For the guest who requested an update so pleasantly...


We walked the winding halls and rooms in the castle until we reached what appeared to be the uppermost floor. To the right was a sharply winding staircase that went up into a tower and to the left was an open door. Inside the room, a man was working on organizing papers. The four walls of the room were lined completely with shelves that were covered in thick leather-bound books. It must have been some sort of records room. The man that was studiously rifling through loose pages hardly looked up when Christian entered the room.

"What is it, young prince? I have no time for frivolous matters. I need to find where that forgetful old man filed the census of Grenaway Gardens from this year. The princess wants to make sure all the pertinent families from that district are invited to the upcoming ball and that dusty old Gustav did not organize a thing in here."

"Joslynn wanted me to tell you that she wants to look over the guest list for the ball. We are on our way to the hall of pictures."

The man looked up now. He glanced at me briefly before returning to the papers, "Oh, another young lady, how nice. I'm trying to get the guest list together but this confounded room is a mess and I can't find anything. The Grenaway Gardens district is the last group I need to add to the list then I will give it to your sister."

Christian bent and picked up a bundle of papers tied together with a green string that had fallen on the ground. "Be sure that you do or she'll be at both our necks. By the way, Grenaway isn't in a book. Gustav thought it was a good idea to mark it with a green tie."

The man snatched the bundle and untied the string. "Thank you, your highness. I will have this to your sister within the hour. Be careful in that hall."

We left him to his work and began the ascent up the stairs on the other side of the hall.

"There's a hall up here?" I asked. There was no possible way that an entire hall could fit on top of a tower.

"Well, it's not technically a hall of pictures. If it was named accurately it should be called the tower of pictures but that doesn't have the same ring to it. The fairies wanted it to be placed somewhere high in the castle to remind us that we had connections in the sky. You may want to put on your cape now, we're almost there."

There was a small landing at the top of the stairs with a ladder leading up to a trap door. We put on our capes and Christian strapped the sword to his belt. I felt as if we were about to brave some wild wasteland rather than just a tower in the royal castle. Christian went up first and opened the door. A cool breeze blew down on me. There must be open windows or something that exposed the room to outside the castle to create such a breeze. Christian disappeared in the room and called me up. I climbed the ladder into the hall of pictures.

The hall was certainly beautiful. It was not made of the same grey stone as the stairs we had climbed. Instead the floor, walls, and arched ceiling was made out of white marble. Ten large pictures in golden frames lined the walls with equally large windows in between. All the windows were open and their thick red drapes pulled to the sides to let in the sun. Through the windows I could see the beautiful view all the way to the surrounding country side and forests that ran to meet with the horizon. This must have been the tallest tower in the castle. However, the view of the outside world looked as if it was the painting and not the scenes in the pictures. Each golden frame held a painting of a different breathtaking landscape. I spun in a circle to look at all the amazing pieces of art. Now that I was seeing them, I could not imagine any danger being in this wonderful place. It must have been a very talented artist to make such flawless and lifelike pictures.

"Do you like it?" Christian asked.

"Oh, yes I do!" I said walking towards a picture of a lush jungle. "How could anyone be afraid of this room? These pictures are exquisite, I feel like they are hardly painted at all."

"No," Christian called as he grabbed my hand and pulled me sharply back to the middle of the room. "Not that one."

I did not see what was wrong with the jungle picture, but I decided to go along with Christian. "Which one then," I asked, "Perhaps that one over there of the ocean, or the snowy mountains?"

"I was more thinking of that one." Christian pointed to a picture of what looked like a white stone cave with some sort of colored pools dotting the floor. To me it seemed a bit out of place with the other views the pictures offered. We walked to get a closer look at the painting. The colored pools seemed to have a faint glow over them as I inspected them closer.

I yelped and jerked away from Christian and the painting when I thought I saw something in one of the pools move. Christian gripped my hand tighter. "Are you ready?"

Keeping a firm grip on my hand he pulled me straight towards the painting. I blocked my face with my other arm; sure we would run into the wall. Christian had gone mad. I felt something like a light mist and peeked out from behind my raised arm. It was like we had entered a tunnel of the mist. Before us I could see the white cave with the pools getting nearer as we walked toward it. I glanced behind and saw the tower room, though this time it looked like it was a picture in a frame and the cave the real world. We stopped when I felt pebbles under my feet. I lowered my arm and felt the shifting pebbles under my feet. It was colder here. We were no longer in the hall of pictures, I was not even sure we were still in Lantine. If Christian had not still been holding my hand I probably would have collapsed there from the shock of it all. Instead I looked frantically all around me. I had never imagined that such a thing was possible, passing so easily from one place to another in an instant.

Christian's slight squeeze of my hand slowed my spinning thoughts. "Are you alright? It's a lot to take in at first. We are under the Ivory Mountains in the south."

"How can that be?" I wondered. I knew fairy magic was powerful, but I never imagined anything like this.

"I told you the hall of pictures used higher fairy magic. I'm told that in Mekt, those kinds of pictures are everywhere and are used as nearly the only method of travelling the kingdom. Go ahead look around. This is one of the safer places the pictures show since it is hidden away under the mountains." Christian let go of my hand and I took a few tentative steps foreward.

Even though it was chilly here in the cave, I hardly noticed. The pools were in fact glowing as they had seemed in the fairy picture. Now I could see the strange liquid that filled each pool with a different color. Dripping stalactites hung from the ceiling over the pools. The liquid ran down them in a spiral and cast dancing shadows around the cave. My legs had steadied and my mind had begun to settle and focus of the other things in the cave. I walked over to a pool filled with light purple. I crouched down next to it to get a closer look. It looked a bit like milk except for the color.

"What is it?" I asked Christian.

He was standing beside me. "I don't know. My father and his father have had scientists and wizards examine it but no one can come up with any definitive reason or source for it. They call it liquid alabaster, but as far as they can tell it isn't really a liquid."

"It looks like a liquid to me." I said. There were constantly ripples from the stalactites above and the liquid alabaster circling down.

"Touch it," Christian said. He had crouched down close to me. I was aware of how close his hand was to mine. "Then you will see it's not liquid."

I waved my hand over the surface of the pool. It cast a purple glow onto my palm. "Is it safe? It won't burn me or sting?"

Christian shook his head and together we reached one hand into the pool. I gasped at what the liquid alabaster did. Instead of rippling like normal water, it began a slow spiral up my fingers. I could barely feel it on my skin as if it never actually touched me. When I moved my fingers, the liquid alabaster moved as well staying close to my skin. I could even lift my hand out of the pool and the purple substance would still be winding around my fingers. Now it seemed to almost be like a fog in the way it moved but that couldn't be because I could feel the gentle flow of it over my hands. I looked up at the ceiling. Up there it seemed to have no trouble obeying gravity and falling into the pool but it was not dripping off my hand. "How peculiar," I commented.

Christian also had the liquid alabaster winding around his hand. "Quite," He agreed. Then to my surprise he moved his hand closer to mine. The closer he got, the liquid alabaster on each of our hands seemed to attract each other and pull away from our hands to bridge the space between. I looked at Christian's face when his fingers entwined with mine. Now our joined hands were covered in the strange substance.


So does anyone know where the hall of pictures came from? Anyone? Anyone? That's right! It's from Super Mario 64 on Nintendo! That's where I got the idea of portal pictures. I was just sitting around one day thinking about how where he took her had to be awesome and how I wanted a location out of the city without actually leaving the city and Mario was there just being all like 'just jump through the pictures'.