This Tale of Omphalos: The Shadow Forest was the result...
When Map slept, the twins could hear her snores reverberate through the walls of the cottage.
After pulling potatoes, onions, peeling them, slicing them, and putting them in a new pot, she was often exhausted. Danyel helped out with pulling, slicing, and stewing (he’d accidentally gotten himself so many times peeling, he’d been forbidden that particular duty), but it was still hard work. Map didn’t always make it to her bedroom. Sometimes she collapsed in her chair in the common family area adjacent to the kitchen. All she had to do was close her eyes. The rumbling would begin, a steady, long-drawn out series of pronounced snorts.
Tayel watched her, mouth open, legs akimbo, covered with a many-layered skirt.
“The dragon rests, yet maintains her guardianship,” Tayel murmured in a low voice from his own cushion on the floor. “We are the treasure cache which she never leaves unprotected.” The image of his mother as a dragon didn’t frighten him at all. Dragons might swallow a boy or set his village on fire, but even the unseen creatures waiting in the hungry darkness would hesitate to attack a dragon’s children.
“I’m glad she’s asleep.” Danyel poked his head around the doorway. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Mind the bubbles in the cauldron for they could be trouble.” Tayel rested one foot on the floor, rising with careful quiet. Best not to awaken Map. “Not to mention this something of yours.”
Danyel did his best to tip-toe across the floor to the bookshelf, but he wasn’t as quiet as Tayel. A floorboard creaked beneath his foot. He shot his foster mother a wary glance, but Map continued to snore.
With a little more confidence, Danyel pulled Beyond the Door off its place of honour on the bookshelf. “It might well be trouble, trouble of the odd sort Map hates. Look!”
He opened the book and scowled at the pages. The faintest purple residue clung the words and the binding.
Tayel wouldn’t say anything about this, not until Danyel showed him the odd trouble. Best to tackle that first, since it had taken a solid enough form for his twin to notice it.
“It was right here,” Danyel muttered, staring at the picture of the tower right next to the beginning of The Tower and the Crown, the first story he’d ever read to Leiwell, the night their older brother had brough home this particular book. “I know it was!”
Tayel wasn’t about to encourage this odd trouble by asking what it was. He moved to his brother’s side, studying the way the pages fell on top of each other. “We discover something new every time we read.”
“No! Well, yes, only this was an actual something I could pick up with my hands, not a something you just play around with in your mind!” Danyel looked up at him with wide, violet-blue eyes. The flecks of green were back in his irises, the tiny shapes which perhaps only Tayel noticed. “A pressed flower, a crushed rose was at the beginning of this story!”
Tayel tensed at this. As beautiful as flowers were, they could be many things. A crushed rose in particular sounded ominous, a living bloom which had plucked…and pressed. At the same time, Map plucked and dried many plants which she used in her cooking. The intention in putting the flower in the book might be no more harmful than one of her recipes.
“Last time I brushed against this, the book threatened to take you away.” Tayel gestured to a piece of paper sticking out ever so slightly. “This might be another attempt.”
“I don’t understand what you’re…what’s this?” Danyel drew the note out between the pages.
Tayel shivered as his brother unfolded the paper. He’d learned to shut his eyes to seeing too much, yet now things were starting to manifest as objects. Worse, they were appearing to Danyel. Danyel would ask what they were, pick them up, just as he was doing right now.
Written in an elaborate, cursive hand which suggested a flamboyant, melodramatic personality were the words:
“I no longer remember who I was, but I remember you. Never forget your purpose. Your purpose is your path. Keeping it in mind is the way to stay on that path, to finding your way out of a woodland of shadows. Never allow another purpose to swallow your own. Within dreams and shifting possibility, being overshadowed leads to being devoured. If you allow this to happen, you will no longer be you. Stay yourself. No matter what may happen to me, stay true to yourself. “
Danyel’s hand shook after reading the last few words. Tears fell from his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m crying, yet I feel as if this letter was meant for us.”
“Purple,” Tayel murmured in response. “Looking at the writing suggested the passionate, aggressive flamboyance of a red personality, yet there is blue is these words.”
“Levels of sorrow, descending into varied feelings and meaning.” Danyel bit his lower lip and tried to smile. “That would make this writer purple.”
It was a game the twins came through, matching a person’s character to a color. They didn’t meet that many people, but they read about all sorts of characters Ashleigh met in Beyond the Door. Danyel felt that Map, the reluctant protagonist of The Tower and the Crown possessed a red character, a terrible temper, and powerful emotion swings which she regretted when she calmed down. Tayel agreed. They disagreed about Christopher, the mysterious boy who’d disappeared into the pond. Danyel felt he was blue, layered with conflicting feelings which stopped him from doing what he wished.
His twin really didn’t understand blue, how complex a color it was. It took you deeper than most colors ever could. Christopher did have bluish qualities, but Tayel felt he was more purple. Dangerous passions often ruled him in his decisions.
“Tayel, you don’t suppose this is from Christopher, do you?” Danyel swallowed, pressed the page against his chest. “Maybe he’s warning us in some way?”
“A fictional character is limited in his ways of communicating.” Tayel shut his eyes, not wishing to see the purple tendrils crawling off the page to play with the ties of his brother’s tunic. Perhaps this letter had been left for Danyel. This was not a comforting thought. “This is sound advice for many people. Taking it too personally may engage your heart in a dangerous way.”
“I think my heart is already engaged.” Danyel rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Yours, too. You’re crying, too.”
“My heart has been touched, not engaged. I refuse to give it with such ease to the first manifestation of pretty words that appear in a book.” Tayel lay a palm over his upper face, covering his tears.
“Deny it all you want, but you have to be curious, too.” Danyel stopped crumpling the letter against his chest. “If it wasn’t Christopher, who wrote this? Who put this letter inside our book?”
“I’m not certain if we should claim ownership to Beyond the Door.” Tayel dropped his hands to study the exquisite hand, much steadier and less curvy than the writer of the letter. For days he gazed into the pool, seeing the visions of another world caught within. He could not look away, yet he always did.
“Do you think whomever left the letter took away the crushed flower?” Once Danyel got started on the questions, there was no stopping him. It was as if his twin’s reluctant to ask them made him rattle them off all the more. “Why?”
“The flower may not have been meant for me or anyone else who opened the book,” Tayel spoke with great reluctance. Saying something could invoke it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage Danyel’s admirer who left him crushed flowers and letter, even though the latter appeared to have been intended for Tayel as well. “How we react to them could effect the giver’s wishes.”
“Once again, you’re being enigmatic enough to drive me mad.” Danyel shook his head. “Do you think Leiwell was the one who left these things?”
It was a possibility. Their older brother could be as mysterious as Tayel tried to be. This compensated for some very simple wishes.
“Or the one who now commands him.” Tayel didn’t explain himself. This was direct enough for even Danyel to guess his words.
“Leiwell’s lord, the mysterious master of this cottage?” Danyel folded the letter in an abrupt motion, returning it to the pages. “I want no gifts from him. He’s given and taken quite enough from us, thank you very much.”
With more roughness than he’d ever treated the precious book, he shoved it back on the shelf with a loud thump.
Map paused in her snores and snuffled, “Don’t abuse something you love because it’s connected with someone you hate.”
Danyel turned to stare at his mother. Tayel studied her slack face and relaxed mouth, which managed to form such a coherent phrase.
Map kept her eyes shut and resumed her snores, oblivious to what she’d just said.
“A dragon, indeed.” Tayel smiled a little. “Legend says one ought to let sleeping dragons lie, yet I doubt anyone ‘lets’ this dragon do anything she doesn’t wish.”
“I’m not sure of that.” Danyel regarded his mother with wary tenderness. “Sometimes she seems more afraid than any of us of what’s out there.”
He didn’t explain what he meant. He didn’t need.
“She may know more of what’s out there than any of us. She may have reason to be afraid.” Tayel gave his twin a side glance. “Reason not to blame Leiwell’s lord for Leiwell’s choices as well.”
“Do you like how that man holds our brother’s heart in his grip like a vise?” Danyel gritted his teeth together. “Or how much Leiwell has changed since he started serving this master we’ve never seen?”
Tayel bowed his head. “No more than I like the sound the cauldron is making neglected. You’ve abandoned it for too long.”
“Oh, no!” Danyel dashed for the kitchen. “I hope our stew isn’t boiling over!”
“So do I,” Tayel said, not turning to watch his twin, but keeping his attention focused on the book shelf. “So do I.”
“Just keep a sharp eye watchful,” Map muttered in her sleep with surprisingly clarity. “Don’t give anything a chance to boil over.” She punctuated the last with a deep breath, not opening her eyes.
“I’m trying to, Map.” Tayel felt the tears gather in his eyes, but he managed to smile at his mother, or foster mother. She kept insisting their real mother was out there, somewhere, and they needed to wait for her. As far Tayel was concerned, Map was his mother, even if she wouldn’t let him give her that title. “I’m really trying to.”
“Seeing too much is hard,” Map muttered. “Be sure to shut your eyes from time to time. They’ll get tired if you don’t.”
Tayel considered these words. This made sense.
He walked over to his cushion and lay down on the floor. He closed his eyes.
“Well, I saved the stew…” Danyel began, poking his head around the archway, only to see his twin napping on the floor at Map’s feet. “Which should be ready when everybody wakes up.” Danyel shook his head with a slight smile. “Ah, well. We should wait until Leiwell joins us before we eat.”
No one spoke, but Tayel nodded. This was reply enough.
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