“And this is exactly why I can’t stay here,” she thought.

  “This is why I have to find the answer in the book.”

  “To move out, to help grandma, to take care of Mister Scuttles – everyone’s depending on me.”

  She grabbed her copy of Magical Places and Where to Find Them and with a warrior-like determination proceeded to her room. She went through the hallway then up the stairs whereupon her “father” magically made his entrance on the bottom of the staircase after her ascent.

  “Zoe!! Zoe!!”

  The warrior continued moving forward and with a child-like dependence hoped he did not purse her. His words receded to the background as she entered her room and locked the door. She also tried to bar him from her thoughts.

  However the vague-emotional apphrenhension persisted that this was not her room. Not her space. She kept dwelling on how a 14-year-old is supposed to provide for themselves, where alarm signals really go, and who invented the concepts of rent and private-property in the first place.

  She felt physically sick though also numb, tired, and hypervigilant.

  She layed down into her bed and doved back into the book Zack had brought her. She felt like it contained almost a secret mystical energy of sorts though when she tried to read its contents it felt rather dry and boring – as if the secrets of the universe were locked away behind these at times analytical and wall-of-texts entries and she lacked the key unfasten this abrasive and barring lock.

  She put two fingers to her temple, trying to focus, but she could still feel her nerves and the uncertainity of the world all around her.

  She searched for the letter “M” category and then “D.” The book in encyclopedia format had its entries alphabetisized.

  “What if Zack is right?” Zoe’s thoughts drifted off again. “What if it is a real place? What if this is the wrong book for me?”

  She interrupted her search looking through the entries in the book to observe the front cover. There was a fanatastical picture. It showed a series of mountains with islands floating above them. Huge and thick roots of foilage and fauna descended into spirals surrounded by mists from the bottoms of the floating islands to the tops of the winter-scaped mountains. It all looked so mystical, like one big mystical-ecosystem, like the self-enclosed worlds in glass-bottle terrariums – nature had creeped-in into a manmade artiface, found an equilibrium, then asserted a muted dominance that left one in wonder at the mysterious-and-magical outgrowth.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Zoe had not noticed it at first, having been so enraptured in the worlds-above and worlds-below but in the foreground of the picture was a small forest with a cutout village dwelling squarely in the center. She could not but help but wonder if this was a world of peace, as she secretly hoped it was such a place.

  “I hope the villagers are happy.” She sighed.

  She did not know what to do or how to proceed. The cover felt like it had no answers for her yet called to her. The contents of the book meanwhile felt impenetrable, were assumed to have the answers, and yet did not interest her.

  She forced herself to scroll through the book once more, now under the category “B.”

  “Barnacle Bay,” caught her eye. “Home of the world’s first talking sponge and world’s smartest starfish.”

  That was not it – though it seemed oddly familiar.

  Zoe skipped ahead to read the end of the entry, “published in 1907 in the Elias Chronicles by Roger Sherpader.”

  “Nope that’s not it.” She said under her breath.

  Zoe skipped forward a few more pages in the book. She was back in the “D” section though she felt like she had perused it thoroughly with enough focus to consider it read…

  She forced herself to read it more thoroughly this time.

  “Damnation Park? – Nope.”

  “Dominion Orowvora? Nope, but it sounded super interesting.”

  “Duertermy Zigla? … I don’t even know how to pronounce that!”

  She sighed again. Zoe was what you might call a notorious mis-pronouncer. Her first week of high-school she had accidently while reading to the class mispronounced “organism” as “orgasm” – which of course sounded wrong to her but, “hey, it’s a textbook” she reasoned – and lets just say. She kept to herself more so than usual after that cheek-blushing incident and she made “friends” through osmosis like Zack.

  Zoe violently flipped a big chunk of the book. “Stupid ‘doer-thermal’,” she mumbled.

  She found herself in the “T” section.

  “Taratarus – a pit in the afterlife regions of the ancient Greeks. It was believed to house the profane elements of the Kosmos, compared with the Elysian Fields which gave remembrance to the sacred, and spiritual gaeity.”

  She continued reading the entry, “The contemporary gods of ancient Greek cults cast the previous generation of divine beings into this realm. The first written record, now extant, is mentioned in Tacitus which cites clay tablet from 907 B.C., itself attributed to the mathematician, poet, and craftsman Heiphastous of Zagria.”

  “Ughh, no.”

  “I hope the people of Zagria lived peaceful and happy lives,” she stubbornly thought as she clo

  sed the book with a hard thump.