Truth and Consequences

 

 

Two evenings passed.  Orenda’s journal remained silent.  And in spite of her incredulity, Marissa’s curiosity refused to be squelched.

But regardless of how long she sat upon her bed after each late-day lesson and willed the book to surge to life, the ciphered writing upon the musty and tattered pages endured.  Time and again she would sift and search, hope and wait, leafing through in one direction and then the opposite, always expecting something, anything—a shift or a swirl upon a page, a tingle in her fingers, the crackle of sounds within her mind.  Instead, she had come away with disappointment.  Only when Abigale knocked at her bedchamber door each evening did she retire the hidden book to the knapsack, and resign herself to final evening meals alone at the central pool, discontented slumbers, and the completion of her neglected previous night’s work before the risings of the second sun.

Late the following day, however, proved different.

Just departed from her Keeper’s company, Marissa had not yet placed her hand upon her bedchamber door latch for evening studies alone, when she felt something strange—a subtle, almost reluctant, tug at her essence that coaxed the journal into her mind.

Suspecting what it meant, Marissa hurried into her bedchamber, dumped the Tome of Leadership onto her writing desk, yanked the journal from the knapsack, and crawled onto her bed, where she sat hunched over with her back to her door.  Once it rested in her lap, the book began to glow, and Marissa, heart thudding, lifted the cover.

Her thoughts crackled, her tingling fingertips pulsated, and each quick page turn brought strength in both until, at last, a swirl of color burst across the surface of a blank page near the middle of the journal.  Marissa leaned forward, captivated once more by the book’s enchantment.

The new portrayal focused gradually; blurred outlines took shape, the crackle softened.  Before long, the mergence of a meadowland and a forest’s edge came alive with a fresh opaline stream draped in lavender sedge and nodding flowers that glistened beneath the midday suns.  And amongst these rushes and stiff grasses, knelt the youthful Orenda.

From her cupped hand she sipped the liquid in the solitude with an unburdened manner, yet her mien hinted at a lingering sadness: a wistful face, sorrowful iridescent eyes, shoulders rounded beneath long, dark hair.  And once she had taken her fill at the stream, Orenda drooped against her folded legs, dropped her hands into her lap, and shifted her gaze to the ground beside her.  In a trice, however, her melancholy slid away and intrigue took root.  The view shifted downward.

There, upon the grassy slope nearby lay a convex circle of swirling hues encircled by lustrous silver and gold bands, whose ends curved outward and joined to flattened points on either side.  Orenda gasped, seized the object at once, and held it aloft to the light, her face filled with an insurmountable joy.  Glinting in her grasp, was an unblinking eye the length of a single arm’s reach from tip to tip.

Orenda gaped in bewilderment, her brow, nose, and cheeks bespeckled with the play of iridescence that filtered through the iris.  She delved her wiggling fingers into the triangular voids, which rippled as though liquid air.  Her hands caressed the bands that formed the frame around the swell of the iris.

Slowly, Orenda pressed the eye to her chest with a sob, then turned her smiling face skyward.  A golden-hued tear trickled down her flushed cheek.

Marissa startled as the page tugged out of her hand and flipped.  Words began to decipher.    

It was not natural, and yet it was true.  I had seen its like steadfast in the heavens foremost after my embracement of life.  It was His Eye—and His gift to me.  My heart grew eager.  My beseechment had at last been fulfilled.  I knew this gift held a special purpose, for He would not have relinquished it otherwise. 

Yet for the endless ages I carried it, I failed, over and over again, to uncover its secret, to discover in desperate futility what I had forthcoming, what He wanted me to receive.  I failed, that is, until the time was right, when I had at last opened my Maker’s Eye and had, unbeknownst to me, changed henceforth my world and myself—forever. 

 

The writing dimmed.  Glimmers of silver seeped onto the page and with it came the familiar rustle of leaves.  Soon, the bulge of a forested knoll began to materialize below a soaring view, which plunged through the canopy into a grove atop the summit.  There sat Orenda upon a patch of mossy ground with the Eye lying in front of her folded legs.

Lids shut and face upturned, the unclad woman bathed in the slanted rays.  Her fingers twitched; silver-streaked hair teased against her cheek in the slight breeze; a blue aura skirted about her form.  She pulled in steady breaths.  The surrounding lands had hushed; they dared not disturb her quiet meditation.

But it was not long before Orenda began to stir and broke the silence with a deep sigh.  Her lids fluttered open.  Then she gathered the Eye to her bosom, rose, and drifted across the grove to a stretch of light that spilt upon the ground.  There she knelt, laid down the Eye, and spread her fingers a fraction above the iris.

For a long time she did not move.  With head bowed and hand poised, she merely waited and listened.  Her world likewise waited, listened, watched, and perhaps wondered.  The wind had ceased, the rustle had silenced; all hung heavy and still.  Marissa leaned closer.

When Orenda at last looked up, enlightenment had masked her face.  She lifted her hand above her head and, with a tiny nod, struck the convex circle hard with her palm.  The Eye exploded with a deafening roar.

Orenda flew backward.  Grasses and flowers flattened, trees creaked and snapped.  Marissa winced and grabbed at her head.  Through the slit of one eye, she watched as two beams of churning light spiraled upward from the rippling voids and erupted with a high-pitched whistle through the canopy of foliage.  She saw Orenda, splayed upon the forest floor, gape at the sudden turmoil, then scramble into the surrounding woods.

The noise abated.  Marissa straightened and lowered her hands.  The image faded and more writing transformed.

He was powerful.  Deeply powerful.  But his gift duly reminded me what I had forgotten in my ageless existence in my world.

Very much afraid, I let the suns set twice before I dared approach the Eye once more.  What lie in wait for me, however, was more extraordinary than I could have ever dreamed possible.

Another page flipped; another image appeared.

Orenda hid from tree to tree, thicket to thicket, around broken boles and scatterings of branches, her face anxious.  Across open space she scuttled to pause, crouch, and glance out at the beams, which had hushed to a soft, crackling light.  She scampered.  Hid.  Peeked.  Scurried.  And hid once more.  Until finally, pressed against the far side of the tree closest to the Eye, she peered round the edge to stare in bewilderment at the fulgent tears in the fabric of her changeless existence.

She emerged, steps hesitant, and halted in front of the Eye.  Her mystified gaze trailed upward for a brief moment, then dropped down to fixate upon what lay within the beams.  She leaned right to gaze into one light fissure.  The view narrowed into the shaft.

Inside the rip, an entity raged in towering walls of flickering heat.  Its shapeless mass heaved and rolled with endless roars which belched great billows of gray breath.  Its lengthy orange and crimson fingers thrust toward the high rock ceiling of a vast cavern, through which skulked a thin darkness that sinuated and curled, hissed and seethed.  Macabre shrieks pierced over a steady rumble.  Maniacal laughter and a swell of frantic howls echoed.  Marissa wiped at her damp brow, but shivered despite the warmth within her body.

Orenda recoiled from glowing flecks that spewed out from the beam in sharp snaps, which died in thin, white wisps upon the grasses.  With a bit of reluctance, she turned her attention to the other light fissure.  But intrigue took hold at once and she crept closer.  Again, the view narrowed into the beam.

This second rip, unlike the first, harbored a less turbulent world.  A single sun blazed in a clear, blue sky.  Lazy shafts of light slanted through a thin canopy of withered foliage onto timber and thatch dwellings spread across the stretch of a wide grove.  Over a faint gurgle came varied bursts of fife-like trills, which dropped in pitch and rose again in a mysterious, echoing melody.  A confused wind swirled through blades of emerald grass and scattered discarded leaves of shriveled browns, reds, and yellows.  Marissa shivered once more, this time chilled by an interior cold.

Orenda brushed her fingertips against the beam’s invisible surface.  It rippled and crackled, and she pulled away, her gaze darting from her hand then back to the light fissure, where a young woman hastened into view.

The young woman strode toward a small, clear stream that grumbled over a multitude of rocks, hunched beneath a rough-woven shawl held taut about her shoulders.  A white bonnet tightened over her long flaxen hair shielded her ears from the brisk wind that reddened her cheeks.  She clutched the handle of a slatted bucket that banged against her faded linen skirt, which flapped about her hurried legs.

Orenda submerged her arm through the light fissure.  It yielded with a crackle of soft wavelets.  The young woman halted, pivoted toward Orenda, and gasped.  The wooden vessel slipped from her hand and splashed into the stream.  After several glances down at herself and back to the startled young woman, Orenda gave a smile of delight and, without so much as a glimpse behind, ventured forward into the beam.  It wobbled and spluttered in glittering bursts, then fell still with a tired hiss.

Caendoria whispered its disquiet with a silent blanket of worry.  The radiant beams pulsated.  Marissa leaned closer with a confounded stare.  Though the hush seemed to conclude the depiction, the image did not fade away and no writing transformed.  And neither did Orenda reemerge.  It merely waited.  For what, however, Marissa could not guess.  Then, all at once, she yanked back with a frightened cry.

Chaos had erupted through the other light fissure.  A violent flare from the shapeless orange mass vomited forth a drove of immense horned creatures, who spilt onto the lands in yowling shrieks.  They stumbled over one another, their red and saffron cloaks evaporating in wisps of white and gray, and launched themselves high from the pelted backs of those crushed underneath.  They writhed, their long faces twisted in agony as crimson skin shriveled onto loathsome shapes.  Cloven hooves tore at the ground in a wild escape, and they scattered into the forestlands from whence they had come, away from the colossal black clawed hand that slowly stretched out through the beam.

With a rumbling whoosh, the hand swung round to rent a swath through the forest, then hurl clumps of silvery trees in a livid spray, where they crunched and snapped far in the direction the creatures had fled.  Time and again it groped and searched, dug and gouged until deep wounds of dark soil and wide gashes of broken and defiled trees scarred the land.  Finally, with a heavy rumble, the hand withdrew and Caendoria lapsed into silence once more.  The image winked out.  The book’s glow faded.

Marissa gaped, brow drenched and body trembling.  Her head bolted up and she pulled in large gulps of air, unaware that she had been holding her breath.

Stricken with fear, she forced the journal closed, leapt from her bed, and threw the book back into the knapsack, then whirled around and blinked.  Her wall lanterns had illumed; early evening had already settled in.

Marissa hurried through the Center, too shaken to wait for Abigale’s knock, into the silent township, and down to the central pool, where she hunched upon the stony rim aside the luminescent liquid with her shaking hand pressed hard against her forehead.

What, in the name of the Maker, did I just see?

Hearsay spoke of the Eye and of Orenda’s former possession of it.  At one time it even entertained the notion of other possible worlds, beheld or otherwise.  Is that what she witnessed? Is that what Orenda’s magic wanted her to believe? But unrecorded stories of the Eye were often ambiguous, more the work of folklorists and those who had a fondness for fanciful tales rather than chronicled events.  The Tome of Leadership spoke nothing of it, and the Eye itself had long been dismissed, its supposed powers unproved and unlikely.  And besides, it was not natural.  No.  Not natural at all. 

 

Excerpts