Reality Bites

Chapter 5

We ran from Kane's men for what seemed like days on end and when we stopped, all three horses were slick with sweat and frothing at the mouth. From my poor vantage point, we had thundered through the village, then out onto a barren plain with towering rocks dotting the landscape and an impossibly tall, looming mountain running across the left. We lost Kane's men somewhere around the narrow pathway between two halves of the mountain. It had been a painful squeeze, and both my legs were skinned on their sides.

I stared into the dull, washed out flames of the fire. It provided little light, only giving enough heat to cook the slabs of meat Trace had brought with him. I sighed and slumped back against the hard granite wall. Darien had decided we would spend the night under the protection of the cool walls of stone, and this little cavern with a slanted rock as a roof had been the closest fit to our purposes.

"Ari," Darien spoke quietly. "Come here."

I scooted over to him and saw he was holding a small handful of pebbles.

"Yeah?" I asked curiously.

He bit his lip and rolled the pebbles around in his hand for a moment before speaking. "I think it's necessary, at this point, to teach you the basics of dark matter. This is a pebble," he says and holds up a pebble.

"It most definitely is."

"When you joined with--," he cut himself off and then cautiously started again. "When you came here, you became a part of our dimension and share in our control over the dark side of the world. The origin of the left-hand path. Always remember that our darkness is in everything and can be accessed anywhere, although it's a lot more concentrated in the earth." 

"In the pebble," I guessed. 

"That's right. Here," he said and held up his pebble again. "There is darkness in this. So if I accessed that and just nudged it to release it's form," he halted for a moment and the pebble disappeared while tiny flecks of dust floated down to the ground, "you can change the state of its matter." 

It was what he did with the wall. "Cool," I said and smiled. It was like one of those magician tricks, except real. "Can you put things back together, too?" 

"Well, yes, but it's more complicated than simply destroying," he smirked, "and less fun. To put something together again, you'd have to locate all the dark elements of the original object, isolate and replace the light elements, and then reconstruct the object."

"Oh?" I said. I didn't really get it; but hey, it's magic. Maybe I'm not supposed to get it.

"Because darkness tends towards chaos," he continued, "reconstructing is a lot harder than the other way around. You try," he said and handed me a pebble. I took it and stroked the cold, smooth surface. 

"So, um, what?" I asked, completely lost.

"Just," he frowned, at a loss for words. "Just close your eyes and focus on the pebble." 

I obliged and then felt stupid sitting there with my eyes closed. 

"Do you feel anything? Try to touch the heart of the pebble and access the light-dark composition of matter within it." 

"But . . . pebbles don't have hearts," I replied after a moment.

"Alright maybe not a heart, but the same idea. Even the pebble has a center of its being where the matter is drawn and arranged into its physical form. Just use imagery to imagine a heart and thrust your own energy into it. This is basic stuff, Ari. A little pebble should be completely do-able for you." 

"Touching a non-existent heart of an inaminate pebble isn't exactly what I learned at school," I replied defensively. I was being difficult, but what he was asking me to do was practically impossible. Where did he get the idea that I would be able to just pick up on this?