Haven's Addiction

I wandered the city for a while after I left Ongkin’s, eventually finding my way back to the Courtyard of Champions. The walk was enough to clear my head to realize that drinking myself into a stupor wouldn’t do me any good. Besides, it was well past closing hours for all the taverns I passed, so it seemed that the decision to sleep it off was made for me.

I finally took residency at an inn overlooking the courtyard. I didn’t need to be numbed. What I really needed was sleep. With a simple charm spell, the single attendant on duty paid me no mind. I could have slept in a dark and deserted alley under a Shroud, but refused to stoop to that. I needed to sleep. I didn’t feel tired, but I knew that I also hadn’t slept in at least four days and lost a lot of blood during my warehouse escape. I was losing my edge, and after the encounter with Ongkin I feared I was on the verge of losing my sanity as well. I was still a noob in all this, but I could see a variety of actions I could have chosen that would have been a lot smarter than the way things went down lately. That, and the brief, private conversation with Gerald was a real eye opener, and there still hadn’t been time to process it.

I lay on the hotel room bed, the room aglow with the red Orb on the table next to it. I still didn’t know how far I could trust Barthandolous. Honestly I didn’t think I could trust any of the dragons. Nor could trust anyone in Haven. As far as I could tell they were all lying and hiding things from me, using me to serve their own purposes. I nodded off instantly into dreamless sleep. I needed it, I just didn’t realize how bad. I woke up sometime in the early morning feeling relatively refreshed.

I woke and sat at he side of the bed thinking of nothing but my wife. I missed her dearly, and there seemed to be more and more decisions thrust before me with each passing day that I must to contend with. Not only did I miss waking up next to her, holding her, and kissing her, but I also missed her advice. Even if I couldn’t see her, a way to communicate would have made a world of difference. I took a meditative stance like the Lord Djedois had shown me. I imagined her being there, in my mind. I put all of my focus into it, all of my will.

Then it happened, like something raining down from the heavens. A miracle. She stood there before me. It seemed so real that I could smell the shampoo she used in her hair. I just wanted to hold her and forget all of this had ever happened. Then I realized that it was all in my mind, nothing more than a mental image I created out of desire to consult with her. I put so much will into it that I had almost made her completely real. In reading about the Will, the source of energy behind all Psionics, I remember that if the Will is powerful enough it could make a thought into reality. I knew I wasn’t nearly that powerful, but it stuck with me. This image of her wasn’t the real thing, but it was a close as I was going to get. That was good enough for me.

All I wanted to do at that moment was break down and cry. She reached her hands out and wiped at my eyes to keep any tears away. The phantom was so real that I could feel the heat of her touch, which made me cry more. The urge to wrap my arms around her struck again, even harder than before, but I knew that my time was fleeting. So I focused and composed myself.

“What do I do?” I asked, nearly breaking down in tears again.

She shook her head and rolled our eyes. “Idiot.”

Coming from anyone else it would have been an insult, but from her it was a statement that I was being thick headed and not noticing what was right in front of me. I was being Captain Oblivious again. I always hated when she called me Captain Oblivious, and sometimes Lord Oblivious when I couldn’t see something right in front of me as unmistakable as one of the dragon statues. She would remind me that, “it’s a guy thing to be so blatantly unaware of what’s going on around you”. I would then agree and remind her that women are observant, but insane. We would both laugh about it and move on.

She was right. I was being Captain Oblivious. I was trapped in a contract with this Orb. I could not break it until the contract was fulfilled. The only way out of it now would be my death, imprisonment, or freeing the dragons. Death didn’t seem like a very viable option. Hell, pulling off the feat of freeing them would be like the odds of winning the lottery. Gerald made mention of a prophecy of someone who could break free of the Orb. The odds of the prophecy being about me seemed better than winning the lottery, but it was still about as lucky as getting struck by lightning while in a submarine.

If that was me, then I wouldn’t be able to fulfill the quest of freeing the dragons, and every fiber of my being agreed that freeing them felt like something I was meant to do, almost like it was part of a prophecy unto itself.

So there was really only one option left available to me. Free the dragons, but push up the timetable so that I could before I became imprisoned. As soon as I realized this the image of my wife smiled, that beautiful, wonderful smile that made me fall in love with her. She nodded, touched my cheek affectionately, and then disappeared like an illusion that had never really been there. It took me a while to regain my composure and dry my eyes.

That was when shit got weird. Well, weirder. I’d already learned from experience that ‘weird’ is a relative term in Haven.

The red glow in the room coming from the Orb suddenly shifted to a green hue. I leaped up from the bed immediately, turning towards the bedside table where the Orb sat, pistols already in hand out of reflex. I felt the sudden disconnection from the power of the Orb that I experienced earlier in the evening, this time without a net around me. I quickly swept the room with the pistols taking the lead, searching frantically for the threat, certain that Gerald had tracked me down.

A disembodied voice that seemed to come from everywhere all at once, both audibly and in my mind, spoke up, “There is no need to be alarmed. There is no danger here.”

Ignoring the content of the words, I continued to scan for the threat. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“We are your allies. That is all you need to know.”

“We?” I said out loud, suddenly realizing why the voice sounded so incredibly bizarre. It wasn’t one person speaking, but several voices talking all at once ranging from male, female, young, old, deep basso, and falsetto. There had to be at least two dozen different voices that I could discern, but all of them spoke in perfect synchronization with every syllable so that they came out as one. “What do you want?”

“To be saved.”

“Then find god. I’m not him, and certainly no savior.”

“Not yet, but you will be.”

“How do I know that you aren’t a threat?”

“Because we aren’t really here. We are part of your mind, and have been the entire time, waiting for you to find a way to reach us.”

“The entire time? What, since I’ve been in Haven?”

“Correct.”

“Wait, are you the ones who sent me here?”

“Correct.”

The anger and frustration over the last several months flared up all at once, finally able to confront the ones responsible for my being here. I handled the rage about as well as the last few months by using the pistols to perforate every single wall in the room while screaming out in anger. I didn’t believe for a moment that it would hurt them, but I needed to shoot something, and there were no actual targets to vent my frustration.

“That won’t do you any good,” the voices spoke up. After I began to calm down, I could see what they meant. I heard the pistols fire and felt the kickback, yet everything else in the room remained completely intact, including the windows, like I had fired two full clips of blanks straight out of a hollywood movie set.

“Jeez. Talk about not being able to hit the broad side of a barn,” I muttered. I finally saw what they meant. Shooting wouldn’t do me any good because this was a dream. “So, this is either a dream or you are communicating with me remotely from back on Earth.”

“Incorrect. We are the gatekeepers of the barrier in your mind.”

“So, if you are the Gatekeeper, then I must be the Keymaster?”

“Correct.”

“Wonderful,” I mumbled. “I’m not going to turn into a giant stone dog in the process, am I?”

“Correct.”

The response seemed way too clinical, and then it hit me. “You’re not a living entity, but a sort of interactive recording implanted in the part of my mind that is blocked away from Barthandolous.”

“Correct.”

“So by meditating and having a mental sit down with my wife is the key to communicating with you.”

“Correct. This entire conversation is taking place in the partitioned portion of your mind under the guise of getting advice from your life companion.”

“Makes sense,” I wondered aloud. “If anyone asks, including Barthandolous, I have the cover story of playing ‘What Would my Wife Do?’.

“Correct. The mental barrier is to give you a place to follow a line of thought without intrusion.”

“But that isn’t the only purpose of the barrier.”

“Correct. Memories are also locked away that would compromise your mission.”

“And what memories are those?”

I immediately regretting asking. Suddenly I found myself lying in bed back at home as the memory of the experience came back to me.

After the fight with my wife she went to bed and I stayed up for a while playing a video game; shooting at zombies seemed like a good way to vent my frustrations at the time. When I got to bed she was sound asleep, and I lay awake for a while before I finally drifted off. I was roused from my sleep by voices that seemed to come from nowhere. It was not so much hearing these voices with my ears, but more like they were talking directly into my mind.

At first I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The voices were in distant whispered tones, and were too soft to make out any of the words. The only thing I could tell for sure certain was a sense of urgency to their tone. It started with just a few voices that slowly increased in volume. They seemed to be pleading desperately, like a group of kids who fell down a well and were calling out for help.

The volume continued to escalate as if I was walking closer to the well they fell down. As the volume increased, so did the number of voices. As the number of voices increased, so did the desperation in their tone. By the time the jumble of voices became loud enough that I could make out what they were saying, they were possibly in the thousands. They were all talking, pleading, and crying out, but there were so many of them talking at once that I couldn’t distinguish one voice from another.

I tried looking around to find the source of the voices, but there was nothing to be seen, nothing but blackness. I couldn’t even see myself, or feel any of my surroundings. It was like I was in a dark mental void where I was being bombarded by sounds from every direction. Covering my ears to block it out didn’t do any good because the voices were being pumped directly into my mind.

I tried calling out to whoever they were, asking what was wrong. Where are you? What can I do? My questions went unanswered as I could scarcely hear my own voice over the thousands that were growing increasingly louder. They seemed to be approaching me, and with each step their numbers increased a hundred fold.

I tried concentrating so that I could make out at least a few particular voices and what they were saying. The voices came in all varieties; Men, women, children, young, and old. Many of the voices that I did manage to make out were in languages that I didn’t even understand. What few words that I could understand in English were in short choppy phrases.

’Help me’. Help you with what?

’It burns’. What burns? What happened?

’You must help us, I beg of you’. ‘Save us.’ Save you from what? What in the world is going on?

’You must stop them.’ Stop who? Stop what?

I may not have been able to understand the many other languages that were bombarding me all at once, but they all rang the exact same tone. Something very bad was happening and they were all pleading for help, begging to be saved from whatever horrors were being unleashed on them. I could no longer make out any of the voices, the sheer number of them increased to the point that they were all nothing but one huge melting pot of static noise.

They weren’t just pleading; it was as if they were pleading directly to me. They were begging Me to help them. Their numbers were in the millions bearing down on me, and then millions upon millions. Their numbers increased. Their volume increased. Their desperation increased. Then it was millions upon millions, and then possibly in the billions.

I jerked up in bed snapping out of the darkness. I sat up so frightened and so quickly that I stumbled to the floor. I was in our bedroom, but it was not like I had awoken from the dream at all. The voices were still as strong as ever, and growing stronger. I lay on the floor clutching at my head because the noise was too much to bear. The voices became so loud that it felt as if my brain was about to be split apart.

I tried screaming out loud to make them go away and make the pain stop. “What do you want from me? I don’t know what you want! I don’t know how to help! Get out of my head and leave me alone, I can’t take it anymore.”

I bent on my knees crying and pleading, praying that it would end. The only response I received were more and more voices in agony. The billions of voices now felt like they were all standing next to me, also on their knees begging for it to end. I looked down at the floor for a few moments before I realized that I could see the carpet when it was pitch black only moments before.

I slowly managed to pull myself to my feet while the voices continued their barrage. I looked over the bed to the only window in the room leading outside. The curtains were open because it was a nice cool night out. I watched as the night outside turned to day, like watching a sunrise in fast forward. Only this sunrise wasn’t coming from the east, it was rising from the west.

I watched in horror while in the final few seconds I realized that I wasn’t watching a bizarre sunrise. The rumbling I could feel in my feet confirmed my fears, but it was too late. The flames from the explosive blast blew out our bedroom window and came searing towards me too quickly to duck out of the way. The voices bombarding my head reached a crescendo that drowned out the noise of the blast.

The last thing I remembered before the flames and shards of glass and debris reached me was a single voice that seemed to rise up above all others. “You are our last hope”.

Suddenly there was darkness. I stood screaming with my arms in front of me in a vain effort to protect myself. I stumbled backwards to avoid the flames that came too quickly. As I was falling flat on my back I realized the flames had disappeared in an instant, as had the multitude of voices. While I lay sprawled out on the floor I realized that our bedroom too had disappeared along with everything else. I appeared to be no longer in a room, but lying on the ground of a wide open field. I could see nothing out of the corner of my eyes, and all that lay above me was the endless expanse of stars on a clear night.

I lay there for a moment letting my racing heart settle down and tried to figure out what had just happened. I couldn’t conjure up the will to move. It had all seemed so real that it was unmistakable, yet too fantastic to have been anything but a dream. It happened so fast that it seemed to have started and suddenly halted in less than a minute. What made it seem all that much more fantastic and real at the same time was that I could still feel warmth of the flames that just nearly singed me, and the sulfurous smell of the blast still filled my nostrils.

After what felt like an eternity I finally called up the nerve to get up and look around my new surroundings. I immediately regretted doing so. As I stood up I noticed that I could not see the ground I stood on. I could not see it because it wasn’t there. Below me I could see nothing but the blackness of stars that permeated the sky above me, and the sun like a distant ball flung to the farthest end of the room. I looked around and saw nothing but starry night everywhere around me. I could still feel solid ground beneath my feet, but with no other indication that there was anything there, as if I stood on a pane of clear glass hovering in space.

“Good evening,” a voice called from behind me, nearly causing me to jump out of my skin. I was so startled that I fell to the ground. The voice was a thick nasally British accent, and the greeting spoke in a way that reminded me of the classic Hitchcock introduction. After picking myself up off the ‘floor’ again I looked over to see my host. He stood only about five feet from me. He appeared to be an elderly man with white hair and a meticulously trimmed white beard. He wore a white suit and tie that made him stand out against the blackened sky around him like the proverbial sore thumb. The solid white shone so brightly on the black background that he almost seemed to shimmer and glow white light.

The creepiest of all was the sound, or the lack of it. The dead silence permeated the air. There was no echo at all. Even my breath seemed to fall flat as soon as it exited my mouth. I found myself fidgeting with my ear hoping it would make some sort of noise. The deathly silence frightening me more than anything, and I started to panic.

He stood patiently waiting for me compose myself with his hands gently clasped behind his back. At the appropriate moment he spoke again.

“My apologies for startling you. And further apologies for what you are about to go through, although there is little choice in the matter.” The British accent was unmistakable. The man before me reminded me of a well dressed Samuel Clemens, but the voice sounded unmistakably characteristic of Alfred Hitchcock himself.

“You have a lot of questions, but I regret that providing you with answers is not my purpose. I am merely here to start you on your journey, and my existence here is but for a short time. All I can do is show you what you are up against and send you on your way.”

His presence was so revering and awe inspiring that it felt almost divine, more so than in the in the presence of Lord Djedous. He radiated an aura overpowering tranquility. I felt so calm and at peace just by being near him that any signs of fear or uncertainty over the events that transpired recently were but a distant memory, and were of no concern to me.

I knew I should have been asking him a million and one questions, but I was just too captivated to come up with a single word. As if he could read my mind he spoke up, “Your world is in grave peril and is on the brink of destruction. It has been overcome by a force of pure evil, and that is not a word that I throw around lightly. Here is what lies in store for your world.” As he said this he looked down at the ground beneath us.

I followed his gaze and looked downward. We appeared to be floating in space high above the orbit of the Earth. The vast globe we live on dangled in space a hundred miles beneath my feet. Yet it seemed to look less like our planet and more like the sun. The planet appeared to be ablaze in a fiery inferno that engulfed nearly the entire surface of the sphere. Even parts of the ocean itself seemed to be ablaze. If not for the calming presence of this mysterious man in white I would have been crippled with fear.

I noticed one portion of the world wasn’t ablaze. There was roughly a triangular shape where no flame appeared. I couldn’t tell what part of the world this was since every portion of the planet looked the same on the fiery surface. Then I noticed that the triangular patch moving along the surface like a pointer on an ouija board. It wasn’t part of the surface that was resistant to the fire, but the outline of something floating above the surface blocking portions of my view; a ship of some sort that was orbiting the planet.

“This is the fate of your world. A fiery doom” the stranger in white finally spoke up. “However it is a fate that can be changed. Whether or not this happens is up to you. I can take you to another time when these creatures were vanquished. There you will learn from others how to defeat them. When you have attained this knowledge I will return you here back to the same point at which you left. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to defeat them, and save what is left you your world.”

None of this seemed real. It couldn’t be. I had to have still been dreaming. His My next words only seemed to confirm my suspicions. “I have just enough energy to take you to one place; any place in your world that can equip and better prepare you for the journey ahead. The amount of time you have will be fleeting, so you must hurry. Just picture the destination in your mind and you will travel there in your dream. After your time is up I will further transport you to the world where you will gain the knowledge you seek. I am sorry that I can not assist you any further.”

“There is only one word you need to remember,” he said. “Graxis.”

Without any warning or so much as a goodbye I suddenly found myself in a different place again. It was a dimly lit warehouse. The shelves and racks in front of me were filled with weapons and equipment of every kind imaginable. I recognized it right away as my paranoid militia brother-in-law’s private bunker.

I didn’t have but a moment to gasp at the vast array of firearms before I realized that the room was steadily getting brighter with the strange light that had consumed our house moments before. I found a couple of duffel bags under a workbench and began throwing guns, ammo, and whatever else I could get my hand on into them as quickly as possible before the explosion destroyed this building as well. I only hoped that the pattern of my dream would hold steady and I would be pulled from the blast before the flames reached me.

I grabbed and stuffed items so frantically that I hardly noticed the heat of the flames around me ready to scorch me once again when the windows of the storage room burst inwards…

Then I snapped out of the memory just as quickly as I went into it. I was back in the hotel room in New Haven City with the forest green glow filling the room.

“Now you know what is hidden,” the disembodied voice/voices spoke.

I nodded in agreement, soaking it all in. “So I really am here to find a way to defeat the Graxis and return home to the point that I left through the temporal tether?”

“Correct.”

“Now that I know this, how will I keep it from Barthandolous?”

“That memory will remain locked in here, even when your conscious mind departs.”

“Which doesn’t do my an good at all. My goals in returning home were based on suspicions, and when I leave here I will go right back to it.”

“Incorrect. You will leave here with belief without knowledge.”

“Belief that I’m on the right path,” I mulled it over.

“Correct.”

“And if I need a reminder, all I need to do is meditate about consulting with my wife.”

“Correct.”

“Alrighty then. Just give me a few minutes to baske in my mental fortress of solitude and I’ll be on my way.”

I stretched out on the bed, lying down with my hands behind my head, savoring the silence. For the first time since picking up the orb, I finally felt peace and quiet without the unnerving feeling of my thoughts constantly being intruded upon. I didn’t realize until that moment, that not thinking things because Barthandolous might pick up on them was exhausting. Every time a thought started to come up in my mind since the meeting with Gerald, I needed to quickly double check it and tuck it away to keep it from being used against me.

Yet, at the same time, I truly craved the power of the Orb. I could have spent an entire day in a catatonic state enjoying that kind of solitude, yet I wouldn’t have truly enjoyed any of it because of the pull I felt towards the Orb. I finally began to realize the true insidious nature of the Orb in its creation. The magic of the bond between the dragon and its owner truly was addicting. I realized that the moment I stepped out of my mental shield I would do anything to keep anyone from taking the Orb from me. I would sooner give my life than hand it over willingly. Getting the Orbs from their owners was going to be a lot harder than I thought, because they would fight to hold on to theirs just as tenaciously, which was the entire purpose. If the only way to free the dragons was to get them all together, what better way to stop it from happening than have the Orb owners at each others throats? Besides, and this was the biggest challenge I suddenly realized, because of the addicting nature of the Orbs, would I be able to finish the job when the time came, or would the addiction take over and I would keep the Orb until it consumed me?

“Oh, well,” I muttered to myself. “I guess there’s no rest for the wicked. The sooner I get this over with, the better.”

I resumed my meditative stance and relaxed my mind from that state. The room returned to its previous red hue. The connection to the Orb resumed, and I could feel myself give a deep sigh of relief to be back in contact with it. The moment the lighting switched, any memory of the conversation with the mysterious voices went away immediately. All I could remember at that moment was the conversation with the image of my wife, and the urgency that I needed to assemble the Orbs quickly before my dragon transformation was complete. I was swept up in the sudden belief that releasing The Twelve to learn the secrets to defeating the Graxis so that I could return home and save it was the path I needed to take. I couldn’t explain how I knew this just yet, but the belief was undeniable.

I roused Barthandolous and had him teach me a few things as I prepared to go meet Fenton. He expected me to be there and pick up my order. There was no doubt that the place would be watched.

Well, I don’t want to disappoint them, I told him. Let’s get this show in the road. I’ve got a date to keep.

He laughed maniacally through the Orb when I told him my plan. You are insane, he continued to laugh. I knew there was a reason we were destined to be together.