The Great Darkening (Epic of Haven Trilogy) (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

T
he
moment the supports failed and the column collapsed, Cal was flung headlong into the bookshelf embellished with the bronzed Owele relief. He crashed into the carved bird, fully expecting to meet jarring resistance, but what he found instead both saved his life and surprised his senses.

The shelf was not actually a shelf at all; rather, it was a passageway of sorts, a door to a hidden chamber on the other side of the library. Cal had a feeling that this was not a common door, nor a common place, for the very entrance had been disguised and kept hidden under the watchful, haunting gaze of the bronze Owele.

When the storm of noise had finally subsided, Cal shouted to his worried friends on the other side of the mess.

“Hello! Elder John? Klieo? I’m ok, or rather … I think I am ok!” Cal shouted.

“How can that be? Are you trapped underneath the wreckage?” the Miller shouted back.

“No, I must have stumbled into a secret passage of sorts!” Cal replied.

The Miller and the rest of the gathered Poets exchanged knowing and awe-filled glances with each other. The excitement and intrigue on the heels of their utter relief was indeed invigorating, and it had the time-weary Poets alive and buzzing with a youthful energy.

Just then, Tolk approached the group of old dreamers with a worried expression on his face. “What is going on here?” he questioned. “Is everyone alright?”

“The boy has discovered a passageway!” enthused Elder John.

Tolk surveyed what damage he could see as he peered into the doorway of the library. He shook his head in consternation. “My boy, you must be more careful,” he shouted to Cal. “Now tell me how this all came to be.”

Cal recounted how he found the armor and subsequently stumbled into the Owele. Only when he was finished with the telling of his discoveries did it dawn on him to ask a question of his Poet friends.

“Do you know what this place is?” Cal asked as he squinted in the darkness of the chamber.

“I cannot say, my boy,” Tolk said with worry in his voice. “It is obvious that whoever fashioned such a passage meant to keep whatever is behind it hidden.”

“Why the bronze Owele?” Elder John asked in a hushed voice so as not to concern their trapped friend. “Klieo, have you seen much mention of the Oweles in any of the annals and histories that you have found?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not one single mention. Though most of what I have found are records and plans, with a few scattered stories here and there. Nothing of hidden magic, or Oweles, or secret passages under the mountain.”

Clivesis shouted his answer out first. “Be careful in there, lad! There are many dark and mysterious places here in the mountain palace, and I am not so trusting to believe that they are all of the safe and pleasant variety.”

A parental sense of worry hung over the residents of Kalein. These old Poets were not sure that Cal was in imminent danger, but they were not certain that he wasn’t, either. It is this kind of ambiguity that can drain even the strongest man of his confidence to make the right and wise choice.

“What do we do?” Meledae asked.

“What
can
we do?” Clivesis replied matter-of-factly.

“Aye, I tend to agree with the old fellow here,” said the Miller as he gestured to Clivesis. “Do you see a way out?” he called out to Cal.

“This doorway I came through is blocked solid by the fallen stone, so there is no way I can come out the same way that I came in,” Cal yelled back to him. “It looks to me as though I am in some sort of long corridor, a hallway, perhaps.”

The Poets talked quietly amongst themselves, weighing the few options that their trapped friend had.

“What if he just followed it?” Elder John proposed. “It is sure to lead him
somewhere
, is it not?”

“All paths lead somewhere, my friend. The question is whether or not this is the kind of somewhere we would want him to end up!” Tolk countered.

“Some have said that Petros is inhabited by the ghosts of Terriah,” Klieo said worriedly. “What if we are sending him into a danger more perilous than mere falling rocks?”

“We cannot know what great evils may be trapped in such an ancient crypt,” Meledae echoed Klieo’s worry.

“Well, that may be so, my sisters,” Tolk agreed. “But it might do us all a bit of good to remember that it was the THREE who is SEVEN who brought Cal to our humble community of hope, and I tend to believe that He is at work, weaving other plots that we are not yet privileged to know of.” Tolk turned and surveyed the fallen mess of stone. After a moment of long thought and a resigned sigh, he spoke again.

“We might just have to trust that the sign of the Owele is a good one,” Tolk spoke more for his own worried heart than for those of the gathered Poets. “For who knows the true workings and beautiful designs of the THREE who is SEVEN, save the great artist Himself?”

The Poets looked at each other in worried agreement.

“Cal?” Elder John shouted across the chaos. “You are going to have to press on! Perhaps the shortest way home is through! Huh?”

“Just mind that you don’t get yourself eaten by any ghosts over there!” Clivesis said, half-jokingly.

Meledae hit him hard in the arm and he let out a boyish, “Ouch!”

She gingerly rubbed her aged hand and gave him an apologetic smile.

“Ghosts?” came Cal’s nervous reply.

“Just keep your wits about you, and mind your step,” Clivesis said kindly. “That’s all I meant, lad.”

“I guess I don’t have any other choice,” Cal reluctantly told his friends. “I am going to follow where it leads, and hopefully,” Cal sighed, taking in the gravity of the moment, “it will lead me back to you.”

With that tenuous goodbye, Cal turned and made his way down the barely visible hallway into the unknown bowels of the mountain palace. He heard the voices of his Poet comrades shouting their farewells as he moved further away from their comforting presence and into the dark unknown. The corridor was tight, not so tight that he had to hunch over, but small enough that there was not much room for him to be careless with his steps. He walked cautiously, and was able to move straight ahead for roughly forty paces before the path made an abrupt stop. There, embedded in the immovable, stone wall in front of him, he could just make out another bronzed carving of an Owele.

His hands wandered over the embossed lines, causing his imagination to muse over possibilities both terrible and wonderful. He pushed hard on the carving, half expecting the wall to move under his touch, much like the bookshelf had done.

But nothing happened.

Panic began to crowd Cal’s mind. “What do I do now?” he yelled in frustration to the inanimate, bronze bird. Turning back towards where he had just come from, all he could see was the blocked doorway and faint light from the library that streamed through the dust-heavy air in shimmers of violet.

“Surely this leads somewhere,” Cal said worriedly to the darkness. “Who in their right mind would build a passage to nowhere?” He did his best to calm his racing anxiety and decided to follow the walls of the corridors with his eyes, tracing the boundaries and desperately looking for a break in the rock.

A wave of relief washed over him when his eyes landed on what appeared to be a dark opening in the wall just a few paces from where he stood. He ran his hands along the cold stone until his fingers confirmed what he hoped his eyes had found. “Another passage,” he breathed, his flagging confidence now beginning to return. “Thank You.” Cal whispered the desperate but grateful prayer under his breath and took his first step into the dark passageway.

“AHH!!” Cal shouted into the blackness. He fell head over heels, bumping and crashing against the cold stone stairs that he could not have seen in the barely visible dim of the corridor. He fell several steps before he was able to catch himself on a piece of the rough-cut stone.

“Ugh! Take it easy, Cal,” he moaned aloud as he rubbed his tender, throbbing arm, which was still mending from the beating it took upon the river Abonris.

He pulled himself back to his feet and clung to the wall, exploring each step as it presented itself in front of him. Not counting the handful he painfully expedited earlier, Cal reasoned that he must have made his way down another thirty or so steps before he found himself on a landing. He held his arm to his chest and began to probe around for his next move with his good hand. As he reached out into the darkness, he heard something that made him stop in his tracks.

“Calarmindon,” a lilting voice whispered out of the darkness.

The hair on the back of his neck rose to full attention, and he quickly turned to look back up the flight of stairs he had just descended, desperate to see someone,
anyone
who could have called his name. He shivered at the thought of the alternative. Perhaps Clivesis had been right about the ghosts after all.

“Calarmindon, I am waiting for you,” the voice called out again.

Cal’s mouth went dry, and the palms of his hands began to sweat uncontrollably. He thought for a moment about running back up the stairs, but he knew his way was blocked.

He whispered another desperate prayer. “Protect me, please.”

“Follow, Bright Fame,” the voice beckoned. “Follow the light.”

“What light? I … I don’t see a light down here. And wh-who … who are …”

Cal was interrupted mid-sentence as wall-mounted torches, one after the next, burst to life in violet flames and illuminated yet another flight of stairs that descended deeper into the Hilgari. The light was a welcomed sight, if only for the fact that he could now see the path that he was traveling. It was this, and the pain in his twice-wounded arm, that distracted his mind in the midst of the encounter with the ghostly voice.

One thing, however, bothered him deeply. The last time he heard a mysterious woman’s voice call his true name, he almost became entrapped by the bitter ruse of an angry witch.

“Please, uh, could you please tell me who you are?” Cal asked.

“Follow the light, Calarmindon. It will guide you to me.” Each time the whispering voice spoke, the flames on the mounted torches danced in rhythm to the unseen wind of her words.

“That is what I am afraid of,” Cal mumbled to himself. “Are you a ghost? What do you plan to do with me?” He waited and listened, but no other words were offered. Surveying his surroundings by the light of the magic flames, he gathered what fleeting courage he had left in him and followed the ghostly violet light down the flight of stairs. Although he was unsure of his path and not completely trusting of this voice, he did find some subconscious comfort in the fact that the flames guiding him were violet in color, as opposed to the evil, green-hued flames he had encountered in the cutter camp, or the sickening yellow of the bridge witch’s eyes.

All along the walls of the stone corridor were carvings that he could not have seen when first he stumbled along the path in the dark. Now, in the violet light, he could make out stone reliefs of magnificent trees adorned with the most beautiful words, words that looked as though they were somehow actual music written upon the branches of the carved trees.

Cal had never seen work like this, nor had he ever heard of a language that
looked
this beautiful. He paused for a moment, studying the intricacy of the written forms, enchanted by their artistry and the magic they seemed to radiate. Their beauty moved his soul, and something inside of him came alive at the thought of being a part of such things, things deeper and older than his small story. It was here, in the purple glow of the burning torches, that Cal forgot his fear for the moment.

He moved further down the corridor and stopped again. “Another one! That makes three of these haunting birds!” He had come to another landing and yet another flight of stairs, and, in the light of the torches, a third bronzed Owele engraving was revealed.

The whispering woman’s voice called out for him again. “Follow the light, young Bright Fame, follow the light.”

Whatever relief he had found in the beauty of the engraved walls had disappeared in the silence that followed the beckoning voice. Cal turned to face the third flight of stairs that descended further into the depths of the mountain, and it dawned on him that he was going in the wrong direction if he was hoping to find another way back to his Poet friends.

“This does not make any sense!” he called out. “You are taking me the wrong way!” But the only response to be found there was in the small sounds of the flickering flames of the purple torches that illuminated the stairs.

He steeled himself for whatever he might find as he clung to the words that Tolk had left him with. He chose to trust that the sign of the Owele was indeed good, even though his nerves told him to run. Down the third flight of stairs he went, down into a deeper unknown, down even further into the bowels of the Hilgari. When Cal reached the third landing at the bottom of the stairs, he encountered something drastically different than he had seen on any of the previous landings.

This landing was more like a large, vaulted chamber. The floor was littered with fallen chunks of ceiling. Huge cracks veined out on the walls and ceiling, and gaping holes pocked its original craftsmanship. In this room there were three distinct archways that led into three different corridors. The passages on the right and on the left were shrouded in darkness, but their openings were unobstructed. The archway in the middle, however, appeared to be walled in, as if someone wanted to seal off whatever it was that resided on the other side.