Stone

There was very little light coming from the smoky torch on the wall, enough to see the dear lines of Ren’s face, but not enough to see the men who had just walked in.  I tensed, expecting my fear to come flooding back, waiting for my hope to be locked up once more, but I was not afraid.
“Who are you?” I asked, peering hard into the darkness.
“We are the E’ementa’ak.  You brought our mortal enemies to our home and now you must pay.  You can never leave this place.  We will not kill you.  We kill only the abomination, the Kresta’aki, but the price for the sin you committed is a life underground.”  The speaker stepped forward into the dim, flickering light and Ren gasped.  It was as if a small piece of the mountain had broken off, walked toward us and opened its mouth to speak.
There was not a hair anywhere on its body; it was bald as an egg, but not smooth and contoured like one, rough and misshapen like it had sprung not quite formed from a fissure in the living rock.  I had heard tales during my childhood of men and women formed from the rock.  Rejected and abandoned by the mountain, they became animated and lived their lives trying to once again become one with the earth.  They became bitter and hard because stone does not die and without death, they could never become what they were before.
I looked at the one standing before me and I could see it in its eyes; the futility of its existence and its forever quest to belong once more to the mountain that gave it life.  They were gray and bored into me, hard as diamonds and full of death.
I gazed upon its face, anathema to all I held dear, anti-life, anti-love and incapable of recognizing the miserable fact, and I was not afraid.  The only emotion I felt was at that moment was pity.  The world of emotion had been opened up to me in the last few days and though it threatened to tear me apart, I shuddered to think of a world where I felt nothing.
Before I realized it, two large tears snaked their way down my cheeks and dripped off my chin.  “How much you miss.”  I wept for them.  Ren looked at me as if I had gone insane and from the dark shadows at the entrance to our prison, I heard the faintest gasp.  I reached out in that moment for anything that could change our circumstances and in the mass of  stone beings, I found something I did not expect.  In just one of the E’ementa’ak, there beat a human heart.
There came the grinding of cold stone on cold stone and once more we were entombed within the earth.  Once more, the smell of herbs filled the air and I could feel my emotions leaving me once again, but this time, it was different.  As unconsciousness claimed me again, I wrapped a hard sheet forged from determination around my hope, protecting it from the onslaught of the numbness.   It was the part of me that kept the link with Ezra alive and I could not leave him alone to face his fear when I could give him the strength to continue.  It also kept my drive to leave this place from petering out.  Complacency was my greatest enemy and I was protecting my greatest treasure, the candle that cast out the darkness.
My eyes slowly closed and I was hoping and praying that this would be enough.  Just before I was completely swallowed by the darkness, I felt Ren’s hand reach toward mine and his love wrapped around my heart.  I added it to the wall of protection with my last conscious thought.
The days passed without me, or at least I wasn’t aware of  the moments drifting away.  There were moments when I was aware, but only long enough to cast another layer of protection around the kernel of hope at my core.  Time did not matter in the small area that remained conscious at the centre.  I vaguely remembered urgency as I plotted a way to break free from our underground prison, but I had not managed to pull it into the tiny place I had managed to protect and so I was not faced with panic at the lost moments.  As bits of lucidity came to me, I gradually learned to expand my consciousness, slowly gathering parts of my psyche as I gradually became aware.
Finally, the moment came when I knew it could no longer touch me.  I had managed to gather all my mind together and finally, I figured out how to bring my body into the protective sphere and the drug could not deaden my limbs and make me unable to search for a way to escape.  The connection with my brother did not waver and, even though we were underground and there was no discernible way out, my hope still burned strong and Ezra was able to wait.
He was so afraid.  I worried about him, but the Khresh did not torture him as I feared.  He was simply the bait and they would keep him as long as they knew I was still on my way.
It did not take me long to learn to wake Ren from his stupor, simply a matter of extending my protection once again to include his consciousness.  I was well practiced at keeping up my own shield and it was hardly a stretch to pull him inside with me.  The moment our minds connected, we began in earnest to search for our way out.  Now that all of me had come back to life, urgency was returned and I worried about my brother more and more as each hour passed.  He seemed reasonably healthy.  I could detect no signs of hunger or pain.  He even seemed relatively calm and aware, but with every breath I took, I feared the Khresh would become impatient and decide that they couldn’t wait any longer for me to arrive.
Ren and I were pretty much left up to our own devices.  The door opened once every day and food was left there for us.  An hour later, pots of smoking herbs were placed in our chamber to send us back into our stupor.  Two hours later, they were removed so we could slowly climb our way back into consciousness to eat 21 hours later.  Other than that, we saw no one.  There were tiny lights set flat into the wall.  I could not figure out how they worked.  They gave off no smoke and no heat.  They were barely bright enough to reveal our faces.
We pored over those walls for hours.  Every indent and irregularity was scrutinized for a possible way out, but the only opening we could find was the door and it was impossible to open.  It was carved from a single lump of granite, far too heavy to move without horses or oxen.  There was no handle or lock that we could see and it sealed us in completely.
Each time the door opened, I pushed my thoughts and feelings at the guard, trying to crack through the impenetrable wall that protected their emotions from me, if indeed they were not as cold and dead as the stone from which they sprung.