by Randall Pine
Llewyn closed his eyes and took a breath. He decided to let it go. “All you need to do is choose a blossom. Pick a shade of blue that’s particularly attractive to you, if it helps. Place your hands over it, and be still. The curiocus will do the rest.”
Simon bobbed his head thoughtfully. “Makes sense, I guess. Or as much sense as any of this makes.”
“Question,” Virgil said, raising a hand in the air. “What do we do with the curios once we have them?”
The wizard grunted. “You’ll see.”
Virgil raised his eyebrow at Simon. “You want to go first?” he asked.
Simon gestured forward with one hand. “Be my guest,” he replied.
Virgil took a deep breath. Then he stepped forward, up to the line of flowers. He chose the one on the right, a midnight blue blossom. He lowered his hands over the flower, then looked at Llewyn for confirmation that he was doing it correctly. The wizard nodded, so Virgil closed his eyes and tried to quiet his mind.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. But then he felt a strange coolness against his palms, as if they were being caressed with a cold breeze. Then he felt the brush of flower petals, a gentle nudge that turned into a strong push as the flower grew bigger and bigger. His hands moved out as the blossom expanded, and soon it was growing through and above his palms. He peeked down and watched it balloon outward. It grew larger than Llewyn’s had, and this gave him a small, if petty, feeling of pride. Then the flower broke off of its stem, and Virgil was cradling the curiocus in his hands.
It was heavy, heavier than he thought any flower could be. He hefted it a few times, and the weight felt somehow familiar…
The petals began to fall away, drifting down to the mossy green floor of the forest room. It only took a few seconds for all of the petals to fall, leaving Virgil holding his curio.
It was a vintage wooden Skee-Ball ball, nicked and worn with use and time.
Virgil gaped at the ball. He twisted his palms over it, feeling the texture under his skin, letting the oils from his hands soak into the surface of the wood. He lifted his eyes and looked quizzically at Llewyn. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I didn’t. The curiocus did.” The wizard stepped closer and inspected the wooden ball. “It’s a fine specimen,” he admitted, “though I haven’t the slightest idea what it’s for.”
“Skee-Ball,” Virgil said absently, inspecting the ball. He had never seen one so old, or so well-formed. “We’ll show you how to play sometime.”
“I trust it holds a significance for you?” Llewyn asked.
“You literally couldn’t find anything on Earth that holds more significance for him,” Simon laughed.
Virgil shrugged. When Simon was right, he was right.
“What do I do with it?” he asked.
“In a moment,” Llewyn replied. He crooked one finger and beckoned Simon forward. “Your turn.”
Simon nodded. “Okay.” He stepped up to the last remaining flower. It had a striking cornflower blue blossom. The color of it seemed both cheerful and powerful at the same time. He liked that.
He placed his hands over the flower, and he closed his eyes. He tried to clear his mind. It was harder than he thought it would be; images kept shouldering their way into his vision of their own accord, without his conjuring them up. But he decided that was okay; if the curiocus was supposed to tap into the very essence of you, then maybe it was okay to show the flower what it was that kept you going.
The usual images cropped up: flashes of his parents, of his childhood, of him and Virgil playing in the woods and running through the Templar alleys; pictures of his dad, pictures of Laura, pictures of Abby...and something deeper, something darker, a picture that was mostly reds and blacks, a heavy and despairing thing that he actively worked to push down, because he knew if he let it bob to the surface, it would show him a porcelain baby mask, or maybe the nightmare face beneath it.
He jumped with surprise when he felt the flower’s petals pushing against his palms. Then he relaxed, focused in on a mental image of Laura’s gravestone, white, shining granite against an emerald green field, and the flower grew and grew and grew, until he was holding the blossom in his hands, free of its stem, full of the fruit that would be his own personal curio.
The cornflower petals began to fall away. Simon looked down into his hands.
He was holding a key. It was antique, with an ornate metal scrollwork bow, a channeled throat, and a jagged bit with five mismatched teeth.
“A fine key,” Llewyn said approvingly. “What does it open?”
Simon gazed down at the thing in his hand. “I have no idea,” he whispered, turning the key over between his fingers. “I have absolutely no idea.”
The wizard furrowed his brow. “It has no significance for you?” he asked, sounding concerned.
“Not that I can think of,” Simon said, confused. He squinted down at the key, even held it up to the light, trying to get a better look. Its shape was entirely unfamiliar. As far as he could recall, he had never even held a key that wasn’t a standard Schlage-style key, modern, simple, and unremarkable.
But this key…this key was extraordinary.
“I should recognize it, right?” Simon asked, a feeling of panic starting to rise in his throat. “If it’s my curio, it’s something that should be important to me, I should know what it is, shouldn’t I?”
Llewyn rubbed his chin. “The curiocus knows. This key is significant to you. It is surprising that you don’t know why, or don’t remember. But it is yours; that much is very clear. The curiocus is never wrong.” He placed his great hand over Simon’s so that the key was pinned between their two palms. He looked at Simon with a heavy gravity. “If it doesn’t open a door to your past, it’ll open a door to your future. Keep it sacred. Keep it safe.”
Simon nodded. He would keep it sacred. He would keep it safe.
He just wished he knew why.
“I have a hunch about what it might be,” Llewyn said, using his own hand to close Simon’s fingers over the key. “Give it time. If it doesn’t reveal its secrets, then you and I will force its hand. Together.”
Simon exhaled. Having the wizard on his side lifted a weight from his chest. “Thank you,” he said.
The wizard winked his one good eye.
“Okay, so what do we do now?” Virgil asked, inspecting his Skee-Ball artifact.
“The curio chose you; now you must reciprocate the choice by imbuing it with your energy,” the wizard said. “This will be your first and most potent article of power.”
“I’ve got to be honest, I have no idea what that means,” Virgil pointed out.
“We’re…new at this,” Simon reminded the wizard.
Llewyn took a deep breath. It had been over a century since he’d trained apprentices. He took a deep breath. “When you have a curio, you can take some of your magic and transfer it to the object. Then, that magic lives in there. And when you need it, you can call it forth, and the object will expend its power according to your designs.”
Virgil cleared his throat. “Am I crazy, or did that not clear it up very much?” he asked sincerely.
Llewyn’s cheeks grew dark. “Follow my instructions, and you’ll see,” he said between clenched teeth. “Remember how you focused your energy in your manacles?” They both nodded. “The same process is in effect here. Gather your strength…focus your memories…feel your energy…push it into the curio.”
Simon stepped forward, holding his key before him. He closed his eyes and formed the now-familiar burning down deep in his stomach. He forced it up into his chest, pushed it out through his arm, and gathered it into his palm. The key began to hum with its own power, and it vibrated in Simon’s hand. Then suddenly, the warmth and strength evaporated from his skin, his magic completely subsided, and Simon was left with nothing but an old skeleton key s
itting in his upturned hand.
But the key had changed. It had felt the magic.
And more than having felt it, it had actually soaked it in; Simon could see that clearly. Even though the key didn’t exactly glow, it did seem to have a heightened sense of self-importance. It was a little bit shinier, and a little bit brighter, and a little bit prouder, and a little bit heavier. Simon pinched it between two fingers and held it up in the false light of the forest chamber, inspecting it carefully. “It’s different,” he said aloud.
“It’s pretty shiny,” Virgil observed, stepping up and inspecting the key from up close. “Not bad.”
“It will be a token of incredible importance,” Llewyn said. “Mark my words. Keep it safe. It will one day do the same for you.”
Simon frowned down at his key. He hoped that the wizard’s words were true.
“Now you,” Llewyn said, nodding toward Virgil. “Ready to transfer your magic?”
“I’m a magic-transferring expert,” Virgil replied. He held the wooden ball up high in the air, closed his eyes, and thought about how much he wanted to win enough Skee-Ball tickets to get that coveted Nerf gun. He didn’t know how long he’d have to work, but he did know that this was exactly this sort of ball that could carry him across the finish line. He had worked at mastering Skee-Ball for almost a whole decade. He and the wooden ball understood each other. They were practically one. And while he felt bad that Simon had wasted his mental energy on conjuring up a key to nowhere, Virgil felt confident that he and the Skee-Ball ball were always meant to be together. He held the ball tightly in his hands, and he closed his eyes. He, too, brought forward the same memories he’d conjured when he had charged his manacle, all the easy spots of brightness he could recall. He pushed the ball of heat up into his chest, out beyond his shoulders and into his arms, and he could actually feel the magic seeping into the wooden ball. He could feel it become saturated with an otherworldly strength. And when he opened his eyes, he saw the distinct difference in his artifact: it had become golden, and full of a strange, internal light.
It was its own being now, its own creature. Bonded to Virgil, but wholly separate.
Virgil held the glowing wooden ball out toward Llewyn. “Magic-transferring expert,” he said again.
The wizard smirked. “A fine job,” he admitted. “These curios are the things that will serve you for as long as you live. In your darkest hours, they will rise to your aid.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Virgil admitted, admiring his wooden ball. “But how do they work?”
“Each curio is different. My great-grandfather’s flask will work differently than your ball, and they’ll both work differently than the key. The flask may always be filled with water, no matter how much you drink…or perhaps any liquid it holds gives the drinker some extra burst of strength or stamina. It will be impossible to say, until I’ve had the time to work with it, to learn its magic. You’ll need to learn how your own curios work.”
“Pretty sure mine works like a Skee-Ball,” Virgil said. He took a few steps and pitched the wooden ball underhand across the clearing. It rocketed along the mossy grass, actually gaining speed the further it got from Virgil, and glowing its golden light. It zoomed toward one of the trees and struck it head-on, exploding through the thick trunk and ricocheting off the stone wall on the far side. It shot back across the room, knocked against the opposite wall, then screamed back toward Virgil. He shrieked in fear and threw up his hands to block his face, and the wooden ball came to a sudden stop, right against his palm. Virgil peeked through his fingers. The ball hovered in the air, waiting patiently for him to grab it. He did, and the golden light dimmed.
Virgil cleared his throat. “Well. Guess that’s what that does.”
“Indeed,” the wizard said. He turned to Simon and considered the key. “Yours…may work differently.”
“Yeah, I figured that,” Simon frowned.
“As I said,” the wizard continued, crossing his arms, “you can call upon your curio when you need it. When you don’t need it, it should be kept safe. A lost or stolen curio is a dangerous thing. In the wrong hands…” His words drifted off as he considered some hidden horror. “You don’t want them in the wrong hands,” he finished.
“Should we get, like, a safe for the apartment?” Virgil asked.
“You’ll store it in your psychic vault,” Llewyn replied.
Simon and Virgil both raised their eyebrows at that one. “Our psychic vault?” they asked in unison.
“It’s a place that exists on the astral plane. A six-dimensional space that you create, and that only you can access.”
Simon scratched the side of his neck. “I know we’ve seen a lot of insane things of the last few days, and between demons and wizards and shadow flowers and possessed Skee-Balls, I shouldn’t really get stuck on ‘astral plane,’ but…seriously? The astral plane?”
“It’s not theoretical, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” the wizard said, sounding a little irritated. “And it’s far from the only other plane that exists beyond our own reality.” Then he grinned, a sharp, dangerous smile that sent a shiver down Simon’s spine. “Perhaps you’ll even visit it yourself one day.”
“Okay, okay, so how do we create these psychic vaults?” Virgil asked, desperate to break the tension.
“You’ve already created them,” Llewyn replied.
“What? We did?” Simon asked. “When?”
“In the future.”
Simon wrinkled up his face in confusion. “We already created them in the future?”
“Yes,” the wizard said, as if this should be obvious.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not in this level of reality. But on the astral plane, time works differently. Or, to be more exact, time does not exist, at least not as we understand it. On the astral plane, time isn’t a line, or a circle, or a ribbon. It’s a hailstorm.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, either,” Virgil pointed out.
The wizard smirked. “There are plenty who would say the concept of time in a line is absurd.”
“Those people should probably get a watch.”
“Wait, I’m sorry, can we go back a second?” Simon interrupted. “So our psychic vaults already exist, because at some point in the future, we will create them. But if they’re already created now, why would we need to create them in the future? They already exist. It’s like if you already have a cake, you wouldn’t bake a cake so you could then have a cake. You already have the cake.”
“Man, I could go for cake right now,” Virgil said wistfully.
Simon ignored him. He was getting a little worked up about the hailstorm of time. “Having a psychic vault means that in the future we’ll have to make one, but we won’t ever need to make one because we already have one. So when will we make one?”
“You won’t,” Llewyn shrugged. “You already have one.”
“But if I never make one, how will I have one now?!”
“Because you’ve already made it.”
“But I haven’t!”
“But you will.”
“But I won’t!”
“You won’t need to.”
Simon screamed. He pulled at the roots of his hair and turned away. He walked over to the trees, to put some distance between himself and the argument that was warping his brain.
“Makes sense to me,” Virgil said. “But I’m a lot smarter than Simon.”
“No you’re not,” Simon said from across the room.
“Don’t think about it too much,” the wizard suggested. “We’ve got a lot more to worry about. And trust me, there’s plenty about the kinesthetic arts that makes less sense than this.”
“Great,” Simon muttered into the trees.
Virgil gave his wooden ball a few light tosses into the air. “So how do we sto
re these bad boys?” he asked. “If I hold onto this for much longer, I’m going to want to break more stuff.”
The wizard nodded. “Finding your vault is easy. All you have to do is picture it in your mind.”
“But we don’t know what they look like!” Simon cried, exasperated. He was circling the room from beyond the trees.
“Yes, you do,” Llewyn replied. “You know because you built it.” The wizard turned his attention to Virgil. “Trust me on this.”
“Oh, I do,” Virgil assured him. “You taught me how to shoot lasers from my wrist and grow a magic Skee-Ball from a flower. Whatever you’re selling, I’m buying.”
Llewyn smirked. “Good.” He raised his voice so Simon could hear him clearly, too. “Picture a vault in your mind. Whatever the vault looks like is the right way for it to look.”
Simon sighed. He sulked back over toward them, his mind racing with the strangeness of life. “Okay,” he said, defeated. “Okay.” He closed his eyes. “I’m picturing a vault. Now what?”
“Now open it.”
“In my mind?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“Yes.”
“I can’t, it’s locked,” Virgil said, his eyes also squeezed tightly shut.
“What sort of lock is it?” Llewyn asked, and somewhere in the furthest reaches of Simon’s mind, he had a spark of understanding about just how absurd this conversation would sound to someone who was eavesdropping.
“It’s a combination lock.”
“Mine has a keypad,” Simon sighed, giving into the ridiculousness of the exercise. He let himself imagine a vault, huge and round, like an old bank vault, but shiny and new. A small keypad was set into the door above the handle—black buttons with white numbers spaced out in two rows, zero through four on top and five through nine on the bottom. In Simon’s imagination, the vault was set into a white background. It wasn’t a wall. It was more like a void. Like a brilliant, white nothingness.
“Numbers,” the sorcerer nodded. “Good. You already know the combinations for your vaults. Enter the combination, and open the door.”