When We Were Eternal | ONC 2021

Chapter Two

2. The Apple Core Test

Caught in the thick of a cheering mass of bodies, Amaran remembered why he never liked the Blue Moon Festival in the first place.

When he was younger, his father would sit by his bedside and tell him stories—stories he'd carried over from his balmy home in the south. He would tell him stories about how, on every Blue Moon's Eve, the Beast would prowl the streets in search of naughty children. When it found them, it would gouge out their eyes and boil them for feasting back in the boglands where it lived.

Amaran had always been a fervent believer of his father's stories. He had what Amaran liked to call a storyteller's voice, the sort of voice that could rip one's hope clean out of the heart. That voice had instilled within him a heavy sense of dread; it'd sat in the bowels of his young stomach like a stone. As he grew older, though, it had begun to fade away like the remnants of a bad dream.

Now, Amaran felt the dread more profoundly than ever before.

Dragging along two of the hinnies he'd borrowed from a mule-skinner on the verge, Amaran could barely keep up with Vel's dark head of hair flitting to and fro ahead of him. Now and then, she'd stride towards one of the vendor stalls on the roadside and reappear with fried dough or candied apples in hand. He found it especially surprising, considering she'd been complaining of a sprained ankle only five minutes ago.

When, at last, they were able to break off from the procession continuing north down Shellcord's Pass, Amaran heaved an enormous sigh of relief. The air around him was breathable again, and they could finally mount their hinnies without accidentally kicking a passerby in the nose.

He could already see the ward rising in front of them, past a league of sweeping scrubland and dry boscage. The moonlight washed its glassy gold surface silver, and the wildwoods' thick canopy of vines and palm trees grew up alongside it, unable to break through its magical barrier.

"I never asked what you were going to do about that mess you left behind in your father's study," Vel began in between bites of her third candied apple, "I don't want to risk getting caught because you failed to straighten it up before you made us leap through a window."

Amaran steeled his friend a sidelong glance. "I snuck enough milk of the poppy in his tea to keep him sound asleep on his cot for at least two days. He'll wake up to a study as tidy as he left it."

A thin smile of wry amusement played at Vel's lips like the flames of a candle. "Drugging your father and stealing from him? That's cruel."

"It's not like he would ever let me do this sober," Amaran shot back, his dusky cheeks flushing hotly with shame.

"He would never let you do this high, either," Vel replied, her eyes narrowing furtively. "But, if he somehow finds out about this..."

"No one's going to find out this," Amaran stressed, pinching the bridge of his nose, "not if we keep all the incriminating details to ourselves."

"Oh? So we're criminals, now?" Vel asked, rolling her eyes. "How lovely."

Amaran shrugged his shoulders, looking down at the barren slopes crumbling like pie crust beneath his hinny's hooves. "It's not a crime as long as we don't get caught."

Vel scoffed, her free hand searching for any rogue treats in her pockets while her other hand clutched the reins of her mount tightly. "That's a very broken philosophy to live by." Her brows furrowed when all she found was wrinkled wax paper and apple cores.

"Are you done?" Amaran jeered flatly with a quirked brow.

"Done with what?"

"Mocking me."

Vel stifled an exasperated groan. "Yes."

Amaran's hinny began to bray as he pulled back on the reins and stared up at the ward from where it cut into the twilit sky. "Great—because we're here."

Amaran dismounted his steed and stretched out the kinks in his legs. Riding bareback was an absolute pain. Vel was already off her hinny and treading past him; hands thrust deep in the pockets of her cotton kaftan, she pulled out the core of the apple she'd been crunching on minutes prior. Amaran called out to her, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Vel tossed the core up into the air and caught it in her palm once before she propelled her arm back and threw it across the ward. It rippled like the hypnotic surface of a lake. The apple core fell to the ground on the other side of the ward, a wrinkled and shriveled black pulp.

Amaran could only wonder what the ward did to human flesh.

Hands back in the pockets of her kaftan, Vel whistled long and low in astonishment. "That incantation—it is the right one, isn't it?"

Pulling out Theories on Thaumaturgy from the inner pockets of his longcoat, Amaran walked his way over to Vel's side and lowered himself onto his knees. "It has to be the right incantation if was created by royalty, right?" He flipped through the book to the bookmarked page and laid it down on the ground before him, less than a hairsbreadth from the ward's threshold.

Vel kneeled next to him and slid her side-bag off of her shoulder. "That's nothing but a rumor. A village idiot could've created it, for all we know."

Amaran chuckled under his breath. "Then I thank the village idiot whom we're betting our lives on."

Groping through his pockets, Amaran wrestled out an empty charm apparatus and the stylus he would need to pen the incantation onto the charm's panel. Vel stopped rummaging through her side-bag to gape at him.

"There is no way a flimsy charm like that can support an incantation of this magnitude. It has dents, Amaran. Dents!"

Amaran sighed. "I know it's not what you're used to, but it's all we have to work with, so you're just going to have to bear with me."

The used charm apparatus Amaran had bought from the market across the street had been the only one he could afford on short notice. The round frame wasn't steel, and the paneling wasn't quartz like the Sasian charms mass-produced for daily use. Instead, the frame had been beaten out of aged bronze and installed with a standard glass panel. It wasn't of the finest quality, but it would have to do.

While Vel huffed and grumbled something about how he would be the death of her, Amaran penned the incantation from Theories on Thaumaturgy onto the charm apparatus' panel. Twisting the knobs on the side of the apparatus's frame, the two long needles in the glass panel aligned with a click, and the incantation's words began to glimmer like spider silk. 

As he felt the charm heat up in his palm, he tossed it through the ward's threshold; the golden barrier accepted it with a shudder.

After a moment of silence, Amaran cleared his throat. "Do you think it worked?"

Vel drank in a big breath of air before she pulled out another apple core from her pocket. She met Amaran's hesitant gaze and said, "There's only one way to find out."