Chapter 20 Zarev
“What are we supposed to do?” Odette hisses.
After Ban gave me nothing earlier, we tried Raymundo. It was against my better judgment, but with a giant present, we had to address it at one point or another.
He had no recommendations, just grief. Tom is hanging, on thanks to Rapunzel, but she’s running out of ideas. Her magic has limits. The dead are one of them. Once he crosses, Ray is the only one there who can help him.
I resist the urge to groan as I eye the square building. Speaking with Ban was supposed to clear things up, not make them more complicated.
Jumping back to the home isn’t exactly a good idea, but it beats sitting around for no reason. Odette is as antsy as I am to return, and the sooner we figure out what to do with a giant, the better.
“Fucked if I know.” I sigh, blowing out a breath. “Ban was supposed to say something useful.”
“He seems a little distracted right now,” Odette points out.
Don’t I know it? He mentioned queens, plural, and barely let us talk for a few minutes.
I need a lot more time than that to work out what to do, but Ban isn’t going to answer his stone again.
I know if he’s decided whatever he’s doing is more important, then he’s already thrown the stone back to the shadows.
“I’ve seen a lot of skeletons,” she continues unhelpfully. “Maybe one of them can offer some hints?”
“Sure,” I grumble, nodding to the first body. She winces but doesn’t turn away, wandering to the corpse. “Let’s go looting.”
“It’s not looting,” she hisses. “We’re looking for clues to what this… this monster wants.”
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, the idea 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.”
“We only found this place because of the beanstalk,” I point out. “How would any of them hear about it, if the pool is even real?”
Odette shakes a finger at me, closing the book.
“Why wouldn’t it be? The fountain in Tressa was real, right?
And I saw with my own eyes that there’s a looking glass beneath Swan Lake.
It reacted to my blood. Considering the Mad Queen saw us in the reflection, and that Lake Wonderland is listed in the book, it’s safe to assume that the bit about there being a looking glass in Wonderland is real, too. So why wouldn’t this be?”
She has a point. I just don’t know what good it will do for us. Seeing anything is great, but to only have one chance, we’d have to know what we’re seeking before we find the pool.
“We should look for it. I groan, eyeing the shack again. Still no sign of the giant. “If we’re careful I think we can slip past him. I don’t believe we should risk any magic in case it alerts him.”
“Agreed,” Odette says, handing me back the book. I carefully drop it into the shadows again. There’s no sign that the giant’s noticed. “How do you think it ties in with him?”
“I have no idea. This trip already feels unnatural.”
We get up without another word, and Odette nods at me to lead. It’s the same pattern we’ve followed since coming back here, and I skate a large circle around the home so we can keep our eyes peeled.
The last time I crossed a being this size, the ground shook. In theory, if it’s out and about, we should have a warning before anything happens.
For a few minutes, as we cross the wide field and make our way along the outskirts, Odette stays quiet. Once the shack is in the distance, and we’re beginning to walk through a space with short clouds that remind me of bushes, she starts talking all over again. “What do we do if we find it?”
“Let’s just find it first,” I reply.
“I’m serious, Zarev. We can’t waste a gift like that. That magic could be used by anyone, for anything. Maybe there’s a reason it’s hidden up here.”
“Or it’s all a rumor, and we’re walking around for nothing,” I reply dryly. “Did the book mention a location?”
“No–”
“Then let’s assume this is all a big dream and there’s no hard proof,” I say, stepping to one side.
She falls into step with me as we continue.
We’ve moved far enough from the shack that I’m not completely paranoid about turning my back.
“We’ll keep looking, but I’m not confident we’ll find this pool. ”
“Such a skeptic,” Odette replies, shaking her head. “I’m serious, you might be worse than Ban. At least he’s snarky.”
“I can be snarky.”
She laughs. “No, you’re grumpy. It’s not the same thing.” I shoot her a glare, but she doesn’t stop.
The further we get, the less diverse the landscape becomes. It’s beginning to shift back to the hazy clouds we found when we first arrived up here, and Odette’s becoming disenchanted as we walk.
“I’m disappointed to admit that I wanted to find it,” she says with a sigh, pivoting to look around.
It didn’t take us long to leave behind the shack and the field of debris.
Now that we’re back in the cloudy landscape, it’s almost dreary.
These aren’t the puffy white clouds from before, but that’s one of the only differences.
“I wish we could find it. It could be useful.”