Macey Perovay, age seven, gawked up at the huge metal lions. They didn’t compare to what the museum had on the inside, but they greeted her like old friends. Simon and Rufus, she named them. If they had any names before, they were long lost to time. Perhaps when she grew up, she would discover their names in the depths of some ancient library, and get her own exhibit in the museum.

“You know, I’m going to work here someday,” said Macey nonchalantly. She was practically exploding with excitement, but decided to play it cool. Macey would let her uncle be the star of the trip rather than her.

“Yes dear,” said her dad, not really looking at her. “Yufizard isn’t presenting for two hours, why are we here so early?” he hissed to her mother.

“Because she likes it here,” she hissed back.

Macey pretended not to notice, and instead focused on her mental list of exhibits she wanted to see. Whenever she visited, she made up an order to tour the museum. Sometimes it was past to present, sometimes it was present to past. She decided that this time, they’d start from the outer exhibits to the inner, and end with uncle Yufi’s show at the very end.

She held her mother’s hand as her father grumbled about ticket prices. Her mom was…well she didn’t want to be mean, but a mom shaped woman. Like those lady shaped bottles the syrup came in. She was soft, but that made her nice to sit next to and fall asleep cuddling. She had the same curly red hair as her, the same freckles, and the same need for glasses. But Mace got her height and frame from her dad. She was already taller than most boys in school, and she often wondered if she’d just keep getting taller as she grew. Her father was nearly two heads taller than her mom, and a bit on the scrawny side. Apparently, he was quite handsome when he met mom, but now he always looked sad and angry.

They walked into the lobby, and Macey saw the familiar, comforting sight of dead skeletons looming overhead. Dinosaurs, giants who walked Munth untold eons ago. All that was left of them were their dragon descendents. The brontosaur’s long neck weaved through the air while a pterosaur swooped above everything. It was rumored that there were still some flying dragons in the mountains, but she was satisfied with them strung from the ceiling.

Finally they came to the exhibit’s center piece. A terrifying tyrannosaur battling a triceratops. Wizards had managed to rig up a system where their roars boomed through the room while flashing lights simulated lightning. Macey always wondered how they were able to record sounds from the distant past.

She breathed in, and could swear she could smell the fresh mud beneath their feet, the blood of their wounds, and the feeling of a coming storm on her skin. When she was a kid, well a smaller kid, she would always cry and curl into her mom when they got here. But now, she knew that these creatures were so dead, and that they were a special kind of dead called extinct. Her mother always said that just because something is new or ugly or even a little scary doesn’t make it bad, and Macey took that to heart. This unfortunately led to Macey’s personal zoo of ‘pets’ she ‘adopted’ from the swamp by their house.

She felt the floor vibrate under her feet. That wasn’t part of the usual experience. She looked around and her jaw dropped. Her mother’s jaw followed and even her father couldn’t help it. A real, living behemoth stomped by. If not for the vibrations their tremendous weight caused, they were eerily quiet.

Behemoths were huge, hairy, intelligent elephants. They were to mammoths as humans were to chimpanzees. Their long, agile trunks were as dexterous as any human hand. Much larger than their animal cousins, but could speak, even though they rarely spoke.

Their taciturn and shy nature generally kept them away from humans, especially cities, but this one wore a sash that told everyone he was an employee at the museum. Macey briefly wondered what the behemoth thought of all those dioramas of bloody behemoths battling naked humans. The banner it hung read ‘Magical Demonstration for Children. Presented by Yufizard Hickory. Every Weekday from 3pm-4pm. Museum Planetary’. She smiled at that. She knew her uncle was famous, but she rarely got to see his name so big that it took a behemoth to lift it.

You did not see a behemoth every day, but even this couldn’t alleviate Macey’s father’s permanent sour mood. He motioned for them to move on quickly, apparently wanting to just get this over with. They went to a hall labeled ‘The Olde City Experience’, a miniature town built right in the museum to make you feel like you were back in ye olden times. It made Macey feel like a detective on the old streets at night. Cobbles beneath her feet and chip on her shoulder. On the lookout for olde type crimes like vagrancy or simony, whatever those were. Authentic fake posters were plastered over the brickwalls. Some were ads for plays, some were travel posters for countries which had long since been renamed, and some were for clubs that her mom told her were only for ‘moms and dads’.

A crowd was gathered in the fake town’s square, flashes of light and colored smoke coming from somewhere in their center. Macey was tall, but like many children, was still child sized.

“Can you give her a boost?” asked her mom.

Her father let out an exasperated sigh, and without a word, hauled Macey onto his shoulders.

“You’re getting too big for this,” he mumbled. Over the heads of the other patrons, Macey saw an old style wizard performing street magic. He wore a leopard pelt over his shoulder and waved a snake shaped wand.

“By the power of Tha-Muu-El, I declare that this is your card!” The crowd cheered. Uncle Yufi had always taught her that magic used to be done differently in the past, and that it would probably be done differently in the future. Magic used to be a random assortment of tricks, helper spirits, strange gods, and little scientific understanding. Modern wizards now sorted magic into two categories, push and pull, arcane and occult, light and dark magic. Uncle Yufe had described push as scientific magic and pull and religious magic, but that that was our modern understanding of it. He said that we’re always learning, and that the academy he taught at was always on the cutting edge.

“Dad, do you think maybe I could volunteer?” she asked.

“Mmm, maybe next time.”

Macey knew there probably wouldn’t be a next time. She and her father rarely went anywhere together. Her father gasped suddenly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you see that man in the crowd, the one with braids in his beard?”

Macey scanned the crowd. It was hard to tell adults apart. They all looked so similarly miserable. She eventually found him. Macey had to admit he looked pretty rich. Fur trimmed everything, more rings than knuckles, and a crazy look in his eye that meant eccentric to some.

“Yeah, do you know him?”

“That’s daddy’s boss’ boss.”

“You know I haven’t called you daddy in like two years right?” she asked as he put her down.

“Not now sweetie, daddy has to go network,” he said, disappearing into the crowd.

Her mother huffed. “Stay right here, Mace, I have to go have a talk with your father.” They had a lot of ‘talks’ recently. ‘Talks’ were the nice way of putting it. Macey took a seat on the town’s central well, complete with real fake water. Clear resin filled the fake well while historical coins covered its bottom. Everytime she came to the museum, she hoped that the water would magically become real and she could fish out a coin, but it was just the same pit of simulated water. As much as she loved the museum, it was still all fake. It seemed to her like a lot of thing in her life she thought were real were only illusions. Little lies everyone told each other to spare their feelings.

Her parent’s talk stretched from five minutes to ten, which was practically an hour. Like all children, Macey made it obvious how much her parent’s boring adult conversations personally inconvenienced her. She stretched backwards on the well and groaned loudly, but they didn’t look over. If childhood had a grimoire of all their not so ancient spells, none could withstand the power of a parent taking a long time to do anything.

Her parents were angrily whispering to each other while her father tried to charm his boss. With no sign that they had noticed her, no surprise there. She looked around the museum and noticed a new hallway that wasn’t there before.

She couldn’t remember the last time the museum had a new exhibit. The hall was flanked on both sides by large sculptures of winged mushaks with human heads. The heads had luxuriously braided beards, perfectly plucked eyebrows, and golden lipstick. Her father would have called them ‘unmanly’ which seemed strange coming out of his beardless face. And he seemed to really like his boss’s boss who had a similar styled beard, but that was because, as her mom put it, her father had a certain color of nose.

The sign between them read ‘Temple of the Old Gods’. Macey, looking back to her parents who were starting to really ramp up their argument, and decided that she was old enough for a little adventure. She had the average amount of caution for a child. Zero could still be an average. She casually wandered over the statues and peered between them. The floor ramped downwards, enclosed in a material that looked like real stone walls, but was like everything else, fake. Though she had to admire the craftsmanship. Carvings of little stick figures decorated the walls, marching, working, and celebrating in two dimensions forever.

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Then she spotted the sign and groaned. ‘Not Open to Public’. It was amazing the amount of secrets adults kept from the world of children. They expected them to be curious one moment then telling where they can or can’t go the next. It frustrated Macey to no end. She had hypothesized that grownups were just making up rules to make everyone, themselves included, more miserable. Much later in her life, Mace would realize how right she had been.

Part of why she liked her uncle is because he encouraged her curiosity. She glanced over her shoulder. No one was looking, and she could be in and out without her parents even noticing. And you didn’t get a museum this full without a bit of adventure. Did explorers follow the rules of the owners when they ‘recovered’ stuff from their tombs? She causally ducked under the rope, and set off on her first real adventure.

Macey ran her hand along the wall as she walked, savoring the feel of each relief. They weren’t real, but they were the closest she’d get. Dim lamps flickered in the gloom, making the carvings look almost like they were moving.

The hall opened in a chamber. The temple’s holy of holies, or its best approximation. Class cases were filled with strange artifacts. Gods with the heads of bulls, rams, and bugs were modeled in dirty metal. There were wooden dolls with their fronts cut open, and it looked like all their guts were removable. Macey hoped that was just the way they taught anatomy back then. Elaborate ritual costumes hung on mannequins. One looked like it had been intricately woven together with a million blades of grass. She saw clay offering bowls, which looked uncomfortably like screaming human heads.

A chill traced up her spine. She didn’t mind the dark, nor scary things like bowls with suspiciously red stains, but something about this place felt off. Off in a cosmic sense. It was just that she wasn’t supposed to be down here, that’s all, she thought to herself. It certainly wasn’t all these golden animal masks staring at her.

She spied a single open case in the corner. Paint buckets were strewn in front of it. Apparently this display was still being worked on, but left the artifacts unprotected to grubby hands.

There was a funny looking bronze bull head in the center. Small figurines of people were arranged around it, and seemed to be dancing towards the bull’s maw. Its mouth was open and lined with sharp obsidian teeth.

Macey glared at the strange visage and felt her breathing slow. Her thoughts felt distant, almost like she was thinking through fog. She had the urge to put her hand in its mouth. Macey knew what to expect, a cut finger and tears. Maybe even a trip to the doctors to treat whatever infected those teeth. But something inside calmed her fears. It was alright, it comforted, touch the teeth, nothing that bad will happen. What’s life without a little risk? Don’t you trust me? Curiosity could hurt sometimes, but the pain of not knowing was worse.

Her hand slowly lifted. She could just barely make out something in the bull’s mouth, past the razor sharp teeth. Was that face staring back at her?

Her finger was mere inches away. Almost there and…she touched it. One small finger caressed the smooth, cool obsidian. She felt a rush from her stomach. She was actually touching history! Her finger traced up the smooth side of the tooth. She wondered if it was still sharp. It looked sharp, but something told her there was only one way to really know. Her pointer finger was less than an inch from the sharp tip and…

“Macey?”

She jumped. Spun around. Shoved her hands in her pocket. “I wasn’t going to touch it!” she said quickly. Every kid knew they were bad liars, but also they knew that punishment was always inbound no matter what, so they gambled.

A tall man stood in the hall. Recognition washed over as her muscles relaxed.

“Uncle Yufe, you scared me,” she said. Then she realized that family could punish you more specifically than strangers, and tensed again.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for your big show?”

“Relax, you’re not in trouble, I had some time to kill and got curious about this new exhibit. Do your parents know you’re down here?”

She was about to lie again, but thought of a better reply. “Does the museum know you’re down here?”

He chuckled at that. “Asking the real questions, that’s my girl!” he said proudly. He looked around the small room. The fake chamber was cramped, and made you feel like you were in some dusty tomb or under a pyramid. Macey had been in caves before. She and her family took a trip to the dwarf crypts of Petra Harmon. In the caves, she never felt like it was hard to breathe, or trapped, or like something was hiding around a corner. But this exhibit did. It was dusty, a little too warm, and like something big was trying to get in.

“Do you know what all of this is?” asked her uncle, waving around the dark room. “This,” he said “is the other side of magic.”

“You mean..it’s pull magic? So it’s different from you and mom do?”

“Unfortunately yes, what we do we can understand. And what we can’t understand, we find out. But this is beyond anyone’s understanding.”

“What do you mean?” She liked it when her uncle taught her things, especially scary things. Her bookshelf at home was filled with both adventure and horror books.

“Your mother and I manipulate the world around us. These…things, gods as some people call them, send power from beyond the world.”

“Like from space?”

“From beyond space.”

She stared at the toothy bull head. “But I thought all the gods were gone?”

He shrugged. “Some are, but some find their way back, and some are new. And ‘gods’ is not the word I’d use for them, more like entities.”

“Can you learn about them at your school?”

“Not everyone can,” he shook his head. “You have to be very careful when conversing with these things, so it’s only for some students.” He gestured to all the artifacts that depicted screaming human faces. All Macey saw were secrets waiting to be discovered.

“Anyway, we should probably get you back to your parents. Neither of us are supposed to be down here. I won’t tell if you won’t,” he winked.

“Can’t we stay a little longer?” she pleaded.

“I think I’ve had my fill of scary stuff for one day. And your mother can be scarier than everything here combined.”

When they returned, Mace was crestfallen to find her parents still whisper-fighting. She didn’t want to worry them or get in trouble, but she thought they’d at least notice that she was gone. Her parents stopped when they saw uncle Yufe approach.

“Oh hi Yufe!” her mother said cheerfully. She could switch gears faster than anyone.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” said Yufizard, his eyes meeting her dad’s glowering stare.

Macey never knew why her dad didn’t like uncle Yufe. He was always so nice, but her father liked her being around Yufe less than he liked being around her.

“Oh no, we were just having a discussion,” said mom.

“A parenting discussion, a private parenting discussion,” corrected her father.

“Well, Mace here got a little excited and came to see me before the show.”

Her father shot her a look.

“Aw,” sighed her mom. “She’s already curious, just like a wizard already!”

“Yeah, like a wizard already,” grumbled her father. “Well little Macey is so hungry so we’ll have to catch you later!” smiled her father.

“But I’m not really hungry-“ started Macey before she was dragged away by her father.

“You’re practically famished, sweetie,” her father ordered.

“Are you serious?! Who would charge that much for an egg sandwich?!” Twenty minutes later, Macey found herself next to her father, who was arguing, or ‘practicing good business’ as he called it, with a food vendor.

“Sir I-“

“Don’t you ‘sir’ me!” her father interrupted. “I am a paying customer and I expect to be treated with respect!”

That was one of his favorite tactics for ‘good business’. Shouting something conflicting at a poor cashier until he got what he got what he wanted. He treated everyone like an opponent. Either they were above him and deserved ‘just enough respect’ until he usurped them, or they were below him, and deserved ‘nothing but contempt’. Macey briefly wondered where she was on his ladder.

“Dad, I’m not even that hungry-“

“Not now darling. Remember what I told you about listening and learning?”

Macey was certainly learning something. He finally got the cashier to capitulate. He knocked a whole ten percent off the price, which seemed to please her father.

He smiled at the poor man. “There! Now was that so hard?”

As they walked and ate, her father turned to her. “You probably thought I was being rather short with that man.”

Mace didn’t answer, and knew he wouldn’t wait for one. She was thinking a lot of things about her father.

“But I had to teach both you and him a valuable lesson. Do you know what that is?”

“No dad.”

“It’s ‘always fight for yourself’. You won’t be able to rely on your mother and I when you move out. You have to fight for any scrap you can sink your teeth in. Take that food vendor, for example. He would’ve done anything to charge me double for that sandwich! I had to put him in his place.”

“My stomach feels a little funny,” said Macey.

“Either you’re fighting for the top or you’re dead at the bottom. And when you win, only you can reap the rewards. And if you fail, you have no one to blame but yourself!”

Macey would’ve said ‘like how you blame your boss and coworkers?’ But for now, she was too focused on her queasy stomach.

“If the whole world worked like that, we’d have real freedom! It’s the natural order, but of course they won’t let it happen!”

In all of his rants, he always eventually got to ‘them’. Macey still wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, just that her father spat out the word and that ‘they’ seemed to personally cause all of her family’s problems.

“Dad, I think that egg sandwich made me sick,” said Macey quietly.

“Well we can’t take it back now.”

Macey looked down at her half eaten food, and nearly doubled over.

“But dad I-“

“You wanted it, I paid for it, you’re eating it.” His tone told her that was that. Macey rubbed her stomach and hoped it would go away by showtime.