Wish-Granting

     Neither of them, despite their experience with battle and healing magics respectively, had ever heard anything about transforming Relic Neopets back, and Skyleur found herself wishing that she had spent more time studying Kauvara's work from Neopia City.

     Neopia City. Skyleur shook her head. It was Neopia Central now, and the last time it had been called Neopia City--she wondered if anyone in the Haunted Woods other than the Brain Tree and the Esophagor remembered when the fledgling marketplace first came to be called a city.

     A Korbat Morphing Potion would do the trick, and so, Skyleur thought, would a Paint Brush, but getting on a boat to Mystery Island and trading for one didn't feel like it was the right kind of atonement, anyway. Skyleur had turned Nicarina Relic with a potion of her own devising, and to make that right, she needed to figure out how to undo it.

     During the day, she walked alongside Amumita's wagon, watching Petpets dart through the trees. By daylight, the Haunted Woods was just another forest--a forest of leafless trees, but in the depths of winter, that wasn't as intimidating as it was during the summer. Crealiana's Lightmite buzzed around her shoulders sometimes, rested on them, or flitted around to the other wanderers--it spent time playing with Surthair's Zombie Neucloop, or checking in on Zinifar, who slept while her wagon rumbled along the root-covered ground.

     How the Gelert slept when the wagon did that much bouncing Skyleur didn't understand, but she was grateful that the Gelert was there, just a shout away, in case any of the Woods' denizens loomed up between the trees, and she was even more grateful when Zephira, the Nimmo, called a halt to their progress on the second day.

     "We're here!"

     Skyleur made her way to the front of the caravan and peered through the trees.

     Ahead was more of the same--leafless trees and twisting roots, shadows too deep for midday, a breeze that bent the branches in impossible ways.

     At the Aisha's confused expression, Zephira added, "This is the place you marked on your map."

     "Are you--are you sure?"

     She nodded sagely. "Up ahead. A few minutes' walk. We'll go on with you if you'd like, but I thought you'd prefer to go alone?"

     Skyleur nodded. She didn't want to face whatever lay ahead on her own, but if Nicarina was out there, Skyleur wanted--needed--to be the one to find her. There was too much to say, and she didn't want to say it in front of others.

     She stepped forward, but a rough voice called her back.

     "You'll need this."

     Skyleur turned to see Zinifar, her eyes clouded with sleep, holding out the Freezing Potion and a Steam Jug. She wasn't sure where the Gelert had gotten the Steam Jug--maybe it was in her stash, and Skyleur hadn't seen it--but wherever it had come from, the Aisha took it gratefully.

     "Thank you." She looked over the whole camp. "All of you."

     "How long will you be?" Zephira asked.

     How long should we wait? Skyleur heard. How long was too long? How long would it make sense to look? "Until dark."

     The Nimmo laughed. "If we wait until dark, we might as well wait until sunrise. Go. Face your darkness. We'll be here with soup and blankets when you get back."

     "Thank you."

     Skyleur turned to face forward, and took her first tentative steps toward her tower.

     It hadn't felt real, until this moment. All the time they'd travelled, her conversations with Zinifar and Amumita about potions, the time she'd spent poring over the Old Papers that made it to the Rubbish Dump--all the way to Meridell. Through all of that, it was just an idea. A thought. Not something that was real. Not something that could hurt her. But now, stepping away from the shelter of the line of wagons and the friends she'd found and made there, it became real.

     She was doing this. She was going to find Nicarina and make things right, if she could.

     When the camp faded from view behind her, a splash of green appeared ahead of her, and a few moments after that, the tower itself emerged from the forest, a trunk of stone, towering over the other trees.

     Rather than the near-silver grey she remembered, the tower's walls were closer to the colour of the trees around her--coated, Skyleur realized, with soot. There were great gashes in the sides, places where the massive blocks had been gouged, or else fallen loose to lay in piles of rubble around the tower's base. Green vines and small flowers grew over the rubble, as if they were somehow drawing warmth and life from the remnants of the tower's magic.

     Skyleur stared at it for a long time, tracing its height with her eyes, remembering the rooms that lay on the other side of those stones.

     Nicarina would be on the balcony.

     Taking a deep breath, Skyleur continued forward.

     No door hung in the doorway--time had weathered the wood away--and through it should could see clearly the tower's first level: another empty door frame that led into the kitchens and mundane storerooms, the base of the stairs that spiralled all the way to the top, a small room beneath the stairs where she used to receive important visitors.

     She paused again at the bottom of the stairs and took in the smell of the tower--it held the same rotting damp smell the Haunted Woods did after a deluge, but there was a hint of something else in it, something that made Skyleur's skin tingle.

     Magic.

     There was still magic in the tower. Maybe the tower itself. Maybe something that hadn't been looted from the vaults upstairs.

     She started up the stairs.

     Though time had worn at the stairs too, and they were slick with moss and damp, Skyleur's paws found sure, effortless footing. She knew these stairs better than she knew the stairs back home--her new home--on Tombstone Road. She remembered the secret niches hidden in the walls, the loose stones that could be pried away to reveal boxes full of things she'd once thought too precious to put where someone might look for them.

     Most of them were empty--perhaps one of the Neopets who had worked in the tower had seen her stashing things away, and told the invaders what to look for. Or perhaps adventurers in all the years that had passed since had come searching for whatever secrets the tower might still hold. She could imagine Eviamnora having done something like that once--not here, not to her tower, but to other ruins, in other places. She would have been clever enough to check for loose stones, careful enough to dodge the traps and curses Skyleur had laid on some of them.

     Never again, the Aisha swore when she opened the third of the secret compartments and felt a jolt of dark magic. I'll never curse anything ever again.

     She continued up the stairs to the second level, where the magical storerooms once lay. Like the level below, all the wood had rotted away. The great bands on the armoury door, the ones she had seen in her nightmare, lay rusted across the floor, and the room beyond was a wreckage of broken shelves and shattered glass.

     "So much for finding something useful." Skyleur's voice echoed through the abandoned space in a way she never remembered it echoing before.

     Because there were tapestries here, she remembered. Cloth hangings that warmed the space against even winter's bitterest chill, and dampened the sounds of Neopets coming and going. She couldn't quite remember what any of them had depicted--they'd been hanging in the tower when she first arrived, and by the time she might have thought to inquire about them, her apprenticeship was over and they had faded into the background.

     Still, she wanted to be back in that space. To experience it again, to face whatever other memories might resurface. Skyleur stepped carefully across the threshold--her slippers were ill-suited to venturing into the ruined armoury, but she put her paws down slowly, and moved cautiously--and came to stop in the middle of the room.

     It had been here. The enchanted glass case where she kept her Scroll of the Dark Star. On this spot. She'd shattered the glass that night. Beneath the built-up dirt and broken shelves, there would be a layer of glass that glimmered with a dark shade instead of the usual rainbow hues. Or maybe it wouldn't anymore. Maybe it held no more of the magic she infused it with all those years ago, when she sealed the scroll in the armoury in the first place.

     She remembered how it felt to hold that scroll in her hands on the balcony.

     She remembered what she'd thought that night.

     I didn't call it evil. I called it power, and with it I had an advantage over them that they were denied only because they denied it to themselves.

     The darkness wasn't evil, she'd been right about that. The darkness was mysterious, subtle, and powerful. It was the things in the darkness that were sometimes evil.

     Like she had been.

     Skyleur squeezed her paws into fists.

     She had thought those things. That the darkness was hers, that night was a weapon she could wield against her enemies. That the Neopets who worked in her tower were her subjects more than they were her equals. She had broken the seal on that scroll with the intent to banish the army at her doorstep, and hadn't given a single thought to what "banish" would mean for the Neopets who had gathered below.

     Tears spilt from her eyes.

     It had been lucky that the Lenny stole her Starlight Potion. That the Lupe was awake when the rest of the camp was sleeping, that he had looked up at the tower at exactly the right moment.

     If fate hadn't intervened...

     Skyleur wept.

     Wept for the things she had done, the Neopet she had been.

     Never again, she swore to herself.

     Then she said it out loud, to the broken shelves and crumbling stone, to the blank walls where tapestries once hung, to the memory of all the dark things she had once made.

     "Never again."

     She wiped her eyes and looked down into the rubble beneath her paws.

     To her surprise, she found a flower nudging its head up through the wreckage. Her tears glittered on its bright bud, and as she watched, they bloomed.

     Its name came to her a breath later.

     Color Changing Tulip.

     Skyleur bent down and picked it gingerly from among the glass and stone.

     It sang with magic.

     This was it. This is what her potion needed.

     She looked around the armoury.

     It was fitting, she thought, that such a thing should finally emerge here.

     One last detail came back to her as she spun the tulip in her paws: Nicarina had been on the balcony when she'd used broken the scroll's seal.

     If she was going to find the Korbut in the tower still, it would be there. On the balcony, watching the world change around her as Skyleur herself had watched the world change...

To be continued…