Okay, Crazy, it’s now or never. Go with subtle. Just grab his hand. If he looks at you like you’re insane, pull him to the kitchen and pretend like you were just offering him some ice cream. Yeah, that’s it. Okay, now do it.
Lucy turned her body and started to slide over to Benjamin. As she gently reached out her hand toward his, her father’s voice broke in and derailed the entire maneuver.
“Lucy, why don’t you take Ben in and get some ice cream.”
She was so thrown off course that she actually ran into the side of Benjamin, and he was forced to catch her before she fell to the floor.
“Whoa there, Goosey; watch that first step.” James chuckled to himself, garnering a sympathetic laugh from Peter.
Benjamin’s arms around her waist, while humiliating, felt so good. But, her father’s instant comment caused her face to flush, her cheeks hot.
What was that, you moron? What is wrong with you? Her self-chiding was starting to become too commonplace. She felt she was probably in danger of driving her own self-esteem down to nothing.
“I guess it’s my turn again to ask if you’re okay.” Benjamin’s voice was so soothing, she wished she could just cuddle into his chest and lose herself there.
Regaining her footing, she responded, “Yeah, I’m fine, just in danger of stupiding myself to death.”
She covered her blistering cheeks with her hands and gestured for him to follow her to the kitchen. Benjamin softly laughed and followed her.
Because of Lucy’s proficiency at committing every party foul known to man, Laura greeted Benjamin as they entered the kitchen and offered him some ice cream. He kindly declined, citing the sizeable meal he had just finished.
“Well, I’ll just leave you two alone to finish cleaning up the kitchen for me while I go take a bath.” Laura hung her dishtowel on Lucy’s shoulder and kissed her daughter goodnight. “It was a pleasure seeing you again, Benjamin.”
“Likewise, Mrs. Higgins.”
The two shared a courteous smile, and Laura disappeared upstairs.
Lucy waited until her mother was completely gone before she even attempted to engage Benjamin in conversation.
“This is a little awkward; I’m going to do the dishes while you watch.”
“Well, I’m no stranger to doing dishes; let me help you.”
Sliding up next to Lucy, he manned the rinse sprayer and immediately got to work rinsing suds off of the bigger pots and pans and placing them into the dish drainer at the edge of the sink.
Nothing was said for quite some time. Lucy was content to enjoy his company while she struggled with a way to broach the subject of the haven and light and everything.
It was difficult not to notice once again that Benjamin seemed a little preoccupied or tense. Every so often he would look up from what he was doing and look out the window, his eyes scanning everything that could be seen without actually moving his head from side to side. He seemed almost skittish, like he was waiting for something to happen. Lucy stopped what she was doing.
“What’s the matter; are you waiting for someone?”
Benjamin finished rinsing the last dish and dried his hands. “No, I’m not waiting for anything. Why?”
“It’s just that you keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking out the window.”
“Oh, that,” He chuckled and folded the towel neatly and placed it on the counter. “I thought I saw a short person walking around with a rifle in his hands.”
Lucy rolled her eyes, looking out the window. “That’s just Russell, the boy up the street. He’s always shooting things.”
Lucy stopped. This is it, she thought to herself. This is the perfect segue; you have to do it now.
“In fact, he shot a bird the other day in our front yard. I found it by the tree out front.”
She watched Benjamin closely to see if there was any amount of recognition; maybe he would remember her saying something about it in the grove.
“What a horrible thing to do.”
That wasn’t exactly what she wanted, so she pressed on. “Yeah, I actually picked it up while it was dead.”
She paused, and Benjamin responded discouragingly once again.
“Wow, there aren’t a lot of people who would do that.”
Lucy continued on. “But the weirdest part was, while I was sitting there holding it, I could almost, sort of, feel this kind of energy flowing from me into the bird.”
Another pause; Benjamin waited fixedly on Lucy’s every word as if truly intrigued by the story. She went on.
“And it was the strangest thing, but …”
“It came back to life,” Benjamin chimed in.
Lucy looked at him, stunned. Her mouth hung open in disbelief that he would just throw it out there, proving finally that he was the same Benjamin in the forest, that he had been having the dreams or experiences, too. But Lucy, being unable to trust even herself anymore, decided to ask one more question before playing her hand.
“How did you know I was going to say that?”
It was Benjamin’s turn to look shocked. “What? That’s what you were going to say? I’m sorry; I was just trying to be funny. What a coincidence.”
He smiled and laughed at his good fortune, but Lucy wasn’t amused. She turned back to the sink to ring out a washcloth to wipe down the counter.
Benjamin could see that he had upset her, so he moved immediately to mop up his own little mess. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
Before he could finish, Peter and James came into the kitchen. “Well, I think it’s time for us to head out and leave these fine folks to their evening.”
Peter’s voice had the same calming effect to it that Lucy had noticed in Benjamin. Though they were at least fifteen years apart in age, they were definitely brothers.
Lucy didn’t look up from her task at the counter; she was hurt and didn’t feel like reciprocating pleasantries.
Benjamin never got the opportunity to finish his sentence before he was swept away by his brother’s hand.
Lucy could hear her father bid the two farewell, and by the time the door had closed and James had secured it with the deadbolt, she had retreated upstairs to her room in tears.
Chapter 13
Lucy sighed heavily as she realized she was, again, sitting in the rainforest grove.
“Please don’t be here,” she said under her breath tiredly.
It was bad enough that Benjamin constantly disappointed her waking life; she didn’t want to have to relive it in her dreams. Then she felt him; she felt his presence just like she had in the classroom. She refused to turn around. She heard his footsteps come up behind her and felt his hands on her shoulders. He spoke softly in her ear.
“I told you out there that I would deny everything. I didn’t lie. You can try, but I won’t be able to talk with you about what happens in here when I’m out there.”
It was difficult to believe that the two Benjamins were in fact the same person.
“Then what’s the point of any of this?” she lashed out.
“I promise I will tell you everything in time, but there are things that you need to know first. Everything will make sense soon.”
“Good, because this whole thing with not being able to even approach the real you about any of this is really getting old.” Lucy didn’t hide her frustration.
“I need to tell you about my past before any of this can make sense. Some of it is still going to be hard to understand, and some of it might even be a little bit …” He looked away for a moment.
“What?” Lucy prodded.
“It might be kind of frightening.” He let the words sink in.
Lucy rolled them around in her head. “Fine, whatever, but I need to know,” Lucy said impatiently, realizing she was sick of waiting.
“In that case, I think we should probably get comfortable.”
The two of them sat on the fallen tree trunk as Benjamin started talk
ing.
“Lucy, I’ve lied to you about my age. I’m not really seventeen; I’m eighteen.”
Lucy looked at him with wide-eyed incredulity and threw her hands in the air. “So what? You’re eighteen, big deal; what does that have to do with anything?”
“I turned eighteen … more than two thousand years ago, Lucy.”
There was silence between them. All that could be heard were the birds in the trees and the wind gently blowing through the branches.
“Okay, I’m listening.” Lucy said as her heart rate began to pick up a little bit.
“I come from a city that doesn’t exist anymore. At least, it doesn’t exist on earth anymore. I showed it to you. It is a city called Zharem.”
Lucy’s expression softened.
“The people of Zharem have abilities that the people of the rest of the world do not have. You’re starting to develop those abilities.”
Lucy looked down at her hands. “I am?”
“Yes, and my story will help you understand why. But I need to know if you think you’re ready to hear it.”
Lucy looked surprised at the question. “Me? How do I know if I’m ready to hear something that I still think I’m making up in my own head?”
“Because, Lucy, deep down I know you believe this place is not in your head, and you know that what I tell you in here is important. My past is about to become your present and I’ll tell you right now, it’s not normal—not how you see normal, anyway.”
He was right; Lucy knew he was right. She did believe it. That fantastical side of her personality had believed it from the beginning, but the logical side was starting to cross the line.
“I can’t go back, can I?”
Benjamin looked compassionately into her eyes and gently shook his head. “No, you can’t.”
Lucy looked at her hands again, the source of the supposed light power she was developing. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes for a moment. I hope you know what you’re doing, Luce, the logical half of her brain said to the fantastical half. She opened her eyes and looked at Benjamin.
“Yes, I want to know,” she said. She decided that a leap of faith was better than wondering for the rest of her life.
Benjamin looked at her, displaying a still compassionate, but very pleased expression on his face.
“Okay,” he said smiling.
He paused for a second, as if choosing a place to start.
“Nearly three-thousand years ago, everything changed for my people.” He began like he was telling a story, and Lucy appreciated the simplicity. “We were a highly advanced civilization, like the world is today, but instead of electricity, we had the light. Through generations of kings and queens ruling with their different philosophies, we were graced with a monarchy that started us down a road that would lead us to the world I was born into: a world without war, a world of unity, where every person worked for the betterment of mankind. We were unique in the world, but it took a tragedy to get us to that point.”
Lucy sat with her legs crossed in front of her and her senses focused directly on Benjamin’s every word.
“About one thousand years before I was born, our queen and her special guardian, having been somehow bated outside the city, were captured by an invading city’s army in this very forest. They were both killed.” Benjamin stopped himself for a moment.
“First, the guardian was tortured and killed for information about weaknesses in Zharem’s defenses; but the guardian was strong, and she sacrificed her own life in order to keep her knowledge safe. Our beloved queen was then killed by an evil sorcerer named Krohan. He wanted her light to be part of him, so he performed what is roughly translated as an extraction. He would absorb as much knowledge as she had and then he would take what was left of her light and store it in his body.”
A shiver went up Lucy’s back. The very explanation of the process sounded evil and she felt a strange, intense sorrow for the queen.
“He wasn’t able to extract her completely, so he killed her after the king’s special army had slain every man, woman, and child in Krohan’s city, searching for the queen. When they finally caught up to Krohan and the queen, it was almost too late. Right in front of the captains of the king’s army, Krohan absorbed the remaining light of the queen, leaving her nothing but an empty shell.”
“What did they do?” Lucy said, feeling the burden of the story.
“They couldn’t do anything. Krohan vanished right in front of them, taking the queen’s light with him.”
An odd sort of guilt overtook Lucy as she listened to the story.
“If the army had just gone looking for the queen rather than destroy the city, couldn’t they have saved her?”
Benjamin shrugged. “No one knows why they destroyed the whole city. It was brutal, but we don’t really know the circumstances because the army disappeared. Their two captains were called Klarr and Aux. They were brothers, and they took their army and their story with them.”
“Where did they go?”
Benjamin shrugged again. “No one knows. They just left. Wherever they went, they’re all dead now.”
Lucy considered this army, the queen’s guardian, and extraction, and her whole body shivered. It was scary, and though it should seem so distant, it felt so close to her, like she had been there in that time. She shook aside her thoughts.
“What happened after that? What did the king do?”
“In his despair and grief,” Benjamin continued, “the king demanded that the high priest make him immortal because he knew there would be no heir to the throne without a queen; so, he would be able to atone for failing his kingdom by spending the rest of eternity making Zharem into the perfect city.”
“For nearly one thousand years the king led his people, and they did become the perfect city. There was no jealousy between neighbors; there was no crime and no war to speak of. The people enjoyed great prosperity. It was truly a paradise on earth. Unfortunately, things changed again when the king had an illegitimate son with a servant woman in his palace. Knowing that any child of his would have a right to the throne, he banished the servant and her newborn son to the outer borders of the kingdom.”
“Wait,” Lucy cut in, “the king who decided to live forever because there would never be an heir to his kingdom produced an heir and then banished him? Why?”
“Well, in his successes as king, he had begun to feel that he was the only person who could rule Zharem properly, and any new king might take what he had worked so hard to build and destroy it.” He paused to make sure Lucy grasped what he was saying.
“He sounds kind of selfish. Not to mention, he could have raised the kid to follow in his footsteps.”
“Selfish is one way of looking at it, but he was the greatest king Zharem had ever seen. His judgments were both just and merciful, and his people loved him unequivocally. That’s something you would never see in the world we now live in. Giving that away to a new king would have been a gamble.”
Lucy nodded her head in agreement and motioned him to continue his story.
“When the mistress of the king—her name was Shaharia—and her new son had been suitably arranged outside the city proper, they encountered a man with spectacular—almost magical—powers, who offered to help them with their land and take care of all their needs. In return, Shaharia would simply give him a home in which to stay. Eventually, Shaharia married the man, and the two of them raised the boy together. He taught the boy how to use his own magical powers. The man was Krohan.”
“But, he lived a thousand years before Shaharia was kicked out of the city,” Lucy said curiously.
“That’s true, but how old am I?”
Lucy nodded, conceding her point to Benjamin, but raised another. “Speaking of which, how is it that you’re still alive?”
“I’m getting there,” he responded calmly.
“Okay,” Lucy said, “but tell me this: The evil sorcerer shows up a thousand years after disappearing and decides he
wants to settle down and raise a family?”
Benjamin chuckled. “Not exactly. He knew who her son was, that he was royalty by birth, so he raised him because he wanted to use him to kill the king and take control of Zharem.”
“So Krohan used the king’s own son to kill him?”
“Yes,” Benjamin answered directly.
“But how did he know the kid was royalty?”
“Remember that Krohan carried the light of the queen inside him. It made him sensitive to anything she would be sensitive to, and when Krohan came across them, the queen’s light identified the boy as royalty.”
Lucy mulled over the information, shaking her head. She understood so little about the ability or gift she had that the thought that it could be sucked out of her, thereby killing her, gave her the creeps, so she tried to steer the conversation away from the bad guy.
“So, you said that you’re two-thousand years old and the story is not at the two-thousand mark; where do you come in?”
Benjamin smiled at her astuteness. “That’s what I was just about to tell you.” He nodded approvingly in Lucy’s direction. “When I was eight years old, my father was made the high priest of our people by undergoing a ceremony we call the Transfiguring. He is able to use any light of any kind for the good use of mankind. Our high priest before him, we thought, was the most powerful being on earth, until the king was killed by his own bastard son, who had grown so powerful under the tutelage of Krohan, that not only could he use the light, but he could take it from an unwilling victim. Our high priest is unable to do that.”
“Why is he unable to take it?”
“Well, I guess it’s not that he can’t, it’s that he won’t. We didn’t fully understand the practice of restraint like that until Krohan. The reason we don’t steal life is because once you forcefully take the light of a person or other living thing, your own light begins to turn dark, and you become incapable of distinguishing good from evil. The thirst for more light controls your body; you become addicted, a slave to your own desires. When your every thought is on getting more light, you kill for the sake of getting more. You are so desensitized to the value of human life that you don’t care that you are killing innocent people, you only want the light they possess. That insatiable need for light turns you into an inhuman creature. A creature we call a reaper.”
Immortal Light: Wide Awake Page 17