September 15th 2012, 5:05 pm, Peosta, Iowa
Father Antonius, Brother Tobias and Jed quietly left the Abbot's office and made their way down the east hallway. All around them, doors could be heard opening and closing, footfalls came and went and odd clangings and clickings bore witness to an active community full of its own comings and goings, routines, responsibilities and rules.
The east-west corridor, styling a white, gray and black marbled floor intersected with a north-south wing, that seemed to have been built quite earlier than the other parts of the Abbey that Jed had seen. High windows poured forth beams of sunlight onto the quarried limestone floor, exposing millions of dust motes, high above, floating lazily in the dying sunlight. The sound of communal activity was nowhere to be heard now and Jed felt that with each footfall, he was walking further and further into the past. They quietly followed this passage, past endless doors and alcoves, until they came to a single, ancient wooden and iron-bound door on their right.
Upon opening the creaking door, what met them was a stone set of steps that wound their way into the underground levels of the building. Upon begin their descent, every so often a door would appear to their right that would be ignored by the monks who both had switched on flashlights just moments after entering the stairwell.
, thought Jed to himself as he ran his hand continuously along the limestone blocks on his left. To Jed, the temperature seemed to drop every few seconds as the trio continued to descend - level after level, passing door after door - until Jed's left hand noticed a marked change in texture as he continued to run it along the dry surface. He noticed that he was no longer touching uniform, limestone block but uneven, natural stone. Jed was no architect, but it seemed to him that they had just passed out of a man-made structure into a naturally formed cave. Beneath them all the while, the curving stairs continued to burrow their way into the inky darkness.
mused Jed who was beginning to feel more like a character in an Indiana Jones movie than an average minivan owner.
His skin was genuinely cold by this time and the rock to his left was just beginning to feel damp when the stairwell finally came to an end and one finally doorway - this one seeming even older than the one at the top of the stairs - presented itself.
Jed's incredulity was interrupted by Abbot Antonius' gentle voice which seemed to echo endlessly upward as he spoke.
"My apologies, Reverend Matthews, but I must leave you with Tobias for only a moment."
With no other explanation, the Father withdrew an ancient-looking brass key from the folds of his robe and inserted it into the lock of the iron wrapped door. As it turned, a prolonged scraping followed by a dull thud that echoed up the stairwell could be heard as the latch gave way. Both Jed and Tobias watched as the aged man opened the door, entered silently without comment and closed it behind him. They heard the bolt slide back into place, once more, then it was just the two of them.
, thought Jed as he nervously smiled at Brother Tobias, who returned the gesture, but remained silent.
They waited in that manner for several minutes, neither of them willing to break the absolute stillness at the bottom of the stairwell that seemed to be filled with a substance of its own. All at once, the sliding bolt of the door jarred each of them back from their personal reveries and in contrast to the silence they had been experiencing, jarred them into the present moment.
The ancient door creaked open on its hinges and Abbot Antonius, without a word, gestured for the two of them to come inside. To Jed's surprise, upon stepping through the doorway he was met, immediately, with a solid stone wall only four feet in front of him. Looking both to his right and his left, he could see the wall curve away in each direction, gently fading into shadow as it passed out of the light of the two monk's flashlights.
Antonius led them to the right for about twenty paces as the wall gently curved inward, before turning abruptly to his left, entering a new doorway and following a second, identical, hallway back in the opposite direction this time curving itself away toward the right. They followed this new passageway for a full two minutes, Jed surmised, before Antonius stopped and turned again, this time to his right. This time, they were given the choice of turning either to the right or left, at this intersection, but Antonius never wavered from his course and performed a complete switchback into a third passage.
! Thought Jed to himself, with no little amount of excitement.
He had always wanted to walk a labyrinth, having studied them in church history courses, but to find one ten stories below the earth and built within a natural cave under an obscure Abbey in Iowa was dumbfounding to Jed.
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It took the men a full ten minutes to work their way through the labyrinth, the duration of time bearing witness to its enormous size, before Antonius stayed the two younger men with his left hand, and motioned silence with the index finger of his right before making the final left turn into a domed rotunda at the heart of the maze.
Jed squinted in the candlelight that circled the room in scones as he tried to put some semblance of order to the images that appeared to him. The room at the heart of the labyrinth was perfectly round with a high, domed limestone ceiling. What made the room especially unique, however, was that it was tri-leveled in concentric circles. The level on which Jed stood was the highest in the room, appearing to be six feet wide and running the entire circumference of the room. One lower circle, running on the inside of the one they currently stood on was visible three feet below them. One hundred and eighty degrees opposed to where Jed stood was a short set of stone steps that led to this second concentric circle and he could see that when one reached that set of steps and followed the second level around one hundred and eighty degrees a final set led to the ground level of the room. It was also perfectly circular at about twenty-five feet in diameter. This bottom circle contained only one object - a raised platform, carved from the indigenous limestone of the floor, that served as a bed for a wizened man that lay upon the coverlets that draped it.
"Welcome Jedidiah," rasped the man laying upon the slab. "I have been waiting a long time for you."
________________________
The Cleric turned his head, slightly, as the young man entered the room and a light sigh escaped his lips as he reflected. So many of his hopes rested on the unimpressive man approaching him. Would he be equal to the task? He waited for the three men to complete their circuits of the room and approach the foot of his stone-carved bed before he spoke again.
"I am old, Jedidiah Matthews. I have become a man of few words and fewer pretenses during my life, therefore I will say what I have to say to you, tell you what you must do, and leave the answering of your questions and pointless arguments to Antonius and his monks."
As the Cleric sensed Jed gathering up his courage to question this rude arrangement, he prevented him with a weak, but stern voice.
"It would be best to hold your tongue, young man," he said.
The Cleric narrowed his eyes as he continued. "You have no idea who you're talking to, nor what I have experienced over thousands of years, nor why someone such as the likes of me is so desperately in need at this time of someone such as the likes of me."
Jed's original complaint died on his lips. he thought in alarm?
The Cleric noticed the young parson pale and allowed a light smile to touch his lips. He gave a knowing look to Father Antonius, who remained respectfully silent along with Brother Tobias, before continuing. "Young man, you have been given a rare, and probably altogether unwanted gift. But nevertheless, that gift is needed at this time and it is for this reason that our dearly loved and departed brother, Sage, sought you out. This was both at my behest and in response to an authority much higher than I."
He adjusted his position on the thin pillow that he was resting on and continued. "Antonius tells me that you are already acquainted with .
After a brief pause, the young man found his voice and answered the Cleric, meekly. ", sir?" He nervously cleared his throat. "I assume that you mean the magic that Sage ..."
The Cleric interrupted, "Let me make one thing very clear, young man. The is not - he raised his voice to emphasize the word - magic, nor has it ever been. It is , to be sure. Just as fire in the forest or lightning in the sky is elemental. But just because mankind was not prone to understand or harness these great things that are so manipulated and taken for granted today, doesn't make them "magical," and so it is with .
He entered into a brief coughing spell, at this point, and Antonius walked to his bedside and slowly handed him a cup of water which sat on a table. The Cleric tipped up his head and slowly drank, before returning to his resting position and fixing his eyes back on Jed.
"was an element woven into the fabric of creation, just as fire, water, wind and man," he said. "Before the Great Fall, our original father and mother had use of it. Afterward, the capacity to sense and subdue it waned throughout the generations. At the time of the Great Flood ..."
The Cleric's eyes grew distant for a brief moment, as if remembering something misted over by great lengths of time.
"At the time of the Great Flood, perhaps less than ten percent of the world's population retained use of the part of the human brain that it needed for drawing, storing, and manipulating . Today that percentage is down to perhaps one percent of one percent - most of them not even realizing that they possess the gift."
The Cleric could see a thousand questions forming on Jedidiah's lips, but he pressed on.
"Now enters the sinister note to the developing drama. Most of the gifted
who that they are gifted, have given themselves to the employ of our adversaries?"
"Adversaries?" Jed interjected, this time before being censored.
The Cleric continued, "An organization, both ancient and modern, that far exceeds our numbers and unceasingly scours the earth for those who can wield . Those with the gift are either given the opportunity to join their employ which leads to great riches and power - or they are destroyed."
His eyes misted over before he continued on. "Until recently, only two of our Order lived. One given over to recruiting and the other to convalescing. As you might surmise, the recruiting branch of our fledgling army is no more." The Cleric cleared his throat and went on with more determination. "But, he has succeeded in his task. He has found one with the gift, previously unknown to our enemies, and he has brought him to me."
The Cleric reclined fully, without warning and closed his eyes. "That is all for now, young man. My strength is not what it once was, a thousand years ago, and I will answer none of the questions that I can tell are ready to burst from your lips. Our dear father, here, is well suited to that task."
Even with this admonition, the Cleric could hear the beginnings of an argument rising from the young man's lips before Antonius shushed him. Then he heard the shuffling of men's feet on the hard stone floor grow fainter and fainter before his world was returned to silence.
