Azura

Chapter 2: It Begins.

Learning the difficult way that small town life starts early, at least at their grandparent’s house it does. By eight in the morning both Cece and Litha are already washed and dressed in light summer attire. Stomachs full from a classic English breakfast, where they were promised a trip into town under one condition.

Ready to start with the first itinerary on the list. Reorganizing.

Cece opens the sliding door and pushes it so it glides to the side, enough for them to pass through. Immediately the intense sunlight steeps into their skins, starting to simmer from within. Standing on top of a slight elevation.

A scented summer breeze winnows through the grass. They saunter down the short slope to the standalone storage shed. Litha’s eyes explore their surroundings: The shed up ahead, the virescent green lawn, the bright blue of the lake beyond the fringes and the pier on the left-hand side, directly in align with the back of the house. A clear view of it from the main bedroom.

On arrival, Cece pushes down on the corroded handle of the discoloured metal door. It doesn’t budge, sealed close like something on the other side is blocking the entrance. She pushes harder and her face warps with visible effort.

“Take your time, sis, I’m really enjoying being roasted by the sun.”

Aggravated, she shoots back and tosses a hand in its direction. “Give it a go then, heartbreaker.”

Litha ambles forward to take her stead. Holding the handle down, he thrusts his shoulder into the door and it swings open, unveiling a tall door frame of black. Litha cruises inside. Cece walks in after him, her hand gropes the wall for a few seconds before she flips the switch. The light from the one hanging bulb sends the darkness fleeing to the shadows.

The storage shed is the size of a small bedroom with extensive metal shelves that line the walls, teeming with worn brown cardboard boxes, neatly arrayed. The only evident clutter is the boxes on the steel worktable straight ahead of them, that look as if they have been purposefully taken from the ones in formation. Boxes randomly placed and clearly delved through, with piles of books and open albums on the table amidst the boxes.

“How subtle,” Cece remarks.

They both walk to the worktable and inspect each box for themselves, sifting through the albums that sit open as if on display just for them.

“Check it.” Cece holds up an album and her finger taps to an old photograph in the bottom corner.

Litha slants forward and his eyes zoom in on the family portrait. Two tottering kids, each on a parent’s lap. A much younger version of gramps and gran standing behind them, pulling wild faces at the camera.

A wistful look softens his face by a degree. Already fading, his expression hardens into an austere look. He turns away and starts to pack other albums into the adjacent box, shoving them inside with unnecessary force.

“That was a long time ago.”

Cece purses her lips to the side, she carefully closes the album and joins in on the packing. An interval of silence ensues, although short. It seems to stretch infinity with every unspoken word.

“Is this what our whole vacay will look like? Filled with nostalgia and…” he does a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scan of the shed, “reorganising?”

“What did you expect, Coachella vibes? This is LakeShore, the epitome of a kid-friendly town. At the end of the day, we’re here for the fam.”

Litha scoffs. “And for the ‘reorganising’.”

Cece laughs and looks at him. He glances back at her, his gaze slips and for a split second a blue glint kindles on the earthen floor. His eyes revert, narrowing on the minuscule spark of light. His smile stripped into a grave line, he walks past her and creeps to the corner. He crouches low, his head banks deeply to one side, peeking under the last shelf at something burrowed away.

Both of them know that Litha is not the most curious one between them, but this time it is different. Something inside of him thrums with raw longing.

“What are you doing?”

“Something’s down there.”

“And?”

Litha reaches out and unexpectedly seizes a slender wooden rod. He crawls back and draws it out and into the exposure of light. He ascends to full height. The staff in his hand rises with him.

“Whoa.” Litha ogles, wide-eyed. “This is a really cool walking stick.”

“It’s a staff.”

“Hey,” Litha sternly scolds, “making futile corrections is grandma’s thing.” His eyes unable to part from the staff in his grasp, the way it unexplainably feels like his fingers perfectly fits with the unmarked grooves of the staff. His eyes examine its tall wooden body, sculpted from fine wood with a strange ornament on its head. A pale blue crystal, oval-shaped, sits crowned on top with thin fingers of vines twining around the crystal in a veiny siege.

“This staff looks… out of this world.” His chuckle fades as it begins. “Think it was part of a costume ensemble from back in the day?” He begins to theatrically sway the staff like a sorcerer casting a spell. “Maybe gramps dressed up like a character from the Lord of the Rings.”

“I don’t think they even know what that is,” she says and returns to her station and resumes packing.

“I didn’t think they knew about Avatar, and I was wrong,” Litha retorts, still embarking on his fanciful quest, moving the staff in full orbit turns around his body and a few twirls in front of him.

Cece fires him a cursory glance and shakes her head. Three book packs later, she picks up one that not even she can avoid. Her curiosity unable to shirk off. Heavier than she expected. It is neither a book nor an album but a tome. Glided with stark golden etchings along the hard-umber cover with no words on it. Only gold-plated designs. It doesn’t look an ornamental antique. But something far more significant, ancient even.

“Litha.”

He glances at her and his gaze is pulled down to the gilded tome in her hands. He inches to her and inspects it from over her shoulder. Cece slowly opens the tome and sifts through papyrus pages, time-worn but still intact.

“I don’t get it… its totally empty.” His eyes investigate the tawny blank pages.

She stands still. With a meticulous eye, she looks over at the pages inscribed with phantasmal engravings, written as if someone had etched in it with a clear white fluid. Appearing almost transparent but marginally still visible. Somehow clear enough for her to witness the words she has never seen, runic symbols that she does not understand. The tome contains various multi-complex drawings and depictions sprawled across the chapters, with each aimless flick of a page.

“No, there is something… it’s just so light, like someone wrote with a white ink pen or something.”

A frown puckers Litha’s forehead and he steps closer. Anchoring down the staff, he stomps the foot of it on the earthen floor and that is when it is triggered. From his periphery, a familiar blue spark haunts.

Litha’s head whips to the side and watches a small ball of light glow inside the crystal. A growing ball of flickering, lurid blue light expands to fill the inside until the crystal itself is a beacon of luminescent light. Since even the dimness they had before has completely thawed, the darkness returning from the shadows. However, it only powers the light in the crystal to shine even brighter.

“What the….” He dawdles off, eyes feverishly darting around the crystal, the light mounting in strength to the point that its light reflects in his eyes. His dark pools alight with a blue hue.

Cece’s eyes are locked on the open tome. Glowing blue light floods through the inscriptions like a surplus of water in a river, gushing through every letter, symbol and drawing. Although all of it is foreign. It is now lucid to her vision. Bare and unmasked for only her vision.

“Litha look.” Eyes still watching the blue light flow from corner to corner, enlightening each etching. “Look!”

“No, you look. Look!” He frenziedly shakes the staff in his grasp. “This magical, harry potter staff is literally glowing!”

“I know!” she says with twin panic. “But look at what the staff… what the light thing is doing to the book…”

Litha finds it in himself to rip his gaze from the crystal that burns with a dominant blue. His eyes flit across the pages and he only sees what he saw before. Absolutely nothing.

“You’re insane.” His voice easily scales the high length of fright. “I see nothing.”

“Are you joking?” She looks at him with eyes exploded wide, and to her surprise. He looks back at her with a look of true bafflement.

“Even for me, this ain’t a time for jokes.” His gaze lured back to the gleaming crystal. “Not a… not a joke,” he repeats in a stutter as if trying to reattach his mind back to reality.

Panic spuming in her core. Cece drops it down on the table with a loud thump. She frantically probes through the pages, the same foreign lettering, words and sentences clustered on the page as if whoever wrote it had too much to say, and too little space and too little time to document it.

Her eyes skim over the drawings, each more foreboding than the last. Bestial figures of otherworldly beings and some unmistakably wild and unknown beasts like something out of a fantasy novel. Despite the heavenly blue glow that brightens the etchings and drawings. It still does not overshadow the formidability of the creatures drawn inside.

“Litha… be serious, you’re telling me you don’t see.” She pauses to inspect the page on the right, with a drawing of a demonic-looking fiend with too many angles, delineated out of blue inky splashes and drawn with jarring eyes.

“This.” Her index finger stabs the sketch.

Litha stares back at her like she’s speaking in mandarin. Finally, he blinks and out of consideration his eyes peruse the pages, around her finger, and he shrugs exaggeratedly.

“I don’t know what to tell you….I don’t see anything.”

Cece takes a moment to asses him and through their sibling bond and simply years of mastering the art of lie detecting. To her misfortune, her sisterly senses detect no lie to be found.

By instinct she wishes to cup a hand over her agape mouth, but the tome is so heavy, her hands remain cemented at its rear.

“Can we please take a moment to focus on the enchanted staff, please,” he urges desperately, “just—shining out nowhere!”

Litha gawks at her. Gradually, his face pleats with concern and sees her bewilderment to be genuine. That she is truly seeing something that he cannot.

“Sis… that’s… this is impossible… like movie-level impossible.”

Cece’s lips part as if to speak and they instantly seal back close. Both of their ears perk up, heeding to first, a distant echo.

“Sisipho.”

“Litha.”

Their heads snap to face each other with a mirrored expression.

Gramps waits at the top, gazing down at the storage shed, waiting for them to respond to his summoning.

But they never do.

Taking matters into his own hands. He walks down the slope with purposeful strides. The door of the shed: a hair’s breadth ajar, he pushes it fully open and stands in the door frame.

He flares a brow.

Cece spin on her heels. She faces him with a flustered face, eyes a clear white. She shuffles to the left to protectively stand in front of a particular box. Litha stands beside her with tweaking fingers and conceals them by shoving his hands into the pockets.

“Uh… are you two finished? Your grandmother—” pronounced with all the bitterness he can muster, “—she said that it would be best if I take you into town now, let you sightsee a bit and fetch you when lunch is finished. That is, if you are done... reorganising.”

Cece and Litha trade looks and nod to each other absently. Gramps’s eyebrows furrow with suspicion, but obliviously waves it off. He shrugs and soon disappears out of view. The siblings follow him out. On the way, Litha casts a lingering glance off his shoulder, to the staff that lays hidden where it was found. To his surprise, his heart mourns to separate from it. He frowns, shakes his head as if to shake off the feeling.