Another explosion rocked the place and he dove once more to a corner. He was becoming good at this, getting closer to the house. It seemed the closer he got, the more defenses the house seemed to put up. The wooden stakes that were pinned into the floor with barbed wire around them began a faint glow, and then from each of them sprang out several kale-like weapons."Oh-oh," Isaiah exclaimed. This wasn't good; they would shoot in no time, he thought. There was nowhere to go, whether back, front, or to his adjacents. "Will I die today?" He thought.The kale shot into him, coming with its invisible bullets, a vibration in space and time, and the world became dark in Isaiah's view. The blue cloudless desert sky that was above his head now seemed incredibly beautiful to him. He wondered why he had not noticed it in the first place."I am dead," Isaiah said, seeking not to fight fate anymore. Maybe the person that he was supposed to become was really nothing but a dead man lying on the dese

"Did you get the scroll?" Elena asked, her tone becoming extraordinarily serious. "Yes," replied Isaiah, although he was very much tempted not to, since Elena was not answering any of his questions."Give it to me," she said, hands outstretched. "I want to see if it is the real one or the original.Isaiah stepped back and placed the scroll farther from her reach. "No," he said firmly. Elena looked at him squarely. "What?""I said no," he replied once more, taking further steps back. "No, unless you tell me everything.""What are you talking about, Isaiah?" She asked, walking towards him. "I am not joking or playing around, Elena," he said. "You have to tell me what is going on or this scroll gets destroyed. And I'm telling you, I'll do it."Elena blushed at this, seeing him become fierce all of a sudden with glittering eyes, not denying his intent to destroy the map.She raised her hands. "Okay, I surrender, my dashing prince of mayhem. What do you want to know and why would you

Elena's shoulders were raised as high as ever as she listened to the conversation between Costa and Isaiah play out. To her it was the most disgusting thing she had ever heard, but she decided to keep her calm. Despite how hard she tried, still, her teeth remained gritted while her palms grasped extra firmly around the steering wheel.There was nothing she wished more there and then than to kill Costa with her own hands. She wished that Isaiah could simply just stop feeling bad for what he did and tell Costa off. Whatever will be, will be. She wished Isaiah was like the men of the past who would rather see the world crash to war than bend their knee for other men. Seeing Isaiah cry filled her with quiet scorn.Meanwhile Isaiah listened, with tears still streaming down his cheeks, ravaged by guilt and buried in grief."Now here is the question," Costa continued, slowly, as if taking his time, having Isaiah marinate in his anguish and Elena in her anger. "Why did you do it, Isaiah? Why

Tanuk had a puzzled look on his face. "What do you mean by everything? Have we not told you everything you wanted to know? The scroll you have on you holds a secret of our ancient civilization. What else do you want to know?"Sweat dripped away from Isaiah's forehead; he wiped a bit of it from his forehead. "What I want to know has nothing to do with your ancient civilization but with me. I want to know why I had to go through all of this. And I don't want anymore lies now—I want the truth. I know that you all know what is going on."Tanuk passed a stare at Elena over his shoulders, and Isaiah could perceive a silent cry for help from him to her.Elena, meanwhile, sneered at this, throwing her gaze away. "What's going on?" Isaiah's voice was becoming more desperate. "There is no way I would believe I went through all this for nothing. I just robbed and destroyed a house, and now I am in a strange town where nothing seems to have progressed in age past the 1800s. Tanuk stared once mo

"A servant of Elena, huh?" Isaiah asked in irony. "Let me guess, she sent you here to convince me to join her mad circus, didn't she?" "No," Kate said. "Elena hasn't sent me on anything..." She was sitting down on the steps below the building before standing to look Isaiah in the eyes. "You just told me you were her servant, so why should I believe what you're saying?" "Being her servant doesn't mean I am here to convince you of anything. Moreover, you can hide all you want. You can run and leave, but you can't really escape your destiny. We don't force that on you, do we?""It seems forcing it on me has been the only thing you've been doing so far..."Kate sighed. "You haven't understood this yet, have you?" She asked.She was wrong. Isaiah understood it perfectly, and perhaps, even more so than Kate herself. But his problem was not the aspect of understanding it, but that the project, in its entirety, was extremely contradictory to all the values that had been taught to him from