Cloudyearner Keep

It weighed on Hitch’s mind whether Izzy would be sated with exploring the keep alone as she must have been now, wherever she may be. He was torn in knowing he’d never come back, yet would never let anyone be left there alone, for he knew very well how it felt while he climbed the wide and shallow steps of the spire.

Doubtless that it was the spire. The colored windows that scaled along its body, beckoning to them ever since they left the forest, lined the spiral stairwell and flooded the it with a rich and crawling light. Their surface was not glass or crystal, but made of some fluid that stretched across the opening just the same. Its colors that flickered at a distance now swirled and swam among each other like paints upon an easel. When Hitch though the keep could fill his mind no further with perplexities and complications, he still found himself stopping to stare.

At the peak of a windowsill, from somewhere out of sight a drop of cherry red was introduced to the flowing surface. It fell through the whites and escaping greens weightlessly and began to expand itself with seemingly no outside addition. Soon all other colors of the candied image were pushed to the window edges by the swelling red until nothing else remained. A deep purple snuck in from a corner Hitch ignored, and again the drama of colors began. Dozens more windowpanes all swirling and blotting fantasias that, in eternity, no two would repeat continued up the walls. On the central pillar, the frames of paintings lay broken and slacked from their hangings mirrored them opposite. The art within their boundaries gone, as if their paint had escaped the frames to live in freer shapes within the windows. In the silence of the stairwell where his hoofsteps ceased, he heard them calmly pulse. The pulse began to move. Soon he realized he was not alone amid the tower.

Perhaps the recipient of Alouette’s message had descended to meet him, he wondered. The last and loudest of the deep pulses sounded, just beyond the wall where Hitch stood. A fact he realized only a moment before the surface of the painted window stretched out to grasp him.

Immediately he reared up, whether to run or fight it didn’t matter. His front hooves kicked at the air between him and the amoeba of color that attacked, to little avail. A cohesive tendril slipped behind his head past his flurry of panicked blows and another wrapped his barrel. In an instant he feared it would yank him through itself and toss him from the tower, but instead it pushed him into the spire’s core, dislodging itself from the window to grapple him upon the steps. The heavy night air rushed in with a chill, and it seemed to seep into his mouth in chest much like the waters beneath the keep. The creature accosting him was not resistant and seemed to struggle upright, already short of breath.

With no grace to afford, Hitch twisted as he lay upon the stairwell, tumbling down several steps if only for the distance from his attacker. As he faced to confront it, the air from outside stung his eyes and wrapped him in an invisible froggy warmth he could feel rushing down they spire past him. Whatever tackling him had regained itself, as had the window’s barrier, which lay unidentifiable among the other ebbing windows. A few steps above him, a Pegasus spread and flapped its wings, drops of the technicolor substance flying from them in marble drops. Only when it’s icy blue eyes caught his own did he finally recognize her.

“Hitch!” Zipp called down to him.

Still winded, quick hoofprints remained behind her, writhing with color, “You’re still here? Where’s Izzy?” She wipe the streaked remnants of the window that stained her white cheek.

“Probably living her wildest dreams. That pool you left us in didn’t end up where you thought it would, and we came up in separate places. You alright?”

“Yeah, yeah I think so. That wasn’t Monoceros that attacked us back there. I tried to follow it up past the spire, but there’s something wrong with the air. It’s too thick or something, you can’t breathe it. But there’s a chamber up there that’s sealed off, and someone’s living up there, but I don’t know if ‘living’ is the right word. All I know is it knows a lot about Monoceros, and it really, really doesn’t want us here.”

“Oh!” Hitch said, “sounds like you put in a good word for me, then?”

For a moment they only stood there, laboriously breathing at one another. Zipp’s brow furrowed, shook her head briskly in confusion.

“Go find Izzy,” he said, walking past her up the endless steps, “and get back to Bridlewood with her.”

A stiff and sudden breeze disheveled his mane. Once again the white Pegasus, wings outstretched like carved jewels, stood between him and his ascent. “Hitch, no. This thing is way more than we signed up for. We need to stick together if we’re going to get anything useful out of this.”

The generous breadth of the stairwell left her hardly an impediment as he continued past her again, “You know, that sounds awfully familiar, Zipp. Didn’t I say something like that when I was floating in a pool beneath the keep, and you flew off to go antagonize a witness, recklessly endanger yourself, and left Izzy and I to wash up on the banks of the lake?”

The sounds of his voice echoed back to him paler from the depths of the stairs he’d left behind. In the shadows between the emplacements of the windows, Zipp’s face was hidden. He was glad of it, for it was far dimmer than he ever wanted to see. He waited for her retort, the one he knew would be far more reasonable than his, but it never came. He went on, “Your weather tower fell before we left, did you know that?” he said, quieter.

A sound came from Zipp, a “yes” of some strangled sort.

“They need you there, okay? And they need me here. There’s something going on in this keep that no one knew. Not me, not Izzy, not Queen Haven. I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Follow the stairs down to the courtyard. There’s a lot of halls in this place, and Izzy is down below somewhere. Get back with her to solid ground.”

He left her then. He listened for the descent of her hooves down the spire, or even the flight of her wings to deliver her before him again, but neither came. As he climbed, the stones of the walls seemed to straighten, the broken picture frames made whole, but still empty. He thought about Zipp, and how inane it was to think she’d do anything he said. As he knew, he had no authority here, and even less over friends with promises broken.

The final mesmerizing window passed, and he found a wooden door, immaculate with its iron handle and wax sealed wood shining in the warping colors of the spire. Whatever was convicted behind it, the door must have closed, then never opened again, not even by the ancient wardens of the place. In that room, the accomplice of Alouette’s master, lay. Beyond that, something so precious that Zipp would leave her friends in a cold and dark pit if it meant bringing it back. He’d already forgotten Alouette’s message. Finding the Pegasus magic and proving to Zipp that there was no objective worth chasing if it were not chased together remained his only goal. But as he pushed open the door, swinging like a ballast upon its hinges, he realized he’d already failed. Beyond the door was a study, but he had sent Zipp away, just as she had him.

It was not a study in any form he’d known, with a desk and walls lined with books, but a room where items of curiosity were in such unfathomable volume that it only magnified the mystery of it all. Though the circular center of the room was hedged with a chest high border of the carved Bridlewood that had accented all the keep thus far, the walk-able way about it held a maze of littered desks. Scattered parchments upon the tables were pinned down beneath the knobby iron legs of frames in which glass instruments were cradled. Some of the blown glass chambers twisted and stretched, muddled in color like model clouds flying above the runic geography of the scribbles they held down, some endeavoring so far as to arch between tables to support themselves. More than one of them resembled to Hitch the same structures he’d see installed in hamster cages, or the devices that artisan tea methods he’d seen Izzy impulsively order from at her adored Crystal Tearoom. The greatest of them all lay in the room’s center: a massive glass semi-sphere that emerged from the floor, the distortion through its surface further warping the oddities of the room.

For a moment Hitch was compelled to call out to whatever Alouette had sent him to meet, but the room was silent. He began to circumscribe the glass orb and its wooden boundary. Weaving between desks, sometimes crouching beneath the arches of glassware that twisted like smoky serpents, until finally a light in the dark caught his eye. The compulsion to call out to Izzy was undeniable, yet he remembered her light gleamed purple, and not the dull blue he saw now, were she even capable of finding and beating him to the tower’s top. Like a water droplet running down a drenched window, slowly yet punctuated with swift jumps between other drops, the light began to move within the dome. With every jump it seemed to grow larger. Hitch finally called to it, but received no answer.

Soon the thing took shape. It ceased to move like a drop against gravity, and now walked on four little legs. When it was nearly his height, Hitch thought to call again, and perhaps it would raise its low and sullen head. It became obvious before then that, despite the prohibitive size of the chamber, it was somehow still very far away.

A hot breeze soon permeated from the orb, which he soon realized was the thing’s breath. Nothing substantial separated him from it. When it finally stopped, Hitch would need to rear up on his back legs to touch its nose, but only because it hung its long, fanged face far below its shoulders. There was no a creature, save for Alphabittle, Hitch found he could not stare down. He looked into the eyes of the giant shimmering wolf, and that list received a new addition.

“I’m Sheriff Hitch. Maretime Bay Jurisdiction,” Hitch said. He needn’t show his badge; the sky blue of the creature’s glow gleamed from it already, “I’ll need to ask you a few questions.”