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22
Leda
We stood at the crossroads of four ecosystems laid out in a perfect grid, each one beautiful, each one dangerous. I wasn’t sure how I knew that dangers lurked inside those gorgeous natural environments, but I did. Danger lurked there. And death.
In front of me, in the grid’s upper-left quadrant, lay a field of flowers. Sweet-smelling, colorful flowers. They were all different—and yet all sang notes of the same melody. The flowers and notes blended together in a superlative, seductive song. The song, combined with the gentle breeze and warm sunlight, made me feel kind of drowsy.
A dark forest covered the grid’s upper-right quadrant. Though it was daytime just next door, here it was night. Darkness reigned supreme. I heard the foreboding, bewitching melody of animals inside the forest. Brightly-colored, poisonous spiders perched on gigantic webs strung between the trees.
The crossroads point was small—barely large enough to fit me, Nero, and Arina—so I turned carefully on the spot to get a better look at the two quadrants behind us.
The lower-left quadrant was a sunny meadow. There was no grass, and there were no trees or bushes here. Mushrooms were all that I saw. Mushrooms in every conceivable color and pattern. I stared at them, transfixed. And the longer I stared at them, the more transfixed I became. I couldn’t look away. My vision blurred. I thought I saw one of the mushrooms change into a bunny, then it started hopping around.
“Careful,” Nero said.
He’d caught me as I’d swayed.
I smiled at him. “Thanks.”
When I looked back at the meadow, the bunny wasn’t there.
“That area seems to have hallucinogenic qualities,” Nero observed.
That explained the bunny. I decided not to stare at the mushrooms too much longer, in case I started seeing more things that weren’t actually there.
I turned my attention to the final quadrant. The ecosystem in the lower-right area of the grid was dark. Very dark. Brightly colored fuzz that looked like some kind of bacteria had covered some of the darkness like a layer of moss on a tree. I felt a very weird, very irresistible urge to touch the foul stuff. I reached out. The multicolored fuzz spread toward my hand.
I retracted my hand. “Ow!” I’d felt a surge of pain where it had touched my fingers.
“What are you doing, Leda?” Nero asked me.
“Looking before I leap again, apparently,” I said sheepishly.
“You really need to stop doing that.” Nero looked my hand over. “I don’t see anything. Does it still hurt?”
“No, the pain is gone now, but that was really weird. This whole place is weird. Where are we anyway? This isn’t a memory or a vision. It’s something else entirely.”
“I believe this isn’t a real place at all,” he said. “It’s a metaphor.”
“A metaphor?”
“A symbolic representation.”
“Yeah, I know what a metaphor is,” I chuckled. “But what’s this place a metaphor of?”
“Magic. I believe we are looking at the four quadrants of magic.” He pointed to the field of flowers in the grid’s upper-left quadrant. “Active light magic, the magic of the gods.” He pointed out the blossoming flowers. “The magic of Nectar.”
He indicated the dark forest in the grid’s upper-right quadrant. “Dark active magic. The magic of the demons.” He looked up at the venomous spiders in the webs. “The magic of Venom.”
He turned with me and indicated the sunny meadow with all the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the lower-left quadrant. “Light passive magic.”
“The magic of the spirits,” Arina chimed in. She indicated the mushrooms. “The magic of Elixir.”
“Spirits? Elixir?” I asked her.
“The spirits are like gods or demons,” she explained. “They’re another kind of deity, a deity with passive light magic. And Elixir is like Nectar or Venom.”
I turned to the final quadrant, the one with the multicolored, biting fuzz. “Then that makes this area the representation of dark passive magic.”
