The Forgotten Land of Myria

ROY

Far off, I heard the peaceful sound of waves crashing and flocks of seagulls squawking overhead. Slowly, my eyes opened, still in a blur. The blazing sun gleamed above me.

Okay, I thought. This might have all been a dream. My mind was numb.

It might be from sleeping on the beach. Beach. How did I get here?

I yanked myself up and brushed the sand off my clothes. I was shirtless and my cargo pants were wet. The water was shallow, with small waves tickling my feet. These waves crashed all around me. I squinted to find the shore somewhere. Nothing. No trees, no island, no ships, no shore. It was official. I was on a sandbar in the middle of nowhere.

Don’t panic, my mind told me, which was practically useless. I screamed. Stumbling over my own dizziness, I picked myself up and looked around the white sandbar for somebody.

Then I saw something moving, from a distance. It lay still. As I approached I recognized the scientist, lying with half his body underwater, unconscious. Struggling, I pulled him out of the water. He was still alive.

“He’ll be up soon,” a familiar voice said. I turned and saw the nurse perched on a small boulder, trailing her feet in the water playfully.

“Where are we?” I asked. She didn’t answer. Instead, she took a small flask containing a shimmering blue liquid and poured it on my hands.

“Rub your hands together,” she said. “It’ll spread through your body.” I instantly felt a rush of hot energy fill me.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s called Eríntys Liquefactus, the Tonic of Thermal Touch, but you can call it the Foxtail Elixir. It’s made from the sap of green foxtail stems and it possesses a hot energy source that spreads through your body with one touch, temporarily numbing out pain and exhaustion. The soup you took at the hospital contained three drops of Foxtail Elixir, although drinking it can be dangerous. Your organs can’t tolerate the energy and would dissolve, killing you. It would be like drinking lava.”

I was at the highest level of confusion one could possibly be and was beginning to think the nurse--well, wasn’t really a nurse.

“Hmm-- I didn’t get your name,” I said.

“My name is Livia. Warden of Nalini, of the Order of Alchemists, specialized in Tekéh.” “What’s Tekéh?” I asked.

“It’s a healing art. Specifically, the art of development of elixirs.”

“Okay, err, Livia. I’d love to know more about Tekéh and all that, but I really need to get home, so--”

I stopped when Angus began to flinch. He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes before sitting up and looking around, dazed, like a lost kitten. He was dead silent. Livia gave him the Foxtail Elixir as well and explained all that had happened, and how we had ended up here. None of us uttered a word during the entire speech, which was full of big words and terms I’d never heard before.

I took a moment to absorb the situation and then spoke up.

“So basically...I’m supposed to believe that we were teleported here?”

“Reintegration would’ve taken years” Angus exclaimed, cutting me off.

My only possible reaction was “HUH?!?” “Are you mad?” I asked.

“Are you slower than reintegration?” he shot back. “Well, maybe--but just try to consider the facts. The unexplained catastrophe, the unidentified creature, and now we’re here. It’s not the only possible explanation, but I don’t see a Eurostar station around here.”

“But...how?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

We were interrupted by the sound of a jetski engine revving. My heart pounded in relief. I heard it coming closer, and I yelled and waved my arms for rescue--Livia laughed like she knew what was coming-- until I could see it through the fog. A bearded middle-aged man with ragged clothes and dirty sandals stood on a raft made of tree trunks. He parked his raft in the sand and hopped off. He was the weirdest looking guy I’d ever seen--and I’d seen pantsless hippies before.

This guy had white shaggy bangs and a ponytail of dreadlocks, with different colored beads for each lock. His eyes were pearly blue and he had an awestriking stare. His hands were rough and beaten up, full of callouses as he rubbed them over his sweat-soaked forehead

“Greetings,” he said, with a foolish smile.

I noticed that from behind his odd hair, he carried an animal on his shoulder. It was no ordinary animal. It had small black half-moon eyes, long ears, shaped like a rabbit’s, and its fur was snow white. Two purple bat-like wings peeked out of its back and one small black antenna, almost like a strand of hair, stuck up from between its ears, resting in its back. The creature was perched on the man’s shoulder gripping it with his hands in a piggyback ride position. For an unreal creature, it was awfully cute.

“Wh-what’s that?” I asked, pointing to it.

“His name’s Banebee. He’s a jujoo, straight from Robinchester. One of the first ones actually. He’s quite old.” “Kupa!” the little creature cried.

The “jujoo” Banebee climbed off the man’s back, and approached Angus, lowering its head in a bow.

“It seems he likes you,” the man said to Angus.

He then pulled a bag out of his pocket, unwrapped it and

took out a red fruit with leathery skin and spines. He cracked it open began to nibble, giving one to each of us.

“I take it you guys haven’t had anything to eat in a while.”

“What’s this called?” I asked.

“It’s a...err... a kithelite. That’s what it’s called,” he said.

“It’s a rambutan,” Angus said. “A native southeast Asian fruit.”

The man shot a stern expression at Angus. “Well, it looks more like a kithelite to me.”

Livia, who was still cooling her feet in the water behind us, giggled.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’d take this in a reversible sense. The question is who are YOU!” he answered.

I was getting impatient. “I’m Roy Kendon, surfer and marine biology student and I find you a bit rude.”

“You study marine biology?” Angus asked.

“Yes, I just so happen to be in the second year.”

“And you’re nineteen?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is that so?” he said with an arrogant grin and began

bombarding me with questions like “What structure develops into a vertebrate spinal cord? How do echinoderms use their endoskeleton as their exoskeleton? When and why does phosphorescence occur?”

All I could answer was “repeat please?”

“Answers are: the notochord, an exoskeleton can also be used as a shell, and phosphorescence occurs in places all over the world, and it happens when micro-organisms ‘glow’ in the water. It just so happens a 17-year-old second year civil engineer has outsmarted you. Again.”

“Listen here, you punk--”

“Pitiful,” the man said. “A skirmish with such poor arguments.”

“Oh sorry,” I said sarcastically. “It’s just I’m not really used to taking elixirs and being teleported, or seeing...whatever that rabbit furball thing is, or dealing with the fact that I’m on a deserted sandbar with nothing but a raft to get home!”

Everyone was silent. I was getting extremely angry. It seemed as though nothing was being explained to me.

“Home? Okay,” the man began slowly. “Since you are so impatient with how things work, I’ll explain things carefully.” I nodded. He took a deep breath.

“Your current life is a lie and I’m here to take you back where you belong.”

I was speechless. Completely speechless. How could a man like this randomly show up and start saying these things?

“....Excuse me?” I made a fist and went for a swing at his face, but I was still recovering, so I ended up swinging the air and falling butt-down in the sand like a drunk.

“I really don’t know how to be any clearer,” he said. “Ah yes, my name is Eleazar. Like Livia, I am also from Myria.”

“Did you say Myria? What’s a Myria?” I asked.

He then shifted his head towards Angus, who had been awfully quiet, solving equations with a stick in the sand. Banebee snored and drooled on his lap.

“It’s where he got the medallion,” Eleazar said, turning towards Angus.

Angus immediately stood up, eyes wide, knocking the little jujoo face flat onto the ground.

“The medallion? How did I get it?”

“Well, I guess you are having some trouble understanding,” he said. “What do you boys know about the Nieles 47 pandemic?”

We looked at each other, tracing our minds, but the name wasn’t familiar.

“Of course you don’t know. Nobody knows. Sit down.” We did as he said, and Banebee trotted towards Angus, perching himself in the sand next to him.

Eleazar cleared his throat. “Well, the comet came, the virus spread, and people died. Anyway, the military forces-”

“Wait what?” I asked. “Seriously, you have to be more detailed.”

“And convenient,” Angus snapped.

Eleazar released a chuckled, and cleared his throat.

“You kids are quite...quittery. So back to the story. The Nieles-47 was a disease that emerged forty years ago when particles of dust fell out of the comet’s tail into Earth. They carried a combination of viruses that formed this deadly infirmity. It began on a group of small islands and later spread into a worldwide pandemic.”

“What did it do?” I asked.

“Many things. I’ll get to that later. The fact is it became uncontrollable. By the time a treatment was developed, millions of people had already died. It even attacked other living beings. First world countries quickly recovered from the disease, but it still remained in some places, especially on the islands where it had first emerged. There was not one person in that area that hadn’t been affected.”

“In the face of global panic, military forces all over the world gathered to execute an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the victims still affected by the disease in the area of its first appearance. At least that’s what they told the world, but corruption is the main enemy of man. What they were really plotting to do was send a steel bird to dissipate the island, and every human, plant and animal that lived there.”

“Impossible,” I said. “That’s nonsense. What’s a steel bird?” Eleazar nodded.

“In the Commonland--I believe you call it a missile.”

“Impossible,” I said. “That’s nonsense.”

“Yeah, I’m getting tired, and you’re getting repetitive,” Eleazar said in a frustrated manner, “so I’ll let Livia finish the story.” He collapsed onto the sand, and scooped Banebee up.

“Okay, so explain how and why military forces would blow up the whole island and all the remaining victims, if they had found a cure?” I said.

“If they had just quarantined the island everyone would have died off eventually,” Angus blurted out.

“Simple,” she said, side-eyeing Angus while focusing on me. “Because it was a solution to their problems.”

“Huh?”

“Simply destroying everything was easier for them than having to spend money and share the treatment with all those people. It would make their jobs a lot easier. That’s how organizations like these think. Well most humans. Whatever suits themselves best is what they’ll do. History itself shows it.”

“Okay, Debby Downer,” I sighed. “But how does all this explain what’s going on here? How are all these events connected--and what just happened?”

“I’m getting there,” she said. “Hope. Hope was brought to those people through a prophet. No one knows who he is or where he came from, but he appeared in the midst of despair and safeguarded the islands. This man is referred to as The Messenger, but no one knows his identity. As for the missile, it was deflected and plummeted into the ocean. The blast still resulted in a lot of damage, impacting the structure of the islands.”

“Wait a minute! How did this man deflect a giant missile, and shield the islands” I asked.

Angus grinned, and drew in his breath. Here comes another useless spew of words, I thought.

“The same way we do everything around here,” Livia cut him off. “Through this.” She held out a small glass flask in the form of a teardrop. In it was a metallic blue flame that moved around like a lava lamp.

“It’s called Myrrh. When the Messenger came, he brought it to heal the people and protect the entire island from the missile, creating a sacred barrier. The Myrrh was sealed in a fountain at the center of the main island, Musgrave Island, thus becoming our source of power.”

“So do you smoke it or snort it?” I half-joked.

“But what exactly is it?” Angus asked, as he snatched the flask right out of her hands and examined it proudly.

“It’s a celestial anointment from Yihwa. Our hope.” “And who’s Yihwa?” I asked.

She smiled a peaceful smile. “Yihwa is everything from the force that conducts the universe, to the air we breathe in our lungs.”

“In other words, you don’t know what this is,” Angus concluded, still eyeballing the flask. “Now, the islands were never destroyed by the missile. Tell me about the people.”

“There was much destruction,” Livia maintained her patience. “Only a small number of the victims of the disease remained and throughout the years they managed to reconstruct and build a new society. The sacred barrier that The Messenger created rendered the islands invisible to Commonlanders. Over the years, that nation was slowly forgotten. However, it is still very much alive, inhabiting the space that you guys call the Auckland Islands. We gave it a new name. Myria. The Forgotten Land of Myria.”

“Is that where he came from?” I asked, pointing to Banebee. “Creatures like him. Fantastical creatures. They exist?”

Livia seemed to hold her tongue for a moment before replying.

“They have always existed,” she said. “They are creatures of the spiritual realms. Only they were obscure to us until that barrier was broken by Myrrh. They now dwell in our midst and we have discovered traits and abilities far beyond what you call natural.”

Banebee hopped around, raising his meaty little arms. “Wupoo!”

We heard grunting and groaning and realized Eleazar had woken up. He twitched his nose and scratched his head staring at us, through squinty eyes.

“Do you guys get it now?” he asked.

“You are all from Myria?” I said. They nodded, including Banebee.

Eleazar spoke up in a stern voice.

“All that has happened the last week wasn’t in vain. You guys met for a reason and it lead you two here. Together. What you say is supernatural or mythical, is more real than you can ever imagine. And now--the Land of Myria has called upon both of you.”

My heart was pounding. I slowly stepped back. I turned to Angus who was now cradling some kind of medallion that he’d pulled out of his bag. Unlike me, he seemed somewhat curious about this hallucination. How bad must he have it? Even I prefer home--and my room was an attic!

“This is madness. I need to go home. I mean, how do you just expect me to believe that?” I asked.

“Wait and see. This is only the first day of the rest of your life,” Eleazar answered, pointing towards the horizon where a flash of green light cut through the fog. The entire environment around us began to fade. We were now hovering over the water, moving. I couldn’t believe it. We were actually levitating a few inches over the water! My legs felt ice cold. From the distance, I saw specks of land approaching us. Islands. They grew bigger and bigger.

“Wait--I can’t just wander into--” “Welcome to the Forgotten Land of Myria.”

“Kupa!”