Amelia Blackwell sat in the pilot’s seat of Starwitch and looked out the window at the sun, Solus. The glass had significantly darkened to protect her eyes, leaving the stars of space impossible to see. The surface of the fiery orb bore darker sunspots, which appeared almost like pimples on a teen’s face, though there was only a small handful of them. Along the edges, Amelia spotted a number of prominences, temporary structures of plasma suspended above the surface by the sun’s magnetic field. Each would eventually destabilize and result in a coronal mass ejection, which was more commonly known as a solar flare.

  The sun loomed ever wider, because Amelia had spent several days slowing Starwitch down, to set the ship on an intercept course for the very center of the sun. She ran the calculations through her head one final time and concluded everything was just right.

  She stared at the sun and spoke ancient words of power in the witch’s tongue, starting with ‘space’ and ‘translocate’. Next, she used a linking syllable, followed by ‘doorway’, another link and ‘star’. She finished the spell with ‘void’ linked to ‘bridge’.

  Amelia looked on the sun and wasn’t surprised to see her spell having an effect. Dark lines appeared on its surface, colored very much like sunspots, though they were far more precise and geometric. It started with a simple hexagon formed of broad strokes, followed by two interlocked triangles that formed a linked, six-pointed star inside the hexagon, the lines of which were slightly thinner. The center was another hexagon, in which formed another six-pointed star. The lines of the geometric fractal hexagram grew finer with each smaller iteration, with the pattern constantly drawing closer to the center, without ever touching it.

  Amelia watched the fractal grow over the course of twenty minutes, pleased it really was possible to use the vast energy of the sun to cast a spell of immense power. Her eye was inevitably drawn to the center of the fractal hexagram, where a blackness beyond that of a mere sunspot formed, like a yawning emptiness, while the hexagram continued to reach toward it, from the outside.

  As Starwitch fell toward the sun, the blackness at the center grew wider, eventually obscuring the hexagram from view, until the blackness eclipsed the sun, leaving just the prominences along the edge visible. The glass of the windows lost their almost smoky quality as the light outside the ship lessened and Amelia glanced sideways as the sun was entirely obscured by the blackness ahead of the ship.

  The stars were more brilliant than she’d ever seen before, each like a jewel tacked to a bit of cloth. Even the faint gasses of interstellar space had become visible, appearing like roads linking the stars together.

  Amelia turned away from the beauty of the scene and focused her mind forward, because she had one final task to complete. She stared into the dark void, because someone had to bear witness to the depths of it, lest she and her sisters die.

  Starwitch entered the tear in reality and left the universe behind, while Amelia steeled herself for what she knew was coming, because she was the elected sacrifice. After all, it had been her idea and after hearing what would be involved, her sisters had refused to take that role.

  The arrowhead-like nose of Starwitch vanished, obscured by a blackness beyond words. The blackness crept into the witchpit and Amelia gripped the armrests of the pilot’s seat. The enchanted lights of the interior of the ship faded from sight and Amelia was left in the heart of the void.

  She couldn’t breathe and her heart stopped! She failed to scream as the cold emptiness of the void crept through her flesh, leaving first her fingers and toes numb, followed by her forearms and calves! Tears pooled around her eyes as the artificial gravity of the ship faded away. She tried to tear herself from the pilot’s seat, but was horrified to discover she couldn’t even move! She closed her eyes in an attempt to block out the inevitable tide of darkness, but that only made the blackness of it more complete!

  Amelia was isolated, lonely and more depressed than she’d ever been before. She would never again know love or affection. She would never experience a comforting hug from one of her sisters. She would die alone, her soul consumed by the void itself, because she’d been elected to pay the toll with her own soul.

  Her body grew numb and with that came a sense of release, because the very worst had happened. After all, what more could the void take from her?

  As if in answer, her thoughts drifted to Dawkin Icebrow, the only man Amelia had ever loved. Her heart ached for one more moment with him. She longed for his kiss and loving embrace. She longed to explore what they felt for each other, but as that thought settled into her mind, she knew the horror of what she’d done: she’d left him behind and there was no way she would ever see him again.

  This was purest darkness, the cold certainty that everything had been taken from her, and worst of all, she’d done it to herself. She reached the most bitter of all depths, certain her entire path leading to that moment had been a mistake.

  However, just when she felt as if the bitter depression had become a physical ailment that would snuff out her life, it was over. Light returned in the form of a red glow that included darker lines for the blood vessels in her eyelids.

  She opened her eyes, wiped away the tears and assessed the situation. Starwitch was hurtling away from a star that was at the center of a nebula composed of green and yellow gas, streaked with a little bit of red.

  As she admired the view, she considered the terrible depth of what she’d experienced. She could navigate between stars without experiencing that awful moment of nothingness again, since she’d paid the toll, though a piece of herself would forever remain in the void. That was why The Book of Newts called interstellar navigators ‘void-touched’. Not everyone could endure that black depression and The Book said some went insane from the experience, never quite able to detach from the intensity of it.

  There had been no other choice, but as she looked out at the strange beauty of the scene, she decided it was worth it. Of course, that was a lie, because it would be quite some time before she really adjusted to how her mind and heart had changed.

  She knew there was no going back, which made it even worse. She’d left Dawkin behind and she would never see him again. Tears poured from her eyes as the black depression returned.

  Amelia woke from the extremely vivid dream, bothered by the implications of it. She sensed subtle magic in the air of the dimly-lit crew quarters of Starwitch, that emanated from the workshop, the next room.

  The experience reminded her of something from years back, in which The Book of Newts had touched her mind to share its dream. That was when Amelia had first envisioned Starwitch as a gleaming tower of steel, rising on a column of superheated steam, a dream she’d made a reality five and half years later, in an attempt to escape a government that had turned her sisters into living weapons.

  Once again, The Book was trying to tell her something, but Amelia really didn’t like the idea. Clearly, it wanted to go further, to explore the universe, but all Amelia wanted was a place to call home. She’d thought Starwitch would be that place, but after rescuing her sisters from a deranged, undead witch, all Amelia wanted was to return to Cakana, the moon she’d been born on. She wanted to find Dawkin and apologize for flying off without him. She wanted to explore her feelings for him, rather than exploring space.

  Amelia was in her mid-twenties and just like her sisters, she had blue eyes. She was also rather short and petite, though she was athletically built, with muscles shaped by constantly building things. There was still grease on her cheek from the many days she’d been awake and alone on Starwitch, as she followed the undead pirate witch’s ship. Her dirty-blond hair was only a few inches long and uneven, because she’d hacked it off with a knife, since she’d been stuck in zero-G during that time, unable to spare any magic for an artificial gravity spell.

  The crew quarters were more like a storage room than anything else, with a number of lockers and cargo racks built into the walls, holding everything from pressure suits, to a frozen locker full of cheese for the unseen members of the crew, the house brownies, who lived entirely on dairy products.

  Aside from the central portion, which featured a ladder to aid moving around the ship during times without gravity, the floor of the room held a series of little doors held closed by springs, which could be opened to reveal rings for lashing things down. To one side was an acceleration couch. Three sections of floor bore mattresses clamped to the rings, which served as the beds for Amelia and her sisters.

  Iris, the middle sister, lay sleeping on her own, though it was obvious she wasn’t resting very well, because she was trembling and sweating in a distressing manner. Iris had recently been addicted to pleasure spells against her will, after her captor realized torture would never break her. Iris had been military trained to resist torture and interrogation, but no one had foreseen the reversal from pain magic to highly-addictive pleasure spells.

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  Iris had ash-blond hair that she kept up on her head in the form of french braids, which her sisters often helped her with. She was five years older than Amelia and had always been exceptionally beautiful.

  Amelia rolled out of bed, then tucked her blanket in, around the edges of the mattress.

  As she stepped over to one of the lockers, she moved past Iris, hearing her mutter, “Iris Blackwell, Specialist, L-F-7-5-9-0-2.”

  Name, rank and serial number. Iris used them as a mantra to block pain, and Amelia was surprised she was saying them even in her sleep.

  Amelia was by no means an expert at medicine, but Mother had given her some basic training, which was better than the average village quack got. Amelia paused to examine Iris, deeply worried. She was sweating enough to be dangerous, but the only water on board was in the steam engine dedicated to extending or retracting the landing gear, which wasn’t very much, anyway.

  Refueling was the primary reason they were heading for a port, but the water the ship used for fuel also served as drinking water.

  Amelia dressed for the day in a blue uniform she’d designed specifically for working in and around the ship, which had started as coveralls, though the one-piece suit had been perfectly customized for Amelia’s body. It also included a number of pockets and adjustable tool loops along the waistline, which were able to accommodate just about any handheld tool.

  She yawned as she headed for the workshop, because she still hadn’t caught up on her sleep. After all, she’d only had a few hours sleep in a five day period, which was worse than just before the launch of Starwitch, a time when Amelia had pulled three all-nighters in a row.

  The workshop was the largest room in Starwitch, complete with many workbenches and tool racks, all designed for zero-G, just in case. To one side was a corner dedicated to working with clay, because Amelia’s oldest sister, Marta, had been running a rather profitable business making ceramic items with runic enchantments.

  It was odd, but most everyone in space had forgotten how the written form of the ancient language of magic worked, aside from the Newt Witches, who ruled the star system. That ancient order of witches hadn’t forgotten, but the only runic enchantments they sold were spell-cores for star ships, which were considered essential equipment for space travel.

  One of the benches was dedicated to The Book of Newts, the ancient and powerful magical book Amelia’s mother had purchased for her at the age of ten. In retrospect, Amelia wasn’t sure how much she trusted the thing, because it had a mind, will and goals of its own, which were starting to conflict with her own.

  Paradoxically, while The Book was magical, it largely wasn’t about magic, instead filled with scientific, engineering and mathematical knowledge far beyond anything Amelia might ever have learned on her own, in addition to detailed charts of the known cosmos. She’d only read a quarter of it, because it always took time to fully comprehend what it taught her.

  The Book was two feet square and four inches thick, with thousands of rice paper pages and a small lock to keep the interior safe from prying eyes. The cover was elderly, battered leather that bore the title and a depiction of a newt, both of which had been pressed and hammered into the surface. As she looked on it, the letters and image reshaped themselves, until it read as Newton’s Mechanics, with a stylized image of a gas giant surrounded by rings that represented the orbits of moons, complete with bumps in each orbit for the planetary masses. That was The Book’s true form, which only Amelia could see, because it masked itself with an illusion.

  Amelia passed out of the workshop and into the spell-core room, which was largely undecorated, aside from the spell-core itself, which stuck out of the back wall. It was four feet long and made of gleaming mythril, with two heavy plates held together with four rods at the corners. The top plate featured a magic circle that served as a sort of control system for the Blackwell sisters to use the device, which was capable of casting any spell they could imagine. The bottom plate was little more than a mounting bracket for a smaller variety of spell-core, of which there were twenty-one. Each of the smaller ones was about five pounds, which added to the thirty pounds of the larger core, for a sum of one-hundred-thirty-five pounds of the naturally magical metal.

  The undead pirate that kidnapped Marta and Iris had also stolen the spell-core from Starwitch. The Queen had left Amelia adrift, with no option for survival, aside from attacking the bigger ship, because her magic was rather weak, despite her talent for using it with great precision. In the end, the sisters had been unable to separate their spell-core from the larger core the pirate queen used and had opted to steal the whole thing, leaving the pirate unable to properly control her ship, because it was far too large to easily manage without the magic device.

  In one corner, a wheel of cheese lay on the floor, for the house brownies. Amelia had never seen them, but the occasional tiny hand print in the cheese was all the evidence she needed to know they were there.

  Amelia put a hand on the core and concentrated on its magic, confirming the gravity-manipulation spells they were using for propulsion were still functioning as expected. That was one of the wonders of such a large spell-core. The pirate witch had been using it to unify the magic of an entire mountain of granite. In stark contrast, it was easy to use it to propel a fairly small ship like Starwitch, without using any water.

  Amelia turned back around, passing back through the workshop and crew quarters. She reached the entry bay, which served as both a cargo bay and the ship’s airlock, during emergency procedures, like repairs. The left wall bore the ship’s only door that linked the living spaces to the outside. Like the rest of the ship, the walls and floor were steel, though the floor featured the same little doors with hidden rings as crew quarters, while the walls and ceiling bore adjustable mounting brackets that slid on rails. Currently, the room was empty, though it was easy to reconfigure it to mount cargo racks to the floor, walls and ceiling.

  Amelia stepped through a doorway to the witchpit, where Marta sat in the pilot’s seat, with her new dog laying near her feet. She was a particularly large woman, with a frame just like their father, who’d been a lumberjack in life, though Marta was no less womanly for it. In effect, she was proportioned right to be attractive, though she was built to a much larger scale than average, with muscle Amelia had always found useful for engineering projects. Marta’s golden-blond hair was currently in a single braid that hung down her back.

  The dog, Bones, was the biggest example of a rottweiler Amelia had ever seen and as she approached, he opened his eyes, revealing the fact they glowed red, because he was a zombie. Amelia wasn’t sure she could trust the brutish animal, because he’d nearly killed her several times, but since Marta had said Amelia was a friend, Bones had treated Amelia with kindness and even affection. Marta had won over the death dog’s loyalty, largely because he couldn’t tell the difference between Marta and the pirate queen, due to the fact that he saw with the eyes of his spirit, rather than his physical ones.

  In front of Marta was a console that held several flat and wide quartz crystals that had been enchanted to provide both exterior views of Starwitch from every angle and the surrounding space. Between them was the face of a mechanical alarm clock, which kept time for maneuvers. Mounted below the crystals were various levers for controlling the ship, the most prominent of which was the throttle for the steam engines.

  Starwitch appeared almost like an arrow, with a sharp point at the front, beyond the windows of the witchpit, which came to edge-like protrusions to either side, that made the ship more aerodynamic. Tucked into those peaked edges were two of the ship’s masts that were used for directing spells outside, while the other two were tucked into the top and bottom. Three of the masts ran nearly the full length of the ship, which was sixty meters, or just over sixty-five yards. The fourth was damaged and only about five feet long. The masts could be extended or retracted by means of a set of four winches set into the walls, floor and ceiling of the witchpit. The ship ended with four rocket nozzles and a set of control fins useful for atmospheric flight.

  “Iris is getting worse.” Amelia spoke solemnly, “How are you doing?”

  Marta turned away from the view outside the ship, giving her sister an unsettling and wicked grin, “I’m fine.”

  That wasn’t true and Amelia knew it, though she wasn’t sure if her sister understood that fact, at the moment. Marta and Iris had been kidnapped, because the Dead Queen consumed the souls of strong witches to extend her undead existence. That process involved an exchange of soul fragments, one of the most vile and twisted uses of necromancy, followed by a battle of soul versus soul that came down to eat or be eaten. Worse, that process had been started with Marta before Amelia had been able to rescue her sister.

  As a result, Marta’s personality was changing and she’d already become more callous and cruel. The upshot, however, was that her magic was more powerful than ever and she was able to stand toe to toe with the pirate queen in a duel. She’d even done some things that were normally impossible, such as exactly mirroring the Queen’s spell-casting, to produce identical magic moving the opposite direction, which canceled out the Queen’s spells.

  With the way their souls had become linked, Bones hadn’t been able to tell the difference and had sided with Marta over his own master, after licking both their hands. He clearly hadn’t liked the way his actual master tasted, since she was a rotting zombie.

  “No, you’re not.” Amelia challenged Marta’s claim.

  Marta shook her head, took a deep breath and muttered as a tear rolled down her cheek, “She’s in my head and trying to make me more like her.” She admitted, “I can hold her off while I’m awake, but I’m afraid to sleep. I’ve used every spare moment for meditation, but she’s had more practice at this kind of battle than I have. I could lean on her experience, but that would only make me more like her.”

  Amelia asked, “What can I do to help?”

  “Can I have a hug?” Marta sobbed, overcome with obvious terror.

  Amelia wrapped her arms around her sister’s neck and Marta embraced her.

  “Stay strong and keep fighting.” Amelia whispered, “Show her the will of a Blackwell woman. Hold onto who you really are, deep down inside.” She glanced at the clock, “We should be coming up on Ice Palace Sixty-Eight in a few hours. Maybe we can find you a little help; there’s always at least one Newt Witch around the place and they know more about magic than anyone else. Hopefully they can help Iris, too.”

  “Okay,” Marta nodded, “but you should know the Queen has found a way to get her ship back under control. She’ll be coming after us, just as soon as she can.”

  “Yeah.” Amelia sighed, “I wish I hadn’t hesitated to shoot her when I had the chance.”

  Marta smiled slightly, “Unlike me, you’re not a killer and I don’t blame you for that. That’s exactly why I turned to you when we had the Queen cornered, because I can’t trust my own mind, right now.”