In which all is revealed...
Amaretto grasped her aunt's hand and stepped onto the small glass enclosure. La sorcière smiled at them and motioned for them to follow her to the direct center of the dome. Katherine followed the girl quickly almost as if the girl had issued a command. Amaretto followed a little more warily. As she did so, she looked back at eh runes to get their familiar feel of comfort and as she did so, she noticed that the area they were not on began to dissolve into water.
Amaretto screeched as she realized that her only way of escape was being cut off from her. Katherine looked back and then walked over to her go-daughter and took a hold of her.
"Calm down darling. There is nothing to worry about. That's just the water. There has to be water somewhere if this is to be called the water mirror."
Amaretto pointed at the water. "You did not warn me about that! How could you not warn me about that?"
Katherine shook her head. "I didn't know. Now calm yourself."
Amaretto fumed at this. Katherine wanted her to calm herself? She had almost been drowned in an invisible lake! Well perhaps not really drowned, but Amaretto had to admit that she had been startled and really she was more angry at being startled than at her aunt. She took a deep breath and then nodded and regained her composure.
La sorcière smiled slightly and then motioned to the lake that was slowly starting to appear beneath them. "This large lake that we are standing on is known as the Water Mirror," began La sorcière. "It is one of two mirrors that are known to produce visions that are truthful."
Amaretto cut in at this moment. "Truthful? You mean that there are other mirrors that can lie?" She raised an eyebrow and made a smile at her joke. Katherine tried to look stern, but wound up having to raise a hand to her mouth to cover a grin that was beginning to appear.
La sorcière shook her head, sadly missing the sarcasm. "Not in the way that you are thinking no. What I mean to say is that these two mirrors are the only way that someone can see a possible future that is truthful. Not only that, but this is only one of two mirrors that one can see the Possibilities in, the other being the Sand Mirror."
Amaretto put up her hand and shook her head. "Wait a moment, possibilities? Isn't that the same thing as seeing the future? Isn't that what seeing the future is all about?" She knit her brow in frustration, thinking that the girl was almost as crazy as her aunt. Katherine shook her head this time. She turned to Amaretto and made a small sigh and then bit her lip as she contemplated what to say. She then spoke in a slow voice, placing emphasis on several points at once.
"Perhaps we should start at a different place Ama darling," her aunt said. "Your hourglass runs on something called 'Possibility'. It is that small thing that allows anything in the known universe to actually work. It is how your Hourglass actually allows you to transfer from place to another without any consequences. It is the possibility of the fact that the action could happen and therefore, the hourglass permits it. Does that make more sense in the first place?"
Amaretto listened to her aunt's explanation, her eyes slowly widening more as her aunt went on. When she was finally finished, she said, "Are you trying to say that this glass doesn't actually travel? It's only the possibility of travel that makes it happen?"
La sorcière nodded her head rather slowly as if rewarding a child for their innocence in understanding. "That is correct. It is in that thinking that you are able to do it. It is also these possibilities that the Mirrors are able to watch. Since there are so many, you can watch almost anything and appear to know the future, as long as you know one of the decisions that have been made."
"So you're telling me as long as you know something in the timeline of the history, you can pinpoint one of the endless realities that exist," Amaretto said. She then grinned and looked at her aunt. "This is so totally science fiction!" Katherine smiled in return.
La sorcière continued. "It is when I looked that we discovered what had happened. I have one person to whom I must answer to, and we call her the Lady. I work in service with her and she is known to be more powerful than I, though most do not know it. She is the one who allows the Hourglasses to work. She is the one who works the other mirror, almost like my twin. We often talk to each other in order to correlate what it is that we see, and make changes accordingly. However, it has always been known that one cannot change what is written in stone."
At this Katherine let a look of surprise cross her face and then smothered it almost as soon as it bloomed. She then took on a stern appearance and then said, "You are babbling."
La sorcière paused for a moment and then blushed. Amaretto wasn't sure, but she thought that something passed between her aunt and La sorcière. She narrowed her eyes and La sorcière lifted her head again and tried to regain her composure before she spoke again.
"You are right. I am digressing. To put it simply, the Lady has not been in contact with me for quite some time. I later discovered that she had been..." La sorcière covered her mouth and trailed off for a moment as if she was choking on something. She looked down towards the mirror and then took a deep breath before she said the next word, "Kidnapped."
Amaretto scoffed and raised an eyebrow. "Kidnapped? You called us here because of a simple kidnapping?" Amaretto threw her hands up in the air and turned away from La sorcière to walk away and then realized that there was nothing but water surrounding where she and her aunt stood. She sighed in anger and then turned around when her aunt spoke
"Amaretto, this is unfortunately a rather big deal. This is bigger than I initially thought." Katherine frowned. "You do realize this is almost a crisis."
Amaretto rolled her eyes. "No, this is a simple thing of there being nothing to say at this moment. If she says anything more, then we will be obliged to help."
"We are already obliged," said Katherine in a small, tight voice.
"What? NO! I refuse!" Amaretto stomped her foot down and the glass rang under her feet with crystal clarity. She looked angry at the
La sorcière simply shook her head, a pained look crossing her face. "It is not that simple. She was not only kidnapped, but imprisoned beneath the Sand mirror."
Amaretto started at La sorcière for a moment before she blew up in frustration "Beneath the... I don't know where you are getting your script from but this is it! I am done; I don't want to hear any more!"
Amaretto began to try to stalk off of the glass, remembered that it was all water. Amaretto stomped her foot at the edge of the glass and screamed. The cry echoed across the chamber and then centered on the water and was slightly magnified. The water took on a violet hue and shimmered for a moment. Amaretto stared at it as a picture began to form. The image of a young blond girl sitting in a large cavern came into view. All around her was stone much like the cavern that they stood in now, only this cavern was centered on what looked to be a large writhing mass of sand rather than a faux glass dome of water. The sands below her seemed to writhe and swirl. Above it was a small ledge on which the girl sat, dangling her legs over the precipice. The girl looked down at the sand and seemed to move her lips, no words issuing forth from them, but as she did so, the sand reacted and surged upwards from the churning mass into a woman's form. The form grew until it was a large shape taking up over half of the cavern.
The girl looked like she spoke out loud and the sand form placed its hands in front of itself, almost as if it was forming another mirror. That was when the picture in the water seemed as if it was accruing static. Amaretto looked up at her aunt with a look of disbelief. Katherine shrugged her shoulders to the silent question. The picture became clear once more and they watched as the girl was suddenly in the vortex of sand. She seemed like she was screaming as she was pulled downwards into the sand pit.
Spewing forth a column of sand, the mirror deposited it on the precipice. Amaretto's horror turned into fascination as sand solidified until it became an almost exact duplicate of the girl who had drowned in the sand. The new sand girl looked down beneath her feet over the ledge and smiled maliciously as she looked down. The image shifted below her and the original blond, whom Amaretto assumed to be the Lady, seemed to be shackled in a room far below the surface.
"I need your help to free her." La sorcière's voice was quiet, but Amaretto knew what it was that the woman was thinking.
Amaretto shook her head. "I said no the first time and I'll say it again now. No." Amaretto crossed her arms and looked at her Aunt. "Why does it have to be us anyway? Why couldn't it have been someone else?"
The small sorceress looked at Amaretto straight in the eyes. Amaretto stared back at her, quirking her lip in a devil-may-give-a-damn frown. They both said nothing as they stood there locked in the staring contest. Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out her palm pilot and then with her stylus, began to rapidly write on it. The silence seemed to stretch on and then the small girl said with a disdaining look, "Why does it have to be someone else? When has it ever been you?"
This took Amaretto by surprise and she put her hands on her hips. Her anger all but radiated from her person. "I can think of several reasons, the biggest one is that this isn't my problem at all!"
"However it is your problem," Katherine said absentmindedly.
Amaretto turned to her aunt, the frown still on her lips, making a slight pout. "What do you mean that it's my problem?"
Katherine looked at her palm pilot for a moment and then looked at her god-daughter. "Well, you see it's like this," her aunt replied. She was about to continue speaking, but instead, she reached into her purse dropping her stylus and pulled a pair of glasses from her purse to put them on. She then began to then read from her palm pilot, holding it aloft. "It says here, 'When one is given an Hourglass, hereafter referred to as a Glass," -here her aunt made a small quotation mark with her free hand- "They are entered into a legal and binding contract in that and any other reality, hereafter referred to as the domains." Another set of air-quotes were made. Amaretto waved her hands in front of her aunt to make her stop. Katherine paused and looked up from her palm pilot. "If you want to read it, it's all right here." She lifted the palm pilot.
Amaretto narrowed her eyes at her aunt. "So are you saying that because I have this hourglass, I am now accountable to the whims of this freaky little girl?"
"Correction," La sorcière said in a stern voice, "I am the one who says that you must listen. The law is clear on this and has already been laid out since the beginning of the possibility of such." The words were clear and the harshness of them made Amaretto shiver involuntarily.
La sorcière moved slowly away from where Katherine and Amaretto were standing. As she walked away, Amaretto noticed a distant quality in her eyes as she spoke. "A single possibility from the universe that signifies what can, will, and should happen. Though even with this sand, one can never say that a 'one-grain possibility' is impossible." La sorcière continued to walk across her watery mirror where it would form solid underneath her feet as she walked.
She waved her hand in front of her and the water slid upwards underneath it, almost as if in an effort to be caressed by her hand. The water rippled, forming a small shape and expanding into something that looked like an hourglass and then began to pour sand from the top to the bottom one grain at a time. La sorcière turned her head to look at Amaretto. "If one grain of sand holds the future of a single possibility, then it is enough to suppose and assume that multiple grains hold multiple possibilities."
At that moment, the faux hourglass began to pass more grains. La sorcière caressed the watery image slowly with her hand and continued to speak. "When bringing these grains together, one can act on these separate realities. In doing so, one must have a catalyst; for example, an hourglass..."
La sorcière trailed off and Amaretto looked back with a miserable frown. "I don't care what you say. I am not going to run off and help someone I don't know because my aunt decided to give me a gift."
Katherine winced and then walked over to Amaretto. She placed her hand on her god-daughter's shoulder and then said in a soft voice, "There is no choice in this matter."
"Everyone has a choice," replied Amaretto bitterly as she brushed Katherine's hand off her shoulder. She stared down as the water once again replayed the images of what happened at what La sorcière called the Sand Mirror. As she watched it, she felt something stirring inside of her. She struggled with the feeling and continued to watch as the water replayed the scenes over and over again. Soon, she realized with shock that what she was feeling was directed at La sorcière. The feeling was an austere sense of pity. Amaretto looked over to La sorcière and felt the feeling well up to a larger intensity. She watched the small girl replay the only person she could talk to vanish beneath a sea of sand.
"In this case, it is the one thing that you must do." Katherine stared hard through her glasses at the small palm pilot in her hand. "You could think of this as a trial run for what you can do. If you don't want it afterwards, that's all right. However, you have to do this as your trial run. There's no getting out of it."
Amaretto continued to look at La sorcière stare at the water. The pity felt benign to her, but Amaretto was sure that it was almost tragic to La sorcière. Amaretto turned to her aunt. "If this is a trial run, that means if I don't like it, I can return it. I'm going to hold you to that."
Her aunt nodded mutely in her understanding.