Illusion and Reality

Obsession with papers

I froze in my place.

Slowly I turned around to see Lily standing with arms crossed over her chest.

“I was….just….”

She rolled her eyes at my lack of words, “Did you find something?”

I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, I shook my head slightly.

“I have to admit, this is one proud moment for me. I never thought the day would come when my goody-two-shoes best friend would snoop around in someone else’s room,” she said with a smug smile on her face.

“I was just trying to find something useful, that’s all.”

“So, what did you find?” she asked, opening a drawer on the table next to Lucius’s bed.

“Nothing important, just some papers with foreign writings or enchanted writings. Most of them have the royal stamp.”

“I thought they use those flying letter thingies?” Lily picked up a piece of paper from the drawer.

“They are very old, maybe they didn’t use the technique back then?”

“Let’s try to find something, there has to be something in his room,” Lily went to search his closet on the other side of the room, “You have to admit this is pretty exciting.”

I shook my head.

After searching for 40 minutes, we did not find anything that could answer our questions about Lucius as we had only covered half of his room. His room was bigger than our rooms and after searching we were putting everything back in the exact position.

“Ughh...I have never seen so many papers in my life. What is with this man and his obsession with letters? He has papers in every damn color for crying out loud,” Lily cried holding a bunch of papers in her hand.

I chuckled at her.

She gave me a look and opened a bag, which was surprise-surprise filled with papers. Frustrated, Lily kicked the random wall in front of her or what we thought was a random wall. The grey paint disappeared from a small portion and a small door appeared on the wall. 

“What the actual fifty shades of grey is that?”

“Seriously?” I looked at her.

“What? Dude literally has every shade of grey in his room.”

I ignored her comment and tried to open the door, it was locked, “Now what?”

“There must be a tiny key here somewhere,” Lily replied.

We started going through those drawers again. All the drawers looked the same, filled with papers and some other things which did not seem out of the ordinary, except for one thing.

I quickly went towards the large desk near his window, opening the drawer I found the familiar purple rose and my doubt was right. I slowly opened its petals and in the middle was a tiny key hidden perfectly from our eyes.

“I got the key,” I told Lily and went ahead to open the door. 

I put the key carefully in the small keyhole and without even turning it I heard a faint click.

Slowly I removed an envelope and more papers from inside.

“More papers,” I heard Lily.

I passed some of the papers to Lily, who did not look very happy about it but took them anyway.

She opened the first paper, “We finally found what we were not looking for,” her face got serious as she read it, “something about the attack in the palace is written in this.”

Why would he hide a paper about the attack? From what I know only one major attack happened in the palace.

“What’s written in this?” I asked.

“Most of the stuff is in the secret language but some words are in English.”

I took a piece of paper, it was larger than the others so I unfolded it on the floor to see it more clearly. 

It was a map.

Lily sat in front of me and started observing the map carefully, running her fingers on the lines, “This is the map of the palace.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked at the map, but I was not familiar with the hallways of the palace in the first place, whereas Lily spent most of her day there with Liam.

“Yeah, I have been in the palace so many times now. This is the main entrance, we entered from here during the ball,” she pointed towards the corner, “this is the floor where Liam stays and I guess the doors which are in red are secret doors.”

Her words made perfect sense after I looked at the map again, I recognized the back door, from where Lily and I entered when we tried to follow Lucius.

The red doors must be secret passages and the yellow corner?

“Lily, what’s this place?”

She squinted her eyes, “I have no idea at all, this part of the palace is off-limits for everyone. I asked Liam to show me the palace when I first went there, he said that part of the palace is not for visitors. Obviously, I tried to sneak there but it was always heavily guarded and it is protected by magic too.”

We opened a few of the other papers after that and all of them had something about the attack or about the palace written on them, but we were still not sure what any of it meant, the words were cryptic.

“Why does he have all of this?” I asked.

“I don’t know Sammy and I don’t think I am ready to find out,” we both knew what she meant by it but I was not ready to believe he had anything to do with the attack.

“He can not be the part of that attack, it happened about 30 years ago,” I tried to argue.

“These are not humans Sam.”

I bit my lip when I could not find anything to say to her.

“Just open the other envelope, they can come back soon.”

I opened the envelope, a wilted purple rose was sitting in the corner similar to the one in the drawer. I put it aside and removed the last thing in the envelope, it was a picture.

It was my picture.