AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Quite regularly.
His outraged responses were just too amusing to resist.
And right on cue, he scowled at me. “They’re not funny or peculiar, brat. They’re fascinating and exciting. You just don’t appreciate the true magnetism of what I tell you.”
“Of course, I do,” I argued. “That story about the metal horse that moves on two wheels will stick with me forever. What did you call the conveyance again?”
He narrowed his eyes before mumbling, “A motorcycle.”
“A motorcycle,” I repeated in mock awe. “Such a very creative concept. I mean, who would ever think of crafting a carriage like that? Your mind is a wonderland, Indigo, I swear. Where do you come up with all your fantastical ideas, anyway?”
Indigo opened his mouth, pausing before he shook his head. “I don’t,” he finally admitted. “They’ve been passed on to me from my grandpa, Atchison. And they’re not fantasy,” he added, lifting a finger in warning when I opened my mouth to respond. “They’re true. Every single one of them.”
I waited until he lowered his hand before I smirked. “Your grandpa, Atchison, sounds like a fanciful man himself.”
Indigo merely rolled his eyes. “Well, you
’re wrong. He was a genius.”
He sounded so respectful and reverent, I lost the will to mock him, and instead asked, “He’s the one who was related to Vienne, correct?”
Vienne was a native Donnellean, like me. We’d grown up in the castle together, and I looked up to her as the big sister I’d never had. For a few short years, we’d actually been related, because she’d been married to my cousin Soren. But then Soren had turned evil, lost his life, and Vienne had taken Allera’s brother Urban for a husband instead.
“Aye,” Indigo answered with a nod. “Vienne’s grandmother, Anniston, was Grandpa Atchison’s older sister.” Leaning closer, he lowered his voice significantly. “If you were ever curious how old Wren Mandalay became such a genius himself with all his clever inventions, like clear rock, it’s because of his wife, Anniston. She and my grandpa, Atchison, learned everything they knew from their mother, Amelia.” He glanced around the forest before turning back to me and pushing away from the tree where he was leaning. “Can you keep a secret, princess?” he whispered as he knelt beside me.
“Of course.” I loved secrets, so I scooted to the edge of my tree stump and patted the space next to me, giving him leave to sit. “Tell me everything.”
“Well…” Looking just as eager to share his news as I was to receive it, he plopped down beside me. “My great-grandmother, Amelia—Vienne’s great-grandmother—wasn’t born in the Outer Realms at all. She was actually the first Replacement who came here eighty-three years ago.”
After staring at him a moment, waiting for him to explain what any of that meant, I finally shook my head. “Okay,” I said slowly. “And what is a Replacement exactly?”
Indigo muttered a curse before smacking himself in the forehead. “Sorry. That’s my own term I came up with.” Leaning in until his shoulder was pressed against mine, he heaved out a breath. “But I wasn’t sure what else to call them; it just made sense at the time, so yeah…” He sent me a shrug. “Let’s just go with Replacement, shall we?”
“Sure…” I murmured, still just as carefully. “So what is a Replacement, again?”
“Oh! Right. Sorry.” Letting go of my fingers, he spread his hands, holding them about a foot apart with his palms facing. “It’s like this. When a very powerful person of magic wishes to depart the Outer Realms, it’s possible for them to escape this world and travel into an alternate dimension. Except—”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. “An alternate what, now?”
“Dimension,” Indigo repeated, blinking at me as if I should know what that meant. He waved a hand. “It’s like a whole new world. A different realm from ours entirely.”
“Oh! You mean, like the place Vienne’s nanny, Wynter, went when she was hiding from the guards who came to question her about dark magic, right before our war with Far Shore?”
“Exactly. Except the nanny didn’t complete the ritual, which was why she was eventually pulled back to Donnelly. You see, to get there—to this other realm—and remain there, the magical person traveling needs to trade places with someone already there. For them to go through and stay, someone from that realm must come here to take their place, to equal out the balance. And those people who come back from the other dimension are what I’m calling Replacements. From what I can tell, they are dragged here unwillingly, unexpectedly, and most definitely unknowingly until suddenly, here they are.”
I stared at him a moment as he stared back, waiting for me to process everything.
A second later, I scowled and slapped him on the shoulder, hard. “Indigo Moast,” I scolded. “You’re putting one over on me, you scoundrel. I thought you seriously believed all that balderdash for a minute there.”
His mouth dropped open. Then he surged to his feet to pace in front of me. “I do believe, Nic. Just listen.” Pausing before me, he opened the front of his frock and reached in to pull out a small rectangular lump of parchment.
I lurched to my feet and away from the foreign object because it looked freakishly magical. And the last time I’d handled anything infused with magic, I’d disintegrated Vienne’s sister to ash.
I wasn’t so keen on magical objects these days.
“What the devil is that?” I demanded, eyeing the mysterious device untrustingly.
Indigo didn’t try to hand it to me though, he merely unwound a string of leather from around it and flipped it open, revealing more and more pieces of parchment inside, hundreds of them, bound together and fanning up from the center between two thicker outer shells to make an arch. Captivated as all the parchment settled again, I watched in awe when Indigo pressed his hand down on it.
