The Ouiums Journey: Hell Broke Loose (book 1)

Chapter 4

Estelle lifted her head. "Esa? What are you doing in here?" she asked, but her attention flipped another page away. Underneath the table, her leg bounced up and down repeatedly; she was anxious.

"I'm going to try to find Skylar, but I don't know where to begin. He left in such a rush that there's nothing here that could divine his location," I said.

She raised her eyebrow at me. "He doesn't want to be found. I tried," she said. Her feet scraped the chair back, and she stood tall. She approached me from behind the table, and before she passed me, she paused. Her fingers slid across the fabric of my shirt. "Take it off," she demanded. I stood still, hesitating, but I knew her intention. I slid the shirt over my head and handed it to her. She hummed a quiet chant. Her eyes opened wider. Suddenly it was like we were under siege. Her arm swept across the desk and launched books to the floor. The loud clattering from the impact echoed, but I did not notice. She began surrounding herself with several forms of magic—all of it cascading into the palm of her hand. Circles of swarming energy wrung through one another and down onto the shirt laid out. Her body grew heavy, the amount of magic power she was exerting had to be extremely draining on her body. She slumped over the desk after a minute. She was letting out long drawn out gasps of air.

"I could not pinpoint his exact location, something is blocking me, but I extracted enough for you to start. It is not much, and it is fading fast." She handed me back the shirt. I looked down at it, wondering when it had picked up traces of his magic, but there was no time. I folded the shirt over my head and slid it on again. "He's somewhere to the east, surrounded by earthly magic, so his location is somewhere in the large forest to the east I think, maybe further in by the mountains. I could not tell, but you should hurry there before it fades," she said, ushering me off urgently.

I stopped myself at the door, the crunch of my fingers against the door frame stung my hand. "Can't you come with me?" I asked Estelle.

She was far more capable than I at divining and analysing traces of residual magic. Estelle sighed. She looked around at the occupants of the library. Her hands went to her hips.

"Well, I can't go into the forest, but I can come to at least the boundary line."

She surrendered and came alongside me.

We received a few glances when we came to the edges of the building, but Estelle shrugged them off, so I did not give them a second thought. The wet blades of grass brushed against my shoes with each step towards the forest that I took. Estelle, on the other hand, did not touch the grass at all. Her feet appeared to hover above the blades of grass, only the very bottom of her clothes skimmed across the dew infested grass. A towering forest of redwood size trees ran down the hillside for miles. The bark twisted into shapes I had never seen before and was dyed a sickly red.

Estelle whisked her hand over the grass below, a white blanket of dense magic ran across the ground. It rustled through the field until a collection bunched together around a withering flower. The magic flashed a bright purple before dispersing into the air around it. Estelle brought her hands together, crushing the residual magic into a tiny oval pearl. It floated over to me, and with my hands extended, the pearl dropped into the centre of them. The stone had an eerie purple glow to it. I recognised the magic.

"I condensed every trace of Skylar's residual magic in this area into that pearl," she said, her hands were shaking. From her divination and now this bombardment of magic she must be drained. Her face looked pale, and the dark circles under her eyes had grown larger than before. "It will call out to any residual magic within 100 metres. You will feel a pull in the direction, but it's not exactly accurate. This is the best I can do. I cannot go any further, I must attend to some things," she said; her voice carried across the field. "Whatever you do Esa, be careful. There is something dark going on here." In a moment, her body floated back towards the safety of her coven walls. I knew exactly what she meant, and my face twisted at the unpleasant memories I had of dark magic.