I feel like I’m awakening slowly, sunbathing in the fringes of a dream. Magic releases my nerve endings one by one, letting me drift fully back into my body. The vivid reminiscences fade to ghosts but don’t leave me. They linger.
“Wherearewe?” Morgan is marveling. There’s astonishment in his voice. More words break apart under my feet. They’re everywhere, fragments scattered among the trees like fallen leaves:
The Clock of
Old and New
was always talking
There’s a soft smile on my face. Tears in my eyes. I’ve been running with them closed, and now we’ve stopped.
“At the source,” I say, not fully understanding why until I open my eyes again.
Thirty-Six
Ghostgill: A creature that looks half ghost, half mushroom. Shaped almost like a tiny figure pretending to be a ghost, with a sheet over its head. Eleven inches tall. Body is white, with lots of folds, like the gills on the underside of a fly agaric mushroom. They live in creeks and would pass for plants were it not for the way they walk, slowly, like starfish.
Paranimals,AthroughM,
Tempest Family Grimoire
We have foundourselves in an ancient city of trees so towering that Morgan and I, from the bottom, can’t see how high it goes. Birds trill, their music filtering down in ethereal echoes. The air is cool and clammy, mist soaking our ankles.
There is a tall lamp growing out of the soil, with a post of braided iron. Its gentle light spills onto the mossy floor below, the night and dense foliage diffusing it to an emerald green.
“Hey, they’ve got electricity out here!” Morgan raps the lamppost. “Or…hmm. It must be solar-powered.”
“That’s strange. I didn’t put a lamp here.”
Morgan peers at me. “Why would you have?”
Black shapes rising to chest level are slow to appear, given the lack of illumination. They’re shelves. Square plastic milk crates, rectangular wooden crates, and cardboard boxes have been stacked together in a vertical triangle, like a Christmas tree. They’ve been carefully decorated with books, and a memory falls into my thoughts like a shooting star into the sea.
The Traveler’s Library.
That’s what I’d called it.
When I was small, slipping into the woods to build my hideaway. I didn’t have quite enough space to be myself at home, and I’d felt like The Magick Happens was Luna’s haven more than mine, a special place for her and Grandma Dottie to be an inseparable pair. There wasn’t anywhere that I belonged. So I made my own haven out here, one book at a time. I’d stacked my unfinished stories between those by authors I admired: Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Vivian Vande Velde.
Morgan slides a composition notebook off a shelf—the type with black splotches all over a white cover. It’s titledPhantasmagoriain handwriting that was honestly much neater when I was ten years old than it is now, and beneath that:by Zelda Margaret Tempest.
I drape my braid over one shoulder, twisting the ends. “I can’t believe I forgot about all this.”
Morgan flips through the book. It’s barely three chapters long, because in those days I got bored quickly and was too impatient, continually starting over, starting over. Any time I scraped enough quarters together, I was down at the dollar store buying notebooks.
The Clock of Old and New was always talking about how she used to be human, and had butter-yellow hair. That was before the sorceress stuffed her inside a clock.
There was a secret princess inside this clock. She had wooden hair and her arms and legs were wooden, too. One leaf grew from her left knee. If Fortuna could only find the key, she could free the princess.
“This is what I’ve been hearing,” I whisper. “It’s…”
Morgan’s eyes are terribly bright as they rest on me. “You.”
Not brays. Stories. I’ve been hearing stories—some I wrote long, long ago, and others, I suspect, must be glimpses of stories I still have waiting inside me: books and books and books yet to come.
“Does magic want you to finish what you started?” Morgan speculates, sifting through dozens of notebooks. “Look at this.”
Once upon a time, nobody went into the forest and came out of it alive. A little boy named Theodore lived by himself in a cottage at the edge of it, and he could hear dangerous monsters lurking. His father had been dragged away by wolves made of water, who charged out of the sea every full moon.
