The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1)

by Rae T. Alexander

  In the Words of Sam

  I slightly stumbled as I navigated across the two seats to get into the window seat of the crowded commercial jetliner. I was not the man that I used to be. The narrowness of the cabin seating became more pronounced every year that I traveled. I arrived at the end of the cramped row, and I sat down with much relief. I engaged the whirling and spitting sound of the air conditioner above me and then confirmed the limited view through the usual dirty oval window. I sat in the seat thinking of my younger days and some of the events that brought me to my current state.

  I was on my way to North Carolina to see Sylvia Reeves, to obtain the stones that enabled time travel. I had to arrive before Peter! As I reclined in my uncomfortable seat, soon after takeoff, I kindly refused any beverage, and then I drifted into a half sleep and remembered the old days of long ago.

  Many time travelers suffered from something now called hypnagogia. It was one of the aftereffects of the experience—this half awake and half sleep state of mind. Many of us that experienced and suffered from this hypnotic malady, myself included, were deeply in touch with our feelings and dreams. Although, many people failed to regain their memories after the time travel journey was completed, which often resulted in unresolved apprehensions, hallucinations, and an absolute terror in the night! There were often good candidates to guard the ancient and royal stones, but only a handful of those chosen succeeded in guarding the precious relics. The total loss of memory and identity frequently drove people to insanity.

  It was the reason transference was discouraged. It had extreme psychological consequences. It was a practice that was only allowed under threat of life or if the stones were in danger. I have often wondered if the terror of not knowing your past was greater than knowing your past and all of its details. I was fortunate because I had the latter experience—my memories remained intact.

  As to the organization, the Guardians did not have a formal organization before the existence of the Knights because the Guardians were small and secretive. Usually represented by a very small family unit, members were often in groups of two to five people. A husband and his wife were a typical team. Children were possible, but not always. In fact, many Guardians became sterile if they participated in multiple occasions of transference. Small groups were the norm.

  These smaller and localized groups attempted several times to develop some managerial or political relationships between other groups in other countries, or regions. There were attempts to bridge the great geographical distances, but most of them gradually lost touch with their initial mission, either because of misuse of power, or just simple memory loss.

  The grounding of a memory attachment was essential during transference. It was why many of the fifty knights at the time of King Arthur either disbanded or went mad. Even today, you may be aware of someone who has lost touch with reality due to disassociation with his or her past or present memories. Having no memory—a vacant mind—leads to the destruction of the brain.

  Often, when two persons traveled together, one kept their memory, and the other did not. In these cases, the one without the memory was often a kept person, or in some cases enslaved or rudely used by the other person. Again, there were good reasons not to use transference. The banning of it was easy to understand.

  There were also moral reasons not to practice the art of transference. It was considered unethical to move and use a dead body. It was thought of as heretical by many who were religious. Many of those that succeeded in being transferred and showed any signs of madness were often accused, tried, and killed for being a witch. It was much easier to hide the transference when you simply moved through space to a different location. But it was very difficult to assume the circumstance and life of another shell of flesh, without the substance of familiarity of the prior person’s circumstances. For a person that experienced transference was never guaranteed the type of body inside of which they would start their new life.

  I was a fortunate one. I was guarded and protected by a mother who knew the deep magic and power of the stones. Moreover, when a time of great peril came for me, to the point where my life was threatened, I committed the ultimate heresy—or, rather someone committed the heresy upon me. I did not participate in it actively; instead, my protective mother was the one that banished me.

  My mother was a witch, pure and simple. She lived in a village called Ein Dor. Biblical record and history even note her existence. I knew of no other living person who could claim this about their mother.

  I knew little about my mother’s past, other than what she told me. She told me that her ancestors were the first ones to guard the sacred Sword of Gan Eden. She said that some of my ancestors were slaves, but some were of royal blood. I never knew if what she spoke was the truth. She even claimed that her ancestors mated with those from the other world below, the evil ones, or the Anakites. I had their blood in me, so she told me.

  I knew little about the origins of the Anakites. I only knew the legends that the Guardians had passed on about them. I knew these legends because my father was a Guardian, long before the organization known as the Knights. I knew that the Anakites once fought for the control of the ancient Sword of Gan Eden. I knew that they sought the fabled power of the ancient stones, stones that existed at the dawn of time. My father told me that most of the Anakites were defeated in a battle with the great Living Spirit—killed or driven underground to the world far below ours. It was all merely a legend of course.

  Some said that the Anakites originally came from the sky. Some said that they knew the ancient Living Spirit before any creation of a garden. Whatever their origin, whatever their past, many stories of their mating and living with humans existed. Perhaps their reasons were for love, or perhaps, as some have suggested, they mated to survive an alien planet.

  I was always unsure of my origins and my relationship to the Anakites, but that lack of certainty never greatly disturbed me. My father taught me to look for the good in life, be my own person, value the good of your past, and to learn from the bad.

  It was the accusations of gossiping neighbors that initiated the malicious rumors of my breeding, not my parents. It was always the case of anyone that looked or acted differently than their companions or associates. Differences created prejudices, and prejudices created discriminations. The mistreatment of others was often the result of fear, not hatred, and many around us feared our family.

  We were reclusive. We did not participate in many of the religious activities that our neighbors did. We lived in a community, but we did not have many friends.

  We had small differences in our hair and fingernails, and we did not resemble the typical Israelite or Philistine. We had narrow and circular double eyelids and dark and greenish skin. We also resembled no other clan member that surrounded us. We had no other living or known relatives like everyone else had. We were different, and this caused great fear.

  Fear was the power that drove the persecution of my father. It ultimately caused his death. He was a possessor of some of the stones of Eden, and he was the protector of the Sword of Gan Eden.

  Sworn to secrecy, he told no one of his mission. He kept his business to himself, but he never picked this life as his ideal life. His possession of these artifacts was by inheritance only. He did not choose his destiny. His destiny chose him.

  My father was, in fact, a deeply religious man, and he had intentionally avoided the practice of transference. He regarded the body of a human being with great respect. He was one of the many that wished to die a natural death—not extended, or unnaturally prolonged.

  There was a time that I believed that my mother shared in the sacredness of my father’s beliefs. After all, she had married my father, and she was welcomed into the tribe of the Danites—even though she was an outsider. She was an Anakite, and my father was not. Nevertheless, after a man known as Saul murdered my father in cold blood, my mother turned away from any potential of goodness and walked instead on the pathway of reveng
e.

  It was a thousand years before the birth of one called the Christ. It was a time when tribes of the Semitic people of the Near East, known as the Sons of Israel, struggled under a new king, King Saul. To gain strength among those that did not see him worthy of being a king, King Saul abolished the practice of witchcraft and idol worship. Anyone in those days of persecution remotely associated with witchcraft or divination was subject to immediate execution by the king’s orders.

  My father was one of those people accused of witchcraft, and, during a night raid that interrupted a meeting of the Guardians of that time, his punishment was disembowelment. King Saul’s men slaughtered every adult male in the local tribe—in one night.

  There was a rumor that a meeting was taking place that involved magical stones, and gossips immediately assumed witchcraft was the subject matter. Dark, mysterious, and reclusive men of Ein Dor, who met secretly at night, were considered by many to be involved in something illegal or forbidden.

  With no questions asked, elders of Ein Dor directed Saul’s men to carry out the death sentence. It was the price for looking different, acting different, and being different. The price was death, at the hand of the Israelite, King Saul.

  My mother and I fled out of the city. We went to live with the people of Gath, who gladly received us because they were considered to be a very different people in their land as well. My mother and I had a darker skin tone than others, but some of the people of Gath displayed their differences with their height. My mother told me the main reason that we journeyed to the town of Gath was because of our relationship to their people in a distant past. Perhaps this was our Anakite connection. My mother never disclosed the details, and I was too afraid to find out. But I think I must have known the truth anyway. I always felt deep inside me that I had some connection to the Anakites. Maybe their blood did flow in me, I thought.

  I remember the words that my mother said after she found out about my father’s execution. She said, “The king has accused us of witchery, so I shall become the one thing that he fears the most!” And, true to her words, she did just that.

  She became familiar with dark magic and used that magic in conjunction with several of the most sacred items in the history of the Guardians, the Sword of Gan Eden, and the royal stones. While anyone else may have thought that her witchery was about evil, I knew for certain that it was all about revenge.

  She vowed to end the career of the king. She consorted with the king’s enemies and provided divination on battle outcomes. She conjured mental spells of torment and madness upon King Saul. She even provided to the king’s enemy our most sacred and honored possession, the Sword of Gan Eden, to the giant known as Goliath, to war against and to destroy King Saul.

  As I watched my mother change, I saw this woman as she grew into an abomination. I became greatly discontented with her. When she gave the Guardian’s sword to Goliath, something moved inside of me. Some righteousness swelled within me. I felt that my mother was doing something that my father would never have approved of had he still been alive. She participated in the destruction of human lives with the motive of vengeance. There was no honor in that. In fact, the mission of the Guardians, as my father had taught me, was the preservation of life, and the secrecy of the stones and the sword.

  My mother explained to me, when I confronted her about it, that the stones and sword were being used by God to destroy the abusers of power. She claimed it was God’s will. Throughout time, I saw this same excuse used by multiple thousands of people when they contemplated the killing of another person. God’s will, the will of the Living Spirit, was frequently abused throughout time, even by well-meaning people. Even I was caught up in the spirit of the Crusades when I rode with Merlin and Arthur. Was anyone truly immune to self-righteousness?

  Ultimately, her explanations were not enough for me—my conscience firmly objected to her actions. I disagreed to the point that I resolved to rebel against her and save both the sword and the ancient stones.

  Now, to be clear, every person that guarded a stone had possession of one or two stones at the most, but rarely the possession of much more than that. The stones were usually scattered and kept intentionally apart from the others because of their extraordinary powers. It also kept anyone from using their special combined strength—for some stones had special powers, if used in certain combinations.

  While it was an earlier and ancient goal of the Guardians to gather all of the stones, the later Guardians favored their distribution. The first Guardians believed that the stones, if gathered together, would magically disappear and return to their dimension and source. Later Guardians abandoned that theory.

  The ability to gather all of the stones together that had scattered by way of the Anakites in the ancient times was an unreasonable goal. The goal of keeping their powers secretive became a much higher and much more realistic priority.

  My father always told me, “Never trust your knowledge of the stones or our possession of the sword to anyone!” But my mother violated this, in every possible way. She sold her soul and the sword to an enemy nation for the price of avenging her husband’s murder.

  One day, my disagreement with my mother took official action when I decided to visit King Saul. I planned to reveal her betrayal. I vowed to warn him of the dangers that were coming. I planned to warn him that an Anakite, living among the Philistines in Gath, was on his way to kill him and to annihilate his army. With my knowledge of how to defeat the Anakites, I was going to stop this act of vengeance from taking place, I thought.

  However, King Saul refused to see me. His counselors rejected my wisdom. My warning to them seemed like madness, and I was never allowed to tell the king in my own words the sure method that could be used to defeat his enemy. I knew a secret, but I could not share it with the king.

  The answer to defeating any Anakite, and one of the many reasons for their successful expulsion to an underground world, was their susceptibility to total paralysis by a certain chemical in one of the royal stones. My father taught me this, one day in my youth. A true Anakite became immobilized and unable to move if struck by a sacred black onyx stone.

  The effect of temporary paralyzation allowed for the death of an Anakite. If the head of the Anakite were cut off, during this frozen state, then they would die. However, I was told that the Anakite could avoid this fate if they possessed the stones of transference—the blue and the white royal stones. There was another way for them so survive, but my father did not teach it to me.

  Since I was still considered a youth and had a tale that was unbelievable to the advisors or the king, I was refused several times for the audience that I demanded. It was then that I decided to do the next best thing. I followed a youth that I saw coming out of the tent of King Saul. I spotted him just as I walked away from the King’s Counsel.

  I had heard rumors about this boy by the people that surrounded the king’s tent. They claimed that this youth had seen the king and was prepared to fight the giant, Goliath, and without any armor. Perhaps, this is why I was refused an audience with the king, I thought. The advisors had probably had enough of young kids trying to act as if they were grown men while they spouted unbelievable threats of victory.

  I had an idea as I saw this youth adjust his sling that he had around his neck. It seemed like he was going to the nearby brook to gather some stones to sling at this giant called Goliath. I decided to follow, although at a safe distance. I had a bag of stones with me that I had planned to give to the king. They were five stones of the royal onyx, for the demise of the Anakite, or one I believed to be an Anakite. At that time, I was not sure.

  I followed the boy as he walked along a stream that flowed near the dusty camp of the king, and then I decided to make my move. From a discreet distance, I threw the stones, one by one, into the brook. They plopped into the water. When he heard the first one land, he turned toward the sound that came from the brook. After I had thrown the next one, he turned toward me. It startled
me at first—my cover was blown.

  When he did not react to me, I continued to throw the remaining stones toward his feet and the brook. We exchanged an acknowledgment—as if he knew that I was trying to help him in some way. He looked into the water at the stones. He gathered them and placed them into his pouch around his waist. He looked back and waved at me, but I had found the cover of a rock. I only saw his hand raised slightly while I cautiously peered from the side of a boulder.

  His stones successfully landed the giant later, so I heard, although I wasn’t there to verify it. He had cut off the giant’s head with the giant’s sword and had ended the life of Goliath. Many attributed the powers of the paralyzing stones to the young boy’s God. Whether the source was from the stones or from the Living Spirit, I did not know. I was merely glad that they took the sword away from the Anakite and placed it into the hands of nobler men. A boy named David, as he defeated the giant, destroyed my mother’s plans.

  The sword that had some of the royal stones embedded into it was handed over to the priests of King Saul. Young David, proclaimed a hero, was considered a threat to King Saul’s throne from that moment onward. A jealous Saul, a man afraid of losing his throne, would hunt David, and a vengeful mother who would hate me forever for interfering with her plans would hunt me. My mother knew when she had heard of the defeat, and how it had happened, that someone with the knowledge of the ancient stones was surely involved. She knew it was me.

  Eventually the witch of Ein Dor found me, probably by way of a prophetic stone, or a red stone of clairvoyance. It was a brief reunion that lasted a matter of seconds, a time measurement that I would become familiar with in the future. She entered a cave that I was hiding in, but she waited until my fire had died out, just before dawn. She sneaked into my camp. She came to the spot where I slept. She drew a dagger, and she plunged it into my back.

  I awoke in severe pain, even as I heard her voice as she spoke mystical words of banishment over me. Those words I never forgot. They were unspeakable words. They were not words from any known language of humans.