“Each colored crystal serves a unique purpose,” Balam explained, standing next to Jake. “Some we know what they do, like this one.”
He plucked a crystal from the tray and held it up into a shaft of sunlight that beamed through one of the twelve holes in the dome. The crystal was the color of dark red wine.
Balam turned to Marika, who sat on a stool next to Jake. He raised an eyebrow toward her. “And what’s the name of this crystal?”
She scrunched up her brow in thought. “Ironshine?”
“Very good,” he said with a proud flash of a smile. “This stone, when wet, draws iron to its heart.”
Balam licked the crystal and placed it near a small metal nail. The nail leaped off the table and stuck to the shard.
Jake leaned in closer, fascinated. The crystal had somehow become magnetized.
Balam smiled at his reaction, pleased with his demonstration, then tapped the crystal with a silver hammer. The iron nail clattered back to the tabletop.
“Other crystals remain a mystery, and it is such mysteries that I spend my days studying.” Balam placed a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Most of the time, alchemy is one part wisdom and nine parts chance. And more often than not, dangerous.” Balam touched the silver badge on Jake’s jacket. “These are the four cornerstones of alchemy. And you must learn them well.”
Jake stared down at embedded crystals on his badge. The ruby, the emerald, the sapphire formed a triangle around the diamond. Balam tapped each one.
“From these stones all others rise.” Balam waved a hand over the box. “‘From the four flows all the power of Kukulkan.’”
As Jake studied the badge, something began to trickle through his brain, something he’d learned long ago. But what was it? Something to do with the three colored stones that formed the triangle: red, green, blue…
Then he suddenly remembered. It was like a starburst going off in his head. Something his father had shown him when they were out camping. Jake twisted in his chair and bent down to his backpack on the floor. He searched through its content and found what he was seeking buried near the bottom of the pack.
His franticness had drawn Balam’s interest.
Jake pulled free a chunk of quartz cut into a triangular prism. “Red, green, blue,” he said. “They’re the three primary colors of light!”
His father had explained how televisions and computers used red, blue, and green phosphors to produce the millions of colors on the screen. Jake’s father had also shown him something else.
Before anyone could respond, Jake lifted the quartz prism into the shaft of sunlight. As the sun’s ray shot through it, the light shattered into a small rainbow that splashed against the wall.
“This is advanced alchemy,” Balam explained. “Few understand how hidden in the heart of sunlight are all the colors of the world. In fact, all alchemy starts with the sun.” He pointed to the open slits across the roof of the dome, then turned his focus back to Jake. “Where did you learn this?”
“From my parents,” he answered. “They taught me how if you mix different colored lights together, you can make a new color.” Jake pointed to the rainbow on the wall, to where the red and green bands of light blended together to form a yellow streak. “Red light and green light make yellow. While red and blue blend into purple. And the more you mix, the more colors you can make.”
Jake lowered his prism and the rainbow vanished.
Balam still stared at the wall, as if the rainbow still shone there. He slowly shook his head. “Such knowledge is reserved for journeymen of the third degree,” he said. “Not for first-year apprentices. Such knowledge lies at the heart of how we forge new crystals, how we make the new colored stones.”
He nodded to the box of multicolored crystals.
“Wait,” Jake said. “Are you saying you made all these crystals? How?”
Balam reached over Jake. “Let me show you.” He removed an emerald green shard and a sliver of ruby from the box. He crossed to the center of the room and lifted the two stones into a tiny bronze basket that hung by a chain from the clockwork mechanism that filled the dome overhead. Balam pulled another chain that sent the basket up into the mechanism.
Jake quickly lost track of it as it spun and whirled through the complicated mechanical maze. Fluid flowed through glass tubes, and sunlight refracted through the device from the twelve slits in the roof.
Jake remembered Balam’s words: All alchemy starts with the sun.
Did solar energy fuel it all somehow?
As Jake struggled to figure it out, he grew dizzy looking up into the heart of the twirling machinery.
Finally the basket completed its cycle. Balam reached up and showed Jake that only one crystal remained in the pan. It shone a bright rich yellow, like a piece of the sun.
“Red and green make yellow,” Jake mumbled. He stared up in amazement at the whirring, creaking, bubbling mechanism. Somehow the two stones had become one.
How did that happen?
Balam declared, “Over the centuries, alchemists have forged crystals of every hue, colors from every splinter of sunlight.”
A question still bugged Jake. It had been nagging at him since he first saw the crystal chandelier in the main hall of the castle keep.
“But what makes the crystals glow?” he asked. “What powers them?”
Balam smiled more warmly. “Such a curious mind, Jacob. No wonder you have grown so quickly in knowledge.” Balam turned to his daughter. “But perhaps Mari could enlighten you on your question.”
Jake glanced over to the girl.
Marika glanced shyly toward her toes. “All power rises from the crystal heart of Kukulkan.”
Balam nodded. “Jacob, have you ever tossed a stone into the center of a pond and watched the ripples cast outward toward the shore in all directions?”
Jake nodded. Of course he had.
“It is the same with the crystal heart in the center of the great temple. Its heartbeat is like a stone dropped into a still pond. It casts out ripples over the valley that ignite our hearthlights and set fire to all our stones. It allows the tribes to speak with one tongue and washes up against the ridges that surround our valley, where it protects us.”
Jake pictured the energy flowing outward from the temple, powering the crystals and protecting the valley.
Marika spoke, “But beyond the valley, the ripples fade quickly. More than a league from the valley, one tribe cannot understand another, and the green crystals lose their ability to farspeak. It is why we need dartwings to send messages out into the deep jungle, and why hunters or scouts travel with members of their own tribe.”