A Fortress of Pebbles

The Fortress gates had never seemed bigger, sweeping aside like curtains of a stage big enough to contain the world. If Montana was somewhere in the swirling void beyond, Aissaba couldn’t tell. All she knew was that every step was taking her closer to the patch of grass where the wide-eyed children usually stood – the same patch on which she herself had once stood, a wide-eyed child herself, washed up on the shores of a rare afterlife.

A second chance that she didn’t deserve. A stray thought – All the world’s a stage – came to her as she passed beneath the grand archway. Something she’d studied under the Master of Language. Something from Western culture. Tassadu would know.

She looked at him now. To her surprise, he said, “And all the men and women merely players.”

Had she spoken out loud?

A few steps ahead of them, the Master of Mind, glanced back – giving them a reassuring look. The Mind Stone around her neck shined like a lighthouse, a gray star to follow. Then, she walked forward, as if she were going to step off of the edge of the grass. Instead of falling, she disappeared.

Are we entering or exiting? Aissaba thought. Coming or going? Living or dying? She put her hand into Tassadu’s. His talons wrapped her gently, like a hug.

“Magpie,” he whispered.

Aissaba laughed, or maybe she was crying. The warmth of the water on her cheeks told her that it was more than raindrops there. An even bigger storm raged inside her chest – made her want to scream. She couldn’t tell if she was excited or terrified, joyful or anguished. All she knew was that, compared to her heartbeat, the thunder overhead was small and insignificant. Whatever stage she was leaving, whatever one she was entering – both were minuscule compared to the one inside her heart, where a million feelings per second played their parts: living, spinning, dying with every heartbeat.

Aissaba tried to tell Tassadu with her eyes that she wanted to die like this – with him beside her. If it ever happened, if this was the end, she wanted it like this. Needed it.

Me too, his eyes said back. Just like this.

They stepped forward at the same moment – like two actors bursting onto a scene, or two idiots falling off a stage. It didn’t matter. Only that they were together.

Aissaba let out a shriek of excitement, a desperate release of energy. Wow, I’m smiling, she realized.

***

Cassandra went to bed without checking beneath her pillow. But she could feel the tiny bump beneath her cheek. She was the princess, and it was the pea.

For some reason, she hadn’t told anyone – not even Orion. And she usually told him everything. Like, everything.

Maybe she’d kept it secret because, every now and then, she blinked and saw whatever Aissaba was doing. Caught snatches of thoughts and feelings – like faraway music.

Aissaba was keeping secrets, too. That was for sure.

On a related note, Cassandra had recently decided that Aissaba was the coolest person she knew. Previously, it had been Keely from down the street – but she’d taken to wearing pink exclusively. Aissaba, however, wore sunglasses. Plus, her best friend was a dragon. Or was he Aissaba’s boyfriend? Cassandra couldn’t tell.

That morning, Cassandra had begged her mom to buy her a very particular pair of sunglasses online, insisting that they be delivered with next day shipping. With any luck, she would be able to start wearing them to school by the end of the week. This would no doubt help with the fact that she and Orion were being treated like they had some kind of disease.

Like ebola.

Or a weaponized super virus.

If Orion were a dragon, they wouldn’t be having this problem. They would be automatically cool. But he wasn’t, so sunglasses were the next best thing. She’d watched enough old shows on Dad’s VHS to know that cool people wore sunglasses. Without exception! And as Dad would say: “Sometimes correlation does indicate causation.”

On the bunk above, Orion’s breathing shifted into his sleeping rhythm. Cassandra took the pebble, careful to cover the glow completely in her fist, and slipped out of bed like a ninja. She’d seen a lot of ninjas on VHS, so she was pretty good at moving without making a sound, even across the creaky floorboards that her grandfather had laid when he was young.

In the bathroom, she shoved towels under the door – because sometimes Orion liked to look (or roll toy cars underneath) while she was trying to pee. Then, she closed the toilet lid and sat on it like a throne. The princess and the pee, she thought, and had to stifle her own giggle.

As her memories of the Fortress had come back to her, triggered by Mom’s readings and Dad’s incessant questioning, an idea had occurred to her. What if she placed the pebble to her forehead as she had seen the Fortress people do?

(Blink: Aissaba let out a shriek of excitement, a desperate release of energy. Wow, I’m smiling, she realized. The next moment, she was standing in the snow, surrounded by Montana trees. Somewhere, an owl hooted.)

Suddenly, Cassandra was overwhelmed by the feeling that Aissaba was coming, that she was closer than ever, that she might see her again soon. Cassandra very much hoped that the sunglasses would arrive beforehand. It would be cool to have matching ones.

As for the pebble in her hand, Cassandra had a feeling they might be wanting it back. She would give it to them too. Maybe that was why she hadn’t told Mom or Dad about it. They’d totally want to keep it.

Well – as Mom liked to say – it was now or never.

She put the pebble to her forehead, and suddenly there was a small version of Tassadu hovering in the air in front of her. Like a popup on a computer screen.

“Tassadu!” said the small version. “May I just say that you’re looking unusually handsome today? How shall we flash this pebble?”