Shortly after re-materialising inside the lamp chamber, Clara realised that she had been re-dressed in the pink harem costume. She let out an irritated sigh and wasted no time in calling on her magic to change her apparel into a white blouse and track pants. After quickly looking her new outfit over, she walked over to the volume of Zhiasa's journal that she'd been reading earlier. It was still sitting open on the floor by the bed. The hi-fi that Clara had conjured into the room earlier sat silent. Clara waved her finger at it, silently commanding it to play a collection of her favourite REM songs, as her magic raised the book to a height where she could grab it without bending down. She layed down on the bed, and continued to delve into the journal.
Clara discovered that within two weeks of the night that they first made love, Zhiasa and Hal'hadin were wed. The journal contained detailed accounts of a few more sexual encounters, especially the events of the wedding night, although none were as graphic as the account of Zhiasa losing her virginity. Clara was severely tempted to slip her hand down her trousers and have a little fun while reading the spicy entries, but resolved to behave herself, fearing a repeat of her last embarrassing exit.
It seemed that after the wedding, Zhiasa didn't return to the lamp very often at all, as the journal was only sparsely written in from that point onward. The remainder of the journal indicated that Zhiasa and Hal'hadin lived together very comfortably in the grand palace for many years and remained very much in love. A few years into the marriage, Zhiasa bore Hal'hadin his first son. The couple went on to have three sons in total and twin girls, who would later turn out to be identical. As far as Clara could tell, the children bought both Zhiasa and Hal'hadin much joy - there didn't seem to be any black sheep in the family. "...Apart from aunt Tukanni," Clara thought to herself.
Then the journal's tone became somewhat sombre. Some time after all the children had grown up, Zhiasa and Hal'hadin began to face the fact that Hal'hadin would not live forever. He was already beginning to show signs of age. Upon her master's death, Zhiasa would have been instantly pulled back into the lamp, to await summoning by her next master. Her sad, lonely life of servitude would begin all over again. Hal'hadin remembered the tales she had told him of this life, and dreaded such a fate ever being revisited on his beloved wife. He made his third wish, for Zhiasa to be free of her imprisonment, but to the surprise of both Hal'hadin and Zhiasa, the wish could not be granted. It seemed that Tukanni still had some nasty surprises for her sister, even after all these millennia. The enslavement spell had a clause built into it that prevented anyone from being able to wish Zhiasa free.
After the gravity of the situation had sunk in, Hal'hadin and Zhiasa realised that they would have to go to more drastic measures to end the princess's imprisonment. Even though they speculated it would probably kill Zhiasa, the couple made the difficult decision to destroy the lamp. Zhiasa wrote about how bravely her husband concealed his breaking heart, on the day that she asked him to destroy the lamp, as she could not bear to return to her old life. But destroying the lamp proved to be easier said than done, as the couple tried many ways of accomplishing the task but never succeeded. The strongest men in the lands could not even dent it with a mallet. The greatest elephants in the land could not crush it beneath their feet. The finest blacksmith in the lands could not stoke a forge hot enough to melt it. The wisest alchemists in the land could not concoct an acid strong enough to dissolve it. Many times the couple said tearful last goodbyes to each other, only to fall asleep that same night, holding each other tightly. Clara got the feeling that even though Zhiasa was becoming increasingly worried about the likelihood of eternal imprisonment, she was more even more grateful for the extra time she got to spend with her husband.
The journal was unclear about how long it was before the couple abandoned the idea of destroying the lamp. But one entry was penned with such heartfelt despair that it even bought a tear to Clara's eye. Zhiasa had lost all hope. She tried to comfort herself with the notion that she probably had many more years to enjoy with her husband, but ultimately, she was certain that an eternity of countless cold masters awaited her.
The next entry however, was much less melancholy. Zhiasa had remembered once thinking that her sister's amulet might have had the power to release her. The cryptic message on the wall of the chamber implied that some kind of key was required for her release, and the amulet was just the right shape to fit in the opening below the message. Zhiasa knew that it was a long shot, tracking down a piece of jewellery from eight thousand years ago, but at least it was a shot.
As her sister died childless, Zhiasa believed that the amulet
should
have been entombed with her. Hal'hadin immediately summoned the most learned scholars in the land to his palace. He paid them almost insane commissions to track down the whereabouts of the ancient queen's tomb. At this point the journal became frustratingly vague. It was clear that several years passed by, with many promising leads that would turn out to be dead ends, but Zhiasa hadn't included any details about the search, or the scholars' discoveries in her entries.
In her final entry, Zhiasa stated that one of the scholars in Hal'hadin's employ had sent word that he'd discovered an ancient stela, buried in the region of her old kingdom. It was worn and damaged, but there were writings on it that claimed a queen, who could well have been Tukanni, had been entombed on
'the peak where two suns join as one.'
As cryptic as this message seemed, the scholar seemed confidant that he knew where the ancient tablet was referring to. The lead seemed so promising that Hal'hadin and Zhiasa made immediate preparations to travel to the suspected site of the tomb and oversee the final leg of the search in person. They planned to meet up with the scholar en route, and then he would guide them the rest of the way.
Clara sighed as she quickly thumbed through the final blank pages of the book. She could only assume that the old scholar's theory had paid off, and they had found the amulet. Zhiasa would have been too ecstatic upon obtaining the key to her freedom to pen a final entry in her journal. One thing that was obvious was that she had definitely managed to free herself, and it was almost certainly with the amulet. The amulet... at least now, Clara knew what she needed in order to free herself. She couldn't recall any pieces like it being discovered in Hal'hadin's tomb, but then, she had disappeared well before the expedition there had been completed. It was possible that the amulet had been discovered after she disappeared. She would have to ask Jeff about that the next time he summoned her.
Clara spent the next several hours sitting at the desk, re-reading some of Zhiasa's earliest journal scrolls. She had a gut feeling that she might need all the information she could get about Zhiasa's kingdom. While deeply engrossed in a scroll (as she had been for much of the night), she felt a familiar tingling in her toes. She looked down at her feet to see the smoky cloud swirling around them. Not nearly as freaked out by it as she had been last time, Clara casually turned her attention back to the scroll and finished reading the sentence she'd been on. Within a few seconds she found herself standing in Jeff's presence, once again in Roft Manor. Jeff was wearing nothing more than white cotton briefs.
"Warwick's down the hall, knocking on your door. You'd better get back to your room if you don't want him to start wondering where you are," he said.
"Yes, I'd better. Thank you, Jeff," Clara replied as she began to walk towards the wall.
"... and you might want to change your pyjamas to something a little more English, if you don't want to get any weird looks," Jeff said. Clara looked down over her body, realising she was once again clothed in the harem outfit.
"Oh blast!" she complained. "It did this to me when I went back in, I think it must reset the wardrobe to default every time I move in and out of the lamp." Her magic transformed the costume into a set of full-body, cream-colored silk pyjamas. Clara even had the sense to give her hair the untidy appearance it would normally have after a rough night's sleep. "How do I look?" she asked, spinning around to give Jeff a 360-degree view.
"Not bad," he responded.
"Thank you," Clara smiled, taking one last look at Jeff wearing nothing but his underwear. "See you at breakfast." She turned around and walked through the wall, into her own bedroom, chuckling to herself. She couldn't help but enjoy the poetic justice she'd just enjoyed; Yesterday
she
was the one that had been caught half-naked.
---------------
The three Rofts and Jeff sat down to breakfast together in the sitting room. The meal wasn't as formal or grand as dinner the night before, but it still came with full service. After breakfast, Clara changed into a sports bra and track pants and went for a run around the manor grounds, as she often did when she was home. She still wasn't sure how she was going to explain her disappearance to her parents, but she knew that she could not put the issue off any longer. Her main concern was her mother. The elder Lady Roft tended to worry about her only child, always running off to the most remote locations on the globe. Clara had always tried to spare her mother's nerves by not telling her about the perils she faced on her adventures. But this time Clara had fallen into a trap that she could not stay silent about.
