Chapter 65 - Growing Up and Letting Go
I came back a few days later, in the middle of the week. I just wanted to check in on Kara and Lila to be a part of something that was without issues seeing as my life was only spiraling. I arrived at the large room to find Tarne sitting on the couch in silence.
“Hey,” I said. She looked over, frowned, and turned away. “You ok?”
“They’re at it again,” she said. I worried that she meant they were having relationship issues, but a soft moan entered my ears from upstairs. I looked at Tarne, who was red in the face embarrassed. “Can you make them stop?”
“It’s a natural thing,” I explained. “But it would be hard to understand at your age. Give it some time, you’ll understand.”
“And then it wont bother me anymore?”
“Well, then it will bother you more,” I said. “But you’ll understand and look for something similar with someone.”
“Who?”
“Good question,” I said. “Probably someone you haven’t met yet. Once you leave this place, you will meet countless people, and some will be fun to be around. At a certain age, there is this thing that happens to humans of my world where their bodies go through a change that allows them to create life. This ends up being really annoying because society forces your changes to be public with others of your age.”
“It would be better if they gave you two years off to change into an adult before forcing you to get along with others,” Tarne suggested.
“That would make sense,” I said. “But the thing is, the timing isn’t the same for everyone.”
“That’s why two years,” Tarne argued.
“It might take a bunch more,” I said. “When it hits, it hits like a truck, but sometimes factors prevent this thing called puberty from activating until middle teen years, or even later. I have to go, but I do have a quick solution. Here.” I created a pair of noise canceling earmuffs, then jumped up to disappear out of the library.
break
I came back the next day, with more time to spare. There was a large difference when waking up after a full night’s rest. Intrusive thoughts often made sleeping difficult, not to mention the fear of being caught in a nightmare. There was a great deal of things to fear with an overactive imagination, but mainly the beings that lived in the darkness of everyone’s minds, the Garavand.
I had written the first story of the series for them, where Lila expanded the series to countless books all lost twice over. The mentioned creatures of the dark were sourced upon human beings, created by reconstituting what the human body contained. A true Garavand was more of a particle, a clump of thoughts linked by hives. In a way, they were the equivalent of nanobots that my reality was developing, but they were organic and alive, with a central particle of the hive sharing knowledge of all past Garavand that came before to every new.
I shook off the terrifying idea, and stepped into the library in time to see Tarne falling from a hole in the ceiling. I caught her with a wave of my hand in creationism only to find her older than yesterday. As her feet touched down, she said nothing, only ran off upstairs to the attic without a second lost. I floated up through the hole instead to find a small bit of chaos on the dance floor.
The music was blaring loudly, and the lights danced around. The whole place was filled with Trevits, little purple pygmen of the Secear dimension from a few stories I found there. The music was old-fashioned disco, but the little guys were dancing wildly without a care. They also threw tiny purple-glowing explosives all over the place at certain moments of swelling music. Lila was among them, dancing, but Kara and now teenage Tarne were fighting them off.
Rather than join them, I did three things in the same second. I turned off the music, turned off the lights, and froze all the Trevits in place with a snap of my fingers. The silence and darkness that ensued lasted only a few seconds as I went to turn on the ballroom lights.
“Hey,” I said. “You guys threw a party?”
“No,” Kara said. “Tarne accidentally opened a portal to Secear. She was testing her creationism out, and somehow managed Secear of all places. Lila closed it, but not before a large group of these guys flooded through. Before we had a moment to tame them, they found the ballroom, and Lila got them dancing. It was fine until they started destroying things with their Ekha.
“Aww, why’d you stop it?” Lila asked, flying over from the center of the room.
“They were blowing the place up, Lils,” Kara said.
“All in good fun, Kay,” Lila said.
“Tarne got caught up in an explosion, and fell through the floor,” Kara added. Lila’s smile waned, and her upset face made an appearance. With a swift motion, she knocked all the Trevits into the air, then launched them at high speed toward the wall. Right before they impacted, a portal appeared to the purple place where time worked differently. Once they were gone, Lila sealed the portal and walked over to Tarne to check on her.
“So, Secear, huh?” I asked. “Where did she get that idea?”
“If you’re suggesting it was something I said, don’t,” Kara said, crossing her arms. “I try to keep my distance from Tarne.” I grimaced, worrying.
“Why?”
“She’s hitting that age where it’s best to keep a distance,” Kara said. I sighed in relief. “What was that for?”
“I thought…” I started. “Never mind. Yes, she is a teenager now. Curious thing, isn’t it? Time doesn’t exist here, so she must be growing up by her own creationism, right?” Kara shrugged.
“I don’t know much about creationism,” Kara said. “But seeing as she was once you, she does have power where you have power. Which begs the question of what happens when this place disappears.”
“Maybe it’ll end up just like before,” I said. “You, Lila, and Tarne take the part of my reality core and secede from my reality as a bubble outside existence, another library sanctuary that you can come back to with your Keir. How did Rebecca get along, by the way? Have you been to her place a lot?”
“I was there when she died,” Kara said. “Passed away peacefully surrounded by the people who loved her. She’s gone, buried in her reality. She’s no longer a part of you, but she lived quite a life after she left you.” I was happy, and sad at the same time.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “Is that a good way to finish this up?”
“Sealing the library in a bubble of your reality core divided out of your reality core by skillful claws of Fyntn the Third?” Kara asked, rhetorically. “Maybe. There is always an end to things, huh?”
“That’s pretty much what the Infinity Void is,” I said. “And yet, it’s the start of so many ideas in the minds of so many. It’s such a beautiful circle of life. People go through life experiencing parts of their life and ideas from the void, only to find their own connections within the void to source into original ideas of their own. In that way, it becomes original, even if the base is a collection of cliches.”
“Don’t forget the Rahin,” Kara said, “The balancers of chaos in the Infinity Void. Maybe one day, you will get eaten by them and become a void leech, too. And then you can cling onto an empty shell just like countless before you.” I felt a wave of tension release as she finished that sentence. For just a moment there, I thought that she remembered everything, that the pillar of light she was standing within when I took her memories, was sending information to James Denizen AI for retrieval after. Kara looked confused for a moment.
“What’s up?” She asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, and laughed it off. “Just you telling me that one day I’ll be eaten by the literal chaos fish and pooped out back to the raw existence felt like you were angry at me.”
“I am angry,” Kara said. “But I also want to thank you. I haven't been feeling so good ever since… ever since James died. I didn’t want to protect anything anymore. I gave myself up to the Keir duties, and started cleaning up those individuals who spread chaos in their realities. That led me to Lila, and that led you to her, and you changed her. I found someone who could keep me grounded for the first time in a while, and with Tarne, we became a family. It was like I was with James, Johnny, and Danielle again. It is like that, I mean. So, thank you.” I smiled, and walked up to hug her, but she leaned back for a moment before I was too close. I waited with my eyes closed until her arms wrapped around me. Once we parted ways, I smiled and exited by vanishing into tiny green sparkles.
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