Aurelius and I

by Benjamin James Barnard

  “I think so,” I said. “It looks like the same one, only ... bigger.”

  “That’s because it is the same one,” Ophelia said solemnly.

  “But how is that possible?”

  “Because it, he, is a daylet,” she said solemnly.

  “Oh blimey,” exclaimed Grahndel, “I think you’re right. I never really believed they existed.”

  “What’s a daylet?” I asked, wholly bewildered once more.

  “A daylet, Charlie, is what you are holding in your hand,” said the princess. “It is thought that they may be part of the same evolutionary family as fairies, but nobody really knows because nobody has ever been able to study them properly, well not live ones anyway, they’re extremely rare...because they go from birth to old age and finally death in the space of a single day.”

  Suddenly I understood why my companions had become so glum since identifying the creature sat in the palm of my hand. As it stared trustingly up at me with its innocent young eyes it was all I could do to hold back my tears at the thought of its imminent and inevitable passing.

  “Food,” it repeated, amazing me all over again with how incredibly quick it was not only to grow, but also to learn. In barely more than an hour it had taught itself to speak. It was truly miraculous, and I was instantly able to recollect why I had previously found the creature to be so inspirational.

  “Food Dadda!” it said again, looking right at me.

  “What should we call it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Ophelia. “You already gave him a name, remember, his name is Daisy.”

  “Yes, but that was when I thought he was a girl. Daisy is a girl’s name, we’ll have to change it.”

  “Why? Daisy may be a girl’s name in your boring old human world, but here in the forest, it is simply the name of a flower – neither male nor female, just a flower.”

  “But isn’t being named after a flower a little, you know...girly?”

  “Nonsense I once had a cousin named geranium, and he was the toughest of the tough. He’d have pulled the arms off anyone who called him girly.”

  “Still, I don’t know...”

  “Daisy!” squeaked the tiny orphan, fatally undermining my case for a change of name before I could finish putting it. Ophelia didn’t bother to speak, she simply raised her eyebrow at me, in full knowledge that, as usual, she had won her argument.

  “Daisy!” the little fellow repeated gleefully. “Daisy hungry!”

  “I suggest,” said Ophelia, “that you spend a little less time worrying about the name of your new adoptee, and a little more time thinking about how you can feed it.”

  She was right of course (need I even mention such a fact anymore?), but where was I going to find food for the tiny fellow when, as it turned out, none of us had any idea what daylets ate. What I did know was that he was hungry, and so was I. It was that thought that eventually provided me with an answer.

  “Come on guys, hop into the rucksack, I know a place where we can get something to eat.”

  Chapter 28

  It had taken nearly two hours of trekking before Aurelius’s cottage eventually came into view. A fact that was largely my own fault for opting not to reveal our destination until I was well and truly lost, having marched confidently in the wrong direction for more than forty minutes.

  “Finally. I’m starving...not that I’m blaming anybody in particular,” whinged Grahndel, staring deliberately at me.

  “Look, its not my fault if you were too fussy to eat any of the many thousands of acorns we walked past along the way is it? Daisy, Ophelia and I have no choice but to be hungry but you’re just picky, so why don’t you just shut up for once?” I felt a little guilty at the harshness of my words, but I was tired and hungry, and beginning to feel the pressure of the level of responsibility that had been placed upon my young shoulders.

  “Yeah, shut up!” repeated the daylet, whose language skills had developed even further throughout the duration of our search.

  “I think I liked you better when you didn’t speak,” snarled the dragnor.

  “Not to add to your woes, Grahndel,” added Ophelia as we turned onto the windy, white-stone path that lead to Aurelius’s front door, “but what makes you think Aurelius is going to have kept his cupboards stocked with a regular supply of bat dung?”

  “Don’t even say that,” said Grahndel, a look of sheer horror sneaking across his face. “He must do, mustn’t he? I mean, what sort of person owns a house but doesn’t keep a fresh supply of bat droppings in their larder? I mean, that would just be weird wouldn’t it?”

  “Some people might not find that quite such a strange thing, no,” she replied, without even attempting to hide her smile.

  “Will you guys please be quiet,” I hissed. “Aurelius isn’t on our side remember, we don’t know who could be in there.”

  “Yeah, be quiet!” the daylet echoed.

  “You too, Daisy.”

  “Oh, me too? Okay.”

  Having descended from their various positions about my person, my now free moving companions formed an orderly queue behind me as we crept slowly and silently toward the broken doorway of Aurelius’s circular cottage. I took the final few steps alone, signalling for the others to stay back until I had checked that it was safe to enter. Despite the fact that the interior of the cottage looked like a jumble sale after an earthquake, its small size and lack of viable hiding places meant that I was able to ascertain very quickly that the space was uninhabited. There were no trolls hidden under the table, no witches lurking in the mysteriously existing corners, and no goblins behind the sofa.

  “All clear,” I said, turning to the others. No sooner had the words left my lips than the hungry dragnor pushed past me and began a disorganised, desperate ransacking of the kitchen cupboards in what was an inevitably futile search for bat droppings. Needless to say he didn’t find any. Indeed, he didn’t really find much of anything. It seemed that every cupboard he searched was bare.

  “I thought you said there’d be food here,” he whined at me.

  “There is, or at least there was. I mean, there must be. Aurelius must eat. He does eat, I’ve helped him collect ingredients. There must be some food somewhere here.”

  “Must be,” echoed the daylet.

  “There is,” said Ophelia, “but I don’t think you’re going to want to eat it.”

  I followed the gaze of the young princess down to the wooden floor where my eyes were met with the answer to the question of what had happened to all the food. There it was, right there in front of us. All of it. All mixed in together. Whoever had ransacked the place had emptied every cupboard during their search for who-knew-what, with little care for their contents. As a result, all the jars and tins of various food products now lay together in a disgusting gloop on the floor. Strawberry Jam created a marbled effect with baked beans, chocolate ice cream melted unappetisingly over beef stew, mayonnaise was united in an unholy alliance with a tub of hundreds and thousands. It was revolting - and, of course, entirely inedible, not least because tiny shards of glass from the shattered jars that glittered throughout the concoction.

  “Oh that’s just great,” moaned Grahndel, “what are we supposed to eat now?”

  “I don’t know, okay,” I snapped, the anger building inside of me. “I haven’t got all the answers you know. I’m not even a Protector. I don’t even know why I’m here. I definitely don’t know what were going to eat. I JUST DON’T KNOW!”

  I screamed with rage, hurling a half-empty tin of tuna fish across the room as I did so. My friends each closed their eyes and dropped to the floor, waiting for it to bounce back off the wall and hit one of them on the head.

  But it didn’t hit any of them. Indeed, it didn’t bounce back at all. I had thrown the little tin with such strength that it had become a missile, tearing a hole c
lean through the wall in the corner of the room on impact. For a moment I just stood there staring, unable to believe my own strength. And then, something struck me as odd. It was a beautiful, sunny day outside, if I had torn a hole clean through the wall, the dingy cottage should have been instantly filled with a stream of bright light. Yet this had not been the case. No light at all was forthcoming. Indeed, if anything, the hole I had made seemed darker than the rest of the room.

  I wandered over to inspect the damage I had done – it was just as I had suspected, I had not been strong enough, even with my magical powers, to hurl a relatively light piece of metal through a solid brick wall. I had however, been strong enough to hurl it through a wall of thin plasterboard.

  “I knew there was something suspicious about corners in a round house,” I said to myself as I began pulling the flimsy plasterboard away with my bare hands.

  “He’s gone crazy,” said the dragnor, finally daring to look up from his position on the floor. “He’s gonna tear the whole place down.”

  I ignored Grahndel’s faithless, pessimistic cries of and carried on my destruction, too eager in my work to provide reassurance to my companions that I had not lost my mind as they looked on with great concern. After several minutes of intensive labour I had created a gap big enough to allow the entire hidden space to be illuminated enough for me to see inside it. Empty. I walked quickly across to the opposite corner and promptly put my fist through it.

  “Charlie?” I heard Ophelia behind me, speaking more quietly and timidly than at any time since I had met her. I couldn’t tell whether it was fear I could hear in her voice, or simply concern. I suspected it was a little of both. “Charlie, it’s going to be okay, we’ll get some food eventually. Destroying this place isn’t going to help.”

  “I’m not trying to destroy the place,” I said, pushing past her and making my way across to the third corner. On my way there I saw a hammer laying amongst the mess on the floor, which I picked up gleefully before turning to Ophelia and informing her with what I now realise must have seemed a quite maniacal smile, that I was merely ‘looking for something.’

  “I don’t think you’re going to find any food in their, Charlie,” she answered gently, but patronisingly as I made light work of the third poorly constructed, fake wall with my new-found, specialist utensil. This time I could not even be bothered to reply. I was all too aware of how mental I must have looked, sweating, hammer-wielding and appearing to have been turned rabid by hunger, but I was simply too excited to explain. Too eager to continue with my task. I was certain that I was on the brink of some greatly important discovery. I had no clue as to what that discovery might be when I found it, or how it might serve to help us in our cause, but I was certain it was there to be found. Well, almost certain. I mean, who would build corners in a circular house for no good reason, right?

  Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones, that’s who.

  I suppose this should not have come as any great surprise. Aurelius was, after all, quite the most eccentric man I had ever come across. And, as everyone knows, ‘eccentric’ is really just a polite way of calling someone a nutter that is reserved for those occasions when it is a posh person who has well and truly lost all trace of any marbles they may once have had. And yet surprise me it did. Indeed, more than that, it angered me. I had really thought I was on to something, but how could I expect to use logic to solve the puzzles of a man who seemed to have so little understanding of the concept of logic?

  “AAAARRRGGH!” I screamed in despair, hurling my hammer at the final corner as I did so. Daisy, Ophelia and Grahndel covered their heads and winced in unison as they awaited the inevitable thump of iron hitting concrete. It duly arrived, and was quickly followed by a second, equally loud thump as the hammer fell to the floor, severely denting the wood as it did so.

  And then came a third.

  The four of us looked immediately to the ravaged corner where the hammer now lay. There should have been no third thump. Something else had fallen, something unseen. Something from behind the plasterboard.

  I rushed over to the substantial hole I had created and peered inside. As my eyes adjusted to the light, a smile returned to my face. There, laying on its side and covered in plaster and splintered wood, was a small wooden chest.

  I carefully removed the chest from its hiding place within the wall and placed it on the ground before my companions. It was made of a strange, dark wood, the likes of which I had never come across before, and was intricately carved with pictures of dragons, and unicorns, and great warriors. Bordering each of the images was a series of strange symbols which appeared somehow other-worldly. Even though I had no experience of such things, the chest appeared, to my young eyes at least, to be very, very old. Perhaps even ancient.

  “Where did that come from?” asked Grahndel, his yellow eyes never leaving the chest. In fact, no-one’s did. We were all totally mesmerised by the intricacy of the carvings, and mystery of the symbols.

  “I don’t really know,” I answered, still fixated on the chest. “I guess there must have been some sort of hidden shelf, or perhaps a false ceiling.”

  “Well, it’s here now,” said Ophelia. “So what are we going to do with it?”

  “Open it, I guess.”

  It seemed like the obvious answer, and yet it was not one I had put forward lightly. Somehow the box just seemed to have a sort of presence, a sense of power about it. Though it was simply a small wooden chest, one couldn’t help but feel that it was, at the same time, something much more than that. Something important. Something powerful. Something that should not be opened without a sense of foreboding. Something that, once opened, may serve to change the very course of our destiny.

  “Open it! Open it!” yelled Daisy, who, just as you would expect from one so young, had all the patience of a three-year old on Christmas morning when it came to discovering what was contained in ostentatiously-decorated boxes.

  Gingerly, and with shaking hand, I lifted the lid of the little chest. The interior was every bit as exquisite as the exterior had been. Inside though, there were no intricate carvings or stories told in foreign hand, but merely a lining of deep, dark green velvet, fringed with golden thread and blue diamonds.

  None of us could speak. All we could do was stare at the open chest. But it was not the richness of the velvet that had mesmerised us, nor the shimmering of the diamonds. No, the discovery that had stolen the words from each of us was the discovery of what the chest contained, or rather, what it was built to contain, and the terrible realisation of what that meant. For the floor of the box was not simply flat, but artfully moulded so as to provide the perfect fit for one specific object – the curved blade of a scimitar.

  Chapter 29

  Hungry and dejected, we left Aurelius’s cottage and wandered aimlessly and silently into the woods, each of us taking some time alone with our thoughts - except Daisy that is, who had once again fallen into slumber. I found it both incredible and incredibly tragic how one who lived for such a short time could spend so much of that life unconscious.

  Not for the first time that day I was feeling the pressures of leadership and wondering whether my so-called gift was not in fact a curse when one considered the immense responsibility that it had brought with it. Only a short time ago the biggest questions in my life were based around how best to wangle my way out bath night and which flavour of custard was superior (a philosophical conundrum I am yet to settle with myself – chocolate seems more exciting on the face of it, but vanilla is far more versatile as an accompaniment). Now though, a great many lives hung on everything I said and did, and at that moment I had no clue of what to say or do, or even think.

  Our discovery at the cottage had briefly rekindled my faith in Aurelius; Why, I had asked myself aloud, would he have gone to such trouble to hide the box of the scimitar if he was evil? And why would Blackheart and his men have found it necessary t
o ransack the cottage if Aurelius had handed them the scimitar willingly? The answer to these questions, which Grahndel had been so eager to point out, was as obvious as it was unwelcome; Aurelius and Blackheart had had no way of knowing that my companions and I would witness their collusion at the caves, and, had we not done so, our discovery of the fernator’s wrecked abode would have assisted in the tundrala’s web of deception by leading us to continue in our belief that Aurelius was still on our side and had been taken against his will.

  Whilst I did not want to hear the fernator’s words I felt it impossible to deny the logic of them. In light of the ‘deal’ I had witnessed Aurelius and Blackheart discussing, and the confidence the latter seemed to hold in the successful completion of The Professor’s evil plan, their seemed no other plausible explanation for the fact that the scimitar was missing. As uncomfortable as it may have been, it seemed almost certain was that the man who I had called my friend, the man who had introduced me to all these wonders, was the very man who would seek to destroy them. I knew I couldn’t let that happen. What I did not know was how I could stop it from doing so. And so, with no answer to this question, and therefore no plan regarding what to do next, we simply walked.

  I couldn’t tell you how much time passed while we wandered aimlessly in the cloud of hopeless silence which had fallen over us all in the face of yet another setback, but I suspect that it was well over an hour, for by the time we spoke again dusk had begun to settle on what was the longest of days.

  “TOOWIT-TOOWOO!”

  “What was that?” cried Ophelia, who had been buzzing her own way through the forest being as we had nowhere to go and hence no reason to hurry.

  “What was what?” I snapped, unhappy to have been pulled from my own miserable private musings.

  “That noise, didn’t you here it?”

  “What noise? I didn’t hear anything.”