Despair Part 2

The smell of old paper hit me. My nose crinkled at the scent. It hadn't made much sense to scorn anything now. Nothing here was going to kill me faster or slower. I opened the worn leather cover tentatively.

Who knew what lay ahead of me. I trembled as the page fell open and I saw the handwriting that melted into the page. Something about the handwriting made a slight effort in putting me at ease. The tiniest effort and I respected that.

The name written on the page under the indication of a diary was Nial Crows. The similarities in our first names had not escaped me.

A common first name, or was it fate that he had this name?

Taking my time, I turned the page of the slim, worn paper. The story unwrapped itself before me. It weaved the interesting tale of a man.

Crows had woken up with a headache. Upon his arrival at the lake to do some fishing, he encountered his reflection in the water. What happened to his hair, he wondered. Crows felt like he found a kindred spirit. I had a similar morning encounter myself. A growl had me flinching. Now that I thought of it, my stomach growled, reminding me of the breakfast I had not eaten.

I continued to read on, ignoring it, for I lost my appetite anyway. Crows, not understanding what was happening, went to one of the mystics in town where he received a reading. Someone had placed a curse on him, because the daughter of one of the authorities at the time had fallen in love with him.

His status was not worthy of her hand in marriage, therefore the family, fearing the development of the relationship as well as the loss of their economic wealth, ordered a witch to place a curse on his head.

He had seven days to live unless he found this mystical place that was filled with riches; flushing water, bountiful trees, vacant, fertile land, and buried treasure.

"Huh?" Well, that was vague, I thought. At that time, that could have been anywhere. I kept on reading.

The mystic rubbed Crow's third eye with a magical mix of herbs and told him to trust his intuition and the images that came to him as he instructed Crow to close his eyes and entered him into a trance.

Crows spoke about the place he saw, described in detail its unique beauty, unlike any place he'd ever seen before.

A place of immense wealth was a mountain high over the distant seas and the sprawling forest. The plateau of which grew a myriad of bright purple flowers that sparkled with such a shine you swore they were white.

The wind blew and sent streams of those flowers flying into the wind. They scattered and spread out, breaking into tiny pieces as if the wind sliced them.

The river flowing off the cliffs drained into the swell of breakoff rocks and the sporadic curves of the rock face. The water looked so clandestine.

The grass on the rock face held a deeper green, like some dark forest. Animals darted across the rock face, bracing danger, but never fearful.

The depths held a deep valley, the bed of which was a bigger river. It held little boulders and had a straggling array of trees hugging the thin river bank.

Those trees had the leisure of being able to lean back on the rock face. A wonder gesture afforded to them by nature.

I pulled each page with a more eager taste for knowledge.

Crows left the mystic feeling as though that place only existed in his fantasies. He doubted his intuition, but then again, he stood there knowing that his hair was white and his eyes were also purple. So, anything was possible.

He made his way back home ridden with fear, watching his back, so tired from his journeys and the overwhelming news. He had crashed his head as soon as he reached his bedroom.

Crow detailed the next few days the recurring dream of that mystical place that haunted him every night. His diary stopped telling his story on day four.

That was it. Caught by surprise by the abrupt ending, I flipped through the other pages, only to find them empty. What happened after day four? Had he found the place? Had he lived?

"What happened next?" I said out loud to myself in my room as I stared, feeling cheated at the thick scam of deceit wrapped in a book.

"Is that what I needed to do?" I thought to myself. Then I remembered that there was a distinct similarity to the mountain in Nial's vision and a mountain that was close to us.

It could have been that place. He was an ancestor, so this was likely the village he lived in, either that of the nearby villages.

That mountain, I never climbed it. I was never had the heart to. I had glimpsed that place probably once or twice, but I could that be the place?

"Was it possible that this place could be the same place Crow had envisioned?"

I sat there pondering over the imagery Crow described. I had never actually been there, and it's far from the lands on which we lived.