Race Through Time:
Visionary Sister Trust and Prophecy
Maurice wasn't kidding when he said that it would take a couple days for the pilgrims to reach the place holding 'mystical powers' that would guide them to Bartok.
After two days of sailing down the holy river, Rosetta was getting even more seasick. Once again, her vomit had been used for skin lotion.
Tristan hadn't spoken to Rosetta ever since the encounter with Darwin at the ruins of the Batrishan Sanctuary, but on the second day, after seeing how the child was forcing herself away from the other pilgrims except from Harry, who brought her his fried fish that she enjoyed, Eglantine, who'd help her clean her laundry, and Tristan, who came to collect her vomit, Tristan decided to go sit with her at the front of the boat.
"How's everything going, Rosie?" he asked as he sat down in front of her. The demigoddess was bundled up in a blanket and looked up at the Batrishan. She was in a horrible state: her dark Egyptian skin seemed to be getting pale, her hair was messed up as if its owner had trouble sleeping, and her eyes...Good lord, her eyes were getting tired black marks underneath them and their glare was the one of somebody who didn't sleep and was severely traumatized.
Tristan instantly regretted asking Rosetta how she was doing, because now he saw exactly how he imagined young Batrishans when fleeing the Evil One's wrath during the Batrishan Genocide: a child getting her innocence crushed and her mind traumatized by the real horrors of life.
"I...I miss my parents!" Rosetta broke into tears. "I miss Fidget, I miss Storybrooke...I WANT TO GO HOME!"
"Hush now." Tristan moved towards her so that he could sit by her side and pull her into a comforting hug. Shining tears fell into his shirt from the girl who was crying her face into it, but Tristan didn't mind. "You'll find your family. I promise."
"And what if I can't?" Rosetta whimpered. "What if I'm stuck here forever?"
"Rosetta..."
"I never should have read the book. If I hadn't, I would have never have come here!"
"And if you never came here, you would have never brought hope."
Rosetta wiped her nose and looked at Tristan. "What?"
"Rosie, you have no idea of how many years I spent trying to find an answer for the race through time and my people's revenge prophecy. Until you showed up, I barely found anything. You have no idea of how much help you are to me."
Rosie smiled a bit before making it fade away and turn her face from Tristan in a sad way. Whether it was Tristan's imagination or not, it seemed like something was bothering her.
The boat stopped abruptly, shaking its passengers a bit. They had reached the location of the 'mystical power' that would help them locate Bartok, and then they could back to their quest for the shrine of Canterbury.
"Moe, are you sure this is the place?" Isaac asked rather nervously while Dwight tied the boat to a giant tree in order to keep it on port. "Because it looks as creepy as the Batrishan Sanctuary."
Most of the pilgrims had to agree that after the Batrishan Sanctuary and where goblins had attacked them, this was the third scariest thing they had seen in the holy river. Every inch of solid ground appeared to be occupied by large, jungle like trees that went all the way up a foggy sky with their twisted branches and thick canopies like the snake hair of a Gorgon.
"It is." Maurice nodded. He pointed up high in the creepy canopy. "The mystical power is said to lurk somewhere in the trees. Only Rosetta, due to her advanced foresight powers, can find her way through this branch maze and reach her visionary sister power..."
"Visionary sister?" Rosetta asked.
"Legends say that people with advanced foresight powers are bonded by a deep connection of power," Maurice told her. "If you can use that mystical link, then you can make your way through the maze and reach the mystical power, where you'll find the answer to our problem."
"Easy-peasy." Isaac shrugged with consent.
"Yeah..." Rosetta gulped as she stared upwards. "Easy-peasy." She began to make her way towards the boat's edge and stared at the water, which had lost its original brown color to a tar black one. This only reminded her of the vision she had of Fidget trapping Belle and Emma in an hourglass full of tar during his first scheme against Hook. Rosetta still had nightmares just from doodling that scenario in her sketchbook and even writing about it for her 'recorder's job' to the gods.
Eglantine and Tristan were the first to notice Rosetta's uneasiness.
"Maurice, is it necessary?" Eglantine asked the clerk. "She's just a child."
Just a child.
A small splash was heard. The pilgrims were freaked out when they saw Rosetta missing from her position on the boat but sighed in relief that they saw her moving her way through the water.
"You alright, lassie?" Anaïs called out. Rosetta kept walking as the waters eventually became shallow and into small waves moving slowly on the puny excuse of a beach. She then made her way to a nearby tree and began climbing her way up into the fog.
"I don't know if it's because you called her a child, Eglantine," Harry said, "but that kid just got active."
Minutes later
Just a child.
Rosetta had felt a big pang going through the neurons of her brain when she heard the prioress Eglantine calling her a child. Sure, the prioress said it out of concern for Rosetta, but if there's one thing that Rosetta learned to dislike since she was small and to loathe completely ever since she got dragged into an undesired pilgrimage, it was to be called out as the helpless little demigoddess that needed protection from her papa wolf Anubis.
When her berserk button got pushed, she then felt something dragging her spiritually out of the boat, through the waters, and up into the canopy's labyrinth of branches. It was calling to her, pulling her to the top like a puppet master pulling the strings of a marionette.
The fact that she felt being pulled made Rosetta think of Marco, aka Gepetto, back in Storybrooke. Who knows what the heck he was building right now? A few days ago, she was helping a humanoid spider turn wagons into a boat able to carry eight humanoid animal pilgrims, one human child, and a herd of sheep.
Rosetta stopped to catch a bit of air once she arrived at the most crowded part of the canopy. Good thing that, with the large size of the branch she was standing on, she had no chances of falling. The only thing that could make her fall would be the constant banging in her head worthy enough to give her a knock out headache.
She almost began to sit down on the thick branch until a strange noise hit her ears. It was a distant, but audible sound, a...rather pleasant noise. It sounded like a combination of chiming, glass clanging, and hissing. All mashed up into one harmonious tune.
Follow that sound, the banging told Rosetta.
"OK," she said out loud to no one in particular.
Eventually
After pushing her way through walls of branches getting more attached to one another, Rosetta reached the end of the branch, which had now begun to take the shape of a cripple stairwell going straight towards some sort of giant cocoon made of branches. The strange sound was getting louder as Rosetta walked down the branch and found herself in front of the giant branch cocoon.
Rosetta didn't see any entrance around the cocoon. She began to think of how she could get in until she got a vision of Regina, back in her old days as the Evil Queen, walking through a looking glass with the Mad Hatter. Hit by the unwanted inspiration, Rosetta put her arms out and, as predicted, walked her way through the branch-thick shell of the cocoon, which felt rather weird as it passed her skin. It reminded Rosetta of the time when she was little and one of her father's servants had the weird idea to use litchi nuts to make cream for tending Rosetta's bruise after the latter accidently tripped in the staircase.
"One of these days I'm going to wish for brain surgery," Rosetta muttered to herself.
"You shouldn't say things like that, little sister." The mysterious voice made Rosetta jump, giving her the chance to look at the interior of the cocoon.
It was rather stunning. The only thing to decorate and give light to the room were several trinkets hanging from the dark ceiling: wind chimes, tavern bottles, stained glass shards, pierced coins, old rejected jewelry, vials containing hair locks, eyeballs, or body organs, and candles. A majority of the hanging bazaar explained the stuff that Rosetta had heard on the way here.
"Anybody home?" Rosetta asked out loud.
"Look ahead," the mysterious voice said.
Rosetta did so. Up ahead of her stood a woman sitting in a lotus position, meditating on an Indian pillow and meditation mat. The demigoddess took the courage to walk a few extra steps towards the meditating woman, but stopped when she got a better view of the pillow.
It wasn't a pillow.
It was an Indian rock python, coiled up in a position that allowed it to both relax and grant a comfortable position for the meditating woman, who was covered by several tattered Indian or Persian silks that managed to form a traditional Indian dress. A few strands of black hair came out of the purple turban, crowned with a snake-eye gem, that she wore on her head. Her lips were black and her eyes were shut.
"Is every person with advanced foresight not white?" Rosetta asked bluntly. She could imagine her parents scolding her for such a racist comment.
Then came the creepy part: while the woman shrugged and spoke calmly, without even opening her eyes, the python opened its own, revealing gray human eyes.
"OK, this is something I don't see everyday." Rosetta winced.
"I don't blame you," the woman said quietly. "Ah's quite of a silent brooder."
"You're snake's name is Ah?"
"No, sister. Ah is a part of me. We share the same soul, but before we got split into two different bodies, we were commonly known as Kaa."
Rosetta stiffened. "K...Kaa?"
This was one of those rare examples of why Rosetta hated the turns-out-that-storybook-tales-characters-are-real reality. Her mother used the Disney movie of The Jungle Book as a way of telling Rosetta that if she went out alone, Kaa the man-eating snake would lurk from underneath the shadows and swallow her whole as punishment for disobeying her parents' orders of Rosetta to be accompanied. This caused Rosetta to have visions of all the villainous adaptations of the python, the scariest one being the female version from this year's version of the Disney movie. Just hearing that female, seductive hypnotist serpent entrancing Mowgli into her coils and nearly eating him gave Rosetta nightmares.
"Trust in us, we weren't like that," the meditating woman said as if reading Rosetta's mind. Her words stunned the little girl a lot.
"How did you know what I was thinking?" Rosetta asked.
"Ah and I are part of the same being, Kaa," the woman said. How she managed to keep talking and remain in her lotus position while sitting on her snake was a complete mystery. "Kaa was just as described by Kipling: an old being, powerful and feared, but wise and loyal. A mentor to his friends and allies and a respected teacher."
"But that changed." Rosetta yelped and fell on her butt when she saw and heard Ah the python speak with his own mouth. It was rather creepy: while his female human half spoke in a normal voice and kept her eyes shut, Ah had human eyes and had the hissing voice of a snake. "Over the years, many individuals have ceased to view snakes as protectors, voices of advice, mentors, or even healers. They began to see us as death for our venom, as sirens for our smooth words, and treacherous for hardly possessing any limbs."
"So a wizard, out of the pressure of a human village, had the personalities of Kaa split into two," the woman said.
"The human side and the snake side?"
"Mostly the wise, humane, and loyal being and the fork-tongued, predator, and so-called 'ruthless predator' one."
"That's just dumb." Rosetta rolled her eyes. "Human doesn't mean good incarnate. Well, not always."
"Kaa said the same thing before he got split into us," Ah snorted. "But no one wanted to believe a snake anymore, so once Hak and I got split, they immediately asked her for the truth, and when Kaa's exact words got out of her lips, we got sealed in this tree...forever."
"An unfair, but predictable punishment," Hak said. "The world locked us away from it, leaving us to rely on Kaa's remaining followers, who were kind enough to provide us nourishment and small gifts to...liven up our little home."
"We do get some travelers who visit us, mostly to ask for council, but a majority become my dinner thanks to their pathetic ingratitude."
Rosetta gulped at the part of Ah saying he ate ungrateful travelers.
"Relax, I'm not going to eat you," Ah reassured Rosetta. "Besides, one of my grass-snake cousins told me that you helped him out back in your town, this...Storybrooke."
"Grass-snake?"
Then it her like a pile of bricks. "Oh, Steve!"
"Steve?" Hak frowned at Ah.
"The grass-snake who came by last week? He said a daughter of Anubis helped him with a ghastly tummy ache. Once she let him go through the town line and into the Land Without Magic, he slithered his way to New York, but got sick of the constant cars and zero respect for little guys like him, so he took the well portal back to the Enchanted Forest."
"And how's Steve doing?" Rosetta asked.
"Hate to say this, but he had a bad encounter with a local crocodile."
"Oh." Rosetta frowned, feeling sad for the sudden news of her old acquaintance's death. "I hope Apep sent him to a good afterlife."
"Same here, but enough about the past."
"You came for something, didn't you, little sister?" Hak asked.
"Why do you keep calling me 'little sister'?" Rosetta asked. "We're not related."
"Gifted individuals blessed and cursed with advanced foresight are spiritually connected. We are like the eyes of Argos: we see things differently, but we are connected to the same mind of the same beast."
"My visionary sister," Rosetta recalled the words that Maurice had told her back on the boat.
"Precisely."
"So...by being visionary sisters, I can trust in you?"
"It's not a question of if you can trust in me." Hak opened her eyes, which turned out to be pitch-black snake eyes. "It's a question of whether or not we can trust one another."
Later
They ended up trusting in one another and the three had moved from the meditating area to the center of the core, where they sat and sort of ate. And by eating, I mean that Ah swallowed a live iguana while Hak and Rosetta made cheers with bowls full of cow bone broth.
"So, you wish to seek the former prince of the Batrishan," Hak said while Rosetta struggled to finish her broth, which tasted more like blood than broth. "You don't have to finish it if you don't like it, little sister."
"I apologize for my unintentional rudeness...big sister," Rosetta said as she put her bowl down. "But yes, I...Well, the pilgrims and I need to find him."
"Don't you mean you need to find him?" Ah asked, using his tail to point at Rosetta. "Snakes may be untrustworthy in mankind's miniature sense of logic, but we can tell through ground vibrations and emitted waves of heart beats when a human lies."
"What Ah is saying is that the pilgrims themselves don't want anything in particular from Bartok, little sister. They only decided to go look for him because you claimed you had a vision of him. But Ah and I are like you. As we are the split halves of Kaa, we know you lied to them."
Hak and Ah knew the truth, so Rosetta took a deep breath and told them everything that occurred to her in the Batrishan Palace, especially during her encounter with the Masked Girl. The woman and the snake didn't interrupt the child even once; they just made head gestures that indicated they were listening and wanted her to continue.
"So now I don't know what to do," Rosetta sighed as she finished her story. "I don't want to drag Tristan and Bartok out of their own will to Storybrooke just because the Evil One gave me no choice and I don't want them to meet Fidget. I mean, I care for Fidget..."
"You see him as a big brother," Hak filled out for Rosetta. "Out of all the individuals you encountered, from your birth to Storybrooke, he is the only one who doesn't treat you like the weak daughter of Anubis every adult thinks you are."
"No."
"Minus the time he held you captive, you are the only one among the Storybrooke heroes and their allies that he doesn't want to harm." Ah slithered towards Rosetta and gently patted his head on her lap to comfort her. "And that's something coming from him. Ever since he chose to accept eternal immortality from the Elixir of Nine Lives, he chose to avoid paying its price of making its drinker watch his or her loved ones dead. Bartok took the Elixir and he has suffered it for centuries. And Fidget...he believed to have lost everyone he loved after his foster family and betrothed were killed and Aldorada was exterminated by war. What better way could he think of avoiding a painful price as the one of the Elixir than to renounce loving anything?"
"Fidget might not be willing to give up the power he meant for revenge after so many years, but he can't bear to see you get hurt anymore," Hak agreed.
Rosetta nodded, recalling all her memories that came out as proof to Hak and Ah's words.
You know, you're kinda of a nice jerk, she had told Fidget when he had held her captive and he had briefly consoled her from her tears and misery by letting her cuddle in his lap and covered her with his wings to keep her warm. And he did all that in a sort of brotherly way.
I'm not, Fidget had told Rosetta. Crying just annoys me, especially when I'm close to victory.
Whatever.
Rosetta then recalled the second scheme that Fidget did: tricking the Bog King into returning him his Dark Cursed wife, Queen Marianne, in exchange for killing Lily and Hook, and in order to deepen the fake Storybrooke identity he gave to Marianne, Fidget handed her to Bluebeard, the town's worst black market sex trader and the Enchanted Forest's most vile rapist. At first, Fidget was against his associate toying the amnesiac woman but chose to not blow off his scheme until Rosetta knocked some sense into him and he gave up.
I...hope this is the last time I let the codfish get away, he had cried.
Rosetta then hugged him. You know, you might be a villain and a jerk, but you're not that heartless.
Rosetta also recalled the showdown on Main Street on that same day, when Bluebeard threatened her life with a gun pressed on her skull. Fidget had actually looked terrified when he saw the blue-haired maniac threatening the child.
Let her go, Rosetta remembered the Batrishan saying.
During the time when the San Angel heroes were in Storybrooke, Rosetta and Fidget had been interacting casually in the woods as if it were the norm. He gave her a nice book. She kept her mouth shut about his scheme involving Xibalba's medal. He trusted her enough to hold a book as sacred as the Book of Life. Rosetta especially never forgot how Fidget calmed her down from letting her overwhelmed emotions make the Book explode and badmouthed her father Anubis from being overprotective towards Rosetta.
Plus, after he isolated himself in his cottage, Fidget didn't feel like seeing anybody else other than Rosetta for their usual Tea Thursdays.
She pushed her memories aside and went back to the conversation. "You're right about my personal views on Fidget," she told Hak and Ah, "but I'm also aware that he isn't exactly a...safe person."
"I'd personally go with the fact that he's dangerous to the core," Hak said. "But that's not the point, little sister. Unlike your friend the Batrishan squire, the Batrishan Prince of Darkness has already met Bartok."
"Wait, what?" Rosetta felt a wave of shock going through her spine. "But he said he never met anybody of his own kind!"
"Did you even ask him to swear on the river Styx on that?" Ah asked skeptically. "That Batrishan has never been the most trusted by others, especially the heroes of Storybrooke, because of his dark past that drove him towards a very official path of villainy that Ashiva laid out for him."
"Why on Earth would Ashiva want one of his mortal people to become evil? Batrishans are supposed to be the most altruistic and benevolent of all kinds!" Rosetta protested.
"You'd be surprised, but with all the things he did in the past and all the powers he consumed just to get his revenge, he has become a very powerful source of darkness himself." Hak eyes suddenly began to glow and a golden mist shaped and glowing like a solar eclipse began to illuminate the core. Hak and Ah's mouths stayed wide open like a snake on the verge of swallowing its prey. At first, Rosetta feared that they were going to kill her, but then she gasped when she saw red smoke coming out of their mouths and slithering towards the eclipse projection. Golden lights clashed with red ones until a giant, fiery-colored smoke Indian rock Python appeared, rising on its coiled body like a sage and tilting its head down at Rosetta like the cobra on the pharaoh's crown.
"Kaa," she realized.
Kaa's smoke apparition nodded. It opened its mouth and words echoed through the core much louder than the bells of Notre-Dame:
The race through time you must take
To when the fate of balance must have begun!
The race through fate will be at stake
And soon shall rise the Evil One.
Rosetta felt like she had been slapped: the words she had read that dragged her to the Enchanted Forest...
THEY WERE PART OF A PROPHECY!
After three centuries, the sun will darken again.
From the underground the maze shall rise.
Through crystals shall be heard the goddess and Batrishans scream in pain.
From his crown, the Prince of Darkness' evil will terrorize.
The cursed dagger will bond with the dragon,
Who seeks her enslaver's demise and the loyalty of her heir.
The worlds' town will face the agony
As darkness, evil, and malevolence rule the air.
Kaa's apparition, along with the smoke, dissolved into nothing, causing Hak and Ah to nearly lose consciousness and fall of their seated positions until they got back to their senses. Rosetta rushed to ensure their wellbeing.
"Hak..." Rosetta began.
"South Porthaven," Hak said as she rubbed her head. "Right where the holy river touches the open seas. It takes about a week to get there by boat. You'll find Bartok there."
"But..."
"It's on the same way as the Shrine of Canterbury, which is located at an island not too distant from South Porthaven." Ah started pushing Rosetta away from Hak and towards the core. "You have to go! Otherwise the Masked Girl will warn her master!"
"What will the Evil One do to you?"
"If he finds out that you're still snooping in his business? I fear the worst! JUST GO! AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T LOOK BEHIND YOU!"
Rosetta wanted to reply, but she only nodded and ran up the path she took out of the core once Ah fully pushed her out. She didn't look back. By the time she reached the tree she used to climb up towards the canopy, a distant sound of fire burning was heard.
"Rosie, you're back!" Eglantine was the first to spot the human girl making her way down the tree. Anaïs, who had been collecting mushrooms, instantly grabbed the girl and gave her a piggyback ride while making their way back to the boat.
"We have to go to Porthaven!" Rosetta said as soon as her foot was on the deck.