CHAPTER THIRTY TWO: TREES OF LIGHT

The scenery blew Calin away, it was beautiful. He had dreamed his whole life of having adventures, breaking free of his orphan status. But this moment alone was better than any adventure he could conjure up.

Soft whistling sounded off to his immediate left and it echoed into the open space. Jerry stepped in next to him.

“That sure is something...” The boy said, with awe in his voice.

“Yeah, it is.”

Just then out of the tunnel, a scrambling noise burst forth, as Kara and Evany came bounding out, panting.

“Man,” Kara said as she exhaled loudly. “I thought it had been bad in the day. But—“

She stopped as she looked down to the crystal trees glowing faintly. Her smile burst forth from her face as she looked to Calin excitedly and said, “I was right! I called it. I said that those crystal trees would light up if you shined a flashlight on them.”

Then Kara got quiet, and even in the little light, her face got all serious. And after a moment, she said,

“I don’t understand it. During the day when we went through here, the crystal didn’t show any indication of giving off light. Even in the shadows... It doesn’t make any sense.”

Her features contorted while she was brooding. But none of them seemed to have any answers as Calin looked around. Yet, when he looked to Tyas, the man was staring at him with an intensity that made Calin take a step back. Though, it lasted only a moment as Tyas’s face relaxed with a shrug.

Then he tilted his head down for a second, and stepped past Calin. As he did, the man said, “The answer lies in the nature of the Morning trees.”

“What?”

“Yeah, what are the Morning trees?”

It was like something snapped in Tyas as he growled and walked off on the open pathway in the mountain side, he headed in the only other direction, towards the big structure at its end.

The reason for Tyas’ outburst was clear to Calin, but at the same time it confused him deeply. The man was frustrated that he couldn’t remember.

“What was that all about?” Jerry said from the side.

Calin sighed and said, “He wants me to remember something, whatever that might mean.”

It was at that moment that he looked back. Kara’s eyes had pleading in them. He almost let his own frustrations take over him as he wanted to scream at her silent question, I don’t know!

But he controlled his emotions and just shook his head with a big sigh, leaving a confused looking Evany and Jerry behind as he followed Tyas to the other end of the pathway in the rock.

As the other end of the high cliff-side tunnel came closer, the flashlight revealed what looked like a big watch tower that was moulded out of the granite mountain. Hundreds of small slits adorned its face and Calin realized that it was arrow ports. Probably to make sure the secret passage was secured against infiltration. He continued to marvel at the workmanship of the place. It blew his mind.

Getting closer to the watchtower, he looked back down at the great eagle gates and noticed how overgrown some places were. If Kara was right and this was Mesa Versee, strange as that may be, then it truly was abandoned a long time ago. He couldn’t help but wonder for what reason.

Up front, the passage opened up even more and a smooth ramp led up into the watchtower. Tyas was waiting at the bottom. The man looked at him and then dropped his head a little and said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t know how to handle this situation. We had been friends, for years before that day you fell from the cliff... Suffice to say, I’m still figuring it out. But,” Tyas paused. “To the point, this ramp is very slippery so hold onto that stone railing as best as you can. If you slip, there is a possibility you could go off the cliff.”

“Great,” Calin said, drawing the word out. “I really, really wish you hadn’t told me that.”

A confused expression flashed over Tyas, but Calin nodded towards the drop off and the man realized. Strangely, a small smile came to Tyas’ lips before he started up the slick marble ramp.

Calin watched as he waited, and after ten minutes, Tyas reached the top. Still Calin waited, he had it down to needing to warn the others, but in his heart it was more about being terrified of going up a dangerous ramp that was as slippery as soap while only a little over a metre from a vertical drop off of at least eighty metres.

But, he sighed, certain that he had to scale that thing to get into the watchtower. Just before Jerry reached him, Calin breathed in deeply a couple of times to calm himself.

“Hey, Jerry, this is a really slippery part. Tyas said that we should hold on tightly to the railing. So I was thinking, let’s each take a girl and let them go up right in front of us.”

As the boy looked at their route, he pulled his lower lip down on both sides making a noise of worry.

“That’s nasty. Are you going to be okay with that?”

Calin steeled his face and nodded. Not trusting his voice at that question, he stayed silent and scraped together his resolve.

When Kara and Evany reached them he let Jerry do the talking. He flatly ignored the subject and only said, “I’ll take Kara.”

It was a small miracle that she was not hung up on that previous question at the moment. With his left hand holding onto the railing, he grabbed the right side of her sleeveless hoodie. At the very least, there was a small strip of the ramp closest to the railing that was normal rock with a decent grip, but it wasn’t very wide. So he had to be careful to keep his feet on only the little strip. And he was certain it would be all too easy to lose balance and go onto the slippery marble.

Time seemed to slow down to a crawl as Calin moved up the slope with Kara. A quarter of the way up, he had already logged the experience into the top three scariest things he had ever done. The top two being: his run-ins with the big Nighthounds and the small one.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

It certainly didn’t help when Kara said, “It was less scary going down than up.” But still her voice was strangely steady, and that in itself helped Calin to stomach his fear.

His eyes were wholly focused on the railing and the strip of rough stone the entire time, and when the ramp flattened, Calin shouted out in glee. Only to be silenced by Tyas.

“Silent! We don’t know if anybody is around.”

It was a fair point, so Calin calmed down and Kara was following suit. Inside the watchtower was an assortment of devices that Calin assumed was meant for defence. What was strange was that everything seemed as if it had been left in a ready position. At the one end, there were more familiar pieces of weaponry, ballistae the size of a car.

As they moved to the back of the watchtower, through different rooms, marble doors came into view. They stood ajar and revealed two sets of staircases winding down into the mountain.

Calin looked to Kara and asked, “Do you know how to get to the Well from here?”

Without a word, she glanced at him, like she was considering something. But then she shook her head and then pointed before she said, “That one.”

With just that, she descended the closest stairwell. Calin sighed, everything about Kara was screaming that she was going to badger him with questions, and soon too. He pushed the thought aside and followed her.

***

Ten minutes later, after passing a few hallways, they came into a big room and stepped onto an oval walkway. It was situated on the second floor with an open view of the first floor foyer over the railing. What was surprising, however, was that in the middle on the bottom floor stood a living tree that reached the third floor.

The roof had a circular glass window that overlooked the tree. Calin smiled at it, the idea of having a tree on the inside of a building was always cool. But as he turned his headlamp to the side, Kara was already going down the stairs. He made haste after her.

On the bottom floor she stopped and Calin almost ran into her.

“Kara, what—“

She lifted her hand and he bit off his question. Her eyes were wide as she slipped the hoodie off her head, letting her scarlet hair fall free. Next thing he knew, she bolted forward and ran through an archway that led out of the room. Calin groaned and glanced to the other three.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go get her,” He said, not understanding what was going on. He dropped his rucksack and sprinted after her. But as he caught up to her, he grabbed the edge of her long sleeved shirt, and with a firm voice said, “What are you doing?”

“Everything is here...” Her voiced cracked. “I don’t understand.”

Calin stared at her in confusion and was about to ask what she meant, when he took in his surroundings. His light flashed over it, there was a circular room with an open door and a round structure in the middle. Left and right of them were many familiar looking scientific instruments and equipment scattered about, but only on the one half of the room.

Then it struck him. The one side of the room was strikingly familiar to the inner room of the Ruins that he had seen a bit more than two weeks ago. But what was evident without a doubt was, it wasn’t just half of the room anymore, with that unique ‘sliced down the middle’ scene. It housed the entire room, and the Well was also intact.

As much as confusion flared through him at that moment, it was Kara’s reaction to it that caught him off guard. She fell to her knees and started crying. Her shoulders heaved as she sobbed. Calin dropped down next to her and placed a hand on her back.

“Kara...?” He said. “Are you okay?”

“NO! Don’t you get it?! ... If ... the entirety of the room is here, then what happened back then couldn’t repeat itself... And if that is true, and what Jerry told me is true… we are stuck here!”

Taken aback, he stared at her, her green eyes wide with anxiety. She was the strongest person he knew. Seeing her like this, it got to him. Then something misplaced popped up.

“Wait,” He said carefully. “I thought you said you didn’t believe the stuff we told you.”

Her crying stopped. But she looked away from him, her hair hiding her eyes as she said, “I kept denying it. But the more I see, the more I can’t stop thinking about what I have experienced the last two weeks. From the day at the Well, to waking up here with the rest of the scientists in this room, Wanrey and his cahoots running out of the Ruins.” She slammed her hand to the floor as she mentioned Wanrey. “But then I saw the trees of light and all the way through to this moment, this room wasn’t intact that day after the bright flash of light, but now it is. There are far too many mysteries to just think everything is normal. It is not!”

“It’s okay,” Calin said as he wrapped his arm around her. “We will figure it out. The room being intact doesn’t mean outright that it, whatever it was, couldn’t happen again.”

Kara sighed and brushed the hair out of her face.

“Maybe you are right,” She said.

Calin stood up and helped the girl back to her feet and was about to turn to the Well, when he stopped.

“The trees of light?” He asked. “Are you talking about those crystal trees?”

“No,” She said. “Haven’t you seen any yet? They—“

As she spoke, the crystal veins in the floor started to glow under them systematically.

Like pulsing roots the entire room lit up with a gentle light over the course of a few seconds. Calin froze and Kara stood still as well. As they turned back to where the source of the light in the crystals came from, through the archway there were visible arms of the tree glowing with a bright turquoise light.

His legs moved, as he wandered closer to the tree. Evany was there, open mouthed as she stared. He was about to go ask her what happened, when Tyas moved in next to him and Kara.

“That is a Morning tree,” Tyas said with a firm tone, but a moment later it turned bitter. “You knew that once.”

It was hard to swallow. The awe of the tree was veiled when he saw Tyas’s white knuckled fist clenching at his side. There was pain in the man’s face. Even if it wasn’t his fault for losing his memories, it still struck Calin like a blow. He didn’t know how to start figuring out how to handle the situation. But to his relief, Kara spoke up, disarming the tension.

“So they’re called Morning trees then... What had been bothering me the entire time I was in that prison was that, why they don’t always shine? And what makes them shine in the first place... it’s not bioluminescence. That much I concluded.”

A few moments of silence permeated the air, but Calin watched as Tyas’ fist slowly unfurled.

“It’s a complex answer, one I don’t feel like trying to explain right this second. But... it is the moon and sometimes starlight, to a smaller degree. The Morning trees shine when there is moonlight. Look, those huge clouds are gone.” The man pointed to the round window in the room. Through it, there were clear gaps in the clouds, showing the night sky.

“That is so cool!” Jerry quipped from on top of one of the big roots of the tree. “I guess that explains a part of why there aren’t many windows in the place.”

A voice from a bit further away turned Calin’s attention.

“I think you are right,” Kara said from one of the walls. She was glancing over one of the crystal veins that ended up at a glowing crystal, situated in an opening in the wall. It was carved in the shape of a flame.

She picked up the palm sized object and carried it back to where he stood, but it did not lose its light, even with her back to the tree. But what was a surprise to Calin was that, the raw emotion that had flooded out of her earlier was nowhere to be seen. Just like Kara, give her something to figure out and she is in her element.

“If my theory holds out,” She said. “Then these crystals hold the energy a long time after it is exposed to light. I’ve seen hints of it as I had studied it with my father. But a flashlight doesn’t seem to give nearly the same intensity to it that the Morning tree does. This is remarkable in itself...”

As she was talking, there was movement to his right. He turned and Evany was reaching for a low hanging branch, trying to get a leaf. In shock, Calin jumped forward and shouted.

“Don’t touch the leaves! We don’t know what will happen—“

But a hand grabbed his arm. As he tried to free it, Tyas’s voice lifted over his shoulder.

“It’s fine! Calm down. The trees and their leaves are perfectly safe.”

Calin regarded Tyas and stopped moving. The fear slowly dissipated as he took the tension from his muscles. A look around the room made it clear everybody was staring at him.

But without allowing embarrassment to find its foothold, he started laughing out of his stomach. Then a chorus of laughter filled the room.