Bryan Davis - Eye of the Oracle

He let out a quiet sigh. Had his own mother been so loving? Had she protected him from pain and exposure? How many years did she weep for her lost son? Did she die in grief, never able to break free from the pain of a mother’s empty arms?

After four thousand years, only a shadow of his mother’s image remained. Still, this childless woman’s care for orphaned babies brought a familiar warmth, something he longed for that had gone wanting for too many centuries. Even her eyes somehow seemed familiar, like those of a friendly stranger who had smiled for no reason and then walked away, disappearing into the passage of time.

Mrs. Nathanson patted his hand. “Don’t worry about checking the escape tunnels tonight. I don’t think it will rain, so they should stay dry.”

“I’ll check them anyway. I’m trying to memorize all the paths in the maze.”

She gazed toward the ceiling, and her voice changed to a dreamy whisper. “I memorized them a long time ago. It’s fun to explore.”

“You memorized all of them? Why? They’re only for emergencies.”

“I sort of feel at home down there. It’s so peaceful.” She shook her head as if casting off her dream, but she kept her smile. “You’d better hurry to the meeting now. Patrick will want to begin on time.”

“Oh, yeah. Right!” Elam bolted toward the door. “Thank you!”

“Dress warm!”

“I will!” He grabbed a sweater from the back of a chair and rocketed from the room, sprinting down a long, high corridor as he slid his arms into the sweater’s sleeves. Although the mansion seemed designed by a stuffy aristocrat, with marble floors, brass doorknobs, and sculpted columns, neither the master of the house nor his wife would ever scold him for his mad dash down a hallway. After all, with about sixty orphans of various ages, shapes, and sizes living in a human beehive, the house always seemed abuzz with activity. No one would take notice of a multi-thousand-year-old teenager breezing by.

Elam slowed and turned down another corridor, a narrower one with a low ceiling and rough walls. Grabbing a lantern and a matchbook from a shelf along the way, he stopped at an entry to a dark hall. A heavy oak door, usually closed and locked, stood open, probably in anticipation of his arrival.

Striking a match, he touched the flame to the lantern’s wick. The fire crawled across the braided cotton and leaped upward into the glass chimney, giving rise to a beautiful image in his mind Sapphira Adi, her white hair igniting and the flames spreading down her lithe body just before she brought Acacia back to life. Though tears filled his eyes, he smiled. He would find her again someday. . somehow.

He stepped through the doorway into another corridor. Its ceiling was so low, he instinctively ducked, though he knew he could stand erect without scraping his scalp. A few of the ceiling’s ancient, wooden beams bent toward the floor, and a musty odor hung in the dank air.

The corridor ended at another open doorway that led to a much larger room. He soft-stepped in and found Patrick seated where he expected him to be, in one of seven chairs at a round table set precisely over a circular compass etched into the floor. Two lanterns sat on the table, their wicks burning brightly.

As Patrick tapped his finger on a scroll he had rolled out in front of him, a cold pocket of air filtered through a ragged-edged rectangle in the stone ceiling high above. Several large ravens fluttered from one side of the opening to the other, apparently longing for the relative warmth of the humans’ abode.

Bathed in the eerie glow of moonlight, Patrick buttoned his thick gray sweater, then brushed his hand through his short reddish brown hair. A shadow, stenciled on a green curtain covering a ten-foot-by-ten-foot section of the wall, mimicked his actions.

After blowing out his lantern, Elam approached the table. “I am here, as you requested.”

Patrick rolled up his scroll and motioned toward the chair next to him. “Please sit. We have a lot to talk about.”

Elam slid into the chair and set the lantern at his feet. “Your wife told me you had news from other dragons.”

“I do.” Patrick opened a folded note. His thick eyebrows angled downward as he scanned it. “This is a translation. The original was written in a mixture of Hebrew and an old English dialect. Unfortunately, I have forgotten much of both languages, so I took it to Charles, who translated it for me.”

“Charles? Who’s he?”

“You met him a couple of years ago at an archery tournament. We congratulated him for winning his division. He was a high school senior then, and now he is an extraordinary linguist studying at Oxford, but even he had to dust off some old books to complete the translation.”

Elam leaned closer and tried to read the note, but the handwriting was too scribbly. “Can you trust him?”

“I trust him as far as I need to at the moment. If my investigation of his character proves him worthy, I hope someday to invite him to join my circle of knights at this very table.”

“So, does Charles know about the dragons now?”

“No. The message was in symbolic language, so he wasn’t able to interpret the meaning of the English words, but the project made him extremely curious. I am tempted to explain it to him, but he is young and inexperienced, so I have decided to wait a while.” Patrick flattened the note on the table and pointed at the first line. “Let me read it to you. I had to embellish it a bit to fill in the gaps.”

As Elam leaned back in his chair, Patrick cleared his throat. “The king and queen are still in play, though the two dark knights have lurked through a fortnight. A pawn emerged from the queen’s skirts, enraging the evil pursuers. When the knights finally found the king and queen, the royal pair flew to a new world to mark a trail, leaving the pawn to hide under the shelter of the white knight’s home.”

Elam blurted out his interpretation. “So Hannah and Timothy are alive! And Devin and Palin have been chasing them for fourteen years.”

“Exactly.” Patrick gestured for Elam to continue. “And. .”

“And they had a baby, so, in order to protect him, they flew to the States, hoping Devin would follow him, and they left their baby here with you.”

Patrick clapped his hands. “Very good! Charles was completely baffled.”

“Well, it’s not so hard when you know the history.” Elam glanced toward the hallway that led back to the main house. “So, does your wife have the baby?”

“Oh,” Patrick said, chuckling, “he’s hardly a baby.”

Elam pointed at him. “Right. Hannah could’ve had the baby years ago.”

“Timothy told me earlier that even though they believed they were already husband and wife because of their dragon ritual, he and Hannah decided to have a legal human wedding before reuniting. As I understand it, the baby was born almost exactly nine months later.”

Elam counted on his fingers. “So if he was born in January of 1936, now he would be. .” He rolled his eyes upward. “Thirteen?”

“Precisely! Timothy’s and Hannah’s getaway to the States occurred only very recently, so one of my colleagues fled with the child from Glasgow and brought him here.” Patrick slid out his chair and turned toward the green curtain. “Gabriel, you may come out now.”

The curtain moved, parting in the middle. A boy peeked through the gap. “Did you tell him about the” he gestured with his head as though someone were behind him “you know what?”

“Oh.” Patrick winced. “How could I forget?” He turned back to Elam. “Gabriel doesn’t want to frighten you. He has a unique gift passed down to him by his mother, so be prepared for a shock.”