Jess dropped to her knees near the edge of the plinth, and seemed to be examining something. I started walking toward her, drawn not by that ineffable pull of the Source, but by my own burning curiosity.
“Is it… what you thought?” I asked, as I got closer. My mouth had gone dry, and I swallowed convulsively. “Is it a… a Gateway?”
Jess looked up at me, her expression very serious. “Oh yes. There’s no doubt about it. A Geatgrima once stood here.”
A great sense of relief washed through me. Answers at last. “How do you know?” I asked her.
“Well, let’s look at the most concrete evidence first. The plinth is consistent with the design of other Geatgrimas I have encountered. You can see here, the runes that have been carved into the stones. These once ringed the entire platform, forming a Casting—what you might call an incantation, I suppose, or maybe a spell. Here, you can still see some of them, though time and damage have worn much of it away.”
She gestured for me to join her on the ground, and after only a moment’s hesitation, I dropped down onto my knees. She brushed some dust and sand away from the largest stone to reveal a shape almost like an arrow with a wavy shaft. Then she lifted two pieces of broken stone, and showed me how they fit together—revealing anothersymbol like half a sun with rays shooting out in spokes. The sight of them sent a shiver up my back and into my hair, though I had no idea what they meant.
“You can also see that the structure is still partially in place. These stones once stood in one large, solid archway. You can see this stone here used to rest right at the top,” she pointed to another symbol which, to my surprise, I recognized.
“I’ve seen that before,” I told her, tracing my finger through the air, mimicking the shape of the carving. It was like three spirals joined together at the center.
“It goes by many names,” Jess said, nodding, “and has appeared in many forms and with many meanings. We call it a triskele, or a triskelion. What does it mean in your tradition?”
“I saw it in one of our family’s books—a sort of textbook, I guess you could say, that I’ve been reading as part of my formal witch’s training. It was used alongside a description of the witch’s cycle—Maiden, Mother, and Crone,” I said. “Each phase is different, but powerful, and they are all connected.”
“In the Durupinen tradition, we think of this as three phases as well, but they refer to the phases of a spirit’s journey: the phase within the living body, the phase in the Aether, when the spirit first leaves the body, and then the phase beyond the Aether, after the spirit has crossed fully over into the spirit realm. It is a central symbol to our sisterhood. Even if nothing else had still existed of the original structure of the archway, seeing this one stone would have been enough to tell me what we’re dealing with here.”
“How old is it?” I whispered.
“I won’t pretend to be an expert on accurately aging a structure like this,” Jess said slowly, “but I do know for sure that it was here for hundreds of years, before the witches settled Sedgwick Cove.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around that sort of age, so I just nodded, and let the information roll off of me.
“Here’s the thing, Wren. We have a problem here. A big, big problem.”
I swallowed hard. “Just the one?” I asked, in a pathetic attempt athumor—an attempt that nonetheless elicited a slight smirk from Jess. “So… what is it?”
“Well, like I told you back at the bed and breakfast, I could sense a Gateway nearby, but I also knew that the energy, while still identifiable was… off. I would have wanted to see this place regardless, but the wrongness of that energy made me want to find it even more.”
“Well, it’s… it’s all broken apart,” I said, gesturing around to the rubble surrounding us. “I mean, that’s what’s wrong, isn’t it? It needs to be… rebuilt or something?”
But Jess shook her head. “It’s more than that.” She leaned back until she was sitting on her haunches. She gazed around at the rubble as though it made her inexpressibly sad. “I’ve seen another Geatgrima in this kind of condition. It was also destroyed. Forgotten. But that wasn’t what had broken it.”
I found I was holding my breath, and forced myself to breathe as I listened to her.
“The truth is that, whether the archway stands to mark the place, the Gateway still exists. It should still be a location of safe passage for spirits to find their way through the veil to the spirit world. But this place—there’s something wrong with it,” Jess said, dropping her gaze again to the stones, and running a gentle finger over one of them. “Very, very wrong.”
I thought about the Darkness. About the things I hadn’t told her yet, because they felt at once too personal, and also not my secret to tell. I couldn’t bring myself to say any of it. Not here, not when the clock was ticking, and any moment someone might come and discover us here. I swallowed hard, and still felt like I was choking on my own fear.
“Do you think you could explain this once we’re out of here? We need to hurry,” I said. “What else do we need to do to?—”
“Wren?!”
I knew the voice that called my name. I leapt to my feet to find Persi standing inside the entrance to the cavern.
“Persi?” I gasped. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” she cried. “What the hell are you doing here?!”
Her hair was wild, but not as wild as the expression on her face. She hitched her thumb back over her shoulder. “You know I don’t trust them to keep a proper watch over the grimoire, so I’ve been checking in on it myself. Are you responsible for that aquatic spectacle out there?”
I smiled sheepishly. “Indirectly,” I admitted.
“Well, I don’t know what you think you’re doing down here, but the Conclave will boil you in a cauldron if they find you here unaccompanied. Now, come on, before someone comes ba—” Her eyes darted from my face to the Source and then, inevitably, onto Jess.
