Page 50 of Professor and the Seer
“Yes, that seemed obvious, and yet he doesn’t give any clues.”
“He wanted me to go to him and bring my sisters.”
“And yet he hasn’t given you a location.”
I grimaced. “Speaking of location, did you get a picture of the cavern?”
He nodded. “Picture and video. We’ll peek at those in a minute. First, let’s get this back into the archive just in case it’s leaking magic.” The cracked mirror came off the hook and back we went inside, me pausing on the dark spot and shivering internally as invisible fingers trailed over me to see if I passed the sniff test.
Creepy magic stuff.
The archive itself I liked, the quiet being only one reason. I’d always loved books. From a young age, I used to bury myself in the pages of a novel, living out wild adventures and cheering on the young teens that discovered special powers and went on to save the world.
Silly me. When I changed at sixteen, I’d foolishly thought I could be a heroine. Then reality hit, all gazillion versions of them, wrecking my view of the world and humanity. It seemed like just about everyone I met had at least one dark path. Some had many. It became depressing to see how many people chose the easy but evil route, and that compounded over time. It didn’t help that every time I tried to gently guide someone into a better direction it backfired. Like that boy in high school who decided to try some molly at a party. I warned him he should say no to drugs. If he did, he’d go on to be a football superstar. Alas, he ignored me and, within the year, lost his scholarship and all his prospects. By his twenties, he was living as a junkie on the street until his death at twenty-three.
While John placed the mirror on the wall and then covered it, I wandered the stacks of books. Not as many as in the main library. Only seven bookcases, none of them quite full. I trailed my finger over the spines, expecting to see something, but blankness remained.
If only I could put this kind of magical dulling on my apartment. John indicated he could help with that, assuming he ever came to visit.
I had no idea where this thing with him would be going. Yes, we’d slept together. An epic night that even now made me tingle in delight. But would he still want to be involved after what happened since? Waking up next to my cold body, breaking his mirror, bringing him to the attention of the spooky dude who came out of the portal. Had I just ensured my vision would come true?
“Holy shit, vixen, check this out. I caught all of it on camera.”
I rushed to his side to see him playing a video of the entire encounter via the mirror, with only one thing missing. “We can’t hear him talk.”
“No. He must have been speaking in our minds. But it proves he exists.”
“You didn’t believe me?” I hated how I sounded pathetic.
“What? Of course I believed you, but this will help prove it to others.”
“What others?”
“The Arcane League for one. If there’s been a threat unleashed on this world, they need to know.”
“Oh.” Then because it occurred to me, “Will we be in trouble because of that?”
“How would that be our fault?”
“Because Bane let the portal open to save Enyo’s life.”
He shook his head. “He won’t be in trouble for that. None of us will. Whoever this being is, they were imprisoned well before our time, and quite honestly, if it was that important to keep them locked up, then those who did it should have done a better job ensuring we knew why.”
His vehement rebuttal brought a smile to my lips. “It seems odd there’s no mention of it anywhere.”
“Which leads me to wonder if the being that escaped deserved to be in there or not.”
I blinked. “Um, come again?” Unlike some men, he didn’t take it the dirty way.
“There are a few reasons why there would be a lack of knowledge about the being and why it was locked up. Natural disaster being the top one. However, that doesn’t explain why the Warden, the person tasked with keeping that door closed, wouldn’t know the reason and pass on everything they knew.”
“Given the curse chose a new person upon the Warden’s death, that’s not too surprising,” I pondered. “Bane said his dad wasn’t even supposed to be a contender, and yet he got the job, and then Bane, still a kid at the time, inherited. Who’s to say a premature death of a Warden in the past didn’t prevent the passing down of the knowledge?”
“If that were the case, then the next warden wouldn’t have known to guard the doorway.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “But it could be the person who inherited after an abrupt change in power knew the basics of the task just not the root reason for the guarding.”
“Plausible if an oral version was all that ever existed, but that seems odd. There should have still been something. A book mentioning it. A scroll with those markings. Some kind of legend hinting. Even a ruin with those symbols. Instead, someone went through the trouble of eradicating all evidence of the existence of Mr. Cloak.”