Page 24 of Sinful Curses
“What if it’s an hourglass?” she whispered.
“What?” Elsa asked.
“We can’t open a portal out of this realm, and vampires can’t teleport here. Both things are done by immortals who can bend or manipulate time. It’s also a manipulation of physics, but I’m no expert in that. I do know we influence matter to open portals or teleport ourselves.
“When we do, we also manipulate time by moving from one place to another in a flash. While time remains consistent through all the realms, we create a hole through the fabric of time to get us from one place to another.
“What if this”—she waved a hand at the symbol—“is an hourglass? And here, in this town, is where the sand”—she pointed to the shaded area at the top of the figure eight—“has started running through it?”
“It’s a pretty shitty-looking hourglass,” Zeth said.
“Everything in this realm is shitty,” Orin retorted.
They looked dubious, but Elsa’s face started softening as her mouth parted. “But if it’s an hourglass, what do the arrows mean?”
“Another way to tell time was with a sundial,” Zeth said. “The symbol doesn’t look like a sundial, but it could be something like that.”
“If there was a clock around it, what numbers would the arrows be pointing toward?” Elsa asked.
Sahira imagined a clock surrounding the arrows in her head. “The one at the top is pointing toward the three, the one going through the middle would point toward the five and ten, and the arrow at the bottom is pointing toward the eight. I don’t think any of them would line up perfectly, though.”
“So, the arrows could represent all those different combinations of time,” Orin said.
“Oranyother combination,” Zeth said. “We have no idea how time runs here. It could be upside down, reversed, or completely different.”
“So, if it is an hourglass, the shaded area must represent the sand in it, but what does that mean?” Orin inquired.
“Maybe it means we’re heading toward the end,” Sahira suggested. But she had to add the other option, even if she didn’t like it. “Or we’re running out of time.”
She didn’t mean her words to sound so ominous, but they sure did.
“So does that mean there are other towns out there like this one?” Elsa asked. “With other hourglasses?”
“Maybe,” Sahira murmured. “Or maybe it all means nothing, and it’s not an hourglass. We’ve gotten as many answers here as in Belda’s town.”
Feeling disheartened and more irritated by this place, she broke away from the others. She strode across the dusty floor and beneath the archway to the main part of the library.
As she crossed the threshold, she stopped to take in the vast, three-story room so similar and different from where she’d worked in Belda’s town. There, thousands of books lined the shelves.
Here, the shelves were bare of anything but the dust coating them. The lights were the same, but no tables or chairs sat out for someone to relax in while reading near the windows.
Her eyes scanned the room as she strolled toward the main desk. She stopped there and rested her fingers on the only book in the room.
She recognized the tome immediately; it was the book where everyone in Belda’s town wrote their stories to prove they existed. It held the lives of the immortals trapped in the Cursed Realm.
Opening this book, she expected to see pages of different handwriting and assorted tales, but blank pages greeted her. She flipped through the entire empty book before closing it again.
“Anything?” Orin asked from behind her.
“No.”
He glanced around the massive, empty room before shaking his head. “We’ll leave here tomorrow.”
They had to keep going, but Sahira wasn’t ready to leave her newly found bed and shower. However, there was less here for them than in Belda’s town. Sure, there was water in the pub, and they’d discovered a small river behind the buildings, but the food supply was less, and they hadn’t come this far to stay here and rot.
“We should go back to the pub,” she said. “At least we can wash our clothes before leaving.”
Trying not to feel defeated, but unable to suppress her disappointment, Sahira followed the others outside. After exploring the pub last night, she hadn’t expected answers from this town either, but she was incredibly sick of dead ends.
