I shrug. “Looting.”
We search around the outside of the building, ever mindful of the giant returning from what I’ve dubbed a shack. It’s big, but compared to his size, it’s not spacious. Looking around the clouds and avoiding using my shadows gives us time to really look around.
It’s not just items left around the space. There are bones, whole skeletons, some whole bones and some pieces. There aren’t any spirits, as far as I’ve seen.
“What are we looking for?” Odette asks some time later, and I look up to glare at her.
“Does it look like I know?”
She huffs, digging through another bag. Most of the things up here are so old and decrepit it’s not giving us much to go on, and she wrinkles her nose when she tugs out bits of moldy parchment from another bag. “Ugh, none of this is helpful.”
“We’re going to have to go and barge into the giant’s home then.” I groan. This is not what I planned on doing. Talking was out of the question, but in my head when we traveled up here, it would be a quick search and return. We weren’t hoping to find anything dangerous, or deadly, much less a giant from the past.
What is it doing up here? All the people are on the ground, except, apparently, the poor souls who are left as scattered remains out here. It’s hard to gauge how old the corpses are, and without souls I can’t ask anyone.
“It’s all nonsense,” she says, digging through another stack of parchment. Less moldy, but it still looks unhelpful. “Giant eating habits, Pool of Truth–”
“Pool of Truth?” I ask, perking up. “I’ve heard that someplace before.”
Odette pauses, staring down at the parchment in thought. At this point, we’re grasping at almost nothing, but giving up feels ridiculous after we spent time coming up here. “I have too…” She trails off, turning to drop her pack and dig through it. I sit back and wait, wondering what the hell she’s searching for.
Sighing, she drops her head to the canvas pack a few moments later. “Right, I almost forgot. It was in a book Ray had. I saved the book from the caves, but it was a spellbook. Ban took it.”
My eyes narrow. “A book?”
“Yeah. I thought it was kind of interesting. Ray was reading bits of it. I was planning to as well before it got destroyed. I guess he didn’t have it in the shadows.”
“What’s the book called?”
She frowns. “Oh… it was…Umm.” She taps her chin. “Through the Looking Glass, I think? I don’t quite recall–”
Her voice cuts off as I reach into the shadows, eyes locked on the dwelling in the distance in case we’re ripped across space again, and tug out something I’d all but forgotten about. “Like this?”
Blinking, she snatches it out of my hand. “Yes! This, this is it. How did you get this?”
“I found it,” I say, cocking my head. “Back in Tressa, before it fell. I’ve had it since.”
She frowns, peering up from the pages she’s fanning through. “I think that’s where Ray found his. After the wall fell.He kind of told me about it. He was reading it when we traveled to Swan Lake.”
“Huh.”
I don’t know what else to say. It’s odd that we both had a copy of a book we’ve barely read, mentioning something that a poor traveler had way up here in the clouds. Had Odette not thought of this, I doubt I would even have remembered that I own the book; the pockets here in the shadows are endless. Unless I know and recall what I’m looking for, it’s easy for things to be forgotten.
“Let’s see if it’s got anything useful in here,” she grumbles. “I mean, it’s not much to go on, and really, we’re in the clouds. Aren’t pools up here just rain?”
“I guess.”
“So, this is probably useless,” she continues, running her finger down a page before she starts reading. She’s fast, flipping through the pages with a determined scrunch to her brows. I let her do the looking, keeping my eyes peeled around us.
There’s got to be more up here than the giant. Sure, there are bodies, but where are they coming from? Other than the giant itself, we haven’t seen anything living up here.
“Ah! Here it is.” Odette scoots closer until she’s more or less shoving me out of the way so she can sit directly by my side, pointing to lines of text as she reads.
The Pool of Truth is a different kind of looking glass. Unlike the other bodies of water, the pool is blessed by the legendary Icebound and carries the eternal gift of the cursed spirits of the north. One need only look into the pool and ask a question to see what their heart desires. But be warned, the pool will only take a request once from a person. Asking a faulty question will result in the loss of the gift. Once asked, theidea is to jump into the pool before the image appears. You can go anywhere, but only once.
“Well, that’s not promising.” I sigh. “What good does that do us up here?”
Odette stops reading to look around. “Maybe that’s what all these people were looking for. They sought the pool, but they died before they could test this theory.”
