The Revealing

It was quiet enough to hear a pin drop in the cave. I knew it! But his revelation seemed wrong, so I voiced my confusion.

“But Carson’s eyes were pink—a baby pink. Yours are—”

“Violet?”

I nodded.

“Well, puberty in my world darkens your eyes. It also makes you taller, fills you out and deepens your voice.”

I stared at him.

“It really is me, Obsidian.”

“Why didn’t any of you tell me?” Tears welled up in my eyes. “I thought Carson died!” I laughed, and everyone stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “I thought you died, Carson!” I shouted, and I hugged him.

He hugged me back, finally able to show me how much he really knew me. It was the hug of my old friend. I let go of Carson and turned to face Mason. I glared at him. “You knew he was real! All of them knew, but they let me believe he was imaginary! Why?”

Mason sighed. “For your safety. Honestly, the rest of your family couldn’t see him. I was the only one who could. Because I was your guardian, I could see what you saw. It was also for the safety of Carson.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me now? Obviously, Carson can protect himself, and I have all of you keeping me safe.”

Damian rolled his eyes and shoved Mason over. “Because we knew you would freak out like you are now.”

I looked at him. “Why didn’t I know you or Willow from that time?”

“Because Carson was at the yearlone age.”

I cocked an eyebrow. How stupid did he think I was?

“When we are that age, we need to spend a year or two, or even three, alone. We are concealed from everyone during that time, except for the specials, who can see past the veil. You are a special.”

“What?”

Before Damian could answer, there was a loud crack, followed by another and another. The sound was coming from the roof of the cave. Something from the ceiling came plummeting down and landed among us all. The thing was almost identical to the creature in my dream. It was a little smaller, only about three feet long. I screamed, and it looked at me. I’d thought it was dead from the fall, but it clearly wasn’t, as it yelled, “Liar, Your Majesty!”

Mason’s eyes widened, and his head turned as soon as those words left the creature’s mouth. It started to drag itself toward me, but Damian picked it up and threw it across the cave. It didn’t have legs. Damian ran toward one side of the cave, where there was an arch in the wall, and everyone followed. Willow and I ran in the back. These creatures were landing on the floor all around us. One landed beside Willow, but she kicked it away. They were like a colony of ants.

On the ceiling, I couldn’t see rock, only moving bodies, which fell off at different points. We went through the arch.

“This way!” shouted Damian, and he turned the corner. Even though Mason had been the one leading us, Damian seemed to be quicker on his feet. He was shouting orders, seemingly knowing exactly what to do. We all piled into a small cave and leaned against the wall. Damian stood at the mouth. He reached out, caught one of the falling screechers and held it by its throat at arm’s length. One hour’s walk into a cave on Earth, and this is what you get? Creepy.

The things started to make screeching sounds, looking for us. The sound was the same as the sound my dream. I started freaking out, and Willow mouthed to me to calm down. After we’d spent about two minutes hidden behind the stone wall, everything seemed to simmer down. All the sounds were muted and slow.

The screecher in Damian’s hand grunted and squirmed. “Oh, stop trying,” Damian said. “You’re going to die in less than three minutes anyway; you might as well have final words—that is, if you’re one of the ones that can actually talk.”

It stopped squirming, and its hollow eyes squinted at Damian’s glowing ones. “She will die.” Its raspy voice finally echoed out of its mouth.

Damian squeezed. “Not with us around.”

It wheezed out a horrible sound that I could only describe as a laugh. “Do you think you can really save her?” It laughed again and choked a bit at the end. It was close to death now. “She is the special of all the specials. She is the one we need. The little one is part of the package, but we need her. We need to get rid of her!” it said while choking. It coughed and laughed again. “She will die! And we will win! I will come back as one of you but better!”

Damian’s eyebrows rose.

Willow whispered, “So this is what they tell them.”

“You will not come back,” Damian said. “You will return to the hole that you came from never to move again. She will not die, because everyone loves her. We will win because that’s just the way it works.”

“Your Majesty will die!” it shouted as loudly as it could bear with Damian squeezing what I could only assume was its windpipe.

I shivered as he threw it across the cave. “Am I really what they are after? Is that what this is? A trap?” I fell to my knees and let everything hit me. I began to cry, and Willow knelt beside me and comforted me.

Damian came to my side and held out his hand. “Bunny, we don’t have time for this right now. We don’t know if that is what they really want; all we know is that they have Peri. Save the mental breakdown for after the rescue. Okay? When it happens, I promise I will be there with fifty boxes of tissues, but right now, we need to leave. I am not entirely trusting of the place we are in.”

I nodded, sniffed a little and held his hand as he pulled me up. He pulled my arm closer as I stood up, and he tapped his lips on my cheek. He put his arm around me and addressed everyone as the silence surrounded us.

“So we need to make a real plan before this goes any further. So far, we have just been walking in here blindly, and we have really no idea what we are going to be doing. Mason, this would be the right time for you to pull out some kind of map or something.”

Everyone turned to look at Mason, who was fishing for something in his jacket pocket. The whole time, he was watching Damian’s arm around my shoulders, and I reached up and held on to the hand resting on the edge of my shoulder to show Mason that he was wrong and that I was, in fact, interested in Damian. He rolled his eyes and pulled what he had in his pocket out for everyone to see. It looked like a couple of pieces of paper folded together twice. He unfolded the papers and revealed three drawn pictures, each one displaying a different skill level. It wasn’t until he pulled out something recent that I realized these were all drawings I’d done. All the drawings of shapes were labelled. The shapes were the caves.

“No way! Did I actually draw the map for the mountains when I was younger? What made you even think about looking through my pictures?” I said.

“Well, when you painted that picture on the floor of your art class, I remembered going through some of your old pictures, which I do every so often, and seeing the word caves. So I went back, and these three pictures were folded together, so I took all three, hoping they were connected. You even drew where Peridot is.”

“How did you get that from these?” I held the papers in my hands and looked at the odd shapes. There was a strange, large shape in the middle of the page, and I’d drawn a little circle at each corner of the shape.

Damian looked over my shoulder and whispered in astonishment, “It’s a floor plan of the caves. The circles are the posts of the guards.”

“How do you see that?” said Willow, who seemed just as confused as I was. Damian, Carson and Mason all looked up at us with blank expressions, and Carson, who seemed the most patient, explained it to us.

“On the third piece of paper, you labelled the circles as the guards. That’s what those numbers are in the same places on this other one. And the green dot here”—he pointed to a section of the odd shape that held a little green dot in a dead end—“is Peridot. You labelled the colour green as the gem on this second piece of paper here. So you need to have all three of these papers to be able to read it right.”

Willow and I both looked as if we’d run into a brick wall, because we understood how the boys read the map. I said, “That’s amazing! Did I draw these at different times in my life?” I looked at the details on the three different pages. “What’s the forth page for?” I looked up and realized Mason still hadn’t unfolded it.

“Oh, this is just an extra sheet of paper that I brought in case we needed you to draw something. I even brought a small pencil.” He pulled out a stub of a pencil from one of his big pockets, and I laughed.

Mason took out the second paper and put his finger on a little black dot. “This is where we came into the mountain, and we are right about here.” We weren’t that far into the shape. I stared at the 10-centimetre distance between the entrance of the cave and us. It felt as if we had been walking for so long.

Mason looked up at Willow. “Willow, your gift is going to be extremely useful for us. You will conquer each guard post. The elders don’t stand guard; they hire Tharsion loyalists to stand at these posts, which means your gift overpowers them easily.”

I stared at Mason and said, “How do you know they have the weak on the outside?”

“Because you wrote it here.” He pointed to the second paper, which showed clusters of numbers from one to three. The threes gathered in a section deep inside the cave. There weren’t as many twos, and they were spread out around the threes. Around specific sections and nooks of the cave, there were ones all over the place.

“How do you know who the numbers represent?” I asked.

“It’s simple. The elders are the most powerful out of the numbers, so they are definitely the number threes bunched together like that. The other numbers are scattered in such a way that they can’t be anything but the guards. So going by that logic, the number ones are the weakest,” said Damian.

I nodded in understanding. “We need to get going then,” I said, worried about some of the strange sounds of the cave. Everyone straightened up and got ready. Mason left the nook we were in first, and then Willow followed. Then Carson left, following the lead. I was about to follow, as I did not want to be at the end of this line, when Damian grabbed on to my hand.

“You’re not going to be alone, Bunny.” His hand was warm. I hadn’t noticed how much the cave was taking a toll on me. “I’m going to walk with you, all right? I just don’t want you to have another panic attack.” I nodded, and he smiled and pulled me in to kiss me. I followed his lead and let him pull me to him.

Just before our lips touched, Mason popped his head back into the nook. “You guys coming?”

Damian didn’t let me go when Mason appeared; however, he did stop himself from closing the distance and pulled himself back to a safe distance so as not to arouse any suspicion. However, knowing Mason, he would find suspicion not in Damian’s actions but in mine. The fact that I was looking at the floor and blushing like a fool was all he needed.

“Yeah, Mason, we are coming,” Damian said as he let go of my hand and put it on my back, nudging me forward a little to get me moving. Mason popped back into the other room, and Damian took the opportunity to move his hand down and go back to holding mine. It made me happy. Then he looked down at me and smiled. I had never seen that smile on him, so I decided to make a note of it.

“I like it when you smile like that,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up in surprise right as we exited the cave nook. This was the first time I wasn’t the only one with a changed expression when coming out of a moment alone with someone. Willow started laughing and came to whisper in my ear. “What did you do?”

I whispered back just loudly enough for Damian to hear, “All I did was tell him that I like when he smiles.” This comment unearthed another one of my new favourite expressions of his.

“Jeez, you’re going to have a hard time acting like you hate him for the play,” she said as she ran off to go walk with Mason.

Carson was in between the four of us, walking in the middle of the group. Damian laughed and turned to look at me. My mood was a little changed, and I whispered to myself, “That is, if we ever get back to even do the play.”

Damian said nothing, but he squeezed my hand in reassurance. I swallowed my fear and kept walking in the silence that had just engulfed us all.

The time came when we arrived at the first guard post. Mason let Willow walk ahead of us. She walked forward to the giant guard watching the doorway to a tunnel. Mason looked as if he were ready to pounce in case something went wrong. Tension was wafting off Damian like a strong perfume. I traced my thumb in circles on the back of his hand to calm him down a little. It seemed to work. At least his stress wasn’t as tangible as it had been a minute ago. Willow stepped forward cautiously as she approached the man. He had to be at least 6 feet 7 inches tall. His hair was so short it looked as if his head were sprouting a garden of tiny little brown hairs. His face was serious, and he stood still with his hands folded behind his back. He looked as if he could eat a car if he wanted to. Willow walked right up to this gigantic threat. We all stood in the shadows, watching the scene unfold. Willow made sure to be in his line of sight as she stepped forward.

“Who’s there?” shouted the man in a voice that did not fit his behaviour. It was shrill and unbalanced, and it cracked in a few places out of what seemed like fear.

“You’re not afraid,” she said confidently. However, this method backfired a little, because if he was not afraid, he could do his job better. He raised his hand, probably to shoot a fireball or something. She put her hands up and shouted at him to stop, just as all three boys were ready to lunge to her assistance. The man stopped what he was going to do; he seemed confused. Then Willow saw what she had done and straightened. “Good. You stopped. Now, you think I’m imaginary. You’re tired. It’s been a long day.”

The man rubbed his hand on his forehead and sighed. “I must be seeing things. It’s been a long day.”

Mason smiled and relaxed his shoulders. Damian stopped squeezing the living daylights out of my hand, and Carson relaxed his tense stature as well. Then Willow spoke again.

“Now your imagination is running wild, and you see five intruders, but you won’t sound the alarm. You’re one hundred percent positive they are hallucinations.”

As Willow said this, the rest of us moved into the light and followed her lead. None of us said anything as we walked past the confused guard. I smiled and thought, This might actually work. We did the same maneuver for the next few guards and got past them. Then we came upon a problem.

“So what now?” asked Carson. We all stared at the three tunnels in front of us.

Mason looked at the map. “There are no tunnels on any of the maps. But there are these squiggles here. I don’t know what they mean.”

“Have you ever thought that we got in too easily? I mean, if that was the only entrance, wouldn’t they be guarding it?” I said. Mason avoided eye contact. “Mason? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Well, I think I know what the squiggles might mean.” Before Mason could finish, a low rumbling sound coming from one of the tunnel entrances interrupted him. “This area of the mountain has been declared unsafe for climbers because of rock slides.” There was another rumble in the third tunnel. “They could have it unguarded because this is a natural booby trap.” He paused, took a breath and then continued. “I also realize why you drew three separate maps.”

“Are you saying we need to split up?” squeaked Willow. All of her confidence from conquering the guards leaked out of her as if she were a sieve. Mason put a hand on her arm to calm her.

“So who gets which map and which tunnel, and who goes with who?” I asked, ready to move forward. I didn’t ever want Peridot in a place like this, and since she was already there, I wanted to get her out as quickly as possible.

Mason looked at all three maps. “Well, I think I am going to take Willow and go through the first tunnel on the left there. We will take the map with the guards.” Willow smiled slightly, but her face was still full of anxiety.

“Obsidian is with me. No questions asked. We’ll take the map with Peridot,” said Damian forcefully as he stood slightly in front of me. I looked up at him, and then we all turned to look at the odd man out: Carson.

“So I guess I get the last map and the solo act?” he said.

Willow went to Carson and hugged him. I went to Mason and hugged him as well. After all, if something happened to any of us, this would be the last time we saw each other. When we’d all finished saying our goodbyes, we all took our designated maps and went into our separate tunnels. I could see that everyone was scared, and the mood had dropped to a seriousness that I had never noticed before with them. They were all worried for each other. Mason seemed as if he didn’t want to leave me without him. I made eye contact with him and smiled kindly, showing him that it would be okay. Then we all disappeared into the tunnels.