The Family Lokison (Part 4)

Portal Cast (VALI)

(VALI)

It was all Narvi's fault.

A month ago, after Father left for the city, Narvi found one of Father's old handwritten spellbooks and hid it under the floorboards of our room. I told him Mum would be angry and blame me, but he wouldn't listen. Made me promise not to tell, so long as he shared whatever spells he learned.

It bothered me that he was better at magic. Annoyed me that he hardly seemed to try. Yet whenever I was hurt, Narvi took my pain away, so I trusted him. He could fix whatever I did wrong. I agreed to keep his secret, but only because I was bored with lighting candles and the simple charms our classmates could do, too. I wanted more.

Our parents told us we would have a baby sister within the year—something both Narvi and I dreaded. Weren't we enough? Father sat us down and explained how such a thing happened...I always knew it was gross when he and Mum got close together. I didn't like it one bit. Narvi didn't, either. Now we were going to have to share our bedroom with a girl?

All the better to learn ways to escape.

Narvi and I stayed up late, well past the moonrise, deep into the night after Mum fell asleep. With Father out of the house, it was easy to hear her snores in the next room and keep from being caught.

Tiwaz was another thing entirely. He scratched at our bedroom and stuck his paw under the door, whining to be let in.

"Shh, Tee, stop it," I hissed, glaring at Narvi to read faster. "Found anything worth trying yet?"

"I dunno. Father writes funny." Narvi squinted and held the book closer to his face, huffing to himself.

"What's the matter?"

"It's just..." He flipped a few more pages back and forth. "This doesn't make sense. Maybe we should start with a different book."

"Come on, there has to be something worth trying in there."

"Do you recognize this?" He put the book flat on the floor and pointed.

I remembered to sneak a couple of extra candles in before supper and lit them with a quiet snap to see. Tee's scratching didn't stop, but Mum was still louder than he was.

"It's a map, right?" I asked, trying to find any familiar names.

"I think so. But look..." Narvi peeled back a few pages to a drawing that I'd seen Father make many times. "You know how Father talks about Yggdrasil? The Great Tree?"

"Aye, so?"

"So, he often talks about it being split up into pieces. Realms, remember?"

I stared at him. "And?"

He grumbled. "You really need to pay attention more, Vali."

"Pay attention to what? What are you going on about?"

"The realms are split up. Look at the top." He pointed to a word in curling font that I barely understood. "This is Vanaheim." Flipping the page, he found the same word over an intricate map that had several dotted lines for roads, symbols for camps and fortresses like ours, and a stylish letter L. Our house. "We live in Vanaheim."

"Aye. I know that. I'm not stupid, Narvi."

"You're missing the point." He showed me the tree again, focusing on the next spot down, which was marked with a symbol made up of three triangles instead of a name. "This matches the next map in the sequence, and down and down again. Father knows these places."

"So, the spells in here are from other realms?"

"Not just from them." Narvi looked at the map for Vanaheim again and put his pointer finger across a line of the same curious triangles. "These are all over the second map. I think...I think there's a way to travel between them. Go to them."