The deli was almost empty this deep into the holiday season, because everyone in Nioli was huddled in their own houses with their families.

Winter dusk was fast approaching, bringing a flurry of snow along with it.

After so long, the snow had lost its magical sparkle and had settled into an annoying frozen slush of dirt and ice.

The deli was still warmly lit, but the lack of company made it seem cold.

There was no buzz of chatter, no smell of sizzling sausages, only a desolate waft of reheated black coffee.

Justin gripped his coffee cup like it was the only thing in the world that was keeping him from going completely crazy.

They were huddled into the same booth, all bundled up in coats and scarves except for Katherine.

No one was really in the mood to discuss visions and fainting and backstabbing teachers, all of them being too full of sugar cookies, hot chocolate and the complete lack of homework.

All of them, that is, except Justin.
He had been a champion warrior from the start, and now he’d turned the corner and headed into full-blown panic.

The state swimming competitions were closer than ever, and he couldn’t even stomach the idea of having an episode like that in the pool.

Not to mention that he thought that the pool water responded to his feelings.
Everyone was silently sipping their coffee, all having a lot to say and not knowing where to begin.

Earlier, the investigation had been fairly linear, with one lead after the next, albeit leading to more questions and answers.

But still, that had been better than two simultaneous and extremely abstract leads, because now they had to wonder about the connection between the two.
The latest vision had been the clearest and most unambiguous one so far, but the headaches and the fainting was still the same.

From the very first vision till the latest one, the visions were getting more and more specific, and Justin was worried everything would come to its pointy end too quickly and they wouldn’t be ready for it.

Exactly what the pointy end was, he didn’t know, and that was the worst part.

But worrying had always been his thing, and he didn’t voice his fears out loud because all that would do was scare the rest of them as well.

Chris set down his empty coffee cup and sighed loudly.

“Are we going to talk about this?”, he asked wearily. “Or are we just going to stare at our coffee and hope it answers our questions?”

“We didn’t volunteer to get these visions”, spoke Noah from the corner he was slouched in. “Why should we be the ones to get to the bottom of all this?”

“It’s too late for all the ‘Why us?’ nonsense”, said Katherine bluntly. “I know this is just tiring now, but we’re in this together, for better or worse.”

Noah rolled his eyes and slouched back again.

“What I don’t get”, said Amy, “Is why one time everybody gets the same vision, and then the next time it’s all different again. I’d thought that finally everything was coming together, but now it’s split apart again.”

“That’s your only question?” said Justin before he could stop himself. “Have you forgotten the whole thing with losing consciousness and just falling to the ground without any warning?”
Amy rose up indignantly.

“I haven’t forgotten anything, thank you very much”, she said coldly. “I just think the visions are trying to tell us something.”

“Yeah, it has to be some sort of symbolism”, ventured Chris, trying to bring the discussion back on track. “I saw this star, and maybe it points to some constellation or something.”

“Was it drawn in white?” asked Amy. “In very thin white lines- and everything else was this dark grey colour.”

“Yeah, my triangle was the same”, said Katherine.

“Wait, you saw a triangle too?”, said Justin with a crease between his brows. “Was it pointing up or down?”

“Up”, said Katherine. “Yours too?”

“No, mine was down.”

“Mine was pointing up too”, said Amy. “But it had a line through it, about two-thirds of the way to the top.”

“Star, triangle, upside down triangle…”, mused Noah. “Is it a code language?”
“Any way you could do an image search?”, asked Amy, looking at Noah.

She pulled a tissue out of the dispenser and drew a triangle on it with a pen from her coat pocket.

Then, she drew a horizontal line across it, near the tip.

“That’s mine”, she said and passed the pen and paper to Katherine, who was sitting next to her.

“Draw it and pass it on.”

The next few minutes were spent in gravely passing the tissue around and drawing the symbols on it.

The ink bled a little on the flimsy tissue,but the symbols were very clear and looked suspiciously like they were trying to spell out a word.

Amy took a photo of it and ran an image search.

All that came up was alchemical symbols, and there were only four of them; of
air, fire, earth and water.

There was no mention of the star anywhere.

Then they ran a search with just the star, and that gave hits on a Jewish religious symbol called the Star of David, but Chris insisted that his star looked different.

Suddenly, Noah held up a hand.
“Wait waitwaitwaitwait”, he said. “I know where I’ve seen these before.”

He took out his phone, scrolled through his gallery and put it on the table.
“This is the record we got from the archive room,'' he said.

They all peered at the small screen.
Katherine put one black fingernail on the edge of the photo.

“That’s them, isn’t it?”, she asked, looking up.

On the top left corner of the paper, outside the margin, the same five symbols in their vision were drawn in black ink, one below the other.

Amy took a photo of that column of symbols, in that specific order, and ran the search again.

This time, finally, they got a solid lead.
It was from the ‘Know Your Magicks (KYM)’ section of an online newspaper called ‘The Witch Post’ in an article about a lesser-known branch of alchemy called ‘Elementalism’
That article gave them the name of an online catalogue of books on Elementalism ‘for those who are drawn into the realm’

That catalogue link was broken, but the search ‘elementalist alchemy’ sent them to an article on a library of a private collector with a collection of the Elementalism books.
The photo of the bookshelf was blurry, but there was no mistaking the five symbols on one of the leather bound spines.