Evening at the Black Chimaera. This post is written from the point of view of a pentral that Lorelei has trapped in a locket.


When the warmth of skin and heartbeat vanished, the pentral woke. She hung, suspended not by a pale neck, but by something thinner, something less alive that curled out of the wall of oak like a twisted fingernail.

The pentral hung silently, getting a sense of the room.

Pinpricks of light flickered in clusters, reflecting off a smooth, round surface as still as a lake. Shadows threatened on the walls, and one shadow was a wizard who chanted words like a song and scolded the bones that skittered freely on the floor.

Clocks did not tick in this place, and if there were mice, she couldn't hear them, and if there were a window, it must be shrouded by a curtain, and Lorelei should be a few rooms away, perhaps having found the brother she'd brought back from the dead. A thin, red thread of amusement drifted on the locket's chain. The beat-beat-beat of Lorelei's headache still echoed between the golden hinge and clasp.

The pentral tumbled in on herself in the smallest home she'd ever had. Waiting.

The attack came suddenly and without warning.

Something struck the outside of the metal locket, causing a deep thrumming to reverberate through the hiding place within. Then it struck again, and again in quick rhythm, as if to force the tumbling pentral back into the land of the living through sheer percussive force.

There was another spirit outside, using empty eyes to try and peer inside her prison. But this spirit was not made of the fog of self and memories. Though it was hidden inside cold bone-armor, hints of bright, iridescent colors seemed to dance over it, constantly shifting and never quite there: scintillating tufts of ghostly green and blue pin feathers shimmering across its boney wings; the tips of curved purple horns, spiraled like a ghostly ram, poking out and then receding back into its skull; and an almond-shaped orange eye, striated like a cat’s pupil, which was attempting to examine her through the crack in the locket.

The prismatic, flickering spirit grabbed hold of the locket between the two bony pincers of its skeletal beak and gave the pentral’s locket another wrenching, rattling shake. Hints of tumbled questions were thrust at her, inquisitive and intense.

Why was she here? it wanted to know. Why wasn’t she on her way?

This post is written from the point of view of two pentrals (written collaboratively by Elle and Sparky!)


Flung around a tower where the walls were closing in, the pentral pressed her wispy limbs against the metal confines, trembling and flickering in the midst of the attack. Not Lorelei, but a lightning strike against the oak wall, a sunset sharp as knives and the bright sun scanning side to side.

Let... go!

Her words were carried on a breath spent from too many fires burning year after year. She took another breath to reform her plea, bracing for the next clap of thunder.

But the next clap never came. Instead, the almond-shaped orange eye came to peer into the locket again. The dark pupil widened as if greedily sucking in all the light it could from her hiding place, and then got very small, showing streaks of alien gold in the striated pupil.

“Tzippori!” A harsh human voice cut through the air. “Leave it alone!”

There was a rattling sound, like bones clacking together. The skeletal-armor spirit retreated, leaving her alone with the fading heartbeat.

Let-me-out-and-I'll-tell-you, let-me-out-and-I'll-tell-you, the pentral thought again and again until the words became nonsense words without place or time. The moment had passed, hadn't it? The storm had rolled in and left just as quickly.

---

It could have been seconds, minutes, or hours when the next intrusion came. But her second visitor was not an interloping spirit hiding inside a strange bird-skeleton. Instead, it came as a rolling silver fog, feeling its way carefully around the cracks in the locket.

Sorry, we’re sorry, the pentral spirit told her. It doesn’t know any better. It can’t understand why we’re still here in this place.

The pentral drew back in the locket. A person! Speaking to her! Not Lorelei. Who did this once-human voice belong to? Who was Zee-por-ee-! with the star for an eye, imploding from the black hole within? Who was the shadowed man who kept so much light around him?

She only had so much time before her words would fade, too. She paused for several seconds or minutes, forming her question.

You're... free?

Her first words were careful, each one measured and cut from her soul.

How-why?

Like always, more words tumbled out unbidden. She watched the cloud between the cracks, and forgave-forgot the bright storm. Her attention often drifted to the brightest flames, the loudest clacking of bones.

If the other pentral had seemed at all cautious at first, it grew quickly in its boldness. Tendrils of mist crept around the edges of the locket, pressing at the corners, feeling along the cracks.

Its answer came in a racing mix of words, sensations, and pictures. Surrounded by darkness, weighted with anxiety and fear. It had raced from one flickering bit of safety to another, fleeing from the ravenous, shadowy maws that were greedy for its light. Then a bright spot in the darkness. Warmth. Light. Respite. It had charged towards the dancing candle flame, but then a glass prison had closed around it again, and it had feared that its freedom was once again lost.

But then something unexpected. The mist of the pentral spirit quivered, as if uncertain how to put the feelings into words.

This time, the prison had opened for it. It had been set free to dance around and around a lantern. It had darted between a hundred burning candles on a dusty chandelier, burned hotly in the face of danger, and bravely charged straight into the gaping mouth of a different hungry-spirit to drive it off. There were still dangers lurking, still shadows outside (Lorelei Hunt, the pentral whispered fiercely, the name that had been seared into each and every one of them), but they were less frightening now. Instead, it had a blue-glass home that it could curl up tightly inside, and the shadowed man, friend-protector against the darkness.

You should come out, it told her. It’s better in the light.

The pentral flickered faintly in frustration.

She reached a wipsy limb to the hinge of the locket where the crack was widest at the sides, to the presence full of light and joy there. She'd tried to escape before, and there was something engraved on this prison, some piece of her, possibly, that kept her from getting out. Her reach was like a hand on a window, a reminder that Lorelei Hunt had made the pentrals the same, whatever their differences in life would have been. Here, there was only free and not free. And yet here, she still couldn't escape and the other could.

Though she didn't know the shadow man, and she didn't trust anything made of glass, she felt the other pentral's sincerity.

She tapped the latch and exhaled her request:

Ask shadow man to open it.

The other pentral hovered for a moment around the edges of the locket, still prodding for an opening, pressing for her foggy tendril. It gave a twinkling chime of agreement, and then quickly withdrew.

Aviad huffed a sigh as he looked up from the mirror, his eyes tired from staring into the reflective surface for so long. Annoyed, he leaned his head first to one side, then to the other, trying to stretch out the crick in his neck.

It felt as if he’d been scrying for hours. The mage half-suspected that Lorelei Hunt and her silent, foreboding brother had conjured the list of names for him as a joke, something to keep him occupied while they waited to see how long he lasted. Considering the shrinking number of escaped pentrals and Leander’s growing network of haunted, decaying owls, it seemed as if there were diminishing returns for his name-by-name hunt, regardless of the veracity of the list.

Annoyed, he risked a glance around the room to take stock of his undead menagerie. Tzippori was occupying itself by trying to unscrew the doorknob. Arba, the four-fingered skeletal hand that he’d adopted after it had sacrificed a digit to replace one for Nate Briggs, had disappeared somewhere under the bookshelf. There was only the arafel spirit, bolder when the Hunts were a few rooms away, making its usual circles to explore the room.

But it was the arafel spirit that came racing towards him now, twinkling in the bell-like voice that it often seemed that only he could hear. Aviad rolled his eyes at it, pointing in the direction of the blue nazar pendant that he’d set on the table.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he told it, irritated. “If she’s coming back, you know where to go.”

But for once, the strange, mistlike spirit hadn’t fled to him out of fear of Lorelei Hunt. Frowning, Aviad regarded it, trying to get a sense of what it wanted. It was much more difficult for him to understand Hunt’s pentrals than it was those spirits that retained a more human shape, but it was still easier for him to comprehend the arafel spirit’s meaning than it was to understand something like Tzippori.

Finally, he grasped it. Brows knitting, he looked over to the hanging locket.

Hunt didn’t scare him as much as she might want to, but he still hesitated to disturb anything that belonged to her. And the pentral that resided inside this particular prison did indeed belong to her. She’d left no room to mistake it: she’d kept the little spirit close to her heart.

But his arafel spirit wasn’t about to take no for an answer; not even fear of Lorelei Hunt could dissuade it this time. It pressed at him, still twinkling like a bell, urging him to move. Sighing, Aviad rose to his feet and crossed the room to where the locket was hanging.

Touching a finger to the outside, he mentally reached out for the spirit inside.

She missed the other spirit almost immediately, repeating its chime in her head. It meant help was coming. As the suns orbited the shadowed man, she hoped the spirit wouldn't forget her for what was brighter and more alive.

Footsteps sounded; a heavier, reluctant sort of step that reminded her of Lorelei's brother.

She went very still within the locket, and startled at the human touch on the metal. It wasn't a hand closing around her, suffocating, but only the tip of a finger, restful, steadying the locket-prison.

A human mind, reaching out.

For a few seconds she stayed still, then reached a wispy limb to the inside of the locket where the hand was pointing.

What had she meant to ask? It was so, so important.

It was so, so strange that this shadowed man had come over to do the spirit's bidding. Her surprise helped her shape her thought into words.

Are you trapped or free?

Oh no, not the right question.

The arafel spirits had been a conundrum ever since he’d first encountered one slinking into his room at the Shodding Arms Hotel. Aviad still wasn’t entirely sure that spirit was the right word to apply to them. Sometimes it felt like he had spent more time mingling with the dead than with the living, but most of the apparitions that he encountered were shades of the living, shadowy echoes that had been left behind to go through the same motions again and again when they’d been meant to pass on.

These pentrals were different. Though each one that he’d met so far had died at the malevolent hand of Lorelei Hunt, they still didn’t strike him as the reverberating echoes of someone who had once lived. They had minds and impulses of their own, much closer to whatever Tzippori was than a typical ghost. It was much harder for him to understand their intentions, too, or to impose his own. Pentrals like his arafel spirit spoke their own resonant, bell-like language, and while he could often pick up on its meaning, it was fleeting that he could comprehend the words.

But this time, the meaning of the bell-like voice that twinkled in his head came through as clear as day.

Are you trapped or free?

Aviad went very still, and something caught in his throat. Out of instinct, he drew his finger back, away from the soft heat of the locket and whatever strange, spirit-like creature was cowering inside.

The room had grown cold as he’d been scrying; in the fireplace, once-bright flames had begun to die down into flickering embers. Near the door, Tzippori had halted its harassment of the door knob. Instead, it appeared to be peering at him, its empty sockets giving no hint of its meaning or intent.

There was a twinkling sound. His arafel spirit darted to and fro across his gaze, urging him forward again. Aviad shot it an annoyed look, and then impatiently laid a finger back on the locket.

“The living aren’t pentrals,” he said out loud, his tone more surly than conversational. Trapped or free? was a question for spirits, not for living mages who made their own decisions and occasionally had to consort with the human equivalent of dybbuks like Lorelei Hunt. “What do you want, little spirit? The other arafel spirit came to plead for you.”

Ah, thank you! She remembered what she wanted now. She didn't want home, or safety, or any of the things she'd cared so much about in life. When the other pentrals had escaped, she'd still been stuck.

I want to be free, she thought more easily and hopefully this time. Could he hear her? The warmth on the locket had returned, but his voice sounded cold.

If he let her out, she would thank the Air-uh-fel, and then she'd go, past the dozen suns and the storm of feathers, out the window or out the door.

The sentiment that flowed out from the small locket was light and airy, interwoven with hope and yearning.

That was the other thing that made these arafel spirits, these pentrals, so different from the other shades that he’d encountered during his quarter of a century. Most spirits that were left behind when one of the living passed on did so because of intense fear and desire: to shy from the unknown that lay ahead, to recover something that had been stolen from them in life, to haunt those that had done them wrong.

But these pentrals weren’t driven by the echoes of longing and fear. The longer they lingered without crossing over, the more they seemed to let go of who they were, what they had wanted in life. They yearned for light and freedom, for bright places far from heart-shaped lockets and panes of glass.

That was their tragedy and their curse: for what lamp stayed bright forever, and what really came after freedom?

Aviad sighed, looking sadly at the locket. However sympathetic he might be to its plight, Lorelei Hunt guarded this particular spirit with a fierce jealousy. The little effort it would take him to open the clasp would be painfully repaid a thousand times over.

His arafel spirit was twinkling even more fiercely now, swirling and swirling in the air above his finger on the locket. The mage barely glanced at it as he shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said, to the spirits both trapped and free. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t find freedom so easily, little spirit. Hunt isn’t about to forget what’s hers.”

She wasn't Hunt's, though. She didn't belong to her. The pentral had remembered herself all this time, despite the horrors wrought by the shell of herself.

He couldn't, he said.

You can, the pentral encouraged.

I won't possess you, she continued without a trace of irony. I won't get very far before I...

She hesitated. She wasn't sure what would happen. She wanted nothing, but she wanted the stars, the moon, the sun.  This existence measured by inches and marked by the slow thud of Lorelei's heart, held together by a golden hinge and clasp, her features fading, her hair a streak of rust, her wispy limbs forever curled; it wasn't an existence at all, and if he opened the locket, she might make it to the window, and she might not. Her time was running out.

She won't be able to trap me again.

The pentral understood this instinctively. A third attempt would be her last.

They were the breezy, fleeting hopes of a pentral. Airy and ephemeral; yet trapped in a prison of cold metal rather than a cloven pine. The little spirit might be hopeful, but Aviad held no fantasy that it could make a clean escape from Lorelei Hunt’s straining skeletal fingers. The sorceress would never let her little prisoner get away.

His arafel spirit was still jingling ferociously at him, unwilling to let go of the argument. Aviad pressed his mouth shut into a thin line, displeased.

He wanted to grab the persistent little ghost and shake it. Where do you think you two could fly off to that you think you could escape Lorelei Hunt? His little spirit refused to even leave its glass home when the smiling witch with the dead eyes was nearby. Arba hid under his shirt collar whenever she entered a room. Not even Tzippori ventured near her.

Under his finger, the metal of the locket felt too hot, too sharp.

Are you trapped or free?

A year ago, he wouldn’t have given a damn what any of the living thought about him aiding a spirit. He’d invited himself into funerary homes; helped the dead find freedom away from the living.

Six months ago, Lorelei Hunt’s threats wouldn’t have phased him. He’d broken the wards on her home to get her attention and summoned her a pentral with a candle flame. Even though it had felt then like he was handing over his soul too, all he’d intended to do was watch, wait, and learn.

Watch, wait, and learn. Find a way to escape from the fate that he’d sentenced himself to, all those years ago.

And yet, was he trapped or free?

The mage stood still for a long moment, his finger pressed tightly against the locket’s clasp. It would be easy enough to do it. Even if Hunt raged at him, what did he care? There were other pentrals to torture, other spirits to use in her planned ambush. She wouldn’t dare cross Tawse in his own sanctuary – or at least if she did, she’d pay some sort of price.

Suddenly, there was a loud clacking noise from near the door. Aviad looked up sharply; he could hear heavy footsteps in the hall.

Without a word, he jerked his hand away from the suspiciously warm bite of the locket. Arba was clambering across the floor, hurrying to safety. His own arafel spirit had already darted away in terror, racing to find refuge in its glass nazar charm.

By the time the door opened, the mage was already bent back over the mirror that lay flat on the table, grimacing as he rubbed as if at a crick in his neck.

Behind him, the locket hung alone on the wall, swinging ever so slightly, as if a faint draft had just barely kissed it.

She wasn't hers, the pentral told herself when Lorelei's cold hands plucked the locket from the wall. The thud-thud-thud of Lorelei's heart warmed the walls of the locket prison, and she thought of the ticking of the clocks in the house she'd once called home, and the way her footfalls had sounded out of rhythm when she'd walked down the corridor of stolen faces, her steps going thud-thud-thud, her heels hurting just because Lorelei wished to make an entrance.

Even then, even when she'd looked at the spirits trapped under glass and her eyebrows had twitched downward and her mouth had softened, she'd felt more sorrow than guilt. Her hand had clutched Lorelei's wand and her hand had wielded cruel magic but not her soul, not her will, not the very lack that had kept her from what she'd wanted in life. 

She wasn't hers, the pentral thought when Shadow Man watched the scrying mirror beside Lorelei. Did he remember her? Did he remember that he'd almost set her free? He needed to remember, because she couldn't promise she would. The warmth of the ritual candlelight kept drawing her against the hinge of the locket, a new bright thing competing with her memory of the burning cottage, and the more distant, hazy realization that that wasn't the first time a house had burned down around her.

She wasn't hers, the pentral clung onto her existence as Lorelei's skin and hair warmed underneath a brighter sun and the heat of a gentle breeze that felt as close to life as she could get. She shivered against the goosebumps of Lorelei's skin when the witch ventured again and again into the depths of the cold tailor shop where the whispering voices found her and told her secrets Lorelei would never know.

Where was she? One day Lorelei removed the locket from her neck and placed it on a thin, flat surface. Lorelei closed the paper walls until there was no light and no air. A talon scratched against the box and it wasn't Zee-por-ee! with the star for an eye, but a creature she'd used to love. The owl lifted the box with her in it and went to the window. Was this it? The world dropped out from under her and the sun felt so close and she was soaring, far away from Lorelei and the brother, away from Shadow Man and ara-fell, into the sky with the flapping of wings.

She wasn't hers! The beat-beat-beat of the wings faded to the back of her mind and she pushed her limbs against the locket and imagined that she were taking a flying leap into the lake and this moment was hers, the moment of suspension, the memory of Iona's laugh as she splashed and said she'd gotten there first.

Her cousin was always one step ahead of her. In life, in death.

As long as the pentral flew, she was free.