Hearing that, she laughs out loud, so loud that the house seems to be shaken.
"Ha ha ha, oh boy, you have such an extraordinary imagination. Ha ha ha, no I am not a hell spawn. Ha ha, do I look like one? ha ha"
"I don't know. I haven't seen any hell spawn anyway..."
"No, I am not, boy. I am an old woman, and I used to be a servant of the lord council. That's why I know some stories. ha ha"
"Then why are you here? I still don't get it."
She stops laughing instantly, and looks straight into Lenny's eyes creepily.
"Because I stuck in here. Me and Oldfart are too old now, we can not travel too far. More than that, the hell spawns won't let us go too far anyway."
The answer does not seem to satisfy Lenny, as he continue asking her,
"That Epet or something, it was cast away by you yelling at it. It looks like you can handle those monsters pretty well, doesn't it?" Pauses a second, he says,
"I almost forgot this, but where is that big dog of you?"
"He will comeback soon. AAPEP is my neighbor, he is not the strongest hell spawn out there so I can handle him with my magic. Old Fart isn't a regular dog either, he is also a Hell Spawn so he is pretty much in pair with AAPEP. My mom found him a long time ago, after my dad went to heaven."
"He looks, well, friendly. And you told me the Hell Spawns are not very friendly in your story, didn't you?" Lenny is confused, again.
"Yes, I did. But Old Fart is the sweetest doggy ever. He was wild when he was a puppy, but my mom raised him up so he is now my family. He is all I have left in this world.." The grandma looks down to the ground.
"I am sorry for your family..."
"No, please don't. Both of my parents went away peacefully. I really hope that one day I can go after them, but I still have some businesses need to be done here."
The book
"Like?"
"Like waiting for someone like you to come, and give you the tools to change this world." She smiles mysteriously.
"Some one like me? What are you talking about?"
"By someone like you, I meant YOU. Yes, you. Young boy, I have waited for you all these time."
Lenny stands up, looks at the old granny disturbingly.
"You sound creepy, do you know that?"
"Ha ha, sorry for creeping you out. I didn't mean that."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"Sit down first, boy. I wont eat you, dont worry. Haha. I took you here and saved you twice, remember?"
Lenny sits down. He certainly cannot find any reason to object her words. She then continues,
"One day, you will know the reason why you are here, in this place, at this moment. That day will come soon. But first, I have a feeling that you should read this book and maybe you will find something useful out of it."
She pushes the book toward him. Lenny does not know what to say so he decided to stay silence and starts to look at the cover of the book. This time, he looks at it more carefully into the details. The book is covered by leather, with a thick layer of dust on the surface. He gently blows away the dust to read the title. As the dust was blown away bit by bit, a strange iron symbol becomes clearer at the center. It looks like a crossbow, with a green stone on top. He use his hand to wipe the dust covering its sides, and an eye appeared. The eye was painted on the upper right corner of the cover, and it looks so real it makes Lenny feeling uncomfortable thinking it was a real eye looking at him. There is no title, except some strange symbols at the bottom half of the crossbow. There is no way for Lenny to understand those symbols at the moment, but he feels that they are very familiar to him. Naturally, after wiping out the dust, he tries to open the first page.
But it stays shut, no matter how hard Lenny tries to open it.
"It won't open. It is glued or something. Is this a sick joke??"
"It will, but not without the right person and the right moment."
"So I am not the right person? That makes sense. After everything you told me." Lenny feels a little bit angry.
"Ha ha, calm down boy. You need to become the right person for it first."
"How?"
"This is a magic book. It questions the right of a magic user. Every magic user has an unique trait that must be asserted by the book before he can open it and learn its secret. There are many magic books in this world, each of them has their own choice of readers, but I believe this book will choose you."
"So the book is judging me now?" He says, sarcastically.
"In a way, yes." She smiles again.
"Then what do I do now?"
<To be continued>
For some reason, the previous post did not allow me to comment. So, I re-posted here.
ReplyDeleteI checked some of the official correspondence I had recently within US and the way people handle dates varies. On one of the letters, I even saw "10 Feb 2014". Perhaps, that's a recent trend? I am not sure. Language rules change, so we'll see what happens with dates. Have you thought of this?
It is also comical that the degree is given in the pedagogy of English. I would assume faculty in this department (English education) would know the rules for writing dates...
The faculty has already changed it back to 26th, they also said it was a typing mistake (without any apology). I agree that sometime, some rules change. People makes the rules anyway. However, should it make sense when we change a rule? Human is evolving, so does English. Often, we change into something else that make sense, or we will be excluded from the gene pool. 26th makes more sense than 26 to represent a day in the month, or does it? If the post-fix wasn't there for numeric order of things, then we are likely to misunderstand some situations. It is certainly useful, and I think that's why it was there. Believe me, I saw this trend of removing post-fixes and silence syllables quite a lot recently. I can tell the teen-language is even worse than that: no tense! Many people thinks it is faster to type that way, but they might forget about the impact of their action. I fear that one day, when people talks or write to each other, their partners will not be able to understand any sentence without regarding to the whole context ! I believe that we should still keep some rules with us, if those rules help our sentences stay clear.
DeleteAlso, Vietnamese people are very bad at speaking English. If they don't understand the basic rules of English, it is quite dangerous for them to jump in variances of it. We have witness how English was deformed in the US through three hundreds years of immigration. Too many variances of English that make things difficult for newbies like me to join. Therefore, I think I would try my best to encourage my fellow countrymen to learn English in its original form. With it, they can live anywhere without any concern of English's variances.
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