by Isaac Winter
28
Winston
I opened my eyes, squinting against the fluorescent overhead lights.
Why was it so bright?
Where was I?
I tried to pull up my map and nothing happened.
Wait...
I held my breath, trying to recollect my thoughts. Last I remembered, I was in the burning basement of Fel’s establishment. Monsters swarmed around me and the Tear hung open like a sore as the Academy burned. I remembered trying to close it. I remembered the Runes knitting themselves back together. I remembered a bright light, then a terrible blackness.
I opened my eyes completely as a familiar voice approached.
“Winston! God, you’re awake!”
Winston... I frowned in concentration. Right. That was my name. But that meant...
I turned my head to see Mabel rushing toward me. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest at the sight, for more reasons than one.
She was okay.
But I was back on Earth. I must have fallen back through the Tear. I must have passed out...
I put a hand to my head and closed my eyes, breathing in through my nose. I was back.
Mabel appeared at my bedside and touched my forehead with the back of her hand, laying a cool cloth over my temples. “You’ve been burning up. There we were, putting the last of the fires out, and then you come flying through, crumpling like a test dummy. We thought you were done for.”
I squinted, trying to remember any of that. How had I come back? And what about my friends? What about Laurie?
I tried to sit up and groaned as pain shot through me. Lowering myself back down, I growled at Mabel, “What happened?”
“When I came back, I...” she stopped, her throat bobbing as she took a deep breath and swallowed. “I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to help. I found the book you tossed through and went to work. We might not have powers like in the Veil, but we learned to make do.” Mabel smiled and brushed the hair off of my forehead.
My brown, human hair.
“Is it closed, then? Is everyone okay?”
“They’re fine, save for a few bumps and bruises. I’m not sure I can say the same about you, though. Took a nasty fall out of that portal.”
“I was trying to...” A cough interrupted me and I shook as I gasped for breath. “I was trying to save them.”
“Shhh...” she soothed. “You did your job. You’ve earned your rest.”
“How’d you manage to convince Tanner?” I asked. “He was determined not to listen last time I saw him. I might have...well, we didn’t leave one another on a good note.”
Mabel laughed. “Oh I heard all about that. The whole Academy did.”
I winced.
“But once the Tears started happening more often, he came around. A giant hole in the sky with monsters coming out is difficult to reason with, after all.”
I stared at the ceiling, wondering if he’d ever forgive me. “The book...” I croaked. “The runes...they disappeared...”
“I did a little studying of my own,” she beamed. “Not as much as you of course, but I learned a few phrases.”
“What?” I asked in shock. “You learned the Runes?”
“Just a little,” she said, shrugging. “They don’t come as easily, but with the book and all the energy coming and going from the Tears around here, I guess it was a little easier to pick up?”
“Huh,” I breathed.
“I knew when I returned here I couldn’t just return to my normal life. I wanted to, Winston. God, I wanted to. I went straight home and saw my kids and they held me so tight I wanted to promise them I would never let go. But then I thought about you, and Laurie, and Tris and Fel and all of them. You were still fighting. It wasn’t right for me to sit things out. So I did what I could. I learned. I taught. And we’re finally fighting back.”
I turned my head to look at her. When I saw her fall through the Tear, I thought she was gone forever. But to see that she was still here, and leading the charge on the other side? I couldn’t help but admire that.
“You did well.” I smiled.
“I had help,” she replied, taking the book from her back and laying it on the bed next to me. There it was. It reached out to me like a lost limb. How did I not realize how much I’d missed this thing? “I added a few new notes. Figured you wouldn’t mind.”
I placed a hand on top of the book, tracing the jet-black stone inset on the cover. “Thank you,” I mumbled. “For everything.”
“I’m sorry for the way I acted in the Veil,” she admitted. “I was there for so long I kinda...lost my head. It messes with you. There’s something, I don’t know, almost evil about it. I kept having all these awful thoughts, and dreams, and…” She took a breath. “After you disappeared, I basically lost all hope. I resigned myself just to doing the best job I could as a healer, but then you came back.”
“Hey,” I interrupted her. “It’s okay. We’ve been through a lot.”
“You can say that again,” she muttered.
“Can you do me one last favor?” I asked, meeting her gaze.
“What’s that?”
“I need to go back to The Veil.”
Mabel stayed silent for a few long moments, pursing her lips. “In your state...” she started.
“I need to go back,” I repeated. “Fix me up and let me go.”
She let out a breath. “If you don’t return…”
“Let me worry about that. I have a job to finish. I can’t leave them.”
My eyes roamed over the tired lines of her face, the sad eyes, the loose tendrils of hair that fell out of her bun and across her shoulders.
“You’re a good man, Winston.” Mabel said finally, squeezing my hand. “Or should I say Cael?”
I smiled and let out a breath, staring at the ceiling. “You said you know a little bit of Runic, right? I’ve got an idea.”
A mountain of anti-inflammatories, painkillers, and a splint later, I was back on my feet. Her protests became less and less vigilant as we prepared a circle on her living room floor.
“Bet you never thought you’d be doing something like this,” she said, marking off each corner of the room with chalk.
I huffed in amusement. “Sure didn’t. Woulda told you it was bullshit.”
“And here we are.”
“Here we are.”
“You found the right page?” She asked, finally turning back to me.
The room looked like some kind of freaky witchcraft ritual, with chalk and candles burning in all corners. I’d never tried to purposely cause a Tear before. But I was going to have to, in order to find my way back.
“When it opens, you gotta stand back, okay? I’ll go through and it’ll close, just like before. We can’t mess this up.”
“I know.” Mabel put a hand on my shoulder. “I trust you.”
And in the moment, that was the best thing she could have said.
“You sure you wanna do this?” She asked one more time.
“I’m sure.” I squeezed her hand.
She bent down and lighted the candle at the middle of the circle. We each took our places. I stood facing North, she stood facing South.
“Ready?” She asked me, meeting my eyes.
“Ready,” I confirmed, and the ritual begun.
It wasn’t much. All the fanfare we set up was to draw in extra energy, in case our own invocations weren’t enough. Using Runes in the Veil definitely threw off the power balance, but here on Earth? We were flying blind.
Mabel only knew a few words in Runic, but she knew one of the most important: the rune for Open.
So that’s what we did. Mirroring the other’s movements, we drew the rune in midair, chanting its name.
Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris…
The ground began to vibrate and the candlelight flickered.
Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris…
A great surge of energy hit
me like lightning and rushed through my veins, all the way to my toes. It was either the greatest endorphin high of my life, or it was magic.
I was hoping for the latter.
Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris…
The ground shook more readily now, and one of the candles toppled over and extinguished itself. Sweat beaded up on my forehead as I held concentration, my energy rapidly waning.
Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris. Ancellra alacris…
Our chants reached a crescendo and a great screech echoed through the air. I smelled smoke, heard screams. Then, like ripping a paper in two, a Tear opened in front of us. The ground wobbled as if I were at sea and a great buzzing rang through the air, like a poorly tuned television. We lowered our hands as our chants trailed off, and I took one last look at Mabel.
“Godspeed, Cael.” Mabel brought an arm up in salute and I returned the gesture.
“Thank you, Mabel. Keep fighting. For all of us.”
“I will.” She promised.
I saw stone walls through the portal and a flickering torch hung on a wall. It looked like some kind of dungeon, but I had no idea where in the Veil it would take me.
Beggars can’t be choosers, I mumbled, and the abyss swallowed me once more.
29
Laurie
Cold stone rose all around us as the door creaked closed. The resounding thud echoed through the hallways with an eerie sort of finality. This was it.
Three passageways lay before us, one heading to the left, one heading to the right, and one heading straight ahead. No other markings distinguished them from one another. We had to make a choice.
I turned back to the door, panic rising for the slightest moment. Locked.
“Which one do we try first?” I asked the group, trying to swallow my fear.
Aurelius nuzzled at my neck. He was growing already, now the size of a small dog instead of a large rodent. The more I spent time with him, the more I was sure our minds were linked in some way. He could tell when I was scared, happy, hungry. And I could do the same with him. The only vibes I was getting right now were those of danger.
Breathe, I reminded myself. I pulled in a draught of cool air through my nose and forced it out through my mouth, just like I’d been taught. The chatter in my mind quieted just enough to focus on the task at hand.
“It’s a classic puzzle,” Fel noted. “It’s meant to confuse you and get you turned around. We’ll need to leave some kind of marking to signal that we’ve been here, so if we end up back in this same room, we’ll know.”
“Got anything?” Tris asked, digging through her bags. “I got a couple old gears, but I’m loath to part with them.”
I dug into my inventory and finally found what I was looking for.
> Melifern Bark
Use
Examine
Drop
“Here we go.” I scraped the bark across the stones, making a brownish line. I crossed it and created an X on the floor where we stood. “We’ll put an X on each room we come across.” A gold-plated number one marked the center of the room.
“Good thinking,” Fel agreed. “Now we’ve got to stick together, no matter what happens. He’s going to play mind games with us, so steel yourself now.”
“I’m ready,” I said, gulping. I just wished I believed that. “Let’s go left.”
“We’re going in circles,” Tris wailed, pointing at the floor.
Room number two, marked with an X. She was right. We’d been through nearly a dozen rooms, and yet here we were again. We were still no closer to finding the exit, or anything else for that matter.
There had to be some kind of secret. Some kind of pattern. But hell if I knew what it was.
“We need a new strategy,” Tris said, huffing. “This is getting us nowhere. And we’re running out of time.”
“Let me think,” I mumbled. Everyone was too loud. The room was too bright. The walls crushed in around me, sucking all the air out of the room.
Aurelius squawked and nipped at my shoulder. I yelped and swatted him away. “Quit that.”
“Looks like he’s hungry.” Fel shrugged.
I ground my teeth and sighed. I’d prepared plenty of snacks for him before leaving. The only problem was, they went up in flames with the rest of Fel’s building.
Now I was stuck in an endless maze with a hungry baby dragon on my hands. Great.
“He’s going to have to learn to wait.” I bit back at Fel with more venom than I intended.
“There’s got to be a method to this madness,” Tris insisted. “But the numbers don’t seem to go in any kind of order. There could well be hundreds of rooms at this rate! I saw a 5, a 144, a 21...” She shivered.
“Wait a second,” I said as an idea struck me.
I never had a chance to get to know Crane very well before he disappeared, but I did know he was a man of routine. He loved structures and patterns, even started a weekly riddle back at the Academy. What if this was another one of his riddles?
“Tell me those numbers again.”
“I don’t remember them all, but there was 144, 55, 89, 13...”
“And we’re in 2 right now,” Fel added.
I scribbled down a sequence right there on the floor, the numbers spilling from my fingertips.
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...
“Do you remember seeing a 3 at all? An 8?” I asked as I computed more sums in my head.
“Yeah, now that I think about it...” Tris said. “You’re saying its some kind of pattern?”
“It’s the Fibonacci Sequence.” I declared. “The next number in the sequence is the sum of the two before it. Think about it.”
“Hmm, maybe,” Fel agreed. “But haven’t we seen other numbers, too?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps they’re to throw us off.”
Tris pursed her lips, thinking. “How do we test this?”
“Well, we’re on 2 now,” I said, pointing to the plaque on the floor. “That means we need to find 3 next. And 5 after that. If we keep going in that fashion, it should, theoretically, lead us out of here.”
“And the other doors are just decoys?”
“Gotta be.”
“We still don’t know which door goes to which room, though.”
I brandished the bark in my hand. “We can find out.”
After another hour of meticulous backtracking and record-keeping, we’d worked out a crude map of the area and what doors led to what rooms. Fel came up with the observation that the correct door could be determined by taking the goal room number and dividing it by three (the number of doors). Whatever was leftover as the remainder pointed to the correct door. If zero was the remainder, we took the left. If 1 was the remainder, we took the middle. And if 2 was the remainder, we took the right door. Once we figured out that pattern, the journey became a lot easier. It was just a matter of following the next number in the sequence.
“Guess your Fibonacci idea was right after all.” Fel said, clapping me on the back. “Good job.”
> Traegoria Keep: Level One Complete.
Finally, we reached room 610, tired, hungry, and out of breath. Aurelius kept projecting images of fruits and veggies into my mind while I was trying to do math. Not very helpful.
Room 610 opened onto a wide circular atrium with four wooden platforms at the north, south, east, and west of the room. In the middle of the room lay a glittering treasure chest. A doorway barred off with steel rods and a lock sat at the opposite end of the room.
“Finally!” Tris said, lurching forward before we had a chance to stop her.
The floor rumbled and a shimmering golden cage flashed around the chest. Bits of the floor fell away, tumbling into a dark abyss. The chest remained, but on an island in the middle of the room, surrounded by a chasm too wide for any of us to cross. Spikes shot out of the ground up toward the ceiling. If it weren’t for her tumbling away at the last second, she would have been impaled.
“Well
, shit.”
“What did I tell you about jumping to conclusions?” Fel said. He glared at her like a reproachful parent and offered a hand to pull her up.
“Not to,” Tris pouted.
“Okay,” I thought aloud. “The chest is obviously a no-go. Looks like we need to get to the door on the other side, but just waltzing out there isn’t gonna work. I don’t feel like getting spiked today.”
I gazed at the platforms on each side of the room. Perhaps they had something to do with it. I stepped on to the first one, the south platform. It was right in front of us, so I didn’t have to go far. It sunk into the ground with a subtle clunk as I stood on it and a hissing sound came from the chest in the middle of the room. One side of the golden cage dissolved.
“Huh.” I stepped off the platform, and the cage repaired itself. So it was some kind of platform puzzle. But how did we get to the others without killing ourselves?
“Tris, can you slink around the perimeter to the east platform? Carefully?” I emphasized the last word.
“We should check if the floor is safe first,” Fel said, rolling a small stone across the edge of the room, right next to the wall. A burst of flame shot through the air, incinerating the stone as it clattered across the floor, smoking.
“Oookay then,” Fel hissed. “New plan.”
“On it,” Tris said, once again fishing in her bags.
“What all do you have in there?” I asked. It seemed whenever we were in a jam, she’d be able to find some gadget or gizmo to get us out of it.
“Supplies,” was all she said, and kept digging through her stores without skipping a beat.
“Never question a Tinker’s inventory,” Fel said with a wink.
“Noted.”
She pulled out a length of rope and a thin bar of metal. Using a pair of pliers she bent and twisted the it into a long hook shape, grunting as she strained against the metal.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I breathed as I realized her plan. “A grappling hook? A homemade grappling hook, at that?”
“What’s wrong with homemade?” She snapped, giving it a swing. I leapt out of the way of the flying metal just in time. “If we can’t touch the floor, guess we’ll have to take to the air.” Tris raised an eyebrow at me. “Unless you have a way we can stick to the walls or something.”
