I enter the world called real as one enters a mist.

Julian Green

She mouthed the odd word a few times before repeating it.

“Paltophern? I’ve never heard that word before. I’ve read a lot of books Jaius and I’ve never seen it in any of them.”

“Ok genius now what? Are you going to tell her that it’s a word you just made up?”

“It’s from a Science fiction show I watched. It was a world where there were no humans in it.” He figured a little white lie couldn’t hurt, plus it had gotten her focus off of those crystals.

She gave him a weird look, said the word out-loud a few more times, and then shrugged. “I guess since this probably isn’t Narnia or Middle Earth, then it wouldn’t be right to use them as names. So, Paltophern it is.” She said with a nod.

“Cool, well Ali, welcome to Paltophern.”

“Thanks, what is there to do in lovely Paltophern?”

“Well, we have swimming in Crystal Creek. A nature walk in the Endless Forest. And the scenic outlook on top of the Hole, and no trip to Paltophern would be complete without gazing into the Uber-Cloud.”

She smiled at the names he gave the places that they had been. She looked up when he mentioned the cloud and her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. “Ju…Jaius…”. She stammered as she pointed up at the sky. He turned and looked up to see a large part of the Uber-cloud missing. The opening took the form of a large rectangle. Through the rectangle showed the silvery light of a moon, although it seemed like you were looking at the moonlight from the bottom of a pool. Jaius marveled at how closely it resembled the Earth’s moon. There were bright twinkling stars shining through as well. They both stared in awe at the awesomeness and beauty of this sight. Their revelry was interrupted by her stomach beginning to growl and it didn’t seem to want to stop. She couldn’t remember ever going this long without eating before.

“Yours too huh?” He Said as he tore his eyes away from the sky. “Mine has felt like it had a black hole in it for a while now. A lot of the movies I watch say that you can survive for a week or two without food as long as you have water.”

Her gaze shifted form the window of sky above them to the gently flowing creek next to them. “Ohhh that water is awesome, Jaius. After I got jolted by the crystals all my joints hurt. I drank some of that water and all the pain left me. I don’t even feel tired right now. You need to try some.” She looked him up and down and then pinched her nose. “You could use a bath too.” She said, smiling and giggling.

He felt embarrassment start to well up, but then he found himself stopping it. He realized that she was right, he did need one, and also he realized that she was his friend. That when she was giggling at him, it wasn’t meant to hurt him. She was just joking around with him. It might even be how friends show affection for each other. He wasn’t sure, he’d never really had a friend like this before. For now though he was going to go on the assumption that she was just joking around with him.

“Heh, yeah, I guess you’re probably right.” he said as he laughed a little.

She smiled and shook her head. “Believe me, I’m not making fun of you, I was a gross mess before I got in.”

“I know, I got the picture to prove it.” He said with a grin.

Her smile lessened. “I know.” she said with more sullenness than he had expected.

He felt a little hurt, that it was ok for her to joke with him, but not for him to joke around with her. He didn’t let it get to him though. Instead he pulled out the iphone and turned it on. He moved over to her and knelt down. He pulled up the picture he had taken of her and pulled up the delete option. He held it out to her.

“Sorry I’ve been messing with you on this. I thought you’d like to do the honors.”

She looked at it for a minute, looked up to him, looked into his eyes and then shook her head.

“Nope, you keep it. I trust you Jaius. Alison burned me, but if I go around believing that everyone is out to betray me, I’m going to have a pretty lousy life. You’re my friend and there are no secret between…” She looked up at him and smiled. “….between best friends.”

He’d never had someone call him their best friend before. “Wow, I’ve never been that to anyone before, a best friend that is. “Wha…What do best friends do?”

She smiled and shoved him back, playfully.

“Well first off they take baths before coming over to their best friend's house.” She said giggling.

He laughed with her. “Alright, alright, I’m going, I’m going.” He stood, turned off the iphone and headed over to the creek. He saw their wet clothes laying there.

“Hey, Ali, now that we have a fire, we can dry our clothes.”

“Oh man, I didn’t even think about it.” She got up and came over to him. “Thank God that fire got going. It will be kinda comforting to get my regular clothes on. I may be in an alien world, but at least I got something that will remind me of normalcy.” She gathered the wet clothes and then took them over to where the fire was. She laid them out as close to the fire as she dared, and then walked back over to him. “Thanks for reminding me.

“ It’s alright” He went over and picked up his swim trunks and then looked at her. “No peeking.”

She laughed. “You got it.”

He went over to the same grouping of bushes and changed into his swimsuit. He stole a look back and saw her sitting with her back to him with her hands over her eyes. She was singing again, and the crystals were glowing in a way that lit the entire clearing with a light that made every last detail of plant and earth stand out in amazing clarity. He marveled at the sight for a long moment, but then turned away and walked back down to the clearing and into the creek. As the ground sloped downward he began to swim out to the middle. When he was treading water right over the crystals he looked down at them. Their soft glow was twinkling up at him. He was about to dive down to look, when he noticed something. There was no current at this spot in the creek. He had felt it pulling at him as he swam out, but when he got to this point there was nothing. It was like a dead zone or something. He tried to think of how this could be but came up with nothing. So he shrugged and dove down into the water. He hovered just above the crystals, taking care not to touch them. As he was immersed in it, he definitely felt the difference in the water that Ali had mentioned. This was the cleanest water he’d ever been in. It didn’t sting his eyes, and there was now grittiness, or cloudiness.

He went back to the surface and took a deep breath. He then took a drink from the creek. She was right, there was a sweetness to the water and he could feel the aches in his muscles start to ease. “What the heck is this place? The air is different, the water is different, and it has glowy crystals at the bottom of the creek.”

She had heard him in the water and so thought it safe to turn around and check on him. She had to make sure that he hadn’t touched one of those crystals. She saw him come up for air and waved at him. He waved back and then dove down again. She picked up his clothes and carried them back to the fire where she laid them out near her's. She stood up and looked at the creek again. When he came up she shouted, “Isn’t the water awesome?”

“Yeah, you were right about it making you feel better.” Something about the clearing seemed different. He looked up at the sky. The light all around them seemed dimmer. “Ali, does it look darker to you?”

The smile faded from her face, and she looked at the clearing before her.

“Yeah, it does. Looks like Paltophern has a night time too.”

“We better go get more wood. And we may need you to sing to the crystal again and make it light the fire if it goes out.”

“Do we really have too?” She said timidly as she looked down at the thing that had almost killed her.

He swam to the shore and turned toward the camp. She had turned her back to him, but he saw where she was looking at the crystal shards. She began to rub her arms as she stared at the faceted gem. He came and stood next to her. “We should try Ali, we might need it. Don’t worry I’ll be right there with you. I’m going to go dry off and get changed.” “No looking.” They both said at the same time, which made them laugh. The laughter allowed her to tear her eyes away from the crystal, and she turned and stood by the shore watching the water flow past her.

“Right!” She blushed a little and moved. She could hear him moving along the path toward the bushes. She began to become aware of how clearly she could hear him moving about. She’d never thought she had poor hearing, but this was something more than what it had been. After a little bit she heard him walking up behind her. He laid his towel out near hers and then held his hands out to the fire.

“Ready to get some more firewood?” She said feeling more energetic then she knew she should.

“Yeah, there were a lot of branches that were wet. It took me a while to find ones that were dry. Actually I was kind of surprised that the ones I found caught fire, cause they looked like they had just fallen today. I had heard that branches that had just come off the tree were hard to get lit.”

Alianna looked at the fire and saw that there didn’t seem to be any problem with the wood catching fire. This drew her attention to the crystal and she wondered if it was the energy from the crystal that had made the new wood light. She shivered a little at the power that the stone held.

“Yea..Yeah, my Dad told me the same thing when he taught me how to make a fire.”

Jaius noticed the hesitation in her voice and saw her looking at the crystal again. He had to hide that thing from her. After a moments thought he landed on an Idea. He walked over and grabbed his backpack and then went to where the crystal was laying. He picked up the shard that started the fire and placed it in the bag. Once it was secure he went to where the other shard had fallen. He studied it as he lifted it off the ground. This shard seemed to have a razor-sharp edge. In fact, it looked a lot like a knife. “Ali look we can use this half as a knife!”

She looked at what he held up but then grimaced and turned away. He groaned inwardly. He often wondered why he always spoke before thinking. “Sorry Ali, I’ll just put it with the other one for now.” He placed the crystal knife into his pack.

“Thanks.” She said sighing with relief.

They spent the next hour gathering wood. It was pretty hard to find wood that wasn’t still wet. They concluded that it must have rained before they got there and that was why all the wood was soaked. As she gathered wood, she listened to the forest. They had heard birds and other animals before, but now she could hear them so much more distinctly. Something was happening to her, her hearing was improving. “How can that be?”

“Jaius.”

“Yeah?”

“Something is going on with me. I…I can hear a lot better than I was able to this morning. It almost seems like super hearing or something.”

“Ah, come on Ali, there’s no such thing as super hearing, in people anyway.”

“Jaius, there is no such thing as Paltophern, but here we are.”

“Well, yeah, I guess you have a point.” He thought for a moment. “It could have something to do with this being another world. I mean, with all the noise that is constantly around us on Earth, cars, planes, people, lights, maybe it is just your ears adjusting to the new silence? Or it could be like what happened to Superman. He came to a different world and got all of these superpowers. Maybe Paltophern is turning us into mutants.”

She looked dubious, and somewhat concerned at the excitement she heard in his voice when he said “Mutants”, but there was little logic that she could gather up to discount either theory. “I guess it's possible, but think back over the past few hours, have you noticed if you could do something that you couldn’t do this morning?”

He thought back over the past few hours and the one thing that stood out was that he had been able to stay ahead of Alianna when she was chasing him through the woods. He hadn’t even lost his breath when he reached the cliff. “Well, I didn’t get winded when we were running through the woods.”

“Yeah that’s right! But when we first got here you couldn’t even walk fast without losing your breath. You're right, I got super hearing and you have super breath! Oh my gosh! We are mutants. ”

“Great, I

I finally get the chance to be an X-Man and my power is supper breath?”

“Well as long as it's not super bad breath.” She jibed at him.

That struck a nerve. “Or radar ears” he shot back, perhaps with a bit more vehemence than he really wanted..

They both paused, as they had to fight down the hurt feelings that served as a defense mechanism. They knew the other wasn’t being mean, but old habits die hard.

After a moment or two they both began to laugh, tentatively at first, but then full on.

“Good one Ali!”

“Thanks, you too.”

“Jaius?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think that the jokes they play on us could be just as good natured as the ones we just made on each other? Maybe we were just misunderstanding the other kids?”

He lowered his head and thought. After a moment he raised it and shook it back and forth.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Ali, I know you want to sit at that table, to be part of them, but…Ali, they are mean and there is no way around it.”

“But, they were nice to me Jaius, Mandy Furlon invited me on a trip as soon as I met her. Maybe to be cool, you have to take jibes and give them too.”

He shook his head and put his pile of wood down on the ground. “Ali…They had something planed for you today, something out of a Stephen King movie. I…I over heard Keri talking to Alison. They were just outside one of the lockers that I had been thrown into.” He was about to go right on omitting the Diary, because then she would know that he told a white lie earlier, when he seemed to not know that Alison had it. He would not have mentioned it had he not found himself looking her in the eyes. As he looked into her eyes, he knew he couldn’t lie to her, not when so many had.

“What were they going to do Jaius?”

He looked her in the eyes. “Ali, I’ll tell you that in a minute. I got to tell you this, because I kinda panicked an hour or so ago, and I kinda acted like I didn’t know something when I really did. I…I knew Alison had your diary, I even know where she is keeping it. I am so sorry that I lied, I just wanted you to know that. I won’t lie to you again Ali, I promise.”

She was already on edge, waiting to hear the awful thing the A crowed had planed for her. Him telling her that he lied to her set her kettle boiling. Just as she was about to let him have it, something inside of her stopped the fireworks. They had both been scared earlier. Of this place and of each-other. She felt the kettle cool off. She was still a little miffed at him though, so she dropped her pile of wood and walked away a few yards and stood looking off into the trees. After thinking it over for a few moments, she decided that that little slip wasn’t worth her hurting the friendship they’ve started. She turned around to see a few tears leaking from his eyes.

“He did tell the truth.” She thought. She hurried over to him set her hand on his shoulder.

“Its Ok Jaius, I forgive you. Don’t worry about it , OK?”

“OK.” He said in a heavy voice.

She stepped back and looked him in the eyes. “Now what did they have planned?”

“I’m not sure you want to know, it was pretty bad, and it might make you feel worse.”

“I need to know in case they try to pull it off once we get back”

He was about to say “If we get back,” but thought better of it at the last moment, and instead proceeded to tell her all that he had heard.

She went more pale the more he told her. He stopped halfway through, but she made him go on. When he was done she turned and began to walk through the trees. When it looked like she wasn’t going to stop he went after her. He caught up to her, but she didn’t look at him so he just walked along next to her in silence.

Her mind kept playing the scene he had described over and over again. It had been the entry she had prayed Alison wouldn’t remember. “Why God, why did you let that happen?” But then the thought hit her that it didn’t happen. “Sorry God, I guess you did stop that event from happening, but why did all this happen?” She didn't get an answer, but she then compared it to what had happened in the caff, how Keri had poisoned Jim against her, and how Jim had just turned on her. “Not much difference between the two. Same result as well. Why God, why are we here?”

She slowed as they came to the tree line. She went very close to the edge of the cliff and looked out across the void that lay before her. Jaius came up next to her and placed his hand in hers. “Thanks Jaius, I need some support right now.” She squeezed his hand tightly and didn’t let go.

He felt her squeeze his hand. The tingling was still there, but, it didn’t scare him anymore, so he kept his hand in hers.

She looked out upon the alien landscape. The land on the far side of this chasm was a spattering of woodland and plains. Far toward the horizon she thought she saw the gray shadows of mountains. There was no crystal city however. She felt a twinge of disappointment. Paltophern is definitely alien, but so far no people or cities or even animals, although they could hear them.

“Ali, you beat them you know. They threw all they had at you and your still here. Please don’t let this get you down Ali, we are far enough away now that the Bellows can’t hurt us. No one can.”

She looked at him and smiled. “We’re safe then, safe from the monster’s in the dungeon. Safety is an odd sensation, I haven’t felt safe in a long time, I guess I had forgotten what it felt like.” She took a deep breath and then let it out. She sat down and so he joined her. They listened to the sound of far away animals, and reveled in the wind that flooded across them.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He watched her as she stared off into the lands beyond the chasm. He still couldn’t believe that they were here, in a fantastical land that was light-years from the dungeon. He didn’t know about her, but right now he had no desire to leave, which shocked him based off his earlier fear of this place and desire to leave.

The kids at the dungeon couldn’t touch them, and there was no one to make every conceivable choice for him. He missed his family, mostly Anne, but they will get along Okay without him. He really was glad that it was Ali here with him. “What if it had been Trudi Bellows?” He shuddered at the thought. The shuddering brought her out of her musings.

“You OK?” She said.

“Yeah, just a queasy thought.”

“Like what?”

He had promised not to lie. “The thought jumped in that What if I had been sent here with Trudi bellows, instead of you? It made me shudder.”

She shuddered as he said it. “Yeah that is shudder worthy.” She said giggling.

“We should be getting back Ali, we don’t want the fire to die down too low, or else we’ll need to relight it with the crystal.”

She was on her feet in a moment. “What are we waiting for then, let's go.” She said, pulling him up off the ground. He scrambled to get to his feet as she had an iron grip on his arm and he was afraid he might lose it. “Ali, wait, take your time, I don’t think it will go out in the next few seconds!” He grunted as she began to run, still holding onto his arm.

“You don’t know that! If we don’t get back there we might freeze.”

They ran back through the forest stopping only to pick up the piles of wood that they had found. She broke through the trees and ran down the incline and skidded to a halt when she neared the fire. She sighed with relief to still find it burning. Jaius dropped his pile and put his hands on his knees for a few moments. He might have super breath, but Ali’s natural ability in running had been doubled, and she seemed to be stronger. She had tugged him through those woods like he was a pillow

“I thought you had supper breath?” she said with a smile.

“I do, it's still no match for a marathon girl.”

She thought for a moment. “You’re right. I’m not even winded in the slightest. In fact, now that the pain is gone, I feel like I could run around the “Hole” 10 times or more. Jaius, what could be causing this? I mean, it’s great that this place is giving us power boosts, but do you think it could be hurting us in the process? I mean, do you think Paltophern causes cancer in lab rats?”

“I think lab rats are born with cancer in them. Everything seems to cause it in them.” He looked around them. “I think Paltophern is just fine, in fact, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to leave.”

“Not leave? Jaius why don’t you want to leave? You said earlier that you wanted to go home, and now you don’t? We could die here, we might never see our families again.”

“We could die back on Earth too. The Dungeon almost took your life from you Ali. At least here, as long as we can find food and not get eaten by something, we won’t have to endure the torture they’ve been dishing out on us. I think our families would rather us be happy and free, then bound up and tortured. Anyway, earlier I was scared and hungry. I‘m still scared and hungry, but Paltophern has started to grow on me.”

She looked as if she was going to respond, but instead closed her mouth and sat down a few feet from the fire. “I get what your saying, I mean I haven’t felt this good in a year, but…but I miss my Mom Jaius. I miss my Dad and Simon and Sarah. If they can’t locate us they’ll eventually say that we’re dead and then my Parents will have to have a funeral for me and my Mom… My Mom will have that look on her face, that dead look from my vision.” She pulled her knees up and rested her head on top of them.

He could see her shoulder’s began to shake, and he could hear her muffled whimpers. “Marathon girl to Niagra falls girl in less then five seconds. How was she able to get her mood to shift so radically?” He sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She leaned into him, and continued to cry softly for the next several minutes.

After a time she quieted and looked up at him. “Sorry, Jaius, I seem to be crying at the drop of the hat lately. It comes on without any warning. I wish I could nail down why?”

“Ali, you don’t have to apologize. You’ve probably been holding all of this in for a while and now that you have a safe place like Paltophern to be in, your letting yourself get this stuff out.”

“Maybe.” She said as she turned to stare into the fire.

“Ali?”

“Huh?”

“Your going to have to do something I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to do.”

“Like what.” She said with trepidation.

“Your going to have to try and get that crystal to light up again. If we’re going to get any decent sleep, then we won’t be able to keep wood on this fire all night. We’ll need to be able to light it again tomorrow.”

She shuddered as he spoke, but she eventually nodded her head. “I know.” She said glumly. She knew he was right, but the thought of what those stones almost did to her sent a chill coursing through her.

Just then she heard something growl near her. She jumped away from him with a shriek.

“Whoa, Whoa Ali chill, its just my stomach, I’m starving, and it is totally letting me know. And, I guess, letting you know too.”

She knelt there shaking for a minute or so, but slowly was able to regain control of herself. He then heard a similar growl come from her direction. She looked down forlornly as the sound continued.

“What are we going to do, waste away to nothing?” She thought as fear began to creep into her. So she fell back on the thing that she turned to when all else was lost. She never saw any response but it was all she had left. Alianna took a deep breath to calm herself, and to prepare herself for disappointment. Before she closed her eyes the flickering of the fire caught her attention. “I had prayed earlier for fire, and…and now we have fire. It seemed like an accident when the crystal hit the wood, but was it really an accident? Maybe Paltophern is closer to God.” Confidence began to rush in to replace the fear. She closed her eyes and quietly called out to God. “Hi God, its Ali again. God was that you that provided that fire? If it was, thank you so much, we really needed that. God, if Paltophern is closer to Heaven then Earth is, and you can hear me better now, could you please send us some food? We are totally starving and I’m afraid my stomach will eat me. Even if your not hearing me this time God, I think it was you that gave us the fire, so thank you very much. Amen!”

Jaius had almost said something to her at least five times, but every time he was kept from checking on her by his fear that he might disturb her and then she’d be mad at him, like Sis always was. He would probably fling himself into the “Hole” if he had to spend the rest of his life with someone who treated him like Sis did. So he said nothing and just kept repeating over and over again in his head “Please be Ok, Please be OK!”

When her eye fluttered open, he about choked as he let go the breath he’d been holding. “Are you OK Ali? I…I was a little worried, you had your eyes closed for a while. What were you doing?”

“Praying.” She said in a quiet whisper.

“To who?”

She looked at him in confusion. “God, who else would you pray to?”

He looked down, felling like he’d said something stupid. “I don’t know, I don’t pray much right to God, I always pray to the statues of the saints I have in my room. It is hard even then though to do long prayers , I can't keep my mind on it long enough to get more than a few words out. I’m not sure it works anyway. When I did try to pray, I would ask for the kids to stop picking on me, and also for Sis to like me. Neither one has happened yet.”

There was an odd silence that fell over the clearing once Jaius stopped speaking.

Alianna could feel the pain that was bottled up inside him, she could almost see it. It reminded her of heavy chains, like the ones that are attached to boat anchors.

“I’ve been kinda feeling that way this past year too Jaius. I used to talk to God all the time when I was younger, I think he even answered me back a few times. This past year though, when everything was falling down around me, it started to feel like he wasn’t there. I was starting to get scared when I thought about it, cause I mean if God isn’t there then… then there isn’t much hope at all.

I think God made that crystal light the fire Jaius, I prayed to him to help us start the fire, and a few minutes later the crystal flared and caught the wood. I was thinking that maybe Earth is so far away from Heaven, that sometimes the reception gets clouded, but maybe Paltophern is closer, and we can get through to him better here. I just prayed for him to help us find some food. If he can start the fire without a match, then some chicken nuggets shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You prayed for Chicken nuggets?” he said it chidingly, but with as much levity as he could muster, so that he wouldn’t risk hurting her feelings. He watched her cringe slightly and felt that fear well up in him. He began to worry that he hadn’t even come close to levity, when she shook her head and smiled.

“I wasn’t that specific, but if he does bring Chicken Nuggets then you don’t get any.” Her face was unreadable and so the words sank in like an arrow. He tried not to flinch but he couldn’t stop it. Being left out was one of the things that he hated the most. It made him feel like he was alone in a room filled with billions of people.

She waited for him to grin, or shrug, or shoot something back at her. Instead she saw him wither and shrink back inside himself. “Oh Jaius, I’m sorry, maybe neither of us is ready for banter yet.” She got up and started walking toward him.

He saw her moving toward him. She probably felt sorry for him, for his weakness. He was supposed to be the one saving her, yet it always seemed that she was the one coming to his rescue. Something welled up in side him as she walked toward him. He couldn’t put a name to it, but it shoved the fear right out of him. As she knelt down in front of him, compassion flowing from her face, he grinned at her. “You can keep the nuggets, My sister worked in fast food this past summer and she said that the nuggets got dropped on the floor and then put back in the box and served all the time.” His grin widened as he saw the jibe register. The concern on her face turned to a frown as she processed the words. The frown didn’t last long, however, for a grin quickly replaced it.

“Maybe you were right earlier Jaius, banter could be how some people show affection for each other. Maybe the effort trying to one-up the other person shows them that you care enough to try?”

He though about that for a moment or two and then looked at her and grinned. “I told you that it might be true Ali, this has got to be how all the other kids show affection for each other, and to us it just seemed like they didn’t like us.”

She was about to agree with him, but then stopped. Something wasn’t right about this way of thinking. She poured through the past year in her mind, examining all the times they had done something to her. She shook her head back and forth. “The more I think about it Jaius the more I think that what you said earlier is true. The things they do to us are not endearments. Banter might be a way of showing friendship between themselves, but with us I think they really are trying to hurt us. Remember the stolen suit of Armor and what Keri was planning to do with it? I wish I knew why she hated me.”

“I thought you said that was a word that shouldn’t be used?

“I still believe it shouldn’t, but when I think about what her plan was, I can’t help but think that that is how she feels about me.”

“I hope your wrong Ali, cause if hate means what you said it means then no one deserves to have that feeling inside them, not even Keri Bellows.”

She hesitated a moment before nodding her head. “Your right, not even Keri Bellows.”

Jaius could see her twitch slightly every time Keri’s name came up, so he tried to change the focus of the topic off of her. “Ali you’re my best friend now, so it shouldn’t hurt when we banter back and forth, but even though I know you don’t mean it, it still hurts. Why does it still hurt?”

She closed her eyes and searched for an answer. “Maybe its that we’ve been hurt so many times that our bodies have grown accustomed to flinching when certain words or certain tone is used.” She finished by opening her eyes and looking at him. She had never spent this much time with a boy before, and so she still felt uneasy, but at the same time he had become her best friend. “Jaius, I promise that my words will never be spoken to hurt you. Trust that they are always in friendship and mirth, never in malice.” she whispered.

He‘d never had anyone say something even remotely that deep to him before. In all honesty he had never heard anyone talk like that before either. He knew she meant what she had just said, and it left him momentarily speechless. Slowly he was able to fit together what he hoped was an adequate response. “I promise that anything I say to you will never have any meanness behind it, and any laughter will be with you not at you.”

She smiled at him, but noticed right away that he was not looking at her. He was staring at the ground to their right. She followed his gaze, and saw a brown rabbit sitting there looking at them. She had heard animals in the distance, but this was the first one she had seen. It was looking at them. First it would stare at Jaius and then up at her. She had thought that she’d given up on the fleeting dream that this place was Narnia, but now, looking into the rabbits eyes, that dream resurfaced. “Hello Mr. Rabbit, what is this place?”

Jaius wore a confused expression on his face as he processed what Alianna had said to him. When he heard her talk to the rabbit, the expression became one of concern. He was about to remind her that rabbits couldn’t talk, when he saw something in her eyes. It was a twinkling light. He had seen the same thing there when she had exclaimed that they were in Narnia. Why would she be thinking of that again? The longer he looked at that light, the more he understood. Books came alive to her just like the movies did for him. She had probably lived in Narnia for years, it was familiar to her and it comforted her to pretend that she might actually be there. “What do I do? I don’t want to hurt her, but is it right to let her focus on that fantasy when we got a whole boatload of reality to deal with?”

She waited for the rabbit to reply to her. Hope burned within her, hope for something that was familiar to her, for someone she had wanted to meet since she had first read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She thought she heard a noise from the trees. She turned her head toward the noise and held her breath. She could almost see a golden mane breaking through into the clearing, when she heard a voice behind her.

“Alianna.”

To her it was deep and reminded her of a growl. Then she felt something soft and heavy on her shoulder, like a paw, she swore it was a paw. She turned with a massive smile on her face, but instead of seeing eyes that held peace, and the mane that offered safety, she saw Jaius looking at her, his hand on her shoulder. The outline of a majestic lion wavered in the rays of Paltophern’s moon, but as Jaius said her name again, the lion faded and then was gone.

She knew at that moment that it had just been an illusion. Aslan wasn’t here, this wasn’t Narnia. The whimper escaped her lips before she even knew it was on them. Tears erupted from somewhere deep inside her, sobs shook her body as she disintegrated to the ground. She felt Jaius’s hands gently grasp her shoulders and lift her up until her head lay against his chest. His arms closed around her, allowing her the protection she needed to let out the grief that was overtaking her. All day long she had not allowed herself to give up on the thought that they were in Narnia, that she would finally get to meet Aslan. She loved the relationship that Lucy Pevincy and Aslan shared in the books. It was a closeness that she yearned for. To be close to someone who could protect her from the monsters back at the dungeon. Now though she could no longer ignore the reality of Paltophern.

Jaius almost started to cry as well. He’d never heard anyone make a noise like the one Alianna had just made. It was as if someone very dear to her had just died right before her eyes. He felt so bad for her. He didn’t understand what had made her this despondent, but knew that whatever it had been was being fueled by what she had endured at the Dungeon. He knew because he could feel the same well of sorrow churning in the depth of his heart. Those kids had taken from him the person he might have been and left him with this useless, perpetually terrified, husk. He wanted to cry, even more as the sorrow in him was pushed to the surface by Alianna’s tears but he held it back. Somehow he found some minuscule amount of strength floating inside him. With it he was able to hold back his own grief, he was able to be strong for her.

“Aslan…” she exhaled, her voice rasped from crying.

“That was it, what made her dissolve like this. Her hope that this really was Narnia is what had kept her moving since we got here, and now she’s accepted the fact that there won’t be any massive Lion coming to save her.” He looked down at the rabbit who hadn’t moved, even during all the commotion. “Maybe a somewhat lousy knight would be enough?” He asked the small creature. “Great, now I’m doing it.” The rabbit just stared back at him.

As Alianna’s grief began to ease, a fairly morbid thought began to creep its way into his mind. He looked from the rabbit to where his backpack lay. He was specifically looking at the pocket where the crystal knife was. He looked back at the rabbit, and it seemed to catch a hint of the change in his contemplation of it. It raised up on its back legs and he thought it was going to bolt. It stayed where it was , however, and lay back down on the ground, its ears laying flat along its back. “Did it know what I was just thinking? If it did, why isn’t it running?” Jaius felt like there was very few alternatives to his plan. They needed food, and even if they could find some kind of berries, there was no way to tell if they were poisonous. “Ali.” She didn’t answer him. “Ali. Ali I need to ask you something.” She raised her head and looked at him with bloodshot eyes. “Ali, I know you're upset, and I think I know why. I know you really wanted this place to be Narnia.” Her head fell back down to his chest as he said Narnia. He lifted it back up so she was looking at him again. “Ali I wish we were there too, but we’re not. We’re actually stuck in some alien world and we’re starving. I…I just had a thought, but I’m not sure you're going to like it. We have a source of meat, sitting just a few inches away. That one piece of the crystal is sharp on one sideak, like a knife. If we move quickly enough we could…well we…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

It took her a number of moments to even register that he was speaking to her. Slowly what he said began to filter in. At first she was repulsed that he was even saying something like that. She almost pushed him away, but as she looked at the rabbit what he was saying began to make sense. They had no food, and she would swear that her stomach was going to eat itself soon. As she looked into the creatures large brown eyes, she felt all resolve and determination slipping away. “I…you’re right Jaius, but…I don’t think that I can do it, I mean I can skin it and cook it, I think, but I know that I won’t be able to kill it. Look, I know I said I shot a deer before, and I did, but that was at 75 yards away and I didn’t look in its eyes through the scope. I…I don’t think I could kill it with it looking at me.”

“Well, I keep saying that I’m the Knight.” He thought to himself. “I can do that, I think.” He gently helped her sit up, and then went over to the pack. The rabbit barely twitched at his passing. He opened the side pouch and cautiously reached in and gripped the smaller shard. As he walked back he brought it up to his face to examine it. It looked just like the crystals they had examined in science class this year. He couldn’t fathom where the energy had come from that lit the fire and nearly killed Ali. As he got closer he could see her looking away from him. He thought maybe she was still hoping that a lion would leap out of the trees, but then he saw her glance back at him and when she saw the shard she quickly looked away again. He sighed and then knelt down next to the rabbit. It looked up at him, and then the shard, and then set its head back down on its paws. He’s never killed anything bigger than an ant before, at least outside of his video games. He began to imagine the bunny in the uniform of a Nazi soldier, hoping that would help. He was almost to the point where he thought he could do it when he hesitated. He didn’t want the creature to suffer, he had really no idea how to kill it quickly. “Ali?”

“Huh?”

“I…I don’t want it to be in pain, do you…do you know how to…well you know, without it suffering?”

There was silence for a few moments.

“My Dad said the side of the neck is the best place, unless you know where the heart is, that’s the quickest way.” She said without turning back to him.

He looked down at the rabbit once more and took a deep breath. He reached his hand down and clamped it over the creature's back. It flinched and began to squirm, but after a few seconds stopped. He could still feel it shuddering though. He knew that if he didn’t do it now, he would very quickly lose his nerve. Just then his stomach rumbled and driven on the waves of need, his hand flew straight toward the rabbits neck.

Forty minutes later they had the rabbit over the fire. They found a wet stick nearby and they dunked it in the river and used it as a spit. It seemed to be resisting the fire for the moment. He had watched Ali take the rabbit to the river to skin and clean it. She had cried the whole time she was working, softly to herself. He had seen the tears though, when he had gone to check on her. She moved through the process like she knew what she was doing though. He was really impressed. It was unusual to find a girl who didn’t faint at the sight of a little blood. After another fifteen minutes the spit started to smoke, and after examining the rabbit, Ali indicated that she thought it was safe to eat.

They barely waited for it to cool. Once the first bite hit their mouths the rest was consumed in short order. Afterward Jaius dug a hole in the ground about a hundred yards from their camp and they buried the remains. Jaius looked down at the small mound of dirt. “Thank you Mr. Rabbit.” He really couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Thank you God.” He heard her whisper before she turned to walk back to the camp. They drank water from the creek and spent the rest of the evening sitting by the fire staring into the flames. They did start talking after a while, when it got too dark to sit in silence. Jaius told her about the movie he’d been watching on the bus the other day. She told him about a Wrinkle in Time, which was the closest to science fiction that she had gotten to. They eventually passed out from exhaustion. They slept close to each other more out of a need for comfort than anything else.

Alianna woke with a start, she was surrounded by a gray mist and she was soaking wet. She screamed before she even knew what she was doing, it just felt like the right thing to do when waking up, soaking wet in a dense fog. She heard Jaius groan off to her right, and then shout out in surprise. “What the…?”

“It looks like fog, but… but I’m soaking wet. Did I fall into the creek?”

“Huh, not that I saw, you probably wouldn’t be alive though if you did. Plus I’m soaked too.”

“Oh My gosh, what if we are dead? What if Paltopherin Rabbits are poisonous? This could be Purgatory? Or….”

“Ali, we're not dead, I can feel my heart racing. This is just some seriously wet fog. We’ll have to wait till it goes away and then start the fire again and dry off.”

“The fire huh? Do we have to?”

“Unless you want to sit in wet clothes all day?”

She took her time answering, trying to weigh the idea of sitting in wet clothes to try to activate that crystal again.

Once the fog lifted and the clearing was revealed again Jaius got out the larger crystal and laid it down before her. He then went to where the rest of their firewood lay and began building up the fire again. He knew it was all soaked through, like everything else, but he hoped that the crystal might be able to light it. She looked at the crystal for at least a half-hour, trying to work up the courage to touch it again. Finally both of them sitting there shivering granted her enough courage to pick it up and walk over to the fire pit. She held it out before her and aimed it at the fire, then squinted her eyes shut and waited for the end. After a number of seconds had gone by without her being vaporized she opened her eyes hoping for a nice fire to have started. She let her shoulders slump when she saw the logs were unlit.

“Try singing again?” Said Jaius through chattering teeth.

She looked dubiously at him and then at the crystal, but eventually shrugged and set the crystal in the middle of the wood pile. She sang the other song she had heard on Jim's itunes, the one about a girl named Emily. Somehow, just like last night, she could remember every note, every word. As she sang the beauty of the song and the images it brought to her head stored her heart and she gave her whole self to the song a soft glow appeared through the gaps in the pile of wood, and steam began to rise off of the wood. As she hit the last, drawn out, note of the song a pillar of flame shot upward from the crystal and the wood erupted into flames.

She smiled in-spite of her fear. Even though the stone had almost killed her twice, she had to admit that its power was amazing and also quite beautiful. There was something else she noted. The effect was more strong, more powerful than the last time she sang at the stone. Jaius, his eyes wide, looked at her. “Wow Ali, that was a lot more than had happened the last time. How did you make it shoot flames like that? That was so much more than the last time.” She looked into the stone as she thought about the process she had just used to produce the effect. “I’m not sure. I mean, I used a different song this time, maybe it’s somehow linked to the song. Also that song really stirred my heart and I felt like I was putting everything I had into singing it. I think I also imagined a pillar of fire keeping up to ignite the wood. Jaius just stared at her with his mouth slightly open. After a few moments he sat down pulled his legs up to his chest and stared deeply into the fire. Alianna looked at him for a long moment and then sat down next to him and also pulled her legs up to her chest. They sat like that long into the night softly talking to each other trying to figure out how in the world singing at a crystal can produce anything, let alone a pilar of fire.