“Duncan…” I said warningly. He winced, and slowly turned his head in my direction.

“Yes, Owen?” He said, feigning innocence.

“Mind if I borrow that for a second?” I held out my hand toward the book, then switched tactics and stood, I took it from his hand when he started protesting. I looked at the book, flipped through a few pages, then went back to the cover to see if the “THE HERMIT” was still written there. This had, in fact, been stolen from the library. Everyone watched, utterly confused by the interaction before them.

“Duncan… Ohhhh Duncan. We’re going to be in so much trouble.” I plopped back into my seat, and allowed my head to rest on the cool surface of the table. Duncan took the book back from my hands.

“What? What did he do?” Lacey asked across the table, she stood up to get a look at the book.

“Nothing! I mean- okay I obviously did something, but I didn’t do anything to the books. I swear!”

“Aside from steal it. Wait, books? Like plural?” I grumbled, then shot my head up as I realized the mistake he made.

“Dunk. What did you do?” Lacey said, looking at the book from over his shoulder. He shrunk in his seat.

“I… May have switched out two of the old journals for these ones…But it’s fine, they shouldn’t notice! I’m the only one who can really read it and I doubt they paid much attention to them anyway!” He tried to defend himself.

“Duncan you idiot.” Paisley leaned herself back into her chair, hands on her face. Sophie-Rose gasped.

“I- we-” he inhaled sharply. “There’s information in this book, a lot of it. It has answers to probably everything, or at least gives us what we need to answer it ourselves. I couldn’t just leave it!” He explained. Lacey had her hands on her face.

“You literally stole archived books from the library! if someone notices they are going to go here first and foremost.”

“I put replacements! I was going to bring them back once we figured everything out.”

“You risked getting us put in jail.” someone said. I stopped paying attention for a little bit, and spaced out. I turned my head to see Sophie holding the book on her head like an umbrella, clearly stressed out. Liam had his hand to his mouth, eyes wide. Only when the bickering turned to yelling did I start paying attention again.

“I know that it was stupid and I’m sorry but we need to be able to have this on hand! You guys don’t even know what it says in here!” Duncan was waving the book around in the air.

“There could’ve been another way! We could have tried to buy it back!”

“That process, if its even an option, would take too long to accomplish.”

“Guys come on please we can figure it out.” Lacey cried out, to no avail. They were sucked up into their own little world. It’s odd though, Paisley was never this argumentative.

“GUYS.” I shouted, with the added effect of banging my fist on the table. This startled everyone enough to grab their attention. I sighed. “Please, lets go a full day without clawing each others’ throats out. We don’t need that, it already happened, so we should just work on rolling with it for now. Lacey, did you have something to say?”

“It’s just… I agree with Owen, we can’t lose our heads right now, and I get that all of this is really stressful but if we get split apart it’s only going to hurt us.” Lacey sounded uncharacteristically sad. “Paisley, can I talk with you in private for a minute?” The eldest nodded, and they walked through the doors into the kitchen to speak. Duncan settled back down.

“Duncan..-” Liam started.

“I know, I got that. It was stupid but it had to be done in my opinion so let’s just move on.”

“Yeah, it was pretty stupid, but you were given ‘the Fool’ for a reason… I was actually just going to ask if there’s anything you found that you should share with us sooner rather than later.” He spoke softly, allowing Sophie to hop off of his lap and go to her own chair. Duncan lit up a bit, thankful that he wasn’t immediately being shut down for his behavior.

“Okay, so this guy kind of implies he’s the Hermit; and then he brings up the world and the chariot a few times but he doesn’t say ‘The Chariot’, he says ‘Our Chariot’ I think that’s all of us, or at least the idea of our adventure thing, which is why there was a key for the world but not for the chariot. You’ve got to be ‘the World’.” He said to me.

“Are you sure? I don’t really see how I fit…”

“That’s kind of what I was stuck on, and why I didn’t say it outright. The world is like a bringer of change, or a journey.” He said.

“I think it’s more personal than that.” Liam said suddenly.

“How so?” I asked.

“You brought everyone together! You keep us that way too! That makes you our World!” Sophie shouted at me with a big smile.

“You did kind of drag everyone into this in someway, that could be how you brought change.” Duncan added.

“We could be reading ‘a journey’ too technically, a journey could also be an adventure, quest, or it could be a spiritual journey.” Liam took his turn to speak. “I’d say it fits you pretty well.” He smiled at me. I looked away shyly.

“I guess…” I said, just before Paisley and Lacey walked back into the room.

“Alright everyone, I would like to apologize for my behavior once again, Duncan, what have you got?” Paisley sat back down and looked to Duncan.

“Actually, we were just discussing that.” He quickly summarized the previous conversation, then continued on with newer stuff. “So, he calls the blue dust “The Eyes” and he doesn’t know much about them, but he knows them to be benevolent, and are one of the only protections against ‘Sulphur’ which is what he calls the black mass that you guys saw. He said that Sulphur is malicious, but will act calming and helpful in order to achieve its goal, it is secretive and seductive, and at the end of the page he wrote ‘DO NOT INTERACT WITHOUT PROTECTION’ in all caps.” He listed off.

“Why did it kidnap Sophie?” Paisley asked.

“Because he needs her. He needs all of us actually. So I assume he was going to try to split us all a part one by one, in order to trick us individually into helping him.”

“What does he want?” Liam asked.

“I haven’t gotten that far yet.” Duncan looked at the book in front of him. “I do know that there are places all over the property that we each need to ‘purify’ and it includes instructions to that room under the tower. So we were supposed to go there first to get these keys.” He stopped talking, he looked like he wanted to say more but he was hesitating. Paisley was the first to clue in to what he was feeling.

“I feel like we should be taking this somewhere else. Duncan, are there any places that are already purified?” She asked him, lowering her tone as if someone were to overhear.

“Yea. The library is the only one right now, that was the room that Stanley unlocked. If we close the door we should be safe to talk.” He was already standing, and we all followed, suddenly careful not to say anything on our way. Once inside, I shut and locked the door. Then went into the library with everyone else.

“So, anyway. We should avoid dark areas when we are alone, Sulphur seems to be afraid of the light like an overused cliche. Some areas are more dangerous than others. Specifically our rooms, until we purify them. I think basically Stanley was afraid of Sulphur getting its hands on the only way to stop it, so he made these keys and hid them, and put some sort of spell on his journals to keep it from getting his secrets.”

“Why are we doing all this? Why didn’t he do it himself?” Lacey asked.

“He can’t do it alone, in the first few pages he said he had an opportunity to build his own chariot. He built a team, then something happened to tear the team apart and he was the only one left after, he was pretty vague about it. So he spent all of his time dedicating himself to prevent Sulphur from finding out about what he knows, and I think he taught himself to see into the future because he knew that we’d all come together, and then he spent the rest of his free time preparing for us and writing these journals.” Duncan paused before saying, “Also, he’d like to apologize for being so cryptic about everything. He said so at the very beginning of this journal.”