Amateria : The Age of Dynamic Forces.

Or as I call it : Walt Disney's playground. Come on, this place is AWESOME! So much fun! I can't tell you how many times I saved and replayed the video of the craziest rollercoaster ride ever! :D They need to build a replica of it somewhere.

Looking through the blue telescope showed the third tusk across the bridge she had linked to when she'd first entered J'nanin. It seemed like a hundred years ago. Melody hadn't realized how tired she was until that moment. The sun hadn't set yet and she wondered if night time on J'nanin had passed while she had been in one of the other Ages.

Melody yawned. There really wasn't time to sleep, but maybe after she opened the final tusk she'd taken a nap before heading into Amateria.

The symbol on the telescope was a circle. She lined it up with the window on the tusk and used the side door to exit the observatory. Her first clue that opening the tusk was not going to be fun was that the window she had seen from the telescope was actually ground level, which meant that the actual door was underground. A search of the area revealed a hole in the rock leading downward into a grotto. A walkway built above the water lead to the door, but things were never that easy. A large, heavy metal barrel-looking object blocked the way. Melody frowned. Was this Saveedro's doing or had Atrus put it there as an extra challenge for his sons?

After several moments of pushing, shoving, kicking and name-calling, Melody decided to look around for alternate means of moving the stubborn obstacle. Stepping stones lead toward a ledge that had a podium on it. Melody hopped, skipped and jumped her way across. There were two handles on the podium. Since there were obviously connected to the tusk in some way, Melody picked one and pulled it down. The section of the walkway after the barrel went up and the section behind went down. Pushing the handle up caused both pieces to go back to their original state. The other handle controlled the section by the ladder. After some maneuvering, Melody managed to roll the barrel back behind the ladder and out of the way.

Feeling proud of herself, she hopped, skipped and jumped back over and was thrilled to find the door unlocked. Then enthusiasm turned to irritation. The floor of the tusk had been smashed to pieces, leaving a large gaping hole between her and the linking book.

Saveedro. Definitely Saveedro.

Just as she was considering if punching the wall repeatedly and risking a broken hand was worth relieving her anger, she looked back at the barrel and got an idea. She went back to the podium and fiddled with the levers some more. By raising and lowering the handles in reverse, she managed to roll the barrel into the hole. Her idea worked and she was able to step on the barrel to reach the linking book. It was royal blue and had Amateria in gold across the top.

The fly-by was strange to say the least. The place looked like a giant playground with pagodas that reminded her of a Chinese restaurant. She could make out a large track running throughout the large structure that sat in the middle of an ocean.

This was it. The final symbol was somewhere in this Age.

Melody took a deep breath and placed her hand on the page.

The first thing that struck her was how much darker it was in Amateria compared to the other Ages she had been in so far. The sun was setting off in the distance. Or perhaps it was rising, she couldn't really tell. Either way, the darkness made her even more sleepy. Dark clouds were in the distance on the opposite side of the structure and she could see lightning in the clouds. Hopefully it wasn't coming her way.

Now that she was actually in the Age, Amateria reminded her more of an amusement park than a playground. The track that she had seen earlier looked suspiciously like a rollercoaster and the center of the structure looked like a large fun house shaped like a pagoda. She headed there first. Maybe she would find a bed inside.

That plan failed quickly when she realized she couldn't reach the giant pagoda because the track leading up to it had large gaps in three places. Since it didn't look broken but more like something she was going to have to unlock, she assumed that this wasn't Saveedro's doing but something Atrus had installed. The man obviously had had way too much time on his hands.

Yellow fire marbles lit the way as Melody followed the shaky walkway around and into a corridor of rock. A steep, tight winding stairway lead down into a tunnel with blue fire marbles stuck in the walls. Gaps in the walls showed the calm water outside. She walked until the tunnel split two ways. The left tunnel led outside so she decided to go that way first. The wooden walkway was on level with the water. It led to a large mechanism that had been built over pools of nasty looking green water. Melody watched her step carefully. She did not want to fall in.

The walkway ended at a metal platform with a control console on it. The switches on the console wouldn't work until she pulled a lever next to it. The platform rose slightly to give her a better view of the mechanism. Three little switches and a big one made up the console. She pulled the bigger one to start.

Her mouth dropped open as the roof of the funhouse lifted into the air and dropped a crystal ball onto the track right beside the mechanism. At the same time a wooden ball started rolling along a separate smaller track. The crystal ball and the wooden ball reached the mechanism at the same time, the wooden ball dropping into a basket on the lower part and causing the track on the top to rise. But it rose too high, causing the crystal to miss the track and crash into a thousand pieces. The wooden ball was then knocked back to its original place.

She soon discovered the three small switches controlled the fulcrum gear, which controlled how the track was balanced. She tried the track again, but the track still rose too high and the ball smashed again. The weight on the other side had to be off somehow.

Melody lowered the platform and continued to follow the walkway. A door led to a small room on the other side of the mechanism. The weight was inside, but was incomplete. There wasn't enough weight to balance
the wooden ball. There were chunks of different kinds of material on the bench that lined the wall. Two metal, two wood and two crystal pieces that could be placed on the weight to form a sphere. The bottom of the weight was made of wood, but there were not enough wood pieces to make a complete wooden weight. Evidently she needed a combination of the different materials.

Pieces of crystal littered the floor. Something told her that there had been more pieces but a certain someone had destroyed most of them. Thank you Saveedro, she thought sourly. I hope you choke on a grape.

Just as a test, she piled on the two pieces of crystal, one piece of metal and one piece of wood to complete the counter-weight. But when she went back out and tested it, the weight was too heavy so the track didn't rise enough and the crystal ball still smashed to pieces.

Evidently she was going to have to figure out how the weight of the different materials added together to make the correct amount of weight to perfectly balance the wooden ball.

Or she could go and explore some more. She liked that option better.

Back at the fork in the tunnel she went the other way and found, shocker, an elevator. Atrus seemed to have a thing for elevators and fireplaces. This particular elevator led up to a ledge over the balance mechanism and, another shocker, a journal page:

My attempts to produce a carnivorous hybrid have had limited success. I thought I was making greater progress, but the life that grows in the forest isn't like the plants on Narayan. It's much more tenacious. Less susceptible to grafts. Perhaps if I try mixing the species from the swamp?

Hmm, that was interesting. He was obviously talking about Edanna here. Carnivorous hybrid? Did that mean Saveedro was the one who created that giant plant that had tried to eat the mother bird? Why would he do that? Was there a reason or did Saveedro take a break from the revenge business to do some gardening on the side?

Melody continued to followed the winding walkway until she found footholds cut into the rock. Following them upward, she came to another metal platform like the one at the balance mechanism. Only this one was over what looked like a spider web of looping tracks with large rings on them. It was very loud and she realized the sounds were coming from the rings themselves. The noise was resonating in her ear drums and she winced in discomfort. Was the solution to this puzzle to shut off the noise? She hoped so.

She pulled the little lever to release the crystal ball. The roof of the fun house rose and dropped one onto the track. As soon as it reached one of the resonating rings, the pulsating sound shattered the crystal. Since there was nothing else on the console, Melody guessed she was going to have to go down and investigate the rings and fix whatever was wrong with them manually.

Oh joy.

Just as she was about to go back she noticed another journal page stuck by the lever for the platform:

Focus Saveedro. You must not let the fog come and swallow you. There are long spells I think. Days, maybe months at a time when I can't remember what I've done. The fog rolls so thick around me, even if I hold my hand in front of my eyes I can barely see it. I strain and strain and strain but nothing sticks.

I think…

I think his sons came to visit us twice. On Narayan.

The first time Atrus asked me to meet them. He told me they would come through the book. He says, they will not understand how your words fit together, but they will use them to open the shield. Narayan, he says, is where their lessons come together. Narayan is the sum of what they must learn.

I remember Tamra was carving a spirit mask into the Tree the day the boys arrived. She tugs my sleeve to get my attention. Points at a glide ship in the sky. I am shocked by how young the boys appear. They look so much like their father. Yet they are different somehow too. They're more impatient. And they are angry not to be treated like men.

I take them to our home. I tell them I will teach them how to care for it. I say together we will encourage the Lattice Tree to grow tall. They ask me why they have to work so hard. They tell me…

No Saveedro! That was later. That was after Atrus took them away. You know this, because when you see them saying these things they are older. Their faces have become angled and hard. They have grown up into men. And something is dark in their eyes.

They tell you they've come back to fix Narayan.

It was all starting to make sense now.

Evidently Saveedro's people lived in a giant tree that they had to take care of to survive. A lot of work and a lot of time spent just trying to survive to the next day to do the same thing over again. Definitely not something that fit Sirrus and Achenar's greedy lazy personalities. They had gotten the people of Narayan to trust them by claiming they could 'fix' the Age so the people wouldn't have to work so hard.

But that had been a lie. Number one the Age had been functioning so it hadn't been 'broken' and number 2 even if it had Sirrus and Achenar couldn't have done anything about it. Atrus hadn't taught them the Art. They couldn't write Ages or attempt to repair them, which was impossible.

Back down the footholds and onto the walkway, the next thing Melody saw when she rounded the corner was another painting on the wall. She had come to recognize Saveedro's handy work by now.

This one showed two crowds of angry people, arguing and fighting. A blue robed figure, Saveedro, stood in between the two crowds, trying to calm them. Above him floated two oversized faces, laughing at everything. Sirrus and Achenar no doubt.

It was a painting of the civil war on Narayan that Saveedro had written about. Chronologically this painting went in between the ones in Edanna and Voltaic. Sirrus and Achenar stayed just long enough to cause chaos, steal Narayan's treasures and leave without bothering to clean up the mess they had made.

Saveedro's wife and children were not in this painting. Melody wondered where they had been during the civil war. Hiding maybe? She would have been. No scratch that, actually she would have been taking out Sirrus and Achenar.

Since dwelling on violent thoughts was not going to help her at the moment, she pressed on to the last puzzle in the Age which likely meant another part of the track she had to fix.

Melody yawned. Hopefully she'd find a place to sleep too.

As she was walking around to the next puzzle Melody noticed that all of the tracks led back to the fun house in the middle. That was probably where she had to go after she fixed everything. The more she studied it, the more the place looked and felt like a giant game of Mouse Trap. Once everything was working properly, the crystal sphere would go through each part of the track until the end, wherever that was. Maybe the symbol was on the sphere.

The final piece of the track looked like a jungle gym from a distance, but when she approached it she realized it was another mechanism with six rings arranged in a circle on either side. Some of the rings had bottoms, forming baskets, the others didn't. When she got to the console she realized that the six rings were represented as holes arranged in a circle just like the rings on the mechanism. When she pulled the switch to get a crystal ball, she watched as it rolled down the track, fell into one of the baskets and the rings began to rotate like a turntable. Once the basket with the crystal got to a certain point, the crystal launched into the air. Unfortunately the timing was off and inside of falling into a basket on the other side, the ball fell into the water and sank. Red pegs were in a compartment on the console. By placing the pegs in certain holes, she could change the timing of the mechanism. It looked like more trial and error puzzle solving was called for.

Melody blinked sleepily at the puzzle. She just couldn't do it. Her brain was foggy from lack of sleep. There was no way she was going to be able to figure out any of this. What she needed was a nap.

On a ledge next to the turntables she found yet another journal page:

The memories flood over me too fast. They race around my head, filling my soul with despair. And the more I think about how nothing can be done, how no one can be alive outside his shield, the faster the fog rushes in.

I can lose myself in the fog. When it's thick enough, I can let go and be safe. I can start to forget.

But I must not forget. I must remember every lie they told my people. How they manipulated us all to get what they wanted! They told me they had come to fix my world. They asked me to arrange a meeting with the Elders. The books they carried with them showed other worlds, beautiful places where people didn't have to work so hard to survive. They told my people that Atrus had written these books. That he had written Narayan, but that he'd made our world unstable. They said he wanted to make us slaves to the Tree. They asked me, don't you remember Saveedro? Our father wrote this world to teach us. To show his sons what an Age shouldn't be.

I don't know what to say. I don't know how it could be true. But why would they lie? Why would Atrus have lied? The worlds they showed us in those books…

The Elders refuse to believe them. They say we cannot abandon the Tree. For thousands of years we have tended the Lattice Roots. Without our traditions, we will die.

I don't want us to die! I don't! But Sirrus and Achenar said…

They said they would come back, Saveedro. Just like Atrus once said to you as well. He said he would come back, but then he didn't. He didn't.

And for that, you will have to make him pay.

The page shook in her hands as Melody read. Her anger was causing her to shake, crumpling the paper.

How dare they?! How dare those evil jerks say those things about Atrus?! Atrus would never knowingly make people suffer. Never! It wasn't fair. Saveedro had known Atrus. How could he have believed those horrible lies?! If he had truly been Atrus' friend, he wouldn't have believed.

But then again, he didn't know that Sirrus and Achenar had been after Narayan's treasures. In his eyes, they had no reason to lie. And Atrus hadn't returned, which had seemed to give credit to the lie. By that time Atrus had been trapped and was working desperately to save Riven. He had been working so frantically, that he had forgotten about Narayan.

If only Saveedro knew…

When she finally met Saveedro, she would explain everything and hope he would listen to her.

Next to the turntables was a little alcove in the rock wall. Melody curled up as best she could on the small ledge and closed her eyes. Thunder rumbled in the distance, but instead of alarming her it lulled her to sleep. Her last thought was that she hoped she wouldn't have nightmares.

So I decided to divide Amateria into two chapters. I probably should have done the same thing with Voltaic but ... *shrugs*

I will be uploading one more chapter to finish up Amateria, then it will be a day or two before we head to Narayan.

Don't forget to review. It warms my heart to see them.