The Library

Blackfire Stone

After stumbling about Alejandra's workroom and knocking over books and bottles, Allina had only managed to find the cauldron. She hauled it to the middle of the room. She left it there, but held the wand in her teeth, afraid to leave it unattended.

The rest of the ingredients were a mystery to her. Allina returned to the journal, hoping it would contain answers. Thankfully for her, the next page read:

Juana's spell ingredients (locations of the ingredients because I'm a forgetful old biddy)

Mandrake root: I have a tray of mandrakes (along with other plants) beside my bed. Feather: on one of the shelves above my desk (probably near the other bird parts). Seabrine: I have a full canister somewhere in the corridor (I collected plenty of it during my journey across the seabed). The blackfire stone is there as well. The heart of the mandrake—

There was more writing on the page, but it was obscured by spilled drink. Allina would have to work with what was there.

Alright, she thought, putting down the journal. Let's see if I can do this.

First, she went to the desk. One shelf was full of jars containing bird parts: beaks, pieces of wing, bones, feet, and eyes that for whatever reason hadn't rotted. But there was no jar with feathers.

Allina looked down at the bottles and jars she'd knocked onto the desk. Just as she'd thought, one of them contained the feathers. She plucked out a reddish-brown feather that might have been from a great horned owl. It went in the cauldron, because Allina didn't have a bag to carry it in.

Next she grabbed a knife, carved from bone, and walked over to the tray of plants. Surely, Allina thought, removing the heart will involve some cutting.

When she got to the plants, she had a hard time figuring out which was the mandrake. She vaguely remembered seeing a drawing of a mandrake plant once, and that plant had purple flowers.

Allina chose the plant with purple flowers, ripped it out of the dirt, and began slicing away at it. To her surprise, a perfectly formed yellow stone fell out of the plant and bounced off her big toe onto the floor. It was the heart of the mandrake.

She sliced off the plant's three roots. In doing so, she slit the tip of her finger. It bled on the roots, but Allina was in too much of a hurry to fix her finger or clean the roots off. The roots, too, went in the cauldron, which she left in the middle of the room.

Now, all she needed was seabrine and the blackfire stone. She started toward the corridor, which seemed to her as dark and strange as the depths of the ocean.

Allina opened the creaky closet door and walked in. In the darkness, she felt around for a canister of some sort. Her hands became quite dirty in the process, and she almost cut herself multiple times on broken glass jars.

Just when she was about to go back for a candle, in case there were any in Alejandra's bedroom, Allina stumbled upon something cylindrical covered in dust and grime. Its sides were puckered; it smelled of old copper. Yes, this is it, it must be, Allina thought.

She hefted the cylinder up. It was so heavy that her knees buckled beneath its weight, and she had to drag it all the way back to the other room. Its top came off, and the canister leaked something slick with a smell of salt all over the stones.

Allina set the canister just outside the door and put its top back on. Before she did, she looked inside: the canister was full of blue-black goop that swam with tiny white specks. As she looked into it, ocean wind rushed up at her.

She wiped off her face, which had mysteriously become covered with sea spray, and went back into the corridor. Allina had to find the blackfire stone.

Allina walked up and down the corridor four times, feeling every stone, rifling through every fabric pile, and even digging through the dirt near the closet door. Then she thought, Perhaps it's up the ladder.

Up the ladder she went. When Allina was about halfway to the trapdoor, she felt a heat she hadn't noticed before. She reached out a hand: it was coming from the wall behind the ladder.

Feeling around in the darkness, she located the exact stone in the wall the heat was coming from. It came out of the wall with ease, but quickly grew cold in her hands.

Her muscles were growing tired from holding on to the ladder. She dropped the cold stone down to the ground far below and reached out for what was behind the stone.

She'd expected to find dirt, or more stones. Instead, she found a shallow hole in the wall that led to a section of stone carved into a perfect sphere. Her arm was just long enough to reach out and grab the thing hovering in the center of the sphere.

It was a small stone. The stone was triangular with rounded corners, and it fit perfectly in the palm of her hand. It burned with a fierce heat but didn't hurt a bit.

Allina climbed down the ladder. She hurried down the corridor as it wound and spiraled, then finally reached the closet door.

When Allina emerged into the lit bedroom, she put the stone in the cauldron. It was darker than night or a cave or the depths of the sea, and Allina knew as soon as she saw it that it was the blackfire stone.

All she needed now was the mouse's true tooth.