The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

It didn’t feel as if anything about the portal was malicious, per se, but the portal knew I wasn’t supposed to be going through and clearly wanted to make me just as aware of that fact as it was.

There was no blankness between worlds. Just that brief moment of discomfort, and then air again—air that didn’t smell like the ocean. Air that smelled a little like Indigo: pine tar, sap, smoke.

The forest was dead. All of it was dead, really. Behind us, the circle of burned trees—seemingly empty of occupants or magic from this side of the portal—looked more alive than the rest of the recently-burned forest.

The trees stuck up like nails hammered into a board, the ground blackened and charred by the previous day’s events. The night before, I’d watched as fire had licked and gnawed its way up the trunks and along the branches, but there was no fire anywhere nearby now. Just empty, frigid blankness, a terrible sort of exhaustion that was closer to resignation than anything else.

At least, I thought, it’s a forest. Forests grow back, even after they suffer awful devastation. They don’t grow back the same, and it can take thousands of years for them to grow back the way they once were, but forests are not like humans, who are ephemeral and who don’t grow back. At least the forest was asleep. If it had been human, it would have been truly dead.

The forest was asleep, but there was no indication as to when it would wake up again.

I looked at Indigo. Against the pale blue-grey sky, he was dusk-clad: dark grey shirt, dark blue jeans, deep olive green jacket. His eyes flashed, though, a bright hazel against the deepening shadows of late afternoon.

“You ready?” he asked. “It’s not good to go in unprepared.”

I glanced at the forest. How prepared could you be to go into the wreckage of a forest fire? Not very, I expected, considering that the only people who were prepared for forest fires were the people who a) caused them, b) stopped them or c), did both.

“Sure,” I said.

He tugged me by our linked arms into the depths of the forest.

VI

When I stepped into that forest with Indigo, I hadn’t planned on meeting his mom. Something you should know about his mom: she is the polar opposite of mine, who is hands-off but supportive. Another thing you should know: where Indigo is from, librarians do a very different sort of job than they do where I’m from. Think Indiana Jones without the colonialism.

Too hard? Okay, try this: the first time I stepped foot in the chilly, high-raftered library, Indigo’s mom aimed a gun at my temple.

It was a beautiful gun, if that makes it any better. Carved from a kind of steel you can only get in Indigo’s world, it was pale silver but bloomed red every so often.

I raised my hands and tried to keep my knees steady. Being held at gunpoint is always an awful experience, but the first time is easily the worst.

“Hey—” I started.

Fortunately, his mother saw Indigo before she could shoot me. She smiled.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “You’re late.”

That was a weird way to greet your only child after they go missing for a night, but his mom has never really been down to earth. She’s always off doing translations, or negotiating a trade deal over an artefact she wants to display.

Mostly, though, she thinks about books. A good librarian writes about books, teaches herself lost languages from books, updates the way the books are ordered, and makes sure the androids that haul the books around are working properly.

That’s the dangerous bit.

I’ve never met Indigo’s father because he worked in some obscure section of the library and refused to come out to talk to people.

His mother, though, cuts a figure intimidating enough for both of them. Like her son, she’s tall, broad-shouldered, with freckled skin and dirty blonde hair that curls gently across her forehead. She dresses as though she is always preparing for either war or a Renaissance faire: bits and pieces of ornate armor here and there, a flowing white dress, her hair unbound. She always looks as though she can take on the world.

“Who’s this?” she asked, her voice level and smooth. Indigo opened his mouth to introduce me, but I cut him off.

“I’m Clementine. A friend of your son’s.”

She pushed the barrel of the gun harder into my temple.

“My son doesn’t have friends,” she told me. “Who the hell are you?”

“Mom,” he hissed, and I saw him redden a little out of the corner of my eye. “She is a friend. You’re embarrassing me.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I know that sounds odd. It definitely felt crazy at the time, but I couldn’t help it.

She withdrew the gun then and I felt the breath return to my lungs. “Okay, I believe you. But only crazy people would be friends with my son, so I still don’t trust you.”

I cocked a brow at Indigo. “Indigo doesn’t seem that strange to me.”

“He hasn’t started levitating shit in front of you?” She glanced to him, then to me, then back. “Huh.”

“Levitating?” I repeated, turning to stare at Indigo. He didn’t look like someone who could levitate stuff. I’m not sure what that person would have looked like, but it wouldn’t have been a young man in his late teens wearing a poorly-buttoned button-down and a pair of absolutely destroyed dress shoes. He grimaced.

“I didn’t want to mention it,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t you mention something like that?”

He shrugged, but his mother interjected.

“He’s not great at controlling it,” she said. “Until now, it seems. What did you do, J—uh, Indigo? Wait, Indigo? That’s the stupidest fake name I’ve ever heard. Worse than Clementine.”

“Thanks,” I told her, an eye on the gun she still hadn’t holstered.

“Let’s take a walk,” Indigo told me, his voice as gentle as possible. Now that I’d met his mother, he suddenly seemed like the sweetest person in the world.