Spells in Silence

Chapter 11: The Hill

"Wow, making a bottomless bag is so easy!": Heh heh heh. Not quite. I'll get more into it later (it's actually a fairly major plot point), but for now suffice it to say that Hazel wouldn't have had such success had she found a canvas backpack or used one of the leather purses. In fact, I will go as far as revealing that she didn't CAST anything...
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Her belly flat against the grass, Hazel switched her gaze repeatedly from the red sun hanging low on the horizon to the circle formed on the ground by a ring of standing stones. She was still a hundred meters or so away from the stones, and between the distance and laying on the ground and being covered by her ignore-me smoke, she was reasonably confident that she could not be seen. Unseen was how she wanted to be until after nightfall.

She knew she was probably being paranoid, but this was Elva Hill! A place where fairies were said to gather. There was no way she was drawing attention to herself until she knew there were not going to be creatures like the red cap that wanted to eat her guts and grind her bones for bread. At least on the flip side, she was so small that if giants truly existed they should not see her unless she really wanted.

The sun sank out of sight, and soon shadow covered the world. Still Hazel waited, but despite her patience nothing was happening. It was quiet as a grave all around.

Maybe I'm worried about nothing, she wondered. Morgan had no answer for her, and she glanced over to find him sitting on her satchel, puffed up and letting out a cute little birdy snore. Despite herself she found a smile on her face, so shaking her head she returned her attention to the stone circle.

An hour passed. Two. Nothing happened.

Now I feel dumb. Pushing herself up from the ground, she used her magic hand to lift Morgan onto her shoulder and pick up her bag. Her friend woke up just enough to sidle closer to the warmth of her neck, and she started walking towards the stones. Maybe that was the problem? She had not exactly had a lot of luck with stone circles, as Stonehenge clearly attested. Even the stones in Shervage Wood, though connected to magic in the story they told, were made by regular humans...

...What was glowing in the center of that circle?

Hazel took a quick step back, suddenly worried that she might not have been patient enough.

The light instantly winked out again.

A step forward, the glowing something or other returned to the circle. A step back, it was gone. She repeated the movements a few more times before she had to accept that whatever this thing was, it was only appearing when she got within a certain distance. Her legs tense and ready to jump her out to anywhere else, she slowly walked closer and closer.

She halfway expected that the shorter the distance, the brighter it would become. What happened instead was that the colored blur became crisper and more detailed. She stopped at the edge of the stone circle and stared.

Hanging in the air was a... She had no words to describe it. A crack? Yes, a crack or a squiggle, glowing a faintly off-yellow and spinning slowly as it floated there. While it was turning, the individual lines that created it shifted or lengthened or shortened, changing the design from moment to moment but not the overall shape. She had never seen anything like this, nor had she even heard or read of it. What in the world was it?

And why had no one ever mentioned this thing existing before? This was not like the stone circle in Shervage Wood, which was out in the middle of the woods where people were unlikely to go. Elva Hill was a well-known landmark with regular visitors. Surely someone had seen it before her!

Closing her left eye, she examined it more thoroughly. Her lens made it easier for her to see things close up, so maybe if she only looked at this thing with that eye, she might find an additional clue. Sadly all it did was make the edges of the crack a bit more crisp, not as fuzzy.