by Chris Miller
As the riddle rattled around in my head, a thought struck me. “Did the riddle mean we only get to ask one question? Or one for each door?”
“It’s not very clear,” Dad admitted. “To be safe, we better come up with a question that gives us the answer we need no matter which door we ask: the perfect question.”
It was true. We couldn’t risk counting on two questions; our wording would have to be very specific. We might only get one shot at this.
“No pressure,” I muttered.
I ran through at least a dozen questions in my mind, but every combination seemed to come up short of a precise answer that eliminated any doubt as to which door was really the true exit. Given enough time, I’m sure we could have figured it out, but that’s when things got a little, shall we say, interesting.
A gritty, grinding sound came from the wall to our left. The wall was lowering down, and something was spilling into the room. Sand…and lots of it.
“Oh great, who flipped the hourglass?” I whined. At the rate it was coming in, the sand threatened to bury us in only a few minutes. Already, it had reached my feet. “Tell me you remember something, Dad.”
“I don’t; the Maze is always shifting…. This is a different test than before.”
“Well, we’d better think of something quick because we’ve just been given a deadline.”
Just when we thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, a second grinding noise added to the first. The wall to our right was lowering and a second batch of sand came spilling in. While Dad and I scrambled and bounced potential questions at each other, the sand in the room reached to our ankles.
“Dad! What was it that the riddle said about ‘Truth’ and ‘life’?” I asked, fighting to keep on my feet.
“Only Truth leads to life,” he answered.
“Only Truth…” I murmured, before shouting excitedly, “that’s it! Then we know there is only one true way out!”
Dad looked at me in confusion.
I explained hurriedly, “We have to ask either door if there’s only one true way and if a door says ‘no’….”
“Then we’ll know it’s the door that lies,” Dad finished the thought. “The perfect question…. Brilliant, Hunter!”
The sand was growing deeper by the second, now almost to our knees. Wasting no time, I knocked on the door nearest me. It was the first door, the one I had almost entered before. Nothing happened.
“Go on,” Dad urged. “Ask the question.”
I rehearsed it once in my mind then in my loudest voice I asked, “Is there only one true way to life?”
In response, the door answered with two red letters, writing themselves on the face of the door: NO. It was the wrong door. Knee-deep in sand we worked our way over to the other door, which was no easy task. By the time we arrived, we realized we had another problem.
“It’s still locked!” I shouted, pushing against the face of the door with all my strength. “The riddle didn’t say anything about a lock!”
“It’s no good anyway. The door is surrounded by sand; you’ll never open it,” Dad said, his face turning pale.
“We have to try,” I begged.
Together, Dad and I shouldered the door, hoping it would open. It didn’t budge.
With the sand level rising to my chest, the words of the riddle came to me with new revelation. This key you are given…knock…ask.
Pounding on the door, I shouted, “Will you please let us pass?”
Three letters painted themselves near the top of the door: YES. With a final push, the door swung open and we spilled out through the opening, riding a river of sand.
Chapter 27
The Eyes Have It
We weren’t buried in it anymore but there was still sand everywhere. It was in our hair, our ears, our clothes. I even found myself spitting the stuff out of my mouth and trying not to bite on the grit it left between my teeth. It was one of those “wish I could take a shower right about now” moments that I often found myself in. I shook my head and did my best to brush myself clean.
While Dad poured piles of sand from his shoes, I tried to figure out just exactly where in the labyrinth the door had dumped us. When I looked up, I saw that the door itself had disappeared completely.
Staring up through a gap between the walls of the Maze, I caught sight of the Eye’s cavernous ceiling high overhead. It was bathed in an orange glow that emanated from the center of the Rings. We were still well off-center.
“Why does it feel like we’re even farther away than when we started?” I asked, feeling a wave of discouragement wash over me.
“We may very well be,” Dad replied, shaking the sand from his hair. “But the Maze doesn’t work like an ordinary linear one. Things don’t connect like you might imagine. It’s always changing. At any moment, we could come across another challenge that transports us straight to the center of the Eye.”
Or we could get stuck in an infinite loop of random traps and never find our way back out again, I thought.
A pair of the golden moths suddenly passed into my view, fluttering away down the long tunnel and disappearing behind some new branch in the Maze. Theirs was a hopeless, wandering flight through the Maze, in my estimation…not unlike our own.
I sighed. “So, which way do we go now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Why don’t you pick?” Dad suggested.
Checking first to make sure he was serious, I glanced up and down the length of the passageway to weigh our options. Either way looked the same, with no distinguishing features to base a decision on. I’d have to go with my gut.
“Hmmm…that way,” I finally said, pointing to our right.
Dad didn’t object, motioning for me to lead on. I lifted my Veritas Sword higher to light our way and set out in the direction I’d seen the moths fly.
Before long we reached the turn I’d thought the moths had taken. Sure enough, a pair of tiny flickering orange lights were dipping and drifting far off down the passage. With nothing else to guide me, I decided to follow their chosen path a bit further.
“You know, Dad, I’ve been thinking. Have you ever noticed that the moths always seem to stay down in the trenches of the Maze. They can fly. So why don’t they just go up and over the Maze walls?”
“Interesting observation; maybe they’ve got predators up there,” Dad suggested, “or have an aversion to the Eye’s light.”
“But they’ve got that whole, ‘as a moth is drawn to the flame’ reputation going for them,” I contested. The predator idea sounded bad too. I had enough to be nervous about without entertaining the idea of new threats from above.
“Yeah, they do love light, don’t they?” Dad admitted. He chuckled to himself and said, “Remember camping with that bug zapper we got from my uncle Jim? We’d put it out at night and all the bugs would just come right over and....”
“They were consumed by the fire!” I blurted out dramatically.
“It was electricity,” Dad reminded me, having missed my point entirely, “but that’s a fun way to put it.”
“No. I mean the answer to the riddle you wrote, Dad. We enter the circle by night and are consumed by the fire. The answer is ‘moths.’ Don’t you see?”
Dad was all over the idea. I could almost see the wheels in his head spinning.
“Entering the circle by night…as in by the cover of night, darkness, shadows.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Staying low in the Maze passages; there’s your ‘cover of night.’”
“And we think they’re still drawn to the center flame?” Dad threw the question out, poking at the integrity of our blossoming theory.
“Why not? They’re obviously going somewhere,” I answered. “Haven’t you noticed how they never turn around? It’s like they’re on a mission.”
“If you’re
right, then we just found ourselves our own natural GPS to the center of the Eye!” Dad said, breaking into one of his signature, crooked smiles. “I can’t believe you figured all that out, son. Incredible!” He gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder and messed up my hair a bit like he always did when I was a kid.
“Hey,” I objected, wriggling out from under the affectionate gesture. I had forgotten how much I missed these simple moments together. “You were the one who figured it out the first time through the Maze. That’s why you wrote the riddle…. I was just following the clues.”
“Yeah, well, enough with the clues,” Dad said. “We’ve got some moths to follow!”
We both broke into a run, chasing down the passage after our distant newly appointed guides. They must have been able to sense we were following because they sped up too, staying always a good ten yards in front of us. My sword’s light didn’t provide us with enough view of the path to make a full-out run, limiting us to a tentative pace. And then there was the trick of tracking them when they made a sudden turn down a side passage and disappeared momentarily from view.
The last turn opened into a circular room with over five different branch-offs to choose from.
“Where’d they go?” Dad panted, making a frantic turn in search of the golden lights from their wings.
“There,” I pointed to a particular path. “I see lights reflecting off that wall.”
The light was growing dimmer by the second. I dashed off down the path in pursuit with Dad playing catch-up a few yards behind.
“Hold up, Hunter,” Dad tried to say, falling farther into the shadows. I heard him trip over something and stumble to the ground, but I didn’t stop, for fear we’d lose the moths’ trail around a potential secondary turn.
Reaching the corner, I came to a dead stop. There was no sign of the glowing guides anywhere. Even stranger yet, there was nowhere for them to have gone.
“What is it?” Dad asked from out of the darkness.
“It’s a dead end,” I replied. I swung my Veritas Sword’s light from side to side, but couldn’t see anything but the three solid walls.
“Figures,” Dad sighed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were trying to give us the slip.”
Confused, I turned to head back toward where Dad was still fumbling about in the dark, but before I could leave, something caught my eye. A patch of surface on the dead-end wall began to glow softly and out of its light, a milky constellation of twinkling lights appeared.
“Hey, come on back here with that light,” Dad complained. “I can’t see a…ouch...blessed thing.”
“Just a sec,” I said, not wanting to pull my eyes away from the phenomenon. The lights became brighter, spinning around until they formed into a shape…the shape of a person. For some reason, the face was blacked out. A second faceless person appeared beside her. I squinted, trying to make out the blurry features.
“Hunter, what’s going on?” Dad’s voice called out, sounding concerned.
I didn’t answer, but continued to watch in amazement as a pair of hands reached over and yanked what looked like black bags from the two heads. The faces revealed were my mother and Emily. They were crying and scared and…so very real I could almost reach out and touch them. Mom turned and seemed to look right at me. She smiled.
“Mom?” I said, reaching toward her. She reached back, our fingers only inches apart when my father’s scream broke the moment.
“Hunter, don’t!” Dad shouted as he dove headlong from out of the shadows to tackle me. The image vanished the moment we hit the ground.
“Dad, what are you doing?” I argued, trying to push him off me. “It was Mom, she’s in trouble and….”
“It was a vision, Hunter. We can’t look at them, remember?”
Truthfully, I didn’t remember. In fact, I was actually angry with him for pulling me away from them. I was confused.
“But she could see me. Emily was there too, and they need our help. They might be….”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dad said sternly. “We can’t change what we see in the vision unless we have the Boodstone. You have to look away.”
I searched his eyes for any sign of sympathy for what Mom and Emily must be going through. Did he even care about them anymore? How could he say it didn’t matter? They were in pain, and he didn’t seem to be worried at all. He must have known how I was feeling because he answered my thoughts directly.
“Hunter, listen to me; you have to trust me. I’ve tried chasing visions and it doesn’t do any good. All it does is steal your future from you. I still care about your mother. I love her, Emily and you more than you could possibly know. We’re going to save them, but the only way we’re going to be able to do that…the only way we defeat Tonomis is if we….”
“Get the Bloodstone, I know.”
Suddenly, I remembered what he was talking about and why we were here. The vision had been so powerful it had almost led me out of the Maze.
“You’re lucky, son. That was close. Another second or two of that vision and you’d be gone.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, as he helped me to my feet again. “I’m sorry I….”
“Ahhh, forget it,” he said, waving me off. “We’ve got a lot of road to cover so we’d better get back to it, right?”
He was right, but without the moths to follow, we were going to be back to navigating the Maze blindly again.
“Dad, do you suppose the moths were trying to lead me into that vision?”
“Like a trap?” Dad asked. “I’d be surprised. I really believe we were on to something with our idea that they are on a migratory path to the center fire.”
“Then where did they go?” I held my sword light back up to the dead end to let my dad see the problem for himself.
“Where, indeed?” he asked, walking closer to the end wall to run his hand over it. He picked up a loose rock from the ground and used it to tap against the solid stone wall in random places. It sounded as thick and unmoving as it looked.
“Hey. Did you just feel that?” I asked, becoming aware of a cool sensation on my right arm. I held my hand out to the side and tried to pick up the source of the gentle breeze. Dad moved in front of me and picked up the trail easily.
“Here,” he said, brushing his hand over a small fissure in the side wall of the dead end. He lifted his stone and tapped the wall near the crack. This time, the wall didn’t sound so impenetrable, just hollow.
“You think they went in there?” I asked, amazed that the moths could have squeezed through the sliver of an opening. To do so, they would have had to slide in sideways with their wings folded flat.
“Stand back,” Dad commanded. He squared up to the wall and then delivered a well-placed kick centered on the crack. Thin sheets of rock broke away from the wall, creating a wider opening. After busting out as much rock face as we could, we found ourselves staring down the throat of a naturally formed tunnel, an open vein running through the rock. It was certainly big enough for the moths to have flown down easily. A man? Not so easily.
That didn’t stop Dad from attempting to stick his torso into the tunnel, testing it out for size.
“You’re not actually thinking of going in there, are you?” I asked nervously.
He wiggled his way back out and instructed me, “It looks just big enough for us. The technique is simple: keep yourself as flat as possible. When it starts to get real tight, hold one arm in front, one behind you.”
“And think thin,” I teased, patting Dad’s belly.
“Just for that I’m sending you in first,” Dad threatened. “Actually, since you are the smallest, you should go first. If it gets too tight for you, then we’ll know I won’t fit and can back out.”
“Oh great,” I said. “So now I’m the guinea pig? Remind me why I’m doing this.”
“For Mom and
Emily,” Dad said, removing my backpack and thrusting it ahead of me into the hole. I thought of their frightened faces. There was no question I would do whatever it took for them. But there was something more.
“You mean, for our family,” I added.
Dad looked embarrassed, “Oh, right…yeah.”
Taking in a deep (and potentially final) breath, I plunged headfirst into the hole, my Veritas Sword held in my leading hand. From what I could see, there was no sign of where this tunnel might end. We started at a shallow crawl, eventually settling into a belly-slither, and finally inching along on finger and toe power. The tighter the passage got, the more I felt like a rat being ingested by a snake.
As bad as all that was, the worst part didn’t come until I needed to scratch my itching nose. Or maybe it was at the point when I realized that I’d never actually seen one of the moths use this tunnel, meaning we could be on a fool’s errand.
Just when I thought I would crack from the weight of the world pressing down on me, a small, golden light ahead gave me hope.
“I see…one,” I said, squeezing the words out. “A…moth.”
“Uh-huh,” Dad grunted. I could only imagine how tight things were getting for him. I forced myself to keep pushing ahead. After all, the moths weren’t likely to wait and even if they did we were running out of time if we wanted to beat Tonomis.
“Al…most…through,” I gasped, forcing myself to the other side. “It’s too tight…. I’m stuck!”
“Stuck?” Dad asked. “What do you mean, stuck?”
“Can’t…move…” is all I could manage to say.
“Can you come back toward me?” Dad asked.
I tried but found that I couldn’t. In all my struggling I had apparently managed to wedge myself literally between a rock and a hard place. There was no budging.
“No…” I gasped, unable to refill my lungs with a sufficient amount of air to speak more than one word at a time.