The Scepter of Fire

Professor Amethyst stood in the shaking school. It had been evacuated fully, and now only he was left. But he could not just flee. The sixth dimension was full of scrolls and textbooks, artifacts and weapons. Before he could leave, he had to secure the room and lock it all safely away. If any of the seer technology fell into the wrong hands, it could mean the end of the world.

There was, however, one very large snag. Professor Amethyst had exhausted almost all his powers. From creating the wormhole in the kapoc tree to evacuate his staff and students and the second portal for Oliver Blue and his friends, to then projecting his voice through the vortexes of time and diverging the two paths, the old man had drained himself. And because of the violent tremors of the school as it went through the process of collapsing in on itself, the elevator—supersonic, just as he’d invented it to be—was broken. Professor Amethyst, who was accustomed to being whooshed through all fifty floors in a matter of seconds, would have to take the stairs. He’d have to climb fifty floors to reach the sixth dimension. He had no idea how his frail, ancient knees would handle such an undertaking. But there was no other choice. He had to make sure none of the weapons or inventions were ever released into the world.

He began his ascent. But he’d only made it to the first floor landing when he heard an awful noise come from the foyer below him.

Hurrying to the balcony, Professor Amethyst glanced over and down to the central atrium below. Many of the kapoc’s branches had already broken, as had the walkways they’d previously held up, and the debris lay scattered all over the ground. But there, between the chunks of plaster and concrete and the thick wooden branches, Professor Amethyst saw a glowing, flickering light.

“A portal,” he said aloud.

He knew what that meant. There were only a few seers in existence with such powers, and only one he could think of who’d want to breach the school.

Sure enough, the large portal widened and widened until it was big enough for a stream of students to file out. They were all wearing the recognizable black uniform of Mistress Obsidian’s School for Seers.

Professor Amethyst narrowed his eyes with anger. Magdalena Obsidian had, many years earlier, been his brightest student. Her mind had been powerful and boundless. A mind to rival his own. An intelligence matched only by Newton. By da Vinci. By Oliver Blue. He’d wanted to challenge the young seer, but the missions he’d sent her on caused her mind to balloon. She’d wanted more knowledge, more access, more artifacts, and she’d wanted to take all the knowledge of the future and apply it to the past.

At first, her quest was admirable; use the foresight of the future to spare humankind of the mistakes of the past. Indeed, almost every young seer Professor Amethyst taught had asked the same thing. “Why can’t we change the past?” But where most young seers accepted that a seer’s duty was to follow the guidance of the universe, to mend the cracks and fissures in the order of things, Magdalena Obsidian refused to accept it. In her idealized mind, such events should be rewritten, whether the universe had chosen it or not.

“The task of a seer is to keep the world on the path of least destruction,” Professor Amethyst recalled telling her once in his office, as they’d sat by the fireplace, she just a young girl of twelve. “We cannot erase Hitler, but we can stop him from obtaining a nuclear bomb. We cannot stop the great world wars, but we can minimize their casualties.”

But the girl had refuted his claims. She’d refused to follow his teachings, refused to accept a seer should not divert the course of history entirely. And once she’d discovered that she was a cobalt seer and began reading up on all the cobalt greats, well, her mind darkened. Finally, she chose her devastating path, went rogue, and started her own “school,” finding seer children before Professor Amethyst was able to and corrupting their impressionable minds.

He’d had no choice but to put a protection spell around the school that banned her from ever entering. Not that such a thing would stop Magdalena Obsidian. Now, she just sent children to do her bidding, or manipulated the laws of the dimensions for her own means. He knew what she’d done with Edmund. She’d twisted his mind by projecting herself through the dimensions, something extremely dangerous that he’d only ever done one time, out of desperation, in order to tell Oliver he needed to find the Scepter of Fire. He knew, too, that she sent her little army of students through time, that she’d even summoned the dark army. She never got her hands dirty herself. Professor Amethyst had mused away many an hour wondering why. He’d come to the conclusion that she knew if she ever looked her old mentor in the eye again, she’d have to confront the reality of her situation. That she was wrong. That she’d gone rogue. That she’d left nothing but destruction and chaos in her wake.

Suddenly, Professor Amethyst heard the clattering footsteps of the Obsidian children as they began to race up the steps toward him. He doubled his efforts to ascend. But he felt his knees creaking. His bones and muscles weren’t strong enough for this. He was thousands of years old, after all. There was only so much the seer body could take.

He would have to fight them.

The last thing Professor Amethyst wanted was to fight children, especially the ones who’d been brainwashed by Magdalena Obsidian. But on the other hand, every minute the Obsidian students spent in the School for Seers was another moment they weren’t pursuing Oliver or Esther on their quests to locate the Scepter of Fire. Perhaps he could buy the two teams some time by causing a distraction.

Just then, he heard footsteps reach the landing behind him. He twirled on the spot. Four children were facing him; a girl with ginger plaits, a second with black hair and nails, a pale boy with bony cheekbones and a long, thin, shrew-like nose, and a final boy, heavyset with broad shoulders like a quarterback, and the most disconcertingly coal black eyes.

“Ah,” Professor Amethyst said, jovially, to the four. “Welcome. Are you prospective students? I’m afraid the school is undergoing something of a transformation at the moment. It’s zapping out of time. So it’s unlikely I’ll be unable to take on any new students until the old shakeroos are resolved.”

The four children looked at one another, confused, their expressions vile and conceited. Professor Amethyst felt only pity for them, for failing to find them before Magdalena Obsidian, and for the inflated egos she’d given them.

“What are you yammering on about, old man?” the large boy said.

The darker one turned to him and sneered. In a nasty voice, he said, “Don’t you know who that is? That’s Professor Amethyst.”

The headmaster continued with his distraction tactics. He put a hand on his chest. “Oh! Am I famous?”

But the children had lost their patience. They glared at him, teeth bared like feral creatures, and began to advance.

Professor Amethyst felt a lump form in his throat. It was time to fight.

CHAPTER NINE

“What is the compass telling us now?” Simon asked Esther.

She looked down at the bronze instrument. All the symbols it was showing seemed to be related to the ocean—boats, fish, the anchor again.

“I think we should head to the harbor,” she said.

The sun beat down on them as they journeyed along the narrow path toward the glittering ocean. The masts of many vessels bobbed up and down, and Esther marveled at them. Their designs were ancient. They were so old that Esther couldn’t even think of any wrecks that had survived to the modern era to be viewed in museums, so to see them with her own eyes was truly awe-inspiring.

When they reached the harbor, it was just as bustling as the market had been. There were men dressed in linen cloaks hauling nets filled with fresh fish, as well as boats unloading precious cargo from faraway lands. This was clearly a very important trading hub, Esther reasoned.

Luckily, thanks to their outfits, they drew barely any stares at all, and were able to mill around looking for clues as to their time, whereabouts, and where they might find the Scepter of Fire.

“Rhodes,” Simon said suddenly. “We’re in Rhodes.”

“Really?” Esther asked, her eyes widening with surprise.

Rhodes was one of the islands that belonged to the Greek empire. She wondered why the Professor might have sent them here rather than to the mainland. She racked her brains, trying to recall which Ancient Greek philosophers resided in Rhodes in the BC years.

“How do you know?” Walter asked Simon.

Simon pointed to some lettering printed on a sign beside the harbor. It wasn’t in the same alphabet, but a completely different one. Walter pulled a face.

“How’d you get Rhodes from that?” he said. “Looks like gobbledygook to me!”

Simon rolled his eyes. “My education in Victorian London was extremely fine. We studied both Latin and ancient Greek. Honestly, there’s no better way to read the old philosophers than in their own tongue.”

As the boys squabbled, Esther attempted to work out what date they may have arrived in. She recalled the Colossus of Rhodes, the great statue built beside the ocean and one of the ancient wonders of the world. But all they could see of it now were the two columns of stone upon which its feet had once stood. So they must have arrived after its collapse in 226 BC.

That narrowed it down slightly. But they were still a long way from anything concrete.

“Since you know so much about Greek philosophers,” Esther said to Simon, “any idea which ones lived on Rhodes?”

“Well, there’s Andronicus of Rhodes,” Simon said. “Who lived here around 60 BC.”

Just then, Esther’s attention was drawn to an elderly man sitting on an upturned crate alone, staring out to sea. Something about his face seemed familiar to her, though she couldn’t quite place it. The way he was staring contemplatively was at great odds to all the people hurrying around him. His clothes made him look rich and important. The way he stared out to sea as though in deep thought made him seem scholarly. There was also a pile of parchments on his knee that Esther could just make out was filled with sketches.

Whoever the man was, he appeared to be someone of importance. A scholar. Perhaps even a philosopher. And considering most of the scholars of the past turned out to be seers, or linked to seers in some capacity, she decided he was a good place to start.

“Is that him?” Esther asked, interrupting Simon’s monologue about philosophers and pointing at the man.

Simon squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand. “Well, I wouldn’t know. I don’t think there are any surviving portraits of Andronicus of Rhodes.”

Walter gave a shrug. “Meh. He looks like a philosopher to me. We may as well go and say hello.”

He waltzed off in the direction of the man. Simon and Esther exchanged a glance and a shrug, then followed after their confident, unfazed friend.

But as they drew closer, Esther suddenly realized where she’d seen the old man’s face before. It was in the history rooms of the School for Seers! The school had lots of busts on display of famous scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, politicians, and the like. This face—though now lined with wrinkles—belonged to Posidonius, the Stoic philosopher whose teachings had been mainly lost in time.

Esther flailed out an arm, gripping hold of Simon by the wrist. “I think I know who that is.”

Simon was nodding, clearly having put two and two together at the exact same moment as Esther had.