Post by Anna on Dec 5, 2007 22:18:51 GMT -5
Formerly Lisbeth le Fay
Lisbeth Faaye pushed open the creaky wooden door to the castle. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?” There was no answer. She stepped forward hesitantly, and dust billowed up around her face. She waved it away, sneezing, her throat dry and gritty with the sandy dust. Glancing back at the floor, she saw the depressions in the thick layer of dust, an astronaut’s footprints. “Great,” Lisbeth muttered. “A haunted castle, and it’s Allergy Central to boot.” Shirt pressed over her mouth and nose, she stepped cautiously down one of the long, narrow hallways. “Hellooo?” Her voice reverberated off the stone walls.
“Hello,” an echoing voice replied. Lisbeth spun around, her heart pounding in her throat. “Gram! You scared me!” Her grandmother set down her luggage on the dirty floor, waving dust out of her face.
“Elizabeth, this is my friend Mr. Derdrom. He’s the caretaker here at Pendragon Castle.” She placed her hand on the shoulder of a tall, impossibly gaunt and bony man with thinning white hair. He was so pale he appeared to be translucent.
Lisbeth nodded a nervous hello. Where did he come from? Mr. Derdrom stared at her but didn’t nod back. Unnerved, she averted her gaze and turned to look at her grandmother. “Gram, I’m allergic to this place. Are you sure we have to stay here?”
“Elizabeth,” her grandmother said evenly, “Mr. Derdrom is working very hard. The castle will be clean soon enough and, in the meantime, you will be fine.”
Lisbeth tugged on her bangs in frustration. “Gram, this place is haunted! People disappear here.”
Her grandmother turned on her heel and walked quickly away, her shoes clack-clack-clacking on the stone floors. I take it that this conversation is over, the sound seemed to say.
Lisbeth wandered down the halls, running her hands over the icy stone walls, turning the castle’s history over and over in her mind. Pendragon Castle had belonged to anyone who wanted to use it for as long as she could trace it back, and for just as long, every child between the ages of ten and sixteen who had stayed there had disappeared-- including, when Lisbeth had been nine, her older sister Katie. She’d searched libraries, poured over encyclopedias and grilled Gram, but she had coaxed nothing out of it all. And all of a sudden, Gram had decided that it would make a perfect vacation spot.
Lisbeth’s fingers caught on a narrow crack in the wall. Coming out of her dreamy state, she probed the wall with her fingers, brushing dirt away, until she uncovered a rusty iron handle. She fingered it curiously, then, without a second thought, gave it a mighty yank. With an enormous creak, the door pulled away from the wall, letting a ray of dusty sunlight into the room. Lisbeth glanced around to make sure no one could see her, then slipped into the room.
Surrounding her in the weak sunlight were more books than Lisbeth had ever seen in her life. Dazed, she turned around and around, taking in leather covers and gold binding. One particularly thick and aged book lay on a tiny table near the door. Lisbeth picked it up and ran her hand over the embossed title: Tales of King Arthur. She opened the book, brushing dust and leaves off the pages.
“Young lady,” said an abrupt voice behind her. Lisbeth jumped. Mr. Derdrom was standing in the doorway, his colorless eyes snapping. She tried to speak, but her mouth had gone dry. “You are to stay out of this library at all times,” he growled. “Do you understand?” His penetrating stare fell to the aging book in her hands. “And put that book down!”
Lisbeth nodded, too frightened to speak. With one last angry glance over his shoulder, the caretaker left the room.
Once she was sure that he was gone, she shoved the book inside her sweatshirt pocket and slipped out of the room.
Lisbeth spent that night reading, finding herself completely absorbed in the legends of Merlin the brilliant magician, King Arthur, his wife Guinevere, his half-sister Morgan le Fay, and the Knights of the Round Table. When Gram came in to check on her, she covered the book with her hand and promised her grandmother that she would turn out the light before midnight. She fell asleep like that, her hand draped over the book’s crumbling pages.
*****
Lisbeth Faaye never saw the dark green leaves that pushed their way out of the book’s pages. She didn’t notice the vines that snaked out of the binding, twining their ways around her thin wrist, up her arm, finally twisting around her neck. She had no way of knowing that, as she slept, her body was less and less lying in a creaky old bed in Pendragon Castle. She never knew exactly what had happened.
When Lisbeth awoke, she was lying in a pile of dirt on a cold stone floor. She didn’t notice that she wasn’t on her bed anymore, or that she was in what appeared to be a very dirty jail. The only thing she noticed was that she was completely immobilized with vines.
“HELP! Help me!” Lisbeth screamed, her entire body flailing in panic. The vines were as thick as ropes, and didn’t let her arms and legs move at all. A crowd of children and teenagers came rushing over to her. Some began to untangle the vines; others held her down to stop her from flailing. When she was finally free, she sat up, gulping in air and massaging her neck where the vines had cut into it. She glanced around: stone walls, dirty floors, and—she swallowed convulsively—rusting metal bars covering the entrance to what seemed to be a large jail cell.
“Where am I?” Lisbeth whispered. A boy about her age grabbed her hands and hoisted her upright, but nobody answered her. “Where am I? And just how many people can fit in one jail cell? Are there more coming?” Everyone seemed to flinch, but no one spoke a word. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Lisbeth whipped around and had the sudden sensation that she was looking into a mirror, or at an older version of herself. It took a moment for her to realize that she was looking at her sister.
“Katie?” she whispered. “But aren’t you dead?”
“Not any more than you are, squirt,” her older sister replied, pulling her into a tight embrace. Lisbeth held onto her sister until Katie had to tug away. “Kate, where are we?”
Her sister flinched. “Lisbeth, were you reading a book called Tales of King Arthur?”
Lisbeth nodded suspiciously. “Yeeessss…”
Katie swallowed. “Did you get to the part where Arthur gets killed, and how the last thing he ever said was that he would come back and kill his nephew, Mordred, who had betrayed him?”
“Nooo…” Lisbeth said slowly. Suddenly, looking around and realizing that many of the people in the dungeon were wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion over three hundred years ago, she understood. “Oh God,” she muttered. “Kate…?”
“That book isn’t a book. He’s been recruiting all of us for his army.”
“But then…?”
Her sister nodded. “Arthur’s father’s last name was-is-Pendragon. That castle was built on the site of the battle where he was killed. Lisbeth, you’re in ancient Camelot, in King Arthur’s dungeon.”
Lisbeth was stunned for a moment. Then she had the sense to ask, “How are all of these people still kids? You still look fourteen.”
Her sister nodded. “I am. Merlin’s been helping him. He was keeping all of us the same age—the perfect age to fight—until they had enough of us. There was also a spell on that book. That’s how we all ended up here. We’re sure that Merlin has lifted the enchantment just this morning. He wanted five hundred of us. The last one who came, the fittest and technically the youngest, would be the leader—and also the one who was certain to die.”
“Katie,” said Lisbeth, almost fearing the answer, “Why was the enchantment lifted?” She knew before the answer came.
Katie shook her head, sadness in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Lisbeth. You’re the five hundredth.” She squeezed Lisbeth’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”
*****
Lisbeth sat in the dungeon, knees drawn up to her chest, and though harder than she ever had before. She had just come back from her briefing with King Arthur. He had told her that her job was, in essence, to change history. She had three things to do: Find Mordred, who had mysteriously disappeared; plan out a battle strategy; and kill Mordred. She’d asked Katie how Mordred could have disappeared, but she had merely shrugged and muttered something about the reversal of time. “This is the second version of this period in time,” she’d insisted, much to Lisbeth’s annoyance. So finally, Lisbeth had been left alone with her thoughts, trying to work some sort of pathetic miracle.
Lisbeth approached the group on the other side of the dungeon. Some were telling stories; others were playing hand games. She sank down miserably next to Katie, who was playing a game in the dirt with three other teenagers. “I should have listened to Mr. Derdrom. If I’d obeyed him, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Mr. Derdrom?” said a chubby girl with black hair twisted into braids. “Not the Mr. Derdrom? The caretaker? He was there when I visited, and that was over two hundred years ago!”
Lisbeth blinked in surprise. “What do you mean? Nobody’s that old, are they?”
“Hang on,” said Katie. “What did you say his name was?”
“Mr. Derdrom,” said Lisbeth, puzzled. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Derdrom…Derdrom…it sound sort of strangely familiar,” Katie murmured. “But I never met any caretaker.”
“He was an old guy, really thin and pale. It was freaky; he was almost see-through-”
“Lisbeth, that’s it!” cried Katie. “Derdrom! Derdrom spelled backward is Mordred!”
“Mordred?”
“Yeah! Arthur’s nephew, the evil guy!” Katie bit her lip. “Lisbeth, what did you say about him being see-through?”
“He was so pale, it was like he was made out of dust, I swear, and he always seemed to come out of nowhere. He was really weird.”
“That totally explains it! Mr. Derdrom is Mordred! He’s a ghost!”
Lisbeth shivered. “No wonder he didn’t want me looking at that book; he must have noticed that kids were vanishing and known that Merlin and Arthur were involved.” Her face fell. “But if he’s hiding in the future, there’s no way we can find him.”
“Yes, there is,” Katie insisted. “We just need to go back to the twenty-first century—and this will make things easier, too. We surround him, we kill him. Job done.”
“Katie!” Lisbeth screamed, nearly delirious with frustration. “He is not hiding in the future! You can’t do that! He must be somewhere in Camelot! And you can’t kill a ghost!” She sighed, suddenly exhausted. “How are we going to do this?”
“Umm..well, no, you can’t kill a ghost, but right now the actual Mordred is alive, too. At least, I think so.”
Lisbeth sucked in her breath. “Well, then, we have 499 people to explain our plan to, and one of them isn’t going to like it.”
“Why wouldn’t the others like it? It gets us out of here, doesn’t it?”
“I mean King Arthur,” Lisbeth explained.
“Why wouldn’t he like it?”
“Well, it might be a good way to kill Mordred, but it’s also a good way to get out of this jail cell.” Lisbeth shrugged. “So, in short, we’re doomed.”
* * *
Lisbeth sat and waited. She had explained her plan to everyone; they all knew what to do. She was only waiting for Arthur’s approval.
“King Arthur had a sword called the Excalibur—one touch of this sword to any point on your body and you were done for, living or ghost, human or animal,” she had explained. “If we can take the Excalibur into the future, we can kill Mordred’s ghost. Then he’ll be truly gone, and hopefully we can go back to our own lives.”
Now she lay on the dungeon floor, sitting up at the clink and rattle of a key in the dungeon door’s lock. A scruffy prison guard entered, carrying a red leather book. Lisbeth spotted its title: Tales of King Arthur. “No!” Lisbeth shouted. “Get that thing away from me!”
The guard shrugged and deposited the book at her feet. “Arthur says yes,” he muttered. “But he says only you. You and one other.” He turned on his heel and scurried out.
Lisbeth picked up the book carefully, like it could break at any moment. Then, with every ounce of strength she could muster, she peeled herself off the musty floor and walked over to where her sister sat in a corner of the dungeon. “I need to talk to you,” she murmured, her lips brushing Katie’s ear. “It’s time to go.” She cracked open the book, its pages somehow even older and more worn than they had been in the library. The sisters placed their hands on the book, Katie’s pale, long-fingered one protectively covering Lisbeth’s. The vines wound faster that time, twisting and snaking around one girl and then the other until Lisbeth couldn’t tell where she ended and Katie began. The room twisted and rippled, and Lisbeth and Katie were falling through blackness.
They crashed together into a cold stone floor. Katie quickly sat up and began wrenching apart the vines binding them. Lisbeth opened her eyes slowly, gradually noticing the presence of something in her right hand. She forced herself to focus on it. It was a sword, with a hilt of gold and a blade sharper than a thousand knives. She slowly lifted it up. “The Excalibur,” she murmured.
Katie turned, hacking the last of the vines from her legs. “Where?”
“In your sister’s hand,” said a cold voice behind her. Lisbeth turned slowly, a silent scream rising inside of her. In the doorway of the library where they had landed stood Mordred. Before Lisbeth could move, he had snatched the Excalibur out of her hand and was on top of her.
“No!” Katie screamed. “No, get away from her! That’s my little sister!”
Mordred laughed, having heard her but not having listened. “Any last requests?”
“Yes,” said Lisbeth steadily. “Why is my last name Faaye and not le Fay? My grandmother is Morgan, isn’t she?”
Katie’s face was filled with shock.
Mordred smirked. “Glad that you mentioned it. You’re Morgan’s daughter. This girl”—he jerked his head toward Katie—“is more like Morgan’s great-great-great-a thousand times over-granddaughter. But if your last name was as famous as hers is, you might have worked all this out by now. You were fighting against your own side. Morgan was working with me all the time.” He raised the Excalibur above her heart, smirking. “But I suppose some are simply destined to die.” He brought the sword down in a flash of silver, and the last thing Lisbeth ever saw was Katie’s screaming face.
* * *
Lisbeth struggled to open her eyes. As the room around her came into a blurry half-focus, she licked her lips nervously. They were caked with dust.
Lisbeth was in the library. She glanced around, skimming the floors and walls. Something’s missing. The depressions in the floor’s dusty carpet were gone—no footprints, no blood stains. No
Excalibur.
No book.
Tales of King Arthur was gone.
Lisbeth struggled to her elbows. Sure enough, the book was gone from where it had landed on the floor. She checked the bookcases and the tables. It was gone.
Getting shakily to her feet, Lisbeth started for the door. She did a double take.
No door.
Lisbeth spun frantically, seeing no way out. She grabbed the top of a table, ready to heave it into a wall, but the table didn’t lift. Lisbeth glanced down at her hands and screamed.
Her arms were no more than a thick layer of dust. Her fingers were translucent, just as Mordred’s had been.
Lisbeth’s scream reverberated off the high ceiling. It pushed through the gaps in the stone walls and filled the hallways of the castle; a banshee’s cry.
Lisbeth Faaye pushed open the creaky wooden door to the castle. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?” There was no answer. She stepped forward hesitantly, and dust billowed up around her face. She waved it away, sneezing, her throat dry and gritty with the sandy dust. Glancing back at the floor, she saw the depressions in the thick layer of dust, an astronaut’s footprints. “Great,” Lisbeth muttered. “A haunted castle, and it’s Allergy Central to boot.” Shirt pressed over her mouth and nose, she stepped cautiously down one of the long, narrow hallways. “Hellooo?” Her voice reverberated off the stone walls.
“Hello,” an echoing voice replied. Lisbeth spun around, her heart pounding in her throat. “Gram! You scared me!” Her grandmother set down her luggage on the dirty floor, waving dust out of her face.
“Elizabeth, this is my friend Mr. Derdrom. He’s the caretaker here at Pendragon Castle.” She placed her hand on the shoulder of a tall, impossibly gaunt and bony man with thinning white hair. He was so pale he appeared to be translucent.
Lisbeth nodded a nervous hello. Where did he come from? Mr. Derdrom stared at her but didn’t nod back. Unnerved, she averted her gaze and turned to look at her grandmother. “Gram, I’m allergic to this place. Are you sure we have to stay here?”
“Elizabeth,” her grandmother said evenly, “Mr. Derdrom is working very hard. The castle will be clean soon enough and, in the meantime, you will be fine.”
Lisbeth tugged on her bangs in frustration. “Gram, this place is haunted! People disappear here.”
Her grandmother turned on her heel and walked quickly away, her shoes clack-clack-clacking on the stone floors. I take it that this conversation is over, the sound seemed to say.
Lisbeth wandered down the halls, running her hands over the icy stone walls, turning the castle’s history over and over in her mind. Pendragon Castle had belonged to anyone who wanted to use it for as long as she could trace it back, and for just as long, every child between the ages of ten and sixteen who had stayed there had disappeared-- including, when Lisbeth had been nine, her older sister Katie. She’d searched libraries, poured over encyclopedias and grilled Gram, but she had coaxed nothing out of it all. And all of a sudden, Gram had decided that it would make a perfect vacation spot.
Lisbeth’s fingers caught on a narrow crack in the wall. Coming out of her dreamy state, she probed the wall with her fingers, brushing dirt away, until she uncovered a rusty iron handle. She fingered it curiously, then, without a second thought, gave it a mighty yank. With an enormous creak, the door pulled away from the wall, letting a ray of dusty sunlight into the room. Lisbeth glanced around to make sure no one could see her, then slipped into the room.
Surrounding her in the weak sunlight were more books than Lisbeth had ever seen in her life. Dazed, she turned around and around, taking in leather covers and gold binding. One particularly thick and aged book lay on a tiny table near the door. Lisbeth picked it up and ran her hand over the embossed title: Tales of King Arthur. She opened the book, brushing dust and leaves off the pages.
“Young lady,” said an abrupt voice behind her. Lisbeth jumped. Mr. Derdrom was standing in the doorway, his colorless eyes snapping. She tried to speak, but her mouth had gone dry. “You are to stay out of this library at all times,” he growled. “Do you understand?” His penetrating stare fell to the aging book in her hands. “And put that book down!”
Lisbeth nodded, too frightened to speak. With one last angry glance over his shoulder, the caretaker left the room.
Once she was sure that he was gone, she shoved the book inside her sweatshirt pocket and slipped out of the room.
Lisbeth spent that night reading, finding herself completely absorbed in the legends of Merlin the brilliant magician, King Arthur, his wife Guinevere, his half-sister Morgan le Fay, and the Knights of the Round Table. When Gram came in to check on her, she covered the book with her hand and promised her grandmother that she would turn out the light before midnight. She fell asleep like that, her hand draped over the book’s crumbling pages.
*****
Lisbeth Faaye never saw the dark green leaves that pushed their way out of the book’s pages. She didn’t notice the vines that snaked out of the binding, twining their ways around her thin wrist, up her arm, finally twisting around her neck. She had no way of knowing that, as she slept, her body was less and less lying in a creaky old bed in Pendragon Castle. She never knew exactly what had happened.
When Lisbeth awoke, she was lying in a pile of dirt on a cold stone floor. She didn’t notice that she wasn’t on her bed anymore, or that she was in what appeared to be a very dirty jail. The only thing she noticed was that she was completely immobilized with vines.
“HELP! Help me!” Lisbeth screamed, her entire body flailing in panic. The vines were as thick as ropes, and didn’t let her arms and legs move at all. A crowd of children and teenagers came rushing over to her. Some began to untangle the vines; others held her down to stop her from flailing. When she was finally free, she sat up, gulping in air and massaging her neck where the vines had cut into it. She glanced around: stone walls, dirty floors, and—she swallowed convulsively—rusting metal bars covering the entrance to what seemed to be a large jail cell.
“Where am I?” Lisbeth whispered. A boy about her age grabbed her hands and hoisted her upright, but nobody answered her. “Where am I? And just how many people can fit in one jail cell? Are there more coming?” Everyone seemed to flinch, but no one spoke a word. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Lisbeth whipped around and had the sudden sensation that she was looking into a mirror, or at an older version of herself. It took a moment for her to realize that she was looking at her sister.
“Katie?” she whispered. “But aren’t you dead?”
“Not any more than you are, squirt,” her older sister replied, pulling her into a tight embrace. Lisbeth held onto her sister until Katie had to tug away. “Kate, where are we?”
Her sister flinched. “Lisbeth, were you reading a book called Tales of King Arthur?”
Lisbeth nodded suspiciously. “Yeeessss…”
Katie swallowed. “Did you get to the part where Arthur gets killed, and how the last thing he ever said was that he would come back and kill his nephew, Mordred, who had betrayed him?”
“Nooo…” Lisbeth said slowly. Suddenly, looking around and realizing that many of the people in the dungeon were wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion over three hundred years ago, she understood. “Oh God,” she muttered. “Kate…?”
“That book isn’t a book. He’s been recruiting all of us for his army.”
“But then…?”
Her sister nodded. “Arthur’s father’s last name was-is-Pendragon. That castle was built on the site of the battle where he was killed. Lisbeth, you’re in ancient Camelot, in King Arthur’s dungeon.”
Lisbeth was stunned for a moment. Then she had the sense to ask, “How are all of these people still kids? You still look fourteen.”
Her sister nodded. “I am. Merlin’s been helping him. He was keeping all of us the same age—the perfect age to fight—until they had enough of us. There was also a spell on that book. That’s how we all ended up here. We’re sure that Merlin has lifted the enchantment just this morning. He wanted five hundred of us. The last one who came, the fittest and technically the youngest, would be the leader—and also the one who was certain to die.”
“Katie,” said Lisbeth, almost fearing the answer, “Why was the enchantment lifted?” She knew before the answer came.
Katie shook her head, sadness in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Lisbeth. You’re the five hundredth.” She squeezed Lisbeth’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”
*****
Lisbeth sat in the dungeon, knees drawn up to her chest, and though harder than she ever had before. She had just come back from her briefing with King Arthur. He had told her that her job was, in essence, to change history. She had three things to do: Find Mordred, who had mysteriously disappeared; plan out a battle strategy; and kill Mordred. She’d asked Katie how Mordred could have disappeared, but she had merely shrugged and muttered something about the reversal of time. “This is the second version of this period in time,” she’d insisted, much to Lisbeth’s annoyance. So finally, Lisbeth had been left alone with her thoughts, trying to work some sort of pathetic miracle.
Lisbeth approached the group on the other side of the dungeon. Some were telling stories; others were playing hand games. She sank down miserably next to Katie, who was playing a game in the dirt with three other teenagers. “I should have listened to Mr. Derdrom. If I’d obeyed him, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Mr. Derdrom?” said a chubby girl with black hair twisted into braids. “Not the Mr. Derdrom? The caretaker? He was there when I visited, and that was over two hundred years ago!”
Lisbeth blinked in surprise. “What do you mean? Nobody’s that old, are they?”
“Hang on,” said Katie. “What did you say his name was?”
“Mr. Derdrom,” said Lisbeth, puzzled. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Derdrom…Derdrom…it sound sort of strangely familiar,” Katie murmured. “But I never met any caretaker.”
“He was an old guy, really thin and pale. It was freaky; he was almost see-through-”
“Lisbeth, that’s it!” cried Katie. “Derdrom! Derdrom spelled backward is Mordred!”
“Mordred?”
“Yeah! Arthur’s nephew, the evil guy!” Katie bit her lip. “Lisbeth, what did you say about him being see-through?”
“He was so pale, it was like he was made out of dust, I swear, and he always seemed to come out of nowhere. He was really weird.”
“That totally explains it! Mr. Derdrom is Mordred! He’s a ghost!”
Lisbeth shivered. “No wonder he didn’t want me looking at that book; he must have noticed that kids were vanishing and known that Merlin and Arthur were involved.” Her face fell. “But if he’s hiding in the future, there’s no way we can find him.”
“Yes, there is,” Katie insisted. “We just need to go back to the twenty-first century—and this will make things easier, too. We surround him, we kill him. Job done.”
“Katie!” Lisbeth screamed, nearly delirious with frustration. “He is not hiding in the future! You can’t do that! He must be somewhere in Camelot! And you can’t kill a ghost!” She sighed, suddenly exhausted. “How are we going to do this?”
“Umm..well, no, you can’t kill a ghost, but right now the actual Mordred is alive, too. At least, I think so.”
Lisbeth sucked in her breath. “Well, then, we have 499 people to explain our plan to, and one of them isn’t going to like it.”
“Why wouldn’t the others like it? It gets us out of here, doesn’t it?”
“I mean King Arthur,” Lisbeth explained.
“Why wouldn’t he like it?”
“Well, it might be a good way to kill Mordred, but it’s also a good way to get out of this jail cell.” Lisbeth shrugged. “So, in short, we’re doomed.”
* * *
Lisbeth sat and waited. She had explained her plan to everyone; they all knew what to do. She was only waiting for Arthur’s approval.
“King Arthur had a sword called the Excalibur—one touch of this sword to any point on your body and you were done for, living or ghost, human or animal,” she had explained. “If we can take the Excalibur into the future, we can kill Mordred’s ghost. Then he’ll be truly gone, and hopefully we can go back to our own lives.”
Now she lay on the dungeon floor, sitting up at the clink and rattle of a key in the dungeon door’s lock. A scruffy prison guard entered, carrying a red leather book. Lisbeth spotted its title: Tales of King Arthur. “No!” Lisbeth shouted. “Get that thing away from me!”
The guard shrugged and deposited the book at her feet. “Arthur says yes,” he muttered. “But he says only you. You and one other.” He turned on his heel and scurried out.
Lisbeth picked up the book carefully, like it could break at any moment. Then, with every ounce of strength she could muster, she peeled herself off the musty floor and walked over to where her sister sat in a corner of the dungeon. “I need to talk to you,” she murmured, her lips brushing Katie’s ear. “It’s time to go.” She cracked open the book, its pages somehow even older and more worn than they had been in the library. The sisters placed their hands on the book, Katie’s pale, long-fingered one protectively covering Lisbeth’s. The vines wound faster that time, twisting and snaking around one girl and then the other until Lisbeth couldn’t tell where she ended and Katie began. The room twisted and rippled, and Lisbeth and Katie were falling through blackness.
They crashed together into a cold stone floor. Katie quickly sat up and began wrenching apart the vines binding them. Lisbeth opened her eyes slowly, gradually noticing the presence of something in her right hand. She forced herself to focus on it. It was a sword, with a hilt of gold and a blade sharper than a thousand knives. She slowly lifted it up. “The Excalibur,” she murmured.
Katie turned, hacking the last of the vines from her legs. “Where?”
“In your sister’s hand,” said a cold voice behind her. Lisbeth turned slowly, a silent scream rising inside of her. In the doorway of the library where they had landed stood Mordred. Before Lisbeth could move, he had snatched the Excalibur out of her hand and was on top of her.
“No!” Katie screamed. “No, get away from her! That’s my little sister!”
Mordred laughed, having heard her but not having listened. “Any last requests?”
“Yes,” said Lisbeth steadily. “Why is my last name Faaye and not le Fay? My grandmother is Morgan, isn’t she?”
Katie’s face was filled with shock.
Mordred smirked. “Glad that you mentioned it. You’re Morgan’s daughter. This girl”—he jerked his head toward Katie—“is more like Morgan’s great-great-great-a thousand times over-granddaughter. But if your last name was as famous as hers is, you might have worked all this out by now. You were fighting against your own side. Morgan was working with me all the time.” He raised the Excalibur above her heart, smirking. “But I suppose some are simply destined to die.” He brought the sword down in a flash of silver, and the last thing Lisbeth ever saw was Katie’s screaming face.
* * *
Lisbeth struggled to open her eyes. As the room around her came into a blurry half-focus, she licked her lips nervously. They were caked with dust.
Lisbeth was in the library. She glanced around, skimming the floors and walls. Something’s missing. The depressions in the floor’s dusty carpet were gone—no footprints, no blood stains. No
Excalibur.
No book.
Tales of King Arthur was gone.
Lisbeth struggled to her elbows. Sure enough, the book was gone from where it had landed on the floor. She checked the bookcases and the tables. It was gone.
Getting shakily to her feet, Lisbeth started for the door. She did a double take.
No door.
Lisbeth spun frantically, seeing no way out. She grabbed the top of a table, ready to heave it into a wall, but the table didn’t lift. Lisbeth glanced down at her hands and screamed.
Her arms were no more than a thick layer of dust. Her fingers were translucent, just as Mordred’s had been.
Lisbeth’s scream reverberated off the high ceiling. It pushed through the gaps in the stone walls and filled the hallways of the castle; a banshee’s cry.
