"What exactly are we supposed to find in this basement?" Ian demanded of Elizabeth as he smashed the library window and reached through the shards to unlock the door.
"An old friend," Elizabeth repeated unhelpfully, waiting for him to hold the door open for her to pass through it.
He rolled his eyes, but did so anyway. "Why do I doubt this so-called friend is going to be at all eager to see us?" he asked pointedly.
"Perhaps the sword gave it away," she replied, just as pointedly. She crossed the main room of the library to the rickety old-fashioned elevator, pulling back the doors which groaned in protest after decades of disuse.
"Which brings me back to my original question: what is in the basement?" he repeated.
She just shook her head without answering, what looked a lot like a wicked grin threatening to break out across her red painted lips.
As Derek gasped for air, eyes wide and stunned at his sudden waking, everyone else seemed to stop breathing as one.
Emily clapped a hand over her mouth, tears springing to her eyes as she let out a shaky half sob/half laugh. "Oh my God..." she breathed.
Silently, Penelope shooed Clara from the room, shutting the door behind them to give the two reunited lovers some privacy.
"Oh my God, Derek..." she repeated. "It's you – it's really you!" Then, before he could say anything in response, she flung herself at him, wrapping him in a tender embrace for the first time in eighteen years.
For a moment, he didn't move, didn't respond to her embrace, mind reeling as years of memories came flooding back all at once. But eventually, shaky hands came to rest on her back, gentle and timid at first, then tighter and tighter until she could barely breathe for the embrace.
"Emily..." he rasped, "Emily, my love. My Princess."
She laughed softly. "You remember..."
"I don't know how I could ever have forgotten my love for you," he lamented. "I lost eighteen years with you..."
"What's eighteen years when you have eternal love?" she asked, pulling back so she could look him in the eye. A soft smile played about her lips as she looked at him – really looked – before she leaned in to kiss him, the touch of her lips on his so familiar, so right, it was like the missing part of her had finally fallen back into place.
Muttering to himself, Ian braced himself with one hand on the wall of the elevator as it shuddered and clunked its way into the basement. He'd been none too keen to trust Elizabeth to stay above to operate the elevator, but he hadn't had all that much choice.
With a heavy metallic clank, the elevator hit bottom and the doors swung open on rusty hinges as he pushed on them. What he found was an impossibly large rocky cavern – completely at odds with the building that sat above it.
"Hello?" he called out into the cavern, his voice echoing through the space.
He was starting to suspect that this had all been some elaborate scheme to trap him down here when the ground beneath him trembled and he nearly lost his balance. He reached out to grab onto a nearby stone pillar to keep himself upright as the ground seemed to roil and heave with the movement of something impossibly large approaching.
"What the fuck?" he whispered to himself as one massive paw came into view, followed by a second, then finally a pink nose, mere feet away from him.
He emerged from behind the pillar to see what was unmistakably a Sphinx blinking down at him with neon green eyes.
The beast licked its chops as it eyed him, obviously thinking of making him a meal. "A tasty mousy..." the Sphinx declared, using one claw to pick something out of its teeth. "Been so long since I've had fast food." She laughed to herself at the joke, a deep rumbling sound that echoed through the chamber.
"Elizabeth sends her regards," he announced before she could get any ideas.
She hissed at that, eyes narrowing with displeasure.
Realizing that, perhaps, it had been the wrong move to mention the beast's captor, he changed tack, declaring, "I propose a game..."
"A game?" she repeated, obviously irritated.
"A game," he repeated. "A riddle – if you win, you get lunch. If I win, however, you owe me a favour."
The Sphinx mashed her lips together, mulling the proposition over before rolling her glowing eyes. "Four riddles," she amended. "Since you're a friend of a friend."
Huffing, annoyed, he conceded. "Four it is."
A wicked grin crossed her lips and she lay down, crossing one forepaw over the other. "I'm offered to the loved and also to the dead. I come in many varied hues, most notably red. My pricks are known to pierce the skin, often resulting in wounds that bled. What am I?"
"A rose," he answered with barely a moment's hesitation. Of course the answer would have something to do with the Beast...
"You measure my life in hours and I serve you by expiring. I'm quick when I'm thin and slow when I'm fat. The wind is my enemy," the Sphinx recited. She seemed almost bored with the game, her claws drumming a rhythm on the stone floor.
Ian had to think for a moment on that one, running through his wife's story in his mind. Finally, he landed on the answer, "A candle."
"My spine stiff. My body pale. I'm always ready to tell a tale..."
He chuckled, smirked, entirely too cocky. "A book." He hadn't expected to win quite so easily, but perhaps almost two decades of being locked away from any prey had made the Sphinx slow-witted...
She grinned then, as if things were going exactly the way she'd anticipated. "I am free, yet priceless. You can't own me, but you can use me. You can't keep me, but you can spend me. Once you've lost me, you can never have me back. What am I?"
He opened his mouth to answer, then faltered, uncertain.
The Sphinx was examining her claws with decided interest, humming to herself.
The tune struck some chord of familiarity deep inside his mind and he followed the thread for a few moments until he landed on the answer. "Time!" he announced, entirely too pleased with himself.