Ann froze.
She was right in front of the door. All she needed to do was to reach out and knock, but to cross the gulf of space those few feet had turned into seemed nigh impossible.
As she’d walked to the address scribbled in magic on the back of her hand she had considered the possibility of freezing up. It had been one of the worries that were distinctly more real than the others that had crossed her mind, but perhaps due to its mundanity Ann had pushed it aside. It was easy to argue that she’d faced far scarier things that were far more likely to kill her in the past and the fear she felt now wouldn’t be anything like that.
It turned out that those thoughts were wrong and this fear was exactly like that. Ann wasn’t one to freeze at danger anymore though.
The reason that Ann was trapped inside her own mind at that moment was, when going through all the possible emotional dangers of this visit, she hadn’t thought about the physical ones. Namely warding to stop anyone too powerful from attempting to breach the threshold.
She started to reach out with her mind a little, trying to feel for any cracks in the warding without alerting the person who set them she was doing so. Any shapes that weren’t perfectly regular, any lines that didn’t quite connect, any place where the magic wasn’t quite strong enough. She tried to extend her arm and found she could stretch it about halfway to the door. She smiled at that with it quickly turning into a grin when she realised that there was no resistance when she moved her mouth.
Ann could feel a little of the shape of the power when she reached out. It was unwavering and secure, exactly how warding magic should be, but she knew that if she felt a bit deeper there would have to be some way to make it crumble and
Huh. It feels like me, she thought. That’s weird.
And with that her ever so careful prodding of the house’s defences lost all subtlety while her subconscious took over in its ravenous hunger for answers.
She tried to reign it in as quickly as she could, take back control of the feelers she’d woven through the warding network, but if there are two things that don’t often work well together they are emotions and control.
A moment later a man was opening the door. He was about a head taller than Ann, in his mid thirties with bags under his eyes, accompanied by an air of annoyance which didn’t quite match a man greeting a dangerous fellow magician he’d warded his house to protect against.
Ann was frozen again but this time it wasn’t anything to do with the warding. There were a thousand versions of everything that could happen next filling the uncrossable space between them. Ann could see in the way the man’s eyes widened that he saw the impossibility of reaching out across that void of possibilities as well as she did. The movement drew attention to his eyes and away from the bags underneath them.
The irises were the same shade of blue as Ann’s own.
“Huh. You look like me.” She said, forgetting for a moment how inconceivable it was less than a moment ago to cross that chasm. “That’s weird.”