by C. A. Gray
Abruptly, Brock stood up. The neighborhood was asleep, and he found that he could not stand his own kitchen, his own living room, or his own house for another instant. He had to get outside. Perhaps the fresh night air might make sense of the chaotic noise in his brain.
He clicked the door closed behind him as quietly as possible and walked aimlessly, though he realized after several steps that he was headed towards the park. He took several steps more and halted.
“Hello,” cooed the ravishing blonde creature that blocked his path. “Miss me?”
Brock felt a cold shiver of fear run down his spine. He took a step back.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said a voice directly behind his ear. He had never heard the voice before, and yet, he recognized it. It sounded like the voice of his own thoughts. He turned abruptly and came face to face with the flame-haired siren who had been his constant companion until the accident. This time, though, she was solid.
He needed to stall, but his mouth was so dry. He managed to croak hoarsely, “You’re mine, aren’t you?”
“Or you’re mine. It depends on how you look at it, really,” said the siren in a voice like tinkling crystal, and she laughed. The laugh was mesmerizing and it drew Brock irresistibly and made him want to run away at the same time.
“No point in running,” said the blonde, reading his body language if not his thoughts. “You won’t get very far. We have backup.” She snapped her fingers, and at least a dozen other creatures stepped out of the shadows just near enough that Brock could see that they were there, they were vaguely humanoid at best, and they were menacing in the extreme.
“What do you want with me?” he demanded, his voice escalating with panic. “Peter and I aren’t even friends! If you’re trying to get to him, he won’t care if you take me! He’s not going to try and save me! I won’t do you any good!”
“Well,” said the flame-haired siren, as if she were really considering his words, “that’s true. You’re definitely not friends. Based on the way you’ve always treated him, it would really serve you right if he let you die.”
“That’s right!” said Brock frantically. “It would serve me right! You’d be no closer to getting Peter, either!” He tried to back away but there was nowhere to go. In fact, the creatures seemed to be moving in on him. He couldn’t actually see their feet move, but the circle seemed to grow tighter all the time.
“Yes,” mused the flame-haired siren again, “Peter might not give his life to save you, if you were the only consideration. However, your brother is his best friend. And Peter would do anything for him.”
“You already have his dad, don’t you?” cried Brock desperately. “What do you need me for?”
“Insurance,” she replied lazily.
Before he could scream, a solid hand clamped over Brock’s mouth; it was cold as ice. At the same moment, another several sets of hands reached forward to grab him from all sides.
And then, the familiar neighborhood began to dissolve before his very eyes.
Chapter 19
“So now what?” said Cole finally, hardly daring to move, but staring wide-eyed at Peter and Lily, who sat rigidly apart from one another on the floor of the secret library.
“We have to figure out which of us it is,” said Lily. Her face was ashen and she refused to look at Peter.
“How?” said Cole. “I mean, technically it could still be Kane too, couldn’t it? He might be the third one. Or there could be someone else the Watchers lost track of!”
Peter closed his eyes and tried to think. Finally he found voice enough to say, “It doesn’t matter right now if it’s me or you, Lily, or Kane or anybody else. The penumbra still believe it’s me, so they’re not going to let my dad go.”
“Peter, the whole reason you wanted to see the prophecy was to prove it wasn’t you so they’d let him go, remember? And... and I mean, you have just introduced reasonable doubt, haven’t you?” Her voice trembled.
“I’m not gonna just give you to them in his place,” Peter said flatly. “I’ll just have to... try and find him myself.”
“Yes, but how?” said Lily.
“Wait a minute!” Peter leapt to his feet, remembering the book Kane had handed to him right before he’d left.
“The Life and Times of Morgan le Fay?” said Cole doubtfully, reading the cover. “Wasn’t that Arthur’s evil half-sister? What does she have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter, “but when Kane left he told me to try this one next, once I was done reading the prophecy.”
“So you think he knew this would happen?” said Cole, confused. “You think he knew what we’d find out?”
“He can’t have,” Lily insisted. “Maybe he didn’t know the whole prophecy. Or maybe he didn’t know what it meant!”
“I don’t know what Kane thought,” said Peter, suddenly very tired. “It doesn’t matter now, though. All I know is that I have to find my dad, and I don’t have any other leads.”
Cole shook his head. “Wouldn’t you think that if somebody has your dad, it’d be Sarg–?”
“Shut up!” Peter shouted, lunging at him and clamping a hand over his mouth.
Lily stared at Peter in alarm. “What’s the matter?”
“You can’t say his name,” Peter hissed, his heart still pounding with adrenaline.
“Why not?” Cole said, shaking him off.
“Because, remember what… that nimbus this morning said about names here?”
Cole’s face went slack. “Oh,” he said. “They act as a summons. Right.” He looked abashed, and then tried to change the subject hurriedly back to his original point. “All I’m saying is, I thought Morgan le Fay wasn’t even a big character in the Legends? Why her?”
“She wasn’t big, but she was important,” said Peter. “Without her hatred of Arthur as an influence, Mordred might not have been willing to give up his body to the Shadow Lord when the time came.”
“You also said that she was obsessed with finding some object that would give her power over all the elements, not just water,” Lily reminded him. “Do you think she found it?”
Peter sighed, frustrated. “Probably, I guess, but I don’t know why we care.” He sat down with the second heavy volume and opened the cover. “Would have been nice if Kane had given us some clue what we were supposed to be looking for.”
“Wouldn’t an object like that make a good bargaining chip?” said Cole, eager to redeem himself. “If the Shadow Lord doesn’t already have it, don’t you think he’d be willing to give us your dad in exchange?”
“Oh, brilliant, Cole, you want to give the evil Lord who wants to rule the world a weapon of absolute power?” said Lily.
“Well, I’m thinking here!” he said defensively.
“No, it’s not a bad idea,” said Peter, and Lily gaped at him in disbelief. “I’m not saying we’d give it to him outright,” Peter explained quickly, “but maybe there’s a way we could make him think we were going to.”
“We don’t even know what we’re talking about yet!” Lily pointed out.
In response, Peter turned his attention back to the open book in front of him and thumbed the edges of the first few pages.
“Careful,” Lily warned him. “Don’t touch them.”
“What are these?” Cole said, leaning over Peter and pointing at the page over his shoulder. “These symbols here look different from the ones in the book of prophecy.” The page he was pointing to had only four symbols on it and the rest was blank, as if it were a title page of sorts.
Peter stared at them for a moment and frowned. “Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “I recognize these! My dad has them on the wall of his study…”
“Did he tell you what they were?” said Lily eagerly.
“Yes,” said Peter slowly, thinking hard. “He said they had to do with alchemy. Wait, give me a second…” His finger traced a line indicating the three symbols oriented horizontally, without actually touching t
he ink on the page.
“These are the Tria Prima,” he said, “the Three Primes of Paracelsus.” He pointed to the first one and said, “Sulfur represents the omnipresent spirit of life. Mercury is the fluid connection between the High and the Low, and salt represents base matter.”
“What about this one?” Cole pointed to the fourth symbol at the bottom of the page.
Peter thought for a moment. “The word punctum is coming to me for some reason,” he said, closing his eyes. “I know I’ve seen it before…”
“Oh!” said Lily. “You mean like the sun god Ra from Egypt?” Peter and Cole looked surprised, and she said, “I did a term paper on it last year. That was his symbol. I don’t see how that helps anything, though –”
“No, that makes sense,” said Peter. “This must be the symbol for the sun, then… which in alchemical philosophy means it’s also the symbol for gold. They’re interchangeable.”
“What do they mean, though?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know, I’m trying to remember,” Peter murmured.
“Hold on, look here,” said Lily, pulling another volume off the shelf titled in large gold filagree letters, Alchemy and the Middle Ages. She opened to the introduction. “It says here, ‘The pseudo-science of alchemy began in the Middle Ages. Alchemists believed that one form of matter could transform into another, especially metal into gold. Most of the early alchemists were also mystics. Their famous adage, ‘as above, so below,’ implies that the world we see is merely a reflection of the cosmos.’”
“Hence the Tria Prima?” said Peter. “Sulfur is spirit, salt is the body, and mercury is the connection between them, the mind, I guess?”
Lily nodded. “I guess so.” Then she kept reading, “They believed that the conversion of metal to gold on a terrestrial level represented transmutation from the impure into the pure, or the body to the spirit, on a cosmic level.” She pursed her lips and began to scan the text with her finger hovering carefully above the page. Then she paraphrased, “It says the problem was, even though the alchemists took it as a given that these processes could occur, they couldn’t actually perform them... and they didn’t know why. So they postulated the existence of some missing ingredient…”
Peter, who was peering over her shoulder, suddenly pointed excitedly and said, “That’s it, right there! The Philosopher’s Stone – that’s what Morgan le Fay must have found, the object she was obsessed with!”
“The Philosopher’s Stone?” said Cole doubtfully, looking from Peter to Lily as if trying to track with them. “Isn’t that supposed to give eternal life?”
Peter shook his head uncertainly and squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself to remember the conversations he had had with his dad on this subject, which had seemed so unimportant to him at the time, a bit of scientific philosophy that turned out to be hogwash many centuries earlier. “Dad… said… in the beginning of time, the Philosopher’s Stone was not necessary. He said once, all men knew the Ancient Tongue and could command all the elements, not just the one toward which he was naturally gifted. He said the Ancient Tongue was the Philosopher’s Stone. Just by speaking, all men could transmute matter, until… something happened, I can’t remember what. I think he called it the Great Deception. Then the Ancient Tongue was all but forgotten, and after that, only the person who found the Philosopher’s Stone, and those who aligned themselves with that person, could control all the elements at once, and perform those kinds of conversions of matter from one kind to another, or from salt to sulfur.”
“From body to spirit, you mean,” said Lily, and Peter nodded.
“Spirits are eternal, though, aren’t they?” said Cole. “So in a sense, the Philosopher’s Stone would give eternal life?”
“If someone used it on his own body, I suppose so,” said Peter.
Lily looked at the book, and said with foreboding, “I think we can assume Morgan le Fay found the Stone, then. We’d better find out what she did with it.”
Chapter 20
Peter went back to their first text and hurriedly tore through the pages. The Life and Times of Morgan le Fay also bore the peculiar characters of the Ancient Tongue.
“Don’t you want to start at the beginning? We don’t know what we’re looking for,” said Lily.
Peter shook his head. “That’ll take too long. If we start at the end, we can back up for more information if we need it.”
Cole nodded eagerly. “Makes sense to me! Let’s go!”
“Hold on,” Lily frowned, looking at Cole. “I think it’s my turn!”
“Wha–?” his mouth hung open in protest.
“Peter has to go, since it’s his dad we’re looking for. But I think you and I should trade off!”
Cole furrowed his brow and pouted. “Oh, fine. Go on, then.”
Lily looked triumphant for a moment, and then remembered their slumped figures. She became momentarily apprehensive, but then she looked at Peter, whose hand was already poised over the page.
“Ready?” he said, and she nodded, resolute.
“Ready.”
They touched the page at the same time.
The Year 469 AD
Mordred rode in a dark traveling cloak astride a dark pony, which reflected his dark thoughts. The road to Avalon was poorly marked, since almost no one in the village of Cornwall had either courage or reason to venture out to the castle of his Aunt Morgan. The pony’s hooves pounded the peat moss into the dirt and Mordred squeezed its flanks with his knees harder than necessary, forcing the poor brute to go faster. He hardly saw the rolling hills or the trees up ahead. The castle rose before him in the distance, growing larger with each clop of the hooves on the soft, doughy ground. He felt impatient to arrive, impatient to discover that his aunt had returned successfully, with the Stone in hand… impatient for not just absolute power, but for revenge.
It had been five years since Mordred left Camelot. He had no idea what had become of his mother. His father had not bothered to so much as bid him farewell; he was told that he was “no longer welcome” in his parents’ castle – he, the Crown Prince – and would be required to depart to the care of an aunt whom he had never met in a city he had never seen within less than twenty-four hours. A stoic child, he pursed his lips and said nothing and packed as little as possible on purpose, as if to deliberately revel in the misery of his deprivation, and followed the messenger when bidden without uttering a word of protest or question.
Mordred had taken a twisted sort of pleasure in the monstrosity of his own situation, because it seemed to confirm what he always wished to believe. He never understood his father, who had the whole world at his feet and yet chose peace over power. He adored Lancelot – or, rather, he admired his prowess on the battlefield – but in spite of this, Lancelot was Arthur’s subordinate, and Mordred found that to be so unjust as to be personally offensive. He never respected his father, and over the years that lack of respect had gradually turned into contempt. His banishment at last gave Mordred a perfectly legitimate reason to hate King Arthur. His exile gave him a kind of fierce pleasure, and for that, he felt he could endure nearly anything. Hatred proved to be a powerful opiate.
Now, after five years of plotting his revenge, at last Mordred saw the means: the Philosopher’s Stone.
As he rode, he was still distracted by the conversation he’d had in a pub in Cornwall. A cruel smile curled his angelic lips as he remembered it.
“Hey,” said the bartender as he polished a glass. He spoke to a toothless old farmer on his left, but loud enough that Mordred could hear. He nodded toward Mordred with his head. “D’you reckon that’s the kid that went to live with Morgan le Fay?”
Mordred looked up. He almost never ventured into town; usually Aunt Morgan sent Hutchins, their servant, to fetch supplies. Hutchins and Morgan had both been gone a fortnight, though, and finally Mordred became desperate for food. It made sense that his appearance in the town would cause something of a stir.
“Le Fay?”
Mordred asked suspiciously, as if the bartender had addressed him directly. He adored his aunt to the point of obsession, and the way the bartender said her name sounded less than admiring. “What does that mean?”
The bartender blinked. “Blimey,” he said. “You don’t get out much, do you? Le Fay, the fairie. You know, like the fairies in the Enchanted Forest.”
Mordred’s face visibly relaxed. “Oh. You mean because she’s a sorceress.”
Presently Mordred became aware of the fact that several other men at the bar had stopped talking, and he had the peculiar sensation they were trying to eavesdrop without appearing obvious.
“So it’s true, then?” said the toothless farmer. “We always suspected she was into the dark arts!”
“Does she skin cats alive and use their pelts for her magic?” asked another.
“Is it true that she has a basement full of human skulls?” demanded the farmer.
Mordred’s expression must have taken on a look of horror, because the bartender held up his hands and said, “We mean no offense. But when a woman that lovely spends nearly a decade as a recluse, people gotta have an explanation –”
“Why don’t you tell us the truth, then, boy?” leered the toothless farmer. “Then we won’t have to make up stories!”
Mordred set down his glass, affronted. “I most certainly will not!” he said, “You’ll twist my words and make her out to be even more of a hag than you already think she is! How dare you!”
The bartender shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, “but remember, imagination is nearly always worse than reality. You could be doing her a favor, telling us how it really is.”
Mordred’s eyes flashed, and he looked around to see that he had now gathered a small crowd, eager to hear whether or not he would reveal the secrets of the castle of Avalon, so long a subject only of rumor and mystery.
“All right, then,” he said defiantly. “My aunt doesn’t have to resort to such mundane things as spells with the hideous ingredients you imagine. She can speak a secret language called the Ancient Tongue. She’s taught it to me, as well,” he added, puffing up his chest with pride.
