Why was the wise man so familiar? That crazy hair going in all different directions, that accent, that moustache. Oh my gosh!
“Was that who I think it was?”
Tuntuni squawked and nodded his yellow head. “The one and only Einstein-ji.”
“The physicist from your world whose name is practically synonymous with intelligence,” Neel added.
I swallowed my spit the wrong way and choked. Tuni had to swat me on the back with his wing for me to regain my breath. “Albert Einstein?” I finally managed. “Albert Einstein is our golden bird on a diamond branch?”
“He was one of the few scientists from your dimension to understand the seven parallel worlds, the thirteen simultaneous universes.”
“But isn’t he, like …” I paused. “Dead?”
“Well, technically, yes. At least, in the way we understand death. Remember, this is a guy who unlocked the secrets of space, time, and a bunch of other things I don’t even know about. It’s he who first predicted dark matter to begin with.”
But I didn’t have time to process this mind-blowing piece of information, because the red and white spheres were making noises, groaning and squeaking. The red one hopped out of Neel’s sling on its own, and began rolling up the hill and out of the star nursery.
“Wait, Lal, stop!” Neel yelled, chasing after him.
I had no option but to run after Neel, and what I was soon realizing was Lal manifesting into a red giant star. As Neel ran after his brother the red giant, the white sphere, which had shrunk now to the size of a nectarine, slipped out of his sling and began rolling down the hill toward me.
“Mati!” Neel yelled, but I dived for the rolling star-sphere, catching it and holding it in my palm like it was one of those crazy predict-your-future Magic 8 Balls.
“Got her!”
We ran after the red giant, who now looked less like Lal, or even a sphere, as opposed to a huge mass of pulsating solar energy. Although no less scary, this was no fee-fi-fo-fum kind of giant, but something else entirely. It was as if a huge forest inferno suddenly grew some legs and began running across the landscape.
In fact, as the red giant ran, he wreaked havoc all around him. The fuzzy purple trees of the nebula caught on fire, exploding in cracking cascades of flames.
“Lal! Stop!” Neel called, but the red giant didn’t hear him. This wasn’t Lal anymore but something beyond human. He was a solar phenomenon.
We ran through walls of flames exploding over the formerly azure plains. Branches cracked and fell too near my head for comfort. Where was the red giant going? How would we survive chasing a monster essentially made out of fire?
The white dwarf in my hands buzzed, as if with worry for Lal too. I shook it desperately.
“Mati,” I called. “If there’s something of you left in there, help us. I need to save my parents before they get swallowed by the spell turning into a black hole. But I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know how long they have.”
Tick, tick, tick …
Amazingly, some part of Mati must have heard me. The ticktocking noise was coming from the white dwarf. Its face resembled something like a clock now. But the labels on the clock’s face were like nothing like I’d ever seen before. They were the phases of a star cycle—nebula, star, red giant, white dwarf, supernova, and black hole. And the clock’s single hand was pointing right at the third position, the red giant.
“Where is he going?” Neel called out desperately. “Lal! Bro! Stop! It’s me! Dude, it’s me!”
But the red giant kept running, setting everything in its path on fire. Neel and I were running side by side, a charred-looking Tuntuni on his shoulder, and the white-dwarf-slash-clock in my hand. The mist was getting thicker, and the ground looked more orange than blue now, because the entire nebula was on fire. The heat was getting unbearable, and poor Tuntuni squawked as he lost one feather after another.
“Lal!” I tried. “I know some part of you can hear us! Tell us where we’re going before you burn us to cinders!”
Tick, tick, tick …
Mati’s timepiece was now pointing at the space in between the red giant and white dwarf. Which meant it was creeping even closer to the black hole. Which was essentially my parents’ death.
“We’ve got to hurry, Neel!” I showed him the clock, indicating the all too rapidly moving arm. “My parents don’t have much more time!”
As if in answer to the danger my parents faced, the landscape itself seemed to change. Instead of the pastel colors and glowing atmosphere, there were spiky bushes and black trees with thorn-covered branches. In front of us, the red giant ran through a hastily put up cardboard archway. It was a little crooked, and decorated to look like a demon’s open mouth, complete with fangs hanging down toward us. On the garishly painted signboard, near the top, was the word:
D E N G A R
As the red giant ran through it, it set the flimsy sign on fire. Neel and I both stopped short, avoiding the falling embers and pieces of burning cardboard.
“Dengar?” I shouted, to make myself heard above the noise of the burning sign. “Really?”
“English is not everyone’s first language,” Neel explained defensively, raising his arm to protect Tuntuni from a floating piece of flaming cardboard.
I realized there were a few other signboards here and there around the burning archway with crazy slogans painted on them too. Before they started to catch fire and burn, I saw that most of them were warnings for people setting out to fight rakkhosh:
AFTER WHISKY, FIGHTING DEMoNS RISKY
and
IF YOU SlEEP, YoUR FAMIlY WIll WEEP
in addition to
RAKKHOSH BABIES DON’T SAY MAYBE!
and the ever popular
FIGHT DEMONIC FOOLS AND FORM BLOOD POOLS!
“The well of demonic energy must be nearby, right?”
Neel didn’t have a chance to reply, because, just then, Mati’s clock hand started ticktocking even louder than before.
“Oh no! Neel! Look!”
We watched as the clock hand now swept right past the white dwarf to hover somewhere right before the black hole mark. As it did so, the glowing white shape in my arms began transforming once again into the silver sphere I knew and loved.
“Neel! I’m running out of time!”
But Neel had run ahead of me through the almost burned-out “Dengar” archway and was picking up the other sphere. It had magically transformed back into the golden bowling ball that we were used to, its red giant manifestation complete. And while that brought some strange degree of comfort—to see Mati and Lal back to their magical sphere forms—it also reminded me that the spell we were dealing with was almost at an end. As was the time I had left to find my parents.
“What do I do?” I cried.
“Look for the ring! Look for the ring!” squawked Tuntuni from Neel’s shoulder. The bird was pointing at what looked like a simple pile of boulders in front of us. Now that it had stopped raining fiery cardboard from the sky, I could approach it.
“What is this?”
I wasn’t sure if I actually had tears in my eyes, or if it was the swirling mist, because, all of a sudden, the rock formation began to glow.
“Dr. Einstein said to look for a ring of light …” I remembered aloud.
“Einstein’s ring! Of course!” Neel was tucking the golden and silver spheres back into his makeshift sling. “Einstein predicted that dark matter must exist in the universe because he noticed that light from distant stars sometimes looks like circles of light instead of pinpoints.”
“Oh, right, I heard about this on a science program,” I added. “He realized there must be something in the way—so that the light had to travel all around the object before making it to Earth. Hence, Einstein’s ring.”
At Neel’s surprised expression, I shrugged defensively. “I never said I wasn’t good at science.”
Neel nodded, squinting at the glowing rocks. I followed his gaze.
In between the gaps in the boulders, I could make out something glimmering with a strange, magical force. Without a second thought, I began to climb up the slippery stones.
“What are you doing?” Neel took my arm.
I glared at him, and he dropped his hand. “There’s something in the middle there, and I’m going to find out what it is!”