by Luke Valen
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to do an image search.” Bryon continued to pull up his camera on his phone. “By taking a picture of your birthmark, I can enter it into a filtered search and find other images that contain the same image or ones very similar to it.” With that, Bryon took a photo and uploaded it to his image search engine on his computer. Half a second later, hundreds of images flew onto the screen.
“Wow. How did you do know how to do that?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“I told you, I’m good with finding things,” Bryon bragged.
Looking back to the computer, our eyes couldn’t focus on just one thing—there was so much.
“Whoa,” Bryon let out. “What is all of this?”
The images were not what I was expecting at all. As we scrolled from picture to picture, our combined curiosity grew.
“How did you get this on your wrist? You’re messing with me, right? That’s a tattoo, isn’t it?” Bryon asked as we continued to look.
“No. I’ve had it ever since I was born,” I said, staring at the screen. I could barely believe it myself.
Bryon leaned in. “Dude these are like…awesome.”
I leaned in too. “Yeah.”
Breaking out of the awe and wonder from the images, Bryan said, “Dude, I knew you were like some time-traveling superhero-alien or something!” He jumped out of his chair.
“Shhh!” I shushed him and pulled him back down by the shirt collar. “What are you thinking?!”
“I’m sorry, but, dude, this is crazy! The only pictures coming up are all from B.C. as in Before Christ! There are no current photos of this anywhere. Not to mention all of these are associated with ancient battles from like every religion.” Bryon was bugging out. “Look, look at this…” The symbol was seen emerging through a ball of flames on what resembled the blade of a sword as it came down from the sky like the wrath of God himself. “I mean, dude. This is awesome. Your birthmark is on nearly every ancient crucifix and painting throughout the world.”
“What does it mean?” I asked rhetorically, sitting back in my chair. Bryon stood up and leaned onto the desk closer to the computer, as if it would help to get a better look. Unaware of our building curiosity, the café patrons stayed locked onto their screens. Everything was so quiet, the only thing I could hear over Bryon’s heavy breathing was the sip, sip of coffee all around.
“It means you’re a badass. No wonder you were able to throw that dude through a wall. I mean, you’re a boss,” Bryon continued. “Is your dad a badass too or what?!”
That struck a chord. I looked at Bryon, a little angry, but I knew he didn’t know. I stood up and walked toward the door without turning back.
“Dude, Dean! Wait up!” Bryon called after me.
I pushed the door open, my frown feeling like it was permanently etched on my face as the cold wind rushed past me.
Dingle-ling. Dingle-ling.
The door rang as it slammed shut behind me only to ring again as Bryon followed after. “Where are you going? Was it something I said? Dean!”
I whipped around to face him. “I don’t know who my parents are. Okay? That’s what I was looking for! That symbol is all I have of them! Those pictures don’t mean shit!”
The snow fell silently on the pure white ground all around me.
I paced back and forth, packing the snow beneath my feat, unsure of why I felt like sharing. “I thought, well, I thought that if I could find out who my family is—or was—then I could try to find them and ask them questions about what is happening to me. I thought if I found them, I could ask them why they left me and why I’m seeing all the things that I’m seeing!”
The birthmark on my wrist began to glow a deep red. The snow around my feet began to puddle and the snow falling near to me became like drops of rain.
“Dude.” Bryon stared, raising his hands, placing them behind his head, and taking a step back.
I am rage.
“You don’t get it, Bryon! You have a family, you know who they are, and you know you can go to them when things are falling apart around you! I can’t!”
The storm inside me grew.
“Dude!” Bryon yelled.
“What?!” I yelled back, seeing the fear in his eyes, I stopped. Looking down at the puddle of water around my feet, I noticed my wrist. Heat was emanating off my body. Bryon stood petrified, like a small boy who had just seen the monster that lived in his closet all those years. “Bryon,” I said apologetically.
He didn’t respond right away. “It’s okay.” He dropped his hands. “But wow, we need to teach you how to control your temper. That was insane! I have never seen anything like that before,” he said, laughing and smiling as he ran toward me, throwing his arm around my shoulder. “Come with me. I think I know someone who can help.”
“Help with what?”
—§—
Walking down the dirt path out of town with Bryon was an odd feeling, unfamiliar at best. I had never actually walked with anyone, let alone to get somewhere together.
Looking behind me, I could see the town in the distance, with a slight fade among it from the low-flying clouds, it looked like something out of a photograph, unreal. Snow covering the ground and trees. Beautiful log cabins with green tin roofs covered in pounds of fresh, white powder. The mountains looming behind the small town with patches of green treetops popping out from the snow that blanketed them. The path was lined with open fields on both sides as far as the eye could see. With the sun beginning its descent, the golden rays shined beautifully through the rows of freshly picked alfalfa fields. It looked as if we were walking into the infinite abyss with no end in sight, the horizon untouchable.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Mmmm. The smell of pine needles filled my lungs. That smell would never get old.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s just say I know a guy who knows things,” Bryon said unhelpfully. His pace was slow. He must have been taking in the views as well.
How do I know I can even trust this guy? For all I knew he could be taking me to some torture chamber to experiment on me for one of his YouTube videos.
As time passed and the sun approached the end of its daily life, a large oak tree could be seen in the distance. A solitary giant standing like a lone wolf in the field of an empty dirt lot just to the right of our path. No mountains, or shrubs, just the tree with endless horizons. We must have walked at least twenty miles by the time we grew close.
“Here we are!” Bryon said with a big smile, followed by a slight sigh of relief. “My feet are killing me!”
“Where are we?” I searched the 360 degrees of nothingness.
Bryon held up his finger and walked over to the tree. Taking a breath and moment to think, he then began to knock on the trunk of the tree. He placed his ear onto the tree with his next knocks.
Knock. Listen. Repeat.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Hold on…It’s around here somewhere…” Bryon responded as he continued to knock on the tree trunk.
“I must have been crazy to think you could actually help, I’m going back—”
“GOT IT!” Bryon exclaimed. He pressed his fingers into the trunk. A small, hidden door popped out of the trunk. About the size of a small child, it was round and seemed to be made from the tree itself, blending seamlessly. I stood there stunned. I had never seen anything like it before. I was excited and a bit nervous at the same time. “Well, come on! Don’t just stand there. Let’s go!” he said, crouching down carefully and stepping into the hole in the side of the tree trunk.
Maybe this guy could help me after all. Bryon stuck his hand out of the very tiny, round wooden entrance, waving for me to come in. The sky was lit only by the residual sunbeams that bounced from the clouds as the ball of fire dropped below the horizon. Squatting down to half my height, I took hold of Bryon’s arm and stepped in. There wasn’t much room—actually there was no room at all. Th
e two of us were pressed up against each other in the interior of the enclosure. I struggled for a better position. The next thing I noticed inside the old oak was the smell. Outside had been a fresh, crisp air, only to be replaced with the thick, musky smell of mud and moss. Closing the door behind me, we stood body to body in the pitch-black trunk of a tree that smelled like rot. I questioned once again why I would trust this guy.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic.
“Bryon,” I said, voice monotonous.
“Yeah, I know. Gimme a second.” Bryon shuffled his feet, attempting to turn around, bumping me up against the bark.
“Bryon!” I said.
“One second, geez.” He continued doing circles, squashing me against the innards of the tree.
“What are you looking for?” I patted the walls. They were smooth, really smooth. Almost like glass. Odd.
“A knob—she must have moved it.”
“Who moved what?”
“This!” he said. I could hear something slide together and lock, almost like a metal bolt.
The small area of ground next to our feet slid back into the trunk, revealing a spiral staircase dimly lit by candlelight.
“Whoa.” I stepped back, careful not to fall in.
“Come on, we don’t have all day.”
Bryon began walking down the wooden staircase. It wasn’t all wood; it was dirt that was shaped and packed together and held up by wooden planks. Where did this guy even find this place to start with?
“I’m going to introduce you to my good friend Jade. She is the one who made all of this. She is going to be very interested in you…not in a sexual way or anything. I just mean…Never mind, you get it,” Bryon babbled. “Jade can be a little…weird, but she is a genius. She taught me everything I know about technology and research. She is into stuff like this.”
“Stuff like what?” I asked carefully, watching each step.
As we neared the bottom of the stairs, a large cave-like room revealed itself. The walls and ceilings were all smooth and made of what looked like carved sand and rock, with several wooden beams along the walls, supporting the large room. The space was so large with ceilings that looked to be thirty feet tall. Everything was lit either by candle or by old oil lamps. Books lay scattered all over the wooden ground. Shelves all around the room were filled with what looked like scrolls, novels, encyclopedias, gadgets, and artifacts that reached the very tops of the cavern.
There in the corner, apparently undisturbed from our arrival, working away was an average-sized figure in brown suede pants and a white button-up shirt, both of which were covered in dust, with her back to us. She stood, looking down into a large magnifying glass at a blank piece of paper.
“Jade!” Bryon yelled.
Startled, the figure leapt from her post and landed on her butt. She scrambled to her feet to face us. She had crazy black hair sticking up in every direction and her eyes were shielded by multilayered bifocals. I think they were green.
“Oh my God, Bryon don’t do that,” Jade said through heavy breaths. “How did you get in here? I moved the knob.” She had an accent—Spanish, maybe?
She couldn’t have been more than one or two years older than us, with a petite figure and five-foot-nothing. How was this girl supposed to help? I was growing impatient.
“I noticed,” Bryon said as he flipped through a book on one of the desks.
“And who’s this?” Jade was referring to me as she looked me up and down, her hands on her glasses, analyzing.
“Jade! This is Dean,” Bryon said, introducing us.
“Pleasure to meet you, Dean,” she said, putting her hair up into a bun and turning back to her work, the words insincere. “But I’m going to have to ask both of you to leave. Bryon, you know not to bring anyone here.” Definitely a Spanish accent I was hearing.
“Dean is not just anyone. He is special,” Bryon gloated.
“I don’t care how special of a friend he is, you can’t stay,” Jade said, already busy at work looking through the magnifying glass.
“Come on, Bryon. Let’s just go,” I said, turning back to the stairs.
“Wait.” Bryon stopped me. “Jade, I think you might want to take a look at this before you kick us out.”
Jade placed both hands on her desk and turned to look at us, her green eyes glaring. “What is it?”
Bryon stepped toward me, grabbing my arm. He pulled me over to Jade, revealing the birthmark that resides on my wrist. She looked closer, leaning in. As she neared, she seemed to have noticed something, her eyebrow rose, and her eyes became wide. Grabbing my wrist out of Bryon’s hands, she pulled it up to the binoculars she called glasses. A moment passed as she continued to examine my mark. “Hmm.” She looked up for a brief second to make eye contact with Bryon, then at me, and back down. Her eyes were green.
“This is incredible…Come with me,” Jade said, turning and walking to the other side of her chambers. Following suit, we walked through the book-littered ground to a small wooden desk with stacks of books as tall as a person.
“I told you he was special,” Bryon stated.
“You said your name is Dean?” Jade asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
She stopped and stared at me hard. “What is your last name?”
“I don’t know.” My eyes dropped.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” she asked.
“I don’t know because I don’t know who my parents are…” I said.
“I see.” She seemed to know something. Grabbing at some books, she began to flip through the pages.
“What are those?” I asked.
“These…are books. Very old books.”
Apparently, we have a wise guy on our hands. Great.
Jade slammed a handful of larger books down on the table in front of us. Dust from the table and the books flew everywhere. “These books were written before the birth of Christ.”
“Just like the pictures we saw!” Bryon slapped me on the shoulder with a big smile. I gave him a look that said, If you ever do that again, I’ll throw YOU through a wall.
Jade continued to filter through the pages of one of the large leather-bound books. “Here.” She stopped on a page, pointing.
Excitement filled my being as I leaned in to look at what she had found.
The image on the page was of a sword that had the exact same symbol engraved in its hilt.
“We’ve already seen this,” I said, disappointed. I took a few steps back, placing my hands on my head, the excitement left me.
“What does it mean, Jade?” Bryon leaned in.
“This sword was said to have been wielded by an ancient creature that guarded the holy lands. It says here that this archaic being would come down in a cloud of flames wherever war would break among the holy lands.” Jade was digging in, exciting herself. “There are also sightings of it near the lands of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Nile…The list goes on and on.”
Exciting me too. I moved back in to the huddle. Leaning in, I took another look at the image, tracing the sword with my hands.
“Wait a second…” Jade put down the book and ran to her wall of scrolls.
“What are you looking for now?” I asked.
“Dude, this is so freakin’ cool!” Bryon jumped and began looking through the books on the desk like a kid in a comic book store.
“I have seen this symbol in a few other spots too…Look here.” Jade pulled out a scroll and blew off the dust, revealing the still-rolled parchment. There it was, the symbol on my wrist right there on the scroll. It was mixed in with a slew of other symbols.
“What is this?” I asked.
“This is a scroll straight from the pyramids of ancient Egypt. These are hieroglyphs.” Jade looked at me with amazement, unraveling the papers. Her eyes the size of melons through her glasses.
“It says here that a powerful being would come down on winged horse whose feathers itself were covered in fla
mes.” She ran her fingers over the hieroglyphs. “It says it came down to protect the people in the time of Thutmose II. This was the creature that destroyed the city of Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty.” Jade looked over at me once again. This time her sense of amazement was accompanied by curiosity. Her jaw almost slack. “This was back in the time of Moses,” she said with such weight, plopping down on a chair near the desk.
“Okay, so what does all this mean?” I asked with no clue as to what was going on. “It’s just a coincidence,” I said after a moment. I’d learned over the years not to get my hopes up for anything. Though lately I had been forgetting that.
“Why did you come to me? Why were you looking this up? If it’s just a birthmark, then why are you here?” Jade asked as she moved closer to me, staring into my eyes with a stern glare. I could feel her breath on mine.
Why was she so close to my face? Did she think it was dramatic? At least she’d brushed her teeth.
Before I could find an answer, Bryon broke the awkward silent stare. “JADE! You have to see what he can do!”
We both glared at Bryon, who seemed not to notice. Instead, he reached for his laptop and pulled up the infamous YouTube video of the fight.
How did he get internet down here?
“You have internet?” I asked.
“What? No, crazy. We are in an underground cave beneath a tree for Pete’s sake. No one has internet. I shot this, remember?”
Another wise guy. Even better.
Watching in amazement, Jade couldn’t take her eyes off of the screen.
“What were you looking at before the fight began?” Jade asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look here.” She rewound the video and paused it before Bryon had actually focused the camera on me. There I was, just standing there, my wrist glowing. No one was paying any attention yet. “You were looking at something. Your mark looks like it’s on fire—what was it?”
“You’re not going to believe me,” I said.
“Try me,” she said with a serious face. We stood up from the computer.
“I don’t know. It was this…thing,” I said, trying to describe it the best I could.
“What kind of thing?” Bryon pulled out a bag of trail mix.