Chapter 389: 390: The bad place

The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

There is something different about this magic, about this spell, about this crystal. There’s something else in the air, as her hands hover above the crystal-ball, the eyes of her friends on her.

“Is this wise?” asks Basil, playing with the bracelet on her arm. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

Jubilee nods, crossing their arms. “This is a terrible idea,” they agree. “But we’re still gonna going for it.” They lift a finger, not unclasping their arms to point at Fresh. “Do it.”

“Yes, Jubilee,” says Fresh, looking back to the crystal-ball and the dark purple aura swirling around inside of it. Witch magic is one thing. Holy magic is one thing. Glass magic is one thing. But this use of all three of those things combined, glass, holy and witch magics, has led to a situation in which the atmosphere in the basement has simply shifted.

Necromancy is its own thing too, after all and while this isn’t exactly necromancy, it borders on close to it. Conventional wisdom suggests that the realms of the dead and the realms of the living are clearly separated for a reason and that it is best to leave them that way.

“Shamrock?” asks Fresh, focusing on channeling her magic into the crystal. “Can you touch this and think about the other two?” she asks “I need someone who knows what they looked like.”

Shamrock looks at her for a moment and then nods, stepping forward and taking off his gauntlet. A wet, slimy hand sticks out of it, touching the glass sphere.

Fresh closes her eyes and focuses.

Nothing happens.

She opens her eyes, staring at the thing. “Huh…?” The girl scratches her cheek, looking over her shoulder. “Guys, it didn’t w-”

Everyone is gone and worse, something has changed.

“Guys…?” Fresh stares around the basement that she is alone down in, but… “…Guys?” She shudders. Fresh looks around in confusion, until she finally forms into clear thoughts what’s wrong with the world.

It’s mirrored.

The basement that she was just in is reversed. The workbench with the crystal-ball that she was standing before is now on the far side of the room. Basil’s station, which was by the broken wall in the back, is now by the front. The entire basement has been reversed.

She looks down at herself, realizing that she has no coherent body. It’s like when she’s in a fountain dream. She’s just kind of… a thing. A blob. An entity that is vaguely human. “Jubilee? Basil?” calls Fresh. “Shamroooock~?”

No response.

Did the crystal-ball do this? Is this…

Fresh walks up the staircase, heading up and out of the basement. Despite walking up the stairs, she has the distinct feeling of a lurch every time she takes a step, as if she were heading downstairs, rather than up.

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Opening the front door to their house by pushing it outward instead of opening it to the inside, she stares out at the odd world before herself. The city is still here, but it’s different. It looks… older. All of the buildings look like they might once have looked years and years ago. The streets that she has come to memorize are reversed and wrong. The dungeon is to her left now, instead of to the right.

Everything is flipped around.

Her eyes wander up towards the world-tree, which, despite the grandiosity of its sight, is nothing more than a shriveled, wrinkled, wrong husk here. It is a husk of a thing, bent over at a frightening angle, directly overhead, as if it were looming over her and their house.

Fresh can’t help but notice that the tree seems to have the oddest thing, a pattern, worn into the wood. It looks like a face, frozen and contorted into a scream that makes no noise, its voice having been quieted by the poison which consumed its body months ago.

She shudders, looking around herself.

The realm of the dead. The underworld.

Something rattles off to the side, down an alley and Fresh turns her head, looking towards the source of the noise. An old, glass bottle clinks and rolls down into the street, coming out from the alleyway.

She doesn’t know what’s happened here. But she has to find the other two witches, Spiraholle and Gauden and then, more importantly, she has to figure out how to get out of here again.

Stepping back inside, Fresh quietly closes the front door, jiggling it to make sure it’s closed, not wanting to attract whatever is outside. She quickly scoots upstairs and grabs her flying broom, which is thankfully still where she left it. Attached to it, is a strange blob that looks distinguishably like a lantern.

Fresh smiles, holding a hand over the odd spirit. “You stuck around for me, huh?” she asks quietly, stroking her hand over a rough, jagged metal surface. “Thank you,” says Fresh to the spirit of the enchanted lantern, placing her leg over the broom and lifting off into the air.

The lantern glows, guiding her towards the hole in the ceiling for the telescope. She slides it open and flies out into the sky, sparing one last glance down towards their house.

Something has opened the front door.

The hairs on her neck stand on end, as she feels not just one, but many pairs of eyes watching her, as she hovers there, above the city and below the looming shadow of the world-tree that looks as if it were trying to crash down onto their home, to crush them in one final act of defiance that it never managed to fulfill.

Fresh stares up towards the contorted ‘face’ in the wood and then turns the broom towards the direction that the mirrored south ought to be in, shooting off and over the wrong landscape.

It’s going to be a long flight towards the southern region of the world. Time is running short. In less than two days, the shield is going to fall and Perchta will make her final move. She needs to find Gauden and Spilleholle, she needs to get back to her friends and she needs to, most importantly, make sure that the place she and her family live in never looks or feels like the place she finds herself in now.

As she flies off and away from the central-city, something screams from behind herself, from below, from the many rows of houses.

She doesn’t turn around to look at what it was. But it certainly didn’t sound like anything close to a human.

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