by Obert Skye
Rast moved up the tight ivy that covered the trunk of the tall fantrum tree, pushing fat bickerwicks aside with his black hands. He looked over his shoulder every couple of seconds to make sure that no one was following him. Not that anyone would, mind you—sycophants were honest and loyal and kept their business to themselves. Of course, the place where Rast was heading now would probably garner interest from almost every soul in Foo, despite their honesty and loyalty.
“The key is there,” Rast said to himself. “There’s no need for worry.”
He reached the top of the tree and jumped the three-foot distance to the rocky cliff wall. The wall was moist from the Pother Falls. Rast looked down at the churning water. The rush of the falls drowned out the wooden bells and made his white fur wet and heavy.
“The key’s safe,” he told himself again.
The cliff wall was hundreds of feet high and angled in to meet with a taller wall of red stone. Where the two walls met, there was a rocky depression that was visible only for a few seconds each day when the largest sun was setting. Rast waited, his eyes trained on the wall. As the sun set, the wall lit up like a piece of reflective glass.
Rast could see the elusive depression. He moved quickly, knowing that in a moment it would be unnoticeable and lost on the solid wall of stone outcroppings and dips.
The sun shifted just as Rast made his way into the depression.
Rast pushed himself against the inside wall and twisted his body around. From there he could see a small black hole that led down just on the inner wall.
Rast smashed himself into the hole.
He was not quite as thin as he had been the last time he had made this trek. He crawled through the hole on his belly, twisting every once in a while to make the fit. There were other tunnels and routes around him, but Rast stuck to the course only he knew. Now and then small, lizardlike lather whips would scurry over Rast, spitting sparking saliva at him for disturbing their territory. The sparks stung, but they also created brief flashes of light, helping him find his way. After crawling for twenty minutes, Rast saw steady firelight up ahead.
He moved through the tunnel, placing his hands and feet carefully on solid ground. The tunnel opened up into a small, round cavern with jagged stalactites hanging from the ceiling. There were two torches suspended from the wall by thick leather straps. Only one was lit, its flame weakly burning.
Rast looked at the flame with disgust.
“Stand tall,” Rast commanded, brushing a couple of persistent lather whips off his arms.
The fire flickered and straightened itself. Rast looked around, and the flame slouched just a bit.
“What happened to the second torch?” Rast said. “Who put it out?”
The flame groaned. Rast moved closer and stared into the fire.
“Have there been any others through here?”
The fire crackled and popped.
“Who?”
The torch moaned.
Rast looked around. He closed his eyes and breathed in and out slowly, then turned in a circle, letting the feel of the cavern come to him. He twisted around two times before he shivered and stopped.
Rast opened his red eyes and moved toward the back wall. The fire leaned in his direction, watching to see what was going on. Rast reached out and touched the wall. It felt solid. He stuck out his right hand and made a tight fist.
“I hope I’m right,” he said to the fire.
Rast pulled back his right arm and jabbed his fist toward the wall as hard as he could.
He hit the right spot.
There was a brittle cracking noise followed by a wet slurp as his arm slid into the wall.
“The stone film seemed thin,” he said to himself.
Rast had found the hole, but the layer of stone that had hardened over it was less substantial than it should have been.
“Someone’s been here in the last twenty years,” he surmised.
Rast began to sweat. With his arm halfway in the wall, he twisted his hand around inside, feeling for a switch.
“There you are,” Rast said with conviction.
Stone scraped against stone behind the wall, and in a moment the stalactites on the ceiling of the small cavern began to lower, moving to the floor like jagged teeth. When the tallest stalactite hit the floor of the cavern, all movement ceased. The lowering stalactites had pulled down a section of the ceiling, revealing a tiny set of stairs just the right size for a single sycophant to climb. Lather whips burst from the hole by the hundreds, spitting and darting around the room like thick lines of black marker. The ceiling of the room sparkled like bright fireworks as they all spat.
Rast held his arm over his eyes and waited for the slippery pests to clear out. The lather whips fell to the floor and spilled down into various cracks in the cavern. In a few moments there was no sign of a single one.
Rast pulled a thick strip of cloth out of a tiny pouch he had hanging from his waist. He wrapped the strip of cloth around his head and eyes, blindfolding himself. He then began climbing the stairs up into the dark. The stairs circled up for a few feet in a tight stairwell that only a being the size of a sycophant could fit inside. At the top of the stairs, the cavern opened up into a rectangular-shaped room that seemed to have no ceiling, just a vast, thick darkness.
Rast could feel himself stepping on and over a number of objects. The small room was packed with small metal instruments and utensils—objects made of the shiniest metal—placed there to stop any sycophant in his tracks. Few sycophants could resist stopping to touch and look at them. Most sycophants would easily spend the remainder of their existence simply looking at their own reflections in the back of a shiny coin or spoon. The metal on the floor was lit by two small rocks that glowed bright white, one on each side of the room.
Of course, none of the objects interested Rast because of the blindfold. Although, having been in the room a couple of times before, Rast wished he had brought earplugs as well. He couldn’t see the metal objects, but hearing them brush up against each other was almost as tempting and intoxicating as looking directly at them.
Rast reached the far wall. He moved his hands up and down, feeling for something. About fifteen inches up he found the end of a dried vine sticking out of the wall. He took hold of it and pulled as hard as he could. The thick brown vine snaked out of the wall until Rast was holding about six feet of it.
Rast took the vine and, still blindfolded, made his way to the opposite end of the room and tied the loose end to a thick looped vine hanging from that wall. He twanged the tight vine.
“Perfect,” he said.
He hopped up on the vine-tightrope and felt the wall a foot above where he had tied it off. There he found the end of another vine and pulled. He then moved along the tightrope back to the other side and tied up his second vine. Rast repeated the action, creating a third vine a foot or so above the last, building a rope ladder that would take him up and into the dark. He took off his hood and kept his eyes looking up.
As he strung the vines, he sang an old sycophant devotional song to calm his nerves:
When fate runs dry it’ll be you and I
Who save the dream from soil and sky.
The smallest hand will hoist the toil,
And set to right the sky and soil.
His voice echoed off the walls of the small space he was working in, and every couple of minutes the mountain would moan as if bothered by the singing.
Rast paid the mountain no mind.
He worked the vines until they were twenty-three rungs high. It was pitch black, and if it had not been for gravity, Rast would have been confused about which way was up. His singing had turned to humming three vines ago, and now he was too tired to even hum. He held onto the last vine and swung himself up. He straddled the vine and reached to try to find the ceiling.
It was there, and he was only inches from it.
“This is why I never check on the key,” he said breathlessly to himself.
There were five tiny stalactites on the ceiling. The stalactites were all shaped differently—each of them in the form of a sycophant symbol. Rast reached wide and twisted the one shaped as a tree. He turned the one shaped as a flower once and the one shaped as a square with a missing corner four times until each one was positioned how it should be.
He turned the final two.
A faint click sounded and the cavern exhaled. The stalactites retracted and a small crevasse above Rast’s head opened. Dust sprinkled out and covered Rast. The dust whispered words of warning as it settled on his shoulders.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Trouble lies in spaces such as this.”
“Leave well enough alone.”
Rast ignored the dust, reaching up to feel around the dark crack. He couldn’t feel anything, and his sweating increased.
Rast frantically stood as tall as he could on the top vine and pushed his arm up further into the opening. There was something there. Rast worked the tips of his knobby black fingers to bring the object closer. As soon as he could reach it properly, he wrapped his hand around the handle on the box and pulled it out.
“Whew,” he said, dropping down to stand on the second-highest vine.
The dust shifted and whimpered.
Rast tossed his leg over the vine and sat down, holding the higher rope with his right hand. He balanced the heavy box on the thick, flat vine. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but Rast knew it was the key box.
“Of course it’s here,” he said to himself. “The one key the sycophants are entrusted to care for and we lose it? Unheard of.”
Rast opened the lid up and reached inside the long box.
Life is not always what you think it will be. Some people, however, are still surprised when something turns out differently than they might have expected.
I suggest you don’t get too comfortable. You can count on only two things—books and change. At only a handful of points in the history of mankind has a book ever not performed its job. Perhaps the story fell short, but that wasn’t the book’s fault. It went to the trouble of holding itself together and delivering the words or images it was born to pass on. Same for change—it’s constant and eternal. Even the things that seem still are still changing.
That said, however, if a person places a key in a small wooden box and locks it in a stone vault hidden deep in a mountain and protected by shiny metal objects, hidden entrances, and seemingly unclimbable heights, that person might very well expect that key to be there the next time he came around to check on it.
It was no different for Rast. He reached his hand in the little box and found . . . nothing.
Rast shook and almost fell from the shock of it. He felt around in every corner of the key box, frantically searching for the key.
There was nothing there.
Rast climbed back onto the top vine and felt around in the hole above.
It was empty.
Rast’s ears twitched violently.
The legends talked of a tree on Alder that could sprout metal. Seven keys had been forged from the metal of the tree, and the seven entities of Foo were each given one—the sycophants, the lithens, the nit elders, the Want, the Sochemists, the Eggmen, and the Waves. Each key kept a secret that, if unlocked, would unleash opposition to the fate of Foo. And it was said that all the keys together could open the soil and release a being powerful enough to destroy Foo. As long as those who held the keys sought for good, Foo would survive. When the inhabitants of Foo stopped caring for what was true, the keys would work to end all dreams and all of mankind, restoring the power to the soil that all creatures and beings had once come from.
And the sycophant key was missing.
Rast shook. The box slipped off the vines and fell down, eventually crashing against the metal objects on the floor below.
Small dust mites in the air cried and sniffled.
Rast could feel something coming on, but he couldn’t stop it. His whole being trembled, and then there was a soft pop. The passion of the moment was so horrific that it had created a Lore Coil. Rast’s heart sank even further. In a short time, those listening in any part of Foo would know that the key was missing.
Frazzled, Rast lost his balance and slipped down, bouncing off of four vines before he was able to right himself. His heart was beating faster than it had ever thumped. If someone really had unlocked the secret, the life of every sycophant was in jeopardy.
Rast was sweating, and his wet hands and feet slipped on the vines. This time he could not stop himself from falling. He tried to reach for anything to stop his fall, but his tiny, wet hands couldn’t get a grip.
He landed with a metallic thud against the ground. Rast had the presence of mind to close his eyes so as to not be distracted. He scrambled over the metal objects and worked himself down the tight stone stairs.
Rast stumbled into the cavern where the single torch was burning. He blinked anxiously and looked at the fire. The flame seemed nervous.
Rast stood. “Who was here?”
The fire fizzled.
“Who put out the other torch?” Rast demanded.
The fire whimpered.
“No one knows of this place aside from me,” Rast moaned. “There can’t be . . .”
Rast stopped himself. His heart sank to his toes and then raced up his stomach and into his neck. He shook until the fire became concerned and dimmed.
“Someone was here,” he said firmly.
The torch made no objections.
“You didn’t stop her?” Rast questioned, remembering the only other person he had ever brought here.
The fire couldn’t take it—it extinguished itself in one desperate yet soft puff of smoke.
Rast was gone from the room before the last bit of firelight had faded. He had a key to find.
Chapter Sixteen
Uncertainty
Leven was confused—deeply and utterly confused. He had no idea what day it was or what time it was. Day or night? Who knew?
Not Leven.
He was unsure of where he was, who he was, and what he was supposed to be doing. He couldn’t remember if he had eaten lately, or when he had last slept. He couldn’t remember if he had family or friends or any purpose in life. The only thing he knew for sure was that his legs were about to fall off from pain and that he was hiking up a never-ending stairwell with some small creature who insisted his name was Steven.
“Steven?”
“Yes,” Clover answered happily.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Leven said, breathing hard and brushing his hair back.
“It should,” Clover insisted. “You named me.”
“Steven?”
Clover nodded and jumped down onto Leven’s left arm.
“And we’re climbing these stairs because . . . ?”
“We are trying to get to the Want fast.”
“Because . . . ?”
“He’s all-powerful and Geth thinks he can help you save Foo.”
“Foo?”
“That’s where we are,” Clover explained. “Foo. The space between the possible and the impossible.”
“And I live here?”
Clover tsked. “I shouldn’t have let you drink that whole thing of water.”
Leven ran his fingers through his dark hair. His brown eyes burned gold around the edges as he looked up at the endless amount of stairs. Glancing down was even more astounding.
“Who built these stairs?” Leven asked.
“Not sure,” Clover said. “Probably some rants.”
“Which are . . . ?”
“Unstable beings who are constantly caught in dreams from Reality.”
“Who lights the torches?”
“They stay lit,” Clover said. “No reason for them to go out.”
Leven stopped climbing and collapsed onto one of the stairs. “I can’t go any higher,” he announced.
“Of course you can.”
“No way, Steven,�
�� Leven said.
Clover smiled.
“That just doesn’t sound right,” Leven repeated, confused. “Are you sure your name isn’t Clark, or Calvin, or Kaiser?”
“Nope,” Clover insisted. “I’m all Steven, Ted.”
“And you’re positive my name is Ted?”
“That’s what you told me,” Clover said. “So, unless you’re
lying . . .”
“I don’t feel like a Ted.”
“I could rename you if you’d like,” Clover offered.
“That’s all right,” Leven said. “Ted?”
“Ted.”
“How did I forget all this?”
“You drank some water from the Veil Sea,” Clover answered. “For the record, I tried to stop you.”
“So I’m Ted, you’re Steven, and we’re climbing these billions of stairs to see a guy called Want?”
“Right.”
“Because a guy named Geth and a girl named Winter said so?” Leven asked.
“Now you’re getting it right.”
The effect of the water was beginning to fade. Leven could see real memories washing in and out of his mind.
“And you’re in charge?” Leven asked.
“Only because you all begged me to be.”
More bits of Leven’s brain began to clear.
“We begged you?”
“It was actually a little embarrassing,” Clover said.
“I’m sure it was, Steven.”
Leven’s brain cleared further. He could see Foo and Reality in his mind. He could see Winter’s face and Geth as a restored lithen. He could see Clover handing him the water and promising him it was safe to drink.
It was all coming back to him. Leven looked up at the stairs and moaned. He took a deep breath, pushed himself up, and began climbing again.
“You know, I’m glad I named you Steven,” Leven said, breathing hard. “I would hate for you to have one of those girl names like, um, Clover.”
