Hunter Brown and the Eye of Ends

by Chris Miller

  “Keep on your guard,” Desi commanded. “We need to get moving. Where to, Hunter?”

  I pointed in a direction that seemed right, but honestly I had no clue. The forest was thick, black and impossible to navigate without a point of reference to start from.

  By night’s end, we came to a clearing I recognized at once as Blood Canyon. It was a welcome sight, but also confirmed that we had just wasted half our day walking the wrong way. Belac’s castle was a full day’s walk back in the opposite direction. Frustrated, we turned around and headed back up the long and treacherous path through the Woods of Indifference. Every step of the way, we were well aware that we were not alone. We were being watched.

  Chapter 19

  Chasing Shadows

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” they always say, but at the moment I couldn’t care less. Sure, having been a prisoner in Belac’s castle once before didn’t make me exactly eager to try it again. At the moment I was so anxious to find out what had happened to my father I didn’t much care if I put myself or anyone else, for that matter, in harm’s way again.

  I was on a mission, and no bug-eyed swamp troll was going to keep me from finding the truth. Not this time.

  If the picture proved true and Belac really had killed my father, I was dead certain he was going to pay for his crime. It wasn’t that I had revenge on my mind…well, okay, it was a bit of revenge. But there was righteous anger in there too somewhere, I’m sure of it. Besides, it was high time someone put Belac in his place. After all, this wasn’t only for me but for all the other boys who had lost their fathers at the tender age of twelve; it was for Stretch and his horrible experience in Solandria; for Mom and Emily who were missing. What all of this had to do with Belac, I’m not exactly sure. But it made sense in my mind and it gave me the motivation I needed to go back to the castle without feeling even the slightest hesitation. “Once bitten, twice the ball of fury” is what I say.

  Things were different this time. Desi’s fire whips, my Veritas Sword and Trista’s bow would be more than a match for a bumbling troll and his club. It was three against one; we had the upper hand. But beyond having mere numbers on our side, I knew a secret that practically guaranteed our success. Like the Noctu, Belac slept during daylight hours…more importantly, he snored.

  By snoring I don’t just mean that grumbly, snarly sound your uncle makes when he sleeps, but rather an obnoxiously loud, cement mixer snore with the amplitude of a megaphone added in for good measure. If there was anything you could count on from Belac, it was that from dawn til dusk, the grumpy old troll disappeared into his junk heap of a bedroom…and snored. There wasn’t a second of the day during my captivity that I didn’t hear the beastly sound, echoing throughout the castle.

  Our strategy was simple: attack at high noon under the cover of Belac’s snore. It was a brilliant plan, and one that couldn’t fail, or so I thought.

  By daylight, the castle in the swamp looked almost charming, like something out of a fairy tale. Almost, that is, if it weren’t for the constant stench of the rotting bog that burned in our nostrils.

  “What is that wretched smell?” Desi spat as we approached the last line of tree cover outside the stone fortress. I had forgotten how nauseatingly awful the bubbling bog was.

  “It’s not the smell of the swamp that should bother you,” I replied. “It’s what’s in it.”

  “Which is what exactly?” Desi asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” I replied, recalling the giant leeches that had covered my body night after night on my previous visit. The reminder fueled the fire in my stomach again. It was time to get even. As swiftly as we could, we crossed the swamp to the front door. It was locked from the inside.

  “It won’t budge,” I said, shoving my shoulder into it a second time. The first phase of my supposedly perfect plan had come to a crashing halt.

  “You weren’t exactly expecting a welcoming party, were you?” Desi asked.

  Ignoring the comment, I shouldered the door a third time and nearly bruised myself in the process. It was no use; the door wasn’t going anywhere.

  “What now?” Trista asked, as I stepped away from the door with a slightly embarrassed look on my face. There was no way I was going to admit defeat.

  “If at first you don’t succeed…” I said, raising my Veritas Sword over my head and preparing to hack my way through the immovable door.

  “Whoa there, cowboy,” Desi interrupted, stopping my arm mid-swing. “Do you want to wake Belac? We need a better plan.”

  “Oh, right. Well, maybe there’s a back door we can slip in through,” I said, feeling good about the suggestion.

  “That’s not a plan. That’s floundering.”

  The remark smacked my ego full in the face, but I wasn’t going to let it get to me. After all, it was my own brilliance that had led us this far. Neither Simon nor Desi had been able to figure out where my father had gone. We were only one door-width away from finding the answers that had eluded us both.

  “Floundering or not, I haven’t heard any other ideas,” I replied.

  “Well, there must be some other way in,” Trista added.

  “There always is,” Desi replied confidently, taking control of the situation. “It’s just a matter of where…to…look.” She backed away from the door a few steps and glanced overhead. “There!” she nearly shouted, pointing to a window on the second story.

  “How is that a plan?” I asked, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “It’s thirty feet up at least; how are you going to reach it?”

  Desi rolled her eyes and held up one of her fire whips. “Stand back and learn,” she said, drawing the tail of the blue whip much longer than before. When she was finished, the length of the whip fell to the ground beside her. She gauged the distance and swung the whip overhead, targeting a beam that stuck out from the roofline just above the window. The tip of the whip wound around the beam tightly and Desi gave it a good tug. It held in place.

  “Be back in a minute,” she said, using the glowing whip to scale the wall. She crawled through the window and disappeared inside. A few moments later, the front door creaked open and Desi was there. She retrieved the whip rod and retracted the tail into it. Together, the three of us slipped inside Belac’s home and closed the door softly behind us.

  The dingy interior looked worse than I remembered. The walls were actually growing moss on the inside and the floor looked like it had never been cleaned. But it wasn’t the look of the place that bothered me most. It was what we heard…or rather what we didn’t hear, that made my heart freeze.

  “We have a problem,” I whispered. “No snore!”

  The absence of Belac’s obnoxious snoring could only mean one of two things….

  “Maybe he’s gone?” Trista asked, sounding somewhat hopeful.

  “That, or he knows we’re here and he’s waiting somewhere,” Desi added.

  It struck me how different the two girls were. Trista was the eternal optimist, hopeful and trusting to a fault. Desi, on the other hand, was more like a cat, confident and sly, always on the alert and ready for the unexpected to happen. They were a well-matched pair.

  “Either way, there’s no use wasting time. We’ll find out soon enough,” I pointed out.

  “What’s next?” Desi asked, deferring to me, despite the dismal failure of my plan thus far.

  “Follow me,” I answered, motioning to the left and slinking down the hallway. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next part of the mission. It meant revisiting one of the darkest moments in my life: Belac’s prison.

  A collection of iron shackles in various shapes and sizes hung from wooden pegs on the wall outside the prison door. They were the same kind of shackles Belac had used on Stretch and me to ensure we didn’t run away. I picked out a pair that seemed large enough to fit Belac himself and imagined the joy I’d feel locking
them on his wrists for a change.

  As we turned to leave, I spotted something through the barred window of the prison door I hadn’t even considered a possibility: a prisoner was inside. I’m not sure why but the thought had never occurred to me that Belac might have found another slave to be leech bait. The man in the prison was gaunt and heavily bearded, a mere shadow of the human he once had been. He slept soundly on the stone floor, waiting for the dreaded night to fall when he’d be drug out into the swamp. My heart went out to him; it could have easily been me had the Author not intervened and saved Stretch and me that night. Everything in me wanted to open the door and let him out.

  “Not now,” Desi whispered, seeing the prisoner. “You can’t risk the mission over him. Not until Belac is restrained.”

  Desi was right; we couldn’t wake him. If the prisoner was even half as starved for salvation as I had been, any sign of a rescue and he’d be shouting for joy. That was the last thing we needed with a vicious troll potentially lurking nearby. We needed silence. The rescue would have to wait.

  “Stay on your toes. The prisoner means Belac can’t have gone far,” I said. “He’s got to be somewhere.”

  We returned to the main hall and tiptoed up the stairway toward the room where Belac slept. I ignited my Veritas Sword and motioned to the door. Desi and Trista nodded, armed themselves and prepared for the worse.

  With a shove of my hand, the door to Belac’s room creaked open, revealing a massive hulking shape in the shadows behind it. At first I figured the shape was Belac, but quickly realized it wasn’t moving. It was just a heap of junk, one of many that nearly covered the floor of his room now. We moved gingerly through the precariously stacked piles in hopes of spotting the enormous bed behind them. Unfortunately, the bed was empty.

  “He’s not here,” said Desi. “Do you want to look for clues?”

  As much as I did, I knew the better course of action was to contain Belac first…then look for clues.

  “We can’t afford to be discovered. Let’s check the other rooms first. If Belac’s here, we need to find him before he finds us. We’ll have time to come back later.”

  The three of us ventured out on our hunt for the troll. Room after bedraggled room turned up no sign of him. The place was a regular pigsty. Each room seemed to be a bigger mess than the previous room, with the exception of one, the library.

  The library was surprisingly well kept, not exactly clean, but for Belac it was as close as clean gets. In fact, despite the thick layer of dust that blanketed the room, you might say it was practically pristine. But there was something else about this room, a feeling that something wasn’t all that it seemed.

  “I guess Belac isn’t much of a reader,” Trista said, after taking in the state of the room.

  “Well, there’s a big surprise,” I replied smugly, turning back toward the hallway that had led us here. “There are only a few rooms left. Let’s go.”

  “No, wait,” Desi said, holding up a hand. “Somebody has been here…recently.”

  “How can you tell?” I questioned.

  She pointed to a stone pillar that curved out from the wall to the left of the doorway. On it, about shoulder height was an iron ring, which hung from a metal plate embedded in the wall. The ring swung out from the wall a bit and held a wooden torch. The torch was still smoldering…. Someone had let it burn out.

  “Of course, the torch,” I said, nearly kicking myself for having missed it.

  “But I don’t get it,” Trista said, expressing what we were all thinking. “If Belac has been here, then why is it so clean? There aren’t even any footprints in the dust.”

  I scrutinized the room, gazing across the space and down the walls to the floor where the carpet we stood on led up to a bookshelf. That’s when it hit me.

  “Unless…maybe Belac doesn’t think of it as a room at all. Maybe it’s more like a hallway to him, a place between rooms,” I said, suddenly figuring out Belac’s secret. “Do you see how the carpet rolls under the bookshelf?”

  “Yes,” Desi said, her eyes lighting up at the realization. “It’s a fake wall. The bookshelf is hiding another room.”

  The three of us eagerly ran to the bookshelf and went to work searching for a way to open the door.

  “There’s got to be a trigger of some kind,” I said, “a secret book or lever of some sort.”

  Nothing presented itself. After several minutes of fruitless searching, we were ready to give up.

  “Do you think we’re overanalyzing it?” Trista ventured to ask.

  “What do you mean?” I answered.

  “Well, Belac’s a troll, right?”

  “Yeah, so?” I wondered where she was going with this.

  “So, maybe we need to think like a troll thinks.”

  “How do we do that? Take half our brains out?” Desi asked, smiling at her own joke.

  Trista pretended not to notice. “No, but we could try pushing our way in.”

  Without another word, Trista started pressing against the bookshelf with all her might. Surprisingly, it budged. It was only a half-inch, but it moved. With newfound hope we joined her, pushing together and managing to slide the centermost bookshelf backward a full five feet before it came to a stop against a stone wall. A staircase led down into a lower level of the castle we had yet to explore.

  “You’d make a pretty good troll,” Desi teased Trista. I could tell from the face Trista made she didn’t appreciate the comment much at all.

  A cold draft blew up from the blackness at the bottom of the staircase. It was the kind of draft that felt more like a gasp for breath, as if the staircase itself were a gaping mouth that wanted to pull us down its throat. The light of my Veritas Sword seemed to be gobbled up by the darkness of the creepy tunnel.

  “Well, I guess we…go down,” I said nervously. With wobbly knees I stepped down into the blackness toward the hidden basement. The passage was lined in cobwebs and continued a hundred or more steps down, before ending in a rather small, rectangular room. The room was entirely empty except for a simple wooden stool in the center and a tall, oval-shaped mirror, which seemed vaguely familiar to me.

  “Well, that’s a let down,” Trista said. “All that secrecy for nothing. Who hides a mirror in their basement?”

  “What is it?” Desi asked, noticing my attention drifting from the mirror.

  “It’s the room,” I said thoughtfully. “The picture my dad drew of Belac. It happened in this room, in that corner….”

  I pointed to the corner I had sensed was the place. The same jagged rock popped out from the wall.

  “And that mirror,” I said, “I think I’ve seen it before too, in my dream. A traveler visited a room like this one. He created a black mirror…just by drawing it.”

  Desi’s eyes widened slightly, contemplating the idea.

  “What do you mean, ‘drawing it’?” Trista asked.

  I explained how the traveler in my dream had made the mirror appear, seemingly out of nowhere; how it was almost as if he had willed it into being with the help of the crystal stone.

  “Scrivening. It’s the art of writing into being,” Desi said with excitement. “I always thought it was just a myth. Your father had long talked about creating a world of his own—a world where he could escape the fate he saw in the Eye of Ends. Before he went missing, he said he had been studying the art of scrivening. He believed it was possible to create a portal to a new world where he could control the outcome of things.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “By using the power of the Bloodstone,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. At the very mention of the word, my jaw tightened and I clutched the place where Aviad had once removed the cursed object from my chest. The Bloodstone had been the source of so much trouble before I couldn’t bring myself to believe it existed again.

  “But the B
loodstone is gone; Aviad destroyed it,” I said. “I saw him do it myself.”

  “Yes, but your father didn’t need to find the original Bloodstone; he only needed to harness the source of its power to make a new one,” Desi explained. “He must have found a way.”

  “How is that even possible?” I asked.

  “Well, the Eye of Ends comes from the Living Tree, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, have you ever seen a cross section of a tree?”

  “Sure, lots of times.”

  “Well, the rings of the tree are like a record of the tree’s life…its history. According to Simon’s research, when you enter the inside of the Eye of Ends there is a Maze of Rings, where the history of our worlds are contained—like a code. Mortals, like your father, must navigate this maze until they come to a dead end. Each dead end reveals another vision. At the very center of the maze—a place known as the Inmost Circle—a pillar of fire rises up to infinite heights. This fire is believed to be from the very stream of the Code of Life…the source that once gave the Living Tree its life and the Bloodstone its power.

  “As far as we know, your father is the only one who successfully found his way to the center of the Eye. If what you saw in your vision was true, your father may have learned how to harvest a second Bloodstone from the Code of Life.”

  “Are you suggesting the traveler in my dreams was really my father?” I asked.

  Desi shrugged, “It’s a possibility, but whoever it was didn’t want this mirror to be found.”

  I approached the dirty mirror and wiped a layer of dust off its face. As I did, the surface reacted to my touch with a dazzling display of brightly colored lines beneath the glass. It was like finger painting with digital light. The glowing marks only lasted a second or two before fading away, but the effect was impressive.

  Trista gawked at the mirror and said, “Can I try? That’s cool!”