The Secret World of Briar Rose(45)
Despite the illegible text, the royal family had preserved the tome for generations. People believed King Samael left the book as a parting gift before he passed. Some rumored that the nonsensical text was a secret language that revealed where Oleander, his advisor, hid the last treasure of gold. Still, no one could decipher it.
Amelia didn’t care for riches or gold, so the book hardly piqued her curiosity. Instead, her eyes wandered to the window, where in the moonlight, she caught the shadow of a raven.
She leapt to her feet and opened the window with a gasp.
Malicine’s raven. It had to be, looking at his eyes. The stars shone bright, yet his red pupils gleamed stark in the night. He was bigger than she imagined, darker than when she last saw him at her birthday ceremony, where she chased him in such reckless fury she didn’t even realize it had been her life she wanted to leave behind.
“Take me away from here,” she whispered.
The raven didn’t respond to her plea, merely staring back with glowing pupils. Then his wings spread and took flight. She called for him, reaching a desperate hand to catch the bird, but it was too late. She only snatched the black feather he left behind.
Amelia closed the window and held the quill delicately between her fingertips. Under moonlight, the feather glowed an iridescent blue. She pressed the feather into the pages and ruminated over losing the raven once again.
It took a minute before she realized the letters on the page were moving. Crooked shapes straightened together, slashes of ink bent backward. The letters floated across the page until they made discernible shapes, an alphabet that she could recognize. She gawked at the text until the first sentence completed itself.
To whom this may concern:
If you are reading this, I am writing to you from the Otherworld.
Her heart thundered against her chest, a quiet storm igniting for the first time that night. She was wide awake now, and suddenly the crinkled edges of the pages felt tinged with magic. When she pulled the quill away, the words rearranged to indiscernible text again. With the brush of the feather, the letters came back together in an alphabet, blue luminescence gleaming across the ink. Her pulse hummed. This was not a secret language, or even cryptic code. This was the result of writing from a different world.
Pages trembled in her hands as she continued reading. Her eyes fervently skimmed across the handwriting, each pen stroke illuminating long-darkened hallways. Beyond Gyldan’s walls was something extraordinary, and the barriers were finally crumbling down. Amelia assembled fragments of knowledge, piece by jagged piece, until the truth emerged:
King Samael was not dead.
He had opened a portal to somewhere else.
CHAPTER 21
CORIN SENSED THE shift in seasons as the last blossoms scattered like soft confetti along a pathway of parsley-green fields. Spring leaves deepened into lush canopies to shade her group from the warming sun. The day stretched as long as Elly’s shadow, which jumped alongside the girl as she plucked ripening cherries from trees. In the golden air, Corin could hear the cicadas clicking in rhythmic patterns, their volume growing louder as her group reached a sandy terrain that curved around a jewel-blue sea. Waves crashed against black rocks foaming white. Salt-crisp air filled her lungs as she took a deep breath and turned to Briar.
“Remind me, again, why you put the treasure in Summerland?”
“I didn’t,” Briar replied. “You did.”
Corin shielded her eyes from the sun, which reflected onto Briar’s dress and turned the fabric luminescent. Butterflies had drifted away from her cape, while her sleeves shortened into layers that ebbed and flowed like ripples of water. “Is this supposed to be another cryptic message?” Corin grumbled.
“There’s no fixed position in the dreamworld,” Malicine explained. “The landscape changes depending on its inhabitants. Sometimes it’s our memories. Sometimes it’s our wishes for better ones. Since the treasure is going to be yours, your subconscious has tucked it over there.”
The demon pointed to a wildflower-studded cliff beyond a beach, where water poured from the rocky ledge and plunged into a deep pool. The rapids glimmered as if they contained stars.
“Look familiar to you?” they said.
Corin shook her head before the smell of linseed oil wafted in the breeze, and she was brought back to paint streaked in the lines of her palms, her mother’s hands guiding hers across a canvas, the sweltering sun turning both their skins a deeper brown. She’d plucked wildflowers during their hike to this cliff and learned how to draw them under the sunset. The rounded tip of her brush had glided against parchment and curved into soft petals. Her damp cloth had blurred the brushstrokes of mountains in the background. She’d been so proud of that painting, even though the work was amateur, for she never quite learned how to avoid the sharp edges her hands often made. She’d thought she would have the rest of her life to keep practicing.
“It’s not familiar at all,” Corin lied, but that lie became a truth, too, as her eyes followed the waterfall cascading into a deep pool that opened into an ocean. She’d never seen a body of water as large as this. Gyldan’s surroundings beyond the borders were dense with trees except for the river that separated the rolling hills. When she painted the kingdom’s landscape, she’d been excited to use blue paints and draw the winding curves of the stream, not knowing that in a few years, her father would bring them there to drown in oils of teal and cobalt.