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“Come on, Mal. Just take it. Even Newton agrees,” Jay said, wiggling his fingers at Mal, while still grasping Evie’s hand tightly in his other hand.
Mal gave up with a sigh, grabbing it after only a slight hesitation. Mal then held her hand out to Carlos, who grabbed it as if it were a lifesaver, seeing as he knew his physics better than any of them.
Somewhat awkwardly, and little by little, the four of them pulled and pushed and helped each other slosh their way up the muddy path, sweaty palms and muddy ankles and cold feet and all.
Before long the pathway curved once again, and now the thick rain cloud surrounding it seemed to part on either side of the four adventurers, revealing a sudden and dramatic vista—what appeared to be a long and slender stone bridge, half-shrouded in mist, that jutted out above a chasm in the rock directly in front of them.
“It’s beautiful,” Evie said, shivering. “In a really terrifying way.”
“It’s just a bridge,” Carlos said, holding up his box. “But we definitely have to cross it. Look—” The light was flashing so brightly and so quickly now that he covered the sensor with one hand.
“Duh,” Jay said.
“It’s not just a bridge,” Mal said, in a low voice, staring at the gray shape in front of her. “It’s her bridge. Maleficent’s bridge. And it’s pulling me. I have to cross it. It wants me to get to the other side.”
“It’s not the bridge I’m worried about,” Carlos said, looking into the distance. “Look!”
Beyond the bridge and mist, a black castle rose from a pillar of stone. The bridge was the only way to reach the castle, as sheer cliffs surrounded the black fortress on all other sides.
But the castle itself was so forbidding, it didn’t exactly look like a place that wanted to be reached.
“That’s it,” Mal breathed. “That has to be the Forbidden Fortress.” The darkest place on their dark isle—Maleficent’s old lair, and ancestral home.
“Sweet,” Jay said. “That’s one sick shack.”
Evie studied it from behind him, still shivering. “And I thought our castle was drafty.”
“I can’t believe that we actually found it.” Carlos stared from his box to the castle. “And I can’t believe it was so close to the island all along.”
Mal’s eyes were dark, and her expression was impossible to read. She looked almost stunned, Carlos thought. “I guess that explains the rain. The Forbidden Fortress hides itself in a shroud of fog and mist. It’s like a moat, I guess.”
Carlos examined the air around him. “Of course it is. A defensive mechanism, built into the atmosphere itself.”
“I’m sure my mother designed it to keep everyone she didn’t want out.”
She didn’t say the rest, so Jay said it for her. “Which meant, you know, everyone.”
Carlos found it hard to look away from the black tower on the hill. No wonder the citizens of the Isle of the Lost were told to keep away. Here was concrete proof of villainy, of the power of darkness and infamy.
Malefient’s darkness.
It wasn’t just any evil. What loomed in front of them was the most powerful and most storied darkness in the kingdom.
Carlos suddenly felt it—the magnetic pull Mal had tried to describe. He could feel it thrumming in the air, in the very stones beneath his feet. Even if magi
c was no longer a factor, there was power here, and history.
“Feel that?” Carlos held his vibrating hand up into the air.
“I can too,” Evie said, picking up a rock from the mud. It rattled in her fingers as she held it. “Destiny,” she announced dramatically.
Jay pointed at the lightning that crackled in air above the black turrets. “Me too. I guess it’s time.”
Mal didn’t say a word. She only stared.
“Hold on, now. We’re not in any rush,” Carlos said. “We need to do this right, or—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He just shrugged.
Then he caught Mal’s gaze and knew she felt the same way.
