In all of its long history, the Squid and Teapot had never smelled so good. It was almost unnerving.

Instead of the usual perfume – a heady blend of skunk cabbage, spilled ale, and poached squid legs – the inn now carried hints of rosemary and citrus and honest-to-goodness fresh vegetables.

It took no time for the word to get around the island that something special was happening down at The Squid. It had even attracted Doc Willoughby, whose gastronomic curiosity had overcome his deep antipathy toward Philomena Bucket.

He arrived three nights running, sniffing the air like a suspicious badger in tweed, poking at the menu and asking, far too loudly, whether someone had finally discovered a way to render spoonwalkers edible. Philomena accepted the remark with a frozen smile, and every muscle she owned clenched in unison. Being in an especially mellow mood that evening, however, she allowed the slight to go over her head and fly out to sea. Nothing was going to disturb her equilibrium; after all, Pyralia Skant’s parting gift had given her the means to provide the inn with a better menu than it had ever known.  And that would have been the end of the matter if Doc Willoughby had kept his mouth shut.

Then came the remark. The one that halted Philomena in her progress to the kitchen.

“It’s a mystery where this place suddenly gets its food from” he’d said, to no one in particular. “Almost as mysterious as Durosimi O’Stoat’s single-malt supply. The man drinks like he’s got a distillery at his beck and call.”

Philomena felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

Pyralia’s voice echoed in her memory: Take only what is needed. Disturb nothing else.

If Durosimi had learned of not-Hopeless, that wild liminal space of near-realities, then the pompous, rules-optional sorcerer would not be limiting himself to a handful of carrots, repaid with a grateful sigh.

This is how, some nights later, Philomena found herself crouched behind a blasted hawthorn stump at the edge of the fissure. She had picked her time deliberately, knowing that this would be when Durosimi would be most likely to replenish his store of whisky.

Under the dark of the moon, those few days between its waning and waxing, was traditionally the best time for dark magic. And everything about this particular midnight felt dark. Philomena’s pale blue eyes narrowed, straining to penetrate the foggy gloom.

Durosimi arrived with all the subtlety of a peacock entering a funeral. Rings flashing and a self- satisfied grin so smug it could curdle lamp oil.

He muttered a few opulent words, traced sigils in the air, and the fissure yawned open. It was obedient, malleable, too easily bent. It reminded Philomena of a dog her father had owned, beaten into cowed submission. The hair on the back of her neck prickled as she sensed Not-Hopeless shiver. It did not like to be steered.

Durosimi marched straight in. Philomena followed, tentative, silent and filled with a sense of trepidation. The air within the fissure glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

What she saw made her breath catch: shelves of bottled whisky that had never existed, turning themselves obediently toward Durosimi. Trees releasing ripe fruit at a snap of his fingers; it was a docile landscape bowing like a bullied servant.

Not-Hopeless writhed under it. The very ground seemed to ripple. Shadows lengthened in odd directions. A tone, deep and vibrating, thrummed through the bones of the place, like a warning growl from something enormous but not yet visible.

Philomena clutched an amulet Pyralia had left her.

“He’s pushing it too hard. He’s bending it too far,” she was terrified that she had spoken the words aloud, but if she had, Durosimi had not heard her.  For how long had he been doing this? And knowing the sorcerer, enough would never be enough. No wonder the island felt so bruised.

Cracks skittered across the sky like fractures in porcelain.

Durosimi, to his credit, paused mid-plunder and frowned at a nearby boulder that had started quietly bleeding sand.

“Hmm,” he said, as if mildly inconvenienced by the prelude to a cosmic rupture. “Perhaps I’ve over-steeped the infusion…”

Philomena knew then that if she didn’t intervene, the people of Hopeless would pay the price.

Not dramatically; there would be no big blousy apocalypse. That would require too much enthusiasm from the island. But it would retaliate  in those small, unpleasant, irreversible ways it specialised in.

This was only the beginning.

And Philomena Bucket, purveyor of soups, ale and occasional witchcraft squared her shoulders.

There would be a reckoning.