“Once bitten, twice shy,” they always say, but at the moment I couldn’t care less. Sure, having been a prisoner in Belac’s castle once before didn’t make me exactly eager to try it again. At the moment I was so anxious to find out what had happened to my father I didn’t much care if I put myself or anyone else, for that matter, in harm’s way again.
I was on a mission, and no bug-eyed swamp troll was going to keep me from finding the truth. Not this time.
If the picture proved true and Belac really had killed my father, I was dead certain he was going to pay for his crime. It wasn’t that I had revenge on my mind…well, okay, it was a bit of revenge. But there was righteous anger in there too somewhere, I’m sure of it. Besides, it was high time someone put Belac in his place. After all, this wasn’t only for me but for all the other boys who had lost their fathers at the tender age of twelve; it was for Stretch and his horrible experience in Solandria; for Mom and Emily who were missing. What all of this had to do with Belac, I’m not exactly sure. But it made sense in my mind and it gave me the motivation I needed to go back to the castle without feeling even the slightest hesitation. “Once bitten, twice the ball of fury” is what I say.
Things were different this time. Desi’s fire whips, my Veritas Sword and Trista’s bow would be more than a match for a bumbling troll and his club. It was three against one; we had the upper hand. But beyond having mere numbers on our side, I knew a secret that practically guaranteed our success. Like the Noctu, Belac slept during daylight hours…more importantly, he snored.
By snoring I don’t just mean that grumbly, snarly sound your uncle makes when he sleeps, but rather an obnoxiously loud, cement mixer snore with the amplitude of a megaphone added in for good measure. If there was anything you could count on from Belac, it was that from dawn til dusk, the grumpy old troll disappeared into his junk heap of a bedroom…and snored. There wasn’t a second of the day during my captivity that I didn’t hear the beastly sound, echoing throughout the castle.
Our strategy was simple: attack at high noon under the cover of Belac’s snore. It was a brilliant plan, and one that couldn’t fail, or so I thought.
By daylight, the castle in the swamp looked almost charming, like something out of a fairy tale. Almost, that is, if it weren’t for the constant stench of the rotting bog that burned in our nostrils.
“What is that wretched smell?” Desi spat as we approached the last line of tree cover outside the stone fortress. I had forgotten how nauseatingly awful the bubbling bog was.
“It’s not the smell of the swamp that should bother you,” I replied. “It’s what’s in it.”
“Which is what exactly?” Desi asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I replied, recalling the giant leeches that had covered my body night after night on my previous visit. The reminder fueled the fire in my stomach again. It was time to get even. As swiftly as we could, we crossed the swamp to the front door. It was locked from the inside.
“It won’t budge,” I said, shoving my shoulder into it a second time. The first phase of my supposedly perfect plan had come to a crashing halt.
“You weren’t exactly expecting a welcoming party, were you?” Desi asked.
Ignoring the comment, I shouldered the door a third time and nearly bruised myself in the process. It was no use; the door wasn’t going anywhere.
“What now?” Trista asked, as I stepped away from the door with a slightly embarrassed look on my face. There was no way I was going to admit defeat.
“If at first you don’t succeed…” I said, raising my Veritas Sword over my head and preparing to hack my way through the immovable door.
“Whoa there, cowboy,” Desi interrupted, stopping my arm mid-swing. “Do you want to wake Belac? We need a better plan.”
“Oh, right. Well, maybe there’s a back door we can slip in through,” I said, feeling good about the suggestion.
“That’s not a plan. That’s floundering.”
The remark smacked my ego full in the face, but I wasn’t going to let it get to me. After all, it was my own brilliance that had led us this far. Neither Simon nor Desi had been able to figure out where my father had gone. We were only one door-width away from finding the answers that had eluded us both.
“Floundering or not, I haven’t heard any other ideas,” I replied.
“Well, there must be some other way in,” Trista added.
“There always is,” Desi replied confidently, taking control of the situation. “It’s just a matter of where…to…look.” She backed away from the door a few steps and glanced overhead. “There!” she nearly shouted, pointing to a window on the second story.
“How is that a plan?” I asked, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “It’s thirty feet up at least; how are you going to reach it?”
Desi rolled her eyes and held up one of her fire whips. “Stand back and learn,” she said, drawing the tail of the blue whip much longer than before. When she was finished, the length of the whip fell to the ground beside her. She gauged the distance and swung the whip overhead, targeting a beam that stuck out from the roofline just above the window. The tip of the whip wound around the beam tightly and Desi gave it a good tug. It held in place.
“Be back in a minute,” she said, using the glowing whip to scale the wall. She crawled through the window and disappeared inside. A few moments later, the front door creaked open and Desi was there. She retrieved the whip rod and retracted the tail into it. Together, the three of us slipped inside Belac’s home and closed the door softly behind us.
The dingy interior looked worse than I remembered. The walls were actually growing moss on the inside and the floor looked like it had never been cleaned. But it wasn’t the look of the place that bothered me most. It was what we heard…or rather what we didn’t hear, that made my heart freeze.
“We have a problem,” I whispered. “No snore!”
The absence of Belac’s obnoxious snoring could only mean one of two things….
“Maybe he’s gone?” Trista asked, sounding somewhat hopeful.
“That, or he knows we’re here and he’s waiting somewhere,” Desi added.
It struck me how different the two girls were. Trista was the eternal optimist, hopeful and trusting to a fault. Desi, on the other hand, was more like a cat, confident and sly, always on the alert and ready for the unexpected to happen. They were a well-matched pair.
“Either way, there’s no use wasting time. We’ll find out soon enough,” I pointed out.
“What’s next?” Desi asked, deferring to me, despite the dismal failure of my plan thus far.
“Follow me,” I answered, motioning to the left and slinking down the hallway. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next part of the mission. It meant revisiting one of the darkest moments in my life: Belac’s prison.
A collection of iron shackles in various shapes and sizes hung from wooden pegs on the wall outside the prison door. They were the same kind of shackles Belac had used on Stretch and me to ensure we didn’t run away. I picked out a pair that seemed large enough to fit Belac himself and imagined the joy I’d feel locking them on his wrists for a change.
As we turned to leave, I spotted something through the barred window of the prison door I hadn’t even considered a possibility: a prisoner was inside. I’m not sure why but the thought had never occurred to me that Belac might have found another slave to be leech bait. The man in the prison was gaunt and heavily bearded, a mere shadow of the human he once had been. He slept soundly on the stone floor, waiting for the dreaded night to fall when he’d be drug out into the swamp. My heart went out to him; it could have easily been me had the Author not intervened and saved Stretch and me that night. Everything in me wanted to open the door and let him out.
“Not now,” Desi whispered, seeing the prisoner. “You can’t risk the mission over him. Not until Belac is restrained.”
Desi was right; we couldn’t wake him. If the prisoner was even half as starved for salvation as I had been, any sign of a rescue and he’d be shouting for joy. That was the last thing we needed with a vicious troll potentially lurking nearby. We needed silence. The rescue would have to wait.
“Stay on your toes. The prisoner means Belac can’t have gone far,” I said. “He’s got to be somewhere.”
We returned to the main hall and tiptoed up the stairway toward the room where Belac slept. I ignited my Veritas Sword and motioned to the door. Desi and Trista nodded, armed themselves and prepared for the worse.
With a shove of my hand, the door to Belac’s room creaked open, revealing a massive hulking shape in the shadows behind it. At first I figured the shape was Belac, but quickly realized it wasn’t moving. It was just a heap of junk, one of many that nearly covered the floor of his room now. We moved gingerly through the precariously stacked piles in hopes of spotting the enormous bed behind them. Unfortunately, the bed was empty.
“He’s not here,” said Desi. “Do you want to look for clues?”
As much as I did, I knew the better course of action was to contain Belac first…then look for clues.
“We can’t afford to be discovered. Let’s check the other rooms first. If Belac’s here, we need to find him before he finds us. We’ll have time to come back later.”
The three of us ventured out on our hunt for the troll. Room after bedraggled room turned up no sign of him. The place was a regular pigsty. Each room seemed to be a bigger mess than the previous room, with the exception of one, the library.
The library was surprisingly well kept, not exactly clean, but for Belac it was as close as clean gets. In fact, despite the thick layer of dust that blanketed the room, you might say it was practically pristine. But there was something else about this room, a feeling that something wasn’t all that it seemed.
“I guess Belac isn’t much of a reader,” Trista said, after taking in the state of the room.
“Well, there’s a big surprise,” I replied smugly, turning back toward the hallway that had led us here. “There are only a few rooms left. Let’s go.”
“No, wait,” Desi said, holding up a hand. “Somebody has been here…recently.”
“How can you tell?” I questioned.
She pointed to a stone pillar that curved out from the wall to the left of the doorway. On it, about shoulder height was an iron ring, which hung from a metal plate embedded in the wall. The ring swung out from the wall a bit and held a wooden torch. The torch was still smoldering…. Someone had let it burn out.
“Of course, the torch,” I said, nearly kicking myself for having missed it.
“But I don’t get it,” Trista said, expressing what we were all thinking. “If Belac has been here, then why is it so clean? There aren’t even any footprints in the dust.”
I scrutinized the room, gazing across the space and down the walls to the floor where the carpet we stood on led up to a bookshelf. That’s when it hit me.
“Unless…maybe Belac doesn’t think of it as a room at all. Maybe it’s more like a hallway to him, a place between rooms,” I said, suddenly figuring out Belac’s secret. “Do you see how the carpet rolls under the bookshelf?”
“Yes,” Desi said, her eyes lighting up at the realization. “It’s a fake wall. The bookshelf is hiding another room.”
The three of us eagerly ran to the bookshelf and went to work searching for a way to open the door.
“There’s got to be a trigger of some kind,” I said, “a secret book or lever of some sort.”
Nothing presented itself. After several minutes of fruitless searching, we were ready to give up.
“Do you think we’re overanalyzing it?” Trista ventured to ask.
“What do you mean?” I answered.
“Well, Belac’s a troll, right?”
“Yeah, so?” I wondered where she was going with this.
“So, maybe we need to think like a troll thinks.”
“How do we do that? Take half our brains out?” Desi asked, smiling at her own joke.
Trista pretended not to notice. “No, but we could try pushing our way in.”
Without another word, Trista started pressing against the bookshelf with all her might. Surprisingly, it budged. It was only a half-inch, but it moved. With newfound hope we joined her, pushing together and managing to slide the centermost bookshelf backward a full five feet before it came to a stop against a stone wall. A staircase led down into a lower level of the castle we had yet to explore.
“You’d make a pretty good troll,” Desi teased Trista. I could tell from the face Trista made she didn’t appreciate the comment much at all.
A cold draft blew up from the blackness at the bottom of the staircase. It was the kind of draft that felt more like a gasp for breath, as if the staircase itself were a gaping mouth that wanted to pull us down its throat. The light of my Veritas Sword seemed to be gobbled up by the darkness of the creepy tunnel.
“Well, I guess we…go down,” I said nervously. With wobbly knees I stepped down into the blackness toward the hidden basement. The passage was lined in cobwebs and continued a hundred or more steps down, before ending in a rather small, rectangular room. The room was entirely empty except for a simple wooden stool in the center and a tall, oval-shaped mirror, which seemed vaguely familiar to me.
“Well, that’s a let down,” Trista said. “All that secrecy for nothing. Who hides a mirror in their basement?”
“What is it?” Desi asked, noticing my attention drifting from the mirror.
“It’s the room,” I said thoughtfully. “The picture my dad drew of Belac. It happened in this room, in that corner….”
I pointed to the corner I had sensed was the place. The same jagged rock popped out from the wall.
“And that mirror,” I said, “I think I’ve seen it before too, in my dream. A traveler visited a room like this one. He created a black mirror…just by drawing it.”
Desi’s eyes widened slightly, contemplating the idea.
“What do you mean, ‘drawing it’?” Trista asked.
I explained how the traveler in my dream had made the mirror appear, seemingly out of nowhere; how it was almost as if he had willed it into being with the help of the crystal stone.
“Scrivening. It’s the art of writing into being,” Desi said with excitement. “I always thought it was just a myth. Your father had long talked about creating a world of his own—a world where he could escape the fate he saw in the Eye of Ends. Before he went missing, he said he had been studying the art of scrivening. He believed it was possible to create a portal to a new world where he could control the outcome of things.”
“How?” I asked.
“By using the power of the Bloodstone,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. At the very mention of the word, my jaw tightened and I clutched the place where Aviad had once removed the cursed object from my chest. The Bloodstone had been the source of so much trouble before I couldn’t bring myself to believe it existed again.
“But the Bloodstone is gone; Aviad destroyed it,” I said. “I saw him do it myself.”
“Yes, but your father didn’t need to find the original Bloodstone; he only needed to harness the source of its power to make a new one,” Desi explained. “He must have found a way.”
“How is that even possible?” I asked.
“Well, the Eye of Ends comes from the Living Tree, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, have you ever seen a cross section of a tree?”
“Sure, lots of times.”
“Well, the rings of the tree are like a record of the tree’s life…its history. According to Simon’s research, when you enter the inside of the Eye of Ends there is a Maze of Rings, where the history of our worlds are contained—like a code. Mortals, like your father, must navigate this maze until they come to a dead end. Each dead end reveals another vision. At the very center of the maze—a place known as the Inmost Circle—a pillar of fire rises up to infinite heights. This fire is believed to be from the very stream of the Code of Life…the source that once gave the Living Tree its life and the Bloodstone its power.
“As far as we know, your father is the only one who successfully found his way to the center of the Eye. If what you saw in your vision was true, your father may have learned how to harvest a second Bloodstone from the Code of Life.”
“Are you suggesting the traveler in my dreams was really my father?” I asked.
Desi shrugged, “It’s a possibility, but whoever it was didn’t want this mirror to be found.”
I approached the dirty mirror and wiped a layer of dust off its face. As I did, the surface reacted to my touch with a dazzling display of brightly colored lines beneath the glass. It was like finger painting with digital light. The glowing marks only lasted a second or two before fading away, but the effect was impressive.
Trista gawked at the mirror and said, “Can I try? That’s cool!”
She was already beside me, drawing random hearts and flowers on the surface of the mirror. Her eyes lit up like a child’s with a new toy at Christmas and she drew a pair of glasses and a mustache over the reflection of her face.
A moment later, words began to appear in the colorful ink behind the surface of the mirror, as if someone had written them in from the other side. The words were written backwards and read:
My end is my beginning,
my beginning is my end.
Find me in my reflection
beyond the…
“A riddle?” Desi asked, raising an eyebrow. “Your father loved riddles.”
“But this one isn’t finished,” Trista said.
“That’s because the last words of the riddle are the answer, I think,” I said. “It’s like a password. I think we’re supposed to write the answer on the mirror.”
“Yes, but what is it a password to?” Desi wondered.
“To finding whoever made this mirror,” I said thoughtfully.
“You mean your father?” Trista asked.
I shrugged, but I was thinking the same thing.
“Well, you’d better be sure of the answer before you write it. If your father made this mirror, he likely didn’t make it without taking precautions.”
“Meaning what?” Trista asked.
“Meaning,” Desi answered firmly, “he probably put traps in the room for anyone who didn’t answer correctly.”
Our eyes darted nervously around, scrutinizing every corner of the space. Suddenly, my imagination got the better of me; nothing could be trusted anymore. The floor could give way, the ceiling might cave in, the room might flood…any number of dismal ends might come to us if we got the answer wrong. There was no way of knowing for sure, but that’s what made it all the more nerve-racking.
“Okay, let’s think about it for a while,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster. My dad had made some pretty difficult riddles for me in the past, but none of them would ever be as important as this one.
I ran through a series of potential answers in my mind.
“What rhymes with end?” I asked aloud.
Trista rattled off a long list before I could think of one.
“Send, bend, lend, depend, tend, mend, pretend, ascend, spend, contend, descend, suspend….”
“Whoa, slow down!” I shouted, stopping her short. “Okay, that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. We have to start somewhere else. Let’s go back over the first lines; there’s got to be a clue there.”
I began repeating the riddle aloud a few times in hopes it would help the answer come.
“My end is my beginning…” I said.
“My beginning is my end,” Trista continued.
“That’s it!” I shouted, in a sudden burst of enthusiasm. “A palindrome.”
Trista looked blankly at me.
“A palindrome is a word that can be read two ways: forward and backward. It’s kinda like a reflection, only with letters….”
“You mean like the phrase Xaul helped us solve?” Trista said, her eyes lighting up with excitement. “The one where we wrote the same letters down in the cave?”
I nodded.
“So, you think the answer is the word palindrome?” Desi asked, not sounding completely convinced.
“Find me in my reflection, beyond the palindrome,” I said aloud, trying it on for size. “It might be it.”
“Yes, but how sure are you? It doesn’t even rhyme.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to rhyme to be a riddle, but still…something doesn’t feel quite right.”
We sat for several minutes, silently debating different phrases. Everyone had their own opinion of the riddle. There were far too many answers to choose from. Unfortunately, none of them sounded in the least bit right until Trista blurted out something I had forgotten entirely.
“Mirror Rim!” Trista said, at last. “Isn’t that the phrase your father wrote in his Writ? It’s a palindoo-hicky, or whatever that word is. Isn’t it?”
“You’re right!” I said excitedly. “Mirror Rim is spelled the same backward and forward.”
“And a mirror shows your ‘reflection’ too,” Trista added.
“Find me in my reflection, beyond the Mirror Rim. Is that it?” Desi asked.
“It sounds better than anything else I’ve come up with,” I answered. “It’s either that or we give up.”
We took a vote and agreed to give it a shot. Trista and Desi stepped back toward the stairs just in case our answer was wrong. They would have a chance to escape if a trap presented itself.
When everyone was ready, I wrote the answer to the riddle onto the mirror’s surface. I took care to write the letters backwards to match the previous words that appeared above it. As the last letter was completed, the words disappeared and my reflection vanished from the black mirror completely. I backed away from the mirror, wondering if I had gotten it wrong. Then, with a dazzling flash, the mirror lit up with an infinite nest of neon blue rings that made it appear like a tunnel through the wall.
“He did it!” Desi smiled so wide she almost laughed. “He actually did it!”
Now that it was safe, Trista and Desi joined me in front of the tunnel of light.
“So this mirror is a portal to my father’s world?” I asked.
“There’s only one way to be sure,” Desi answered. “You have to pass through it. If this is your father’s mirror, he won’t be far from the other side.”
We decided I should go alone. Desi felt it was best that she and Trista stay behind to guard the mirror from unwanted intruders. After all, Belac couldn’t be far, and there was always Vogler. If something went wrong, she would reach me on the Symbio device.
“How do I enter?” I asked.
“Just step through,” Desi replied.
I swallowed nervously at the thought and glanced at the tunnel ahead of me in the mirror. After years of wondering, I was perhaps one step away from discovering the mystery of my father’s disappearance.
“Hunter, wait,” Trista begged. “How do you know it’s safe? I mean, how do you know there is even a way to come back? What if you get lost in the mirror like…like your father?”
“The mirror should have two sides,” Desi offered. “Pay attention to where it is you arrive. That will also be your way back out.”
“Okay then,” I said, my heart racing so fast my fingers trembled from the excitement. “I’ll be back.”
“We’ll be waiting,” Trista said, wringing her hands nervously in front of her.
Slowly, I approached the mirror, intent on finishing the quest I had begun. I took a deep breath and raised my foot. I stepped into the mirror and time slowed to a crawl until it seemed as if I had frozen in space halfway between the world behind and the world that lay ahead. Though I couldn’t move, the lights of the tunnel began to move toward me and past me, slowly at first—then quicker and quicker until they were nothing but a blur of solid light around me.
********
I was frozen now, captured on a brilliant blank canvas of pure white light. Everything my senses perceived felt fresh and new. Words I could not understand began to take voice as whispers all around me. As the cryptic words were spoken, shapes began to form out of thin air like the first, loosely sketched lines, outlining a yet-to-be masterpiece. All at once this budding world burst into life as vibrant colors filled in a new layer of definition. When the sweeping transformation was finally complete, I found myself finishing my original step through the mirror to arrive in a magnificent, glass-domed room.
From its panoramic view, the room appeared to be atop the highest tower of an impressive, modern facility. A lush, rolling landscape stretched off into the distance far below me, warmed beneath the billowing, pink-lit clouds of a soft sunset sky. The view outside was breathtaking.
Inside, however, was an entirely different story—a pack rat’s paradise. An infestation of books and loose papers held together what otherwise would have been an unrelated assortment of found items, from the commonplace to the extraordinary. Half of the things, I couldn’t even identify, though I supposed that was the function of the notes taped to many of them—an attempt at cataloging the collection. Whatever the intent, the disorderly piles transformed what otherwise could have been a state-of-the-art research lab into a state-of-the-art disaster zone.
Remembering Desi’s advice, I checked the wall behind me for the other side of the mirror. I was relieved to see a free-standing mirror set up amongst the junk heaps behind me. This would be my doorway back to Solandria if all went well.
“What is this place?” I marveled aloud, turning slowly to take in the bizarre setting.
“Somewhere you should not be,” came the unexpected reply from over my shoulder. Though I hadn’t heard the voice since I was twelve, I recognized it in a heartbeat. It was the voice of my father.