Cave of Nightmares Read Online Free PDF Page A

end of the hall and stood before the closed door. The Masters were all lining up in front of peep-holes carved into the wood-paneled wall, probably so they could watch him while he was inside without interfering.
    “Step inside and look around,” the young one told him. “If you feel a natural pull towards anything in the room, follow your intuition.”
    Hayden nodded in understanding, though he didn’t, and opened the door in front of him.
    The chamber was smaller than he expected, and cluttered. It looked more like a storage room than a testing area. Piles of different colored powders and grains were in the middle of the floor, and he had to walk carefully to avoid stepping in them, suppressing the urge to sneeze. There were tables littered with pieces of wood in various sizes and colors, along with some completed wands. Hayden drifted over to the table and stared down at them, but nothing about them made him feel magically-inclined, so he moved on.
    There were stacks of papers all over the room, though Hayden had no idea which of the arcana they were supposed to belong to. Perhaps this really was a storage room after all….
    He accidentally jostled the corner of a desk and sent a bottle of liquid crashing to the ground, where it shattered. Blue liquid seeped into the nearby stack of papers and Hayden winced and said, “Sorry,” to no one in particular as the paper began to smoke and curl at the edges.
    There were dozens of other phials and flasks of liquid nearby, but they frightened him more than they intrigued him and he hurried past. Charms and talismans dangled on strings from the ceiling, but he didn’t know what they were for and avoided them entirely; one of them looked like it had a human finger-bone in it. He recognized a pack of ordinary drawing chalk on a nearby table and examined it briefly, oddly comforted by the familiar object.
    Mom and I used to draw outside with chalk when it was sunny out.
    A glimmer of green light caught his eye near the room’s only window.
    Moving towards the light, he saw that it was coming from what looked like a large diamond sitting on a stool. Unlike everything else in the room, there was only one of these, and Hayden approached it cautiously, drawn by the multicolored bits of light it cast on the walls in the rays of the sun.
    He picked it up by the edges, surprised by how lightweight it was. Upon closer examination it seemed to be made out of glass instead of diamond, but it was mesmerizing all the same, filling the palm of his hand. Hayden noticed a strange metal band resting nearby and picked it up as well, inspecting the hinges on either side and noting that it made a circlet that was big enough to fit around his head.
    Maybe that’s what it’s meant for.
    Without really knowing why he was doing it, Hayden rested the circlet around his forehead and locked the hinges into place. It fit snuggly. There was a strange piece of metal that hung down over his right eye, forming a smaller circle that he was now looking through, like half a pair of glasses but without a lens.
    Why would anyone wear a metal headband like this?
    There didn’t seem to be anything magical about it, but Hayden suddenly became aware of the glass diamond in his hand. He held it up in front of his face, noting that one side was circular but flat, while the other tapered to a point. Without really thinking about it, he brought the diamond to his face and twisted it into the circular frame over his right eye, pointy-side facing out.
    The effect made him gasp in amazement. All he could see through his right eye was an array of colors, every color in the rainbow, scattered in front of him in the light of the sun. His left eye allowed him to see the room normally and kept him from getting queasy, and Hayden turned slightly to allow more of the sun’s light to strike his face through the strange diamond.
    The colors were mesmerizing, but there was something unsatisfying about them. Touching the frame of