by H A Tisdale
Now, these types of circumstances happen all the time. X loves Y, and Y loves Z, and Z loves A, B, and C. The infuriating lack of harmony in these lovers' desires is enough to make anyone want to pull Cupid's arrow out of one’s butt and fire it back at that evil baby with wings. Regrettably for me and anyone else who has shared a similar misery, Cupid cannot be thwarted so easily, and though I knew that this pain was not uncommon, I still could not shake away the crushing weight of despair left in my soul by Amber’s rejection.
So maybe my broken heart from Amber had been the major catalyst for my deep despondency. Or maybe it was the sharp sword of rejection in general that had motivated me to buy the gun. Perhaps, I felt I just didn’t belong in the world.
But as I thought more and more about it on the walk home, I did not really wish to die when I really thought about it. So somewhere along the way, a deep root of hopelessness must have settled into my soul, sneakily convincing me to take my own life.
The wind suddenly snapped me out of my deep thoughts as it began to blow vigorously in my face. The clouds in the sky grew darker and more foreboding, ready to burst with bolts of lightning. The thunder began to rumble, so I hurried back to the entrance of the apartment complex but not quick enough to escape the clouds’ merciless downpour.
As I reentered my dinky apartment, my clothes and hair were soaked from the rain. Having kept the leather book dry under my shirt, I put it on the nearby kitchen table and stepped in the bathroom to dry myself off with a white towel.
After removing my clothes and dabbing the remaining water from my body, I looked in the mirror at my black hair, my tan skin, and my brown eyes, and for the first time in a while, my eyes did not look quite so sad. A certain light had returned to them, and the way they glowed in my reflection reminded me of the kindness in Beverly’s blue eyes.
Astonished by the impact of our encounter, I wondered if I would ever see that old man again and imagined what it would be like for someone to have Beverly as a grandfather. This pleasant thought only furthered my desire to see him again. But first, I would need to read The Book. So I wrapped the white towel around my waist and retrieved the leather book from the kitchen table on the way to my bedroom.
As soon as I stepped through the threshold of the doorway, lightning illuminated my room, highlighting the pistol I had left on the mattress. Shocked by the blinding light and subsequent crack of thunder, I dropped the leather book on the stained, carpeted floor. The sight of the lethal weapon there disquieted me, and I immediately seized the gun and slid it under my bed to escape the despicable feeling it gave me.
Quite unsettled, I retrieved the book from the ground and sat on the edge of my bed, looking out on the pouring rain in the darkened atmosphere. I closed my eyes, and for a little while, I listened to the pattering of the rain, which sounded just like the rainmaker my parents had brought me back from Jamaica before their divorce.
When enough time passed in the dark, I turned on my bedside lamp and opened The Book to its first chapter. With no idea what lay in store, I scoffed at the banality of its title as I read out loud, “The Beginning.” Scanning through some of the pages ahead, the font appeared small, and I did not imagine I would get very far in the daunting text.
But for Beverly’s sake, I turned back to the first page, forcing myself to commence the drudgery of reading. Surprisingly, the first page did not disappoint, prompting me to give the next page a chance as well. This process continued page after page, and before I knew it, I had read the first chapter and could not wait to start the next one.
As the storm ravaged the land outside, my interest with The Book increased more and more as I read well into the night. Eventually, heaviness unwelcomingly fell upon my eyes, and I hated the notion of interrupting this newfound adventure for the sake of meaningless sleep.
Fortunately, I remembered that I had just purchased a new bag of espresso beans over the weekend, so taking the giant book with me, I walked to the kitchen and brewed an Americano while continuing to read. To my supreme satisfaction, the caffeine served its purpose and gave me the energy boost I needed to make it through the night.
The storm passed just before dawn, and once again, I felt fatigue slap me in the face. Torn between passing out and continuing the saga, I eventually found myself back in the kitchen brewing more espresso. This pattern persisted for the rest of the day, and though the weather could not have been nicer outside, I stayed indoors, filling my stomach with espresso drinks and my imagination with the words of the story.
The Book had captured my heart and mind, and nothing else seemed to matter, not even the lunar eclipse taking place outside my window. Indeed, as I finished the last page of The Book, I did not even remember the gun lying under the bed beneath me. Finally finishing the quest with which the old man had tasked me, I collapsed on my under-stuffed pillow, eager to rest my weary eyes.
…
Now, think about the mysteriousness of a dream. For some people find themselves more alive and aware in their dreams than they do in real life where they can mindlessly drift through their days as if asleep. It’s hard to know whether being conscious while physically awake constitutes reality more truly than dreaming while physically asleep. And for that matter, it’s difficult to know whether we will all wake up one day from this “reality” to some greater one. Yes, reality can be quite perplexing. Thus, out of consideration for reality’s ambiguity, one should not disregard my cerebral journey and write it off as meaningless. For on my internal adventure, I not only encountered treacherous evil but also unveiled the truest of loves, so rest assured that for me, these experiences were quite real enough.
Chapter 2
Born of the Boulder
In a quiet, hollow space, I awakened with a deep breath through my nostrils, though my nose caught no scent. My eyes opened only to meet darkness, and my ears heard nothing but a void. Out of confusion, I turned my palms down, and in the process, I sensed something familiar. My hands recognized a resistant liquid flowing through my fingers, and a few splashes trickled echoes in the dark. The water felt neither hot nor cold, and when I stopped moving my limbs, my skin could hardly detect the water’s existence. So I lay still for a moment with hardly any sight, smell, sound, taste, or touch, basking in the ethereal experience. As I took another breath, my body felt light, almost completely imperceptible. Without the distraction of my senses, the flow of time seemed to cease.
And in this transcendental territory, I sensed the feeling of forever as my consciousness seemed to lift out of my body. My entire being felt unbound by time and space as if I were everywhere at once. As my consciousness filled the void, the thought approached me that being everywhere might mean I was nowhere. For if I were everywhere, where could I be?
This mystery felt both disclosed and hidden to me within the hollow space. And though my mind should have been twisting and turning in complete bafflement, infinite serenity took bafflement’s place so that my mind flowed in a river of peace.
Yes, a river of peace flowed through my mind, and a true river this river was, both gentle and rough, both warm and cool, both salty and fresh, and most significantly, filled with life. So much life dwelled in this river of peace, so much so that I never would have wanted to leave my current state of mind.
But every river flows somewhere, never remaining in one place. A river is not still, not still like a lake. And my thoughts did not sit in a dead lake. My thoughts streamed through a living river, suddenly taking me somewhere I did not want to be. My consciousness wandered to the edge of what I knew, coercing me to ponder what lie beyond the brink.
Bubbles suddenly started surging beneath me, the sensation causing my consciousness to return to my body in order to face the situation at hand. And like a baby being pushed from his mother’s cozy womb, the water beneath forcefully thrust me out of the dark space and into a blinding light. Almost immediately, the water dropped, and I pounded to the ground, my breath fully knocked out of me. Without time to
recover, the water carried me down a slope, dropping and leveling out again and again like a water slide at an amusement park.
With a final rush into a pool of foaming bubbles, the current of the water switched directions, and a nudge of little waves gently laid me upon a bed of sand where I attempted to recover from my rude awakening.
I opened, closed, and reopened my eyes over and over, trying to adjust to the blinding light of day. The light shined so bright that I could barely make out the figure hovering over me. Meanwhile, my body felt the warmth of the soft sand beneath me, which balanced out the icy discomfort of the steady breeze on my wet skin.
Soon enough, my eyes began to adjust to the things nearest to me. A blonde-haired woman dressed in camouflage overalls came into my focus. Her eyes stared at me with great concern and abundant wonder, but that was not the only thing I noticed in her eyes.
“Jiminy Willers! What’s wrong with your eyes, lady?” I bellowed, sitting up in a panic.
“My eyes??” the woman responded with confusion.
“They’re—" I started to say before I noticed the sky behind her, though this was not the normal blue sky with which I was well-acquainted. Instead, a layer of rock rested above our heads, and this was not just some ordinary rock one might find in a typical cave. No, this rocky sky was composed of every beautiful stone that one could imagine, and every part of this cavernous ceiling glowed brightly, so brightly that the scene appeared as bright as day. The different colors from the glowing stones created the most unbelievable hues across the turquoise water in front of us. It was as if someone took a mystical rainbow and sprinkled it across the dazzling sea.
Slowly standing up, I surveyed the rest of the bright, new world around me. I stood on a beach which connected to a grassy land sloping upward, filled with hundreds of bamboo bungalows. A giant blue mansion with seven pillars sat behind the bamboo bungalows, and behind the mansion stood a soft mountain with two plateaus that layered out at different heights. More interestingly, a long and narrow staircase ran up the entirety of the mountain, which flattened into more of a sidewalk on the two plateaus. At the summit of the mountain, a massive boulder lay to the left of the staircase, and through a relatively small opening in the boulder, a stream of water flowed out and down the mountain across the grassy land. The stream flowed all the way to the sea whereby I now stood on the beach with the smoothest of sand. Near to my left and far to my right, two natural walls of jagged rocks lifted high into the air, encircling the bungalows and the mansion all the way from the edge of the beach to the top of the mountain.
“Where am I?” I finally found my breath to say as I turned back to the woman.
“Oh!” the woman yelped, covering her bright red eyes that I had originally noticed. “You might want to cover yourself with my towel first.”
I looked down to discover my bare predicament. Mortified, I grabbed the white towel from her hand and wrapped it around my waist. “Jiminy Willers, where are my clothes?” I protested.
“This is how you came out of the Ancient Boulder,” the woman explained graciously as she stroked her blonde braid.
“Ancient what?”
“Boulder,” the woman repeated, directing my attention to the massive rock on top of the mountain with the staircase. “I saw you burst out of the Ancient Boulder on Victory Hill and float down all the way here to the Sea of Surrender.”
“And where is here, generally speaking?” I asked, looking up at the cavernous ceiling. “Is this some kind of cave?”
“This is the Pit,” she answered matter of factly.
“The Pit?” I echoed in shock. “The Pit. That does not sound good in the slightest. What do you mean the Pit?”
The woman directed my gaze back to the cavernous ceiling.
“Well, long story short, our ancestors once lived above the cavernous ceiling, but then they fell down into the Pit, which is where we now dwell.”
“So we’re literally underground??” I made sure to clarify.
She nodded, her bright red eyes still fixated on me as if trying to solve a riddle.
“How far down are we?” asked my claustrophobic side.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Nobody knows.”
At this point, I panicked, sinking to the ground and putting my hands on my head. “What is happening? Maybe it’s not happening, and I’m just dreaming. Yes, maybe I’m dreaming. Look at this place. I must be dreaming! That would explain why I’m naked too.”
The woman knelt down and put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not dreaming,” she stated calmly. “This is really happening.”
“Sure, okay, so you just expect me to believe that I magically came out of a rock in this glowing, underground cave and that your freaky, bright red eyes are real?”
“Whoa, man,” the woman responded, standing up in offense. “First of all, my eyes aren’t freaky. They are completely normal for someone with a ruby birthstone, and you really shouldn’t insult someone’s birthstone, you dull-eyed—”
“Wait, I’m sorry,” I interrupted before hearing her colorful choice of insults, “but did you just use the words ‘ruby birthstone’ and ‘completely normal’ in the same sentence to describe your—”
“Second of all, this isn’t a dream. You’re really in the Pit, whether you like it or not,” she concluded in a huff.
I just looked at her stunned. As I sat there in the soft sand with nothing covering my body but a towel, I did not feel I was in a strong position to rebut the ruby-eyed woman’s claims. Sensing she had triumphed over my insolence, the woman gracefully regained her composure and sat down beside me.
“I’m Reina by the way,” she said, holding out her hand with a much friendlier demeanor.
“Benjamin,” I replied, shaking her dainty hand.
“Benjamin, I like that name.”
“Thanks, I’ve never been that big of a fan,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck. “So I’m sorry for insulting you and all, but I just have one quick question. If we are really underground, does that mean there’s no sun here?” I asked, looking back up at the illuminated cavernous ceiling.
“You know about the sun?” Reina grabbed my arm with vigor.
“Uhh, yeaaah,” I answered surprised at her enthusiasm. “It rises and sets pretty much every day.”
“Wait, have you seen the sun???” Reina’s ruby eyes opened wide.
“Yesss…?” I questioningly stated, still curious over its significance. “And I see the moon often too. Why? Is that a big deal or something?”
Before Reina could answer my question, she gasped as her eyes noticed a couple of nefarious figures approaching from the grass. “Run!” she screamed, tugging my arm just before she let go in a sprint.
I tried to oblige her command, but running in a towel does not come easily, especially when done in the sand. Almost immediately, my foot caught the bottom of the towel, causing me to fall face first on the beach. Discombobulated from the impact, I lifted my head to see Reina long gone.
Even worse, I saw two masked men marching directly towards me with weapons in their hands. They each wore one of the two masks from a theater, one representing comedy and one representing tragedy. Comedy carried a bow and arrow, while Tragedy wielded a sword.
I realized an escape would not be likely at this point. Even if I had ditched the towel, Comedy surely could have shot me dead with one of his arrows. Unwilling to risk being punctured by the pointed projectile, I stood up to meet my advancing fate, fear holding me in place as it normally did in my dreams.
Comedy and Tragedy arrived on the beach shortly and ceased their menacing march about five feet from me. No one said a word. For longer than a reasonable person could tolerate, the silence lingered, and I thought I might die of dread. Comedy finally made a move and held out a rolled-up scroll for me to grab.
By some miracle, I summoned the courage to take the scroll and unravel it to reveal the message within: You are hereby summoned to appear before the Mas
ter of Games. Please proceed to the Master’s Mansion as directed by the Master’s servants.
I read the message silently as fear had robbed my voice. I looked up at the two men whose masks were blankly staring back at me. Their smile and frown combined were enough to haunt anyone’s nightmares for a lifetime.
Comedy then lifted his hand and signaled for me to follow. Tragedy accordingly lifted his sword as if to say that not following them would end badly for me. With that, the two of them turned around to make their way towards the Master’s Mansion before the mountain. I reluctantly followed in my towel.
On the long walk to the mansion, Tragedy marched in front of me while Comedy lurked behind with his bow gripped tightly in hand. All the while, fretful thoughts bounced through my mind: Who is the Master of Games and what could he possibly want with me? Maybe my nudity has violated their law, and I will soon be punished.
Not desiring to find out the severity of my punishment, I figured I should maybe ditch the towel and sprint away despite the lethal risk posed by Comedy’s arrows. However, I feared I may have already missed my window to escape.
We finally reached the blue mansion and walked up about twenty steps before crossing the threshold of the seven pillars. Instead of entering through the giant red door in the middle of the portico, Tragedy led me around the right side of the house through a sketchy door and up a windy staircase which seemed to have no end.
When my glutes could hardly endure another step, Tragedy took one of the exits in the staircase and brought us into a bright, rectangular room with large windows for walls so that the colorful city could be seen from three different sides. Without any explanation, my eerie escorts then departed, leaving me alone in the long room with nothing but my thoughts, thoughts that would drive any sane person mad if left to fester.
I desperately hoped Comedy and Tragedy would not return for fear of being tortured by the fiendish foes. I further feared that this Master of Games could somehow be worse, feeling a deep anxiety that maybe the Master of Games would be a clown, and my nightmare would be complete.