Page 181 of Sigils & Spells

Like some kind of field trip chaperone, Ruby had prepared us backpacks, two of which were stuffed with snacks and water bottles. The third was filled with something that clattered like hunks of metal, her only explanation being that they were “artifacts.” Still confused, I nodded anyway.

Next, Ruby put a small round stone in each of our hands. mine was shaped a little like an ear, and in the center was a hole about as big around as a pencil. I glanced at the rocks in the other’s hands. the same gray stones with small holes in the middle.

“This is a Hagstone.” Ruby explained. “It will help you see magic. You’ll be able to see it anyway in Elfhame, but I'll need some help finding an entrance. you can use these to help me look.”

I frowned at the stone. “How does it work?”

Ruby grinned as if excited about a trick. “look through the hole.”

I put the hag stone to my eyes, and nearly jumped. My jaw dropped. I’d expected nothing to happen, somehow after everything I now knew to be true, I’d expected the hag stone to be nothing more than superstition. But I was wrong.

Everything was gray through the hag stone, like the world had been cast in black and white, like there was a lens in the center of the tiny hole. Well almost everything. The world was gray, but not everything was gray. Minho and Ruby, who stood next to each other, both seemed to glow. Well, glow wasn’t the right word. It was like they were surrounded by floating glitter. It was difficult to describe, but they both had an aura around them. Minho’s was pale gold and his eyes were luminescent. Ruby said you could see magic through the stone. Minho was a werewolf, so I was seeing his magic.

But he might as well have been black and white beside Ruby. The glowy, glittery aura around her was nearly blinding, and it seemed to be every color all at once, shifting and moving. Her hair and her eyes glowed and every time she talked it was like there was a fire inside her and the light was desperate to get out.

* * *

Now that wewere properly equipped, Ruby led us out the door of her study, and down a worn path that led down to an old and dried stream bed. Blackberry brambles filled the ditch, and blocked our way to a sparse forest beyond. Undeterred, Ruby waved her hand and the brambles parted like the red sea for us to cross through.

As we walked over what would have been an easy and pleasant hiking trail if Mission De-Horse Julian weren’t so perilous, Ruby took a small palm sized book out of her pocket. She opened the book, and as soon as the pages separated, it was suddenly a hefty volume that she needed both hands to hold. We wandered for the better part of an hour, which I spent marveling over just how much magic there was that my eyes ignored every day. I watched three tiny people with round red faces close a little door in the base of a tree, grumbling to themselves. My human eyes only saw a rabbit hole.

“Alright.” Ruby announced after a while. She looked from the book to the tree and back again until she nodded curtly and traded the book for her wand. “Remember what I said. Never say thank you or you’re welcome, don’t eat anything that you didn’t bring. Don’t drink from any streams. And whatever you do–” Ruby looked us each in the eye for a long, hard moment “--don’t trust any of them. Let me do the talking if we meet any one. Also, don’t say your full names.”

“Our full names?”

“You can say your first name. Like I can still call you Julian, but never ever say Julian Sanchez. And really really don’t ever call me Ruby Brambles. ‘Brambles’ as a word is off limits.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Off limits?”

“Let’s just say I have some Harry-Potter-chosen-one-bullshit I have to deal with all the time and any creature that ever hears my full name always wants to eat me.”

“Yeah,” Minho added, “even her aunt tried to murder her. We had to enlist the help of a cow.”

I blinked at him, “Excuse me?”

“Shush,” Ruby waved him off. “Keep names to first names, and keep to yourselves. I don’t know what we’re about to walk into, and I don’t know how far we’ll have to go before we find someone who can help.”

“So, remind me again, what is our plan?” Alice asked.

Ruby looked a little pale already, and I could practically feel the nerves radiating off of her. “Well, we don’t have much of a plan. Our best hope is to find either who did this to Julian to begin with, or to find someone more powerful than them so we can get him freed. We have some artifacts to trade.” –Ruby shook her bag, which rattled a bit– “and beyond that we’re winging it.”

She grimaced. “I know how that sounded.”

Alice rubbed the back of her neck, pulling her short hair up and fanning herself. It was early, but the air had already started to thicken with the daily Texas heat. I caught myself looking at the back of Alice’s neck. Her skin was a pretty, smooth copper and the sweat beading there made her look a little like she was sparkling. I caught myself and looked back at the tree. Ruby had her wand out, and was gently tapping the wood around the hollow.

The hollow of the tree was just big enough for a person to crawl through. Though, to the naked eye, it only looked to be a couple inches deep.

I fished the hagstone back out of my pocket and looked at the tree again. Ruby tapped around the entrance with her wand.

The tree itself was in color, which stuck out starkly from the forest around it. The tree was like an over-saturated version of itself, and the hollow seemed to glow. A pale white seemed to radiate from the edges, and instead of the darkness of inside the tree, the hollow was filled with a swirling mass of yellow and blue and white. It sparkled and sparked.

I took the stone from my eye and looked at the normal bark, filled with leaves and old rain water.

Magic was so cool.

“Ruby?” I asked tentatively, nervous to break her intense conversion, but too curious to wait.

“Hmm?” she asked without looking up.

---