Elsewhere, but not elsewhen, Mace Perovay and Thistle Nightwarren climbed the hill, shovels slung over their shoulders.

“So fire really isn’t an element?” asked Thistle.

“Just a chemical reaction. It needs stuff to react to, mind you. All fire needs a fuel source, but it’s really just heat and light.”

“It just seems so primordial,” said Thistle.

“Heat and light are some of the oldest things in the universe. So fire is as primal as it gets,” said Mace, impressed that Thistle picked up the word primordial. She was learning fast.

They came to the pit that was dug for Cornsilk’s body, where they found it open and empty.

“Some dug it up!” Thistle exclaimed.

“Yeah, and you know what’s worse?” asked Mace, a puzzled look on her face.

“What?”

“Look around the hole, do you see anything?”

“No, why?”

“Exactly. Whatever dug it up didn’t leave a pile of dirt.” Mace took the lantern and shined it down the grave. What had once been a six foot hole had become a gaping chasm that stretched deep below.

“Which means it must have burrowed down.”

“It? You say that like it purposely tunneled down,” said Thistle nervously.

“How do I put this? Sometimes, when a spirit enters into our world via a portal, they look for any kind of matter to possess. To give them form and logic. Sometimes, they’ll take control of the matter around the portal itself, and it looks like this one was clever enough to do so. It’s sort of like dragging a door frame with you wherever you go.”

It was pretty smart on the god’s part. Couldn’t have any rivals come through a portal if you were the portal.

“So now we have to catch the thing?”

“Catch it before it gets smart enough to run,” said Mace nonchalantly as she fastened a rope to the cherry tree that overlooked the pit. When a god entered the world of science and reason, it slowly lost its emotional mind and replaced it with a logical one. It was a side effect of the laws of physics. Though logic to some gods was to flood an entire nation to kill one guy.

“How do you even seal up an interdimensional portal?” asked the older woman.

Mace smiled and pulled a small object out of her sleeves. “With this!” she said proudly.

What she pulled out was a small, slightly elongated lump of soap. It had a tail and two little twisted bits for flippers.

“A fish, made out of my bathroom soap?”

“Not a fish!,” said Mace, annoyed. “A seal!”

“A seal,” said Thistle flatly.

“A seal, both literal and uh literal. It’s a scare-god, an effigy carved to look like the enemy of a particular god. When Turpenwile told me that the thing was a cephalopod, I made it into its natural enemy. Ergo a sealing seal.”

Thistle gave Mace a long, uncomfortable look, then said “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. Because that sounds like nonsense.”

Mace shrugged. “Pull magic is a lot of nonsense, which is why hyperlogical wizards try to stay away from it. And besides, scare-gods don’t always have to look like seals. But excuse me for the pun, I guess.” She stuffed the scare-god back in her sleeve and began to climb down. Thistle breathed out a puff of air.

“Well, you are the magic expert I suppose,” she said, and went down the rope.

They eventually touched the cave floor, which was slick with moisture. Mace licked the ground, much to Thistle’s dismay. Her parental instinct was yelling at the younger woman. “Don’t put that in your mouth, it was on the ground!” but she kept her quiet.

Mace stood up. “Saltwater,” she declared. “It’s close.”

They shined the lantern down the down, which was less vertical than the entry shaft, but crooked. They silently made their way, hunting for stray breaks in reality.

“You know,” whispered Mace after a while. “You could eventually learn to carve tunnels like this.” Thistle gazed up at the wet black rock. “It’s all chemical erosion. Many caves are made from soft limestone, which is made from the fossilized sea creatures. Water carves through it like butter, over a really long time of course. Wizards can do it in a millionth of the time.”

Thistle thought about what she could do with the power to carve through stone. A new storage space for her cooking supplies? Suites for guests at the roadhouse? She smiled as she finally settled on building that rec-room she and her husband always wanted. Thistle would have to ask Mace more about it, that is, if she wasn’t cagey about it.

Thistle had long picked up on her mentor hiding something, and she suspected Mace too had picked up on her picking up. And since neither would put anything down, their friendship was haunted by mutual suspicion.

She sighed internally. Why wouldn’t she just tell Mace what was bothering her. It’s not like Thistle was anyone important enough to keep secret from. Who was she going to tell? The old man who spent his whole day watching ants in the park? Oh yeah he was certainly a spy master extraordinaire, just waiting for whatever juicy secret Mace was hiding. Her husband had been the same. This time, she didn’t shove the memory down but let it linger. She wouldn’t look directly at it yet, but she let it sit in her mind.

Thistle heard a distant echoing and paused.

“What’s wrong?” whispered Mace.

Thistle put a finger to her lips and pointed to her ear then up ahead. Mace nodded. Slowly, they crept through the tunnel as the voices got louder. It was hard to make out, but Thistle estimated that there were two voices, and they were arguing. The pair sidled along the wall, the torchlight and voices coming from just around the corner.

Mace took off her glasses, and angled them ever so slightly around the corner. Now that’s clever, thought Thistle. Her mentor could talk your ear off about magic or obstinate about demonstrating it, but she was frequently surprised about how resourceful the young woman could be. She saw two warped figures standing while a third was seated.

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“C’mon, the dagger for the sword is a good deal!”

“No it’s not, this is probably magic!”

Thistle recognized those voices. She put on her best authoritative voice, which came naturally to all mothers, and strode out in the grotto, much to Mace’s surprise.

“Arnathan and Germinate! What are you doing here?!” she shouted more than asked.

The two men froze. Mace followed and let out and threw her hands up as soon as she saw the seated figure.

“You’re here too?!”

Tria Durana sat cross legged on the cave floor, something in her lap. She looked shocked at first, but quickly settled into indignation as soon as she saw Mace.

“We’re just doing what you were supposed to be doing. You know, actual wizard’s work!”

Mace looked at the thing on Tria’s lap, Thistle followed her gaze.

Mace snorted, “If you can call that wizard’s work. What is your scare-god supposed to be? A bird?”

The thing that Tria had in her lap seemed to be a bundle of sticks tied together with strings. It had a few downy feathers stuck to it, along with a rock in place of a beak.

“It’s an eagle!” she said defensively. “A spirit of protection and wisdom.”

“Yeah, and how is that supposed to frighten off a tentacled abomination from beyond space and time?”

“And you could do better?”

“I did better,” said Mace proudly as she pulled out her seal. Tria looked down at the small soap sculpture, then gave Mace a look that could take the pride out of any noble.

“It’s a little small,” said Mace, rallying. “But it’s got it where it counts. At least seals eat cephalopods!”

“Birds can too! It’s a complex ecosystem!”

Thistle rolled her eyes as the pair got into another argument. She turned her attention to the young men, who became really interested in their feet. The twins were each holding a weapon, but they held them more like toys. Something in Thistle’s voice had jogged a distant, childhood memory that brought them right back to their boyhood. Germinate had a small dagger with a wavy blade while Arnathan had a bronze short sword, or at least, Thistle guessed that it was bronze. It was so green and deteriorated that it would crumble under the weight of just looking at it.

“First,” she said frighteningly calmly. “Arnathan, you are going to put down that rusty sword. You could cut yourself and we don’t have bandages down here. That thing looks like it’s held together with hope and tetanus. You too Germinate.”

They put the weapons down.

“Second, you are going to tell me where you got those.”

“Well I-” began Nate.

Arnie interrupted. “Well I saw this sword when I was pulled under by that tentacle-y thing. I told Nate that I saw it down here, and when Miss Durana asked us to help her dig up the grave, I thought we could get it. I was just hoping it was a magic sword is all.”

Thistle sighed. Would she have done anything different? She asked herself. All those days were spent exploring the woods with her future husband, pretending to be heroes in a far off land. Silently hoping that they’d find a real magic sword.

“It’s pronounced go-eh-tics, the long e changes when you’re talking about the practice!” shouted Mace.

Apparently the girls’ argument was covering a lot of topics. Thistle turned her attention to Germinate. “Well?” she asked, leveling her gaze at him.

“Um…I found it,” he said,

“Can I ask where?”

“Uh…no you may not?” he tried.

“Germinate,” said Thistle, her patience running thin.

“It was just in the mud! Outside of…Cornsilk’s tower,” he mumbled.

Thistle gawked at him. “You found a dagger outside of Cornsilk’s tower and didn;t bother to tell anyone?!”

Mace and Tria turned towards them. “Dagger?” they said in unison.

“These two found a dagger outside of Cornsilk’s tower and failed to mention it to anyone. I’m very disappointed in both of you.” In all the spells of motherhood, that one would do the most damage.

“Why didn’t you say anything Nate?!” snapped Tria.

“Well I didn’t think it was important,” he defended. “Everyone said he died of a heart attack! You saw him! Not a scratch on him.”

Mace chimed in, though it was less a chime and more of a gong. “It’s still an important piece of evidence, I can’t believe you’ve- wait, is that a Shamdal dagger?”

The rest looked at her in confusion. Their collected anger was momentarily paused, and waited for Mace to clarify its next target of wrath.

“How can you tell?” asked Tria.

“I practically lived at the museum back in Amoz as a kid, I’ve seen plenty of them.”

“What is a dagger from Shamdal doing all the way out here?” asked Tria.

“I don’t know, why don’t you ask your new friends if they’re hiding any more evidence,” smirked Mace.

Tria’s face reddened. “At least I have friends!” Their argument restarted, reloaded with fresh insults.

“Eugh, children,” scoffed Thistle. She turned back to the boys. “Now, you are going to take that dagger, give it to the constable, tell him exactly where you found it. And you’re going to tell him and your father and your mother what you’ve been hiding.” Their faces paled. It was one thing to get chewed out by the police, but getting it from their parent’s was practically cannibalism.

“This whole thing could’ve been avoided if you just let me look at the damn stuff!” shouted Mace.

Thistle’s dressing down paused. They were really going at it.

“I would have! Happily! If you could just swallow your pride and admit you cheated! Do you even have any magic?!”

Thistle stepped between them. They looked like they were about to throw punches.

“I got both sides right here! Push and Pull,” she said, raising her fists.

“Calm down!” Thistle commanded.

The two young women were red with muscles tense, but they didn’t scream another word.

“The two of you have been nothing but awful to each other since you got here, and we’ve all had just about enough of it!”

Arnie and Nate looked away, not agreeing with the whole ‘we’ part.

“You two are grown women! Do you know how embarrassing it is to be around you when you fight like toddlers? And not only that, you’re wizards for heaven’s sake! I was under the impression that wizard meant ‘wise one’, but you’re acting like petulant teenagers!”

She turned her gaze on Mace, who was red in the face.

“Now I don’t know Tria, and trust me, her mentor is getting a hell of a letter. But I do know you Mace. I expected better from you.”

The coup de gras of motherhood. No one, from kings to dark lords to a college dropout could survive that.

Mace took a breath in, her muscles tightened, and shouted. “You know what?! You’re right, you’re all right about me!” Her arms gesticulated wildly. “I am an adult and I’ll own up to my mistakes! You’re right Tria, I did cheat!”

The whole room went silent.

“I’ve been cheating this whole damn time! And I’d do it again. I have to!” Tears were beginning to form in her eyes, but they were well hidden behind the unyielding rage. “I don’t have magic like the perfect princess Tria! Or even a natural talent like you, Thistle! I don’t have any magic at all! Now everyone knows that Mace Perovay, scion of the illustrious Thurizard Hickory is a complete and utter failure!”

Tria whispered, “Mace, I had no idea-”

“You know you’re his favorite, right?” she snapped at her. “I’ve been working my whole life to get just a fraction of the pride he has in you, a fraction of the love he gives to you!”

Tria was quiet, as was the rest of the grotto. That was, except for the low rumbling that was getting quickly louder.