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

of…” I glanced at Indigo for permission. Mentioning magic and miracles and that nonsense could get us in a lot of trouble—I needed his permission before heading into that territory.

He nodded, although anxiety formed a fold between his dark eyebrows.

“We sort of…teleported?” I supplied. Saying that out loud should have made me feel like a fool, but it was somehow freeing to be in on a secret so weird, so out there, that the only people it didn’t seem crazy to were the people who had seen proof.

“Oh,” Ginger breathed. “You’re them.”

“That’s clear and nonthreatening,” I grumbled.

“I mean you’ve met Mint,” she said. “Right?”

“Mint,” I repeated. “You’re one of the others?”

A smile spilled across her face, equal parts intimidating and warm, and she finally shook my hand. I startled at the feeling—her skin was ice-cold in a way humans usually weren’t, in my experience. At least, not while they were living.

She grimaced.

“Lilac told me about that,” she said. “Apparently people from other realms are...what’s the word?”

“Warm-blooded?” I supplied. I extricated my hand from hers before she could give me frostbite.

“Hmm...speaking of Lilac—” she glanced down the ladder she’d climbed up and shouted: “It’s okay! They’re friends!”

“You don’t have friends!” came a shout from below, but we were soon joined by Lilac, who greeted us with a smile and a wary glance at the ashes.

“Uh,” she said. “You’re sure they’re friends?”

“They didn’t do this,” Ginger assured her. “They’re the other magicians in Mint’s merry band of traumatized students.”

Lilac grinned and shook hands with us both. She was taller than me by an inch or two, her skin a warm brown, her coily hair cut just below her jaw, and her jean jacket painted with clouds around the cuffs. Her boots were caked with mud, like Ginger’s.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I started, “you two look like you’ve been digging for something. Or wrestling a river. Or maybe both.”

Lilac laughed, a little sheepish.

“Something about this place drew us here this morning,” she said. “I stayed here last night because I couldn’t go back through to my world, and this morning, Ginger woke up and said we were going to go looking for something. Never told me what. We’ve been digging out the side of a hill for the last hour.”

“I should have looked up,” Ginger muttered. “It’s definitely this.” She pointed to the ash.

Lilac glanced at it and shuddered. “And you’re sure that it’s—”

“Yeah,” Ginger confirmed, her tone grim.

The unspoken words swirled through and around us.

I glanced around while Ginger and Lilac considered the gleaming blue dust and contemplated what to do with it. The forest was all blue as far as the eye could see, even the light, like sea glass swirling in a bottle. It was weird and refractory, too, as though light was coming from somewhere besides the sun and was staying in one place for a little too long. I wondered if this was how this whole world was.

“Hey, do you two want lunch?” Ginger asked after a period of silence. “You look hungry...Indigo, was it?”

Indigo nodded and glanced at me.

“I don’t really feel up to food,” I said. “But I want to get off this platform right now.”

We clambered down the ladder after the two of them. The rope cut into my hands, which was made worse by the fact that being a hundred feet off the ground was absolutely nervewracking.

Lilac walked next to me as we followed Ginger to wherever the two of them had set up lunch earlier.

“What happened to your world?” I asked her at last. “If you don’t mind my asking. It’s just that Indigo stayed with me last night because his world was...well, burning.”

“Mine wasn’t burning,” Lilac said. “There was a huge thunderstorm .I was up in the clearing at the time, talking to Mint. I saw the lightning hit my house. I wanted to wait it out and then go back down, but it didn’t make sense to do that, considering the danger. Ginger offered to let me stay with her, so  I figured I’d stay the night and check when we go back to the clearing this evening.”

Indigo stepped up to my side to talk to Lilac, bumping shoulders with me as he leaned over to ask her questions. I tuned them out, for the most part, to examine the new world around me.

I had never thought of a place like this. Maybe my imagination has never been good—before I saw magic, I never really thought of how it would look, for example—or maybe it’s just impossible to imagine in complete and vivid detail places that would never exist in your world.

The trees rose up three hundred, four hundred, five hundred feet into the air, stretching for the sky but never quite scratching it. There were no branches down near the roots, which curled like talons over and into the soft blue soil. The trunks of the trees were smooth, like the sides of a glass, until a multitude of branches spurted out well over a hundred feet in the air, waves crashing toward a nonexistent shore.

Leaves fell in front of us, probably the product of an animal moving too quickly along one of the branches. The awe—the impossible, unmatchable awe—of catching a bright blue leaf in your hand for the first time, of holding it up to the light of a sun that is not your own, of running the pad of your thumb over the veins in the leaf, of seeing the subtle purple shine veer across it...it’s an unmatchable kind of awe, the existential quietude of understanding that this is proof of something so much bigger.

Sometimes, the knowledge that the world is bigger than you expect it to be is terrifying. Other times—times like that one—it is comforting to know that there are things beyond your knowledge. It’s comforting to know that the world is still full of surprises, and that some of them are good.

“Clementine,” Ginger said at last. “What kind of sandwich?”

I glanced at