The Destiny Detour

Too Easy

Finally, they found the sealed wing. Sealed was not the right word, considering the only barriers were a few tables someone had hacked the word "NO" onto. The stairs were too great an obstacle for the flat bottom of the dome, unfortunately. The first time they tried to go up, the dome slid straight through. They had to backtrack, and Rosaliy had to abandon the enchantment, retying the metal ball securely around her belt. They were so close anyway.

"Good thing Sorceress Issabeth makes us run stairs every day," Jadelynn sighed. "She always says if you're not prepared to run up ten flights of stairs in an emergency, you're not prepared for anything."

That did sound like the High Sorceress.

"Hey," barked a voice down a distant hallway. "I heard something in the cursed wing."

Jadelynn moaned. "Can we not tell the Sorceress she was right?"

Rosaliy would have agreed wholeheartedly, but she was busy running up what must have been a thousand stairs. Jadelynn kept pace, and eventually they were at the top, panting. If Issabeth could have seen them, they would both have been assigned strict new training regimes as punishment. Rosaliy managed to close her fingers around the metal ball before three pirates crested the stairs, weapons drawn. Up close, the pirates—two men and a woman—were menacing. Where the Crocs had given the impression of trying to look tougher than they were, these pirates were exactly as tough as they looked. Their spiked boots and copious weaponry were less decorative and more a lifestyle. The woman was her own brand of fierce. She looked like one of those swamp flowers that tempted travelers with its colored leaves and wafting smell, just to devour them when they got too close.

"Room by room," ordered the woman. She rolled her r's like they were the ocean itself. "Flush 'em toward the sea."

"We toss 'em over when we find 'em?" asked one of the men. "Or you in the mood to chat?"

"They're interrupting my busy evening of devouring canapes by the trayful," she groused in reply. "I'm in the mood to gut them and hang them from the South Turret."

The questioner pushed open the first room with the blade of a withdrawn knife. "Hello?" he called. "Anybody in here? Just looking for a partner for a rousing game of bladelings. No?"

"I don't like bein' up here, Es," whined the other pirate. "These hallways are cursed by the spirits of—"

"You can stop right there, Harl," she cut him off. "There are no roaming spirits down these hallways unless you count rats and gulls. Plenty of those."

"Then why don't no one ever come in here?" he shot back.

"Cause you blasted a hole in the side of the castle eight years back, locoburro," she scoffed. "Don't make me waste energy on threatening you."

"I wish mom would let me put streaks in my hair like Esmona's," Jadelynn sighed, eying the woman's dramatic teal hair.

Esmona? Oh.

"We need to get past them before they beat us to the secret room," was what Rosaliy said out loud, although her thoughts were quite different.

They waited until the pirates had cleared the hallway and made for the end, hopping over wide cracks in a crumbling floor. The dome may have carried them safely across, but the drop to the swelling ocean below was alarming enough to convince Rosaliy not to take the chance. Rosaliy had to relinquish the ball so they could try the door. She bit back a cry of dismay. The wall to this room had been ripped away, plus the entire adjoining room. There was no way to go further from here. To add insult, Jadelynn pointed. Directly across this pirate-created chasm, Rosaliy could see the space between the floor they were on and the floor above. The secret room was so close, but there was no way to reach it from here.