The Elysian Prophecy

by Vivien Reis

  "Pepperoni and pineapple?" Cora eyed the pizza and then sent the look to Ben.

  A tiny smile cracked on his lips at her reaction. "It's my favorite."

  "Interesting...I'll take it." She shrugged.

  By the time the sun had set, they had reached the final pages of the journal. Since Ben wasn't taking the time to read every page, it was going a lot quicker than when he had tried to go through it by himself. He specifically searched for mentions of Mundi and ignored most of the other words unless something leapt out at him.

  He sighed, stretching his arms overhead as Cora finished with the last page.

  "Okay." She puffed a strand of hair out of her face and clenched her hands into fists to stretch them. "There seems to be a lot of times she uses it before or after Mundi." She clicked a few keys on her laptop. "Yup, eleven of the twenty-two times.”

  "So, it's a person or a thing then."

  "It seems like it would have to be a thing. Why would you refer to someone you knew as it instead of him or her?"

  "True."

  "I'm not sure but let me try something." Preoccupied, she clicked around on her computer before mumbling, "I think I can run a formula to find the most commonly used words."

  He waited a few minutes for her to finish, grabbing the last piece of now-cold pizza while she worked.

  "There."

  Ben stood over her shoulder as a list popped up.

  "Most commonly used are it, dark, and take."

  "Let's see the ones with take."

  The program highlighted the words in her spreadsheet and she scrolled to the top so he could read them.

  Take it. Don't leave dog as it runs and dark all the way over. And over.

  This was followed by an explanation of a swirling pattern that snaked off the last letter, running the rest of the page. After all the work they had done, he didn't feel any closer to solving this mystery.

  "I'm going to send this to you, and then we can both look over it separately tonight. Maybe if we sleep on it something will pop out at us." Her eyes flitted to the corner of her screen. "We've already been at this for over nine hours. I think we're too tired to notice anything anymore."

  He nodded, deflating a bit at their apparent lack of progress.

  "I think you should also try to decipher what the rest of the surrounding sentences say. I can take pictures on my phone, if you don't mind, and look over them too. What we need might be hidden in one of those passages for all we know."

  Ben had doubts, not just because of the lack of clues they had found so far, but in their ability to decipher what his mom had meant when she wrote it.

  "Hey, Ab—Cora?" He flushed, realizing he’d been about to call Cora by his sister's name. "Can I see it again? The necklace?" Something itched inside him to hold it again, to make sure there were no hidden clues on it.

  She stared at him for a moment, and he prayed it wasn’t because of his slip at her name. "Yeah, sure." There was hesitation in her response as if she didn't altogether trust him.

  Was that such a bad thing? It was better she guard the necklace from everyone, including him. If these men also had abilities like Mr. Flynn said, Ben wasn't sure exactly what they could do, and how much they would do, to get that necklace.

  "Is it in the same spot as last time?"

  Cora nodded. "Yeah, I haven't touched it since you saw it last."

  Ben stood, his knees stiff as his heartbeat quickened. If the men that were after the stone had Abi...

  "You should move the stone."

  Her forehead creased. "Why? You're the only other person that knows where it is."

  "I know..." How could he phrase this so he didn't sound crazy? "Abi knows where it is, doesn't she?"

  Recognition spread across her features. "Oh, shit. Shit. What if she's—" She twisted in her chair to face him, her hand gesturing as she spoke. "What if they know it's here?" Cora was already out of the kitchen and Ben had to yell after her.

  "Hide it. Tell no one where you put it, even me."

  She shouted a response up to him from the basement but he didn't hear it. A tiny tremor had spread through his knees and forearms. What if the necklace was already gone? If these bad people had taken Abi...he didn't want to think about it, but the voice nagged at him.

  “Torture. Torture. Torture.”

  He waited, scratching at a burning itch on his forearm. Was the necklace even safe in the house anymore? If Abi had told them it was in Cora's house, maybe they needed to find some other place to put it.

  The itch dug deeper into his skin and he kept scratching, eyes on the doorway to the kitchen. Should he bring Mr. Flynn into this loop and tell him about the stone? It was possible he knew where it had come from and could help them decipher his mom's diary.

  But it also felt odd to do so. This little project got him away from everything—his classes, other prying people, the hospital. It was something small he and Cora shared and it felt traitorous to include an adult in it.

  “The weirdest thing just happened.” Cora was far away, her voice muffled by the distance. “I swear the stone was just red for a—

  "Ben!"

  He jumped, her voice coming through clear. Cora stood directly in front of him, staring down, down at his arm.

  Red was smeared across his fingertips, under his nails and along his arm, a quarter-sized gash dripping with it.

  "Jesus." He cupped the blood spilling out of his arm and darted to the sink.

  Cora turned the water on for him and then disappeared as he washed as much of the blood off as he could. Two weeks ago, he had done this very thing, and the thought produced a sour taste in his mouth.

  "Here." She handed him a wad of paper towels that he pressed against his skin. It bled through within a few seconds, and he folded it again and again, pressing hard each time. Cora cut a square chunk of gauze that he held in place while she wrapped even more gauze around and around his arm. "You might need stitches or something for this. It's not deep but, I don't know, it's still bleeding a lot."

  "It'll be fine."

  He knew she was looking at him, probably wondering what the hell was wrong with him. And he was too. How could someone scratch a hole into their skin without knowing, without feeling something? The pizza he had easily eaten an hour ago turned to a boulder in his stomach.

  "I should go." Quickly, he glanced up at her and then away. She seemed concerned, but he couldn't tell if she was concerned for him or for herself. "Gran will probably start to worry soon."

  "All right. I'll send you this spreadsheet. Here."

  As she held out the journal for him, his fingers touched hers and something felt wrong about it, electric in a sharp way. She didn't seem to notice, and he left with a mumbled goodbye.

  It wasn't until he reached his truck that he realized he had forgotten his jacket on the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. He didn’t want to go back and counted each second as he drove until warm air finally blew out of his vents. Although the bandage was tinged red, the bleeding appeared to have stopped.

  The clock on his dash read 8:30 in harsh red lights, glowing in contrast to the surrounding darkness. He needed to tell Mr. Flynn about this. Not about the journal and the necklace, but about his arm. Mr. Flynn had insisted that he wasn't losing his mind, but he hadn't really told Ben what would happen if he didn't complete this transition. What if his body rejected what was happening to him? Would he be the same afterward?

  Ben could count the number of times he’d been to Mr. Flynn's house on one hand, but navigated to it easily. From Cora's house, it was nearly a ten-minute drive west to get to Gran's place, and Mr. Flynn's was twice as far from Gran's. The last time he’d been there, Mr. Flynn had just started his chicken coop, gathering fresh eggs when Ben and his dad had driven up. The memory of it stung. He had to find his mom. She would fix his dad and bring him back.

  When he pulled into the long gravel driveway, he toyed with the idea of turning back. It seemed silly now that he was
there, but the front porch light clicked on. Mr. Flynn must have seen the headlights from Ben's truck shining through the windows. It would be weird if he turned back now.

  He parked his truck next to the black Acura. A buzz from his phone displayed a message from Cora:

  I'll look over the necklace later with one of mom's jewelry magnifiers. I'll let you know if I find anything.

  As he closed his door, he tugged at the sleeve of his shirt, covering the bandage so Mr. Flynn wouldn't immediately see. If his teacher opened the door to Ben wearing a huge bloody bandage, his reaction might be a little more dramatic than what Ben needed right then.

  It was too dark to see any of the animals but their distant stirrings made him quicken his pace to the house. Movement caught his eye in one of the upstairs windows, but when he looked, there was only a motionless curtain in a dark room.

  Most of the houses this far from town were older, and the porch creaked with hollowed thumps as Ben stepped up to the door.

  It opened while his hand was still in the air. If Mr. Flynn was surprised to see Ben there so late, he didn't show it.

  "Hey, Ben. Come on in."

  He stepped inside, noticing and half-remembering the neat stack of shoes by the door. As Mr. Flynn veered to the left, toward the living room, Ben slipped his boots off. He held on to the banister for balance, gazing up the stairs at the unknown part of the house. The light in the foyer didn't reach that far, and the stairs ascended into darkness.

  It made him uneasy.Paranoid, are we? He told himself to calm down and followed Mr. Flynn’s voice, who had apparently been talking without noticing Ben's absence. He was mid-sentence when Ben stepped far enough into the living room to hear him in the kitchen.

  "—try, just a few things I thought might help speed things up. I haven't gotten in touch with any of my old contacts yet, but I've been searching my brain for an old ritual we did in our lessons early on in our transitions."

  Mr. Flynn came back into living room holding a mug of steaming liquid. It had a yellowish tint and an odd sharp odor filled Ben's nose.

  “First off, though, tell me what happened.” He leaned against the arm of the sofa, his calm almost contagious. “You wouldn’t have come all the way out here if something hadn’t happened.”

  Ben stared at his hands, swallowing hard. "I had a weird...episode."

  Mr. Flynn's eyebrows knitted together, and he waited for Ben to continue.

  He tugged his sleeve up, noticing that the wound didn’t hurt at all. The red splotches were fading to a dull brown around the edges. "I was thinking about Abi earlier and…my arm itched, but I just kept scratching."

  His fear of sounding stupid felt justified as he explained what happened. Could he really not be trusted to scratch an itch on his arm now?

  "Are you all right? Did you need stitches?" He made to step toward Ben, but Ben raised his hand to halt him.

  "It’s fine now, but..."

  "You're worried this is related to your transition?"

  Ben nodded. “More than that, though. I think we need to speed this up.” He wasn’t sure how Ravi would take it and he wasn’t sure how much more he could really take but it wasn’t enough. “Abi’s in danger.” The words were sticky in his throat.

  There was no immediate response. Mr. Flynn stared out the large window to Ben's right, deep in thought. Pitch black stared back at them and Ben imagined dark things hovering on the other side of the window.

  "I'm glad you told me about your episode. It's possible your root with Abi's mind may be the source of your side effects, like a tick with Lyme disease. If there's an issue with the root, we may be able to alleviate some of it by severing the connection."

  "Severing?" That sounded so harsh. "But I thought we needed it to find out where Abi is."

  "We do. Which means we'll have to find another way to ease your transition and somehow speed it up at the same time. For now, at least."

  So grin and bear it.

  "This changes some things, though. If it's true that your root with your sister is defective, then we're under an even greater time crunch than we thought. Transitions are finicky, and sometimes the mind doesn't develop the way we expect. It's possible that your mind will naturally try to heal this defective root and sever the connection before we can properly use it."

  "So we're in a race against my mind? If it's anything like school, then it shouldn’t be much of a race." Ben tried to chuckle at his own joke but Mr. Flynn didn't seem amused.

  "Don't belittle yourself so much. We don't all excel at the same things. You're obviously more talented at sports-related activities, but that says nothing negative about your growing skills as an Oracle."

  Ben sat down in a recliner, uncomfortable by the confidence Mr. Flynn seemed to have in him. He wanted to help his dad, to help his mom and Abi, but deep down he didn't know if he would be able to. He would screw it up somehow, just like he did everything recently.

  The irony of it dawned on him. His mind was developing faster than the average person's mind, yet he lacked any sort of intelligence to use these new skills.

  “You're a waste.” The voice moved against his neck, dark and rough like worn velvet.

  He held the mug out to Ben and he took it, eyeing the dark contents while Mr. Flynn rummaged around in a cabinet across the room.

  "We only did these rituals a handful of times, since most of our transitions went seamlessly, so I'm rusty on the specifics.” He turned, setting an armful of items on the table before noticing Ben’s analysis of the tea. “Ah," he said, "That’s a blend of thistle, elm bark, ginger, and anise, among other things. It helps relax the mind for our little ritual. It tastes quite bitter, though, so best to chug it down."

  "How exactly is it supposed to help?" What he really wanted to know was if he had to drink it, but didn't want to sound childish.

  "There's a gap in the modern understanding of the mind and how it relates to us as Oracles. Hundreds of years ago, Oracles began exploring that gap, and how it's possible to utilize alchemy to do things like reduce recovery time and stay up without sleeping for days. In essence, the chemical reactions our bodies have to certain mixes of herbs and spices can strengthen the effect of a ritual on the mind."

  Ben gripped the mug and stared into it, swallowing hard. "Mr. Flynn?" He set it down at the same time Mr. Flynn took a seat on the leather couch opposite Ben, twisting together what looked like a bundle of sticks.

  "Drink the tea and we'll start our practice for this evening."

  He thought of Abi, wherever she was. God only knew what was happening to her and he was whining about drinking a tea? He choked it down while Mr. Flynn lit dozens of candles, spreading them across his coffee table, the mantle, and end tables. He turned the lights off and a warm, flickering glow spread through the room.

  The mug grew heavy in his hands, and he set it on the table with a little too much force. His head was fuzzy, but not like when he had his headaches. A weight lifted, and he drifted toward the ceiling, even as he sank deeper in the recliner.

  "This practice is to strengthen your mind. Our Deia's magic flows through everything. We need only channel that magic to aid in your transition." His voice echoed and floated around Ben, metallic and hollow at the same time.

  He wanted to lie down and then realized he already was. The recliner was leaning back and his feet were propped up. He was warm and...safe. Safer than he’d felt in a long time.

  Mr. Flynn's words became even more garbled, and Ben was vaguely aware of a large white object now at the center of the coffee table. He squinted but couldn't make out what it was, although it seemed to pulse with light. His teacher continued to mumble and moved his hands over and around the object.

  "Relax, Ben." The words moved up and around him. "I want you to feel the Deia's power flowing into you."

  And he did. Something warm, almost hot, spread from his toes and fingers up his arms and legs. It burned in his chest, the sensation rising to pain.

 
Then it stopped, his limbs tingling and cold in the absence of whatever it was that had flowed into him.

  Ben didn't know he’d fallen asleep until Mr. Flynn nudged him awake.

  The living room light glowed bright and Ben blinked away the sluggishness.

  "How do you feel?"

  He worked his mouth up and down before he was able to speak. "Tired."

  The face above him nodded. "That's expected. Here, let's raise you up."

  The recliner returned to its original position, causing Ben's head to swim.

  "You'll be tired for the next day or two, but hopefully that means it had a good effect on your mind.”

  Sitting up, Ben rubbed at his eyes. "What time is it?"

  "You've only been out about twenty minutes. I called your grandmother to let her know you stopped by. Would you like something to eat? I have some leftover shepherd's pie I was about to reheat for myself."

  "Yeah." He nodded, surprised at the hollow pit in his stomach.

  "Rituals like that one work up an appetite. Let me pop a couple plates in the microwave."

  When he was gone, Ben surveyed the large room. The candles had been tucked away along with the strange white object that had been at the center of the table. Although the grogginess was wearing off, Ben was sure if he closed his eyes again he would sleep for days.

  Mr. Flynn walked back into the living room with two plates balanced on one arm and a beer and utensils in the other.

  "Hope you don't mind my drinking. Those things always make me crave a beer."

  Ben grunted, unable to speak now that the smell of the food hit his nose. Ravi seemed to be in a better mood, and he prayed the ritual would stick.

  The TV clicked on but Ben was too busy scooping the hot food into his mouth to really notice. The potatoes were cheesy and the ground beef perfectly seasoned, on par with his dad’s cooking.

  It wasn't until his plate was almost clean that he noticed the hockey game on TV. Mr. Flynn seemed completely engrossed, occasionally taking a sip of beer. The scene was like a snapshot of what an ordinary adult life was like, and Ben felt briefly like a fly on the wall. He wanted to stay like that, an observer of something normal.