Chapter 4: The Crossing
Lyda knew she must have lost her mind to think this was a wise idea. She slipped quietly back into her room, careful not to wake Adea as she dressed in warm clothes. She then hurried out to the small shed near the chicken coop and grabbed an old, rusty lantern. They rarely ever used it because her family did not often leave the cottage at night, so she doubted anyone would notice she was using it now. She managed to light the stone cold lantern and, with her leather-bound book stuffed in a pack on her back, she saddled up one of her father's smaller ponies and rode off down the ridgeline.
Lyda had been learning to ride since she was six-years-old, so she was fairly good at it for her age. The pony she had taken was her favorite, the same one she rode the first time she ever mounted a horse; a beautiful, auburn young pony with white spots dotting along her back. Lyda fell in love with her immediately, naming her Hazel.
Despite how adept she had become riding Hazel around the cottage, this was already farther than Lyda had ever ridden before. She took it slow but sped into a gallop whenever she could. She knew the mountains around her house very well, but it became tougher for her to navigate the farther she rode into the dark. Nothing was going to stop her. She tried her best to remember the way Iris took her this morning. They had kept a creek to their left most of the way. Maybe that would lead her back again. Lyda pulled Hazel to a halt for a moment while she listened to her surroundings. Sure enough, she could make out the soft rushing of water in the near distance. It was too difficult to tell for sure in the dark, but Lyda guessed she was on the right path.
She followed the creek for a little over two hours, weaving through the trees before Hazel suddenly jerked to a halt. Lyda gasped as she lost her grip on the reins, snatching hold of her pony's mane to keep from getting thrown off.
"Hazel!" Lyda cried. "What's the matter with you?" She tried to spur her forward, but the pony only resisted and whinnied anxiously as if some unseen force was preventing her from going any further. "Worthless animal," Lyda berated her as she dismounted. She tried to pull Hazel by the reins in her direction, but she resisted the same as before, and Lyda noticed an expression like that of pure fear residing deep within her large, black eyes. This, however, did not faze her. "Fine," she grumbled, "but you're staying right here." Lyda guided Hazel over to a nearby tree small enough to tie her reins around but strong enough to hold her until she returned.
With Hazel secured, Lyda picked up her lantern and proceeded to go on by herself. She did take more than several steps before Hazel started going berserk again. Lyda glanced back, watching as the pony thrashed about as if trying to break free of her tether. She froze as soon as she saw Lyda watching. Lyda took another step forward, and the pony began to whine again. It was as if she did not want Lyda to go any further.
This only annoyed Lyda more than anything. "Shut up!" she hissed and turned to keep walking, ignoring Hazel's incessant wailing. She thoroughly scanned her surroundings as she went, ensuring the creek remained nearby. She had no idea how far away she was from the spot Iris took her to, but she knew she had to be on the right path. Things were starting to look more and more recognizable, and after no more than ten minutes of wandering, she came across a familiar sight.
Lyda walked past a small patch of feverfew flowers. Her mind flashed back to Iris' lesson that morning. She held up the lantern and began shining the light around until it rested upon a large slab of stone in the ground just ahead of her. She had found her way back on her own, and in half the time, thanks to Hazel.
Lyda knelt upon the rock and glanced around, marveling at how much different this place looked in the dead of night as opposed to the illuminated beauty of the day. Not sure what to do from here, Lyda was about to sit down on the rock and take out the book, hoping to find something that might give her a better understanding as to how to find this "Crossing". However, before she could even sit down, something ahead of her caught her eye. It took her mind a second to register it, but she gasped in astonishment as she jumped to her feet, holding the light in front of her to make sure she was not imagining it.
It was unbelievable. Only about twenty feet away, exactly where Lyda had seen the rhododendron shrub earlier, she was now staring at a towering brush of the same plant. It was utterly enormous, and the cluster was large enough to span into the tree lines on either side. It looked a bit more like an erratic hedge than a brush. Lyda was breathless as she gawked at it. There was no way all of this was here before. She would have seen it, sure as day. She could not keep her blood from going cold as an unnerving thought came to mind: perhaps whoever wrote the passage in the book was telling the truth, and this place was not always here. Was it an illusion? A hallucination? Or was this place truly a domain of the Spirits?
That last thought filled Lyda with a rush of adrenaline. Her desire to know more was far stronger than her rational impulse of fear, the same fear that Hazel must have felt when she went ballistic. Lyda held the lantern ahead of her as she approached the brush, and it was now that the tangible sensation of the area hit her all at once. This time, however, it was different. It felt neither tranquil nor malevolent. It was more like an intense pressure in the air that made Lyda's head start to swim. It was as if this place was testing her own will and desire. If that was true, then it was a challenge Lyda was ready to accept.
She approached the edge of the brush. The pressure was heavier now more than ever. It almost felt as if something was trying to guide her. Lyda started making her way around the edge of the rhododendron cluster, not sure what she was looking for until she came upon a sudden break in the brush, just wide enough for a single person to walk through. Her excitement continued to escalate as she remembered the book speaking of a narrow, maze-like path winding through the rhododendron. Lyda slipped into the opening between the bushes without hesitation. The path was a tight fit, even for her small body, and she had to angle her arm carrying the lantern awkwardly in front of her. The tops of the bushes curved over the path, creating a ceiling that blocked much of the starlight.
Although the narrow path was abundant in twists and turns, Lyda noticed no deviations or other tracks branching off elsewhere, making it seem less like a maze and more like a mere winding trail. It was not fear that was gripping Lyda's mind, not yet at least. Instead, the voices in her head were both pressing her to go deeper into the brush and screaming at her to turn around and run away, but her curiosity was far stronger than her primal instincts, and all the while, the atmosphere continued to get heavier. At last, the towering bushes on either side of her broke apart without warning, and Lyda stepped out into the open, gasping at the sight right in front of her. She had found it.
The first she found herself staring at was the starlit western horizon casting its faint light upon the mountains in the distance. Scanning around her new surroundings, Lyda saw that she had come out into a large, basin-like spring with a pair of streams flowing from the rocky walls on either side. The streams snaked toward the center as if mirroring each other, before joining beneath the exposed roots of a very unusual-looking tree. From there, the merged stream flowed toward the west and over the cliffside at the end of the basin.
Lyda approached the tree in the center of the spring. The roots of the tree rose up from the ground as though the streams had eroded the area to the point that they now flowed underneath it. The roots then formed a base from which four identical-looking trunks extended up and entwined around one another in a twisting manner. Lyda's face lit up with a wide smile and expression of discovery. Everything about this place, from the tree standing before her to the tangible serene sensation in the air, was a perfect match of the description in the book.
Desperate to delve even further, Lyda set the lantern down on the rocky ground and removed the pack from her back. She leaned against the tree, took out the leather-bound book, and immediately began flipping through it. She took this time to skim through all the pages between the first passage regarding the rhododendron bushes and the bone-chilling page 47, hoping to find something more about this place which the writer spoke of so malevolently.
She came across many different topics such as the history of the mysterious Seluitah tribe, the hierarchy of the Spirits, various passages concerning potions and healing draughts, and something about the gates to a place called Valhalla. Lyda paused for a moment when she came across a strange drawing on one page that looked like a snake winding around in a circle to clutch its tail in its mouth, above which was a barely-legible word that she could only pronounce as, "Rag-na-rock". She shook her head, not even bothering to read the paragraph below it as she continued flipping.
Eventually, she returned to page 47, finding nothing more on this place called the Crossing. Lyda turned the page over to the first blank parchment, sighing to herself as she rested her head back against the tree to stare up at the stars. As frustrated as she was, the spray of the streams on her face was soft and peace-inducing, like the touch of a million tiny fingertips. It was only in this tranquil state that Lyda's upward gaze fell upon something she had not noticed before.
Pulling herself to her feet, Lyda got a closer look at the quadruplet tree trunks. Just above her eye level, a series of symbols were carved into the bark of each of the twisting trunks. They were all facing in toward one another and identical except for one small detail: the symbols were each comprised of six dots in a hexagonal pattern, but two of the symbols on opposite trunks were painted white while the dots of the other two were black.
Lyda had no idea what these symbols could mean. She did not recall seeing them in the book. She reached up and ran her fingers along one of the white-dotted symbols. The concave indents of each dot were smooth and almost pleasant to touch. Instinctively, Lyda reached up with her other hand to touch one of the black dots on an adjacent trunk, but flinched when her finger came into contact with it. Unlike the white circles, the black ones felt damp and almost gooey, as if they had only recently been painted or something. Lyda pulled her hand away and examined her fingers in the dim starlight. The black substance looked less like paint and more like oil as it glistened in whatever light touched it. Disgusted, Lyda flicked her wrist as if to shake the stuff off.
A gust of wind suddenly picked up. It came from over the cliff to the west and Lyda turned her head as the pages of her book started to rustle in the breeze. One of the blank, torn-out pages got caught by the gust and started to blow away.
"No, no, no!" Lyda cried as she chased after it. She caught the parchment just as it landed in the conjoined stream and quickly plucked it out before it could get too wet. Without thinking, she ran her oil-stained hand across the page to wipe off the water droplets, only to curse herself as she spread the substance across the parchment. She turned to take the page back to the book when her eyes fell upon something truly strange.
In the middle of the page, where she had accidentally smeared the black goo, she noticed a series of thin-lined circles had appeared. It looked like somebody had taken the end of a pin and drew the shapes in the oily substance. Lyda would have shrugged it off as nothing, but she immediately noticed that there were six of these circles, and they formed the exact same hexagonal pattern as the ones carved into the tree.
Letting out a breath of surprise, Lyda continued to smear the substance across the page. Another identical symbol appeared to the left of the first, but the substance went completely around the dots of this one, giving them a more hollow look than the one to the right. Lyda guessed this must have been the white symbol, and the other was the black. It was clear that these pages were not blank after all, and that this peculiar goo was capable of revealing what was invisible upon them.
Lyda was ecstatic as she hurried back to the tree to collect more of the revealing agent. She started smearing it across the top of the page, where she uncovered a single word written in all capital letters that made her heart skip a beat: TWINS.
Lyda glanced up at the symbols on the tree trunks, her jaw hanging open. These must have been the marks of the Twin Spirits Iris spoke of. Her excitement could not be concealed. She had to keep going. This was incredible! Who knew how much she was learning right now that others did not know? She giggled at the thought of possibly knowing more right now than the Oracle Mistress who rejected her.
Once she was done with the first parchment, Lyda began work on the rest of the pages without wasting a second. Eventually, she came across a name at the top of one of the pages that was revealed by the agent, also in capital letters: SEL.
The Light Twin, Lyda thought to herself. On the rest of the page, the substance revealed a passage that was almost too difficult to read due to the way it was made visible, but Lyda managed to piece it together.
"Firstborn of the Sky Woman, Sel, patron of the Seluitah tribe, conceals itself within the moon and envelops our world in the light it reaps from the sun. This it does to protect the world from the powers of the Darkness."
Lyda nodded her head in affirmation. That was exactly how Iris described the Light Twin, even by name. She turned the parchment over and resumed her smearing routine. This side of the page appeared similar to other. The invisible passage was revealed and a name was written at the top of the page. This one Lyda had never heard before, and she could not help but whisper aloud as she read it.
"SIKAR."
The gust of wind suddenly swept through the spring again, but this time, it dissipated as soon as it began. Lyda felt goosebumps rising across the flesh of her arms and, for the first time since she left the cottage, she felt a tingle of fear.
So this was the name Iris refused to speak. Yes, Lyda thought, she refused. So far it was not the first thing she lied to her about. It made Lyda angrier and all the more desirous to continue.
"The Darkness," the passage read. "The evil twin. The Devil himself, I used to believe. But I was wrong. This is something different altogether. The Seluitah do not speak its name and have long forbidden the worship or even acknowledgment of this deity. They say it whispers to you in your sleep to tempt you with promises of unholy treasures. I dare not imagine what treasures are given by something so perverse. It is taught all throughout the kingdom that there is only one true God. I have recently learned that that is only partially true. I know now that, though there is only one Creator, there are many others like Him, and some are incomprehensibly dark."
"Whispers," Lyda said to herself, musing on the passage she had just read. She began to think back to her sister's most recent night terror. It made Adea tremble as she mentioned hearing sinister whispers in her dreams, but she was too scared to say any more. Perhaps it was time that Lyda made her open up about what she was seeing in her nightmares. She was too deep in her new studies to stop now. This was far too fascinating.
Any feeling of sleep she may have had prior to leaving the house was gone, replaced by an overwhelming state of ecstasy. Part of her wanted to stay here for a while longer, but Lyda knew she did not have the time. She had to make it back to the cottage before her parents would wake and realize that she was gone. Resisting the temptation to read on, Lyda collected more of the oily substance from the twisted tree and spread it across the last of the blank pages. She waited for it to dry before stuffing them back between the covers of the book. She could study them later, but for now, she had to haul it back home before dawn.
Finally mustering the will to leave, Lyda slipped the leather-bound book back in her sack, picked up the lantern, adjusting it as it the flame was dying down, and headed back toward the path from whence she came. She was about to step between the rhododendron hedges when another breeze picked up, this one much lighter than the last, and she could have sworn she heard a faint whispering as it fluttered past her ear. Lyda whipped around and shined the light of the lantern around the area, as if expecting to see somebody, but there was no one. She shook her head, thinking she must have been hearing things due to all her excitement, and she turned back to navigate through the path. Somewhere in the back of her head, she had a feeling she would see this place again.
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