"I know," the Aeras middle man replied. "We've been expecting you," he added, his eyes finally leaving me and taking in Theo. "Welcome to Peru, Prince of Pyrkagia. You won't mind if we bind your Stoicheio for the trip?"
My eyebrows shot up and I felt Theo tense, then with what must have been a monumental amount of self control, his shoulders slowly relaxed and he gave a curt nod of acquiesce. I let my breath out slowly, wondering if there'd be a light show now, that the humans couldn't possible ignore.
The Aeras speaker flashed white in his eyes, blindingly bright, and then a bolt of that light arced out towards Theo. My Pyrkagia side flared to life in direct response to what seemed like an attack. Even though the guy had warned us and Theo had agreed, the reaction was intrinsic. Coming from somewhere deep down inside. Somewhere my love for Theo dwelled.
Before I could stop myself, before I could think better of the action, I let it have free rein, spreading out in a wall of flames in front of Theo. Directly into the path of that faster-than-the-speed-of-light flash of white. A crackle, a hiss, a sonic boom of thunder, and the wall of Fire snuffed out, leaving a sizzling ozone smell on the air. The little hairs on my arms stood up, I could feel the longer strands on my head floating.
Theo was looking down at me with a bemused expression on his face. The two Guards were blazing white from their eyes, crackling energy hanging in the air around them. Their leader, the one whose lighting bolt I'd just intersected, had his head tilted at an angle as he studied me.
"Thisavros," he finally muttered. "My grandfather hadn't warned me of that." He seemed a little put out, but otherwise not overly concerned. Or at least I thought so, until he added, "Well, this changes things, I suppose." He shrugged his shoulders, then looked at his two Guards. "Don't hurt them too much."
My eyes expanded and an argument got caught in my throat, as three bolts of lightning came towards us way quicker than the previous faster-than-the-speed-of-light pace. I didn't have a chance to put up a wall of flames, and if Theo had intended to, I don't know. The next thing I knew was only white light, an intense shot of pain right through my body, tingling in my fingertips and toes, and agony in my head; splitting it apart.
I couldn't tell what was up or what was down, only a strange sense of speed and air and space moving around me. I reached for Theo, but my body wouldn't respond, and as I could no longer see where he was, I wasn't entirely sure I'd have been able to grasp his hand anyway. But still I tried, unable to give up on searching for him, frantic to ease the pain with touch.
I reached inside for my Gi, but here, in amongst nothing there were no plants or animals to fuel that Stoicheio. For the first time since the Gi fortress and my prison there, I felt entirely cut-off from my Element. This was worse than when I shut myself down in the car. Worse even than the Gi torture of a concrete bunker. It felt gone. My Gi was simply no longer there.
I whimpered, or at least tried to, then reached for my Pyrkagia side. Only to suffer the same desolate loss. No Gi. No Pyrkagia. Only bright, white light that I had to assume was Aeras. I wondered if I'd tap into that Stoicheio too, but obviously now was not the time for an Awakening, as it remained aggravatingly aloof as well.
Seconds turned into minutes, which seemed to turn into hours, but how could I really tell? Floating in this painful white haze of nothing. After some time I stopped even trying to reach for Theo. I stopped trying to reach for my Stoicheio, too. And simply stopped trying to fight the sensation of floating, of moving, of stinging pain; an electrical current which arced through my veins.
I shut down.
I just stopped.
And, surprisingly, realised for the first time since I'd been buried in that pit of Earth, how truly precarious my life had become. I'd thought I'd understood the perils. I'd thought I'd come to acknowledge the dangers lurking in this new, often cruel world. But it wasn't until an upstart Aeras with his two personal Scout Guards attacked us, that I really accepted how frighteningly bad my life now was.
I was an Athanatos. I was an Ekmetalleftis. I was supposedly an Aether, at present connected to two Stoicheio. But none of it mattered, because I was defenceless against three Aeras, in a way I had never been when alone in a room with Davos the Gi.
That pit of despair opened up before me...
And swallowed me whole.
Chapter Twenty-Two
So, This Is Aether?
It was the scents that reached my consciousness first. Clean, crisp, something altogether different from any smells I'd ever experienced before. There was an ethereal quality to it. My lungs strained to gain enough oxygen, yet my sense of smell was in heaven.
I hadn't realised how affected I had been by all the pollution in the cities I'd been visiting. Manaus and Santarém had both been laden with the smells of the rainforest and wet vegetation. Belém had the salty air of the Atlantic Ocean to soften the smells of diesel and overcrowded streets. But here, right now, I couldn't smell the denseness of forests, nor the clogging, choking stench of petrol. Not even the scents of too many people registered when I inhaled.
No, all I smelled was clean, fresh, slightly thinned air. We were are up high. My guess, we were in the Aeras village already.
My eyes flickered open on that thought and I took a look at the room I'd been housed in. A simple bedroom, with one king sized bed, a pale wooden dresser topped by a mirror, and side tables in the same light coloured wood. A comfortable looking armchair stood in the corner, and a large window with the most extraordinary view through open drapes beckoned over its shoulder.
I swung my feet off the side of the bed and felt the world tilt precariously sideways. It took a moment or two for the spinning to stop. Whatever the Aeras had done to get us here had taken a toll on my body and head, that was for sure. I wondered if Theo had fared better. And then, the realisation that Theo wasn't with me in the room made my stomach roil. Where was he? What had the Aeras done?
For a moment fear consumed me, but I forced myself to breathe through the angst and focus on what I could control. Location. I needed to know what I was up against outside of this room. Then I needed to find Theo and make sure he was all right.
I crossed to the large window without any further ill effect and found myself staring out onto something that should not have existed. A long, stretched, surreal moment passed as I tried to align what I was seeing with what was the truth. I'm a practical kind of person, but this was taking a hell of a lot to digest.
Grandly designed houses sat on top of centuries of rubble and ruins. The scattered remains of an ancient city seemed familiar, yet I knew I'd never been here before. This was Machu Picchu, but not as I had seen it in any travel magazine. The building my room was in must have been high up on the mountaintop, because a vast rebuilt village lay below the window I was staring out of, in staggered layers down the side of a steep slope. Yet, even though the houses looked well maintained and modern, the ruins of the ancient Inca town they lay on still seemed more visible than they should have.
It was like one of those visual history books where a sheet of see-through plastic covers the ruins and shows you what they would have looked like whole in their day. Remove the clear sheet and you have today's image of ancient rubble. Replace it and you've got an artist's impression of what it would have been. But this wasn't a trick of the eye. Or was it?
Humans can't see what Athanatos are capable of, they find excuses they can believe for anomalies around them. When humans looked on this site they would see Machu Picchu's ruins. Athanatos see the Aeras village.
Clever. And what better place to be, than up in the mountains, in a clean, crisp atmosphere if you're an Air Elemental?
Part of me was dying to explore. To see what the Aeras had done to this iconic Inca place, but I wasn't here as a tourist. If my arrival was anything to go by, I was here as a prisoner. Again? I shook my head in disgust. When would these paranoid people just invite me to their homes? I think they were as afraid of me as I was of them.
I swung around at the sound of my door handle turning, followed by the gentle squeak of hinges that needed oiling. The Aeras middle man of earlier poked his blond head through the door and smiled when he saw me up and about. I didn't feel inclined to return the greeting.
"You're awake," he declared. I just raised my brow, ya think? "Good. Good," he announced, rubbing his hands together excitedly. "Maybe we can get on with this, then."
For a second he looked like an over enthusiastic puppy; harmless, excitable, raring to go. I couldn't quite make this guy out, and that scared me. I'd trusted Noah, and he'd turned out to be an Alchemist. Hell, I'd trusted Gramps and look where that had got me.
"Where's Theo?" I demanded, not moving from my spot by the window.
"The Prince? Ah, yes the Prince. You see, he needed to take a break," he replied.
"A break from what?"
"From threatening to take our heads if he couldn't see you," the guy replied, deadpan. I had to work not to smile at that image. Theo could very well be making life more difficult for himself, I shouldn't really be encouraging it.
"Maybe you should let me see him, then," I suggested, knowing the answer I'd receive already.
"No can do," the guy chirped, almost merrily. "Grandfather is asking for you."
I ignored that. "Have you harmed Theo?"
"Of course not!" the guy replied, looking shocked. "Only contained him, like we have you."
Contained me? A sinking feeling took up residence inside my heart. I reached inside blindly searching for my Stoicheio, finding both elusive. Not a shred of their existence detectable.
"What have you done?" I demanded, horrified at what Theo must be feeling, cut-off from his Element like that. I'd had experience at this, Theo had not. No wonder he was rampaging and threatening their heads.
"We did what was necessary to protect our people," he answered, gone was the carefree attitude of before. Replaced now with pure intent. "You attacked us."
"I...I did not," I spluttered. "I defended Theo."
"We were not harming the Prince," he said slowly, as though talking to an imbecile. "We were attempting to contain his Stoicheio after gaining permission to do so. Something we do for all high level dignitaries from another Ekmetalleftis branch when they enter our territory." Yeah, there was an element of truth to that, wasn't there? "You attacked us," he repeated. And God, didn't it suck that he made containing our Stoicheio sound so legitimate? "We have many people who are not as strong as the Prince living here in Aeras," the guy pointed out. "They deserve to feel safe in their own homes."
Ah, freaking hell. He had a point. I didn't like it, but it made perfect sense. He had asked permission to contain Theo's power. I'd just reacted automatically, without forethought. Damn.
"What about my Stoicheio?" I said, hopefully.
"Well, you proved as powerful as the Prince." And that was clearly all he wanted to say about that. He opened the door further and made a motion to usher me outside. "Grandfather awaits," he added with a flourish of his hand.
"Who's grandfather?' I asked, as I allowed him to direct me out of the room and down a light corridor. Paintings of mountain scenes and cloudy, sunlit skies flanked each wall.
"Our shaman," the guy replied. And I was guessing the shaman Aktor had mentioned. Maybe something good would come out of all of this, after all. Ah, hell. Who was I kidding?
We walked in silence down the long hallway, turning a corner here and another there, making the building seem larger than it should have been. I hadn't quite managed to get a handle on the scale of Machu Picchu, but this was taking longer than I had certainly expected, in any rate.
"What's your name?" I finally asked, thinking conversation was better than letting my mind run rampant on what was about to happen.
"Oh," he said, sounding surprised that he hadn't introduced himself yet. "Hip," he promptly supplied.
"Hip? What kind of name is that?"
A laugh bubbled up from his chest, surprisingly genuine. I got the feeling this guy, Hip, was a happy sort of chap under normal circumstances.
"Hip, is short for Hippolytos," he explained.
"Ah," I said with a nod of my head in understanding. "I can see why you'd go with Hip."
His returning smile was sensational. It lit up the hallway we were in as much as the unbroken sunlight streaming through the windows did. He seemed to relax further after that little exchange, opening up about their village and what they'd done to create the illusion of Machu Picchu still being in ruins for the humans who trekked all the way up here.
"It's the atmosphere," he explained. "We control weather, which is basically just the state of the atmosphere. Through this we can manipulate the layers of earth's atmosphere, substituting the troposphere with, say, the thermosphere." I stared blankly at him. He smiled indulgently. "Mix it up a bit?" he added. "Make a little of outer space blend with a little of the troposphere which begins at the earth's surface. Manipulate it until those parts of the village containing our rebuilds are housed in a different layer of atmosphere than humans can detect whilst still on earth."
"Huh," I said, really not quite getting it, but aware all the same that it obviously worked. "Cool," I added, for good measure.
"Yes, it is pretty cool, isn't it?" Hip agreed. "About as cool as what you'll be able to do."
My head swung so I could look at him, trying to decipher what he meant by that. But he wasn't looking at me, his eyes were focused forward on a thick, double width and height carved door we were about to walk through. The carvings on the wood depicted various weather scenes, from a sunlit day, to a storming night at sea. From the the heavy rain of the Amazon, to the fork lightning of an electric storm, trees bursting into flames where it struck. Stars covered the entirety of the top of the carving, wrapping the scenes in an ethereal blanket. In one quick glance I could see the imagery suggestive of all four Stoicheio, with Air being the cornerstone of each.
I had a feeling the Aeras thought very highly of themselves.
Hip pushed the doors open and incense immediately wafted out to greet us; sweet, alluring, smoky trails spiralling up into the air from each corner of a dimly lit room. Candles flickered on various surfaces, a fire crackled in a round sided hearth, copious colourful cushions scattered all around its circumference.
"Take a seat," Hip suggested. "I'll let my grandfather know you're here."
He continued on to a curtain covered alcove, pushing through the drapes and disappearing from sight. There were no Guards here, no one standing watch at the door. Hip had closed it behind us, but not locked it. I could have easily turned around and headed back out, trying to find Theo. The desire to do so was so great I even took a step towards them, but that wouldn't get the answers we needed. I knew this, but it didn't make it any easier to deny myself the urge to rescue Theo, to seek comfort in his touch. My fingers curled in on themselves, and I forced my gaze back towards the fire and the rest of the room.
Inca style artwork adorned the walls here, as opposed to the impressionist looking paintings of the mountains out in the halls. Golden faces surrounded by sun like rays; oranges, reds, turmerics and browns. Geometric designs, ceramic sculptures, even a silver jug with an unusual looking dog balancing on it. It was fascinating, and I was guessing real. These items should have been in a museum for all to see. But then, considering how long the Aeras had lived here, maybe the Incas had given them the items personally.
By the time I'd made a visual assessment of the entire room there was nothing left to do but sit, as Hip had suggested. Just as I'd gotten myself comfortable on one of the cushions, the curtain at the back of the room parted and an old man shuffled out. It's difficult to tell an Athanatos' age, but this guy had to be ancient. He looked older than Aktor, whom I knew was twenty-five thousand years old. So....
I let a slow breath of air out on that thought. He had wrinkles. Lots of them. And his once dark blond hair was all white, standing up in tufts of frizz like some mad scientist. His back was
stooped and he used a carved cane in one hand for support, leaning onto the arm of Hip with the other, as he made excruciatingly slow progress into the room. I winced at the obvious difficulty he had moving, wondering if he was in pain, or just stiff jointed.
When he came to rest next to the cushions I almost leapt up to help him myself, but with one unexpected supple movement he was sitting down, lotus style, on a pile in the next breath. My eyebrows rose up my forehead. Wow. Hip positioned himself halfway between the old guy and me, maybe as a buffer? Then when the guy lifted white lashed eyelids up to look directly at me, I got the distinct impression he did not need protection from anything.
White; pure, blindingly bright white shone from his eyes and nothing else. I tensed, thinking he was about to attack, but nothing happened. No increase in static, or ozone smell on the air. No crack of thunder or bolt of lightning arcing through the space towards me. He just stared. For a good couple of minutes.
My eyes flicked between the spooky old guy and Hip, then back again. Hip kept his gaze focused on the flames, but he surely knew I was unsettled.
Finally someone caved to the silence, and it wasn't in any way that I had expected.
"Ah, Aether comes at last to me," the shaman said in a crackly old voice; high pitched and weak sounding. I thought it might just have been an act. Power rolled off this decrepit man in waves of prickling tingles. "How fares our Aether, will she be?"
"Grandfather," Hip said, still staring at the flames. "She has use of two Stoicheio already."
My gaze flicked to Hip. He'd seen my Fire at the airport, I'd not been in touch with Gi since before we met. But then, maybe when you 'contain' someone's Element you get to see what's what.
"Aether grounded in Earth stands strong," the shaman mused. "Against all that man does wrong. Aether wreathed in Fire burns bright. Lights the darkness of the night."
Oookay. I sat back slightly on my cushion, unsure how to take this strange old man who spoke in riddles.
Elemental Awakening Book Bundle Page 49
