Bel had wanted to loiter for longer with Beth and Crecerelle, but Jan couldn’t wait to get back to his wounded fox and Bel was more than a little worried about Dutcha’s state. After another round of hugs and best wishes, she continued her descent with Manipule and Orseis. They were oddly cheerful, Bel thought.

  “This could be a disaster,” Bel said, breaking their cheerful silence. “Dutcha is a spirit of chaos, and she seemed really pissed that I left.”

  Orseis waved a tentacle. “Oh, come on. Lempo has plans, right? She wouldn’t let Dutcha get out of hand.”

  Manipule tilted her head. “I’m sure–”

  The rock wall next to them exploded, interrupting Manipule mid-sentence.

  The head of a giant serpent emerged, followed by two more.

  They hissed loudly and then went silent as they stared at Bel with wide, reflective eyes.

  “Oh,” Bel said. One of the serpents was bright pink. Bel knew what that meant.

  “Hi, Dutcha.”

  “Hi!” the serpent replied. She grinned cheerfully. “Where did you run off to?”

  “Yessss,” hissed a second, dark green head. “You ruined our plansss! I should eat you!”

  “That isssn’t the plan either,” hissed the third, coal black snake. “We need to follow the plan.”

  “The plan isss ruined!” the green one moaned.

  The pink serpent – as wide around as Bel’s shoulders – twined around Bel’s legs and looked her in the eye.

  “Where did you go, daughter? I was very upset. Do you know how long I’ve waited for this?”

  “Yesss!” hissed the coal black snake. “Our plan! It wasss perfect!”

  The green one glared at Bel menacingly. “But now the portal is closssed! Unmoored! Loossst!”

  “I, uh, I got a key from some people.”

  Bel tried to gesture at her travel box, but she’d been wrapped up by the three Dutchas and could only squirm.

  Manipule pulled the box from Orseis’ grip and popped the top open, quickly pulling out the small pyramid.

  The serpents snaked their heads around, examining the object from multiple angles.

  “Could work,” the coal black one said.

  “Maybe,” the green one agreed.

  The pink one squeezed Bel with excitement, popping a few of her joints. “Yay! Let’s pull ourselves together and try it out!”

  The serpents grew close to one another and, like soap bubbles suddenly merging, they became one thicker, even more menacing serpent. The dangerous spirit looked Bel over. “I have some words for you, young miss. We don’t have time to waste though.”

  The spirit opened her mouth wide and her body grew squat and fat. She lunged forward, snapping her maw closed around Bel, Orseis, and Manipule, as well as the ground beneath them. They lurched and there was a sudden flipping of stomachs.

  “Did she jump?” Orseis asked frantically as they began to tumble around Dutcha’s interior.

  “Dutcha! We can’t survive this kind of fall!” Bel screamed.

  A bright, shining face formed on the ceiling, watching as Bel and her companions bounced around. “We need to rush! Don’t worry, you’re tough, I’m sure you’ll be fine!”

  “Dutcha!”

  The face disappeared, plunging them back into darkness. The space lightened quickly after that, and Bel saw that the spirit’s body around them was turning transparent. No, Bel realized, she was turning into air.

  The wind howled, and the three mortals found themselves caught in a swirling gale that pulled them along as easily as a storm carried rain. Bel couldn’t see anything, but from the time that passed, she assumed that they weren’t going to violently splatter all over the bottom of the pit.

  She could see her companions as they were whipped around, Orseis a terrified shade of white and Manipule clutching desperately to Bel’s travel box, but the wind drowned out any attempt at speech. She resigned herself to her fate, closed her eyes, and tucked in her snakes as she waited for Dutcha to let them go.

  It happened abruptly, and Bel once again found herself rolling across the floor. She stood up, dirty, sore, and tired.

  She was back at the giant room that had once held the portal, although now the flat-topped pyramid was empty. It had also been smashed to pieces.

  “She must have been angry,” Bel said.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “You bet I was angry!” Dutcha rumbled from multiple bodies. Bel saw that the spirit had literally fallen into pieces. A hundred bodies of different colors and substances crawled, swam, and flew through the cavern. They were combining into a growing mass at the center.

  As Dutcha’s body grew, so did her frown, and Bel worried that whatever plan she had ruined wouldn’t be so easily fixed.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” demanded the spirit.

  “No,” Bel replied. “You guys never told me the plan.”

  “We never…”

  The spirit vibrated and outgassed a cloud of small, agitated spirits of flame and darkness.

  “Oh, you’re right!”

  Having apparently cast out her negative emotions, Dutcha brightened like sun and she laughed out loud. Bel and her companions stood to the side as the noxious spirits rushed past.

  “You’re right! Well, that was silly of us. It was Lempo’s idea though, so I guess I’m mad at her.”

  The spirit laughed and lifted the pyramid key. “This little thing will open up one of the other portals that Technis stashed away in here, but I don’t know where they go.”

  Bel lifted her eyepatch and looked around the room. She had bumped into a small stone structure during her disastrous fight with Technis, and now she saw that it wasn’t alone. The space was filled with small shrines and temples, and many of them had the tell-tale rainbow lights arcing out of them that indicated a potential portal in her vision.

  “I can check them out,” Bel offered. “The spirit in my eye gives me an idea of where they’re going.”

  “Great,” said Dutcha. “Check them out quickly though. Technis took his power source with him, so I’m going to have to do all the ripping apart of reality by myself. There’s still some lingering turbulence from the last portal, so the faster we go the easier it’ll be.”

  Bel ran around the room like a lost tourist, glancing in every direction as she attempted to find something that she wouldn’t recognize until she saw it. Some of the shrines looked too similar to the teleporters that she had already used – they only lead to somewhere else on Olympos. She glanced at the smashed pyramid and wished that Dutcha hadn’t broken it.

  Wishing for the spirit of chaos to be mindful would be asking for too much, probably.

  Bel finally found something with an aura of unseeable colors and impossible angles. It was a small temple with a couple of pillars with tops crafted into the shape of wide leaves. The outer stone of the temple was decorated with a colorful motif of people doing things and offering their labor to a people in tall hats.

  There were lots of tall hats in the art, actually.

  “Now I wish I listened to my brother when he talked about Old World fashion.”

  “What?” Manipule asked from Bel’s elbow.

  “I’m trying to figure out if this goes to the Old World. I assume that the pictures on the outside – oh, I can just call him!”

  Bel reached up and wrapped her fingers around the golden cuff that decorated her ear. James’ rushed voice answered immediately.

  “Bel? Is everything okay? Did you fight Technis?”

  “He got away.”

  She opened her mouth to explain, but she unexpectedly found herself choking up.

  “I’m going to leave through a portal. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back.”

  “I know. We already talked about it.”

  “I just want to you know that–”

  “Is this it?” Dutcha asked loudly. “Can I start? You know I’m basically going to be reduced to a lump of rock after this, right? If I run out of energy partway through, the whole thing will collapse and we’ll end up super dead.”

  “What was that?” James asked.

  “Dutcha is telling me to hurry, I think.”

  “You think? I’m obviously telling you to hurry!”

  Bel glanced over to see a swirling storm of angry sleet and stone. She turned back to the small temple. “So, um, what kind of hats do they wear in the Old World?”

  “What?” James asked.

  “Who cares!” Dutcha yelled.

  “I need to know this goes to the Old World,” Bel explained, “but I can’t read anything on this temple. There are a bunch of people in weird, tall hats though.”

  She could hear James sighing. “Any other clues? Animals maybe?”

  Bel quickly looked over the carved stone. “There are some people with animal heads. That doesn’t really sound like the Old World.”

  Bel frowned with disappointment. She would have to keep looking.

  “No,” James said, “people with animal heads were common in Old World religion.”

  “Really?” Bel asked.

  “Yeah. I always thought they were made up, but after coming here I don’t know.”

  “There are some people with bird heads,” Bel said. “They’re also wearing hats.”

  “What’s the writing look like? Is it pictures, or does it use symbols like the languages you know?”

  Bel looked at the complicated drawings. “Pictures, I guess. Snakes and sandals and water. More birds. Some bowls.”

  “It could be from Egypt.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a really old civilization.”

  “From the Old World?”

  “Where else?”

  “So should I try it?”

  Dutcha had apparently had enough of their talking. She stormed between the temple’s pillars and into the interior. A moment later, light flooded out. Bel covered her eyes to shield them from the intense rainbow of colors.

  “I think I have to go, James. Dutcha opened it.”

  “Be careful. Remember all those things I told you. And say hi to my parents!”

  “I will. I love–”

  Her words were interrupted by an eruption of hands from the interior of the temple.

  “Let’s go, kids!”

  Bel tried to resist, but Dutcha plucked her from the ground and hauled her towards the brightly glowing orb in the center of the temple.

  The spirit’s disembodied voice echoed from the storm. “Listen, Bel. I’m going to be completely drained from this. You’ll have to carry me around until you find something powerful to recharge me.”

  “Carry you around?” Bel asked, incredulous.

  “Yup. I’ll just be a lump. You need to find a big source of essence and throw me at it.”

  “But–”

  “Now let’s go!”

  Dutcha threw the Bel and her companions into the portal and dove in after them. Bel cursed loudly while Orseis shrieked with glee.

  The world squeezed Bel like a fruit. If any kind of normal physics existed in the strange between space, she thought she would throw up. Instead, she felt incredibly wrong but didn’t have a body to do anything about it. The feeling persisted for a while, but, without a body to experience time passing, she wasn’t sure how much time actually passed. After what could have been a few seconds, or just as easily could have been a few days, she was vomited out onto a stone wall.

  Orseis and Manipule, along with her wooden travelling box, slammed into her backside.

  Bel groaned and her snakes hissed and she turned around. Then a rock hit her in the head. She almost kicked it with anger, but one look at the rainbow-hued stone told her that it was her spirit mother, reduced to a mere rock the size of her thumb.

  Bel quickly picked up the precious stone and made a space for it in the metal of her armor, over her heart. She put it into place like an out of place decoration.

  “Where are we?” Orseis asked.

  Bel shrugged. “Some place called Egpyt, I think.”

  They were in a short, narrow hallway with more of the Egpytian writing and pictures on the walls. The writing on this side was faded, and the paint was mostly gone, but it looked similar enough to Bel. She looked up and was surprised to see that the building didn’t have a ceiling. Instead, the hallway was inside of another, larger structure with strangely smooth walls.

  “Well, I guess that we’ll have to explore. If Technis is causing trouble somewhere, then he shouldn’t be hard to find.”