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

I hauled the board into my lap. It had gone white—bone-white, not just the white of pale driftwood but a bleached paper-white—and the mark I had drawn just minutes before glowed a subtle silver in my apartment’s light.

I lifted it out of my lap with unusual ease; the thick slab of wood had lost more than half of its weight. For a moment, I mourned my coffee table.

Driftwood in hand, I stood. That was when it started to hum, a quiet but noticeable sound. Startled, I dropped it, but the wood didn’t fall. It just rested there in midair, white as nothingness. My lightbulb buzzed. Someone outside shouted to an Uber driver. The ocean rumbled in the far distance.

And the knowledge of magic filled my chest.

I put my hand on the driftwood, unsure if it would take my weight. Beneath my fingers, the lines were raised like lines on a fingernail, almost imperceptible but there. The man I’d gotten it from had lacquered it. I could still feel the texture under my thumb.

A more convenient way to get around, a voice in my mind said. So I was supposed to—

I’d hauled myself onto the board before I’d finished the thought. It was a silly idea considering the laws of gravity, but it just dipped and held steady.

Okay, well, the issue now was with moving.

I tried leaning in one direction or another, but it did nothing.

I finally pressed my palm to the mark, which was near the top of the board—if I had stood the board up, the rune would have been at eye level. The board jerked, spun in a circle, and threw me off.

My back slammed into my desk and my head knocked one of my speakers onto the floor.

“Fucking awesome,” I breathed, and lunged for the driftwood again.

It took a few tries and a number of bruises to figure out that I just needed to press my palm to the charm and think of a direction for it to take me there.

Something you should know: there is nothing more exhilarating than feeling your feet lift off the ground for the first time. There is nothing that compares to flying. Absolutely nothing.

I swept the note up from the ground and tucked it into my pocket, blood in my cheeks and a tremor racing through my shoulders. I left the journal page on the floor. Dealing with it would be too much. My body might have been shaking, but my mind felt clearer than it had been in years.

My fingers were shaking too much for me to lace up my shoes, so I let the laces free as I clomped down the creaking stairs to the ground floor.

I hadn’t had a normal night in two days. By now, it didn’t feel strange at all to be outside at half past the witching hour, easily carrying a piece of driftwood that was almost as long as I was tall.

The night air seared my nose and fingers with its cold. I knew I’d be stiff and shivering in a matter of minutes, but I couldn’t wait until morning, and besides, what would people say if they saw a young woman soaring around on a bleached piece of driftwood? Gossip wouldn’t just be an inconvenience—it would be a danger.

A head of dark hair materialized about ten feet away from me. Vivi strolled closer, disgruntled. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her after that unearthly noise earlier. That noise...it had made her more real. It had made her more than a specter, or a figment of my imagination.

Now, there was no possibility of ignoring her.

I clambered onto the board and pressed my hand to the charm. The board shivered, like a dog shaking off water, and then shot into the sky faster than I would have liked. The way my stomach bottomed out reminded me a little of the fall on the drop tower at the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

This was going up, but it felt the same. Worse, actually, since there was no seatbelt on the board. A hundred feet up, I knew I’d made a mistake, but there was no stopping.

And...and, as the board evened out, I realized something that warmed me despite the cold. Vivi couldn’t follow me into the sky. I saw her eyes on me from down below and felt her frustration at being unable to reach me. But no matter how much she followed me on the ground, she couldn’t get to me in midair. Apparently, despite being dead, she was still subject to the laws of gravity.

I whooped loudly enough to wake my neighbors and thought, full steam ahead.

After that, as an afterthought, I told the driftwood a single word: Indigo.

XI

The driftwood took me back to the clearing. I didn’t see Indigo, but Lilac stood there, leaning against one of the trees that led to her world.

“Clementine,” Lilac said in that beautiful voice of hers. Vivi stepped through from between the trees at my back and sidled up next to me, sulking.

“Hi,” I replied. I didn’t know what to say. Lilac is hard to talk to when you first meet her, partly because she’s spare with her words until she gets to know you and partly because she is a necromancer. Necromancers are notoriously nervewracking. People are scared when they come into proximity with someone who can tell death itself “no.”

“A house has been built,” she told me. “For us. Look.”

She gestured, her painted sleeves glimmering in the moonlight. Behind her, I saw the outline of a hulking building, its rooftops elegantly carved around the corners.

“What is it?” I asked. “Some sort of testing site?”

“Maybe. For now, though, it’s our playground. Come on.”

I followed her toward the house. The forest opened around us. I wondered whether it was the magic of the forest or whether someone had hacked their way through it in the past few hours.

The air got warmer the closer we came to the house. The trees