“They are miles away and off track.”
I nodded then looked into the fire. After a long moment of wrestling with myself, I asked, “Why would they do it? Why would they take me from you?”
Regina sucked in a breath, and Phillip closed his eyes as if in prayer. They were relieved to find I’d finally arrived at the truth. Though I hadn’t, not truly. To look upon the faces of these strangers and know they were my parents… it didn’t set with me. They didn’t feel like my parents. They were still just strangers.
“Of the five Orders,” Regina said looking down at her glinting blade. “The Veritas and Luxis have battled each other most fervently the last two hundred years.”
Phillip wryly chuckled. “Often we share the same goal, to serve the Light, but we use different means to achieve it.”
“We seek the same resources.” Regina said, now flipping her knife over her hand and catching it in her palm over and over again, in a practiced move. “The same texts, the same objects of power, and there is no compromise to be found on either side as to their use.”
I finally allowing myself to sit down at the bench set against the table to absorb their story. My muscles and bones ached, not only from running -- they didn’t feel like they were set right. I felt like a wooden marionette put together all wrong.
Though the jungle was cooling and the fire was small, I felt like I was suffocating. When the heat finally became too much, I fluidly pulled off my armored, long sleeved black shirt, stripping down to a white tank top.
“Twenty-four years and six months ago,” Phillip said, “we fought over the Orb of Thesis. It was a powerful object that would fuel a powerful person with the sight.”
“The sight?” I asked.
“The ability to see into the future,” Phillip supplied. He stayed standing in the doorway, his body erect, actively guarding us.
Regina continued, “The order of Luxis discovered the object, but Phillip and I had followed them and stolen the orb in the dead of night.” Regina stopped flipping her knife, her wrists going limp as her head bowed. “So they retaliated, coming under cover of the dead of night and stealing something of ours in turn.”
“You,” Phillip clarified.
When Regina looked up, fire burned in her blue eyes. “We walked right up to the Temple and banged down their doors until they let us in. I tore the place apart looking for you, but they continued to claim they did no such thing. I never found you.” Her eyes suddenly showed their age. Her life had been hard, and where she looked healthy and young for her age, it was her eyes that betrayed all she had endured.
My understanding was losing a child was one of the most difficult travesties a person could undergo. It was strange to realize I was the object of such pain. It became too much to look at such naked emotion, so I turned my focus back to the fire.
“Did it work?” Emma asked behind me. I turned around and saw she was awake and had been listening. On one side of her head, the hair was smashed flat against it from where she had been resting. For whatever reason, emotion swelled inside of me.
“Did what work?” Phillip asked Emma.
“The Orb of Thesis,” Emma said. “Did it help you see into the future?”
Philip looked off in the distance, as if recalling the events of what happened. “One of our most powerful Elders used it. Since Regina and I had been the ones to retrieve the Orb, and it came at such a great cost to us, he used it to find out what happened to our child.”
Regina’s voice was rough as she continued to stare at me in an unerring fashion. “Though we were certain the child had been slain by the Luxis.”
Phillip said, “The light of the Orb engulfed our Elder and as he was infused with the power of sight, he turned to us and declared we would one day find our child, a grown man. When the barrier was thin, our son would be at the center of the chaos.”
Regina’s eyes closed. “The fall of the dark children would herald our son’s return and that is when we would discover our child again.”
The Crib. The dark children were the Crib, which is why they had doggedly followed us.
Regina looked over at Phillip, “But then the Elder burned from the inside out.”
“The Orb was a one-time shot,” Phillip shrugged, “but we didn’t know that. I’m sure our Order wouldn’t have been so generous with granting us the first sight if they had known.”
“But he was right,” Regina straightened in her chair. “As soon as creatures from the Stygian crossed over, we found you, my son. At the center of it all.” Her eyes shifted over to Emma, and I felt uncomfortable letting this woman look at Emma. “And we found the Propheros with you. It can’t be coincidence.”
Regina stared at Emma like she coveted her, like Emma was a thing, but she wasn’t a thing. Emma was dynamic, fragile but so incredibly strong. She was the most alive person I’d ever known. In all the darkness, shewasthe Light. My Light. I had to keep her safe at all cost.
Emma sat up all the way on the cot, swinging her legs over the side. Her brown eyes were no longer red-rimmed, though there was slight bruising under her eyes from lack of rest. Even under great stress, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever beheld. It pained me to see her slowly unraveling the further we traveled together. If I could stop everything for her, I would do so instantly.
“Then you both know the sacred book or whatever it is, says I have to die to save the world,” her voice was hard and bitter.
Regina reared back as if she had been slapped. “Die? Our job is to make sure that exact thing does not happen.” She sheathed her knife then shoved it in her belt.
