The Purple Rose Revealed

Jasper Xavier finds the Purple Rose and Anastasia fights him for it at the Temple.

           I sat silently in my tent listening the crackling of the fires and the crickets.  Somewhere in the distances I heard the frogs croaking along the Tunguska riverbank.  In the silence I made the decision to talk to Jasper.  I left my journal on my bed and walked to his tent.  I expected to find him pouring over today’s finds, but he was no where to be found.  I found his assistant Zykov by the trucks.  “Where is Jasper?” I asked.

            “Who knows,” Zykov shrugged.

            I wondered through the camp asking everyone about him, but no one had seen him.  I found myself at the edge of Zurzu and venturing inward.  Something told me that he was there.  I moved passed the twenty homes that we were still working on to the center of the city.  There, in the middle of an open square, was a temple that we had just discovered.  A huge mound of dirt and trees still covered the top, but the front of the temple stood before me in near perfect condition.  The stone stairs led up to an open door.  No one had dared entered the temple yet, no one except Jasper that is.  The natives and their superstition had rubbed off on the rest of the group I think.

              I mounted the stairs under the pale light of the full moon.  My senses were heightened and I was aware of every sight and sound around me.  Once at the top of the stairs I peered into the darkness.  A torch flickered somewhere in the distance.  “Jasper?” I called.  My heart beat a wildly in my chest as I waited for his reply.  “Jasper?” I called again softly.

              “Anna, come in here and look,” I finally heard him say.

              I stepped into the cold darkness and moved toward down the hallway to the torch and Jasper’s voice.  “Where are you?” I asked trying to make out his figure in the dark. 

              “In the inner chamber,” he said. 

              I came to the end of the hall and turned a corner. There Jasper was, his face illuminated by the torch light.  He was bent over the altar in the center of the room.   “See, I knew it would be here.”

              “What?”

              “The Purple Rose,” Jasper grinned.  He pointed at the altar. 
              I pushed my black hair back behind my ear and leaned down to see what he was pointing at.  There on the altar was a painted engraving of a purple rose.  I was surprised at its still vibrant color.  The detail of each petal was intricate and beautiful.  There must have been five shades of purple in the etching, let alone all the hues of green for the stem and the rich pink and grays that surrounded it.  “It’s fantastic, but it’s just a picture,” I told him.

            He shook his head. “No, it’s in here,” he insisted.

            I ran my fingers along the solid block of stone that was the altar.  It was smooth and cold to touch.  “This is a solid block.  There is nothing in there but more rock.”

            “I’ll show you,” he said.  He took off the ring that was on his finger and pressed it into the center of the rose.  The ring clicked into place, setting ancient mechanisms into motion.  I heard a rumbled and then saw the block disappear.  The smooth rock had apparently been glass, and the ring had taken away the illusion.  Under the etching was a three-dimensional rose perfectly preserved.  I stooped down to get a closer look.  The deep purple of the petals almost seemed to shine in the pale light.  I moved and swore that it looked almost holographic.  Some ancient magic trick? 

             “I see,” I said quietly.

             Jasper studied it with awe for few a few moments.  In the eerie silence I knew that something horrible was about to happen, but I wasn’t sure what.  I watched as he popped off the lid of the case and reached inside for the rose.  Before he could even touch it the earth began to shake.  Dust and bits of loose stone fell around us. 

              “DON’T!” I cried.  “Don’t touch it!”

              Too late.  Jasper grabbed a hold of the rose, which was suspended in the case in some sort of liquid. He held it up in the air triumphantly.  Blood from where the thorns had pricked him and fluid dripped down his hand and down his arm.  The earth shook more violently then before and the torch and went out.  I shook my head and headed out of the temple before it clapsed in around us.  As I felt my way down the pitch-black hall I couldn’t help but be reminded of the nightmares I had been having.  Had they been a premonition?  I prayed that it had just been coincidence and fled down the stairs of the temple.  Once outside I suddenly noticed a dense fog drifting in around the city and smelled sulfur.  I paused at the bottom of the stairs to collect my self and think about what I needed to do next.  Forget Jasper and make sure the others are all right I thought.

             Out of no where a man appeared in before me in a black hooded robe.  Maybe I was still dreaming I thought.  “Jasper, give up the rose,” the man said.  It sounded like Nicholas from St. Petersburg.  Could it be?  What the hell was he doing here?

              I turned as Jasper called from the steps, “No, it belongs to me now.”

              The man moved toward me and so did Jasper.  Before I knew what was happening Jasper had grabbed me and pulled me back up the stairs.   “Don’t move another inch or I will take her with me!” Jasper cried angrily. 

            “You know if you go, you have to alone.”

            “Who says?  The Brotherhood?  Those rules are your rules, not mine.”

            “The price for immortality is never being able to leave, and being here completely alone.  You know that.  You’ve always known that,” the man said slowly approaching us.

             “Let me go!” I cried struggling to free myself of Jasper’s tight grasp.

            “Sshh,” Jasper said into my ear, “It will be okay.  This all part of what is supposed to happen, all a part of my plan.”

            “Your plan?”

            The man put down his hood and reached out toward us.  In the pale light it certainly looked like the man I’d met.  “Be reasonable Jasper.  Put back the rose and we can discuss this.”

            “No!” he cried pulling me with him as he backed away.  Jasper let go of my waist long to grab my wrist instead and drag me up the rest of the stairs.  I tried to stay put, but was no use.  I followed behind protesting the whole way.

           “What is all about Jasper? Ow! Let me go! Damn it!  You’re hurting me!”

           At the top of the stairs we came to sudden halt.  Another man in a black robe blocked to the doorway.  “Go in if you dare Jasper, but leave her here,” the man said calmly.

          Jasper waved the rose in front of him, “Move out of the way!” he demanded.

         The man stood silent and unmoving.

         Jasper began speaking in another language that I had never heard.  He was chanting, cursing the man who stood before us.  The man seemed unaffected, but I was completely freaking out.  This was too weird for me.  It was really beyond belief.  I told myself that maybe this was just a hallucination due to stress and insomnia, but I knew that wasn’t true.

        Letting go of my disbelief and fear I felt an energy rise within me.  And then guided by some urge of intuition I seized the opportunity to free my hand of Jasper’s grasp and reach for the Purple Rose.  When I held the rose in my hand I felt a thorn prick me.  The pain was brief and then a tingling sensation filled my whole body.  The cold and darkness of the night faded away and there was only comforting warmth.   I suddenly understood what the city and the rose meant to me.  They were about strength, empowerment, but most of all about peace.

       Jasper and the men in the black robes stopped in awe.  Wordlessly, I moved passed everyone and walked undisturbed back to the inner chamber.  Not needing light to guide the way I was able to get back to the altar swiftly and safely.  I dropped the rose back in its container and put the lid back on.  The earth shook once again and did not stop.  As if in a trance I calmly walked out the temple, past Jasper and the other men to the camp.  As I walked the city crumbled away behind me and disappeared into the dense fog.  I continued past the bewildered workers in the camp right to my tent. 

 

        The next morning I opened my eyes and starred up at the top of my tent.  Slowly the memory of the night before came to me like fragments of a dream.  I would have never thought it more than a dream had I not ventured out of my tent a while later.  When I walked out I nearly had a heart attack.  Before me was not the ruins of Zurzu, but an empty field.  The rest of the workers were standing on the edge of where we had been digging.  As I approached them it struck me of how much they looked like they were standing on the shore of an endless sea instead on the carefully measured line of an escavation site. 

            I stepped beside Victor and Catherine and starred out at the empty field with them.  We were silent for a long time before we talked about what had happened.  Jasper was no where to be found though.  Everyone assumed that he had been killed in the earthquake, but I knew better.  Something told me that he was still alive somewhere.  Jasper, just like the city, was not meant to be uncovered.  No one, to this day, understood how the city disappeared again, but I did.  Some things are beyond explanation or proof.  There was talk about continuing our search, but everyone felt it would be pointless.  Zurzu was gone for good and we would never see it again.

           By the end of September the mini-city had been completely packed away and the site abandoned.  The locals went back about their daily business and all of the scholars had returned back the civilized world and their studies.  The six months that were spent there we chalked up to a leaning experience.  Though the record of our work still exists, much of the original artifacts mysteriously disappeared.  Zurzu and everything around it still remains very much a mystery. But it doesn’t really matter in the end.

   

            Nicholas came to visit me again before I left the Tokyo Airport for California.  He sat down beside me as I waited for my flight.

            I put down my book to look at who had was beside me.  “Nicholas!”  I smiled, “How did I know I hadn’t seen the last of you?”

            “Because you are the chosen one.”

            “I don’t know about that.  So was that you in Zurzu?”

            “Of course.”

            “So it wasn’t a dream?”

            “No, it was quite real.”

            “So what did happen?”

            “Jasper was half Spanish, half Slavic.  When his father died in 1996 The Brotherhood came to Jasper to initiate him so he could take his father’s place. After he swore his loyalty to us we told him about Zurzu.  He was telling you the truth when he told you that he was in love with you and had been following your work.  When you discovered the city he knew he felt that it was fate that was bringing you two together.  At first we sent him out to guide you away from the city, but then he betrayed us.”

            “Why?”

            “Because he began to believe that by getting The Purple Rose that he could spend eternity with you.”

             “The Rose can’t really grant immortality can it?”

             “Not like Jasper wanted it to.”

             “Then how does it work?”

             “The Rose is a symbol of transcendence and perseverance.  The only power it has is the power you bring to it.  The Brotherhood protect not just Zurzu and the Purple Rose, but what they represent.  Jasper didn’t understand this because he was blinded by what he thought he wanted.  He was searching for something he was never going to find in the field or anywhere else.  He was searching for something that you already had and didn’t even know.”

             “What’s that?”

             Nicholas leaned in closer as if he was going to tell me a secret.  “So many things, so many things,” he said quietly.