Today’s Post: THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN: Chapter One–Part Five:

From the sky, it all looked intriguing and yet alien. Yesterday morning, she had been at Gryphon Park—now she was part way around the world. It had not been a hard trip. Her parents had taken her to London, along with Peter and Laurel, her older brother and sister, and the three children had stepped through a Travel Glass—which turned out to be a really big version of the Walking Glasses they used to get around town.

The Travel Glass led to New York City. Her parents had taken them to see a few sights: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the gilded Temple of Apollo on Fifth Avenue, the Shrine of the Goddess Amaterasu. These last two landmarks had been crowded with mundane folk who had come to worship. Rachel had never mixed with the Unwary before, those who were ignorant of the magical World of the Wise. She had kept her shadowcloak tucked around her and stayed close to her family.
After that, it had been a simple matter of stepping through a second glass that exited in a cottage near the dock along the Hudson River, where the ferry, the Pollepel II, picked them up to carry them to Roanoke Island.

The trip had not been difficult, but it had been disorientating. The worst part, the part that made her chest clench even now, as she soared on her broom, had been leaving Sandra behind. For years, Rachel had imagined she would arrive at Roanoke for the first time holding her oldest sister’s hand. All those years, as she had watched Sandra leave for school each autumn, she had never bothered to do the math. Otherwise, it would have been obvious long ago that, by the time she was old enough to come to school, Sandra would already have graduated.

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