by Jade Alters
“So this is supposed to be some kind of test, then?” she reasons aloud. I only half-hear her. My eyes are busy climbing the unending shelves of ancient knowledge. I note the gigantic, golden Roman numerals at the top of each vertical section. MLVI. It takes me a moment to work out in my head. “Holy shit… one-thousand… fifty-six?” Cece reads, when she notices what I’m staring at.
“Actually… yes,” I admit. I’m more than a bit surprised that Cece is able to read it at all, let alone so quickly.
“Is that… how many sections there are?” she questions, though I’m not sure if she’s actually talking to me as she wheels around and groans into the blackness above us. “Are we going to have to search them all for the right book or something?” Her back hits the bookcase and she melts halfway to the floor. A few tomes topple off their shelves. The echo of their thunks on the ground bounces up into the void over our twisted maze.
“Would you be careful?” I snarl. I kneel to scoop up the downed books and replace them. I graze my fingers over their scaly outer coatings before parting with each one of them. The secrets that might be contained within… but that might well be the test. I fight the temptation to slide each book back into the musty gap from whence it came. “These books are older than the Academy. Older than… maybe anything, no one even knows. So-”
“Seek ye the Guidelight Almanac,” Cece recites. Her voice is a little too stiff for it to be an oddly timed slam poetry session. She’s reading something, I realize. I spin around to find Cece with a dilapidated, precious volume splayed open in her hands. Her eyes trace the lines across a cracked, canvas page.
“What the hell are you doing?” I bite. I charge over to seize the tome from her, but Cece leaps back and jerks it away from me. I hear the thin, string bindings creak with the threat of snapping. “Would you be careful, damnit!”
“I was being perfectly careful until you tried to snatch it from me!” Cece barks. It boils my blood. She just has to have it her way. With the condition of these books, we shouldn’t even be touching them! Not without the right equipment. We might well tarnish the passage with the secret to fighting the Fiends!
“Cece,” I breathe slowly to calm myself. If I don’t, she might well destroy our one chance at gleaning the forbidden truth. “Put it back.”
“Emery, do you need help pulling your head out of your ass?” Cece counters. My middle finger and thumb scrape together. The urge to trick her into doing what I want ties knots inside me, all the way down my throat to my gut. Then Cece says, “Didn’t you hear what it said?” That’s enough to freeze me up, at least for a second. My fingers wait patiently, ready to snap as I recite,
“Seek ye the Guidelight Almanac.”
Of course I remember. I have two ears and a memory span of more than thirty seconds! I gasp as it hits me. My fingers peel apart with the sudden realization of my own idiocy. “You read that. It’s in that book, in English?”
“God, now you hear me. Yeah,” Cece spins the book around so I can see the page. “It’s the only thing in here, too. Every page.” She thumbs one canvas sheet over the other to show me. On every single one, there is but one line, dead center. Seek ye the Guidelight Almanac. “That has to be part of the test, right?”
“These books were authored by the ancient predecessors of the Dalshaks, the Ahwahneechee Tribe, and the Six Rivers Witches and Warlocks. Indians and Native Americans. Yet the words on this page appear to you in your native language. I’d say it’s part of the test,” I draw out for her. Cece snaps the book closed in a way that makes me wince. It’s an illusion. It’s an illusion, I tell myself to calm down.
“Do me a favor… when we get to the real books… please let me look through them?” I grumble.
“That makes you a little uncomfortable, does it?” Cece teases as she shoves the tome back into its proper place. I twitch again.
“Bitch,” I mutter to myself.
“Nerd,” Cece whispers, like the child she is. I sigh out my frustrations and shake my head. I bend down to pluck up the last fallen book and replace it, when Cece gasps. I turn to find her with yet another book splayed open in her hands.
“What?” I ask. She flips it out to me. Every page she fans through contains the same exact message. Despite the binding labeling this as a clearly different book with symbols I don’t comprehend, its contents are identical to the last. Seek ye the Guidelight Almanac, says page after page. “You think… they all…” Much as it pains me, I pull the book I just shelved back out. I tenderly peel the covers away from one another to find the confirmation of Cece’s suspicion.
“The secret book to get out of the maze,” I read instead, in the gravest voice I can forge.
“What?” Cece coughs. The satisfaction I get in the shift of her face when I smirk and turn the book around is enough to keep me warm naked on a cold winter’s night. “Son of a bitch,” Cece spits. I fold the book shut again and replace it on the shelf.
“I think it’s safe to say they’re all the same,” I chuckle at my revenge. Cece pouts a few seconds longer, before saying,
“Besides the Guidelight Almanac. Now we just need to find it.”
“Yes,” I confirm and begin down the corridor of bookshelves. My eyes fly ahead of me, along the highest shelves. I read the golden numerals that mark each shelf. Cece stumbles into pace behind me. She glances from one wall of bookshelves to the next. She draws lines through dust and puffs away the coating over titles.
“How in the hell are we going to do that when there are at least one-thousand-fifty-six shelves down here?” Cece asks.
“There’s more,” I point out, with a finger up at the golden numerals over our heads. After passing a few shelves by, they’ve climbed into the one-thousand-one-hundreds. Cece groans as we come to a crossroads. Three paths fork out in front of us. I turn left, where the numerals continue to climb, and begin down the way. Cece follows, arms crossed.
“You being cryptic on purpose, or are you just wandering?” Cece growls. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. How the hell do we find the Guidelight Almanac?”
“Assuming this is set up in some sort of sequence, we follow the numerals to their conclusion in one direction. Right now, we’re going up,” I let my voice bouncing backwards off the bookshelves explain without turning around. “Now, the titles of the books are in a language I don’t recognize, the language on the binding, so we can’t exactly seek out G for Guidelight Almanac. Our best hope is that the book will stand out from the others. We walk in sequence and, if we don’t see it going up in numerals, we turn around and go down.”
“Stand out, like that?” Cece says. I only turn halfway back over my shoulder, expecting retribution for my own fake solution earlier. But, to my disbelief, I find Cece’s dumbfounded face turned sidelong down a branching corridor that I walked right past. I retrace my steps back to her, and look on with the same wide eyes she has at a volume that puts the phrase stand out to deepest shame.
This branching path lets out in a small, square antechamber of bookshelves. Several perfectly white pillars hold up a stone gazebo over a similarly stone podium as wide as Cece and I combined. Sitting atop the square platform on top of it is the biggest book I’ve ever seen. Its cover outsizes the span of my shoulders by several inches. It’s positioned to one side of its podium, so it can be opened. The leathery brown cover shimmers with gold trim.
Cece and I float through the chamber to the side of the podium. I can’t believe what my eyes read inscribed in that same glimmering gold thread across its cover. The very words we sought dimple its smooth cover. The Guidelight Almanac. I run my fingers over it to the edge. A shiver dances through the hairs of my arm, to the back of my neck.
“That was weirdly easy, right?” Cece shudders as she touches it, too.
“Well… this isn’t necessarily the end of the test,” I remind her. I force my other hand beneath the cover before hesitation can ward me away. “Get on the other side. Help me get it open.”
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nbsp; “If the bookworm condones it,” Cece shrugs. She rounds the Almanac to face me and slides her fingers under the cover. She pulls when I do. The bindings splinter and crack as the gigantic cover peels back, shooting puffs of dust into the air. We cough our way through it until the cover is past halfway. With a nod of agreement, we let it go to thump down against its podium. A tidal wave of dust mites rolls out over us. When the arm waving and coughing is done, Cece and I stand before yet another single line passage.
“This is…” I murmur to myself, but a true description eludes me. I don’t know what this is, beyond the next, very deliberate clue. For an enchanted test, it’s remarkably straightforward, which is precisely what scratches the back of my mind. What if we’re only meant to think it’s straightforward? The line tells us, Find next the tome in the southeast corner of the MLVI sea.
“You think…” Cece mutters as she peeks under the gigantic page, the size of a small bedsheet. “Yep. They all say that. MLVI… that’s all the way back where we started.”
“Yes. Hey, what in the hell are you-”
I don’t have time to ask before Cece tears a corner off of the massive page of the Guidelight Almanac. The rip grates my nerves and sends my eyes on a wild rampage around every wall of the bookshelf chamber. But, no matter where I look, or for how long, nothing seems disturbed. No trap is activated. I look back to Cece with fury in my eyes, but she hardly seems to notice. Even so small a fragment of the Guidelight Almanac is the size of a regular notebook page. Cece then folds it in half and rips it again on her way to me. She holds it out, despite the contortions of my face.
“It’s too easy. The maze is going to throw something at us. It’s going to shift around and separate us, or worse. We should write down the message, in case we get lost. That way, at least one of us can find our way to the Mystic Core and maybe we all stand a chance,” Cece says. With each statement, I find myself more surprised. Less angry. More surprised at how less angry I am.
“That’s… fair,” I have to admit. Who knows what the others are going through right now? Cece’s right. One of us has to get to the bottom. I’m even a little impressed when Cece fishes a pen out of her tight, black jeans. She scribbles a copy of the message on her little scrap, folds it, and pockets it. I take the pen from her to copy the procedure. “Let’s do it,” I nod to her. We leave the Guidelight Almanac splayed open and leave the little bookshelf chamber behind. We retrace our steps back down the endless corridors of numbered shelves, to where we first descended into the maze.
“This maze wants to make me an idiot,” Cece murmurs as we near section MLVI. I chuckle, but the truth is I feel like the idiot that I didn’t think of it sooner. Of course the maze would separate us. Or so I thought. The fact that it hasn’t only means that there’s something else more sinister at play. Something more subliminally divisive.
“Must be nice not to have to work too hard,” I tease anyway. Cece shrugs off the insult and follows along as the numerals descend, all the way back to our point of origin.
It’s not too hard to recognize, even without the golden numeration. The seam in the floor where our chunk of stairs slid into place is still there. What an incredible trick. It tantalizes the darkest parts of my mind to imagine the secrets hidden in these books’ true contents. Mystical secrets that gave the Magicians of old the power of manipulation to create an illusion of such massive scale, yet such minute detail. A human with such mastery of the mind and reality… is such a thing even possible anymore? Would you even call it a Magician?”
“Wh-what are you doing?” I break out of my trance when Cece yanks a book from the shelf written in the Guidelight Almanac. MLVI. She’s got the right section, but the completely wrong book. By the time I bring it to her attention, she’s already digging her fingers into the pages, to splay it open. “Wait!”
“What? You forget how to follow directions?” Cece snaps. Her fingers dig down into the pages anyway.
“Damnit, Cece, would you slow down and listen to me?” I dig in. That gets her attention, at least for a second. Her fingers freeze. Her eyes jump up at me. “You took the wrong book. The Almanac said southeast corner. That should be bottom right.” The gap in the MLVI bookshelf shows, clear as day, that Cece holds the tome from the bottom-left. It was all just illusions before we opened the Almanac, but now? Who knows what kind of trap we could trigger by choosing the wrong book?
“Yeah, southeast would be bottom right,” Cece confirms, “Which is why I have this one. The book said southwest.”
“I’m positive it didn’t,” I refuse. It was only fifteen minutes ago, so I trust my memory, but that isn’t even the only proof. I shove a fist down in my pocket before Cece can crack open her book, just from spite. My fingers flicker around in search of a folded parchment square. I open it up one crease at a time, to show Cece the message from within. “Look.” Cece leans forward to scrutinize the lines with two squinting eyes. “Find next the tome in the southeast corner of the MLVI sea,” I recite perfectly from memory as Cece reads it.
“Yeah?” she challenges me instead. She lets her book down in one hand to rifle through her pocket with the other. From it, she tears her own torn corner of the Guidelight Almanac. Cece struggles a few seconds to unfold it with one hand, then plasters it up inches from my eyes. I hardly believe them, once they refocus enough to glide one way and back. Find next the tome in the southwest corner of the MLVI sea, it reads. “Southwest. See?” I shrink back from the paper, hand over my mouth in quiet consideration.
“This… this has to be part of the test,” I whisper to myself.
“Are you kidding me?” Cece snickers. A vein pops through the surface of my forehead at the sound of it. I already know what she’s thinking. I can’t blame her, but our success in the maze may well be contingent on her thinking outside of natural instinct. “You’re that stubborn? That arrogant? You couldn’t have just made a mistake - it has to be part of the test?”
“Listen to me, Cece,” I try to calm her, two hands out in front of me. “We’re both intelligent people. East and West are not two words easily mistaken for one another in writing. What chances are higher - that one of us misunderstood the message, or that the Guidelight Almanac showed us each a different message?” For a second, she almost looks like she hears me. Like she understands. But there are walls between us, old and new, even if we can see one another through the cracks.
“If that’s true… how do we know that yours is right, either?” Cece demands. I put a hand up, wordlessly motioning for patience. She indulges me long enough for me to crouch and pull the book out from the bottom-right.
“You’re right,” I admit, to subdue her, even for a moment, so I can take better aim. “So why don’t we…”
“You open your book and I’ll open mine,” Cece breaks in. Her fingers crack her pages again. “You said yourself, before, that the labyrinth has to be solvable!”
“And you said yourself that this was too easy! It can’t be this simple, Cece!” I plead, but the book cracks open in her hand. “Don’t.”
“You’re so smart, you should know not to give me orders,” Cece sighs, a grave look on her shaking head. I hurl my book straight towards her. It’s a crack shot. Cece’s tome and my own scuttle across the stony floor. “Damnit!” Cece barks. By the time she thinks to dive, I’m already on the floor.
Cece and I slap one another’s hands from their paths on their way to our respective books. But she’s much stronger than I am. It’ll be seconds before she out-muscles me. I have to get that book out of her reach. I swipe it sideways, but it hits the bookshelf and flaps open on the ground, right below my chin. Instinct snaps my head down. Its pages are blank but bright. They seem to glow at first, then shine, until I have to shield my eyes from the glare. The light consumes the Forbidden Shelves, me, and the whole world.
When the light dies down and I open my eyes, I’m hardly sure who I am, let alone where. The name Emery rings a bell, but if I’m Emery… then whose feeling
s are these? Anguish. Fear. Guilt. The guilt is by far the worst. The weight of a horrible deed sits on my chest like a car full of cinderblocks. My hands come up to wipe tears from my eyes, which tells me a few things about my oddly new situation.
My skin is a few shades lighter than usual. It’s the color of a long winter spent inside, compared to my usual pallor. My clothes are also a matter of interest. Gone is my usual Academy top. I’m in a hospital gown. That brings my face back up, to read my surroundings. The bland tile floor. The stiff sheets. The sterile white lights everywhere. It is a hospital. The room is filled with several people I don’t recognize. There’s a doctor and a nurse, easily identifiable by their uniforms. But the other two… a thin, older blonde woman and a stocky, balding man… they look at me in the most peculiar way. Almost like I’ve just punched them. Their lips move in the shape of language, but I hear only muffled grumbles. I blink hard and strain to hear them. What I hear, though, is surprisingly familiar. Though I know not the words, I do know the voice. It’s Cece. And the voice is coming from me.
“No, please! Mom, I didn’t… this guy - he bit Jason! You… you should have seen the blood,” Cece pleads with the thin woman, or maybe I do. Against the pull of all my cries, the woman pulls her hand away from my scalding hot shoulder. “Please listen to me!” The woman turns completely away from me, to face the doctor.
“Doctor… what was Cecelia’s blood alcohol content when she checked in, again?”
“Two-point-eight,” the doctor tells her. A pang shoots through every organ in my body.
“Jonah,” the woman says to the balding man. He can’t seem to look at me, or anything, besides his shoes.
