Bryan Davis - Eye of the Oracle

Elam shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I wasn’t sure enough to say anything.”

“I understand.” He lowered his head briefly before returning his gaze to Elam. “Pray for me. I must tell my beloved about Roxil. As far as I know, she is still trapped in that God-forsaken town. And I also must search for the spirit of my father. I refuse to believe he is really that deceiver who indwells the body of Arramos.”

“I will pray.” Elam nodded downstream. “You’d better get going.”

He gave Elam a military salute and chased after Hannah. As his horse disappeared into the thick forest, Elam waited, listening to the approaching hoofbeats. He let the bloody bandage dangle over the ground for a moment, then rode along the creek’s muddy shoreline, following it upstream as he squeezed more blood onto the ground.

“That should do it,” he said out loud. “We’ll see if Devin takes the bait, and then we’ll try to find Valcor.” After patting the mare’s neck, he gave her a gentle nudge with his heels. “Okay, Legossi, let’s make tracks!”

Sapphira bolted upright in bed. Sweat dampened her nightgown and plastered her sleeves against her skin. The dream was awful. A man jumped out of a window with a sword and swung it at Elam and Hannah, but the dream suddenly ended. She never saw what happened.

Sapphira focused her bleary eyes on the portal screen, now just a vortex of fuzzy orange light. How strange! Had she shut it down and not remembered? Waving her hand at it, she whispered, “Expand,” but the dim eddies just swirled like deaf pixies, dancing on without a care.

Sapphira stared at a stubborn rash that had recently invaded her palm. Could the irritation be hampering her power? She touched it with her fingertip, reinflaming its awful itch, but she resisted the urge to scratch.

She pushed gently on Acacia’s back. “You’d better get up. Something’s wrong.”

Acacia rose to her elbows, barely opening her eyes. “What? What’s wrong?”

“The screen is off, and it won’t come back on.”

Acacia lifted an eyebrow. “Didn’t that happen once before?”

“Yes. Elam got a bunch of tar on the Ovulum. But it’s not black this time. It won’t expand at all.”

“Don’t worry about Elam. He’s been around for a lot of centuries. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Sapphira scratched her head and yawned through her reply. “I’m going to get ready for the day, and if the screen’s still blank, I’ll start worrying about Elam.”

“You do that.” Acacia turned over and nestled into her pillow. “It’s Easter morning, so we’re allowed to sleep in.”

“But we still have to eat.” Sapphira shoved her again. “And it’s your turn to get food today.”

Acacia sat up and frowned. “It is my turn, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.” Sapphira rose to her feet and, with her vision still blurry, stumbled toward the museum, ready to step through her routine wash her face from the basin, measure the tree’s growth, pick out the new books she would read, and sit in front of the portal to watch Elam for a few hours before kicking back for a quiet afternoon of reading.

After splashing in the basin and drying her face, she picked up a measuring tape from a shelf and set one end on the ground near the slender trunk. Then, pushing her face in among the lush green leaves, she unraveled the tape against the trunk, moving it upward until it reached the top of the growth core, a height that roughly equaled her own. She pressed her thumb on the mark, and, after extracting herself from the foliage, read the tape and sighed. “Still sixty-three inches.”

Gazing at the surrounding shelves, she located the magneto bricks she had installed and counted the bright rainbow colors. All seven seemed to be working, but whether or not they did much good from so far away was impossible to tell.

She grabbed a pencil and a nearby scroll and marked down the tree’s measurement. “You haven’t grown an inch in three years now.” Rolling back to the beginning of her records, she tapped the pencil on the parchment. “I almost forgot! If I’m marking time correctly in the upper world, today marks one thousand years since you sprouted!”

Sapphira closed the scroll and put it away, smiling as she turned back to the tree. “Shall we have an anniversary celebration, or ” She stopped and stared. Something new hung at the end of one of the branches, something white and spherical.

Sapphira sang out her sister’s name, extending the syllables. “Acacia! You need to see this!”

“Coming!” Acacia called.

Sapphira set her palm under the fruit and slowly lifted. It was light, much lighter than she expected. Caressing it with her fingers, she marveled at its tactile surface, more like the lumpy buds of cauliflower than the slick peel of an apple or a pear.

Acacia hummed a lively tune as she entered but suddenly stopped and smiled. “We have fruit!”

“Yes.” Sapphira rubbed the fruit with her thumb. “It’s kind of strange, though. It feels sort of fibrous, like it might be soft and flaky.”

“So, shall we have it for breakfast?” Acacia asked, reaching for the fruit.

“Wait!” Sapphira grabbed Acacia’s wrist.

Acacia pulled back. “Wait for what?”

“If this is the tree of life, it might make us live forever without ever getting hungry.”

“Right. I thought that was the idea.”

Sapphira cocked her head to the side. “Well. . do you really want to live forever? I mean, this isn’t exactly heaven. I know we’re not aging now, but maybe we will someday, and from what I’ve read about heaven, I’d like to get there eventually.”

Acacia scratched her scalp through her tangled white hair and laughed under her breath. “All this time we’ve been begging the tree to produce fruit, and now that it’s here, are we going to change our minds?”

“Sometimes you have to when reality kind of smacks you in the face.”

Acacia tapped the fruit with her finger, making it swing back and forth. “So what should we do with it?”

Sapphira laid a hand over her heart. “Let’s promise each other that we won’t eat it unless we’re truly starving, like if for some reason we can’t get any food from the upper world.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Even if we were starving, we still wouldn’t want to live forever, would we?”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I were starving.” Sapphira caressed the fruit with her fingertip. “But it can’t be a coincidence that it showed up after exactly a thousand years, can it? It has to mean something.”

“True, but we don’t have anything but guesses.”

Sapphira leaned to the side and peeked at the portal screen. “Maybe we’ll see something today that will make it all clear. We always seem to get messages from the Ovulum whenever we really need them.”

Acacia leaned with her. “I don’t think we’re going to learn much from it. It’s still just a column.”

“I noticed.” Sapphira crossed her arms and began tapping her foot.

Acacia wrapped her fingers around Sapphira’s wrist. “I can read your mind, Sister. You’re not going to traipse over to Glasgow to see what’s going on.”

Sapphira stopped tapping. “Why not? With our disguises, we could get there without anyone noticing us. We’ll be wearing our sunglasses.”

“Oh, sure,” Acacia said, rolling her eyes. “I can see the people on the train, pointing at us. ‘Look at the poor little blind girls all dressed up in their frilly bonnets. Aren’t they cute?’”

“But today is Easter, so no one will think anything’s unusual. And maybe we won’t need bonnets at all. I read about a new hair dye that might work.”