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RYNAEZEL'S SITTING ROOM COULD MAKE A THIEF'S EYES BLEED.
Strange objects climbed their way to the ceiling alongside clouded jars, teacups, golden volumes and skulls, all of it swaying in unison at a single abrupt movement. A thicket of vines clawed a maze of forest green across the arched ceiling of the circular room, weaving around the large windows, through which light cut the air in thin golden pillars of a dying day.
Rynaezel hummed a gloomy tune as she uprooted one of the piles of litter in search for a teapot, the only one in the room full of empty, chipped teacups, hollow and pearly like crescent moons.
"Thee knoweth that flowers doth not groweth in the drowning seas unless thither is a kind sailor?"
"Yes, but what—" Rynaezel cut herself off as she stuck a bony arm into a hole she'd dug up in a pile of old books and felt with her hand for the porcelain handle of the teapot. When she set the pot on the messy table between the two light blue couches in the center of the room, water was quietly boiling inside of it at her touch, whispering like lovers entombed in a prison of gold-rimmed ceramic.
She raised her dark eyes towards Maige as she sat down opposite her. "What was it that I was going to say... Ah. You think someone helped the child cross the mountains?"
"A kindly sailor, aye, not a starving spirit like thee," the witch poured the steaming brew into two cups, spilling the tea as it fled past the limits of the lustrous cups made of deep-water shells.
Maige was something strange, even to someone like Rynaezel. Perhaps that's why she liked her. For as long as she could remember, Maige had always spoken in a mix of the two languages of Rhene, borrowing words from one and then another to build sentences that made little sense if any at all.
At times, though, Rynaezel had a feeling that there was more to it than simple insanity.
"When I caught the scent of the human, the wind was blowing from the north-west, here," she pointed the tip of her long sharp nail to where the Nygrunn Mountains spread across the map of yellowed parchment on the table, then drew an invisible line towards Helldor.
"They has't entered the realm from the mountains while it standeth that no mortal may walketh in the steps of gods unaided," mused Maige, as she brushed away a lock of curly lightning-blue hair away from her eyes.
"Exactly. It would never have crossed the mountains alone unless there was a witch to help it. But, then, why should a witch help a human cross the mountains instead of taking its heart? Here," Rynaezel drew Maige's attention back to the map, decorated by swirling leaves and heads of mythical creatures. "They must have docked their ship here, then traveled down the mountain range, but," she brought a hand to stop the words bubbling at the tip of the other witch's tongue, "The scent stops here."
It was a point on the map Rynaezel had marked with a large, crooked 'X' as the sun crumbled away into the inky blackness of the night during the previous evening. She was sitting in her tower, casting a spell to locate the human child across Rhene when the scent just... stopped. Like a string cut off, a bubble popped, a candle blown out.
