Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

Leah kicked the door open wide and led the way inside the Chamber of Lock and Key.

Stuffing the Skeleton Key back into my pocket, I followed.

“You see,” said Mallory from behind me, “this is why this place is a byword for security in Avalonia.”

“Fort Knox eat your fucking heart out,” I breathed, staring around me.

We walked out into a corridor that stretched for… for miles. It was so long that, to both my right and left, it tapered off into a distance that I could not see. It was far too long to be contained within the Castle of Ascendance, so it must have been some kind of enchanted room or pocket dimension, perhaps.

The huge hall was lit by large fairy-filled globes hanging from the vaulted ceiling. The ceiling itself was high, high enough to accommodate three doors stacked on top of one another—and there were three doors stacked one atop the other.

Three doors high and a gazillion wide. The two higher doors were reached by catwalks that stretched to infinity and beyond, like the rest of the corridor.

Literally thousands upon thousands of doors of various kinds in a single wall that went on for what felt like forever. Each door had a very elaborate and fancy looking keyhole.

“Denoting a fancy fucking key,” I murmured to myself.

I ran my hand through my hair. I felt like I was basically standing in front of the Universe’s safety deposit box.

“Well, it looks like we’ll still need to use the Skeleton Key,” I said. “But which damned lock do we put it in?”

Leah started laughing to herself.

“What is it that you’re finding humorous about this particular situation?” Mallory asked. Her usually placid face was tight with worry.

“Oh come on, Mallory, you beautiful little worrier you!” Leah chuckled. “Look at this. This is outrageous!”

I was inclined to agree with Leah.

“The question of where to start is an apt one,” Mallory said, her face softening a little at the sight of Leah’s slightly despairing laughter.

“One door is as good as another,” I said. “You never know your luck. May as well just dive in and see if we can’t pull something miraculous out of our asses.”

“You know what I’ve always found interesting about miracles,” Mallory said as I approached the door directly in front of me.

“What’s that?” Leah asked.

“Is that people always see miracles as being synonymous with good. You know, you find a sack of money in an old tree or your dog gets its collar caught on a lucky branch just before going over a waterfall. But, just because something is bad—someone gets hit by lightning, for instance—doesn’t make it any less miraculous.”

That was food for thought, certainly, but now was not the time to chew it over. I reached out a hand, grasped the door handle, and slipped the Skeleton Key into the lock.

The door opened to reveal a portal. The portal was a greasy, opalescent, multicolored mess that spoke of pure magic, but almost as soon as the door was open, it changed and flowed into something that most closely resembled a window.

A window that opened onto a white sandy beach.

“Where the hell is that?” Leah blurted.

It was a picture-perfect scene. A strip of white sand, a bright blue ocean behind and an even brighter blue sky above. There were a set of yellow and red flags waving to either side of the panorama. Gorgeous, plastic-looking women wearing tiny bikinis, with deep tans and fake boobs bigger than their heads strutted about. Athletic guys with bodies like Adonis, covered in tattoos and wearing caps backward prowled through the throngs of women muttering to each other and high-fiving. Almost everyone was holding a cellphone and taking pictures of their friends or themselves. Off to one side, I noticed a sign that read, Welcome to the Gold Coast, Queensland!

“That looks like… like Earth,” I said, though I had no idea where the hell the Gold Coast was.

“Must be a coast filled with gold,” Leah said. “That’s why everyone is so shiny and healthy looking.”

“Whatever,” I said. “It’s not what we’re after.”

I slammed the door closed.

We moved onto another randomly selected door. This time it looked to me like we had opened up a portal that stared out of a locker in the locker room of the Golden State Warriors. It was either that or Klay Thompson had been abducted and sent to some other universe.

The third door was filled completely with smoke, and there was only a single burning candle sitting on the floor.

“Creepy,” Leah said and booted the door shut.

Door four held the smell of baking, golden light, and a whistled tune.

Opening door five, I came face to face with none other than Donald Trump sitting on the can and crying.

“All right, that’s enough,” I said. “We need a way to harden the target here!”

We lapsed into thoughtful silence. It was not a feeling that struck me often but, right then, I felt like I could have given up. I mean, when you’re faced with that sort of problem it’s difficult to ignore what all your senses and your brain is telling you: that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at figuring this problem out.

If only I had someone to talk to, someone like my parents who had been here, who had more experience in figuring this sort of shit out…

My thought trailed off, as another one came crashing into it like a truck T-boning a minivan.

I couldn’t speak to my parents inside their staffs, but maybe they could help me out all the same. Maybe I could use their joint vectors, their twin spirits, to direct me.

I pulled my mother’s white crystal from my pocket and made my father’s black crystal staff materialize in my other.