It was an instant, and then the voice was forgotten.

But the idea remained.

Although here in the dark everything was obscured, Abor, by now, had adjusted his eyesight to the dark. He still couldn’t see worth a poop, but he could grope his way around and by doing so, he found what he knew to be the center most point of the room.

Kneeling at that center most point, Abor didn’t know what he was actually doing, but he was riding on impulse. And right now, his impulse was telling him to find . . . something. As soon as he found it, he would know, and then he could put this whole episode behind him and all that was good in his life would return. He knew it. Just. A. Matter. Of . . .

Eureka! Abor thought. He found it.

Placing his face right up against the dirty stone floor— stone? Somewhere in Abor’s thought-process he wondered why the floor was now stone— and carefully swept away the mucky dust and ruin. Revealed to him underneath it all was a faded mark; though normally this mark would have been wholly unnoticeable even during the daylight beams, the strange patterns seemed, somehow, familiar to him.

Wiping away all of the grim, the full pattern was revealed. There, on his knees in the dark, Abor grunted and groaned about what he needed to do next, the warm heat that whispered in his ear, gone.

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“What is there, beyond me?” Abor thought to himself in a mood uncharacteristic to his age, sullen. “Even if I escaped, what would there be? Love and marriage, a family like I am a part of, but . . . it will all be . . .” But Abor shook himself back to himself and cussed his own mind for trying to make him think life was anything other than a gift.

Feeling pained kneeling on a slab of stone, Abor stood upright. As he stood, he thought. “What is there beyond me?” he mused. “Freedom.”

Instantaneously, the marking on the floor flared to life with a fantastic red glow, illuminating Abor in the process as it nearly blinded him. But shielding his body away from both the light as well as the shawl whipping against his face, he closed his eyes and wondered what was happening, his fear rooting him in place.

Like a lightning rod, Abor’s body attracted the strange energies flowing from the floor sigil. Throughout every nerve and atom of his being, Abor felt the full power of the force being unleashed; it tingled, hurt, and made his hair stand on edge as his perception of reality underwent changes. In his vision was now a double-form, where this reality and another facet of existence intertwined. But, like a light bulb shorting out, suddenly, the vision was gone and the blurred red light vanished.

It was dark again.

But only on the outside.

On the inside, Abor saw all laid bare as the secrets of the grass, earth, and sun danced in his heart.

Standing as proper as he ever stood before, Abor, with a straight back, held out his hand monumentally and said into the darkness, “Come, and let us resume.”

Springing into warmth, torches on the wall long dead, flared to life with brilliant yellow flames. And though the flames appeared by all means ordinary, they were not; for, they illuminated not physical space, but the unseen, and by contrast, now showed the presence of a gathering of seemingly spectral figures. With a jolt, the crowd in unison turned their heads to Abor. And they waited.

There was work to be done.