It all started with the crack. The girls noticed it at breakfast; a long, jagged crack snaking its way across the dining room wall, splitting apart the faded wallpaper. Aisling walked over and peered inside it, searching the blackness within for some clue, some sense of what lay on the other side. She longed to place her hand inside, to thrust her fingers into those black depths and probe their secrets.

Aisling cupped her hand behind her back, fighting against the urge. She knew if she stuck her hand inside, all she’d be left with was a bloody stub.

This particular crack was low on the wall, and it must’ve been growing for some time, for it was quite long and wide, and had already begun pulling in the furniture. It had taken a corner of the armoire already. Around the fissure, the walls were blackened, rotting away as the radioactive chemicals ate at the house.

Cracks in the walls of old houses weren’t that uncommon. When the Hollow had existed in the human realm, a lattice of cracks marred several of its once pristine walls, causing their father great concern over the house’s structural integrity. The sisters’ grandmother June had brushed off her son-in-law’s protests. “These cracks are like the lines on my face,” she said, rubbing her withered cheeks. “They’re part of the history of this house, the wisdom of its twilight years, the natural decay of its life. Let her grow old gracefully, just like me.”

Of course, now that the house had been pulled partway into the fae realm, it wasn’t entirely natural anymore. When the human world had been all but destroyed by nuclear war and the poisoned air killed all of the trees and animals, the fae had come. They came for the only creatures still left alive – the witches, like Aisling and Bethany and their mother and grandmother – to power their cities and supply them with the magical energy called atern they used as currency.

Grandmother June barricaded the Hollow with spells, and with the assistance of Aisling’s mother and June’s two sisters – what remained of their coven – she bound herself to the house so the fae could not take her. The spell killed her, transferring her power into the Hollow’s walls. Undeterred, the fae took the Hollow – walls and doors and furniture and witches and all – into their world, figuring they could get inside it later to tap the witches’ atern, like a particularly recalcitrant nut they needed to crack.

But the Hollow wouldn’t crack. Instead, it fought back.

Aisling was only five years old when the fae came. Grandmother June hid her and Bethany in the pantry while she and their mother and father and the other witches fought against the fairy armies that marched across the countryside. Aisling buried her face in Bethany’s shoulder, sobbing as the house shuddered around them from the force of spells being hurled back and forth. The air crackled and sizzled with restless energy, like a thunderstorm building up inside. Cans and jars of preserves toppled from the shelves on top of them, and Aisling’s chest tightened with fear when she heard her father screaming.

Though they battled with Grandmother June and the house for days, the fae could not bring the Hollow completely into their world. They still hadn’t. The Hollow teetered on the edge of a great cliff on the boundary of Scitis, a faction of the fae realm. The grand wooden manor bridged the two worlds, existing between the intense heat of the radiated human realm and the burning ice of the fae realm. It defied logic – the entire east wing was suspended in midair hundreds of feet above a vast, bottomless chasm from which a great storm rose. Winds wailed through the chimneys and dark clouds crashed against each other, battering the house from all sides and often completely obscuring the view of Scitis through the windows.

Over the years, the Hollow had succumbed to the incredible forces exerted upon it. Rooms stretched and distorted. The ballroom was now larger on the inside than it was on the outside. Staircases descended into nowhere. Cracks formed in the walls as the house was pulled in both directions by the incredible forces. Between those cracks, an unholy darkness lurked. If the void took you, you would never return. That was how Aisling had lost her mother when she was thirteen.

Aisling was now twenty years old. For fifteen years, this house on the edge of existence was all she and Bethany had known. They protected it from the occasional fae attacks, and repaired what they could. But the cracks grew bigger, the rooms took on a mind of their own, and the house seemed determined to swallow them up.

This particular crack’s presence was a bitter end to a beautiful moment, one of the first they’d shared together in months. Bethany – the older sister by four years – had been so reserved of late, barely talking to Aisling, where they used to share everything. She spent hours sitting in the blue drawing room in the east wing, watching out the bay window as the house swayed over the edge of the precipice, unblinking as lightning snaked from the swirling miasma below and crashed against the icy sky. Aisling stayed in the doorway, watching her elder sister. She wanted to do something to cheer her up. Bethany was the only family she had left.

One morning, Aisling found a jar of strawberry jam hidden behind the beans in the pantry. She’d thought they’d used up the last of the jams two months ago, and it was supposed to be several months before another jar appeared. Grandmother June’s pantry enchantment had been slowing down for years. Food now took months to replenish, and Bethany’s gardening experiments in the frozen greenhouse attached to the kitchen garden had so far been a failure. Aisling clutched the jar to her chest, stroking the lid as though it were a precious jewel. This is just the thing.

Aisling set the dining table with the nice china, and collected some fabric flowers from Grandmother June’s sewing room – which now contained an ornate staircase that had never been there before – to place in a vase in the center. She even opened one of their few remaining bottles of grape juice and poured them each a glass. Widdershins – their grandmother’s soot-black cat who’d survived in the house as long as they had – crept inside and curled up on the rug under the table.

Bethany entered the dining room just as Aisling was folding the napkins. She tossed her brown ringlets over her shoulder. “What’s all this? Is that jam? I didn’t think we had any jam.”

“I found some at the back of the pantry. I thought we’d have a celebration.”

“What are we celebrating?” Bethany pulled out her chair, and started spreading a thick layer of jam across her cracker. Aisling wanted to tell her to use less, to ration the jam so it would stretch further, but she didn’t have the heart. Not when Bethany was smiling the first real smile she’d seen in months. Instead, Aisling sat down opposite her sister, spread an even thicker layer on her own cracker, and took a big bite.

The sweetness delighted her tongue. The jam was almost thick enough to disguise the stale taste of the cracker. Aisling took a swig of juice. Oh, it was heavenly, like swallowing a rainbow.

Aisling glanced up at the calendar she had pinned to the wall. She’d made it from pages she’d torn from a book on butterflies she’d found in the library. It was pretty crude, just numbered boxes with crosses through them. She didn’t even bother with the days of the week anymore. What was the point? They were all the same.

“We’re celebrating survival.” Aisling said firmly, as she made a quick calculation in her head. “For 5,522 days, we’ve kept this house safe from the fae.”

“What good is survival without life?” Bethany said sourly, setting down her cracker. She stared at a spot behind Aisling’s head. “We have nothing inside these walls but a library full of books about things we’ll never experience. I want to swim in an ocean, or feel the grass between my toes. I want to fly in an airplane, or smell a real rose, or fall in love.”

“The world in those books doesn’t exist anymore,” Aisling said.

“I don’t care!” Bethany slammed down her glass so hard, grape juice splashed across the tablecloth. Widdershins sprung to his feet in alarm and darted from the room. “I can’t stand seeing the same walls, day in and day out, while the fae get to carry on with their lives outside our gate. We’re prisoners here, Aisling, as surely as we would be if the fae caught us. We might as well be dead.”

“Don’t say that,” Aisling said, her heart hammering. We have each other.

“Why not? It’s true. Grandmother June has trapped us here, and for what? To save this house? She loved the Hollow more than she loved us … oh, no—” Bethany’s gaze landed on the wall behind Aisling. Without turning around, Aisling knew from her sister’s stricken expression what she would see: A dark fissure slowly opening across the wall.

“Bethany, I’m sorry.” Aisling squeezed her eyes shut, fighting back the urge to cry. Her plan had completely backfired.

“I’ll get some boards.” Bethany rose from the table, pushing her half-eaten cracker away. Aisling reached for her, but Bethany ducked around her outstretched fingers. As she swung open the heavy door to the hallway, Aisling glimpsed tears streaking down her sister’s face.

Her own eyes pricking with tears, Aisling cleared away the dishes, eating the rest of her sister’s cracker. It tasted like cardboard. She pushed the dining table closer to the door, away from the crack. Bethany returned a few minutes later, carrying several pieces of a mahogany bookshelf they’d chopped up last month.

“This is the last of it,” she said, dropping all the wood on the floor in front of the fissure and pulling out her hammer, all business now. Her cheeks were dry of tears, her eyes dead. For some reason her no-nonsense demeanor frightened Aisling more than her outburst of emotion. Bethany had been morose for weeks now, but this was different.

“Let me help.” Aisling picked up one of the wooden boards. Bethany snatched it from her hands.

“I’ll take care of this. You get the sealing stones.” Bethany held the wood up to the wall and started nailing it in place, her strikes cool, efficient, the sound jolting through Aisling like thunder.

Not wanting to upset her sister again, Aisling ran from the room. She found the sealing stones in Grandmother June’s desk in the blue drawing room, where they kept all the magical implements. The drawing room was toward the front of the house, overlooking what would have been the front garden but was now a barren, icy field between the house and the low stone wall encircling the garden. They’d chosen this room as their safe store, as it was furthest from the known locations of the void, and would be one of the last rooms to crack. Aisling grabbed the velvet bag of stones from the desk drawer and ran back to the dining room.

“Bethany, I’ve found them—”

Aisling’s heart stopped beating. Bethany wasn’t standing behind the table. Instead, she lay facedown on the ground, in front of the wall, her face turned toward the doorway, frozen in a look of such intense horror, it make Aisling’s stomach turn. Her sister’s left arm had been completely torn away. She wasn’t bleeding, the wound staunched by the burning darkness of the void. Her severed arm was nowhere to be seen.

“Bethany?” Aisling dropped to her feet and pressed her fingers to her sister’s wrist. Bethany’s skin felt clammy. There was no pulse. Aisling tilted her sister’s head back, preparing for mouth-to-mouth, but she caught a glimpse of Bethany’s glassy eyes, no longer seeing, and she knew it was too late. Whether she was dead from the shock of losing her arm, or from the darkness devouring her soul, Aisling would never be able to ask.

Behind Bethany, the fissure had opened even further along the wall, a gaping black tear from the gilded portrait of their grandfather above the fireplace to the small cameo of a cat along the right edge of the wall. The gap in the center was the breadth of Aisling’s outstretched hands, and it tapered to a point at the ends, appearing as black lips curling up in a mocking grin, the two boards Bethany had nailed in like crooked teeth. From within issued inky black tendrils that gave off an acrid, smoky stench.

Bethany’s hammer lay on the thick carpet in front of her, a single nail poking from the board above it, only half nailed in. One of her shoes had rolled off under the table. A thin trail of black smoke rose from the insole.

Aisling sank to her knees in front of the wall, her heart breaking inside her chest. The pain of her loss was physical, a searing heat burning through her body, as though she’d been set on fire. She pounded her fists against the floor, her cries of desperation echoing through the heavy, silent house.

Seconds, minutes or hours later, Aisling rolled over, her eyelids drooping, her nose stinging and her face sticky with tears. The grief ebbed, still sitting beneath her skin but no longer burning her alive. She rubbed her eyes, and her gaze fell on her sister’s shoe, sitting where she’d left it under the dining table.

Now I am the only one left.

* * *

Aisling decided to bury Bethany in the graveyard behind the Hollow. The eastern gardens bordered the rift, but the graveyard was to the west, at the far end of a long, rectangular field where Aisling and her cousins used to play soccer in the spring. It would be one of the last corners of the house to be devoured. The grass was no longer green, of course, but a brown mat frozen solid beneath a layer of dirty ice, cracked and pitted in places where lightning had struck it.

The storm raged above as Aisling lugged the gravestone she’d made across the field. Behind the low iron gate, four rows of neat graves lined the path on either side. Aisling remembered visiting the cemetery before the fae came, when she stayed with Grandmother June over the holidays. Her grandmother would grip her hand tightly while she recited stories about the ancestors who resided in those graves.

Bethany never much liked the cemetery. “Grandmother June lives in a world of the dead,” she said sourly, kicking a stack of books in the upstairs bedroom they shared whenever they stayed over. “She doesn’t know anything about current events or technology, but give her some dusty bones in a moldy cemetery, and she’s happy.”

“I like Grandmother June’s stories,” Aisling had said, feeling defensive on their grandmother’s behalf. June had made a particularly good batch of hazelnut brownies earlier that afternoon.

“This whole house is like a mausoleum to our family. All the furniture in this house belonged to someone who died. And those creepy portraits everywhere! You’re sleeping in a dead person’s bed. Just think about that.”

You’re in the world of the dead now, sis, Aisling thought, as she struggled to lift the stone into place at the foot of the mausoleum. Her hands burned from the frigid air, and she nearly dropped the stone as she set it in place beside the one she’d made for her parents.

The stones were dwarfed by the structure immediately behind them. Lady Aisling Greymouth – the first witch in their family, for whom Aisling was named – built her ornate mausoleum in the center of the small plot. It was an above-ground structure, decorated in the gothic style Lady Greymouth had so favored, with flowing vines and winged cherubs dancing around the marble arches flanking the twin iron doors. Inside, she and the other twelve members of the original family coven were buried, watching over their descendants for eternity.

When Aisling was younger, their family would meet at the grave every year on All Souls Day. Grandmother June would throw open the doors to the mausoleum, and they would perform a short ritual and offer up flowers and wine as gifts to honor Lady Greymouth and the family. They had continued the ritual for as long as they could after the house was brought into the fae realm, but now the door was frozen shut, the mausoleum half-buried under a pile of snow. The final winter was closing in.

After some maneuvering and chipping away at the ice on the step, Aisling finally got the stone to stand straight. Shoving her hands deep into her pockets, she stood back and admired her work. Bethany’s stone was simple, for Aisling was not much of an artist with a chisel. She’d pulled up one of the paving stones from outside the greenhouse, and managed to carve her sister’s name, and the words “In Loving Memory.” She would have loved to have added some Rolling Stones lyrics – Bethany’s favorite band – but she ran out of space and patience.

It took Aisling all day to dig the grave in the ice. She broke up the dirt with an ice pick, then dug it out with a shovel. By the time she had a decent-sized hole, her back ached and her hands were cut and broken. Luckily, the cold wind had kept her sister’s body well-preserved beneath the linen tablecloth Aisling was using as a shroud. When Aisling rolled her body into the grave, Bethany’s corpse felt stiff. She didn’t smell, and no insects or carrion animals had come to eat her.

There’s only one kind of carrion beast who survives in Scitis, Aisling thought, as she stared out over the low garden wall, down on the city below. White spires cloaked with ice and snow pierced the empty sky. Blinking lantern lights glinted between the buildings, their light casting a pale glow across the white city. The distant bell tower of the university chimed the hour.

A wave of nausea flowed through her body. All those fae living in that city, using the energy they drained from the world without a second thought. They were the ones who stole her life, who took her and Bethany’s chance for a future. I hate them.

Aisling allowed herself one final tear. A single, solitary drop of water for the sister who had been taken from her.

And then it was time to get back to work.