4th Wall Universe

Alone In A Cave With Just Me and My Scorpions

#AloneInACaveWithJustMeandMyScorpions

#AnExtremelyShortStory

#ByMReneLee

#4thWallUniverse

A scruffy man with an unkempt beard repeatedly flips a tattered piece of parchment back and forth several times as an equal mix of confusion and panic cover his face. He looks with concentration at one side of the old piece of parchment for minutes before turning it onto the other side and doing the same. Then he flips it back over again.

"Go forth in the heated sands of the desert and welcome the guardian under your phoenix wing?" the man questions out loud. "Go forth? Go forth where?" he asks himself out loud. He looks at both sides of the parchment again, then around the cave walls that surround him as if he expects to find someone. He looks back at the parchment. "This mystical crap is really hard to get a handle on," he says to himself.

He walks down the cracked stairs of the hidden temple inside the cave that he is in and before he can step down hundreds of scorpions appear out of nowhere and cover the ground everywhere he prepares to place his feet.

"I guess I'm just alone in this cave with you scorpions," he says to the venomous arachnids swarming the sandy cave floor. He walks back up the stairs and plops down in a corner of the antiquated temple-like structure. He looks at the parchment paper one more time and tosses it aside.

"'Leo, you should go on personal vacation' they said. 'Leo, you should take your personal jet' they said," Leo mummers to himself in frustration. "I knew I shouldn't have listened to them. I have a few recurring hallucinations about training a young man in the desert and now it's necessary that I take vacations." He looks at the distant entrance to the cave and the scorpions covering the ground that lead to it. "And whatever happened to my pilot? He told me to bail out and if he landed the plane successfully he would be sure to find me." Leo thinks for a minute. "I'm guessing he didn't land the plane all that successfully."

Leo jumps up and enters the temple, stopping at the towering wall of scrolls and old manuscripts. He remembers how he read every last one of them. He remembers how he actually began believing in all the zodiac mumbo jumbo that the many texts seem to be centered around. Then he remembers his old creado.

"It is what it is. I'll just be alone in this cave with just me and my scorpions," he says to himself as glances back at the scorpions. He walks over to a bare part of the broken tiled temple and sits down. "I guess whether this stuff is true or not, I'm here for a reason." That's when he notices a book that looks newer than the rest. He opens it and on the first page it reads:

This diary belongs to David Walthorne. In it accounts my time in this and what I believe to be the last years of my life.

"Oh, so, I'm not first poor soul to be trapped here," Leo says to himself. He continues reading,

They say I'm some kind of Scorpio Oracle or something based on these scrolls in here. Strange and ridiculous as all this sounds it kinda feels right. I wonder if I am experiencing some kind of delirium from the isolation or am I finally getting shell shocked from war.

"Must've been a military guy," Leo says as he flips through thick diary. After a while he cannot help but grow more intrigued with the diary. Not just because it was a distraction but because it was eerily familiar. This David Walthorne was here for six years before he started writing this diary. That is almost as much time that Leo was there. For whatever reason, he wrote down all the scrolls he had read and the order in which he read them. He read the same ones in the same order Leo had, up to that point. He said he began writing the journal after he found a piece of parchment that told him to go forth into the heated sands of the desert and welcome the guardian under his phoenix.

Leo is in disbelief. He finishes the diary in a few days and immediately collects as many blank sheets of parchment and paper he can find to begin writing his own diary.

He goes back and rereads some of the ancient scrolls and learns to meditate in order to reach a transcendent state, just as David Walthorne had done. And also like David Walthorne, in a year's time, he feels the cave grow hotter than usual and hears the wind howl from the outside of the cave. When he goes to check, he notices the scorpions that once covered cave ground had disappeared.

Leo steps down off the final step, and to his surprise, the scorpions do not return. He proceeds to the entrance of cave knowing that he would be back, but this time he wouldn't be alone. Just like David wasn't the first time he left the cave and returned with his guardian under his wing.