The Geode King

by H A Tisdale

  Knowing I somehow had to rescue the ComePlatians, I decided not to resist the white-eyed brothers’ present will to take me into captivity. So they stood me up and pushed me through the fog, leading me where I needed to go. And as I marched forward into the unknown, I thought back to the two masked men in Come Play City, experiencing a strong sense of what some call déjà vu. So much had transpired on my adventure in the Pit since then, and even though some undesirable twists and turns had taken place, I strangely felt Doug’s words ringing true in my heart.

  You’ve got the Good Gale in your sail, and this force behind fate doesn’t just move in our birthstones but in all things, working everything out for our good.

  After trekking through the mist for a while, the fog finally thinned, and before us lay an enormous castle composed of compact dirt. Its three tall towers rose almost as high as the cavernous ceiling, still glowing dimly in that dark grayish hue. And in front of the three towers, I saw a wide, murky moat surrounding the clay castle’s grounds with no perceivable way to cross it. But when we approached this petrified palace, a wooden bridge mystically lowered across the murky moat without Wick and Devon saying a word, and as we walked over the rickety bridge, I looked down at the filthy water where my eyes caught a glimpse of a gator gliding upon the stagnant surface.

  “A Litter Gator,” I released its name from my breath fearfully.

  “Oh yes,” Devon commented, “the Litter Gators answer to the Flamecatcher now, encircling the entirety of his great fortress.”

  As I heard Devon’s answer, I assumed he was referring to Hive when he used the term Flamecatcher, which perfectly explained the unresolved mess on the surface of Lake Shale. Of course Hive would use the Litter Gators for his own gain, taking them away from their true purpose in the Pit. And I thought back to the obscene amount of trash in the water, how the Hippo Critter had instantly choked on the garbage when I stuffed it down its mouth.

  Then the terrible detail occurred to me: What happened to Kairou?! I had last seen her running for her life from the Hippo Critters, and I couldn’t imagine how she possibly could have escaped the stomping stampede. Tears thus swelled in my eyes as I tried to hold onto Doug’s assurance that the Good Gale was working everything out for our good, so I desperately hoped that Kairou’s Kung Fu had come through.

  Fortunately, we finished crossing the rickety bridge where my mind became distracted with the strange sight of the courtyard before me. Dressed in fire-colored, torn, flapped clothing, hundreds of wind followers walked inanimately, each gazing intently into his or her own handheld mirror. Transfixed with their own reflection, the wind followers did not converse with one another as they wandered through the smelly mud in circles, captured by the stillness in their souls.

  As we traveled through the unsettling crowd, I noticed they all possessed an alluring beauty, though the light in their eyes appeared dark. Most of them did not even acknowledge our presence, and the ones that did notice us barely looked up from their handheld mirrors. They maintained their lifeless eye contact for maybe a second before quickly returning to their coveted image, reflecting endlessly on their unsatisfying reflection.

  “Wait here,” Devon commanded.

  “Where are you going?” I inquired, uninterested in joining the dead dance at this ball of mirrors.

  “We are going to the fetch the Flamecatcher,” Wick jeered, “so he can seal you for the Flame with the mark of his right hand.”

  They departed into the middle tower swiftly and left me with the ghastly group of wind followers, though I thought maybe they were no longer wind followers at all. If they referred to Hive as their Flamecatcher, I figured they should now be called flame followers.

  Thereby alone with the flame followers, I seized the opportunity to take control of my situation. I concluded I couldn’t leave the castle grounds without being eaten by a Litter Gator, so I decided I would try to scope out the construction of the beast. This seemed a wise strategy: to examine the monster we would all have to eventually face, the deadly force that threatened the fate of the Pit.

  So I quickly approached a short, red-haired woman from behind, who happened to be gripping the handheld mirror especially close to her face. With the random hope that she would be kind, I reached out my hand to tap her on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered as I made contact with the top of her arm.

  “HOLEY PIT DIGGING DINOSAURS,” the woman screamed, almost dropping her mirror to the ground. “You scared the living daylight out of me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I apologized. “I should have been more conscious of my approach.”

  “Geeez,” the woman exhaled breathlessly, “what do you even want from me?”

  I decided to be bold with my approach. “I was just wondering if you knew where they were building the beast.”

  “Beast? What beast?” she voiced quizzically with a bewildered look in her spinel eyes.

  “The big monster the ComePlatians are building?” I expounded. “The vessel for the Flame?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, mister,” the woman remarked, “but that’s probably because I’ve been binge watching myself for a few days now.”

  “You’ve just been looking into that mirror for multiple days?” I asked incredulously.

  “Uhh, duh,” the woman replied, “it makes me look so-extra-specially beautiful! How could I resist?”

  “What’s so special about a handheld mirror?” I inquired skeptically.

  “See for yourself,” the woman prompted me as she delivered the mystical mirror into my hands.

  I took hold of the distorting device and lifted it up to read the story of my face, and what I discovered in the mirror disturbed me to my core. Shining out of my heart through my eyes, the lens of the Domikos revealed to me the monster that threatened the fate of the Pit.

  A darker version of myself was staring back at me eerily from the mystical mirror. The foreign form’s eyes glowed darker than the most wicked of villains, and a despicable, fiendish smile spread like a virus across its face. Worst of all, in the dirty skin of the disfigured figure, a plethora of grotesque worms wiggled and crawled as they ate away at the vile miscreant who deserved nothing but death.

  Determined to rid the Pit of the world’s worst wrongdoer, I slammed the mystical mirror into the mud where it shattered with a bright flash into a thousand little pieces. Immediately, the red-haired woman fainted, and I caught her in my arms, her spinel eyes soon reopening.

  “Who are you?” she questioned softly.

  “I’m Benjamin,” I answered her, realizing she had been bewitched. “What’s your name?”

  “My name’s…Gretta,” she stated as if remembering it for the first time. “Where am I?”

  “You’re at Hive’s Castle on the shores of Lake Shale,” I informed her. “Do you have any recollection of that?”

  “The last thing I remember was a flash of lightning in a great storm,” she articulated in awe.

  “You must have been overcome by the Rotten Ruakia,” I hypothesized based on my own encounter with the lightning.

  Gretta lifted herself to her feet and looked around at the self-centered spectacle in the clay castle’s courtyard. Her mouth dropped and her spinel eyes watered as she observed the subtle swirl of the flame followers wandering aimlessly through the mud.

  “I know these people,” she whimpered. “Many are my friends. What’s wrong with them?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, “but you were under the same spell only moments ago.”

  “How did you free me from it?” Gretta pleaded with desperation.

  “I guess by smashing your mirror into the ground,” I speculated.

  Gretta hurriedly ran up to a brunette woman and tried to yank the handheld mirror out of her hand. The brunette woman immediately resisted and punched Gretta right in the face, causing my mouth to drop to the floor.

  “MUD MUNCHING MAGGOT,” Gretta protested loudly in pain. �
��Why didn’t that work?”

  “Umm,” I searched my mind for an answer, “I suppose I didn’t take the mirror from you by force. You offered it to me willingly.”

  Gretta hesitantly turned back to the brunette woman, tapped her on the shoulder, and requested rather pitiably, “Umm, Hanna, may I please see your mirror? Mine’s broken, and I was hoping you could share yours with me.”

  Hanna gave Gretta a strained look as if she wanted to help out a dear friend but also as if she desired to hold onto her precious self-image. With much pain in her sapphire eyes, Hanna handed her mirror over to Gretta.

  “Thank you,” Gretta voiced sweetly. She then instantly chucked the handheld mirror into the mud where the same smashing phenomenon occurred in a little explosion of light, and Hanna fainted forward into Gretta’s faithful embrace.

  “What happened?” Hanna breathed weakly as she came back to reality.

  “The Rotten Ruakia put us under some freaky ass spell,” Gretta screeched in a less than delicate way to her awakening friend.

  Hanna looked all around at their fellow friends forged from following the winds before a soft stream of tears trickled down from her sapphire eyes. And in those deep blue windows to her soul, I saw a fire within her birthstone igniting as she observed the corrosive corruption taking place in the clay castle’s courtyard.

  “We have to free everyone,” Hanna stated solemnly with a fierce indignation simmering beneath her calm resolve.

  “NO PIT!” Gretta squawked. “What do you think I was doing with my new friend Benjamin here?”

  Gretta briefly introduced me to her best friend Hanna before explaining to her that the people could only be freed if they willingly handed over the mystical mirrors. The three of us then quickly went to work, conversing with as many flame followers as we could. We ransomed many of them from their narcissistic nightmares; however, the majority of the flame followers would not turn away from the viral vision of themselves.

  “Why do so many of them resist liberation?” Hanna fumed after she faced another flame follower’s refusal to part with the handheld mirror.

  “Because they know their proper place,” Wick scolded as he exited the door to the middle tower.

  “We have to get out of here,” Gretta screamed to her freed companions as she ran towards the moat. But she stopped short when she spotted the surfaced heads of the Litter Gators.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Devon laughed. “Only Wick and I have the power to lower the bridge, and the Litter Gators won’t be friendly to those who cross their boundaries.”

  Realizing we had been trapped by Wick and Devon, we who stood without a handheld mirror accepted the fate that we faced and surrendered to the evil men who stood to oppress us.

  “All who have smashed their mirrors will now be escorted into the dark dungeon where you will gaze into a new mirror,” Devon instructed maliciously, “the reflection of your self-made misery.”

  So the men without birthstones directed us through the entrance of the middle tower where we proceeded down a spiral staircase for what felt like forever. Wick walked at the front of his prisoners while Devon followed at the end of the line where I happened to fall in the order.

  “Fortunately for you,” Devon derided me, “Hive was preoccupied with his concubines, so you’ll have to wait for the seal of the Flame like the rest of the ComePlatians.”

  “What about his wife?” I asked, pretty much ignoring his comment about the seal of the Flame.

  “What about her?” Devon remarked coldly, so I feared Kecelia had not survived Hive’s ruthless beating.

  When I reached the entrance to the dark dungeon with the rest of the prisoners, Wick smacked me in the face once again with a twisted cackle before he casted me to the muddy floor of the cold chamber.

  As I lifted my head and wiped the mud from my face, I saw a couple of red gems, shimmering by the low light of a nearby torch on the wall, and these familiar jewels stared at me as they did when I first saw them on the shores of Come Play City.

  “Reina?” I exhaled in the shivering space.

  “BENJAMIN,” Reina exclaimed, “it is you!”

  I stood up covered in filth and embraced the thinned woman who had basically served as my mother in the Pit. She looked at me longingly as if one of her own children. Fresh tears subsequently swelled in both of our eyes.

  “It’s really good to see you again,” I expressed from the light in my heart.

  “It’s so good to see you, Benjamin. You have no idea how much my birthstone eroded when I lost you in that desert,” Reina replied weakly.

  “Are your children here too?” I inquired, hoping to be reunited with the one I desired.

  A bitter expression overtook Reina’s face, answering my question before she said a word. “Before I could find them in the desert, Hive, Wick, and Devon rounded us up and brought us here where they forced us to construct their castle made of dirt. But after Hive returned from his mission to find his wife, he found some fire in Lake Shale they call the Flame, and we’ve been making something terrible for it.” Reina’s ruby eyes filled with dread as she admitted the grave truth of what was taking place in Hive’s kingdom of darkness. “There’s a monster behind the castle, Benjamin, at least half of one anyway, and we can’t stop building it because if we refuse to work, Wick and Devon will torture the children.”

  Having revealed the ruinous reality she had endured for so long, Reina broke down in my arms as I stared at the other ComePlatians in the dark dungeon who had suffered through the same circumstances. A thick layer of dirt covered their sunken cheeks, and I once more struggled to understand how the Good Gale could be working everything out for our good.

  “Where is the Glorious King?” Reina cried on my shoulder. “When will he deliver us from this forsaken Pit? When will he reunite us with the Alchemist?”

  “There is no Alchemist,” some scoffer named Sylvester remarked in the dark.

  “Yes there is!” I rebutted fiercely, refusing to let this stranger take away the only remaining hope any of us had in the bogged down mire.

  “If the Alchemist were real,” the quarrelsome man contested, “then why would he have let our ancestors fall into the Pit? If he had really loved them, he would have done something to prevent their plunge into Lake Shale. And even if he had let them fall out of the Haven, he would have rescued them as soon as he could, but check it out morons, we’re still in this mess after years and years of nothing but darkness and death.”

  “That’s not true,” I declared unable to tolerate the distress on Reina’s face. “There has been light from the beginning, and there has been life to the fullest extent. The ancestors did not stay dead but rose from Lake Shale where they populated the Pit with an abundance of jewels and gems. There have been dreamers like Father Edd who have never given up on the hope of the Glorious King. There is the sunlight from the Haven, which faithfully shines down every year on the surface of that still, dirty lake. And there is the Domikos, the Good Gale blowing throughout the Pit who is working everything out for our good.”

  “The Domikos? What are you talking about?” Reina questioned me for once about something in the Pit.

  “The Domikos is the way to reconnect your birthstone to the love of the one who created us,” I shared from the inner wind of my heart. “As children’s birthstones are brought to life in the water, as the ancestors’ gems were born in the sunlit puddle, you too can be reborn in the water with the inner wind of the Alchemist. No matter who you are or what you’ve done, if you seek the Domikos with all of your birthstone, you can actually catch the wind breathed out from the Alchemist, and you can walk in the new life of his inner wind. Together, we can overcome death with the Domikos.”

  “Yes,” Reina breathed with a deep longing in her ruby eyes. “I’ve been waiting for this wind to blow my whole life. Show me how to catch it, Benjamin.”

  “First, we need water,” I stated with an authority from the Domikos I didn�
�t quite understand. Suddenly, the words of my faithful friend from the river flowed through my mind: Just always remember, if you dig it, you Doug it.

  So I looked at the crowd of dirty prisoners who had all been listening attentively to our conversation. And in an attempt to rouse the desolate bunch, I proclaimed, “I’m sure if we dig deep enough in this mud, we are bound to hit a spring eventually. So who’s willing to dig in the mud with me to find the hidden well?”

  “I’m in,” Reina replied immediately.

  “Me too,” Hanna promptly volunteered next.

  “ME THREE,” Gretta jumped up before many others stepped forward after her.

  Though not all of the prisoners believed, choosing to scoff instead, a large collection of ComePlatians and flame followers united, joining together in the effort to follow the inner wind who had no end. So down in the dirt, we used our hands to excavate through the worm-filled mud, our birthstones rocking as one.

  Not long after the digging commenced, we reached the destination of our pure hearted desire, and as the dugout hole filled with fresh water, the Domikos arrived to fill the deep voids in the chasms of our birthstones. Together then, we greatly rejoiced in the harmony of the breath-giving breeze, splashing with joy as the dirt washed away.

  And as our restored birthstones glowed and our eyes shined brightly, we all together sang a revised chorus of Pit, Breeze, and Flame’s famous song from the windless valley:

  We follow his wind because there’s no end;

  We follow his wind because there’s no end;

  We follow his winddddd, we follow his wind!

  Chapter 17

  Later Litter Gator

  Within the dark dungeon, the Domikos had restored many ComePlatians to become Veratians as they always should have been, and many flame followers, who had once followed the wind, now basked in the breeze of the Alchemist. However, those prisoners who had not dug deep with the rest of us looked upon our rejoiceful singing as if we had gone mad. But we knew without a doubt in whom we believed. We had full assurance that our lives were headed in the direction of the Alchemist.