A decade ago, I found a book, sitting in the middle of the parking lot at work. Who’s it was, how it got there, I had no idea. Old, worn, traveled. A book like none other. I opened it, and the pictures inside moved. I carelessly brushed my fingers across the page and found myself there. But that’s a different story.
About this time, two years ago, I stumbled onto a mystery in the New Mexico desert. My parents have a summer home in the Rockies, I was driving to Sante Fe, and…well, it’s not really important, is it? I turned off the highway onto a dirt road, then another dirt road, and another, until I ended up at a barbed wire fence. I found a cleft, in the ground, near an extinct volcano. I found Zandi at his trailer who pointed the way. I was drawn to this patch of land, following some inner calling….
I fell down a rabbit hole, and like Alice, was never the same again.
There is a secret, buried deep below. I was not the only one called to the desert. I was not the only person in the city beneath. For several weeks, I and others started the Journey, walked the Path and found the Least. Until the day the lights went out, the giant air fans slowed their spin and the Great Zero stuttered to a halt.
The DRC had pulled the plug. The Restoration was no more. The story was over.
For two years I have mourned the loss, the waste, a piece of my heart still buried down a shaft in the New Mexico desert. Even though I’ve seen my friends through their struggles, glimpsed their new home, restored the Bahro and finished that story, I always wondered about the before. About the civilization they stumbled upon and the secrets, the history slumbering below. Until last week, when my KI beeped once, the purple glow lighting up the bookshelf it rested on. Power must have been restored. The Great Zero again revolves. The City breathes. I must go back, back to the Cleft, back to the Journey, back to D’Ni.
I’ve given my three weeks notice at work, started storing my furniture and giving away all that I own. My KI is again strapped on my arm, a familiar weight and companion. I do not know if I can retrace my drive in the desert, don’t know if the call will once again sing in my heart as I get close. Even if I can’t, even if it doesn’t, if I cannot find the Cleft, I am sure my linking book will still transport me to my Relto, and the Ages waiting patiently on their shelves. I can return. I can continue. I can finally restore what was lost.
And I know my ending is far from being written.