Ivory Kingdom

I hate them. I hate them all.
 “Ahh!” I screamed in frustration, as I tripped over a hidden log beneath the dead autumn leafs.
I hit the ground hard, but was up in seconds because I knew that they would be looking for me. Running through the brushes I burst out into a field of wild flowers that my mother and brother, Joey and I had found the year we had moved into a small wooden cabin in the Rocky Mountains. The field had been our secret, but past even this beautiful field of flowers was a well hidden cave that only I had known about and hadn’t had the time to show Joey any of it. Actually Luna was the one who had led me to find the hidden space, Luna is my very intelligent pet ferret, and she had shown me only a small part of the cave by guiding me with her brilliant blue eyes and her snow white fur which is barely visible in the dark.
 I heard a crackle of leafs directly behind me and then I felt small claws digging into by back and up onto my shoulder. I smiled, Luna was always with me no matter how bad the situation had become.
 “Crystal!” my mother hollered sadness and fear coated her voice, from a distance to close for comfort.
 She was too close, way too close, so I pumped my legs harder and ran for my life until I felt like my lungs were about to explode from lack of oxygen. Finally we reached the cave entrance that long ago had been marked, the cave was one that was three-fourths buried and only a small hole remained for me to squeeze through. Luna leaped off of my shoulder to block the cave entrance with her tiny body. She let out a furious screeching noise and every time that I tried to take a step forward she would jump at me and hiss.
 “Crystal!”
 “Luna, get out of my way. Now!” I said as I scooped her up and slide down into the cave right as my mother came bursting through the tree line behind me.
 “Crystal! Please come home! Crystal!”
 Standing there I really considered turning back, but I refused to go back to people like her or any of them. So I turned away from the entrance, my mom, my home, and raced off into the darkness of the cave. Luna jumped down from my arms and tried to block my path several times, but every time I just stepped over her and continued on my path. After a few hundred feet Luna stopped trying to block my path and just followed along grumbling and hissing quietly behind me.
 “We have to keep going Luna. This tunnel has to let out sometime.”
 On and on we walked, but on and on the tunnel seemed to go, never ending just turning every hundred feet or so. I turned what seemed like the millionth corner and walked into a small room. On the left side of the cave was a lantern hanging from a peg in the wall and the rest of the room seemed to be barren.  Then I face the immediate problem, there were two staircases leading in the opposite directions, up and down. I stood there trying to make sense of the choice I had to make, up would lead me to the top of the mountain and down could lead me to the bottom or a dead end. But why would the light be hanging from the left side, why was the lantern even here? I had a gut feeling that if someone had placed that lantern there, there must be a way out from the bottom. As my feet started towards the descending stairs Luna jumped onto the stairs leading up and started to reprimand me for choosing to go down instead of up. Instead of standing there listening to Luna having a hissy fit I started down the stairs one foot after the other and Luna came flying down the steps trying to keep up with me, spitting and hissing the whole way.
 Down, down the stairs seemed to go on forever into a black oblivion. I didn’t think that they would ever end, they just kept on going. That’s when my foot stubbed into something on the stairs and I came down them the hard way. Head or heels I rolled down the last ten steps and slammed into the rock floor. Slowly I took inventory of myself and felt my bone in my right ankle sticking out at an awkward angle. I could taste the metallic blood into my mouth, warm liquid running down from my nose and over my legs and arms. Luna started squealing and jumped onto my chest sniffing at my face and then she stuck her nose into my ear.
 “Stop it.” I said with a pained smile on my face.
 Gingerly I stood up and tried to apply pressed on my ankle and it held, but only barely. Using the wall as my lean-to I slowly made my way back up the stairs until I felt the object on the floor that I had tripped over. I sat down and felt around with my hands and found a booted foot then a clothed leg and arm, and then finally I reached up and felt the bone, the skull of a human, a dead human. I let out a blood curtailing scream loud enough to wake the dead. I tried to get away from the body, but my hand must have gotten hooked onto something because as I feel down the stairs again, so did the decaying body. When we landed on the floor the body was pinning me to the ground.  With the last burst of energy I had left I rolled the body off of me.
 “Get ahold of yourself it’s just a body, it can’t hurt you.” I tried to reason with myself.
 Suddenly from the top of the stairs came a roar that sounded like a million suffering people. Then a faint green light appeared in the darkness just above the outline of the dead human. I shook my head once, twice, three times, but I knew that it was real and that it was not a figment of my imagination. Slowly the light grew brighter until I could see my surrounding more clearly. The light seemed to be radiating from underneath the body in front of me. Carefully I turned the body over to find a white ivory sword strapped to John Does’ belt and a solid ivory bow strapped to his back, but no quiver or arrows. I also found that the origin of the strange green pulse was radiating from the spiraling symbols on the palms of John Doe. Ever so gently I traced my fingers around and around the spiral on his left hand until I felt a sharp sting and a sudden wave of emotions. A faint voice in my head told me to snatch up the weapons, and to run like a bat out of hell. Still I could feel my skin peeling away as if being burned with the hottest of flames and I could hear all the screams of its victims. But what was the it I was thinking of? As quick as I could I untied the sword for his belt onto mine and then flung the bow over my shoulders. Then the thought hit me, where do I run and what from? The light from the stairs started to grow brighter and the air grew into a wave of radiating heat that made it hard to breath.  Luna was hissing and spitting wildly, running trying to get my attention as I watched a hung wall of white flames flying down the stairs before me.
 “Shit.”
 All thoughts disappeared and off I ran after Luna as fast as I could without crashing to the ground in pain. There weren’t any spaces to dodge into to hide from the fiery wall. Luna started to lag behind, running out of energy so I reached down and scooped her up into my arms. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hid, so on I ran, but not fast enough to outpace the wall of flames reaching towards me, trying to envelope me. Looking back at the flames I knew they would be on me at any given moment. With a loud smack I ran right into a very solid rock wall.
 “No, no, no!” I cried out in fear and anger, “This can’t be it, it can’t just end!”
All along the wall were old Indian paintings and one set of hand prints pressed an inch into the wall.
 “What’ll we do, Luna? What do we do now?” I asked senselessly.
Shaking and shivering Luna stood up on her hind legs and placed her front paws into the hand indentions upon the wall, and then she turned her head towards me and chirped. From what I could tell she wanted   me to put my hands into the ones on the wall. Luna scurried up to my shoulder and chirped in my ear, as if encouraging me. I could feel the heat pulsing hotter and growing closer. I placed my hands into the indentions and found them to have plenty of room for my own hands; it was like these were the hand prints of a man. A brilliant line of green stretched out along the wall growing into patterns upon more patterns. Growing and creating a liquid tapestry of a male warrior carrying a sword at his side and a bow strapped to his back. The once solid wall had a ripple effect and turned to liquid grey. I reached out with a shaky hand and ran my fingers along and into the water, swishing and sloshing it with my fingers; the heat grew into an inferno. Blood seeping from my cuts, sweat dripping from my brow, I took one step forward into the watery wall and then I jumped the rest of the way into the liquid wall. Time seemed to slow and stand still, I felt like I was floating in zero gravity, but underwater were I could breathe. With a sudden force, a fast current thrust me out and onto a freezing marble floor. I felt my head crack against the surface of the memorizing marble, then nothing.
  I was floating in darkness or was the darkness floating around me.
 “Crystal, Crystal, come on.” Joey whispered insistently into my ear.
 It was July so we always left the windows open to catch the warm summer breeze. It was also about midnight and Joey and I always snuck out every night to the field of moonflowers.
 “Ow!” Joey yelped.
 “Are you all right Joey?!” I asked worried
“I’m fine, just stepped on. . . well I don’t know what I stepped on, but that doesn’t matter. Come on.” He continued to pester.
 “Fine lets’ go.”
 So quietly we put on our shoes and tiptoed out into the hallway, down the stairs, and out into the night time wilderness leaving our adoptive mom snoring behind us. Once we figured that we were far enough away from the house Joey started to laugh and shout with excitement. Just seeing him laugh brought a smile to my face; very rarely did Joey smile or utter a laugh because he is so tired and sick. Joey had cancer and the doctor had said that Joey only had a few weeks to live and that they couldn’t cure him. So instead of keeping him in the hospital cell room our adoptive mother brought him home where he would be happy for his last couple of days.
 It had only seemed like a week had gone by when Joey had fallen out of his chair at lunch and started to seize up. His eyes rolled back into his head, a dull moan escaped from his mouth, and he just kept on shaking tensely as I screamed his name, telling him he was not leaving, that he would get better. Susan had called the ambulance, but before they could arrive Joey stopped seizing and didn’t move ever again, his chest did not take in any air. He just laid there a hollow empty shell of my only family. It’s weird how you look at someone who woke up happy and joyful, running and playing only hours ago; then to see them go from great to horrible and now they’re gone in a blink of an eye. I was still holding him in my lap, cradling him close to me when the ambulance finally arrived and I never would have let him go if they hadn’t pried out of my hands and taken for me. That day broke me; I clammed up to all but Luna. They buried him in a little cemetery at the base of the mountain from what Susan told me. I didn’t go, I had already said good-bye and I didn’t want to see the sadness and pity that the people would feel. I don’t want anyone’s pity, I don’t need it; I need my brother.
 Another piercing roar reached my ears as I lay still on the freezing marble floor. My eyes snapped open and squeezed shut from the sudden force of white light and a killer head ache. I’d never in my life felt such pain, creeping and stabbing me from my ankles to my spinning head. I could still feel the heat radiating through the wall in the marble chamber. Luna was again perched on my chest staring down at me, while licking my face with her rough tongue. Gingerly sitting I noticed that I had a death grip on the ivory sword at my waist. All around me giant marble pillars reach up into a ceiling that was masked by soft white clouds. The creamy marble floors grew warm to touch.  And a  vibration shook  the entire room as the blazing wall of molten fire fell through the liquid portal.