Ultimus Thesaurus: The last Treasure (Era of Change Book 1) (32 page)

“Makama makamaka!” arose from the goblin and he lifted up his tiny arm to grab the handle of the large door.

I decided to help him and opened it, but immediately I wished that I had not. They had tortured Magnus in this room and I saw the burned and flayed remains of other prisoners in the corners of the chamber. Magnus hung on a wheel in the middle of the room and before him was a large powerful man whose appearance was very similar to that of the goblins, but still distinctively different.

“Take him to the other corner. I will soon take care of him,” he said and showed me that I had not been mistaken.

Whatever kind of creature he was, I had never seen anything like him. It was as if he was the next stage of the goblin’s evolution. I suspected him to be one of the many experiments of the prince.

Magnus could not recognize me and he could hardly open his eyes. His gaze wandered through the void in search of a fixed point and yet he was ever lost in all the pain and sorrow that he had to endure for so many days. His spirit began to regress to the point from which it once developed and it would probably not be long until I would see the old Magnus again, who would have no choice but to comply with the prince’s wishes.

“Why are you trying to break him, if he only loses his needed capabilities in the process? Do you not want to know what he knows?” I asked and was sure that it was not an intelligent gesture to raise my voice against my superior in such a chamber.

The man but ignored my words and drew the attention of the goblin and directed him with some gestures to bind me to the other wheel in the room. Many of the tools in this chamber were of strange and especially of deviant nature. Magic and technology merged to something completely new, possessing no name and deserving no existence.

He tortured Magnus before my very eyes, but he knew neither him nor me if he believed that this would change anything. Magnus had made his choice and mine had been made a long time ago. None of us would comply with the requests of the prince.

As the man continued with the procedure on and on, the words finally escaped me: “It is enough! Where do you want this to end?”

The man stopped and turned to me and I saw the same look in his eyes that I had seen so often before in this castle. These rigid eyes, which seemed to gaze deeper into the soul of another being as deemed natural. All of him was abnormal and yet it was still true. The Sun King had warned me that all things which were wrong would stand against me, but the prince seemed to have found a way to resolve the conflict between correct and incorrect, if they had ever really existed.

“You want to know, what it is that we are looking to achieve? Nothing! We already have what we want and do not want anything except what is not and never will be. Don't you see that everything that is, is too simple to ever search for it? Sometimes, something lies dormant behind the truth. Behind the reality is an untruth that we need. Can’t you see it?” he asked, while his rigid gaze followed me.

His goal was to suppress Magnus, in order to force Isaac out, and despite his confusing words it still remained unclear to me why. This gift of his troubled him and his thoughts were directed at nothing that truly existed. This man was obsessed with madness itself and nothing he did pursued an internal logic.

“He will survive these torments and at the end you will still not receive what you are looking for,” I said and the man turned away to continue his task.

It didn’t take long for Magnus to change. They had brought me to the room, because they knew that the point had finally been reached. Isaac showed no wound and no fear, as he opened his eyes and it was as if he himself had changed because of the ritual. No longer had the two of them just shared a body, now they had found a connection.

“We have what we want. Now we start to compile,” the man said and removed Isaac’s chains.

I was not sure if he did not know that Isaac did not have the skills of Magnus, or whether all of this was just a trick.

“Fear not, somehow we will escape all of this,” Isaac called out to me, while he was dragged out of the room.

Once again I found myself alone, now tied to this wheel, once again surrounded by goblins, who however hardly noticed me. They felt a deep humility toward the man who resembled them and just like he was their master, so he was also their god. Was this what the prince tried to achieve; total control over life itself?

All these questions lost their sense, while each act of mine lost consequence, the closer I came to my own death. My life was hardly of importance to the prince, but nevertheless I lived. I asked myself whether it was because of all these things that Jasper had told me and those he remained silent about, of which my own father also knew. Now where all questions and answers encircled me, Lucia entered the room and dismissed the goblins from their duty.

Her gaze had changed and I was hoping that she had finally realized what was happening around us.

“An end like this ... I never wanted that for you. In the beginning it was you who gave me courage and showed me that there was perhaps still hope left in this world. For this hope you have sacrificed everything, even the things that are not yours. You have put aside the life of all, to only see the greater cause.

We wanted too much, too fast. Now we never got what we wanted and we never will, because this is the place where it ends. This is the choice he has given me; your life, or my own. I cannot make this choice. You have chosen the life of future generations and at the same time you decided to destroy this same future.

My choice has now become simple. The prince is weak and his life is hanging by a thread. Only a few know where he is in this castle and I can take you there when the time comes. The knowledge inside of this book is not a simple trick to bring the dead back to life, it is the mystery of this world. 

Each question inside of it is an answer. My demand is therefore as follows. I will help you kill the prince and in return you give me the book. I don’t even want Magnus to translate it for me as long as I can live on with the hope that the solution to everything is right in front of me.”

Her request seemed simple, but it was also exactly what I was not able to do. Killing the prince was our main objective, but for as long as this book existed, other beings like him could continue to exist.

“We can find the answer to everything, but we do not need a book to do it. My decisions may have been wrong, but maybe they weren’t. All the things that your father and mine have withheld from us are now no longer important. We do not need to know what is hidden behind these pages. A book that not only knows the truth, but can also manipulate it, is simply too dangerous.

I wish that I could help you, but I cannot do it.”

“I will wait until the book is translated and as soon as I know what I want to know, you are free to destroy it. But, what if he kills your friend? Are you ready to sacrifice his life to preserve this world?”

“You have said it yourself that we have done things that brought us to this place. Now we need to stand up for what we have become. We are human beings and not gods. Knowledge of this magnitude should not exist in our hands.”

“I will see what is hidden in this book and I will see again my father. And if you want to protect the knowledge then you will also need to kill me.”

As she turned away from me I called out to her, but even though she stopped, she did not look back at me.

“I will never allow you to die. I will find a way and everything will return to what it once was,” I said and she left.

Only when she was gone, I eased my posture and left myself hanging in the chains. I asked myself whether I deserved what happened to me. The world did not seem to work in ways that I appreciated and so I found myself now and again in an impossible situation. No matter what would happen, I had to find a way to save Lucia. It was not because I promised her father, but because I had promised myself so many times already.

I would have never thought that I truly had any influence on this world, but now where I was sitting in a cell, it was clear to me that the world had already forgotten me. My friends had either turned against me, or have been tortured, while I could do nothing than wait. It is said that decisions were everything in life, but for me there have always been moments in which there were no decisions to be made. These moments changed everything, because without a way to help my friends, I would never forgive myself should they die.

With time the question ‘if?’ turned to the question ‘when?’. My wounds, which Lucia had inflicted, healed very quickly, but they never felt really devastating to begin with. I felt that my eyes had been further modified and yet I did not know what happened to them. My sight had gotten better over the last days and even if I now no longer needed glasses, so I missed them nonetheless. 

They had been a part of me that not only showed others, but also me, that I had limits. Of course it never mattered, as there was hardly a person who had appreciated me and even less knew that I ever existed, but now where I stood against beings like the prince, I needed this characteristic more than ever.

The ring, which I wore on my finger, was a symbol of hidden power, even if I might need it, so I still feared it more than it helped me. The answers were so close but just like the prince, I was unable to decipher them.

Great boldness had led us to this place and where the Sun King had failed, I had now arrived after such a short time. I should have waited to better understand who my opponent was, but it came as no surprise, how we had reacted, if you bear in mind that we did not even know who our own father really were. At that time we had looked up to them and wished that we were able to achieve what they already had, only to now see that there was nothing. 

We are living in times of peace, but the civil war, which has now started to spread over the many parts of the world, disturbs, what once appeared so pure. For me, the question remained, whether it was the prince who corrupted the borders of our world and who ensured that we would be weakened, in the moment when he would be in the possession of the book, or whether my own actions already sealed our fate.

Now all that held him back was an unknown language, a puzzle, to which he could have already found the solution by now. I was unsure whether it would make sense to convince the goblins to free me, where they could hardly speak a word and even less understand it. Many more days passed and every night I refused to fall asleep for ever longer periods, only to always drop off feebly. I was afraid that one day I would not wake up anymore and that everything would be lost. This fear, whether justified or not, drove me almost into madness. More and more guards left the small room until in the end I was alone and the light of the torches became darker and darker.

I understood that the prince now demonstrated to me that nothing was safe, not even my own peace. The fear that he tried to induce, was not the only thing that I now tried to suppress with all the force of my mind, but also the urge to give up. Not everyone would sacrifice his own life to help the world, because everyone knows that it is not necessary. For too long now have I jeopardized the lives of others and have achieved too little. This feeling of powerlessness stirred up something deep in me that perhaps had always been there. I exhaled and the light of the torches began to flicker, their weak glimmer became a real storm made of pure heat, the more I breathed, up to the point where I stood up from the ground and grabbed the cold iron bars of my cell with my bare hands. My eyes burned with such a hellish pain that it intensified my grasp until it was strong enough to crush the heavy bars, as though they were made of plain paper.

The power that awoke in me did not make me afraid, but it also didn’t really give me any time to reflect. I ripped apart the cage and just by slightly touching the air near the door to my chamber, I heated it up so much that it exploded. 

The noise caused by my jailbreak had travelled quickly through the entire castle and soon I saw the goblins rushing towards me. But at the mere sight of me they bolted in the opposite direction, because each step I took heated up my body even more. The walls were charred and slowly melted away and the ground on which I ran, felt as if it were made of water. This power must have been hidden within the blood of the prince and now it arose after such a long time since I had drunk it. Jasper changed something in me and now it broke free, but I could not really control it - it controlled me.

My anger knew no bounds and my journey knew only one destination. I was looking for Isaac and wanted to free him, but after a while the pain became too much for my body to bear. I tripped and tried to stop my fall with my hands, when I felt a presence in the distance. It was as if I could hear what he thinks and could feel where he was. The prince was sitting in his room, I felt his weakness and yet his power was indescribable. My rage began to decline and the more I was forced to think the less I was able to concentrate on my objective. My time was running out and so I forced myself back onto my legs and stormed from room to room until I finally reached Isaac.

He sat in an old library in which so many books had been piled up that I assumed that it had to contain the entire knowledge of humanity. Isaac was outright captivated by the book he browsed and the man, by whom he had been tortured, stood next to him. In his hand he held an unusual whip, whose spiky end shifted about on the ground.

“Now where we have left you alone, you come back to us? It is too late. We already have what we wanted and you can do nothing to stop my master,” the man said and struck the ground with the whip.

The walls of the room were trembling, but there seemed to be no further effect.

“Release him immediately!” I shouted at him, because as much as I tried to remain calm, the anger clouded my mind.

I was unable to form coherent words and hardly any of my movements were intended. So I ran towards the man, but every time I almost touched him, he disappeared like a deception.