Caer Sidi sighed, flopping down on the edge of the Times Circle fountain. The splash of water in her ears was comforting, and she smiled faintly to hear it, a brief distraction from the turmoil of her own thoughts.

Ever since her visit to Hyperborea, Sidi had been pondering her own Wonder. She'd spent plenty of time on Google, digging and searching to find answers, and had come up only with a single ancient poem by a single ancient poet, desribing an otherworldly fortress with a defense so impenetrable, it was said that none returned form Caer Sidi.

Hardly a lot to go on, all things considered.

But really, there was only one way to find the answers she sought. So, she took a deep breath, and pressed her hand to her heart, closing her eyes.

"I pledge my life and loyalty to Caer Sidi, and to Cosmos. Grant me your protection, so that I may grant you mine." The words tumbled from her lips almost without conscious thought, and when she opened her eyes, she was no longer sitting on the edge of the Times Circle Fountain.

No, instead, she was sitting on a plush, comfortable bed, surrounded by a gauzy, shimmering canopy made form a strange fabric that was softer to her touch than anything she had felt before. As she moved it aside, it seemed to sparkle, like there was rainbow glitter on it, but it didn't have the scratchy texture she associated with anything but the finest Earth glitter; instead, it was like silk, but thinner even than any silk she'd laid eyes on.

She was in a circular room, fairly large-sized, and there were three elegant windows spaced around the wall. The bed, she discovered as she moved off it, was a half-circle tucked against a wall, and took up a good portion of the room. The other walls were lined with bookshelves, and an elegant desk made of a strange white wood and inlaid with gold scrollwork around the edges drew her eye. There were papers sitting on it, but most interestingly, atop them sat a ring. It looked delicate, and as Caer Sidi approached it, briefly, she saw another woman sitting there--someone who looked almost like her, but not quite. The other woman's long tumble of red curls, fell down her back, held in place with a crown braid much like the one Sidi herself liked to wear. She recognized the elegant stained-glass-and-gold hairpiece holding her braid in place as the one that was in her own hair, whenever she powered up, and it made her gasp quietly.

This was...this was her. Or the her that had existed a thousand years ago.

Sidi approached, and she could see that the woman's face was buried in her hands, and she was sobbing desperately. Sidi was crushed, all at once, by a wave of hopelessness and grief, and the certainty that she had failed, she couldn't help and protect them, she was too weak, trapped here as she was, guarding the fortress and its bounty--

And then, the woman vanished, and the vision ended.

Sidi swallowed, and picked up the ring from where it rested on a stack of papers--all written in a language that she knew she had no hope of reading. Something--a thread of memory?--told her htey were letters, but she knew nothing more than that. This must be her signet, the one Hype had told her was so important. There was nothing else it could be. So she slipped it on her finger, and held it up, examining the Celtic knot star that sat on it.

Beautiful. delicate. Mired in tragedy, it seemed.

There was so much more to see, though, she was sure, and so she moved to one of the windows, and with a little wrestling, it came open, and she gasped.

This was, indeed, a fortress. Her tower, the one she had teleported to, rose out of the center, and she could see, a good distance away, the circular walls of a Celtic hill-fort. She thought she might hear the crash of the sea, but it was miffled--because the entire fort was surrounded and suffused by an ethereal mist.

Truly, she could see why this place might have been called an otherworld, and with walls and towers like these, built to defend...there must be something here, something precious. She ran for the door, and tried it, and frowned to find it refused to open. Stuck, or locked, she wasn't sure. Worse, there was no other exit; climbing out the window simply wasn't an option, not when the drop was so terribly sheer and so very, very far. She certainly wasn't dressed for any dramatic tower escapes.

So, fine. She would have to look for a key.

She turned the room upside down, moving pillows and even flipping up the mattress, pulling the drawers out of the desk and rifling through the papers inside them.

Nothing. All she had to show for her work, after what felt like hours of turning the tower-room upside down, was a lot of exhaustion and a huge mess.

"Damn it all," she grumbled, and she looked around.

Ugh, she couldn't leave this place in such a state. She'd have to clean it up, quickly--her own sense of care for her spaces wouldn't accept anything else. And this might not be her room at home, but it was hers, or another hers--it was difficult to wrap her head around, but that was another issue all its own.

So, she began putting things back in place, readjusting the covers on the bed and setting the many, many plush pillows back where they belonged, and moving drawers back into the desk.

It was as she was wedging one of the desk drawers back in that it happened. She must have bumped it just right, because the drawer made a tiny click noise, and the bottom popped up. Not much, certainly, but enough for Sidi to notice.

She gasped, eyes going wide. A secret compartment!

Carefully, she lifted up the bottom of the drawer, and there it was--a key, delicate and gold, with a filigreed handle in a more elaborate version of the design on her ring.

"Oh," Caer whispered, softly. There wasn't time tonight, no. But she would have ot come back, as soon as she could.

She set the key on the desk, and finished cleaning, and then glanced at it--but no, too much risk that it might get lost if she took it back to Earth with her, and no one else would be able to get here. Next time. Next time, she would probe this place's secrets.

With a smile, she pictured home, and brought herself there.

[wc: 1137 words]