by Samuel Fort
Chapter 50 - Family Album
The next evening, the tears and wails of despair behind him, Ben sat in the tablet repository alone and meditated on all that had happened in the past week and wondering what lay ahead.
He pondered Ridley’s statement that a force of some kind was being born on the other side of the world that would take possession of any lands that the Fifth Kingdom did not claim and that it would fight for the lands the kingdom had. What kind of power, he wondered? A military power? What of the other Nisirtu kingdoms? Surely they would not be powerless to stop such an advance.
Where exactly had Ridley gone? Lilian had said that the scribe had told her he was a player in a script written by another, but that begged the question, what script? Who was the author and how did Ridley know about it? Wasn’t it a truism that the actors in Nisirtu scripts didn’t know they were actors?
Ben wondered if he was still an actor in such a script. This question bothered him because it raised the unnerving question of whether the decisions he was making were really his alone. If the decisions he had made up to this point and would make in the future were based on a set of values and beliefs instilled in him by a life-long script, was he really is own man? Did he really have free will if everything he did was the result of some hidden power’s manipulation?
The photo album in his lap made such questions even more pressing.
That’s what it had been, the thing on the oak table next to Ridley - the large leather book that Ben had seen just before the scribe had released the Empyrean. It was a photo album filled with photographs of Ben when he was a boy. His mother and father were in many of the photographs but Ridley was in all of them, usually smiling like it was Christmas morning and looking directly at the camera.
The scribe had not been young even then, but he was less stooped, had more hair and his skin was tauter. He wore flannel shirts or sweater vests and sometimes caps with football team logos on them, appearing every bit the quirky uncle every family seemed to have at least one of. There was nothing that would make the scribe’s appearance in the photos remarkable, at least not to anyone but Ben, who observed that not once, in any of the photos, did his parents look at Ridley. It was as if the man were a ghost making cameo shots in family photos for his own amusement.
Ben had surmised that his parents really hadn’t seen the scribe. Now that the block had been removed, he remembered many of Ridley’s visits and how his parents had seemed so remote when the man was present, often disappearing into their bedroom and not coming out until Ridley had told them he was leaving. It would have been easy enough for the scribe to convince them that he wasn’t even there, if he spoke the right word to them.
The researcher remembered sitting in his family’s kitchen with Ridley studying the Tiwanaku tablets and how after several months he had achieved the “epiphany event” - the instance in which the entirety of the Empyrean Glossa registered in his young mind. He remembered Ridley’s joy and how the two of them had talked long into the night about a million unimportant things, speaking rapidly. He remembered the ice cream sandwich that had been his reward.
He also remembered how a somber Ridley had convinced him to accept the words that would imprison the Empyrean Glossa in Ben’s mind for the next two decades and which would remove any memory the boy had of the scribe.
One of many mysteries the photographs did not resolve was how Ridley had happened upon Ben in the first place. How had Ridley known that young Ben Mitchell would have the capacity to learn Empyrean? How had he found him? When had the script that controlled Ben’s life begun?
A more troubling question: What had those scripts required? Had they, for example, required his parents to die prematurely, or for him to enter the Marines, or for his convoy to be bombed? Had his hasty removal from Afghanistan been scripted?
It was not a mystery, at least, why Ridley had left the photo album for him. The scribe wanted to assure the new king that his memories were genuine. It would be easy for a man with Ridley’s abilities, or now Ben’s, to create in another person’s mind an entirely fictional past. The photographs were Ridley’s way of telling Ben that the memories that were resurfacing were genuine.
Unfortunately, the things that Ben had forgotten, the kinds of events that anyone might forget, remained forgotten. Empyrean did not grant its users perfect recall, and Ben had, in fact, forgotten many of the events captured in photographs contained in the album.
An event captured in one photograph, in particular, troubled him.
Deeply.
He pulled it from the album and inspected it yet again. It was a four by six inch glossy color photograph taken at an amusement park or perhaps a county fair. Kids were everywhere in the photograph and most were in costume so the photograph was presumably taken on or around Halloween.
In the background of the photograph was a miniature castle, gray and menacing, generously decorated with plastic bats and sheeted ghosts. A set of decrepit double doors were on either side of the castle, in front of which were faux-drawbridges in the down position. A rail with red passenger cars on it spanned the distance between the two drawbridges.
It was a haunted house ride, as was made clear by the large sign affixed to one of the castle’s turrets that promised in amateurishly painted gothic letters The Beast Awaits Within!
In the foreground of the photograph was Ridley in his yellow robe, a “costume” that would not have earned him a second glance on Halloween. For once, he wasn’t smiling. His face was solemn, his expression omniscient, as if he were looking past the camera and the photographer and directly at the man in the vault now holding the photograph.
The scribe’s hands were on the shoulders of the two children, a boy and girl, both perhaps ten or eleven years old. The boy, dressed as a generic superhero, his cape bellowing gently behind him, faced the girl, and the girl, a glistening toy tiara resting on her golden locks, faced the boy.
The girl was bashfully holding an object out to the boy, and the boy, looking bewildered, was reluctantly extending his hand to accept it.
Ben had recognized the object immediately. He had seen it before, only days ago.
A golden cup.
