Nym's Arc

Chapter 9 of 41

Magnus did not answer at the window. Nym pressed him. She needed to know where her mother had gone. He turned, cleared his throat, and waved her toward a side door. "Come with me," he said. "Let me show you the books." She followed him into a small room. Books lay everywhere. They covered the floor and rose in piles taller than her waist. The black cat slipped in behind them and settled on a stack, its green eyes fixed on Magnus. He stepped over the spines and pulled a heavy book from the bottom of one heap. He set it on a table and turned the pages fast. His hands shook a little. He stopped on a picture drawn in black ink. The shape had no face. It was only darkness spread wide, swallowing the land around it. Nym leaned close and felt cold. "This is the evil," Magnus said. "He called himself Zarool. He came from a land far from ours." He tapped the page. "He crossed into Enchantia over three hundred years ago. Drasila was made to fight him. She was made in his time, not yours." Nym stared at the number. Three hundred years. Her mouth went dry. "That can't be right," she said. "I was left on a river twenty-one years ago. Margo raised me. I am not three hundred years old." "No," Magnus said. "You are not." He looked at her the way a man looks at a puzzle that should not exist. "That is what I cannot understand, Nym. Drasila lived and died before your grandmother was born. She fought Zarool and she vanished. I read the runes myself. I wrote her ending in this very room." He pointed to a shelf. A thin book sat alone there. He lifted it and opened it to the last page. The ink was faded. "Here," he said. "Drasila fell in the final battle. The light took her. That was three centuries ago. There was no child in any account. There was no you." Nym's legs felt weak. She sat down on a pile of books. The cat jumped into her lap. She had come for her mother. Now her mother was a woman three hundred years dead, and Nym should not be alive at all. "Then how am I here?" she whispered. Magnus closed the thin book. His voice dropped. "I do not know myself how you are here, but I can bring you to the last place we ever saw your mother" Nym held the ring on her hand. The runes glowed faint beneath her skin. Her mother had died fighting the darkness and yet somehow Nym existed 300 years later.