"Outwitted (Part 19)" an original work of fiction for #365daysofwri...

This is today's offering (day 183) for @mydivathings' #365daysofwriting challenge (click here to see her current post)

Today's picture prompt (below) is a Photo by Philipp Pilz on Unsplash

Clutching the amulets to my chest, I ran to the door. It was not locked, the handle turned easily, and the door swung open. I stepped out into the corridor. It was dark, the flickering oil lamps barely throwing light beyond the walls to which they were attached. Of my sister, there was no sign. I took a couple of steps and then stopped. I took a deep breath. I needed to slow down. To think more carefully. I returned to the room, and marched over to the purple covered chair. Falling to my hands and knees, I rummaged underneath for my cloak. The coarse material was familiar, reassuring, and as my fingers closed around it and pulled it towards me I felt a strength, somehow flow from it's cloth. I closed my eyes and took another breath.

With strength also came anger.

I had been a fool! I had been far too hasty, and had wasted an opportunity I may not have the fortune to have again! Of course Mathilde had expected me to try to harm her!

After all, it was not the first time I had attempted to do so.

We learned a lot from the equipment, books and amulets we stole from my sister’s secret place in the Desert Lands. Not knowing how long we had before my sister, or her master - or servant, or whatever Grevyl was to her now - returned, we did not have the luxury of time to wait for me to recover enough to examine everything where it was. So, as I lay recovering in bed - too weak to leave it for more than a few minutes at a time - Pewds had teams of men strip the place of everything he thought might be of use. It turned out to be most of it.

“When we return home, we’ll need to hire a bigger ship!” Pewds laughed, one evening, as he sat by my bedside talking me through the day’s’ discoveries. “The cases of dust alone would fill this room. And the machinery! If I live to be a hundred years old I may never work out all their uses!”

Although, feeble I was impatient to get back to studying. And I had a desire - a need - to feel the power flow through me again. Whilst I was bedridden, Pewds forbade it. It choked me to have Pewds - a man I now considered my intellectual inferior - tell me what I was and was not allowed to do. But, of course - in this instance - he was right. Opening myself to the power in this state would have only left me weaker. And if I was unable to control it - if it were to control me - we could only guess at what might happen.

He did, however, allow me to study the books and manuscripts he had found. Much of it was useless. Books written by scholars who knew little more than me - or in some cases much less - that did little to help me develop my understanding of the power. There were three manuscripts that Pewds brought me - his face flushed with excitement - that, I believed, could change everything.

If only I could decipher them.

I had told Pewds of the codes my sister had used, as a child, a way she could record important information without others being able to read it. We used to leave notes for each other, sniggering with childish glee when Mother found them and dismissed them as garbled nonsense. Only if you had the book containing the codes that would unlock their secrets could you understand what was said. When Pewds found the scrolls he recognised what they were immediately, and after giving them to me he returned to the house to try to find the manuscript or book that contained the key.

I didn’t think my sister would be that clumsy.

I was convinced that Mathilde would not leave that what would unlock the secrets here in the Desert Lands. They would be back home. Not our home, of course. Mathilde no more thought of the Big House as her home than did I. No, if I wanted to unlock the secrets I would have to travel to her new home. Grevyl’s home.

In the North of our Islands, sat a small castle that had been in Grevyl’s family for generations. Like the man himself, it’s cold, grey, walls were said to be tall and imposing, grim and unforgiving. It was rumoured to be impenetrable to anything but the persistent sound of pounding, icy, waves of the Dark Seas that crashed upon the battered rocks surrounding it.

It was within those walls that Mathilde and Grevyl lived and worked. It was within those walls they kept all their secrets.

And it was within those walls that I must go if I were to uncover them.

...

Part 20: @felt.buzz/outwitted-part-20-an-original-work-of-fiction-for-the-365daysofwriting-challenge

"Outwitted (Part 19)" an original work of fiction for #365daysofwriting challenge