It only took Airya a moment to realize they were in the woods where Airya had seen the witch throw an owl into a fire because that woman was standing in front of them in utter shock. The woman had on the same long robe Airya had seen her in before, a stark, brilliant blue against the green of the forest. She had the same necklace also dangling from her neck, made from the talons and feathers of the owls in this forest. Her hair fell over her shoulders darker than the lake at night. And when Airya studied her, she noticed that she had a red stamp directly on the corner of her forehead.
The woman who had seen Airya arrive lifted her nose up to the air and sniffed, “You smell of dimensional pixy. Why?”
Once again, Airya had no idea what that meant. And it seemed like it didn’t matter if she called out to the universe wanting to be taken to Obsviden. It only took her to his mark. She wondered if it was because she had touched his stamp. She knew her powers took her to Hethei if she was trying to find him, so it didn’t make sense why it didn’t work for Obsviden, unless with Hethei it was different because they had gotten their powers together at the same time.
Hethei dove at the lady, ready to scratch at her face, but the woman brought up a hand with dangling items clanging together that stopped Hethei in his tracks. When the woman noticed the scars on Hethei’s feet, her hand went to her necklace in what looked like shame. Her brows creased together. “How?” She asked Airya, her eyes directing her to the owl.
“I’ve seen you throw an owl in a fire. It ended up where I’m from. The same happened to him,” Airya glared. “Whatever you’re doing, let him go.”
“So, it works?” she asked.
“What works?”
The woman only nodded and Hethei fell from the sky. Airya dove onto her stomach and caught the bird in her hands.
“I never meant to harm your friend. We know they are being sent to a better place,” the woman waved Airya off and walked away from her.
“How? How would you know that?” Airya yelled after her. She let Hethei hop out of her hand before she stood up and followed after the woman with the glimmering red stamp.
The woman had to know something about Obsviden.
“Considering when anyone does anything, they guess at it. We did the same, except our intentions were higher. I am a decent witch here. I know what I’m doing.” She turned on Airya making Airya stop in her tracks. “Why are you following me? I told you that I did not mean to hurt your friend?”
Airya stared at the woman’s necklace again.
She covered it suddenly before glaring at her, “This was a gift of grief. Not pain and suffering like the idea in your head.”
For some reason, Airya couldn’t find it in herself to believe her, but she paid another look to the stamp on her forehead instead.
“What!” the woman yelled, moving her light brown eyes up to try to look at her brows. “Do I have something on my face?”
Airya brushed her hand across her own forehead to show the lady where she meant when she said, “A stamp.”
It took the woman a moment of searching with her fingers until her fingers touched it. She pulled them away, her face burning red as fire, “Obsviden,” she hissed his name like a curse.
“You know who he is?” Airya asked. “Do you know where he is?”
The woman almost laughed but held herself back, “No one knows where he is. What is your name, child?”
“Airya.”
A nod, “Has he marked you as his own too?”
Airya wasn’t sure. She looked down at her arms and then touched her head.
The woman tilted her head, amused, “You would know. Trust me. And it isn’t many humans he does that to. You can see the mark? Have you seen more than one?”
Airya found herself nodding. Was she the only one able to? “Can you?”
“Of course not!” The woman started to walk away again, and Airya followed. “My name is Marlee. Why have you been brought here?”
“I brought myself.”
“Even more interesting than you were before.”
Past a few more trees, Marlee brought them to the place where Airya had seen her with the owl she had thrown in the fire. All her items, like the book, the cage, the containers of plants, and such, were gone, but a little further ahead, Airya spotted a house.
“You said something about a dimensional pixy?” Airya asked. “Obsviden said something about a pixy too.”
Marlee stopped right outside of her home, and turned her head to look back at Airya, her dark brows rising high. Then she bent over laughing, holding her stomach as if it couldn’t be contained. “Is that how you got your magick also? The magick that brought you here?”
Airya didn’t say anything. How the woman was reacting seemed bizarre. By the time Marlee looked up at her, she must have seen the confusion on Airya’s face.
“Interesting. I’m guessing not,” she stood straight again, calming herself. “The pixy is something that Obsviden disgustingly ate to gain his powers. You would think that would have been below him with how he acts, especially since dimensional pixies are almost extinct.” She seemed to consider Airya for another moment. “You say the owls go where you are from? The intention is to take them somewhere safe, a paradise of sorts. But no true paradises are known. At least within my limits of understanding. So, did a pixy make your world? Is it a pocket dimension? How small?”
Airya didn’t know how to answer her questions because she didn’t know the answers to them. Her world did act more alive and caring than some worlds she had visited. It cared for her and her people like it was truly a paradise. She could even imagine the river as its own loving beast because it healed, cleaned, and fed them like any mother would for her children. But the idea that a creature made a place like that… That a creature made her home…
She thought of the giant mountains where her world ended, then looked around the trees and saw no end in sight. Wasn’t her world as small as any other world?
“You do not know,” the woman stated, a little disappointed. “Well, come inside and tell me why you’re here.”
The inside of her home was cluttered and dusty. The house was so small that there wasn’t anywhere to sit or stand. The cage with the sharp points was sitting on a table with books opened and laying all around it. There were books covering the floor, the chairs, and stubbing Airya’s feet.
Marlee shook her head, went to a couple of chairs, and took the books off them to throw them to the floor. She motioned for Airya to sit, but before Airya could, she spotted something interesting on the table before her.
“What’s that?” Airya asked. It was a book showing a purple triangle that could be broken into many pieces, as displayed by the picture next to it. The picture after that, showed many buildings made of the same kind of purple glass domineering an icy sky from the ground.
“You can read that?” Marlee asked, coming over to her.
Airya nodded.
“Then you tell me.”
“It’s just instructions. It says how it works. You break it apart, and it can oversee a vast area and signal when there’s stress by showing that stress in the glass face that is held.”
Snapping the book shut, Marlee threw it across the floor. “What a stupid gift. I thought it was something so much more interesting than that. How can you read that?”
Since Airya wasn’t sitting, Marlee picked up the small wooden chair and brought it over to her before pushing her down to sit on it.
“We have a mirror that helps us read things… or learn to read things at least… my mom helped too. She understood the mechanics of words and language.”
“In many forms?” Marlee asked, grabbing a chair for herself and sitting directly in front of Airya. She was too close. Their knees were touching.
Airya only shrugged.
“This mirror. Is it one with no true reflection?”
Airya stared at the woman’s forehead and the glistening stamp. She wanted to leave, but she needed to remind herself why she was still here.
“If it’s that mirror, I know where it came from, if you care to know,” Marlee offered, sitting back and crossing her arms. The movement and Marlee pulling away from her made Airya look into her eyes.
“I don’t really care to know. I just want to know why you have that mark,” Airya said. The sooner she knew what Marlee knew, she could leave. She had to remember the next time that Hethei and her came here, that they were to stay out of the forest.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
She rolled her eyes, “Obsviden gave it to me because I know the knowledge of the Spinning Top of Le Muse and there are no written records of it, and although he asked nicely, I refused to make him one. So, he marked me instead.”
“What is the Spinning Top of Le Muse?” Airya asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
Airya looked at the cage on the table. Her heart hurt as if it was trapped inside it, “My people have died. I’m trying to get them back.”
Marlee was silent.
When Airya finally found the strength to look at her, she saw that Marlee had been calculating for the perfect thing to say. “I’m sorry, but you don’t want to go that route. If you find it and spin it, then the Muse will come. If you fail to impress her, she will make you her slave. And honestly, I don’t see anything you could do to impress her and convince her to grant you one wish.” She licked her lips and then shrugged, “I also don’t know where it is. But I do know of a place where there may be more information you may seek. A story that Obsviden told me when I had seen him long ago.”
It was a place where nature refused to be touched. That was what Marlee had said, and Airya could see why. Lush trees created a beautiful magickal forest around her. This forest somehow made the forest she had just been in much duller and grey.
Hethei sat on her shoulder, taking it all in.
The tree trunks that gleamed the color of bronze were thick. So thick that there was no way Airya could wrap her arms around one and touch the other side unless there were three of her. She was entranced with how the leaves on every tree flickered a vibrant lime color that reflected off the high sun as if each blade were pieces of their own flawless metals.
And then there was what Airya could only describe as magick. Raindrops were suspended in various spots all around without a cloud in the sky. It was as if they were frozen waterfalls containing only droplets. Some were still, but others took turns reaching high past the leaves without touching a single green blade. Airya watched, mesmerized as the drops slowly floated up randomly, shimmering a light violet, until they faded away in the blue sky. It was as if the ground was filling the sky above them with the water it thirsted for to rain on other parts of the world.
This world breathed magick that was soaked in the beauty, and in the distance, through the trees near the sky, Airya could see the odd-shaped mountains that Marlee had told her about. She swore they looked as if they were moving and rotating unless it was a trick of the eyes. They were the mountains with a man trapped inside.
Airya went to take a step toward them, wanting to walk through the perfection that her mind begged to understand, but then the strands of grass under her feet stretched up and wrapped themselves around her ankles, holding her in place.
They started to burn her, excreting some kind of clear liquid.
Airya opened a portal and tore away from them. As soon as she lifted her foot away, the strands of grass let her go unbroken.
Untouched. The forest wanted to remain unchanged.
She wondered how far it would have been willing to go.
Back in Ausrine, the weight on her shoulder lifted as Hethei flew off of her and sat himself by the river where Airya went to soak her ankles in the cooling water. A band of blisters had started to form on her skin. She would need to go back, but this time she would go straight to the mountains instead.
But she couldn’t stop the beauty from haunting her thoughts.
It was what Ausrine possibly could have been if it hadn’t been tainted by creatures or death. Airya remembered when Ausrine was so bright, so beautiful when she was in her younger-aged body, until everything happened. Now, looking around, she could feel and see that a part of Ausrine had lost its glow.
Had Ausrine been even brighter and more beautiful before the Yellow Eyes had arrived?
Her mind flitted to the Place of Yellow Dust. Would that world have survived if it had been untouched too?
She lifted her feet out of the water and saw that now she had healing light pink wounds. She opened another portal. Thinking back on what could have been only hurt her heart more. She didn’t want to linger those thoughts, especially when she did not have time.
Slanted green-opal stone met her feet before she slipped and the back of her head hit the hard, smooth surface that she had been standing on. Before she fell, she saw that on the other side of the odd-shaped mountain she was on, endless sand stretched out through the reaches of time. She started to slide as the sea of slanted green stone began to shift and move around her threatening to slice her as one piece hit another and then ground across the stone she was lying on. It forced her to roll off of it onto a new slate that took its place. She tried to look up to the bright blue sky and saw Hethei flying above.
Then it all stopped. The stone plates froze, allowing her to scramble up the sheen rock a little before it started moving again.
She could hear Hethei screeching above.
She had no idea where she was or what she was supposed to be doing. She could not see anything around her but stone.
Jagged movement had her almost falling on her face when the stone plates shifted and began advancing in the opposite direction than they had before making her slide further down on her knees to what she thought was an opening down below.
But then it closed.
She was going to be crushed if she tried to go through there.
But did she really have any other choice? She had once decided with her dad that she would be brave. Wasn’t this the chance to prove that she was? That she had grown into someone who was willing to risk her life to set her people free?
If she survived this and brought her people back, she knew that her dad would love the adventurous stories that would be told. But she would have no stories, no family, and no people, unless she continued to let herself slip down and not get cut in half.
“Go home, Hethei!” Airya yelled, not knowing if the words would reach him now that she had even more slabs of stone towering over her than she had before. She saw him try to come in toward her, but he got scared and flew out.
“I’ll be fine. I promise! I’ll meet you back home soon!”
She was almost there, almost to the hole that kept opening and closing. It opened again and slid shut as the stone plates separated and came back together, twisting and dancing with the ones above her.
She held her breath, getting closer to the opening.
But then it all stopped.
The plates froze and started shifting the other way again, making her twist and roll, unable to keep track of the hole directly below her.
Then she caught sight of it, and right when her legs were about to fall through, it was about to close.
She could almost feel the stone cutting into her legs to slice them off as she watched the hole grow narrower below her as she slid. She knew she wouldn’t make it through and didn’t know what to do.
She called to home for only a second and made a portal over the hole that her feet slid inside of right as the hole closed up below. At that very moment, she yanked her legs up, tucking them to her chest away from the portal before making it disappear right when the hole started to open again.
She was sent into a freefall.
White sand glittered beneath the vibrant, moving green rocks and greeted her legs with a jarring shock as her knees buckled and her chest fell into the sand.
She spat the sand from her mouth and looked around.
There. There on the sand, partly buried, were bones. Bones shaped like a person only starting to fall apart. And near it, buried in the sand too, was something with a red glaring stamp-like mark.
She crawled toward it, her legs shaking from falling into the grating sand.
She reached the stamp and dug her hands around it to dig out a blue-crusted device that looked like a shell. It was oddly shaped with curves and indents that only nature could forge. A single clear line running down it beckoned her to run her finger over it to give it heat from a well-beating heart. At that moment, it felt like magick.
“Looks like you are one of the only ones who could have found this one.”
Air sucked into her lungs at the voice from behind her. Whipping her head around, she saw Obsviden standing there looking smug and just as perfect and flawless as before.
As he walked toward her, no sand threatened to sneak into his black sleek shoes. The sand cowered away.
He looked at the pile of bones with a smile, “Poor guy.”
“What…” Airya tried to find words. Tried to fit all her desperations into this moment before he might slip away. She held up the blue-crusted piece of earth that was possibly magick. “What is this? Why is your mark on it? Why is your mark on many things?”
“My mark?” he snapped his finger as if something came to him, “You can see them then. Because you touched one and have the same magick I do.”
She was tired of hearing about how similar she was to him. “What is this?”
He flicked at the air with the back of his hand, “Well, do what you were about to do?”
She did. She trailed her finger over the thin translucent line that called her name.
Vibrations sprung to her fingertip as shots of something invisible forced their way out of the device and buried themselves in the sand. She almost dropped the heavy piece of magick she was holding when a broken voice taking form presented itself in front of her. Between the four holes that glistened, lines of purple and green began to twirl and move as words were spoken that she did not understand, no matter how hard she tried to decipher the language she did not know.
When it all stopped, Obsviden looked to her as if she should have her answer.
“I couldn’t understand what it was saying.”
“What he was saying,” he corrected her. “He complained about how he was thrown into this agonizing place with no escape by a god. He added that it was because he almost had his hands on the Shackled Eye of Brillia. Then he whined that it was because he only wanted to find his people again.” Obsviden’s hand shot to his mouth in feigned shock, “Oh, like you.”
Was that really what the voice had said? Could she trust him?
“What is the Shackled Eye of Brillia?” she asked, letting the device drop back into the sand before making herself stand on her quivering legs. Even though he was dressed so much more intimidating and was so much older and had more power than her little body had, She wanted to meet him on his level. She wanted to show him that she had no fear before asking the questions she wanted to ask next.
“It’s a shackle that takes you to the place the dead dwell in discontinuation,” Obsviden answered with a shrug of indifference. “It was made by a god.”
“Is that where my people are?”
“I guess you are going to have to find out. Why end your adventure here?”
Desperation. That was what she felt covering every inch of her skin. “Please…. Can you just tell me? I have a time limit.”
He gave her a smile, “Oh, yes. The marks tell me where you have been, and I can imagine what your eyes fell onto. But your situation is unique, isn’t it? The fact that your dead aren’t allowed to wither and decay. The souls die first. Very interesting.”
A tear cooled her cheek. She couldn’t lose them forever.
He noticed, “Your first taste of death. And it wasn’t even a small taste. It wasn’t even natural. It was catastrophic. I bet your insides want you to fall into them and suck you into their own black hole. Death does that. Death leaves nothing else but grief… And yet… to think that humans and creatures still give death to all through strife.”
She could only stare.
“That. That is why death is so interesting.”
“Where is the Shackled Eye of Brillia?”
His perfectly white teeth gleamed, “In a bustling kingdom. So busy and hot you can barely breathe. It’s locked away in the top tower of The Vizen in Nokia with other gifts from gods, which with your powers, I’m sure you can get to.” He laughed, “You will find it interesting there. The sibling Queen and King have godlike blood in their veins.”
He came closer and grabbed a lock of her hair, letting it fall between his fingers as he pulled his hand away. He was so much taller than her, so domineering that she shook whenever she came too close to his touch.
“You have six months.”
Then he was gone.
Airya looked to Hethei, "Are you ready?"
A puff of feathers.
Hethei had been ecstatic to find Airya after she had opened a portal back to Ausrine, but he had been irritated to find out that she didn’t want to rest. Not when she was so close. Not when she had something that she knew she could use. She had six months. The first thing she had to do was find her people. Then she would have to spend the rest of the time she had left figuring out how to get them back.
She reached out and let herself want to be in a place that was surrounded by so many people, unlike her own. She wanted to be in a dry, hot kingdom with a large sun beating down. She wanted to be with the gods of Brillia and look into their eyes. She wanted to feel the warm air and the raw presence of life. She wanted to go where The Shackled Eye of Brillia may be.
A small hole opened, growing extensive, and then stood there waiting. She sighed, "Let's hope we got it," she said to Hethei before stepping in.