[6/26] Fountain
This story is part of the A-Z challenge that I’m doing.
I remember my mother shouting at me when I was a kid, “You keep reading book after book, why don’t you go out and play?” I didn’t want to. I never wanted to. To play outside. With other kids. I am not athletic. I am more of a mind-athlete.
Books were always my friend; the friends weren’t. This story is of one such book. The book that I bought from the footpath for a dollar. It merely has fifty pages, and some of them are empty. Empty — for everyone else. Not for me. I’ve found a way to hear the silence.
Every empty page reads out a riddle and the answer to every riddle takes me to a place I’ve never been to before. Riddles have taken me to the park I’ve never been to in my childhood, and also to a city a thousand miles away. It’s third time today.
A blank page lay open in front of me. Like always, I ignore the emptiness of the page and pretend to read it. And the ink appears on the pages that turn into words. I find it funny that the things that try to hide themselves from us, reveal themselves as soon as you stop searching for them.
Today’s riddle reads -
The city is far,
But so is the desire,
Farther than the faintest star,
Fountain lies under the fire.Eternal youth, you may seek,
Beyond the beginnings and the ends,
Burning city, the river flows through the peak,
It’s there, where the might bends.
It seems to be a long journey this time. Longest, I believe. And the rarest. So does the prize. Eternal youth.
I was never the hygienic one. Keeping myself tidy was one thing that meant least to me. I tried to keep my mind top-notch instead. I hope eternal youth can make up for it. All I have to do is solve the riddle, find the fountain of eternal youth and become immortal.
The journey begins…
