Chapter 28 –– Hey Jude

Dear Diary,

It all started when I was working in the mining cave. I work as one of the diggers there, searching for minerals and ores like many other alphas in the village. This job requires a lot of strength and stamina which is how we alphas are perceived as. Not that we can complain, because that’s just how things are here. I heard that alphas are valued differently in other villages— sometimes even better than other genders— which is beyond what I could ever imagine.

One day, I brought my sister to the cave to show her how the work is done down here in such a dark and damp place. I call her my sister, but we are not actually related by blood. Her name is Jude Maramota, a beta female guinea pig who was raised in the same orphanage as I was. We are about the same age, about the same height, yet with totally different personalities. She is more of the studious type and a very curious girl.

Jude doesn’t like physical activities that much, but she is very smart. She knows how to read; not only the Common Tongue, but also the ancient script. The ancient script is a dead language, so the fact that she even knows how to read it says something about her passion in studying.

Jude works as an ore valuer, a very prestigious job in our village. She rarely–– if ever–– came down to see the ores inside the cave herself, which made her excited when I asked her to come to the cave with me. She’d been begging me for months to take her to see the cave with her own eyes, so this was the day she finally got her wish fulfilled.

During my shift, I taught Jude how to use the pickaxe to mine for ores inside the cave. At one point, she hit something which we initially thought was a solid hard ore at first. Jude then dug up the soil around it to take a better look at what we’d found. Instead of an ore, we found a chest with ancient runes written on it. I had no idea what it said since I didn’t know how to read it. However, since Jude could read the ancient script, she translated it for me.

“Open me, the chosen one.”

We hesitated for a moment whether to open the chest or not. For some reason, I had a bad feeling that it was gonna haunt me in some way, so I advised Jude not to open it and to bury it back into the ground. Jude refused, wanting to find out what was inside the chest. We then tried opening the chest.

Jude attempted to open it first. Jude struggled to open it, as if the chest was locked or something. However, we didn’t see any lock or any keyhole to open the chest at all. She tried several times with all her might, but to no avail. After she gave up, it was then my turn to open the chest.

I actually didn’t want to open it, but seeing how desperate Jude was to see what was inside the chest, I felt bad for her and attempted to open it for her sake. To my surprise, I opened the chest without much effort. I even opened it on my first try. It was so unbelievable that I almost thought Jude was faking it when she couldn’t open the chest. Jude was so shocked to see how easy I opened it, as if the chest opened itself just for me.

Inside the chest, we saw a small drill in the size of a paw. Jude and I thought it was a keychain at first, because it was so small that it looked somewhat fake. It looked more like an accessory than an actual tool. Jude took the drill first before I did and tried to examine it. She didn’t find any clue that could lead us to know more about the object, just a plain old tiny drill. She then told me that she wanted to keep it to do some research about it later on. I told her that she could keep it if she wanted to as long as she didn’t tell anyone about this event. She then promised me that she wouldn’t say a word, so I trusted her.

Little did we know that opening that chest was like opening the box of pandora. It changed the course of our lives, forever.

Until next time,

Marie