Page 16 of The First Trial
Hours later, I adjusted my position on the bed, uncrossing my legs to stretch them out before pulling the tome I was studying closer to me as I glanced between my notes and the pages. My brain was getting that fuzzy feeling it got when I was close tofiguring something out, but I’d been sitting in the same position for so long, my extremities were starting to go numb.
The swirling markings on the pages were a lot easier to pick out now that I knew what to look for. At first, studying the words was like looking at an endless picture. The start and end of each word, let alone each sentence, was impossible to pick out, but that was one of the first things Oz and I had ever figured out about the strange writings. Unfortunately, there were only so many ways you could write a swirl. Most of the words blended together into a jumble of scribbles that all looked the same. The differences were so slight that many who had studied Old Fae in the past gave up before achieving any breakthroughs. They were practically impossible to find without a specific form of magical assistance.
Ozzie and I had made that discovery by pure accident three years ago. Years of hopelessness and a lack of answers had bred frustration that then turned to anger. One night, Oz and I had gotten into a fight. He wanted to give up, to find a way to live our lives despite our curse, but I wasn’t ready to quit. Feeling like I was losing him, I threw one of the tomes in a panic-induced rage. The corner nicked his skin just below his collarbone, but all it took was a single bead of blood, and he suddenly had access to a deciphering code inside his head. I was quick to follow after that.
It was the only time I had ever been grateful for a papercut.
I squinted my eyes and adjusted the book so it was tilted at a slight angle away from me, then let it lie flat again. There… Could it be…?
‘Hey, Ozzie, come look at this. I think I found something.’
He was immediately at my side, leaning over my shoulder to see what I was looking at. I pointed towards a curve on the side of one word, the line slightly thicker than the rest.
‘Do you think it’s thicker, or is it a dot that’s blended into the rest of the word thanks to the ink?’ I asked. Old Fae was nevermeant to be written in ink. The intricacies of the symbols were too fine for something that bled so easily on the paper. It was yet another reason why Old Fae was such an impossible language to read.
He squinted his eyes and leaned in for a closer look, then tilted the page just as I had a moment ago. His eyes lit up with excitement when he caught what I had, a grin lighting up his face.
‘That’s definitely a thicker curve. It looks like it’s just faded over time, which was probably why it was so hard to see. Good catch, Junie,’ he praised.
We isolated the words and copied them into our notes, enlarging them, just as we had all the others we’d figured out. The bigger size allowed us to see all the details so easily missed in the smaller, older script. Then, we consulted our previous research notes to decode the word itself.
‘Do you see the positioning of the thicker curve?’ he pointed it out. ‘How it’s connecting the five swirls?’
‘Huh. Yeah, I do.’
He grabbed the tome I was working on and scanned the page. ‘Look. Right here,’ he said eagerly, pointing to the word beside it. I hadn’t noticed since it blended in with the surrounding markings, but it was a word we had already deciphered.
‘Trials?’ I mulled out loud, trying and failing to connect the dots inside my head.
‘With the way the word is written, the connections as well as the rest of the sentence… I think it has something to do with combining something.’
I frowned. ‘Combining what?’
He shrugged, but it was stiff. I wasn’t the only one who was bothered by the fact that we didn’t yet know enough to answer that question. ‘Who knows? It’s more than we had before, so I’m counting that as a win.’
He held his palm up for me to slap, a grin stretching wide across his cheeks and revealing both dimples usually hidden with his constant brooding. I loved it when he smiled, and I couldn’t stop myself from returning the sentiment.
‘Look at us, working together to make sense of our discoveries,’ I beamed.
He froze, then turned to me with wide eyes. ‘Junie, that’s it! You’re a genius!’
I blinked. ‘Um… thank you?’
He let out a booming laugh, his joy bouncing around the small room. ‘That’s what the word means, Junie.Working together.’
I hummed thoughtfully. “Working together trials’? What does that even mean?’
‘Uniting, maybe?’ he mused. ‘Trials that unite something?’
I studied the word again, noting the five distinct marks within the symbol, and a sudden clarity hit. ‘Five somethings,’ I said, pointing to what I’d found.
‘Nice catch, Junie. So, we’ve got five things, working together, and a trial. I wonder what that’s about?’
‘I don’t know. My brain hurts. I need to take a break from being smart for a minute,’ I complained, massaging my temples as a throbbing headache began to pound against my skull.
‘Sure. You okay? Need me to heal you?’ he asked.
‘Nah, I just need some rest. Staring at swirls for hours on end usually ends in a headache eventually.’
