The Secret of Namana (The Arnaka Saga Book 2)

by Lucia Ashta

  Still, this wickedness repelled them. Anak held onto Thom’s wrist instead of holding the hand that carried the knife. Beings of such great light as these did not enjoy contact with darkness. Thom picked up the knife first to save his companions from the task.

  They closed their eyes, and each connected to the tree they stood under and to the earth they stood on. Were the tree and the earth willing to receive and cleanse the knife?

  The tree and the earth consented to the job. Over time, the darkness the knife carried would dissipate. It would intermix with the light of the earth and its plants. Like all energy, whichever was prevalent drew the lesser energy. And so the darkness would gradually transform into light.

  The light warriors crouched down unevenly among jutting roots. Thom held the knife aloft while Ashta and Anak dug with their hands. The twins dug as deeply as they could within the interlocking system of roots that extended far beneath what was visible above ground.

  Thom moved forward to lay the knife within its final resting place. Wait, Kaanra said. The moonlight had flickered across the edge of a weathered engraving on the knife’s hilt. The hilt was made from bone, and it was well worn and molded to its owner’s hand. Even so, the engravings that had once been prominent revealed just enough of their secrets to give the knife’s owner a name.

  The knife had been a gift from his father, and his father engraved the knife himself with his son’s name. It was a name hardly anyone knew the son by anymore, but it was a name Kaanra remembered hearing long ago. Kaanra could make out the barely-there letters of an almost-forgotten name. Vohrne.

  Kaanra said the name in a soft whisper, astounded awe on his breath. His attacker had been the infamous man who frequented legends. He was a man many feared, and with good reason. Kaanra remembered hearing that the man killed his father.

  Kaanra never met the man before. When Kaanra heard the tales, he imagined the man was very old. He had to be; the people of Arnaka had been telling stories of his misdeeds for a very long time. But Kaanra’s assailant was young and possessed the strength of youth. If this was indeed the man Kaanra suspected he was, some dark magic was at play.

  His name is Brazzon.

  Ashta and Anak gasped. This name was one of the most dreaded in the stories their parents told them as children.

  Brazzon means “wrath of darkness.” Kaanra expounded for Thom’s sake; Thom did not know the words of Arnaka’s language. Without an explanation, “Brazzon” would mean nothing to him—even through telepathic communication that reconciled language differences.

  He is among the darkest men who have ever lived. Few see him and live to tell about it. I do not know if a soul remains in his body. He has been lost to the shadows for too long. There may be nothing human left within him.

  As one, all of them glanced at the knife in Thom’s hand. Thom hastened to give it over to the earth. Under the dappled moonlight, layers of old blood revealed themselves, caked around the edges of the knife’s hilt. Thom placed the knife as far within the earth as the hole allowed, and then the twins filled in the cavity.

  The warriors crouched quietly, supporting the intention that the knife release its darkness. The silence was alive with magic, and with sadness. Kaanra, Ashta, and Anak, who knew the stories of Brazzon, lamented that the world of shadow had claimed this man, once son to a knife-carving father. The darkness extended its tentacles to any who was open to its temptations of power.

  The hole closed now, Thom rubbed the palms of his hands in the dirt, calling on the earth to transmute any darkness that remained in his touch. The earth responded to his request readily, and by the time Thom stood back up, it was done.

  Somewhere faraway above them, a raven screeched. The light warriors turned their gazes skyward, where they got lost in the dense covering of the tree canopy. No one could see past it, and nothing could see within it, not even a desperately circling raven, driven almost mad by the proximity to the doman he failed to capture.

  The light warriors packed their blankets quickly, preparing to journey, but then they took their time in saying farewell to the mother tree. Her trunk was wide enough to afford each of them a sense of privacy while they shared their respect and gratitude.

  Then, as each emerged from behind the tree, they assembled and took off. Without a care for direction, they followed their heart’s desire; it led them deeper into the forest.

  26 The Shackles of Darkness

  Elena and Marco had been asleep for a while. After the languid energy of the day, Elena longed for togetherness, and she and Marco zipped their separate sleeping bags into one. They now slept in a large sleeping bag that accommodated them both. Within their enlarged sleeping arrangement, Elena drifted toward her edge and Marco toward his. Knowing she could reach over and touch her lover at any moment was sufficient for Elena.

  Sitting Bear stayed up with the fire after they went to sleep, but eventually even he closed his eyes for the dream world. His chest rose and lowered evenly. He slept directly on the earth close to the fire so it could keep him warm during the chill of desert nights.

  At least three pairs of eyes watched the adventurers rest. One of the men was so focused on the opportunity to attack that he remained unaware of those that looked on as he observed Elena, Marco, and Sitting Bear.

  But he discovered their presence rapidly when he moved to attack. Before he could reach his first target, the second man and an animal pounced, taking him down in what seemed like coordinated attack. The defense was so ferocious that the intending attacker couldn’t readily tell which was man and which was animal until the man’s hands wrapped around him and held him down. The animal bared his teeth, lips pulled back, daring the prowler to attempt his attack against Elena again.

  In the pale moonlight, the intruder couldn’t make out the animal’s sleek silver coat or the rippling muscles beneath it. But he could hear the threatening pitch of the coyote’s growl. He felt the strength of the man’s arms that restrained him, and he resigned from any further fight. It was not from the rumblings of his conscience; it was simply a creature knowing when he is overpowered and choosing to conserve his strength.

  Awakened from the trained light sleep of a warrior out in nature, Sitting Bear rushed to Coyote’s side, knife in hand. Once it was clear that man and animal had the situation under control, Sitting Bear relaxed his stance.

  Elena and Marco, startled awake too, realized immediately that the threat had been neutralized, and so they watched, alert, from the confines of their sleeping bag. Elena recognized Willem as the man that constrained her would-be attacker, and her heart thumped as she saw the silver mane of her coyote friend. She had shared just one, powerful interaction with each of these souls, and yet they had come to their rescue. She was speechless.

  “Thank you,” Sitting Bear said to Willem. His voice was gruff.

  Sitting Bear turned toward Coyote next. He gave Coyote a meaningful nod of thanks while looking the creature in the eyes. Coyote accepted Sitting Bear’s gratitude, and then Coyote looked at Elena. After meeting her eyes, he turned in the opposite direction and stalked off. Before long, not even the silver light of the moon could find his mane; the night had swallowed him.

  Marco searched inside his backpack until he found what he was looking for. Then he walked in bare feet over to Willem, who still held their would-be attacker down. Sitting Bear looked at the rope Marco held in his hands, and he tentatively reached for it. Marco handed the rope over and observed Sitting Bear expertly tie first the man’s hands and then his feet. Finally, Sitting Bear bound the man’s hands and feet together so there was no chance he could break free.

  While Sitting Bear and Marco focused on their aggressor, Elena looked at Willem. She met his gaze as she had Coyote’s. Then Willem, like Coyote, retreated silently into the night. By the time Sitting Bear was satisfied his knots would hold, and the two men looked up, the person who had come to their rescue was gone, engulfed by the dark of night.

  Elena stayed where
she was. Even though their attacker looked normal in his appearance, she could feel darkness hanging over him, and it made her shudder. She looked away.

  Sitting Bear and Marco did a good impersonation of the good-cop-bad-cop routine, but they received no answers from this middle-aged man who looked like he drove an average car and lived in an average house in the suburbs. Neither Sitting Bear nor Marco was willing to use violence to elicit information. When the man did not respond to their intimidation tactics, Sitting Bear and Marco gave up.

  They decided to turn him over to the police instead. They weren’t sure if they were allowed to be camping there, and they especially didn’t want to bring any unwelcome attention to the pyramid, so they loaded the man into their car and drove him to the police station. Marco offered to drive the man by himself, but neither Sitting Bear nor Elena thought it was a good idea. They still didn’t know anything about this man or why he had been all the way out here in this isolated setting plotting to attack them.

  After all the out-of-this-world experiences they’d had over the last many months, Elena didn’t want Marco riding with the man alone. They couldn’t be sure he didn’t have some kind of unusual powers or effect on people. If all three of them were together, they had a higher chance of coming out of the situation in a better way. At least, that’s how Elena saw it. Besides, it’s not like one of them needed to stay behind to guard the pyramid. The pyramid had survived very well without their help for thousands of years. It would make it at least one more night unattended.

  Sitting Bear volunteered to sit in back with the prisoner. He stuffed the man in the back seat next to him, and this was no easy feat, because Sitting Bear refused to untie the man’s hands from his feet. Sitting Bear had loosened the rope some so the man could hobble the distance to the car, but the slack was not much.

  Sitting Bear’s stare alone would have been sufficient to cause many better men to shrivel and repent, but not this man. There was something terribly off about the man, and Elena began to suspect he may be crazy. There was an imbalance within him that showed all the way through to his eyes. Anyone who knew what to look for could see it.

  The man was dark, and Elena didn’t like it. She lowered the window of the passenger seat to the cool, crisp air of the desert night. She breathed in the clean air until she completely filled her lungs with it. Then she released the air slowly. She closed her eyes and focused on expanding her light. She pulled light in through the crown of her head, and then she moved it all the way down her body, letting it go into the metal shell of the car beneath her feet. Eventually, the light found its way through the metal and into the earth. Elena connected to the earth and to the heavens at the same time. After all, she was a creature of both.

  Elena encouraged this light to spread throughout her body. Light radiated within every particle of her being. She looked within herself and imagined the light completely filling her, and so it did.

  In the back seat, Sitting Bear’s eyes grew wide. A faint yellow glow encompassed Elena’s entire body until it touched Marco’s similar radiance. He had been doing the same thing as she had.

  As the beloveds’ luminescence grew stronger, the man, previously silent, began to thrash, kick against his bindings, and scream, all at once. Neither Elena nor Marco turned. They held their connections to the light strong, and they looked forward, toward the beauty of the future moment that lay just a second ahead.

  From the back, it looked as if angels were driving the car, and the man possessed by darkness retreated from their light in desperation. He sniveled. His features changed right before Sitting Bear’s appraising eyes. The normal-looking man became ugly. A subtle distortion of his face exposed the hideousness within him.

  His eyes revealed inner torment; his eyebrows cinched down in fear; his lips bared back over dull teeth; and his nostrils flared. Elena, in compassion, began to speak softly. But her words grew in volume and in strength as she approached her crescendo.

  “I call on the divine white healing Light of unconditional love of Creator God to come fill and surround this man, this perfect child of Creator who has lost his way, to extend down to the core of the earth and carry away any worries, any concerns, any anxieties, any doubts, any negativities, and transform them into pure energy of the universe.

  “I ask for a super bubble filled with Light to encapsulate the demon attached to this man.

  “I command in the name of Creator God that the demon attached to this man release its hold on him and step away now,” Elena said with a calm strength that sent a shiver down the full length of Sitting Bear’s body.

  “I call on the Archangels Michael and Uriel and the Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth to take the demon to the place of confinement, to the womb of transformation, now.”

  Sitting Bear saw the demon’s desperation flash through the man’s eyes as the demon struggled to keep its hold. But faced with Elena’s invocation of intervention, the demon could not. Sitting Bear watched the demon leave; he saw the change in the man’s eyes. Even in the dim back seat, Sitting Bear noticed the difference. Light returned to the man’s eyes, and they shone mutely from the man’s contorted position against the car seat.

  “I call to the Archangel Raphael and the angelic realm to come heal any harm or damage to this man’s mind, energy body, and physical body done by the demon during the time it was attached.”

  Now Elena proceeded softly, as if she spoke only to herself. “I give thanks of gratitude from my heart to the archangels and the angelic realm for their help with this clearing.”

  Then there was serenity. A deep stillness filled the air. Elena, Marco, and Sitting Bear sighed as one. They were loving, compassionate people, and they sympathized with the suffering the darkness had imposed on this man.

  Marco broke the brief silence that had filled the space so fully.

  “I ask the angels to do a soul retrieval for this man, to return all soul parts that have fragmented off at times of trauma and pain, that he may be spiritually whole and strong.”

  Sitting Bear blinked his eyes in amazement at the flurry of small, glowing spheres of light that materialized, traveling toward the man. But the man did not witness this miracle. The deep relief of his soul captivated him. He had finally broken free of the shackles of darkness, and he closed his eyes in repose.

  But Sitting Bear saw it. If he hadn’t been a believer in the magic of life already, he would have been from then on.

  They drove down unlit dirt roads of the Utah desert, with two angels in human bodies glowing in the front seat, and with the soul of an unknown man celebrating its returned pieces in the back. And Sitting Bear witnessed it all. He grinned a smile bigger than any he ever had before and shared it with the cold, still night outside his window.

  He had wondered why Spirit had led him to help this woman, and now he was glimpsing the reason. She and her beloved were unlike any people Sitting Bear had met before. He believed he would follow them anywhere to help them in any way he could. He doubted there was anything more important he could do right now.

  Thunder Gods and his siblings, Swift Horse and Sky Elk, traveled these lands together once more. Sitting Bear couldn’t wait to see what the next moment held. Still, he embraced and held this one before it passed. His heart leapt in joy and gratitude, and Elena and Marco’s glow expanded just a little bit more.

  27 The Secret to Freedom

  Sitting Bear headed down the concrete steps of the police station first. Marco followed, and Elena brought up the rear. They were frustrated. They had spent much of the night reviewing the events with a series of police officers, culminating with the detective who would handle the case. Despite the clearing in the car, their attacker wasn’t talking. He denied everything and asked for an attorney.

  But Elena wasn’t concerned with him anymore. She was worried about the conclusion she, Marco, and Sitting Bear had reached: their attacker was only an underling. Someone else was commanding this middle-aged, otherwise-ordinary man to act
. The man possessed neither the determination nor the intelligence to locate them and hunt them down. He behaved like the kind of person who took orders, not the one who gave them. He lacked the passion it took to determine a need for attack and then to orchestrate it. There had to be someone else involved.

  Marco drove them back to the pyramid. There were still a few hours left before sunrise.

  “So, it doesn’t really matter who this man is then?” Elena asked. She was trying to work it all out.

  “That’s right,” Marco said.

  “We should only be concerned with who ordered him to attack us?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how do we find him? The one who ordered the attack?”

  “We don’t.”

  “We wait for him to find us.” Sitting Bear spoke up from the back seat.

  Elena turned to look out the passenger seat window into the cool night. She didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Isn’t there something we can do instead of just wait?” Elena asked. Patience was not one of her strengths.

  “Yes,” Marco said, “we can keep doing what we are here to do. That is more important than anything else.

  “We are light warriors. We need to act like light warriors. We continue working toward understanding the pyramid and how to use it. We keep listening to our guidance, and each moment we become more the people we are capable of being.”

  What Marco said worked. Elena felt encouraged after just those few sentences.

  “Remember what we went through in Sedona, amore. We have an important reason for being, and there are many vital things we have come to earth to do.

  “A little darkness does not matter, amore. Light is always stronger than the darkness. Remember that.”

  Sitting Bear, who had seen them glowing like otherworldly beings when they traveled this same road in the opposite direction, nodded to himself in affirmation. To him, it was obvious that what Marco said was right. Elena and Marco were on earth to do something incredible. That much was clear to Sitting Bear. He had seen them do too many incredible things, most unplanned, in the short time he had known them.