The Quill of Ages

There was no way to know just how much time had passed. It was dark, I was alone, and not in the library anymore. I peered up at the stars through the bare, bone branches of an old, gnarled oak. The sky looked like a canvas of black peppered with specks of silvered glitter. High in the sky, the moon was a skinny slither of white that provided a pitiful amount of light. The night’s breeze swirled dry, brittle leaves across the cool, autumn ground that made an eerie scratching sound as they blew along.

“Where am I,” I asked myself as I sat up.

My thoughts were hazy, and I felt disconnected from my senses. I tried to shake off the fog that clouded my mind and kept me from remembering whatever happened before— this. I examined my polished black shoes and pristine white blouse. I glanced at my perfectly pleated, burgundy and black, plaid skirt. My cloak with its dormitory patch of an owl on a burgundy background covered the rest of my clothes, and none of it seemed out of the ordinary. My uniform looked exceptional and meticulously maintained, as always. The last thing a student at Grammaire Hall wanted was for a master instructor to yell at them for being less than presentable, but then I’d always exceeded expectations.

Taking in my surroundings, I realized I was sitting in the campus graveyard. The most esteemed instructors and students were buried here when their time came. Anyone who’d ever died on campus became historically famous and was laid to rest in this place of honor. Graveyards always gave me a severe case of the creeps, so I avoided them. It was mostly because my telepathy wasn’t limited to just the living like other Cogitari students. I could hear the thoughts of the dead as well, and that made me different. It was something no one before me, to the best of my knowledge, had ever been capable of doing. Verbally talking to the deceased was one thing, but being able to communicate with them through the powers of the mind was another thing altogether. It made me somewhat of a freak among not only my peers but the magical community as a whole.

Picking myself up off the ground, I headed toward my dormitory building wondering why no one had come looking for me. Judging by the moon’s position in the sky, it was well past night check. The walk from where I was in the graveyard to my dorm tower would take less than five minutes. Along the way, I heard the solemn call of wolves in the distance. Crickets chirped their nightly song, and the nocturnal birds asked their never-ending question of, “WHOOO.” When my dormitory tower came into view, I picked up my pace along the old cobblestone walkway. I passed through the courtyard with its magically maintained gardens and fountains. The stone cherubs in the fountain closest to my dormitory tower didn’t greet me as I walked by them, and it struck me as odd. They were among the few individuals who ever spoke a word to me. Coming to the heavy wooden door of the tower, I reached for the handle to swing it open, but rather than gripping it, my hand passed right through instead. Slowly, I pulled my hand back and stared at it in confusion.

What the…, I thought to myself.

Again, I tried to grasp the handle, and my hand passed through both it and the door as if they were a mere illusion. From the other side of the thick wooden barrier, I heard the soft mew of the dormitory cat, Hunter. Cautiously I stepped forward. When my arm went through the door, I stepped the rest of the way through. There at my feet, Hunter stared up at me through lemon-lime eyes. He sat on his orange tabby haunches and regarded me intently. As I stood there staring down at him, I remembered how his coat’s softness rivaled that of a rabbit’s fur. I moved my arm over him, and his little head swiveled as it followed the movement.

“Well, at least I know you can see me.”

“Meow,” Hunter yelled repetitively.

“And that’s one thing that’s as normal as ever. You’re still a loud freaking cat,” I said, stepping over him.

I ignored his indignant caterwauling and climbed the twisting stairs past the first floor and up to the second. Hunter stayed right on my heels and hollered at me the whole way up. My dorm mate, Sophie McClure, shared the second floor with me. Since there were so few Cogitari students, the school only ever bunked two to a dorm room. The norm was four, but the Cogitari tower had room to spare. I moved through the social lounge and down the first short hall on the right. Walking through the open door at the end, I peered into the bedchamber with its two wooden, bunked beds on either side of the space. Between them were two dressers, and on the outer side of each bed were heavy roll-top desks complete with matching chairs. All the furniture in the room was made from the wood of the Swiss Stone Pines found in the heart of the Swiss Alps where Grammaire Hall was situated.

The right side of the room was mine and looked exactly the way I’d left it. Sophie’s soft, steady snoring filled the space as she slept. I’d told Sophie on countless occasions that she snored, but she’d adamantly disagreed on the point, insisting that girls didn’t snore. The memory of Sophie’s scrunched up face played back in my mind, and I laughed out loud. She honestly believed that snoring had something to do with gender. I found her idea on the matter amusing. Hunter sashayed into the room, walked passed me, and jumped up onto my empty bed. There he lay down and started his caterwauling in earnest, but this time it was much louder than before. I hurried to where he was lying and bent to try and shush him, but it was pointless because the stupid cat was hell-bent on waking Sophie. It didn’t take him long to accomplish his goal, either. Not a minute had passed, and I stood there in shock as I watched an overstuffed pillow fly right through my stomach and hit Hunter square in the face. It effectively shut him up by landing him on the floor with a thud.

“And they say cats always land on their feet, but that’s a damn lie, isn’t it, Hunter,” I said to the cat as he fought with his fat belly to get upright again.

“Stupid freaking cat, I’ve told you a hundred times Chloe is …” Sophie started yelling sleepily.

The look on Sophie’s face was something between shock and curiosity. I waited to see how she was going to react because one thing was clear. Sophie could see me. She threw the covers back and cautiously slipped out of her bed. On bare feet, she crossed the room and stared at me for a long moment before she finally spoke.

“Are you really here, Chloe?”

“Yes, Sophie, isn’t it obvious? I’m standing right here in front of you, aren’t I?”

“What,” she asked.

I started to repeat how I was there but stopped when Sophie leaned in like she was trying to hear something quiet. My spirits sank, and I sighed with aggravation because even though Sophie could see me, she couldn’t hear me. I was distraught, and when I went to plop down on my bed, I passed right through it, ending up on the floor instead. At that moment, I learned that while structures harboring foundation to the earth would hold me aloft, things that weren’t permanently fixed in place would not. Doors could be removed off their hinges, so it made sense why I could pass through them. Picking myself up off the floor, I appealed to Sophie silently with a look.

“Chloe, you’ve been missing for five days, and no one knows where you are, or what happened to you. People are starting to believe the worst. Are you dead?” Sophie asked cautiously.

I thought back to where I’d been before waking in the graveyard. I was in the library, yet I couldn’t remember why. Lydia Nostredame’s face kept popping up in my head along with fire and the scent of blood, but I couldn’t connect the dots. Everything was still so hazy and unreachable.

“You don’t know do you,” Sophie asked, but I could tell she already knew the answer by the look of pity on her face.

I shook my head, no. Sophie took a moment, apparently to think because a short time later, she seemed to have a plan.

“We need to find a way to communicate so we can try to figure this out. We need to find out where you are, and if you’re dead, or if—this,” Sophie said, motioning toward me, “is something else. Lord in Heaven, I pray it’s something else.”

She rushed across the room to her desk.

“There has to be a spell, potion, or something capable of making it so we can talk, or rather, so you can talk where I can hear you,” she said with determination.

When she reached her desk, she flipped open her student spellbook and recited the spell of Daylight’s Illumination.

“Solis Lux Haec Domum”

Light poured into the room, and when Sophie turned to offer me a reassuring smile, I realized she couldn’t see me anymore. She looked around the room, confused.

“Chloe,” she asked emptily, and even though I still stood in the same spot, I had vanished from her sight.