chapter fourteen
461 Words
They didn't enter the portal.
Not yet.
Meera insisted they needed one more thing.
“The final message.”
They returned to the puzzle chamber and searched again.
This time, the girl stopped trying to understand the entire puzzle.
Instead, she looked at the spaces.
The gaps.
The things that weren't there.
Then she noticed something beneath the floor.
A tiny compartment.
Inside was an old photograph.
Her grandmother was standing beside a younger Meera.
But there was another person in the photograph.
A young girl.
The protagonist stared at her.
She looked familiar.
Too familiar.
“Who is that?”
Meera didn't answer immediately.
The girl looked at her.
“Who?”
Meera finally said,
“Your mother.”
Everything seemed to stop.
“My mother?”
Meera nodded.
“She was connected to the realm too.”
The girl couldn't speak.
All her life, she had wondered why nobody talked about her parents.
Now she finally understood why.
Her grandmother hadn't simply hidden her parents from her.
She had hidden the entire truth.
The girl turned the photograph over.
There was writing on the back.
A message.
If she asks who she is, tell her she is human enough to choose her own path.
She stared at the words.
“What does that mean?”
Meera looked at her.
“It means you are not completely like the people from our world.”
Her breathing became shallow.
“What am I?”
Meera didn't answer.
The boy stepped closer.
“Maybe you don't need to know everything tonight.”
She looked at him.
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because you're standing at the edge of something enormous.”
“And what if I'm ready?”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Then I'll go with you.”
She smiled slightly.
“You're really stubborn.”
“So are you.”
For the first time, she laughed.
A real laugh.
It surprised even her.
Then the laugh disappeared.
Because the photograph had revealed something else.
A date.
The date her grandmother died.
Beneath it was a second sentence.
When the guardian falls, the door will begin to open.
The girl looked at Meera.
“So my grandmother's death…”
Meera nodded slowly.
“Was the beginning.”
A terrible realization settled over her.
Her grandmother hadn't died at the end of the story.
She had died at the beginning of it.
And everything that happened afterward had been set in motion by her death.
The portal wasn't opening because they had found it.
It was opening because her grandmother was no longer there to keep it closed.
The girl looked toward the darkness beneath Willowmere.
“Then we have to finish what she started.”
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