Chapter 11: Two Cookies

Orko ate with the Lionswpaws that evening, outside with all the elves at a communal meal. As they ate the dishes that each of the elven families provided for all, his hosts told stories of their land as entertainment, and as a response Orko went to bed later on with his mind full of flying dragons with scales the color of emeralds, white castles like pearls on carpets of green grass, and a valley full of candy-like, edible plants and terrain, including cotton candy clouds. And as he laid down, the last image made his sleepy mind drift loosely along the candy connection.

Candy at Eternos City at holidays… candy treats he always used to receive on his birthdays…. Party favors from when he would celebrate birthdays with his childhood friends….sneaking into the kitchen to get fresh-baked cookies…. He chuckled quietly to himself. He’d always been good at sneaking cookies from his mother’s kitchen, snatching two from the cooling plate and vanishing before anyone noticed. And of course it had always been two cookies. It had to be two. One for him, and one for….

Orko sat up suddenly, calling out:

“Okoru!”

Memories raced upon him, of a friend named Okoru, who looked exactly like him, right down to the cetimeter in their height and the O on their robes. They’d loved the same things, and had the same fears, the same struggles and successes.

And only Orko had been able to see him.

He laid back down. How could he have forgotten Okoru? Even though he hadn’t been a lonely child, like Star had said, there had been times when he’d felt alone, like when his friends had mastered a spell that he struggled with, or late at night when there had been storms. And in those times, Okoru had been there. He even recalled where Okoru had ‘lived;’ in the mirror in Orko’s childhood room, hence their identical nature.

Then Orko sat up again.

“Wait! I remember Okoru!” he said to himself eagerly. “Trolly-Molly, if what they said is true, and if he lived here, then he’d still exist or I wouldn’t be able to remember him at all! I’ve got to ask Cassa - “ Then his eyes happen to glance out the window, and he calmed. “What am I thinking? Trolly-Molly, it’s late. And she gave birth today, and revived Sylwin. I guess I can wait.” He laid down again, thinking of every memory of Okoru he could: of the day they’d ‘met,’ of the two stones they had - Orko’s black with a white O, Okoru’s white with a black O - or practicing spells together, and of course sneaking cookies.

The dawn couldn’t arrive fast enough.