She Who Rises

by Rachael Arsenault

  “In a minute.” The girl sat on the edge of the sofa down by my knees and set the bottle on the table. It slid a couple inches on the sloped surface. The girl seemed more interested in something across the room, however. She brightened. “Oh, good timing — she’s awake, Mut.”

  Someone — the second woman, maybe — grunted. I heard the faint whisper of feet moving closer, like socks brushing hardwood. I still couldn’t see her when she spoke, but the thinness and tremulous quality of her voice made me think she must be extremely old. “What does she remember?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to ask yet.”

  While they spoke, my mind spun. Why did they want to know? Did they want me to remember something? Or did they really not want me to remember? That way I wouldn’t be able to report anything about what happened if they let me go. But if they were worried about something like that, why was this girl letting me see her face? She looked young — maybe in her mid-twenties. She might be new at this. The old woman certainly knew to stay out of sight.

  “Please,” the girl was saying, resting a hand on my knee in what may have been intended as a comforting gesture, “try to tell us whatever you can remember.”

  I wasn’t an idiot. “What’s going on? Where am I? Who are you? Why did you take me here? What—”

  The other woman said something in a sharp hiss, but it definitely wasn’t English. The girl cut her a look, back straightening as though recoiling in anger, her dark cheeks flushed. She snapped something back in return (once again not in English), before turning back to me with a slightly softer expression. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

  I tried to pull my knee out of her grasp.

  The other woman sighed. There were more slow, whisper-soft footsteps before she came into view. My guess had been right: She was definitely very old. Her skin was dark like the girl’s, but leathery and deeply wrinkled. She was completely bald and had a smattering of age spots across her scalp and face. She wore simple, loose-fitting sweatpants and a flowy orange blouse, which seemed incongruous with the small blue backpack hanging from her shoulders. “You’re paralyzed on a couch. Do you think arguing and paranoia are going to do you any favours?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was bluffing or already knew that I was withholding information. I also wasn’t sure what their angle was now that they were both letting me see their faces.

  And she was right. I had no control in this situation.

  “I was at a museum to work on my thesis. I was checking out the precious stones collection. There was a bright light… That’s all I remember. I think I passed out.” I strained to look around again, but my neck muscles still weren’t having it. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in—”

  The old woman cut her off with another hissed, unfamiliar word.

  Rolling her eyes, the young woman said, “Masika, please! She’s cooperating with us. Let’s cooperate with her. She should know where she is.” Then, before the old woman (Masika, apparently) could speak again, she turned to me and blurted, “You’re in Midooguay.”

  I struggled to remember where that was, but drew a complete blank. With a surge of renewed panic, I realized how little I knew about New Brunswick. How was I going to get home? How far away was home? Did I even still have my cellphone to call someone or check a map?

  I fought to sit up, to pull away from this strange woman, but all I could manage was full-body trembling. “Who are you? Why did you take me here? What did you do?”

  The girl was getting to her feet, holding her hands up placatingly. “It’s okay! It’s okay! We didn’t do anything — we found you! We brought you to safety!”

  “Found me? I was going about my day, minding my business, and then there was this light and roaring noise and I wake up here and I can’t move and — and — what did you do? Did you kidnap me? Was that a bomb? Are you—”

  “I told you—” Masika started to say to the young woman, wrinkles deepening into a scowl.

  The young woman knelt and grabbed me by the arm. Instinctively, I tried to pull away, to kick and flail — but I couldn’t move. And then I was filled with warmth like stepping out into the sunlight on the first true day of spring. A layer of soreness left my body like ice melting from a tree.

  “You had badly scraped up the skin on your arm,” she said by way of explanation. As she pulled away, I saw a dull glow fade from her fingers. “I probably should have healed it earlier, but…”

  “What — how—?”

  “The stone you picked up wasn’t ordinary. And there are others like it.” To illustrate her point, she reached into her shirt and pulled at the beaded necklace tucked away there. From the necklace hung a round, blue-green stone veined with darker blue. She let go of the beads, letting it slip back under her shirt.

  “What do you mean?” Another thought stuck me as I replayed her words in my head. “H-how did you know I had picked up a stone?”

  She ignored the second question in favor of the first: “There are more worlds than just this one. They’re parallel to each other and aren’t supposed to cross paths, but sometimes they do.” She paused, looking expectantly at Masika. She hadn’t stopped scowling. With a sigh, the young woman continued, “Millenia ago, another world started to bleed into ours. We don’t know much about this world, except that it is full of fantastic creatures and magic.”

  ‘Magic?’ I stared at this strange woman. Her hands had glowed and erased my pain. A wave of nausea rolled over me as realization sank in.

  “These creatures and their magic came to our world through… rifts, we’ll call them. They wreaked havoc. It was dark times. They weren’t indestructible, but they wielded powers far beyond anything humans could understand, and no matter how many we managed to defeat, more continued to appear.

  “But after years of struggle and terror, someone came upon a solution. As magic steadily bled into our world, it slowly changed us and became part of us. Some learned they could use this new magic to seal a weakened creature away. And there was something about the properties of precious stones that made them perfect vessels.”

  “So… Wait, that light when I held the quartz…”

  The young woman nodded. “There’s a creature inside that stone.”

  My head was spinning. Magic. Magic was real. I had used magic and probably destroyed a museum. This woman had used magic on me. Magic had come to us from an alternate dimension and—

  “No!” I snapped, suddenly furious. I couldn’t explain it. The whole idea was bewildering and absurd and stupid and this could not be happening. “No, there’s no way. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Masika mumbled something in another language that made the young woman frown and shoot her a disapproving look.

  “Would you stop that?” I snarled. “Just because I don’t understand you doesn’t mean I can’t figure out you’re talking about me.”

  Masika’s ever-present frown deepened.

  “I know this must be overwhelming,” the young woman was saying, placing a hand to her chest as though that would make her words sincerer, “but you need to pause and think rationally.”

  “I am thinking rationally! What’s not rational about saying you’re crazy and magic isn’t real?”

  “How do you explain me healing you?”

  I struggled with that for a moment. “Well — it’s — I don’t know how you did it, but there was obviously some kind of illusion involved! I didn’t even see the so-called scrapes you healed — it’s probably something like the placebo affect making me think I’m in less pain, and—”

  She abruptly rose to her feet and hurried off. Good. Maybe she had realized I wasn’t about to be persuaded into believing in delusions. I turned my attention to the old woman. “You don’t seem nearly as keen on whatever she’s planning. So why are you going along with it?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was grimacing or if the expression was the closest approximation of a smile she could manage. “Sometimes her stubbornness outweighs he
r good sense and I can’t reason with her.”

  “I haven’t lost my good sense,” the young woman said as she hurried back into the room. She sat on the edge of the couch next to my legs again, held out her arm so it was directly in my line of sight, and then pulled out a knife and slashed open her forearm.

  “What the hell are you—”

  The words hadn’t fully passed my lips before she had her hand pressed to the bleeding slash and a soft glow emanated from it. A few seconds later, she pulled her hand away. The cut was now a slightly raised pink line.

  “Explain that,” she said.

  “Th-there has to be—”

  A sudden burst of heat and light appeared over her palm. Fire. She was cupping a handful of fire. “Explain this.”

  I stared, mouth working like I was a fish drowning in open air.

  “You should have started with the fire,” Masika said dryly.

  “I thought it might scare her.”

  Masika raised her eyebrows. “More than cutting yourself?”

  “Okay, okay!” I snapped. “I get it. You’ve convinced me. I still don’t understand why I’m here or who you are or why I can’t move or what you want with me.” As my anger subsided, anxiety rushed in to fill its vacancy. My heart was pounding. I struggled to pull air into my lungs; it felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest.

  The fire fizzled from the young woman’s palm. “Sorry. We should have introduced ourselves. That’s my grandmother, Masika, and I’m Farida. What’s your name?”

  I decided not to answer that.

  To her credit, Farida didn’t push. “Okay, well, I’ll need to explain the history a bit more. So, once people found out they could seal magic creatures into stones, they also learned that they could draw on that creature’s magic so long as they carried that stone. But people became power hungry. Monster hunting became a sport — a competition to amass power. It became a sort of magical arms race, and people were willing to make huge sacrifices — human lives, the safety of villages — just to capture more creatures. We had learned how to deal with the creatures, but now we were causing our own destruction.

  “That’s why things had to change. A secret group of magicians formed to stop the flow of magic and monsters into our world. Though they didn’t know exactly who they were or where they were based, many people caught wind of their plans and wanted to stop them — kings, emperors, knights, other magicians. But this group was determined and clever; they found a way to use their magic to close the rifts. And once the rifts were closed, they began hunting down and reclaiming every magic stone so they could be locked away, ensuring they would never be used for war again.”

  “Then how do I have one? How do you have one? And how do you know all this?”

  “Just because something is meant to be locked away forever doesn’t mean it stays that way,” Farida said. “Look at the pyramids. They were tombs intended to hold the dead and the treasure they brought to the afterlife forever. But people broke in and looted them.”

  “Okay, but how do you know all of this? Getting your hands on magic sarcophagus treasure doesn’t mean you know what it does or how it came to be.”

  “These stones weren’t sealed into actual tombs for the dead,” Masika said. “I made sure they had a designated tomb in an isolated, hard to reach place, and I collapsed the entrance tunnel when I was finished.”

  “You did? But you said this happened millennia ago.”

  “It did,” she said. Her tone left the impression she didn’t intend to explain further.

  I rubbed at my face tiredly. “That… that doesn’t make sense. You can’t be thousands of years old.”

  “It looks like your paralysis is starting to wear off,” Masika said instead of elaborating on her seeming immortality. “It’s a side-effect of improper, reckless use of magic.”

  “Masika,” Farida chastised, “leave her be. She didn’t even know magic existed, let alone how to use it safely.” To me, she smiled and said, “Magic isn’t meant to exist in our world, so our world doesn’t know how to handle it. It can be incredibly destructive if you’re not careful. Don’t worry — Masika is a genius with magic, and I’ve grown up around it. We’ll make sure you learn to use it safely.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Not right away, of course! I understand this is a lot to take in and—”

  “No.” I struggled to sit up, every muscle in my core screaming in protest. I managed to prop myself partially upright against the arm of the couch, though even that left me short of breath. “I can’t. No. No way. I just want to go home and work on my thesis and—” I broke off as a surge of dread left me momentarily speechless. “What… What happened to the museum? How badly did I — is it…?”

  “It’s still standing,” Farida said gently. “There’s just a hole in the roof.”

  Just? Like that wasn’t a big deal for a small museum? Nausea rolled over me again, making me dizzy enough that I worried I would fall off the couch. I shook my head slowly. “No. I — I can’t do this. I’ve already… I don’t want… I can’t.”

  Farida looked crushed. Masika looked smug but, for once, didn’t make a snide comment in that unfamiliar language.

  “Please,” I said, suddenly hit with a whole new kind of exhaustion, “I just want to go home.”

  With a sigh, Farida rose from the couch. “Okay. But you’ll need to rest a little longer. I want to make sure the paralysis has worn off before we take you home.”

  Chapter Three

  It took close to an hour before my muscles cooperated enough to let me stand and walk. In the meantime, I used my limited mobility with my hands to check my phone (which Farida fished out of my back pocket for me, an incredibly awkward experience if there ever was one). The screen was badly cracked, forming a spiderweb-like pattern across the glass, but at least it had survived.

  Mom had texted me six times and left two voicemails, Emily had sent me several all-caps text messages and Facebook messages, and I had three missed calls from Mitch. Dad had sent one text — “ur mom is worried pls txt” — and there was a slew of posts and messages on Facebook from other friends and extended family asking if I was okay. The disaster at the museum had apparently made headline news; I would have to wait until I was back at my apartment so I could use wi-fi to read up on it. I didn’t want to burn my data.

  I sent Mom, Dad, Emily, and Mitch quick texts that just said, “I’m okay,” and put up a similar status on Facebook. I didn’t really know how to explain what had actually happened. I didn’t even know if I should explain. I was hoping I would be able to come up with a lie that wasn’t too outlandish.

  Farida also brought over my backpack and helped me look through it to be sure I hadn’t lost anything. One of the front pockets had gotten torn open, but all that had been in there was some spare pens, my class schedule, and a bag of cough drops. All easily replaced. I was lucky — I didn’t want to think about how much it would’ve cost to replace a textbook. I’d brought one with me so I could go straight to class when I was done at the museum. I had probably missed an amazing lecture, too.

  Once I could get up and move around a bit, I helped Farida pack up her and Masika’s things. Not that there was much to pack. The house, evidently, was not a permanent residence, which I would’ve been able to guess even if Farida hadn’t explicitly told me as much. It had running water Farida poured into that water bottle with its built-in filter (a “LifeStraw”, apparently), but there was no electricity, the furniture was sparse and decrepit, and cobwebs clung to the corners of the ceilings.

  “How long have you guys stayed here?” I asked as I struggled to roll up a sleeping bag. It wasn’t just my weak and shaky post-paralysis arms that were causing me trouble. I had never gone camping before.

  “Not long. Kind of a shame, really. This is one of our better squats.”

  I wanted to ask what exactly a “squat” was or why she and Masika had to live in one instead of having a normal home, but I also wan
ted to keep my distance in all ways possible. “Why don’t you stay longer? You can always come back after you drop me off at my apartment.”

  “It’s…” She hesitated, hands stilling in the middle of securing the buckles around the sleeping bag she had rolled. “It’s complicated. We’re on the move a lot.”

  I didn’t press for answers. The less involved I was in their lives, the better.

  When we went outside to pack their limited belongings into the trunk of the car, sunset was crawling over the horizon, staining fingers of orange and gold across a once-pristine blue sky. I wasn’t sure how long I had been unconscious for, but it must have been several hours. Thinking about the blank spot in my memory made it hard to breathe.

  The car itself was a tough but battered looking Pontiac G6, its blue paint overwhelmed by rust around the fenders. Farida took the driver’s seat and Masika took the passenger side, leaving me to sit in the back. As Farida dutifully checked her mirrors, I caught her glancing back at the abandoned house with what I could only call a forlorn expression. How many times had she done this?

  She put the car into gear and we backed out, gravel crunching under the tires as we went.

  I didn’t recognize where we were as we drove along a pothole-ridden road. Dark evergreens rose up on either side, boxing us in, creating the impression that there was only one direction in the world we could follow. The setting sun was a watchful eye over the road that converged into an inverted V behind us, while an emerging blanket of star-speckled blackness draped overhead.

  The drive started out quiet. Masika didn’t strike me as particularly chatty in general, let alone when she was around me, someone she clearly couldn’t wait to be rid of. Farida just seemed glum. Aside from the old blue Pontiac rattling over potholes, it was silent.

  Farida eventually switched on the radio and started hopping through stations. A song I didn’t recognize came on and she squealed, turning it up enough to hurt my ears. Masika quickly reached over and turned it down a snatch, but that didn’t stop Farida from singing along excitedly. Her off-key but enthusiastic voice was just belting out the last repetitions of “baby, I’m not over you” when headlights suddenly appeared in the distance, headed toward us.