A Sanguinary Rose (Complete)

The sound of the exploding gunshot tormented my sleep for the next several days.

The whistling in my ears didn’t go away for at least three days. The scene kept replaying in my head during idle moments, even in dreams—the blast of the shot, the smoking gun, Mom’s shriek, Tobias’ dazed expression as blood pooled in his shirt around the heart’s area, how he keeled over. While paramedics lifted the corpse off the scene, it was already crumbling to dust, as though the wind ate away at his body on a molecular level. Once I dreamt of Dad turning the Glock on me and firing. I awoke in the middle of the night, panting, and with a cold sheen of sweat on the side of my face.

I avoided the subject. If Mom and Dad talked it through, it’d be in my absence. One time Dad broached the subject, he seemed to refer to Tobias as though he’d been human. But I know it in my heart he wouldn’t have gone straight for the kill if that were true.

As days went by, we weathered through the shock and Marcus came out of his shell, saying something that made me dig my nails into my skin.

We were having dinner after school. Shutters were almost the whole way down at my usual insistence. I was pretending to enjoy Mom’s juicy pork chops and fried rice when Marcus opened up about Halloween. It was such a relief that Dad was still at work.

“You know how in superhero movies, when bad guys harass the hero’s friends, and he intervenes, tells them to get lost, but the bad guy puffs up, and the hero punches them across the room?”

“Neat. What about it?” Mom asked between mouthfuls, fork in hand.

“That’s what happened on Halloween, when Scarlett stood up to that dude for me.”

I nearly choked on my food as I swallowed.

“You stood up to him?” Mom looked at me with a mixture of admiration and concern. “He was bigger than you, stronger. It was reckless, baby.”

I nodded. But Marcus had to keep at it.

“No, I mean. Mom, it was badass. Like, you have no idea. She literally sent him flying across the street. Ten feet into the air. Across the entire width of the street. It was so freakin’ cool!”

“N-no, I simply shoved him away. He was getting under my skin. Besides, it was dark, doofus. You didn’t catch the whole thing.”

Mom crinkled her eyes in amusement.

“I SAW. I couldn’t make that up,” Marcus said. “I saw him staring weird at your friend and then you launched him into the air like he weighed nothing.” He turned to Mom, eyes twinkling with excitement. “Scarlett’s a freakin’ superhero!”

Mom was frowning, on one hand disbelieving anything Marcus might’ve said due to his well-documented exaggerations. Still, she had only to connect the dots. I tried not to make my aversion to the sun too apparent, but sometimes I had no choice but to act weird to avoid getting torched before my family.

“Right, then I fired lasers from my eyes.”

“Why do you gotta be like that? It was awesome.”

“I don’t wanna think about it, okay? Please, I want to forget the whole thing ever happened.”

“Marcus, it was a very shocking incident for all of us. Scarlett’s not feeling well about it. Just let it go.” But I wouldn’t forget the stifling silence after that.

Mom had agreed with Dad to set up a curfew for us to be back home before 6pm. Only now it wouldn’t apply to me because I’d be starting work after school at the government offices downtown. Marcus wasn’t so lucky.

To my parents’ knowledge, I’d be interning at a tiny government office. The truth was, I didn’t have an inkling of what the hell I’d do once there.

***

As soon as cryptology period was over, I stayed behind with Mr. Royce to tell him a full recap of our Halloween night.

“How are you holding up?” he asked, looking me over with concern.

“I can deal. I’d never heard a gunshot before. Made me jump out of my skin.” I didn’t want to think about Dad’s reaction if he found out he’d been harboring a vampire for months, so I omitted that part.

As if divining my thoughts, Mr. Royce asked: “Do your parents suspect you?”

“Dad mostly spends the time away at work or shut in his office. It’d be a long shot. As for Mom… I don’t know. It’s only a matter of time before she pieces it all together and gets the big picture.”

“In the meantime, staying alive is your priority. Tobias, the lake, that was the beginning. We’re in for the long haul. I think what we all need most is to know how to defend ourselves. Alan’s the only competent enough in that regard. Even I made my blunders, and we’d probably be dead if not for him. That shouldn’t be the norm. Can you stay after your seventh? We need to confer.”

Six of us came to his classroom: Alan lounged at his desk, wearing a russet blazer; Anja drummed the floor with her feet impatiently; Oliver exchanged glances with Melanie, who responded with tight-lipped smiles; Morganne poked the legs of chairs with her shoes or extracted lint from her pockets.

Mr. Royce sat down on the edge of his desk and told us the story of why he had devoted his life to time magic.

“Her name was Odette. By this time, I was about halfway through college, an eager twenty-one-year-old chap, with a good grasp of my aspirations, and decent knowledge of magic and sorcery. Steady support from my parents came in the form of monthly allowances, and they helped pay part of my tuition out of their pockets. Take note, back in the day there was no Extra-Human National Orphic Achievement Scholarship offered. Deviants had to pay for college just the same as humans. The government later instated these ENOAS to keep lower income deviants and mystics from coming out to the public during their daily goings-on.”

He propped his chin on one hand. “Anyway, my parents took a hit to their pockets and the cash flow dried up. I took up a part-time job at a local bar as a busboy. That’s where I met Odette. It was love at first sight for me. She was human; not that it mattered.” He chuckled. “She’d come in several times a week and order a strawberry sundae or root beer while she did homework. The jazz music, the oldies motif, the ambience. Odette loved all that.” As he told us his story, a smile gradually set in his lips.

“At the time I was scrubbing tables, and once I noticed her struggling with a couple of math questions. Like the nosy brat I was, I offered to solve them for the sake of impressing a girl. We introduced each other, struck a conversation, and it took off. We’d chat about life in college, the snobbish teachers we had, and from there it was gold. We hit it off and dated for a good while. She loved baking dumplings; we’d wrap them up and eat them by a lake. Once we made a bet. I lost, so I had to dive in the lake in full day clothes. She jumped after me. It’s a good memory.”

His smile became doleful. “At the time I also struggled with my studies. Bs and Cs soon replaced my top grades. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I didn’t have free time. So it occurred to me, what if I delved into the inner workings of time and learned to control such dimension to the extent I could rewind it at will, thus improving my grades and enjoying more free time?” He reached for his pocket watch and held it before the class. “Odette gave me this on my twenty-second birthday.” Mr. Royce stared at its glass dome.

“Time magic is a punishingly difficult and exhausting discipline to learn, not to mention master it. It’s cruel and grueling. I pored over hundreds of tomes and grimoires on the subject. I spent months merely to get a grasp. After so much effort, I found I could rewind time on a single object for no more than five seconds. Travel itself was impossible. But I was onto something. One night…” He swallowed. “Odette dropped by my place. We usually went about Boston by foot, like many of you do here in Farpoint. I’d failed several times trying to get a broken glass to repair itself by rewinding time shortly after breaking it—I was short by three seconds, and my temper was at its limits.”

Mr. Royce paused; you could almost hear ghosts whispering in the silence. “I snapped at her, told her to leave me alone, that her presence broke my concentration. I didn’t even realize she was gone. The harder I pushed my concentration, the more I messed up the spell, until the glass stopped moving and the time I had to fix it slipped from my control. That’s when the dead silence really struck me, like a blow in the gut. The night before I’d heard howling, and that night was a full moon. I stormed out of my house, hollering her name. What I got as a response were screams for help. I don’t think I’ve ever run as fast as I did that night, and as the nightmare seemed to stretch ceaselessly on during my frantic hunt, a sinking feeling dawned on me that I’d lost something precious forever. I must have spooked the beast because he let go her neck and fled. I couldn’t think straight, but I acted on instinct. The sheer desperation, seeing through a fuzzy curtain of tears, made me fumble for something, anything I could use, and I found this watch in my pocket. I cast the spell that had hitherto betrayed me over and over and rewound time around her—only to watch her die again, and again, and again, making her relive her last few agonizing seconds on this Earth, having her wounds open and reopen, all because I was short a few more seconds. This knowledge is my curse. In trying to bend time, my time with her was taken away.”

I saw Anja wiping her eyes. Mr. Royce stood up and gazed out the window through a gap in the shutters. His voice cracked. “I devoted the next decade to furthering this accursed discipline, with the futile and absurd goal of bringing her back. One minute is as far back as I can travel. That’s the progress I’ve made since then.”

He turned around to face us. “Farpoint isn’t what it used to be. You’ve all experienced this firsthand. Always travel as a group, and most importantly, don’t leave your house past dusk. Learn to defend yourselves and your fellow humans, too, if you can, who are most likely unaware of the danger. Times call for it. I do not say that lightly.” Mr. Royce took center stage of the classroom. “I’m prepared to put out my time after school to show you how to maximize your potential and master your abilities, while coaching you how to defend against others.”

I knew my super strength couldn’t be put to good use if I didn’t know how to throw a punch, so I was in from the get-go.

“Where would we meet?” Oliver asked. “I don’t think the principal would like to see the gym burned down.”

Mr. Royce cupped his chin. “School is out of the question. Outdoor training is a no-go. We’ll find a way.” He cleared his throat and looked at me. “Have you filled them in on the latest developments?”

“I told Oliver and Anja. Morganne saw.”

“You never told me what happened after we beat it. Did he let you go? Did you outrun him?”

I still felt uncomfortable broaching the subject. “He’s dead. Deader.” Alan gave me his usual scowl. “Tobias. The one who sired me.”

“Dang, how did you manage that?” The witch turned on her seat to give me her undivided attention.

“Dad shot him point blank in the heart.”

Morganne’s mouth formed an ‘O.’

“But… why is it he could come into my home? I thought vampires couldn’t enter uninvited.”

Mr. Royce stepped next to the whiteboard. “Remember when I explained the phases in a vampire’s evolution?”

He wrote in blue. Vestal, Tainted, Debased, Profaned, Fiendish, Demonic.

“The more people they kill, or the more they feed, they evolve, and the curse deepens—their strengths become more pronounced and their weaknesses accentuated.” He gestured to us. “It’s the reason you and Melanie still have a reflection when you look in the mirror. If Tobias could enter your house uninvited, then he wasn’t as far gone down the rabbit hole as we thought. I would’ve placed him between Debased and Profaned.”

“So, say, a demonic vampire will be more susceptible to sunlight?”

“A demonic vampire will catch fire the instant it’s exposed to a sliver of light. But its strength and speed will be unmatched, and its thirst for blood insatiable. Besides, shooting an evolved vampire in the heart won’t be enough to kill it. As such, they can only be killed with fire, sunlight, decapitation, or a wooden stake in the heart, preferably hawthorn.”

Alan raised his hand. “If he’s gone that means Anja doesn’t need me anymore. Must I remain her guardian angel?” He shrugged. “I mean, there’s danger out there, but she won’t be singled out anymore.”

I gritted my teeth. “Your neglect is the reason this mess happened in the first place.”

Oliver’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

Awkward silence ensued. The ventilator droned on overhead. The shouting from football practice outside came muffled through the closed windows.

Mr. Royce shuffled on his feet. “All right, back on topic…”

I could tell Alan was seething under his laidback demeanor. His back was turned to me, but way his shoulders rose and fell betrayed any suave appearance he wanted to display. He bounded to his feet, sweeping one of his books off the desk and slamming on the floor. I shrank away from the anger in his eyes as he leaned down on me, pressing down on the edge of my desk.

“You’re one to talk. You may fool everyone with your poor victim mentality and, oh, your crocodile tears. But I see right through you.” He cast a glance at Melanie. “I know it was you. Doesn’t take sleuth to figure it out.” I looked away from him. My face was burning up from embarrassment.

“Come on, man, lay off her,” Oliver said, rising to his feet.

Alan ignored him. “How many more, Rosenbaum? I’ll say it right now, not one more!” I felt a speckle of spittle land on my cheek. “One more, and you’re done.”

Oliver put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey.”

Anja was flushed. “Guys, please stop this.”

Alan shoved him away into an empty desk. Oliver kept his balance and halted the momentum with his hands, making the desk’s legs screech. His fists glowed momentarily, but let it slide. He saw me looking and turned away, blushing.

Mr. Royce clapped his hands hard. “Alan, don’t test my patience. Sit down. Threaten her again and we’re going to have a problem.”

“Do you not condemn anything when she does it?” Alan pointed at me. “Why does she get a free pass?”

“Of course it’s wrong. But turning someone into a vampire is nowhere near the same league as murdering somebody, which is what you’re threatening to do. It doesn’t fall to your jurisdiction.”

“So she gets a free pass?”

“No, what she did is indefensible. However, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. ORPHEUS already knows her deed. So, yes. You will give her a pass.”

Alan’s fists were clenched by his side. “You think Odette would approve of that line of thinking?”

The teacher gave him a chilling look. “Don’t dare.”

A lump had formed in my throat. My voice came out soft at first. “You’re right.” Then louder. “You’re right. I can’t, nor will I defend what I did.” I turned to Melanie. She looked an uneasy mess, her eyes darting around the room. “No words can ever make up for what I took away from you. I swear it on everything I ever loved, I’ll make it up to you.”

Melanie’s jet-black hair fell in a curtain that framed her face. She acknowledged the apology with a quick nod, but I doubted we’d ever be friends this century. Although she did return my phone and purse in better conditions than I had left them. She also seemed a whole lot more comfortable being around me, which was an unimaginable feat only a week ago.

“This week I start working for ORPHEUS after school. I’m going to find out about a cure and share it.”

“Dad worked used to work there, before he fell down the well,” Morganne said, tapping her lip with a finger. “Oh, I was just recalling.”

“Was there ever a bring-your-daughter-to-work day?”

“Um, nah. He was super-duper hush-hush about it. I remember him being in charge of keeping logs up to date—who entered, when, what they looked for. He also kept the storage in proper order. You know, pretty minimum wage stuff.”

“What logs? What kind of place are you talking about?”

“Dad once let slip they called it ‘the Starlit Almanac’ at the office.”

I turned to the teacher. “Sounds like a good place to start.”

Mr. Royce gave me a snarky look. “I did say if it exists, if somehow you manage to get in, and if you’re lucky after all that, some semblance of answer actually exists. Of course, it still is your best bet.”

That, or the Red Star.

“How noble.” Alan folded his arms over his chest. Despite the sarcasm exuding from his voice, I could tell he’d calmed down a notch. “But you’re placing all your bets on an improbability. It’d be of much better use if you found out what the hell’s happening around town and why. You know, the sacrifices at the lake, careless vampire proliferation, that sort of stuff.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Royce,” Oliver said, raising his hand. Everyone’s head turned to him and he stuttered. “I, um, I think I’ve come up with an idea where we could meet.”

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

“How about my place?” Oliver tittered, glancing about him. “I-I don’t mean here, in Farpoint. My other place. There’s enough space, and I can go wild with fire without having to worry about the destruction.”

“Are you sure your parents are okay with that?”

“I haven’t asked, but sure, why not? It’s for a good cause.” Oliver laughed, but that made me think his parents wouldn’t be okay with that.

“What other place? You have two homes?” Melanie said, frowning. “Like, you’re rich, or something?”

“He means his house in Inferno,” Mr. Royce said, eyebrows arched. “The keep of House Belial.”

***

Mandala raised his arm and closed his fist.

The crazed-looking vampire stopped in his tracks and choked.

The brute tumbled to his knees from his headlong charge and clawed at his throat like a man in the vacuum of space, tearing strips of flesh with his nails as ribbons of blood crawled down and streaked his ragged clothes. No sooner had he raked at muscle tissue below than he turned red—neck, cheeks, and brow.

The sight sent my stomach churning, so I turned away just as the vampire’s body made a splat sound.

Mandala pulled on his glove. “No questions this time?”

“What did you do to him?” I asked, trying to keep my dinner down.

“I destroyed his brain. Caused liters of his blood to rush to his head and compressed it. Works as well as decapitation.”

“Is there any reason I had to watch that?” Besides the obvious show of power.

“This isn’t a watch-and-learn scenario. It’s watch-and-do-what-you’re-told.” Mandala slid a small phial out of a breast pocket and upended a drop of its black contents over the dead vampire. “Step back.”

When I looked, the gruesome sight had almost vanished. I was transfixed by how a dead man lay on the gravel one moment and was gone the next.

Heaps of ash flowed out of his creasing white shirt. His threadbare jeans had started to flatten. The blood that had pooled around the corpse became a cracked crust. The black liquid dug into the ash like a hungry worm and the tiny mound crumbled inward, collapsing in on itself. For a few seconds air rushed into the orifice, absorbing ash, grit, blood, and fabric alike, completely clearing the scene of evidence. Nothing but the gravel remained.

Mandala corked up the phial and put it back in his trench coat.

“What was that?”

“An ‘eraser’ as it’s known colloquially. A substance out of this world. It’s not man-made. That’s all you need to know.” The warlock gazed up at the stars. “One more hour and you’re free to go.”

The one great perk I could tell about my job so far was the instant globe-trotting aspect. Though it came with the sizable downside we only spent about thirty minutes to an hour at each locale, and I couldn’t wander off outside Mandala’s field of vision.

Manhattan’s Central Park was off my bucket list by now. We’d found the Fiendish vampire roaming among the trees looking for unwary joggers. Mandala lured it out into the open and made a ‘Picasso’ out of his brains.

“We’re off to San Diego now. Another Profaned vamp. He’s been picking off cops and we cannot have that. There’s still daylight over there, so stay close if you don’t want to be a charcoal stain on the pavement.”

Runes shimmered under our feet. A light flashed before my eyes, a gale of wind ruffled my hair, and now brick walls closed in on each side in a narrow alley.

In the end, Mandala subdued the vampire to his knees and drove a needle filled with SanguineX into his neck. I only got to witness the earlier symptoms, and I almost felt bad for him. All the energy he had putting up a fight seemed to deflate out of his body. Arms went limp and eyes lolled backward, and he slumped into a drooling stupor while reinforcements handcuffed him.

Other days we’d track down ‘stragglers,’ as Mandala called them—unregistered deviants who either reviled or somehow were unaware of ORPHEUS’s existence.

One time we caught up to a werewolf who had just come out of his transformation and was gawking confused at his, albeit small, path of destruction through a town in London outskirts.

Mandala sat him down on a bench. “Do you know what you were doing?”

He was a homeless man who hadn’t received help before, already into his mid-fifties. A copious graying beard and mustache covered his face, and his mouth drooped open as he struggled to understand what the warlock told him.

But that werewolf was the odd exception, since most stragglers tended to be vampires. Bits of their brief conversation with Mandala often echoed the one we had on our first meeting, and the first three times I made that connection I had been covered in goose bumps.

The darkness doesn’t betray. It is your one true ally.

I realized those words were laden with truth.

One time on a windy Los Angeles evening, I found the courage to ask something that had been bothering me since day one.

“I still don’t understand why I have to come with you. What’s my job, exactly? All I do is watch. How am I contributing to anything?”

“You don’t. You watch, learn, and do what you’re told,” the warlock said. His gaze seemed to hold power over people, always eradicating any sign of defiance. A red glint flashed briefly behind his dark shades. “If you wish to stop, the next SanguineX injection is for you. In case you forgot, you’re on probation. Think mandatory community service.”

Some days I spent the afternoon through evening at the government building in Farpoint instead. Mandala would head out on his own and I’d do office work—stapling, stashing, handing out folders, moving stacks of papers from room to room. Those were the only times I got to nose about.

ORPHEUS’ Bureau building didn’t stand out as I thought it would. It was built in Farpoint downtown side by side among the other government buildings. They all bore similar Victorianesque facades—screaming gargoyles spying upon passersby and a stone guardian sitting in everlasting vigil of the town atop the cupola’s peak.

What set this building apart was what lay underneath its foundations, not intricate carvings, glassworks, or its eminence. Only half the building jutted upward to become level with the rest, while the other half was burrowed deep underground. Once I got to inspect the directory as I delivered folders from one wing to the other. Floor -1 led to the lab and pharmaceutics. Floor -2 released you at external affairs and the Gates—I couldn’t guess what that meant without getting too fantastical, but nothing could surprise me anymore. Floor -3 was wholly dedicated to the Archives. That’s where I needed to go.

But I couldn’t take the step forward and see for myself. Intuition held me back; something in the back of my head warned against it. If I were to sink knee-deep in mud, I needed an excuse to pluck me free.

Then I found it. Eric, my supervisor, asked me to take some folders up to the third floor. That’s when it clicked; I just had to play dumb. I might risk a slap on the wrist at worst, so I went for it.

The elevator hauled me to the third story below the ground floor. There was a loud ding, and like the yawning mouth of a cave, a splash of cold air hit my face. The folders tousled in my grip. Heart beating with anticipation, I walked into the spacious hall. Torches gave the cavernlike place a vibe of a catacomb. Limestone coated the rock walls where there was no concrete.

Security cameras watched me come up the hallway. Glancing up, I caught them swiveling slightly to adjust on me. The security guard put down his book and got up from his stool. “Please deposit any metallic items here on this tray.” He held it up, and I dropped my phone in it. The guard gave me buck-toothed smile and waved me in.

As soon as I crossed the threshold, I set off a beeping noise.

“Let’s see, what else you carrying?”

I looked down at the folders. “Must have been the paper clips, I guess.”

“Fine, go ahead. Are you delivering?”

“Yeah, go figure. My manager said floor three. But which one, you know? So here I am.”

The guard’s smile turned into a flat line and sat down to continue reading.

Great double, rivet-studded doors were all that stood between me and the answer I hoped was contained within. A pair of large stone griffins took watch at each side like guard dogs.

I walked up to the glass window over the counter, and a middle-aged bespectacled man looked me up and down and said, “Good afternoon. Can I help you? Are you lost?”

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. “Ah…”

My curiosity overcame me. I was so close to my target, yet so far away, so I thought up an excuse to probe my luck.

“So there’s this really obscure character who lied about being a witch to save her daughter from being executed during the Salzburg Witch Hunts.” The clerk stared at me as if I were a creature of another world. I pushed on, because dammit, I had to try. “Nobody seems to know even her name. I was hoping to find more details about her final moments of defiance and the ripple effects she had on the country.” A pleading tone had snuck into my voice. “It’s for homework, please.”

The man exchanged puzzled looks with the woman stationed on the second window. “You’re too young to be here.” His confused frown became an annoyed scowl. “This area is exclusive to government officials and the OA’s employees.”

“Interns don’t count?”

“No. Sorry, I’m calling security.” The man reached for the phone line.

My heart raced. “No, wait. I only came here to deliver these to you. My supervisor sent me. I was just kidding. Very lame joke, I know.”

The clerk took a gander at the seal on the top folder and rolled his eyes. “Financial Affairs are on floor THREE, not MINUS THREE.”

That was where my answers lay. Deep in my soul I knew it to be true. In what form though? I could only imagine, with a name like Starlit Almanac. I had to find a way to violate the system to get in.

Fast-forward a few days later, Mandala fetched me from the lobby and had me follow him.

“We’re not going out today? Was hoping we could catch stragglers in Paris.”

His voice was grave. “Believe me, you’d not see the pretty parts even if we went there. Follow me.” I felt the tug of his blood powers in my veins, and before he exerted his will on controlling my body, I went after him myself.

We got on the elevator and he jammed the -3 button. I looked up to see his face etched in stone. Butterflies surged up in my stomach, to the point where they might have been hornets instead. Before I realized it, I was sweating profusely as the elevator slid down the shaft.

The doors skimmed open and a sudden gust hit my face as though compensating pressure in a vacuum. Mandala marched down the drafty corridor, his trench coat billowing after every step. Once again there was a tug in my legs, prickling in my knees, as bone, sinew, and muscle ordered me to follow him. As soon as I complied and took control of my step, the intruding sensation disappeared.

“You must’ve been taught in cryptology what warlocks and vampires have in common,” Mandala said, looking ahead. “Greed. It’s bottomless. The difference between us all and humans? We have the means to go beyond imagination.”

He knows I was here.

“Anything you want to know, anything you want to obtain, the answer lies within the Starlit Almanac.” Mandala ducked and marched through the metal detector and set off its alarm. I stopped cold, looking at the security guard, looking to him to save me from what was coming my way. The warlock’s commanding voice made the old uniformed man flinch. “Let us pass.”

Another tugging in my legs, another in my arms, like strings out of a puppet, and they forced me to follow him. A bout of nausea assailed my senses.

I’m in it deep now.

Mandala stopped before the glass counter and gestured to have the doors opened.

“This goes against protocol. You need to notify the higher-ups and update the logs—” the clerk protested, but Mandala interrupted him.

The warlock reached out an arm to him. “I know how it works. You can shove the blame on me. I made you do it.”

The clerk swallowed and removed his glasses. “All right, all right.”

The iron-bound great doors slid soundlessly on their hinges. It led down a dark vaulted tunnel, and another door awaited at its other end, slowly rising like an old portcullis. A white unnatural radiance spilled over and drowned out the darkness in its glow. Quite literally, it was a light at the end of the tunnel.

A sudden ear-splitting screeching went off as the stone griffins gaped their maws to sound the alarm. I ducked and covered my ears, pressing hard to stop the pain in my eardrums as tears threatened to flow.

The warlock grunted, strained himself to stand upright, and signaled at the clerk to make them stop.

“Sorry, sir. The upper echelon already knows of this breach. Sorry, sir.”

“Aye, aye.” Entranced by the heavenly light, I didn’t notice Mandala towering behind me until he croaked out, “Go. This is your chance.”

I snapped back to my senses; all sense of wonder was now shattered. Dread filled my body once again. It’s a trap. There’s a catch. Why would he dangle the prize over my head like that? It couldn’t be this easy.

“She can’t go in like—” the clerk yelled but was silenced with a clamp of Mandala’s fingers.

“But… why?” I took a step back, wincing. I bumped against the warlock. “Why does it look so… wrong?”

He stared ahead toward the light with a fascinated smile on his lips.

“Isn’t this what you were looking for? Isn’t this why you’re even here?”

“I’m not going in there. You can’t make me.”

Mandala let out a dark chuckle. He ordered the clerk to close the doors. The light at the other end was cut off, and darkness consumed the tunnel. The great iron gates banged shut.

Mandala’s lips twisted in the mockery of a smile. “You were right to stay. The overload of knowledge would’ve driven you irrevocably insane. The knowledge of the universe would’ve been too much for your insignificant mind to bear. This is the power of all the cosmos given unto us all.”