Lovers of Babel
Page 19
“This was done as a precaution. Also, we wanted to make sure that you didn’t leave before we got some answers.”
“Answers to what? We simply got lost,” I said.
“You got lost in the desert? How did you come across the desert in the first place? I doubt you just stumbled across it.”
“Well, we did.”
“What about your strange clothes? And what’s this contraption?”
The man held up the H2O inhaler. Chad and I kept quiet.
“Only one other time have we seen someone from the outside make it into our territory and he never made it back to his home. Do you want this to happen to you?”
We paused for a while.
“What is it that you want to know?” Chad asked.
“Where do you come from?”
“We come from a place called Equinox.”
“And who sent you?”
“Would you know who it was even if we told you?”
The man glared at Chad.
“Fine. Amias Riley. He is leader of our land.”
The man was thinking. He stood up and paced around in circles.
“Why did he send you?”
Chad looked at me as if to say, should we tell him?
“To find the Book of Wisdom,” I said.
The man examined us for a while. His stares made me anxious and uneasy. I was on edge just waiting for an opportunity to defend myself.
“What are your names?”
Chad answered with an unsteady tone in his voice.
“I’m Chad and this is Sage, the daughter of our leader.”
“How did you travel to the lost desert? I know you didn’t simply stumble across it,” the man asked.
“We didn’t stumble per-se. We walked,” Chad lied.
The man looked at Chad skeptically then reached in his pants to pull out a glass knife. He bent down in front of Chad and showed him the knife.
“I made this with my own two hands. Do you notice the leaf inside? My grandfather kept this leaf as a keepsake before the apocalypse. It is one of the only remnants from the trees in the old world and I kept it inside here so that it never decays. Now,” he moved the knife closer to Chad’s eye, “if I have to use this on you, I risk the possibility of shattering this glass and ruining the leaf. And I simply couldn’t handle that. You wouldn’t make me use this would you?”
Chad was trying to speak, but could only shake his head.
“Good.” The man stood up. “Tell me how you traveled to the lost desert.”
Chad and I looked at each other. I decided to speak this time.
“The desert happens to be on the border of Equinox. In order to get to the border we had to teleport there.”
The man folded his arms.
“Teleport? You mean you travelled through space and time to get to the desert?”
“We knew you might have trouble believing or even understanding that,” I said.
“Not at all. You are magic people…magi. I know your kind,” the man said with a slight growl.
“Great. Can we go now?” Chad asked prematurely.
The man erupted in a fit of laughter. It was so loud and forceful that it made us shift in our seats.
Finally, he stopped and gave us a stern expression.
“You can go where I tell you to go,” he proclaimed.
Then he dug in his pocket, pulled out a wooden flute and played a short melody that sounded like a bird song. Then he spoke.
“You are magi from Equinox. You should know that magic is strictly forbidden in our territory.”
Chad and I looked at each other with intense anxiety. I felt the urge to use my power, but I needed to wait for the right time.
Four men entered the forest. One of the men bowed to our captor and called him Sire Job. The sire placed a soft hand on his shoulder and began to speak to them in a foreign language. Then they all looked at us. Two of them came over and started to loosen our bonds.
“We are untying you, but you must remain here. The thing that you seek will never be given over to you. It is too precious to our people,” Job said.
When we were finally untied, Chad looked over at me with a panicked expression. I tried to gesture to him to relax for now, but it was too late. He had already grabbed my hand and began to trek away, but suddenly I felt fire around my ankle. I looked down and saw that there was a shackle made of blue lava around it with a chain that led to Job’s hand.
He yanked me down and I lost my grip on Chad. When he saw that I was down, Chad tried to help me up, but he got shackled as well. We were laying there helpless on our backs looking up at the mysterious strangers amidst the trees. I got a sudden chill of fear through my spine and I knew I had to act. I commanded Chad to quickly cover his mouth and began to create a sleeping gas to sedate our captures.
Job and his minions looked slightly confused as to where the gas was coming from. Then, Job looked down at me with a smirk.
“So you’re the creator? I think I have something that’ll fix that,” he probed.
He held out his hand and one of the men put a glowing golden ring in it. Then, Job threw it down like a Frisbee toward me, and it traveled directly to my head and hovered there just above my crown like a halo.
All of a sudden, the gas disappeared and so did my powers.
Who are these people?
“I didn’t want to use these, but you left me no choice. Now, what do you say we head to the village?” Job said.
A man grabbed each of us and led us through the forest. The sun was setting in between the trees making the tops of them disappear into the gradual dimness of dawn. We walked a ways until we reached open grassland that reminded me of the village we had seen when we traveled into the past. In fact, it was the same village only now it had several more buildings and stables with horses. Some houses had been built using brick instead of mud. The savage village was developing.
We were practically dragged through the town with our unique shackles displayed gloriously on our bodies. We were both adorned with ankle bracelets made of the type of lava that never left a scar, but I was the only one wearing a glowing halo that seemed to mock my current situation. There were people planting gardens and gathering water from a nearby creek. Children were playing with roaming chickens and the men were mixing mud and water to make cement. When we passed by, they stopped and looked at us with no expression and then continued to work, never skipping a beat.
These wholesome sights were inconsistent with the harsh way we were just treated. Sire job looked so honorable and loving on the outside, but on the inside he was a monster. I bet those village people would be more reluctant to call him Sire if they knew the things he did to us in the forest. I wanted to spit at the thought.
After walking what seemed to be an hour through the village we walked up a steep hill to a copper colored barn. Inside was an array of farming and building equipment as well as a few instruments for the butchering of animals. I shuddered to think that we were those animals. The barn seemed to go on forever. There had to be at least four rooms – two on each side of the entrance – that hid behind the dimness of a few hundred flickering candles that seemed to float above our heads. The savage men led us to the room on the far left corner of the barn. When we got to the doorway it was too dark inside to see much of anything. One of the men with a piece of white rope braided in his long hair, left for one minute and came back with the brightest lantern I’d seen. He walked ahead of us and placed the light source on a small table to the side of the room.
There were two operating tables at the center of the room, only these tables were made of transparent glass. Job ordered us to get on the tables and lay down on our backs. We hesitated and looked at each other. Chad nodded his head slightly as if to reassure me, then we did as commanded. The table was cold as ice.
As I lay there a freight train was running through my mind. My thoughts were coming in so quickly that they began to run into each other. At first I though
t of escaping, but then realized that would be impossible since I was wearing a halo that took away my powers. Then I thought about how the coldness of the table reminded me of death. The thought of death led to panic, panic to confusion, confusion to desperation, and desperation to panic. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Let us go! Please! We don’t want your book we just want to go back home. P-please!” I pleaded with a stream of tears running into my ears.
Job looked down at me and reached over my head grabbing my halo and examining it thoughtfully. Then he looked at me.
“You want to go back to your home? Well, this is my home and I guard it with my life. Home isn’t just a place, it’s a haven for your soul. You both will soon find out that your home is only a place of residence. If it were more than that then why were you so quick to leave it behind in search of the truth?”
I was half listening to the savage sire, because I was more focused on escaping. Job had my halo in his hands which meant that I could use my power. I quickly tried to sit up, but as soon as I moved four metal rods shot out of my table and bounded my limbs. I tried to break free, but it was hopeless. I sunk back onto my table defeated. I looked over at Chad who was being released from his ankle bracelet of fire, but was immediately bound to the table like I was.
“I’m sure you’re thinking about using your powers now, but I wouldn’t if I were you. Besides, I have something more permanent than those accessories you were wearing,” Job said.
He walked in between our tables and we looked up at him with eyes to kill. He held out his hands and two of his men placed a needle in each.
Chad finally spoke up.
“W-what are you planning on doing with that?”
“We can’t have visitors roaming around our village with dangerous powers. We give you this so that you don’t have to carry around those cumbersome shackles,” he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“Why do we have to stay here? We can just leave and you’ll never see us again,” I begged.
“Let you go so you can go and tell your leader where we are? I’m sorry, but you know too much already. You should’ve never come here.”
And with that, he injected the vein in our wrists with a substance that set fire to my blood. Chad and I howled in pain writhing from the venom that had invaded our bodies. The men stood and watched expressionlessly as we seized and moaned in pain.
“What did you do to us!” Chad yelled.
“Right now a virus is surging through your body that is numbing every molecule of your power sources. In other words, your powers are being taken away each cell at a time,” Job said while inspecting his fingernails.
I wanted to break each one of his fingers.
I don’t remember what was worse: the excruciating pain of having this virus attack my insides, or the fact that my powers were being destroyed.
My palms were being cut by my finger nails digging into them and my jaw was getting sore from being clinched so tightly.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the virus had taken its affect and the pain was gone. Chad and I slumped back down like lifeless dolls. I felt like every speck of energy that I had left, was gone. I felt the absence of my power in my body and it was hollow and heavy. Our abilities made us who we were. We never thought that there could ever be something that could take away our essence. Suddenly, there existed a people who not only knew about our powers, but understood how to take them away from us.
I looked up at Job who had taken my wrist and was checking my pulse. I wondered who he really was. How did he become Sire of this place? How could this place even exist without my people’s knowledge? We didn’t know about them, but they certainly knew about us.
As Job walked over to Chad to check his pulse, it occurred to me that these people couldn’t be complete strangers. They had to have survived the apocalypse as well, or at least the elders must have. There was no way that these people survived the apocalypse without living underground like our ancestors did. Maybe this was how they found out about our powers. Still, I wondered why they would want to leave the Equinox after their ascent from the underground.
After Chad’s pulse was checked, our bounds were released. We both hardly had the strength to sit up, so the two men helped us up into a sitting position. My legs swung off the edge of the table and I sat there for a few minutes. I was in a state of disbelief that this all had happened. I wanted so badly to defend myself, but was too weak to even think of how. All I could do was let the savage man carry me on his back to our cabin in the village.
Once we got inside our new home, Chad and I were placed in our individual beds so that we could rest. We slept for what seemed like an eternity. When I finally opened my eyes I felt the aching burden of what it felt like to be, well, human.
It was late afternoon when I woke. I must’ve slept for two whole days. Chad was already awake and in our small kitchen area reading a letter. As I slowly entered the room, Chad looked up at me and began walking over to me with a look of apology in his eyes.
“Sage I’m so sorry that I couldn’t protect you. Once they threw that shackle on me I couldn’t move. I felt almost paralyzed. Every bit of me was trying to teleport, but it seemed like with each attempt I made, the power of that shackle got even stronger. I just gave up. I’m so sorry,” Chad said hanging his head.
“You don’t need to be sorry. We were both unable to do anything about the situation. Those weapons were unlike anything we’d ever seen. We were defenseless. Please don’t be sorry, Chad. And hey, at least we’re alive, right?”
I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and slumped down. I was hardly convinced of my own optimism and apparently so was Chad who was pacing slowly back and forth in front of the table.
“What was that letter you were reading?” I asked.
“Oh, I almost forgot. It’s a note from our hospitable sire, Job. He wants to invite us to dinner,” he said with the fakest smile.
Chad handed me the piece of paper. It read:
Dear guests,
We would like to invite you to a feast this evening. Please prepare yourselves by changing into the clothing that we provided in each of your rooms. Dinner starts when the trumpet sounds.
On behalf of Providencia,
Welcome.
He signed it simply: Job.
I sat there and examined the letter for a while. The words he chose and the handwriting seemed so genuine without the harshest intent. I couldn’t fathom that this letter was written by a man that stripped us of our powers. I ripped it to shreds. Chad looked at me and chuckled.
“I wanted to do the same thing after I read it, but I knew you’d want to see it.”
“I just can’t believe the audacity of this man! First he takes away our powers and now he wants to have dinner with us!?” I said.
Chad nodded then sat down in front of me.
“How are you feeling? Does it hurt?”
“There’s a constant dull ache that I feel. It’s driving me insane.”
“Me too. I never imagined how it felt to be a natural, to have no powers at all. I always thought that my powers were a part of who I was and without them I’d die. I guess I was wrong,” he said dropping his head onto the table.
“Don’t worry. I believe there’s got to be a way to get our powers back. Job said he gave us a virus, but viruses go away eventually. Or at least there might be an antivirus. We’ve got to find out how to get them back.”
“As much as I want to believe that what you say is possible, this place is so heavily guarded that I’m sure Job covered all his bases,” Chad said into the table grabbing my hand that was lying in between us. “Regardless of what happens, we have to stay together, okay?”
I squeezed his hand and nodded with a dull smile.
“Good. Now, let’s prepare for the savage feast! I’m sure it’ll feel like a nightmare, but at least we’ll get to eat. I feel like I haven’t eaten in days,” Chad said and raised his head.
We each left the kitchen and headed to our rooms to get ready.
I remembered what Job’s letter said about how our clothes were picked out for us already, so I walked over to the wooden wardrobe that was beside the bed and opened it. There were several linen dresses in variations of white hanging inside. There wasn’t much to choose from, so I chose the one with the most detailing. It was short sleeved with a fairly plane collar in the front, but there were thin panel cut outs of lace that were placed randomly on the dress. I placed it on the bed, then headed to the bathroom to shower.
Once my dress was on I looked in the full-length mirror that was inside the wardrobe and realized that I hadn’t combed my hair in what looked like ages. My hair was a curly tangled mess. I looked around the room for a comb or bush and found one in the drawer of the glass dresser at the front of the room. I brushed my hair until the tangles were gone then decided to put it in a single French braid down the middle of my head. The coils from my hair would keep it from coming loose at the end.
When I was finally ready, I went over to the kitchen to wait for Chad who was still getting ready. I looked inside the various drawers and cabinets containing all sorts of kitchen essentials and for a second, it seemed like an actual home. I noticed throughout the cabin that there were lots of glass furniture pieces. That reminded me of Job’s glass knife so close to Chad’s eye –
Chad finally appeared from his room looking like a brand new person. His blond hair was combed and slicked back giving him a sophisticated look. His linen pants outfit actually fit him well. He looked grown up and I wondered if it was so much the outfit that made him appear older or the lack of power that drained him of the innocent quality he had. Either way, he was different and I was somehow drawn to the new Chad.
“You look beautiful,” he said.