When the Diary Speaks

My name is Chris, or at least that's what’s written on the cover of my diary.

I do not remember who I am or why I am here.

When I woke up on the hard, rocky ground, this leather, unfilled diary was the only thing I was holding, together with a pencil.

The year isn't noted on the front, back, or anywhere else on or in the book.

I counted how many pages the book has, a hundred.

“What the?”

I look around the cave, still half sitting down.

“Who the hell are you?”

 I am currently looking a random boy in the eyes, and I’m sure that I’ve never seen this dude before.

“Who the hell are YOU?”, I reply.

The boy thinks for a moment and says,” I dunno, you?”

“Chris.”

I want to add a last name to it, but I realize that I don’t know what my own last name is, or maybe I just don’t have one.

“What’s that?”

The boy points at the diary.

“A diary, you’ve got one too”, I say.

He looks around him and jumps up into the air as he sees his own diary.

“BLOODY UNDERPANTS!”

“I’ve never seen someone have such a crash out over a notebook”, I mumble.

“HELLOOO, ANYBODY HERE?”

We turn our heads and stay quiet, not because we’re careful, but because we have no idea what we should do at all.

“HELLOOOOOOOOOOO”, the voice yells again.

I’m sure it’s a girl, but I do not know how old she is.

I would guess my age, even if I don’t have any idea how old I actually am.

The guy and I walk towards the sound, now yelling back.

“HELLO, WE’RE HERE”, he says.

The cave we woke up in is open at only one side, and that side is connected to a tunnel running parallel to the opening.

We walk into the tunnel and look at each other.

“Left or right?” I ask.

The other boy wants to answer, but I can’t hear him because the girl screams again, but not like the other times.

It’s a scream that sounds like she’s hurt, and it’s coming from the left.

The other dude gasps, and we run to where the sound came from.

We run as fast as possible, and we arrive at another cave at the end of the tunnel.

“Who the hell are you guys?” a girl asks.

She looks barely older than twelve, so I’m sure she wasn’t screaming.

She is sitting at her knees with a notebook in her hand.

“She asked: Who the hell are you guys?”

Another, taller girl with ginger hair appears from the shadows in the back of the cave.

She looks strong and intimidating. I would guess her to be around 17 years old. 

“I’m Chriss, or that’s what the diary states”, I say.

The other boy smiles and says,” And I have no frikkin’ idea who I am.”

The two girls look at us, then look at each other and shake their heads.

I see that the taller girl has a notebook too, stuck into her belt.

“What about you? We heard a scream.”

The taller girl crosses her arms.

“The little one woke up and only saw me while I was in the shadows; she thought I was a ghost or something.”

The little girl stands up and looks at her diary.

“Amily”

I look at her.

“What?”

She looks at me and says, like it’s obvious:” That’s what’s written on the cover, isn’t that how you knew you’re Chriss?”

I simply nod.

The other guy gasps and takes his notebook.

“Daniel, it says Daniel.”

The girls look at him.

"Seriously?"

“You haven’t even looked at that thing?”

He makes a silly face and says,” Madame, I’m sure I was being sent here by someone who saw that I would become a great person in the future, but that doesn’t mean that I’m dumb.”

She shakes her head and sighs.

“Anyway, I’m Frigg, don’t mess with me.” 

We just stand there for a minute, and after a few dry coughs, Amily states that this isn’t normal.

“There is no explanation for us being here, waking up in a dirty cave with a diary with our names on.”

She might be small, but she seems clever.

Daniel looks at her with a face that says one thing: Don’t act like you’re smart or special, you haven’t accomplished anything yet.

I’m afraid he’s actually going to say something like that, but when he opens his mouth, he surprises me.

“It doesn’t matter what we’re doing here; if we don’t advance, let’s check out the other tunnel.”

Frigg blinks, opens her own mouth to say something, but closes it as she realizes that she doesn’t know what to say.

“Let’s move on,” I suggest, as I start walking in that direction.

The rest followed quite easily, and even started to accelerate as we got closer to the end of the tunnel.

The tunnel itself is mossy and rocky, but it has lamps on the ceiling, so it has to be manmade.

“I don’t understand the guts from this place”, Daniel says.

Amily looks at him with a cocky smile.

“Well, no one expected you to be able to understand anything”, she says in a dry tone with a sniff of superiority.

Daniel must have lightning-fast reflexes, because his reaction came so fast that it almost looked like he had studied it.

“Well, no one expected you to be able to read anyway”, he said with an even cockier smile on his face.

This boy integrates me, so I take a moment to study him as I keep on walking.

He’s about 16 years old, is tall and slim, not extremely muscular, and he has short, black hair.

The thing that makes him so interesting in the first place is undoubtedly his face.

More specifically the orange freckles all over his face in combination with his dark hair and green eyes make it hard to look at him without forgetting what I was doing, or what’s going on around me.

I’m looking at his soft jawbones as he notices me, maybe I was walking strangely because I was so focused on his face.

“Hey, I know I’m hotter than most regular people, but could you stop staring at me like that, please?”

I’m brutally pulled out of the almost-trance.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

He looks at me with a face that could be both silly and as serious as death itself.

“You were looking at me like you were thinking about how you could use my cheekbones as chopsticks, stop it, please.”

I don’t know why he formulates it like that, but I can feel a cold shiver crawling down my spine.

That’s the moment when Amily, who’s mostly walking a bit behind both of us, sees the first signs of a way out of this cave.

“Hey, is it just me, or is there actually a glow around here?”

All four of us look around and look at each other and ourselves.  

She’s right, there is a blue glow around us and the tunnel.

It’s dim, very easy to miss, but it’s there.

“Bloody socks, I’m a smurf!”

I still don’t know where Daniel gets his swears, but I don’t want to know.

Frigg and Amily sigh, and I can see that they are thinking the exact same thing.

Amily looks at Frigg and me, like we’re her parents, and asks:” If we’re ever getting stuck on a deserted island without any food, he’s the first one we’re going to eat.”

It seems like I’m in a cave with a dude that curses with underwear and thinks that he’s a smurf, a girl I shouldn’t mess with, and an eleven-year-old know-it-all with cannibalistic thoughts.

I might even try to just head on; this might be a longer tunnel than I expected.

Frigg is the first one to think clearly and look into the tunnel as she advances.

“Hey guys, I think the glow is getting brighter the further you go.”

Seems like she isn’t all-muscled. 

We all follow Frigg, who now has the lead, but doesn’t look as aggressive as she seemed the first moment I met her.

The tunnel makes a turn, and the blue does indeed get brighter, like we’re approaching the source of the light.

Frigg is a few meters ahead of us when she takes the turn left, but stops immediately after looking around the corner.

“Eeeh, everyone, you might want to check this out”, her voice vibrating as she speaks.

We all run in her direction, and she’s correct, we do want to check this out. 

The corner ends in another cave, like the one where we all woke up.

The ground is covered in grass, and the walls and roof are smooth and do not show any ridges.

In the middle of the room, there was a pillar with a blue spot in the middle, where the glow found its origin.

We are quiet, no one dares to say anything, as if there is something hiding within the blue light that will wake the moment someone talks.

We slowly advance, keeping our eyes on the source of the glow.

As I come closer, I see that there are numbers written on the sides of the top of the pillar.

There are four of these numbers, and they are:100, 50, 41, and 2.

I take out my diary and go to the last page.

Page hundred.

I walk around the pillar, all around it, until I’m standing right in front of 100.

With a soft ‘pling’, the number turns blue.

“Chris, what exactly did you do?”

Daniel looks at me like I just did something incredibly difficult, which I didn’t.

“Everybody look at the last page of your diary and go stand in front of that number.”

Frigg doesn’t understand.

“What?”

Amily shows her.

“Look”, she flips to the last page of her diary,” my last page is 2”, and she moves to the spot in front of the two.

“Pling.”

Daniel understands it before Frigg does.

“Wait, so I’ve got 41, so I’ll go to…”

He moves to his spot.

Frigg follows his example and completes the circle around the pillar.

“Pling, rrrrrrrrrrrrr”, the blue spot goes.

Frigg looks around and speaks in a soft and sharp tone.

“What was that?”, like any of us’d know.

She wants to say something else, but the words get stuck in her throat as the blue glow starts to shrink.

It looks like the orb in the middle of the stone pillar absorbs all the blue light in the room and concentrates it just an inch above the stone surface of the pillar.

As the area of the light starts to become a more solid form.

When it is completely transparent, I reach out my hand, not daring to breathe even the slightest bit of air.

I almost touch it, my hand is half an inch away from the blue, night-like sky coloured stretched-out orb, but I pull it back as fast as I can as it starts pulsing like a heart, spitting out constellation-like traces of light every time it rapidly expands.

Together with the pulses, a voice sounds, like a music box trills during the bass tones. 

“Greetings, participants of team twelve, we’re happy you’re all still alive.”

The voice of a middle-aged woman sounds through the cave.

She speaks at a calm, friendly tone, like a stewardess before take-off.

“You will be considered dead as long as you don’t make it to Nectaron, and only if you reach its walls.”

“Your primary task will be to complete the trail and to arrive as one team; if not, you will lose your seat on board the ST2 world ship.”

The form starts to pulse like it’s glitching, stretching, and imploding with unusual power and speed, and the voice starts to change too, like someone is messing with it like a radio.

“You will be sgghhhhhhhhhh, run, if you can hear me, rusgghhhhhhhh, there will be nosgghhhhhhh”, we all stand completely still, not knowing what to do as the new voice, the one that told us to run, completely takes over the channel.

“If you can hear me, run, the gates of your caves will be opened in a split second”, and as she is talking(yes, it’s a woman talking to us), the back wall of our cave does really split open like an elevator.

“Get to the north as fast and stealthily as possible.”

“I repeat, go north and don’t let anyone spot you, or you will get yourself killed.”

The blue glow and pulsing orb disappear in a flash.

“Guys?”, Daniel doesn’t sound as confident as normal,” who are those weaponed dudes outside the front door?”