One Great Year (54 page)

Nate had been tested and had bravely sacrificed himself. For what? What could Quinn possibly do to make the sacrifice worthwhile? Should he have stayed and fought? Now he would surely die anyway! Should he have died with Nate?

Huff, huff, huff, click, click, click
. The Guardian panted as it ran, still growling its deep guttural warnings.

Quinn knew he couldn't run much longer; his thighs and lungs burned as he sprinted. Would he die here? Would this useless end complete this useless life? An Emissary by mistake, there was no doubt left in him now. He was a miserable failure; thirteen thousand years and all the wisdom of the Universe could not help him be a better man. The human condition was difficult for everyone, and once again he was failing to fulfill his purpose.

Shameful … shameful. You've done nothing with your knowledge
, he admonished himself inwardly as his pace slowed.

“Stop!” Quinn commanded aloud. The sound of his voice echoed through the passages. “No more despair! I am a tool of the Light, and I am not responsible for Nate or for the beast! I will succeed! I will not add to the darkness of this world with unconscious thinking!” he panted.

He was now barely a hundred steps ahead of the charging Guardian, though he dared not look back. He need not look back, for a second Guardian had appeared in the corridor directly ahead of him. Trapped! He was now most certainly doomed, and he could see the bulging eyes of his attackers as they narrowed. He could almost feel the heat of their breath on his neck, and he prepared to be devoured.

“God help me!” he cried, just as the snarling creatures pounced.

A door, just to his right! In the split second it took the hideous sentinels to crash into one another, their prey disappeared. Quinn slipped through the fleeting opening, and when the door had closed behind him it immediately disappeared into the craggy stone wall. It was enough. The Guardians had not passed through.

Quinn found himself in a familiar place. It was the cenote of Atitala. The beautiful place where Marcus and Theron had spent so many joyous hours, and where he and Helghul had battled for her honor. It was exactly the same—the enticing blue water, the hanging roots and vines stippling the sunlight that peeked through the skylight above.

Tunnels shot off in different directions, and as Quinn wondered which one he should take he saw someone emerging directly opposite him. His heart leapt as he thought of Theron, but it was not Eden who emerged through the archway. It was Helghul! Helghul as he had been in Atitala—a man in his early twenties, blonde and smug, his usual sneer directed at Quinn. Quinn soon realized that he too was changed. His body was young and muscular; the skin of his arms was deep caramel brown. He was as he had been as well. Marcus had returned.

“You!” Helghul snarled. “It's time to do what I should have done in the beginning,” he said.

The two men ran at one another, determined to battle, determined to end one another at last. As they collided, something extraordinary happened. Instead of meeting flesh to flesh and grappling, they each hit an invisible barrier and rebounded with a jolt. They sat, mirror images of one another, in exactly the same position, stunned, on the stone floor. Marcus stood up and, still in perfect reflection, Helghul did the same. The light and the dark, they stared at one another. Marcus reached out to feel for the barrier between them. As he did so, Helghul's corresponding arm was pressed back in equal extension. But there was no tangible separation, he felt no screen or wall, yet the two men were unable to touch.

“What is this between us? Why do you back away so strangely?” Marcus asked angrily. He had no time for these games. He must find Theron and he must do so before Helghul intervened.

Helghul punched toward Marcus, who retreated in exact response. The men looked at one another in confusion. Helghul nodded his head forward three times and Marcus's head simultaneously bobbed backward three times.

“Stop that!” Marcus shouted, once again lunging toward Helghul. Helghul's body responded in exact reversal and therefore could not be touched. For every movement, there was an equal and opposite counter-movement. For every intention, there was an equal and opposite intention. Marcus turned to leave; he would find Theron and be done with this nonsense, but as he did so, Helghul also turned.

Marcus marched out of the cave, and twenty yards ahead he saw an archway. He entered and, to his bewilderment, he was back in the same cenote and Helghul was entering from the opposite side. Step by step they were in perfect, but opposite, sync.

“What is this? What have you done to me?” Marcus shouted.

“It is you who has done it,” Helghul snapped angrily.

“Is there something you are not telling me?”

“We will stay here like this indefinitely. Time is irrelevant in this place. Until we understand it, we are stuck here, together,” Helghul said irritably.

“What are we to understand? Tell me so we can be done with it.”

“I wish nothing more than to be done with
it
, but the solution to this riddle eludes me just as it does you. Do not tire me with your demands anymore. It is bad enough I have to endure your face, your stench, and your energy. Let me think.”

Marcus made some more movements, complex and strange, and in every instance Helghul did the equal and opposite in perfect sync, without effort, each time growing more annoyed. Marcus sat down to think and as expected Helghul did the same. They could not leave the cenote and they could not touch one another, though everything that one of them did undeniably affected the other. Each man thought and struggled.

“What are we missing? I have to get out of here. What are we missing?” Marcus said, wracking his brain.

Suddenly Marcus grew very still. He slowed his breathing, closed his eyes, and instead of trying to think, he tried
not
to think. He emptied his mind and breathed.

Marcus meditated for just less than eight minutes, while Helghul sat nearby in exactly the same pose facing the glistening blue cenote.
Why the cenote? Was it because of Theron? Atitala? The fight so long ago? No!
Marcus jumped to his feet, and Helghul stood beside him.

“It's the water! Water is the most ancient of ancients! Everybody who's come before us is alive in the water. Every birth sac and withered corpse returns to the water cycle like a puddle drying in the sun. The water holds knowledge!” Marcus proclaimed.

It took him a moment to contemplate further. He ran forward to jump in the water but, as he did so, Helghul stepped equally away. As if a rope held them core to core in a tug of war, Marcus could not enter. He had been so sure! What could he be missing?

Marcus bent down and picked up a small pebble. He threw it into the pool, and beside him Helghul mirrored the equal and opposite motions, though he tossed no stone. The single stone dropped in with a plop. In response, a ring rippled out, and then a second. From that zero point were born two rings, and they split one from another, which is not the way of water. Instead of living within one another, the rings split into the vesica piscis, like the splitting of a cell in the creation of life. The rings rippled side by side, and between them, where they touched, was their point of origin, like an eye. Together they were duality—the yin and the yang, balance—and they made the eternity figure eight, which began to spin. Larger and more quickly a great whirlpool was created in the center of the cenote, and the sound of its rushing water filled the space.

“We must go together, side by side,” Marcus said to Helghul over the rushing water.

“It appears it can be no other way,” Helghul agreed. They both stepped simultaneously toward the edge. “You are still no friend to me, Marcus.”

“Nor am I your enemy,” Marcus said benevolently, and together, in agreement, they jumped into the magical eddy and were gone.

Whoosh! The ground fell away like a trapdoor, and Eden cried out in alarm. She heard Quinn shouting as his fingers grazed her hair, and then she was gone. Down, down, farther and farther, she continued to fall, slip, and turn across smooth stone. It reminded her of a slide at the water park back home. Back home, she knew where it would come out. Back home, she knew she was safe. Her heart was racing and she wondered if she should hold her breath. Was she about to burst through and be drowned, burned, eaten? Where would she come out?

Theron landed lightly, sliding like a feather into place. It was a strange seat, unlike anything she had ever seen, with carvings and artwork on every possible surface. She had dropped into an ornate golden throne.

It took her a moment to get her bearings and register her surroundings. There was an elaborate gold scaffolding in front of her. The white limestone room had high ceilings and intricately carved cornices and porticos all around its walls. There was a whimper, like the mew of a kitten, that called her attention back to the gold structure before her.

“Children!” she shouted joyfully as she saw the six young Crystal Children several yards above her looking down. They sat on two separate gold platforms with low edges around them, three to the right and three to the left. Eden tried to stand but could not. She was not bound, she felt no weight or pressure on her, but though she struggled, she was unable to lift her stuck body from the seat.

“Please, please, help us! Get us down!” six small voices called.

Eden looked up at the pink, chubby faces beseeching her. The children were between the ages of three and seven. Eden could see the fat, fleshy dimples in their elbows and fingers as they wriggled around, obviously trapped just as she was. The girl with the golden ringlets, who had sung so sweetly, now cried softly.

Eden contemplated how she would get them down once she was able to get unstuck. It's a scale, she realized with confusion. “How did you get up there?” she called to them.

“I don't know. We just landed here,” the little girl cried.

“I can't move, I can't get to you, there's something holding me in place,” Eden said. “I need help. I don't know what to do, I need some help,” she added under her breath.

Beginning as smoke and becoming solid as Eden's eyes struggled to focus, the King of Shambhala, in white, gold, and jewels, appeared in front of the enormous scale, almost equal its size. His black hair was smooth and shiny beneath his glittering crown.

The children marveled in awe from either side as he reached out his giant hands to soothe them. They were not afraid; the energy that surrounded the good king was pure and light, and he shimmered like gossamer inlaid with fine crystals.

“Welcome, Theron. What is it that you wish to know?”

“What is this place?”

“You have returned to Shambhala, to the inner world. Before you stand the Scales of Justice. Weighing upon the scale is a sacrifice in equal balance to the gains ahead. There is a door beyond and it leads to that which you seek. To pass you must first retrieve the key. You cannot go back. You must choose,” he answered.

Eden noticed for the first time that on either side of the scale, dangling from the bottom of each bowl, was a large gold key on a chain. Behind the contraption was a huge gold door.

“That door will lead to my son?”

“Yes.”

“But I cannot move from this seat, it holds me,” Eden said.

“You are limited only by your beliefs. Reach deep inside yourself and you will move freely through this chamber and beyond it,” the king assured.

Eden trusted. She pulled her feet up onto the seat and crossed her legs. She straightened her back, lifted her chin, and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Free. Release me. Free, she thought, concentrating her energy on her forehead and on the pineal gland inside her skull.

Eden didn't know how long she sat like that, but finally the lines of her face blurred as she began to take on the appearance of another. Her arms, her legs, her torso began to vibrate and shudder gently. The children watched silently from above as she, like the Shambhala king, became something more like smoke and cloud than solid. A filmy, ethereal spirit stood and stepped out of Eden. The children exclaimed in wonder.

There stood Theron, as she had appeared in Atitala. Her hair glimmered like garnets, and the fine point of her nose made her resemble a bird, perhaps a phoenix. She was completely separate from the uninhabited, resting shell of Eden on the throne behind her—only a thin umbilical cord linked them. It looked like the strand of a spiderweb and maintained their connection regardless of where she moved.

“Miraculous!” she beamed, marveling at her hazy hands and legs and regarding her inert shell.

“To pass, you must make your choice. When you take a key, the balance will falter and the sacrifice will be determined. The side you choose will rise up safely, the opposite will crash to the ground. What will you choose?”

“I have decided,” she said, too quickly.

“There is no undoing what will be done. You understand that one side of the scale will be released?” the king cautioned.