You are beautiful with words. I am not kidding, I acaully cried a little bit :) :(

@Sterling: oh, thank you! that was about the tone I was going for.

@Celeste: lol yeah, i get you. i can get very weird and conceptual at times :7 & thanks! 

@Hawkstar: so speechless. isn't it every writer's ambition to make people cry? --in all seriousness though, thank you so much <33

i'm really enjoying writing this, so i'm glad y'all're enjoying reading it :}

Here's part four! This is getting dark. I mean, it was already dark -- it's a murder mystery, after all -- but the darkness is continuing unabated. Calloway is a shapeshifter, as you may recall; that Important Detail resurfaces in this snippet. And as always: guesses, eliminations from The Possible Suspect List, diaries, thoughts?

---

Pix read for a long time. After a while, she stopped doing it aloud, when she suspected that most of the ski lodgers were either asleep or falling into it. But she kept reading, her candle burning low and her eyes tiring from following the small black print. She was determined to stay awake, to make certain that the murderer didn't steal any more lives that night. That was why she had had the CBers all sleep in the same big room -- safety in numbers. She knew me. She knew how I did this, and it was always without witnesses.

I have always been uncommonly clever, though. In the end, she is just a little girl, and I'm her elder brother. (I was a child too, once, but the magic has stolen age from me. She is as she always was.)

This is how it happened, more or less.

Pix read from her poetry, occasionally glancing up at the shadowy room, her candle the only illumination. She startled at the sound of the wind or the ancient Castle creaking, thinking all of it to be my footsteps, come to steal.

She was reading Caroline's poem about the sunset ("I am coming home after four hours in the studio/and I am tired. But then I look up and see the melting sky-/blue at the top, fading to/creamy white-pink," May eleventh, 2017, at eight forty-six P.M.) She heard footsteps, and she looked up quickly, her eyes scanning the shadows.

At first she saw nothing, only shades of black on black on gray, but then she caught a touch of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she saw a figure standing in the ballroom, vague and tall and dark. All she could see was that the person was standing up; everything else bled into the blackness all around them.

"Who's there?" Pix called, trying not to sound accusatory. It was probably just a CBer up for a glass of water or something, she told herself. It was nothing. But she had done this dance with me too many times to entirely quash the persistent, half-irrational fear in the back of her mind.

The figure turned. "Oh, hello, Pix," they said. Pix couldn't place their voice; it was definitely familiar, and it wasn't mine (my natural voice, anyhow), but she didn't know whose it was. It sounded a bit light. Feminine, Pix thought. Not that that helped narrow it down very much; fourteen of the remaining ski lodgers were girls. "I was just going for another cup of tea. I can't seem to sleep."

Pix noted with detached, professional interest the way the figure's voice fractured, just a little, at the end. She wondered if it was real emotion or skilled acting. She wished she didn't have to wonder, but she had me as a brother, so she did. She also noted that the figure hadn't answered her question.

"Um -- do you want some?" the figure asked. Excellently depicted uncertainty, Pix thought cynically. She knew I was talented at pretending to be young. "It's no trouble."

"All right," Pix said, not letting her wariness spill into her voice. If the person brought her tea, she would definitely see her face. (But of course I'm cleverer than that.) "Black, if you can find it? I imagine I'm going to have to be up for a while yet."

A bit of a smile in her voice now. "Sure." She turned and left the ballroom, slipping out the door that led to the kitchen.

Pix returned to her poetry for a little while, trying to ease her fear, telling herself that the person fetching her tea was not her brother in disguise, that she was grasping at straws, that there was nothing to be frightened of. It was just a person getting tea for herself and for Pix. A nice thing to do, all things considered. Honestly. Pix was being paranoid.

But she couldn't shake the fear; she had worn it for too long for it to be easily shed, even if she knew, rationally, that it was probably unfounded. Everything was probably fine. Wasn't it?

if you could re-write/fairy tales, you ask me/in english class, what/would you do? (by September on the twelfth of May, 2017; ten twenty-seven P.M.) The person returned in short order, slipping back into the ballroom and making her way in between sleeping ski lodgers to reach Pix.

Pix caught only a fleeting glimpse of her face in the candle's flame before the candle, placed in its holder at the head of Pix's makeshift bed, fell over and went out with a hiss and a wisp of smoke.

"Oh, sorry!" the person -- definitely female, Pix decided -- said, stepping back. They were shrouded in the complete dark. "Sorry. I wasn't looking where I was going. I must have tripped over it."

She sounded so genuine. Pix almost gave up her worries entirely as she accepted the hot porcelain teacup in the dark, her fingers brushing the girl's. "Thanks. Don't worry about it." She heard the girl's "Of course!" and her retreating footsteps.

After taking a sip of her tea, Pix set it aside and righted the candle. She fumbled for her matchbook and found it in her left pocket. She pulled it out and, working by feel, pulled out a match. She tried to strike it in the dark, feeling peculiarly dizzy. The match slipped off. She tried again. She blinked and stifled a yawn, and when she tried to strike the match a third time, she dropped the matchbook.

She realized what was happening a moment before she fell asleep. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Accepting tea from a person who wouldn't tell you her name. Who might possibly be Calloway. That girl... She -- or, more correctly, he, because it had been Calloway, Pix was certain; of course it had been Calloway -- must have put something in the tea. A sleeping draught, or something, because now she was falling, falling into a deep dark sleep. No witnesses. Her last half-lucid thought was, Oh, he's going to kill them, isn't he? I have to --

And then she was dreaming.

More! More!

@Celeste: oh yes, Calloway and Pix have a very complicated relationship. Hopefully all will come to light at The Big Finale.

@Hawkstar: your wish is my command, my friend. Here is More.

--part five! you know the drill: theories, diaries, thoughts? 

---

Someone screamed. (Again. But this time it was because they had seen murder, not because it had happened to them.)

Amethyst wasn't sure who it was, but it yanked her out of her dreams and into the stark, slightly chilly reality of the ballroom, lying in borrowed blankets on a floor she'd danced on only hours before. It was dark; the only light, pale and pearly, came from the opened double doors at the front of the room. It must be morning.

She only half-processed these details, all her attention taken by the scream. She searched dozily for the source of it.

Her eyes landed on Tilly, the shy black-haired AE who'd worn a smashing top hat to the party. Now she was dressed in a frilly Victorian nightgown that hung to her ankles, wringing her hands. She looked as if she had just screamed; though at what, exactly, Amethyst wasn't certain. The dim dawn-light caught the whiteness of her gown, almost making it glow, and rendered her a wingless dark-haired angel standing in the midst of a room full of shadows.

It took her a second to register it, to register this, this horrible stark proof that the world was exactly as dangerous and unforgiving as it had been yesterday, when they'd found Azalea dead in an emerald-green armchair. Now she saw why Tilly had screamed, why people were sitting up in their rumpled blankets and staring, why Strawberry was pressing her hands over her eyes and Reuby was distantly wrapping an arm around her AE's shoulders, why there were tear tracks traced absentmindedly across Eclipse's face.

WiLdSoNg is dead, Amethyst informed herself numbly. Ame is dead too.

No one spoke. Most of the ski lodgers had gotten up by now, and they stood silently around the two murdered, not speaking, not moving. They were a tableau of death, carved in marble. The only sound was of someone's quiet weeping. Eclipse, maybe. Tilly. Maybe it was Amethyst herself. She didn't know. She didn't really care, either, because the entirety of her mind was focused on the terrible scarlet-painted scene in front of her. Even if she had been able to look away, she was certain that when she closed her eyes, she would see WiLdSoNg and Ame on the backs of them, bleeding and sleeping, not sleeping, dead, gone, lost

She didn't know what to do. She didn't think anyone else did, either. When someone finally spoke -- Artemis, her dark eyes scanning the faces around her -- it was to say quietly, "Where's Pix?"

Amethyst searched, and found Pix wasn't among the marble statues.

Sapphire scanned the room; her gaze snagged on something by the opened double doors, and she pointed across the room. "There she is."

Everyone's eyes followed her finger to where a small, green-clad form lay on the floor, a book left open beside her.

Darkvine, not wasting a moment, ran across the hall to Pix. Kneeling quickly, she shook her shoulders, speaking quickly and indistinctly.

When Pix moved -- pushing herself up on her elbows, replying to Darkvine in a dozy monosyllable -- Amethyst took a deep breath, relieved. Everything was still terrible, but it was not as terrible as it could be, because their brave eight-year-old queen was still alive. Even if two of her subjects were, quite suddenly, not.

Pix got up, straightening her crumpled green gown, and for a moment she and Darkvine spoke in low voices. Amethyst saw the moment when Pix learned that WiLdSoNg and Ame had been killed: Darkvine's knitted eyebrows, Pix's face shattering into a thousand tiny pieces for one instant, before she schooled her features again, nodded sharply, spoke. They embraced briefly, almost perfunctorily, and then they both walked back across the hall to the crowd of ski lodgers (sixteen alive; two, the other thing).

When she saw Ame and WiLdSoNg, Pix sighed. It was a quiet, breathy thing, barely there; more a motion, a brief collapse, than an audible sound. Then she said, "I'm sorry. This is my fault."

"What do you--" Hawkstar started, but Pix cut across her incredulous words with her own, quiet and sure and, underneath the steel, broken: "I'll explain. Let's bury them, and then I'll explain."

They buried them.

By the time they trickled back across the green lawns to the Castle, the sun had crept over the horizon and shone a golden morning over them all, the pink streaks of sunrise fading into blue. The Castle gleamed as though it was forged from gold itself; the Lake glittered, blue and sun-speckled. It was an unfairly beautiful morning.

Nothing is fair, not even beautiful things.

They congregated in the ballroom again, gathering in a sloppy circle in the middle after folding up the blankets and stashing them in stacks along the walls. Everyone looked at Pix.

"Go on, then," Hex said, not unkindly. "What happened?"

Pix sat down cross-legged and put her face in her hands. She looked suddenly very young and small. After a moment, in which Pix was silent and the ski lodgers stood around awkwardly looking at each other, Pix lowered her hands and looked around at them all and said, "Okay. This is how it happened." She ran a hand absently through her short fair hair, making it even messier and spikier than it already was, from sleep. "So. I was awake in the night. I was -- keeping watch, I guess. I wanted to make certain the murderer didn't kill anyone else." Her eyes flickered away from them for a moment, and she said flatly, "Obviously I failed."

As she spoke, the ski lodgers began hesitantly to sit down as well, as it was strange and difficult to listen to someone tell a story when you are standing and they are sitting, and there were already enough strange and difficult things running around. Pix continued, "Mostly it was quiet. Everyone was asleep. I just stayed up and read some poetry and tried not to join them in dreaming. At some point, I heard a noise, and I looked up, and there was someone up. i asked her who she was, but she didn't answer. She just asked if I would like some tea." Pix's ocean-blue eyes flickered across the ski lodgers' faces, looking for -- something. Guilt? She didn't seem to find it, whatever it was. "I said yes. She brought me it. I drank it. And it was laced with -- something. Something that made me fall asleep, so that she could kill WiLdSoNg and Ame with no witnesses." She rubbed her forehead. "It was stupid. I should never have accepted the tea. I shouldn't have accepted anything from her when she wouldn't tell me who she was. When she wouldn't let me see her face."

"Wait -- so you never saw who it was?" Echo Hallowswift said.

"No," Pix said. "It was dark; the only light was my candle. When she gave me my tea, she knocked it over. She made as if it was an accident, but she must've done it on purpose. So that I wouldn't see who she was."

"So we still don't know who the murderer is?" Lyra said.

"Actually," Pix said, something terrible and fractured underneath her eyes, "I do know who the murderer is. I knew who it was even before Azalea was murdered, even before any of you came here." Her voice drifted quieter, as if she was speaking to someone else, someone unseen. She was talking to me, really. "He's always the murderer."

"What?" Hawkstar exclaimed. "You know who the murderer is? You knew, and you let them kill Azalea? You let them kill WiLdSoNg and Ame?" She stared at Pix. "How --?"

"Who is it?" Darkvine demanded.

"I can't tell you," Pix said. She looked at Hawkstar. "I would have stopped him if I could, believe me. I tried to stop him last night, but he was too clever for me." Her eyes drifted away again. "He's always too clever for me."

"So -- you're on our side?" Hawkstar said, frowning. "But --"

"Why can't you tell us who the murderer is?" Hex said sharply. "Why didn't you say anything before now?"

"Because he's enchanted me so that I can never say who it is," Pix said. "He's only let me say this now because it doesn't matter. Because you all already know there's a murderer among us, and knowing that I know who it is will only turn you against me."

"Is this the person you said had stronger magic than you?" Poinsettia queried. "Is this the person who's enchanted you, who's -- who's killed Azalea and WiLdSoNg and Ame?"

Pix nodded, almost imperceptibly.

"So there's a murderer," Eclipse said. "Obviously. And Pix knows who it is, but he's enchanted her so that she can't say. And last night, he offered her a cup of tea with the Draught of Living Death in it, and he killed WiLdSoNg and Ame."

"That's about right," Pix said, wearily.

"Wait," Celeste said, holding up a hand. "You said 'she' when you were telling us about last night. But now you're saying 'he.'" She frowned. "What's the murderer's gender?"

The corner of Pix's mouth quirked up, just slightly. Those blasted clever CBers. She loved them. "He's male. He's a boy, really; or he was."

"So how was it that the person who brought you tea was female?" Eclipse interjected. "Was that the murderer? Or is there someone he has working for him?" Her eyes widened. "Is it one of us?"

"He works alone," Pix said. "But he is one of us. He's right here, sitting on this floor with us."

"You're talking in riddles," Darkling pointed out. "Not that I'm objecting, of course, but we're trying to figure out the identity of a homicidal criminal here. A little more transparency would be nice."

"I've told you all I can tell you," Pix said. "I know who the murderer is, and he's male. Last night, someone with a feminine voice brought me tea that had sleeping-draught in it, and the next morning we found two murdered CBers. And the murderer works alone."

There was a small silence in which everyone tried to think of anyone they knew who could shapeshift. Some of their lists were longer than others, but the chances of either Tempest, Wildfire, or Nymphadora Tonks running around murdering people in a ski lodge they weren't even in were pretty low, especially when you solve for the cross-genre contamination. That left only a couple candidates, and only one whom they knew was predisposed to killing people.

He had told them there would be murder.

Writing said, "Gosh."

With all due and appropriate drama, Sapphire added, "It's Calloway."

---

Dead: Azalea, WiLdSoNg, Ame

Alive: Echo Hallowswift, Lyra, Hex, Eclipse, Artemis, Sapphire, Darkvine, Celeste, Darkling, Hawkstar, Poinsettia, Writing, Amethyst, Reuby, Strawberry, Tilly

@Writing: thanks so much, again!! i am proud of that line :D (we'd have a tad more chaos, that's for sure, with two shapeshifters running around...)

@Poinsettia: why, ty! yep, Calloway is most def the murderer, everybody knows that now -- what remains to be seen is which of the ski lodgers he's impersonating, because he is impersonating one of them... and thank you for the diary entry! i've never seen them in a ski lodge either, but i've seen people mention them, so they must've been a thing at one point. i'd like for them to come back around, because it helps me write y'all more accurately -- obviously, there's going to be a lot of fictionalization anyway, but still.

alrighty, part six! yktd: tdth? (i'm going to make that over-abbreviation my official ski lodge sign-off, because it's so much faster than writing 'you know the drill: theories, diaries, thoughts?' every time, and i'm a modern american child who thinks everyone should talk in text-speak /jk)

---

Strawberry's mouth formed an 'oh' shape. "Y-you mean -- he's shapeshifted? ...To look like one of us?"

Pix nodded.

"He's sitting here right now?" Strawberry stared around at her fellow ski lodgers. "He's one of them?"

Or it's you, and Calloway is just being clever, pretending to be surprised, pretending to be the sweet hyper AE no one would ever suspect. Everyone thought this. No one said it. (Except for the murderer -- except for me -- because I thought, There it is. The distrust. It's rather trite by now, but divide and conquer. Purely practically, it's easier to kill people who are alone.)

They were all realizing that any one of the people around them could actually be me, their enigmatic, apparently homicidal, and probably slightly unhinged ski lodge host, hiding behind a face they thought they could trust. It was a monumentally disturbing thought, I'm sure.

"Wait," Amethyst said. "So -- one of the ski lodgers never signed up at all, and it's been Calloway all along?"

Darkvine answered before Pix did. "No, that can't be it," she said. "All of these people, including Azalea and WiLdSoNg and Ame, sent their forms in. We saw them. They're posted to the thread."

"Maybe he impersonated one of them," Hawkstar reasoned. "Maybe one of those forms wasn't posted by a real CBer, but by Calloway."

"Technically speaking," Artemis said, "Calloway is a real CBer. He's me. I invented him." She spread her hands. "To break the fourth wall for the fifty-seventh time, I'm writing this as we speak."

"Yeah, well," Darkvine said. "We aren't in reality anymore, remember? We're in your story. In your story, you're just one of us, and Calloway is the deranged ski lodge host who invited unsuspecting little you to a party with all these folks. In your story, you don't know how this ends."

"Right," Artemis said. She sighed and tugged absently at her earlobe. "Let's leave the philosophical digression for another time, i guess. Calloway must've impersonated somebody on the Chatterbox."

Hawkstar frowned, thinking. "Actually, you know," she said, "I heard someone scream, that night in the library. When Azalea was murdered."

"It must've been her, right?" Hex said. "Kind of... obviously?"

"Yeah, that's the rational answer," Hawkstar. "It's just... it didn't sound like her. It wasn't her voice."

"Well, then whose was it?" Artemis asked, raising her eyebrows.

Hawkstar met her eyes, hazel on dark. "I don't know. But... I think that someone else was murdered that night. I think that's who screamed. I think Calloway murdered someone, and then he shifted to look them, and then he killed Azalea. To cover his tracks with someone else's face. Even if we figured out that it was him doing the murdering, we wouldn't know where to look for him, because he could be any of you."

"That's it," Pix said. "That's what he does."

"But why?" Poinsettia asked suddenly. She wasn't talking to Pix, or to her fellow ski lodgers, trapped children in a Castle made out of thought. She was talking to me. (The problem was, her fellow ski lodgers and the latter could quite possibly be one and the same. They were, most definitely. She just didn't know which.) "Why kill people? Why invite people to a party just to kill them? What's the point?" She spread her slender hands.

"That's the great question of our time, isn't it?" Darkling said. "That's always the question in these things."

"Well, it's not important right now, is it?" Celeste said, a little impatiently. "We've a murderer running around -- or, well, sitting here listening to us talk about him and laughing at us, probably. We need to find out whose face he's wearing, and stop him before he kills anyone else."

"She's right," Pix said. "That's what's important." She stood and brushed off her crumpled gown. "Breakfast is also important, especially when the last thing you ate was viridescent punch at the party yesterday. I'll go fry us up a little something, and you kids theorize." Nobody pointed out the fact that she was at least three years younger than everyone else in the room, and therefore the amusing inaccuracy of her use of the word 'kids.' They were still too scared to laugh.

Pix walked away across the ballroom, and at the door that led to the kitchen, she stopped and looked back. "Don't go anywhere alone," she said, and was gone.

"Why is it okay for her and not for us?" Hawkstar said, raising an eyebrow.

"She must think Calloway wouldn't kill her -- they are siblings, aren't they? And anyway, we'd notice if someone suddenly sneaked off to kill her, and then we'd have our answer," Sapphire said. She frowned at the door Pix had vanished through. "I wonder, though. I bet she knows why he's doing this."

"Yeah, but we've just agreed that is of little consequence at the moment," Hex said. "Which is true. We can ask Calloway himself when we catch him, but first we have to do that."

Poinsettia said, "But why don't we just leave? Escape the murderer? There's more of this world beyond the Castle, isn't there? Can't we survive that way?"

"Yeah, why not?" Sapphire asked.

"Well, we'd never be able to get home," Darkvine said, "until Calloway gives Pix back her magic. And that isn't going to happen unless he's dead, or in jail, I'd wager. If there are jails in this place."

"Also, he's one of us," Hex added. "He's one of the ski lodgers sitting right here with us, right now. Wherever we run too, he'll come with us, because we don't know which of them is him."

"...Right," Poinsettia said. She tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and sighed. "Okay. I guess we have to figure out who he is. What do we know?"

"Well, the murderer is Calloway, obviously. He's shapeshifted to look like one of us. He murdered Azalea the first night here, and the second, he gave Pix sleeping tea and killed Ame and WiLdSoNg," Eclipse listed.

"Hold on," Darkvine said, and pulled out of nowhere a pen and spiral-bound college-rule notebook, because it was a ski lodge, and I'm a generous dictator. She flipped to a blank page, folded the cover over, and said, "Okay, everyone's guilty until proven innocent. I'll write down everyone's names." She started writing quickly.

"I thought it was innocent until proven guilty," Hex protested, the corner of her mouth quirked just slightly.

Darkvine's glowing green eyes flicked up to meet Hex, and straight-faced, she said, "Toto, I've a feeling we aren't in America anymore. I think it was the giant Castle and the murdery nonexistent ski lodge host that tipped me off."

Hex laughed, surprising herself. "I'll say! We're in a made-up Castle trying to figure out which one of our friends we've never met in real life is secretly our evil ski lodge host with the weird name and the weirder sister. Not to mention the fact we're in a ski lodge, and for some reason we know we're in a ski lodge, and everybody is running around breaking the fourth wall for the amusement of our readers."

"Yeah, but we're Chatterboxers," Darkvine said. "That's what we do." She finished writing down the names. "Okay. Let's begin at the beginning."

"Excellent idea," Darkling said. "Once upon a time, there were fourteen Chatterboxers and five alter egos, and they decided to go to the ski lodge with the weird intro and the creepy host, and his winged sister showed up and made them winged, too, and they all flew off into the dark to the Castle by the Lake, and partied. Then some people went to the library, and the cool ones danced, and Azalea was murdered." They frowned. "Actually, wait a mo. Two people were murdered, and Calloway impersonated the first and murdered the second with the face of the first. We think. Lord Dunsany. This is complicated."

"Hey," Tilly said, "if Azalea was murdered in the library, then everyone who was dancing in here must be innocent, right? Because they weren't at the scene of the crime. Calloway must've impersonated one of the people in the library, 'cause you'd've noticed if he suddenly turned up and killed one of the dancers and shapeshifted into them and ran off to the library to kill Azalea, right?"

Darkvine pointed her pen at her. "Splendid deduction, Watson. All the dancers are innocent. Unless any of them recall anyone leaving the ballroom at any time when the murder could've occurred." She looked around at the circle of ski lodgers, plus one murderer.

"I don't remember anyone leaving," Sapphire said. "Strawberry?"

Strawberry shook her head. "Everyone stayed in the ballroom after we started the fast Irish thingy."

"Splendid," Darkvine said again, and looked down at the list. "Who all was dancing?"

"Me," Writing offered. "And Darkling was fiddling."

"Me too," Echo Hallowswift said. "Both the Amethysts. And WiLdSoNg, too, but I guess she and Ame are already innocent." She bit her lip.

"Sapphire and Strawberry, you already said so," Darkvine added.

"I was dancing," Eclipse said, and Hex nodded. "So was I."

Darkvine crossed out all the dancers' names from the "Suspect" list and moved them to the "Innocent" column. "Okay. You all have alibis now. That leaves Lyra, Artemis, me, Celeste, Hawkstar, Poinsettia, Reuby, Tilly, and Azalea who were reading. That's all correct?" No one dissented. "Spectacular. Azalea's already not a suspect, obviously. So our as-yet-not-proved-innocent folks are Lyra, Artemis, me again, Celeste, Hawkstar, Poinsettia, Reuby, and Tilly. Eight."

All of the dancers were of course relieved that they'd been proved innocent, and all of the readers still felt uncomfortable at the thought that they were, by necessity, still suspected of murdering three people. Well, no. Four, because they would've been murdered as well, and Calloway taken their face. Their crime was the possibility that they were him.

"Okay, moving on," Darkvine said. "What happened next?"

"Um. I found her," Hawkstar said. "Azalea, I mean. Dead. I think I screamed. I found the other readers. Darkvine told Pix and the dancers. Pix took charge."

Darkvine scribbled a small note in her notebook. "Okay. Right. We buried Azalea, and made up the beds and got candles and tea and books."

"Oh!" Echo Hallowswift exclaimed. "I forgot!" She searched her pockets. They'd all changed into fresh day-clothes stored with the nightwear they'd worn that night. "Oh, it's in my other clothes," she said. "From the party."

"Uh, sorry -- what is?" Hawkstar asked, looking confused.

"Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," Echo Hallowswift said. "The book Azalea was reading when she died. I picked it up when we were burying her."

"Do you think it's relevant to the investigation?" Darkvine asked, professionally interested.

"I don't know. I'm not sure how it could be -- I mean, she probably didn't have the time to scribble a helpful note in the margins when she saw the murderer." Echo Hallowswift looked at Darkvine. "Should I get it, though?"

"Well, we're short on clues, so sure, I guess. Let's finish this first, and then we'll find it. Remember, we can't go anywhere alone." Darkvine's tone had a slight dose of figurative eyeroll when she quoted Pix's instructions, but she didn't trespass them. Pix, short and unimpressively youthful as she was, had been at this much longer than they had. "All right, we buried Azalea. We read poetry. We slept."

"That's when Pix saw the murderer in the dark," Eclipse said. "A girl."

"Right, yeah, but that doesn't help much," Darkvine said. "We're all girls, except for Darkling and Writing and Ame, and they were dancing, and they're dead. So."

"Right," Eclipse said. "Right. Um. The girl -- or Calloway, I guess, wearing somebody else's face -- brought her tea with sleeping-draught in it, and knocked over her candle."

"Celeste and Darkling made the tea," Lyra mused. Celeste's amber eyes flickered, but they didn't say anything.

"Yeah, but we keep forgetting it's Calloway," Darkvine said. "It doesn't matter who he looks like. He's Calloway underneath. Of course he knows where the tea in his own Castle is kept, and the sleeping-draughts too, even if the person he's impersonating has never been in the kitchen. Or maybe he conjured the tea out of thin air. He is supposed to be magic."

Echo Hallowswift frowned thoughtfully. "I wish we knew something about what the girl looked like," she said. "It'd give us something to go on. We're sure Pix didn't see anything? Not even what she was wearing, or how long her hair was? You can tell that just from a person's silhouette, even if there's hardly any light."

"We'll ask her when she's finished with breakfast," Darkvine said, and made a note. "Okay. Pix fell asleep, and Calloway murdered WiLdSoNg and Ame." She scowled briefly. "Why them? Why those two, and not someone else? Why two, and not one or three or five or all of us at once? Did he have no time?" She wrote down her questions in brackets in the margins of her notes.

The ski lodgers' Sherlock session was interrupted by Pix, who appeared in the ballroom again, wearing a white apron and a chef's hat that was at least two sizes too large for her. It would have been cute if they were in any other situation. She called, cupping her hands around her mouth, "Okay, come and help me cook, yon children! I've realized there's sixteen of you and one of me, and that's a lot of toast, even if I am a wicked-cool magic sorceress. Also, y'all're tall and I can't reach the pepper."

The ski lodgers complied, Darkvine tearing out her sheet of notes and folding it carefully to stash in her pocket. They went and cooked bacon and eggs and toast and chopped up pomegranates for seventeen people with varied dietary restrictions. Which was a fairly all-consuming task, by definition, but did not extinguish the seeds of doubt their revelations had planted in the back shelves of their minds. 

Anyone around them could be Calloway. Anyone at all.

---

bonus thingymawhosit, 'cause I feel like it. Darkvine's investigatory notes:  

Great and sad at the same time. Here is a short entry from me-

Two more were killed. I will miss Wildsong, I enjoyed talking to her. I didn't really know Ame, but....Sapphire thinks it is Calloway but I honestly disagree. Why would the host of the party ski lodge hunt us down? I suspect Darkling. Their pronouns are they them, and so it could seem like a male, yet have a female sounding voice. I will keep my arrows sharp and quiver full, and I have drawn my hunting knife from the hidden compartment in the quiver. I don't know who to trust. The most unlikly will be the most likly, in the end.

@Hawkstar: ty!! so often the greatest things are also the saddest. (not that my ski lodge is 'the greatest' haha; that's just a fact about stories I have noticed :>) And thank you for the diary! I wrote in your suspicions. Although now I have realized that diary entries -- however useful in characterization -- don't really work, because y'all don't know who the murderer is; it might very well be you, and then obviously your diary entries would be very different. so no more, please and ty, helpful as they are. i really ought to have realized that pitfall sooner :/

anyway, here's part seven -- another longer one; on my doc it's three thousand words. More murder, this time from Calloway's perspective. & ofc yktd: tth?

---

Reuby focused on chopping up the orange. One, two, three. Careful cuts across sunny-orange skin, slicing it into thin wedges that smelled of far-ago summer. The skin felt smooth and bumpy at once underneath her hands, the motion of the well-sharpened knife easy and quick.

Story or not, Reuby thought that the deaths of two Chatterboxers and an AE was important and terrible and not something that wore off soon enough for you to laugh. It was wrong.

She knew the others would say it was Calloway, that he'd conjured it with his magic or something. And that would have been a perfectly reasonable answer. If it was Calloway. Reuby wasn't convinced about that. What proof did they have? That Pix said that it was him? That Pix said the murderer was a boy, and her midnight visitor was female, so obviously it had to be a shapeshifter, and there were no other possible explanations? That Calloway had been creepy and enigmatic and not altogether reassuring about their chances of survival in the ski lodge intro? That was normal ski lodge-host behavior, wasn't it? And why should they trust Pix? Calloway had said explicitly in his letter that she was his sister, so even if he was the murderer, why should they believe Pix wasn't in league with him? Just because Pix was young, and magic, and good at ordering people around, didn't make her trustworthy. No matter how many tears she shed over the bodies of the ski lodgers; after all, she may well have helped to kill them.

"I think that orange is sufficiently diced by now," said a voice, and Reuby, jerked out of her thoughts, looked around herself. Her eyes landed on Hawkstar, a tall girl wearing simple, earth-toned clothing. Reuby had spoken to her at the party, but not much after that. She hadn't spoken to anyone much, after Azalea was killed.

Registering what she'd said, Reuby looked down at her orange, and had to agree. She'd accidentally chopped it up much smaller than she'd intended. "Um. Right. Yeah."

"Here, chop this," Hawkstar said, and handed her a large green apple.

Reuby scraped the remains of her orange into a bowl, and set to slicing the apple. She studiously ignored Hawkstar's gaze; she didn't want to be drawn into another conversation with another light-hearted CBer who didn't seem to care that three people were dead who shouldn't be.

"What do you think about this murderer business?" Hawkstar asked presently, her voice careful, and Reuby sighed inwardly. "It's awful?" she suggested shortly, still not meeting Hawkstar's eyes.

"Yeah, but, like -- do you really think it's Calloway? Everyone seems to be taking it for granted that it is, but I'm not so sure. Why would the ski lodge host kill his own guests?"

Reuby looked up and stared at Hawkstar's calculating hazel eyes. "...Yeah," she said, surprised she'd found someone else who wasn't seeming to follow Pix blindly. Or at least being a little cautious, for heaven's sake. Pix was exactly as much a stranger as Calloway was. She wasn't automatically innocent just because she was short and young and nice. "It definitely doesn't add up. Why should we trust PIx any more than we trust Calloway?"

Hawkstar smiled. It was not a happy smile, or an amused smile, or even a cruel smile. It was the sort of smile you did when you'd found someone who looked on the outside like you did on the inside. "Exactly," she said. She leaned in closer, spreading butter purposefully on a piece of toast, and said in a low voice, "Who do you think it is?"

"I'm not certain," Reuby said, quietening her voice to match Hawkstar. "I don't think it's Calloway. It's possible, but it doesn't seem likely. Maybe Pix herself? We're relying on her account of last night; maybe there was no murderer fetching her tea, and it was her all along."

"I'm inclined to believe she's telling the truth about that," Hawkstar admitted softly. "She seems genuine. I don't know about the murderer being Calloway -- she might be telling the truth about being enchanted, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's him. She never said that outright, did she? And even if she did, it could be the real murderer's enchantment, making her lead us on a wild goose chase."

Reuby nodded. "Yeah, that's a good point. But who, then? If she really did see a girl last night?"

"I think it might be Darkling," Hawkstar whispered, dropping her voice even lower, before leaning away again and reaching for another piece of toast.

Reuby looked down the long kitchen table, lined with ski lodgers chopping fruit and vegetables and beating eggs and all sorts. Darkling and Celeste were cooking eggs next to Pix on the big old stove, four wide cast-iron frying pans crammed onto it with at least five eggs to each pan. Darkling was definitely strange and enigmatic enough to be the murderer, and they seemed like they'd be pretty good at pretending to be innocent, too. That still left the question of why, but it seemed more plausible than Calloway sneaking in to kill his own guests at his own party. Also, Pix could feasibly have mistaken their voice for a girl's, and still say the murderer was male, for some reason. That might explain all the gender confusion that had led everybody else to Calloway.

"What about 'Danny'?" Reuby asked. "Strawberry heard her say something to a 'Danny' when we found Azalea. Could that be the murderer?"

"I don't know," Hawkstar said, frowning at Pix, whose chef's hat had fallen over her eyes again. She pushed it up again, laughing, and gesticulated animatedly with her spatula, seeming to be mid-conversation with Celeste. "There's a lot of clues, and they don't all point in the same direction." She glanced back at Reuby. "Hey, what d'you say we start our own investigation? Darkvine can look for Calloway, and hurrah if she finds him, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to look in more places than one."

Reuby nodded. "Okay. Suspect number one: Darkling?"

"Suspect number one: Darkling," Hawkstar agreed, and they shook hands.

When breakfast was more or less finished, Pix organized the transportation of food and cutlery into a room the ski lodgers hadn't seen before. It was a large dining room on the western side of the Castle, with tall windows that let in pale, unobtrusive natural light. They set the table, and then set out the breakfast. The latter was a makeshift conglomeration of the sort that only comes of seventeen unusually imaginative people under the age of sixteen making breakfast together in a magic Castle that doesn't exist. Everyone sat down and tucked in. 

Both Holmes-and-Watsons studiously discussed their theories as they ate alligator pear on toast and chocolate-drizzled popcorn. Darkvine, Sapphire, and Hex sat at one end of the table, and Reuby and Hawkstar at the other. Hawkstar had told Darkvine quietly about their plans, and Darkvine had accepted them decorously, agreeing that it was probably best for them to investigate multiple theories. Neither CBer told PIx. And Hawkstar declined to mention the fact that Darkling -- who Darkvine had already decided was definitely innocent -- was their prime suspect. She and Reuby discussed this point over Reuby's minute orange cubes.

"But Azalea was murdered while Darkling was fiddling, wasn't she?" Hawkstar pointed out, brandishing a spoon. "When -- when I found her, and Darkvine went to tell them, Darkling was there. Weren't they?"

"I'm not sure," Reuby said. "I was in the library too, remember?" Both CBers reflected on this fact that, according to Darkvine's calculations, meant they were both still suspects.

"I don't know," Hawkstar said. She prodded absently at her mostly-empty yogurt cup. "Maybe Darkling isn't the murderer." She sighed. "I'm just so scared, you know?" she said softly, her usual steel veneer of confidence melting a little. "I mean... I don't think you're the murderer, Reuby, honestly. But it's possible. I don't know." She looked at her fellow CBer. "It's entirely possible. And that's terrifying."

Reuby nodded. She understood, probably. Probably she really was torn up about the deaths, and she really did share Hawkstar's fear. Or maybe she was the murderer, and all her grief was just an act cleverly devised to deflect suspicion away from herself. You never knew. That was why it was terrifying.

After breakfast, when everyone's plates were mostly clean and their hunger satisfied, Pix, without preamble, climbed onto the table.

The ski lodgers watched, with varying shades of amusement, as she navigated her way around the popcorn bowl to stand importantly between the empty bacon plate and the dish that had once held twice-baked honey cakes. "How are you?" she asked, swiveling around to look at all the ski lodgers.

At first, some of them were too taken aback to answer. But others -- too strange themselves to be put off by PIx's antics, or too used to them by now to make any special note of them -- answered at once.

"Everyone is in danger because there's a murderer somewhere in our midst, and we just buried three of our friends," Reuby said flatly. "We're spectacular."

"Scared," Tilly admitted, twisting a strand of her shadow-dark hair around her finger.

"The popcorn's good?" Strawberry offered half-heartedly. "Also terrified and I would like very much to go home."

"That about sums it up," Eclipse said.

"How about we go outside?" Pix said. "You should still probably all stay together, but it might be nice to catch some sunshine, despite everything. It'll probably be more productive than staying in here worrying about getting killed, anyway."

"That's a good idea," Amethyst agreed, glancing out the tall windows with a touch of longing in her expression. She had always liked the great outdoors.

"Sounds all right," Hawkstar said, and Darkvine added, "Echo was going to fetch us Azalea's book. Let's go do that first."

"I can do it alone," Echo Hallowswift said. "You decided you can trust me, right? Besides, it won't take long."

"I'll go with you," Writing volunteered, and Pix nodded. "That's settled then. Everybody else -- let's go." She smiled a sad sort of smile and said, "This is a beautiful place. It's a shame you all had to see it like this." And then she hopped off the table, and everyone went outside.

"So where is this book?" Writing asked, as xe and Echo Hallowswift watched the others file out of the dining room.

"It should be with my other clothes. The ones from the party, that we all put in the washroom on the north wing?"

"Oh, right!" Writing said. "Right. I'd like to get my boots anyway. I accidentally left them there when we went up."

They set off in what they hoped was the direction of the washroom; the Castle was very large and seemed to enjoy getting them lost.

Both of them were rather apprehensive at going somewhere alone with a murderer on the loose, even if they were both supposed to be innocent and everyone else was outside. It was that constant, underlying fear of the kind that one couldn't shake. But, as it turned out, it was unfounded. It was not they who were going to be murdered that day.

We went out into the sun, as Pix suggested, and it was as beautiful a noon as the dawn when we'd buried WiLdSoNg and Ame had been. It felt like springtime, impossibly. In the real world it was past Christmas, December twenty-eighth -- but in this one, if they were keeping count at all, it was still the twentieth, and as warm as June. Maybe the Castle is in the tropics, or maybe it just doesn't exist and we should stop trying to rationalize magic. I've never paid much attention to the weather, but now that I think about it, it must change itself according to our thoughts, like everything else does in our world. So that by the time you look at the perfect cerulean sky, you've forgotten that it was gray and stormy last time you glanced at it.

Amethyst suggested they swim in the Lake, and several of the other ski lodgers agreed, taking off their shoes and anything else perishable before jumping into the water. It must have been freezing, but they were laughing when they surfaced. 

I was watching them, sitting on the dock next to Poinsettia with a slight smile on my face. It reminded me, for one fleeting instant, of those lovely endless golden summers Rose and I used to spend at our grandfather's house. I learned to swim in that lake -- this Lake, really, because it was that old house and that old lake that were the real prototype for our imagined world, our Castle by the Lake.

But I brushed those thoughts away. Those days were gone now, and they would never come back if I did not do the thing that I had to do, no matter how it made the boy who still lived somewhere inside of me hate himself.

I gazed at the sun-freckled water, replacing all my thoughts with the image of the sun dancing on the Lake, drowning every doubt and worry and fear with the endless finite blue.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"Yes," Poinsettia agreed, and I started a little. I hadn't realized I'd said it aloud, and inwardly I chastised myself for slipping. If I started saying everything I was thinking, I would definitely be discovered.

Poinsettia glanced at me, and said, "Aren't you going to swim?"

I smiled, a little. "I'm terrible at it," I informed her. I wasn't. I was a champion swimmer.

"So?"

"So I need somebody to swear an oath to resuscitate me when I drown anticlimactically in six feet of water, before I go jumping into Lakes willy-nilly." I wondered if speaking of death was inappropriate in this situation. I was so desensitized. For a second, I despised myself again, but then I quashed it with thoughts of the Lake again.

My joke must not have been too off-key, Poinsettia laughed a little -- though perhaps only because they were all so starved of laughter -- and said, "I do so swear. C'mon. It'll be fun."

"Oh, all right," I said. "You first."

She laughed at me and carefully unclasped her tiny garnet earrings, flashing red in the sun, and set them on the dock. Then she stood and jumped, spraying me with water. She sunk beneath the water for a moment, then resurfaced, her hair dark and slick against her head. "Come on!" she said, splashing me again, and I jumped, splashing her back.

I opened my eyes under the water. I was, all at once, in an aqueous green-blue universe of light and shadow. Rose and I used to pretend to be mer-people in this Lake. Not this Lake.

Remembering Poinsettia and my alleged lack of skill at swimming, I resurfaced, gasping and blinking in the sudden sunlight. "It's --" Extraordinary. Unfathomable. Like light and darkness mixed together. I stopped myself mid-sentence and reminded myself to talk like the person I was pretending to be, not like the old young boy/shapeshifter/murderer/ski lodge host/person I was. "-- so cool under there!"

Poinsettia grinned. "It really is." She submerged again, and I followed, swimming deeper. I saw the other ski lodgers, some of them under the water, some of them engaged in a makeshift game of water polo, some of them simply swimming across the wide Lake.

There were so many of them, all of them thinking of anything but the fact that they could be murdered at any moment by someone they thought they could trust.

I could feel the world pressing in around my thoughts. I looked at Pix, who was water-racing and (of course) losing against Eclipse on the other side of the Lake.

Then I glanced at Poinsettia. She was swimming back towards the surface for air, momentarily distracted. She didn't see me stop in mid-water, sinking through the blue to the sandy bottom of the Lake. She didn't see me pull out the knife I'd stolen from the secret slip in Reuby's boot that night in the library. The knife I had killed Azalea and WiLdSoNg and Ame with. She didn't see me surface to throw it, or the words I whispered afterwards.

She only saw when Celeste collapsed, slumping in the water with a blade in her heart.

---

Dead: Azalea, WiLdSoNg, Ame, Celeste

Alive: Echo Hallowswift, Lyra, Hex, Eclipse, Artemis, Sapphire, Darkvine, Darkling, Hawkstar, Poinsettia, Writing, Amethyst, Reuby, Strawberry, Tilly