More lines appeared.
“We need the elements to unlock it!” she exclaimed.
“I have dirt!” I said. I ran into my room and opened my trunk to get my pot of Locrian soil. I brought it back into Io’s room and placed a handful of it on the scroll.
But nothing happened. The dirt remained on top of the scroll and no new lines appeared.
“Why wouldn’t that work?” Zalira asked.
I racked my brain until I came up with, “Maybe because this is from Locris? Lysimache cursed it, so it won’t work on the scroll.”
Suri ran out of the room, and without her saying so, I knew she was going to grab dirt from the courtyard. That would be the closest place. Io picked up the scroll and let the Locrian dirt fall to the ground before placing the papyrus back on the table.
“We need fire!” Ahyana said, rushing over to where the flint and tinder were kept. She brought them back over.
“What if the scroll catches fire and gets destroyed?” Zalira asked. That was a valid point.
“We have to have faith,” Io said. She took the flint and tinder and went over to the fireplace and sparked an ember onto a long piece of bark, which immediately caught fire. Io brought it back over to the scroll, laying the bark on top of it.
Everyone held their breath and watched. The scroll sucked in the fire until it was gone. The papyrus didn’t burn.
More lines appeared.
Suri returned then with a handful of dirt and dropped it on top. The scroll accepted this dirt, and it dissolved into the papyrus.
Even more lines.
“Is that writing in the bottom left corner?” Zalira asked, getting closer. If they were words, they were unintelligible. What if they were written in a language we couldn’t read?
It was impossible to tell what the scroll was trying to convey. The lines needed to be completed. We were missing an element.
“We need aether,” Io said sadly. The fifth element. “Where are we supposed to get that?”
“I’d bet if Lia told Xander to go pull her down a star, he’d find a way to do it.” Ahyana was teasing, probably in an attempt to lighten the mood, as I was sure we’d all come to the same conclusion.
We had no access to aether. We couldn’t get our answer from the scroll.
Her words also had the unintended side effect of making me remember Xander asking, “Would you also like me to fetch the sun and put it on a chain so that you can wear it around your neck?” when we had been negotiating the terms of our marriage.
Then he’d given me a sun pendant. And I remembered the way he had caressed me with that necklace, and it put all sorts of unbidden images from that night into my mind.
I tried to shove them out. This wasn’t the time.
But now that my husband was in my head, I again started thinking about the dreams and how I might be responsible for them. Could my dreams help me find solutions? If it was the goddess’s magic, I had spoken to her in my dreams before. What if I tried to focus on getting an answer?
“Is there a substitute for aether we could use?” Zalira asked.
Io shook her head. “Not that I can think of. And it can’t be created, either. It’s an element, a base material. We have to get something that has it in order to complete the scroll.”
She sat down dejectedly in a chair, putting her head in her hands. We had been so close but it wasn’t enough.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, leaning down to hug Io.
I hoped that was true.
It was well past midnight before Xander came to bed. He looked surprised to see me sitting up, waiting for him. My heart pounded furiously in my chest, bruising my rib cage.
“Why are you still awake?” he asked as he closed the door. He tended to do it more quietly at night.
