Of Disappearances and Dragons - Complete

Part 1

Finnian let the shop door close behind the last customer of the day with a sigh. Working in a book shop was dangerous business, at least when the shop served the sort of clientele that Finn had had to deal with over the past few days. One Page More - books for the Magically Minded, Perpetually Puzzled and Obstinately Odd attracted a rather peculiar sort of crowd to say the least. In the last three days Finn had been screamed at, cried on, fainted on, challenged to a duel, handed three babies while their parents shopped and only been asked for two of them back once their parents were ready to leave, diagnosed with Phletica and offered a human heart as a remedy, and been slapped by a customer who refused to speak any language other than troll and was then offended when Finn couldn't understand her.

And of course there was the leprechaun who, on learning that the book he was waiting on had still not been delivered, had put a curse on Finn so that every time he tried to speak all that came out were seagull cries. After that episode Finn had ended up leaving the enthusiastic-but-not-overly-sensible Hetton in charge and hiding in the stock room until it wore off.

And the kicker of it all was that he wasn't going to see a penny's payment for all his hard work. The shop belonged to his younger brother Archibald and originally Finn had just been filling in for a day as a favour to him. And then they'd lost Archie and he hadn't been able to leave.

No that wasn't quite true. They hadn't lost him. Archie had done the losing all by himself. One minute he'd been experimenting downstairs in his laboratory, apparently on the cusp of figuring out once and for all how to make a cup of tea that never went cold, and then there'd been a bang so loud the whole building shook, an overwhelming stench of rotten eggs and Archie had vanished. While he wasn't dead, Finn had absolutely no idea where he now was.

That was the problem with magic, thought Finn as he locked the door and pulled the curtain across, resolutely ignoring old Mrs Marshsea as she hurried across the road waving her arms at him. It was all too vague, too temperamental. One too many drops of an ingredient in a potion or a stray thought running through your head while casting a charm and you could be in trouble to put it mildly. He'd much rather put his faith in hard work and if necessary cold, hard steel. A sword seemed a far safer and definitely more reliable weapon than any magic.

Finn slowly wandered through the shop tidying up. Someone had left a book open face down on a table. To Archie that was one of the worst ways to treat a book short of folding the corners over or tearing pages out. While the sight of it didn't send Finn into quite such a rage he did feel a surge annoyance at whoever had left it like that. Clearly he'd spent too much time here.

He picked the book up and turned it over but before he had a chance to close it all of the letters on the two open pages began to swirl wildly around as if they were grains of sand being blown by the wind. Then the majority of them fell in a jumbled heap at the bottom of the pages. Those that remained continued to spin around the top half of the book for a moment longer before rearranging themselves into three words that repeated themselves over and over again.

Help me Finn.

This would have been extraordinary had it not happened at least once every hour since Archie had disappeared. There had also been more impressive messages than this one. Clearly the pages were somewhat lacking in the necessary letters because as Finn scanned the words he saw the message soon changed to Hlp M fi before shrinking even further to Hp fi.

But Archie's meaning was clear enough. Finn just didn't know where to start. Well actually that wasn't quite true. The signs all pointed to Hawthorne Beach over on Arys Isle, quite literally in fact. Finn's gaze was reluctantly drawn to the large map of the island stuck above the counter. Like with the book most of the letters had left their original positions where they'd been marking out the best places on the Isle to find Pixie Grass and were now congregating around Hawthorne Beach.

Finn had never been to Arys Isle but he knew it had a reputation as an odd sort of place and not one that most people would visit voluntarily. Apart from, it seemed, the customers of Archie's shop. The map had drawn quite a bit of attention so he'd asked around about the island during the day and while many of the customers positively rhapsodised about the island their comments tended to focus more on the spiritual atmosphere being particularly conducive for spellwork or allowing certain potion ingredients to grow in abundance and less on the peculiar rumours that circulated about the place.

There was only one thing for it.

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