Where I discovered almost immediately that I had no idea where I was going after all. Under ordinary circumstances, when magic meets mundane, the mundane wins by miles. It’s so hard to cast a spell in the face of casual disbelief that most wizards don’t even try. But you can do it if you pour enough mana behind it and keep going, or if you’ve got enough wizards around, with our total confidence that magic really does work. And with a battlefield-full, the world began to change around us.
All those circling garden paths, which had been meant to make you feel as though you were wandering lost in the wilderness, were spreading out along those lines of intent, almost as if they were in an enclave, new branches uncurling to make room for still more wizards hurling still more mana profligate in every direction. Trees were putting out clawed arms or growing unnatural fruit that tried to persuade you to stop and eat; the many statues were coming off their plinths and out of their niches to join the fighting. Strange pieces of artifice were growing up out of the ground—the kinds of impossible structures that defied the laws of physics so forcefully that ordinarily they couldn’t be put up outside an enclave. If a single ordinary person did slip through that perimeter right now, or if there was some poor bastard living rough behind one of the bushes, they would find themselves in the middle of a world that had stopped making sense.
I crept round trying to find the initiation well, while silent terrible killing spells went flying overhead so fast and thick that some of them had to be going at the wrong targets. I got all the practice in harvesting bad intentions that I could want without finding a single fight of my own. I caught murder and maiming and agonies out of the air, stuffing them into my metaphorical sack until the gems on all my bangles were glowing vivid red, the crystal hanging round my neck was full as well, and I felt like my skin was going to split like an overripe plum.
By then I had realized that all of us were caught in a working, some spell of endless wandering that was encouraging us to stay lost. I suspect none of the other wizards had ever been round here; no sane wizard would have come anywhere near the Scholomance entrance. So they didn’t know what to look for, other than someone to fight, and there wasn’t any shortage of them in the twisted gardens. But even full-up on mana, I couldn’t get out of it.
Or rather, I could have got out, but I couldn’t get in. After that time of getting lost inside London enclave, I’d made a point of looking up a proper wayfinding spell and memorizing it carefully—it wasn’t intended to kill or mangle anything, so I had to work to get it to stick in my head—but when I tried it now, I only got back to the front entrance of the park, where the gates were standing wide open and the fire engine lights going in the distance and the park behind me shrouded in dark: an invitation to be on my way, if I didn’t like to stay and be a part of the festivities. I gnashed my teeth and turned round and plunged back into the rising confusion of the battlefield.
Mostly no one was paying any attention to me; your assumption if you saw a teenage wizard trying her best to sneak quietly round the battlefield would be that she was a recent graduate who’d clumsily got separated from her enclave’s team, and not worth your notice. But the enclavers certainly did notice that none of their deadliest spells were landing, and neither were the ones their enemies were flinging. I was overhearing people debating whether New York or Shanghai had put some sort of muffling enchantment over the grounds.
But they only got more aggressive in response. More and more wizards were turning up, and all of them went on doing their best to kill each other with the hoarded mana they’d all piled up inside their enclaves. I couldn’t hold it all, so I started turning people to stone instead. Each time someone lobbed another attempt, I caught it and took the mana and returned fire, and fairly soon the paths I was wandering began to fill up with elaborate replacement statuary.
Which I had the chance to admire over and over, because I couldn’t find the bloody well! It was even worse than the last time I’d been here going in circles under the blazing sun with hordes of tourists; at least then no one had been deliberately keeping me lost. And I didn’t understand the working well enough, so I couldn’t work out what it was meant to do. As I went round yet another time in rising fury, I began to give real thought to going back to the gates and taking that as a vantage point and just ripping the gardens entirely off the earth to expose the underground layers beneath, which was obviously a terrible idea, only it began to seem better than just going round and round and round, and then someone shouted out, “El! Galadriel!” into the dark—a man’s voice, familiar.