Neal turned to Eric. “Did you see that? They’re afraid of Ko. They must be working for him”
Eric nodded. “As usual, Ko has bad guys all over Droon. These guys don’t want to anger him by opening the pouch before he does.”
“Which may mean he’s coming for it,” said Neal. “Maybe he’s coming for it soon.”
The thought made Eric shiver. Did Emperor Ko really think the treasure would magically unite the sons of Zara? Had he known that the blue snowflake would bring Galen up north? Did he suspect that Sparr would turn up there, too?
And what of Urik, the eldest of Zara’s sons? He was trapped in the past of the Upper World. How could he possibly appear after so long? It wasn’t even certain he was alive.
Was the prophecy nonsense?
Or was it Ko’s most evil trap ever?
“We need it back,” said Neal.
“But how?” asked Eric. “There are six of them, plus who knows how many others nearby. We have to look before we leap.”
Neal turned to him. “Or the other way around. I may be a genie, but I’m still me. What would Neal do in a situation like this?”
Eric thought for a moment, then smiled. “Create an outrageous distraction?”
“While you grab the treasure!” said Neal.
Eric grinned. “So how Nealish are you feeling today?”
“Very,” Neal said. Then, taking handfuls of snow, he bolted up out of hiding and shouted, “Who wants a snowball fight?”
The ice warriors turned in shock.
“No one?” said Neal. “Then I’ll start!” And he hurled snowballs like a machine gun.
At the same time, Eric leaped from his hiding place, dived at the treasure, and snatched it from them.
Shrieking, the thieves jumped at Eric.
But Neal was ready for them. “Wait. Have more genie treats!” Conjuring fireballs from his fingers, he tossed them at the ice creatures. They shrieked and fled into the snow.
“Eric, run!” he said. “I’ll chase them!”
Neal whooped loudly, flinging fireballs at the Yugs’ feet over and over, chasing them from drift to drift until they disappeared into the storm.
“Thanks, Nealie,” whispered Eric.
Then he looked down. The treasure pouch sat unopened in his hands.
He realized he was trembling. Could the strange snowflake actually unite the wizards? Could it find Sparr? Could it find Urik, the most mysterious of Zara’s sons?
Eric had a fleeting memory of Urik’s smile as the two had soared across rooftops to escape a band of creepy goblins. Urik said he simply imagined himself a bird, and he flew.
As it turned out, Urik had flown right out of their lives — into a whirling time tunnel, not to be seen again.
If the prophecy could come true, Eric had to make sure it was safe. Slowly, he pulled the pouch open, knowing he was doing what the icemen had refused to do.
He put his hand into the pouch, closed his fingers over the treasure, and pulled it out.
He gasped. “What?”
It was not the blue snowflake.
What lay in his palm was the size and weight of the snowflake, but was no more than a plain round disc, flat, shiny, and colored a bluish white. In its center was a small blue knob or button. And instead of twelve crystalline points, it bore twelve black marks around its edge. It looked like a dial or the face of a cheap clock.
Eric fell to his knees. “No, no, no!” he gasped. “Where is the snowflake? How could the Yugs have switched it? What is this thing? What about the prophecy?”
Then the noise came again.
Tap … slish … tap … slish …
Listening, Eric wrapped the pouch on his belt again. Then, bracing himself with Galen’s staff, he rose to his feet.
The air was quiet. He listened.
Tap … slish …
Eric turned. “What is that?”
The sound faded away. Then another sound came. It was close by.
Erch … erch … erch!
It was the ice beneath his feet. It moved.
“Uh … I think I need to get off this ice,” he said to himself. “But which way is which? They all look the same!”
Then he heard a voice that sounded very much like Galen’s.
… left … move left … three paces. Then turn right … five short steps … turn twice, crouch, and leap … leap …
“Wait!” said Eric. “Galen, is that you?”
Do what I said….
“But it’s too complicated. Say it again?”
Left three paces, the voice repeated.
He stepped left. “Okay …” he whispered.
Then right. Five short steps.
“How short?” asked Eric.
Short! said the voice. Turn twice …
Eric did that, then halted. He found himself standing at the edge of a chasm deeper than any he had ever seen.
“This doesn’t look safe. Should I go back?”
No. You should leap.
“Leap? That’s crazy. It’s a bottomless pit!”
Trust me. And do it soon. They’re after you.
“After me? Who’s after me?”
All at once, Eric heard the cry of Yugs closing in behind him. “Ayeee!”
So are you going to leap?
“I guess I am!” said Eric.
Closing his eyes and holding tightly onto Galen’s staff, he leaped into the chasm.
Faster and faster and faster he dropped, until the darkness around him was no more than a blur.
Still clutching Galen’s staff, Eric fell and fell and fell into the black chasm. The deeper and faster he fell, the more he felt as if he weren’t actually falling so much as moving sideways or floating backward or drifting suspended in midair.
Time and time again, he tried to open his eyes, but wind was rushing too fiercely into his face. Finally, he forced one eyelid open.
“Are you kidding me?” he cried aloud.
He was not falling at all. He was moving forward through the air, no longer in a dark chasm, but in daylight, high in the air, and he was sitting in an elaborate leather saddle on the back of … of … of a giant flying creature.
A giant blue flying creature.
“The serpent!” he shouted. “The blue serpent! It’s real. Holy cow. It’s real! And I’m riding it!”
The serpent’s neck arched up and down slowly as its great webbed wings rose and lowered in a slow, regular rhythm. And what at first looked like hinges or braces on the serpent’s body, Eric decided was armor.
Clenching his knees tightly to the serpent’s body, Eric looked down. Cold wind rushed against his face as he spotted a tall, broad hill surrounded by several smaller hills. In the distance, a great blue sea stretched far out to the horizon. With a certainty he could not explain, he knew the place below was his own town.
“So … this is my world?” he gasped.
It was his world!
The Upper World!
“But … how is it possible? My world doesn’t have serpents —”
The serpent only cooed in response as if it were singing. “Roooo-ooooo!”
Below him he made out the houses and streets of his neighborhood.
“Woo-hoo!” he hollered. With a gentle nudge of his heels, he made the serpent loop over his house. He thought he saw a tiny figure in his yard waving up at him! Then the serpent circled over Neal’s and Julie’s rooftops. He laughed at the top of his lungs.
“This is amazing!”
“Roooo-ooooo!” the serpent cooed, louder than before.
As he petted the serpent’s massive neck, he saw that its skin was covered with innumerable rows of scales the size and shape of snowflakes. His heart trembled inside him.
Then the serpent went up and up and did not stop climbing. No matter how often Eric nudged its sides, the serpent rose through the clouds toward a tunnel of dark air he had not seen before.
“Wait!” Eric shouted. “Turn back —”
> Before he knew it, a storm surrounded them. Soon they were twisting and turning out of control. Thunder boomed. Lightning crashed all around. The serpent howled and swooped to avoid the jagged spears of light.
When lightning blazed, Eric spied vast ice fields and wastelands of snow. Towering mountains loomed over great frozen lakes.
“Droon?” he gasped. “Are we in Droon now? But how …? Oh! We entered the passage!”
All of a sudden, a bolt of lightning shot down at him. He pulled the reins to try to turn the serpent, but there was no time. The searing flash struck the creature’s neck, causing a deep wound, red and raw. It was exactly the size and shape of the snowflake treasure.
The treasure that was now gone.
“No!” cried Eric as the serpent faltered.
Then, instead of feeling alive and yielding, the creature’s hide stiffened. The saddle was changing beneath Eric. The serpent’s wings grew hard, immovable. What was happening?
Eric couldn’t control the creature.
“Serpent!” he called out. Instead of its musically soothing voice, a mighty growl filled his ears. And the serpent was falling.
“We have to land!” Eric gasped, tugging on the reins as he had before, but to no effect.
The serpent fell, fell, fell, and just before it struck the ground, Eric saw everything dissolve — the serpent, the storm, Droon, everything — as if he had woken from a dream.
“Huh?” he gasped.
He was somewhere else. In darkness.
He lay in darkness.
Where was he?
Eric didn’t know. Flexing his legs and arms, he realized he was lying on cold, hard ground. Was it the bottom of the chasm? Was it a cave of some kind? He rose to his feet.
“Hello?” he whispered.
There was no echo. He decided he must be in a small space. An inside space.
Slowly, he put his hand up. His fingers touched the ceiling. It was flat and smooth.
So … he was in a room?
“Of all the crazy things —”
There is a door….
“What?” said Eric. “Who said that? Is somebody there?”
Me, as usual.
“And just who are you?”
Do you always have to argue? All I’m saying is that … there is a door…. Bye.
“Wait! Hello?”
There was no response.
Eric took a step. A gust of air moved across his face like a dry, thin scarf.
“A door?” he murmured. “Too weird.”
Then he remembered Galen’s staff. He felt around on the floor until he found it. Grasping it tightly in both hands, he uttered a few words the wizard had taught him, and — fwoosh! — the staff lit up.
So he was in a room, and the room was small, but he felt strangely drawn to the wall on his left. Like the others, it was gray and solid and frosted with ice.
And yet … there was something about it.
No sooner had he set a hand upon it than he saw lines swimming across the wall in filigree patterns, twisting, turning, and looping back on themselves.
As Eric watched, all the lines came together into the outline of a low, round-topped door.
He trembled when he recalled the wizard’s words — “Oh! Light!” — and his strange last look at him.
Then, all of a sudden, Eric’s fingers sank into the rock and he fell headlong through the solid wall.
Eric fell past the thick icy wall and into a space as blue as the evening sky.
He staggered but stayed on his feet, and was stunned at what he saw.
It was another room, but a room as enormous in size as it was impossible. The walls were several stories high and tapered to a rounded peak, as if he were standing inside a giant dome. Eric knew that the walls were hewn from ice, yet they were pearly smooth to the touch.
Overhead, innumerable jewels, crystals, lights — things — twinkled across the ceiling’s broad blue surface like stars.
When Eric took a step, the room hummed, as if the air itself were musical and his movement set it humming.
“Where am I —”
Swit! Swit! Swit! A bird — no, two birds — no, three birds! — glistening with crystalline wings swooped and banked around the ceiling, then settled into the limbs of a great tree he had not noticed before but that rose from floor to ceiling in the room’s distant center.
As Eric approached the tree, it seemed to come nearer to him with each step, so that even though at first it seemed far away, in a very few steps, he was standing by its trunk.
“Okay, this is weird,” he said.
The tree was leafless and sculpted, Eric imagined, of ice. But it was so intricate and detailed that its limbs, branches, and even twigs quivered from the movement of the bird’s flight as if the tree were as impossibly alive as the birds.
“The enchanted room!” he whispered, afraid to raise his voice over the sound of the room’s music. “I’m in the enchanted room the snowfolk told us about. But how could I be here? I fell through the ice miles from Krone. Did I fall so far? Have I actually found it? But … how is it possible …?”
“A question I ask myself, too!” said a voice.
Eric whirled on his heels to see a blue-cloaked figure sitting cross-legged on the ground behind him. When the figure raised his head, Eric saw that it was Galen himself!
“Galen!” he exclaimed. He was sure he had passed the very same spot but had seen no one there. “But … how … I just …”
“I know,” said the wizard. “I think you’ll find that we keep moving around, much faster than is possible — oh, here we go!”
And suddenly, both he and Galen were sitting on a stout branch of the tree. It reminded Eric of the apple trees in his yard at home — trees that his dream vision had shown him only minutes before.
He blinked. “Where exactly are we?”
“I wonder,” said Galen. “I fell through that wall — you saw me — and I ended up here. If you started from even farther away and fell here, too, all I can say is that this room truly is enchanted.”
Eric smiled. “All roads lead to the enchanted room?” he said.
“Something like that,” said the wizard, who was holding a scroll that seemed to be made — like everything else — of ice.
“What’s that?” Eric asked.
“A strange tale,” said Galen, “of a poor young man who suffered a terrible accident and cannot remember his past. I found it in this room. These few words are all he was able to recall of his life before his memories left him completely. Touch it.”
Eric obeyed, and at once he became aware of an odd sensation. The scroll seemed as alive as if he were holding the hand of the one who wrote it.
“Is it the story of the serpent master?” asked Eric. “I had a dream that I was riding the serpent. There was a terrible storm, and the serpent was struck by lightning. It lost a scale.”
“The scale you have in your pouch right now,” said the wizard.
Eric’s throat thickened. Galen had to know about the treasure. How it was switched. Gone. How he had lost it. Slowly he opened the pouch. He removed the plain blue disc and held it to Galen. He swallowed. “The treasure —”
“Is safe,” said the wizard. “Well done.”
“But —”
“Promise me you will keep it safe,” said Galen.
What? thought Eric. Could Galen not see what lay in his hand? But when Eric held up the disc, the clock face, the numbered dial — it was a blue snowflake once again.
“Strange to have lost a part of itself,” said the wizard. “Almost as if the serpent were not so much alive as …”
Galen trailed off, then opened the scroll and ran his fingers slowly over the words as he spoke. “The serpent master’s words are sad,” he said. “Listen. ‘A storm. Lightning. I could not control her.’”
“Her?” asked Eric.
“I take him to mean the serpent,” said Galen. He went on, “ ‘I fell through the sky, my h
ead wounded in the crash, remembering nothing of my life. I wandered this world for ages, my past a darkness to me, until I sensed her again in the far north. I found her below the ice. I made a home for the little ones. In exchange, they looked for her … treasure. Until it is found and the sky opens again, we cannot return home.’ ”
When Galen spoke, the room sang as if his words were notes plucked on an instrument. The song faded as his last words died away.
Eric breathed in deeply. “I think the serpent master sent me the dream and showed us how to find this room.”
“But why not the others?” said Galen.
“Maybe we’re the only ones who can help him return home,” said Eric.
Galen slid down to the floor and began to pace. “Yes. Yes. He entered Droon through the storm. The serpent was — and is — his only way back to his own world — your world, Eric. But without the treasure, they cannot return.” He turned to Eric.
“I fear these words could be the words of … could be my …” He paused, then spoke again. “These could be my brother’s words. Urik was in the Upper World the last we know. What if he lost his memory? What if the prophecy …” Galen went silent.
Eric’s heart thundered. The prophecy?
Yet as he stood beneath the lower branches of the tree and he looked straight through them to the underside of the dome, he felt something else.
Eric saw the three birds perched together on a high branch and, behind them, the room’s far ceiling twinkling with the light of innumerable stars.
Birds. Stars. Birds. Stars.
What came to him then was so simple and yet so extraordinary.
“Galen,” he said. “We know someone else whose words they could be. A man who lost his memory long ago. A man who wandered Droon for ages. Galen, the man who wrote those words could be the Prince of Stars!”
The old wizard gasped.
The Prince of Stars was a mysterious figure they had met once before in the far north. He was a man of clouded past. He had no memory. And he was accompanied by three birds.
“Yes!” cried Galen. “The Prince of Stars! Not Urik at all! The Prince of Stars!”
All at once, the birds began to sing, and the stars flashed. The entire room dissolved into a sparkling, whirling wind around the two wizards, and they found themselves on the stormy surface again.