The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “Lake, what are you doing?” Ari shouted.

  Lake, still clutching at some rocks on the steep slope, merely glanced back at us with a grin. Then he went back to work, shimmying his way across the cliff face, toward the turtle’s shell. Once he was positioned nearly above it, we all realized what he was going to do.

  “Lake, don’t!” Ari yelled.

  But Lake jumped anyway.

  And he wouldn’t have made it, were it not for me casting a quick spell that sent a burst of wind whipping behind the turtle and funneling up between it and the side of the mountain. The gust of wind caught Lake just as he was falling and lifted him onto the back of the boulder turtle.

  He still landed pretty hard and went sprawling across the boulder, tumbling nearly off the other side. But he managed to find a few handholds and stayed on top of the shell.

  Lake gingerly climbed to his feet and grinned down at us from behind the turtle’s twin heads, which, though the mouths were opening and closing, didn’t ultimately seem too concerned with his presence on their shared back.

  “What are you doing up there?” Ari demanded.

  “Whence sand spewed forth betwixt ye turtle’s mouths,” Lake yelled back down, “thyne peepers beseeched nary emblems marking solution. What hath doth presented itself but glimpses ye carvings in ye shell!”

  “What the heck did he just say?” Edwin asked.

  “When the turtle was shooting sand at us,” Ari translated, “he thought he saw some carvings on the turtle’s shell.”

  We waited as Lake crawled around on top of the boulder and out of sight.

  “Well?” Lixi finally yelled up after a few minutes. “Are there markings?”

  “Aye!” Lake yelled back down. “Thee be’est ruination symbolic of ye ancient tongue.”

  “Can you read it?” Glam shouted up.

  “Aye!”

  “I can’t believe his obsession with ancient languages might actually be anything other than annoying for once,” his sister said with a hopeful grin.

  We all waited silently for Lake to read the ancient inscriptions. It felt like nobody was even breathing for the better part of several minutes.

  Then, finally, Lake’s smiling face appeared above us, and he sat down on the edge of the turtle shell just to the right of the heads, which were still bobbing slightly, but much slower than before.

  “So what does it say?” I asked.

  “An ancient riddle!” he shouted, holding up a piece of parchment that he’d apparently used to transcribe the translation.

  I sighed.

  I had thought perhaps we’d actually be able to make it through this quest without having to answer some lame riddle. But at the same time, I was extremely grateful and encouraged that we might have found a solution that didn’t involve futilely battling a stone turtle until the end of time.

  “Well, okay, then!” Edwin said with a grin. “Let’s hear it!”

  Lake cleared his throat and began reading:

  “‘You, dear traveler, of noble spirit and soul, are on a quest. Your journey is nearly over, and from this point forward, there can be no going back. You have arrived at a fork in the road, and the goal you seek lies at the end of one of these two paths. Down the other, a fate even worse than death awaits. At this crossroads sits a mystical turtle god. It is known that there are two turtle gods who rule this realm. One, Abraxis, is evil; he always lies and always means you harm. The other, Sixarba, is good, means you well, and always speaks the truth. However, these turtle gods are twins and cannot be told apart. Therefore, you have no way of knowing which one sits before you. But legend says the turtle god is permitted to answer one solitary question from a traveler such as yourself. One lone question can lead you to either your goal . . . or endless pain. What question do you ask this turtle?’”

  A few seconds of silence allowed his words to sink in (and also the fact that this was the first time I’d ever heard him speak “normally,” which was likely due to the direct translation of the riddle).

  “What the heck?” Glam yelled.

  “Yeah!” Tiki added. “This is bloggurgin stupid!”

  “But it’s clearly our only way past this thing,” Edwin said.

  “And also symbolic,” Foxflame said.

  We all turned toward him.

  “I suspect,” he elaborated, “that this is more than a simple riddle. I suspect that the fate of the traveler in the riddle will match our own. If we ask the correct question to solve the riddle, then we will be shown to the path we seek. If we ask the wrong question . . . well . . . you heard where the other path leads . . . .”

  As he spoke, the boulder-turtle heads nodded again, much faster than they had before, as if confirming this was true.

  We all considered Foxflame’s words. We had no reason to believe his theory wasn’t true. All the symbolism matched up. The bobbing of the two turtle heads only cemented this in our minds.

  Which meant we were now literally trying to solve a riddle to save our lives.

  CHAPTER 31

  Is It the Red Sea or a Red Sea?

  So what’s the answer?” Glam asked, breaking the somber silence. “Come on, Greg, you and your friend are the smart ones. What do we need to ask this stupid turtle?”

  I shook my head, at a total loss.

  “It’s tricky . . .” Edwin said, thinking aloud. “The turtle could either be Abraxis, in which case anything he says will be a lie. Or it could be Sixarba, which would mean the answer is the truth. But how will we know which one we are talking to?”

  “We could simply ask which turtle it is,” Wrecking Ball suggested.

  “No, because we still wouldn’t know if it’s telling the truth or not,” Edwin countered. “If it’s Abraxis, it will say it’s Sixarba since it always lies. And if it is Sixarba, it will say Sixarba since it always tells the truth. So, either way, it’s going to answer Sixarba. But we still wouldn’t know which turtle it really is, and also we wouldn’t know what path to take, which is what we’re really trying to find out.”

  We all fell silent again as we brainstormed.

  “What about if we ask it something we already know the answer to,” Ari eventually suggested. “Like, we could ask it: Are you a turtle? Then if it says yes, we know it’s Sixarba. If it says no, we know it’s Abraxis.”

  There were several people nodding in agreement, but Edwin shook his head vigorously.

  “No, that still doesn’t help,” he said. “Knowing which turtle it is still won’t tell us which way to go. And remember: we only get to ask it one question.”

  “Well, dang,” Ari said.

  After another short silence, Lixi jumped to her feet.

  “I think I got it!” she said. “We could ask it: Am I going to die if I take the left path?”

  “Okay . . .” Edwin said, as he worked it out in his head.

  “Think about it,” Lixi explained. “If the left path is the good way, and the turtle is Abraxis, he’s going to lie and say yes. But if it’s Sixarba, he’ll tell the truth and say no. So if it’s the bad path, Abraxis will say no, and Sixarba will say yes . . .”

  But even as she spoke, we could see that saying it aloud was helping her see the fundamental flaw in the question: it was a way to get a different answer, sure, but it still wouldn’t tell us which way was correct, because we still wouldn’t know which turtle we were speaking to. So that question would only work if we knew which turtle god it was to begin with. Nobody even needed to explain this to Lixi. She trailed off, realizing it on her own.

  “Oh,” she said, her head dropping. “Oh, yeah, okay, I see now why that still doesn’t work.”

  We all went back to our own thoughts.

  At some point, I stopped thinking about the riddle itself, and started thinking about my dad. He was always very good at riddles. I remembered this one ti
me when I was seven or eight, and we went to this old diner called Cozy Corner. They had place mats with puzzles and mazes and riddles on them. That day there was this riddle:

  If you throw a white stone into a red sea, what will happen to it?

  I could tell from my dad’s wry grin that he knew the answer right away. But he stayed quiet and let me work on the question for a while. After three or four incorrect guesses, in which I tried to figure out if they meant the actual Red Sea or just a sea that was red, and what type of white rock we were dealing with, I finally gave up.

  “So what’s the answer, Dad?”

  “The rock will get wet,” he said.

  I scoffed at such a stupidly simple solution. It had to be cleverer than that, right? But then I checked the answer key on the back of the place mat, and sure enough there it was: It will get wet!

  It almost seemed like the exclamation point in the answer key was its own way of laughing at itself. And at you, for not being able to figure out a question so simple that it was actually stupid.

  “Riddles have a very basic mechanism for fooling people,” my dad explained as he shoveled a gargantuan twelve-egg bacon-and-sausage omelet into his mouth in massive bites. “They trick you into overthinking the problem or question. The answer is usually so simple and direct that most people overlook it right away. The riddle outsmarts people by allowing people to outsmart the riddle. Solving a riddle is like solving most of any of life’s problems. You just need to find the simplest, most direct way to answer the question.”

  My dad applied that logic to almost everything in life, not just solving lame riddles. When the air conditioner broke one summer, we just wore fewer clothes around the house (and we were fine). When our car got a flat tire once, and we couldn’t afford a new one, we simply sold it and rode the bus more often. When he set dinner on fire, we just ate around the burned parts. When trying to figure out what lamp to buy for our living room, he chose the one that required no assembly.

  So what’s the most direct way to the solution, keeping in mind that it might even be to ignore the problem altogether?

  In this case, all we needed to know was which way to go. Which path was right, and which path was wrong. So the most direct, simple question would be . . . No. No way could that be correct. It was, after all, so easy.

  So simple.

  “I think I got it,” I said suddenly.

  The whole group looked at me.

  “We ask the turtle: Which way should I go?”

  “Pfft, come on!” Rhistel said. “It’s got to have a cleverer answer than that!”

  “Yeah, doesn’t that end up with the same problem, where we would get two different answers?” Ari said. “If left is correct, Abraxis will say right. And Sixarba would say left. And so we still wouldn’t know which—”

  “No, Greg’s right!” Edwin interrupted quickly, speaking fast like he always did when he was excited. “Or at least he’s very close. We just need to alter his question slightly, since we’re forgetting about a key detail: one is evil, and one is good. That detail is in there for a reason. So what we really need to ask is: Which way do you WANT me to go?”

  “That’s a pretty purboggingly small difference,” Tiki said.

  “But it will make all the difference in the answer,” Edwin said, pausing so we could all figure it out on our own.

  And he was right; that subtle change fixed everything.

  Asking which way the turtle wanted you to go factored in both that they always lied or told the truth, and their good or evil intentions. For instance, let’s say the left path was the good path. If the turtle was Abraxis, he would want you to go right so you would die, but since he always lied, he would say to go left. If the turtle was Sixarba, he would want you to go left so you would succeed, and since he always told the truth, he would say to go left. So either way, you would be told the correct way to go. You’d get the same answer, the correct answer, even without ever finding out which turtle god was in front of you.

  Once it was clear that each of us had figured this out, we huddled up in front of the sandpile.

  Lake climbed down to join us.

  “We’re all in agreement, then?” Edwin confirmed. “Because if Foxflame is correct about this riddle being symbolic of our actual fates, and this answer is wrong, then it means certain death for all of us.”

  One by one, we all nodded, including Blob, whose version of a nod was to mold himself a sort of head protruding from his mass and wag it up and down.

  “Okay, then,” Edwin said. “Who wants to do the honors?”

  “You should, since you figured it out,” Ari said.

  Edwin shook his head.

  “Not without Greg’s original question, I wouldn’t have,” he said.

  “Let’s do it together, then,” I suggested. “Me and you.”

  Edwin nodded.

  We broke our huddle, and Edwin and I both stepped forward in front of the boulder turtle.

  “We have the answer to your riddle,” I shouted up at the turtle’s heads, which slowly turned so that it seemed like they were looking at us. “We would ask the turtle at the fork in the road . . .” I stopped, pausing so Edwin could join me. “Which way do you want me to go?”

  Almost immediately, the turtle’s heads dove toward us, mouths wide open. The right head went for Edwin and the left for me.

  We were too stunned to react, and they swallowed us whole.

  CHAPTER 32

  The Moment You Find Out I Won’t Die, at Least Not Until the Very End (Though I Hope You Already Knew That)

  Okay, so, clearly you know I didn’t die.

  How else would I be telling you all this, and how would you still be reading? After enough false deaths to fill three books, I’d hope you’d have learned by now that I somehow ended up surviving at least most of this whole ordeal.

  I did, in fact, survive being eaten alive by the huge rock turtle.

  And so did Edwin.

  For one thing, the turtle’s heads did not have teeth. Secondly, they did not clamp down with the intent to crush us, but instead scooped us up and tilted back so we tumbled down a pair of parallel tunnels in the stone, which I suppose were like their esophagus.

  Unlike when the Kraken swallowed me whole, I did not end up in the belly of a beast. This time I slid down a narrow tunnel of stone and into a dank cavern lit by glowing green crystals embedded in the walls. I could only assume, as Edwin plopped down next to me, from his own neck chute, that we were now inside the boulder that comprised the turtle’s “shell.” The ceiling was domed, and there was an open doorway at the far end, where the turtle’s tail connected to the mountainside.

  Beyond it: the unknown darkness of more caves and tunnels.

  “Dude, I think we got it right,” Edwin said, helping me to my feet.

  “Yeah, we really beat that turtle by a hare,” I said.

  Edwin actually guffawed at my unexpected and terrible pun.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, still laughing. “I’m shell-shocked we survived. We should really have a shellebration!”

  I laughed, and then we both quickly fell silent a moment later.

  “They’re all going to think we just got eaten and are now dead,” Edwin said.

  “Maybe not?” I suggested.

  But in the brief silence that followed, we could actually hear our friends outside. Their voices were faint, as if halfway across the world instead of ten feet away, but they were screaming and wailing at the loss of their friends and supposed “leaders.” It was pretty awful to listen to.

  “We have to let them know we’re okay,” Edwin said. “If we can hear them, then surely they could hear us?”

  I nodded, and we both began shouting and screaming, trying to let them know we were okay. But after yelling for several minutes, until our throats were sore, I stopped him.


  “Wait, if all they hear is us screaming, they’re probably assuming we’re getting, like, slowly and painfully digested or something?”

  “Oh, yeah, good point,” Edwin said with a grim smile. “What do you suggest, then?”

  I quickly pulled Blackout from my belt and cut off a small chunk of my shirt.

  “Got anything in there to write with?” I asked, nodding at Edwin’s satchel.

  “No . . .” he said, quickly plucking my knife from my hand. “But there’s always this.”

  He made a shallow cut on his arm.

  “Dude!” I gasped.

  “Pretty gross, but blood is the oldest form of ink,” he said.

  “Is that really true?”

  Edwin shrugged.

  “I don’t know, probably,” he said. “It sounds true. Now come on, hurry up. Elven flesh wounds clot and heal very quickly.”

  “Is that true?” I asked, pretty shocked that nobody had told me that before.

  “Yeah, man,” he said. “You got the strong bones, but we got the strong fleshy parts. Now what do you want me to write?”

  He took the cloth from me and placed it against the wall. Then he ran a finger along his cut.

  “‘We’re okay,’” I said. “‘Give the turtle the same answer.’”

  Edwin quickly scrawled the message in blood with his finger on the scrap of my shirt. When he was done, he handed it back to me.

  “So how did you plan to get it to them?”

  “The same way we’ll be doing lots of things going forward,” I said. “Magic.”

  I threw the chunk of cloth up toward the left turtle neck tunnel and then summoned a wind spell. A gust of fresh mountain air blasted down through the right tunnel and then swooped up the cloth, carrying it deep into the left tunnel and (hopefully) out through the rock turtle’s mouth.