As Elvie walked the hallways and stairwells, tiredness clung to every limb. Why did being in the past need to leave her so emotionally drained?

She pushed open the door to her bedroom, and there, framed by the wooden panelling, stood a cat with purple eyes.

Elvie stared.

The cat moved towards her, and she resisted the temptation to flinch from the blurred edges of its form. Déjà vu flooded her – a feeling she’d known this cat before and not just seen it, but where? When?

The tree. This had been the cat from the tree in the forest. And those eyes…

‘I’m dreaming,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I’ve fallen asleep in the hallway, and I’m dreaming.’

The cat brushed up against her leg, with its tail tickling across her thigh – not like she would expect an actual cat to tickle – but faintly, as if a mouse made tiny tracks across her skin. The cat circled her legs before moving off down the hallway.

Purple eyes turned to look back. ‘Follow,’ the cat whispered into Elvie’s mind.

Undecided, she kept staring.

‘Follow,’ it told her again.

‘Maybe if you told me what we’re doing with more than one word…’

‘Follow.’

So she did. She trailed the cat through the corridors of Elder House as he wove a precise path. He, or she, or it? She didn’t know – but the cat walked through the house like it was the owner, keeping a steady pace forward and a watchful eye backwards to ensure she remained close. Each time she paused to turn on a light switch, the cat waited. Each time she needed to open a door, the cat watched her calmly.

‘Ahhh… What’re we doing?’ Elvie asked at one point, turning the handle so the cat could continue down a long hallway towards the rear of Elder House. It gave no reply, but she had a vague idea where it led her. After all, she’d been there before. ‘I’m starting to get a feeling I know where we’re going, you know…’

When they reached their destination, the purple eyes turned to her and stared.

It was the door, that same locked door.

Nothing had changed about it since she’d last visited. The evidence was written onto the tiles where her footprints tracked a path through the dust. Had she once hoped nobody would notice those?

The solid oak door was still as impassive as the first time she’d arrived, and, not surprisingly, still just as locked. ‘I’ve tried this before, and I can’t get in,’ she told the cat, exasperated.

The purple eyes didn’t blink.

She jiggled the door handle loudly but was met with the same resistance; there was not even any movement in the door or frame. She pushed the door back as hard as her strength would allow. Nothing. It was utterly, solidly, locked.

‘Apertyse,’ the cast whispered into her mind.

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A spell, but of what house? That was the question. She wouldn’t be able to cast it effectively if it was from a different Great House, but perhaps she could squeeze enough willpower into the spell if she used Alistar’s theory of the ‘fuzzy feeling’.

Elvie pictured the door opening and created a sense of a secret revealing itself. In her old life, a large package had been delivered one morning. It was plonked on their doorstep, and then it mysteriously disappeared. Elvie had been desperate to find out where the box went, and what was in it – it was close to her twelfth birthday, after all. That was the memory and feeling she used as the focus to her spell – a desperate desire to get to the bottom of a mystery.

‘Apertyse,’ she commanded. Pale blue light flashed, starting on the lock before it rippled across the whole doorway. The door clicked and fell ajar.

It was open. She’d done it! Or, the cat had done it.

Elvie pushed the door further open to a loud creaking sound and a dry, musty smell.

‘You coming?’ she asked the purple-eyed cat. In response, he leisurely strolled by, forcing her to follow.

The room was small and poorly lit. Elvie swept her hand back and forth across the walls, but struggled to find a light switch. After a while, she gave up. Clearly, no electricity had been installed in this room whenever they’d updated the rest of Elder House.

‘Verlig,’ the cat spoke to her.

She tried the spell. Without knowing the focus, it produced extremely weak magic. A small light flickered into existence in the air over her head, barely illuminating the room in which she stood. But Elvie didn’t need much. The room was no more than two metres across, and three metres back, with wooden floors and bare rustic white walls.

One small table sat in the room, dully reflecting the feeble light from above. On that singular table, lay a long staff.

Elvie reached for it, then paused. What if it was magic? You didn’t just lock things up because you felt like it – not with magical wards. And there was something about all of this that just felt…

A part of her was worried, but she trusted the cat – it had saved her numerous times now with warnings. Elvie lifted the stave from its resting place.

At first glance, the staff appeared to be made from a metal that gleamed like a dull mirror. But as her fingers closed upon the staff, the soft ripples beneath her hand told the truth – it was a staff made of some sort of unusually light wood. Runes ran its entire length, seamlessly curving across the natural dents and knots. In the centre of the staff, between the spot where Elvie assumed you would hold it with two hands, was a deeply etched, larger rune.

‘What are you?’ she pondered, but she didn’t know the answer. It didn’t feel magic. It didn’t feel special, even if it looked unusual. In fact, she was certain she’d seen magicians with similar style walking sticks, especially the older ones. Intuitively, she assumed the staff had to be remarkable. The craftsmanship, symbols, and runes suggested it had some magical ability.

‘Why would you hide something like this in a warded room?’ she asked the cat. He was doing his silent act now, and didn’t reply.

The best place for the staff, Elvie reasoned, was likely in this room – at least until she could talk to Callum or Alistar about it. So Elvie returned the staff to its resting place but grunted in surprise.

It stuck to her hands.

She wrung her hands, desperately trying to remove the staff, to let it go. But the mirrored wood attached itself like it had melded to her skin. What on earth was happening?

She looked at purple eyes in desperation. ‘What do I do?’

His head tilted, but he didn’t reply.

‘Seriously. Please! Help me.’ She panicked. ‘Please, please! Could you please get this off me?!’

The symbol on the staff reacted to her desperation, glowing to a blinding brightness before vanishing. Elvie shuddered in pain as a burning sensation swept across the inside of her wrist, leaving her gasping for breath.

The staff had vanished into thin air, but the symbol had implanted on the inside of her wrist. It wasn’t a burn – indeed, it wasn’t red but silvery – but it was visible and slightly raised like an old scar.

She stared at it in shock.

The cat remained, watching her curiously.

‘You did this!’ she accused, pointing down at the image on her wrist and glaring, then alternating her glare back to him.

The cat’s purple eyes glowed as it tilted its head, but no more words were spoken in her mind.

‘Don’t ignore me – that’s rude. You led me there! You wanted this! Why?’

The cat meowed plaintively.

For the umpteenth time, she glared at it. ‘You can talk when you want to, but you refuse to tell me what just happened?’

No response.

For better or worse, it was done.