Spells in Silence

Chapter 27: Return to Britain

Planting her staff into the ground, Hazel finally reached the top of the hill. Even following the roads as much as she could, getting to the ruin in which she stood still required a bit of a trek. Still, she was here now, and she could finally look around at this ancient temple of Apollo.

The journey to Greece had taken longer than she initially assumed, in large part because one leg of her trip had seemingly turned into an active war zone. Had she known traveling through Yugoslavia would require her to hide from men walking around armed with guns and yelling at each other when they were not shooting something, she would have found some other road, although finding such a route would have been difficult. She was able to make up a little bit of time when she crossed through Albania, but that was less because the road was easy and more because several of the forests had a dark, forbidding atmosphere that made the hairs on her neck stand up on end and goosebumps creep up her arms. Morgan had seemed to feel the same, which did not reassure her at all. Normally she liked visiting forests when she traveled, but these? She hastened her steps to get through them as quickly as was physically possible.

All the snakes – not just typical garden snakes, but also vipers and even one snake she would swear had to be related to a boa constrictor – she saw in those foreboding forests did not help matters.

Delays aside, she nonetheless arrived in Greece eventually. From there she had done quite a bit of exploring, including some sightseeing of the Parthenon and walking over to the real Mount Olympus. She considered climbing the mountain for a short while, but the height was enough to dissuade her in the end. Other temples were on her itinerary, but strangely enough despite all the rich mythology of this part of the world, she had found little remaining evidence of gods and magic. It was as if all the stories were just that, stories.

Hazel was so, so happy that she knew wizards were both real and loved their privacy, otherwise her hopes would be crushed. She did not know where to start looking for their private enclaves, which meant it was entirely possible that all the valuables from the temples, all the ancient relics of bygone heroes and monsters, might be safe and secure and out of sight of anyone who did not know where they already were rather than lost to history.

It was still absolutely maddening.

This temple was next on her list. It was not a temple to one of the big gods of the ancient Greeks, and she did not know if this was the greatest temple even to the sun god Apollo, but it was likely the best known in its own way. It had once been host to probably the greatest prophet in Greece, the Oracle of Delphi. Both a seer and the high priestess of this temple, she was known to speak prophecies as though uttered by the god himself. Most interestingly, this was not a single woman but a title passed on from priestess to priestess, which raised all sorts of questions in Hazel's mind. Were the priestess all related, the title and the oracular abilities being passed on from mother to daughter as her own mother had given the magic Hazel now wielded? Or instead was it a magical art that could be learned, and so it was the skill that was instead taught to the next woman that would become the oracle?

Were those lessons or others like them still taught? Obviously the Oracle here was not the only soothsayer in history, so she would assume lessons existed somewhere, but if she could find instructions here it meant she would not need to go looking elsewhere. Even if they would undoubtedly be in the strange alphabet she was still incapable of reading; magic lessons were at this point the one thing that would get her to learn Greek. Her walk through Yugoslavia had necessitated picking up a smattering of Hungarian and Serbian in addition to the French and German she already knew, and none of them needed different letters!