“Wake up.  Wake up, boy!  There’s money to be made yet, can’t have you clogging up the floor.”

            Trevor’s head turned to the side.  Then the other.  Something was stinging his face.  He was being slapped.

            “Tripped,” he said groggily, slowly coming back to his senses.

“Nonsense boy.”

That was Jesse.  Last name Vasquez.  Trevor didn’t like the guy.  He was the type of person that put money above everything.  Including the health of his fighters.

Not for the first time Trevor questioned himself on why he would choose this as his main source of income.  What, in this area at least, is most commonly known as pit fighting.  Usually that doubt existed because he felt guilty.  First because he was making money hurting others, second because he had an unfair advantage he kept secret, even if he didn’t entirely understand it yet.  But this was an entirely different scenario now.  He had actually lost a fight, and had apparently been knocked out cold.

Now that he was conscious, Trevor worked his way over to the side of the ring and through the crowd half under his own power, the other half coming from two of Jesse’s goons grabbing him underneath each arm.  He was trying to mentally acknowledge the complaints coming from the crowd around him, but the two guys helping him unceremoniously dropped him into a chair, and a shot of pain starting at the base of the back of his head ran in both directions and erased all thoughts from his mind.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he complained, hoping that cradling his head would ease some of the pain and keep the nausea from overtaking him.  It did, if barely.

“Easy amigos!” Jesse mockingly yelled, clamping Trevor’s shoulder with his hand, making the pain travel anew.  “No reason to damage the merchandise any more than it already is!”  He shooed the other two away.

Trevor looked up, rubbing his neck, and Jesse kneeled down in front of him.

“I was tripped,” Trevor repeated. 

“I know, I know,” Jesse whispered.  “Keep your voice down about it, would you?  It’s good to see you remember, at least.”

The thought process took a little longer than normal, but Trevor scowled.  “You know!?  What the fu…”

“Easy, amigo.  Eaaaaasy!  I’m not proud of it, but I did it for you!” Jesse said.

“Excuse me?  How can you sa…”

“Because the bets were getting to be too easy!  It was either this or stop you from fighting altogether.  I thought you said you needed the money!?”  Jesse chided.  The way Jesse was cutting him off and knowing what he was going to say, Trevor guessed that this was not the first time Jesse had had a conversation like this.

“That doesn’t mean I’m ok with getting my head being damn near separated from my shoulders!” Trevor said as calmly as he could manage.  “If you were so worried, couldn’t you just have asked me to throw a fight or something?”

“And risk the crowd seeing that?  No thank you, my friend.  If I knew your acting was as good as your fighting maybe, but I’m doubting that.”

“So you risk me getting tripped?”

“There was a good actor in the crowd.  I always have a few for emergencies.  You let Crusher push you into the crowd, and the opportunity presented itself…”

“Oh stop trying to pin this on me, like I had it coming or something.”  Crusher…just thinking of the name made the ache a little worse.  Trevor had indeed been thrown into the crowd.  And when he was systematically thrown back into the ring by that crowd was when someone took the opportunity to trip him up.  That was all the advantage Crusher needed to live up to his name.  On the back of Trevor’s head.

“Hey, I did what I thought was best for the both of us.  It’s not my fault if you didn’t see the writing on the wall.”

“Writing on the…what?  I was sitting in a cubicle this time a year ago.  I’ve always done what you’ve asked of me.  There was never any mention of ‘writing on any wall’,” Trevor complained to Jesse.

“Right,” Jessie replied in a sincere voice.  Or at least as sincere as his body language which was to say he knew people were watching.  “And what would you do if you had to quit the pit?  Go back to your cubicle?  You told me you don’t even remember what you used to do before that.  So isn’t being able to continue worth a quick knock on the head?”

Jesse was right.  When Trevor had first started, not being near the biggest and most intimidating guy around, the odds being against him had made some serious cash for him and anyone willing to risk betting on him.  That began to change when it became a stupid thing to bet against him.  Jesse was a lot of things, a great promoter being one of them.  And those promoting skills had managed to stave off the inevitable for a while.  But it was no secret the cash flow on Trevor’s fights had started slowing quite a bit as of late. 

Jesse was also right about his inability to remember anything prior to a few years ago.  Trevor had met Jesse right as his savings were about dwindled after he quit a job working for a stationary company that bored him to tears.  He would readily admit that not being the best decision he’d made in his life, but that was the problem.  There was no way to know because before that time he simply remembered precious little.  As if he had some kind of amnesia or something.  All the doctor visits and scans hadn’t helped in the least.  This worry had been front and center in his mind for so long now even thinking about it made him nauseous at this point.  Right now that was the last thing he needed, so he changed his focus back to his current predicament.

Trevor kept a steady look right into Jesse’s eyes.  He respected a person who could meet his gaze, but for some reason his blood pressure would start to rise if the process took too long.  Not up for this fight, Trevor sighed and gave a curt nod which again reminded him of his injury.  Part of him wanted to argue more, knowing he had been slighted and a better option was probably available to them.  But his head hurt and he was tired, and he just didn’t want to think about this anymore either.

“That’s my boy,” Jesse told him, and then asked, “so…this mean you’re not up for another match later today?”

Trevor growled at him, low, guttural and definitely menacing.  It surprised him.  He hadn’t planned on it being so impressive.

Neither did Jesse, who betrayed himself with a short pause and wide eyes.  Jesse didn’t like to act like anything surprised him.  And admittedly little did.  After that split second, Jesse threw up his hands, laughing.

“Ok, ok, amigo!  I was just kidding you ya know.  Go home and get yourself some rest.  I’ll code you your next match.”

Trevor watched him walk away.  When Jesse didn’t have a set schedule yet for the next several days, he would text the fighters in code with the day, time, location and sometimes the expected first opponent.  But if he had a concussion or something, Trevor had no intentions on another fight anytime soon.  Even if the income was slowing down some, he had still made quite a bit of money these past months.  He wasn’t going to starve.

It was time to go home and worry about all this later.

Home.  There’s something to that word.  The old saying ‘Home is where the heart is’ was an accurate description in Trevor’s opinion, and his current place didn’t fit it.  He rented a condo from an older couple who decided at some point to invest in some real estate.  It wasn’t a bad place at all; it just never felt like a place he truly felt was his.  It lacked a certain comfort level for him.  But that was no surprise.  He had felt very out of place for quite some time now.

His memories all seemed too scattered.  He was born in this city, a town called Crystal Woods.  That he remembered clearly enough.  And he remembered his parents died in a car accident when he was young, while he was with his babysitter.  At five years old, he found himself an orphan and without any accepting relatives around was taken into state care.  He remembers the confusion of that time, and he remembers some of the people he first met in the orphanage, but the next 20 years or so after that, up until about a year ago, so much of his memories were sketchy.  Friends, school, work…he knows he experienced them, but the details just couldn’t be recalled.  It was very confusing, and more than a little frustrating, but what was there to do?  He hadn’t had an accident of his own that he could remember.  The hit he took today was the worst pain he could ever remember feeling.

His only rationale at this point was simply to let it be, hoping something would eventually make sense.  He didn’t remember all the workouts, but his body was strong.  Very strong.  That’s why he had dropped the idea of another lame office job he had when the opportunity to fight in the pit presented itself.  On a day when Jesse had approached him during one of his runs he initially scoffed at the idea.  But with much pleading, Jesse convinced him to start some training, and Trevor took to it like a suffocating fish takes to water.  He felt comfortable training, and applying that training to the fights.  For some reason it was an entirely natural process.  No understanding it, but he was sure happy for it.  Most of the time.

Jesse had told him that simply watching him run made him sure he’d be at least somewhat of a success in the pit.  Where Jesse stood a few inches over 6 feet tall, Trevor was half a head shorter.  And where Jesse had a stocky build and looked imposing, Trevor was, while fairly muscular, much more thin and lithe.  He was amazingly agile and dexterous, which perhaps wasn’t entirely surprising with his build.  What was surprising was that both his strength and power matched or surpassed any of the fighters he had faced so far.  That included Jesse, who took great pride in the power his frame offered him.  So while he often called Trevor a living anomaly, Trevor could tell it was a source of contention between them.  Not that it mattered too much since Jesse had made a small fortune off him so far. 

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For all that though, a blow to the back of the head by a man named Crusher still hurt like the dickens.  His strength, agility and ability to fight had upgraded him from the potential success Jesse had attributed to him to a resounding success within a few months.  But it became a liability as Trevor started to come into his own and the fights became too easy.  Now here he was, sitting at home with his head pounding, not sure if he should even try and win the next fight or not.

Racing thoughts weren’t his friend right now, so Trevor laid back on his not-so comfy leather couch and cleared his mind as best he could.  Resting his head on the soft pillow, ice pack in place, didn’t make the pain in his head go away completely, but helped quite a bit.  His last thought as he was drifting off to sleep was that he vaguely remembered he shouldn’t be going to sleep yet.  No matter, it could wait.

            What a peculiar noise.  Like thick chain link being drug over a bar.  Slowly, one link at a time.  A strange noise to hear in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, made even more strange by how incredibly loud it was.

            Not being able to hold back my curiosity any longer, I made my way out the front door.  In that moment I realized I didn’t recognize the house I was just sitting in.  The street wasn’t familiar either.  All the same, the noise persisted and something inside of me told me to pay attention to my potential future as opposed to the quizzical recent past.

            The noise was definitely coming from behind the house, the north.  The cadence had picked up and now sounded almost mechanical.  Like the sound I’d always attributed to a quarry deep within the bowels of a dwarven cave if there were such a thing.  The situation became even more curious as darkness began to prematurely take over the sky.

            I started walking away from the house, looking over my shoulder for something, anything, to clue me in as to what was going on.  I started to panic a little in anticipation, imagining the worst even though I was still unable to picture in my mind what it could possibly be.

            Hundreds of yards away from the house…there.  Something beyond big, that sort of thing that will take your breath away when you see it, elevating in the dark sky.  Another.  Then another.  Until I looked up and realized that they rose up so far into the twilight I already couldn’t see where they ended.  These things looked like they were composed of something familiar.  Of what?  Was it bone?  Every so often one would elevate and there would be a break and I would see the sun sitting just above the horizon for a few seconds, and then another would elevate out of the ground blocking the light again.  Incomprehensibly, they looked like vertebrae.  Vertebrae!?  A giant spine was rising out of the ground?  Of all the stupid...

            The second that realization struck, the Earth was struck in tandem.  Startled, I turned to see shards of man-made things and dirt flying up in the air.  Far away, but not too far to not feel the ground shake with the impact.  Again, this time to my left, something gigantic smashed down and more things went flying.  Car alarms started to go off.  I could see dust settling in the air in front of those last tiny remnants of light from the setting sun.

            I spared a glance up high in the sky as I started to run.  For a split second I saw a hand and a giant club, before it lifted up into the darkness and out of sight.  That was it then.  At the top of the spine erected from the ground was a gigantic something.  ‘That is not at all terrifying,’ I thought to myself sarcastically.  I didn’t see the other club come down so much as heard it, and I prepared myself for another impact which came seconds later.  This one seemed closer, the ground didn’t simply shake but jolted beneath me.

            Without any more hesitation, I ran full sprint away from this thing, believing there was no way for me to really escape its reach but thinking it stupid not to at least try.  Again the ground was pounded, and again more Earth gave way.  Again.  Coming faster each time.  It became hard to run because the ground was so unsteady but I tried anyway.  At least until the ground was struck so close it sent me flying.  Up and up I went in what seemed to be slow motion.  I reached the apex of my ascent, and started to drop.  I could feel particles of dirt hitting my face as they continued to rise and I fell, going up my nose and into my mouth.  I watched the battered ground get closer as I picked up speed, preparing to hit the ground.  A strange peace came over me as I realized everything happening was out of my hands.  I was suddenly curious what a person must feel when they hit the ground from so high up?  Is there any pain at all, if life passes immediately?  I felt as though if I had more time to think it out, I just might be able stop myself.  It was my dream after all.

            But despite the calm I felt, I was awhirl.  My mind was awhirl.  And as the ground raced up, I heard the mocking chuckle no doubt from a being newly risen.  It wasn’t loud like the thunderous blows of the clubs or the mechanical raising of its spine.  It was soft, personal.  In my head.  The ground raced up and we met.  I felt nothing as blackness took over me.  One question answered.

Trevor woke up, and immediately wished he hadn’t.  The back of his head, where he had felt a modicum of comfort when he had initially laid down, now felt like it was on fire.  Trying to sit up was a mistake, so he rolled off the couch and ended up on all fours.  He had a coffee table and sitting on it was a basket full of magazines, for which he was grateful for now because he used it when the nausea overtook him.  Oddly enough his first coherent thought was whether this is what people with bad migraines had to go through all the time.  If so, those people had just gained Trevor’s sympathy forever.

His living room was not spinning so much as just going in and out of focus.  He spent some time blinking rapidly, hoping that would make it stop.  When that didn’t work, he could only think of one thing that would help him more than anything, and that required him getting outside.

It was a daunting task, but he managed to get himself up and walk to his front door without any major mishaps.  Luckily for him, this town called Crystal Woods lived up to its name.  There were plenty of woods in and around the area he stayed.  And there, in the trees, was a place he felt more at home than anywhere.  And that was where he headed now.

He had a few favorite spots.  A few that he used for his workouts, and a few that he used to escape the world that he didn’t feel he belonged to.  All were off the beaten path, so he chose the closest one.

Once there, he sat down, gingerly, against a thick tree trunk.  He knew by experience, that one of the best ways to ease pain and any anxiety was to focus on being calm.  He closed his eyes and took some long, deep breaths, breathing in through his nose and slowly out of his mouth.  Always a great signal to the body that it has reason to believe you have things under control.  Trevor could feel his heart rate dropping and the pain in his skull start to lessen.  His stomach no longer felt like he needed to expel food he didn’t even have in his stomach.  Trevor was always amazed at the power people had over their own bodies, if they would just take the time to learn how.  This latest event was no exception.  He started to visualize a soft light enveloping the back of his head, and the pain lessened even more.  Amazing.

He sat there in a meditative state for a good deal of time.  He was almost afraid to move, for fear that if he did the pain would return in force.  Eventually though, he opened his eyes and stretched his neck on either side.  His neck cracked, most likely from falling asleep on the couch more than anything, but the pain didn’t reach near the crescendo it had when he initially woke up.  It was a dull ache now.  And a dull ache he could handle.

Trevor stood up, slowly, and thought about getting back to his place to get something to eat.  He was headed out of his small secret clearing when something caught his eye.  The Sun had long ago dropped below the horizon, and while Trevor’s night runs through the forest seemed to indicate he had better night vision than most people, whatever it was that grabbed his attention didn’t take much effort to see once he knew it was there.  Oddly enough, it looked like it was reflecting a faint light, though there was no light present to reflect.

Closer inspection revealed a pendant of some sort.  In it lay a unique looking stone, held in a silver casing that was attached to the chain.  It wasn’t until he left the trees and held it under some light that he saw the stone was pink.  And beautiful!  It did seem to provide its own unique source of light somehow, if very slight.  Trevor cupped it in his hands, and could still see the faint luminosity of the stone.  Most likely it was just an anomaly of some kind.  A trick of the eyes.  Whatever it was, it made the stone look absolutely brilliant.  Not that he was a jewel expert or anything.

When he got back home, he boot up his laptop and started a search.  He really didn’t know where to begin, but before long his search was well underway.  Apparently these necklaces were so popular that a simple search for ‘pink necklace’ brought one up that was close to what he had found.  Not being much into jewelry, and not being overly social, he didn’t realize until now he had been missing out on a well-known fad.  Well, based on some of the comments he was reading, it was more than a fad.  Many, many people were very impressed and smitten with these new kinds of stones.

“Everyone short of real diamond suppliers,” Trevor said to himself out loud.  Which he did more often than he liked to admit, but hey, the price of being a loner he guessed.

Based on what he could see, the stones, referred to as Keys oddly enough, were of a very high quality at very reasonable prices.  Professional jewelers couldn’t help but admit the quality of the cuts and clarity of the stones was that of even the very best of diamonds.  Aside from dazzling the eye, they were durable, hard to scuff, and what most people found impressive, came in so many colors people were learning just how many colors actually existed.  And best of all, even the biggest of the stones were priced more like a cubic zirconia in the hundreds of dollars range.  A far cry cheaper than real diamonds of equal size and quality.

The best he could figure, based on its size and shape, this particular Key came from a line called Ultra.  My Key Ultra it was called, like a point cut diamond or two pyramids connected at the base.  This seemed to be the most popular, but there were plenty of others.  Numerous shapes of diamonds with slight variations, like two cones connected at the base instead of the pyramid shape, and even what was called sphericon, which Trevor hadn’t ever seen before.  Interesting.

Trevor could definitely see why people were drawn to the Keys.  He held the one he had found in front of him, noticing that it was flat out pleasing to look at.  It was as though the stone had a story it wanted you to know if it could only learn to communicate it to you.

Trevor lost a minute or two, mesmerized.

“Wake up, space ace,” he chided himself, laughing.  Maybe he fancied pink more than he ever realized.

He wondered how he should go about finding the owner of the pendant.  It’s not like it’s an overly expensive thing, would it be missed enough to go through the effort?  Would the police scoff at him for bringing in a necklace not even worth a hundred dollars?

It was getting late for now though.  Nothing he could really do about it at the current time anyway.  And his research had left his head throbbing pretty good again.  Staring at a computer monitor always left him with an achy head and eyes.  He did take another minute for a quick web search for concussions.  It appeared since he didn’t die the first time he fell asleep, he should be fine for the second.

He got a bite to eat and then readied himself for bed.  Heading to his room, he took another glance at the necklace, still sitting on his desk by the computer.  He stopped, curious at the draw it had on him.  It was kind of like that person who has their head turned away from you, who then feels you looking at them and turns to look at you with eyes so bright it’s slightly shocking.  Except now, there’s no need for concern over being rude for staring.  Trevor chuckled to himself, and turned to head to bed.  But a few steps later he stopped again.  He went back to his desk, grabbing the pink stone to bring into the bedroom with him.  Silly to have it getting lonely, sitting out there by itself.