer exists. A world where magic evolved differently. Where the Hollow Ones won.”

They sat in a rough circle—Eliot, Margo, Alice, Quentin, and Josh—still covered in glass dust and the lingering echoes of Kaworu’s last song. Through the window, Eliot could see other students going about their lives, blissfully unaware that something had torn a hole in their careful reality.

“So he came here to, what, change history?” Alice’s voice was steady, but her hands trembled as she took notes. Processing trauma through academic framework—classic Alice.

“To teach us,” Fogg corrected. “To give us the tools his world discovered too late. The Hollow Ones—they’re not invaders. They’re antibodies. Reality’s immune response to magic growing beyond its prescribed boundaries.”

“That’s insane,” Josh said flatly. “Magic is part of reality. How can reality be allergic to itself?”

“Because this isn’t reality’s natural state.” Fogg pulled out a bottle of something that definitely wasn’t water, taking a long drink before continuing. “Magic was never meant to be caged, categorized, controlled. We did that. Generations of magicians, building smaller and smaller boxes, telling ourselves it was for safety. For stability.”

“And it worked,” Quentin pointed out. “We have a functioning magical society—”

“We have a dying one,” Fogg interrupted. “Haven’t you noticed? Fewer magicians born each year. Spells that used to be simple becoming complex. The ambient magic level dropping steadily for decades.” He laughed bitterly. “We thought we were being responsible. Turns out we were slowly strangling the very thing we sought to preserve.”

“So Kaworu came to teach us the old ways,” Margo said slowly. “To show us how to be… what? Wild magicians? Chaos casters?”

“To show you how to be complete.” The voice came from the doorway, and Eliot’s heart did something complicated in his chest. Kaworu stood there, looking exhausted but whole. His white hair was singed at the edges, and his clothes bore tears that showed glimpses of light beneath, as if his skin was just a costume he wore. “The Hollow One retreated. For now.”

“You’re alive,” Eliot said stupidly.

“Debatable,” Kaworu replied with that soft, sad smile. “But I’m here. And we have work to do.”

He moved into the room, and Eliot noticed how carefully he walked, as if each step required concentration. Whatever he’d done to drive off the Hollow One had cost him.

“How long do we have?” Alice asked, ever practical.

“Until the winter solstice, maybe. Possibly less.” Kaworu sank into a chair, and for a moment his form flickered—there and not there, solid and translucent. “The Hollow Ones hibernate, after a fashion. Digesting what they’ve consumed. But when they wake…” He shook his head. “In my timeline, we had years to prepare and still lost. You have weeks.”

“So teach us faster,” Margo demanded. “Whatever you did back there—”

“Will kill you if you’re not ready.” Kaworu’s voice carried harmonics of warning. “What I did wasn’t magic as you understand it. It was… unbecoming. Letting go of the boundaries between self and sound, matter and music. I can teach you, but—”

“But we might lose ourselves in the process,” Eliot finished. He thought of the song that had poured from his throat, the feeling of touching something vast and terrible and beautiful. “We might become something else entirely.”

“Yes,” Kaworu said simply.

They sat with that for a moment, the weight of it settling over them like snow.

It was Quentin who broke the silence. “In the books—in Fillory—Martin Chatwin became the Beast because he couldn’t accept what he was. He tried to change without changing, to have power without paying for it.”

“Your point?” Alice asked.

“My point is that maybe the problem isn’t becoming something else.” Quentin’s jaw set with determination. “Maybe the problem is fighting it. Maybe the only way forward is through.”

“Poetic,” Margo said dryly, but Eliot could see her calculating, weighing costs and benefits like the queen she’d always been meant to be. “Also probably suicidal.”

“Definitely suicidal,” Kaworu agreed. “But what’s the alternative? Hide in your boxes until the Hollow Ones come to edit you out of existence? Watch magic itself wither and die because you’re too afraid to let it grow?”

“When you put it like that,” Josh muttered, “certain death sounds almost appealing.”

“I need a drink,” Fogg announced. “Several drinks. And possibly a new career.” He stood, suddenly looking ancient. “You have my permission to use whatever resources Brakebills can offer. Try not to destroy the universe in the process.”

“No promises,” Eliot said, and was surprised to find he meant it.

Chapter 6: The Deep Music

They moved their lessons underground.

Brakebills had basements beneath basements, forgotten spaces where old experiments had been sealed away. Kaworu led them to the deepest level, past wards that tasted of fear and doors that whispered warnings. The room he finally chose was vast, circular, carved from living rock.

“This was a song chamber,” he explained, running his fingers along walls that thrummed with dormant power. “Before your predecessors decided music and magic shouldn’t mix, they used spaces like this to weave reality.”

“It’s beautiful,” Alice breathed, and it was. The walls were covered in carved notation—not musical notes as Eliot knew them, but something older, more fundamental. Looking at them made his eyes water and his magic stir restlessly.

“It’s dangerous,” Kaworu corrected. “But then, so are we.”

The new lessons were nothing like the gentle breathing exercises of before. Kaworu pushed them to their limits and past them, teaching them to unravel themselves note by note and rebuild in new configurations.

Eliot learned that his body was just a suggestion, that with the right resonance he could be liquid or light or the space between heartbeats. The first time he successfully dissolved into pure sound, he thought he’d never find his way back to flesh. It was Kaworu’s voice that guided him home, a lighthouse in an ocean of possibility.

Margo discovered she could weaponize harmony itself, turning the universe’s background hum into blades sharper than thought. She practiced on training dummies that didn’t just break but ceased, edited out of existence with surgical precision.

Alice fought it the hardest, her orderly mind rebelling against the fluid nature of musical magic. But when she finally let go, the results were spectacular. She didn’t just cast spells—she composed them, writing symphonies of power that rewrote local physics.

Quentin surprised them all. His connection to stories, to the narrative structure of reality, made him a natural conductor. He could take their individual songs and weave them into something greater, creating harmonies that multiplied their power exponentially.

Josh became their anchor. His magic had always been about comfort, about home and hearth. Now he learned to be a tuning fork for the others, keeping them grounded when the music threatened to carry them away entirely.

“You’re not ready,” Kaworu said after two weeks of brutal training. They were all exhausted, bearing the kinds of scars that showed only in certain lights—places where they’d stretched too far and snapped back imperfectly. “But you’re as ready as time allows.”

“Comforting,” Margo drawled, but her usual sarcasm was muted. They’d all felt it—the growing wrongness in the air, the sense of something vast and hungry stirring to wakefulness.

“I have something for each of you,” Kaworu said, producing instruments from the strange non-space where he kept things. “These aren’t just tools. They’re focuses, ways to channel what you’re becoming without losing yourselves entirely.”

For Margo, a violin that looked like it had been carved from crystallized screams. When she drew the bow across its strings, the air itself flinched.

For Alice, a strange hybrid of harp and calculation engine, its strings arranged in mathematical progressions that made Eliot’s head hurt to follow.

For Quentin, a conductor’s baton that wasn’t quite there, existing more as intention than object.

For Josh, a drum that looked simple until you noticed it had no bottom, that striking it was like knocking on the door of the universe itself.

And for Eliot, a piano that existed in too many dimensions at once, its keys rippling between states of matter.

“These are…” Eliot touched a key experimentally, and felt it touch him back, measuring his worth. “These are alive.”

“Everything is alive if you listen closely enough,” Kaworu said. “These are just more honest about it.” He pulled out his own guitar, the one he’d arrived with, and Eliot noticed for the first time how wrong it was—too many strings, arranged in patterns that hurt to perceive directly. “Tomorrow, we start learning to play together. To be an orchestra rather than soloists.”

“And if we can’t?” Alice asked quietly. “If we’re not strong enough?”

Kaworu’s smile was answer enough.

Chapter 7: The Mathematics of Loss

Three days before the winter solstice, Alice Quinn discovered the equation that would break her heart.

She’d been working in the song chamber, trying to reconcile musical magic with her phosphoromantic training. The harp-engine Kaworu had given her sang under her fingers, each string a variable in a cosmic calculation. She was so deep in the work that she didn’t notice Quentin enter until he spoke.

“You’ve been down here for eighteen hours.”

Alice’s hands stilled on the strings. Had it been that long? Time moved strangely in the deep places, especially when the music took hold. “I’m close to something. A pattern in the harmonics that might—”

“Alice.” Quentin’s voice was gentle but firm. “When’s the last time you ate? Or slept?”

“I can’t sleep.” The words came out harsher than intended. “Every time I close my eyes, I see them. The Hollow Ones. The spaces where things used to be.” She turned to face him, and Quentin sucked in a breath at what he saw in her expression. “I’ve been calculating probabilities. Running scenarios. Do you want to know our odds of survival?”

“No,” Quentin said immediately. Then, quieter: “Maybe. Does knowing help?”

“Thirteen percent.” Alice laughed, high and brittle. “Thirteen percent chance we survive the solstice. Two percent chance we survive unchanged. Zero point zero three percent chance that what survives is anything we’d recognize as ourselves.”

Quentin moved closer, careful not to touch the instruments. They’d all learned that lesson—touching someone else’s focus was like reaching into their soul uninvited. “Those are just numbers, Alice. Not destiny.”

“Numbers don’t lie.” She turned back to her harp, fingers finding strings that sang in minor keys. “I’ve modeled every variable. Our power levels, the Hollow Ones’ consumption rates, Kaworu’s degradation…”

“His what?”

Alice’s hands stilled again. “You haven’t noticed? He’s burning himself out teaching us. Using his own essence as fuel.” She gestured at the walls around them, the carved notations that had grown brighter over the weeks. “This whole chamber is feeding on him. Every lesson costs him years, decades maybe.”

“He would have told us—”

“Would he?” Alice’s voice was bitter. “He’s exactly the type for noble self-sacrifice. Coming from a dead timeline to save strangers, knowing it will kill him.” Her fingers moved in sharp, angry patterns on the strings. “I’ve done the math, Q. Even if we win, he doesn’t survive. He can’t. He’s the price.”

The music that emerged from her harp was ugly, full of sharp edges and unresolved tensions. It spoke of futures cut short, of potential eternally unfulfilled. Quentin listened to the whole piece, then sat beside her on the cold stone.

“Show me,” he said simply.

For the next hour, Alice walked him through her calculations. The elegant proofs that demonstrated how Kaworu’s presence was an impossibility that reality was slowly correcting. The energy expenditure of teaching them in weeks what should have taken years. The way his form grew more translucent after each major lesson, light bleeding through in places where flesh should be solid.

“So we stop,” Quentin said when she finished. “Tell him we won’t learn anymore if it’s killing him.”

“Then we all die.” Alice’s voice was matter-of-fact. “The Hollow Ones won’t care that we’re being noble. They’ll consume us, then move on to the rest of the magical world. Then the mundane world. Then…” She shrugged. “Then nothing. Just void where a universe used to be.”

“So we let him sacrifice himself?”

“I don’t know!” The words tore from Alice’s throat, raw and painful. “I don’t know what the right answer is. The math says he dies either way. At least this way, his death means something.”

“Math,” Quentin said slowly, “doesn’t account for everything.”

Alice laughed bitterly. “Spoken like someone who’s never found comfort in constants.”

“Spoken like someone who’s read enough stories to know that prophecies are usually self-fulfilling.” Quentin stood, offering her his hand. “Come on. You need food, and the others need to know what you’ve discovered.”

“Eliot will—” Alice stopped, something strange crossing her face. “Eliot will break.”

It was Quentin’s turn to laugh, though there was no humor in it. “Have you seen the way he looks at Kaworu? He’s already broken. We all are. That’s what this whole thing is about—breaking us down to rebuild us into something that can survive.”

“And if what gets rebuilt isn’t us anymore?”

Quentin thought of Martin Chatwin, transformed by power into something monstrous. Then he thought of Julia, transformed by trauma into something divine. Change was inevitable. The only question was what you did with it.

“Then at least we’ll have chosen it,” he said finally. “That has to count for something.”

Alice took his hand, letting him pull her to her feet. The harp-engine continued to sing behind them, running calculations on futures that grew darker by the hour.

Chapter 8: The Color of Sound

Eliot found Kaworu on the roof at three in the morning, playing guitar to an audience of stars.

He’d woken from dreams of music—not heard but felt, vibrating through his bones like memory. His new senses, still raw and uncontrolled, had led him up through the cottage, following traces of sound like breadcrumbs.

Kaworu sat at the roof’s edge, feet dangling over empty air. His guitar—that impossible instrument with too many strings in too many dimensions—cast shadows that didn’t match the moonlight. The melody he played was soft, private, meant for no one.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” Eliot asked, settling beside him with careful distance between them. Close enough to talk, far enough to maintain the illusion of casual interaction.

“I don’t sleep anymore,” Kaworu said simply. “Sleeping means dreaming, and my dreams have teeth these days.”

“Poetic.” Eliot pulled out his flask, then thought better of it. Alcohol didn’t mix well with the new magic, made the edges too blurry when they needed to be sharp. “Also concerning.”

Kaworu smiled—that soft, sad expression that made Eliot want impossible things. “Everything about me should concern you. I’m an impossibility wrapped in flesh, teaching you to become impossibilities of your own. Concern is the most rational response.”

“When have I ever been rational?” The words came out lighter than intended, flirtatious almost. Eliot winced internally. Even facing potential annihilation, apparently he couldn’t turn off that particular defense mechanism.

“You’re more rational than you pretend,” Kaworu observed. “The elaborate constructions, the careful facades—those take tremendous thought. Planning. You’ve built yourself into a work of art, Eliot Waugh. The tragedy is that you’ve forgotten there’s someone living inside the gallery.”

Eliot’s throat tightened. “That’s—we’re not doing this. The deep emotional excavation thing. I’m not built for it.”

“Aren’t you?” Kaworu shifted the melody, and suddenly Eliot could taste honesty on his tongue, feel it trying to crawl up his throat. “Music is honesty. You can’t lie in harmony—the universe won’t let you. If you’re going to survive what’s coming, you need to stop performing and start being.”

“Easy for you to say.” Bitterness crept into Eliot’s voice. “You literally come from another world. You don’t have history here, expectations, a lifetime of carefully managed disappointments—”

“I come from a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” Kaworu interrupted gently. “Do you know what it’s like, being the only survivor of an entire timeline? Every person I ever loved, every place that ever felt like home—not just dead but never was. Edited out of existence like a typo in reality’s rough draft.”

Eliot turned to look at him properly for the first time since sitting down. In the moonlight, Kaworu looked translucent, like watercolor paint spread too thin. Alice was right—he was fading.

“Why?” The word escaped before Eliot could stop it. “Why come here? Why save us when it’s killing you?”

“Because the alternative is worse.” Kaworu’s fingers never stopped moving on the strings, weaving melody like armor against the dark. “In my timeline, we discovered the truth too late. Magic isn’t separate from reality—it IS reality. The fundamental force that turns possibility into actuality. And we’d been caging it, generations of magicians building smaller and smaller boxes, until it started to suffocate.”

“So the Hollow Ones—”

“Are reality’s fever. Its attempt to burn out the infection of our limitations.” Kaworu’s smile turned rueful. “The irony is, they’re not wrong. We are an infection, in a way. Consciousness that figured out how to hack the universe’s operating system. The question is whether we’ll evolve into symbiosis or kill our host trying.”

“And you think teaching us to sing reality into new shapes will help?”

“I think teaching you to stop being afraid of your own power might.” Kaworu finally set the guitar aside, turning to face Eliot fully. “You’re so careful, all of you. Even now, even after everything I’ve shown you, you’re still trying to color inside the lines. But the lines are imaginary, Eliot. They always were.”

“The lines keep us safe,” Eliot argued, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“The lines keep you small.” Kaworu reached out, not quite touching, his hand hovering near Eliot’s face. “May I?”

Eliot knew he should say no. Knew that letting Kaworu touch him, really touch him, would shatter carefully maintained walls. But the world was ending in three days, and he was so tired of being careful.

“Yes,” he whispered.

Kaworu’s fingers brushed his cheek, and Eliot’s world exploded into symphony.

He could hear everything—the song of his own bones, the melody of his blood, the harmony between thought and feeling that he’d spent years trying to silence. But underneath it all, he could hear Kaworu’s song, and it was dying.

Not dying—unraveling. Each note Kaworu had taught them had pulled another thread from his being, and now he was more space than substance, held together by will and purpose alone.

“You’re killing yourself for us,” Eliot gasped, tears streaming down his face. “You’re—”

“I’m choosing,” Kaworu corrected softly. “That’s all any of us can do, in the end. Choose how we spend the time we have.” His thumb brushed away Eliot’s tears, and each touch carried new verses of that dying song. “I choose this. I choose you. All of you. A world where magic can grow wild and strange and beautiful.”

“I can’t—” Eliot’s voice broke. “I can’t lose you. Not when I just found—not when we just—”

“You can’t lose what you never had,” Kaworu said gently. “I’m not really here, Eliot. I’m an echo of a world that never was, teaching songs that haven’t been written yet. But the music…” He smiled, real and warm and absolutely heartbreaking. “The music is eternal. Every time you play, every time you sing reality into new shapes, I’ll be there. In the spaces between notes. In the pause before the crescendo.”

“That’s not enough,” Eliot said fiercely.

“It’s everything,” Kaworu corrected. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

He kissed Eliot then, soft and sweet and tasting of endings. In that kiss, Eliot heard the whole of Kaworu’s story—the world that was, the world that wasn’t, the infinite possibilities collapsed into this single moment of connection.

When they parted, Kaworu was barely there, moonlight showing through him like stained glass.

“Three days,” he said quietly. “Make them count.”

Then he was gone, dissolved into melody, leaving only the echo of strings and the taste of starlight on Eliot’s lips.

Chapter 9: The Congregation of Impossible Things

Two days before the solstice, Brakebills began to empty.

It started with the first-years, portaled away to safe houses that might not be safe enough. Then the hedge witches Fogg had been quietly recruiting, their unstructured magic making them either supremely suited or utterly vulnerable to what was coming. By evening, only essential faculty remained, and them only because someone had to maintain the wards that might buy seconds when seconds counted.

The Physical Kids’ cottage felt too large with just the five of them rattling around inside. They gathered in the living room, instruments at hand, pretending to prepare while really just marking time.

“He’s not coming back,” Margo said flatly. She’d been saying variations of this all day, as if repetition could make it easier to accept. “Eliot, you need to accept that he’s not—”

“I know,” Eliot cut her off. He sat at his impossible piano, fingers ghosting over keys that existed in too many dimensions. Each note wanted to pull him apart, scatter him across realities. He let it. The pain was preferable to thinking. “I know he’s not coming back.”

“So what do we do?” Josh asked. He’d been stress-cooking all morning, the kitchen overflowing with food that tasted like anxiety and determination. “When the Hollow Ones come—”

“We play,” Alice interrupted. She’d spent the night in the song chamber, emerging with equations tattooed in light across her skin. They shifted and changed as she moved, calculating probabilities in real-time. “We become the orchestra Kaworu trained us to be.”

“Without a conductor,” Quentin pointed out. “I can guide us to a point, but I’m not him. I can’t—”

“Then we conduct ourselves.” Margo’s voice carried the kind of steel that had made her High Queen in another life, another timeline that Eliot sometimes dreamed about. “We’re not children anymore. We’re not students. We’re magicians who’ve touched the deep music and lived.”

“Barely,” Josh muttered.

“Barely counts,” Margo shot back. “We’ve got two days to figure out how to be a functioning ensemble without our teacher. So let’s stop moping and start practicing.”

They tried. God, they tried. But every configuration felt wrong, incomplete. Eliot’s piano fought him without Kaworu’s presence to mediate. Alice’s calculations grew increasingly frantic as her harp-engine spun out probabilities, each worse than the last. Quentin’s baton moved through empty air, conducting nothing because there was nothing to conduct—just five broken people pretending they could harmonize their way out of annihilation.

It was Josh who finally said what they were all thinking.

“We need more.”

They stopped playing, the sudden silence deafening after hours of discordant practice.

“More what?” Alice asked, though her expression suggested she already knew.

“More instruments. More voices. More… us.” Josh set down his bottomless drum, running hands through his hair. “Five people can’t rewrite reality’s rules. We need an orchestra. A real one.”

“Everyone’s gone,” Quentin pointed out. “Fogg evacuated—”

“Not everyone,” Margo interrupted slowly. “The hedge witches. The ones who wouldn’t go to the safe houses. They’re still out there, aren’t they? Scattered around the city, hiding in their own ways.”

“You want to recruit hedges?” Alice’s voice pitched high with disbelief. “They don’t have the training—”

“Neither did we, six weeks ago,” Eliot said quietly. He thought of Kaworu’s words, about consciousness hacking reality’s operating system. Hedge witches were the ultimate hackers, learning magic through trial and error and sheer bloody-minded determination. “They might not know musical theory, but they know how to break rules.”

“It’s insane,” Alice said.

“Yes,” Margo agreed. “So is sitting here waiting to die. At least if we’re going to fail spectacularly, let’s fail with style.”

They looked at each other, five people who’d been changed by impossible music, who’d touched something vast and terrible and beautiful. Five people who were probably going to die in two days.

“Fuck it,” Eliot said, standing with the kind of dramatic flair that had always been his armor and was now, somehow, also his truth. “Let’s recruit an orchestra.”

Chapter 10: The Gathering Song

They split up to cover more ground.

Margo took the battle magic underground, the fighters and survivors who’d learned their craft in back alleys and abandoned buildings. She spoke their language—violence dressed up as protection, power claimed rather than given. Within hours, she had a dozen recruits who played their magic like weapons and weren’t afraid to improvise.

Josh went to the healers, the kitchen witches, the ones who worked their will through comfort and care. They were harder to convince—their magic was about mending, not unmaking. But when he played his drum, letting them feel how the deep music could heal wounds that went beyond flesh, they came.

Alice sought out the theorists, the hedge witches who’d built their own frameworks for understanding magic. They gathered in a bookshop that wasn’t quite there, existing in the spaces between real estate. When she showed them her equations, her proof that reality itself was just another system to be hacked, their eyes lit with the kind of fervor that belonged to revolutionaries and madmen.

Quentin went to the storytellers, the ones who understood that narrative was its own kind of magic. He found them in coffee shops and libraries, spinning tales that almost changed the world. When he conducted their stories into harmony, showing them how their individual threads could weave something greater, they followed.

And Eliot… Eliot went to the lost ones.

He found them in the places between places, the hedges who’d touched too much power and come back changed. They recognized him as one of their own now—someone who’d been broken and rebuilt and wasn’t quite sure if the new shape fit. He didn’t try to convince them with words. He just played his impossible piano in the ruins of an old theater, letting the music say what he couldn’t: that being broken didn’t mean being worthless, that sometimes the cracks were where the light got in.

By dawn on the last day, they had an orchestra.

Fifty-three hedge witches and five classically trained magicians, gathered in Brakebills’ grand hall because the song chamber wasn’t big enough. They were a motley collection—leather and lace, suits and sweatpants, unified only by the instruments Kaworu had somehow left for them. Margo had found a cache in the cottage’s basement, each one labeled with a name none of them recognized yet.

“This is insane,” muttered a hedge witch with facial tattoos that moved when she talked. “We don’t even know each other. How are we supposed to—”

“We’re not supposed to anything,” Eliot interrupted, channeling every ounce of performative confidence he’d ever possessed. “We’re going to. There’s a difference.”

He sat at his piano, the impossible instrument that existed in too many dimensions at once. Around him, the hedges were finding their own tools—violins made of crystallized screams, drums that opened doors, flutes that could play colors instead of notes.

“The Hollow Ones will be here at sunset,” he continued, letting his fingers find the keys. Not playing yet, just touching, remembering. “They’re going to try to edit us out of existence because we’ve grown too bright, too loud, too possible. And maybe they’ll succeed. Probably they’ll succeed.”

“Inspiring,” someone called out, earning nervous laughter.

“I’m not here to inspire you,” Eliot said. “I’m here to tell you the truth. We’re probably going to die tonight. But we’re going to die making the most beautiful fucking music this universe has ever heard. We’re going to show reality what it could be if it wasn’t so afraid of its own potential.”

“How?” This from a young hedge, barely out of his teens, clutching a harp that looked like it was made of spider silk and starlight.

Eliot thought of Kaworu, dissolved into melody, living now only in the spaces between notes. He thought of Indiana and illusions, of careful constructions and elaborate facades, of all the ways he’d made himself smaller to fit in spaces that were never going to accept him anyway.

“By stopping pretending,” he said simply. “By being exactly what we are—impossible things that refuse to apologize for existing.”

He began to play.

The melody that emerged wasn’t quite music by any conventional definition. It was the sound of becoming, of potential given voice. One by one, the others joined—tentative at first, then with growing confidence as they realized the deep music didn’t care about their training or lack thereof. It only cared that they were brave enough to play.

Margo’s violin shrieked defiance. Josh’s drum beat out rhythms that synchronized heartbeats. Alice’s harp calculated harmonies that shouldn’t exist but did. Quentin’s baton wove them all together, finding patterns in chaos.

And the hedges… the hedges brought their own wild magic to the symphony. Street corner serenades and bathroom stall breakdowns, fight songs and lullabies, all the music that happened when no one was listening. They played their trauma and their triumph, their fury and their joy, creating something raw and real and absolutely unprecedented.

“Holy shit,” someone whispered when they finally stopped. “We actually sound like something.”

“We sound like everything,” Margo corrected, and for once, there was no sarcasm in her voice. Only wonder.

Chapter 11: The Ending That Is a Beginning

The Hollow Ones came with the sunset, just as Eliot had predicted.

They rose from shadows that had grown too long, emerged from spaces between heartbeats, manifested from every doubt and fear and limitation humanity had ever imposed on itself. Not one or two but dozens, a congregation of absence that made the air itself recoil.

The orchestra was ready.

They’d spent the day preparing, not just musically but spiritually. Josh had cooked a feast that tasted like courage. Alice had drawn equations in the air that turned probability into promise. Quentin had told stories that made victory seem not just possible but inevitable. Margo had led them in battle songs that turned flesh into armor and will into weapons.

And Eliot… Eliot had finally stopped performing.

When the first Hollow One breached the wards, he was already playing. Not the careful, controlled melodies he’d practiced, but something wild and true that came from the broken places inside him. Music that admitted he’d never been enough for his father, would never be straight enough for Indiana, would never be whole enough for anyone’s definition of perfect.

Music that said: that’s fine. I’ll be this instead.

The others joined him, fifty-eight voices raised in harmonious defiance. They played their stories—every hedge witch who’d learned magic through bloody fingernails and desperate 3 AM Google searches, every classical student who’d felt the weight of tradition crushing their potential, every person who’d ever been told they were doing it wrong when “it” was existing.

The Hollow Ones faltered.

They’d come expecting fear, limitation, the small magics of a dying world. Instead they found revolution in symphony form, reality being rewritten by people who’d decided the old rules no longer applied.

“More!” Quentin shouted, his baton drawing patterns that pulled new melodies from the air itself. “Everything you’ve got!”

Alice’s equations escaped her harp, writing themselves across reality in formulae that proved impossible things. The square root of negative one danced with imaginary numbers, creating spaces where the Hollow Ones simply couldn’t exist.

Margo’s violin shrieked battle cries in languages that hadn’t been invented yet, each note a blade that cut through absence itself. She played like she lived—fiercely, without apology, daring the universe to tell her no.

Josh’s drum opened doors—not just between spaces but between possibilities. Each beat was a choice, a timeline, a world where they won because they refused to consider losing.

The hedges added their voices, their instruments, their absolutely batshit refusal to accept that magic had rules. They played jazz with the fundamental forces, improvising reality in real-time.

And then, in the space between one note and the next, Eliot heard him.

Kaworu’s voice, carried on the music itself. Not gone, just transformed. Living now in the songs they sang, in the harmonies they created, in every moment when someone chose to be more than they were supposed to be.

“This is it,” the voice that wasn’t quite a voice whispered. “This is what I came to teach you. Not to play music, but to become it.”

Understanding flooded through Eliot like sunrise. He stood, still playing—his body moving with the piano that existed in too many dimensions, his fingers finding keys in spaces his flesh couldn’t follow. Around him, the others were doing the same, their physical forms becoming suggestions rather than limitations.

They weren’t fighting the Hollow Ones anymore. They were showing them what they could become.

Because the Hollow Ones weren’t invaders—they were antibodies. Reality’s immune response to magic that had grown constrained, limited, infected with fear. But antibodies could be taught. Immune systems could learn.

The music shifted, no longer defiant but inviting. Come, it said. See what we see. Be what we’re becoming.

One by one, the Hollow Ones began to change. The absence that defined them filled with possibility. The hunger that drove them transformed into curiosity. They weren’t voids anymore but spaces waiting to be filled with something new.

“Play them home,” Quentin commanded, and they did.

Fifty-eight impossible things making impossible music, teaching reality a new way to dance. The Hollow Ones joined the symphony, their voices adding bass notes that shook the foundations of the world—not to destroy but to rebuild.

When the sun rose, everything had changed.

Epilogue: Every New Beginning

Six months later, Eliot sat at a perfectly ordinary piano in a perfectly ordinary bar, playing perfectly ordinary jazz for tips.

Except nothing was ordinary anymore.

The couple at table three were harmonizing their conversation, words becoming melody becoming magic. The bartender mixed drinks that tasted like memories, each sip a story. The very air hummed with potential, reality having learned to sing along with whoever was brave enough to start a song.

Magic hadn’t died. It had evolved. No more schools teaching rigid structures, no more hierarchies of proper vs. hedge. Just people learning to play their own instruments, sing their own songs, be their own impossible things.

Margo had started a fight club where people battled with ballads. Josh ran a restaurant where the food could heal hearts as well as bodies. Alice published papers on musical mathematics that broke every academic journal that tried to contain them. Quentin conducted community orchestras, teaching anyone who’d listen how to harmonize their personal narratives into collective stories.

And Eliot played piano in bars and concert halls and street corners, spreading the gospel of becoming. Every so often, in the space between notes, he heard an echo of familiar harmony. A whisper of silver hair and golden eyes, of a boy who’d fallen from one timeline to save another.

“I’m still here,” the music seemed to say. “In every song you play. In every person who chooses to be more than they were told they could be. This is my legacy. This is our eternity.”

The door opened, bringing cold air and new possibility. A young woman entered, clutching a violin case like a lifeline, eyes wide with the kind of desperate hope that Eliot recognized.

“I heard,” she said hesitantly, “that you teach the deep music. The real magic. The kind that changes things.”

Eliot smiled, fingers never pausing on the keys. “Sit down,” he said. “Play something true. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

She sat. She played. The music that emerged was raw, untrained, absolutely perfect.

In the space between her notes and his, Eliot could have sworn he heard Kaworu laughing—not gone, never gone, just transformed into the eternal song that would carry them all forward into whatever came next.

The music never ended.

It just waited for the next voice to carry it on.

And somewhere in the harmony between ending and beginning, between what was and what could be, the universe learned to sing a new song. A wilder song. A song that said magic wasn’t something you did but something you were, if you were brave enough to admit it.

The Physical Kids had become something more than magicians. They’d become music itself, teaching reality how to dance to its own wild rhythm.

And in every note they played, in every impossible thing that chose to be possible, Kaworu lived on—the boy who fell from nowhere to everywhere, who taught them that the only real magic was becoming exactly what you were meant to be:

Impossible. Beautiful. Unapologetically alive.

The song continued, would always continue, as long as there were people brave enough to play it.

And in a universe that had learned to sing, there would always be people brave enough to play.