Chapter 13

Interlude

The Vísdómur came again for the boy, Lachlan Quinn at midnight on mid-winters eve. He’d been with his foster father for five years.

“Come,” the eldest’s grating voice woke him out of a sound sleep. She took his hand in her green- skinned fingers and led him still dressed in his pajamas and bare footed through the drifts of one of the region’s rare snowstorms and into the forest behind the old man’s cabin.

The boy, now fully awake, shook in utter terror. He remembered well the night of the glyphs. He’d had nightmares about them long after the pain of his healing had passed.

The three paid his distress no mind. Inside the forest the air was summer warm—the chill of winter left behind. They walked swiftly, the boy stumbling along beside them until they came upon a massive vine swathed maple tree. They laid him down on thick moss that mantled the tree’s base.

Once again, the three took a position around him and chanted a singsong spell, and once again the boy was aware but paralyzed. The youngest stroked a comforting hand through his hair.

“Do not fret, boy. There will be no pain this time.”

Stone-still, they sat legs folded in a lotus position, the Vísdómur stood watch over his body.

“The Goddess Opari comes,” the eldest whispered to him. “Few get to meet her. Watch and learn, boy.”

A blue butterfly—no it was a tiny, winged sprite fluttered about the flowers of a hanging vine then flew in a circle around his face and lighted on his head. Her feet tickled him as she walked around his face with dainty feet. She peered into his eyes and giggled.

“She’s curious and getting to know you.” the voice sounded far away.

The butterfly sprite walked to a spot directly above the bridge of his nose and stopped. Lachlan’s eyes crossed as he watched she preened her antenna. She spoke, a tiny whispering that reached into him and tickled the deep recesses of his mind. As the whispering quested and snuffled and rummaged in his mind and he gradually stopped analyzing.

As he stood by helplessly, his memories began to unfold. They came and went as if the pages of his life were turned. Some good—most awful.

He watched as a tiny baby when a giant bearded dirty face loomed into sight, frightening him into tears. Huge hands came into the dumpster and lifted him into the frigid air.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Jeff, there’s a baby in this dumpster. Call the cops.”

Once more he lived through the fire that killed his adopted parents.

He watched himself go through the fearful process of awakening alone in a house full of uncaring strangers he’d only met the night before.

Once more he met Annie, the little blond-haired girl who was his first friend. The two were inseparable and snuggle slept the terrors away. She held him when he cried himself to sleep at night. He did the same for her. Once more he watched with helpless terror from the closet as the daddy of the house slapped her for stealing food that he had stolen—slapped her so hard that she crumpled to the floor and he couldn’t get her to wake up no matter how he tried. He had let her take his punishment; he hadn’t protected her because he was afraid.

Now this reliving in inexorable technicolor was a dreadful re-punishment for that awful sin of all sins that ruled his life. Tears welled up and tracked down his cheeks. He was too paralyzed to sob—too paralyzed to do anything but endure and witness—and witness—and witness—the memories that continued to flicker.

Finally, the sprite arose with blurring wings and beckoned him into the Opari.

The boy’s spirit arose and followed.

“Let him go.” he heard the eldest say when the youngest quirked an anxious eyebrow as she felt his heart stop beating. “He survived the mirror testing. Few have done so. She now shows him the wonder of Opari.

Lachlan’s spirit wandered rootless with her into the gloom. She took his hand and led him down deep underground into the tangled chaos of a million roots. He sensed the forest’s slow ponderous heartbeat—the pumping of nutrients upward and the tiny pinpricks of light energy that danced downward to an immense a maze of fungal netting of symbionts and parasites that tended it all. She sang to him of the joy and purpose of a self-organized life. Her whispering beckoned him further down—his mind blossomed—he followed her into—Blackness.

Lachlan Quinn awoke in his bed five days later, changed once again.

All commented on the fact that the brilliant blue eyes that had been the first thing they had noticed about the Keeper’s Boy were now the deep emerald green of a summertime forest. What they didn’t see because no one saw the boy with his shirt off was the intricate delicate green vine tattoo that encircled his torso.

The Goddess had marked him as her own.