THE REALM

Chapter Eleven

One year later

  "I'm not ready for this!" I exclaimed loudly.

  "Yes, you are," Kuri said calmly.

  "No, I'm not!"

  "Yes, you are. Now calm yourself and continue on with the exercise."

  I gritted my teeth to bite back any further protest. My nostrils flared wide in search for more air as I focused on moving my foot on the tight rope and inching it onwards a bit further on the rope.

  "You're too stiff! Relax your posture and be easier with your breathing," Kuri called out.

  I spared a glance from the rope beneath me to look ahead towards Kuri, "What happens to your plans if I die right now?"

  "You're not going to fall. Come to me. I wouldn't have put you up to this if I didn't think you were ready for it."

  I glanced back down to my lifeline and desperately fought to hold steady on it against a sudden updraft of air from the valley below. Sweat was running off me as if I was being rained on. My entire being was sick with the fear that I felt at my current endeavor.

  My eyes took in the drop of several hundred feet which formed the narrow mountain gorge between two upthrusts of rock across which was stretched the rope I stood on. There was no soft landing below, only more rock.

  I would die if I fell, of that I had no doubts. If I didn't get off this rope soon I'd become too stiff with fear to even maintain my balance and that would be the end of me.

  "Benaiah?"

  I looked up to Kuri from my sealed fate that waited below.
"Come."

  I had to get off this rope and somehow he thought I could do it!

  I took a big step and then another and another, until in my haste to escape the rope my foot slipped and I fell. I banged up hard against the wall of the cliff and was momentarily puzzled as to why I wasn't still falling.

  In a daze I looked upward and saw that Kuri had a hold of one of my hands.
"I won't let you fall Benaiah."

  I nodded and he pulled me up the rest of the way. Quickly I crawled away from the cliff's edge and pressed up against the wall of the ledge that ran along the side of the mountain.

  Pulling up my knees I hugged them to me and buried my face against them. My whole body was shaking and even though the day was warm I felt cold. I was such a coward!

  "I have something to tell you Benaiah," Kuri said, as he sat down beside me and stretched out his arm to pull me against his side consolingly.

  "It took courage to cross that gorge. You had courage to start out and then to get over halfway across, but then you let the fear of failing get to you and trip you up. At no point were you to be absent of the fear of attempting to cross such a dangerous obstacle, but you let fear control you instead of you controlling it. Next time you'll do better, because you went farther than you thought you could when you started out. Now there's less for you to fear on your second attempt."

  "I don't see it that way," I said before then adding, "I fell!"

  "And I caught you. Next time you won't fall."

  "I wish I had your confidence about that!" I said with feeling.

  "You'll see."

  "Why does there even need to be a second time of crossing this rope?" I asked hopefully.

  "Well, just like with life, it's a certain fact that you'll need a liberal application of courage more than once and so is there the possibility of coming to a gorge like this that needs to be crossed."

  I sighed loudly. There was no way around my mentor's devised strategies or plans for my advancement into learning to be like him. It was a very hard journey.

  I deeply wanted to learn and excel at everything that he was teaching me, but why did it have to be this hard?

  "Come along Benaiah. There's something I want to show you."

  Kuri was on his feet and pulling me up to mine. He started out along the ledge above the cliff and I followed along, curious to know what it was he would show me.

  We had lived for a year now in the lower slopes of the Holy Mountains. During that time we had never ventured farther into the mountains than we were now.

  The trail curved out of view and rounding the corner I gasped at the sight of what was revealed. In direct contrast with the desert sands that lapped up against the base of the mountains all along the northern front, I now found myself gazing down into a garden paradise of vivid greenery.

  Nestled in amongst the lofty peaks lay a large continuous valley that was more lushly green than I had ever before seen in nature. While I didn't know much about the topography of Ayenathurim as a whole I did know some, and to date I had never heard of this place.

  I turned my shocked eyes to Kuri's and was surprised to see that he was gazing down into the idyllic valley with an unsmiling gaze that bordered on anger. What would move him to be angry in the face of such beauty as existed in the mountain valley below us?

  I had come to trust Kuri's instincts on all things so I looked at the valley more closely, in particular the open stretches of terrain not covered by verdant tree canopies. I soon picked out the shapes of moving objects in the lush grass of the valley. There were a lot of something and they were big!

  For the distant objects to look so big so far away must mean that they were absolutely huge up close. Kuri, in a grim tone, spoke into my study of the valley and its huge occupants, "This place, like so many others, was once a paradise, but now it has become corrupted. Some of the creatures that you see are of fallen Malachim design. They are a plague to the higher-order creatures that were given this valley as their home. There is a war going on down there. A war between simple animals perhaps, on the surface, but a war between good and evil at its heart. The evil kinds are trying to devour and drive out all the good that remains in this valley. You've completed your first year of training and now it's time to begin the next."

  I turned my eyes from the valley to Kuri, even as I prayed that he wasn't going to say what I knew he was. His eyes were confirmation enough and his words were only a mere formality for what I knew was coming, "Over the next year you and I and the created higher-order kinds of pure blood that remain within the valley are going to kill and drive out all the unclean flesh that has made this sacred valley their home. Light cannot coexist with darkness. Even so, that which is of El Elyon has no place with being mixed with the abominations of darkness's delight."

  I looked away from Kuri to the valley below once more. In my mind's eye, a valley of idyllic beauty populated with the fallen Malachim's created monsters made the gorge back in the mountains behind me look like a thing of child's play. As if in tune with my thoughts I heard the roar of one of the monsters from the valley below echo up to us.

  "Come along Benaiah. We need to get back to camp so we can pack up and move into the valley in the morning."

  Kuri headed back the way we had just come and with my mouth suddenly dry I asked, "Isn't there another way that we can go back to camp?"

  Kuri never stopped walking as he called out, "This is the straightest path to our destination. There is no sense in diverging from it."

  Oh I could beg to differ with that, but I kept my thoughts to myself and obediently followed. With the coming task at hand looming large I nonetheless retracted my thought of crossing the tight rope as being a thing of mere child's play.