It had been a day since my important meeting with Headmaster Eddy and Lady Penny. I was more excited than I had ever been in my small life! Okay that was technically a fib but it was true. I was so happy right now. I was gonna be on a team with almost grown ups, a special job to go around the world do what I loved to do most in the entire world, explore! Okay technically that is another lie, I love to learn more than anything in the entire world. It just came naturally to me, ever since I was even littler than I was before. Math was like putting together very hard puzzles, science was fun cause we got to learn what made our world so special. I didn’t really like borning English, I could already speak it really really good, so why did I have to learn about stupid nouns and pronouns, verbs and adjectives. However my favorite class was history and languages.
I had a very very special gift. I could speak and read nearly every language on the earth. From French to Arabic, from native Cherokee all the way to the dead language latin. I never really knew why I was able to do that, but it came in handy when reading books that hadn’t been translated into english. I was so smart that I got to take higher level classes and if I was lucky, I would be done with all my schooling by the time I was 15. My mommy, well adoptive mommy, but my mommy none the less, always told me not to brag about how smart I was. She said it was a gift from God, and if I abused and made fun of others because of my gift then he might take it away.
The best part of all of this was that I was gonna be going on my mission with my big brother, Xaiver. At first glance we didn’t look like brother and sister, he was really tall and strong, he had dark brown skin that reminded me of chocolate, and his dreadlocks were longer than my arms. We met in his homeland of Nigeria. We had been together for a very long time but than something really bad happened. We got separated for a very long time. I had no idea where he was and something bad thing happened. Really bad things happened.
I don’t like thinking about bad things.
But then the bad turned really good. I was rescued by my new mommy and daddy. They had taken me to this island, Tarun, where people of all races and cultures could live. We all shared a special gift, it was called jepei. We could harness nature's energy to do great things, it was like being a superhero sometimes. Everyone on the island got along with each other, and we all got along with our animal spirits too. That was the best part in my opinion. Jepei users could manifest their animal spirits, for the longest time I thought mine was just an imaginary friend, but I could also see Xaiver’s animal spirit too. So I just thought I could see imaginary friends, but my daddy told me how jepei users work. I have been here for as long as I can remember now, and I loved my mommy and daddy very much, and I loved their animal spirits too. I had two sets of mommies and daddies now.
What could be better than that?
Maybe knowing my real parents?
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Now if I had be honest, and mommy always says to be honest, I probably shouldn’t have said or did what I did to end up in my current predicament. Mommy always said not brag or be boastful, but she also said to not be disrespectful or rude, not be naughty or throw tantrums if I Didn't get my way.
It all started when my mommy wanted me to get out of my dirty clothes and get ready for bed. I was chosen for a special mission, so I had the right to decide when my bedtime was. I was turning 12 years old in a few months, so I am practically an adult now. So I told her no, and then I might have gotten a bit to cheeky and cocky… that was how I found myself standing in a corner, with no hope of getting out.
Dang it.
“When you are ready to act nicely and behave yourself you can come out of that corner!” A small sniffle escaped my lips as I crossed my arms over my chest and kept my lips firmly held in my sad pout. “Do not think that just because you are a part of a very special team, that gives you the right to be disrespectful Sarah Megan Springchaser.”
“She is using your full name.” I heard my best friend and animal spirit, Bonnie thought to me. She was currently in the opposite corner from me. My momma never put us in the same corner together, cornertime was supposed to be a punishment but with the two of us in the same place together it was impossible to be like that. She was the spirit of the griffin, meaning she was two animal spirits in one. The head and wings of an eagle with the body of a lion.
“You got in trouble too,” I remarked, turning around to stick my tongue out at her. She had done the same thing as me. Her eagle feathers were bright golden, while her lion features were more of a dark green.
“Heads and beaks back in those corners!” We both jumped and spun as my daddy’s gentle voice boomed across the walls. Or I thought it was my daddy voice. It was actually my other daddy that was speaking. Daddy Mason. I bet no one on the mainland had a daddy that was also a beautiful white bison.
“Don’t worry sister,” A more sharp voice spoke out. One that I recognized as Mommy Aikido. She was a very long, dark gray king cobra spirit. Or I suppose that she would be a queen cobra in this case. “I will watch our little troublemakers, perhaps an hour of staring at a corner will remind her to behave.”
“An hour!” Me and Bonnie shouted at the same time.
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Turn’s out we weren’t gonna be stuck in the corner for an hour. In reality it was only around 15 minutes, but it felt like an hour in my mind. Standing in a corner was the worst punishment in the entire world in my mind. I didn’t like staying still, except for when I am in a classroom. Even then I had about 15 different fidget spinners and soft balls that I was allowed to squeeze during class. (I had to get rid of the squeaky ones but that was beyond the point) Once I was released from that and was given a nice warm bath. I was tucked into bed with Bonnie resting beside me, her form already starting to turn into deep green and golden smoke As she was being absorbed back into my gemstone. Mine was unique in design, one half was the head of an eagle and the other half was the head of a lion. “One two three,” I shut my eyes tight as a loud boom of thunder spread across the sky. “Three miles away,” I said snuggling a bit deeper into my blankets. My daddy had taught me how to tell when a storm was getting closer.
“After a streak of lighting, count until you hear some thunder. That will tell you how many miles away.”
It brought me comfort when I could count to 15 or 10, but now that we were reaching single digits, the storm was getting closer. So it could hurt me now if it really wanted to. I know I was behind a warm house, safe underneath my warm pink covers, protected by my room that was filled with toys and books. My favorite stuffed bunny was in my arms and Bonnie would always be with me regardless of what happened. I nearly jumped out of my skin as someone began to knock on my door.
I was sure that the storm had finally come to get me.
However, it was my momma that poked her head into the room. She was on the shorter side barely five inches taller than me, she had long gray hair and a matching pair of eyes. She was dressed in her favorite pajama pants and a light red robe around her thin frame. “Sarah,” she said. “Are you still awake?”
“Am I gonna be in more trouble if I am?” That got her to laugh a bit so I assumed that it was okay. It wasn’t a school night but I still had to be at least drifting off by ten o'clock.
“No dear, actually you have a visitor.” I sat up a bit in my bed a bit confused by her words.
“Who is it?”
“Unique Fullmoon,” my eyes went wide as I quickly got out of bed. “What are you-”
“Give me a minute,” I said looking around my room. One of my teammates was here, she was older than me by probably a lot of years if I had to guess. I didn’t want to look like a little girl, I wanted to at least act my age a bit. I had a few stuffed animals on the floor that I politely kicked underneath my bed. I quickly threw a blanket over my dollhouse. I wanted to take down at least one of my many posters of my favorite cartoons. But I didn’t want to risk damaging any of them.
“Sarah?” I nearly leapt out of my skin as a soft voice filled the air. I spun around to see the older girl was poking her head into the room. She had a towel around her shoulders and her white t-shirt was a bit darker probably from the rain that was coming down in sheets. “I am sorry to disrupt you.”
“No it is fine,” I put on a pair of glasses from my old halloween costume and tried to stand in a way that made me look more grown up. “How can I help you?” I asked in a deeper voice to at least seem older.
However the only thing my pose, deep voice and fake glasses got was a small giggle from the older girl who was using her hand to cover her mouth. She had light brown skin, very long and thin braids that were probably extensions. (I couldn’t ask because momma said that was rude) She had soft facial feathers on her round head, her chin coming down into a gentle mound. She was taller than my momma, maybe around 5’3 or taller. She stepped further into my room with a backpack slung over her shoulder. She had a gentle grace to her, a slim but curvy figure. “You don’t have to pretend to be older,” she said once her giggling had stopped.
“Who is pretending?”
“I have three younger siblings that often try to act older than they are,” she told me before her eyes darted around my room. She looked at my bed when my earlier attempts to kick my stuffed animal underneath hadn’t really worked as I hoped. My face heated up as her calm eyes locked onto, Mr. Rodgers, my second favorite stuffed rabbit. “Plus I would rather get to know the real you, Sarah. So please drop the fake older act, you have nothing to hide with me.”
A moment passed before my small body deflated a bit like a balloon. “I just wanted to be a bit older looking,” I said walking towards her with my arms crossed over my chest. “Everyone else is really older than me on our new team, so I have to at least try to look mature.”
“How old are you?” She asked.
I climbed back up on my bed and straightened out my nightgown. “I am 11 and about to be 12.” It was easier to just say I was 12. “What about you?”
“I’m only 14,” she responded. That wasn’t that far away from me, but even if she was only three years older than me, she still seemed more adult and probably had way more responsibilities than me. I wasn’t even allowed to walk around the store without my mommy and or daddy with me. It is not my fault I get sidetracked easily.
“Are you going to see all of our teammates today?” I pushed a few of my pillows away to make room for the girl to sit on my bed if she wanted too. She seemed to take my hint as she walked over and sat on the edge of my bed. “Cause Xaiver lives two houses down if you want to go see him next, but it is raining really hard so it might be smart to go see him tomorrow. Unless you already saw him and-”
She very politely interrupted me. My mommy always said that I could talk someone’s ear off if they let me. “I actually came to see you and you alone.” She said slipping her backpack off, she reached inside and produced a box around the size of a shoebox. “I remembered that at our meeting, you were able to read the scroll that Lady Hearthstone placed in front of us. The same one that we are using when we officially start our job when we decided to go.”
I huffed a bit at that. That was the only downside to that meeting. I found a language that I could not understand. “I could only read part of that scroll. It’s really really old Hebrew but there is something else I can’t put my finger on what it is.”
“Even if you couldn’t read all of it, you were still able to read parts of it, so that is better than anyone else on our new team could. It is like Lady Hearthstone said, "that is your expertise and you are really good at it.” My face beamed with pride at the girl’s kind words.
“What is your expertise,” I said, enjoying the way that word slid off my tongue. “Expertise.” I whispered again mostly to myself.
“I am really good with Native American history as well as the ancient civilizations of South America.” She opened up the box on her lap before carefully taking out what I thought at first was a necklace made of different colored strings. “However, even in my studies I still struggle with things, and I need your help to see if you know what this means.”
“That’s a quipu.” I said almost immediately. Quipu was a form of writing that the incan’s used, as far as we knew it was the only form of writing that we had from them. It was mostly used to keep track of boring taxes, help organize their military, to help conduct census. It was like the first calculator and until it’s discovery we had no idea how the incan’s kept track of all that stuff. My eyes scanned over it for a moment, it had 22 robes tied to the larger one, 12 of them were brown, six were a deep orangy red color and the last were dark green. “Wait a minute…” I said scooting closer to look at this quipu a bit more. “That is weird.” My eyes were drawn not at the knots that had been tied into the colored strings, but the odd knots that had been tied into the green strings in the middle.
“Do you have an idea of what it means?” Unique asked me.
“Hang on,” I scurried out of my bed and moved over to grab one of my many translator notebooks that was resting on my desk. I found it easier to translate things if I could write them down myself, that was just how my mind and eyes worked sometimes. I found the one I had made when I wanted to know more about the incan people after we learned about them in my history class. I quickly found the notebook I needed and ran back to Unique. “The total number of each side is 1800, but the green strings in the center are not used for numbers. There are four birds tied into that string. It’s not as pretty as it normally would be because it had to be made smaller, but I think I mean this.” I flipped through my notebook and held it out to Unique. “It symbolizes this bird.”
Unique, carefully sat the quipu down on my bed and took my notebook from me. Inside were many of the symbols that they used. This one was a bird or rather a condor, the incan’s believe that the condor was the messenger of the God’s mostly because they could fly so high in the skies. It was one of the three most sacred animals, the other two being the puma and snake. “So what does it mean if it is this condor?” She asked handing me my notebook back.
My face fell a bit at that. “That I do not know,” I said sadly. I pointed my finger at the quipu once more. “You are missing a string that would tell us more.”
“Wait what?” Unique followed my finger, I had noticed it the second we started translating between the four green strings in the middle, where this outline of a bird had been made. There was supposed to be another string. Judging from the slight color change. That string had orange. “Yeah, one of them is missing.” Unique responded.
“Without that one, I cannot tell what the 1800 hundred surrounding these four birds mean-” At that moment, I nearly jumped out of my skin! A massive booming wave of thunder exploded across the sky, taking all of the power from my home with it. My once warmly lit room than faded into darkness, a darkness that later cracked by a massive wave of lightning that seemed to stretch from one edge of the sky to the other.
It was pure instinct on my part as I practically threw myself against the older girl and hugged her tight. “S-Sorry,” I whimpered and right as I was gonna pull away from her. She stopped me, her tense body relaxed and once she carefully set her quipu to the side. I felt her gather me closer into her arms, she smelled like flowers.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she whispered. “You helped me when I couldn’t figure this out, so the least I could do is hold you a bit.” Her voice sounded so soft, it was like a gentle hum that had hints of a Peru accent. “You don’t really like storms that much do you?” I shook my head against her chest. “I actually really storms, in fact my spirit animal is currently somewhere high in the skies. Playing with the thunder like it was a drum and chasing after lightning like a moth drawn to flame.”
“H-How can she play in something so scary?”
“What is scary to some is fun to others, especially when you are the reincarnation of the thunderbird.” I had never forgotten that everyone on my new team had a mystical spirit animal. However, where all of the others were reincarnations, such as Olivia’s spirit animal and Uniques. I think mine was the only one that came from an actual race of animals. There was no king or queen of the griffins the last time I checked.
“Can you stay until the storm goes away?”
Her answer was to gather me deeper into her embrace. One hand resting on the back of my head and the other rubbing up and down my back. “I will stay until the storm goes away or you fall asleep, sound like a fair deal?”
“Yes, please.”
I had no idea when I actually drifted off to sleep, but the hard pitter patter of the rain against the house seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to her very soft singing voice. For the first time I was not afraid of the storm while I tried to sleep, and I had it all to thank to big sister Unique. It was nice having an island where I could have so many big brothers and sisters, and they didn’t even need to be related to me by blood.
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It had been about a week since I had been assigned to this very special team. In that time, I got to meet a good portion of my teammates. We all had special permission to use the library underneath the school whenever we wanted. Since we were getting more information for it, it was only far that we got to explore it. It was quickly becoming a new home away from home, there were thousands of things to keep me busy. Languages that no one had been able to crack, the broken keys to translating now dead languages, I had practically filled five new notebooks while I tried my hand at translating things. It was the best mental playground that I could have asked for. I often went with my favorite person in the entire world, Xaiver. He was so interested in discoveries made deep underneath the sea, and there were a lot of texts down there.
It was there that I really got to talk with Emily Walker. She was really shy but also very polite, probably the only one of my new teammates that didn’t treat me like a little girl. She never talked down to me or made fun of me, I was helping her go through scrolls that were written in hebrew and aramaic. Most of them are texts for her religion. She even taught me things about the bible that I never knew. I didn’t really know what I believed in… I believed there was a god but whether it was the Christian God, The Muslim God, the Hindu gods, sometimes I wondered if it was Zeus. No matter who it was, I was sure someone was watching down on me.
Big sister Olivia was really nice, she was the daughter to Lady Penny so she was really wise just like her momma. She never needed me to translate anything for her, she could understand the texts that she liked very much. She was currently more engaged with ancient roman texts, going through scrolls written by different philosophers of that time. It was because of them that we had the not so true tale of Atlantis and other mysteries, so maybe one of them knew where the tower of babel was supposed to be.
Big sister Unique was there and often spent her time looking at things found in south america. After she came to my house so long ago to see about the pretty quipu that she had been given, she was trying to find the missing link we needed to truly translate it. It was missing one string so she was trying to find out what could have been the last piece. However it was impossible to really know what it was, so now she was trying to find out why this was so important to the council. To see if she could pinpoint where or if anyone had left something behind about it, there were seven more quipu in this library. However those were more damaged with no way to put them back together as well, and only one of them had the odd bird shaped knot in them. I often tried to help her when looking over them, but we were having no luck, the incan people never kept an actual written language, just the use of quipu. That was all we have from that dynasty, so we started looking into the other groups that came before them. She was getting a bit frustrated as even that was a hard task.
Her best friend Daniel was no help really. I don’t think he was mad at me anymore after what happened during dinner a week ago. He was actually kinda nice in his own way, he spent most of time reading in the hall of the fallen. In front of two cases that belonged to his dead parents… he found comfort in reading in their presence or just writing around those cases. I wanted to try and talk to him but Xaiver thought it was a bad idea. I needed to let him be alone during those times. I didn’t know what he was going through, the only time I thought I really lost someone was when I lost Xaiver when I was just a littler girl.
I wanted to help him but I just didn’t know how.
It was also hard to keep this secret from my other friends on the island. I couldn’t tell anyone what was down here, I almost let it slip one time when I was walking around the school with my friends but Lord Eddy stopped me before I let anything slip. He also gave me a stern warning to not do that again. I didn’t really think it was fair that no one else could know what was down here, it was just old texts, and a few old relics that I didn’t find important. In three weeks of being here I didn’t find anything really interesting yet.
That all changed when on a rare occasion when we were all in the library together. Olivia came to my table right as Emily did as well. They seemed really excited about something, they had found something important enough for all of us to come and look at it. I was kinda grateful for that cause my head was starting to kill me. Whenever I used my ability to translate texts, it really hurt my head. It didn’t help that I needed to keep my projection aura up or I would probably not be able to stay in this library for too long. The amount of latent jepei aura that all of these texts held was enough to overwhelm even the strongest people.
After a moment of waiting, Unique returned with Daniel, she was mostly dragging him as he looked kinda annoyed he was brought out of here. His dark red eyes made him look even meaner than he was. “What is it?” He then winced as Unique elbowed him for his rude tone.
Olivia was the one to speak up first. “Me and Emily have been working together for a bit to try and crack the words that Sarah could not fully translate.”
“Did you find something?” I asked, taking a small blue pill out of my bag and throwing it into my mouth. My pain pills usually did the trick in getting rid of my headaches.
Emily reached into her bag and held out a really old looking text. It was protected behind a flat transparent case. “It took a lot of time but me and Esther finally found this.” Esther was Emily’s animal spirit, she was the reincarnation of the Fenrir wolf. She was more a werewolf than an actual wolf. She placed it on the table and pushed it closer to me. “It’s the only known key that had some of the words that you couldn’t quite tell. Maybe it could help you.”
I felt a bit nervous as all eyes came to rest on me. I looked over this really old piece of paper…. No it had to be tree bark. I reached into my bag and took out the notebook I had been using to try and translate more of the original scroll that Lady Hearthstone had given us. Sure enough some of the words that I had been missing were on this other piece of text. And the best part was that this other piece of text had a code from it, someone else had been working on cracking this hidden language. The nonsensical words and symbols suddenly made sense to me and I understood why Emily had been the one to find it. “The language of heaven, words spoken in tongues.” I heard of speaking in tongues but I never really understood what that meant and had no interest in learning what amounted to nothing in my opinion. I looked over at Emily. “What does it mean to speak in tongues?”
“To speak in tongues is to speak the language of Heaven, or rather it is a gift from the holy spirit.” Emily reached into her bag again and took out an old leather backed bible. “It happens when the spirit descends on someone, it unlocks their tongue and while it sounds like gibberish or just silly syllables sometimes. That is not the case, in most cases you need someone else with the holy spirit to translate the syllables as they were spoken.”
“So someone spoke in tongues and this old hebrew?”
Emily nodded her head towards Xaiver. “Can you use that to translate the rest of that text and perhaps it will give us more clues to go along with everything else.”
“I can try,” I said with a smile but first I turned to Big Sister Olivia. “Olive, what did you find?” I at least wanted to know if I needed to try and add anything else to the previous scroll I was given.
Olive nodded towards her animal spirit. A cheeky ape spirit that was around my height, she was the only animal spirit I had seen so far that took on the design of having clothes. Today it was dark pants and a long sleeve shirt. “Well as you know I was looking into the philosophers of Greece to see if they had written anything, something like Plato’s description of the still lost city of Atlantis. Turns out there was a philosopher in Greece, that was a jepei user and he hid his works to avoid causing any trouble. His name was Adonis and he did write a text on what sounds like a really old piece of an ancient city. One that he describes as being part of an attempt to reach the heavens. I think I know where the first part of our journey is gonna take us. We need to go to Greece, specifically. We need to take a trip to where Sparta used to reside.”
“Which means we need passports,” Xavier said out loud.
“Yep, it is the best place to start if we are gonna find anything about the tower.” Olivia than turned towards me. “Sarah, can you finish telling us what that scrolls actually says now? “
“Yep,” I said before taking a deep breath and starting to run my eyes across the text. Taking the words I needed from one and adding it to the original scroll I had started to translate. It was easy now! The words fit on the paper like a puzzle, my mind went from seeing nothing to seeing what I needed. I was cracking a puzzle, and I loved it! I finally finished and handed the finished piece to Xaiver to read.
“Good job,” he whispered as he patted me on the head. He cleared his throat before he started to speak in a soft voice.
“Glory be the rock of ages, glory be to the king on earth, and glory be to spirit. We as man lost our way, we mistook our mission, we angered him and he responded. What was once together is now broken, what was once one is now many. The Beast of war, the massive beast, a glorious beast that only he could make and control came, he destroyed our prideful tower, he tore us away from each other. We went from one prideful nation, to many humble ones, his glory is mighty, his hand is powerful. He dragged us like we were nothing, the waves moved as he walked, his body as thick as the trees. He left us far from where we once were, he left us far from where I once called home. Yet his way was good, he humbles the proud and helps us live. The beast has left, but we are home. The beast has broken, yet has not destroyed, the beast is like me, and like my people. The Lord has spoken, the Lord is mighty, The Lord is Good. I cannot build another tower like it,but my people will build something. My people will build what is humble, my people will build what is good. Long may he reign, and mighty will that Behemoth stand.
I am home. I will be built, I will protect the rod he left. I am chosen, I am chosen.
Amen.”
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The room had gone silent, it was so quiet that I wanted to drop a pin and see if we could hear it. The silence was broken when Daniel spoke up in a voice much softer than he normally had. He sounded scared but also excited. “So let me understand this… the behemoth really did destroy that tower, and moved these people across the ocean. Where was this found?”
“It was found in South America,” said Olive. “Specifically it was found near modern day Brazil. It had traces of jepei so my mo-” She stopped herself. “Lady Hearthstone found it while going through the collection that their president had. She bought it from him when it showed traces of jepei aura.”
“So what I can see,” Unique spoke up. “We have two starting places, following what that philosopher Adonis has recorded in what is now modern day Greece near the ruins of sparta. As well as head to Brazil to see if anything else can be found, maybe the first people there left something behind. Something that can maybe lead to this rod that he told to protect.”
“So we can either take one collective trip to these locations or perhaps divide and conquer.” Olivia suggested. “Well should we have our first team vote as Project Exodus. First should we either divide our team to head to those locations or go together as a team?”
It was exciting to be a part of a team vote, and it came down to a nearly unanimous decision to split the team into two groups. That then brought a problem that I didn’t see coming.
In order to do this right and to give each team the best chance of success on their mission. Myself, Unique, and Emily would go to Brazil. I was going to translate what we could find since it was what I did best, Emily would go if we ran into any more of this tongue language on the way, and Unique had knowledge in South American culture. Olivia would head to Greece where she was skilled in the culture there, Daniel would be going since he had good knowledge in the area as well, and Xaiver would be going with them according to what Olive had said . It was located deep in the waters and Xaiver was the best swimmer there was.
While we agreed to this, I couldn’t help but notice that Daniel and Unique shared the same sorrowful look that me and Xavier shared. We're gonna be split up for a while, and while I think I can handle that. I don’t know if my big brother could handle it. Without me he doubted his skills more than ever, and without him, I didn’t know if I could be the best me I could be.
I guess that was the price we had to pay to help gather information for our people. I wish I would have known what would have happened next.
I think we all would have liked that.
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