by T J Trapp
The Dark Energy Chronicles:
Zero-Point:
Beyond the Five Moons
The Second Book
T.J. Trapp and Japhet Owens
Copyright © 2019 by T. J. Trapp and Japhet Owens
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, stored, or used in any form, including mechanical or electronic means, without the express written permission of the authors; except a reviewer may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.
For permissions contact: [email protected]
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Cover by the authors.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7323253-3-3
ISBN: 978-1-7323253-2-6
Contents
Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Authors’ Notes
Maps
Prologue
Part One
1 – The Beast
2 – The Quest
3 – Mountain Pass
4 – The Dragon
5 – The Gulch
6 – The Cull
7 – Joining the Mothers
8 – With the Drones
9 – Drone Training
10 – Mother Suva
11 – Reaching New Haven
12 –In the Dungeon
13 - Imposters
14 – At the Residence
15 – The Drone Facility
16 – The Mother’s Rod
17 – Convocation
18 – Freeing the Riders
19 – Straplines
20 – Through the City Wall
21 – Consolidator
22 – Zero-Point
Part Two
23 – Pursuit
24 – The Other Side
25 – The Institute
26 - Celeste
27 – Shopping
28 – A New World
29 – Winter in New Haven
30 – A Bleak Prospect
31 – Polly
32 – The Shop
33 – Running the Business
34 - Veranzo
35 – Portal Manufacture
36 – The Ranch
Part Three
37 – Gott City
38 – At the Residence
39 – Attack
40 – Queen’s Wood
41 – By the Fire
42 – The Message
43 – Calling the Birds
44 – The Apartment
45 – Alder Hall
46 – The Truth
47 – Bonded
48 – Transporter
49 – Battle at Queens Wood
Background Information
Lists
A Brief Discussion of Dark Energy
A Brief Discussion of Elves, Orbs, and Other Beings
Authors’ Notes
The Dark Energy Chronicles
The First Spark – The First Book
A young research scientist, Alec, is suddenly transported into a different world after one of his experiments with dark energy has unexpected results. On this alien planet he encounters a young woman with a regal bearing but wearing a slave collar. Is she a slave? a princess? or both? While trying to reach her homeland, the two find themselves inexorably drawn into an ancient war between the elves and the orb that has been raging across the multiverse for millions of years. In addition to learning how to fight with sword and staff, Alec must learn to use his medallion in new ways to harness dark energy and stave off certain destruction.
Zero-Point: Beyond the Five Moons – The Second Book
The story of Alec and Erin continues. Alec and Erin are forced to flee the elves and return to Alec’s home world, Earth, only to discover that it has become engulfed in the conflict between elf and orb. Alec finds that he was declared dead years ago and no longer has an identity, and Erin struggles to understand this strange world of cell phones, pizza, and automobiles. Working against time, while struggling to use a new source of dark energy, Alec and Erin must pierce the elves’ cover and find a way home.
The Grand Cull – The Third Book
The elves have started their Grand Cull to harvest the human population of Earth and have unleashed sinister creatures from another galaxy to subdue and herd their prey. Alec and Erin are torn between two worlds – Alec’s homeland, Earth, and Erin’s land, Theland on the planet Nevia, that he has come to love. Both worlds are in peril. Only a dragon – the ancient weapon-beast of the True Dragon Queen – has the power to defeat this new onslaught. Before they can tame the dragon, Alec and Erin must restore balance on Erin's home world, or risk defeat on both worlds.
The Dragon of Nevia – The Fourth Book
Erin has forged a fragile alliance between Theland and the elves, but there is no easy way to uncover and defeat the False Dragon Queen. Finding the dragon is key to their plan, but it must be swayed to their cause and healed in time to swing the tide of battle if they are to prevail. In the meantime, the elves’ Grand Cull continues to wreak chaos and disease on Earth, and Alec and Erin must find a way to redirect a resistance movement before the civilizations of both their worlds are jeopardized.
What readers are saying about The Dark Energy Chronicles:
“A great story, in the tradition of Tolkien, with many parallel messages for today’s society.”
“The story grows more interesting and complex with every chapter. A real page-turner.”
“Sort of a scientific ‘whodunnit.’ Technically complex, but very understandable, even if you never took high school physics.”
“This story leaves me dreaming of things just beyond my imagination.”
“Each book in the series builds on the last. Spell-binding. Can’t wait to see how this story evolves!”
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Amazon Categories: Science Fiction, Science Fiction – Adventure, Action & Adventure, Aliens, Colonization, Epic, Fantasy, First Encounter, Sword & Sorcery
Other Books by These Authors:
The Dark Energy Chronicles: The First Spark - The First Book
Maps
This small map was derived from the larger maps of Theland that the scholars shared with Alec.
This map detail better depicts the area where Erin led the Quest to find the dragon.
Prologue
I continue this chronicle to inscribe and recount my family’s history, in my effort to better explain the events that so deeply influenced my mother during her realm as Queen. She retold these stories to me, when I was young, and again as I matured, to impress upon me both the frailty of our mere existence, and the continuity across time and stars of our people and our ancestral memories.
I know that as a cross-breed, I carry the blood of both elf and orb, mortal enemies though these two tribes be. The war between elf and orb has raged for a thousand generations, maybe more – fought across millions of worlds in this multiverse. And sometimes I feel the war within myself – of my two beings, my two souls.
My father Alec, Consort to the Queen, revealed to me that he, too, was a cross-breed, as was my mother, Queen Erin. However, he did not grow up with this knowledge, as my mother did, but came upon this accidental truth only when he was grown. Therefore my ancestral elven blood runs deep, as it does in my sister, Ariana, raised to be the future Queen, and also in my younger brother.
&nb
sp; My father explained to me that the elves believe that they were the first race, created along with the ancient dragon’s blood, and that they believe that they created the orbs to serve. But, he said, in their quest to maintain their superiority, throughout their lore they reversed and miscounted the role of gon and orb, dragon and beast, and themselves: elves. In truth, the races of orbs are as old as time, older than the elves. In some worlds the orb know of the elves ranging among them, and in others – such as my father’s native planet, ‘Earth’ – the wild orbs – called ‘humans’ there – have lost all ancestral memory of the conflict. Yet still the battle between orb and elf wears on.
As I write this second part of my chronicle, I dwell maybe longer on this part of my parent’s life than is due. However, the events recounted herein so predisposed my mother to carry out her later decisions, difficult as they were, that she told them to her children – especially to Princess Ari – many times. This is the time when she discovered the grandeur and terror of other worlds and the elves’ claim to their citizens, far beyond the conflicts that so absorbed her in our world. I feel this portion of our story is central to an understanding of my parents’ undertakings regarding the elves and the other beasts. Perhaps this narrative will provide a deeper insight into my parents’ actions and motives, as well as my own, in the years before the exploits for which we are so well known.
Alecder Leon of Theland
Part One
1 – The Beast
The dark tongue flicked out from one head of the beast, and flicked again, sensing.
Sensing.
Then it found its prey.
✽✽✽
“Boss! Boss! I got it! I got a video!” The young man burst through the doorway of the conference room and looked expectantly at the gaunt man leaning over the table, shirtsleeves rolled up, yellow wooden pencil clenched in his mouth.
The news director just stared at him. Summer interns were too ignorant to know that you didn’t just charge into the boss’ office and interrupt a meeting. A meeting with important people. People who weren’t interns.
“I’m … I’m sorry, sir, I … I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I thought you would want to see this right away … the video …”
The boss bit down harder on the yellow pencil. “Whether I do or whether I don’t, you’ve interrupted us, so – what do you have that is so gosh-darn important?”
“The beast! This video! I have …”
“You have a video of the beast?” the boss said, scraping his chair away from the table and standing up, incredulous. Now everyone at the table, all five of them, were staring at the intern.
“Yes – yes, sir, on my cell. A friend of a friend was there, and video chatting with some friends, and – well, she was recording, and then the beast was there and she was recording it and my friend got the video before …”
“Before what?”
“Well, I haven’t looked at the whole thing, but the connection was interrupted and so she sent it to me right away.”
“The ‘beast’?” a woman with owlish glasses exclaimed, pushing away from the table. “You mean that thing that social media was all over this morning?”
“You mean – here? In the city?” the assistant director exclaimed.
“Let’s see it,” the news director said, reaching for the cell. “Connie, get the graphics people alerted – if the video is good, we can get a scoop out.”
“Yes sir,” she said, jabbing a manicured finger at her cell.
“Can I get the tag line for it?” the intern said, as he brought up the video. Pulitzer prize. Media rights.
“Sure,” the boss said, leaning over the phone screen. “Why not.” He took the pencil out of his mouth and tapped it on the table. The others crowded around, squinting at the little screen.
The video was grainy and shaky with bad audio. First was a selfie of a woman, too close and out of focus, hard to hear with the side noise. Then she switched the lens and they could see a cloud of swirling gray.
“What’s that?”
“I think it’s dust – wait! Look there in the back – looks like a building collapsed or something –”
“Is it an earthquake? Looks like an earthquake.”
“Listen to the screams!”
“Be quiet! I can’t hear!”
“Look!”
“Damn!”
A looming figure took form as the swirling dust began to settle: a beast as tall as the shop buildings. A huge horned head with a hooked snout emerged from the dust and three other heads on long snake-like stalks twined around it, darting about, coiling and uncoiling from around the central head. As the dust cleared the screen began to pick up colors – the brightly painted storefronts along the street, the ripped canopies, a battered turquoise Vespa – and then the eyes. Four sets of large yellow eyes set forward on the bobbing heads, staring unblinking, fixing on first one fleeing figure and then another. People scrambled from the collapsed building, running in no particular direction, climbing out of the rubble and then, seeing the beast, hiding beneath the chunks of debris.
“What …” the boss said in a low voice.
“I can’t believe it!” the woman with the owl glasses said. “I don’t believe it! That can’t be anything … real … can it?”
The beast moved out into the open area with a deliberate pace, its squat, armored body like a gigantic pre-historic turtle, thick brownish-gray hide with boney ridges and knobs covering its back, and its three snake-heads moving, always moving, twisting and turning, coiling and weaving, around its central thick neck. The people closest to the beast collapsed to their knees and seemed to sway in rhythm with the darting heads, seemingly mesmerized by the constant writhing.
“Run, dammit, run!” the boss yelled at the little screen, then remembered he was staring at an electronic device and said, in a somewhat quieter voice, “Why don’t they run?”
“I watched it to here,” the intern muttered. “I haven’t seen the rest of it.”
The beast paused, and then the snake-heads began to dart out, striking left, then right, at a staccato pace. After each strike a person fell, lying motionless in a pool of blood. The screaming of the people in the street was overwhelmed by the screaming of the person taking the video. The snake-heads flipped one body, then another, into the huge mouth on the stout central head. As if on cue, a flock of large black birds flew into view, circling, then landing on the shell of the beast, then fluttering to hop on the downed bodies, pecking at the eyes of the fallen, ripping open faces.
“Is … is that really happening?” said the woman with the glasses, her hand covering her mouth.
The intern’s hands began to tremble, and the news director took the cell from him and propped it on the table. “I’ve seen war-zone footage, raw footage, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” he muttered. The intern wrapped his arms around himself, trying not to gag.
The view on the phone swung up to the sky, then panned to one side, regaining its view of the street below. The person taking the video shouted something, and pointed, her hand coming into view from the left of the screen, blocking the view, then receding out of camera range.
“What’s she pointing at?” the assistant director said, trying to get a better view of the small screen.
“I think … yes, she’s pointing at those guys,” the boss said. “Looks like armed guards, or soldiers, or ... some guys with rifles, or long guns, or something … coming around the corner there … see …”
The lens zoomed in on the men, five of them, in uniforms, running with guns in combat position. One by one they stopped, knelt, and fired; the noise of their rifles, if there was noise, was lost in the sounds of screaming, wind noise, and static. The camera jerked back to the beast, then to the rifles, then to the beast. Small puffs of smoke showed where the bullets impacted the wall to the side of the advancing beast.
“Whew!” the assistant exclaimed. “How did they miss! I mean, that string of bullets
was so far off-target …”
The camera continued to focus on the armed men, following an unsteady pan. One of the men threw his rifle to one side and picked up a chunk of rubble and hurled it at the closest snake-head bobbing towards him. The chunk whizzed by the head, but when it neared the beast’s body, the projectile flowed smoothly past the gray hide and skittered harmlessly across the pavement. Then the snake-head lunged towards the man, with the camera zooming in for a close-up of the teeth grabbing the man’s shoulder and flipping him back and forth, his head snapping wildly.
The assistant director gasped, making a muffled noise that was not quite a scream.
“What is that thing? It looks huge. Or is that just the camera angle? It looks – well, it looks like it is taller than a two-story building.”
“No, that’s how big it is.”
“Those eyes – they’re staring right at the camera!”
Then the camera angle abruptly changed: the lens again pointed up at the sky as one of the large birds flew directly towards the camera. A huge head appeared on the right side of the screen, closer than the bird, mouth agape, the image blurring as it came closer, and the camera view careened wildly, showing sky, a foot, the ground, the sky, a railing, and then the ground. An out-of-focus object – a blade of grass? – rested against the camera lens, and then the motion stilled, the picture remaining unchanging.
“What happened?”
“Looks like she dropped the camera …”
The news director stared at the blurry image. “You said she was video chatting with a friend of yours when … when this happened?” he asked the intern.
