Golden Shell Mystery – Investigate the Passageway
Welcome to the third installment of this adventure story =)
If you’re unfamiliar with my blog, this is a choose your own adventure, which means you get to chime in on where the story goes by leaving your vote in the comments at the end.
So, in case you missed the last two installments, you can read them (Part 1 and Part 2) or here’s a quick recap:
You’re a ranger who hunts down dangerous beasts for the king. You were pulled from home by the King’s Hand and taken to an island where you met five other people also pulled from their lives. You were told you have three days to find three golden shells. Whoever succeeds will earn the island from the King, but not everything is as it initially appears.
When you got the opportunity, you searched the walls and paintings in a bamboo hut on the island. You found three things: a map indicating there are three huts total on the island, a small etching left by the King’s Hand indicating you’re hunting for a poisonous beast, and a hidden passageway under a trapdoor. Readers voted to investigate the passageway instead of following Allen, another of the occupants of the island, to a different hut.
Let’s see where the passage leads
Golden Shell Mystery – Investigate the Passageway
There’s a brief moment where you wonder just how you’re going to get Allen Co to leave without you, but he doesn’t look back when he stomps out of the door, talking over his shoulder and never looking back.
How long it’ll take him to realize you didn’t follow, you’ve no idea. You also have no idea if he’ll come stomping back, angry that you ignored him.
You sweep a look over the hut. Since your time might be limited, you do a quick perusal of the bar, pressing against the shelves to see if anything usual gives, but nothing shows up.
Then you head for the trap door. A gentle push moves the wall a full two inches, where it stops against the pinch of the other walls. A small notch is revealed in the trapdoor which you pull upward to open.
A briny gust of wind presses against your face as you take in the wooden steps leading down into a dark tunnel below. The Hand didn’t allow you to bring weapons, but neither did he search you, so you pull the boot knife you always carry before heading down those narrow stairs. They creak abominably under your weight, echoing through the tunnel like a trumpet announcement of your presence.
Once at the bottom, you pull the trapdoor closed by a rope hanging from the bamboo door. There’s a click and darkness envelopes you. Now any beast already in the tunnel will have the advantage, knowing where you were before the darkness descended, so on silent feet, you shift away from the stairs and press tight to the wall, waiting long moments to see if anything moves.
The breeze picks up again with the smell of brine and island flowers but nothing else stirs. Finally convinced you’re alone, you head down the tunnel with your hand against the left hand wall.
A flash blinds you and you duck to the side, knife raised.
“Don’t need that here,” a voice rasps, and then coughs in a chest wracking bought.
Blinking furiously, your vision clears enough for you to realize you’re no longer in the tunnel. The world solidifies into a cavern with a dark pool taking up most of the space and a tiny lean-to against the far wall.
“Disorienting, isn’t it, Hunter?” says the same raspy voice.
This time, you spot the speaker.
Patricia Willard’s dark hair tumbles around her face with barely a resemblance to a braided crown anymore. She sits against the cavern wall with her fingers trailing in the pool beside her hip.
“Yes,” she says, seeing your surprise, “I know what you do.” A bought of coughing hits her and doubles her over toward her knees. When she straightens back up, there’s bloody spittle on her lips.
“What happened?” you ask, putting your knife away.
“Thought the King’s Hunters were smarter than that,” she snickers. “You found a portal. According to myth, the island’s riddled with them.”
Although the information is interesting, that wasn’t what you meant. “What happened to you?” you clarify.
She smiles bitterly. “Got into something I shouldn’t have. It’s a quick killer apparently.”
“What was it?” you ask.
“Don’t rightly know,” she says. “Started to feel the effects not long after the rain subsided, so I headed here.”
The look of confusion on your face makes her laugh, then cough and clutch her stomach once more. Finally, she calms enough to lean back again. “You know what I am, Hunter?”
You shake your head.
“I’m the Story Keeper.”
You stare at Patricia’s grimy face, trying to reconcile it with her claim. The Story Keeper is responsible for keeping the oral histories of the kingdom, big and small. It’s no easy task. You never imagined she’d look like a gypsy woman, but perhaps it makes sense. She travels a lot to investigate and collect stories. People probably share more readily their treasured family histories with a wandering story teller than the King’s official Story Keeper.
Putting details together, you say, “You know the story of this island.”
A wry smile touches Patricia’s lips. “I do.”
“What convinced you to come here when you started to get sick?”
The wry smile grows to true praise. “Maybe you are a Hunter after all,” she says. “I came here because the shells supposedly heal people and this is the least explored location of the three. Figured if I had a chance of finding one, it’d be here, but—” She shrugs, gesturing at her legs where they lay on the floor in front of her. They’re unmoving, dead weights leaving divots in the sandy floor from the heels of her boots.
“Probably a fool’s hope,” you mutter. “No one’s ever found the shells.”
Patricia slaps the water with her hand. It smacks the surface, rippling the glassy water into ringlets.
“Look there,” she points out into the pool.
You look, but it’s just dark water, smooth as rumpled silk.
“No, no, come here,” she beckons you to her side with an impatient hand.
You join her side and she smacks the water again, pointing.
From this vantage, there’s a slight glow from the cavern entrance on the far side. Between the glow and the moving ripples, the mottled colors on the bottom of the pool begin to take shape and you can make out white, black, orange, and even red shells littering the bottom. It’s strange. There’s no sand, just the black stone of the pool’s bottom and hundreds of shells, chipped, whole, halved, all shapes and sizes.
Then your eyes snag on one tiny golden speck.
“See it?” Patricia rasps.
Suddenly she grabs your arm, reaching across her body with the hand she had in the water a moment before. Her fingers are so cold you jerk away with a yelp.
“Easy to see,” she says, hanging on, “hard to get. Each shell has a protection spell. This one’s the cold. Most don’t survive it, and now I can’t even try.” The bitter edge in her voice digs at you as her hand falls away to rest in the water again.
“Is there a trick,” you ask, “to surviving?”
Patricia stares at you hard, her dark eyes searching. “The Hand promised you were good,” she finally says, then she recites, “One lies with the drunkards and their glasses, one sits among its own kind and freezes, and one falls, never landing but hiding in the rainbow. For the drunkards, cross your eyes, for the cold, drink deep and join the party, for the fall, stand below and feel the touch of the island’s song.” Patricia shrugs. “So drink deep and join the party, whatever that may mean.”
Drink deep. Well, there’s only one thing to drink.
You leave Patricia’s side and kneel beside the pool. At the first touch of the water on your hands, cold locks your fingers into a cupped position. You gasp, convincing yourself to draw the water out and to your lips while Patricia watches, her face a mix of hope and surprise. The water makes your lips feel brittle and shoots pain through your teeth, and then it washes down into your stomach and your body flushes warm and then cold again.
There’s a familiar flash and you blink hard again… and find yourself surrounded by hundreds of shells while you stand on a golden carapace. It doesn’t even feel like you’re beneath the water, but you know you are.
The shell under your feet is as big as you are but you know from looking at it above that it’s no bigger than your thumbnail.
Somehow knowing your time is short, you lay down and span the shell’s surface with your arms, grasping the edges with your fingertips.
Moments later, there’s another flash and you stand dripping on the edge of the pool with the tiny shell clasped in your hand. A shiver hits you, so violent it makes you stumble. When your body finally unlocks, you realize Patricia’s coughing, crouched around her stomach in a fetal position.
Rushing over, you kneel. “Patricia,” you try to get her attention, “Patricia, it’s the shell. Take it.” You force her fingers around it.
Long moments pass where she doesn’t even seem to realize what you handed her, but then her eyes widen and she plops the tiny shell into her mouth.
Hunched over still, her body relaxes like she fell asleep. When a long sigh escapes her, you lean closer to make sure she’s still breathing and find her dark eyes open, tears trailing down her dirty face.
“I never would’ve helped you, Hunter,” she admits softly.
You give her a bewildered look. “I couldn’t leave you to die.”
She closes her eyes tight. “You know what this means?”
You sit back on your heels, startled by her shift in conversation.
“The Hand brought you, a Hunter, me the Story Keeper, and four others to this island. You to hunt something, me to know the island’s history, and four others for what?”
Details start to click together. Someone poisoned Patricia. So unless Patricia almost killed herself in a twisted game—“They’re suspects.”
Patricia nods, still weak. “Someone probably poisoned one of the royal family. The Hand aims to figure out who did it and find a shell to heal whoever was poisoned. Seeing how fast the poison can work, I suspect the Hand will want a shell more than the poisoner at this point.”
“The other two huts,” you surmise.
“There’s the portal you know about leading back to the original hut. I suspect that’s the Drunkard’s shell. And there’s a portal over there,” she points to a dark section of the cavern wall. “That I suspect leads to the Falling shell.”
“The others are probably at the second location,” you comment, thinking of Allen.
“Where do you go, Hunter?” Patricia asks.
You almost suggest she help you but as she pushes herself into a sitting position, she wobbles, almost slumping back to the floor before you steady her with a hand.
So do you search for the:
Drunkard’s Shell?
Or
Falling Shell?
Thank you for joining the adventure this week. My apologies that this post went rather long. As I said during week one, this adventure has so much going on that I’m struggling to keep it blog length. Anyway, leave your vote in the comments below and next week we’ll return to see how this story ends!
Blessings,
Jennifer
For a chance to win a FREE copy of my fantasy novel, Quaking Soul, hop on over to Goodreads and enter the April giveaway! (FYI, you need a Goodreads account to enter the giveaway. It’s a free account but does require some steps. Also, giveaway ends tomorrow.)
(For more of my stories, check out either my Choose Your Own Adventure-style book, The Adventure, or my YA Fantasy novel, Quaking Soul, here on my Website or on Amazon.)
