Enjoy This Absence From Reality


Updates ADVENTURES UNTOLD The Invisible My French Teacher is an Evil Sorcerer Jaci's Story The Shroud GREY MAGIC Darnai Erudite BIOGRAPHIES Kiomati Shea Shea Koshan Niteshade ASSORTED Easter Break In Your Element Kingdom in the Sky Watcher Wanderer Them Wind Dancer GRAPHICS Livejournal Icons ME ELSEWHERE Fanfiction.Net Fictionpress.Net Elfwood CUSTOMARY Email Links Dreambook	Erudite The cloaked figure slowly approached, the sword pointed directly at Darrie and the blaze from it intensifying slightly as he advanced. The tip rose slightly until, once it reached her, it rested at the tip of her throat. She did not move, petrified with fear, and tried to see the face of the person holding the sword through the deep shadows cast by the hood of the cloak, absently willing them to fall from the stranger's face. Nathan stood, still dumbstruck from the fact that there was a person wielding a glowing sword. It defied common logic, but so did the lower limbs of that tree parting like that. Before he had laid the fact that the sword was glowing on the sun's lint off of the metal, or maybe he had seen it funny through the trees, but in his heart, he had yet to truly believe it. But now, as the sword came to rest on the witch girl's throat with an exceptionally bright and unnatural blaze, he realized that this was not some dream that he was trapped in and there were no optical illusions at work. This was very real and, seeing that Darrie was currently too scared to do anything, he may have to come up with a way to get rid of this-whatever it was. The hood of the cloak slowly fell back, much to the surprise of all three of them. The sword faltered as the person tried to bring the cloak back over their face. The cloth, however, seemed to have a mind of its own and continued to recede back. Withdrawing the sword from it's position at Darrie's throat, the person tossed it into the ground and struggled with the hood. Nathan went quickly to retrieved the sword from the ground. He lifted it with extreme difficulty, more dragging than carrying the sword away from reach of the person struggling with their cloak. He noticed that the sword had lost it's luster, faded into a dull, mundane gray. He looked at it more closely, unsure if it was indeed the same article as before, and grudgingly determined that it was. Finally, after wrestling the cloak for a few moments, the stranger gave up and let the hood fall back, revealing the face of someone they did not know. He seemed to have the look of someone sent to Juvenile Hall more than once for violent conduct and might have been held back since the beginning of high school. A slight scar on his right cheek marked a recent fight that he had not yet recovered from. "What are you?" he asked, green eyes wild as they stared at Darrie without taking any notice of Nathan whatsoever. Darrie was slowly recovering from the shock of a sword being held at her throat and the guy who held the sword wrestling with his cloak. Her eyes still wide and mirroring some of her fear. "What am I?" she asked weakly coming back to herself. "I'm Darrie. Why?" "That sword," he said, looking directly into her eyes, his hands not moving in any way to signal towards the vacant space where it once was or Nathan's hands where it currently resided. "That sword came to me and led me here, urged me to practice sword exercises even though I don't know anything besides knife fighting. It's making me speak properly, but I don't know how. And now you come and it makes me come here to you, and you do that thing with my cloak. The sword was your fault, wasn't it?" Hearing the rise of anger in his voice, Nathan tried to raise the sword protectively. Finding that quest futile, he allowed it to drop dully to the soft earth. And stepped between the two. "She hasn't done anything," he said in her defense. "You were the one threatening us with the sword, remember?" "Yes," he hissed at Nathan. "But there's something about her and that sword that doesn't make sense. Can't you see that?" Nathan considered it for a moment, his eyes remaining hard on the stranger. There was indeed something odd about this entire thing. Their meeting had an odd resemblance to some old story he had once read long ago in his distant childhood, and even his own coming here was strange. Darrie and the sword did seem connected in some way, as though she were it's master rather than this one who wielded it. The glow that it had only intensified as she had gotten closer to it, but this stranger also had something to do with it as well. It had not glowed at all once his hand had left the hilt and did not glow when it came in closer proximity to Darrie without this guy's touch on the blade. Nathan finally broke eye contact and turned to Darrie, studying her very closely. "You do know something that we don't," he stated, very clearly without accusation in his voice. He picked up the sword as best he could and managed to get it back to his original owner. The stranger lifted the sword with no more trouble than if it were a mere pencil and sheathed it in it's case across his back. "I-" she said defensively, feeling like she were surrounded and having the sudden urge to run. "I don't know. I did this spell a little while back to summon two others to help me with something. It's a bit complicated, but the Lord and the Lady bade me to do it and even I don't quite understand what's going on." "I remember," Nathan said, slightly bewildered. "My Dad loved translating old and forgotten legends and he told me one about the magician, the strongman and the wise man. The magician called them to himself and they were in charge of taking care of their section of the world. The magician claimed that it was by the will of a power higher than himself. My Dad seemed to thing that these people were Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere." "Yeah, so what's that got to do with us?" the stranger snapped irritably. "So?" Nathan said incredulously. "Don't you see the parallels between it? Darrie is the magician who summoned it by the will of her gods to bring us here probably to protect our part of the world." "Protect our part of the world?" the stranger asked once more, growing quite skeptical. "That sounds like a bad Saturday morning cartoon cliché." "I've gotta agree," Darrie said reluctantly. "The Lord and the Lady would have told me if it were something like that." "Maybe," Nathan admitted, "but God told Arthur nothing either. Arthur didn't know anything when he met up with Lancelot and Guenevere that day. The story mentioned that none of them knew anything and that they had to go through some sort of trial first before they found out the truth." Trial. The word echoed in Darrie's mind as something she could not quite place but she had definitely heard before. Then it came to her as a shock. Amongst the emails she had received from the other Greys, there was one that mentioned a trial that she would have to go through with the ones she summoned. If these were the two, then the trial could not be far away. "The trail..." she said in a whispered voice. "You know something we don't again," the stranger said once more, growing annoyed. "You should talk, nameless," Nathan snapped, annoyed himself that he still didn't know the name of someone who seemed to be just as involved in this as he was. The guy seemed a bit flustered, but quickly squashed that impulse before they had much chance to notice. "Call me Cimmerian," he offered. "I'm beginning to hate my real name. William. Sounds so preppie, like I'm supposed to be some proper Englishman or something." "Then call me Darnai," Darrie said kindly. "No one else will and my parents treat it as some sort of swear word that will send them straight to hell if they say it." A look crossed Nathan's face that clearly told them that he thought they had both lost their mind. Though he covered it up, he was too late and both had caught it, Cimmerian looking murderous and Darrie's-Darnai's?- eyes probing. "You have another identity, too, don't you?" Darnai said plainly, as a statement rather than a question. "Do enlighten us." Nathan tried to deny it, but found his mouth already working against him to forfeit the information. "Erudite," he said, partially against his will. "I only use it when I go on the net now to be anyone else other than me." "Erudite," Darnai said, trying the sound of it out on her tongue. "I like it." "Yeah," Cimmerian agreed. "Sort of fits somehow. Don't know how, but it does. So, Why do you try to escape yourself?" "Look, I have to get home soon, before anyone misses me," he said quickly, avoiding the question. "So, if the two of you don't mind..." He let the sentence hang in the air as he turned to leave. "Yeah," Darnai agreed. "I better go too, my parents will think I've gone off and joined a cult, though that won't be much of a change." With a smile, she went her own way. Cimmerian didn't say a word, though a disappointed look crossed his face at the fact that there were so many things left unanswered to him as they walked back to their homes. He had no such desire to quickly return to his own and faded back into the forest, becoming a part of it and seeming to vanish from sight to give himself time to think. Darnai-Darrie?-whatever her name was now, was catching up to him. He slowed to allow her to catch up. "So, what am I supposed to call you now?" he asked. A questioning look crossed her face, and then understanding. "Darrie at school and stuff where the words can get back to my parents. Darnai whenever they can't. It's nice to hear people say it willingly and without any consequences." "Consequences?" Nathan asked. "Oh, you mean your parents. Sorry." "You do realize that I'll be calling you Erudite whenever I can, right?" she asked. "Like a trade. You obviously like the name." "Do what you will," Nathan said. "It's not like I can stop you." They walked until the path forked off together in silence. The birds sang as they both sank into their own thoughts of the day's strange occurrences. An unspoken goodbye past between them as they went their own separate ways, too lost in thought to much take much note of the loss of each other's presence. As Nathan entered the house, he found it in as terrible condition as he had left it. The house had once been forever clean, not a spec of dirt anywhere. Now that was all you saw, mess everywhere. It was a place that he felt ashamed to show his friends, hardly able to step anywhere without stepping on some unknown bit of mould. He made his way up the toy littered stair case to his room, the one clean place in the entire house. Through his door, he could hear the twins running amok about the house and his mother doing nothing to stop them. Since his father's death a year ago, she did little anymore but sink herself into the relief that alcohol gave her, rarely leaving the house besides for her waitress job. He went through all of his books on the shelf until he found one, one his dad had told him to never touch. The bookcase had been there since before the house was bought and the tales of the mad scientist who had resided in the house before them had sparked his imagination for as long as he could remember. Now, something about that book and that story seemed to fall in place. Insanity of a Man by Carline Heinburg never existed, he had looked it up last night with a sudden curiosity about it that he could not explain. Now, he carefully took the immense book off of the shelf to find that it was little more than a box in the shape of a book, the far end hiding a small switch with a Celtic rune beneath it. He carefully flicked it downward and the entire wall began to move to reveal an old stairwell behind it of wood that looked as though it had been abandoned for years. Nathan dared to go up, leaving behind the sounds of the twins acting as two hurricanes ruining the house and embracing the creak of the stairs as he pushed aside cobwebs and ventured into the dark. Realizing that going up in the dark would be pointless if what he wanted to do was see what was up there, he turned back and retrieved a candle stump by his desk and a set of matches, both left there from the last power outage He had no flashlight in his room and did not care to venture out while the twins were in this particular chaotic state, so he settled with the candle, feeling that it would suit what he might find better. This time paying less attention to the creak of the stairs and the cobwebs that seemed to jump out from nowhere to obscure his vision that lulled him away from he havoc of his house, he went up faster to find whatever rested at the top of the stair. He approached the door expectantly, finding it splintered and unfinished, despite the complicated handle laced with intricate designs of the matching Celtic that had marked the switch. With a moment's study he figured it out, first puling, turning counterclockwise, and pushing the handle back in. Nearly jumping at the sound of the bookcase returning to it's original position concealing the stairs, he cautiously entered the room with his candle first to shed light. The walls were sloped like the roof, but were still lined with books on irregular bookshelves that seemed to be made specially for the walls. In the center there was a desk littered with papers and a pile of books neatly stacked in the corner of it. Nathan approached the desk and lifted a sheet of paper that had caught his attention, one with his father's writing on it. It did not appear have notes of old tomes and translation written on it, though what interested him more was the fact that it was here. My dear Erudite, So, you have gotten over the stories and decided to venture up here as my curiosity caused me to do today. I will only come up here once, for there is something about this place that does not suit me, plus I do not wish to venture into your room every time and intrude on your privacy. In these books are translated tomes of all of the works I have been translating over the years, surprising enough to me to find that my life's work has already been completed. Yet another reason I shall not be venturing up here once more. Shame I suppose, but I suppose I have a bit too much pride. May you enjoy these tomes more than I could, ~~and do tell me when you have found it~~. Beware of the gray book, it has a tendency for telling you things you do not want to know, but then you will probably look through it anyway. I warned you. Love always, Dad Nathan read the letter through twice to make sure that it was what it seemed. His father's letter, words to him from beyond the grave. Haunting though it was, it gave him comfort to metaphorically hear his dad use his old nickname for him again. It brought him back to better days when they were a family again. "I'll be back," he said quietly to the room as he turned to leave. The inside handle was as complicated as the outside one, but the same pattern. The bookcase opened once more at his opening of the door and the sounds of the house filled his ears as he came down the stairs. Replaced the bookcase and went out to take care of the twins and try once more to clean up some of the house.