C8 Chapter 8

Erogat

The next morning, after a teary goodbye from her mother, Dana started her journey very early. Despite her objections, Gomek, Olo, and Toben accompanied her. Gomek had the day off as it was, and hadn’t planned to do anything else. And the other two walked past the monolith on their way to work anyway.

The small group around Dana got on their way to solve the mystery regarding the black rock. Shari flew – gleaming brightly – at the front of the procession. Dana and Gomek followed her, then came Olo and Toben who could hardly keep up. Once they’d reached the monolith, they spread out around it and started searching for irregular patterns and hidden locks. The stone felt cold. His exterior was smoothly polished; so much so that they couldn’t even feel any traces of the work that must have been done to it at some point. What Dana noticed most was that the surface didn’t seem to reflect any light. It was just black.

After about an hour of fruitless searching, Olo and Toben had to leave for work. Dana and Gomek sat down on a nearby bench. She discussed what to do next to finally solve this secret. At the same time, Dana played with her locket. When she touched it, she yanked her hand back immediately. The locked had warmed up noticeably – she just hadn’t noticed it in all her excitement.

When she told Gomek about it, he had her hand him the piece of jewelry, and then strutted towards the monolith.

About an hour went by, before Gomek returned, sitting on the bench in resignation. “The thing gets warm, but…”, he started saying dejectedly, “nothing else happens. You should try it. It’s yours after all.”

“Another try, then”, Dana grumbled.

She took the locket from his hand and approached the monolith. The closer she got, the closer her pendant got. When she was right in front of the stone, she carefully touched the locket to the surface. Right away, tiny lights – apparently coming from the inside of the monolith – started gleaming, forming hieroglyphs on the outside.

Dana screamed in surprise and hastily retreated from the stone. The small lights disappeared again. Gomek, who had been watching the whole thing, pushed her to try again. She seemed to have found the solution. Another try, this time with more courage and Gomek’s support, had more success – presenting them with a four by four rectangle of glyphs. In addition, something that looked like a lock appeared, just big enough to fit the locket inside. Dana grabbed the jewelry, pushed it into the opening and … nothing happened.

“What now?”, she asked Gomek helplessly.

“What should we do?”

Gomek thought it over, then his flat hand slapped against his own forehead. “Remember? The poet you found in that old book in the library!”

“You’re right!”

Dana started raffling through her pockets for the piece of paper she’d used to copy the note down onto. After she’d found it, she held it up into the air and beamed.

“Let’s get started then!”

As was written in the poet, Dana turned the locket to the left once and then twice to the right. The last turn of the locket wasn’t even quite done yet, when the glyphs in the rectangle started pulsating.

“How lucky we are that the creator of the text used numbers. We can decipher them without any problems. It’s another order.”

Dana started pressing the signs the same way it told her to in the instructions. Nothing happened. She pulled the locket out dejectedly, but that was when it happened: Where the locket and keyboard had been just moments before, the monolith became ‘fluid’ in parts. It looked about the same size and build as a regular door. The surface didn’t start running, but instead stayed in form. It looked sort of…gooey.

Gomek came closer and touched the area. He saw it as well, but it still felt the same for him. Dejected, he pulled his hand back:

“Just like in that other cave. Only you can pass through.”

Before Dana had the chance to soothe him at all, Shari erupted into cheers. Nobody could stop her before she’d disappeared through the opening.

“She’s gone! I thought we’d have more time… it doesn’t matter! I’ve got to follow her right now! I’ve got to find her!”

Dana hastily said goodbye to her friend and then approached the passage. At first, she only pushed her hand through the “liquid”. It felt cool and not wet at all, as she’d secretly feared it could be. In that moment, she was pulled into the opening, and there was nothing she could to about it.

In the blink of an eye, she was already inside a gigantic cave. A heatwave crashed over her that took her breath away.

“This is it…”, Dana thought before she blacked out.

Splat. Splat. Splat.

Dana noticed that something was poking her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw Shari sitting on her chest, slapping her repeatedly.

“Stop this right this instant! I’m not dead, nor am I injured.”

Once she’d recovered a little, she sat up.

“Where am I?”, she mumbled.

The heat was completely gone and had been substituted by a pleasant coolness. Dana stood up from the ground, still a little week at the knees, and looked around. Shari’s glow helped her see in the darkness. Despite the twilight, she registered the majestic cave she’d apparently landed in.

“Oh, there seems to be a city nearby”, she hissed, addressing her little pixie friend.

She herself was standing on a perfectly round, polished floor that was about twenty meters in diameter. It could only be accessed by walking up several steps. A large pentagram was painted on the surface and the tips of the image almost reached the edges of the platform. Every tip of the pentagram was home to a monolith – making it a total of five big, black stones. The whole structure had been erected in the center of this city, it looked like. But something was very wrong. Dana walked from one monolith to the next. They were all either crooked or standing in the wrong places. Since she knew by know that these heavy things could hardly be moved by a person, she suspected that some sort of tragedy must have taken place.

The closer surroundings were all blackened with ashes. It looked just like what Dana imagined the aftermath of an explosion would look like, which only supported her theory that a catastrophe had struck this place. There was a staircase leading up to a fantastically beautiful building opposite of where she was standing. Everything seemed lifeless. She could make out paths that lead away from that plaza, ending somewhere in the darkness.

She walked down the steps and stepped onto the street. Slowly and surely, watching her environment, she moved through the alleys of the old town.

“…it sure is a very old city”, Dana reverently whispered to Shari.

Shari was making sure they had enough light. At first that was very helpful, but in the end, they didn’t need it anymore. Wherever they went, there was always a burning streetlight nearby. They stopped gleaming once one left its immediate surroundings. Dana was getting more and more courageous as time passed. By now, she was sure that nobody was there with her, and so she shuffled through the streets for hours, studying every street and house she walked past.

Wherever she went, she was met with the same picture. It was clear that nobody had been inside these buildings for an eternity. She headed towards one building that, considering his shape and size, could be a public building – maybe even a library. She felt for her locket, lost in thought, but the locket remained calm. She slowly ascended the stairs up to the door which, to her surprise, opened with ease.

She stepped into the large hall that was stuffed to the ceiling with an incredible number of books on shelves. There were desks and reading nooks all around, and they were still filled with scriptures, as if the readers had only left to grab a quick bite to eat and would return any minute now. She languidly wandered through the rows until she reached the end of the hall where she noticed something bright. It wasn’t a candle, or a torch, or even Shari, because the pixie had already pressed herself tightly up against Dana’s neck.

“Hello? Is anybody there? Show yourself!”

At first, nothing happened. Suddenly, without warning, the light started approaching Dana. If that wasn’t worse enough, once the light was close enough to be understood, it started talking:

“Hello, Dana, long time no see.”

Dana jumped with fright, terrified, and fell backwards over a chair, bumping the hard ground with her behind.

By now, the creature was close enough for her to recognize. In front of her, an old – to her, maybe even ancient – man with a thick beard soared towards her. He was a good two meters tall, and clothed in a billowing rope. If he hadn’t been translucent and gleaming in a mysterious light, she most likely would have thought him to seem nice and pleasant. But like this – that was just terrifying! After the first shock had worn off, she fought back to her feet, deciding to wait for what was to come.

“I am Erogat, your uncle…”

After what felt like an eternity to Dana, the creature resumed talking, smiling at her.

“On your mother’s side! I have waited for you for the longest time. I have died in the process, as you can see – but I am still right here to help you and to guide you.”

After that announcement, Dana had to sit down once more. She tried to stomach what she’d heard. But then she decided to let go of her reluctance. Once more, she jumped back to her feet, and slowly walked towards Erogat. She had to know what this thing really was. She was desperate to asks thousands of questions. Shari, though, didn’t feel anything like Dana, and stayed back, completely different from what she’d usually do. Tons of questions buzzed through Dana’s head and she chose to start with the one that seemed to be the most logical at that moment:

“What are you? What is this place and where is everyone else? Has anyone else ever been here, for that matter?” Erogat smiled.

“Before we get to the good stuff and I answer your questions, I think there’s no way around you reading two books. Otherwise, you won’t understand a thing of what I will tell you later. These books are the first two we have ever written, containing the basic words of our language, and explaining the basic thoughts of our people. Without the introduction from the books, everything else I could explain to you would be in vain. That’s why I ask you to follow me into our guildhall. That’s where our grand library is.”

They walked through the darkness. Erogat walked ahead, Dana followed, and then Shari at the end of the short procession, shy and keeping a remarkable distance from Erogat. Dana noticed once again that the laps they’d past on their way only lit up when they were nearby. In the process, a stately circle around the lights was illuminated in a warm gleam. Once they left the premise of said lamp, it turned off and the next one lit up.

She trotted after him without saying a word. Erogat used almost the same way Dana had used when she’d gone there before. As they reached the plaza – without a doubt the same Dana had landed in earlier – Erogat floated towards a building. The building’s entrance was framed with stately pillars, holding up a roof. He made a gesture with his hand and the door opened. He stepped – no, he floated through and into the extensive hall.

“Dana, this is the great library. If you would be so kind to add these two books to your knowledge…!” He pointed at two large books that were resting on a shelf next to the entrance. “Afterwards, you’ll understand many, many things. Please, start with the one on the left.”

Dana didn’t hesitate in grabbing the first book as well as her locket. As before, the same ray of light shot from the book and connected with her mind, so that she could absorb the data and information that it offered.

Shari was flying over to her then, slowly losing her shyness and anxiety, and eager to learn something. A total of three hours passed, before Dana turned to the second book. The whole reading – or rather receiving – had made her lightheaded. She fell backwards into a chair in exhaustion. There was no way around it, she had to rest for a while. Erogat slowly approached her, smiling.

“It’s usually not common to take in two books at once, plus processing them as well. In all honestly, you shouldn’t take in more than one book a week, because you’re in danger of overexerting one’s soul, as well as the fact that you’re usually not in the right state to take everything in. As you might have notice, lightheadedness is one of the side-effects if one does not follow that rule.”

Dana’s head was buzzing, but she didn’t mind. After all, the brand-new knowledge was extremely useful. The books she’d read before but hadn’t understood, suddenly made a lot more sense to her, even though there were still large chunks of the puzzle she was missing. But she was hoping for Erogat’s help to fill in the things she hadn’t figured out yet.

“Now that you have absorbed parts of our basic knowledge, I am hopeful that I can answer many of your questions. I hope that you are ready now to utilize the answers I give to you.

You are aware of parts of our history now, know many worlds of the olden language, as well as the letters, their meaning, and the translation of most of the hieroglyphs.

In the next few days, you will have to read three more books to complete your basic knowledge.”

“I thought we were supposed to – or allowed to – only read one book per week”, Dana interrupted the ghost.

“I know what I said”, I replied angrily. “In all honesty, you are already too old to start your education. But since you are my only student, we will make an exception with the reading of the books…and the studies! I hope you will pull through. And we will remedy that flaw, your age – or at least I hope we will. I am assuming you will be advanced enough in five years to complete your studies perfectly – if you are willing to study hard.”

“Fine, but now it’s my turn to ask questions.”

Dana had gathered enough courage now and didn’t seem timid any longer. Now she wanted answers.

“Where exactly are we? Who or what are we? Who used to live here? But most importantly – where have they all gone?”

“Those are very good questions, but they are not simple to answer”, Erogat objected, thinking it over for a moment. “Right now, you are in the city of the “Olden People”. It is called Te La Luna. They are calling us the “Olden People”, even though the true name is “Mu’ Nagaan”. We have lived here for thousands of years. I wasn’t born here, but I’ve lived here since this place was founded. We are the guardians of the nature, the planet, and everything that’s growing and crawling on its surface. We own the power over the elements and the laws of nature. Outsiders are calling it magic.”

He paused for a moment before he continued. “We can use nature’s energy for ourselves. We can utilize our powers to help – or to destroy. Our people are the keepers of peace between the light and the shadow, between order and chaos, as well as the keepers of nature. If need be, we are judges and jurors for all that are fighting, ever since intelligent life has developed on this planet.”

Dana looked up. “Light and shadow…chaos…order and nature…?”

“Yes. The world is split up into creatures of the light – those who are active during the day; those who lover order, and straight lines, and honesty of course – and the creatures of the shadow. The shadow creatures prefer the time of moon and night, as well as lies and deception. And most of all the love the chaos. Those are the things they value above all else. That’s why we call them anarchists.”

“Are they…bad?”, Dana wanted to know right away.

Erogat looked at her in silence, then he explained thoughtfully: “No, not per se. It’s their nature. There isn’t something like good or bad in the natural order of things. People have invented that system to justify their own behavior.”

He paused once more. Than he lifted one translucent finger to his lips.

“Please don’t interrupt me. You can ask your questions when I’m done telling my story.” Dana nodded sheepishly.

“So…elves, dwarfs, pixies, and the creatures who do not shy away from the day … they are counted as creatures of light, since they don’t fear the sunlight and present with a selfless character. On the other side, we have trolls, goblins, demons. The love the darkness and the mold. The nature and her creatures are somewhere in the middle. You see, Dana, there’s a place for everything and…”

“But – isn’t there anything else in between? The humans? Where do they belong?”

Dana wanted to know every detail. He short her a dark look, since she’d interrupted him again, but he still answered her.

“The humans are a species of their own. They belong to either side, and yet to neither. A good six million years ago, our people have discovered a strange creature that was just in the process of starting to walk upright. For his species, he owned a promising potential and showed signs of having a consciousness. So, we decided to support the creature. That’s where today’s humans came from. They were a bitter disappointment to us. We gave them all the possibilities to fashion their life in a peaceful and orderly manner.”

“Are they not intelligent enough to live together in peace?”

“Maybe, maybe not. We should see. If they survive the next few thousand years without becoming extinct – by their own doings, mind you – maybe there’s hope for them after all. But the egos and aggressions that live inside of humans, are just too large and unpredictable. The human gets lost in chaos too easily. Apparently, it’s easier for him than keeping things in order. In the beginning, the humans saw us as gods. We didn’t want that. But the humans wouldn’t be deterred, they still worshipped us. They needed gods to justify their evil deeds – war, murder, manslaughter. Of course, also to…control their fellow humans.

But since we didn’t support their actions, not to mention disapproved of them, they searched for new gods, simply to build up their power when it came to their fellow humans. They even started cursing us, telling us we were false gods. They started hunting us down, killing us off. That’s what humans are like. If you are not for him, you’re against him, and that means fearing for your life. That’s why we turned our backs on them.”

“On all of the humans?”

Dana didn’t want to believe it – she couldn’t! She had read so much about the humans; about their inventiveness, the good deeds they’d done, their generosity, and their willingness to help.

“No, not all of them…”, he replied quietly. “In reality, there’s not many of them. But those few can influence and control the masses, leading to the rest of them following them like lemmings, blindly following orders. It leads to the same results.” Resignation colored his voice.

Dana had to chew on that for a while. Someday, she wanted to get to know the humans. But then, a more important question occurred to her.

“Where’s the rest of our species? What happened to them?”

“The rest of us have disappeared during a large experiment. They got lost in the rush of time”, he countered, drenched in sadness.

“Your parents wanted to create a grand portal to bring us all home again – where home might be. They tried to melt the five monoliths on the pentagram plaza into one big portal – a large monolith, so to speak. They though that the energy they needed for that could be controlled. But they overestimated themselves! … The magical explosion possible catapulted them to another time. Well, yes, they got lost in time.

I was lucky, if you can call it that. While they experimented, I was travelling through another portal. When it happened, I lost consciousness, and then woke up here on the pentagram, alone, without my locket. That was, if I haven’t mentioned it before, about five thousand years ago. You are the first to resurface so far. You also know when and where.”

“My parents? How did they come up with that idea?” She was incredulous and shaking her head. “Your parents heard from the experiment of Atlantis. Many of us, who had been disappointed in the humans, had retreated to Atlantis. They lived a good life there, not taking care of their tasks. At some point, the got the idea to use cosmic energy to create a vast portal to go back home. They had overexerted themselves, and the energy they sat free, too, so that this continent disappeared with a bang. That was eleven- thousand-five-hundred years ago.

Your parents believed they had everything under control and wouldn’t repeat the mistakes made in Atlantis. They didn’t want to create a new portal from nothing, they simply wanted to join five already existing portals … But they were wrong. There was a big bang, but the result was pretty much the same. I was left here alone. Stupidly enough, I was in a portal on my way here. When I got here, everyone was gone, just as my locket was. One needs plenty of magicians to create a new locket, do you understand that?”

He looked at her questioningly. Dana hesitated to answer. She didn’t want to interrupt him again and possible anger him further. She quietly listened to the rest of his story. “Now I was trapped in this place. Nobody can get through the magical walls of this cave. There’s just the passage through the monolith. I’ve been waiting ever since. Something told me that you would return someday to rectify your parents’ mistakes. That’s why I waited for you; that’s why I hoped you would reappear when I was still alive. It took a lot longer, but at least you’re here now.”

Once he’d ended his story, Dana got lost in her gloomy thoughts. It was shocking for her to hear. Her parents were at fault for this chaos. It was their fault that she had been catapulted to the future and that she didn’t know where the rest of her people were?

“This is unbelievable…”, she roused quietly, before being interrupted by Erogat.

“Don’t you need to return home, Dana? You’ve been here a while now. Aren’t your foster parents waiting for you?”

“Of course, they are. They’re always waiting for me. But there’s one more question I have for you. Do you know where Shari comes from? What kind of creature she is?”

“Not exactly! We only have assumptions”, he chuckled in response. “We think that they are some kind of seafoam pixies, or at least of a similar species. When we’re born, a magical egg appears nearby. Two weeks later, a creature just like Shari hatches. It stays with us all our life. When we’re gone, their bodily shape disappears as well, and the pixie returns to the sea. But nothing happens when the roles are reversed…”

Erogat studied Shari.

“…we can exist without them. But we have our means to avoid losing them ahead of time. All we must do, is use an ancestral stone to bring them back in the following twenty- four hours. Otherwise, they’ll forever return to their natural element – the water. I am positive you have seen the glittering of a lake, river or creek before, haven’t you? Or the gleaming of the water in the dark? That’s them. That’s where you find their species. They learn all the things we learn, and at the end of their time, they take their accumulated knowledge and return it with them to their element… If one could read from the water, or find another measure to filter the information from it, one would have the vastest library of the world, granting knowledge to the secrets of the entire universe.”

Erogat slowly approached the door. Dana and Shari followed wordlessly. He brought them over to the pentagram.

“Here, Dana, you see the last remnants of the experiment. The magic explosion can still be felt today.” Dana stepped closer.

“That’s why I blacked out – because of the strong magic that’s still ruling this place?”

“Yes. It takes time until you’ve absorbed enough magical energy to apply yourself to the environment.”

“Does that happen to everyone that comes here? Or just us?”, Dana wanted to know.

“I’m guessing the same will happen to everyone. But I hope that’s just one time. And I really can’t be sure. After all, you’re the first to come here.”

“Can I come back tomorrow? And if I can, can I also bring a friend along? And most importantly – how can I bring him with me?”

Dana had decided to bring Gomek with her to all the impending visits with this ghosts, so that he wouldn’t be concentrating just on her too much. Even she needed downtime every occasionally.

“Of course, you need to come back. You should return to this place every day. We must educate you. And concerning your friend: take his hand and walk with him through the portal. But you must be cautious: if you break the connection, he will get lost. I hope we could soothe some of your most burning questions, and I will be happy to see you and your friend tomorrow when you’ve rested.”

“Surely. We will be here.”

She walked back towards the last working monolith and activated it to get back to the kingdom of the dwarfs. She had so many things to tell Gomek, Toben, and her dwarf parents, and she couldn’t wait to see their faces. As she crossed through the portal, she left behind a confused Erogat.