Page 22 of Langiappe & Lost Legends

I returned to the journal and scanned further down the page. "The artifacts must remain separated until they are needed again," I read. “Until those of both bloodlines are ready to bear the full weight of their inheritance.” I sighed and looked up at my sisters. “There's more here about hiding things and protecting them from the Lost Legends."

Suddenly, Dea gasped. We all turned to look at her. A chill ran down my spine at the expression on her face. She was staring at something none of us could see. When her eyes went slightly unfocused like that, she was usually seeing a ghost.

"Dea?" Phi moved toward her, concerned. "What is it? What do you see?"

"Not what," Dea whispered. "Who. There's someone here. One of our ancestors. She's trying to show me something."

As if in response to her words, I felt a strange vibration in the air. It was like the hum of distant power. By the looks on my sisters' faces, they felt it, too. "It feels like she's responding," Kota began, "to all of us being here together."

"She wants us to follow," Dea said as she got to her feet. Her movements were careful like she was trying not to startle whatever spirit she was seeing.

We moved as one through the hallway, following Dea's lead. Moonlight streamed through the tall windows and cast long shadows across the antique runner. The vibration grew stronger as we climbed the stairs and into one of the rooms on the second floor. It felt like static electricity dancing across my skin.

"There," Phi pointed to a section of the wall panel that seemed different. In the moonlight, I could barely make out the seams of what appeared to be a door. It had previously been invisible in the ornate woodwork.

"Should we?" Lia asked as she started reaching out.

"Wait," Dre caught her wrist. She was the cautious one. "We don't know what kind of protections?—"

Before she could finish, a surge of power rushed through me. Looking at my sisters' faces, I knew they were experiencing it. The hidden door responded to our combined presence and swung open with a soft click that echoed through the space like a whisper from the past.

Behind it lay a room that time had forgotten. Dust motes danced in the beam of moonlight that now stretched into the secret chamber. They illuminated display cases and shelves lined with objects that vibrated with magical energy. The air was charged like we'd stepped into a bubble of contained power.

"Holy shit," Kota breathed as she stepped into the room. Her fingers hovered above one of the display cases like she was afraid it might bite. Given our luck lately, not an unreasonable concern.

"Artifacts," I confirmed. I was drawn to a case in the center like a moth to a really old, potentially dangerous flame. Inside sat what looked like a simple silver pendant. As we crowded around it, the thing lit up like a magical Christmas tree. The glow matched the energy signature of the Larmes du Bayou perfectly.

"Look at these markings," Dre said. She had her nose practically pressed against the glass. "They're identical to the crystal's patterns. These aren't just pretty squiggles.

Lia shook her head and said, “They're channeling matrices."

"And amplifiers," Phi announced as she bounced between cases like a kid in a potentially lethal candy store. "Each one's designed to boost different things. There’s protective energy around this one. But, this one..." She stopped at another display,and her eyebrows climbed into her hairline. "Pretty sure this bad boy's for healing."

"But how did this room even get here?" Lia asked as she trailed her finger along a shelf edge. "The plantation wasn't family property until we bought it last year."

Phi's eyes got that distant look they did when her brain was making connections at light speed. "What if they didn't need to own it back then? Think about it. The Lost Legends are messing with temporal magic. What if our ancestors used their recent activity to... I don't know, bring this room forward to where and when they needed it to be?"

"That's..." Dea trailed off and tilted her head like she was listening to something we couldn't hear. "Actually, that tracks with what they're telling me. They’re talking about this place like it's our birthright. One even said it was about time the magic returned to our bloodline."

Adele walked into the room and prowled around Dea’s ankles.“Your ancestors stood in this very room. Their power flowed through the artifacts surrounding you. You six were meant to fight these battles. Meeting Phoebe was no accident.”

I was just opening my mouth to respond to Adele when a flicker caught my eye. The figure in the doorway seemed to strobe between existence and non-existence. She looked like a glitch in reality's programming. One second, she was solid, and the next, she was transparent. And then gone completely before snapping back.

"How the hell did she get past the wards?" Lia shouted, just as our uninvited guest hurled a bolt of temporal energy at the display case. The magic crackled with familiar crystalline undertones.

I threw up a shield. My protection spell spread like quicksilver between the artifacts and the attack. Dre and Kota moved in perfect sync. They launched twin counterstrikes thatwould have taken down a small army. Would have, if our attacker hadn't partially phased out of our timeline to avoid them.

"She didn't get past them," Adele's voice rang out as Phi yanked Dea behind her. "She used temporal magic to slip between the ward's installation dates. She's literally attacking from a time when they didn't exist."

Well, shit. That was a new one. The fight turned into a twisted game of four-dimensional tag. Our attacker kept blipping between moments in time. It blew my mind that she could hit us from a hundred years ago and then dart back two hundred years. We could barely track her, let alone land a solid hit.

But she hadn't counted on facing all six of us. The solid relationships we shared honed our sister-magic and taught us how to anticipate each other's moves. When the intruder phased back in to make another grab for the artifacts, she found herself caught in a crossfire of spells from six different directions.

She managed to snatch something from one of the smaller displays before our combined attack forced her to retreat. She didn't get away before I caught a clear glimpse of her face. It was the same woman who had stolen the Larmes du Bayou.

"Everyone check-in," Dre commanded as she moved from sister to sister with her healer's magic. Her hands glowed with warm golden light as she worked, erasing burns from temporal backlash and soothing our magical strain. "Did anyone break anything?"

"I'm just bruised," Phi reported, helping Dea up from where they'd taken cover. "But what did she take?"

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