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In. Story and genre please.
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Jan 3, 2023 23:53
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:29 |
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The Legend of Leah and Rachel and Bilhah and Zilpah Reunion of Jacob and Esau as Puzzle-Focused Techno-Fantasy Adventure 1679 words How many times, in how many past lives, had Jacob faced Esau? How many times had he delved the dungeons of this land and battled the terrible Guardian Beasts within to retrieve the Crystal Keys that would open passage to the Dark Fortress where Esau, inevitably, waited within. Jacob had no memory of his past lives. He tried to imagine the ruined fortress as it might have been the last time he faced Esau, or the time before, or the time before. He tried to wrap his head around the endless, unbroken cycle of violence that went back to the genesis of the world. Jacob could sense the end of this cycle approaching. He couldn’t remember his past lives, but the chambers felt increasingly familiar as he approached the center of the Dark Fortress. “Sorry, Esau,” muttered Jacob as he smashed through a stained-glass window concealing the entrance to the next—and hopefully penultimate—chamber of this tedious labyrinth. The next room didn’t appear to have any visible exits. He couldn’t have taken a wrong turn; according to the map of the fortress, this was the antechamber to the throne room. Great, another drat puzzle, thought Jacob. He began to search the room for signs of a hidden door. “Hey!” Hospir fluttered over to perch on a cornice overlooking a raised section of tile. “Listen!” Jacob grumbled at the sudden intrusion on his concentration. Hospir’s guidance often came at unwelcome times, but the little glowing dove had never steered him wrong yet, and it’s not like he was making any progress. Jacob rose from his haunches and dusted himself off, wincing a little from the lingering pain in the hollow of his thigh. He hurried over to where Hospir had perched and looked down at the raised block, which he now realized was a pressure plate. “It looks like it needs something heavy to press it down,” chirped Hospir. Jacob was familiar with such pressure plates from his many delves into the dungeons of the Ancients. For their own inscrutable reasons, the Ancients seemed to prefer the ubiquitous plates for operating doors and other mechanisms, as opposed to more modern levers and switches. Body weight was the simplest way to trigger a plate such as this, and it didn’t take Jacob more than a moment’s deliberation to step onto the plate. No sooner had Jacob put his full weight onto the pressure plate then there was a distant, metallic clunk from somewhere behind the wall. He looked around to see what had changed. “Hey!” chirped Hospir. “Listen!” Hospir fluttered urgently over to the opposite corner of the room, where another pressure plate had risen from the floor. Jacob stepped off the first pressure plate and in the next instant there was another clunk and the second pressure plate sank back into the floor, blending seamlessly with the tile. “You have to keep your weight on the first switch or the second one won’t appear!” chided Hospir. “Thanks,” snorted Jacob. He scanned the room for any heavy objects. Stone blocks, huge vases or statues that he could push into place. Nothing. The room was bare. Of course, that would be too easy. There had to be some way to hold the switch down. What was he missing? Ba-a-a-a-a a sheep bleated from somewhere around the corner. The stupid sheep again. Jacob had been bumping into sheep all over the fortress, all of them in unexpected places. Wandering the hall, at the bottom of a well, on top of a pillar in the center of the room. They didn’t end up having any part to play in progressing through the fortress so Jacob had gradually sort of tuned them out. Then it hit him. “drat it!” Jacob felt like curling up into a ball and sobbing on the floor. He was going to have to go all the way back to the beginning of the maze and collect all the sheep. “Just once I’d like to get through a dungeon without having to start over at the beginning again,” Jacob moaned. It took hours but Jacob finally wrangled all the sheep back to the antechamber and goaded them each onto the pressure plates as they were revealed. Once all the plates were pressed, hidden grottoes slid open along the walls and a pair of gigantic Laser Knights lumbered out, brandishing massive swords as they tried to transfix Jacob in the burning beams of their gaze. “Hey! Listen!” chirped Hospir, fluttering around the head of one of the knights. “The Laser Knight’s weakness is the ruby eye in the center of its helmet!” Jacob was too busy dodging lethal laser blasts from the knights’ helmets for a witty retort. After a tense scuffle, Jacob was able to use the mirrored surface of his shield to deflect the deadly beams from one knight into the other—causing it to explode—before then destroying the first knight by turning its own beams back on itself. With the knights defeated, the hidden door to the throne room revealed itself, shimmering into view in the wall opposite the entrance. The door to the throne room was wrought in gold and locked with a gargantuan padlock. The keyhole was large enough for Jacob to fit his whole hand inside and he briefly wondered if he could have just picked the lock by reaching inside and pressing the tumblers, but decided to use the jewel-encrusted key he’d been carrying around instead. The key was obnoxiously heavy and he’d had enough of lugging the damned thing through the entire castle. The lock shattered into fragments and the heavy bars withdrew into the walls, allowing the golden double doors to swing inward. Hospir fluttered down and settled on Jacob’s shoulder. The olive branch in the glowing dove’s mouth tickled Jacob’s cheek. “Be on your guard, Jacob, Esau is in there!” it chirped. Jacob took a moment to catch his breath and gather up his courage, then took up his sword and strode cautiously into the throne room. The light cast by Hospir’s glowing body only seemed to penetrate a few feet into the pitch blackness of the central chamber, but Jacob got a sense from the echoes of his steps and the movement of the air that the throne room was as big as a cathedral. “Heh… heh… heh…” an evil-sounding laugh chortled in the darkness. “Y-you don’t frighten us!” chirped Hospir. A ring of braziers suddenly blazed into life! Their eerie, blue flames revealed a ring of stone pillars marking the boundary of a flat, circular space like an arena. At the opposite end, a huge figure covered in shaggy, red hair sat in a throne the size of a small house. “Have you come to kill me again, brother?” chortled the giant. “Esau, I’ve come to avenge the sins you’ve committed against this world!” called Jacob, sounding braver than he felt. Had Esau been this massive in their previous encounters? “My sins?” Esau stood, his eyes flashed like burning coals in the darkness and he threw back the folds of his cloak to reveal a sword as long as Jacob was tall. “Is it a sin to defend the birthright promised to me?” Esau began to descend the steps of his throne in long strides. “You don’t remember our past lives, do you?” asked Esau. He didn’t wait for Jacob to answer. “I know you do not, because you’ve never remembered them. I, on the other hand, remember them all…” “H-he’s trying to trick you!” chirped Hospir. “Do you know how long our struggle has raged, little brother?” asked Esau. “Thousands upon thousands of years. Hundreds of reincarnations. We’ve been at each other’s throats since we shared our first mother’s womb! And you’ve been trying to hold me back since you grasped my heel to stop me being born!” Esau drew his sword in a flash and leveled the tip inches from Jacob’s face. “Shall we dance this dance again, brother?” growled Esau. “Will you cast me down until our next, inevitable battle? Or will you bow before me at last?” Jacob could feel the Coriolis force of the spiral as it tightened around him, whirling him until he was dizzy. His hand gripped on the hilt of his sword and the brothers stared into each other’s eyes, not daring to blink. He was ready to fight. He’d kill Esau just like he had hundreds of times before. He’d free his wives from their crystal prisons and live happily ever after… until he had to start right back at the beginning again. He was doomed, just like his brother was doomed. His victories weren’t victories, just clearing the latest hurdle on a circular track he’d been running forever. If he killed his brother now, the bitterness in Esau’s soul would just grow a little bit more, so that the next time they faced each other it would be after an even greater ordeal. There had to be a way to stop the cycle, the violence, the endless, mind-numbing puzzles. There had to be a way to just... Stop! Jacob suddenly felt as though a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. His sword rang as it clattered on the flagstones. Esau dropped to his knees before Esau and apologized. “Sorry, Esau.” “…” Esau was at a loss for words. It was clear that this had never happened in all their endless cycles. All the time he spent building more and deadlier defenses, raising bigger and more terrifying armies to repel his brother, sealing himself off in the center of increasingly elaborate mazes. It was exhausting, trying to fit so much work into a single lifetime. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” Jacob wept, still kneeling, his forehead on the stone at Esau’s feet. “We never have to fight again. Please forgive me.” Tears welled up in Esau’s eyes and he threw away his sword, dropping to his knees and wrapping Jacob in his colossal arms. “Hey!” chirped Hospir, circling over the pair of them. “You did it! Hooray!”
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Jan 9, 2023 04:23
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