by J B Cantwell
“I don’t know how to explain,” she said. She picked up a pebble and began passing it back and forth between her two hands. After a moment, the pebble began to hover in the air above her palms. “It’s just something I can do. It’s like we talk to each other.”
“You talk to the rocks?”
“Well, it’s not really talking, I suppose. But we are communicating. Just like when Father was able to pull the power from the ground. He asks the ground to give, and the ground finds a way to respond. Like a dance. You move one way and then your partner follows you. It’s an exchange.”
I eyeballed her, unsure of the girl who stood before me, smiling and friendly.
Maybe I was wrong about her. Maybe I was just overreacting.
I picked up a pebble and began passing it back and forth between my hands, as Jade had done. I looked down at it and thought, move. I closed my eyes and asked the rock, move. I did this for several minutes, but the cold little stone did nothing but lay helplessly in my hands. I sighed in frustration and plunked the rock back down to the ground.
“Try this,” she said. “When you’re holding the rock, you have to give it something. A piece of yourself. It’s almost like an offering. Close your eyes and try thinking about something that only you know, something you’ve never told anyone else.” She closed her eyes, mimicking the motions with her hands, and explained the feeling. “Then imagine the energy in your body flowing through your chest, filling it with light. Then, move the energy down your arms and into your hands. And then, when it’s pulsing at the tips of your fingers, finally, to the rock.” She opened her eyes and looked at me expectantly. “Try it.”
Something I had never told anyone?
I gulped as the thought came instantly to my mind, immediately trying to push it back down. I had no happy secrets. And even if I did, with the sight of those burned bodies still fresh in my mind, I would have been unable to summon them.
Instead the thought that came to mind was dark and hopeless. It was the thought that followed me every day of my life. The thought I tried my best to bury. I looked at her fearfully, but she only nodded.
I didn’t want to do this. The feeling in my stomach was sick again, like a tiny, aggressive animal was trying desperately to escape it. But I had to try. No one would know. Jade wouldn’t know. Only the rock.
I closed my eyes. For a moment I saw nothing behind my lids, only black. But then a tearing, burning fear bubbled through my body as I imagined the face of my father. He scowled at me as if he had never seen me before, as if I were a predator preparing to strike out at him.
Then the pain came. My chest contracted as the truth that only I knew flooded my body.
He didn’t love me.
I was useless.
Alone.
And I was to blame for everything.
If only I were better. Stronger. More.
I imagined the energy of my secret flowing through my fingers and into the rock. Somewhere in the back of my mind I felt sure that, with as much as I was letting go, the tiny stone would explode, not strong enough to handle a lifetime of hurt and fear.
Move.
Come on. Move.
The stone sat stubbornly motionless in my hand. All the pain, all the misery, all the rejection of my pathetic little life was not even enough to convince this tiny piece of Aeso to grow warm under my touch. It lay as still and lifeless as the bones back in that church.
It dropped from my palm and it clicked against the mountainside.
I slumped down to the ground beside it. Next to the girl I had saved. The girl I was still trying to save.
I was broken. As broken as my home planet. As broken as the Fold was becoming before my eyes.
Jade put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it a little.
“You’ll get it,” she said softly. “You just need to practice.”
I looked up into her jade-green eyes, still young, still here with me. The girl I had seen five minutes ago was gone again, and I was left with the friend I depended on.
As long as Jade stuck with me, I would make it.
I picked up another pebble from the ground and tried again and again until the sun finally fell below the land and I could see no more.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
My torch stretched out in front of me as I entered the tiny stone chamber. Along each roughly hewn wall, books piled up in tall stacks.
A little man sat at a tiny desk in the corner of the room. The stubby fingers of one hand gripped the side of the desk, the other a feather quill. He hunched over his work, his pen scratching madly at the page beneath it.
“Hello?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from his writing, only huffed an irritated sigh at my interruption.
“I—” I began, but then stopped. How should I introduce myself? “Do you know where I can find the book?” I finally said.
The quill moved over the paper feverishly as he continued to write.
I looked around the little space, and leaning up against the far wall stood a narrow podium. A large, leather book bearing Jared’s mark rested on the platform. I looked back to the man, but he either didn’t see or didn’t care.
I approached the ancient text, my arms outstretched, and ran my hands along its edges. The leather was intricately decorated, the work of a master craftsman, and the grooves bumped beneath my fingertips. I eagerly opened to the first page.
It was blank.
I quickly flipped through the hundreds of pages in the great book, searching desperately for a sign that I had come to the right place.
All blank.
I looked back towards the man. His eyes stayed down.
But this had to be it. I knew it. I closed the cover and wrapped my hands around the edges, lifting.
It didn’t budge. I heaved on the giant thing, but it didn’t move.
This time, when I looked back at the man, he had stopped writing. He sat staring at me, his thin lips open wide in a malicious smile, revealing pointed, gray teeth. His deep amber eyes gleamed with pleasure.
My stomach sank to my knees. My heart pounded. I heaved again. This had to be the right book. This was the answer. This would solve everything. It was a trick, like Almara’s maps, that was all. Somehow we would get it to reveal its secrets, and when we did, we would level all the planets in the Fold. We would make things right.
As I yanked on the book, grunting in frustration, a wicked laugh filled the room, too big, it seemed, to be coming from such a small man. But when I eyed him again, there was no mistake. His mirth echoed off the thousands of ancient books that insulated the space.
His laugh angered as much as frightened me, and soon I found my strength changing. Coursing through my veins, pumped by my battered heart, could it be only blood? I felt cooled from the inside out, and suddenly the book lost its weight. I lifted it from its platform easily, my eyes greedily taking in every detail of the cover. In my delight at having retrieved the prize, worth more than all the treasures on all the planets, I noticed too late that the sound of his laugh had disappeared.
And his chair sat empty.
Low, angry hissing came from the ceiling. I looked up, the book held tightly in my arms, and saw him. Attached to the wall like a spider in a web, the man had transformed. From between his lips a long, forked tongue lapped at the stale air. His hands and feet had become snarls of claws, so strong that they ripped chunks from the granite ceiling. His mossy teeth grew into giant fangs, and his pitted eyes glared at me as a low gurgle erupted from his throat.
Before I could move, he leapt from the wall, tossing me to the ground. My head hit the stone, and he pushed up on my chin with one of his taloned hands. He opened his mouth wide and arched his neck.
“Aster!”
Jade was screaming.
“Aster! Wake up!” She held onto both of my shoulders, shaking me violently.
I sat bolt upright, my eyes searching frantically around the cave for the monster.
“Where
is he?” I said, trickles of sweat running down my face.
“It was a dream,” she said, panting. “You were having a dream. I couldn’t wake you up.” She sat back, out of breath from trying to shake me awake. Almara sat across the rockfire from me, watching, unmoving.
My breathing came hard and fast, as if I had just sprinted at top speed. I stood up, examining the small cave where we had made camp, but no beast hid in the corners here.
These dreams. Only one dream I had ever had had turned to reality. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and rubbed my eyes. I had dreamed of my father, too. I began to shake as I imagined what my world might look like if these new dreams started coming true.
“What were you dreaming about?” Jade asked. She looked worried and small, spooked by the severity of my dreams, though she could not see them.
“He dreamt of the Corentin,” Almara’s voice came unexpectedly.
“What?” asked Jade, whipping around. “How do you know that?”
“Because I saw it,” he said.
“How could you see a dream in my head?” The back of my head ached where I had hit it on the floor in my nightmare, and I rubbed at it.
“I see lots of things.” He hoisted his frail body to his feet and held out a hand for Jade. She took it and stood next to him.
“If you saw it, then what was it?”
“I told you, it was the Corentin.”
“The Corentin is a dwarf-sized man who turns into a hissing monster with huge fangs?” I asked. Suddenly, I felt silly. It had only been a dream.
“No,” he said, taking out the blindfold and tying it around his face. “The Corentin is every monster, everywhere.” He turned and, running his hand along the cave wall, started walking towards the entrance.
I stared after him, trying to make sense of his words. They struck me, right in my middle, and I knew they were true. I no longer felt silly at all. It may have been a dream, but it hadn’t been just any dream.
“I dreamt of the Corentin?” I asked, more to myself than to him. Then, seeing he was almost at the mouth of the cave I ran to catch up with him, blocking his exit. “Does that mean that he’s—is he in my head, too?”
Almara stopped and turned to me.
“Did he kill you?” his mouth asked, his eyes hidden.
“What?”
“Did he kill you in the dream? Were you dead? Did you feel it?”
“No, he was just about to bite my neck when Jade shook me awake.”
He raised his head, almost as if sniffing the air.
“Then he has not gained entry into your mind,” he said. “Not yet. Do not worry now. When you feel fangs pierce your skin, a knife stab your heart, or,” he shuddered, “flame set fire to your blood, then you worry.”
We walked all morning and afternoon along the orange ridge towards the tallest peak. The road became narrower as we went, but it did not disappear entirely. Sometime, a long time ago, men had carved this path into the skin of the mountain. A few thousand years was a short time in the life of rock, and the scar was still deep and new. I wondered why there was a path here at all. If I were hiding something, I would want to keep it so well hidden I could barely find it again myself when I was done. But this road was pointing us to the book like an arrow at a target.
Jade had spent the morning eyeballing me, her concern not easing for several hours, as if she expected me to drop to the ground at any moment, never to be awakened again. Bu as the day wore on, her attitude changed. Her eyes became sharp and hard as she surveyed the landscape, and her feet dug into the mountainside with a level of ferocity that left even me out of breath. For a few hours I let her be, leading us towards the heart of the mountain in her solitary fashion. Maybe, I thought, she just needed a little time to process all of this.
But I wasn’t sure that an entire lifetime would be enough to process all of this.
People, lots of people, had done great things long before Jade or I or even Almara had ever existed. Who was to say that we couldn’t join them? Maybe we had a shot at this, at actually balancing the Fold. The twelve-year-old kid in me, the one ignored and abandoned, sick and unworthy in my other life, told me that it was impossible. I tried to rally my spirits, to focus on the strengths that I did have, but the horrors left for us by the Corentin were enough to make me doubt everything I knew about myself. As I repeated over and over the actions I had taken to make these worlds better, the words and stories gradually became meaningless in my mind. Instead, my thoughts turned to what I had seen in that church, and I spun myself in circles trying to imagine a life where such things didn’t exist, my own contributions to our effort forgotten in the shadow of that evil.
As the mid-afternoon sun beat down on us, Jade stopped dead in her tracks up ahead. I paused, placing my hand on Almara’s chest to stop him, but she didn’t fall to the ground to hide as she had when we had entered the village. Whatever she saw up there, she didn’t seem to be alarmed by it.
Without even a backward glance, she disappeared over the rise.
I picked up the pace, dragging Almara along behind me. And when we had crested the top of the hill, I saw why she had left us behind.
The entire face of the rock was carved. Stretching fifteen feet above our heads, a gigantic representation of Jared’s symbol was permanently etched into the rock.
Together, we walked to the face. Cautiously, I stretched my hand out to touch it, only flinching slightly at the first contact of the mountain with my skin. I ran my hands all along the wall, searching for a way in, but the smooth surface betrayed no entrance. There had to be a way in. Our path ended here, with no other way up the mountain.
“How do we get in?” I turned to Almara. He stood before the carving, head slightly raised as though he could see it through his blindfold. My eyes followed his up the face of the rock, and I saw in the center of the diamond something that made my heart stop.
“Look!” I said.
An indentation the size of a softball was set into the rock, and from below I could just make out another carving, the same as the first, but much smaller.
“The stone,” Jade breathed. “Father, it wasn’t a champion you needed. It was only the Kinstone.”
Almara didn’t respond to this. He just held his blind gaze up at the mountain, waiting.
I dug the stone out of my bag and held it up above my head, but I couldn’t reach. Jade moved a boulder beneath the symbol for me to stand on. I climbed up onto it and stared at the diamond, face to face.
The symbol within the symbol twinkled and glittered. I compared it with the stone in my hand, and I knew I had the key to get inside. I looked out over the valley, and just for the briefest moment I wanted to flee. Not because of fear, exactly, but because of what I knew might lay within this mountain of rock.
It could be my salvation inside. My ticket home. The way to fix everything that had gone so wrong, in the Fold and on Earth, for so long.
Or it could be, quite possibly, my end.
Far below me a breeze blew thick green grass so that it looked like a body of water from so high up.
I turned back to the mountain, gripped the Kinstone in both of my hands, and matched the symbol in front of me to the symbol on the link.
The side of the mountain shuddered. I almost fell from the boulder, but then got my footing again and jumped down, still gripping onto the Kinstone with one hand. The lightest touch, it seemed, had been enough.
The rock split apart before us, opening up a long tunnel that dove straight into the center of the mountain.
Jade and I took a few tentative steps inside. The sides of the tunnel were covered with writing, In neatly chiseled rows, strange ciphers, foreign to my eyes, lined an opening in the mountainside. We walked down the small hill to where Jade stood, brushing the carvings with her fingertips.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “A code?”
“The book,” I said, slipping my backpack from my shoulde
rs. Many months ago I had stolen a book of codes from Cadoc. Almara’s book, in fact. Now I dug for it in the bottom of the old canvas pack, eager to translate the message on the wall. I felt my hand close around the small volume, and once free of the pack I began flipping through it wildly.
Every page of the tiny manual was filled with translations from language to language. Letters from our language were paired with their counterparts in at least eight others, but one in particular seemed, to me, to be the best place to start.
Sabellioc. Language of the dead.
And I was not mistaken. In the largest letters, the ones placed right over the door, ten symbols of Sabellioc were carefully carved. I flipped through the pages, matching symbols to letters I understood. The first word came together quickly, and I might’ve guessed it had I not had the key to translate it..
“The first word,” I said, “is ‘fire’.”
Jade came to my side, peering down at the little book.
Almara stood still as a statue, his lips moving silently.
I got to work on the next symbol, and after a few moments the message made itself fully known.
W-I-T-H-I-N.
Fire within.
A shiver ran down my back.
My eyes met Jade’s, as hard now as the stone for which she was named. What I saw there surprised me, and for a moment I was distracted from our intentions.
“Are you ok?” I asked, eyeing her cautiously. “You look, I don’t know, angry.”
I, myself, was feeling a lot of different things at this moment, but angry was not one of them. I was terrified.
Her lids squinted at my words, but then, just as suddenly, her eyes seemed to melt back to the ones I knew so well.
“I just want this to be over.” She looked worriedly at Almara, who still stood where we had left him, his lips mouthing words we could not understand. “Let’s just do this and get it over with. One way or another.”
I nodded.
After checking a few of the other lines of text against the code book, my suspicions were validated. No other message was written here for travelers to see. In every language on the wall the same warning was displayed.
