Lovers of Babel (27 page)

“We found you in the lost desert. Your body temperatures were too high so we took off your clothes an
d put something cooler on you. We hosed you off and fed you water. It looks like you’ve recovered well.”

The strange man had dark skin, but a clear complexion. His eyes were dark and aggressive.

“And what about the rope? You didn’t mention when you decided to tie down two unconscious and defenseless strangers,” Chad said.

“This was done as a precaution. Also, we
wanted to make sure that you didn’t leave before we got some answers.”

“Answers to what?
We simply got lost,” I said.

“You got lost in the desert? How did you come across the desert in the first place? I doubt you just stumbled across it.”

“Well, we did.”

“What about your strange clothes?
And what’s this contraption?”

The man held up the H2O inhaler.
Chad and I kept quiet.

“Only one other time have we seen someone from the outside make it into our territory and he never made it back to his home. Do you want this to happen to you?”

We paused for a while.

“What is it that you want to know?”
Chad asked.

“Where do you come from?”

“We come from a place called Equinox.”

“And who sent you?”

“Would you know who it was even if we told you?”

The man glared at
Chad.

“Fine.
Amias Riley. He is leader of our land.”

The man was thinking. He stood up and paced around in circles.

“Why did he send you?”

Chad
looked at me as if to say,
should we tell him?

“To find the Book of Wisdom,” I said.

The man examined us for a while. His stares made me anxious and uneasy. I was on edge just waiting for an opportunity to defend myself.

“What are your names?”

Chad answered with an unsteady tone in his voice.

“I’m
Chad and this is Sage, the daughter of our leader.”

“H
ow did you travel to the lost desert? I know you didn’t simply stumble across it,” the man asked.

“We didn’t
stumble
per-se. We walked,” Chad lied.

The man looked at Chad skeptically then reached in his pants to pull out a glass knife. He bent down in front of Chad and showed him the knife.

“I made this with my own two hands. Do you notice the leaf inside? My grandfather kept this leaf as a keepsake before the apocalypse. It is one of the only remnants from the trees in the old world and I kept it inside here so that it never decays. Now,” he moved the knife closer to Chad’s eye, “if I have to use this on you, I risk the possibility of shattering this glass and ruining the leaf. And I simply couldn’t handle that. You wouldn’t make me use this would you?”

Chad was trying to speak, but could only shake his head.

“Good.” The man stood up. “Tell me how you traveled to the lost desert.”

Chad and I looked at each other. I decided to speak this time.

“The desert happens to be on the border of Equinox. In order to get to the border we had to teleport there.”

The man folded his arms.

“Teleport? You mean you travelled through space and time to get to the desert?”

“We knew you might have trouble believing or even understanding that,” I said.

“Not at all.
You are magic people…magi. I know your kind,” the man said with a slight growl.

“Great. Can we go now?” Chad asked prematurely.

The man erupted in a fit of laughter. It was so loud and forceful that it made us shift in our seats.

Finally, he
stopped and gave us a stern expression.

“You can go where I tell you to go,” he proclaimed.

Then he dug in his pocket, pulled out a wooden flute and played a short melody that sounded like a bird song. Then he spoke.

“
You are magi from Equinox. You should know that magic is strictly forbidden in our territory.”

Chad and I looked at each other with intense anxiety. I felt the urge to use my power, but I needed to wait for the right time.

Four men entered the forest. One of the men bowed to our captor and called him Sire Job.  The sire placed a soft hand on his shoulder and began to speak to them in a foreign language. Then they all looked at us. Two of them came over and started to loosen our bonds.

“We are untying you, but you must
remain here. The thing that you seek will never be given over to you. It is too precious to our people,” Job said.

When
we were finally untied, Chad looked over at me with a panicked expression. I tried to gesture to him to relax for now, but it was too late. He had already grabbed my hand and began to trek away, but suddenly I felt fire around my ankle. I looked down and saw that there was a shackle made of blue lava around it with a chain that led to Job’s hand.

He yanked me down and I lost my grip on Chad. When he saw that I was down, Chad tried to help me up, but he got shackled as well. We were laying there
helpless on our backs looking up at the mysterious strangers amidst the trees. I got a sudden chill of fear through my spine and I knew I had to act. I commanded Chad to quickly cover his mouth and began to create a sleeping gas to sedate our captures.

Job and his minions looked slightly confused as to where the gas was coming from. Then, Job looked down at me with a smirk.

“So you’re the creator? I think I have something that’ll fix that,” he probed.

He held out his han
d and one of the men put a glowing golden ring in it. Then, Job threw it down like a Frisbee toward me, and it traveled directly to my head and hovered there just above my crown like a halo.

All of a sudden, t
he gas disappeared and so did my powers.

Who are these people?

“I didn’t want to use these, but you left me no choice. Now, what do you say we head to the village?” Job said.

A man grabbed
each of us and led us through the forest. The sun was setting in between the trees making the tops of them disappear into the gradual dimness of dawn. We walked a ways until we reached open grassland that reminded me of the village we had seen when we traveled into the past. In fact, it was the same village only now it had several more buildings and stables with horses. Some houses had been built using brick instead of mud. The savage village was developing.

We were
practically dragged through the town with our unique shackles displayed gloriously on our bodies. We were both adorned with ankle bracelets made of the type of lava that never left a scar, but I was the only one wearing a glowing halo that seemed to mock my current situation. There were people planting gardens and gathering water from a nearby creek. Children were playing with roaming chickens and the men were mixing mud and water to make cement. When we passed by, they stopped and looked at us with no expression and then continued to work, never skipping a beat.

These wholesome sights were inconsistent with the harsh way we were just treated.
Sire
job looked so honorable and loving on the outside, but on the inside he was a monster. I bet those village people would be more reluctant to call him Sire if they knew the things he did to us in the forest. I wanted to spit at the thought.

After walking what seemed to be an
hour through the village we walked up a steep hill to a copper colored barn. Inside was an array of farming and building equipment as well as a few instruments for the butchering of animals. I shuddered to think that we were those animals. The barn seemed to go on forever. There had to be at least four rooms – two on each side of the entrance – that hid behind the dimness of a few hundred flickering candles that seemed to float above our heads. The savage men led us to the room on the far left corner of the barn. When we got to the doorway it was too dark inside to see much of anything. One of the men with a piece of white rope braided in his long hair, left for one minute and came back with the brightest lantern I’d seen. He walked ahead of us and placed the light source on a small table to the side of the room.

There were two operating tables at the center of the room, only
these tables were made of transparent glass. Job ordered us to get on the tables and lay down on our backs. We hesitated and looked at each other. Chad nodded his head slightly as if to reassure me, then we did as commanded. The table was cold as ice.

As I lay there a freight train was running through my mind. My thoughts were coming in so quickly that they began to run into each other. At first I thought of escaping, but then realized that would be impossible since I was wearing a halo that took away my powers. Then I thought about how the coldness of the table reminded me of death. The thought of death led to panic, panic to confusion, confusion to desperation, and desperation to panic. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Let us go! Please! We don’t want your book we just want to go back home. P-please!” I pleaded with a stream of tears running into my ears.

Job looked down at
me and reached over my head grabbing my halo and examining it thoughtfully. Then he looked at me.

“You want to go back to your home? Well, this is my home and
I guard it with my life. Home isn’t just a place, it’s a haven for your soul. You both will soon find out that your
home
is only a place of residence. If it were more than that then why were you so quick to leave it behind in search of the truth?”

I was half listening to the savage sire, because I was more focused on escaping. Job had my halo in his hands which meant that I could use my power. I
quickly tried to sit up, but as soon as I moved four metal rods shot out of my table and bounded my limbs. I tried to break free, but it was hopeless. I sunk back onto my table defeated. I looked over at Chad who was being released from his ankle bracelet of fire, but was immediately bound to the table like I was.

“I’
m sure you’re thinking about using your powers now, but I wouldn’t if I were you. Besides, I have something more permanent than those accessories you were wearing,” Job said.

He walked in between our tabl
es and we looked up at him with eyes to kill. He held out his hands and two of his men placed a needle in each.

Chad finally spoke up.

“W-what are you planning on doing with that?”

“We can’t have visitors roaming around our vill
age with dangerous powers. We give you this so that you don’t have to carry around those cumbersome shackles,” he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

“Why do we have to stay here? We can just leave and yo
u’ll never see us again,” I begged.

“Let you go so you can go and tell your leader where we are? I’m sorry, but you know too much already. You should’ve never come here.”

And with that, he injected the vein in our wrists with a substance that set fire to my blood. Chad and I howled in pain writhing from the venom that had invaded our bodies. The men stood and watched expressionlessly as we seized and moaned in pain.

“What did you do to
us!” Chad yelled.

“
Right now a virus is surging through your body that is numbing every molecule of your power sources. In other words, your powers are being taken away each cell at a time,” Job said while inspecting his fingernails.

I wanted to break each one of his fingers.

I don’t remember what was worse: the excruciating pain of having this virus attack my insides, or the fact that my powers were being destroyed.

My palms were being cut by my finger nails digging into them and my jaw was getting sore from being clinched so tightly.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the virus had taken its affect and the pain was gone. Chad and I slumped back down like lifeless dolls. I felt like every speck of energy that I had left, was gone. I felt the absence of my power in my body and it was hollow and heavy. Our abilities made us who we were. We never thought that there could ever be something that could take away our essence. Suddenly, there existed a people who not only knew about our powers, but understood how to take them away from us.

I looked up at Job who had taken my wrist and was checking my pulse. I wondered who he really was. How did he become Sire of this place? How could this place even exist without my people’s knowledge? We didn’t know about them, but they certainly knew about us.

As Job walked over to Chad to check his pulse, it occurred to me that these people couldn’t be complete strangers. They had to have survived the apocalypse as well, or at least the elders must have. There was no way that these people survived the apocalypse without living underground like our ancestors did. Maybe this was how they found out about our powers. Still, I wondered why they would want to leave the Equinox after their ascent from the underground.

After Chad’s pulse was checked, our bounds were released. We both hardly had the strength to sit up, so the two men helped us up into a sitting position.
My legs swung off the edge of the table and I sat there for a few minutes. I was in a state of disbelief that this all had happened. I wanted so badly to defend myself, but was too weak to even think of how. All I could do was let the savage man carry me on his back to our cabin in the village.