This week I’m going to try something a little…different from my regular Secretary’s Corners. I was inspired by the May From the Pastor’s Desk and figured here would be a good place to try out this idea. So without further ado, I present to you…a story.
Smack! My hand knocked against stone, halting me in my tracks. Another dead end. The sixth in a row.
“Dead end!” I called over my shoulder.
A collective groan rose through the line of people behind me. Mumbled complaints rolled off the damp stone that surrounded us, echoing ominously down the corridors.
I turned around, hands stretched out in front of me. One was held close to my face—a shield against whatever might fly at me from the darkness. The other was extended straight forward, a guide through the caverns.
My fingers brushed fabric, so I stopped, waiting for our train to backtrack down the tunnel.
“Ceceleah?” The voice came from near me, lower to the ground than me.
“Yes?” I replied, impatiently leaning from one foot to the other. How long does it take for a dozen people to move back a pace?
“Are we lost?”
I paused. Were we lost? That sounded a lot worse than this felt. “Define lost.”
My sister sighed a long-suffering sigh. “Do we know where we are going?”
“Well…we know where we’re trying to go,” I said,
“That is not the same and you know it,” Elonyah said.
“We’ll get there eventually. We always do.” Footsteps rang out, moving away from me. “Finally!” I started forward, resting the fingertips of my outstretched hand on the side on the tunnel.
“Leah, there must be more than this! This…this darkness! This getting lost every time we travel to the river!” Elonyah said, hand on my shoulder as we walked forward in unison.
I had thought the same thing two years ago, when I was her age. Now that I had reached the ripe old age of nineteen, I knew better than to say that out loud. “Shh! They’ll hear you, El. I do not care what goes on inside that head of yours, but you know better than to speak such…” Treason. The word was right there in my head, but somehow the thought of speaking it gave it much more power. So I let the sentence die away.
“Why else would it be forbidden to speak of?” Elonyah said, voice hushed.
“Elonyah!” I whispered sharply. “Are you trying to get us in trouble? You know what happened to Mum and Dad.”
They had spoken out too. They had spoken out…too much. And now they were gone. They left us here alone.
I shook away my angry thoughts. It doesn’t matter anyway.
My toe struck a fissure in the rock beneath me. I let out a hiss.
“Stub your toe?” Elonyah asked knowingly.
“Oh, hush,” I said, irritated,
“We have eyes for a reason, Leah. Surely if there wasn’t always darkness, they would help guide us instead of our hands and feet. Have you looked at the scrolls? They have something marked on them that can’t be read with our fingers. Maybe there’s a world outside this cave—”
I whirled around. “El. Stop. That’s what got them killed, remember?”
She felt silent.
“Don’t ever talk about it again.”
* * *
I woke up suddenly, rolling over on my mat to face the center of the room. We’d arrived back at the colony late, so tired we could barely keep our feet moving forward.
Elonyah hadn’t spoken to me the rest of the journey back. Instead, she’d moved away from me to walk next to her friends. Their whispers had joined the hum of voices coming from the rest of the group who had made the trek to get water from the underground river.
I sighed, then reached over the few feet of space between our mats. “El? Sorry I snapped at you…” I trailed off as my fingers brushed cold, hard stone. No mat.
“El?”
I sat up, frantically patting the ground. “Elonyah, this is not funny.”
It is funny. I heard her voice in my head, but not out loud.
I stood, striding back and forth across the room, sweeping all the corners…no Elonyah.
Then, on the table in the corner…a clay tablet.
I snatched it up, running my fingers hurriedly across the glyphs pressed into it.
Sorry, Leah. I had to go. I have to see if there is something else out there. Something…better.
“No!” I dropped the tablet. It thudded to the table, no doubt muddling the letters.
“Elonyah, what have you done?”
The End of Part I
