Four Hundred Years in the Sky, Aaron Redfern [reading rainbow books TXT] 📗

an ancient and wizened traveler, coming to a village in distant hills and meeting the descendants of his brother’s line, so far removed that they had forgotten the names and lives of everyone he had once known. He and they would not recognize each other, nor know what to make of each other. He might pass them by, and find other people.

That, however, was a fantasy. There was no exit from the tower.

Unless…

What lies behind the door?

Thirty seconds passed. He was at the door.

His eyes crept across its surface many times as he stood there once more, over the dark, dry wood, and over the silver pull-ring. Animate shadows drifted past him like lives.

He wanted to open it.

His right hand hovered in the air, between him and the ring. He stood in the silence, wondering why he could never open the door, even now. What he felt was no longer fear of what lay on the other side, or fear that the powers that had bound him inside the tower would seek retribution. It was only a recognition of finality. When he opened the door, the life he had had for the last four hundred years would be over.

He gripped it. It was cold, and painful. Lightning-bolts of terror crawled over the surface of the metal. He savored the feeling for a moment, and then he pulled the door open.

It was a square room, empty except for one corner, in which a figure was curled. It was thin and naked, and it moved with such zealous erraticism that it seemed to writhe. Pale green-white light flared out from it, and danced all over the room. The figure seemed to be crouching on the balls of its feet, facing away from him. It writhe-turned toward him as he opened the door.

Its eyes were light. Its mouth opened in a scream, which was made of light. All of it was light.

It came so fast that in the time before it reached him, he thought of very little. He thought of his brother’s children’s children, catching fish by a river, and he wondered very distantly, being above all else a being of habit, from which direction the creature now came.

And so it was.

* * *

It came from the south.

It was unclear to him how he knew direction, for the sky was almost pure black with the most evil-looking clouds. South seemed very urgent to him. He was in a wasteland without color, facing south, at something beginning to happen.

There was a light out there, a pale greenish light. It colored the rocks, and made them seem sickly and dying. Something about the light seemed false to him, almost implanted, as though he were being supplied with the thoughts of someone else.

The light grew and brightened. It played about in rays over the wasteland, blotting out even the spears of lightning, almost. The rays of light tried to become something, but they seemed sick. Nothing formed from them. And underneath them, the ground began to fall away, swallowing up the empty rocks. The swallowing emptiness came on toward him like the rush of waves…

* * *

He awoke on an unfamiliar bed, in a room too huge to understand. He thought that he must still be dreaming, but that thought in itself was enough for him to realize on some level that he was not. He was not the smartest boy in his town, so they said, but he figured things out sometimes. And he could read, too.

Worry had not quite set in. He could not explain why he was in the giant room, but for a few minutes yet it was only a curiosity. He was a boy. He accepted and investigated.

He looked around. There was a table, a desk, a great deal of floor. His eyes stopped on the book.

The walk to the desk gave him a greater sense of how vast the place truly was. Distant things seemed to pass him slowly, and everything was distant. There was a balcony with a spyglass. He did not let it distract him yet.

The surface of the desk and the weighty book were above his head. There was a tall chair next to it, and he climbed up onto it. He suddenly felt very small. And there, kneeling on the seat of the chair, he began to feel for the first time the pangs of dread. The weight of the book seemed to foreshadow something. The infinitely upward columns of the bookshelves on every wall were a presence like nothing he had ever known. Where were his parents?

Carefully, he peeled back the front cover of the tome that lay in front of him. His father had once trained as a page boy for a courtier, back in the kingdom days. He had learned to read; a decade later he had taught that skill to his wife, and two decades later to his son. They had been so proud of him.

The answers to all thy questions be found within

, the book read. There was no other writing on that first page. It required another turn. He did not find the words comforting.

And then, already with a kind of resignation, knowing the way a fish knows when it lies in the jaws of a bear, he turned over the next dusty page and read on.

Imprint

Text: Aaron Redfern
Publication Date: 06-28-2012

All Rights Reserved