Before Valcas could grin in response, I slipped on the glasses and ran.
MY FIRST attempt at traveling solo with the travel glasses nearly ended my life. Since I’d learned everything I knew about using the glasses from Valcas, I did not realize that once I put them on and started running there would be enough motion to transport me somewhere else.
As I sprinted along the palace hallways, I must have been worrying too much about whether or not I would need to jump off of a cliff. Before I had a chance to turn around to see whether Valcas was chasing me, I heard a loud cracking sound followed by a deafening gush of wind. The glasses softened the bright white light that forced me to close my eyes when I’d traveled with Valcas.
The light faded quickly, leaving me looking straight down a cliff. Rushing winds continued to assault my ears. My head spun as my stomach and other internal organs lurched forward. When I caught my breath long enough to remove the glasses, I saw mere inches of rocky ledge separating me from a valley thousands of feet below. I was on a ridge, a shelf in the cliff, with barely enough space to turn around. Tightly gripping the glasses, I took a half step backward and then prickled as the jagged stone of the mountain wall jabbed me from behind. I had no way of knowing how long it would take to reach level ground. My stomach churned as I remembered the colors of the earth rushing by, the terror and surprise of the freefall when Valcas pulled me off of the cliff to get to the palace. The fall would have been deadly without the travel glasses.
I covered my eyes with the glasses to help me ignore the constant reminder of the similar drop below. I breathed deeply, trying to calm down, focusing instead on Uncle Al’s cottage, my room with shelves full of books and the grounds around the lake. That’s when the impact of my arrival must have hit.
The rock behind me began to collapse. The mountain shelf below my feet cracked open and began to crumble. I lost my footing. I grasped the glasses with both hands so they wouldn’t fall off my face. My own screaming replaced the sound of the rushing wind. Uncle Al’s cottage seemed very far away in that moment, but I let the glasses know where I wanted to go. The blurred streaks of mountainside and falling rock instantly subsided, replaced by a warm glow of white.
My right foot came into contact with something solid before the rest of my body stopped falling. I tripped and tumbled forward onto a bed of earth and grass. Lying there flat on my face, I trembled for a long time, even after I’d calmed down. I looked up at Uncle Al’s cottage. I was away from the palace and had survived another fall. Valcas was nowhere in sight. Yet my teeth chattered and my body would not stop shaking. It was dark outside and very, very cold.
I crawled up out of what I now recognized was a tilled flowerbed. Before entering the house, I brushed the dirt and grass off of the gown and sandals that I still wore from the ball. The cottage looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. How long exactly, I had no idea. While focusing on my destination, I had paid no attention to when I was going, just where. The door opened freely, having been left unlocked. I closed the door behind me and flipped the light switch. The electricity was out.
“Hello? Is anybody there?”
No one answered me. The house was still and silent. My body tensed with fear for what may have happened to Uncle Al and flared with anger and resentment toward no one in particular. My brooding never felt more justified.
I climbed upstairs to my bedroom. This I could do with my eyes closed. My bedroom door opened with a creak. The air was thick and smelled of books. I slipped the travel glasses off of my face and propped them up on top of my head like a headband as I fumbled toward my nightstand where I kept a flashlight. A beam of light stretched out from the flashlight when I powered it on, letting me know that the batteries were still good. Wherever Uncle Al may be, it was clear that no one else had lived in the house in the meantime.
Unsure of whether anyone in my family was still alive, my mind flooded with questions about endless opportunities that all seemed absolutely impossible. If I tried traveling to my parents, would I hurt them by the impact of my arrival? Perhaps I would find them already dead. I’d always been curious about my father and now I had the means to find him. Only, I was afraid of what I would or wouldn’t find and of once again being rejected.
More immediately frightening, I wondered if Valcas was looking for me and whether he had the capability without the glasses to find me. Not that I expected that he would answer my questions about that topic any more than anything else. He had the annoying habit of telling me only what he wanted me to know. That made him both useless and dangerous, no matter how attractive he was, creepy eyes excluded.
By flashlight I changed out of my noble-betrothed wear into jeans, a sweatshirt and my running shoes. With the flashlight in hand, I briefly surveyed the room. My backpack, which sat on the floor near my desk, was now as dusty as my laptop and mobile phone. I decided to take the backpack with me, stuffing it with a few personal items and a change of clothes. Then, curious, I brushed dust off of my phone. I wondered whether I’d missed any calls from my two contacts while I was gone. Nothing as far as I could tell—the phone battery was dead. I placed the phone back on my desk, gingerly, fully knowing that I wouldn’t need or want it where I was going anyway. Then I headed back downstairs to the kitchen to see if I could find anything else of use.
I pulled open the cupboards above the kitchen sink and countertops. They were as dark and empty as the rest of the house. I hesitated to open the refrigerator, which I imagined only contained spoilage. I sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like anything was rotting. The kitchen smelled lonely, like a house that was waiting for its owners to come home from vacation.
I squinted and looked around. Something from the kitchen table caught my eye. I paused to stare at it, bringing the flashlight closer to prove that I wasn’t seeing things. On the table sat the newspaper I’d read nearly a week ago, right where I’d left it—the one containing the article about the lake’s overpopulation of sunfish.
My heart skipped. What had happened here since I’d left? I knew I couldn’t stay. Something was very wrong about this place. There was no way I was going to go back to Valcas and his prison of a palace either. A grim thought entered my mind. I had nowhere else to go.
I paced the dusty kitchen floor as I wracked my brain. The best person to answer my questions, the one with the most knowledge, had to be the inventor of the travel glasses. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about that person. Him? Her? How could I search for someone I’d never met? Valcas had said the more details the better, but he had an unfair advantage because he somehow knew me by name and location. I gritted my teeth. Apparently, the glasses didn’t need to be connected to the internet for the wearer to poke into someone’s personal life. Even though a search engine could lead to an individual’s address, the browser couldn’t actually physically take you there. What had this inventor done? Did he have any idea?
Just as I was about to drift off into full-on brooding mode, the ground began to shake below me. The walls of the cottage trembled violently. The kitchen windows blistered and cracked with loud popping sounds. I was not used to earthquakes, but I imagined that this was how one would feel.
I ducked under the kitchen table to take cover right before the windows erupted. Wind and shards of glass squalled into the room above me, sweeping the newspaper off of the table and across the room. I covered my head with my arms and screamed. Moments later, the shaking stopped and the room stilled. The impact of my arrival must have finally happened, and I was very glad that I’d made it inside well before it hit.
I yawned despite how nervous and upset I still was. With trembling limbs I crawled out from underneath the kitchen table and carefully stepped over broken glass. The darkness made it difficult, but fortunately I still had my flashlight, which I’d been clutching in a death grip. I locked the front door of the cottage and climbed back upstairs to my cold bedroom.
I decided to come up with a better plan in the morning, as earl
y as possible. With that decision my flashlight flickered and burned out, announcing the death of the battery. I locked my bedroom door and pulled on a few more layers of clothing. It had been a long time since I’d slept in my own bed. With my ears still ringing from the blast in the kitchen, I burrowed under the dusty blankets and fell asleep.
MY PLAN was not very well-thought-out. Things just kind of happened, most of which I attributed to sheer desperation. The easy part had been deciding on the method of transportation, especially since I started in a location where I had the advantage of being knowledgeable about the geography.
Having undergone two recent cliff dives, I couldn’t think of a better way to go. Wherever I was going was likely pretty far away. As for the details about the creator of the glasses, I still lacked confidence, but I figured that the inventor of this exact pair of travel glasses had to be a specific person. Someone, a particular individual, must have created them. In my mind I developed a character for that person who would become my destination.
I figured that inventors were intelligent and obviously ahead of their time, otherwise someone else would have come up with the idea before them. Surely the person who invented the marvel that I took from Valcas would be a genius and, well, inventive. Personally I hoped that the inventor would also be weak, frail and kind. I formed a picture in my mind of what this gentle-hearted mad scientist might look like.
A lingering vile thought made my stomach churn. What if Valcas was the creator of the glasses? I shook off that thought. It made me angry. Valcas was arrogant enough that if he had invented the glasses he would have told me. At least I hoped so. That and I hoped I had enough details to get to where I needed to go.
With my mind clearly focused on what I wanted to find, I began my first willful experience traveling with the glasses, neither as a means of escape nor as a prisoner of Valcas. I took in one last look at Uncle Al’s cottage and inhaled deeply. The smell of snow filled the air. It no longer felt like autumn, and this place no longer felt like home. As these feelings sunk in, I turned around and marched across the lawn surrounding the cottage, in the direction of the main road. Blades of grass glistened in their fresh coats of morning frost. Then they cracked and crinkled underneath the stomping of my feet.
I recited my search terms audibly as I walked, tightly gripping the travel glasses in my hand. “Genius. Inventive. Helpful,” I said. “Frail. Gentle. Old. Kind.” I hoped. I was pretty sure the travel glasses didn’t hear me speaking these words to it. They certainly weren’t saying anything back.
“Genius. Inventive. Helpful. Frail. Gentle. Old. Kind.” Reciting these words helped me to focus on my task rather than on my fear. Too bad I looked like some crazy person talking to a pair of glasses.
The main road was unusually vacant, even for the post-tourist season. I looked both ways before crossing. There wasn’t a single vehicle in sight. Still, I looked around again before climbing over the guardrail on the other side of the road. This side of the mountain was not supposed to be accessible to the public. Since living with Uncle Al, though, I’d found several trails that I’d secretly taken halfway up to the summit.
I climbed up a rocky trail with scattered tufts of grass. The higher I climbed, the colder it got. Wind blew wildly as I neared the highest point I knew that had a flat-edged cliff and the least amount of pointed rock jetting out of the sides. I walked out to the edge, tightened the straps that held on my backpack and slipped on the glasses. After another deep breath, I sprang forward into the empty white.
MY LANDING felt as natural as taking a stroll around the lake. I was not surprised to find myself in a dingy workshop. Neither was the elderly gentleman of slight build surprised to see an unexpected visitor. The inventor looked up from his work and cocked his head to the side.
“Well, hello there young miss. May I ask your name?”
My heart fluttered weakly as relief washed over me. “I—my name is Calla,” I nearly gasped out.
Vials filled with various colors and viscosities of liquid bubbled on burners of different shapes and sizes on a black slate-top lab table with wooden legs. The table sat in the middle of a shallow room, flanked by several mismatched wooden chairs. Pungent chemical odors tickled my nose and made my eyes water. “Are you a magician?” I blinked.
“Magician? Oh, I don’t practice magic.” He chuckled. “I invent technologies, many of which require me to develop my own tonics and tinctures. My name is Edgar.”
The inventor shakily rose from his seat, bowed slightly and then motioned toward my face. Droopy gray eyes squinted behind round lenses. “I see you are wearing my travel glasses. Might I ask how you retrieved them?” Edgar backed away from me slightly as he said this. I suspected that he was now a touch wary of me.
“I stole them from someone who tried to steal my life,” I admitted, my confidence building.
“And who would that be?” his frail voice inquired breathlessly, in a higher pitch, clearly expecting the worst.
I tried very hard to say “Valcas” without spitting out the word in disgust. I failed.
“Oh, Valcas.” Edgar sulked back down into his seat. “I’m so sorry for what must have happened to you.” His next question sounded a shade hopeful as he looked up at me over his glasses. “Is Valcas dead?”
“He was alive when I left, but his people may not like it when they find out there is no longer a bride for their new monarch. That breaks the rules. I’m not sure what the punishment is, but he seemed pretty worried about it.” I bit my lip, hoping that I hadn’t sounded too sarcastic.
Edgar nodded and excused himself to start tea at a crude stovetop he’d set up in his shop. “I hope you’ll join me. I’m sure we both have a lot to talk about.”
I slipped the glasses off my eyes and propped them on top of my head before helping Edgar clear off an end of the lab table large enough for two place settings. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until he mentioned food. My stomach grumbled even though most of what Edgar had cooking in the shop, his experiments, didn’t look or smell edible. We sat down to biscuits and strong herbal tea which he served using vintage teacups and saucers that appeared to be well worn. The biscuits were thick, hard and flavorless, but the tea was warming and provided some of the comfort that I sorely needed.
Our conversation felt like a dream. Perhaps this was a result of the fumes coming off of the experiments that bubbled in the small, poorly ventilated room. Maybe it was the fact that I’d just jumped off of a cliff after finding my home abandoned and covered in dust. While I was in this frame of mind, Edgar asked me to recount my story from the very beginning—how I met Valcas, my recent escape and how I appeared in his workshop. He let me go on without interruption, often frowning and shaking his head, sometimes even pulling at wisps of thinning white hair. By the time I finished my scathing review of all things Valcas, Edgar had stopped eating. His face paled.
“Edgar, are you okay?”
A thin sheen of sweat moistened his forehead. He looked like he was going to be sick.
“Valcas is my nephew.”
EDGAR’S DROOPY eyes grew wet with tears as he told me how Valcas had received a gift of sunglasses and asked Edgar to experiment with them.
“Realizing how dangerously powerful the final product was, I refused to give the glasses back to Valcas,” he said. “Instead, I replaced them with an identical pair of ordinary visors.”
“But, then how did he get the glasses?”
“It didn’t take Valcas long to realize what had happened. He broke into my workshop and stole the glasses. Since then, I’ve heard from several sources that Valcas has spent the last fourteen years using them to gain power and amass kingdoms.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “Valcas looks to be about my age. That would mean that he would have stolen the glasses when he was three years old.”
Edgar drained his teacup and sighed. “There are many ways that could be accomplished. Playing tricks on time, traveling in loops, resetti
ng timelines, changing the past, extending life. Many ways…each with a price to pay.”
I sat there with my mouth hung open, wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Just days ago, my biggest concern was how to avoid the Kevin Staunches and Sandra Argans of the world. Now I had some kind of ethereal being after me, along with a time traveler who didn’t play by the rules.
Edgar gathered our teacups and plates and began rinsing them at an antique lab sink. Both sides of the sink were covered in glass jars and vials of varying sizes, some sparkling clean, others etched or stained from years of use. I sleepily looked around me, realizing that something didn’t feel right. How would all of this glassware and the frail inventor survive the impact of my arrival? I had no idea how long we’d been talking or how strong the impact would be. Panicked, I leaped out of my seat and placed my arms around the inventor in an awkward attempt to protect him.
“What—what is happening here?” Edgar recoiled in surprise, dropping the teacup he’d been rinsing. Shards of fine china littered the concrete floor.
“The impact of my arrival—it hasn’t happened yet. We need to duck for cover before it hits! Edgar?”
Edgar stared at the shards of teacup until he appeared to grasp what I was saying. He frowned, gently pulling himself away from my protective stance. “That will not be necessary here.”
“Excuse me?” I felt foolish as I watched Edgar grab a broom from the corner of the workshop and carefully sweep up the small pieces of broken teacup into a dustpan. “I’m so sorry about that. Why aren’t you worried about the impact?”
Edgar shook his head. His smile was apologetic, but he didn’t answer my question. He, like Valcas, had his secrets and knew how to keep them. I forgave Edgar for his evasiveness, the only clue so far that he and Valcas were actually related. He was at least genuinely sympathetic, a trait that apparently did not get passed on to Valcas.
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