One of these days I'd like to get this short story published somewhere, but for now, it'll live here.
Treasure hunting, portal jumping, Sir Francis Drake, and creatures from other worlds.
“Hold up. I bloody need to barf again.”
“Wait. . . what? You just did, not that—”
I didn’t let him finish. I found the nearest hollowed out tree and upchucked into it.
I felt his hand, Leroy’s hand, rub my back as I heaved.
“Ed, you don’t have anything left to barf,” Leroy told me.
I heaved one last time, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“There’s plenty left,” I told him. “My stomach, my intestines, my liver, probably my useless brains. . .”
He laughed and gave me a playful bop on the head to shut me up.
“Are you alright?” he eventually asked.
I turned to look at him. His hiking boots were noticeably soggy as he sunk into the moist jungle ground, his jeans were three shades darker from dirt, his Henley shirt was plastered to his skin with sweat. The North Face backpack over his shoulders was ripped and worn, and his black hair was no longer neatly kept in its usual Clark Gable style. But despite his ragged appearance — the subtle blisters and peeling from sunburn on his pale skin, the visible cuts and bruises — he still had a look of optimism in his brilliant icy blue eyes.
“Lad, you’re a walking mess,” I told him with a smirk.
He laughed again. “Yeah, and you sir, are a catch ready for the big screen.”
I laughed too, then he held out the canteen of water to me. I took a careful swig of it, noting there wasn’t much left. Then I readjusted my own backpack, feeling the heavy but miniature obelisk shift inside. A priceless and mysterious treasure known as the Porte des Morts. The obelisk was the whole reason Leroy and I were on this blooming dangerous adventure in the first place.
“We have to keep moving,” I told Leroy.
He gave me a tight nod. “Lead the way, sir.”
I climbed over a fallen quebracho tree, then continued onward through the humid jungle.
This whole thing started with my da — my dad. The poor bloke was an orphan, left at the Liverpool Parish Church when he was just a babe. He grew up in many foster homes across Liverpool, England. He was always a curious lad with a taste for history — a taste so pungent it got him into a great deal of trouble. He had no problem breaking into medieval-era churches and historical landmarks throughout the city for the sake of learning about human history. The bloody bloke was brilliant at finding information and cracking ancient codes. He was a lad that could never stay in one place for long, either, but he did have one constant — The Reverend Canon Paul of the Parish Church. Any time my da got into trouble or ran away from a home, you’d find him at Paul’s home, or in Paul’s office at the church. Because my da spent so much time at the Parish Church, a church with records of being a place of worship for over seven hundred years, since 1257, he managed to uncover records that had been locked away since Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in the late 1500s.
Queen Elizabeth I. A genius lass she was. Her intelligence rivaled that of Da Vinci, if you ask me. If I could marry any woman in history. . .
Well, she’d never marry any bloke like me, but one can dream.
A lot happened during her reign. She gave a good fix to the economy, reformed the church, her English Navy successfully defeated (nearly obliterated) the monstrous Spanish Armada as they attempted to attack English soil. She is also the queen that sanctioned (though she usually pretended she didn’t) pretty much all of Sir Francis Drake’s exploits.
Sir Francis Drake. Or how the Spanish knew him, El Draque — The Dragon. Bloody hell, I could talk about that dastardly glorious man for days. Brilliant bad ass that loved his craft.
Anyway, my da found records of some of the treasures Sir Francis Drake found on his most well-known voyage, his circumnavigation of the globe during 1577-1580. How the records ended up in a church in Liverpool, a couple hundred kilometers northwest of London where the rest of the records once were, I can only make assumptions. Could’ve been that the Irish sent spies to London to steal the information but were stopped on their way home, or could’ve been that Elizabeth ordered the records be stored there to further mask the secrecy of this voyage. Though Drake was a hero to England, he was a notorious pirate to the Spanish.
Elizabeth didn’t want the world to know that she backed and sometimes even assigned much of Drake’s treacherously brilliant exploits. He stole, he disrupted world trade, he looked for the fabled Northwestern Passage to outsmart the high powers of the known world, and on his circumnavigation voyage, he had found a treasure that proved magic was real, a treasure that he used to his advantage for years after finding it. That treasure was banging on my back as I trudged through jungle mud. All the secrecy on this little piece of wood endured for over four hundred years. . .
. . .until my da came along, anyway.
So, my da set out when he was sixteen to find out more about this treasure. Based on the notes he found in the church, it was a simple treasure carved of wood of a tree from “unknown lands to England”. Not much is known about Drake’s voyage in the first half of 1579 as he made his way north along the western coast of North America, and many historians still argue to this day about where he actually made landfall along this coast. But, based on my da’s own findings and his interpretations of England’s records, the Porte des Morts is a Native American treasure, most likely made of fir. Which tribe and which fir, he was never sure. At one point my da explained to me that he got pretty frustrated and let that particular strand of his journey go. He decided it was more important to find where the treasure ended up than it was to figure out where it came from.
I found out my da did eventually find out where the treasure ended up, though his notes were quite cryptic and hard to decipher. But unfortunately, he never got to see the bloody thing himself. My bloke of a da got in too deep. A lot of treasure-hunters from around the world, some very violent men and women, caught wind of what my da was onto, and they hunted him and all the information he held. They wanted the treasure for themselves. In my understanding, my da was killed by some wankers too greedy for their own good before he could even lay his eyes on the treasure he so desperately hunted for.
At one point, my da’s journey brought him to Gill’s Rock, the northernmost point of a peninsula in Lake Michigan — the peninsula of what’s now Wisconsin in America. I suppose I have suspicions (suspicions that defy all logic), but I don’t know why my da ended up there in the first place. But, that is where he met my mum, and that is where I was born.
I don’t remember my mum much. She died of stomach cancer when I was a lad too small. But, I do know she was Native American, the Potowatomi native to the area to be precise, and my da loved her with all his heart. She was the only woman he ever loved. Da said she was brilliant, and he told me all the time how her expertise on Native American artifacts was what pushed his expedition forward the most, despite that she did continuously warn him about hunting for something that could defy logic, physics, and reality itself. We didn’t stay in Gill’s Rock long after she passed, as the pain for da was too much. My da continued his hunt for the treasure with me in tow.
But still. . . I still can’t figure out what brought my da to Gill’s Rock in the first place. Except I should probably point out, though, Gill’s Rock is on a strait of water named Death’s Door. Death’s Door, also known for the French name. . . Porte des Morts. The same bloody name as the bloody obelisk banging on my back. Did my da go there just because of the name? My da was after a treasure that Drake found in the 1570s while on the western coast, halfway across the continent, fifty years before any European even knew of the midwest or a strait called Death’s Door. I mean, the midwest first had French blasting through, not even the English! So what the wanking hell was my da doing in Wisconsin in the first place? On top of all of that, when I was eleven years old and my da found out there was a bounty for his head, he dropped me off at Rev Paul’s and headed back to that peninsula in Wisconsin, where he was eventually killed. This all eats away at me all the bloody time. I still can’t figure it out. My suspicions on it all make absolutely no sense. Why couldn’t I fuc—
“You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”
Leroy’s voice next to me jarred me out of my thoughts. We had been silently climbing through overgrown greenery for hours together. I hadn’t even noticed that the Gulf of Mexico had become visible through the lush tropical trees and down a cliff to our left.
“You’re thinking about why your old man went to Death’s Door,” Leroy said to me. “You always make a dingy face when you’re thinking about the one mystery you haven’t been able to solve.”
I grunted. “Yeah. It is quite irritating. Blimey, I’ve got dummy brains.”
“Honestly, Ed, the answer is probably right under your nose. But, like pretty much everything else, you’ll figure it out right when you need to.”
I groaned. “You mean right when our lives are in danger.”
He gave my shoulder a caring squeeze, then started to carefully slide down a muddy hill towards a small stream of water that I assumed branched off the Río Sixaola. At least we found a place for more water.
He knelt next to the trickling water and lowered the canteen. I tried to kneel next to him, but fumbled over my fatigued legs. I nearly dove head first into the stream, but Leroy caught me.
“Gah!” I shouted at him as his icy hands touched my bare arm. I shivered as I slapped his hands off. “Even in this wanking heat of a jungle and the sweat on your forehead, you are still absolutely glacial!”
Leroy rolled his eyes. “Don’t blow your wig, Ed. You probably need the cool-down anyway.”
He topped off the canteen and screwed it shut. He then sat down next to me and put a Baltic hand to my forehead with incredible care. I shivered a moment, but realized the cool-down was certainly more welcome than I thought. I wasn’t kidding, even though he was grimy with sweat and the humidity was sweltering, the surface of his skin was freezing. The damn fool, what a life it must be for the snide twat to walk around with his boss blue eyes, handsome looks, and abnormal body temperature.
He eyed me cautiously. “What’s that look for?” he asked.
“Nothing, you git.”
He huffed. “Is my glacial hand helping, or is it a trip for biscuits?”
“I don’t bloody understand what bloody biscuits has to do with it, but yes, your glacial arse is helping.”
After a while, he pulled his hand away and his face softened as he eyed my pack. “Do you want me to carry it?”
I sighed, then shook my head. “Won’t matter, lad. It’s a radio tower set only to my own frequency. It’ll make me feel like rubbish no matter where it is or where I am.”
He frowned, but nodded in understanding. “Well, let’s hope you and Paul were onto something with this trip to Portobelo. We’ve got to get rid of that thing. And don’t be stupid, Ed, keep it in the pack and don’t touch it.”
I chuckled. “Trust me, I have no intention to even look at the thing.”
He helped me stand up, but I was feeling a tad better after the short breather. I forced myself to keep up with him as we moved on through more jungle overgrowth.
I wanted to finish what da started, though I did live with Paul at first after my da died. He’s a great guy, and became a second father to me, despite our differences. My da had left all his notes about the treasure with Paul, and one note saying to give the lot to me when I was eighteen and ready to continue the adventure, if I wanted. But when I was fourteen I started to think Paul wouldn’t want me to continue something that ended up getting my da killed, and I was getting antsy. I was used to travelling the world, not sitting at home with Paul. I needed out, I needed to finish. And like father like son, I stole my dad's notes, and I set out on my own.
Yes, it was incredibly stupid. I immediately got in way over my head. But, I adapted, as I wasn’t new to the game. I hit up all of my da’s contacts that could get me to travel across the world as a fourteen year old — a fourteen year old that managed to convince most around me I was eighteen.
I managed to hitch a ride in a cargo plane to Cairo to look for treasure that didn’t exist — because I learned through my da’s notes it was just his way of training me to be able to handle heat.
I took a ship freighter to some uncharted island in Siberia for more treasure that didn’t exist — because my da thought I needed to learn to handle extreme cold.
I was sent to a monastery in Nepal at the foot of Mount Everest, not for glorious riches, but for learning about patience and control.
I was sent to live with the Guarani, an indigineous tribe in Brazil that still lives by its own ways of life, untouched by the outside world. There I learned about using natural resources to their fullest, while respecting the nature that they come from.
But, as I appeared on the map for my da’s contacts and kept in contact with them through my travels, I also appeared on the map for my da’s enemies. I’ve lost count of how many gun fights I’ve been in, and sword fights. I mean, it is the twenty-first century, and people are still using swords? Bloody hell. A lot of these people believed I had the treasure all that time, but I didn’t. I was still looking for my da’s clues. And as my dummy brain should’ve seen coming, my da’s last note got me to see my grandmum in Gill’s Rock. She handed me the last note from him that simply said: don’t let your love be the martyr. It was a line that only I would understand — it was a warning and the treasure’s location all wrapped up in one.
My da named me Ed for St. Edward the Confessor, the first saint of England and the one responsible for Westminster Abbey. My da also named me for St. Edmund. . . St. Edmund the Martyr. So, after reading da’s simple note, putting it all together, I knew where the Porte des Morts was.
In London. In the famed church of England itself, Westminster Abbey. I knew my da didn’t tell me what to look for, because I’m sure the bloke knew I’d know it when I saw it.
And I did.
It was hidden in plain sight. A little piece of wood built into the base of Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb. Why? My guess is that Newton was like my mum, he would believe this treasure defies the laws of physics and no one should have such power, so it should be buried away with him. An untrained eye would think nothing of a piece of wood at the foot of a marvelously carved and gilded marble tomb, but I spotted it. And when I picked it up, little veins weaving through the carved wood came to life. They glowed a faint blue, and that was when I understood that this thing was indeed magic.
Yes, I did break into Westminster Abbey. But that is beside the point. I had accepted long ago I’m going to Hell anyway.
But after I took the bloody thing with me, it all went to shit. Not only is it magic, but it’s like it emits nuclear radiation to the one who wields it. And that lucky bloke, right now, is me. It’s damned power is slowly killing me.
“Should we take up this tree for the night?” Leroy was asking me.
I had been standing over a cliff, looking at the blue gulf water lapping against the sheared rock face a few hundred meters below me. The cliff face stretched as far as I could see both to the right and to the left of me, with the jungle overflowing off the edges. It all looked so untouched by the world. It was late now, I wasn’t sure what time, and the moon reflected over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a brilliant sight.
“You need sleep, Ed,” Leroy said to me as he searched for dry wood with a dimming flashlight.
“You aren’t going to make a fire in this wet jungle,” I told him. “We probably shouldn’t draw any more attention to ourselves anyway.”
He frowned, but nodded. “I was just thinking we could eat, but I suppose I’ve still got some jerky and granola in my pack.”
I lost count of how many times I had to stop and puke out my bloody insides through the hours of trekking through the jungle. Now I was just dry heaving, and occasionally spitting up blood. I felt awful, my head swam, my joints screamed at me, I was dangerously dizzy if I moved my head or eyes too fast, and it felt like a noose was tightening around my neck. I knew I needed to eat, but the thought of food made my nausea almost overwhelming. Leroy held out a bit of jerky to me, and I grimaced. I was trying my best to hide how awful I felt from him, but I was definitely failing now.
Leroy’s face twisted with worry as he put the jerky back in his pack, but he kept a stern voice. “Sleep, Ed.”
The order washed over me. I burrowed into a leafy underbrush, and was comfortable. I was thinking it would take me forever to fall asleep knowing that there were drug lord lackeys scrambling through the jungle looking for us, but my sleep deprivation won out and I fell asleep immediately, then I felt Leroy shaking me awake.
I was about to ask him if everything was alright as I blinked away the morning sun, unsure of how long I had slept, but he gently put a hand to my mouth to keep me quiet. I locked eyes with him and listened to the shifting jungle to hear that somebody was coming, and they were close.
Leroy pulled his chilly hand away from my mouth, then pointed to the blue sky above. I nodded that I understood, and he ran towards the cliff. I was quick to stand and watch, because I could never get tired of watching him do this.
He leapt off the cliff. As I watched him fall towards the waters below, I saw his skin alter and flip with icy blue sparks. His body grew in size, to a size that rivals the size of Sir Francis Drake’s ship, The Golden Hinde. Just as Leroy was about to hit the water, he had completely transformed.
I watched the familiar ice-blue dragon fly up into the sky.
I thought back to after I had gotten the Porte des Morts. That was when I went back to Paul’s to reconcile with him, and to apologize for leaving the way I had five years prior. We got on well, and I was happy to get a moment’s rest with him. I was made up to find that despite thinking I was an idiot, he was proud of me for sticking to my guns. He also admitted it was quite the sight to finally see the treasure both my da and I had dedicated our lives to finding. But, as I said, things went to shit when I got the wanker of a stick treasure. As I sat around at ol’ Paul’s, I got too bloody curious with the thing, I poked around with it too much, and I activated it without understanding how I did.
When I activated it like the idiot I am, I quickly understood that it’s a portal. I’m no scientist, but I know Einstein believed in the idea of multiple dimensions, or realities all existing at once. We may exist in this world, but there could be another world in which we’re bloody squirrels instead of humans or another world where everything is on fire. The Porte des Morts is a literal door — a door to other worlds existing alongside ours. But, it’s a door that no one can open or close of their own accord, it's a door with a mind of its own. I went through more worlds than I can count, keeping the thing with me at all times hoping it would take me back home somehow. But, I could never choose where it opened to, nor could I control when it decided to open. I quickly learned that my mum and my thoughts about Newton were right: no one should have this power because no one would ever be able to control it or understand it.
As I traveled through different worlds, I found that there was a constant in all of them: dragons. Dragons of fantasy, myth, and folklore. I saw fire-breathing ones with brilliant red hides, acid-spitting ones, ones that didn’t fly but could swim faster than I could comprehend, dragons with four heads, or ice-breathing and ice-manipulating dragons like Leroy. All were big, with brilliant scales and teeth, all larger and more magnificent than any creature to roam my own world.
One world I got sucked into was where World War II was on a never-ending loop, and instead of kamikaze pilots, real actual fire-breathing dragons flew the skies. Another world had humans enslaved by tyrannical dragon overlords. Another world had gang wars but with mob bosses that were lightning-spitting dragons. One world seemed to be in 1920s American prohibition, as the government was tired of drunk dragons burning down cities. A lot of worlds had no humans because the dragons killed them all. But, there is one world in all the mix that stood out to me the most: Leroy’s world.
In his world, it was 1933, and humans had learned that the bones of dragons could cure and heal any disease, any injury, any ailment a human suffered, if the human wore a piece of dragon bone as a necklace. Some people believed that remarkably strong dragons could have powers even deeper than that, though no heartless dragon hunter had ever found such bones to prove it.
While I was there, I ended up in Chicago during the World Fair, and the main event of it was a showcase of all the different types of dragons that humans hunted and killed. Since this was also the Great Depression Era, hunting had become a profession that humans vied for — people were willing to pay fortunes for the dragon bones that could heal anyone. But, what makes this world so different from every other world I’ve been to, dragons were humans. They were humans that had the power to transform into the beautiful beasts. So really, humans of this world were hunting their own kind for fortune and fame. Some humans can be so horrifyingly vile and twisted no matter which world your sorry arse stumbles into.
I met Leroy while he was on the run from some hunters, and he was hiding out in the bustling city. He got into a rough scrape, and me being me, I stepped in to help the glacial bloke. It wasn’t long before I pissed off a decent amount of wanking hunters because I helped their prey get away, so I ended up being on the run alongside Leroy.
We became a bloody good team, evading hunters and helping other dragons to do the same. After a few weeks, the obelisk decided to open, and Leroy being Leroy didn’t even hesitate to follow me through it.
But, of course the obelisk didn’t take us home to Paul’s yet. Leroy and I were thrown into even more worlds together. That was about when I realized the obelisk was messing with my arse in more ways than one. I don’t know if it’s because I was never using it the right way or because reality jumping was mucking with me, and I can’t totally explain how I know, but the Porte des Morts’s power was coming at a price. I was getting sicker, weaker, becoming a bit of a useless sack of rubbish with each jump to a new world. Leroy could’ve left my side at any time, but the bloody idiot never did. Eventually he did something to try and save my sorry self, and I’ll never forget the sacrifice he made to try and help me. I’m not one to really believe in a thing like fate, but by some twist of it, right after Leroy’s big sacrifice was when the door opened up to Paul’s.
What Leroy did for me. . . it helped a little, but not enough. Even though I was quick to get the cursed obelisk packed away and out of sight when we got to Paul’s, I only got sicker. Paul, Leroy, and I all knew I had to get rid of the thing. It wasn’t worth it.
With advice from Paul, Leroy and I set off to El Salvador to meet up with a friend that could get us to Panama. But, a big enemy of my da caught wind of where I was going, and that I was carrying a treasure.
Gabriel Juan Estebán Fumar. A wanking twat of a drug lord of Colombia. I’d be wondering why a drug lord would want treasure or how he knew about it, but he rattled it all off in his villain monologue while I was tied up next to a knocked out Leroy in a Costa Rican villa after being taken by surprise and captured at a bus station at the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border.
“Your father was a brilliant man, Señor Ed. My grandfather, too, was a marvelous archeologist hunting for treasure. The Fumar Empire is renowned for its refined taste in priceless artifacts and culture. I had heard of your father’s exploits and what he hunted. And blah blah blah I like money blah blah blah I like treasure and fame blah blah blah… "
I didn’t catch the rest of the monologue because that’s when Leroy woke up.
He probably shouldn’t have transformed into a dragon in a world without dragons, but who was going to believe a drug lord and his lackeys when they claimed they saw a dragon, anyway? There was another gunfight, swords (for no wanking reason), a couple explosions, Leroy spitting ice, me being stupid as I lunged at Fumar head-on to get the obelisk back. But, it was all brilliant because Leroy and I made it out more or less intact, and with the Porte des Morts in tow.
So all of that brings me to here, right now, in the untamed jungles somewhere between Costa Rica and Panama, on the run from Fumar and his lackeys that Leroy hadn’t frozen in place. We were on our way to Sir Francis Drake’s final resting place — somewhere off the shores of Portobello, Panama — because I knew the obelisk was still connected to him somehow.
I had to get out of my thoughts, though, because I heard clunky lackeys getting closer through the surrounding trees. I pulled out the pistol I snatched off of one of them back at the villa and hid behind a fallen tree. I was ready to take a shot, but Leroy, above, spotted the newcomers before I did.
Heavy frost fell from the sky. Sharp icicles were masked by the frost, and punched through the green growth. I then heard some yelling and shouts of pain, telling me that the sharp ice left its mark. But, the ice didn’t stop all of the blimey lackeys, because one stumbled over a tree root then shoved himself through overgrowth towards me. He had snow on his head that was quickly melting, but he looked unharmed. I readied the pistol to take a shot at the guy’s leg only to hear an anticlimactic click.
“What the bloody fffff!?” Of course the clip was empty.
So, I did what any bloody good adventurer does, I threw the pistol at the guy and it made a satisfying clunk against his forehead. He stumbled backwards, and I lunged forward to tackle him to the ground. I threw a right hook to his jaw, and the wimp whimpered.
“Deja de seguirnos, you wanking sleezeball!” I shouted at him. My Spanish was terrible. “You don’t want the bloody thing anyway, trust me!”
I was ready to take another swing, but my dummy brains forgot that I had barfed out all my energy. My head spun, and I faltered. The guy saw his opening and grabbed me by my sweaty shirt collar and necklace, throwing me off of him. He then quickly pinned me down and put a cold barrel of a revolver to my cheek.
“¡Dame el tesoro!” he shouted. “¿Dónde está?”
“Up your arse, you twat,” I muttered as my vision grew dim.
I heard the gun cock, but then the gun and the guy were suddenly flung off of me. Leroy, no longer a dragon, was standing over me with his face scrunched in annoyance and his arms crossed. It was a look and stance he gave me quite frequently.
“Oh, now, where were you?” I asked him.
He grunted. “Taking care of the other half dozen goons scattered through the jungle and aiming to throw lead at me. You’re sick, Ed, you’re pushing yourself too much. Why didn’t you just stay hidden?”
“What, and let you have all the fun?”
The Fumar lackey stirred, so Leroy turned his attention towards him. Leroy’s already icy blue eyes grew more icy — the cold air radiating from them was a thick fog in the steamy jungle air. He drilled his gaze onto the downed man. The lackey’s forehead suddenly started to give off the same icy fog, and then he sleepily shut his eyes.
“Sleep tight, compadre,” Leroy told him.
“You’re too nice to these arses,” I told him.
“What, you’d rather I’d kill all of them?” Leroy raised an eyebrow.
“Well, no, but maybe you could at least freeze their pinky toes off. Or give them a bad case of frostbite? Or even just slide an ice cube down their backs. No bloke ever likes that feeling.”
Leroy rolled his eyes and shook his head in exasperation as he came back to my side.
I tried to get off the ground, but I momentarily blacked out. Leroy was quick to catch me before I collapsed back into the mud.
“Ed, we’re wasting time,” Leroy whispered calmly as he tried to steady me.
“R-right. . .” I muttered trying to regain my useless wits. “We keep moving, then.”
Leroy sighed. “Just let me fly the rest of the way. It would be so much faster.”
I quickly shook my head. “That wasn’t the deal. I wanted you to stay at Paul’s, but said you could only come with me if you didn’t go all bonkers and transform into a dragon at every wanking moment for this stupid world to see. This world is far different than all the worlds we’ve been to together, it doesn’t know dragons. I think that’s bloody scarier, and far more dangerous for you, you bloke. You could literally be shot out of the sky here.”
Leroy gave a warm laugh. “Any more dangerous than everything we’ve already been through together? And besides, you said it yourself back at Fumar’s, who’s going to believe shouts of draque?”
I was too out of it now to give a response. I fell, limp. Leroy then hefted me onto his back and ran for the cliff. After he jumped, I felt his skin turn to smooth scales. His ice dragon scales felt welcome to my feverish cheeks and forehead as I laid sprawled on his back and between his outstretched wings. We flew calmly over the Gulf of Mexico and toward Portobelo.
I have no idea how long he flew, and I have no idea how long I lay passed out on a sandy beach after he landed. When I finally blinked open my eyes, I saw human Leroy sitting in the sand not too far off from me, but looking out to the calm waves. The sun was low on the horizon. I noticed a crescent of jungle behind us, and rock formations weathered from the ocean on both sides of us.
I managed to sit up and crawl slowly to Leroy. My limbs weren’t working well and my nausea was near overwhelming, but I managed to sit myself up next to him.
“You know,” Leroy started to say to me, “I had never seen the ocean before I met you.”
“It holds a lot of mystery,” I said. “Which is kind of annoying, really. I hate mysteries.”
Leroy looked at me and smirked. “You liar. You love mysteries, you just don’t like it when you can’t solve them.”
“Yeah, you bloke. You caught me. You’re bloody right.”
He laughed with good humor. “So, what do we do now?”
I shrugged. “Sir Francis Drake is out there in that water somewhere. Maybe we just throw the Porte des Morts into the water and hope for the best?”
Leroy gave me a look. “Really, Ed? Since when has ‘hoping for the best’ ever been good for us? Besides, I don’t know why you or Paul thought to come out here.”
“Drake had the thing for years, Leroy,” I explained. “Maybe it was what eventually killed him, but he still went years before that happened. All my da’s notes about Drake’s true exploits after his circumnavigation, Drake used the bloody thing time and time again for his voyages. He used it during the fight against the Spanish Armada. He figured out how to use the bloody thing properly. He could use the door any time he wanted, and to anywhere he wanted, to different worlds and even to different places just in this world. He really did find the Northwestern Passage. It’s this little piece of enchanted wood.”
Leroy shrugged. “Well, I’m sure that’s because Sir Francis Drake was a whole lot smarter than you, you twit.”
“Leave the word ‘twit’ in 1933, Leroy.”
“But,” Leroy continued, “I still don’t understand why that would bring us here. The pip’s dead, last I checked, and in some lead coffin at the bottom of these waters that nobody has ever been able to find. It’s not like he can tell you how he used it.”
“I just think the thing is connected to him somehow,” I answered. “I mean, he was El Draque, The Dragon, and every world I went to had dragons. I was hoping, I don’t bloody know, I was hoping that coming out here the thing would react to being close to him or something.”
Leroy sighed. “Are you really that stumped?”
I didn’t answer and we both sat for a long moment. I felt a noose pulling at my neck again, but realized it was Leroy pulling at my necklace. I looked down to the leather cord holding a jagged crystal about the size of my thumb. Normally it was a sort of clear crystal, like quartz, but it glowed ice blue to Leroy’s touch.
“I think this would be the time for you to figure out that one mystery that’s been dragging you down,” he whispered.
I sighed. That mystery was why I wanted to hate mysteries.
“Why did your dad go to Death’s Door, a place that no European knew about when the obelisk was first found?” Leroy asked me. He was goading me to figure this out.
“I. . .” I thought hard. I was only pulling at theories. “I think the obelisk was made there. I think it’s Potowatomi.”
“Potowatomi,” Leroy repeated. “Like your mother.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“But how did it get to Drake if he was way on the west coast?” Leroy wondered.
I shrugged. “Desire. I think the thing senses desire. Drake desired a path, and the obelisk could give him just that. It can teleport through it’s own portals, so I’m sure the thing just teleported to the bloke.”
“That doesn’t seem. . . that doesn’t seem right,” Leroy said. “Desire doesn’t seem strong enough for something like the obelisk. Drake, everything you’ve told me about him, he willingly stayed on a ship with the same men for three years, he willingly did whatever the queen asked him to do, he willingly sacked the Spanish, he enjoyed doing all of it. He enjoyed being the dastardly hard boiled greaseball that he was. He cared about what he did, in his own wacky way. Don’t you think he had something a little stronger than desire?”
“What’s stronger than human desire?” I questioned, raising an eyebrow.
Leroy huffed. “Sometimes you’re real thick, you know that?”
“Shove it, twat.”
Leroy looked to me sharply. “I mean it, Ed. If you’ve only ever thought about desire, that’s why all the worlds were dragons — your desire to follow El Draque’s footsteps. Your desire to follow your father’s footsteps. If you’ve only ever thought about desire, that’s why it never worked for you properly. Desire is what you want, not always what you need. Your narrow thoughts about desire is why the obelisk never worked for you and why it made you sick.”
Leroy then dropped his gaze. It took me a second to realize he was crying, and he was crying ice. Ice in the shape of tear droplets bounced off of his lap. He kept his gaze down but gently put his hand back to the crystal around my neck. It glowed its brilliant blue again.
“So sick that even this couldn’t save you,” he whispered between sniffles so quietly I could barely hear him over the sounds of the waves. “You have radiation poisoning from that thing, Ed. And though the doctors say your mother died of stomach cancer. . . we know she had radiation poisoning, too. She had the thing before your father did. It was back where it belonged, with her and her people, that’s why your father went to Death’s Door.”
I gently put my hand to his, not sure what to bloody say to him. Everything he just said. . . I had to admit I already knew. It was never a mystery I couldn’t solve, it was just one I didn’t want to solve.
“You’re no fool, Ed,” he whispered, “despite how much you claim to be. Why pretend to be so ignorant?”
I hesitated. “Because. . . when I saw my grandmum as she gave me the last note from my da, she said something I haven’t been able to let go. She said that in order to gain what I desire I’d have to lose what I desire.”
Leroy then grasped my hand caringly, but kept his gaze down. “No human in my world ever knew that the bones of my kind have more powers than just healing. If our bones are with someone we care about, we don’t die. We can’t die.”
Care. Why did Leroy keep putting so much emphasis on that word?
I then realized the bloke caught me again. Leroy was right, the snide twat. I was thick.
I remembered back to the last thing my da ever wrote to me: don’t let your love be the martyr.
St. Edmund the Martyr, St. Edward the Confessor. My da gave me both names so I could choose.
I had to choose Confessor. Not Martyr.
“Your crystal—your bones— didn’t save me,” I finally said to Leroy. “You did.”
He looked up to meet my eyes.
“I love you,” I said. As soon as I said it, the mysteries felt less mysterious. The obelisk worked on human’s strongest driving force, I was too bloody stubborn with dummy brains to see it. “You died for me to give me your bones and try to heal me. But. . . I found you only through desire. With what my grandmum said, I was always scared that if I gave up Death’s Door, I’d lose what I got from it, too. I’d lose you. I think I’ll have to do all of this all over again, but the right way. I have to prove I’m worthy enough to have you. Drake proved himself, in his own way, so maybe I can find some way to do the same. He got what he wanted the right way, I’ll just have to figure out how to do that for myself.”
Leroy smiled at me, and looked at me in a whole new light. “And how will you do that, genius?”
“I would travel a thousand more wanking worlds full of useless humans and dragons to find you again.”
Leroy had the nerve to laugh at my glorious yet I’ll admit somewhat messy show of a corny statement. “Just don’t muddle it up, twit.”
We shared one last smile, then I gently took the crystal off my neck. Leroy vanished in a whir of icy wind when I did. I heard his voice echo through the cold breeze — I love you too.
I was now sitting on the beach alone with a crystal in one hand, and a glowing obelisk in the other.
But, I noticed right away that my nausea disappeared, my fever was fading, and my strength was coming back.
The obelisk grew brighter, and I prepared myself for the familiar burst of light, the door opening from it. The lighted doorway appeared in front of me, and I easily walked through. This time it felt different, it felt safe. I closed my eyes as I felt myself be taken somewhere else.
When I opened them, I found myself standing on a different beach. A familiar beach, though, with familiar trees — fir trees. It was a beach on waters I knew.
Death’s Door.
I knew this is exactly where the Porte des Morts belonged and it was where I intended to leave it, but Leroy’s crystal was gone now. Probably back in his own world. But I had to get it back. I had to use the obelisk one last time, the proper way.
I had to get my real treasure back.
— Andi May
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