And with that, and a terrific outpouring of magic, the Original was gone and a large moth fluttered where her head had been. I walked forward, my hand extended toward the marvel. The moth landed on my fingers, its wings of brown and dun—with splashes of white, red, and indigo—brushing my fingers as it found purchase on my skin.
“How can you do that?” I asked, wondering again at the constant violation of every physical law I’d grown up with that was my new supernatural existence.
As if fluttering away my questions, the moth alighted from my hand to sky-amble lazily toward one of the openings. There it hovered, for a handful of seconds, before making its way to the other tunnel, and then the other. Finally, it returned to the middle tunnel, fluttering its way a few feet inward. Then with another wash of magic, a nekkid lady crouched, shivering, in place of the moth.
After grabbing Blondie’s clothes, I rushed them over to her. She was shaking so hard, however, that I had to help her.
“Flying’s h-h-hard,” she said through chattering teeth, as I pulled her shirt over her head, carefully avoiding touching her naked frame. I swear her nipple rings winked at me in the darkness.
“I bet,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just need a moment…” And with that, I felt a tremendous surge of power as Blondie drew strength from… somewhere. With others of my kind—the Alfar-derived, I guess you’d call us—I could feel their elements answering them as water answered to me. But with Blondie, there was that four-elemental surge that said “Alfar,” but there was more… a bit like the surge I felt around Nell or Terk, Capitola’s little brownie, who both used old magic.
But that’s not quite it, either, I thought, my senses unable to pin down exactly what I’d just felt. Whatever it is, though, it’s strong.
Blondie, meanwhile, looked decidedly healthier. She stretched her lithe form—and I felt the twinge of jealousy I always feel when already-long people make themselves even longer—then looked at me.
“C’mon, babydoll. There’s something down this way that’s calling to me.”
“Calling to you?”
“Well, I actually felt something that’s warning me away. But in this case—”
“We’ll consider that an invite,” I said, drily, wondering when I’d become that white person in Eddie Murphy’s stand-up routine who goes inside the obviously haunted house—despite the house whispering, “Stay out! Stay out!”
Together, we set off down the winding tunnel. Luckily, the ceiling was high and I didn’t feel very hemmed in. But as we continued, the floor began to slope downward, as if the ceiling was struggling to meet it. Soon enough we were stooping, the tunnel continually narrowing as we pushed forward.
“Keep breathing, Jane,” Blondie warned. “This is just the first test.”
“Test?” I asked, admittedly rather breathless from feeling the weight of the walls around me.
“Yep. This is the first thing that makes you want to give up and go home. It’s just a tunnel. We’ll get through it.”
There was wisdom in her words, but they didn’t make me feel less hemmed in or nervous. Which only got worse when the tunnel suddenly grew even narrower and we had to crawl. The dirt beneath my hands, though, felt soft and cool and clean, and I focused on that feeling rather than the darkness behind me or the walls at my flanks.
Until, that is, something skittered out from underneath my right palm as I set my weight on it.
Shuddering, I meeped, and then began a series of “ews.”
“Almost there,” Blondie soothed. “I can feel the air changing…”
And sure enough, soon we were pushing through a ridiculously narrow hole into a larger cavern. As I pushed my shoulders through, wriggling to extricate myself, I knew how a newborn baby must feel.
I have been reborn, I thought as I got my shoulders through the hole, but I got caught on my bottom half. And I shall henceforth be known as Hips-Got-Stuck.
Blondie grabbed me underneath the armpits and helped pull me through, dusting me off a little too thoroughly when she had me upright. I was so distracted by the cavern we were in that I let her manhandle me as I unleashed a series of softly lit mage lights to float around the dark space.
Unlike the crystal cave from earlier, this one was made up of unadorned rock. But it was no less impressive: naturally vaulted ceilings of variously hued granite arched above us, jutting craggily, as if carved by rough hands.
Or rough magic, I thought, peering around the cavern for evidence of anything untoward.
“There,” Blondie hissed, nudging me in the ribs with her elbow and pointing with her chin. Sure enough, embedded in the stone to our very far left, we could see in the wavering light of our mage balls just the outer edge of a mirror thingy similar to the one under Gus’s rock. I gestured, and one of my closer mage lights moved just enough to reveal the mirror’s smooth surface.
Just like the one I’d found before, this mirror held some sort of ancient Alfar sigil. But instead of full glimpses of different sigils popping in and out, this one snaked. A serpentlike dark line traced around sinuously to create new forms, never stopping long enough to identify what—if anything—it read.
Blondie and I approached the mirrored surface slowly, our magics pushed out enough to sense anything lurking but not enough, hopefully, to trip any booby traps. When we were finally standing in front of it, I was confronted with the exact same mystery from the crystal cavern, only this time I knew how dangerous our fiddling could be.
“Well, obviously we shouldn’t blast at it,” I said.
“No. That ended badly,” Blondie replied, wryly.
“To be honest, I don’t even want to touch it with magic,” I said.
My own words made me pause. “Maybe that’s it,” I said, after a few moments. “Maybe it’s not about magic at all. Maybe it’s like in a mystery… There’s always a knothole in the tree, or a special book in the bookcase…”
And with that, I began groping around my side of the mirror. Blondie watched me cup, pull, fondle, and basically harass the rock face it was housed in, before she interrupted me.
“What on earth are you doing? Why would the Alfar use a physical trigger when they had all that magic?”
Because it works in Clue! I wanted to snap, but I didn’t.
“Think about it,” I said. “It sorta makes sense. If they’re living before the other species evolved, then all their cohorts are really powerful: they’re other ancient Alfar, Originals like you, and first-magic creatures like Brownies. So why would you use magic to defend something when everyone has powerful magic? It’s a good defense now, cuz there’s not as many creatures with that much juice. But back then?”
Blondie frowned, and then pulled up her shirt sleeves to well above her elbows as if getting ready to duke it out. I hope she wasn’t planning on duking it out with me—she’d win.
“It’s good logic, Jane. But it’s wrong. This is a glyph,” she said, as if that should mean something to me.
“I know,” I said, remembering what Nell had told me. “An ancient Alfar hieroglyph.”
“No, it’s a glyph,” Blondie said. Obviously dropping the “hiero” meant something to her, but it meant diddly-squat to me.
“Lucy,” I said, wearily. “Please ’splain.”
“Glyphs are interactive locking devices.”
“Wha?”
“They’re interactive, meaning we have to do something to the glyph itself. And they’re locks.”
“Locks are good,” I said, thinking of the nursery rhyme. “We want locks.”
“Yep. Now we just have to figure out how to interact with it.”
“With magic?” I said, looking at it warily. All joking aside, I really did not want to end up a seal, or worse.
“Well, you’re actually half-right in this one. These will probably work with touch,” Blondie said.
“Like an ancient version of an iPad?” I asked.
“No, not like that at all. Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“We gotta get in there and touch it,” she replied.
I gave her a Look, but moved up to face the glyph with her.
She gave me a look that read, “You touch it,” just as I gave her a similar one. We frowned at each other. Then we both reached forward at the same time. Before I could stop my hand from moving forward, my fingertips landed squarely on one of the tats on her forearm, one that appeared to be of a very ancient tribal nature…
Suddenly I was in a different cave, squatting next to a smoking fire. The cave smelled overpoweringly of human sweat and rotten meat, but the smell was familiar rather than off-putting. I was cutting up a kill with my sister—a young buck—and we were carefully hanging the meat to dry. With such successful hunts, our clan’s winter wouldn’t be so hard. She smiled at me, her mouth and chin smeared with blood from the delicate organs we’d snacked on as we worked, and I smiled back, content as I’d ever been…