Aru and Mini held out their hands. In the center of their palms appeared a little blue tile shaped like a five-pointed star.
“This is a piece of home,” said the palace. “It will provide you with rest and shelter when you are in need. Granted, it cannot create an arena or training grounds like I can…but it can give you the part of me that matters most: protection.”
Aru curled her fingers around the tile, grinning. “Thank you, palace. It’s perfect!”
“I hope we won’t need to use it, but I’m glad we have it all the same,” said Mini.
More silver confetti rained in a happy shower from the ceiling. “Glad to be of service,” said the palace. “That is all I ever wanted.”
“Palace, what lies beyond this kingdom?” asked Mini. “We need to get to the hall where they keep the celestial weapons.”
“Ah! You need…a map!” said the palace excitedly.
“But maybe not one of those big road maps, though,” said Aru. “More like a pamphlet? Something small?” She had trouble reading maps. And she had even more trouble folding them up when she was done. Follow the lines! her mom used to scold. (But there were so many lines.)
“Ah, yes, of course! How efficient you are, my princess, how noble and precise are your manners!” creaked the palace. “Alas, I have failed you once more.” The walls cried silver rivulets again. “I have no pamphlet and cannot procure you such a thing, because I do not know what that is. However, I can tell you that what lies beyond is a place of sadness. For, you see, it is the Bridge of Forgetting. Only there might you find what you are seeking with the weapons. There is a reason why I have not disappeared: I am not yet forgotten. But I reside in the Kingdom of Death because I am not considered ‘true.’ I am myth. One day, perhaps, I too will cross the Bridge of Forgetting like so many other stories before me.”
Aru braced herself for more tears and rain, but the palace seemed oddly at peace with this statement.
“It is better, perhaps, to be thought of as a fiction than to be discarded from memory completely. If it is not too much to ask, would you think of me fondly every now and again?” The torches sputtered. “It makes a difference to me to know that every now and again I am remembered.”
Aru and Mini promised. Aru didn’t know how to embrace a palace, so she did the next best thing. She planted a kiss on her palm and pressed it to the wall. The palace shuddered happily. Mini did the same.
“Good-bye, good-bye, Pandavas! Do great things! Make good choices!” said the palace. The door swung shut. “And if you must forget me, at least do it with a smile.”
The Bridge of Forgetting
Once they had closed the door to the Palace of Illusions, a winding road stretched out before them. The sky was black, but it wasn’t nighttime. It was the flat darkness of a room with the lights off. Here, in the middle of myth and the Bridge of Forgetting, the landscape was different. Statues were half sunken into the earth. Tall white trees blocked their view of what lay ahead.
“I’m starving,” Aru moaned. “I shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream so fast. Do you have any more Oreos?”
“Nope. I gave the last one to Boo.” At the mention of their pigeon friend, Mini sighed and wiped at her eyes. “Do you think he’s okay?”
Aru wasn’t sure. The last time they’d seen him, he’d been knocked unconscious. That automatically said not okay.
“Even if he isn’t okay right now,” she told Mini, “we’re going to rescue him, and then he’ll definitely be okay.”
“I hope so.”
Two minutes later, Aru’s stomach grumbling had gone from a smattering of sound to giant, growling there’s-a-monster-in-my-belly-and-it-wants-to-eat-you noises. She pulled out the glowing ball and poked it. Was it edible?
“Borborygmi,” said Mini.
“Bor-bor what? Who’s a pygmy?”
“Your stomach sounds…they’re called borborygmi.”
“Did you get that from the wisdom cookie?”
“Nope. Medical textbook.”
“Mini, why were you reading a medical textbook…?”
“I like to.” She shrugged. “Bodies are so cool! Did you know that more than half of us is made of water?”
“Yippee,” said Aru. “Are we there yet?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Well, you’re the one who ate the wisdom cookie.”
“Like I said,” said Mini, clearly annoyed, “it only makes you wise until the thing you’re asking wisdom for is done.”
“Technically, we’re not done. We’re still questing, or whatever, through this place. Honestly, what’s the point of making us go through all this? Don’t the gods want the world to be saved quickly? This journey is more useless than a unicorn’s horn.”
Mini looked highly affronted. “What do you mean, useless? It wouldn’t be a unicorn without a horn. That’s what the word means! Uni, for one. And then corn for, you know, horn. One-horned.”
“Yeah, but they’re supposed to be all peaceful and nice. Why would a unicorn need a horn? What’s it do with it?”
Mini turned red. “I dunno. For shooting off magic and stuff.”
“Or they use it to maul things.”
“That’s horrible, Aru! They’re unicorns. They’re perfect.”
“Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.”
She, personally, did not trust anything that had a built-in weapon and claimed not to use it. Yeah, right.
“It’s so cold all of a sudden,” said Mini.
She was right. The temperature had dropped. Well, not dropped so much as fallen off a cliff and tumbled straight down.
Aru’s long-suffering Spider-Man pajamas did little to protect her. The wind blew through the cloth, chilling her skin. “Imagine having to live in a place like this,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’d have to pick your nose all the time just so that your boogers wouldn’t freeze into icicles and stab the inside of your nose.”
“Gross!”
The air felt tight. Not that stifled, staleness of the palace. It reminded Aru of how sometimes in winter it hurt to breathe because the air had become overly sharp and thin.
“Aru, look, it’s snowing!”
Aru craned her neck and saw blue-bellied clouds drifting above them. In slow spirals, white flurries fell to the ground.
A single white flake landed on her palm. It looked like a snowflake, down to the delicate lacework of ice. But it didn’t feel like snow. Even though it was cold.
It felt like a pinch.
Beside her, Mini winced.
The snow, or whatever it was, was beginning to fall harder. Now the flakes were hitting the ground. They didn’t melt.
As Aru watched the snow, she spotted a tall tree with hundreds of tiny mirrors for bark. Something slipped behind the trunk. A figure—pale and slim, with a cloud of frosted hair. But when she blinked, she couldn’t remember what she had seen.
“Aru!” called Mini.
She didn’t respond. Not because she hadn’t heard, but because she hadn’t realized Mini was talking to her.
For a second, she had forgotten that Aru was her name.
Panicking, Aru tried to rub the snowflakes off her arm and shake them out of her hair. Something about it was making her lose track of things she should remember. It wasn’t like snow at all. It was like salt thrown on a slug. Slowly dissolving what you were.
“Is it such a bad thing, children, to forget?” asked a voice from somewhere in front of them. “If you never remember, you never grow old. Innocence keeps you ageless and blameless. People are rarely punished for deeds they cannot recall.”
Aru looked up. The snowflakes now hung suspended in the air, a thousand white droplets. A man parted the droplets as if they were a giant beaded curtain. He was beautiful.
Not movie-star handsome, which was something else; this was a distant, unearthly beauty. The way you could watch a thunderstorm brewing across the ocean and find it lovely.
The man was tall and dark-skinned, his hair a shock of silver. His eyes were like blue chips of ice. His jacket and pants were an unnaturally bright shade of white.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Mini asked him. “If you did, I…I can’t remember….”