Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology Page 29

  “Makes plenty of sense to me. Just play with your book.”

  “The moon’s behind clouds now. I can’t even see it.”

  “Hmm. Well, let’s try this.”

  She raised the wand and swirled it in the air. A thin streamer of blue-white light began to trail behind it. A few more twirls conjured a sort of wreath of light, more than enough to illuminate the page.

  “Wow. How did you do that?”

  “I just thought about doing it and it happened.”

  “I wonder if that means I can do the same thing with this.”

  He looked at the book’s unfamiliar symbols and imagined being able to read them. At first nothing happened. Then he felt something in his mind start to stir. First one at a time, then in whole lines, the shapes on the page changed. They didn’t look any different, but now a sequence of squiggles and runes seemed to have meaning. Each represented a word or a thought.

  “It’s working. It’s working! This says ‘The Ways and Workings of the First Wave Casting Wand.’”

  “And you said Dad’s sayings don’t make sense,” Layla said. She collected a few medium-sized stones and set them on top of the stump. “I’ll bet you I can hit these from over by the fence.”

  For a few minutes, Layla took crackling potshots at the stones while William flipped through the pages of the book, ravenously consuming the contents of each one.

  “This thing is hard to aim,” she remarked as a third blast in a row went lancing into sky. She squinted and lined the wand up carefully, then gave it a flick. A bolt of energy struck one of the stones, shattering it. “Ha! Those moles had better watch out now! Did you find anything good in there?”

  “I think this book is written to tell you all of the things the wand can do.” He glanced behind him. The spot along the fence that Layla had chosen to stand for target practice was a stone’s throw away from the region’s namesake spire. He eyed it in its place on the other side of the fence, then turned to her. “Let me try it for a second.”

  “In a bit. I’m just getting the hang of it.”

  “Come on, I’ll give it right back.”

  Reluctantly, Layla handed him the wand. He steadied the book in one hand and held the wand in the other. After a few moments of looking at the page he closed his eyes, then opened them again and waved the wand at the spire. There was no immediate effect.

  “What was supposed to happen?”

  “It says I should be able to ‘reveal all that needs to be known’ about the spire.”

  “Leave it to you to pick something boring. Give me the wand back, I—”

  The air around them shuddered, then the world seemed to vanish into darkness. In front of them, where the spire had been, there was only a long and irregular stone. Along the surface, the stone began to spark and flash, falling away in tiny chips. The chips fell faster and faster, eventually revealing the rough shape of the spire. As it became more detailed and refined, the world around it began to fade back into place, but it wasn’t the farm. It was a city, ancient and primitive. The chips falling away to give the spire ever-greater detail were now falling under the expert bite of an artisan’s chisel. The artist moved so swiftly that he was little more than a shimmering blur. Above them the sun streaked from day to night and back again with such velocity that there seemed to be perpetual twilight. In no time the spire stood in all of its freshly crafted glory. Next the whole world around them began to shift and slide, whisking by while the spire remained stationary. It was as though its position and angle were locked in place with respect to its observers. The work of art was slung with ropes, heaved onto a boat, then dangled from scaffolds and affixed atop a castle. For a few glorious moments William and Layla were drifting in the sky beside a magnificent tower while below them a city began to assemble itself. It should have been terrifying to be hanging in the air high over the ground, but the awe of the sight washed the fear away.

  “What is this place?” Layla asked breathlessly.

  “It looks like New Kenvard…only different. I think…I think it might be old Kenvard.”

  The flickering of day/night slowed until the scene was moving slowly enough for them to make out individual people going about their lives. In the distance, beyond the walls, a force of red-clad soldiers gathered. Arrows were launched, fires were started, and then the soldiers broke through the walls, washing over the city like a tide. When the soldiers receded, the city was in ruins. Without so much as a moment’s pause in respect for the fallen, the day/night returned to its blinding speed. Though they passed in seconds, what must have been years of time rolled by with few changes to the scene below. New buildings appeared, and a steady stream of soldiers flowed from them, but little else seemed to occur. Then the sun slowed once more, and in the distance a form in the sky revealed itself, a dragon with a woman on its back. It whisked through the city and darted into the doors at the base of the tower beneath them. A heartbeat later the dragon erupted from within, now with a strange looking creature as its second passenger. Next a blinding flash of blue light blotted out the landscape for an instant. The world twirled around them, and finally the spire came to rest in its current location. The scene flickered with day and night for a few moments more. A tree sprouted, grew, withered, and died. The farmhouse and the fence appeared. Finally the sun set one final time and the ghostly images of William and Layla themselves appeared, played with the wand, then stepped into their present positions.

  A full minute passed before either of the children could coax their minds into producing words. Layla was the first to speak, her eyes fixed in wonder upon the wand.

  “What else does the book say this can do…?”

  #

  The hours of the night seemed to sweep by as swiftly as they had in the visions the spell had shown them. One by one they worked their way through the pages of the book, testing spells that seemed interesting. Knowing what the shapes on the page meant, it turned out, wasn’t quite enough. Many of the spells contained words of which they had no clue of the meaning, or sequences of words they knew, but which didn’t make sense when put together. After a few spells, Layla began to understand that the wand wasn’t simply doing whatever she wanted it to do. It could do a variety of things and was selecting the one closest to what she had in mind. Some of the more abstract spells took a few tries to cast, but before long they had nearly reached the last page.

  “Try this one. It says it will ‘produce from raw material a temporary, simplified, dragon-type puppet under the caster’s permanent control,’ whatever that means,” William said.

  “A puppet? Why would there be a spell for making a puppet?” she wondered.

  “Maybe the wand was supposed to be used for entertainment. That’s what we’re using it for.”

  She shrugged and tried to conjure to mind a reasonable approximation of a “dragon-type puppet,” then flicked the wand. The bolt of magic sparkled toward the mound of earth William had created through days of digging. They waited a few seconds, but nothing seemed to happen.

  “That one was another fizzle. What’s left?” she asked.

  “Just one more,” he said. “It just says, ‘The most important of spells. The beginning, the entrance, the keyhole. A door large enough for four.’ What could that be?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Are you sure we should? The sun’s almost up. We’ve been doing this all night.”

  “As long as we’ve already lost a whole night’s sleep, we might as well finish things,” she said.

  Layla pictured a keyhole in her mind, then waved the wand vaguely toward the stump. A slow wave of black wafted along in the path behind the wand’s motion. The wispy darkness drifted like a ribbon of gossamer caught in the wind, then began to coil in on itself above the stump. The wand shook lightly, then tugged itself from Layla’s fingers, floating forward until it hung in the air just below the coil of black. A filament of brilliant blue light burst from the tip, feeding the coil and causing it to t
ighten and swirl.

  “Oh. This might be a good one,” Layla said, crossing her arms and waiting for the spell to run its course.

  For a time the coil merely swirled with steadily increasing speed.

  “I wonder how long it will take,” William said.

  “Hopefully not too long. I don’t want it to still be going when Mom and Dad wake up.” At the sound of tumbling soil, she looked at William, then at the mound beside the hole. At first she gasped, but then a smirk came to her face. “Oh, look, the puppet spell did work.”

  Emerging from the pile of dirt was a creature that at a glance certainly seemed to be “dragon-type.” It didn’t look exactly like a dragon. For one thing, it was tiny, perhaps the size of a cat. For another thing, it looked almost like it had been chiseled from stone. Its long neck and tail had a segmented look to them, and except for the wings, the features were all very rough and crude, formed from a purple-black hide similar to the book’s cover. There were no eyes, only sockets that had an ember-orange glow to them. Its mouth was a jagged beak hanging slightly open. After stepping free of the now greatly reduced mound of soil, it stood motionless, staring at them.

  “Ugh. It’s an ugly little thing,” Layla remarked. She furrowed her brow. “Why does it seem familiar?”

  She turned to her brother, who was staring with eyes wide with fear.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s a dragoyle,” he said with a frightened hush.

  She looked back at it, then back to her brother. “The monster things? The ones Dad always told scary stories about? Yeah, I suppose it does look a bit like one of them.”

  “Did you picture one when you cast the spell?”

  “Not even close. I pictured a dragon made of wood with strings on it. Why would the wand make a dragoyle?” Her mind churned for a moment, sifting through the stories that the dragoyle brought to mind. Then the answer struck her, and her eyes widened as much as her brother’s. “You don’t think…what if…what if that is a D’Karon wand? The D’Karon were the wizards who made those things, right? Why would a wand make a dragoyle if it wasn’t one of theirs?”

  “The D’Karon are wizards who came here from another world…and we just cast a spell that said it was a door…” he said.

  She looked back to the wand. It was crackling with energy. “We need to stop the spell!”

  Layla rushed toward the wand and tried to reach for it, but a spark of energy leaped out from it and struck her hand, causing her to recoil in pain. William flipped madly through the book.

  “It says the only way to stop a spell is to cut off the source of power. We can’t just take the wand. We have to break it,” he said.

  “But I can’t even get close!”

  The swirl was getting larger now, almost as large as the stump, and there was a foul-smelling wind rushing out of it. Just at the edge of hearing was a mixture of chilling noises, like voices chanting in an unknowable language. Layla panicked, grabbing stones and hurling them at the wand. The fear coursing through her took any precision from her throws, and any stones that came close were zapped away by the wand.

  “Go get me more rocks!” she cried out.

  William scrambled to obey, spotting a decent one a short distance away, but before he could reach it, the little dragoyle sprang into action, clamping down on the rock with its mouth and dropping it at Layla’s feet.

  “Why did it do that?” she asked, her mind in no condition for any more puzzles.

  “It…it is a puppet. You control it.”

  “You’re right!” She turned to the monster. “Dragoyle, destroy the wand!”

  It snapped to the task, bounding toward the wand and shrugging off a blast. It clamped down on the artifact, heaving a breath of blackness while it shook and chomped. There was a hissing whine, almost like the wand was screaming in pain, and finally it fractured in a burst of light and fell to the stump. The instant it broke, the dragoyle fell lifeless, and the swirl began to slow. Layla wiped beading sweat from her forehead.

  “Okay, the wand is gone. What happens now?” she asked.

  He flipped to the end of the book, and his eyes traced over the page, the words now illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun.

  “I can’t understand the words anymore,” he said.

  “I guess that makes sense. All of the spells are going away. Did it just get colder?” she asked, pulling her nightshirt a little tighter.

  “Just windier, I think,” he said. He looked across the brightening field. The tufts of grass and remaining stalks from the harvest were beginning to bow under the force of the wind, but they weren’t moving in the sweeping wave that he was used to. They were bowing in a curve…and all directly toward the shrinking swirl. “Grab onto something! The wind is blowing toward that thing!”

  They sprinted toward the fence, but its widely spaced slats were already rattling dangerously in the wind. If the gale grew strong enough, it wouldn’t anchor them for very long. Crawling through it and fighting a rush of wind that threatened to drag them backward, they made their way to the spire and wrapped their arms around it. The wind intensified. Soil and earth were spiraling into the black swirl. It sucked up the book, shredding it to pieces as it did, and made short work of the dragoyle’s remains as well. The stump was shaking and straining at its weakened roots. Above it, the swirl was barely the size of the fist, but the air rushing into it howled deafeningly.

  With a crack like a whip, the stump pulled free, colliding with the ball of darkness and splintering into a galaxy of tiny fragments that disappeared inside. Now the mass of black was the size of a marble. And now it was the size of a pea. Now a pinpoint. The air shook with a resounding roll of thunder and burst of energy as the swirl finally vanished completely, taking the maelstrom with it just as swiftly as it had come.

  The children let a few long moments pass before they were willing to release their grip on the spire. When they did, they took some time to observe the scene of chaos revealed by the rising sun. The stump was gone, and a good deal of the earth beneath it had gone with it. A few slats had been ripped from the fence and hurled far into the field. Each of the siblings was plastered with dust and dirt, their hair and eyes wild. Their jangled nerves had not yet permitted anything as complex as speech or rational thought to fall into place by the time they heard their names echoing across the field. They looked toward the farmhouse and saw their father rushing in their direction, still in his nightclothes. Layla and William both hurried to him, hugging him tightly.

  “What is going on here? Your mother and I woke to a terrible sound and found your room empty.”

  “We—” William began.

  “We woke up early to…to finish the stump,” Layla said. She was always quick with a lie when the situation called for it. When the truth involved dark sorcery and nearly summoning an ancient evil, the situation certainly called for a lie.

  “You what?” their father asked. He looked around, spotting the scooped out pit of earth and the scraggly remnants of roots sticking out from its edges. “Good heavens. You certainly did a thorough job of it.” He looked around. “Where did you put it? And where did you put the soil?”

  “A man came by. He had an empty wagon. We convinced him to haul it away,” William offered, slowly picking up on his sister’s ideas.

  “If you were digging, where are the shovels?” their father asked, now legitimately confused.

  “We put them away,” Layla said.

  “Then why are you out here?”

  “We were trying to figure out how to fix the fence. It broke when we were loading the soil.”

  The confused farmer looked around at the shattered and scattered slats. “And the noise? What was that?”

  “There was a windstorm. It passed quickly, but it made a mess,” Layla said.

  He looked into the frazzled and anxious faces of each of his children. Their story didn’t make any sense, and he seemed reluctant to believe it, but in the absence of a bet
ter explanation it was enough.

  “We’ll discuss it later. Next time you plan something like this, tell your mother and I so we won’t be worried.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be doing something like this again, Dad,” Layla said.

  The trio set off back to the farmhouse. William glanced over his shoulder at the spire.

  “Father?” he said.

  “Yes, William?”

  “Since the stump is gone, can we go to New Kenvard like you said…after a nap.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do you think anyone there will be able to tell us about the history of the city?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “I’d like to hear about it.”

  “Yeah,” said Layla. “I think I would too.”

  Love, Crystal, and Stone

  Teresa Frohock

  MY FIRST MEMORY was of the sun on the Alboran Sea, glittering crystalline tears of light that bounced on every wave. The ocean thundered and foamed against nearby cliffs, clawing at the earth and dragging it away one pebble at a time. Gulls wheeled overhead, dazzling bolts of silver, they shrieked like women afire.

  I sat on the beach, a toddler speckled with sand, wet curls plastered to my cheeks. I remember I cried until my throat was sore, deep wails of loss and grief, yet no matter how I screamed, my mother would not come. Maybe the heavy waves deafened her, or the screeching gulls distracted her, perhaps she had fallen in her salt-water chambers. The reasons didn’t matter. I only knew that I was alone and afraid. I wanted my mother to take me away from this blistering, noisy beach, back into the cool safety of her arms.

  Suddenly, calloused hands slipped beneath my arms and lifted me high.

  Shocked by the movement, I summoned the energy for a howl that sent the gulls whirling toward the cliffs. When my cry faded and I opened my eyes again, I saw a man’s weathered face close to mine. His eyes were the color of cinnamon, and he wrapped me in a gaze full of warmth. He was a boxy man with square shoulders and thick fingers; accustomed to his own strength, he rocked me tenderly against his chest.