"What do you think is inside the box, Cassandra?" Ruslan asked while Cassandra was washing the dishes after they both had a lunch break.
"The Hope Diamond, I suppose," she said. The long hours of trails and errors had dulled her sense of wonder and made Cassandra a bit disheartened by the fruitless result so far.
It'd better be something worthy to merit that kind of protection, she thought to herself.
"What if it contains Kryptonite?" said Ruslan with an amused smile. They both burst out laughing. She had to give it to the young boy for his tireless enthusiasm. He'd been working on the obstacle more patiently than most adults, and he seemed to take it as a fun challenge. Not once had Ruslan been discouraged by the unsolved mystery in front of him.
But the Siberian sun had begun to descend over the peaks of the mountains. Cassandra shivered at a strange rush of icy cold that had nothing to do with the temperature outside. For some unknown reason, she felt the need to find out what inside the chest and find it fast.
After she finished with the chore, Cassandra went back to the table where her cousin was sitting. He had used every possible tool to open the stubborn relic but to no avail. There were screwdrivers, pliers, wrench, chisel, and other tools spreading all over the table. Ruslan had gone downstairs to borrow just a screwdriver from the landlord, but he came back with an entire toolbox. However, Cassandra had forbidden him from using any heavy drill or hammer for fear of him hurting himself. Besides she felt that the chest was too precious to be forced open.
Despite their many unsuccessful attempts, Ruslan and Cassandra still forged on with whatever solution they could think of.
"Do you think these letters mean anything?" Cassandra said as she eyed the surface of the chest carefully.
"They are letters?" Ruslan said.
"Oh yes," she said. "Don't you see?"
Ruslan suddenly got up and ran to the bedroom. A moment later, he emerged with a magnifying glass, which Cassandra bought for him on his fifth birthday. They then hunched over the chest while Ruslan magnifying the writing on the surface.
"Well, yeah," said the boy after a while, "but I tell you it is not Russian."
"I guess you're right. They do look like Russian at first glance though," Cassandra said.
"Wow, now we have a secret language to decipher!" Ruslan gasped in excitement.
"Yes, possibly," Cassandra added with a nod.
"Or it could be Greek or Runic alphabets?"
"Runic?"
"It's a writing system from the Viking Age," Ruslan told her. "I remember reading about it. Back in medieval times, some of the Vikings settled in Russia. They called themselves the Rus. That's how we became known as Russians."
"I thought our letters were derived from the Greek alphabets," Cassandra said.
"You're also right about that," the boy said and put his hand under his chin like he always did, rubbing his imaginary beard the way some old history professor would do. "When the Rus Viking prince married a Byzantine princess, they created an alphabet for Slavic languages based on a modified Greek script. So it's possible that this writing is both Runes and Greek."
Cassandra was impressed by her cousin's vast knowledge, but not very surprised. He was always better than most of her teachers at school, and she liked listening to him talking about all sorts of amazing discoveries.
Now imagine this inscription was actually some code commands for the hidden mechanism of the box!
They began to try a different way to translate the letters. They had copied the letters one by one onto a piece of paper. Ruslan had run once again to retrieve a book that contained the whole Greek and Runic alphabets. They matched each letter and compared them to the Greek-Russian ones.
"This puts me in mind of a cryptograph," Ruslan said, "unless, the letters had been written without any real meaning and are all rubbish."
"And yet why take so much trouble?" Cassandra mused to herself, thinking about the proud owl again.
All this time Ruslan was busying comparing the letters with the chest's inscription.
"This is harder than I thought," he said. "It was like a code inside a code."
Cassandra was, in fact, fighting against unexpected curiosity and unknown anxiety. Her brain was almost on fire, her eyes were strained with staring at the writing, the whole absurd collection of letters appeared to dance before her vision in a number of black little groups. Her mind was possessed with temporary hallucination, she was stifling.
She needed air.
Cassandra decided to get up and walked to the window. In her mind, the owl's words still echoed like it was from a deep well: "And if you want to know the truth about your mother, you'd better be quick."
The view of the snow-peaked mountains was breathtaking. She inhaled the crisp winter air and let out a loud sigh.
Suddenly she heard her cousin exclaim.
"Cassandra! Cassandra!" he cried. "I think I got it now."
"What did you get?"
"Here is a line of words translated as north, west, west, east, north, and south."
Cassandra, though rejoiced at some success, was also utterly confused.
"What?"
"They are directions!" Ruslan said, looking at her as if to make her read his mind and see what it had discovered. "What do directions do?"
"Oh..." she said slowly, "They direct?"
"Yes!"
"And?"
Ruslan tried not to roll his eyes at her.
"Look carefully here," he said and pointed to a wood piece inlaid on the chest at the center. "Once we slide it according to the six given directions...then?"
"Oh!" Cassandra gasped in realization. "Oh yes! It's like an instruction to unlock the chest!"
Without further delay, the two of them proceeded to try their newfound theory.
"Oh wait, where is the north?" she said.
"Here, slide the wood piece this way." Ruslan pointed to the right. Cassandra wouldn't know what she would do without this genius boy.
Sure enough, when Cassandra slid the wood piece northward then westward and so on, they could feel the lock clicked inside the chest. Her heart pounded against her ribs. It was a triumphant feeling indeed.
After she finished the route, the lid suddenly burst open, knocking itself over the table, startling the two cousins half to death.
Inside was a scroll of old parchment. For a long moment, none of them moved. Then they looked at each other. Seeing that she was the oldest, Cassandra decided to take it upon herself to inspect the mystery.
They looked keenly at the scroll for some moments and then unrolled it. To their surprise and disappointment, the scroll was blank.
"What?" Cassandra said in dismay. "What's the meaning of this?"
Now she had a slight conviction that the Runic and Greek alphabets were simply an invention from some crazy owl to mock a poor human fool like her. She put the scroll down and walked off to compose herself.
Looking through the window again, she saw the last ray of sunlight starting to ebb slowly.
"Oh! Oh!" Ruslan cried a while later.
Cassandra looked back and she gasped.
"Oh Ruslan, watch out!"
This was said because her cousin had positioned the glass so that the sun's rays pass through the lens, forming a small point of light on the thin parchment. A tiny twirl of smoke let up, but Cassandra quickly blew off the first spark before it spread.
"Sorry," Ruslan said guiltily.
But before she could respond, her eyes caught sight of it. A line or rather a beginning of a sentence was now visible on the paper.
"Oh, Ruslan, it is an invisible letter!" she cried. "Now give me your magnifying glass. Quick! Quick!"
The boy handed it to her and looked on with eager eyes. Cassandra held the scroll up before the window where the sunbeam was still coming through.
"Come on," she muttered to herself as she projected the heat from the magnifying glass onto the paper, scorching it slowly without actually burning it.
Then it happened. Word after word began to appear like crawling insects.
"Oh, sweet Tesla's coil!" Ruslan cried in joy. "It worked!"
"So you should know what it means?" she asked him after she finished.
But for the first time, she saw a sight of hopelessness on her cousin's face.
"I guess I can try to decipher it, but it will take a very long time...that if this writing could be deciphered at all," admitted Ruslan. "I'm afraid we might not make it before midnight."
Cassandra felt her heart sink lower in disappointment. It wasn't that she was afraid the talking owl would kill her for breaking her promise or anything, but she started to get a feeling that something horrible was bound to happen if they couldn't succeed.
"Let's not lose hope yet, Ruslan," she said. "We still have a few more hours left. I believe we can do it."
For two hours straight, they worked together to crack the old language again.
"This Runic letter 'I' here could be read as 'Isa', which means 'ice'," her cousin said as he worked out the writing. "There's also a Greek word 'Selini' or 'Selene', which means 'moon'. The rest are just jumbled words between Greek and Runic. It is enough to drive one crazy."
So far he had put together some meaning to a few words that didn't make any sense. What connection could there be between ice, sacred wood, maiden, and moon? The first and the last might in a sentence connected with the landscape, like 'lake of ice' and 'sacred wood'. But what of the rest of the monstrous cryptograph?
After a short break, Ruslan had collected enough words to form a whole sentence.
"Let me read," Cassandra said after drawing a long breath.
She spread it before them on the table, she passed her finger over each letter, she spelled it through. Then a rippling warmth stilled her heart. It seemed to come from the page itself. A great excitement overtook her. Was it possible that she could really read the terribly ancient scroll of some kind?
It came to her like a flash of lightning. She had got the clue. All you had to do to understand the writing was to read it backward.
It wasn't long before she found out that she could read everything despite very slowly.
It was a poem, which read as follows:
'It was the Coming of the Midnight Sun,
A daughter of the Sacred Wood,
Lay in a chamber of the House of the Moon,
And thus shall wither like a dying star
Til the touch of a virgin at dawn.'
"Okay," Ruslan said. "What does the poem mean?""I have no idea," Cassandra said. "But the owl told me to come back to her after I open the box. Maybe I'll find out what it means.""Are you sure you're going to see this talking owl tonight?"
The owl raised her wings and made a high pitch squeak, which echoed off into the sky. The sound was sharp and strong and as soon as it faded the ground beneath Cassandra's feet began to tremble, but before she could scream earthquake, something else far more astonishing caught her eyes.She saw the glowing light emitting from the ancient mirror. The light seemed to form a ring of symbols much like the runes she saw on the chest and letter. Cassandra gasped as she stared at the strange phenomenon for the first time.
Cassandra didn't know what to make of the frog princess, but Owlyn kept looking at her as if waiting for her to do something. After a long awkward silence, she cleared her throat nervously."Well, um...nice to meet you...er...your highness," she said. "But now that Owlyn has found you, I guess there's nothing more I can do here, so I better go back."Then she turned to leave, but the owl immediately flew over to block her way.
No one ever moved faster than Vasilisa did getting back up the stairs. Cassandra was huffing and gasping as she followed the sorceress. Entered another chamber, she glanced around as if fearing that the Groundsler would crawl back, but everywhere she looked was silent and empty as ever."Are we safe here?" Cassandra whispered.
Cassandra sighed in despair. Of course, it has to be some deep dark wood, she thought. Every time you need to find a dumb magical thing, there's always a creepy wood for you to go to. It has always been like that in every fairy tale she'd ever read, but she never once thought she would actually be in one.The serpent appeared to have fallen asleep. Vasilisa stood up with a determined look on her face.
Owlyn safely led Cassandra back to Chamber of Mirror. They went through the mirror again, and the last thing the owl said before leaving was, "I'd appreciate it if you washed your face. You look like something a Groundsler dragged in. And remember we are all in a very great deal of trouble if you don't come back."The bird then turned and flew down the length of the ruined hall and plunged straight into the liquid-like mirror. Cassandra looked around to make sure that she was indeed back in the human realm. To her relief, it w
Ruslan turned the sheet of paper that contained the copied spells around and tried to decipher the fascinating writing system by himself. It looked beautiful but stranger, more alien and unreadable. Yet they also had an air of mocking familiarity, and he felt he would be able to read them if he only looked at them the right way."Latin?" he asked, looking up at the sorceress with unconcealed admiration. Vasilisa was packing her grimoire, wrapping it up with a large piece of gold cloth she had found.
By the time Cassandra and Ruslan reached Mischka Park, it was closed. They had to find a way to sneak in, which was not an easy thing to do. There was a security post by the entrance gate. They weren't sure if there were any guards around, but the post was empty.Ruslan found a gap in the park's fence and motioned for her to make use of it. They could see the greenhouse in the middle of the farmland. At the edge of the park stood the old mansion of the former landlady. No one lived there anymore. It would cost a fortune to renovate it, so it was practically abandoned. Some said the Soviet doctors had turned it into
"Oh, how I miss coming to the sun-drench island of Spain." Florence took a lungful of fresh air. She stepped out of the private jet that had landed at the Canary Island's international airport. The second person to follow was Clare. It was her first time on a private jet. She was still getting used to the special treatments that came with her status, but she was trying to be mindful and kept close to Florence.The whole flight was a smooth and easy journey, and Violet spent the entirety of it quietly working away on her laptop. If she wasn't typing, she was speaking on the phone. The Duchess dove straight to her wo
Tiredness forced Cassandra to lie down. It was a big boat. Besides her, Vasilisa had fallen into slumber again. Cassandra looked up at the moon, which was as thin as a fingernail. Then, painfully, feeling the boat rock beneath her, she propped herself on one elbow and sat up. The mist was still there, hanging low and ragged over the surface of the water. But the marsh itself had changed."We are almost there, my lady," said Nayris.
Owlyn brought back the herbs. Cassandra grounded them into a paste and applied it to the sorceress's wound. The Czarevna was less restless now and her breathing had evened out before she fell asleep again."Now what are we going to do?" Cassandra whispered softly in despair, her worried eyes kept staring at Vasilisa's pale face. The owllooked at her with a gentle surprise.
"Leave the boy with me," said the sorcerer-king. The demons retreated from the hall and closed the bronze doors behind them. The other sorcerers kept watching by the walls. When the Czar walked towards him, Ruslan looked back nervously. For a long moment, the Czar stood looking down at him without saying a word. His eyes seemed to penetrate his soul. Ruslan tried not to stare back."You must be wondering why you're brought here, young lad." His words were courteous, his manner charming, but it was clear that he had no good int
When the falling momentum stopped, they landed on hard ground. Through the opalescent light of the moon and the absence of mist above, Cassandra could see it now. The thing that had dragged her down. It was shaped vaguely like a very tall man, and its long grey arms and legs were covered with matted hair and mud. A terrible stench arose from it. Its feet were clawed like a bird's, but the knobbly fingers which had locked with such strength on her ankle ended in long twisted nails. Then the moonlight shone on its face, and she screamed again, for ithadno face, only an open, gaping wound of a mouth, with pendulous wattles of skin hanging below.
Ruslan had the impression of an open trapdoor with stone steps leading down, but his mind was no longer working. He felt as if it had been pushed into a tight, dark corner of his skull and locked there like a small, furry animal in a cage. He could still see through his eyes, still hear through his ears, but everything was at a long distance as if he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope.Nothing was important anymore, not where he was going. His thoughts crawled through treacle and were blurred around the edges, slipping and sliding away from him every time he tried to use them. If he concentrated reall
There was something about the grey creatures that sent Ruslan into a frenzy of revulsion. He fought like a demon himself. He punched and kicked furiously. The demons were nearly naked so he could see their repulsive, dark grey, hairless scrawny bodies, and their spindly limbs. When they touched him, his skin crawled.Individually, they were smaller than he was, but there were dozens of others who were human-size swarming across the rubble to help. He knew immediately that they were theDrekavac, the screamers, the mythical demons Owlyn had warned them about
Ruslan frowned. He had tumbled out onto a rocky hillside and knew at once something was wrong. He wasn't near the hill with the willow tree where they rested anymore. In fact, he didn't even seem to be in the marshes at all for that matter. How did he get here? Where were the others?Ruslan turned around and around, calling out to Cassandra. The air tasted foul, and it made him cough. It still had a hint of the metallic sulfur that had nearly choked him. And the sky, now he noticed, looked the wrong color. It had the purplish tint you sometimes got before a storm, except no storm was approaching — there was n
Never once did Cassandra think of her mother as anything but a perfectly ordinary woman. Of course, she only had vague memories of her. How her melodious voice sounded, how nice she smelled, and how warm she was to Cassandra when she was a child. Aunt Klementina told her that once when they were going to attend a wedding party, Cassandra's mother told her not to dance. Aunt Klementina hadn't been so fond of her mother for some reason and no doubt she went and danced her legs off. And she broke her hip that night.But that was