He reached in his pockets, coming up empty.
Then he had it: his spectacles. If he could just bend the loop at the end of the arm—
Through the smoke, he saw the white face of the dwarf coming towards him.
“No!” he yelled. “Stay back!” He waved the magimeter towards him. Its meter was reading off the charts.
The dwarf kept coming. Leo threw the doll at him. The dwarf knocked it into the fire.
Desperate and not knowing what else to do, Leo screamed the lines of the incantation at him:
“Break thy bond! Break thy chain!
Leave ‘til only good remains!
By light of moon and fire of sun!
Let us end what has begun!”
The dwarf reached for him and grabbed him. He was incredibly strong. Leo fought and thrashed against him, but to no avail. The dwarf dragged him back down the hall, back towards the rapidly approaching fire.
Leo shouted the lines of the spell over and over.S'il vous plaît, mes Dieux. Aidez-moi!
The dwarf said nothing. He dragged Leo along in silence.
This was it. The fire was so close now Leo could feel the terrible heat of it. There was no escaping this.
The laughter filled the hall until it became a scream. It wasn’t coming from the dwarf. Not this dwarf, at least.
The dwarf threw the door open and threw Leo out into the courtyard.
The edge of Leo’s journal had begun to catch fire. He threw it to the ground and stomped the flames out.
The dwarf was behind him. He fell to the ground and rolled, extinguishing the flames on his face and his shirt.
Leo looked at the dwarf. He’d thought this dwarf was the one who had set the fire, that’s what the others had said, but it seemed like he’d saved him.
The dwarf looked up, and Leo was struck with recognition.
“Groundskeeper Tomasar?”
“Who are you? What were you--?”
Leo’s world lurched backwards. He fell to the ground.
It felt as though the entire planet had come off its axis. It felt as though he could fall into the sky.
It turned and twisted and finally sent him crashing back into the ground as if he’d just fallen a dozen feet.
With the wind knocked out of him, he tried to pull himself up onto his elbow to look around.
The dormitory was gone. In its place was a plaster structure with dark wooden beams and a thatched roof. A child was crying somewhere in the distance.
The world lurched backwards again. It took him several minutes to recover this time.
The ground beneath him was dusted with snow. It was daylight again, the cloisters were gone, and the building that had replaced the dormitory was gone as well.
In its place were the stone walls of a castle.
