Ben Blazze and Heimdall's Orb

Chapter 4: The Tree

Ben decided to follow Fatima's suggestion: showering and putting on clean clothes. If saying "grandma" is cause for reprimand, he thought, imagine coming to dinner in the same pitiful state you left Pará in. Ben went to the sliding doors she indicated. Inside, he found a room with closed cupboards covering the four walls. In the center, two rectangular ottomans and, on the wall opposite to the entrance, another pair of sliding doors.

His small suitcase rested on one of the ottomans. If it could speak, it would be mocking its contents - which did not belong there, for sure.

All my classmates could store their clothes in here with room to spare, Ben thought.

He opened the other door to reach the actual bathroom. The boy took the best shower of his life and went back to the closet, where he began exploring the cabinets. He found more clothes and shoes than he thought he would need until the end of his life. He put on a pair of dark jeans, sneakers, and a black t-shirt. They all fitted as if he had bought them himself. That's odd.

Ben checked the look in one of the mirrors and rushedly straightened his hair. He was eager to explore the room – specifically the game consoles. As he emerged from the closet, however, he got caught by the drawing on the library floor.

The figure provoked an unusual feeling in Ben. It looked familiar, but how? He had never seen that drawing before. Even so, it seemed to refer him to another place, another time. He smiled but felt melancholy at the same time. Ben was mesmerized by the tree. It was a delicious but indefinable sensation that lasted a good few minutes. Finally, the daydream has passed, and he began to examine it objectively. The whole floor was covered in white marble, while the illustration was of some black stone. Was it?

Ben bent down and touched the drawing. He recognized the material at once. No. It was not stone; it was the same metal as his pendant. The same cold, dull metal he had touched hundreds of times!

How weird is that, he thought.

Ben carefully examined the details of the tree. Each leaf had been carefully traced in low relief — down to every tiny line of its ribs. The trunk and limbs also had streaks and knots carved painstakingly. While the exposed roots spread sideways and then upwards, the lower branches curved downward. That gave a circular appearance to the illustration.

It was a stunning design, but it looked out of place. It didn't match anything else in the bedroom or the rest of the house. Ben walked over the tree and looked around.

He was fascinated but also intrigued. So much intrigued that he did something crazy: he laid down on his stomach at the foot of the tree and pressed one cheek to the ground. He wanted to observe the image at the floor level.

Then he saw something weird: from that position, some grooves of the bas relief seemed to line up to form an inscription. Ben adjusted his viewpoint until the engraving became readable. There, right in the middle of the tree, he saw it: BLAZZE. Amazing! He got up quickly and looked over the drawing again. Still, it was impossible to distinguish the inscription from the other lines. Cool, he thought and laid down again to admire that ingenious effect.

Looking more closely, Ben noticed another detail. It was a hexagon perfectly placed between the A and Z of his surname. The boy crawled across the ground like an alligator, trying to get closer without losing sight of the inscription. Still, the grooves mingled as he approached, and so he returned to his original position. There he closed one eye and saw something different: the hexagon seemed to be an opening, a small hole, not a simple drawing. He stood and looked over once more, but the orifice disappeared.

How can it be?

He went to the middle of the trunk and pressed his cheek to the floor again, one eye closed. From there, it was impossible to distinguish the inscription, but there was a small hole indeed. It looked blurry, out of focus – tough to see from that position, impossible to see from the top. Ben put his little finger in the hole. It entered halfway through the first phalanx but could not touch the bottom because the opening narrowed as it deepened.

Finally, Ben fingered the edges of the opening and remembered something that made his heart miss a beat: the hole was the same shape and size as the base of his pendant.