This was a house made from the very fabric of the Everdark. Three-dimensional space was, in many ways, its own tangible thing. One of the lessons Annika's father had often sought to instill in her was that this must be grappled with in order to move across the Veil as the two did, and the funny thing about distorting the space of this realm was that many things hid within it. It was a void, an interstitial area where forgotten things congregated, infinitely wide, yet confined within its own bounds.

He used magic to build this place, a house that didn't adhere to the laws of nature anymore than the realm it was found within.

Seeing it through the same lens as the cat, Annika saw a superposition. Like various watercolor images bleeding over a solid canvas, there was the house as she had once seen it, and the house as it had once been across many years. Rooms flickered and waned away from the dark. The house was normally well lit for somewhere that shadow wizards lived in, yet the light wasn't always reaching the rooms that weren't fully there. They were impressions, old permutations of things Jack had done to the outline of his home. With time and effort, he could rearrange this space by twisting it in ways that he had yet to teach his daughter.

But when he did, the old configurations weren't [i]real,[/i] anymore. It was like breaking walls with a hammer and then renovating what was inside. What Annika was seeing shouldn't have been seen at all.

In some of the flickerings, the hallways were longer. In some, there were less rooms and more wide open spaces dedicated to ritualistic arrangements; The kind of magic that took more than a word or a hand gesture to pull off, with practically pristine books strewn about in a way that Jack himself would [i]never[/i] entertain.

Nochella's ears flattened whenever Annika walked near some of them.

The longer they persisted, the more they seemed to [i]pulse.[/i] They faded in and faded out in waves, not at random.