Changing the Prophecy Chapter Eight Episode 1

Chapter 8 Sense of Direction -- Episode 1

Jasper, Jack, and Doshmisi rode into the Passage Circle at dusk. The previous year, Sissrath’s Special Forces had burned the Passage Circle nearly to the ground. As Doshmisi gazed around in amazement, she saw how much of the circle the people had rebuilt in only one year. Her sister Maia’s buddies, the drummers, had begun to assemble in the central plaza for an evening of drumming. Several of them rushed over to greet Doshmisi as she rode in on her tiger. They immediately asked about Maia and Doshmisi was sorry to disappoint them when she told them that Maia had not come with her. “She’s in Faracadar somewhere,” she said, optimistically, “so you’ll probably hook up with her before long.” Thinking about the botched passage worried her. Had Maia and the others really made the passage?

The drummers smiled and tossed their heads so that their long dreadlocks or long braids (whichever they sported) bopped and popped about. “We’ll drum in her honor tonight and perhaps that will bring her closer to us,” one of them said.

“I feel certain it will,” Doshmisi agreed. The drummer’s words comforted her. After speaking with the drummers, she turned to follow Jasper and Jack through the plaza and toward the side of town nearest to the beaches, where their friends Ginger and Cinnamon lived. Ginger and Cinnamon and their many daughters had once had a large, beautiful house with a spectacular view of the ocean. But the fire had destroyed it. In eager anticipation, Doshmisi rode up the hill to where the house used to stand. She hoped to see it rebuilt, like so many of the other houses she had passed. To her delight, she discovered a periwinkle-blue house with coffee-brown trim in the exact same location. It was not as big as its predecessor, and the plants in the yard were small compared to the mature flowering shrubs and large sage and rosemary that had grown there before the fire. The fig tree had survived and it greeted her with an abundance of lovely new leaves.

Doshmisi hopped off her tiger and bounded to the door, where she knocked twice before opening it and calling, “Ginger! Cinnamon! Anyone home?”

Cinnamon appeared in the kitchen doorway at the end of the hall. She wore a pair of sturdy overalls and she wiped her hands on a towel. Her face lit up at the sight of Doshmisi and she called to her family to come see who had arrived as she ran to embrace her friend. Doshmisi and Cinnamon laughed with pleasure.

“You rebuilt it so fast,” Doshmisi remarked.

“Well, we had many hands applied to the task,” Cinnamon explained. “And of course our men came home when you freed them from the prison at Big House City. Although Ginger and I have still not decided yet whether the help they provide outweighs the extra work they create for us,” Cinnamon joked.

“Hey, hey,” Cinnamon’s husband boomed behind her, “none of that slander. You missed me when I was gone. Admit it. You know you did.” He gave Doshmisi a hug, shook hands with Jasper, and then put his arm around his wife’s waist affectionately.

Doshmisi smiled at the sight of the two of them together. They had spent many years apart while Sissrath imprisoned Cinnamon’s husband for resisting the enchanter’s rule. “Where’s Ginger?” she asked. “And the girls?”

“The girls went to the plaza for the drumming,” Cinnamon’s husband replied.

“And Ginger isn’t feeling well,” Cinnamon informed her.

“What’s the matter? Maybe I can help,” Doshmisi offered.

“She went to lay down in her room. Come, I’ll give you the grand tour of our new house and take you to see her,” Cinnamon said.

“How about some chocolate ice cream for the intuit?” Cinnamon’s husband suggested to Jack, with a twinkle in his eye.

Jack bobbed up and down in the air energetically and echoed gleefully, “Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.”

“Maybe some for the guide too?” Jasper asked.

“I think that can be arranged,” Cinnamon’s husband agreed with a chuckle.

“I’ll go settle the tigers and then I’ll be right back,” Jasper said.

Doshmisi followed Cinnamon upstairs. The previous house, before it burned, had been considerably larger, with an open center and a balcony that went all the way around the inside of the second floor. This house had no such thing. The stairs led to a second floor hallway. Cinnamon went to the first room on the left and knocked on the door, which she then opened a crack as she said, “You’ll never guess who just arrived. Doshmisi. She travels with Jasper and the intuit. Can we come in?”

A rustle of clothing and bedding whispered inside the room and then Ginger replied, “Yes, come on in.”

Doshmisi followed Cinnamon into the bedroom. The sun had set and night was falling quickly. Through the open window, Doshmisi could hear the waves washing on the beach in the distance. She loved Ginger and Cinnamon’s house. Both the old one and now the new one. They had the sort of house that felt cozy and safe, the sort of house that you could lean into softly and rest for days, dozing in bed, reading, eating soup, and not worrying about Sissrath plotting to ruin people’s lives and hurt whales.

Doshmisi held her hands out to her friend. “Ginger, what’s wrong? I have the herbal with me.” Even as she said these words, Doshmisi could feel the anxiety mounting within her as she wondered if the herbal would behave properly or do something strange and puzzling again instead.

Ginger took Doshmisi’s hands in hers happily. Her eyes sparkled and she didn’t appear sick. “I feel ridiculous,” Ginger told Doshmisi. “I have some foolish kind of rash on my stomach. I can’t tell if it’s an infection or an allergic reaction to something or a symptom of something else. I’ve been taking a homeopathic remedy to keep it from itching. I had planned to see a healer tomorrow because it won’t go away. My skin is so sensitive that I don’t like to cover it so I’ve been up here by myself with my belly bare, trying to get some relief.”

“Well, let’s see what the herbal says.” Doshmisi unbuckled the front of the carry case and removed the enchanted book. As she lifted the herbal, she tried not to register her anxiety in her face or her movements, even though she wondered what the herbal would do when she tried to use it. “Do you mind if I have a look at the rash?” she asked.

Ginger peeled back the blankets and lifted her shirt. Angry whitish-yellow bumps covered her stomach. Doshmisi recognized the rash. She had seen one like it the previous year when she worked in the clinic behind Ginger and Cinnamon’s house. She remembered what the herbal had said to do about it, thank goodness, because if the herbal misbehaved then she could still treat Ginger. But she wanted to see what the herbal would say if she tried to use it. So she placed it on Ginger’s chest and waited for it to open.

Doshmisi felt a rush of relief when the herbal actually opened to a page like it was supposed to do. She took a rubber band from her pocket and put it around the book to hold her place. Then she read the page and her heart sank. Only a few sentences of information appeared on the page and they had nothing whatsoever to do with Ginger’s rash. The herbal read: There once was a land fueled by oil. The people of the land failed to think ahead. They resisted evolution. When their oil started to run out, they killed each other to possess more of the remains. They failed to seek new ways or to build new paradigms. They were not adaptable like the insects. Insects survive. The people will vanish and insects will inherit the land. Cockroaches are adaptable. They like to eat grease, but if no grease presents itself, then cockroaches will eat something else.

That was all it said on the page that opened for Doshmisi and she could not force the book to turn to the next page. She closed it gently and hoped that the rubber band would hold her place and allow her to study the page more carefully later. The herbal was transforming itself, but what was it transforming itself into? Ginger sensed Doshmisi’s alarm caused by the mysterious story in the book, but she mistook it for alarm at the problem of the rash.

“Is it dangerous?” Ginger asked anxiously.

“It’s nothing serious, is it?” Cinnamon chimed in.

“No, no,” Doshmisi responded. “It’s not serious. It’s kind of icky, though. It’s not an infection or an allergy. It’s a fungus. You can make it go away by creating a hostile environment that kills it off. I’ll write down the recipe for a paste that you must spread on your stomach for the next few days.”

“A fungus?!” Ginger repeated in horror, as she wrinkled her nose. “Ewww. How did I get something as disgusting as that?”

“Probably from the garden,” Doshmisi told her. She knew that Ginger spent long hours working in the fields and gardens. “It might have happened if you were lying on your stomach in the dirt. It’ll go away fast with the paste. I saw the same ailment on several gardeners here last year. It’s actually pretty common.”

“Come, let’s go mix up the paste so Ginger can start getting better,” Cinnamon suggested. “I’ll be back soon,” she assured her sister as she headed toward the door.

Doshmisi stood, replaced the herbal in the carry case, and followed Cinnamon from the room. She joined Jasper and Jack in the kitchen, where Jack had his head buried in a bowl of ice cream. She was distracted by her concern about the bizarre story appearing in the herbal. She didn’t want to talk about it, though, so she forced herself to behave as normally as possible.

“Do you think it wise to feed an intuit chocolate right before bed?” Doshmisi asked Cinnamon’s husband. He laughed and replied, “He might be an intuit, but he’s also a little boy and he deserves the opportunity to be a child now and then.”

Doshmisi agreed with that. Intuits didn’t often get to play and have fun like other children, and they burned with an intense energy that burned their life right up at a young age. Sonjay and Denzel had made skateboards for some of the intuits, including Jack, the previous year. As it turned out, when intuits stood on skateboards they turned into hoverboards and intuits, especially Jack, were exceptional skaters (or hoverers, as it were).

“So where are you headed?” Cinnamon asked Doshmisi and Jasper.

“To the North Coast,” Jasper informed her. “Sissrath has something going on up there and we want to find out what exactly that is.”

“We heard that he sent Compost and an army to lay siege to Big House City,” Cinnamon’s husband said. “I’ve considered getting together a group to ride over there to see what we can do about it. But I couldn’t get a message through to the Crystal Communication Dome. Do you know what happened at the Dome?”

“We came through the Dome Circle on our way here,” Jasper replied. “Sissrath’s Special Forces shut the Dome down. He left them there to guard it and they have terrorized the people of the circle, killing some of them. They have a lethal weapon.”

“The weapon is called a gun. We have guns in the Farland,” Doshmisi chimed in. “The guns shoot a metal bullet that can kill or wound a person instantly. I don’t think you should ride to Big House City or the Dome until we figure out why Sissrath went to the North Coast and what he has concealed there.”

“Doshmisi thinks he created the siege to distract everyone from this project of his at the North Coast,” Jasper added. “We intend to ride up there first thing in the morning.”

“In that case, you could use a good night’s sleep,” Cinnamon suggested and Doshmisi suddenly realized that she was indeed exhausted from the long day of travel. She wrote out the recipe and directions for the paste for Ginger’s rash and then followed Cinnamon to a guest room where she collapsed into a cozy bed and fell into a deep sleep.