by Jade Alters
I peer around the edge of every bookshelf before we dare cross them. The first crossings are completely empty, housing only bodies. Husks of Lotus warriors with their faces scalded or throats torn out. Empty vessels of our own warriors with fresh, bleeding scars across their chests and guts. Each one ties a bigger knot in my throat. One I can’t pass or swallow. It just lingers there, stuck, until the sounds heighten. Until finally, we turn a corner, and I’m met with the very thing I fear.
It’s an encounter pulled straight from a nightmare. Dragonlord Thise spurts hellfire from her transformed snout. Cece covers her back, spraying her silver breath of spirit flame. Others I recognize jump to their deaths against the sting of Lotus whip blades, Black Crosses and orb maces. Yet, the moment I enter the room, he knows I’m there. He looks straight at me. Through the madness, the violence, the fire. Heren’s icy blue orbs find me.
Rock, Helena and I have plugs in our ears, but it hardly matters. Heren sets his orb to flail mode instantly. He lassos it over his head once, and slings it at us. The three of us scatter from its bludgeoning path. But the second it hits the ground, Heren whips it to one side. My side. Before I know what’s happened, a black shield appears at my side. It takes the brunt of the crash and bounces away, reverting back to Rock on the ground.
“Son of a bitch!” Helena smolders. With a twist of both her hands, she pulls in a spiral of papyrus book pages and flame. The pages encase Heren like a cocoon, then become an inferno.
A nearby Lotus comrade tosses a dry sack of heavy white powder, not unlike what you’d find inside a fire extinguisher. The flame sputters out from Heren’s restraints. They’re just damaged enough for him to rip through them. By then, I’ve already loosed two illusory pikes. Heren sidesteps them both, just in time to raise his flail cable to my translucent blade of light. It hits and holds, shaking.
“Here,” Serge says as he arrives from the line behind us. He puts a hand to my blade, which intensifies to a tangible yellow sheen. It’s like a blade of sunlight brought to life. Serge and I press together to cleave through Heren’s cable like butter. He rolls sideways so our weapon sears a gap in the floor, instead of his chest. He lashes out a rod to whap Serge in the nose before screwing his orb onto it. A mace. Serge shakes it off to stand by my side again.
But, behind Heren, I catch a glimpse of the rest of the battle. Its close. Bodies tumble away in equal measure, from both the Academy-Kyrie alliance and the Lotus. Robed humans and supernatural crusaders lay in mixed piles throughout the fiery wreckage. They need support. They need Magicians. One of them is Darius. He tosses a haymaker so strong the ricochet off the wall dents his opponent’s skull. But there are at least three others with their eyes on him. Each wields a flashing orb. All they need is a misplaced glance. He and I lock eyes for half a second in the breath before the storm.
“Help them,” I say to Serge.
“You need-”
“I have all the help I need. You need to help them, or we’ll lose,” I plead with him. The truth must be painfully bare in my eyes. As soon as he sees it, Serge grits his teeth and trudges off into the fire. Heren braces his mace in both hands. Helena helps Rock up from his daze. I rub the fingers of both hands together for one last shot. One chance to end the blue-eyed scourge. Our feet skid off the floor at the same second. Heren and I leap for each other.
I glance his mace off the side of an illusory shield. The blow sends a shockwave through me, before it deflects. It never hits the ground. Heren uses his force wisely to spin back around, into a falling arc. His orb aims straight for Helena. She unleashes a blast of air from her hand which knocks them both back in opposite directions. She follows with a stream of sparking plasma. Helena’s lightning hits Heren’s robe and trickles away like water.
“Keep it going!” I urge her, despite Heren strolling right through her storm. With cupped hands, I form pockets in the air for Helena’s lightning to collect. I gather as much superheated energy as they can hold, then send them screeching into the ceiling. Heren’s robe may protect against the sting of lightning, but not the tumult of the floor above us onto his head. He’s forced to sprint sideways to avoid the avalanche. Several of his comrades aren’t so lucky.
His red robe glides through the smog. His mace lumbers toward us. I swipe it sideways with another illusory shield. The aftershocks of this one send ripples through my tired muscles. Just when all seems lost, a huge simian body lumbers in from the side. Rock wears the skin of a gorilla, and brandishes its monstrous forearms. Heren ducks low under the strike, and sweeps his mace at Rock’s ankles. For once, Heren is caught off-guard when his form collects in the air, shifting into a blade. I’m surprised, too, but I’m also close enough to grasp the hilt. I take Rock’s gold-gilded obsidian blade in both hands. I slash it straight down Heren’s side. He dodges backward, which would have delivered him entirely from harm if the thing I had in my hands were a mere sword. But Rock, through training, is fully aware. He lengthens his blade long enough to slice deep in the side of Heren’s face.
I don’t wait for our robed nemesis to recover. I hurl Rock straight into the air and conjure two pikes. Rock shifts into an eagle and cuts left just before Heren’s swinging mace connects. Arms up, he’s unprepared for the blast of air from Helena’s fingers. Heren stumbles backward. His eyes are so fixed on me and my pikes, he doesn’t notice the surprise arrival of someone who’s come to settle the score. Hoster’s blue tendrils of mist rise through the cracks in the floor to wrap Heren’s shins. It prevents him from bouncing back. He keeps his mace and his eyes trained on me, though. It’s all distractions and he knows it. That is, until Darius zips in to give him a shove forward from behind. Heren’s feet stay stationary while his chest lurches ahead of him.
He hits the ground. He clutches his mace to strike back, but Hoster’s got him by the ankles and shoulders, now. He materializes beside me. Just in time to relive the scene of his death, reversed. Heren tries to look up at me. He tries, one last time, to form that menacing connection of eyes. But he never sees me again.
One of my glassy pikes jumps straight through his skull, into the floor. Then the other, just to be sure. His body twitches once with each strike. Red leeches from his robe to the lines between tiles all throughout the Lotus Library. Without so much as a whimper, Heren is gone to a Realm none of us know.
I stand over his facedown husk for what seems like days. All the days of my life I’ve known Heren, flooding back into my vitality. I suck down a deep, hot breath of smoky blood and burning pages. It’s the cleanest breath of my life. I keep waiting for him to twitch. To somehow roll over and reveal that he is, in fact, invincible. But Heren just lays there. No, Heren is gone. His body just lays there. Long after my glassy pikes dissolve into the light rays from whence they came. I stand alongside Darius, Helena, Hoster and Rock, alive, while my nightmare lays slain.
“Hey,” Cece’s voice is such a sudden sound in the solemn, crackling silence, that all five of us jump to strike. She raises her hands in surrender, to help us relax. But the look on her face is anything but surrender. It’s twisted in a mixture of emotion that frightens me, at a moment when I felt truly fearless. “Have you guys been outside?” It’s such an odd question, the only way I can think to answer it is with honesty.
“No,” I tell her.
“Come with me,” says Cece. I look to my friends and lovers with a face as puzzled as theirs. But, when Cece turns to lead us, we’re all perplexed enough to follow.
Cece leads us through a sea of fire and gore. Any remaining skirmishes sound distant. At the core of the struggle, through which we wade, there are only members of the Academy-Kyrie alliance left standing. Lotus survivors moan against walls and bookcases, waiting to be put down or claimed prisoner. There’s an astounding lean toward putting them down. The hunters of our kind lay bare for us to exact our vengeance. Yet, now that I’ve had mine…my stomach turns with a sickly emptiness. Cece’s path twists up a half-scorched staircase to a gaping hole in the
side of the Library. Through it, we can see outside the building clearly.
We’re in the middle of the sandy foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, somewhere between the Academy Training Zone and the Kyrie Stronghold. We sit atop a dry, clay knoll in the light of the setting sun, with a perfect view of San Francisco. The city glistens alive in fragmented bursts of light. Night is falling. But so is something else. Darius catches me when my knees buckle at the sight of it. Rock grabs a nearby wall for support. Helena leans on him. Even Cece’s rock solid stance shakes while we stand in the opening.
An object that looks deceptively the same size as the moon has appeared in the violet sunset sky. A school. Built on a foundation of mountainous rock, ripped from California’s countryside hundreds of years ago. A building of high stone walls and decorated gateways. The Broken Academy. The trick that kept it hidden since the age of our ancestors has dissolved entirely. As do the two remaining Tethers beneath it. Their lightstreams break off from their sources on the planet, and retract all the way to the massive doors they connect to on the Academy.
With nothing left to hold it up, the Broken Academy plummets towards San Francisco’s neon towers. It’ll level a huge portion of the city in minutes.
“We have to go,” Cece’s voice crackles, even in the face of so damning a sight, no one should have a voice.
“Cece…” I try to whisper back. I hardly recognize the voice that creeps out of me. Despite everything… All the dead Lotus. All of our own, gone. Despite two skewers through the skull of their leader. We lost. “Even if we got there in time…we’re not strong enough. There’s not enough magic left between us all to even slow it down.”
“For survivors,” Cece manages to whimper. Her head whips over to me, crystal eyes frothing full of salt water. “We did this. We have to fix it.”
The Epicenter
Cece,
San Francisco, Downtown
This can’t be real. I’ve been here a hundred times, at least. Downtown San Francisco is just a short distance from the home I grew up in. The home I lived in with Jonah and Christa. The place we’ve come to know isn’t Downtown San Francisco. It’s some kind of twisted fun-house rendition of the place. What little I can see through the smog is all mounds of searing orange steel and shattered window panes. What I can hear over the blaring sirens of San Francisco police and rescue is all groans and pleas for help beneath the wreckage.
I creep through alongside Emery, and a collection of other people I never thought I’d see as allies. Darius Jecks, the Vampire who in one way or another caused my brother’s death. River, my roommate, with whom I engaged in near-fatal duels during my first term at the Academy. Rock, the Shifter who I defended her from, when push came to shove, because she’s become like a sister to me. Stephanie, my other roommate who turned out to be more than like a mother to me. We, along with a crowd of our friends and lovers, lead the crowd inward through the smog.
Some of us branch off at every major wreck to help the trapped victims out. It hardly matters anymore that the Norman police and emergency responders see us use our powers. They just saw a levitating Academy fall from the sky on half of downtown San Francisco. Besides, some of our own are trapped beneath the rubble that came from the Academy itself. I can hardly believe it as we step up over the giant white-stone support pillar from the corner of the D-Wing courtyard onto the shattered grass-covered platform of the courtyard itself. From there, we have a perfect view of the bloody, fiery chaos around the city. On one side, Dragons transform to pull half-melted foundations off of their friends. On the other, Vampires rush injured Normans to Fey Healers or EMS first-responders, whoever is closer. Ahead and behind of us, supernaturals and Normans fulfill the Lotus’ worst nightmare. They stand side-by-side, helping one another, despite the shock of suddenly being eye-to-eye.
“Spread out and form a perimeter,” Emery instructs one of her Magician pupils. The young man breaks off, with a small group of others. “Help anyone you can, get anyone else you can out from the rubble. But don’t let any Normans leave that perimeter with their memories of us.”
“Understood,” Emery’s pupil answers. He and his colleagues disappear with a crisp snap. Something near half our force splinters off to help with the rescue effort. How Emery manages to think of it all, I haven’t the slightest idea. All I can focus on are the faces I don’t see among us. Faces that inspire a certain degree of suspicion, despite how much I want to trust them. Dorian. Horace. Lucidous. I haven’t seen any of these three since the attack on the Lotus Library began. Come to think of it, I don’t know that I saw them, even as I stepped through the gate to the Silver Realm. They couldn’t have…they wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have.
We know we’re getting close to our target by the increasing frequency of wreckage from the splintered Academy. I pass under an archway that I have probably a hundred times before. It used to open to the gateway to the D Wing dorm I lived in. But on the other side of it is not the hallway I know and love. It’s an open field of leveled earth and debris. A few stubborn structures persist here and there. An elevator car from a skyscraper juts up, half-embedded in the smoking ground. On the other side of the clearing, half of the Council’s round table lays, cracked and tarnished in the dirt. The center of the clearing, though, is the thing that sends a cold pulse of shock through my system. It’s not the weird bowl, set in a wide podium, like the set of some cult-based horror movie. It’s the people.
“They’re here,” says the dry voice of someone I don’t know. He’s mixed in with a few people I know all too well. The boy’s face acts like dry ice. It chills me, the way he looks up at us, without ever having to come near him. He stands amongst Fey Rorelia, Lucidous, Horace and Deliah Dalshak, that bastard Roran, and…my eyes don’t want to believe it, even as I see it. Dorian rushes to the front of the group at the sight of me. They’re all here. The missing Kyrie leaders. The conspirators Serge mentioned.
“Ferres,” Helena smolders a few bodies away from me. Pebbles rattle around her shoes as rage builds in her chest. Her eyes are fixed on the golden-haired boy who spoke first.
“Who?” I hear someone whisper to her.
“Ferres Haruman. A son of one of the Core Lines of Six Rivers. He and I aren’t the biggest fans of one another,” Helena says. All of it trickles right off my shoulders. I might as well be alone with Dorian in that smoldering pit.
“Cece…” he says, like nothing’s wrong. How could he?
Emery,
San Francisco, The Epicenter
There’s no mistaking it. This is the spot. It’s in the same exact position it was illustrated on the ancient maps. The place one Realm was split into many. The Broken Academy fell right on the Epicenter. We’re in it. And yet in the face of history happening before us, the story of a father and daughter is even more captivating. The second I set eyes on his collection of people, I knew what was happening. We all did. The betrayal we feared, in the backs of our minds. But no one thought it would come so soon. So hard. At the expense of so many innocents. We made the mistake of seeing our adversaries as people. It seems, in fact, they were just as the Lotus saw them. Monsters. Now my hand hangs tense at my side. Ready to sling a trick at a second’s notice. It all depends on Cece Ford. The girl who came from nowhere to shake up the entire supernatural order. The hybrid. My friend and my enemy.
“Cece…” Dorian coos.
“Don’t…don’t you dare try to calm me down,” Cece bites back. My hand loosens, just a little. “You did this?”
“There was only one way,” Dorian answers. He’s firm with her, but not callous. He still wants her to listen.
“There had to have been about a billion ways that didn’t take killing a quarter of a city! And our own… What about the people who stayed behind to protect the Academy?” Cece demands. She stomps a step further into the Epicenter. The crowd of others around him form an arc of protection, but Dorian bids them to stay back with a hand at each side.
“Cece,
you know what we’ve stood for. What we’ve always stood for,” Dorian says. “The same thing you did, when you joined the Kyrie yourself. Independence. The freedom to be what we are, without jamming ourselves in everyone else’s boxes. The Council would never have allowed it.”
“So…you thought the best time to strike out was when everyone else was weakened?” Cece barks back.
“It’s the only time. What we’re proposing is a completely new system! If there was a way for us and the Council to see eye-to-eye on this, there would never have needed to be a Kyrie in the first place!” Dorian roars. But, deep in that mighty bellow remains the caring father. It’s what makes it so hard for Cece to take that next step. The one that brings them closer, yet divides them forever.
“We don’t have time for this,” Horace Dalshak interjects. His eyes jump up at the darkening sky above us. The moon has just begun to shimmer through. Although tonight, it has a peculiar shade. “Begin the ritual.” Horace turns as he gives the instruction to join in himself.
He slides a jagged blade of stone across his palm. A waterfall of thick, red syrup pours over into the bowl set in their spellwork altar. I’m not alone in the jerk to stop him. But our party is halted by the threat of the Kyrie leaders readying their arms. It’s an even match in terms of numbers. In ability…that remains to be seen. All that’s sure is how exhausted we are from the Lotus Library showdown.
“The Blue moon… That’s why Dorian wanted us to attack today,” Helena realizes. “It’s a celestial event they can harness to…” She shudders to silence as the azure light from the cosmic body above us envelopes the landscape.
