WHAT LIES BEHIND THE DOOR

The entire time Sophia had been in the room with Cassius, she wanted nothing more than to strangle him.

How dare he ask about her like this? At this time? In this way? Just so he could ease his own troubled romantic feelings for her.

Sophia's anger had kicked up another notch as she left the palace, her eyes burning with fire as she sat quietly in the carriage.

She planned to return home immediately, continue writing her plans to sow the most chaos she could, when she started to feel an odd tug, like something was pulling at her magic and sorcery.

She called for the carriage to carry on without her, telling the coachman that she would walk home instead, and then turned immediately to the direction she felt the tug coming from, before eventually finding herself standing at the entrance to the woods.

The fog was right in front of her, thick and ominous, and strangely familiar.

She released some of her sorcery, the black smoke emerging from her palm moving forward to mingle with the fog. For a moment nothing happened, but then the fog seemed to swallow her sorcery, and then pulsed, as if it absorbed its power and became stronger.

It was clear that the fog was made of her sorcery, somehow, but Sophia could not think of how it could've come into existence. She certainly hadn't made it, at least not on purpose. She remember that Elena had mentioned once in one of her journals that accidental sorcery was possible, but it was exceedingly rare and usually never manifested in any serious ways.

Creating something like this with accidental sorcery should have been impossible.

Sophia stared into the fog for a moment longer before taking a deep breath and stepping through without a second thought.

The first thing she noticed as she stepped through was the feeling of something heavy weighing down on her, like an invisible force pushing on her. The second thing she noticed was that there were dead bodies littered around her feet. It seemed that the people who had tried to entire the fog before her had stepped through, only to die immediately. What was strange was that some of the bodies seemed to be missing parts, sometimes a full limb, other times one or two patches of skin and chunks of hair.

Sophia looked at the bodies for only another minute longer, before she continued walking into the woods, still feeling that pull on her sorcery, leading her to the centre of the woods.

The woods were eerily silent as she made her way past, no animals scuttling around in the distance, no wind rustling the tree leaves.

She seemed to walk for forever until she finally came upon a cocoon of black smoke and magic. It seemed like a shield, protecting whatever was inside.

Sophia put her hand through the cocoon, watching as a hole opened up to let her hand pass. She took another deep breath before stepping through.

What sat waiting for her in the cocoon was the horrific image of what she could only describe as a monster.

More specifically, it seemed to be a female version of Frankenstein's monster. All the missing body parts from the dead bodies Sophia saw before had been gathered into this cocoon, and seemed to be forming its own body. The most horrifying part of it all, though, was that it seemed to be constructing another Selene.

There were chunks of blonde and light brown that seemed to trying to make up Selene's long blonde hair, two slightly mismatched eyes paired together to best match the colour of Selene's original ones, and pale skin that had odd darker patches where it was clear they ran out of skin to use and had to find the closest replacement.

Sophia felt tempted to throw up, but more than that urge, the feeling of hope surfaced. Her sorcery was doing what she tried to do before, it was trying to bring Selene back, only in a way she had never thought to try.

It was building Selene an entirely new body from scratch.

The problem with that was the fact that she didn't know how to put Selene's soul and consciousness into that body.

Elena had left Sophia no notes about this. It would be up to Sophia and Sophia alone to figure out a way through this.

Some of her anger gave way to a budding sense of hope, forcing Sophia to turn on her heel and quickly march her way out of the fog, the wheels in her head turning fast.

While Elena knew a lot about sorcery, there were still other branches of sorcery that she'd never touched on and never bothered with. Some were mentioned in passing in her journals, but not dwelled on as she was only ever focussed on dark sorcery. Sophia knew despite the fact that she knew enough about the basics of sorcery, there was still lots for her to discover, and some of that unknown knowledge could be the key ingredient needed to bring Selene back.

As she walked the long road back home, she realised exactly where her next step needed to be.