Inktober 2024 - 15 - Guidebook

This is the story of a magical guidebook, that could take you to any place you pointed to on its pages.

The Guidebook started out as a simple travel journal, for a young woman who was not aware of her abilities. A true wanderer, she took trip after trip, carefully documenting every step in her diary, at first not realising every single picture she glued in there became a portal to the location where the photograph had been taken. By the time she did understand what she had done, there were already many pages filled with images of places far and wide around the world!

The first time she experienced the magic of what she had created, she was lucky not to end up somewhere too cold or too hot for what she was wearing. Thinking she was hallucinating, she stayed put until, twenty-four hours later, the Guidebook brought her back to her room, where she had been when she had touched it. It laid exactly where it had been then, too.

After that, she did not dare to open it for a while. But it was her memories, encased in this journal, so she got to it again, taking much precaution not to come in contact with any of the pictures. Then, she started to wonder whether she should ever input any new entry into it. Upon much consideration, she decided to, and simply be careful how she enriched it. She attempted to remove some of the older pictures, which seemed too dangerous to keep, but found that they could not be taken off the page. She doubted she could destroy the Book, either.

The witch grew older, go married, had children, and when the time was right, she entrusted the Guidebook to her youngest daughter, who seemed to be the only one of her progeny adventurous and open-minded enough to genuinely enjoy it. She explained how it worked, how the Book only sent you to a place for a single day, and you absolutely had to be in the same place it had sent you to at the same time the next day, or it would not bring you back. The Book never came with you on the trip. She had figured all this out during her first experiments, when she chose safe close by locations to travel to, to determine how far she could roam from her starting point, and for how long.

Generation after generation, the Guidebook changed hands, passed down from one gifted person to the next, until it was eventually lost, when one of its owner was more careless than any other before him, and travelled too far for too long and never got back. The Book was then donated to a public library, where it sent many unsuspecting people to their doom, to the point that it became known as cursed.

Sadly, it only resurfaced again when a researcher in the occult got the idea to use it as a weapon…