Half A House Missing

As we walked into my room the protective spell tore just large enough for us to enter as a group. The door opened and we stepped from wood planks, passed the plaster walls into the wide open field that is my room, the floorboards peeking out from under clumps of moss and patches of grass. The pond sitting in the center with the knoll rising into the unseen sky. There between the pond and my bed was the chest. The 'Shroom Troll walking in front of the group encountered it first and as his little legs and square shoulders approached it pulsed into life rising up to meet his chest. As it glowed and pulsed he stepped back in response, his fear controlling his steps more than his mind. I put my hand on his shoulder and reassured him that everything was fine,"would you like me to wrap protection around you? Would that help you feel safer?" I asked him. He looked back at me and nodded, I let a spark of essence travel out of my hand and it spread over him like mist around a tree. I pulled on his shoulder to face us all. "We need you to open that chest for us." I said to him, "As the last of your people you seem to be the only one who can." I explained to him. Further telling him about what the chest said to me about the feather and the lock. "So my impression is that your hand on the key is the only thing that can open it." I finished, Larry handed him the Quill, placing it in his small brown palm. Pogs' fingers closed around its neck and he turned to the floating chest. He seemed more confident with the spell of protection around him. He stepped forward, and pinched the neck of the Quill with his little fingers, and pointed the nib in the direction of the key hole. The black iron felt the pull of the pen and the key hole gave off a beam of light that highlighted the Troll and set the outline of him in relief against the door and walls of my room. Pogs stepped closer and placed the nib into the iron hole.

For a moment nothing happened, the key slipped and Pogs turned it, for a heavy moment, other than the light fading into nothing. The chest fell to the ground and the lid popped open. For a brief fraction of a second I saw the ivory owl mask that had haunted my dream, and around it there was the golden glow, the glow that felt like every emotion, like every sensation I had ever felt. That glow felt like eternity, it felt like life. That glow felt like every situation I had ever faced but through it I knew that everything would be ok. In the time it took me See the owls mask and think about my dream the world seemed to be torn apart. A silent explosion of light rushed out and over each of us, we were each thrown back landing on our backs, our sides, then the world rocked and a boom sounded, it was like a thousand bombs exploding all at once. Larry was the only one of us to land on his feet.

As I stumbled to my knees and feet I looked over to where my room once stood. What I was looking at didn't make sense to me. I should have been in the hall or the room across the way from where I stood and there was nothing but dust and swirls of smoke, broken floor boards and joints stuck out at strange intervals and odd angles. All of it was broken and what wasn't broken was missing. I willed myself into the air and hovered from where I had landed to where my room began. Looking around the magic that infused my room with the wilds of a forest had been destroyed by the explosion. Smoldering wood lay where my chair and my bed had been, smoking drapes where one of the windows had been. Sitting in the middle of the mess was the chest, its lid open like a maw of a mouth. The mask was missing, "Where did the mask go?" I yelled down to my family as I floated higher and higher searching with my eyes and my essence at the same time. I saw Pogs, he was battered and bruised but he stood up, the magic of my essence protected him from the force of the blast. He would be in pain but he would be fine, I checked on other creatures in the house, Pixie hall had escaped the blast, the library hadn't been affected by it, everything above it had been bedrooms for my brothers and my sister and the attic. All of which is gone, just gone. The scope of it came into view as I left the rubble behind, half of House was a gaping hole in a pasture of green. Thankfully House had responded to the attack before we noticed what was happening, it had folded space around the creatures and beings that lived in our home, and managed to move my room to an area that protected over half of it from the blast. "No one seems hurt or missing." I sent my thoughts out to everyone in the area with enough force that I suspected any person born to fey blood lines would have felt it down in the city. I slowly descended back down to the ground, I landed on the trail that left the kitchen to the greenhouse and stables. As I touched down my sister came out from under a smoking floor, it still had embers burning where the wall was burned away. She had changed into her true form, as had all of us. She was holding a piggy-wog. They are mostly pig, but it had little bat wings, they should have been too small to hold it in the air but piggy-wogs were able to fly like a bird. This little guy didn't look like he would be flying anytime soon.He had burns on his snout, his tail, his wings, and parts of his body. From what I could see with my extrasensory vision his life force was strong and flowed around his body uninhibited. He would live, and with Karen's healing he wouldn't have any signs of harm, not even a scar. "I found him under a pile of wood, it was burning but it hadn't burnt him yet it looks like it had fallen on him." Karen explained to me as she held him and let green healing energy flowing over his body it was knitting the cuts and burns of his body together, and soothing the blisters and burns as it flowed over him. I could see the power filling in the voids and filling them out with flesh and skin.

My eyes lost all color and a shine blue light circled around them as my mind looked into the core source of House."House seems alive but badly hurt. We need to feed it essence, maybe even call up source energy." I was telling my sister and my brothers what I saw as they walked up to me. "Everyone takes a corner or wall, and call up the core elemental energy, have it sprout up roots to feed it into the foundation." I instructed them. We all walked around the outside of our home and as we did roots grew out of the ground and sprouted small branches and leaves or wrapped around joists and bits of rock. Slowly we chanted in our old language, we chanted so low and deep that the air around us moved and vibrated with power. Our minds sent that power down through our chests, into our hips then legs, finally our feet sent that power into the ground. All the creatures, all the beings that lived in our home took places at our sides, all holding hands. Boggart, book worms, gnomes, and pixies all took hand after hand and focused their power into us and through us the ground. Finally I could tell that we had all touched the Prime Element, it was a red hot glow that flowed out from the Earth's core. The power flowed out over and through the hidden waters, the hollow spaces of air, around and through rocks. The fire, the lifeblood of the Earth fed out answering our calls, answering our needs. A light, like green and blue fire filled the roots surrounding House and threw them into House. Slowly rubble started to move, then wood, then glass, and House started moving together.The places where the floor had been split apart new lengths of wood grew, where wood was missing new wood replaced it. Slowly our home was coming together, with the help of everyone that lived in this make-shift village of ours House would be whole again but it would take time."Thank you everyone." I thanked them all,looking around the circle I saw tired faces and suddenly a small gray mouse popped in between the Boggart and a bookworm, he pointed to the stables and we all made our way there to rest. It would take a few days for House to heal and we only had the greenhouse and the stables to call home until then. As we came around the corner and up to the doors the gray mouse appeared again and with a small squeaky voice said,"I brought what I could find." I opened the doors and there was a pile of nuts, grains, and barrels of wine and ale.

We spent the rest of the day tending to anyone who needed healing or an ear to talk to. Robbie and Karen had raided the greenhouse and made a batch of potions to heal and restore, David and Mathew listened to everyone's fears and concerns, doing his best to resolve or reassure, whoever, and whatever situation they could. Most of the damage done was cuts and bruises, others had burns but most of them were just afraid. As the day ended and night set in I asked everyone to come together."The explosion was our fault and I'm sorry. We didn't take all the precautions we could have." I explained to everyone. No one was angry when I admitted to the explosion, in times of calamity it was best to own it. In doing that I saw that there wasn't blame, just fear, in admitting to my part in the problem I was met with understanding, I even felt forgiveness from the beings gathered around us. In my haste the only precaution we had taken, that I had taken was to protect Pogs and seal the room. I hadn't thought about the dangers of opening an ancient sealed chest, to be honest it hadn't even occurred to me that there might be a trap. I could have ported us and the chest to a clearing or reinforced the barrier with more essence and layers of magic. I just wanted to open the chest and learn the truth, figure out the mystery.

"Do you think it was boobytraped or do you think this was a consequence of tampering with ancient things?" I asked Steven. I turned to look at him, as he was looking over the crowd he stopped and looked deep in thought. "I don't think it was anything like that, I think it was how long it had been sealed." He responded. Thinking about it, the mask or the face of Janus had been trapped in that chest for a very long time. No one knew how long it had been in there or even why. The buildup of magic would work like a nuclear force, its power couldn't flow anywhere so it would build in the chest. The sudden release would have been like pressure in a tank of air, rushing out to escape its own presents. We spent the night entering one another, casting a mundane episode of a show. It had something about a group of teenages in high school, a redhead dating two different women and a giant jock who dates a guy and a girl at the same time. All together it wasn't a bad show but I didn't watch much mundane television. Others had memory stones out and were sifting through their memories of their lives, sharing some memories with a group. I saw tunnels that shrews had built, living underground. They crossed fields and valleys, vast cathedrals and chambers. Another memory had large spans of grasslands with little mud huts built by the low land burdock roots, little elves whose bodies were the knotted twists and turns of the plant's roots that gave them their name. Some pixies were sharing memories of the hollow they lived in and the piggy-wog was showing the mud flats that he had been born in and the unique plank trees that grew out of the mud. The trees provided long thick and flat branches high above the flats. Its fruit was sugary and tart. Piggy-wogs flew up and rested on the branches, escaping danger and eating the fresh fruit that grew year round. The garden fairies and the pixies set magical lights around the barnhouse and the night passed. It was like a party, there was food,drink,music, and beings of all forms. Some of the will-o-wisps brought friends in from the forests around us and we all told tales and danced. This would become a story that fed someone's imagination, it would launch an adventure of its own. Maybe even someone in this room. As the night wore down we all made beds and nests as best we could and almost everyone slept the night away feeling safer and happy knowing they were surrounded by a village, a family.