The Rubbish Realm

Chapter 10

Ermengarde paged through the large book. "Can you read this? It's not written in Common."
Isolde took the book from her, wonderingly. "How old is this?"
Ermengarde shrugged. "I found it in the attic." They had been looking for something that would provide a clue as to Evander's location so they could help him, thinking more of the sky would fall soon. He was their best chance. "Does it have a copyright?"
"If it does, it isn't in Common either. Do the pictures make sense to you?"
They seemed to detail the usage of a wand to cast some sort of spell, but the instructions were illegible. Apparently, if you spoke the phrase (presumably) and were an anger affinity (judging from the bright red eyes, the only color in the diagram), something having to do with fire would happen. "Kind of."
Isolde paged through the dusty book, coughing slightly. "Magic... more magic... something to do with candles... more affinities..."
"Something to do with candles?"
"Yeah, they appear to be arranged in a particular order and lit. Of course, I can't read it-"
Ermengarde had already snatched the book back. "Do we have any candles?"
"Of course we-" Isolde glanced up, still unused to the fact that the book was no longer in her hands.
"Where?" Ermengarde's pink eyes shined with mischief.
"In the cupboard, as always," Isolde spoke tentatively. "Don't tell me you're going to try it out, you can't even read it!"
Ermengarde had already started aligning the candles on top of their position in the diagram. "And the lighter is where it usually is?"
Isolde pushed herself up to a standing position from where she had been sitting on the floor. "Ermengarde, no. We don't just mess with magic."
"Why not?" Ermengarde pulled the lighter out of the drawer it was typically in and started to light the candles. "Something needs to be done, after all."
"But not by us." Isolde pulled Ermengarde away from the candles. "What could we even possibly-"
Ermengarde cut her off, knowing what she was going to say. "We can try." She stepped around her friend. "No use just sitting here and waiting for the sky to fall on us."
"No use going off and getting ourselves killed either," Isolde grumbled.
"And?" Ermengarde lit the final candle, arranged in a pentagram with one candle lit in the middle. "Now, to test this." She dropped a pencil in the pentagram... and it disappeared. She dropped another - gone.
"Is that... a portal? Does that work?" Isolde stared, mouth agape.
Ermengarde stepped up onto the counter.
"No, don't-" Isolde yelled, but Ermengarde had already stepped in and disappeared. Isolde fell back onto the floor.
Ermengarde reappeared. "That was kinda creepy. Would not recommend."
"Then why did you do it at all?" Isolde looked back up, the starting of tears in her eyes. "I thought you had- that you-"
"Sorry." Ermengarde hugged her friend, pulling them both back up to their feet. "But it works. I saw the other end, and it was to the center of the world. Gryffensten. Cut the travel time from weeks to minutes. We could catch up to him easily with this."
"Please don't." Isolde had always hated magic, ever since her house had burned down years before... and now it was running through her brain. The screams... the crackle of the flames as they took her parents... the horrible feeling of being powerless... betrayal by the man she'd once trusted... watching the rest of the community try to put it out and being too late... seeing him turn and walk away as if nothing had happened...
Ermengarde's voice came, as from far away. "You alright?"
No response.
"Izzy... it's not then anymore. The past is the past. You're in charge of yourself."
Isolde simply pulled into a ball as the images kept flashing through her brain.
"Izzy...it's gonna be alright." She clung to Isolde on the floor, just being there for her. "I'm sorry we have to do this."
And she shifted the candles, keeping them in the pentagram, simply enlargening it around Isolde. And then she lit the final candle, both of them inside the circle.
"But we really need to get going." She dragged Isolde to the other end, the other doorway, and she stepped out into Gryffensten. They had Evander to find.