Following his father through the hallways, they arrived at what appeared to be an operating room. Masked doctors and surgeons moved purposefully around a bed, and on the bed lay a beautiful, dark-haired woman whose belly was swollen with life. “Oh, Abner... you made it,” she said, noticing Jak's father walk into the room.
“Wouldn't miss it,” he replied, taking one of her little hands in his. Jak's heart overflowed with a mixture of heady emotions as he realized this woman must be his mother. He could only watch, his ethereal form completely unnoticed by any of the busy men in the room, as she and the doctors set to work on the difficult task of delivering the child. Two unsettling-looking men in black military intelligence uniforms stood in the corner, speaking to themselves in low whispers. In his present ethereal form, Jak could hear them perfectly:
“All of our failures have led to this moment. The Parity Project will finally succeed today. We will have our army.”
The other man replied, “All of Genesis under the Imperium, as it should be. As it should have always been!”
Jak's perception of time went into a fast flux. A baby bawled, a mother died, and a father smote his chest with grief and rage.
Jak blinked and found himself in a wild, thicket-strewn plain. The Imperial Way could be seen in the distance. A man was painstakingly making his way through the brush. Jak's father had traded his uniform for a voluminous brown travel-cloak which was large enough to obscure his features. In his arms there was a bundle.
Jak blinked again. He was home, on his farm. Goats trotted around, feeding on the weeds and bushes and occasionally bleating for no apparent reason. A very young version of Jak was running around playing tag with one of the goats. Growing bored with his play, he ran over to his father who was milking a very fat mother goat. “Pa, why don't I have a mommy?”
Jak had asked this question many times before. Mustering his patience, his father now gave the usual response: “You know why, son. It's like I told you before. She passed away when you were very young.”
Time sped up once again. A young boy became a young man. A father kept his secrets. Behind it all, a queen took interest.
He blinked, and he was back in the purple void. Gravity had caught up with him, and his feeble form came crashing down onto the top of one of the stone towers. Despite the rough landing, he was somehow unhurt. He stood up, struggling against the cold, biting winds which battered him from every direction. This was no dream, he decided. It was too vivid. This was a vision. As soon as he came to this realization, his father appeared before him. This time, he was the correct age.
Taken by sudden emotion, he shouted, “Who are you? Who are you, really? Why are you showing me all this?”
His father smiled wanly, then began to shimmer. His form disappeared, and in its place there was a pale man with peculiar, long violet hair and steelberry-grey eyes. Rafael! Jak hadn't seen the man since their conversation more than a year ago.
“I am sorry, Jak. I did not decide to take his form – your own mind played that particular trick on you. The deception, it seems, is no longer necessary. It would appear that your mind is finally prepared to accept the truth.”
Jak blinked, struggling to process what was going on.
“Truth...? This is real, isn't it?” Jak replied. “It's a dream, but it's real.”
“Correct. Such a bright young man. Our Lady Acelia has been saying that about you for some time now.”
“So... that seed she gave me...”
“Was a convenience. A tool to allow me easier access to your mind. She felt that this was the best way to show you the truth about yourself, given our limited time. Fortunately, we no longer have need of such trappings.”
Jak felt a surge of energy shoot through him, and he gasped as he was violently thrown out of the dream. He screamed and thrashed around a bit before finally realizing that he was in his own bed in the dormitory. The room was empty except for the pale figure looming over him. Jak could still feel the coolness from where one of the man's clammy hands had been on his forehead moments prior.
“R..Rafael? What the hell!” Jak sat up with a start. The first rays of morning sunlight were creeping through the dormitory windows.
“I told you it was real. I must apologize again. Please, accept this. We have much to discuss.” Rafael gingerly reached over to a table and retrieved a steaming mug of cinnamon coffee, handing it over to Jak. He sat down on a chair next to the bed and looked directly into Jak's eyes. The young man's heart rate slowed, and he began to calm down. Thinking deeply, he tried to decide which questions to ask first. He found himself strangely preoccupied with the coffee; had Rafael really brought a hot mug of coffee with him, all with the intent to calm him down after invading his mind? He shook his head free of such thoughts, trying to focus on getting answers on more important matters.
“I still don't understand, Rafael. What is all this? I was born in the West? My father was a soldier? Why wouldn't he tell me?”
At this, Rafael frowned. “Even we do not have all of the details. We know that you were born, Jak, but you were also made. You are the result of a project meant to create living weapons for the Imperium, weapons that might have been able to conquer this entire continent if they had succeeded. Your father saved you from that life, made them believe that their plans had failed. He brought you into our Lady Acelia's domain to live in safety."
“You couldn't have just told me this? You had to go into my brain? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
Rafael just looked at Jak blankly, as though he couldn't begin to understand why anyone would find his actions disturbing. His steelberry-grey eyes twinkled in the silence.
“Fine, don't tell me. How do you know all this?”
“Our Lady Acelia has been watching you for a very long time, Jak. Almost as long as you've been alive. Shall I be explicit? The throne reveals that which it wishes to reveal: visions of places and people who will be of great consequence to all of Genesis. It has fixated on you for quite some time.”
“You're telling me that she's known about all this the entire time I've been in the Chateau? And you, as well? Why didn't anyone tell me?” Under the circumstances, Jak thought that he ought to be hysterical. Anger and frustration boiled just beneath the surface, but an ocean of inexplicable calm had suddenly saturated his mind. He was left only with a sharp spike of steady willpower. He knew what he had to do.
In response to his question, Rafael gave him a wan smile but did not speak.
Jak spoke again, more calmly this time. “I... I don't know what to say. I need to go back to my village. I need to talk to my father.”
“I'm sorry, Jak. There is just no time for it. Our queen has a task for you, something only you can do.
“What? A mission? I only just got back.”
A tiredness beyond his short years was apparent on Jak's young face. He didn't want to go fight mutants or get bitten half to death by creatures in the desert, or do anything else for that matter. He wanted to see his father. For the first time in his life he found himself wishing for the mundane comforts of home.
“Our Lady Acelia believes that you are the best person for this job. She believes that you are one of the only people who can solve a certain very, very important problem.”
Jak looked him blankly. “I'm just a trainee, Rafael. How could I be so important?”
“You still don't understand. That energy you use... it is not magic. Magic retreats from you. When they made you, they made you to be something more like an Innate. There is a power inside you unlike any other. If you can unlock it, you will become a hero. This is what you always wanted, is it not?”
“This doesn't make any sense. I've been using magic. I learned it from the book, I told you, I—”
Rafael clasped Jak's hand in both of his smaller ones, interrupting him mid-sentence. The Cascadian Knight's pale fingers were cool to the touch. “Please, Jak. We had hoped that we would have more time, but our adversaries have moved mu
ch faster than we had hoped. The storm of war is coming, but we can stop it. You can stop it, but you must move quickly.”
Jak, however, was at his breaking point. He was tired of riddles and half-explanations. He was overwhelmed; he was a young man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he could do naught but shrug. “Rafael, I'm going to see my pa. I need to talk to someone who makes some sense. Have one of the real Knights take this mission, whatever it is.”
He pulled his hand out of Rafael's soft grip and stood up off the bed. Opening his chest, he pulled out his armor and began strapping it on. Rafael stared at him in precisely the way that an entomologist might study an ant.
After a time, the Cascadian Knight spoke. “You would go absent from the Chateau without leave? You owe us quite a debt, you know.”
Jak finished putting on his banded mail, then glanced over at the ancient greatsword leaning against his bed. “There's my debt, both for the broken blade and for my training. Take it. And if you want to kick me out of the Chateau for this, so be it. I'm going to see my pa.” He grabbed his satchel, walked out the door, and turned off toward the eastern outer gate. He would travel eastwards and then north, making his way along the Sphynx toward his hometown.
On foot, the trip was long and uneventful. Without his road companions, he had time to think, to ruminate upon the events of the last few months. He wondered about his path in life; what had led him to risk his life on such a journey. He realized that the journey hadn't started when he stepped into that caravan with Quentin and the hangman; no, the journey had started years ago when he decided he wanted, needed to become a hero.
He was returning home with scars, three jagged reminders of his time in the desert temple. Two more were apparent on his leg, where the spider's venom had nearly killed him. Were these marks proof of his heroism? Did they demonstrate his newfound manhood? His father had always taught him that being a man meant providing a life for his family, working hard, protecting his home. Jak, in his youth, had concluded that a boy could not become a true man without, at some level, becoming a hero. He believed that a man ought to be the sort of person who would risk everything to protect everyone.
Now, as he trudged homeward, he wondered if these convictions were only the callow musings of a naive child. His dream of being a hero had never felt farther from him. In spite of the dangers he had survived, he felt very much like a boy. How could he hope to change the world all by himself?
Young Jak. That's what they called him, both the queen and her servant who had invaded his dreams. He wondered to himself: who should young Jak become? Should he strive to be more like the hangman, dour and dogged and committed to justice at all costs? The hangman was confident, but never seemed very happy. When he plied his trade, it was with grim satisfaction rather than true pleasure. The hangman seemed very much like the hero that Jak had always wanted to become. And yet, the man was brutal, unforgiving, and almost dead inside. Was this the cost of becoming a hero? Nevertheless, Jak suspected that his pa would like Mr. Taker.
Perhaps he should be more like his father. To raise a family and live a life of simple and honest labor; could this be the true path to manhood? His father, however, had apparently lied about his mother and his past. Was his father a hypocrite, toiling away at his farm while the world burned around him? Rafael's dream-visions had forced the boy to see his father in an entirely new light. How could he ever trust his pa again?
Then there was Quentin. The man could be foul, but seemed very sure of himself, very pleased in what he was. He was a joker, a prankster, a braggart, and an unashamed womanizer who, despite his occasional spectacular failings in that department, surely experienced great success as well. The Cascadian Knight's nature was both crass and frivolous; his careless attitude toward life had once made Jak wonder if he could even trust Quentin in the heat of battle. Even so, Jak had decided that Quentin was not as uncaring as he purported to be. He had, after all, saved Jak's life more than once.
What is a man? What is a hero? Who would young Jak become? Could he even make that choice for himself, or was he only a puppet, the living result of clandestine Imperium experiments? These questions consumed Jak like a fire in his belly, and it occurred to him that this was the first time in his life that he had really pondered the purpose and goal of his path instead of the mechanics of how to travel down it. As always, his mind determinedly turned the problem over and over, chipping away at it with a stubborn steadiness. One way or another, he would find his way through.
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