Oracle of Delphi

by James Gurley

  She did not mean for her words to be harsh, but her question raised doubts he was having about himself. His death would have hurt her, but he was certain that she could have forgiven her father even Tad’s death to have her father back. Any feelings she had for him were erased by his misguided use of his power. Why, he wondered, did his every attempt at Plin magic end in disaster? He had avoided summoning Light Sprites in the Darkness of the Tortured Land for fear of arousing even greater uncontrollable powers, yet his attempt to save himself had killed another. Perhaps Simios was wrong to think he was destined for greatness. Maybe he was just a simple farm boy with a gift he could not control. He remembered young King Karal’s last oracular poem. Had Ket been the friend who would betray him or was that yet to come?

  Two days from the White River, Tad and Lousa encountered a family abandoning their homestead, returning to Fridan. Tad made the decision to leave Lousa in their care. He could no longer hide his guilt from her, and could not assuage it while in her company. After arranging for her passage with the family, he pulled her aside.

  “I cannot return with you.” He stopped her protest with the tips of his fingers pressed to her lips. “This family will see you safely to Fridan and the Monastery. I cannot say what will happen to you after that. Brother Alistair will help you, I am certain. Tell them all that happened and all that we found.” He looked off toward the east. “I will continue my journey to the Skillar Mountains and the High Gate of Tomorrows. Perhaps there I will find what I seek. God knows that it does not lie in the so aptly named Tortured Land.”

  She nodded silently, kissed his fingertips lightly, and turned away. There were no tears of regret in her eyes, no last words, no recriminations, nor did she look back at him again after she boarded the wagon and it continued down the path towards Fridan. He knew this because he watched until she disappeared from view around a bend. Then, swallowing his regrets, he hefted his pack, now freshly supplied with goods purchased from the family, and marched southeast.

  In his quest to find a weapon against the Veil, he had learned that he could kill. In this sense, the Saddir name for the Veil, the Dark, was appropriate for its darkness had stained him as inexorably as ink. He had also learned that his self-confidence and the confidence others had in him were misplaced. His powers were useless if he could not control them. He was a weapon that, if used unwisely or by the wrong hands, could bring disaster to all around him. Forces far greater than he were at work, people better capable of defending Charybdis from the Veil’s return. Perhaps Ket’s wild, scribbled notes and Lousa’s explanations would help the Ennead. More likely, it was useless information from a troubled mind. He did not know what awaited him at the Skillar Mountains or on the long journey along the way, but he could not return either to Fridan or to Delphi. All that remained in either place were memories of better times.

  A darkness that had nothing to do with the Veil had consumed him. He had fallen in love with a girl, Sira, rejected her for fear of placing her life in jeopardy, desired another, Lousa, and killed her father. He would probably never see Lousa again and that might be for the best. He could only serve as a reminder of her sorrow. His memory of Sira still beckoned him from Delphi. He knew he could never forget her. She had insinuated herself in his being like a cancer. No, he thought, like a part of him.

  He had befriended king and rebels alike, and then betrayed both. Yet all of these things paled in comparison to how he had failed himself.

  He did not know with certainty, but now suspected that somehow, he, Saracen and the Plin were connected, one of the threads of a tapestry to which Simios alluded. His grandfather, Kasos de Silva, had been a traveler, well known in Delphi, but what other lands had he traveled; what other discoveries had he made? Tad knew that his powers and his introduction to the Plin were no coincidence. At first, his young mind had resisted the implications, but now he had resigned himself to them – he was not Terran. He did not think he was Plin, at least not entirely, but he was different, a bastard of two races, or perhaps more than two. The Saddir and the Lilith seemed equally fascinated by him. Whose blood ran through his veins? His uncle had said the blood of explorers, proud captains of starships, but his uncle had lied to him about other things. A tear ran down Tad’s cheek.

  Different. The word had haunted him since his outburst at Mors Point when he had discovered the power growing within him. How could a sixteen-year-old boy cope with powers that would overwhelm an adult? Most teens faced the challenge of puberty, their voice changing or acne. He had faced threats of which most could not dream and had survived. Survived unscathed? Tad let his senses scan his body. He could feel the serpent of his power coiled around his spine, waiting. It would have to wait. He would forgo his power, not allow it to consume him.

  There was no going back to what he was. His only path lay forward, but then that was the foundation of life, going ever forward, unable to relive past events except in one’s mind. He would continue to the Skillar Mountains, to the High Gate of Tomorrows, setting their distant peaks as his goal, but he feared that his journey would carry him far beyond their mysteries and into a bleak and lonely future. The king was still virtually a prisoner, the Veil was still coming, and he was still an outcast from Delphi. Nothing he had done since leaving Delphi had changed the future one whit.

  Tad de Silva hitched his pack higher on his back, refusing to give in to the urge to look back from where he had come, and took his first step into an uncertain future. As Simios had said, there is always hope.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James E. Gurley has written and told stories all his life, mostly for fun, but when he retired as an Atlanta chef at 52, he began to take his writing career seriously. Since then, he has published over thirty-five short stories in various magazines and twelve novels in the horror, science fiction, and Young Adult genres, including Oracle of Delphi. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the Society of Southwestern Authors (SSA), and the Baja Arizona Science Fiction Association (BASFA), and the Central Arizona Speculative Fiction Society (CASFS).

  James lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife, Kim, and his two cats, Elsie and Shoes. He plays guitar and keyboards in local Tucson rock and roll bands when not writing.

  SUPERCENTER

  Jason Rizos

  Raised in a retail Supercenter and tasked with playing war games on the Siege Arena video console, corporate-sponsored Buy-All associate G.E. Westinghouse may just be the most well-trained recruit to come out of the Buy-All Virtual Training Corps—but his methodological precision in battle is often criticized as cowardly, if not somewhat apathetic.

  He lives in a quiet, upper-shelf compartment on Aisle 17 with his young sister Nestle, an aspiring painter beholden by her imaginative renderings of outer space. Here, order is maintained by instilling a sense of fear in the resident associates that their capitalistic livelihood depends on victory in a war waged against the ideology of “Schwagism” on the distant planet Pepsicon. Upon discovering a strange blueprint and suspecting there may be more to his universe than meets the eye, G.E. ventures to the abandoned aisles of the Supercenter, where a band of insurgents refuse employment and call themselves the United Associates Cooperative. Led by one of the Supercenter’s only adults, the UAC seeks to undermine the authority of Management and plans to sabotage the minds of Supercenter Associates. As the Supercenter begins to descend into chaos, G.E. suffers from terrifying dreams that compel him to find a way, any way, beyond the walls of Supercenter #1501…

  “[...] a wildly imaginative work of science fiction with a strong allegorical dimension, like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. [...] The writing is exceptionally vivid and compelling, as is the best science fiction, and full of surprises. No reader will ever enter a supercenter again without being haunted by this hallucinatory vision.”

  —Howard Schwartz, author of Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism

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