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MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

Amrita Berman, Director of the Society for the Protection of Natural Magic, was standing in the middle of the Museum of Natural Magic’s latest exhibit staring at a small, iridescent blue glass bottle inside a locked glass case. The bottle was still sealed.

This new exhibit paid homage to the ancient port of Alexandria, and the library that was once there. The room was enchanted with a storm-at-sea charm. Deep blue and gray clouds chased each other across the ceiling and around the walls. Every so often, but not so often as to diminish the effect, a violent streak of lightning slashed through the sky and then the floorboards rumbled with thunder. Fog drifted, seabirds shrieked and the occasional bursts of damp sea mist rounded out the atmospheric experience. Amrita flicked her wand at the ceiling to silence the special effects. She couldn’t think with all that thunder.

“Given the anomalies of the reading on the Ptolemaic glass vial, we didn’t think we ought to tamper with it.” Violetta Scalamandre had delivered this news with folded hands. She had the sweetest, most placid disposition. Probably because she was such an expert at passing the buck.

Amrita knew what Violetta had meant.

“This is far too much liability for our office to take on. It’s your problem now, Director.”

Inside the bottle there appeared to be a curled bit of parchment with smudges of faded ink. But Amrita knew with the anomalous reading of UF-7, the “message in a bottle” could be a ruse, a curiosity-killed-the-cat glamor specifically designed to tempt someone into cracking the seal. The bottle might contain any number of far more nefarious things. A curse. An angry djinn. The ghost of Cleopatra’s least favorite mother-in-law.

Or it might just be a garden variety case of “bad vibes.”

Amrita sighed and unlocked the case with her wand. She reached in and grabbed the bottle.

Violetta had knocked the ball into her court and, unless she wanted to hold up the opening of this whole exhibit—an exhibit she had been working for nearly a year to bring to fruition—she was going to have to open it.

According to the small plaque beside the display, the bottle had been found at the wreckage site of The Tufan, a small but legendary pirate ship, just outside the Alexandrian harbor. The exact date when The Tufan sank wasn’t clear, but it was right around the same time so many other ships were destroyed, and the harbor was set on fire. 48 BCE, during the siege of Alexandria, a date that had long been associated with the destruction of the great library.

Most of the items in this new exhibit had been gathered because of the research she and her staff had dedicated themselves to over the past year. Amrita dreamed of the day when she might be able to learn what had really happened on that fateful night in the past. And now, everything was set in motion. In just over a week, she would be sending two of her most trusted special agents back in time, to the weeks before one of the most devastating moments in magical history.

Of course, what she’d really wished was that she could go back in time to see it all for herself. But the Society would never risk sending its director through a time portal. It was just as well. She trusted the agents who were going. They weren’t merely colleagues; they were also her friends.

Will Porter was a half fae “porter” with the ability to open both regular and temporal portals and navigate ley lines. And Zani Marinescu was a magical archaeologist with expertise in obscure artifacts and arcane relics. The pair were made for this mission.

Aside from the opportunity to witness history, they’d been tasked with trying to save specific items. Amrita had labored over a laundry list of fabled texts they were hoping to pluck from the library before it burned. The trick was knowing which ones they could take without tampering with time. Their time travel wards would only allow them to do that which had already been done. Most of the allegedly lost items on Amrita’s wish list might never have existed. She was most interested in the Glass Atlas, a book that was mentioned often throughout history, but never confirmed by experts. Nobody official had documented or lain eyes on it for over two millennia.

Amrita shook the tiny glass bottle in her hand. The contents sounded dry, like paper. She held it against her cheek. No temperature anomalies either. The bottle felt cooler than room temperature. She touched the tip of her tongue to the glass. It tasted clean, if a bit salty. The bottle didn’t shock her. And it didn’t smell of anything.

There was nothing about it that would suggest anything evil.

No guts, no glory.

Amrita walked outside to the garden with the bottle, and crossed to a bistro table in the shade. After she sat down, she ran the tip of her wand around the perimeter of the seal, making up a charm as she did so. It wouldn’t stifle an evil entity, but it also wasn’t likely to antagonize one.

“Winds and wax and waiting years, Salt of glass and hidden tears, What was kept and left to be, Open now, remember me.”

She pressed her thumb over the seal and felt the waxy coating breaking. When she lifted her thumb, she knew it would fall away.

For a second she reflected on the fact that no one knew for sure who the 1st century BCE pirate Raya Tufan really was. For a moment, Amrita wondered if she was about to find out. She held her thumb on the seal for a second, then she released it.

It was anticlimactic. There was no burst of smoke or flash of fire. Not even a breath of mist. When she removed her thumb, she could see the bottle contained just what it had appeared to hold—a bit of rolled up parchment.

Sometimes a note was just a note.

Inside the glass, rolled into a tight cylinder and tied with a piece of waxed cord was a fragment of tightly rolled up papyrus that was the length of a gum wrapper. She tipped it out into the palm of her hand. It was yellowed at the edges, with brown spots and crystalized salt deposits. Carefully she unrolled it. The paper was stiff and deteriorating. Most of the right-hand side of the note was stained and eroded. It must have gotten wet at some point.

Amrita held a hand to her chest to try and slow her thundering pulse. She blinked a few times, before she was convinced that what she was seeing written before her was real.

What remained legible on the scroll was a note that was impossible. Not because of the test of time. But because it was written to Amrita, in her own handwriting.

She couldn’t deny it. She’d developed and perfected her own unique combination of print and cursive lettering in secondary school and never shaken. The flourishes on the letters l, y, w, z and capital A were unmistakable.

There’s been a necessary change of plans. You will accompany Will and Zani on the Alexandria mission.

Amrita stared at the note, trying to make sense of it.