For a moment, there was silence. I wondered if the question was out of place, that I would lose my only point of contact with the only other person still alive, well, according to her anyway.

After that agonizing moment, Charissa spoke again. "My cell is here, nor am I out of it."

She paused for a moment, seemingly waiting for me to grasp the reference, but then continued on. "What they call a cell isn't what you would call a cell. I wasn't locked up as much as I was locked out, slightly out of phase with all energy known to magic, I can but abide in a world of grey nothingness. No floor, no walls, no body. I have no physical needs, I am alone with my thoughts in an inescapable void.

"Millenia ago, I made a tiny hole, using the last of the pitiful amount of energy they had left me, in order to connect to the normal universe. A trickle of energy passes through it, very little and in no way enough to break free, if I had all time, which I do.

"Little as it is, it enabled me to perform small nudges, sending you that rune, cracking the ruby. I have no more power than that."

"You said you were waiting for me. How could you have known I'd wind up here?", I asked.

"I didn't", she replied, "you could have appeared anywhere and in any time, but it was likely it would be here and approximately this time.
"Once the energy carrying you along entered the dead age, it was diminishing rapidly, with losing its ability to hold you in only a matter of time.
"It actually dropped you earlier than I expected, thank fates. You can't imagine how boring it can be to look at a dead planet. Times moves funny here, but even so, it has been a long time."

"The dead age?", I asked.

"Yes. The age where a Council, drunken on power after defeating the Elders, decided to occupy earth, enslave the mundanes, build castles in the sky and reign supreme. The age where wholesale use of magic depleted earth's stores of it to the point where magic itself was distorted.
"Spells would misfire, causing large scale changes, for lack of energy to control them properly. Floating castles fell onto people's cities, wars started, resulting in carnage never before or since seen.
"The killing blow was a reality changing spell that was well intentioned, ill thought out and absolutely under-fueled.
"It was meant to change a fundamental frequency of magic, to give earth's magic a second lease on life, to make magic work again.
"It misfired, it changed a fundamental of the physical world instead."

"So why is it called the dead age?", I asked.

"Funny you should ask,", she said, "it changed the structure of every living cell on the planet. Plant, animal, no matter. Just not man.", she paused, then continued "There is nothing on this world you can eat."

I was in shock. Nothing I can eat. I would die. I had two weeks left to live. I would die alone, well, nearly alone, on a dead world. The overwhelming realization of my predicament made me break the connection, to roll up into a ball and cry. For Alyssa, Stacy, for a world I had left behind, to die two millenia later.

At some point, I managed to cry myself to sleep, but a pale, grey dawn under the ubiquitous clouds brought me to the point of waking. As I gained more awareness, I suddenly snapped awake with renewed panic. I had to do something. Fast.

I needed to speak to Charissa. I settled down to make a connection, but the whirlwind of emotions inside of me made that a fraught task. Eventually, I had to give up for the time being. I drank some water and opened my makeshift barricades to look around the outside.

The sky was, again, covered by the fast moving grey clouds, the colors of the world being leeched out by the pale, almost unearthly light. Up above, lightning lit the skies, something that, I supposed, was the new normal for this almost dead planet.

Life, as I was able to observe, consisted of small, scurrying animals that would forage in plain sight, seemingly without a care in the world. That seemed to indicate to me that they had no predators, something else to ask about when I was calmed down enough to reconnect with Charissa.

After a while, the sombre mood of the remains of the city, bathed in grey light, took its toll on me and I returned, dispirited but calmer, to the shelter and again barricaded the door. I had a suspicion that I wouldn't have needed to do this in the first place, but better safe than sorry.

Settling down to enter the meditative trance needed to connect to Charissa, I let my mind drift, looking for the right place to settle.

"I see you have returned", Charissa said.

"I tried to, earlier, but I could not find the peace of mind. It's an upsetting thought that I will likely die in two weeks", I said. I continued with my next question, "It seems there are no large animals out there. Do you know what happened?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact I do", she said, "the new structure of biological matter causes it to have much less biological energy, it's simply not enough that a large animal with a fast metabolism could survive on. Interfere with nature at your own peril. This is the result of sorcerers' hubris."

"So", I asked, "is there any point to me being here, to all these events that brought me here, is any of this your doing?"

"Oh my, two questions at once, where shall I start? The events that brought you here were wholly unplanned, no one, not even I, could have foreseen that you would discover how to unravel magic at that precise moment, that you would release the captured energy without remembering you had it.

"No, this was a natural chain of events, of my doing only to the point that I enabled the situation that allowed it to happen.

"In fact, you winding up here is a setback that needs to be rectified.

"The task is not easy and you will have to be the one to perform it. I can guide you to a certain point but after that point I will lose the ability to speak to you and you will be on your own."

"Rectified?", I asked, "does that mean going back?"

"Yes, it means going back, but it's not really straightforward. My time grows short, if I am to have enough energy to show you the way out, the questions need to stop now.

"Here's the short version of the situation you're in. You have not lost your powers. The wave swept away your energy, but then it merely dropped you here and now, in a place that has no free energy to recharge you. You have no powers because there is, literally, no energy left on the planet.

"However, you, like myself, can use energy from objects, from other people, from existing spells. There is one place on the planet where there is still magical energy in sufficient quantities to let you get back to your time. It is in the headquarters of the vanquished Elders.

"Which is in London. London, England. You will have to reach it in the week or so you have left."

"Aww, crap", I said with feeling. "With no infrastructure, no boats or planes, how can I reach London?"

"Ah yes, the tricky part", she said. Remember, you were supposed to be an assassin. There is a bomb in your tummy, you can't see it magically, at least not the way you would normally sense magic.
"You can use the method you used to destroy the spells on the headband to find it. It holds quite a bit of energy, and you will need it. The only way for you to get to London is a transportation spell. With all the risk that entails."

"Can anything ever be easy?", I asked.

"How would that be fun?", she said.

While I had no plans to die here, I would have to be careful that I don't free Charissa without wanting to. I would imagine that, after millenia in prison, she would be batshit crazy. While she seemed to be an uneasy ally, I would never even consider her a friend or think that her endgame would be better than the Council's was.
I would have to bide my time, watch my step and make sure that I made no mistakes, never played into anyone's hand. Here I was again, being the Lone Ranger when I wanted to build a team.
Oh well, here goes nothing.

I left the trance to start, magically, poking my tummy. Thus passed the rest of the day and evening, with me stopping only once it got too dark to see in my shelter. Outside, the strange non-night of this world, so much unlike the earth I knew that I could hardly reconcile the two, continued, making me doubt that I was still on the same planet, the third rock from the sun.

I woke to a change in weather. Instead of the constant calm I had experienced ever since landing here, it appeared that an almighty storm was raging outside. In the distance, a rhythmic hammering sound could be heard, sounding so manmade that it made me perk up. Could it be that life still existed, life beyond small rodents?

I decided to explore, waiting for the winds to subside a little, then gingerly venturing outside. The sound was clearer here, although it seemed to be miles away, it sounded quite steadily, with a muted metallic quality.

I set out to find the source of the sound. My journey drew me to the east, past downtown and into east LA. The banging was quite loud here, something so very unusual for this dead planet.

When I turned the corner of the building separating me from the sound, the nave of a church that was mostly standing, I found the source of the banging. No, there was no life here. None at all.

In the churchyard, on granite paving stones still mostly intact, lay the church bell, being rocked by the storm, the beater, loose inside the bell, rolling back and forth, creating the metallic noise.

I came to the realization that, truly, no man remained alive.

Dejected, I returned to the shelter, to continue finding that elusive bit of magic, now realizing that this excursion was only an attempt to stave off the frustrating search for the magic, the point where I was seemingly doomed to not find it, to die, here, now.

Making my way eastward on what used to be Hollywood Boulevard, I thought about my life. Passing places I used to know, Frederick's of Hollywood, Mann's Chinese Theatre, all lying in rubble and unrecognizable but by the layout of their foundations and me having seen them before, I realized that Charissa must have been rather economical with the truth.
These places didn't look like they had changed a bit from when I knew them, not as if humanity had lived and changed and built and rebuilt for centuries after I was pushed forward. No, these ruins looked like the dead age started only decades, not centuries, after my time.

I began to suspect that Charissa had a completely different agenda, that she had no intention to heal humanity, but only to rule in the Council's stead. That her imprisonment was not simply for having her abilities, but for abusing them.

Also, I began to wonder where the Sorcerers went. With the power they still had, they could have gone somewhere else, leaving Charissa in her confinement, maybe intentionally, maybe not. I suspected that the Sorcerers left before the collapse. Where to, I could not know, but I doubted the ones who were in power died from starvation. That was just the fate of the peons and maybe, just maybe, that spell didn't misfire after all.

Walking along with my musings, I drifted off into the world of cloak and dagger, second guessing everything an analyzing all that had happened, lessening my awareness of my surroundings.
That soon changed when my foot caught on something and I fell, rolling sideways and slipping down a steep drop. My head met the ground and then there was darkness.

I came to after nightfall. Examining my surroundings, I found I was in a well that had been dug into the floor of a collapsed basement. The well, tellingly, was dry, bringing home the fact that I needed to get out of here. I tried to move to get upright, but found that violent pain in my left ankle made that difficult. On further examination, the ankle appeared to be broken, not just sprained.

I was able to drag myself into an upright position using the wall and my right foot, but found that even hopping was too painful to contemplate and climbing was out of the question.

The roots of some plant were hanging into the well and, considering that I was light and strong, I thought I could maybe pull myself up using my hands and one leg.

With nothing to lose, I grabbed the roots and heaved myself upward. For a moment I experienced the elation of having found a way out, but then the ground gave and the roots sagged and deposited me right back on the floor. From above, some large stones fell down and onto my legs. I screamed and fainted from the pain.

Pain. A world of it. Consciousness slowly wormed its way back into my mind, it was what brought the pain with it. I tried to resist, to slip back into velvety, pain-free darkness, but consciousness insisted.

Without being able to move, I couldn't examine myself, but I suspected, from the level of pain and where it came from, that now both my legs were broken. I felt I was in an inescapable situation, fated to die here even earlier than I thought. No trance would come, the pain put paid to that.

Somewhere, unconsciously, much like it did before, in pain and with no way out, my innermost self grabbed for every straw it could see and even those it could not.
It found magic.

Diving into the magic inside my tummy, I analyzed the big blob of energy they had placed in me. It lacked finesse, it lacked the beauty of the ancient spells, a crudely made weapon without poetry, without balance, without art.

I didn't care. It was energy, after all.

Being adept at levitation, the rocks proved a minor obstacle, as did the hole. It felt so good to finally have that connection to power again, the clarity of mind that comes from running at full energy was exhilarating. I levitated myself to the remains of the sidewalk, near the root that I had tripped over and concentrated on healing, welcoming the bliss of pain relieved.

With my batteries on full again for the first time since forever, I was keenly aware that what I had in myself, and what was left of the device, was all the energy this forsaken place had to offer. I needed to get to London. I didn't doubt Charissa's information about that part, since my dying here would not help her at all, she needed me to get back and until I got back, I would be safe.

While I did read up on transportation spells, the deeply worrying and discouraging remarks on them had made me read them more cursorily than I would otherwise have, because I simply wanted to know they are there and how the basics worked, I never studied with a view to actually casting one.

I got up, fully healed, and made my way to the shelter. Here, I dropped into the required trance to speak to Charissa once again.

"Hello?", I asked into the void.

"You were gone for a long time. I had started to worry. I'm am glad to see you again. What happened?"

I answered, "I fell into a hole. Emotionally. I had to drag myself back out. It wasn't easy." I was not about to tell her about my actual misadventure, nor would I disclose my new command of magic just yet.

"I m glad you managed it. Any success with the energy yet?", she asked.

"Sorry, but no. I was hardly in a state for that", I replied.

"Oh yes, I should not have asked."

"When I do find the energy, how do I get hold of a transportation spell?", I asked.

"Once you succeed, you need to go downtown. Find the Crowne Plaza hotel, or what is left. Near where the foundation meets the pavement, there is a brass strip inset into the hotel, it goes all the way around. Some part must still exist. It, in nonmagical runes that won't startle humans, has a transportation spell. It was created a long time ago, when the chamber wasn't accessible any other way and the tradition has been alive all the way to the dead age. The building under which the council chambers were always had this brass strip. Of course, in your day, the chamber was reached by elevator.
Learn the spell, and then I can give you the coordinates to use for it instead of he council chamber's coordinates, and it will take you to London.

I nodded, then became aware she could probably not see it, and sent "Yes, I see. I will contact you when I have news."

I decided to use a small amount of energy to conjure edible food, some wholemeal bread, lettuce and cheese and some apples to eat on the way. Eating the bread, cheese and lettuce sandwiches, drinking some of my water, I felt halfway human again. Or Sorceress. Whatever.

Having slept, I set out for downtown again. Down familiar streets, I stubbornly set foot before foot to eventually arrive in the center of what used to be one of the planet's most important cities. Desolation surrounded me and I wondered what I would find at my destination.

The Crowne Plaza was an impressive place when it still stood. Four interconnected towers, bars, restaurants and much more filled the space in a building that never slept. What I saw was the remains of that great building, stretching several hundred feet to the east, covering the area of 8 or 10 football fields with rubble piled high.

My only chance to find that spell was to the west, on land the towers had not fallen onto. There, maybe, I had a chance to see a section of the brass strip that was long enough to recover the spell from.
I reached the base of the tower at noon, looking for the telltale brownish color of tarnished brass. I didn't find it. A weathered groove, adorned with chisel marks, showed where my salvation had been stolen, a long time ago.

Moving around the rubble, I sought entry into the piles of rocks, to reach some other part of the foundations, but to no avail. Places where I almost reached my goal were, at the very last yard, blocked by huge pieces of concrete.

After backtracking and searching so many times that I lost count, I finally managed to get another glimpse of the foundations. The rocks made up that part of the building's base may be totally out of reach now, but I could see that even here, the strip was missing. It must have been stolen before the towers collapsed. Nothing was left of it, I was sure then.

My glance idly swept the rubble, looking for, if nothing else, inspiration. That was when it hit me like a ton of bricks. There it was plain as day, an electrical outlet on a piece of wall. My phone! I had taken pictures of some spells that could be photographed and the transportation spell was one of them!
I pulled the phone from my pocket and pressed the button, to be greeted with a black screen. Dead battery, now of all times!

No generator could have survived 2 millenia, no power plant was conveniently working, and no batteries with a charge could exist anymore.
I had one chance to get this right, just one. Make it work, or blow my phone.

I started filling power into a reservoir apart from the main place I kept energy. Not that that was really a place, magic doesn't work that way, but language doesn't suffice to describe it correctly. What I did was collect some energy in a way that it would flow smoothly and steady, not prone to surging as my normal energy was.
I was aided by the fact that I was using energy that was processed in a very mechanical, artless way, it made the flow very predictable.

Using a variant of the lightning spell, I converted the energy to electricity, at a constant rate. Locating the battery inside my phone, I directed the energy into the terminals. I had decided against trying to use the charge connector because I had heard that they weren't really straightforward and I was no electronics person.
After what seemed like eons, the screen lit up with the boot logo and a minute later I was dumped to the app screen of my phone.

Swiping through the photos, I finally located the images of the spell book with the transportation spell in it. Leafing through the pages, a lot of other useful spells came into view, only to be ignored in the all-encompassing desire for the one spell that would get me closer to recovering my love, my life.
There it was, before my eyes, and greedily soaking up the runes, I made it my life's goal to learn that spell, to perfection. I had to, without it I would not have life left.

I was not in a sharing mood, so I didn't even consider contacting Charissa, but rather would, in a more hypothetical fashion, contact her from London, making her believe I had just then found the magic, and again asking about next steps, extract the information on what to do in London while making her believe I wasn't there yet.

A dangerous game, but I was gambling on her not wanting to waste energy on surveilling me when she had so little left. I suspected her of some untruth there, because how could a trickle of magic reach her in her cell when there was no magic outside to trickle in? I suspected she was running wholly on batteries and would lose all access to the world if she ever bottomed out. For her, this was certainly the endgame.

I opened the maps app, only to find that it needed a long dead internet to work, just like pretty much everything else on that cursed device. Finally, I opened world clocks and there it was, plain as day, London in the list of selections, with coordinates displayed. I used a rock to scratch the coordinates into the wall of the shelter. Taking no chances, I dropped the flow of energy to the phone, which defiantly stayed on. I must have put some charge into the battery, it showed about 1/4 full. That could be handy, so I turned the phone off to conserve the charge.

Now was the time, without hesitation, to cast the spell while it was fresh in my mind. Substituting the coordinates for London into it, I visualized the spell, powered it and invoked the purple glowing rune in my mind. The world went black. And stayed that way.

I cautiously felt around in pitch darkness, finding myself in a narrow concrete ditch. Overhead a metal rail could be felt that gave enough space on either side to easily get out of the pit that was only 2 feet deep. Standing up, I felt around, feeling a concrete floor and more rails. I cast a cantrip to light my surroundings, a dim, party favor style spell that cost almost no energy at all.

I saw that I was in a subway station, they call it the "Tube" there, having landed in the ditch under the rails that is designed for people falling under trains to have a chance at survival. I climbed up onto the platform and followed the once lit signs that read "Way out". What a funny way to say "Exit", I thought.

After several levels of escalators, I fetched up against an entrance blocked by debris. A nearby map showed the station to have another exit at the other end of the platform, so I made my way back down, to the other end of the platform, and up again, finally emerging onto ground level. A tiled sign on the platform had stood the test of time and told me that I was now in a place called "Seven Sisters".
Whatever that meant.

I holed up in a somewhat intact ground floor of a building to hunker down for the night. I was exhausted and not in any shape to fool Charissa as I had to, so I decided to forgo speaking to her for now.

The next morning I woke refreshed. I took a small amount of water from one of the jugs I had brought from LA, carefully replacing the plug of vegetable matter I had made to keep it from spilling.

The water tasted stale, with a hint of grass, but beggars can't be choosers. I used a little energy to conjure two apples, which I ate immediately. Apples could get old, but I didn't think I would need to analyze and memorize a whole lot of food and the apples were something I only got proficient at because I used to conjure them to give to Alyssa, who positively adored them.

I then proceeded to drop into the communications trance, something that became easier each time I did it. I was just about to call out when I heard a faint voice. Charissa. Talking. Not to me. I faded back to listen.

"No, I tell you, she's seeking for the magic."

"You do know you're going to be in that cell forever if she fails, right?"

"Yes master, I do."

"Then see that she doesn't. This place isn't as nice as we thought, we want to reclaim earth. You will be rewarded for her sacrifice."

"Yes master, thank you, master"

I withdrew, quietly. Suspicions confirmed, even here, even now, duplicity ruled.

The council. It would have been in a place of power. In London, that was Westminster. A handful of important buildings. Find the one with a brass strip. Easy. Right.

Casting magical sight, I took a birds eye view of the city, found a direction and set off to the seats of power, magical and mundane.

Wandering the streets of central London, seemingly without aim, but in fact on a route to hit all the places of power, I traversed Westminster, Whitehall and the Square Mile. I had half expected the ribbon of brass on the palace of Westminster, or the abbey, or anywhere else, but I was most surprised to finally find it at the Shard.

A modern and, in my eyes, ugly building, it didn't ooze history or tradition at all. Rather, new fast money and a sense of urgency were what characterized that building. I mean, The Shard, really?

Reading the band, I quickly gained the needed set of coordinates and, reformulating my tried and true transportation spell, I plugged in the coordinates and invoked the spell.

When I hit the ground, I was hit by a wave of magic, a groundswell of energy designed to power a massive attack. Reacting quickly, I absorbed the energy before it could trap me, reflecting some of it back at where It came from. A magical contraption, dimly seen through a shield, exploded, taking down the shield as it went. Shrapnel peppered my skin, causing numerous bleeding injuries I had to stop and heal to avoid blood loss.

It seemed that, having discovered elevators, anyone using the transportation spell instead was considered a foe and would be attacked. I realized that that was exactly what would have happened to me in LA, had the spell not been stolen.

That, however, meant that Charissa or those she was in contact with, would have knowledge of this trap having been triggered. My jig was up, I needed to find the way home on my own.

Leaving the trap room, I gingerly moved into the halls of the council. Yes, Charissa hadn't lied, there was much energy here, stored in magical batteries I only ever heard about, but never seen, as well as in ancient artifacts filling the shelves and display cases.

There had to be a library, there had to be a record of the event I vanished in, there had to be a book to show the way back.

These rooms had been magicked to stop decay, they were as pristine as the day they were last dusted. I opened a double door off the council chamber to find myself in a library. Six stories high and the size of a football field, with rows of shelving spaced 9 feet apart, the books here must number in the millions.
How would I ever find the book if Charissa could not be trusted?

I decided that I would leave that question for another day, what's a day when the matter is two millenia?

I dropped my pack, then dropped where I stood to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.