In my search for a way back to Ellas I explored numerous avenues, much as Jain and I had on Ellas when we searched for a way for me to return home.
But on Ellas, we had to seek out scholars and wise ones, visit ancient libraries, crawl through hundreds of dusty shelves and pore over thousands of old scrolls and tombs, whereas here on Earth, I could use the Internet as a starting point to narrow down and identify the thing I needed to investigate further.
It would be so much easier, at least that was what I had thought.
At first, I concentrated on ancient lore – I read all I could find on Ley Lines, Standing Stones, the Pyramids, all sorts.
I was especially interested in any form of writing or script that I could find to compare to what I had seen on the Stones of Achra.
And, as with my earlier aborted search, I found nothing. I then began to investigate disappearances, alien abductions, areas where people regularly went missing – anything of that nature.
My logic was that if I had been taken to Ellas then perhaps others had also been abducted and taken there.
If I could find just one disappearance that seemed similar to mine, then it might hold clues as to how I might find a way to return. What I really wanted was someone like me, someone who had been taken, and then somehow managed to find a way home.
I spent a very long time looking into abduction and missing person cases.
Most of the abductions appeared to be total loony bin cases, but some small few really believed that they had been taken by something or someone.
But even those cases didn’t really fit what I was looking for – all seemed to somehow involve spaceships, aliens, loss of time and sometimes loss of memory.
Yes, the creatures that took me were aliens, but they were not your typical three headed martian types, that came in space ships.
I spent weeks on that avenue of investigation and found absolutely nothing that merited further investigation.
From then on my search took on an air of desperation. I googled all sorts of silly combinations of key words that might yield results. Alternate worlds, time travel, Ley Lines, Standing Stones, just about anything, all linked with abductions or missing persons.
I got hundreds of thousands of results but after applying all the filters that fit my criteria, nothing at all remained that I considered worthy of following up.
On this particular afternoon, after finishing work early, I decided to try search for variations on the names that Dar'cen was known by on Ellas.
My thoughts were that someone had left that message all those months ago, and whoever it was, knew of me and so must be from or know of Ellas.
Possibly they were servants of Dar'cen here on Earth, and they just might use the Internet to communicate with others of their kind here. And in those communications they might refer to him, their master.
It was a long shot, but then so were all the other searches I had done.
He had been known by many different names during his conquest, the years of his rule and the Dark Years that followed his defeat. To the People he was simply Dar’cen, the name he himself had proclaimed; the Nargu named him Grandandu which translated to ‘Bringer of Dark’, and to the Varu, one of the long since extinct races, he was ‘Destroyer of Light’.
I tried all of these variations and more, but nothing of any real relevance was returned.
The last search I entered was ‘Demon of the Night’, which was one of the earliest names for Dar'cen, used when he first began to gather armies to himself.
I got quite a number of hits for the search, but one stood out to me, and even now I cannot say why.
In the middle of the search result was the word Darganu, and somehow it drew my eye. Out of a whole page full of text it stood out.
I read the brief summary text associated with the link –
“Seems to think that he has journeyed to our world to escape the Demon of the Night, a creature named Darganu that has come to his world.”
I clicked on the link and it took me to a book review site. The fragment I had just read was part of a larger review of a book, which was quite flippantly titled ‘They Walk Among Us’.
The review consisted of very small excerpts from the stories it contained, with some blurb tying it all together. Unfortunately, there was nothing more of the fragment that had first drawn my attention.
The review had been written a year ago, so I assumed that the book was quite recent.
Within ten minutes I had managed to buy an electronic version of the book, and a minute after that I had the book open on my laptop. In another five I had read through the story that had caught my eye.
The story related to a man found twenty years ago wandering the streets of New York. A police officer had found him late one night; the man had been very, very drunk.
That usually would have just found him confined to a cell for the night, but he had kept ranting on and on about how he was from another world, and how Darganu, the Demon of the Night, had come to his world to conquer and destroy, and how he had escaped and travelled to our world. He had cried the whole time.
Then, when questioned, the man had refused to give his name and had suddenly turned violent. He repeatedly tried to punch and kick the officer, and screamed throughout that he would never be taken back alive. His behaviour had earned him a place in front of a judge the following morning, where he had refused to speak at all.
That in turn got him a psychiatric evaluation where, not only did he refused to speak, but he again became very violent.
Eventually he was placed in a hospital for the mentally disturbed, where he still resides today, some twenty years later. He has not uttered a single word in all that time, and nothing at all is known about him; not where he came from, not even his name.
The author had visited William, that was the name given to the subject in the hospital, and although the author sat with him for an hour repeatedly asking questions, William had not spoken a word, had not made eye contact, and had not even acknowledged the author’s presence.
And so the piece the author had written was based almost entirely on the police report of twenty years ago.
I sat back in the chair, my mind reviewing all I had read. There was no real detail in the patient’s story, nothing concrete, but possibly just enough to bear further investigation.
It was very little, but still the best I had found to date. And there was something about his story and that name, Darganu, that filled me with hope. Could he be from Ellas?
“Best see what Alex thinks,” I said to myself grinning – Alex came over most evenings now to help with my search, and I just couldn’t wait to hear what she thought.
A great deal had happened between us since the day we met beside the lift. We had spoken long and often, and slowly I had come to very much like, and even to trust this slightly strange woman. Strange, she said, was how others thought of her, and also how she would describe herself if she was being honest.
To me she was not strange, she just stood out as not being part of the in crowd – those that seemed to dictate ones looks and behaviour in this hectic, modern world.
She was not vain, followed no fashion that I knew of, cared not a jot for what others thought, and was, at all times, just herself.
More important than all that, I now believed, she was a good person.
That she was in some way linked to Carthia, the one who had ordered Jain’s death, I had no doubt. But in this life, the woman I knew as Alex had done no such deed; of that I was certain. What relationship existed between Alex and Carthia, I did not know – were they actually the same woman, and this woman, Alex, the one here with me, would somehow become the Carthia from Ellas, or were they somehow copies of each other, living separate lives in some form of alternate realities?
The question had plagued me over the time we had known each other, but one thing I now firmly believed was that Alex was not capable of any evil deed, yet alone ordering someone murdered.
Alex was aware of her other self – I had told her some of that story but not all; I had not told her what Carthia had said in that very last instance before I was returned.
Alex, in turn, had told me of Sarah her sister, their book and of Sarah’s dreams, the dreams that had fuelled their stories.
Only recently she had let me see the book for the first time, let me hold it and flick through it’s pages. But when it became obvious that I wanted to sit and read the book, the pain had grown too great for her, and she had snatched it back.
“One day perhaps,” she had said apologetically. “Perhaps one day, when I know you better.”
She did tell me some of what they had written though. Stories of their heroines’ adventures battling their dark adversary and his hoards.
It was not a million miles from the world I had just returned from.
My calling her by that name when I first encountered her, she said, was why she had listened to what I had to say, why she had begun to believe that my story was based on truth.
The question that remained unanswered for me, was how to explain the nigh on impossible coincidences that the heroine from their stories should be named Carthia, and that Alex herself was almost a twin for the woman named Carthia that had murdered Jain and the others, and forced me to return home.
It was all very, very strange. Alex herself might not really be strange, not in my eyes anyway, but Alex, her sister’s dreams and their book really were an enigma.
Since meeting Alex, my Carthia lookalike, everything had changed for me yet again; just seeing her had charged me with the resolve to return.
But it went further than that. Alex had listened to my stories, and it was plain that she was enthralled by them, and really, really wanted them to be true.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Then, when I mentioned my previous search, my feeble attempt at finding a way back to Ellas, she had become really excited and insistent that I start over, and that she be allowed to help. I had argued that I just wanted a normal life again, that I did not want to go back there.
But my heart really wasn’t in it – seeing Carthia’s face stare back at me from within the lift those few short weeks ago, had ensured that I would eventually take up the search again.
And Alex read it there on my face. Having lost the first round, I argued against her involvement, said it was my search and nothing to do with her; I lost that round too.
Alex turned up quite late that evening; some problem at work, she said.
Our normal routine would be to chat about whatever searches I had managed to make before her arrival, and then to pore over any results that might hold promise; although the latter was a very rare occurrence. We would then dive back into the search itself, each on our owm laptops, stopping every so often to discuss something one of us might have come across.
Given what I had found earlier, I hoped that tonight might be different, that we might actually be onto something.
Alex made coffee and we sat. “So what did you find today, then?” she asked. “It’s written all over your face. You’ve found something, I know you have. Come on, show it to me."
I gave here the screen print of the initial search results, the one containing the original fragment that had caught my eye. By now I was beginning to backtrack on my earlier enthusiasm, so wanted to see if she would pick out the same item I had, the way I had when I first saw the search results on screen. I would show her the e-book later.
She scanned the sheet I had given her and, as she did so, something changed in her face and her whole body seemed to tense.
She read it a second time, and then looked up at me with fury etched across her face.
“Is this your idea of a joke?” she screamed. “How did you get hold of my book?”
Then she paused, her look changing to one of panic. She jumped up, almost ran over to her briefcase, opened it and pulled out her book.
A look of relief flooded her face, but her anger didn’t dim in the slightest, because she again began to shout at me, “How did you get your hands on my book? how dare you… how dare you touch it! Why play such a sick joke? You of all people!”
I suppose that outwardly I must have shown an air of calm, because she ranted all the more at my lack of reaction. Inside I was completely baffled and confused at her reaction.
But a part of me was very, very exited; something in that fragment of text must somehow link to her book, and if it did that, then this man William was also a part of the puzzle – we had a lead.
Alex’s tirade slowed as she seemed to run out of expletives. I could see that she forcibly calmed herself before she quietly demanded, “Well, explain yourself!"
I turned to my laptop and started typing in the search criteria I had used earlier that afternoon.
“Alex, I have not touched your book, I promise you. Here’s the search I did and the results… see for yourself, and then perhaps you can explain what it is that you saw that made you react so forcefully."
Alex snatched the laptop from me and spent fifteen minutes going over the search, the results, the book review, and then she even researched the author himself.
Finally she turned back to look at me. “I’m sorry,” she said, and I could see that there were tears in her eyes.
“This is so strange… so unbelievable, really. First you think that I am the Carthia from our stories, and now this… I thought that you must have somehow read my book, and then made this all up."
“You said that once already,” I said gently, but with a hint of excitement that I could not quite mask. “It’s fine, not a problem.
"What I want to know is what you saw that relates to your book."
Looking abashed, Alex opened her book, flicked forward a few pages and turned it towards me, her finger shakily underlining a single word, Darganu.
“Darganu is the name of the Demon, the Dark Lord in our book. Sarah named him; she said the name came from one of her dreams, a really frightening dream," Alex said.
So I showed her the e-book, and quietly sat as she read.
Alex had said it was unbelievable, but I thought that was a huge understatement. The Carthia thing was really baffling as it was, linking a fantasy book of fairy tales, based on her sister’s dreams to Ellas. But now this man William, was somehow linked to that very same book. It was mind boggling.
Alex broke the silence. “I think that two things need to happen now. One, we need to somehow get to see this patient, William, and two… you need to read this.” And with that she slowly, almost reverently, passed me her book.
The book was red, red imitation leather, A4 journal size, but thicker than most journals I’d ever seen. There must have been a few hundred pages at least, and the paper quality was quite good too, the sort you see in journals used by professional writers.
On the first page, written in bright blue ink in an elaborate script, were the words :-
‘This book belongs to the Twins, and is for their eyes only - So hands off, Mum!’ – Twins was underlined twice.
Crossed out below the inscription was what I assumed was the original title of the book. Someone, Alex I assumed, had gone over the words numerous times, almost obliterating them. Below the crossing out was the final title, written in a different hand from the inscription – not as elegant, it didn’t flow as the earlier words had.
I guessed that this was Alex’s work, written after her sister had passed away.
‘The Tales of Sarah the Dreamer.’
At the bottom of the page was a dedication, again written in Alex’s hand.
‘This book is dedicated to my dearly loved and sorely missed sister.
She is the soul of the stories within.
Her dreams were the seeds that grew into the tales of the life she would have lived, had she but been born in another place and time.
I miss you so very much Sarah – my thoughts and dreams will always be of you.’
It was hard reading those words with Alex sat next to me, and I knew that it must have been harder still for her to sit and watch as I pried so very deeply into her past.
But I took my time over the words; I didn’t just gloss over what had been written, instead I pictured a young girl in tears as she wrote for the last time in what was her most precious possession. I felt the hurt and the loss she felt, I felt her emptiness and loneliness. I felt the love she had for her sister.
I read the book from cover to cover that night. For much of that time Alex sat next to me, head tilted over, reading with me, whilst also protecting the book.
I was not allowed to keep it here with me, she wouldn’t leave without it, and yet I did not want to put it down until I had read it all.
We reached a compromise after what seemed an age of arguing, Alex would stop over, sleep in my bed, and I would have the sofa should I get to finish the book.
Alex had long gone to bed as I finished the last page and reverently closed her book; it was Alex’s most treasured possession, and so I treated it with the care and respect she would have expected had she been sat next to me.
“So you’ve finished then,” Alex said from the bedroom doorway, apprehension and excitement both plain in her tone. “What do you think? Is there anything there, anything else that you recognise?”
I had heard her of course, knew that she hadn’t managed to get to sleep, heard her get up and pace back and forth around the room long before the door opened.
But my conscious mind didn’t hear, only in retrospect did those sounds come to me.
Was I truly reverted, becoming less than I was, becoming more human again. Or did the creation that I was, know beyond doubt that Alex was no threat to me, and so had tuned out that which would have otherwise seen me alert and ready to kill such a very short time ago.
I hoped it was the latter, for should I find a way to return, I would need all my senses of old, all of his gifts.
“Nothing concrete,” I replied, as I watched Alex’s so very hopeful face suddenly become crestfallen and disappointed.
“Nothing other than the two names, Carthia and Darganu, and nothing that comes anywhere near to explaining how those names could possibly link back to Ellas… but it can’t be coincidence, it just can’t be. Not two so very distinctive and strange names… and that’s without even taking into account that you are the twin of the woman, Carthia, that I knew.”
“There must be something, there just has to be!” Alex said, desperation plain in her voice. “I agree that it can’t just be coincidence. If the stories themselves are not the link, then it has to be the dreams… Sarah’s dreams,” she said her voice rising, hope showing itself again in her tone.
“Let me show you the parts that are from her dreams. We can read them again... together.”
Tired as I felt, I welcomed the company, and the chance to re-read what Alex and her sister had written as children.
Despite my search and eventual frustration, and the haphazardness of how the book had been organised and written, I had enjoyed the read, enjoyed peeking into Alex’s past and seeing what she had shared with her sister.
The stories themselves were written well, certainly better than I could have managed now as an adult, and better than many of the fantasy novels I had read in the past.
In some scenes the characters came to life as you read. You could picture them clearly and almost hear their voices as they spoke, and you were drawn into some of the scenes, were almost there with them. The evil and the darkness too became almost real in those very same scenes; much too real to be the work of young children's minds.
At my first reading I had concluded that each of the so very real scenes had to be those based upon Sarah’s dreams; there could be no other explanation that would set them so far apart from the rest.
Despite my comments to Alex, I knew that there was something there, something more than just the names.
As Alex had said, the stories had all the elements of a good fantasy – magic, good and evil, demons and wizards, and prophecy… Jain had talked of a prophecy, or should I say hinted of prophecy, with vague comments such as, “It is as written,” or “The prophecies will guide us.” Yet when pressed as to what the prophecy actually said, or even for a little detail to justify the statement, he would refuse to say more, claiming that such knowledge was dangerous and not to be shared.
Jain used to frustrate the hell out of me with his continual references to the prophecies.
To him it was as if the prophecies were some hallowed and sacred pathway to the future, and yet to me seemed to only ever be divulged to justify events from the past, and even then Jain would not reveal any real detail.
And Anna too had referred to prophecies – in her note to me, in her final words, she had said, “the prophecies dictate that it must be so,” as she wrote of snow and my promise to her. Was there hidden meaning in her words? Was there another message hidden in what Anna had written, hidden there, in plain sight?
Could that be how it was with this book? Was what I search for hidden within its pages in plain sight? In the book.
Sarah’s heroine Carthia often spoke of prophecies, again using almost the same vague references as Jain had. And she would often sit and read from a book they named The Book of prophecies before some great battle or adventure the two of them would have.
Nothing was ever said of what was read, only that Carthia took guidance from the book, guidance for the events that were to come.
Again, I was sure that each time this book, The Book of prophecies, was mentioned, it too was from a scene based on one of Sarah’s dreams – a scene where too much was almost real, not a child’s fantasy, almost not a child’s words.
I did not understand what it meant, but I knew that it was somehow a link.
“I’d like that, Alex,” I said. “I’m sure that the dreams are the key, just as you’ve said. But to what, I really do not know.”