« Back
Generated:
Post last updated:
hideaway-land
rule one is that you're only allowed to refer to it as an "armoire"
Permalink Mark Unread

Her first child, her son, was so full of darkness - 

She could see it, she knew him, she loved him, and she could've taught him better if only he'd stayed -

Permalink Mark Unread

And she can't bear another child, and her husband left too anyway, but she can take in orphans.  She takes in a pair of little redheaded sisters who so adore each other.  She can succeed with them where she once failed.  She can teach them to love and be loved, she can teach them virtue and discipline.  She can raise them on bedtime stories of wicked sons and weeping mothers, and fill them up with wholesomeness and purity and decency and love and goodness and light.

Permalink Mark Unread

There are nights she still cries, thinking of Thomas marching out the door, thinking of screaming after him until her voice gives out.  She tries not to let the girls hear.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Kaylee's scared of her.  She can tell.  Kaylee's sweet but sometimes she says dark things, "why can't you just" when the answer is that's horrible, and Sybil hates it.  So Vanessa hugs her and pets her hair and tells her it's okay, when Sybil does the thing she does, when she almost-cries and makes it your fault.  But Kaylee is sweet, and a good person, and if there's anyone Vanessa trusts to carry darkness in her heart it's her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Vanessa hates her.  She can tell.  Sybil tries to teach her right from wrong, tries to teach both of them, and Kaylee knows she's supposed to learn but it's all askew, and she doesn't know why, and it's like Vanessa has her own right and wrong that shines through her like the sun through a crack in a cold stone wall but she's just a girl, like Kaylee -

And she knows Vanessa has perfect unshakeable faith in her and she feels so ungrateful, not to feel the same way about Vanessa -

Permalink Mark Unread

They're twelve, and more and more often Sybil's tears turn to anger, and she takes Kaylee's hand and says "we can leave" and -

Permalink Mark Unread

 

- and they do.

Permalink Mark Unread

They go under cover of night.  Kaylee will of course be trying not to think of how anguished Mom will be, and she squeezes her hand as she realizes it.

(She calls Sybil Mom sometimes, in her thoughts, names like that don't matter too much to her.)

Permalink Mark Unread

They take food, and clothes, and cash, and head for the empty house on the edge of town, where they're pretty sure Thomas hid out when he was running away.  They'll catch the next bus into the city.  They have an aunt, there - she couldn't take them in back when their parents died.  Maybe she can now.  Maybe.

Permalink Mark Unread

The house is dark, and creaky, and cobwebby - and Kaylee hates spiders - but in good repair; Vanessa judges it safe to explore.  Flashlights illuminate it feebly, Vanessa's in yellow and Kaylee's in pale white, leaving swooping green-violet afterburn in their eyes as they sweep over ornate old-fashioned wooden furniture.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Nessie, come see."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What is it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

It's a room full of dressers.  Not normal dressers with drawers, but old-fashioned dressers with double doors and mirrors on the inside.  Armoires, she thinks.  (There is another name for them but the word is eluding her.  She's tired.)

The room is packed full of them - not just against the walls, but lined up in haphazard irregular rows, to make the room a dusty, musty armoire-maze.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"That's weird."  Sometimes it is Vanessa's job to state the obvious.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why would someone have so many?"

She runs her fingers lightly across the door of one.

"It's - stuck shut," she says.  "Nailed or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This one's padlocked," she says.  "This one's stuck shut too.... this one's locked.  This one's boarded shut."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Boarded, like..."

She looks where Vanessa's shining her flashlight.  Boarded like there's two planks of wood, crossed across the doors, hammered into place.  Like it's the entrance to an abandoned house.  - a much more-abandoned house.

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is creepy," Vanessa opines.

Permalink Mark Unread

She rounds a corner, around a row of armoires, slowly, her left hand trailing over ornately worked wood.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Kaylee?"

She darts around the corner after her.

Permalink Mark Unread

She glances back.  "Sorry," she says.  "It's just - there's something about them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...you're not wrong," she says.

" - this one opens."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which one?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Dark, almost reddish wood, still shiny as though freshly varnished, with twining leafy viney designs around the edges of the doors and delicate little brass handles.

"There's no lock, and it's not nailed or padlocked or anything..."

She hooks a finger through one brass handle, pulls.  It swings right open.  Doesn't even creak.

Permalink Mark Unread

She shines her pale white flashlight on the back of the empty armoire, the narrow little left-hand wall, the narrow little right-hand wall--

 

There's no right hand wall.

There's a little passage, a narrow corridor.  Too narrow to walk through, but a child or a small adult could sidle sideways through it.

Permalink Mark Unread

The armoire isn't quite flush with the one to its right.  She slides her hand between them.

It sure has a right-hand wall on the outside.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"...Do you kinda want to go in there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"...Yeah," she admits.  "But..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But," she sighs.

She sets her backpack down and rummages in it for a ball of twine.  She hands the ball to Vanessa, pulls out a thread, wraps it a couple times around her palm.  "I'll tug on this twice, every so often," she says, "and you tug on it twice back.  If I ever don't feel you I'll come back as fast as I can."

Permalink Mark Unread

Kaylee's so smart.  "Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

She takes a deep breath, and steps inside the armoire, and starts sidling sideways.

 

"Can you hear me?" she calls after just a minute.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm just past where I should be able to be - can you bang on the wall of the dresser?  The one I just went through.  I wanna see where it sounds like you're hitting it."

Permalink Mark Unread

She can't get the angle for a proper slap, but she can slip her hand between the two dressers again and sort of slap it back and forth, taptaptaptaptap on the wall Kaylee just walked through.  "Could you hear that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah.  It sounded like you were hitting the back wall.  This is weird."

She keeps sidling, tugging twice every few seconds.

Permalink Mark Unread

Tug tug.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Can you still hear me?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She raises her voice a little: "Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a corner.  Like, the little passageway turns.  Toward the back wall.  I'm gonna look around it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"There's a light," she says.  "The passageway goes on for a little bit and then - there's a light at the end of it."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"...what color is it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Orange," she says, matter-of-factly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Orange?" she says.  "Like - fire?"  She sounds a bit worried.

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, it's steady," she says quickly.  "It's like - a forest in autumn."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...you wanna keep going?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay."

Tug tug, as appropriate.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"This leg's a lot longer," she calls, voice faint, after a little while.  "Light's getting bigger."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's it look like?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Kinda - curvy?  Not straight lines like the rest of the wardrobe."  Wardrobe, that's the word.  "I'm gonna keep going."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, but I don't think I can hear you much farther."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Still got the twine."  Tug tug.

Permalink Mark Unread

Tug tug.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Yelp!

Permalink Mark Unread

She sticks her head into the corridor.  "What's wrong??"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sorry!" Kaylee yells.  "Okay!  Just - lots of spiderwebs."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay."  Tug tug.

Permalink Mark Unread

Tug tug.

 

She won't hear Kaylee again for a while.  The signals on the twine keep coming, though.

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll keep signalling back.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

She reaches the light.

She called out to Vanessa one more time, before now, and Vanessa didn't answer.  So she probably couldn't hear if she yelled from here.

The light is an opening in the wall, shaped more like something that grew that way than like something that was made intentionally or something that was broken.  It looks out into - a forest in autumn.

Permalink Mark Unread

She clambers through the hole.

From the other side, the hole is a gap in the bark of a hollow tree.  It looks exactly like the shape as a gap in a hollow tree would look, from this side, though she didn't recognize the shape when light was shining through it into the dark.

She looks around.

 

That's a forest, all right.  In autumn, which it isn't, and in the middle of the day, which it also isn't.

Permalink Mark Unread

A great big bug floats through the air and comes to hover in front of her face.  Not a frightening bug - it looks like it's an oversized lightning bug.  And there is a tiny little person riding on it, with goldenrod skin and gleamingly black hair and a tiny little bow and arrow made out of a tiny little curve of wood and strung with gleaming silk, strung over her(?) back.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello, giant!" the tiny little person calls out bravely.  "These trees are the gathering-grounds of the honeysprite city of Dozen Leaves!  I am a scout of Dozen Leaves and would like to know your business here!"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - hello!" Kaylee says.  She is thoroughly charmed, though she considers in the next moment that being thoroughly charmed by this person, who is asking basically reasonable and straightforward questions, just because they are tiny and little, is maybe condescending and prejudiced.  "My name's Kaylee.  I didn't know there was a forest here.  I was following a passage through - what I suppose must have been a magic wardrobe - and it led to that tree - " she points.  "Before now I hadn't believed in magic.  I'm pretty - confused and astonished!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That tree is called Fool's Hollow, and the sprites who have entered it say its darkness goes on forever, and if you go too deep you will be trapped in the webs of wild spiders."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - well, there were some spiderwebs in there," Kaylee says.  "But - well, I just walked through them.  I suppose if you're a fairy they'd be dangerous?"

Permalink Mark Unread

It's hard to tell, but the tiny little person might be frowning bemusedly at her.  "A fairy?  Fairies don't exist.  I'm a sprite."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I'm sorry," Kaylee says.  "Where I'm from there's no such thing as sprites or fairies.  There's only humans - I suppose humans are my kind of giant."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're a human?" the sprite says.  "An eld-giant from an entire land full of them, on the other side of Fool's Hollow, with no magic and no other types of creature?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, I guess, if eld-giant is another word for human - and, well, we have animals, but nothing else that talks.  ...Well some type of birds can talk.  But they don't talk as well as you and I are talking and they don't have cities."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You've never heard of Casthanaea before?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is that the name of the forest, or the place the forest is?  I haven't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Casthanaea is the name of all the world under the dome of the sky, Springland and Summerland and Autumnland and Winterland, and Giantland in the center within the ring-mountains.  And at the center of Giantland is Tower Axial, and at the center of Tower Axial is the Throne of the World, upon which legends say an eld-giant must always sit or the world will end."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - is there an eld-giant sitting on the throne now?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, but - well, there's probably someone in Dozen Leaves who can explain the situation Casthanaea's in better than I'd be able to, to a giant who's just arrived from another world - would you be willing to travel with me to Dozen Leaves and hear what my people have to say?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 - there's a tug-tug on her length of twine.  She tug tugs back and says, "I should tell my sister what's going on.  She's on the other side of the passage - of Fool's Hollow.  But can you give me the five-second version?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right.  The king of Casthanaea is the Witch-King Eldest-Giant, who has sat on the Throne of the World for all of living memory and history.  He's cruel and uncaring and considers everyone in Casthanaea his playthings, and when he's not tormenting or enslaving us he leaves us to fend for ourselves.  The only reason he's still on the throne is that he's an eld-giant and Casthanaea needs an eld-giant on the throne."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right."  She - first ties her twine around a knot of the tree, just outside the hole, and then says, "I'll go find my sister and we'll - figure this out."

Permalink Mark Unread

The honeysprite salutes her.

Permalink Mark Unread

And she starts sidling back through the passageway.

 

Once she gets to the bend, she calls out, "I'm here!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You okay?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah I've got loads to tell you - hold on - "

She finishes the trip back, steps out of the armoire and catches her breath.  "Oof."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you okay?  Did you get to the hole in the wall?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes and yes," she says.  "There's a whole forest on the other side of it.  I met a sprite."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A sprite?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like a tiny little person, riding an oversized firefly.  She called me an eld-giant.  She said - she said the forest is in a land called Casthanaea, that needs to have an eld-giant ruling it or the world will end.  And the eld-giant on the throne now is nasty, he - he tortures and enslaves everyone."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Do you wanna go in there and try to usurp Casthanaea."

Permalink Mark Unread

She wrings her hands a little.  "I mean - we should get a grownup, but - no one in town would believe us, right?  They'd say we were crazy.  And they'd ship us back to, to Sibyl.  Everyone loves Sybil."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sweet old lady whose troublemaking son ran away," Vanessa mutters.

Permalink Mark Unread

"And - and even if Aunt Sophie believes us - would she believe us enough to come all the way back out here about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

She sighs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"But.  But kids can't do stuff like that, right?  Not in real life."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...If Casthanaea needs an eld-giant on the throne... maybe the only reason they haven't already overthrown him is because he's the only eld-giant," Vanessa says.  "We could go and say - if there's a rebellion or something, we can join up, and stop the world from ending after the old guy is taken out."

Permalink Mark Unread

It's the rest of our lives, she wants to say, the whole rest of our lives...

But what will the rest of their lives look like if they don't?  Hitching a ride into the city, hoping Aunt Sophie can take them in, hoping Sybil doesn't send anyone after them to track them down... and if Sophie can't take them in, then - then what?  She can't imagine what, her mind goes blank, Sophie taking them in had been their only hope.

 

So she nods.

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

 

It's not a big grin, but it's a grin.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

 

The trip back through the armoire is lengthy and awkward and generally unbefitting of an emotionally weighty resolution to try to save the inhabitants of a magical forest.  But soon enough they're out the other side, and -

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello!" the sprite calls, once they've both clambered out of the tree.  "Welcome to Casthanaea!  ...I don't think we ever properly introduced ourselves, did we?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess not!  My name's Kaylee, and this is my sister Vanessa."

Permalink Mark Unread

The honeysprite salutes them.  "It's an honor to meet you, Kaylee, Vanessa.  My name is Ambrosia."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ambrosia, that's pretty."

Permalink Mark Unread

It's hard to tell, on a face that small, but she might look a little bashful.  "Thank you.  It's actually a pretty common name among honeysprites."  She ducks her head, then meets their eyes again.  "But I'm glad you think so!"

Permalink Mark Unread

Vanessa does a little wave with her fingers.  "Hello Ambrosia!  So, are you going to take us to your city?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not yet," she says.  "I shouldn't lead strange giants to Dozen Leaves on my own recognizance.  But I'm going to head back as fast as I can, and they'll send some Rangers and a Most Honored Daughter to meet you properly.  It might be a little while - though I suppose I don't know how eld-giants account a long or short time - maybe about an hour?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Vanessa glances at Kaylee.

Permalink Mark Unread

Kaylee glances at Vanessa - but then her face firms up a bit, and she looks back at Ambrosia.  "We can wait."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right.  Thank you both."

Ambrosia and her firefly fly off.

Permalink Mark Unread

Kaylee sits down, back against the tree.

"So what should we - "

She stretches, and yaaaaawns.

" - do while we wait?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Vanessa sits down next to her.  "Maybe take a nap.  It's late, for us, even if it's the middle of the day here."

Permalink Mark Unread

Kaylee grins a little sheepishly.  "Yeah, good point."  She closes her eyes and curls into herself against the tree a little.

Permalink Mark Unread

Vanessa lets herself flop sideways and splays out her limbs.

Zzz.

Permalink Mark Unread

Zzz.