Underland Chronicles: 1 - The Border's Edge (A Gregor the Overlander FanFic)

Chapter 22

Pandora met Nerissa in front of the prophecy room. "Good... you have brought your journal," she said after seeing the moleskin in Pandora's hand. "Come," Nerissa beckoned her to follow down the staircase.

"Where are we going?" Pandora asked.

"To a place in the Palace you have not yet had the chance to see," Nerissa answered.

Pandora thought the Palace was so huge, Nerissa could have been talking about practically any room. She noticed that it was one floor above the Overland Museum.

"This used to be the nursery," Nerissa said as she led Pandora inside. It was a spacious room with carvings on the walls and a giant turtle head on the opposite side. The turtle disturbed Pandora, for it had an evil expression.

"The turtle hides a secret entrance," Nerissa explained.

"I remember Howard telling me that Luxa and her... cousin discovered it," Pandora winced as she brought up the thought of Luxa's cousin, Nerissa's brother.

"Henry was quite cunning since we were kids. He would have made the perfect spy." Nerissa's tone saddened with her last comment about her brother. "It almost does not surprise me that he turned on us."

Pandora scrambled to change the subject. "So why did you bring me here, Nerissa?"

"I read briefly that you are having vivid dreams when you sleep," Nerissa said.

"Yes," Pandora affirmed. "All of them were terrifying. Except the last one, which was rather soothing. Would you like to take another look?"

"Of course," Nerissa accepted the moleskin when Pandora offered it to her. She flipped to the first excerpt and took her time reading it in detail. "The pit is a torture used by the rats. It's used for prisoners, such as Gregor's father, or traitors, like Ripred."

"It's funny, because I never know what I dream about until afterwards. I had no knowledge of pits, or volcanoes, or a dam that broke, or..."

Nerissa interrupted her. "Was that one of your dreams? A dam breaking?"

"Yes," Pandora said. "It's the third one written in the journal."

Nerissa skipped to the third excerpt and read it. "These dreams are visions of the past, to an extent."

"What do you mean?"

"The Garden of the Hesperides was where an attack by the humans on the rats went horribly wrong. Instead of just the sluice gates opening, the entire dam burst. Many rats and humans died, including innocent children. Your dream is eerily similar."

"What about the last dream, the nice one? What is it about?" Her final dream was the one that puzzled Pandora the most. Why would she have just one nice dream intermingled with the terrible ones? Was there some sort of pattern? What did it mean?

Nerissa's mouth curved into a smile as she read Pandora's latest entry. "The rescue of the nibbler pups. Workers spent many hours bathing the pups in herbal baths to clean the ash off their fur. The Overlander boy and young girl are Gregor and Boots."

"Really? When I woke up, I couldn't quite remember their faces. I didn't make the connection." Pandora thought hard to take her picture of the boy and girl from her dream and compare it to her memory of Gregor and Boots. "But it has to be them."

"You have visions of the future and dreams of the past."

"Ok," Pandora said, mulling it over. She gestured to the room. "So what does it have to do with this room? Why show me this?"

"See you the carvings on the walls?"

Pandora slowly walked around the room, observing the animals and reading the little poems carved on them. Her favorite one was about giving a bat some bacon.