Immortal Memory (Iris' Atlantis 1)

26: Ink

Timothy

First, when Blizzard took the motorway to the north and not east, I thought there were construction works on the East roads. But he kept heading north, passing another turn to the east as we went.

"You said we were going to see the Queen..." I started uncertainly as we neared a neighborhood I knew a bit too well. "I thought we were going to the Castle?"

"We are. I told you. The Castle moved."

Yes. I had heard him say that. But somehow I had thought I had misunderstood something.

"You mean, Mo relocated the Breasinghae headquarters?" I clarified.

I had hard time imagining all the registered vampires of the capital hiring moving services and carrying cardboard boxes in the night. There were dozens of rooms in the Castle.

"No. I mean that the Castle moved."

"The Castle moved," I repeated, puzzled.

Blizzard drove into the silent yard shared by two houses. He left the car between the two buildings on a tiled platform where my parents had kept their cars when I had been a kid. The motor of the witch-made vehicle hardly hummed. So once he shut down the engine, the silence that greeted us shouldn't have felt quite so overpowering. Yet my ears were ringing as he turned to regard me. Wine red eyes gleaming in the dark.

"Timothy. The Castle moved. It cannot be explained in other words. It used to be in the old warehouse. But last week rooms started disappearing. They came here, taking up space in the neighborhood. We found most of the stuff in the school building, most rooms are there. But some of these houses around the school are now part of this magical entity that we call a Castle."

I sat stunned to silence. I had thought that the Castle had just been a pet name for the warehouse. Of course I had known that other cities had Castles as well. But I had imagined them in similar places, old abandoned warehouses hosting vampires. Even old schools. But not residential neighborhoods. And not animate.

I rose from my seat, to the yard in front of what had been my house.

The house to the right of Blizzard's car looked as it had always looked.

But the one on the left side...

The whole night around felt surreal. Even the old horse chestnut in the yard was the same one. The white painted wooden fence that separated this yard from the neighbor's backyard was the same one. The gravel under my borrowed boots felt familiar.

But the house was all wrong.

"How?" I breathed.

I had heard that I had blown up with the house. There hadn't been anything left half a year ago. Yet now in front of me stood a new building.

Where my house had been painted white, this was of red tiles.

I had had a balcony to the backyard, but this one had a balcony to the front.

I had had a front porch, but this one rested on the ground.

The profile was different.

"Who built this?" I asked. "In half a year?"

"The magic that is the Castle," Blizzard said. "The Castle built it. Some parts were made by men and women working on the construction. Some parts simply seem to have appeared. The City built it."

And I believed him. I could suddenly understand it. Why master Aconite had laughed at me in his office when I had asked if the Forest of elves was just a forest. The City of vampires was just a City. And in this City, as part of it, was embedded the Witch Town and the Castle.