Children of Enochia

by Luke R. Mitchell

  I actually felt for him. I doubt I would’ve reacted much differently if I’d watched Elise go through something like that. Not that I wanted to compare our relationship with whatever gropped up swive-fest was going on between the two ex-Shaper-killers. But still.

  Parker was watching me. Not with his usual condescending superiority, necessarily, so much as with genuine curiosity.

  “What was that thing?” I asked.

  “That was Kul’Naga, oldest and strongest of those who call themselves our masters, the order of the rakul.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath, looking around for I don’t know what. Mental clarity, I guess. All I got, though, was a breathtaking reminder that I was orbiting my planet in an alien spaceship.

  Misguided holy wars, alien ships, raknoth allies, and now freaking mountain-sized space monsters with atomic-level telepathic arsenals. The rakul, apparently.

  Gropping sunshine and flowers.

  “Okay,” I repeated. “So there’s… worse out there.”

  “That may be putting it lightly,” Parker said.

  I looked at Garrett and Siren, who were huddled together—Siren still trying to catch her breath, Garrett looking like he wanted to ask what the scud we were talking about, but was too pissed to form the words.

  I turned back to Parker. “Is that thing… coming here?”

  Parker sighed—a rather human affectation I was unused to seeing from him. “I don’t know. It’s certainly possible. Eventually.”

  “Why? What do they want? What do any of you want?”

  “There are several long, deep answers to that question. But in the end, I suppose it might be grossly simplified down to what all living things desire. Safety and stability.”

  “Seriously?” Garrett asked. “You try to cannibalize our entire species for parts, then you claim ‘safety and stability?’”

  “That Kul’Naga thing didn’t exactly look like a delicate flower,” I added.

  “I did say it was a gross simplification.”

  “Then maybe you can go one further,” I said, “and simplify how we’re supposed to rid ourselves of you and your… whatever they are.”

  “The rakul are our self-appointed masters,” Parker said. “And as for how you might ensure Enochia escapes their eventual notice, I cannot give you a simple answer—nor any answer at all, save for that your planet would be the first to succeed in a long, long line of those who have failed.”

  “We never should’ve got on this gropping ship,” Garrett muttered, skewering me with a hard stare. “There are real people down there, remember? Real problems.”

  I glanced at the viewing wall, toward down there. We were orbiting on the dark side of Enochia at the moment. I hesitated, wanting to agree with him, to get back to what I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt mattered in the here and now. But still. “You didn’t see…”

  “And you’re sure you did?” Garrett shot back without hesitation. “He’s a gropping alien, Raish. You can’t trust what’s in his head.”

  “I could show you more,” Parker said. “Gently this time, if you’d prefer.”

  Fear gripped at my insides, thinking about revisiting even the memory of that terrible telepathic fury, and the feeling it had scorched through the center of my being—like every violent and emotional conflict I’d ever known had somehow been condensed down into one pulse-pounding nectar, amplified with a liberal pull of pure, feral animosity, and injected straight into my brain.

  I didn’t want to go back there.

  “Don’t,” Siren said softly.

  I looked at her, and she shook her head, silently willing me to listen. It was probably the first time I’d ever found myself wanting to, where she was concerned.

  Alpha, what’d happened to the days when I was just trying to hide out from the Legion? Or just trying to stop the raknoth? Or even just trying to get ahead of the Sanctum before they could commit genocide on an entire planet’s-worth of Shapers?

  Where did it end? Save the planet, establish world peace, and then watch the giant space monsters fly in and accomplish what the raknoth hadn’t?

  I had to know what we were potentially up against here.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  Garrett splayed his hands in a clear expression of exasperation. Siren just looked worried. And Parker?

  “What are you so happy about?” I asked the smiling raknoth.

  “It’s rather cathartic,” he said, “seeing you make this journey after all your time spent in your own little world, convinced that your problems were the worst problems, and that you were unwaveringly at the lead of your own little morality parade.”

  “Do you want me to come have another look or not?”

  He shrugged and closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter what I want. Your planet stands in the path of inevitable destruction. The question I suggest you ask yourself is what you intend to do about it.”

  Where before I’d taken the entry to Parker’s mind like a Legion breaching drill, this time, I eased in like… well, like a cautious telepath slipping into dark waters he knew could shift from calm to boiling with but a single misplaced thought.

  “Tell me about Kul’Naga,” I sent, only thinking the words this time, and granting Parker the freedom to guide me through his memories as he saw fit.

  I tensed as the darkness around us flashed to bright landscape, but it was only that: empty landscape, familiar in the snowy tundra and the jagged rise of distant mountains, but also distinctly alien in a way I couldn’t immediately put my finger on. Maybe it was just the oddly bright vegetation I glimpsed at the base of the mountains. Our perspective in the memory shifted before I could tell, Memory Parker turning around to take in…

  “What the…”

  It was like a winter village scene straight from ancient history—and tripping on radical deliriogenics. Odd, globular buildings of some amber, translucent material lined the wide, snowy paths. More of that bright vegetation sprouted here and there along both sides of the paths—big treelike plants that reared out of sizable snow drifts, their tops draped with something that more closely resembled partially unraveled balls of brightly colored wool than they did branches and leaves. And as bizarre as the village was, it paled in comparison to the creatures roaming the paths.

  They were bipedal, but that was pretty much where any familiarity to human kind ended. Their flesh was sky blue, and most of them had a decent amount of it bared, despite the piercing cold—or what felt like it should’ve been piercing cold, at least. They didn’t seem to mind. They were also huge. It was hard to say exactly how huge, without any familiar reference, but definitely far larger than humans. At first, I thought they were partially clothed, but then I noticed the wicked-looking horns sprouting from their heads and realized it wasn’t clothes I was seeing but dark, bony spurs protruding from their bulky forms all along the legs, arms, shoulders, and backs.

  It was like something out of an old fae tale. Giant gropping ice demons, marching about their bizarre village—on their respective ways, I could only imagine, to freeze young children solid for being naughty.

  “Are these more rakul?”

  “Hardly,” came Parker’s reply. In the memory, our perspective giant started off down the snowy path toward the village. “I chose this memory because our occupation of this species marked the first time I saw Kul’Naga in the flesh.”

  “You were… this is you? You were one of these things?”

  “Once upon a time, as you say. This was my third occupation, nearly two-thousand years ago.”

  I quietly tried to wrap my head around and mostly failed miserably as I watched Giant Parker tromp along the snowy path, past dozens of his fellow blue giants, groaning and grunting in a strange, harsh language. Most of them were carrying large stones, I noticed—though boulders might actually have been a more accurate term, seeing as they must have been skimmer-sized on average, and definitely several thousand pounds. The giants carried them like sacks of gr
ain.

  Giant Parker looked over its massive shoulder to where its fellows were hauling their loads: a great clearing where the deep snow had been swept aside and several more giants were busy at work erecting an enormous shrine to what must have been a deity or a king of some sort.

  I watched in disbelief as Giant Parker casually tore one of the thick, bright wool trees from the ground like a small weed and proceeded to take a big bite right off its stringy top. One of the giants in line bumped into his neighbor, who dropped his boulder onto another giant’s foot. What sounded more like a foghorn than a cry of pain erupted from the injured giant’s maw, then it whirled and clubbed the offender across the chest. The second giant staggered back, then caught itself and rushed its opponent in a full-on tackle. They hit the ground hard enough to cause tremors and tumbled around for position. One landed a solid kick, and its opponent crashed through the wall of one of the amber buildings.

  Around them, the rest of the giants laughed as if this was all perfectly normal behavior.

  “I don’t understand,” I sent. “Who are these people? Why are you showing me this?”

  “I’m showing you this so that you can understand these creatures were just another version of life, not unlike you, trying to find their own safety and stability in the universe. I need you to understand what’s about to happen.”

  “Kul’Naga?”

  I didn’t really need to ask. It was clear enough from his words that this wasn’t going to end well for the giants. But the scene around us was already shifting in response to my question. It was a little later now—I’m not sure exactly how I could tell, but I felt it. Some giants were still at work on the shrine, but many of the boulder-haulers were taking a break to chomp down on a hearty meal of giant yarn trees. Everything seemed peaceful enough at first glance, but I could feel Giant Parker’s apprehension bleeding through the memory like a permanent stain.

  It was unsettling, feeling anything other than cold, reptilian calculation from Parker. But before I had time to dwell on it, a huge shadow passed overhead, and Parker’s dread deepened.

  They were here.

  Around the clearing, the giants were exchanging uncertain glances, a few of them wearily lumbering to their enormous feet. In the distance, a ship descended into view and… No. Not a ship.

  Massive wings flapped once, twice, three times, and even from a far distance, the rush of the air they displaced could be easily felt. And the thing riding those gargantuan wings down to the ground… It was a dragon. That was the only word for it. A creature straight out of the old fae tales. And it was the size of a gropping mountain.

  The beast slammed to the ground in an explosion of snow, shaking the rock underfoot even from what I gauged to be a half mile away. Two fiery red eyes came to life, each at least the size of the huge boulders the giants had been lugging about. I understood now, the full scope of the monster my mind had been too shocked to register the first time around.

  Then the thing roared, and I nearly lost it all over again.

  The sound was deafening. The telepathic pressure was worse. It hit like a tidal wave of molten magma. I gasped, reaching for my defenses and—

  “It’s only a memory,” Alton’s voice came to me, not exactly concerned, but not quite condescending either. “He cannot hurt you here. Yet.”

  Somehow, I still had trouble relaxing.

  The giants were all on their feet now, some ducking into their big, amber houses and emerging with a variety of brutal-looking clubs and other various melee weapons. Kul’Naga watched them patiently as they grunted and groaned their cruel language to one another and prepared to make war. The club-thumping continued, reinforcements pouring in from elsewhere in the village.

  Then one of the shrine builders plucked a boulder from the waiting pile and hurled it at the waiting rakul, and the chaos began.

  It was a mighty throw considering the boulder probably weighed in the league of ten thousand pounds. Kul’Naga swatted it out of the air with a massive forepaw and loped into a planet-shaking charge.

  What followed wasn’t a pretty fight.

  The giants fought without fear, raining blow after heavy blow on the enormous rakul from all directions. The attacks weren’t without effect, either. Soon Kul’Naga was oozing green fluid from dozens of ugly wounds, but the rakul took the punishment in stride and continued indiscriminately tearing his way through the giants’ ranks with claws that must have been six feet long, and sharp as razors.

  With each swipe, Kul’Naga hacked another giant to shreds like roast bova. The sky vibrated with their foghorn screams, on and on until I wanted to scream myself.

  “Okay! I get it! Enough!”

  The memory faded at will, leaving me trembling in our shared mental space. Slowly, almost gently, Parker prodded another memory forward. Reluctantly, I allowed it, and took in the final image of Kul’Naga standing atop a mountain of dead giants, covered in their dark blood, eyes ablaze with cruel red flames.

  I couldn’t imagine I was ever going to forget the sight.

  “And that,” came Parker’s voice, “is but one of the twelve reasons we are all doomed.”

  19

  Reason

  “Twelve,” I repeated softly in the quiet darkness of Alton Parker’s resting mind, trying to comprehend just how much havoc twelve Kul’Nagas could wrought without thinking too specifically about the gory details of what I’d just witnessed. “You’re telling me there are twelve of those things out there?”

  “Twelve rakul, yes,” Parker replied, “but none quite like Kul’Naga. Kul’Mada is similar in scale, but the rest are dangerous in much different ways.”

  “They’re not all like… that thing?”

  I hesitated to use the word, dragon, despite the outlandishness of everything Parker had shown me. Honestly, by that point, I was more surprised by my own hesitation than by the fact that there was apparently a living, breathing space dragon flying around somewhere out in the depths of the universe.

  “Each rakul is a unique being,” Parker said. “Each one more or less a salute to the basic form of whatever species they last occupied before making the ascent to Kul. They are a collection of the twelve most dangerous species our kind have ever conquered, and they’ve been building the strength of their vessels for untold thousands of years.”

  Twelve rakul.

  The sacred gropping number.

  It was all too much to process. All connected. The twelve nations of old Enochia. The rakul. The raknoth. Sarentus and his holy Sanctum… All of it.

  Maybe Parker and Zar’Faenor and the rest of his acolytes had only returned to Enochia a decade ago, but their influence had been firmly entwined in the roots of our world all along, right from the start.

  I felt small. And afraid.

  There was anger too—at Parker, at the rakul. At the raw shock of finding out just how taken we’d all been, all of Enochian humanity. But it was an impotent anger. Hopeless. Because what hope could I have? I was fighting the last remnants of a clan that’d nearly brought Enochia to ruin, only to find out that they were the measly scouting party sent ahead by the true threat.

  I felt lost.

  “Do you understand now, why I scoff at the squabbles below?” Parker asked. “The fight to protect a few cities’ worth of humans? The holy war between Shapers and Sanctum? It’s all an irrelevant flash in the pan measured against what the rakul will do when they find us.”

  “You said you didn’t know if they’d come.”

  “I said I didn’t know if Kul’Naga would make the trip. He no longer troubles himself with the planets he deems unworthy of his attention. But it is inevitable. Eventually, the rakul will discover what happened on Earth, and it will be only a matter of time before the reaping of your sister planet leads them here.”

  Too much. It was just too much.

  I backed out of Parker’s head, drawing back into the safety of my own body. Only it didn’t feel safe. Not knowing what I now knew. Not with
our planet floating below, ripe for its inevitable demise by the masters of the very creatures who’d apparently put us here in the first place.

  “He’s back,” someone muttered.

  I looked up and found Garrett and Siren staring at me. They actually looked concerned.

  “What is it, Raish?” Garrett asked.

  Parker surfaced from his own trance and turned an expectant look on me. Yes, that look said. Why don’t you tell them what it is, Haldin?

  I was on my feet and heading for the corridor almost before I knew it. I’d never been one for panic attacks—well, not before the White Tower nightmares, at least—but I wasn’t really sure what else to call the invisible weight crushing down around my chest and lungs as I staggered out of the flight room, gasping shallow breaths, ignoring the vague buzz of voices calling after me.

  Some corner of my mind reasoned that, if I was going to have this reaction, I sensibly should’ve had it on the tail end of watching Kul’Naga slaughter an entire village of ice giants. But the rest of me just carried on, hyperventilating and not really caring why.

  I hurried down the corridor, looking desperately for something to latch onto, anything to ground me. I needed Elise, or Johnny. Needed to hear their voices. Needed to see the face of someone who hadn’t tried to kill me at any point in the past few seasons.

  At the very least, I needed a dark, quiet room to sit and think.

  Wired as I was, I jumped hard enough to hit the bulkhead when the solid corridor wall on my left inexplicably shifted—slithered, even—to reveal an oval opening, not unlike a doorway.

  I stared through the suspicious hole to the open room beyond, my troubles momentarily forgotten as I retraced what had just happened. Finally, I arrived at a conclusion.

  With careful focus, I sent a telepathic image, pretending the wall could hear me. I pictured the opening shifting back to solid wall. And it did. Somehow, the discovery didn’t alleviate the unsettled feeling in my gut. But I’d wanted a quiet space, hadn’t I? And at least I’d stopped hyperventilating.