by John Kerry
“Raise your hands to the skies
“on the tone of midnight,
“and you will travel to the land
“of endless twilight.”
The hands, which she’d figured out referred to the clock hands either side of the gemstone fitting, were stiff and unresponsive.
Sammy polished the gemstone on her t-shirt and peered into it.
The emerald lit up for a split second, pulsing with green light, then returned to the dull brown that had become its natural state. Sammy never flinched. The emerald had done the same thing on numerous other occasions in the last several months. She didn’t know when it had started happening. Only that it had.
She’d been down in the cellar many times since, to look at the bracelet and to remember Perseopia, Mehrak, and Louis. And more recently, Hami … wondering if he’d saved the day. Or if he’d been arrested for treason. She would often daydream about the realm returning to life, the skies clearing, people celebrating. There was no doubt in her mind that she should’ve stayed.
Esther, ‘The Chosen One’, had never returned for the bracelet. Sammy had gone to the market every Saturday for weeks afterwards, wandered the streets of Sheffield, even waited outside the gates of her old school. Yet the woman never returned. Unlocking the portal to save Perseopia clearly wasn’t as important as she’d made it out to be. Unless she’d sensed that Sammy had already used the bracelet and it no longer worked. Maybe she knew, somehow, that the realm had been saved and she could chill out. In the end, the reason didn’t matter. Esther had vanished, along with any chance of Sammy ever returning to Perseopia.
It had been difficult to put her adventure behind her. She’d stopped visiting the bracelet down in the cellar and was on her way to assimilating back into an ordinary existence. Until around four months ago. She’d been in the cellar looking for a tennis ball and noticed a flash of green light coming from the golf bag.
The bracelet had been out several times since then.
Sammy had tried raising the dial’s hands at midnight but they wouldn’t budge. The emerald never pulsed green exactly on the stroke of midnight. Only ever a little while beforehand or sometime after. Never dead on.
Sammy switched off the cellar light and climbed the stairs back up to the kitchen. She sat at the table, placed the bracelet in front of her, and slumped over it, hands on her cheeks and elbows planted either side.
She couldn’t manipulate the emerald with her mental abilities. There wasn’t anything inside it to manipulate.
Sammy’s phone buzzed. She fished it out of her waistband, saw the message was from Wayne, so placed her phone face down on the table.
She stretched and got up. She filled the kettle at the sink, put it back on its base and flicked it on. The time on the microwave flashed to 23:58. Almost midnight. Sammy sat back down at the kitchen table.
How many times had she been down to the cellar to fetch out the bracelet? Too many. And always after an argument with her mother. She wasn’t sure why she kept trying to work the mechanism. Frustration with the status quo, she assumed. Only today she wasn’t frustrated, today she was calm. Nothing would change unless she took charge of her own future. She’d had enough of life with mum and Jerry. And her dad. What a joke that man was. She couldn’t believe how long it had taken her to see him for the bullying and abusive human waste he truly was.
Sammy absentmindedly clicked open and shut the locket at her throat. She wasn’t sure that going back to Perseopia was the change she needed, but something compelled her to keep trying. Two years ago her reason had been Mehrak. She’d had a pretty big crush on him then, even though he’d been married. Silly. Nothing could’ve happened between them. She’d still like to see him again though, hang out in Golden Egg Cottage. Really though, it was the powers she’d developed that drew her back to Perseopia and the bracelet. She needed to find out who she was. What she was. Only the magi could answer that for her. And she had nothing left in Sheffield to stick around for.
The kettle began hissing as the water warmed up. Sammy leaned in close to the emerald on the bracelet. She concentrated her mind on the gem, imagining the atoms inside moving. Imagining swaying grass.
Nothing.
She sat back. It wasn’t going to happen, but she continued to watch the gem.
Then it flashed.
In that millisecond, Sammy saw a blade of grass inside the gem. And that was all she needed. She latched on to it, her mental feelers grabbing hold. She kept the blade inside the emerald going. The light remained and now it was getting brighter. More blades of grass appeared and she latched on to them too, swaying them faster.
Sammy leaned in further, placing her thumbs under the dial hands. They budged up a little, but not enough. They wouldn’t move any more. Why? What time was it? Had she missed midnight? She didn’t want to look away and lose sight of the grass.
The blades were moving relatively slowly. They’d moved faster last time she’d been in this situation. She gritted her teeth and pushed harder. She imagined the atoms in the grass thrown side to side. Rushing back and forth, getting faster, the light brightening.
The clock hands shifted up a little more.
The kettle began boiling, bubbling urgently behind her.
Sammy gritted her teeth, concentrating hard, swaying the blades ever faster. The light was dazzling, almost too bright to look into. She pushed harder still. The clock hands loosened. Her head was hurting, but she wasn’t about to stop.
The gem was humming. Burning ever brighter.
Sammy gave the clock hands one final push.
Both dial hands snapped to the top and green light engulfed the kitchen.
–FIVE–
FAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS
Sammy was back.
She hadn’t opened her eyes yet, but she knew, could feel it.
She extended her arms out to the sides and ran her fingers through the soil. She inhaled the fusty aroma of mushrooms and her nerves pulsed with the electric atmosphere of Perseopia.
She opened her eyes.
The large green mushroom canopies that had populated her dreams since the day she’d left hung above her, scattering their glowing spores in a lazy cascade of glitter.
She sat up and looked around. Everything was familiar, real. Much more real than where she’d come from. Sheffield was a cardboard cut-out. A movie set that when you looked too closely, would give away the scaffolding behind a painted façade.
It had been two years since she’d been here, but it was like she’d never left. Smells and sights seemed richer, the world brighter and more alive. Perseopia was taking hold of her again. Energy being channelled into her.
She realised then that the realm had never left her, had always been there in the deepest recesses of her soul, drawing her back. Her mum telling her it never existed only made her resolve to come back stronger. She was going to find Hami and have him explain what had happened to her; what Perseopia had done to her.
Sammy paused. Turned 360 degrees on the spot.
Finding Hami might take a while.
She clicked open and shut the locket at her throat. The Fungi Forest was enormous. She remembered that from the last time she’d been here. It had taken days to cross and that was on the back of a dinosaur. How would she find anyone? Or even know which direction to walk in?
The first flurry of panic settled over her. She’d returned only to become lost, as she had been before. Mehrak had told her no one travelled the Fungi Forest alone, and that she was lucky he and Louis had found her.
There were giant tigers lurking here. Crabmen too, with their dead eyes and mechanical movements, ready to crush her skull and hack the rest of her to pieces.
A flock of white birds erupted from the bushes. Sammy dived to the ground in a trembling cower as they wheeled above her, then dispersed back into the vegetation.
The forest was still when she regained her feet. She’d been so desperate
to return, she hadn’t considered the consequences of being back. There hadn’t been time. It had taken all her effort to keep the grass inside the emerald moving. If she’d stopped concentrating to consider what she was doing, the gem might’ve gone dull and she’d have missed her only opportunity to return.
Sammy closed her eyes and tried to relax. She felt the forest around her, the animals, the mushrooms, the brown creepers and small yellow bushes. And something else. Danger.
She opened her eyes. There was something approaching. An animal, but she couldn’t tell what kind.
Movement through the haze of mushroom spores. A four-legged silhouette, like a dog but misshapen. It was keeping to the shadows, circling.
Sammy scanned the floor for a weapon. A fist-sized rock at her feet was the closest object available. It would have to do. She snatched it up and raised it as the animal prowled closer, slowly decreasing the distance between them.
It moved into the light of a mushroom and revealed itself to be some kind of half-pig, half-dog creature. Hyena-shaped with a hunch, thick forearms, and an elongated snout with tusks like a boar. Sammy concentrated on the beast. She could feel conflicting emotions, reticence to approach, while also readying an attack.
She sensed the move just before it came, yet a scream still escaped her as it lunged. She dodged to the side and backed away. The creature barked in a strained, guttural manner.
Sammy threw the rock. The beast caught it in its jaws and crunched it up.
She’d allowed it to get too close. It was dictating the flow of the fight. She didn’t let that happen at college, she shouldn’t let it happen here.
The pig-dog growled and chomped its maw. It feigned a lunge. Sammy squeaked and stumbled backwards.
If she calmed down, she’d be able to deal with it the same way she dealt with bullies. The barrier of the Mother World had been shed. She was absorbing Perseopia’s energy, charging herself up. She could take this beast down.
She reached out her mental feelers to the animal but couldn’t picture the molecules in its hide, couldn’t latch on to anything. The only thing she could feel was a vague sense of its emotional state. Hunger and fear, and the hunger was overpowering its desire to flee.
She was ready for the second attack when it came. She read the creature’s intention to charge and sidestepped as it lumbered past and kept going, the inertia of its bulk carrying it on and away.
That bought her some time. Not much, but enough to find a rugby-ball-sized rock. She heaved it up to her waist, cleared her mind, concentrated on its molecular structure and imagined it getting lighter. The effect was instant. And profound.
Sammy raised the rock over her head.
The pig-dog pawed at the ground and their eyes met, jarring Sammy back into the moment.
Then it charged.
Sammy brought the rock down, accelerating it at the animal’s head with her mind, guiding it towards the point between its eyes.
The beast yelped as its skull collapsed inwards. It hit the ground hard, shuddered, and fell still.
A moment passed before Sammy fully absorbed what she’d done. And then it took her a longer moment to get over it. The murder of a living creature, albeit one that had been trying to kill her. She’d killed a crabman on her previous visit, but this was somehow different. This had been closer, more intimate. A living, breathing red-blooded mammal rather than a robotic alien with slimy, blue bodily fluids.
The pig-dog’s head was a mess. It was too disgusting to look at it directly. Sammy peered side on with squinted eyes as metallic green and yellow beetles emerged from the dirt around it. They crawled across the ruined skull and began feeding on the goo inside. Sammy gagged, then turned away and began walking.
The last time she’d been in Perseopia, she’d stopped a crabman’s arm from chopping her head off. She hadn’t been able to do anything remotely close to that with the pig-dog, and that was worrying. Perhaps her powers didn’t work on normal animals. Or was she losing them? That would be especially problematic, now that she found herself back in the Fungi Forest with potentially worse creatures to contend with. And the pig-dog fight had been stressful enough.
The dizziness came out of nowhere. Her stomach turned and she staggered to a mushroom where she sat and rested her head between her knees. The trauma of fighting the pig-dog had affected her more than she’d realised.
Sammy waited until her head stopped spinning and her hands stopped shaking. She couldn’t stay where she was in the hope someone found her. She’d got herself into this mess. She’d get herself out of it.
She got up and walked.
Sammy pushed through a curtain of creepers on the way out of the clearing, zigzagged through a pack of closely packed mushrooms, wandered down a short slope and skirted several yellow bushes.
She was beginning to feel better already. Perhaps all she’d needed was a brisk stroll to burn off some nervous energy.
Then she stepped into another clearing, and stopped. The sight that greeted her made her light-headed and panicky all over again.
A depression in the earth and human footprints leading away. Small, bare footprints similar in size to hers. It was irrational, but it brought to mind Samara, the freaky girl from The Ring. Another human being out in the forest should be a welcome thing. Shouldn’t it? Sammy couldn’t convince herself of it. A person that stalked the forest alone in bare feet was creepy whichever way you looked at it.
She wasn’t going to follow the footprints. They probably belonged to a feral forest child waiting to shoot her with a poison dart, scalp her and make clothes of her skin.
Sammy took a different path, moving purposefully and quietly.
Long after the threat of being dragged down a well by a dark-haired demon girl had abated, Sammy found a clearing large enough that she could see the sky for the first time.
The churning magenta clouds were as mesmerising as she remembered. She watched for a while, swept away by their beauty.
Why hadn’t the clouds dispersed since Ramaask had gone? She wasn’t expecting clear blue skies, but it was as if nothing had happened since she’d been gone. Maybe defeating Ramaask hadn’t been the environmental fix that Hami had hoped it would be.
Then an unrelated thought occurred to her. How had Louis known what direction to travel in? There were no stars in the sky and nothing that distinguished one part of the forest from any other. How did he navigate? She was pretty sure he hadn’t made the journey across the Fungi Forest before. And while he and Mehrak had been travelling, they’d made several deviations. Once when the crabmen chased them and again when they detoured to meet Hami. Come to think of it, how did Hami even know which way he was going? He’d been travelling alone when they met. Louis might’ve used some kind of smell. What did Hami use? Some secret magi ability? A compass? Sammy’s phone was still on the kitchen table back in Sheffield. There’d be no reception or GPS in Perseopia, but the compass might’ve still worked. Maybe.
Which direction was she supposed to head in? She could end up walking in circles. Mehrak had spent weeks, maybe even months, travelling across Perseopia, and he was travelling on Louis’s back. She might never find her way out of the forest.
Sammy stopped herself. She was getting worked up. She took a deep breath and tried to think calming thoughts. More exercise was what she needed. Exercise would reduce stress. She set off again through the forest.
She walked for hours, long after she’d burnt off all her nervous energy. And the terrain didn’t change once.
Sammy shuffled to a halt. She couldn’t go any further. There may be crabmen, pig-dogs or any number of other threats lurking in the mushrooms, but she’d take her chances. Her carcass wasn’t travelling any further today.
She drew a large arrow in the dirt to remind herself which direction to continue walking in when she woke, then shuffled over to a shallow ditch surrounded by yellowing bushes and a low mushroom. She climbed through the bushes a
nd rolled under the mushroom.
Sammy doubted anything could see her where she hid. Getting found would depend on how good her hunter’s other senses were. But right then, she didn’t have the energy to care. She lay back and closed her eyes.
Annoyingly, the underside of the mushroom was bright enough to show through her eyelids. Sammy ran a hand through the gills in an attempt to extinguish the light, but instead covered herself in glowing spores that made her face itch.
She slumped back. A stone was pressing into the small of her back, adding to her overall discomfort, but she couldn’t find the strength to move so let the weight of fatigue drag her into unconsciousness.
–SIX–
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
Sammy stood on the stone bridge that spanned the Cataclysm. At one end, the dark plain stretched out to the strip of glowing Fungi Forest mushrooms in the distance, on the other side loomed the mountain where the fire temple sat.
The skies above were black and the chasm below was white, the light of which shimmered across the marble walls of the temple and lit up the golden dome above like a flaming rosebud.
She approached the edge of the bridge.
I’m coming for you, my princess of darkness.
The words came from the fire below, calling to her. She recoiled from the light. Too bright to look into.
More than anything, she wanted to return to the dark.
Sammy stirred. She flinched at the headache she was just beginning to acknowledge. It was way brighter than it should be. It couldn’t be morning already.
Something was tickling her face. She tried to bat it away but couldn’t connect with anything. “Leave me alone,” she murmured. “I want to sleep.”
She tried to push the thing away but it kept coming back, tickling. It was Pussy Riot, her friend Brigit’s cat. They’d been out, they’d drunk too much and now that mangy mog was climbing over her face, tickling her with its belly fur. It was like the animal could sense when she was at her most hungover and punished her for it.