by RAVENC JAMES
I sighed. I knew I could fly up there, but I did not want to leave Venir in Min. Not yet.
“You don’t need to wait for me,” he said. His gaze was assessing. “Go. Get as much information as you can, then come back here and tell me, as you owe me one.” Then he grinned. “For friendship.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m certain.”
To his confusion, I hugged him and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be back.”
His gaze followed me all the way up. And when I made it to Salsu, I could see his big smile. He was such a sentimental angel.
“Congrats,” Tarain said. “You made it. You should have told me you were ready. We could have flown together.”
“I’ve been ready. I just don’t want to…” I did not finish my thought.
“You don’t want to leave him yet? He is such a good-looking angel.”
I suddenly felt a burning sensation in my stomach. Although I agreed with her about Venir, I did not want her or anyone to be close to Venir as I was to him. It was as though I had claimed him as mine. Was I making any sense at all?
The books here in Salsu had blue plate coverings. Other than that, it was no different from the two lower spheres. I followed the routine. Read, read, and read. There was no knowledge here that would help me about the missing angels or the Focus Room. After reading a few books, I flew down back to Min. Venir glared at me like I was bothering him.
“You’re back early. Concentrate, Ori, go back there.”
I flew back, read more books, and decided to go back to him. The glare was back when he saw me approaching.
“Ori?”
“It’s boring there. The books are about navi measurement. Dedui—”
Venir cut me off by placing a finger on my lips.
“Don’t say it. Treasure that knowledge. Alright, how about this,” he said as though he was talking to a fledgling back in the Garden. I found this tone irritating.
“Can you change the tone of your voice?” I said.
He looked as though he was holding himself back. “Okay, what I’m saying is take as much knowledge as you can in Salsu so you will have enough navi to get to the last sphere. And maybe you can find information that might be useful for our current quest.”
“How hard was it to say that minus the condescending tone?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s just I’m frustrated myself. I’m really trying… really trying very hard to increase my navi, to be better so I can fly with you. But it’s not working for me. I just have to accept the fact that you’re way beyond me and that I’m really, really, really slow.”
The look of acceptance and resignation on his face, coupled with the tell-tale sign of tears in his eyes, made my chest feel heavy and tight.
“You know you’re special just the way you are,” I said. I couldn’t help the tears falling down my cheeks. My strange reaction quickly worried Venir.
“Hey, hey. It’s fine. I’m definitely fine,” he said. “I’m not going to do it again.”
“You didn’t do anything,” I said, confused.
“I will try not to do anything that will make you sad, I promise,” he said. “C’mon, smile for me.”
“That would be a lie because I don’t feel like smiling?” I asked with my brows raised.
“Yeah, that’s true.”
But the way he said it actually made me smile.
“I think I should go back now. I’ll fly all the way to the Rebu,” I said.
“And I’ll be watching you from here.”
And he watched me fly higher and higher and higher, past Salsu and into the Rebusphere where the books had red plates, and the angels looked at me with curiosity.
“Orieumber, you made it!” Naia said when she saw me moving toward her.
“I got bored with measurement.”
“You’re going to need your measurement knowledge to survive Rebu,” she said with seriousness in her voice.
“A knowledge for knowledge. What’s Rebu all about?”
Naia smiled, showing her twin dimples. “Deal. The one who initiates the trade should be the one to tell it first.”
“Pick your hardest book in Salsu and I’ll tell you about it unless I haven’t read it,” I said, grinning.
“Okay, there’s this one book about rulmond, I guess volume two, since there are like two rulmond symbols on the cover,” she said, thinking.
“Oh, that’s not rulmond. The book is called Metropolis.”
She looked confused. “Then why are there two rulmond symbols on the cover?”
“It’s the symbol of the Metropolis. It’s the book next to rulmond, right? It’s actually my favorite book among all the books in Salsu.”
“Yes, that’s the one. Okay, so tell me something about it.”
Ether was divided into five spheres, and the Metropolis, the main place for major trading, was in the third sphere called Tertium. This was written in one of the green books in Mash. However, one blue-plated book in Salsu gave thorough and interesting information about the Metropolis. Since it was a higher sphere, much higher than the entire academy, fledglings did not have enough navi to fly over there. Did they have to wait to become a full-fledged angel to visit the Metropolis? The book had the answer. Fledglings from the academy could use the secret door found at the Academy’s second celestial house.
“However,” I said, looking into Naia’s eyes, “for it to open its door, it requires valuable information from you.”
“That’s fascinating. Now, for the information you seek. Rebusphere contains knowledge about the different kinds of energy. It has an Experiment Area.” She pointed at the wall where the name was written. “It’s where you experiment mixing energy.”
“Are they teaching us how to summon one?”
“Like this?” Naia opened her palm, and a glowing green light suddenly hovered over it. “It’s just a basic energy summoning. I can only summon a Dili quad of the energy.”
Dili was the term for the tiniest amount of energy. On the other hand, a quad was one-fourth of the Dili, so tinier than the tiniest. These terminologies were all discussed in Salsu.
“But the glow is big.”
She gave me her dimpled smile again. “Look, you’ll have to find it yourself.”
How could I forget? No freebie.
“So, you’re done here?” I asked.
She had this huge smile on her face, and her wings glowed even more yellowish.
“I’m ready for the next house!” she said with a vigorously-wing-flapping kind of excitement.
“Good luck!” I said as I watched her descend to the Mash. But before she flew farther down, entirely out of my sight, I was able to catch her reaction to my parting words. It was a complete confusion on her face, like she did not know what the heck the words even meant.
This led me to ask the question myself: where did I learn to say that phrase?
Good luck to me figuring that out.
In Rebusphere, I was way up in the air, hovering with my legs crossed and a book in my hand, and so high that I could barely see Venir below.
The book I was reading had the word ‘Chemistry’ written on the front. It listed down the different types of energy.
Rood was the name for red energy; Grona, for green; Naranza, for orange; Gel, for yellow; Blo, for blue; and Hwit, for white. Many other kinds of energies were excluded in the book, but these were the ones written in the book for summoning purposes.
I looked up and noticed an angel sneaking a glance at me.
“Hi,” I said.
She looked startled when I said that. “You’re fast. I saw you just breezed through all the books, plate after plate, section after section. Magnificent.”
“I’m Orieumber. Have you been here long?”
“I’m Grinlock. I’ve been here long enough to see ten angels move to the next house.”
“That long, huh?” Then a thought occurred to me. “So…you were here when the darkness happen
ed?”
Please answer my question?
She glanced to her left and then right like she was making sure no one was listening. “Yes, and my friend went missing after that,” she said in a whispered voice.
“But they said that those missing angels might have just been in the Focus Rooms,” I replied with my voice lowered.
“Focus Room? I’ve never heard of that. But I did hear that the Great Riddle was already solved.”
“Naia didn’t tell everybody that?”
“Naia? The angel you talked to earlier?” She shook her head. “She only told some of us who could afford her information. And…I had nothing that valuable for her.”
My eyebrows clumped together, and my eyes narrowed. So that was how it was here in Ether? You were as good as the knowledge you owned.
“Well, consider yourself lucky today because I’m going to tell you what you need to know. For free.”
“Oh, no. That’s in violation of the rule here. You’re only devaluing your knowledge, and by devaluing it, you’re making my knowledge even less valuable.”
“No one’s going to know?”
Her eyes widened as if I’d accused her of something. “But I would, and that’s enough. However, I think I might have a piece of information that I can trade with yours.”
“Oh, really? That’s great then.”
“This information only works with you since everybody I met already acquired this information.”
“Let me have it then.”
“I found this information from one of the green books in the Mash, which I believe you skipped, and yet you made it way up here. But that’s beside the point, anyway, the air, the water, everything around us here—They listen and report everything they sense back to the main pool inside the Communication Garden. There are angels working there as Communication Analysts and they sort out its importance and urgency and analyze messages, interpret the languages used. Then, if it’s worth scribing, they write them and send them here to the academy.”
It was interesting how I kept missing all the important information. I would bet my wings Venir had read this book. Still shaken from the idea of being watched or observed, I shared with Grinlock what I had learned about the Focus Room.
Grinlock’s eyes shone with hopefulness as she listened to me talk about the possibility that the missing angels might be hiding there.
“So there’s a book here in Rebu that teaches us how to summon a Focus Room?” she asked.
“I believe so. Or where else did they learn it? I don’t think it’s in the lower spheres since this is the sphere that has books about basic summoning.”
“You’re right,” she said, smiling. “I’d better find it then.”
I went back to my reading. It took a while before I found a book that taught me how to perform a simple energy-summoning.
Energies were part of Ether. They were the reasons why we flew, the reason why the spheres were floating and stayed on their spot, the reason why everything around us moved, glowed. To summon them was to call them, and to make them do what you wanted them to do was to tell them. It was like holding the air in your palm and molding it into something as though it were a piece of clay. Easy, right?
But energies in Ether did not understand angel-tongue. They had their language. Fortunately, to speak the energy-tongue, I only needed to acquire at least a Sei amount of navi. Sei was equivalent to reading five thousand books. With that much navi, I could summon the blue energy Blo and yellow energy Gel. The red energy Rood required a navi equivalent to reading at least ten thousand books, or two Sei. And that was only to summon it; good luck telling it to do something, for Rood was the most stubborn of all energies.
Here was the silver lining. At least for me. Sylfur, though it required as much energy as Rood—that was, a navi equivalent to reading ten thousand books—responded well to me. It was like we had developed a rapport. It did everything I wanted it to do. In fact, I always kept one with me. It turned into a necklace I wore around my neck.
It became my second important companion, next to Venir.
I entered a room where the angels were in different stages of their experiments. Each of us had a transparent container where the summoned energy was confined. My task was to conjure energy and transform it into something.
The sudden commotion at the far-right corner of the room raised my curiosity. I saw a few angels with a look of amazement on their faces. Apparently, a few angels accidentally created a creature when they tried to summon Rood, the red energy. At least this was what I overheard as they told a few who asked for an explanation. The beast was around the size of an average head. It had a pair of wings, fangs, and horns. But what was causing the excitement was the ability of the beast to breathe fire out of its mouth.
“Did we make a creature?” one of the angels said, looking as though his mind was about to explode from pure joy and excitement.
“I don’t think so. It’s not alive or breathing. It’s just pure fire.”
“But look,” the angel said to his friends.
Even when it was not directed at me, I looked anyway and saw the beast increase in size. It grew and grew until it lost its form and became one giant ball of burning plasma.
“Can anyone please extinguish it before it spreads to the whole area?” an angel said to no one in particular.
I saw a few who volunteered to try. Then, when no one was able to contain it, they started panicking.
I stared at the burning ball of fire, and a similar kind of image flashed in my mind. What was that?
“A star,” I suddenly blurted out. They’d created a star.
Out of nowhere, I started seeing the littlest components of what made up a star. I saw the elements inside the fireball and how these elements were rearranging, splitting, and then recombining, only to be destroyed again and then be rebuilt. It was a constant motion of fusion and fission.
Mentally, I summoned the Sylfur energy and cast it into the star. The energy instantly stopped the breaking of the particles inside the star and started creating heavier elements. It continued until the fire was extinguished and what remained was a ball of diamonds.
The angels who witnessed it applauded, and they all turned to me. They smiled, and I smiled back. And when they started walking toward me, my heartbeat quickened.
“That was very creative,” an angel with yellow rays said.
“What’s your name?” another angel asked.
“I’m Orieumber,” I answered.
They each introduced themselves, but the similarity in the sounding of their names made it hard for me to remember them. One was called Siti, and another was Titi?
“You turned the star into a diamond,” the angel Siti said. “How did you do it?”
“I just mixed it with Sylfur to trigger a reaction. I wasn’t really confident that it would work, but it did. But what you did, making a dragon into a star, was the most impressive.”
Their faces reddened in embarrassment.
“Nah, it was a mistake. We didn’t follow directions.”
“Oh, but at least you can try again, right?”
“Yes, of course. That’s all we do here. Try and try until we get it right. That was our one thousand and seventh attempt to summon the Rood.”
My own experience with summoning Rood could confirm that, indeed, it was true. Rood was stubborn and unpredictable. I couldn’t summon it by itself. Since a Naranza, orange energy, is a mixture of Rood and Gel, I summoned it first and then split it. Two energies were rendered out of one.
With my task in the Experiment Area done, I went back to the red section. Grinlock was still reading the same book.
“You’re done already?” Grinlock asked.
“Yes, and it was fun.”
“I wish I could read this book as easily as you can. I have been reading the same line over and over, and yet the next line still does not make sense.”
“I can help you read it,” I offered.
She
smiled. “That would be cheating.”
I then left her and went back to Venir, who I found out flew to Salsu. He must have done it when I was in the Experiment Area.
“I’ve accumulated Tui since you’ve left me,” Venir said proudly.
Tui was the amount of navi acquired after reading two thousand books. That was what Salsu was all about. Measurements. It was boring to me, but Venir seemed to be good at it.
I leaned my back against the wall. “That’s great, but can you hurry up to the next sphere? I think I’m ready to proceed to the next House?”
His gaze was sharp. “Please don’t sacrifice your advancement for me. You can go ahead to the next house.”
“I don’t care about the navi. I care about the quest. Anyway, I will have to find that book that can teach me how to summon a Focus Room. It has to be in Rebu.”
He took a deep breath. “Then go, wait for me there. I think I’ll be done here in Salsu soon.”
My eyes glowed in excitement. “That quick?”
“The books here are easy to read,” he replied, grinning.
I flew back to the fourth sphere with a new determination to read every single book, even when it took me an eternity to do that.
Time did not exist in Ether. There was no night and day. No hours. No minutes. No seconds. Angels measured the length of the day by the number of books read or activities finished within that length. But as much as I wanted to, by the time I reached my one-thousandth book, I stopped counting. I had no idea how long I had been in Rebu.
I placed the book I just finished reading back on the shelf and took a long and frustrated sigh. I was yet to find that damn Focus Room book.
“Maybe I can help?”
I swiveled around, and there was Venir floating across from me with a big stupid grin plastered on his face. In my excitement, I flew toward him and kissed his lips.
Oh, crap.
I was aiming for his forehead. But this one felt nice, though. He looked confused a little bit and then just laughed it off.
“So you haven’t found it yet?”
I shook my head. He gazed up the length of the walls.
“Why don’t we read the books you haven’t read yet?”