Immortal Light: Wide Awake (25 page)

“
What’s the matter; are you
waiting for someone?”

Benjamin finished rinsing the last dish and
dried his hands. “No, I’m not waiting for anything.
Why?”

“
It’s just that you keep doing
that.”

“
Doing what?”

“
Looking out the
window.”

“
Oh, that,” He chuckled and folded
the towel neatly and placed it on the counter. “I thought I saw a
short person walking around with a rifle in his hands.”

Lucy rolled her eyes, looking out
the window. “That’s just Russell, the boy up the street. He’s
always shooting things.”

Lucy stopped.
This is it,
she thought
to herself.
This is the perfect segue; you
have to do it now.

“
In fact, he shot a bird the other
day in our front yard. I found it by the tree out
front.”

She watched Benjamin closely to see if there
was any amount of recognition; maybe he would remember her saying
something about it in the grove.

“
What a horrible thing to
do.”

That wasn’t exactly what she wanted, so she
pressed on. “Yeah, I actually picked it up while it was
dead.”

She paused, and Benjamin responded
discouragingly once again.

“
Wow, there aren’t a lot of people
who would do that.”

Lucy continued on. “But the
weirdest part was, while I was sitting there holding it, I could
almost, sort of, feel this kind of energy flowing from me into the
bird.”

Another pause; Benjamin waited fixedly on
Lucy’s every word as if truly intrigued by the story. She went
on.

“
And it was the
strangest thing, but …
”

“
It came back to life,” Benjamin
chimed in.

Lucy looked at him, stunned. Her
mouth hung open in disbelief that he would just throw it out there,
proving finally that he was the same Benjamin in the forest, that
he had been having the dreams or experiences, too. But Lucy, being
unable to trust even herself anymore, decided to ask one more
question before playing her hand.

“
How did you know I was going to
say that?”

It was Benjamin’s turn to look shocked. “What?
That’s what you were going to say? I’m sorry; I was just trying to
be funny. What a coincidence.”

He smiled and laughed at his good fortune, but
Lucy wasn’t amused. She turned back to the sink to ring out a
washcloth to wipe down the counter.

Benjamin could see that he
had upset her, so he moved immediately to mop up his own little
mess. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—
”

Before he could finish, Peter and James came
into the kitchen. “Well, I think it’s time for us to head out and
leave these fine folks to their evening.”

Peter’s voice had the same calming
effect to it that Lucy had noticed in Benjamin. Though they were at
least fifteen years apart in age, they were definitely
brothers.

Lucy didn’t look up from her task at the
counter; she was hurt and didn’t feel like reciprocating
pleasantries.

Benjamin never got the opportunity to finish
his sentence before he was swept away by his brother’s
hand.

Lucy could hear her father bid the two
farewell, and by the time the door had closed and James had secured
it with the deadbolt, she had retreated upstairs to her room in
tears.

Chapter
13

Lucy sighed heavily as she realized she was,
again, sitting in the rainforest grove.

“
Please don’t be here,” she said
under her breath tiredly.

It was bad enough that Benjamin constantly
disappointed her waking life; she didn’t want to have to relive it
in her dreams. Then she felt him; she felt his presence just like
she had in the classroom. She refused to turn around. She heard his
footsteps come up behind her and felt his hands on her shoulders.
He spoke softly in her ear.

“
I told you out there that I would
deny everything. I didn’t lie. You can try, but I won’t be able to
talk with you about what happens in here when I’m out
there.”

It was difficult to believe that the two
Benjamins were in fact the same person.

“
Then what’s the point of any of
this?” she lashed out.

“
I promise I will tell you
everything in time, but there are things that you need to know
first. Everything will make sense soon.”

“
Good, because this whole thing
with not being able to even approach the real you about any of this
is really getting old.” Lucy didn’t hide her
frustration.

“
I need to tell
you about my past before any of this can make sense. Some of it is
still going to be hard to understand, and some of it might even be
a little bit …
”
He looked away for a moment.

“
What?” Lucy prodded.

“
It might be kind of frightening.”
He let the words sink in.

Lucy rolled them around in her
head. “Fine, whatever, but I need to know,” Lucy said impatiently,
realizing she was sick of waiting.

“
In that case, I think we should
probably get comfortable.”

The two of them sat on the fallen tree trunk
as Benjamin started talking.

“
Lucy, I’ve lied to you about my
age. I’m not really seventeen; I’m eighteen.”

Lucy looked at him with wide-eyed incredulity
and threw her hands in the air. “So what? You’re eighteen, big
deal; what does that have to do with anything?”

“
I turned eighteen … more than two
thousand years ago, Lucy.”

There was silence between them. All that could
be heard were the birds in the trees and the wind gently blowing
through the branches.

“
Okay, I’m listening.” Lucy said
as her heart rate began to pick up a little bit.

“
I come from a city that doesn’t
exist anymore. At least, it doesn’t exist on earth anymore. I
showed it to you. It is a city called Zharem.”

Lucy’s expression softened.

“
The people of Zharem have
abilities that the people of the rest of the world do not have.
You’re starting to develop those abilities.”

Lucy looked down at her hands. “I
am?”

“
Yes, and my
story will help you understand why. But I need to know if
you
think you’re ready
to hear it.”

Lucy looked surprised at the question. “Me?
How do I know if I’m ready to hear something that I still think I’m
making up in my own head?”

“
Because, Lucy,
deep down I know you believe this place is not in your head, and
you know that what I tell you in here is important. My past is
about to become your present and I’ll tell you right now, it’s not
normal—not how you see normal, anyway.
”

He was right; Lucy knew he was right. She did
believe it. That fantastical side of her personality had believed
it from the beginning, but the logical side was starting to cross
the line.

“
I can’t go back, can
I?”

Benjamin looked compassionately into her eyes
and gently shook his head. “No, you can’t.”

Lucy looked at her hands
again, the source of the supposed
light
power she was developing. She
sighed deeply and closed her eyes for a moment.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Luce,
the logical half of her brain said to the fantastical half.
She opened her eyes and looked at Benjamin.

“
Yes, I want to know,” she said.
She decided that a leap of faith was better than wondering for the
rest of her life.

Benjamin looked at her, displaying a still
compassionate, but very pleased expression on his face.

“
Okay,” he said
smiling.

He paused for a second, as if choosing a place
to start.

“
Nearly
three-thousand years ago, everything changed for my people.” He
began like he was telling a story, and Lucy appreciated the
simplicity. “We were a highly advanced civilization, like the world
is today, but instead of electricity, we had the
light
. Through
generations of kings and queens ruling with their different
philosophies, we were graced with a monarchy that started us down a
road that would lead us to the world I was born into: a world
without war, a world of unity, where every person worked for the
betterment of mankind. We were unique in the world, but it took a
tragedy to get us to that point.”

Lucy sat with her legs crossed in
front of her and her senses focused directly on Benjamin’s every
word.

“
About one thousand years before I
was born, our queen and her special guardian, having been somehow
bated outside the city, were captured by an invading city’s army in
this very forest. They were both killed.” Benjamin stopped himself
for a moment.

“
First, the
guardian was tortured and killed for information about weaknesses
in Zharem’s defenses; but the guardian was strong, and she
sacrificed her own life in order to keep her knowledge safe. Our
beloved queen was then killed by an evil sorcerer named Krohan. He
wanted her
light
to be part of him, so he performed what is roughly translated
as an extraction. He would absorb as much knowledge as she had and
then he would take what was left of her
light
and store it in his
body.”

A shiver went up Lucy’s back. The
very explanation of the process sounded evil and she felt a
strange, intense sorrow for the queen.

“
He wasn’t able
to extract her completely, so he killed her after the king’s
special army had slain every man, woman, and child in Krohan’s
city, searching for the queen. When they finally caught up to
Krohan and the queen, it was almost too late. Right in front of the
captains of the king’s army, Krohan absorbed the remaining
light
of the queen,
leaving her nothing but an empty shell.”

“
What did they do?” Lucy said,
feeling the burden of the story.

“
They couldn’t
do anything. Krohan vanished right in front of them, taking the
queen’s
light
with him.”

An odd sort of guilt overtook Lucy as she
listened to the story.

“
If the army had just gone looking
for the queen rather than destroy the city, couldn’t they have
saved her?”

Benjamin shrugged. “No one knows
why they destroyed the whole city. It was brutal, but we don’t
really know the circumstances because the army disappeared. Their
two captains were called Klarr and Aux. They were brothers, and
they took their army and their story with them.”

“
Where did they go?”

Benjamin shrugged again. “No one
knows. They just left. Wherever they went, they’re all dead
now.”

Lucy considered this army, the queen’s
guardian, and extraction, and her whole body shivered. It was
scary, and though it should seem so distant, it felt so close to
her, like she had been there in that time. She shook aside her
thoughts.

“
What happened after that? What
did the king do?”

“
In his despair and grief,”
Benjamin continued, “the king demanded that the high priest make
him immortal because he knew there would be no heir to the throne
without a queen; so, he would be able to atone for failing his
kingdom by spending the rest of eternity making Zharem into the
perfect city.”

“
For nearly one thousand years the
king led his people, and they did become the perfect city. There
was no jealousy between neighbors; there was no crime and no war to
speak of. The people enjoyed great prosperity. It was truly a
paradise on earth. Unfortunately, things changed again when the
king had an illegitimate son with a servant woman in his palace.
Knowing that any child of his would have a right to the throne, he
banished the servant and her newborn son to the outer borders of
the kingdom.”

“
Wait,” Lucy cut in, “the king who
decided to live forever because there would never be an heir to his
kingdom produced an heir and then banished him? Why?”

“
Well, in his successes as king,
he had begun to feel that he was the only person who could rule
Zharem properly, and any new king might take what he had worked so
hard to build and destroy it.” He paused to make sure Lucy grasped
what he was saying.

“
He sounds kind of selfish. Not to
mention, he could have raised the kid to follow in his
footsteps.”

“
Selfish is one way of looking at
it, but he was the greatest king Zharem had ever seen. His
judgments were both just and merciful, and his people loved him
unequivocally. That’s something you would never see in the world we
now live in. Giving that away to a new king would have been a
gamble.”