The Butterfly Effect

She’d answered several more questions about Samone before she joined the boys. Their planning wasn’t anything more than usual and did a poor job at hiding that there was something else bothering them. Tavin eventually left for his own room to get some sleep; the other three remained to create something verging on an argument.

“Can you be confident that there isn’t anything to be worried about?” Henry asked.

“Of course I can,” Lydia remarked casually. “It’s an urban legend. Those kinds of things are never what they’re made out to be. One of them closer to home said that there was a ghost wandering around that dragged whoever saw it to hell with it. It turned out to just be a bird that got thrown off-course during migration that sounded like it was moaning. Another said there was a merchant that sold poisons in a town in Palus. He’s just a regular old guy from Qizar that people got paranoid and spread rumors about. They’re nothing more than a waste of time if you take them to be all that they say they are.”

“There’s also the one where a siren lived in a Seothian river,” Tim said, “and there ended up being a whole group of them. Or that there was a place where the figurines moved every night when they were actually real living things.”

Lydia realized that there’d soon be no way to talk them all into it if things kept going at this rate. “Can’t you both just trust me on this one?”

“I think we’d both love to,” Tim sighed.

Henry nodded his agreement. “What happened to making a decision together? Making sure everyone is willing to go along with the plan, that we’re prepared for everything we might come across?”

“We can make sure we have more than enough supplies when we head out, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she tried. “It’s not going to be nearly as bad as it sounded like earlier. We’re all Stones—even if there’s some truth to it, there’s nothing to be worried about. We’ll handle it.”

“The three of us? Yeah, we can definitely handle a couple of complicated mazes and maybe a serial killer or two. That won’t be a problem at all. But Tavin?” It seemed Henry was against going enough that he was willing to bring it up; that little fragment of truth they mainly pretended didn’t exist. “If we’re not going to be honest any other time, we should at least be now. He’s not cut out for any of this. For a while he might be fine, and maybe if it was just a maze it wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but there’s more than that. It doesn’t seem like a risk worth taking.”

She knew he was right. She had nothing to defend herself with but she needed to do something. It felt like they were pulling away from her.

Like they were about to leave her again.

“A part of it might be involved with our adventure,” Lydia eventually decided to point out. “There’s probably just a bit of truth to it and, if there is, it’s probably something that Achadus set up earlier. If we want to see this thing through to the end, then we at least need to try.”

Neither of them seemed much more willing to go.

“I promise that if things start getting weird, we’ll leave, alright?” she offered desperately. “If there’s a way out by the time we notice it, we’ll head straight back here and look at all the other surrounding forests.”

“Why don’t we just try the safer options first..?” Henry questioned.

Uncomfortably aware of where she truly was and, for the first time, giving an extensive thought to what she was missing… it wasn’t hard to come up with an answer that likely only brought up more questions. “We don’t have the time.”

…

As far as she was aware, they didn’t tell Tavin what they talked about. Not like he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out on his own; if he hadn’t heard them through the walls that night, he was able to make a guess given their actions. They didn’t bring it up again, though she knew it was only a matter of time after they entered the forest that they started to keep her to her word.

They’d made camp just inside of the forest. It wouldn’t have been hard to find their way back out again if they needed to… though she doubted they’d come across anything, since they’d seen nothing out of the ordinary so far.

“We’ll try to head further in tomorrow,” she announced. “If there’s anything good here, that’s where it’s going to be.”

“From the looks of it, someone was able to tell that there was something here,” Tavin remarked. He was looking at the map, something he’d had from earlier that he had yet to return to her. He traced along the edge of the mark of the forest then towards the center. “Either that or whoever had this smeared a bit of ink over it. It’s impossible to tell with these kinds of maps…”

Tim leaned over. “I think that’s a there’s-treasure-here point.”

Henry glanced at it too and shook his head. “That just looks like a bunch of scribbles.”

“I borrowed that one from Dad,” Lydia said. “He’s probably the only one who knows what it is… if he was the one to put it there.”

They had to admit that there was no way of telling until they got there. It didn’t take too much longer for another conversation to take its place, however—one that she hoped wouldn’t be brought up.

Henry sounded casual when he said it, though at least to her it was clear what he truly wanted to learn from it. “Mom, didn’t you say once that there was someone you helped investigate but could never find?” He was trying to pass it off as just another one of his requests for a story. As much as she didn’t want to give him more reasons to try to convince them out of this, she knew it was better to just go with it.

Hesitating gave them just as much reason to be wary of their surroundings as admitting the whole truth to them would. She needed to find a happy medium between the two; make sure they knew enough that they weren’t worried, but don’t know so much that they realize what this all really was.

Still, Lydia took the advantage of the campfire to give herself the perfect atmosphere. It would be like any of the other tales she would tell them.

“A couple and their young kid had been murdered in cold blood, but there were some things that made it different than most others. All the rooms were exactly as they’d been before—the table was set for dinner, the couple’s bed was made and clothes prepared for the next day, everything in perfect order… except for the nursery. The crib was upturned and practically all of the floor and walls were covered in blood. The bodies of the couple were sitting in the window seat, staring at all those who walked inside, smiles sewn on their faces. The body of the baby sat in the middle. All of them looked like they’d only just died due to an artifact beside them. On the windows were dozens of drawn eyes and the words written in blood, ‘I watched you pretend to be the perfect family. Then you watched as I fixed you.’”

All three of them had heard the story before, but Tim and Henry still listened as if they’d heard it for the first time; Tavin was still focused on something else. Lydia continued.

“We spent months investigating it; traveling there, trying to figure out if there were any signs of who had killed them. It was only then that we realized how long it must’ve been since they were killed—they lived on their own, barely going out to town and only doing as little as possible there, so no one noticed when they stopped coming. We found more writing throughout the house that suggested that the killer’s name had been Thistle, but even then we couldn’t find anything about her. We still don’t know where she might be hiding… though it’s pretty likely that she died or at least that they were the only ones she intended on targeting. No other murder since then has been associated with the same kinds of things that theirs had.”

“What was it like there?” Henry asked.

Lydia shrugged. “Well, technically I wasn’t there myself until a couple of years after the investigation closed. I’d learned about an artifact on the way there and Witless, Ellie, and I all went out to get it. But it was still pretty close to what those people that went said and the drawings they had looked like. Aside from the hole I may or may not have put into the wall, anyway…”