Page 27 of Iridian

“It worked!” I repeated in awe as I watched the shimmering silver on the brownish parchment slowly reveal to me a shape—what could have been a valley between two mountains.

“Holy shit, it actually worked,” said Zachary. “Are you guys seeing this?! We have it! We?—”

I looked at his scroll as he held it up for us with a big smile on his face, and I saw that it was empty just a second before Radock said…

“Empty.”

Zachary stopped.

“Yours is empty—mine isn’t.” And Radock showed us his. His scroll that was also empty, which I’d seen the moment I came to my senses.

“Yoursis empty, not mine,” Zachary insisted, and then we were all turning our scrolls so everyone could see, only to realize…

“We can’t see them,” said Flora from behind me, raising every inch of my skin in goose bumps. “I can only see mine, and you can only see yours—nobody else’s.”

“Fuck,” Kaid said, leaning to look at Taland’s scroll, and I did, too. Empty.

All of theirs were empty except mine—to my eyes.

“It’s a puzzle,” Radock said. “It’s a puzzle spell—of course. An extra layer of protection.”

“Does that mean I should have done it by myself?” asked Aurelia.

“It wouldn’t have opened to you,” said Helen. “This was created by the original Council. It requires at least five people to work.” She was looking at her parchment and shaking her head.

“We should be able to read it, though. When the parchments are together…” Natasha said, bringing her parchment closer to Helen’s. “Anything?”

“No. Yours remains empty to me,” the woman said.

Everybody sighed at the same time. We all folded the scrolls and took a moment to gather ourselves—that spell had been intense. The magic that had come out of me, had beenforcedout of me by that burning sun…

It was gone now. I looked up and I expected to find it there still, hovering in the air, but it was gone. It had disappeared as soon as those scrolls had materialized in our hands.

“Let’s sit.” Taland took my hand in his again and led me back to the chairs we’d been sitting in a moment ago. Everybody sat, and everybody was still shaken, except for Radock and Helen, who seemed to be lost in their own minds as they stared at the tabletop. I could see the wheels turning in their heads as the others spoke, gave ideas.

How about only the Council tries it?

How about we do the spell over?

What if we said it wrong?

What if the boy remembered it wrong?

What if we mixed the spell—how are we going to get the whole picture?

Wedrawit,said someone—Kaid, I think, and he was already by Madeline’s desk, getting pads and pens, while she looked at him like she wanted to drink his blood for dinner.

Some thought it would be useless to draw out parts of the map, and some said it would work, but we all got a piece of paper and a pen to draw ours. It made sense at first to create the shape I was seeing on my parchment in detail on that blank piece of paper. It made sense, except…

I could also see what Taland was drawing beside me, and I couldn’t get any of the lines to make sense to me.

“I think it’s a river—do you see?” he asked when he was halfway done, but I saw no river. All I saw was a straight line.

And the others were looking at one another’s, too, but…a voice in my head was whispering. A voice that was almost coming from my bracelet.

I could have sworn it was coming from my bracelet, and the harder I tried to see what Natasha was showing me from the other side of the couch, the louder it got.

Dark.It was too dark to see the drawings in detail, wasn’t it? The drapes were drawn, and the lights overhead were very bright, but it still seemed too dark to me. That’s the word that voice whispered,dark.

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