Lost Kingdom

by Matt Myklusch

  “Atlantis?” Joey asked.

  Hypnova nodded. Joey and the others watched as her magic powder depicted the ocean swallowing up the transatlantic continent. After that it settled down on the table.

  “What about the Emperor’s Hand?” Shazad asked. “What happened to him?”

  “He escaped,” Hypnova said. “And he learned a valuable lesson: not to draw so much attention to himself. Unfortunately, that’s all he learned. He went on being the same miserable excuse for a person he always was, stealing magic items from others and keeping them for himself. His own actions had caused there to be less magic in the world, so naturally he wanted more of it. He found other conniving, selfish people who were willing to follow him, and the Invisible Hand was born.”

  “So that’s how they got started,” Leanora said. “I’m assuming Merlin founded the Order of the Majestic to fight them?”

  “Sadly, Merlin died. You have to understand, what he did… evacuating a continent, hiding a piece of it away, sinking the rest… it was too much. For anyone.” She looked at Joey. “That wand of yours is one of a kind. It can do almost anything, but it takes its toll. If you push it too far, there’s a price. Merlin paid the ultimate price. He did so willingly, because that’s what it took to free the world from a tyrant. Merlin’s apprentice founded the Order of the Majestic to honor his sacrifice. Her name was Kadabra, and she dedicated her life to preserving the world’s remaining supply of magic. Finding magic objects that survived the emperor’s purge, searching for ways to reach lost magical realms… She’s the one who started the Secret Map of the World. The Order spent centuries on that, continuing her good work.”

  Joey, Shazad, and Leanora traded troubled looks. No one wanted to be the one to tell Hypnova they had lost the map.

  “In the old days—the very old days—the Order kept magic alive and free for all, but times change. The modern world pushed magic to the fringes, and the Invisible Hand grew in power. Harry Houdini tried to change that. They killed him. Redondo tried to carry on in his place. They broke him. He had potential, but he never made it this far. He never got the chance to come here.”

  Joey took Redondo’s magic deck out of his pocket and showed them to Hypnova. “Were you really the one who gave Redondo these cards? He said an old woman told him he’d inspire a new age of magic. Was that you in disguise?”

  “No. That was someone else,” Hypnova said. “She’s gone now, but she lived long enough to give me back my purpose. After the Secreteers cast me out, I was lost, but she inspired me, just as Redondo inspired you. For years I thought the wand was wasted on Redondo, but now I see he was just another step on the path to you. It’s the three of you. You’re going to set imagination free and give the world back its magic.”

  “How?” Joey asked.

  Hypnova rose from the table and motioned for Joey, Shazad, and Leanora to do the same. “Follow me.”

  Continuing to act as their guide, she took them through a series of chambers to the throne room of Camelot. It was large and empty, as was the throne itself. Long, vertical banners hung on the wall displayed King Arthur’s coat of arms: three golden crowns on a field of blue. A gleaming silver shield rested on the floor, leaning up against the legs of the King Arthur’s royal seat. Hypnova picked it up.

  “I give you the Caliburn Shield, one of the three great Arthurian relics—the others being Excalibur and that wand,” she said with a nod to Joey. “The Imaginary Vortex surrounding this castle was created to hide Camelot and eat away at its magic. This shield protected it. It has the power to create an impenetrable force field around a person, place, or thing. The only way you can bypass its defensive barrier is by using one of its sister objects, as we did, or if you have touched the inside of the shield.”

  Hypnova turned the shield around and pressed her palm against it. Then she held it up for Joey, Shazad, and Leanora to do the same.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this back on the mountain?” Joey asked. “Why all the mystery?”

  “I told you, I spent my life keeping secrets. Old habits die hard. Also, I had to test you. I gave you time with the candles to see if you would find your way and figure things out. You didn’t, so I had to give you a nudge. I wanted to know if you would go the distance or give up. I’m risking my life by telling you these secrets. The Clandestine Order will find out what I have told you. They’ll kill me if they can.” Joey, Shazad, and Leanora were all startled to hear that. “Don’t worry. I’ll be ready for them,” Hypnova added with a wink.

  “Why would they want you dead?” Leanora asked.

  “Because I’m telling secrets I swore to take with me to my grave. Secrets that have kept their home safe for generations.”

  “I don’t understand,” Shazad said. “Why take the risk?”

  “Because,” Hypnova replied. “Everybody deserves magic. It’s worth the risk. I’m not worried. I’ve seen the extent of your will now. I believe you’ll do what’s necessary. Imaginary forces still exist in the world. Imaginary places. You have seen some of them, but there’s more. So much more. This is just the beginning. You came here to find Camelot, but we can do more than that. We can set it free.”

  “Why us?” Joey asked. “You know all these secrets. You knew how to get here. You had the map. Why didn’t you just do this yourself?”

  “I could get through the vortex unscathed, but I couldn’t destroy it. I needed to get into the castle for that.” Hypnova held up the shield. “To get this. I couldn’t do that without your help. We needed each other. No one can break the spells that hide magic from the world alone.”

  Joey nodded. “Redondo told us the most powerful magic can’t be created alone.”

  Hypnova gave Joey the shield. “Like you said, we’re in this together.”

  They went outside, back to the sword in the stone, which was now the spike in the stone. Joey had slipped his arm through the straps on the inside of the shield. He wanted to take it off and throw it at the stone, smashing it with a well-aimed throw worthy of Captain America, but he didn’t have the arm strength for that. He walked up to the stone, took off the shield, and looked back at his friends. “You guys want to get in on this?”

  Shazad and Leanora joined him at the rock, and everybody took a section of the shield, holding it by its metal edge.

  “All for one…,” Leanora began.

  “One for all,” Shazad said.

  Together they raised the shield as high as they could and brought it down hard. It cleaved through the stone like it was made out of snow, going all the way down to the black iron spike at its base. The shield hit the spike with a metallic clang. The rock blew apart, and whoosh—the vortex blew away.

  They were back on the windswept battlefield, surrounded by crumbling ruins, only now there was a perfectly intact medieval castle in the center of them. Shazad’s and Leanora’s families spun around in surprise, elated to see their children returned to them safe and sound. They were mixed in with the formerly brainwashed locals who were already struggling to make sense of what had happened to them. Now they were scratching their heads, trying to deal with the impossible scene that had just played out before their eyes.

  “That’s it,” Hypnova said. “There’s no turning back now. The world is going to notice this.”

  Joey scanned the faces of the people all around, gawking at the sight of a castle suddenly appearing out of thin air. “We can’t change the world by trying to make people believe in magic,” he said. “We have to make people believe in magic so that we can change the world. This is gonna go a long way toward making people believe.”

  “Well said,” Hypnova replied. “And that belief will enable magic to live. Where I come from, we save the world, but we don’t change it. It’s time for something different. The world needs to change. If we want that to happen, we have to make it happen. We need you to lead the way. The Order of the Majestic.”

  Hypnova bent down to pick up a broken piece of the Finale Mask. “I’d hang o
n to this. There’s still a bit of magic left in there. Might come in handy.” She gave the fragment to Joey. “Remember, magic is an energy powered by belief. That doesn’t make it less powerful. That makes it more powerful. You decide how strong it is. It’s like imagination. You decide if it you want to make it real.”

  A tinny, whistling sound drew everyone’s attention to the iron spike on the ground. The shield had left a tiny ding in its side, and white smoke poured out of it like steam escaping a kettle. Hypnova nudged the spike with her toe, and it broke apart, dissolving into ashes. “One marker down,” she said.

  “Two to go,” Leanora said, finishing her thought.

  “How are we supposed to find them?” Shazad asked. “We lost the map.”

  “Did you?” Hypnova’s eyebrows went up at first, but she took the news in stride as the children explained what had happened to it. “That’s unfortunate, but don’t worry. I memorized it.”

  She took another pinch of purple powder and blew it out again, this time directly at Joey, Shazad, and Leanora.

  Joey nearly hacked up a lung, coughing inside a smoky purple haze. His throat closed up and his eyes stung, but as he pounded his chest, trying to catch his breath, he felt something else happening between his ears. A picture formed in his mind. It was the map. He saw it clearly, as if he were holding the map in his hands. Just as Hypnova had taken away DeMayne’s memories, she had given him a new memory to keep.

  The last thing Joey saw before the smoke cleared was a fuzzy outline of Hypnova pulling the hood of her cloak back up. Their eyes met, and Joey knew that she understood he had seen the map in his mind’s eye. “Something to remember me by until next time,” she told him, her eyes lighting up under the hood. “Goodbye, Joey. I look forward to working with you.”

  Joey rubbed his eyes, and when he looked up, all was calm. The purple smoke had vanished and Hypnova had gone with it. Something else was missing too. “The shield!” Shazad said, noticing its absence before anyone else. “Where’s the shield?”

  “Hypnova took it,” Leanora said. “I saw her. I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t even breathe.”

  “She didn’t take it,” Joey said. “She traded us for it.”

  “What are you talking about? What tra—” Shazad stopped and touched a hand to his temple. “Did she give us the map? In our heads?”

  Everyone confirmed the image of the Secret Map of the World had been burned into their brains. They suddenly knew every inch of the map as if they had studied it all their lives. Joey figured that, plus making Ledger DeMayne forget about him and the theater, made for an even exchange. Better than even.

  The astonished crowd of locals closed in around Joey, Shazad, and Leanora, assaulting them once again, but this time with questions about the castle.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “Were you kids in there?”

  “How did we get here? What happened?”

  Joey didn’t know what else to tell them, so he just shrugged and told the truth. “Magic happened.” What else could he say? “Don’t worry, you’re safe,” he added in his most soothing, reassuring voice. “It’s over now.” But that part wasn’t the truth. Nothing was over. Joey felt the wand in one hand and the broken piece of mask in the other. What had happened in Camelot was just the beginning.

  21 The Journey Continues

  A couple hours later, Joey finally arrived in California, but not before placing a phone call to his mother. He decided he couldn’t put it off any longer. In his mom’s last text to Janelle, she had threatened to call the police and file a missing persons report on him. Joey called her back and she answered on half a ring. He told her he had found his phone and apologized profusely for not calling. His mother wanted to know what was going on and demanded an explanation for why he had refused to call home, despite getting a million and one texts telling him to do so. “I was going to get on a plane and fly out there if I didn’t hear from you today!”

  Joey apologized again and told her he had been buried with work in the lab with Janelle. His mother told him that was no excuse. In fact, there was no excuse. She didn’t understand why Joey couldn’t find five minutes for a phone call in three days. “Forget five minutes; you could have taken one minute!” she scolded. “We were worried! It was like you fell off the face of the earth!”

  You don’t know the half of it, Joey thought.

  “I’m sorry, I got caught up. Exciting things are happening out here.” It was a true statement. As Joey spoke with his mom, people were snapping pictures of Camelot with their phones, posting to social media, and making calls of their own. “Anyway, I was just doing what you told me to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember? You said you wanted us to get the world off fossil fuels by Wednesday. That way I could come home early. Well, we had a breakthrough.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. “Are you serious?”

  “We might even make the news,” Joey said. Just maybe not the front page, he thought, eyeing the castle and enjoying the budding excitement around its appearance. “Either way, I’m done here. I’m ready to come home.”

  There was more silence on the other end of the line. Joey checked his screen to make sure the connection was still good.

  “Mom, you there? Did I lose you?”

  “No, I’m here. That’s… that’s good. I’m glad.”

  Joey smiled. He was glad too. His mother’s voice still had an edge, but it was softening, which meant he was off the hook.

  “Don’t go thinking you’re off the hook,” she told him. “We’ll talk about all this other stuff later, but first things first. Let’s change your flight.”

  Joey smiled. “Okay, Mom. Whatever you say.”

  He spent the next ten minutes listening as his mother rattled off flight options with LAX departure times and Newark arrivals. He mixed up the time zones when picking a flight back and nearly gave away the fact that he wasn’t in California just yet. He had to remember that England was six hours ahead of New Jersey and California was three hours behind. He covered up by saying he was messed up from working around the clock, and they arranged for him to fly back at eight p.m., West Coast time.

  Joey knew he was getting ahead of himself, telling his mom that he and Janelle had a big breakthrough in the lab, but he didn’t feel like he was overpromising anything. It was going to happen. He believed that without question. Shazad and Leanora didn’t give Joey any pushback about him bringing the remnants of the Finale Mask with him to Caltech. After everything they had just been through, they were past that. Leanora’s family had another magic doorknob like the one she had left in the theater. After things had settled down, they used it to send Joey to California. Better late than never.

  By the time Joey found Janelle on campus, the discovery of Camelot was a global news story. Just as Joey had said, it was something that would go a long way toward changing the world into a place where people were willing to believe in magic. After all, there was no explaining Camelot away. People were forced to reckon with the magical nature of King Arthur’s castle. It was not a situation where the ruins of an undiscovered city were found deep in an unexplored jungle. This was an ancient castle—fully intact—materializing out of thin air in a place that had been empty the day before. Joey knew there would still be plenty of doubters out there. People who thought the sudden appearance of Camelot was some kind of prank or stunt, or that there had to be some rational explanation for why everyone had “just missed” the castle all these years. But the truth was undeniable. With the vortex gone, a major source of magic had been returned to the world, and that had a ripple effect that ran all the way to Janelle’s research lab at Caltech.

  Joey told her everything that had happened, and he wasn’t the least bit surprised when she was able to fire the laser using the mask as a power source. She did it on the first try and was able to repeat the experiment on demand. The training wheels were offici
ally off her imagination, and that was going to have a major impact on the world too. Maybe even bigger than Camelot’s return. The broken fragment of the mask generated only a quarter of the power the whole mask had put out, but it was still a big leap forward—especially since Janelle’s lab partners were able to fire the laser too. Some of them, anyway. There was no doubt about it, magic was making a comeback. Joey wondered if the appearance of Camelot had made it easier for people to believe in new ideas, or if there was literally more magic in the world as a result of Camelot’s liberation.

  Maybe it was a bit of both.

  Sure enough, the experiment did make the news. It wasn’t as sensational as a fantasy castle dropping out of the sky, but a group of students discovering a brand-new source of clean, renewable energy was still a very big story. It was presented as a temperamental new element called Finalium. Janelle had picked the name on a whim. It didn’t always work, but some people were able to get it to generate incredible amounts of power. The university faculty was popping champagne and congratulating Joey and Janelle. “Finalium” had the potential to be the next big thing in alternative energy, and they were just getting started.

  When the time came to go home, Joey had to fly back to keep up appearances with his parents. It was tedious going through airport security and sitting through a six-hour flight, especially when he could have used magic to make the trip in seconds, but he had to take baby steps in bringing magic back. It was bad enough he had been out of contact for three days. He wasn’t ready to show his parents what he’d really been up to, and they weren’t ready to see it. Joey also doubted they would be on board with what he and his friends were going to do next.

  Back at the Majestic Theatre, Joey looked at the NATL building across the street. In the past, the mere thought of the NATL office and the people who worked there had filled him with dread, but no longer. There was no one inside looking out the windows watching and waiting for him. There were no threats coming out the front door. If DeMayne was inside, it didn’t matter. Joey was a stranger to him now. After the Imaginary Vortex had collapsed, DeMayne had left Camelot in a stupor, leaving Scarlett to fend for herself. She’d run off, leaving her coat and brushes behind. No one chased after her. Joey knew from the look on her face she wouldn’t be coming back. She was broken, her magic spark of imagination gone. Good riddance, Joey thought. The brief touch of sympathy he had felt for her was fading faster than Hypnova’s mark on the theater door. Joey paused to look at it before he went inside. There wouldn’t be a new mark coming to replace it after this one disappeared, but that was fine. Joey entered the Majestic feeling energized and safe just the same.