Greysons of Grimoire

by Tpaul Homdrom

  “We can’t?” Fae asked. She took a closer look at her drawing. It was some sort of rocky island. Nothing was on the island except a modestly sized building, but it was wildly fantastical. She couldn’t ascribe a single shape to it. Cylinders jutted out here and there, walls sprung up as flat panels and then curved, spiraled, and twisted. Stairs flowed between the outside and interior. Balconies were sloped, the roof was a glass dome, and clotheslines hung about all over the place. But rather than holding clothes, they were holding… paper? Were those maps?

  “You don’t know what this is?” Mercury asked, blinking in bewilderment. “But… you drew it.”

  “Sometimes I just…” Fae started, wondering what she could say. Did she talk about the magic of drawing? Wouldn’t she sound like a total weirdo? Would sounding like a weirdo make Mercury leave her alone? “I… sometimes I draw things without knowing what I’m drawing. I just let things happen. I think of it as… a kind of… well, a kind of magic.”

  Mercury smiled. “Hey, you don’t need to be shy about saying the ‘m’ word around me,” she said. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a guitar pick. Twirling it in her fingers, it pulsed twice with white light.

  It’s a Talisman.

  Mercury grinned, returning the pick to her pocket. “See?” she asked. “No need to worry. I get it.”

  “But… wait, you’re —” Fae stopped herself.

  The Falling Stars are mages. Okay. That’s not that weird. Around forty percent of Grimoire’s population are mages, so it’s not that unlikely. And they do have a totally surreal quality to their sound, even if their lyrics could use work.

  “Do you get like that with your music?” Fae asked. “Like, you just sort of fall into a zone where you’re not really in control, but the art is moving you?”

  Mercury nodded. “Absolutely. My sisters and I are firm believers that art is a magic in itself — from writing to drawing to music, whatever it is, the act of creating something from your imagination is magical, don’t you think?”

  Fae couldn’t find adequate words to express her relief.

  I’m not alone. There’s someone else like me.

  Mercury had a knowing smile on her face. “Not a lot of people think that way, huh?”

  Fae shook her head. She looked back at the strange drawing. “So what about this?” she asked. “Why was it so important you kept Mister Crowley from seeing it?”

  Mercury smirked. “It’s a very special place,” she said. “Kind of the special place.” She pointed to the drawing of the strange psychedelic building hanging maps out to dry. “This is the Cartographer’s Waystation.”

  Fae stared at Mercury. “The what?” she asked flatly.

  “Not many people have heard of it,” Mercury said. “Fewer still know where it is, or what it even means. And even knowing about it doesn’t guarantee you can find it. But if you can find it, well… it’s the key to the entire Enchanted Dominion.”

  “The what?” Fae repeated, completely lost. Cartographer’s Waystation? Enchanted Dominion? What were these strange words coming out of the singer’s mouth?

  Mercury had a far-off, nostalgic look in her eyes. “The Enchanted Dominion is the most magical place in all of existence,” she said, her voice filled with emotion. “Most people don’t know it exists, or know rumors but think it’s a myth. Those people would be wrong. The Enchanted Dominion is real, and it’s where all of magic comes from.”

  “Magic comes from another world?” Fae asked.

  Mercury nodded. “Sure does. But that’s not the most important thing to know about it right now. For you, the most important thing to know is this.” She pointed to the drawing of the Cartographer’s Waystation. “My sisters and I can help you find it.”

  Fae blinked in confusion. “Why would I want to find it?” she asked.

  “That’s simple, really,” Mercury said, smiling. “Your siblings are missing — lots of people already know that. What they don’t know is where they’ve gone. And they won’t soon find them. Because they aren’t in Grimoire anymore. They’re not even on this planet.”

  “They’re…” Fae could hardly bring herself to say the words, it sounded so strange: “They’re in the Enchanted Dominion?”

  “Sure are,” Mercury said. “And the Cartographer’s Waystation is how you find any person or any place in the entire Dominion.”

  Fae leaned back, eyeing the girl skeptically. “How do you know all of this?” she asked. “About my siblings, and about the Enchanted Dominion. Why should I just trust you out of the blue on all this stuff? It sounds insane, if I’m being honest.”

  Mercury just smiled, unperturbed by Fae’s challenge. “I’m sure it does,” she said. “But doesn’t drawing or music or any kind of art being magic sound strange to most people?”

  “Yeah, but… that’s totally different,” Fae said. “We’re talking a completely different world, another dimension, where all magic comes from. That’s too huge to not be common knowledge.”

  Mercury shrugged. “Believe me if you want,” she said. “And maybe you don’t want to find your siblings. Maybe you think they’ll get back on their own, or someone else will find them instead. And that’s entirely possible. If you’re content with that, we can just leave it there and not talk about the Enchanted Dominion again.” She then leaned in close, tapping Fae’s drawing, her eyes sparkling with challenge. “But look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t want to know where this drawing came from. Tell me you don’t want to know if this place is real.”

  Fae stared back at the girl, and for a moment, she couldn’t say anything.

  But that only lasted a moment.

  “Take me there,” she said, emotions welling up within her. “If this place is real, I want to see it for myself. I want to know why I drew it. And I want to know what you know.”

  Mercury smiled back at her, eyes alight with excitement. “Good answer. Get ready, Fae. You’re about to go on the adventure of a lifetime.”

  Chapter 15: Hollow Island

  — G —

  “This is Hollow Island.”

  Isabelle’s words echoed across the beach, strange for such vast openness.

  “That sounds ominous,” Caleb said, staring at the jungle that made up the island’s mainland. “What do you mean? The Hollows come from here?”

  Isabelle nodded, kicking her feet in the sand. “They don’t look exactly like the monsters you called Hollows, though,” she said. “The ones that live here are actually scary.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” Chelsea said wryly. She looked across the beach. “Where’d the flute lady go?”

  Caleb looked as well, pushing his glasses up, but the only people on the beach were him, Delilah, Chelsea, Lorelei, and Isabelle. The woman with violet eyes was nowhere to be found. “Maybe she was left behind?” he offered.

  “Let’s hope not,” Chelsea said. “With how much damage she already caused in one night, if she can keep playing around with her Flute in Grimoire, the Hunters are going to have a war on their hands.”

  “Let’s focus on the here and now,” Lorelei said. “Isabelle, what and where is this place? Tell us everything you can.”

  Isabelle tapped her finger on her chin. “I’m not too good on the details,” she said. “I just know where we are. I don’t know where it is. Hollow Island is an island where the Hollows live. No one’s supposed to come here, so no one ever talks about how to get here from other places. But I can tell you how to escape.”

  “Wait, you said you’d been here before,” Delilah said. “How did you get here the first time?”

  “Mommy took me,” she said. “I don’t know how she got us here. But she took me and my sisters to show us just how dangerous it is, and to show us how to get off the island in case we ever got here by accident.”

  “Well, that’s the most important thing for us to know,” Caleb said, smiling. “So? How do we get out of this place?”

  Isabelle pointed at the jungle. “The
re’s a mountain at the center of the island,” she said. “We have to climb to the top, and then jump down to the port. It’s underneath the mountain, but you have to climb to the top first. And there, we’ll take the ship!”

  “The center of the island,” Chelsea said, staring at the jungle. “Great. Hey kid, have any advice for surviving the trip there? Or shortcuts?”

  “No shortcuts,” Isabelle said with a heavy, disappointed sigh. “But there are paths. And you have to stick to the paths. Lose your way, and you’ll get eaten.”

  “What do we do if we run into Hollows?” Caleb asked.

  “That’s easy,” Isabelle said. “We run.”

  “But we can fight,” Chelsea said. “We’re trained for it.”

  Isabelle looked at Chelsea as if she felt sorry for her. It was adorable coming from a little girl. “You aren’t trained for real Hollows,” she said.

  “Let’s just stick to the paths,” Lorelei said, a hand on Chelsea’s shoulder. Chelsea looked like she was about to pick a fight with the little girl. “And if we find Hollows, we can run. We’re trained for that, too.”

  “Does our magic even work here?” Delilah asked. She pulled out her keychain, spinning it in the air. It flashed with light, and her three Feline Summons came into being. She smiled. “That’s a relief.”

  “No service,” Chelsea said, pulling out her phone. “Not even satellite. Which probably means…”

  “We’re…” Caleb started. Like Chelsea, he hesitated.

  “Not even on Earth,” Lorelei said simply, finishing for them. “Seems that way. If there were a place like this on Earth, people would know about it. And look at the sky. It isn’t natural. You never see sights like this on Earth. Even the ocean looks… wrong.”

  She had a point. The sky up above had seemed to just be white, but as Caleb looked at it longer, he realized that wasn’t it. There were flashes of yellow and pale orange here and there. But even so… there wasn’t a sun. There weren’t clouds. The sky was just an endless sheet of white, with strange lights bursting into life and then fading across its surface.

  And the ocean… the waters were a blue-green, but there was a quality to their movements and the way they caught and reflected light that didn’t seem like water. It seemed more solid, too opaque to be water. Caleb knelt down as the tide came in and scooped some of the strange ocean water into his hands. It was liquid, but it was slightly thicker than water, and… it was just the slightest bit sticky. Bringing his hands to his mouth, Caleb sipped a small amount of the liquid and swished it around in his mouth for a second before spitting it out.

  “It’s sweet,” he said. Honestly, it was very pleasant. He would have swallowed it if he hadn’t known better.

  Smart people don’t ingest unknown liquids.

  “Hey, Isabelle,” Lorelei said, approaching the girl. She knelt down in front of her, talking to her at eye level. “You know your home, the Library of Solitude? Is the sky outside of that place like this one?”

  Isabelle bobbed her head from side to side. “Sort of,” she said. “It’s usually nighttime there, though, so I don’t see this much light most of the time.”

  “So, if you were to describe the rest of the world beyond the Library, if you were to give it a name, what would you call it?” Lorelei asked.

  Isabelle’s eyes brightened. “The Enchanted Dominion!” she said excitedly. “That’s what they call it! I like it because it sounds so magical and wonderful.”

  Lorelei smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Ever heard of it before?” Caleb asked as Chelsea knelt down to join him at the water’s edge.

  “Nothing like it,” Chelsea said, staring out at the strange ocean. “And I don’t like the sound of it. Some world beyond our own? It just seems…”

  “Like magic?” Caleb asked, grinning.

  “Don’t be like that,” Chelsea said, punching him lightly on the arm. “Yeah, okay, when you put it like that, I guess the theory isn’t that strange. But… look at this place. It doesn’t… it doesn’t seem real. How does no one know about it?”

  “I’m sure some people do,” Caleb said. “For whatever reason, they’ve chosen to keep it a secret.”

  “And that’s the idea that bugs me the most,” Chelsea said. “Why? Why keep it a secret? Why hide it? Grimoire’s called The City of Knowledge for a reason. Knowledge gets shared, not kept secret.”

  “Like how mages keep the existence of magic entirely secret from people who don’t have magic?” Caleb asked, laughing. “Maybe they thought an entire world beyond our own qualified as a loophole. I don’t know. When we get back, we’ll have to do some investigating.”

  Chelsea nodded. “On that, we agree.” She stood, staring up at the sky. “I don’t like the feel of this place, Caleb. Something’s wrong. We should find our way to that port as soon as possible.”

  “Then follow me!” Isabelle said excitedly, waving to them. She was now closer to the jungle with Lorelei and Delilah. “I know where the path starts!”

  Caleb smiled as he took Chelsea’s hand. “Ready for an adventure?” he asked.

  Chelsea smiled, shaking her head. “You’re like a little kid sometimes,” she said. “Just keep your eyes open, okay? If it’s really as dangerous as the kid says, we need to be careful.”

  “Hey, what’d you do with your cats?” Isabelle asked Delilah.

  “They’re called Felines,” Delilah said. She nodded towards the jungle. “I sent Redmond out to scout. Felix and Nekoma are in waiting. I can Summon them quickly if we need them, but if we’re trying to avoid fights, I should keep them away.”

  “Which one is Redmond?” Caleb asked, the names of these GFA characters flying way over his head.

  “The archer,” Delilah said. She had a bit of a pep in her step as she followed Isabelle into the jungle. “He has a range of about three hundred yards from me. He’s also great at moving swiftly and silently.”

  “Three hundred yards?” Caleb asked, staring wide-eyed at his little sister. “How the heck do you have such strong Summons already?”

  Delilah looked away, a telltale sign that she was blushing. “I’ve been training a lot,” she said softly. “Started when I was ten.”

  That explains everything. Most Hunters haven’t had much training before they start their internship — a lot of them take the field within a year. If she’s been training for four years… even if it’s only been by herself…

  No wonder she’s strong.

  “We need to stay quieter in here,” Isabelle said in a loud whisper, holding her finger to her lips. “Hollows mostly discover people through sound and smells. Their eyesight is pretty terrible.”

  Caleb nodded in understanding. That was one advantage, then. With his ability to slow time, if things got especially hairy, he’d be able to make an opening for the five of them to escape.

  Then again, he’d been overusing his Time Magic. He wasn’t sure just how much he’d be able to rely on it here.

  Maybe just rely on quick reflexes and Containment Magic.

  And running. Running’s good.

  The jungle quickly grew dense. Caleb had walked the pine forests surrounding Grimoire, but this was a completely different experience. Staying to the path seemed to be unavoidable. Walls of seemingly unbreachable foliage closed in on them, and the light from the sky above was quickly blotted out. The darkness was thick and suffocating, and Delilah soon summoned Felix and Nekoma. The orange glow at their front and purple glow at their back helped keep things visible, but the unnatural light sources only added to the jungle’s mysterious and oppressive feel.

  Not being able to talk was particularly difficult for Caleb. He was always ready to break the silence and lighten the mood with words and a smile. But now he had to stay silent, and he found his thoughts bouncing around at a furious rate, desperate to be vocalized.

  Shut up, brain. You can’t talk all the time. Maybe that’s why some people call you annoying. You are kind of a chatterbo
x. Work on that.

  Isabelle led the way, with Lorelei close behind her. Next was Chelsea, then Caleb, with Delilah behind him. Chelsea looked on edge. She had each of her lighters in hand, and was constantly peering through the walls of leaves and vines and branches on either side with an intense gaze.

  Lorelei looked at ease. She kept an eye on Isabelle, almost like she was looking over a little sister. Isabelle was focused, but still had her usual pep and curiosity, conveyed completely through body language. When they came to a fork in the path, Isabelle was decisive, energetically pointing out the way to go.