Melmarc remained in the hospital for another few weeks before he was discharged. According to the doctors, he was fine, healthy. They had only kept him for further observation.
“Just a precaution,” one of the doctors had said to his father. “We just want to be a hundred percent certain that he’s good to go.”
His father had nodded and said nothing more.
A week before his discharge they had brought a gifted to his room. She had been one of the many gifted who was not a Delver. Instead, she used her skills, all of which were designed towards healing of one form or another to help hospitals around the country. Sometimes she helped in other places too.
She was brought in to clear out Melmarc’s scar only after they’d asked if he still wanted it gone.
“It’s a cool scar,” was all Ark had said when Melmarc had asked him what he thought of the idea of getting rid of it.
Ninra had shrugged, which wasn’t surprising. And his father had said he would support any decision Melmarc took. It was odd how everyone was treating it like a life changing decision.
Despite everyone’s opinion—or lack of opinion—on the matter, Melmarc found it odd that the doctors had even had to ask. Who would want to keep a scar? It wasn’t like it was a cool scar that made him look deadly, like the scar a Delver, aptly named Scar, had that ran horizontally across the bridge of his nose.
In the end, the healer had been brought in to heal his scar.
She had failed.
Melmarc had been depressed to learn he would not be getting rid of the scar. It would remain with him, a reminder of a terrible night. His father had seemed unbothered by the healer’s inability. When the doctor claimed there was a chance the strength of the Player’s mana might have had qualities that made getting rid of the scar impossible, his father had simply nodded.
Ark took the entire ordeal in a different direction. It was still a cool scar to him.
On the day they were discharged, Uncle Dorthna had come to pick them up in his car. He was as full of life as usual, cracking jokes about any and everything. He was one of those people that could get away with making any kind of joke. Melmarc never really understood how he did it. Uncle Dorthna always knew what to say to make you laugh, and how to say it, and when to say it.
He didn’t have a funny face, because, according to Ninra, he was handsome. But he had funny words and a smile that made you smile back.
On their way home, Ark, playing with an action figure of the Delver, Dark-Mist, had offered his excitement about Melmarc’s scar and the fact that they couldn’t get rid of it. “I get to tell everyone that my brother fought a Player and survived.”
Melmarc had stared up at the ceiling of the car. He wasn’t sure of how he felt about people knowing of what had happened to him, but in their city everyone knew everything so it would be hard to keep this a secret. “I didn’t fight a Player, Ark. I fought a piece of glass in my belly.”
“A piece of glass with a Player’s mana. And you won. To me, that’s fighting a Player and winning.”
Melmarc wondered if he should mention that he’d actually lost when he’d fallen unconscious in Ark’s arms in the closet, and had only survived because he’d managed to get to the hospital, which meant the doctors and nurses had been the ones to actually win the fight. But he had a feeling his brother would just turn it around and make it sound like he’d still played a major part in the win.
So he said nothing.
He caught Uncle Dorthna watching him through the rearview mirror. When their eyes met, uncle Dorthna gave him a wide smile and mouthed, Cool scar.
Melmarc smiled back and closed his eyes for the rest of the car ride. Unlike most people, a car ride was like a rocking crib to him. It was the perfect place to fall asleep. Before he did, though, he remembered a piece of plastic he’d hidden from the nurses when he’d heard uncle Dorthna was coming.
He pulled the plastic out of his pocket and held it out to his uncle. It was an old game uncle Dorthna played with all of them since Melmarc could remember. Any disposable that was relatively clean was a disposable he was willing to take from them. There were some he refused. Melmarc and Ark had speculated countless time on what criteria constituted one that was acceptable and one that was not.
They still hadn’t figured it out.
With his eyes still on the road, his uncle reached behind him with one hand and took the plastic. It had been a cup once.
Dorthna studied it casually as he drove. He turned it from side to side, then around. After a while, he placed it gently on the dashboard where it turned gently on its own.
Then Melmarc allowed himself fall asleep. When they got home and he woke up, the cup was nowhere to be found.
I guess it wasn’t a good trash.
Their house was already back in shape by the time they got home. There were no broken walls from explosions or his mother being thrown into them. The stairs and the front porch were newer than before, but except for them, the entire house looked the same.
The living room had the same chairs and everything. A four seater couch that was brown and could be extended into a bed that Uncle Dorthna loved spending his nights on even though he had his own room for whenever he came to stay. Their wide screen television was still mounted on the wall. The few other chairs that filled the living room were still there looking exactly the same as he remembered. A massive red rug, pictures of the family hanging on the walls, and a treadmill they’d gotten for Ninra when she joined the track team a year ago.
Melmarc passed them all, staring in awe as he went to his room. Everything was somehow the same, which didn’t make sense.
Ark was giddy through it all, happy with Melmarc’s reaction. Ninra smiled throughout, chewing on an at least two pieces of chewing gum and smiling almost as excitedly as Ark. It was one of the few times when she wasn’t on her phone.
Their room was also the same. There was nothing out of place in it. The broken bed had been restored. The flooring was the same brown wood as it had always been. Everything was… the same. It was as confusing as it was impressive.
“It was my idea,” Ark told him when everyone had finally left them in the room to go about whatever else they wished to do after confirming that Melmarc was fine. “Do you like it?”
Melmarc didn’t know, but he nodded. He could tell his brother had put some thought into the idea. It was how it was with him. Ark could blurt out the most outrageous ideas as if they just came to him, but Melmarc knew most of them came after thoughtful consideration.
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“Ninra wanted to make it look more pic… more…” Ark puckered his lips in thought as he tried to find the word he was looking for. When he did, it was with a wide smile. “More picturesque. Nin wanted to make it more picturesque.”
He pronounced the word more slowly the second time, as if he might bite his tongue if he didn’t.
Melmarc nodded as his brother spoke. He had no idea what the word meant, and he had a feeling his brother didn’t know either. It was likely that their sister had used the word and he’d just held on to remembering it.
Still, Melmarc liked learning, so he asked, “What does it mean?”
“What does what mean?” Ark asked.
“That word. Picsh…” Melmarc frowned. It was a harder word to remember than he’d thought. “The word that sounds like picture.”
“Oh, picturesque?”
Melmarc nodded.
“No idea,” Ark said with a shrug and a big smile. “But it’s a big word, and I like it.”
Melmarc couldn’t help but smile back. He could always count on Ark to do things like this, things people didn’t normally do.
He spent a few more seconds looking around the room and found nothing new. His attention paused when it fell on the window in the room. It was the first thing that had destroyed. A piece of it had almost killed him. But there it was, looking back as if it had never been broken.
It still has that crack from when Ark threw his toy at it.
He turned back to Ark. “But how did they get it to look the same?”
“Well,” Ark said, happy to explain, “daddy asked if we wanted to move, and Ninra said no.”
Melmarc remembered that. On one of their many walks in the hospital, Ark had pitched the idea of moving to a new place to him. At the time he hadn’t really given it too much thought. He went to school here, and his few friends were friends from school. Moving meant he’d have to find new friends, and his friends would miss him just as much as he would miss them, so he’d simply asked why they had to move.
Ark had said nothing to that, simply nodding. He must’ve taken that as Melmarc’s wish not to move. Not that he was wrong. Melmarc had a feeling similar reasons surrounded Ninra’s decision to stay, too.
“So we told him we didn’t want to move,” Ark was saying. “He didn’t really say anything to that—you know how he can be—but he had that look on his face. You know the one where he’s looking at nothing but looking at something at the same time.”
“His thinking face,” Melmarc said.
“Yes, he’s thinking face. I thought he was thinking of fixing up the house and how, so I said he should make it exactly the same.”
And he did, Melmarc thought. But how?
“But Ninra said it was impossible,” Ark continued. “And daddy said it was not. So he bringed.” He paused. “He brought a friend from work, and he looks around the place for like thirty minutes and says it’s doable. Another friend comes later, and here we are. New house, old house.”
“So… magic,” Melmarc concluded.
“Yep. Delvers are amazing.”
Melmarc said nothing. There wasn’t much to say.
Delvers were amazing. They had been amazing since the first gifted to ever have skills over two hundred years ago. But things had been simpler two hundred years ago, according to most people’s take on it. In fact, there had been no Delvers then. People had simply developed skills over time and used them for whatever they wanted.
At first it was simple skills like the ability to smell very well, like dogs. Or the ability to move simple things with their minds. Or light a candle from twenty feet. Or see very far.
In school they’d been taught the name of the first ever recorded gifted. Melmarc didn’t care enough to remember what the woman’s name was because it hadn’t been really important to him. But he remembered that her gift had been healing and it had made people turn her into what his teacher called a religious figure.
There were people with her skill now, or at least some variation of it. It was called [Word of Minor Healing]. According to a website were the owner listed out all publicly known skills and what they did, [Word of Minor Healing] was a healing skill that cured simple injuries like grazes or cuts. It could cure dislocations, too. But serious injuries like a broken bone or a really deep wound were out of its reach. According to the website, all it could do for injuries like those was remove some of the pain.
Delvers didn’t appear until after a hundred years. Melmarc could still remember the first time he’d learned about it in school. Ms. Tutchi had come down with a cold and they’d gotten a substitute teacher who looked like it had always been his dream to teach.
It was after the first recorded portal had appeared, and the first intruders had come to the world. No one knew what types of intruders they were, but many people claimed they were more like monsters. The gifted had done their best to protect themselves, fighting off the intruders until the portal had closed. Then portals had slowly become a part of their lives. At that time, the number of gifted when compared to normal people was small. It was still small now, but it had been very small then.
The question became, how did Delvers come to be.
The answer he knew was simple but suspicious. According to what he was taught in school, the first Delver was a man called Daytona. His last name started with an ‘S’ but Melmarc couldn’t remember it. What he could remember was that the man had fought the first Player to come from a portal. He had lost horribly, but he was called the first Delver because he was the first person to enter a portal and come back.
He was also the one that motivated the further study into skills and what they were truly capable of.
No one disturbed him and Ark for a good while.
Ark’s joy and excitement lasted for longer than Melmarc had thought he would be able to keep it up. He was more than enthused to show off how old everything new was. From his toys to his clothes to his school books.
“What’s that?” Melmarc asked, pointing.
Ark turned away from the closet where he was putting back one of his favorite shirts that had a green stain around the shoulder that had never washed off. It was very clear against the shirt’s yellow color. Their mom had tried to throw it out once but Ark had thrown a fit. In the end, he got to keep the shirt.
Ark walked up to their reading table at one end of the room and placed his hand on a short stack of books. They’d spent most of their time on that table doing home assignments. School work was the only reason the table was in their room, so when he saw something that didn’t belong, it caught his attention.
With one hand on the stack, Ark took a book from the pile with the other. He slid it out dramatically and held it up for Melmarc to see. “This?”
Melmarc read the title. “Dark-Mist and his many tales.”
On the front page Melmarc was the picture of the Delver, Dark-Mist, in his popular combat uniform. He wore a black hooded cloak that covered the top half of his face. The cloak billowed about him, and most of his body was shrouded in mist that came out from within the cloak. It made it hard for the rest of his body to be seen.
The book was thick, and Melmarc looked at his older brother skeptically. “What exactly is that?”
Ark turned the book to face himself. He ran his eyes along the cover of the book as if he wanted to be sure he was holding up the right book, then looked back at Melmarc. “It’s all the stories about Dark-Mist.”
Melmarc didn’t get it. He knew Ark was obsessed with the Delver, but the book was too big.
“But you don’t like reading,” he said.
Ark lowered the book, crestfallen. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m dumb.”
Melmarc paused, confused. Then it took a moment for it to come to him. “But I said you don’t like reading, not that you don’t know how to read. I didn’t say you were dumb.”
“But that’s how it sounded.”
Melmarc bit down on his lower lip, held back the urge to defend himself even though he really wanted to. He hadn’t said his brother was dumb.
But if someone had told him something like that, someone that wasn’t his brother, he might’ve taken it that way. Maybe he had said it wrong. What he’d meant was that Ark didn’t like reading. He did his math home assignments easily and quickly. It was the reading assignments that gave him a problem. Uncle Dorthna always had to help him with those.
As true as his words were, the confidence of saying the truth paled in the presence of his brother’s sad face.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know you’re smart. You help me with my math homework all the time.”
A slow grin split Ark’s face. “That I do. And you’re right, I hate reading.”
Then he beamed suddenly and ran up to their bed where Melmarc was sitting, book in hand. His excitement was back as if it had never left.
He climbed up the bed to sit next to Melmarc with a wide smile. “That’s why this book isn’t about words.”
“That’s not fair,” Melmarc complained. “You tricked me.”
Ark shook his head. “No I didn’t.”
“You made me think you were sad.”
“I never said I was sad.” Ark opposed. “Why will I be sad? I don’t like reading. That’s why this,” he raised the book up, “is a comic book about Dark-Mist.”
Melmarc had never seen a comic book that big. It was almost half the size of a dictionary.
Ark opened the book, and while Melmarc didn’t like the fact that he’d been tricked, his worries went away with the first page.
In it, Dark-Mist was a boy… Just like him.