‘I can’t disappoint him. I have to succeed,’ said Jaden.
‘Then you must train.’
‘I don’t know how.’
Tarsha stood up and walked toward the trees at the entrance. ‘Then I will show you,’ she said, and picked several lemons growing nearby. ‘I think I know your problem. You have more power than you know what to do with, but you think about your objective too much. You do not focus enough on how you will succeed. Start from the very beginning. First, try to simply feel the energy around you, let it drift in and out just like the air in your chest, and then try to push it out. Breathe deeply if it helps. You must learn control. The Daijuar may not be there next time to protect the people near you.’
Jaden bowed and then took in as much air as he could before releasing it slowly and taking in another breath.
‘Good,’ said Tarsha. ‘Relax with it, accept it.’
Jaden coughed and let his concentration go for a moment.
‘Relax,’ Tarsha repeated. ‘There is no hurry. When you can feel the energy, let me know.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Jaden, but stopped as the two steel doors at the top of the grand stairway swung open.
A woman of great beauty and dressed in white appeared and hastened down the stairs.
‘Raquel,’ said Jaden.
‘What?’ asked Tarsha.
Jaden turned to her, ‘Wait here,’ he said, and then quickly dashed down the slope before she could reply.
His mind was suddenly alert and his eyes wide. She was here. She had come back to find him. For some reason he felt excited that he was going to see Raquel again, the woman of untold beauty and royal grace. She had made it to the temple and entered ahead of him, and he quickly followed her in, but as he stepped inside the hexagonal room, his heart sank.
The woman was speaking to his grandfather and the Daijuar, but he immediately realised she was not Raquel. Her hair was black and her clothes were white, he now saw. Raquel had worn blue and her hair was sun-streaked brown. Jaden stood frozen in the doorway as all eyes were turned on him, but he could not take his gaze away from the woman. Her face was similar to Raquel’s, but not quite the same. Her jaw was thinner and her eyes not as deep, green instead of blue, and her eyebrows had a greater arch in them. Her nose was almost the same while her lips were not as full, but what struck him most was that this woman’s expression was one almost of fear before she had turned to him. Raquel had always been calm, even when she had seemed otherwise. Behind her mask, there was always a unique calmness to her.
‘Jaden, I’d like you to meet Dahla,’ said his grandfather, but Jaden managed only a slight bow before making his way out of the temple.
It wasn’t Raquel. His heart felt as if it had lowered several inches in his chest while his stomach felt weak and empty. Over the little time he had spent with Raquel, he saw now just how close he had felt to her. She was something more to him than company. She was someone who, although she did not speak much to him, was able to understand him better than he understood himself, and without knowing it, she had put him at ease in a place somewhere inside that he didn’t know existed, until now.
He wandered past the fountain, but stopped to take a look inside at the statues. He wanted to see Raquel again, if only for a second, wanted to look upon her face and remember the beauty he had witnessed. Unable to see clearly through the curtain of water, he jumped into the pool and walked to its centre so that he was standing next to the statues, water splashing about him continuously and sealing him off from the hollow. Inside, he studied the Daijuarn embrace, the statues’ hands lightly upon each other’s necks, their foreheads pressed gently together and their eyes shut. Now he saw what he had somehow expected but didn’t want to believe. The statue was not of Raquel. The statue was the woman who had just entered the hollow, a woman his grandfather was surely familiar with, while Raquel was a stranger to him.
Disheartened, Jaden walked back up to the shrine. His hair and skin were wet but the Daijuarn garments were dry, despite water droplets being upon them. The Daijuar had told him that they would be like this. They would never get dirt on them or get wet, and they would not burn from the energy he used. They were made of some kind of special fabric, but they had not explained how it worked or where they had got it. Jaden asked no more questions, deciding it was just part of everything else he didn’t understand about them.
He found Tarsha waiting for him at the shrine. She had a questioning look on her face, but all he did was shrug in answer.
‘I can feel the energy,’ he said. ‘I need to understand how it works before I can go any further.’