There was still hope though. For almost all potions there was a counterpart to reverse everything back to normal. Sadly, it wasn’t just as easy as to take the same ingredients in another order or something. If there wasn’t a direct anti-drink or -spell written down somewhere, you would have to look up the counterparts of each ingredient and mix these together. (By the way, these magical drinks usually taste very bad. Even worse for a mix of the counterparts.)
There was the great book of counterparts which could be found… of course, in the Library of Magic! Clemens was happy that the solution was this easy. He hadn’t heard about the incident with the portal yet… Ouch. Crumble told him about this miserable situation. He hesitated telling him what Mira had done (he figured out something must have happened after Stella’s long talk with Mira… and from what Stella had searched for on the internet he certainly knew what the little spirit had done). So he asked in a more general way what could happen if someone ever took a book from there, maybe this could cause the portal to break?
Clemens laughed. “I can understand people might fear something like this to happen, but haven’t we all tried that yet?” Crumble looked at him in surprise. “Books that you take from the library will simply vanish and return to the library as soon as their time is up. It’s a LIBRARY after all. The books will be taken back automatically. You can extend the time when you visit the library again but all books will finally return back ‘home’ where they belong. This doesn’t cause any trouble with the portal.”
Phew, Crumble felt relieved. Even though that made the question even bigger: what DID cause the portal to break?