Twisted Legends: Twisted Magic Book 4

by Kaye, Rainy

  “Not at all.” She hissed, her leg twitching. If she had started forward again, I would not have stopped her. She didn’t seem to be faking the pain. Instead, she continued talking. “The Fire Souls have every right to be enraged, as they are, but we have not yet been able to focus on amending how we wronged them so long ago. We still have terrible aspects of daily life to contend with first. The lack of water, the lack of weather, the lack of everything but lava and angry souls. But today, that changes.”

  With that, she started off again, limping on her injured leg. Randall and I trudged after her, keeping enough space between her and us that we could at least have a fighting chance if she morphed into a monster hellbent on ingesting us.

  “And why does that change?” I asked, following her down the slope and out across the empty cracked earth, the lava lake to our right.

  “Because you’re here,” she said. “The clouds flashed blue. That was you, was it not?”

  I thought back to when we had first entered the pocket and the monster had risen from the lava stream—a Fire Soul, as it were. I had countered it with blue magic, and the clouds had responded with a heartbeat of corresponding color.

  Apparently, there had been witnesses.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “Just because I can use magic, you think I can get rid of all…this?”

  I waved in the general direction of the lake, of the dead earth, of everything.

  “Not get rid of it,” she said, faltering in her step but not stopping. “Fix it.”

  “I feel there’s a subtle difference we’re not following,” Randall said, sword swinging at his side like a slow but lethal pendulum.

  The woman gestured beyond the tower, toward the statues. “They control the elements. When we have appeased them, they raise their hands and provide us their power, both good and bad. If they aren’t appeased, their hands stay folded.”

  “I assume the guy at the end there must be all about lava,” I said, taking in the statues with a new, unsettling appreciation.

  Did they actually move?

  “The Fire King,” she corrected. “Yes. Earth, Water, Air, respectively. All of them should be appeased, so life can flourish, but we have been cut off from accessing them. Their blessings have dried up, and only fire remains.”

  “Cut off…by the lava lake?” I ventured, but that didn’t add up.

  What had caused the mass of molten awful in the first place? Why hadn’t her people just gone around?

  Furthermore, where in this level of hell were the keys?

  I bit down the question; we had no way of guessing how that bit of information—the reason we were here in the first place—would go over with her. No point in just throwing ourselves onto our own sword.

  “The Fire Lords. They established camp around the tower and blocked us from reaching the idols,” she said, bitterness heating her words. “As soon as the hands of the other three idols went down, the Fire Lords summoned up this ocean of lava as an additional layer of defense to keep us out. With our own magic dried up, we had no fighting chance.”

  I scowled, turning my head to take in the statues as we passed by, from the far opposite shore. “Why would they want that, though? Just fire?”

  “They control fire with their magic,” she said.

  “Ah, yes. Hence the name.”

  She pushed a little placating smile.

  “My people were the Air Lords. We spread life on the wind, distributed water across the skies.” She looked longingly toward the clouds harboring fire in their bellies. “I miss the rain.”

  I did too, and I hadn’t even been here that long.

  “So they scorched the earth, kept you guys away from your idols, and killed your magic,” I said. “That’s pretty diabolical.”

  Randall shot me a nice one look at my pun.

  “How, exactly, do we factor into this though?” I continued.

  “The inhabitants have been here a very long time. We’re tied to this place, to its rules. We obey the laws of elemental magic, because we have no choice. But you…” She flashed a wicked grin that reached her eyes. “You are an outsider. If your magic obeyed our laws, then the clouds would not have turned blue. You would either have no magic, or only fire.”

  “But I have it all,” I finished, the pieces coming together like shards of a broken plate. “I can override the idols.”

  She nodded, and I went along with it, even though I had to wonder why I wasn’t subjected to their rules. Was it simply because I was an outsider?

  Either way, I had used my magic—including one that made the clouds pulse blue, however briefly—and that seemed to be a big deal.

  Which brought me to my next question.

  “What does this all mean?”

  She came to a stop, turning to face me, her lips pulled together but her eyes sparked with the vitality of a reawakened queen.

  “You,” she said, “are going to give us back control of the idols.”

  13

  Even though liberating the idols was not a task I had timeboxed for while in this pocket world, now did not seem to be the moment to discuss my refusal. This woman belonged to a village, and that meant more people. They would surely be on her side in this proposal, and basic math said we would be vastly outnumbered.

  We could turn and bolt—her leg injury prevented her from chasing after us—but that didn’t settle anything. Even if they didn’t send an army to track us down, we still had to find our way around the lava lake to reach the tower. So far, despite the distance we had covered, the lake still did not seem to end.

  We followed her like the casual idiots we were. The ground became hard flat rock as we found ourselves among the slate hills. She led us downward, the slate stripes rising up around us in a narrow path that forced us to walk single file through a natural corridor formed by a canyon. An enormous gate that would barricade the path was pushed open.

  Beyond the gate, small buildings were stacked on top of each other, braced against the slate walls. It wasn’t unlike the drops in Haven Rock, but with far more building violations. The buildings piled up four, five homes high and wrapped around the turns. The wood siding had dried and withered, and light pushed through the holes the cracks and twists created. The perimeter fence erected where the town ended teetered even without a breeze.

  Between the piles of homes, a small lava pond shimmered. Bridges of stone and metal arched over it, and I could only imagine that before the Fire Lords had claimed this world as their own, the pool had been water.

  Perhaps the lava that reached the tower shore had been H20, too.

  A door in a house two levels up swung open, and a man stepped out onto the balcony to peer down at us.

  “Marlowe?” he called. “You found them? I’ll be right there.”

  He darted back inside, and I withdrew as he re-emerged climbing down a ladder draped from the back of the house. A few rungs from the bottom, he dropped to the ground and then hurried toward us.

  The woman—Marlowe—massaged the thigh of her injured leg.

  “Welcome to Drop in the Rock,” she said, and her voice had taken on a casual, easy tone, though she grimaced a little as her leg twitched.

  “Drop in the…” I trailed off, glancing around.

  “Rock,” she finished. She gestured to the slate piles around us. “They claimed this shelter when they first arrived, and eventually built up a town inside it.”

  I started to ask for clarification—arrived from where?—but the man rushed over to us, skirting around the edge of the lava pond.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he said, panting, his earnest grin not matching his exhausted eyes. His gaze dipped to Marlowe’s leg, and he sucked air between his teeth. “Let’s get that cleaned up.”

  “The prophetess,” she began, and I tensed when I realized she meant me.

  I was no prophetess, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “See to them. I will bring myself over to the witch.” She flashed me an apo
logetic look. “Not a real witch. She took on healing with ingredients scavenged from the lands after the Fire Lords rose to power. The remedies have been perfected to be nearly magical.”

  The man shifted weight between his feet. “Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you over first?”

  “I just crossed the Dark Lands on my own,” she said. “I’m sure I can manage a few more steps in safety.”

  He nodded, falling back to clear the way for her with a flourish of his hands.

  “Sahir will get you settled in,” she said. “There is nothing to fear.”

  With that, she turned and hobbled farther into the town.

  I suppressed a scoff. Nothing to fear except that she, and apparently her people, believed me to be a prophetess who could defeat the not-at-all-intimidating-sounding Fire Lords who specialized in magic with lava.

  Nothing to fear, indeed.

  “Come,” Sahir said. “We have accommodations set aside for you, in expectation Marlowe would be able to track you down and bring you back.”

  He set forward as he continued to talk, and Randall and I trailed after him. I kept my eye on the lava pond as we rounded it toward a bridge.

  “I assume she has laid out the predicament with you?” he asked.

  “Kind of,” I muttered. I chose my next words carefully. “The Fire Lords seem very powerful.”

  “In this iteration, they are,” he said. “They have created a world of their choosing by blocking our reach to the idols. Once a path is cleared, we will appease the other three idols, and the Dark Lands will flourish again. With it, the power of the Fire Lords will wane, and balance will be restored—as much as there ever is here.”

  “So, you’re totally aware that this is a world inside a world?” I asked as the thought occurred to me.

  He chuckled as he stepped onto the bridge. Even though lava flowed just feet under it, the bridge seemed sturdy. I had definitely been on less secure structures in the last week or two. My pulse barely changed as I crossed over the bridge to the other side.

  “Our people are sealed in,” he said, coming to a stop outside another stack of homes. “When I arrived, the Fire Lords had become restless but had not yet taken the idols. More than five hundred years had passed from the time the Dark Lands were created until my arrival. It was the first time the people were not united. We all remember where we came from, but it doesn’t seem to be the same life.”

  “Where did you come from?” I asked, feeling for the mood of the conversation.

  “Everywhere.” He tipped his head back to peer at the cloudy river of sky that flowed over Drop in the Rock. “On her arrival, Marlowe wrote, The moon and sun cease to exist, and here, we worship different gods.”

  A little shiver crept through me. The different gods were the idols, but little else made sense here.

  He gestured toward the door of the bottom house. “The witch has relinquished her personal home for your use, for as long as you need. Please, help yourself. We have so much to ask in return.”

  Regret softened his last words.

  I found no response on my tongue, so I nodded and pushed open the door, refusing to be caught off guard in this conversation. I couldn’t quite bring myself to disagree with their request—fear, remorse, and empathy all vied for my attention—but I didn’t want to leave false promises in the air for the villagers to pluck.

  Inside, the house was a simple main room with open stairs that led to a loft bed. The bottom floor contained a seating area, a darkened fireplace, and all the comforting normalcies of daily life. If I’d had any doubt this town was inhabited by something other than humans, it was put to rest, though I couldn’t determine how humans had wound up sealed into this pocket world in the first place.

  With all the other situations at hand, that was a problem best left for…never.

  Randall eased his sword down onto the small kitchen table as he surveyed the room. “Think it’s safe to rustle up something to eat here?”

  “I’m not sure we have many choices but to try,” I said, and then grimaced, retracting away from myself. “I need to wash up first. I taste like the inside of an ashtray.”

  A standing brick wall under the stairwell provided the barest of privacy for a toilet and sink with a sprayer hooked over the edge. A drain in the floor and the lack of a shower stall indicated this area was meant as a wet room.

  I peeled out of my clothes and reached out to place them just outside the room. From across the house came sounds of Randall pawing around the tiny kitchen to the side of the fireplace.

  Naked behind the wall, I fumbled with the faucet and sprayer until I had a soothing jet of warm…oil. I pulled the sprayer back, letting the oil run into the sink, and then mentally shrugged. Certain oils could cleanse skin; I would just skip washing my hair for now.

  I plucked a small towel off a rack by the sink and used the sprayer to hose off, unceremonious and without soap, but by the time I finished, my mood had lifted a few notches and I was down at least a pound in grime.

  I turned off the sprayer, wiggled a little without going into a full dog-shake mode, and then retrieved my clothes with one freshly buffed arm from outside the bathroom. They were dusty and sweaty, but I hadn’t had the luxury of clean clothes and shower at the same time in quite a while. My clothes had long stopped trying to pose as anything but an adventuring outfit.

  Dressed but barefoot, I stepped out from behind the wall.

  Randall scraped vegetables he had been chopping from the small counter into a bowl. “How was it?”

  “Exhilarating,” I said.

  “Shower sprayers serve the same purpose in every world, I see,” he said, deadpan.

  I nearly choked on air.

  He laughed, and then held up the bowl. “I wouldn’t be able to name one ingredient in this mess, but I sampled as I went, and it is distinctly not-quite-Asian.”

  “That’s a pretty broad scope of cuisine,” I said.

  He sniffed the bowl. “We’re going to need a fire to cook this, and I make no promises from there.”

  I shuffled over to the fireplace. As I knelt next to it, I glanced around for firewood, kindle, coals. Torn up journals. Anything to get this fire going.

  Nothing.

  Did magic really need fuel?

  One way to find out.

  I jutted my hand into the fireplace opening, and then cringed at the thought of being bit by something lurking in the shadows. The fireplace proved empty, and I unleashed my magic before pulling back.

  Flames roared to life, crackling and twisting as if they had been formed by natural means.

  Maybe they had.

  “Perfecto,” Randall said as he bent to pull something from underneath the counter. He backed up, tugging a heavy cauldron that came to his thighs. After fishing around inside with clanging noises, he produced a more reasonably sized pot and dumped his culinary creation into it. “Step aside for the chef.”

  I shook my head, backing away from the fireplace. He added oil to the pan from a small bottle on the counter and started for the flames.

  A knock on the front door boomed throughout the room. Randall nearly spilled the pot. I chomped a yelp into a whimper and scrambled for the door. Randall was at his sword, pan discarded on the hearth.

  I yanked open the door.

  Sahir stood outside, the lava pond behind him.

  “Thought you two might like something to eat,” he said, and then scowled at Randall’s raised sword.

  Randall dropped his weapon to his side.

  “Did I…” Sahir trailed off as he took a tentative step forward and leaned in to peer at the fire bouncing around in its confines. “You made that, prophetess?”

  I nodded, despite how I didn’t want to encourage the use of the title thrusted onto me. It didn’t fit well and made my skin crawl.

  He beamed, his chest filling, and I could see all the hope and expectations on my arrival piling up.

  “Let’s go eat,” he said, gesturing
for us to follow him.

  I let out a breath. At least I could delay this disappointing conversation until after my stomach had been reacquainted with food.

  The people here weren’t going to like what I had to say. I was no prophetess, and I had not come here to free the idols. Outside this world, a bigger, more dangerous war was well underway. I couldn’t detour my mission to retrieve the keys to solve political conflicts here. The Fire Lords sounded like straight up bastards—I would give that—but I already had more than enough responsibilities, obligations, and general anxiety-inducing nightmares to contend. I couldn’t take this one, too.

  But first, dinner.

  Sahir led us across the bridge and up the ladder to his second-level home. Inside, Marlowe, her leg bandaged up, reclined on the couch sideways, foot propped on the armrest. She smiled up at us as we entered. A man and woman we hadn’t met prepared food at the fireplace, though lava pooled in the bottom in lieu of flames. A child of eight or nine sat cross legged on the floor, playing a board game with herself.

  “You know Marlowe,” Sahir said as he headed over to the kitchen space. He retrieved several glasses from a bottom cabinet and placed them on the counter with gentle clinks. “This is Aella and Gray—they are the elected leaders of Drop in the Rock—and their daughter, Hava.”

  Aella and Gray bowed their heads in turn with barely a hiccup in their cooking. Hava paused, her hand over the game, and stared up at us.

  “Do you know how to play Tin Elephants?” she asked.

  Gray and Aella exchanged looks, and then Gray cleared his throat.

  “Hava, honey, our guests have come from a long ways away,” he said, pulling a pot from a grate above the lava in the fireplace. He carried it toward the counter. “They are too tired for games right now.”

  I stepped forward, toward her.

  “It’s fine. I haven’t heard of Tin Elephants.” I tried my best to smile at her; if nothing else, the poor kid deserved a moment after spending perhaps her entire life in this wasteland. I could spare a little energy to listen to her. I sat down on the floor by the board, legs folded, opposite her. “What’s the objective?”