An Enlightening Lie About the Lucidity of Bees

By Ian Kraft

Crofton Eer, a member of a militaristic society set in a canyon that knows only war, seeks an escape from the troubled canyon in which he lives, guided by the embodiment of the lone star that is visible from the canyon depths. His escape takes him on a journey in which he discovers that there are a great many more stars (gods) in the sky, which leads to a search for meaning in the valley of life. For if any one people can consider itself the chosen people, then the rest of us are just alone and whatever argument you make about conversions, there will always have been some who were just left alone - is that really how God works? Take the journey and be surprised by the notion that condemnation is more of a human word than a divine one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Kraft
• Release date: Jan 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458177568

Ian Kraft

I am a grad student at George Mason University. During my last few years of college, I began writing a great number of full-length novels. The stories are heavily, although tacitly, influenced by my experiences having a brain tumor 8-1/2 years ago. Surreality, word play, use of multiple languages and an overall sense of that which cannot be dominate my stories. I'm more than friendly, so please, if you have the time, friend me on Facebook with a message that you found me through Smashwords! I'd love to hear from anyone and everyone!

Book preview

An Enlightening Lie About the Lucidity of Bees

Ian Kraft

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Ian Kraft

How is it that you possess the stars, know their every thought and desire of us? Is their love not for the world which was created by the one star?

I was born amidst a flood. And as the canyon filled with water, the torrential wind raging the rising tide into waves that struck the land above the canyon like meteors striking from the sky, my eyes caught first light, the light of a world that was above the canyon people to which I was born.

Do you believe it’s true? asked Doug.

I didn’t answer.

Do you believe in the Armies of Specter? I mean do you believe that they’re up above the canyon waiting for us, waiting for us to come fight them?

I didn’t answer, just assumed an unsure look of distaste.

Well, what do you think? he asked again as if unable to draw a conclusion about anything for himself.

Slowly, I opened my mouth and began to answer. I just don’t want to be a suicide fighter.

Doug looked back at me with a vague smile. He was my friend, yet distantly unaware, I felt, of what truly lay before him.

I think we’ll be okay, he answered after a moment, After all, your father made it.

I laughed. My father was a coward; he went up there and hid in a ditch until the fighting was over and then he came back and received some sort of honorary medal, for what, I don’t really understand.

Yeah, but he made it back from The Conflict, didn’t he?

So what time is the graduation ceremony next week? I haven’t been paying attention to any of my professors, I replied, changing the subject.

With a goofy smirk written across his old-looking face, his brown mop top wild and unruly, Doug looked back at me, a look of interest still on his face. Peak time.

Peak time. From down in the deep canyon of Wilch there were only several hours of actual sunlight every day as the sun passed between the fifty meter gap between the two canyon walls. Peak time was the moment at which the sun reached the center point of the sky between our high canyon walls.

Why? I asked rhetorically.

You know the history; peak time is the moment when Dana the Nonpareila slew Slade the Malificent, temporarily expanding the territorial claims of the princedom of Wilch.

Yes, I shot back frustratedly, but I just don’t see the point – we’ve never actually made any gains; I don’t want to go fight; I don’t see the point.

Just don’t let The General hear you say that, Doug advised with a warning, cautioning voice, That’ll be the end of you. The end of his statement was calm, as if he didn’t know where to put the emphasis in his words. Tomorrow’s our class exam, he continued, changing the subject once more, where do you think you’ll end up?

That was the system. At the end of the 10th year, all male students took an exam. Those that passed were routed through to the next round of school to become military officers; those that failed were sent straight into the ranks of the army to go fight the unknown enemy that was up above the confines of the canyon.

I think that I’ll move on; I’ve been doing pretty well.

Do you think you’ll make General?

I doubt that, I answered with a laugh and yet a dual thought of the potential that lay in such an idea.

The light inside my cabin began to grow cooler, darker and more defined by the vague gloom of the moon above, a body which seemed to be visible for longer than the sun was ever out. I thought about saying that I was going to bed, about shooing Doug out the door, but I was scared, afraid of what was going to happen over the course of the next few days, terrified at the thought of my life culminating in nothing more than a death charge at an enemy that I didn’t even really know anything about.

You know… I tried to begin, intending to ask Doug to stay and talk for a few more hours. Before I could begin, however, he cut me off.

I think I should probably get going, he jumped in, I’ll see you tomorrow, Crofton.

I didn’t want to be alone. I’ll walk you back, I responded with a jumpy, colloquial tone in my words as I pronounced the ‘a’ in the word ‘back’ as if it were the word ‘rock.’

Doug went to the door of my cabin, making his way through the entirely wooden hallway between the kitchen and the outside with a tired, slow pace. As he moved, he looked back to me and continued You seem pretty shaken up – are you sure you’re alright?

Yeah, I’m fine – just nervous I guess.

Doug opened the door with a quick hand, the light tan, wooden egress immediately rotating back on its hinges and revealing the shadowy gloom of the eventide. I could see the wall of the canyon off in the distance, no more than a field’s length away. It rose up from the flat ground of the canyon at a ninety degree angle, dark shadows defining the vertical, guttered groove in the rock of the canyon wall. As we progressed into the nightshade, I made my way behind Doug, following his bold example. Surely he knew where he was going and surely by following him, I would ensure that everything would be alright for me.

I followed Doug along the canyon wall as he made his way back towards his home and neither of us spoke. I simply tread along, my gaze continually locked on the sky up above. There, in the dark firmament above, its form framed by the ledges of the canyon walls that rose far above my head, was a black sky that was alit by a group of three stars, the three anomalous points of light in the sky that no one in the canyon, not even the greatest of our philosophers, could explain. The persisting theory was that they were gods, the three gods who had created the canyon in which we now resided.

Do you think they can hear us? Doug asked, looking up to the sky above as he took notice of the fact that my attention was fixed upon the sight.

I don’t know. We are pretty far down. Besides, they’re so far away.

Yeah, but I still wonder, or at least I like to – what if they can hear us?

Which one do you think is Dana?

Oh, definitely the one on the right, I answered as if it should have been obvious.

Why?

Well, she’s Jave’s right-hand spirit – there’s a reason that she was sent here to bring us a moment of prosperity.

Then Specter is the light on the left?

Of course. I paused. How long do you think it will be until they get back here?

When we defeat our enemies above this canyon.

I didn’t know how to answer that. He had to be wrong.

We approached his cabin along the side of the canyon wall and as I saw his red door, a panicked dread overtook me – I was about to be alone again. The flames of the torches along the canyon walls continued to blaze in their shadow-inducing, orange conflagrations. Doug’s home was nothing more than a passing umbrage in their light. Seeing this, I waved to Doug with a quick See ya’ later, Doug, in which I enforced the pronunciation rules of the canyon, pronouncing the ‘a’ in ‘ya’ like the ‘o’ in ‘rock.’

Doug waved back at me without words and made his way towards the crimson portal that led into his house. Before he had even arrived at the sinisterly sanguine door, I turned and began to make my way back home, wishing that there was some way that i could prevent the fate that was growing ever nearer, no matter what I did to delay, no matter how long I was able to keep studying my way towards an official rank.

Chapter 2

I awoke the next morning to the sound of the canyon call as it echoed through the air, the sounds of the unforgiving horn thundering and reverberating from some unknown point into the depths of the canyon. The deep, cacophonous echo continued for thirty seconds and I sat up in my bed, pushing my blankets to the side. The tan covers fell over the side of my bed like parted soil descending from the canyon ledge above, falling like a stream running over a precipice. I stood and quickly went about the task of dressing.

I was once more responsible for taking myself to school, to the gender-divided academy known as The Nadir. All youth and young adults of the canyon were required to attend The Nadir from the first day that they spoke words. And so, naturally, a person’s first words were always a momentous occasion. I began to make my way towards the door, passing down the rectangular, wooden hallway and grabbing my school bag off of a chair that sat next to the front door on my way out.

The canyon, as shadowy in the morning as it was in the early evening, was filled with an incomplete, amber light and I moved along at a quick pace, fighting the shivering spells that struck me every now and again. I passed by several homes that were, like mine, located in the male student channel of the canyon, looking at their plain, light wooden exteriors, thinking about the fates that awaited the people inside. They, whether in a week at the next graduation ceremony or later, would go to fight against the enemy up above the canyon and would die fighting as every soldier who had ever left the canyon had, every one except for a few anyways.

The trail of the canyon was shaped like a three-sided asterisk, the points of which met in the middle. Each third, each line of the three-pronged star, was sectored off for a different group of people. I lived in the male channel, then, rotating around the lines to the right, there was the female channel and then the returners channel. At the center of the formation was The Nadir Academy. The returners channel was where the select few who had survived The Conflict up above the canyon went to grow old in solitude. The survivors, like my father, were both revered for having returned and looked down on for not having made the ultimate sacrifice of dying for the pride of the canyon. And so they were secluded in the most precarious of the canyon’s three channels, a place filled with boulderous debris from up above.

I made my way towards the center of Wilch, where the canyon opened into an enormously wide circle, a gigantic ring in which sat the two parts of The Nadir Academy, the male building and the female building, separated by a steel wall. The two buildings, both of them two stories high, were both built entirely from dusty tan bricks that had been dug out of and formed from the rocken canyon walls. The taupe buildings had a boxy, institutional appearance that contrasted greatly with the homes and other buildings inside the canyon. The Academy was not only a school, but also a commissary at which and from which all clothes, food and other life-vital supplies were kept and distributed. The roofs of the two buildings rose towards a center point like four-sided pyramids of sandstone and culminated in a point that was adorned by the flag of Wilch – a rectangular cloth that depicted a red claw breaking through the surface of the ground and grasping at the air above as if desperate to attack.

I began to walk towards the male building of The Academy, keeping an eye on the wall behind it as I moved forward. There were human beings on the other side.

The front door of the male half of The Academy was painted a deep, crimson shade of red, a sanguine hue of violence, though I had been told that the women’s half of The Academy had a much brighter color to it. As my hand reached out to press down the bar that let the door open, I looked through the small, square window in the center of the door and saw a frenzy. Students inside, some whom I knew and others whom I didn’t, were studying fervently, desperately searching through books for answers to the current predicament of the canyon as they sat along the rows of red lockers on either side of the wall. I pushed my way in.

The door creaked open in a metallic squeal and I continued to navigate the sight of the desperately studying students that surrounded me. Suddenly, I heard a thunderous crack fill the air like the splitting of bone and I looked up to the end of the hallway to what I knew to be there – The General. He was the head administrator of The Nadir as well as the head of the army into which students were intended to graduate.

The attention of the hallway soon rested on the cruel figure of The General, a broken tree branch in his hand that he had struck against the wall to gain our attention. He was a peculiar-looking man, The General: he wore a fiery red military outfit that was adorned by a great number of medals and other rank-indicating pins across his chest. The golden buttons that held his suit shut in the middle bore the semblance of the claw on the Wilchean flag and his hat, red like his suit, widened from its black brim, expanding into a halo of fiery material that was wider than his head. His face was cold and emotionless; his eyes appeared as if they were constantly being sucked out of his head, bulging from their sockets; his thin mouth was forever twisted in a scowl.

Do I have your hearts? he bellowed out like one of the drill sergeants.

Lord, my Lord! responded the entire hallway in a unified affirmation that they were in fact paying attention.

I remained silent.

The exam will be administered at the disappearance of the sun later today, he began in his thick, traditional accent, All those who are not present will be shipped out immediately. Dismissed!

You! shouted back the choir of voices in the prescribed manner.

The General departed back into the depths of the dark hallway ahead and I turned, making my way towards my locker, which sat at the end of the row on the right side of the hallway, the closest locker to the door.

After sorting through my things for a minute, retrieving the binder that I needed for my first class of the day and putting away several things that I had taken home with me the previous night, I turned and headed towards history.

I made my way down the dark hallway down which The General had departed and turned left just past the point where the space began to fade into shadow, into a room labeled ‘History 324 Professor Albert Tolst.’ The space on the other side of the doorway was bright, well-illuminated by the radiant light of candles that sat all around the room. The students’ space, filled with brown stone tables around which the students were to sit, filled a majority of the small room while the teacher’s space was nothing more than a narrow walkway behind which sat a chalkboard. I sat down on one of the pillars of compacted dirt that surrounded one of the tables that sat near to the board on the left side of the room and waited.

As I sat down, I saw another student enter the room. He was a tall boy with a thin, wiry figure. His name was Althur Soot and it had once been predicted that if and when he went up to fight, he would be the first to die because of his height, he would stand out and the enemy would target him first. I smiled and nodded as he entered and he returned the gesture, proceeding to sit elsewhere. The room slowly filled with students, all of us ultimately doomed to fight.

We soon sat around the tables, filling the students’ section of the room, waiting for Professor Tolst to enter. I turned and looked to Doug, who now sat next to me.

Anything? I asked him to inquire whether or not he had anything worthy of note to talk about.

No, he replied with a despairing shake of his head, Nothing.

The door rattled, the door squealing once more, and just as quickly slammed shut with a clangorous thud and I turned my attention to the source of the noise – Professor Tolst now stood right in front of the door, a book held against his chest as if he were trying to absorb the text into his flesh. His face was as ghostly white as always, his eyes wide, a terrified look permeating his appearance. He wore his half-ring glasses up on his head (he never seemed to use them) like a symbol, an indicator of where he felt he belonged.

Are you all ready for today? he asked with a tone that implied great consequence, speaking, of course, of the exam.

Sir, yes Sir! replied the stern-faced, unified chorus of the classroom.

I moved my mouth, but made no sound.

Good! he replied jovially, "I think that you all will fare well in the fight. I think that this is our year, I