Darling Four
Warning: Contains Calamity’s Daughter spoilers!
Okay, so this is a real chapter. Like a real one that I plucked from the final draft because it just didn’t flow with the rest of the plot. But I thought it would be fun to show how the process of writing works for me. I won’t do many of these because they do contain spoilers, but this one gets special dispensation to live here now as a darling. Plus, there’s a little Rocky Horror Easter egg if you can catch it!
Charlie’s head broke the surface of the water. The air smelled musty and stale, and she couldn’t make out anything in the murky darkness. She might as well have been floating in space, but at least she wasn’t in that goddamn tunnel anymore, and she didn’t drown. Overall it felt like a win.
She swam forward blindly until her feet reached what felt like stairs. Fumbling, she managed to crawl up the steps like a bowlegged newborn deer. Perhaps it wasn’t her most graceful moment, but after a close brush with a watery grave, she was just grateful to be on land.
She tapped her phone with her finger to try to generate even a speck of light. It was dead. Honestly, it lasted longer than she had anticipated.
Her foot brushed against something that caused her to jump to her left and then step to her right. With her hands on her hips, she brought her knees in tight, hoping to avoid anything else in the chamber she couldn’t see. She exhaled the breath she held and waited for her heartbeat to steady.
With one last Hail Mary pass, she spread her fingers over the screen of her phone and concentrated. Gradually, tiny droplets pooled together under her palm, and the screen flickered back to life.
She clamped her lips tightly, impressed that it had actually worked. The small light from her phone lit up the chamber well enough for her to get her bearings. She spun on her heels and studied the area she had just climbed out of. It was another reflecting pool, or at least a small collection runoff from the one in the temple. The tunnel must have been used as a water lock — a tool to keep unwanted visitors from entering.
She doubted anyone other than a water whisperer would have been able to successfully navigate the tunnel. There wasn’t enough time for someone to hold their breath long enough to muscle the trigger that opened the entrance to this room. How she was going to get back through with the iron bars blocking her path she still hadn’t figured out, but maybe she could find her answer in this room.
She stood in a small chamber made from stacked stone walls. Rows of metal shelves had been roughly anchored into the stone and held glass jars — many of which were broken, their contents long since drained or eaten away by time.
Along the walls were torches that smelled heavily of oil — clearly the main source of light when the room was in use. But with the water blocking the flow of air, she would have to be quick if she burned them. The flame from a torch would eat away at whatever limited amount of oxygen was in the small space.
In the center of the room was a large workbench laden with sharp, sour-smelling herbs and papers that were faded yellow and crumbling. No one had been here for a long time. There were several wood crates stacked on top of each other in one corner. A few had broken down, and the studs that held the wood together lay corroded and rusted nearby.
Her fingers brushed against one of the cold torches, and she cursed herself for doing this alone. If she had brought Roan with her, it would have been easy to light a few at least. And she wouldn’t be shivering in her freezing damp dress. She didn’t dare try to peel the water away from the fabric. To dry something that size would take a large amount of her reserves, and she didn’t want to be caught without her powers on the way back.
Charlie scanned the room for anything that might help her light the torches and found two specks of flint on top of the papers on the workbench. She was never much for outdoor survival skills but decided to give it a shot. After a few attempts, she managed to get the rhythm down well enough to create a few flashes in the dark.
She held the flint up toward the torch. It erupted in flames, bathing the room in a soft glow. If she hadn’t been entirely creeped out by her surroundings, it might have almost been cozy. But the cobwebs that covered nearly everything, plus the fact that the room appeared to have been abandoned in a rush, made her wary.
She removed the torch from its holder and lit a few others, but she set a timer for 15 minutes on her phone. She didn’t want to be caught without oxygen again. Nearly drowning was enough for one day when it came to close calls.
She peered over the documents that lay on the table. They were written in a script she still couldn’t read, but she was at least familiar with enough to know what it was: ancient Fomorian. And just like that, the room and the tunnel and the whole setup made sense.
This place must have belonged to Roan’s father.
But, like Roan, his powers only allowed him to control fire. There must have been some other secret to getting through the reflection pool that Charlie didn’t know about.
Her eyes widened. Maybe this is what Aonghus had meant when he said that the bag was at White Stag but not in White Stag. Though this room was still technically on White Stag grounds, she doubted that anyone but Aonghus had ever entered it before.
She scanned every shelf and turned over every crate, searching for the Crane bag. There was nothing in this room but a few rusted bolts and various tarnished weapons, including several daggers and a sword. No sign of a spear, but that would have been too much to ask. It was an odd place to stash outdated weaponry. Still, from Charlie’s understanding, Aonghus was an odd guy who enjoyed collecting.
She cast her eyes around the room, searching for anything she missed, and her eyes landed on a large archway wth a heavy wooden door. With a groan, she went to inspect it.
There was no handle or lock. Nothing on the door allowed for it to be opened easily, because why would it? Charlie was starting to regret coming down here in the first place. She had no idea how long she had been gone and doubted very much that she had cell service in this chamber. There was no way for her to contact anyone, including Roan, to let him know she was okay.
Another loose prayer spilled from her lips that whatever rabbit hole she was about to dive down would at least be the last one, and quick.
She looked back toward the door. On the stone floor in front of it, below her feet, were three tiles, each carved with a different symbol: the runes for life, energy, and heart.
Her forehead cinched together as she repeated the words to herself. Nothing. She sank down, a puff of dust pluming around her teeth chattering from her cold, damp dress. She traced a finger over each rune.
There had to be something she was missing. Suppose her assumption was correct, and this was Roan’s father’s hideaway. Maybe the tiles held a personal meaning for him — Aonghus did have three children, after all. Could the three stones be related to their specific abilities? To her knowledge, Finn didn’t know he had powers until after Aonghus died, but without anything else to go on, she thought she would give it a shot.
Life must have been Finn’s tile. But no, Finn’s power was healing, not life. Charlie tipped her head back as an idea formed. It wasn’t a pleasant one, but this whole situation had been one unpleasant event after the other.
She got up and grabbed a dagger from the floor. Hovering over the tile, she pressed the dull, rusty blade into her fingertip, hoping she’d gotten her last tetanus shot on schedule. A few drops of her blood fell onto the tile.
She had no idea what she was doing, and spilling her own blood on the floor in the hope that it might make a door move felt ridiculous. But what was there to do but keep going?
Heart, the tile on the far right, was easy to figure out. She couldn’t help but smile as she thought about Roan, whom this tile clearly represented. He was nothing but heart. She grabbed one of the torches off the wall and placed it, still burning, over Roan’s tile.
Two down, one more to go, she thought as she chewed on her bottom lip. The next one would be tricky. Blood and fire were surprisingly easy — assuming she was on the right track — but creating electricity from scratch was going to be more complicated.
The timer on her phone screeched through the otherwise silent room. She jumped at the sound and then grimaced. Her phone would have to be sacrificed after all. She really hoped she didn’t need it on the way back.
With both eyes squinted shut, Charlie dropped the phone to the ground and slammed her foot down on it. She winced as the glass shattered and popped beneath her foot. That was going to suck to replace.
She bent down and shook off the glass shards before yanking the battery out from the back. She paused and held the battery in her hand for a brief moment of silence for her phone’s gallant sacrifice. Carefully, she placed the metal dagger — still glazed with her fresh blood — over the tile and went to retrieve another one from the pile of loose weapons. She positioned it so that the tips of both daggers pointed toward the center of the tile. She really didn’t want to do the next part.
Inhaling deeply, she placed the terminals on the battery on each dagger. A jolt ran through her the moment the battery touched the metal, simultaneously burning and numbing her arm. Smoke poured from the batter as it overheated and shorted out. She couldn’t hold it any longer and dropped it.
A grinding noise shook the chamber, and Charlie’s eyes went wide. She had done it. She had been right — but what a bizarre way to open a door. For the life of her, she did not understand how Aonghus would have opened it himself, not to mention how he had created it to begin with. But she passed the test. Hopefully, she would be rewarded for her efforts before the torches consumed the last of the oxygen in the room and she died from hypoxia.
A heavy mist poured in from the black space that replaced the door. Charlie watched dubiously as it filled the chamber. This was probably a bad idea.