Changing the Prophecy Chapter Twelve

Chapter 12 In the Dungeon

During their first few days of confinement in their cell in the dungeon, the captives developed a routine built around when the Corportons brought them meals. The food tasted surprisingly good and it appeared twice a day. The Corportons showed no interest in the captives and left them to their own devices, which suited them fine since they had plenty to keep them busy.

In the morning, before breakfast, Crumpet worked with Sonjay on practicing clearing his mind in preparation for conducting enchantments. After breakfast, Reggie insisted that everyone join him in his exercises. He had a work-out routine he did to stay fit. Bayard flew around the cell madly as the others did sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, and danced to old R&B and Soul music that Reggie played on an ancient vinyl record player. Overweight and out of shape, Buttercup had difficulty with the exercise routine, but she valiantly tried to keep up. Sonjay enjoyed it. Without the exercise, he would have gone stir-crazy. He didn’t have the sort of disposition that leant itself to sitting still all day long.

After their work-out, Buttercup gave Sonjay lessons in the basic operation of enchantments while Crumpet studied the Mystical Book with Reggie. They received no lunch, but they had enough food left over from breakfast to munch on during the day, and always plenty of fruit for Bayard. In the early evening, their jailers brought them a large dinner. After they ate, they brainstormed ideas for making their escape. Reggie had a stationary bicycle and he would bike a mile on it every day before dinner and then Sonjay would bike a couple miles on it after dinner. Behind a screen there was a small bathroom with a sink, shower, and toilet. Reggie had negotiated a fairly comfortable living situation, which had made his life in the dungeon tolerable. The captives could tell the time by the nature of the light that entered the cell through a small window high up in the stone wall. They could not see out of it, but they relished the little sliver of sunshine it allowed into the cell.

At the end of the day, they talked and told stories, often until well after dark. Reggie could never get enough stories about his other children from Sonjay. Crumpet and Buttercup filled Sonjay in on things that had happened since his last visit to Faracadar. Reggie told the others everything he could think of that might be useful about Sissrath and the Corportons, and he told them about his years in confinement. Crumpet listened intently to everything Reggie had to say about the Mystical Book. Sonjay related for his father the adventures from his previous visit to Faracadar the year before. Reggie also wanted to hear about the world he had left behind and what was going on there. Sometimes, if Sonjay felt in the right mood, he would tell his father about his mother.

The restrictions on the use of enchantment within the cell made it impossible for Sonjay to actually attempt a real enchantment. He would follow the instructions provided by Buttercup or Crumpet to produce an enchantment, thinking all the right thoughts and concentrating as they instructed him, but nothing ever happened because of the restrictions within the cell, which frustrated him. He couldn’t tell if he had done the enchantment correctly or not.

Unbeknownst to his teachers, he secretly harbored the idea of locomotaporting out of the prison. Each night, Sonjay waited for the others to fall asleep, and then he concentrated on locomotaporting. He figured that he would have to teach himself how to do it, since Crumpet and Buttercup didn’t have the special skill needed for it. He feared that he would eventually transport part of himself somewhere and not have the ability to get back to the rest of himself left behind. He discovered by trial and error that he could locomotaport despite the restrictions on enchantment in the cell. He had no idea why that might be the case and he decided against discussing it with his cellmates. One night, he managed to lift a phantom version of himself out of his body by imagining his mind leaving the rest of him behind. He floated the phantom Sonjay, which looked like the real Sonjay but had no weight to it, up to the window of the cell.

As he looked out into the inky-blue night sky, spattered with the colorful bright stars of Faracadar, he attempted to touch the bars on the window, but his hand passed right through them as if made of fog. He realized that he had the power to sail out of the window if he chose, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet. He looked down and saw his body stretched out on the rug on the floor of the cell and he didn’t feel confident that he could get back to his body if he left the room. He would have to overcome his fear and make a leap of faith eventually if he wanted to succeed at locomotaporting. The phantom self drifted back down to his body and merged with it. Bayard eyed him silently from his usual nighttime perch on Reggie’s desktop. Bayard’s silence made Sonjay even more uneasy. When a chatterbox of a parrot says nothing, it can set a person’s teeth on edge.

The very next day after Sonjay had nearly locomotaported out of the cell, Crumpet broached the subject that weighed most heavily on their minds. “It’s all good that we make use of our time in this cell, but we need to get out of here if we want to help save Faracadar,” he said.

“What do you have in mind?” Reggie asked.

“I need to see out,” Crumpet replied. Reggie and Sonjay looked up at the little window and Crumpet followed their line of sight. “Not like that,” Crumpet said. “I need to see what’s going on elsewhere in Faracadar, and that’s your department, Prophet.”

“I’ve shown you enough about the Mystical Book for you to understand that it doesn’t work that way,” Reggie reminded Crumpet. “The vision will manifest what it chooses and will not obey a directive from me.”

“Whatever it chooses to be important will be worth seeing. I think you should summon a prophetic vision,” Crumpet announced, as he crunched on a deep-fried goose-chicken eyeball, which was one of Sonjay’s favorite treats from Faracadar. His siblings did not share his tastes and they refused to eat the things.

“I might not succeed in summoning a vision. I can issue a call, but often I get no reply,” Reggie warned.

“At least give it a try,” Buttercup encouraged him. “Put out the call and see what happens.”

Reggie shrugged. He took a candle off a shelf, set it on his desk, and lit it. Crumpet sat down expectantly on the edge of Reggie’s bed and crossed his arms.

Reggie held a bundle of sage above the flame until it caught and then set it in a bowl. The scented smoke drifted upward in a steady stream as the sage bundle smoldered. Reggie opened the Mystical Book, found the page he wanted, and placed his hand gently on the page. “By fire, earth, air, water,” he intoned softly, “by music, metal, trees, whales, and truth…” His voice dropped and his words became unintelligible. He closed his eyes in concentration and rocked back and forth. Suddenly, flashes of rainbow colors shot out in all directions from his hand where it rested on the book.

“Awesome,” Sonjay said quietly. The color flashes of green, red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, and pink banged against the walls and shattered into fragments of brilliant color that bounced around the cell. They pinged against Sonjay’s skin in pleasant tingly bursts. Bayard attempted (without success) to catch them in his beak and eat them. Buttercup giggled. Oblivious to the light show, Reggie drifted upward out of his chair and floated above the desk, while his eyes remained closed and his hand stretched out in front of him as if it still touched the surface of the Mystical Book.

Bayard flew to the top of the cell, chasing fragments of colorful light. Sonjay observed his father floating in the air. After a few minutes, the color-flash fragments disappeared and Reggie floated back down. His hand returned to the page and he returned to the chair. His eyes fluttered open.

“That was hecka cool,” Sonjay told Reggie.

“What was?” Reggie asked.

“The colors, the light, the floating. You know,” Sonjay said.

Reggie cast him a puzzled look.

“Whoa,” Buttercup said. “You don’t know, do you? You’ve never seen what happens when you summon a prophecy from the book, have you?” Buttercup asked Reggie.

“What to do you mean?” Reggie asked.

“You made these blasts of colorful light fly all over the cell and they broke up when they hit the walls,” Sonjay informed his father.

“They shattered and bounced all over the place,” Crumpet said.

“And they bounced off of us,” Buttercup added.

“And made our skin go all tingly where they hit it. Bayard tried to eat the bits of colorful light,” Sonjay told his father, “which was pretty funny.”

“Funny,” Bayard repeated. “Funny, funny.”

“While the bits of colorful light flew around, with Bayard chasing them, you floated up in the air for a few minutes. Then you floated back down into your chair,” Sonjay concluded.

“Interesting,” Reggie responded to the account of the events surrounding his prophetic reading.

“What did you see?” Crumpet demanded.

“What did I see?” Reggie echoed. “I saw a group of children heading to a garden outside of Big House City. I think one of the children was Denzel, because he resembled me, and one was Maia, because she resembled Debbie. Does Maia wear her hair in a lot of braids?”

“Sure enough,” Sonjay replied. “Did she carry a drum slung over her shoulder?”

“She did,” Reggie continued, “and the boy who looked like me when I was young wore a flannel shirt and he had a big backpack. I also saw a girl with glasses and one long braid going down her back and another girl with straight black hair and I saw a little creature with orange hair all over its body. It might have been a geebaching, although I have never seen one in real life (only in books) so I don’t know for sure.”

“Those girls sound like Princess Honeydew and Maia’s friend Elena,” Sonjay informed him. “I wonder where Dosh is.”

“I wonder if the little creature with the orange hair could really be a geebaching,” Buttercup said.

“But the most important thing,” Reggie continued, with a new sense of urgency, “is that the children I saw are about to attempt to enter Big House City through a passageway that runs under the garden. The city is under siege. There is a large army at its gates. Your sister and brother and their friends are about to sneak into Big House City through a secret underground passageway. They plan to try to bring people out of the besieged city.”

“Trouble,” Bayard squawked. “Trouble, trouble.”

“Yes, trouble indeed,” Reggie agreed with Bayard. “The prophetic reading indicated that their plan won’t work. If they follow that path they will become trapped inside the city with the others. The result has not become fixed. If they can be stopped then a different thread of events will occur.”

“They can’t possibly believe they can sneak everyone out,” Crumpet said.

“And they can’t possibly sneak enough food in for the entire population of Big House City,” Buttercup pointed out.

“Or water,” Reggie added.

“They have water,” Buttercup informed him. “Deep wells inside the city provide water. But food must be running low by now.”

“The more immediate problem is that my children could become trapped inside this soon-to-be-starving city,” Reggie reminded them anxiously.

“What can we do about that?” Crumpet complained. “We’re locked in a dungeon.”

Sonjay cleared his throat self-consciously. “I might be able to do something.”

The others slowly turned to look at him appraisingly.

“I could maybe locomotaport there,” Sonjay said in a quiet voice. The others stared at him in stunned silence. “I’ve been practicing. Every night. I can leave my body, but I haven’t left the cell yet. The ban on enchantments doesn’t seem to prevent locomotaporting.”

“Interesting. Locomotaporting must be in a unique class of enchantment,” Crumpet conjectured.

“If you leave, can you get back?” Reggie asked.

Sonjay’s voice quavered as he replied, “I don’t know.” He turned to Buttercup and asked, “What happens if I can’t find my way back to my body?”

“Disembodied impairment,” Buttercup answered. She winced.

“That does not sound good.” Sonjay grimaced.

“Not good,” Bayard observed.

“You said it feather-top,” Buttercup agreed.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll call you back,” Crumpet said. “We’ll help you.”

“How come he can locomotaport from within the walls of this cell?” Reggie wondered aloud.

“No one has had the ability to locomotaport since Hazamon died. It’s not your normal kind of enchantment. Sissrath would not have even thought of preventing it, even if he could do so,” Crumpet speculated.

“Show us,” Buttercup demanded.

“What? Now?” Sonjay stammered.

“You betcha. Right now,” Buttercup insisted.

Sonjay obediently stretched out on the rug where he usually slept at night. His fingers trembled slightly as he placed his hands on his chest. He closed his eyes. His father knelt beside him and put a hand on Sonjay’s shoulder. Sonjay opened his eyes and looked up into his father’s face. “One more piece of information, son,” Reggie said. “This is important. The army outside the gates of Big House City is a reluctant army. They don’t want to be there. They would rather be at home with their families on their farms. It would not take much to turn them around.”

Sonjay nodded. “Thanks, Daddy,” he said. “Now you have to move away and not touch me or I won’t be able to go.”

Sonjay cleared his mind of clutter, as Buttercup had taught him, and felt the spirit presence filtering into his being. The phantom Sonjay emerged and began to float up to the window. The others could see the phantom self. They followed it with their eyes. Sonjay floated in front of the window and then he looked down at his body. The same old doubt and fear squeezed his heart. What if he could not get back? What if he lost his body? What was disembodied impairment? He began to drift back down to the rug. But Reggie called up to him, “There is a great enchanter inside of you, son. Bring it.”

Sonjay nodded once to his father and then resolutely floated through the wall and out of the cell. Bayard Rustin slipped easily between the bars of the window and flew after him.