The Lost Crown

A Visitor In the Dark

A few hours after Walliam left the guard tower with the crown the cold night air filled the tunnels and the chamber at the bottom of the tower.  It was too dark for anyone to notice the doorway that opened and pulled aside.  Or to notice the black clad man that stepped through the doorway.

He walked around the chamber and looked at the bodies of the two Magians, Andromina and Dandrealla.  The man looked at the face of each and then looked around the room.  He went to the pile of objects and began unwrapping them.  The third burlap lump he unwrapped held a round object, suspended inside an ornate gold ball.  The gold “frame” was elaborate and formed a ball with many flat sides.  The ball inside looked like a glass ball, filled with several different colors that swirled slowly around inside it.  In the dark it looked like it was filled with black smoke.  

If there had been any light, or anyone there to witness, they would have seen a smile play across the lips of the man in the black robe as he looked at the orb in his hand.  So at least Swyvern had managed that part of it, he thought to himself.

He opened the rest of the packages in the pile and when he finished it burned in his mind.  Where was the crown?  For an instant he felt rage flash across his vision, but he throttled the feeling.  He had to control those outbursts, he told himself as he stood in the near dark of early morning.

Light was creeping through the tunnel to his left.  Sunrise was still some time away, but it would arrive sooner than he wanted.  If the crown was not here, then he needed to look at the treasury and see if it was still there.

A frown creased the man’s forehead.  He could not open a doorway into the treasury.  It was sealed off from anyone opening a doorway into that space.  He had worked out how to get through the door, into the room.  He had shown Swyvern his discovery.  All he had to do was bend the curse wrapped around the door, and then he could walk through, in the hidden world.  It would be impossible to bend the curse in the physical world.

He opened a doorway into the royal palace, inside the hidden world.  He stepped out on the stairs just above the door to the treasury.  He looked at the door to the chamber and then reached out with his mind and examined everything he could see, in both worlds.  The curse was still there, and he would have to bend it.  Nothing had been changed.

He let one doorway collapse and opened a new one over the door into the treasury.  He could sense the curse and he bent it and then moved through the new doorway.

He looked at the room full of empty shelves.  His instructions to Swyvern had been to take everything he found when he was there in the hidden world.  He had reasoned it out, and he thought that what he wanted would not have been moved for so long it would have appeared in the hidden world.  They would not need to enter the treasury in the physical plane.  

He had been sure that the Shield Crown and the orb would show up in the hidden world.  He wondered if that had been true.  Had Swyvern taken the crown?  He said he had.  He said that all objects in the hidden world had been taken from the room, and that one of them was indeed the Shield Crown.

He would need to enter the treasury in the physical world and make sure that the crown was not there.  He sighed and rage flooded across his vision again, and again he throttled it back until he was calm.

Carefully he built up the matrix in his mind and he extended it out around him -- in his mind.   He looked at how the hidden world looked inside his matrix and he saw nothing to give him alarm.  The matrix vanished and he reached out with his thoughts and built the doorway.  He pulled it aside and stepped through into the physical world, inside the vaulted room.

It was not a big room, and in the physical world there were many things wrapped in velvet, on all of the shelves.  Quickly he began grabbing them.  For fifteen minutes he looked like a velvet whirlwind as he pulled everything apart, looking for the crown.  He found four crowns, but none of them were the one he needed.

A bubble of anxiety surfaced in his thoughts and he looked around swiftly.  He made the doorway that took him back into the hidden world, and stepped into the treasury room, with the empty shelves.  He opened a doorway at the door to the stairwell outside and bent the curse and then stepped through.  Once outside of the protections on the treasury he strode hurriedly up the stairs, and down the hallway, several yards away.

The last doorway he made took him back to his chamber inside his tower, where he sat on his thinking chair for a long time.  He would need to go back to the chamber in the guard tower, after everything had died down, and skrye out what had happened.

He looked down at the burlap wrapped ball in his hand.  At least he had found the orb.

Where was Swyvern?