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Abigail stood. “This isn’t worth it. Let’s just take the ridgeline.”
The group angled across the sidehill and descended to the easier path. Once on the smooth, well-kept trail, Adam limped alongside Abigail while Watson and Kailyn trailed behind.
“Will she be okay?” Adam asked, looking over his shoulder.
Abigail glanced back as well. “She’s strong.”
She turned to Adam. Her brow arched and her cheekbones lifted, tugging at her slightly parted lips. Hope shone from her eyes like sunlight streaming through windows. Her expression was ... magical. His anxieties melted.
“So your ... weapon—it keeps you from having bad desires? Does that mean you never want fruit?”
“It’s like any weapon,” Abigail replied. “It only works when I use it. If I lay it down, I’m as vulnerable as anyone else.”
“What was the treasure?”
Abigail looked at him. “The treasure?”
He pulled the cottage piece from his pocket and ran his thumb across the words in his joy. “Your joy over the treasure drove you to give up everything to get it. If the treasure isn’t gold, what else is there?”
Her eyes brightened. “Great question.” She lifted her hand to her cheek. “I noticed when you mentioned my smile back in the lowlands, you looked at my scar. Let me tell you the story of how I got both the smile and the scar. It happened in the room of delights—in the cottage. It has a series of stone barriers down the center. The left side is the path of empty pleasure. The right, the way of painful happiness.”
“Wait, what?” Adam wrinkled his forehead. “Empty pleasure I get. But painful happiness?”
“Just listen,” she said. “When you enter the room, you have to choose a side because the floor moves and carries you forward.”
“So you’re forced to choose between empty pleasure and painful happiness? Which side did you pick?”
“Neither side sounded good to me, but I thought pleasure would be better than pain, so I went left.”
“And was it—”
“Adam, just listen,” she repeated, touching his shoulder. “The left side was amazing. Right away I thought I understood why it’s called the room of delights. I’ve enjoyed a lot of pleasures in life. This felt better than all of them. But once I passed the first barrier, the pleasure left me so suddenly that I collapsed on the floor. My energy was gone. Worse than that, hope was gone. The future seemed black as night. All I felt was suffocating despair.”
Her chin quivered, and she dropped her head. Then she drew a deep breath to continue.
“The floor carried me to the second barrier. I didn’t think I could handle any pain, so I chose the left side again. And again, sheer ecstasy.”
“Same result at the end?”
“Worse. This time when the pleasure faded, not only did I have no hope, but I lost my ability to enjoy happy memories. All I could remember were injustices, abuses, and decisions I regret. I was drowning in darkness. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t even have strength for that.”
“So did the floor stop then?”
“It never stopped. That’s the thing about that room. The floor just never ...” her words choked off.
“I was still down when I came to the third barrier. I couldn’t even get to my hands and knees. I decided to try the painful happiness side, so I rolled myself to the right. I wanted happiness, and I thought maybe the pain would be mild. It wasn’t. Blades cut into my flesh, blows from rods—I could feel bones breaking. But Adam, I felt like ... I was okay. Even through the blinding pain, hope returned. I could enjoy good memories. I was ... happy.”
Adam shook his head. “What do you mean? How could you be happy in that much pain?”
“It took several more times on both sides before I realized what was happening. Each time, no matter which side I chose, the Ruler stayed on the right side. When I went left, despair came because I wasn’t near him. So the pleasure didn’t matter. And when I went right, I was close to him, so the pain didn’t matter. That’s the treasure that’s worth so much more than all my possessions.”
“So you were in agonizing pain, but you were happy. You’re telling me the pain was somehow enjoyable?”
She shook her head with a vigor that made her bangs fly. “No! It was miserable. But being near the Ruler affected me more than the pain did. The purpose of that room was to teach me that refuge is better than relief.”
Abigail stopped walking and closed her eyes. “I didn’t notice at first, but if you look closely, you can see something rising from the Ruler’s skin—a kind of blue mist. And if you inhale even a whiff, it fills you with hope, strength, courage, gratitude, insight, and happiness—so much happiness that the pain ... it just doesn’t matter.”
Adam remembered the blue residue from the first time he felt the wind, and again at the rockslide. He glanced down at his foot. The substance ... or mist, or whatever it was had worn off.
“So you stayed right from then on?”
“Mostly. But there was one other time when I went left. I felt like I needed a break from all the pain. And I had the feeling that my strength and happiness would stay with me even if I went to the left just one more time.”
“Did it?”
“Not even a little. The pleasure this time wasn’t as intense, and the depression was worse. Even with the pleasure, I was miserable. Any effort to think happy thoughts only drove me deeper into suffocating darkness. I wanted to die.”
Tears formed in Adam’s eyes. He wasn’t sure if it was compassion for Abigail, or the awareness of how foreign that right side sounded to him, and how familiar the left. Not to the extremes Abigail described, but he now realized that most of his life had been lived in a dull gray version of that left side. Pleasures on the outside, but a low-grade fog of joyless emptiness within.
“So then you chose the right side next?”
“I couldn’t. I was so depressed I couldn’t move. I just curled up on the floor. But then the Ruler picked me up and carried me over to the right side. He held me until we reached the end of the room. By then the blue mist covered my arms and legs. My clothes were damp with it, and I was strong again.”
Abigail resumed walking. Adam stood for a moment, then caught up.
“What is it—the blue stuff?”
“You’ll see when the time is right,” she said with a smile full of mystery. “I don’t want to tell you now because I don’t know if you’re ready. On the day you see what it is, you must decide. And it will be a hard decision. A painful one. That day will be the best day or the worst day of your life. You’ll understand when you go through the cottage.”
“Will I have to go through that room?”
Abigail looked away, drew a breath, then turned back to Adam and smiled. “Not if you can learn the lesson ahead of time by listening to my story.”
“What lesson? That I’ll have to suffer pain all my life?”
“I’ll tell you what the Ruler told me when we got to the end. He said, ‘It won’t be like this every day. Sometimes you can have happy pleasure and painless happiness. But as long as I allow the lowlands to exist, life will often be a series of choices between empty pleasure and painful happiness. The pleasure always looks better at first, but it’s never worth the emptiness it causes.’”
The path took a turn to the west, leading up the ridge. Before taking the turn, they waited, watching the path behind until Watson and Kailyn came around a corner back into view.
“Have Watson and Kailyn ... gone through that room?”
“The room of delights? Yes, they have.”
They walked in silence. Then Abigail stopped and took Adam’s arm. “Listen. Don’t worry about the room of delights. For now, just think about the banquet hall. All you have to do there is sit, eat, and enjoy. Trust me—you’ll love it!”
She pointed. “Look. Do you see that clearing? When we get to that, we’ll be able to see the cottage.”
Images of the colors he’d seen from the pond flashed across his memory. His pulse raced. Would his childhood mirage prove real? Would he see the colors again? He picked up his pace.
Memories of the colors infused him with energy. He walked faster.
Soon, he could restrain himself no longer. “Abigail, I hope you don’t mind. I just want to ...” He broke into a run.
Thankful to be on a smooth, maintained trail, he flew up the path, forgetting his pain. He pushed faster, rounded a corner, and stopped cold.
A fallen tree blocked the path. It looked to be a live, healthy tree—the leaves still green.
What kind of force could have pulled this tree down and left the surrounding trees untouched? He studied the area, recalling Watson’s warning about the powers. He shuddered. The group was still well behind—why did it feel like someone was with him?
Climbing through the tangle of branches would mean a hundred stabs into his wounds. No way. He decided the best way around the tree would be on the downhill side of the path. He took a tentative step, testing a stone for stability.
*****
Invisible to Adam, Morax laid a grotesque hand on Adam’s mind. No, not that way. The uphill side is the better route.
As Adam transferred his weight, the evil spirit kicked the stone. It slid, but Adam’s hand caught a limb and he kept his feet.
*****
Maybe the uphill side would be a better route. Adam turned, crossed the path, and started up the steep bank on the right side of the path. With the help of some sturdy branches, he pulled himself up the steepest part, sending pebbles tumbling to the path.
The roots of the downed timber had been torn out of the ground as if by a hurricane and now jutted upward far above Adam’s head.
As he worked his way around the roots, something caught Adam’s eye. A bulging burlap sack lay tucked inside a bush a few yards from Adam. He stepped closer. He thought he smelled—.
“Adam, help me.” Abigail was trying to climb up around the tree and kept sliding backward. He maneuvered back around the roots to where he could reach her, anchored himself on the tree with one hand, and extended the other to Abigail. He pulled her up, then Kailyn and Watson. He decided not to mention the bag. They slid down the other side back to the path and continued on.
Adam wondered again about the tree. Something wasn’t right. What made it fall? And why had he felt so compelled to take the uphill side? And what made him look right at that bag in a spot none of the others noticed?
When they crested the ridge, the cottage came into view. Adam saw no colors, but what he did see took his breath away.