The Great Tree

[Moiety Jean]

Felt like doing some creative writing. Read if you like, and enjoy!


........


I first heard of the site in New Mexico early in October of 2003. It was in reading of the exploits of one Jeff Zandi, and the trail of exploration on which he baited some intrepid adventurers, that I became aware that something new had developed in the subject of my old obsession. Years ago I played Myst and Riven, and fell in love with their worlds, and especially with the characters whose stories the games retold. I read the novels too, and loved them just as much. Now to hear that the stories might be true...

The site was a dormant volcano, in the middle of the desert, miles and miles from anywhere. I didn't have much money, but information was scarce, and I needed to know. I scraped together what money I could and bought a ticket to New Mexico. I'd never done a thing like that before, just up and flown somewhere.

I was able to hitch a ride out to the desert from a friendly local truck driver, who informed me that I was not the first one he'd driven to this place. Apparently, many others like myself had been travelling great distances to see what they could find here. He left with my thanks, and I entered the gate, trying to feel better about what I was doing as I noted the property ownership sign warning trespassers.

Early morning in the desert was as hot as noon in mid-summer back home. The volcano ahead of me sloped steeply up from a landscape that otherwise was nearly flat for miles in every direction, peppered with scrub brush. I saw no sign of the other travellers. No sign of anyone, in fact, except for a single Airstream trailer, sitting quietly in the heat some odd hundred yards to my right. Its awning was extended, shading a single figure from the sun. He lounged in a rickety lawn chair with his feet up on a cooler, reading a book which he put down when he saw me approaching. I wondered if he would tell me to get off his property.

He didn't wait for me to speak as I stepped into the shadow of the trailer, nor did he get up from his chair. He just casually introduced himself as the very Jeff Zandi I'd been reading all those ambiguous things about. So he was real, a flesh-and-blood person, and he didn't seem angry with me. He kept talking, so I listened. It was kind of surreal. Zandi was cryptic, but reassuring, as if he'd expected I would show up like this. I. We. All of us trespassers. Did he give us all the same greeting?

I wanted to ask him what it was all about, what the solution was to his riddle, but I suddenly felt stupid, as though I was in the middle of a long line of people who had wanted to ask him such things, and that he wouldn't have given me a straight answer, anyway. "She's left a message for you," he said.

She?

My mind sort of swam through the rest of what he said. I was supposed to follow her, whoever "she" was. Journeys, trees...

He pointed toward a low, wimpy-looking, wooden fence that crossed the ground for a short distance where it was just beginning to slope up toward the volcano. A sort of weathervane stood there, unmoving despite the breeze that had picked up. The breeze felt good.
Zandi gave me a smile, picked his book back up, and it was as if he'd never said anything, or noticed me at all.

That volcano looked so familiar.

Okay, so maybe "she" would have more answers for me. I left Zandi with his book and began to walk toward the windmill, shading my eyes from the sun. In the distance beyond, gold metal, a pile of scrap most likely, glimmered in waves of heat blur. The wooden fence grew closer, and as the slow curve of the ground rolled over into my view I could see that the fence was guarding a deep hole, out of which were growing the sparse branches of a tree. Not just a hole, a massive crack in the ground, much longer than it was wide, in a sort of lightning-bolt shape stretching toward the mountain. Down inside it wooden walkways criss-crossed across the gap. The cleft, Zandi had said... The Cleft..? no, it couldn't be, could it?

Somewhere at the bottom I saw water reflecting blue sky, and my heart pummeled me. As I made for the ladder on the other side of the gap, my feet stumbled, like I couldn't feel them very well any more. I suddenly wanted to touch everything with my hands, even the ground, to confirm reality. I made it to the rope ladder and fumbled my way down, into cool shade, into disbelief.

The existence of this place had opened to me like a flower blooming in time-lapse burst. My mind whirled as all of the things that I had read and imagined were rearranging themselves to click rapidly into alignment with the truth I was now seeing.

Seeing.
"What do you see?"

I saw smooth stone walls, dusted with sand, meeting with the texture of intricate carving as they curved around doors and windows hewn through the rock. I saw shadows of caves beyond those windows. I saw bridges spanning from wall to wall, connecting balconies of rock, and below them I saw a floor of green, gentle moss and a still pool of clear water. I walked further along my shelf of rock, and I saw more chambers, bedrooms, storerooms tucked into the earth, with old, tattered curtains in the doorways and dusty blankets still on the beds, all of it familiar to me, though I had never seen it before.

I saw history. History that I had thought to be fiction, and I trembled in the depth of it.

Here it truly was. I was standing in the home of Anna and Atrus. My memory of their histories gave them presence as if they were still here. Were they still here? Was this place even proof of their existence? I had been blinded and dazed by the switching on of a light, and now that my eyes were adjusting I wanted to see everything. Before me, across a bridge, was an open door framed in the sunlight. Through it I saw a dot of light, a button perhaps. I stepped onto the bridge, my footfalls creaking, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

Louder was the crack of rope and the rattle of wood as the old bridge gave way beneath my weight. Too startled to yell, I stuck my arms out. The fall was short and about eight feet down I landed hard on green sod. I didn't move, waited for my body to register injury. Waited for someone to come in response to the noise. I wasn't hurt, and no one came, but I'd gotten a nice shock. I looked at my hands, dirty where I'd landed on them. I looked at the ground where my hands had crushed tiny blue flowers into the turf.
Tiny blue flowers... they were all around me, growing all over the green and as far up the walls as the green could reach. Blue flowers with five tiny petals, and dark stamens, like little stars. I stared at them, remembering who had first planted them, and their significance to him, and the adrenaline from the fall caught up with me, and I coughed out a sob. While I wrestled with overwhelmed tears, another memory clicked into my mind, that someone was buried here. In a moment of fear and care, I half-crawled backward until I had bare rock under my feet, not knowing where the grave would be and not wishing to disrespect it. Away from me at the other end of the cleft, I saw the pool of water, where Gehn had once washed his hands after burying his wife. Generations ago, that would have been, the water long cleared of the mud. I wiped my own hands on my pants. The pool watered the roots of the tree, which climbed up, tall, through the shadow of the cleft to offer a few leaves to the sun. A door was built into its high-arched roots, but the door was closed, imprinted with a symbol of a splayed hand with palm spiraling inward. I stood, looked for a way back up without disturbing the hallowed ground. Behind me another broken footbridge hung down against the rock, and I was able to climb it, and edge my way around to the opposite lip of rock where the ornate entryway beckoned.

In the arid, round chambers of the study and living area, I found the message. A hologram, summoned by the button I'd pressed. It was not a message to me but to "they." Those of us who had felt drawn here as Zandi had said. It was strange, grouping myself in my mind with people I had never seen, but I was now one of them, now unique from the rest of the world in our common experience, tied together in more ways than I yet understood. The woman's recorded image spoke lyrically of a place I knew, "D'ni," and of long-past events I knew also, as it wandered within the abandoned room. She was Yeesha, daughter of Atrus and Catherine, grand-daughter of Gehn, great-grand-daughter of Anna. With her words she proved her life, and the lives of her family, whose stories I had loved, whose worlds I had yearned to know. She revealed a small tapestry by placing her glowing hand on the wall. I was to find seven of these. I was to see the City, but first I would take a journey.

Her avatar flickered out, leaving me the weight of new knowledge, and the desire to seek.

I found her seven tapestries, cloths roughly woven with the spiral hand. I had to leave the cleft to lay my hand on them all, and each time I did more of the hand symbol on each glowed, until it was completed. As I walked around the mountain looking for cloths I found them hanging from other things, unbelievable evidences of more stories that were suddenly true. I shuddered as I walked through the dry, giant bones of a Whark, knowing the vicious nature of the whale-like beast before its untimely death, sucked from the sea in its collapsing world to die on this desert. These remnants were connections to another Age entirely. That Age I knew would be dead now and I could never see it, but how many others would there be for me to find?

It seemed that the entire universe was spiralling to meet me at this single point, this beginning. Here, in the humble desert, reality as I knew it was reshaping itself, branching out into a new Tree of Possibility. I cried in astonishment of the enormity of it, the potential, and in joy of the beauty of what I was seeing and might soon see.

I returned to the tree in the cleft, which Yeesha told me was beginning to grow again. The seven cloths unlocked the door for me, a ladder leading down into the earth. I began my journey.
_________________
~Moiety Jean

KI#44727
"There is a certain beautiful danger when a group of geeks get together to entertain themselves." ~Orin Drake

[Professor Askew]

Printed. I'll read it over the weekend and respond.
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[brian]

I really would like to post this on the main page as an article.
_________________
#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

[Professor Askew]

And who's gonna tell you you can't?
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[Daedalus]

Sorry I just had to say I laughed out loud at Prof's statement.

[Professor Askew]

Well, I finally finished it. Good stuff, MJ. A nice, clean short story. I have a version like this myself (as do probably a few others) and I really like the individual interpretations. You have a great sense of the history in your story, of what came before. I also like the emotional link you have with the games so that their truth has that much more meaning. Great attention to detail and you never bog down on any one thing. Also great description of the Cleft.

Now.....you ready for some notes?

1)"...and my heart pummeled me." Don't think you want to use the word pummeled here. At least, not in this context.

2)"What do you see?" Elaborate on the quote source unless this story is strictly for fan reading. Even still, it would fit in nicely with your fond remembrance of the past.

3)"While I wrestled with overwhelmed tears..." should probably be "overwhelming".

That's all. That wasn't so bad. Real good story. I would definitely read more. In fact, I've got an idea......
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[Moiety Jean]

While I wasn't actually looking for criticism, yours is well-received.

Not exactly sure why "pummeled" doesn't work.

I've only posted my story here since it pretty much IS just for fan reading.

And "overwhelmed tears" is meant to imply "tears as a result of being overwhelmed" rather than "tears which are overwhelming me."

What's your idea?
_________________
~Moiety Jean

KI#44727
"There is a certain beautiful danger when a group of geeks get together to entertain themselves." ~Orin Drake

[Professor Askew]

LOL

Sorry, MJ, for the past year I've been living and breathing writing and lots and lots of editing. I didn't mean to presume your work needed work, just a really bad habit of mine.

I read "pummeled" as your heart beat you up and the meaning of that eludes me.

I read "overwhelmed tears" as tears that have been overwhelmed, not you.

Now the idea....
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[Moiety Jean]

No problem.

I imagined pummeled because I was looking for the concept of being shaken up, drummed against. Does it work in that sense?

I can see how you could read it that way, but my brain treats it like "overjoyed tears." I could be wrong, but I think it works grammatically...

Yes? This idea?
_________________
~Moiety Jean

KI#44727
"There is a certain beautiful danger when a group of geeks get together to entertain themselves." ~Orin Drake

[Professor Askew]

I get it now. "...and inside my heart began to pummel me..." works a little better for me but maybe I'm being too flaky about it.
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[brian]

I love "what do you see?" because of what it pays homage to...

Book of Atrus anyone?
_________________
#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

[Professor Askew]

Writing alluding to writing within a specific universe. I love it.
_________________
Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[Moiety Jean]

::fluff, preen:: ^_^
_________________
~Moiety Jean

KI#44727
"There is a certain beautiful danger when a group of geeks get together to entertain themselves." ~Orin Drake

[ghaelen]

Wow, Moiety Jean,

This is really lovely. I learned a lot about the cleft's history from your story. Engaging!

g.
_________________
What a wonderful thing it is to spend time with people who aren't obligated to be there, either.