Light (29 page)

Everything around us rippled more and started to move around. It became a big blur, except for the class who’d just received the truth about the Orb.

I closed my eyes when the spinning around me got worse and when Natalie touched my arm softly we were inside a stone room.

Everything was made of stone; the walls, the benches, even the door. In the middle of the room was a huge stone altar with a stone bowl.

Leigh lit it with a blue spark that came from his hand.

The blue flame ran down the altar in a thin line, on both sides, across the floor to the walls of the room. It ran up the walls and shot out in a huge web pattern on the ceiling; it lit up everything.

I looked at Max who went up to the altar first and held out his hand.

Leigh grabbed something that looked like prayer beads and pressed them inside Max’s palm. He grunted and clenched his jaw tight. His eyes were closed and from the pain on his face, I knew that it was real.

Leigh spoke in a language I’d never heard before and when the thirty second chant was over, Max dropped the beads.

He shook his palm a couple of times, probably trying to dispel the pain. A faint golden glow emanated from his palm where the blazing hot beads had left their mark and then it just disappeared.

Margot was next and the same happened with her, we each had to do this and I so didn’t look forward to my turn.

“Chastity,” Leigh spoke my name softly.

I looked up at him, his eyes were soft, begging me to go through with this insanity.

The few steps I took toward him I didn’t even realize, I just saw the altar coming closer to me and then I was standing opposite Leigh with my palm stretched open toward him.

“It’s going to hurt…a lot.” He’d barely said those last few words when a scorching pain burned the skin on my hand. Leigh closed my hand and I ground on my teeth as he said his little mantra.

I tried to block the words out, block the pain out, but nothing happened. It was still there and it became hotter each second I held the beads. I could feel the pain running up my arm, through my entire body and I became as warm as the beads that were inside my palm.

“Chastity, drop it,” Leigh shouted. It felt as if I was about to pass out and automatically my hand dropped the beads. They fell on the altar and I stared at my hand. The ache was worse than a second ago when I was still holding the beads and I now had a burn mark that glowed a bright golden color. It started to disappear slightly and then it was gone. In its place was a completely different mark. It wasn’t the print of the beads, it wasn’t even blisters upon blisters as it should have been. The only thing that was on my palm was a black sign that resembled a three-leaf clover with sharp ends.

I couldn’t stop looking at it.

“It’s the mark of the oath. All guardians carry it and you’ll see that none of those guardians have revealed the truth about the Orb for the past nine hundred years.” Leigh looked at each and every one of us as he spoke.

“Nobody?” I asked again.

“Nobody, Chas,” he said in a tone that had a double meaning. I squinted and he raised his eyes slightly at me, like he wanted to tell me something and then looked back to the others.

It was probably just my imagination, why would he want to tell me anything that he wouldn’t tell the entire class? I guess I really wanted Leigh to desperately share something with just me, I wanted to be that special to him.

I was really silly. My first crush ever and it was on somebody that wasn’t even real. Someone that lived inside a virtual world.

The room rippled again and this time Leigh rippled with it. When everything spun again, I forced myself to look. I saw him disappear with his eyes staring into mine and then we found ourselves back in our seats in the room we entered an hour or so ago.

My head was still spinning and I was slightly tired but not as tired as everyone else around me looked. It looked like they’d worked for 24 hours straight. Their bodies were slumped in the chairs, their eyes barely staying open.

I got up, the only one to, and pressed the red buzzer. When Dingle came in, he just stared at me. His eyebrows knitted.

“Why aren’t you tired, Chas?”

I shrug. “It’s something I can’t explain. It’s like the opposite happens to me when I spend time in the Virtual Realm, I feel revived, not drained.”

“I see. You’re free to leave, since you don’t need the tonic,” he simply said, pushed me out of the grey room and closed the door behind him.

I went home as it was our last subject of the day and fell onto my bed. Mr. Grey was missing like usual.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Leigh had said. Would I really disintegrate after seven days? I needed to speak to him.

I closed my eyes and it felt like only ten minutes had passed when I found myself in the woods.

Leigh was sitting underneath one of the big oak trees with his back resting against the trunk. His eyes were closed with his glasses resting on top of his head. The picture of him just took my breath away. He was really so beautiful. For a second all my fears about what would happen in seven days disappeared, but they reappeared the second he opened his eyes and smiled at me.

It disappeared the minute he realized that I wasn’t sharing his awesome mood.

“What is it Chastity?” he asked with a smile.

“It’s almost seven days since I’ve been here,” I said and he just stared at me to go on. “Am I going to go poof?”

He chuckled. “You are not a Shadow Caster, I told you that you can choose. Only Shadow Casters disintegrate. Does that answer your question?”

I nodded and looked at him, he still rested his back against the tree. I smiled. “I didn’t know virtual people needed their rest too. What am I doing here?”

“Sit. We need to have a little chat.”

“To be honest, I am seriously starting to fear our little chats. It’s like you’re the bearer of danger or something.”

“It’s nothing like that, Chas.” He had a grin playing in the corner of his lips.

“Okay, fine.” I sat down next to him and rested my back against the tree trunk too. I could still see part of his body. “Shoot.”

“It’s about the Basilisk Orb.”

“What about it?”

“This is something I’ve never told anyone, so you have to keep your mouth shut, Chastity.”

“What, no oath this time?”

“Just see it as me trusting you completely. Don’t screw it up.”

“I’m not the kind, I’m good with keeping secrets. Heck I even kept my best friend’s secrets after she chose ass-and-abs above me.”

He smiled. “The Basilisk Orb has a twin.”

“What do you mean has a twin? Is there a second orb?”

He nodded.

“Remember when the tour guide said that they picked up the pieces that the basilisk broke off when he struck?”

I nodded.

“Those pieces form a smaller Orb which is a replica of the bigger one and has just as much power as Selene and the big Orb.”

“So it makes it just as powerful?”

He nodded.

“Nobody knows about it, only Selene and I and now you. ”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I have my reasons,” he simply said.

“Okay, so where is it?”

“I think it’s in her vault.”

“Wait, you don’t know?”

He shook his head. “She used to carry it around her neck.”

“Around her neck, like something you can insert into a pendant?”

“Yes, Then one day, she didn’t carry it around her neck anymore.”

“Why do you think she took it off?”

“Fear, I guess. That’s not the most important part, Chastity.”

“What is the most important part?”

“If Shadow Casters find it, they’ll need both Orbs to reverse this world and turn it into something as sinister and evil as the Oblivion.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“If I tell you, I’d have to kill you.”

“Haha.” I punched him playfully on his shoulder, and he started to laugh. “I’m serious. How do you know?”

“I’m a good observer, Chastity.”

“Fine, then don’t tell me, but if you think I’m going to buy that crap, you’re seriously mistaken.”

I got up, ready to move back to reality, well my new reality that is.

I stopped, remembering one more thing I’d wanted to speak to Leigh about.

“You know plenty of things around here. Do you know what the deal is with Dingle?”

He squinted. “What do you mean, the deal with him?”

“Fox told me something on my first day here, that he wanted to become a Shadow Caster.”

“Fox told you this?”

I nodded.

He squinted at a memory and then relaxed his eyes. “It is a misunderstanding Chas. Dingle isn’t a bad guy. He’s actually one of the few Guardians I would trust with my life.”

My left eyebrow raised “You sure?”

“Yes, now forget what Fox said. It was a misunderstanding and the reason why he’s still inside Revera and not parading somewhere in the Oblivion.”

I smiled. “Thanks, I guess. Bye.” And just like that my eyes opened and I found myself still lying on my bed, with drool running onto my covers.

I had no idea why I always fell into such a deep sleep when I met up with Leigh.

Still, why would he share something like that with me? If nobody knew about the twin Orb, why didn’t he just keep it to himself?

I had to admit that I loved keeping his secrets and I would never do anything to betray Leigh like that, but my curiosity would eventually get the better of me and I would push to find out why he was sharing every little top secret detail with me.

THE NEXT DAY WE STARTED WITH ONE OF DINGLE’S lectures again. I found him staring at me, just as I jumped off the rope I had just climbed, his eyebrow slightly raised. A cold thumb traced down my back.

What if Fox was right about him? What if he was still dark and had just found a way to hide his sand? Could that even be possible?

We had another training session scheduled with Leigh for this morning and as I got up with Natalie to go to the grey room, Dingle spoke. “Chas, you will stay and train with Max,” he said and then went back to explaining what the rest of the class was going to do.

“Okay, yay you, I guess,” I whispered to Nat who just smiled.

We broke apart when he finished speaking about how the others were going to form two teams. One pretending to be Shadow Casters trying to enter Revera, the others needing to protect Revera.

All of them were ecstatic. A part of me wanted to go, because it was the virtual world but my black sand could easily appear. So I should have thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t going to have to pretend to be a Shadow Caster, it might have become my reality.

At nine, the class, except Max and I, left.

I followed Max to the training area where he wanted me to start experimenting with my dust.

It flowed freely now and I knew it would be gold, as I experimented with it every night, using all my different emotions. I even became angry, and my dust was still gold, which was a good sign. But fear of the dark was still inside of me. The mirror inside my Initiation dream had shown dark.

He really pushed me hard and my mom was right, the dagger came but the arrows didn’t want to.

I looked kind of silly holding the bow and trying to hit a target board as nothing but sand emerged from my string. It would fly into the air and land in trails of sand aimed toward the target board.

“Come on, Chas. You can do it.”

“I can’t. We’ve been at this for two hours, Max. Please can we stop?”

“Chas, you need to learn how to fight with weapons.”

“Then give me real ones.”

“They are not…” He stopped and stared at me. “Okay, it might not be a bad idea. But you tell Dingle that we learned with your sand, okay?”

“Fine, whatever.”

He smiled and opened the weapons chest. “So what will it be? They have no bats in here.”

I smiled. “Are there real arrows?”

“Arrows it is then.”

He handed me a quiver filled with old dusty arrows.

“Why are they here when Dingle doesn’t want us to practice with weapons other than our sand?”

“Sometimes our sand doesn’t take the right course so well, so he lets new students practice their technique first with the real weapons.”

“Makes sense.” I took out one of the arrows and it wobbled in my hand as I tried to connect the tip with the string.

Max started to laugh.

“What are you doing, Chas?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never practiced with a bow and arrow before.”

“Here, let me show you.”

He took a position behind me and turned the bow around. “You pull the string back until the arrow is in line with the bow, and then release.”

I released the bow at his command and the arrow shot out, but didn’t come close to the target board.