Burning, all of it burning. Spires collapsing, all because of one word? People thought that the world would end by flooding due to global warming. Who would have guessed it it would be fire? One man could. As could another. One knew the word. The other sought to learn it. A word to end the world and none to save it.
*Gasp*. I inhaled a deep breath of air as I woke, stunned by the dream that I could remember so vividly after dozing off. My name is Adam Lake, occupation: Word Smith; the occupation in which the syntax of words were changed to trigger certain effects. I am 18 years of age starting today. I am part of the religious order known as the Order of Words. Or at least I was before we were hunted down and murdered causing me to flee our colony on the planet of Alpacha 3 destroying it in the process. I used The Word Which Must Never Be Spoken to ravish Alpacha 3 destroying those who felt it correct to hunt me down. Doing that still haunts me to this day 10 years later. Yes, your math is correct I basically committed genocide at the age of 8. I lived by myself in the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts which had become a ghost town, with everything abandoned once Harvard was shut down. Which is exactly why I was living in this abandoned place. I can get everything I need just in this small town only rarely needing to go into Boston without being disturbed at all. Until the day that she came.
Quoting a 21st TV show, she was “Hell in high heels.” She came strutting into Cambridge, sunglasses covering her eyes and most of her face for that matter, and hair black as night going slightly under her shoulders. She was dressed in a black leather jacket with black jeans and a black shirt underneath. Strapped to her back, which does not help her already frightening appearance, was an AK­47. Well, naturally, after being here for almost 10 years and not seeing a soul that entire time, her
appearance worried me. Calling upon my skills as a word smith I quietly whispered, “To save me from what’s outside, hide me for quite some time.” Those words should have made it so that everything and everyone outside not be able to notice me, which made me feel much safer. That sense of safety was shattered when she yelled in a high pitched voice, “I know you are here word smith! Come out before I start destroying everything in this place, including your house!” I did not really want to come out to that because she could very well either be bluffing or be working for the psychopathic emperor who ruled this planet but would just as soon destroy it once its resources were drained or if a better deal came along. Then downstairs there was a loud bang as though the door was kicked open
and the sound of someone running up the stairs. She barged in and, being me, the first thing I said was, “How did you get in?” Her response to that was, “I kicked the door open stupid.” That explained quite bit with the whole banging thing. She then pointed her gun at me and stared at me long and hard. In her high heels I was still an inch or two taller than her. She took note on every aspect of me, pale skin, tousled brownish­blond hair and very scrawny. To anyone who wasn’t looking close enough, I would look like an 18­19 year old that stayed in the house way too much. However, she was looking closely enough to see the one thing that marked me as different, my eye color. Well colors to be more exact. My eyes were two completely different colors. My right eye was blood red and my left eye was as yellow as Pac­man, which can really stand out to someone who was looking specifically at me since it was such a contrast to my white skin. "How the hell did you know I'm here??!! I casted a ward to go unnoticed!” “Physic sun glasses. Lets me see what others cannot. Why else would I be wearing sunglasses at 9 o’clock at night? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of super genius of something. This is way too easy” was her snarky reply. “Anyway, you’re coming with me or else I’ll
put a round of bullets through your face!” Well that certainly got me up and moving, since I was obviously trapped and I might be able to find a way to escape a bit later. Plus, the idea of being shot was not very appealing. She grabbed me by the collar and pushed me down the stairs. “God dammit,” I muttered under my breath as she grabbed me at the bottom of the stairs by my neck and pulled me down the street onto... The Harvard campus.
We went, her walking and me being pulled, onto the campus of what was one the best schools in the world. She brought me all the way down the campus into a building which was once the edifice that geography, history and other social studies were taught in. She produced a key to unlock the door to the Artifact Room in which she dragged me in. “Knowing that you have your ability over words teleport us away,” she exclaimed. “Why should I do that for you when you dragged me out of my house! I don’t know who the hell you are or even your name!” I shouted. At first whispering she said, “My name is Zayn,” and then in a louder voice she said, “Now activate the teleportation or I will put a round of bullets through your face.” I had to think of a way to work this because it was hard enough teleporting one person, much less two. And then it hit me. Quite literally because of what I could use, a Mayan vase in honor of their god of transportation, fell off the shelves and hit me while I was coming up with a phrase to use. “In order to save my face, take us to another place,” I chanted and in a burst of light we were gone taking us to the place that will save my face. We landed in the one place untouched by the emperor and the place where resistance was best known to exist: Bern, Switzerland.
Once again, I was on my feet being dragged into a large building looming over the rest of the city. I went into the building which on the inside was just as ominous as the outside. Everything was gray and black with only the slightest bit of white. There was a man standing there dressed in white
robes. He introduced himself by saying, “Welcome to the Resistance, I am the leader. My name is Gamasmus. I hope Zayn was efficient and kind while bringing you here.” Zayn kicked my shin and I nodded my head. “Very good!” Gamasmus said. Then they proceeded to lay out what they knew and what they proposed. Apparently I had not been as quiet as I thought and the Emperor was hunting me down. Gamasmus explained, “The Emperor is a lunatic, his father, the ruler of Dathomir, had died recently and The Emperor wanted to rule that planet instead of Earth due to its vast riches and resources. Then he heard about you. One who could reduce people to dust with a single phrase, one who could, say, induce the apocalypse with a single...” And then I started to run, while screaming, of course to escape the Word Which Must Never be Spoken. My escape did not work very well
because Zayn tackled me to the ground which was not a very good experience. In order to protect my sanity, I fainted.
WhenIawokeIwasonabedinawhiteroom. IwenttothedoortofinditunlockedsoI walked right on through the threshold. Who else would I find on the other side but Zayn? She jumped up grabbed my arms and handcuffed me. She led me down the stairs where Gamasmus was waiting. “You gave us quite a scare there. We thought you had absolutely gone bonkers,” he said as we walked down the hallway. At that moment I completely lost it, “HOW DARE YOU MENTION THAT WORD! I USED IT ONCE AND AFTER THAT I SWORE THAT WHEN I DIE IT SHALL DIE WITH ME! NOW ALLOW ME TO LEAVE OR I WILL DESTROY YOU PUNY EARTH NATIVES!” “Calm down. We do not want you to use the word. The Emperor however does. He wants no one to oppose him once he goes to Dathomir. Basically, we need you to go in and disintegrate him or if it comes down to it, destroy his capital city of Moscow. We think you know how
to do that without destroying the rest of the world,” he explained in a calming tone, although my heart kept beating quickly. In order to calm myself down, I whispered “To make my worries nada, I say to me Hakuna Matata.” Being that I am significantly calmer and “have no worries”, I agreed to take the 1,736.9 mile trip to Moscow to kill the most powerful person on the planet.
Well we began flying in a stealth plane from Bern to Zurich to Poznan to refuel in order to finish the remaining part of the trip. All seemed to be going just fine until we flew over Minsk, Belarus who showed that we were not really that stealthy. One well placed shot was all it took to bring us down to Earth. We were falling quite quickly so I shouted “Capite Nobes” and we stopped falling and were very gently placed the plane on the ground. I walked out of the plane to be “greeted” by soldiers who pointed their guns at me because we all knew they were not fond of members of the resistance right next to the capital city of Moscow. From the darkness a man walked out. A man dressed in a way similar to that of Zayn but more masculine. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me off to the side into a small gray building at which point he began interrogating me. At the very end he stated, “Though you hide who you are, I already know that you are Adam Lake, the Word Smith. So now I must ask you lest I save you much pain and suffering, what is the word that must never be spoken? We must know! I must know!” My response to that was what any normal person would do at that moment. I pushed the chair over and started running. I was fast, but they were faster so in order to slow them down I muttered a phrase under my breath which reduced the soldiers to dust. Then I felt one of his minions start probing my mind. He entered, uninvited, and I was totally unprepared. The pain that it caused was unbearable, I collapsed to the floor, screaming in pain as he learned everything there was to learn about me. The pain escalated as he began tearing down my largest defense, the only reason he was
there in the first place, The Word Which Must Never Be Spoken. He then heard the word, a most terrible word. Tadeh. And then he was gone. Not just from my mind, but Belarus altogether. I shouted to Zayn,
“They have the word. If they use it there is no way we can stop them. Go to where we can save the world, where we will start a new world.” In another flash of light we arrived in Russia. But it was too late. Red light was flying out of the Kremlin spreading out over all of the world because Tadeh was spoken. Then I realized what my dream from just one day ago was about for all around me I saw burning, all of it burning, spires collapsing all because of one word.
Then I saw the flaw in the dream. There was a way to stop the effect of the word. While it could not save the rest of Moscow, it could save the rest of the world. Before I did I should probably destroy the Kremlin first. So I chanted, “Ravish the Kremlin as never before, total destruction from mountain to shore.” I took off through the city looking for a relatively high point I could stand on safely. The highest point I could find was St. Basil’s Cathedral which I then began climbing. I reached the top and as loud as my body allowed me to I shouted, “Elfi.” As it is a lot easier to destroy something than to create something, the energy taken out of me caused me to lose my grip and fall off the side of the cathedral. When I hit the ground my entire body broke and blood began filling my mouth and oozing out of the cuts on my body. The last thing I remember before passing into the void was Zayn shouting “Adam!” And then she broke down sobbing.