Aster Wood series Box Set

by J B Cantwell

  I had read that, when the first drought hit earth two decades before I was born, half the population of the planet perished in just a few years. After the rains came again, the people flocked to the fields, celebrated. Then they realized that the poison from high up in the atmosphere was falling to the ground with the rain, killing the crops. Most people congregated in the towns and, later, the big cities. Soon, only the major metropolitan areas were places people could survive. The larger cities had water treatment facilities that could handle the toxins. And, as time went on, they built giant glass towers where our food was grown.

  Things had settled down. After a while of being consistently fed, the population fell back into the normal rhythms of life, or at least the new normal. Mom told me that things used to be different, that after the change in the planet’s ecosystem, the people had changed, too. Meaner, she said, and more cruel than before.

  But I wouldn’t know. It was just normal life to me. Though, after all I had seen, I doubted that life on Earth would remain as I knew it for long. Change was coming, and unless we did something to stop it, or found someone who could, none of us would survive.

  Jade fell asleep on my shoulder, her question unanswered. I looked down at the top of her blond head, white-blond like me, and wondered what lay ahead for us. And for everyone.

  “You’re not Brendan.”

  His voice was low, but not quite accusing, coming out of the dimness, reaching for me. It was a statement of fact.

  I stared, not willing to believe that he could be finally be coming around. Until this moment, Almara had been some combination of child and pet. Always needing care. Always needing supervision. But now…

  “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  “Your voice,” he said. “It’s not the same. I didn’t notice it before. You look so much like him. But then, with the blindfold…”

  “Yes,” I said. “I tried to tell you, in the beginning, but you didn’t—you couldn’t believe me.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Aster Wood.”

  “Wood.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am Brendan’s great, great grandson.”

  “And Brendan?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to bring him pain. But the relief I felt at no longer having to pretend to be Brendan was overwhelming. I went on.

  “He died a long time ago.”

  Almara sighed heavily and put his forehead down into his palms.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We tried to tell you before.”

  “No, don’t be sorry, child. In war, casualties are to be expected.” He rubbed his temples with the pads of his thumbs, then raised his face and rested his chin on his knees. He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Who is she?” He motioned to Jade’s sleeping face.

  “Your daughter.”

  “Daughter.” His tone was even, unsurprised. “I don’t remember a daughter.”

  “You wrote us this letter.” I dug through my pockets carefully, trying not to jostle Jade. “You left it for us in a dragon’s cave.” I passed it to him.

  His eyes pored over the paper, confused.

  “I say here that ‘she is the key.’ The key to what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We were hoping you would tell us that.”

  He shook his head back and forth as he studied the letter.

  “I don’t remember,” he said sadly.

  “Do you remember anything?” I asked.

  He raised his deep, tired eyes and stared into mine.

  “Burning. He burns us.” His eyes grew wide and wouldn’t let mine go. He seemed determined to make me understand.

  “He, you mean the Corentin?”

  “At first you think you can fight it. You hold on. You keep the goal in mind.” Two tears fell silently to his cheeks as he spoke. “But in the end, there is nothing left but you and him. I just—I just want it—to stop.” He dropped his head back into his hands and rocked his body forwards and backwards on the cave floor.

  “But it is stopping now. Isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, you seem better. In the beginning you would forget who I was every five minutes. But now, now you’re remembering, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t want to remember,” he said to the floor. “I want it to stop.”

  Emotions swirled in my gut. Despair was the first. I understood. His torture at the hands of the Corentin was akin to Jade’s. And the prisoners’ beneath Stonemore. And every other person who had been touched by the evil of the one being intent on bringing chaos and misery to our little corner of the universe.

  But anger also flared.

  “You can’t give up,” I hissed. “You are Almara, one of the greatest seers of all time. It’s your job to fix this. You made the choice, just like me, and now that choice can’t be undone.”

  He shook his head vigorously at my words.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “People are depending on you.” Butterflies danced around in my stomach as I realized that he was listening, he was understanding. Was there still hope that he could help us? That I wouldn’t have to carry this journey alone? “I am depending on you. She is, too. You have to fight him again, force yourself back from wherever you’ve been, and help us fix this.”

  “When I die,” he said, “I don’t want the last feeling I have before the world around me fades to black to be the burning.” He was pleading with me now. “I can’t have that be the last thing I feel.”

  In the far reaches of my brain, a memory of death, an eternal space filled with stars, flitted to the surface.

  “It won’t be the last thing you feel. I died once.”

  He looked up.

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” I said. “I was gone. It was Jade who saved me. She told me my heart stopped for over a day before her magic started to work on me. I was gone, and there was no fire.”

  “What was there?” he asked.

  “Peace,” I said. I picked up a tiny rock from the cave floor and rolled it between my fingers. “It’s not your time now. You fight with us, and when the time comes for you, you’ll have peace. No burning.”

  “No burning?”

  I shook my head.

  His whole body seemed to relax, and his shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted, like a man who hadn’t slept without fear for a hundred years.

  Perhaps he hadn’t.

  Chapter 17

  I sat at the mouth of the cave and watched the heavens slide across the sky for most of the night. Thoughts of my father flitted in and out of my mind, and I wondered where he was now. While it seemed unlikely, the little kid in me hoped that it was the Corentin who had made him what he was, not his own actions. Did the Corentin’s power extend as far as the tortured mind of a man back on Earth? I wrestled with the thought, unable to reconcile that possibility with what I had witnessed during my own time with him.

  Someone was to blame. Either my father for refusing treatment for so many years. Or the Corentin for bringing this upon him. Upon me.

  The warmth brought to my body from Jade’s rocks lingered in my bones. It joined a different kind of warmth, a fire of my own, really. Deep in my belly a knot of anger was writhing and growing.

  This Corentin. Was he a man? A monster? Both? It didn’t matter. The only difference the answers to those questions made was in determining how I intended to destroy him. And I was going to destroy him. I was still a kid, that was true. And I didn’t know how or when I would accomplish it; maybe it would take until I was an old man like Almara before I figured these riddles out. But I would do it. Laid out in front of me like playing cards on a table, the tragedies and injustices of my life and the lives of most everybody I had met in the Fold pointed back towards him. I wanted him gone, and once he was, I would take the life he had stolen from me back.

  But I wondered, why? What was the reason that this…being…had become so monstrous? I thought about the things that drove people on Earth to act in these ways. Power. Love. Wealth. These were the e
xplanations adults would give. The words floated in my brain, but I couldn’t attach meanings to them. Was power so addictive that it would eventually make someone desire to burn another person from the inside out? Power was something I had not experienced much of during my life so far. In fact, I had felt completely powerless until jumping to the Fold.

  Suddenly my body tingled with excitement as I remembered myself running through yellow grass beside giant, agile horses. And then another memory, Cadoc fading away as the smoke inside him burst out of every open pathway. And then another, the sound of a hundred iron locks releasing their bonds, and a hundred starved men walking from their cells.

  I realized that I had experienced power, I just hadn’t known it when it was happening. But the experiences that gave me a feeling of power had, mostly, been born from helping another. The things that made me powerful had been from the result of doing something good.

  Did the Corentin’s burning serve any such purpose?

  Thinking about him made my whole face turn down into a snarl. No. The answer to that question was no. There was no purpose other than pure evil in what the Corentin had done to Almara and Jade. No reason that could ever be justified enough to torture and kill and destroy.

  It had to end.

  As the brightness in the sky began to cover over the shining of the stars, I walked back into the cave to rouse my companions.

  They were already awake. Sitting next to each other, they both stared into the rocks in silence.

  “Ready to go?” I asked.

  They didn’t answer, but both of them rose to their feet and collected their things. I tied my shirt over Almara’s eyes, and, holding his hand, led him out of the cave.

  We walked for a time in silence, the covering over his eyes slowing us down. After a while we came to a rough trail worn into the rock. We stopped walking, unsure of what to do.

  “Should we take it?” Jade looked nervously over her shoulder. Almara stood hunched, holding onto my hand like a young child trapped somewhere terrifying.

  “Yeah, I think we should,” I said through ragged breaths. “It will be easier for him.” I inclined my head towards Almara. “And I don’t see how it will make us any more exposed than we already are.” Up here on the bare mountain, with nothing but a tiny spattering of bushes from time to time, we were already too visible. Whether taking the hard path, or the one carved into the rock, if someone had eyes on this place, they would find us.

  We started walking again, and Jade fell into step beside me.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” she asked. “We have no idea what we’ll find.”

  “I know,” I said, kicking a pebble out of my path. “Erod said it was locked in the mountains. How do you lock up a book? In a cage?”

  “Oh, it’s not in a cage,” Almara said from behind us..

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “It is why our quest took so long,” he continued. “Why we could not simply come here first. We needed the champion to retrieve the book.”

  “Champion?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, turning his back to us. He fiddled with the top of his shirt collar, and beneath the fabric I saw the shadow of words, tattooed onto his back.

  “What is this?” I said, pulling at his shirt. Several verses were inscribed into his skin.

  “It’s the prophecy,” he said quietly. “I—when I first felt—him, I asked Foramar to do it for me. He completed it just days before the attack on him by the cats of Rohana. I was worried I would forget, you see. But I needn’t have. It was the one thing I never did forget. The words of Jared held the key to retrieving the book all along.

  He of the line

  Pure of heart

  Lost in the wilds

  From the start

  Untouched by flame

  He ventures through

  In our world, untamed

  To find the true

  The last hope of men

  He seeks to reverse

  To find the end

  To end the curse”

  Jade and I stared.

  “Say that again?”

  He repeated the words, and I moved back to rest against a boulder, suddenly no longer able to support my own weight.

  “That’s what you were asking about, isn’t it? Back in Riverstone? You kept asking if I had found him, but you never explained who he was.”

  He nodded. “Yes, of course. It was Brendan’s purpose to find the champion. Only he was so brave as to jump as far as Earth. He always believed that the champion would be found there. The man who would lead us to the book, lead us to our salvation. The rest of us searched the Fold. We were meant to meet after he jumped back to Aerit.” He brushed his hands through his ragged hair. “But I was taken before we could. And Brendan. Well, you know.”

  Brendan had never returned at all.

  “But, what are we supposed to do now?” Jade asked hopelessly. “We don’t have the champion. How are we supposed to get the book?”

  “We may yet, girl,” said Almara.

  “My name is Jade,” she said angrily. “And where is this champion?” She gestured at the mountain range that surrounded us. “There’s nobody out here! The only people on this quest are the three of us!”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Think of the verse,” he said. “He of the line. Lost in the wilds. Earth is known, among seers at least, as the wild planet. Perhaps our champion is, in fact, in our midst already.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You heard me.”

  “But I can’t be him.”

  “He doesn’t have a magical bone in his body!” Jade protested. “It can’t be Aster. Father, just because he’s from Earth doesn’t make him the champion.”

  Almara smirked.

  “He is of the line. Jared’s line. He has magic, whether the two of you have yet discovered it or not.”

  I may have resolved to destroy the Corentin, but nothing like this had ever occurred to me. Champion? And Jade was right: I didn’t have any power. Except…

  I turned to face her.

  “I can run,” I said. My talent at running faster than a cheetah seemed worthy of noting, especially considering I had barely been able to jog across the hallway back home without having an asthma attack. “And the dream, the dream about Cadoc and Stonemore.” Months ago I had dreamt a premonition about meeting Cadoc, running from him, and it had come true. Very true. And hadn’t my heart problems all but vanished in the last several months? I had to entertain the possibility that what I was experiencing could be related to magic.

  There was only one problem, and my heart fell into my stomach as the reality of it hit me. I didn’t do magic. Not consciously, at least. Magic seemed to happen around me, to happen to me, but I didn’t actively conjure it.

  “Those were coincidences,” she said. Her haughty attitude reared, and her pride spoke for her.

  “You think I want to be champion?” I shot back, getting irritated. “What I want is to go home. What I want is for things to be normal again. But things aren’t normal, Jade! I can’t go home. You can’t go home. None of this is working out the way we’d hoped. So what are we supposed to do? Give up? And do what?”

  “And have a normal life!” she shouted. “Can’t we just do that? Go off somewhere and live and be happy? Why do we have to keep chasing this monster? Father, you could create a link and all of us could go to Earth, away from all of this. Away from the Corentin. I bet that you’d get better, being farther away from him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I won’t be better. Nobody knows what will happen to me if I go back to Earth. I could end up back in the hospital. I could end up dead. And, even if not, Earth isn’t somewhere you would want to live. Earth is so—”

  “What?” she jeered. “Safe? Non-magical? Those are things I can live with, Aster. I’ve seen enough magic to last me several lifetimes.” Her voice cr
acked with her last words, and her lips began to tremble.

  I sighed heavily and tried to take her hands, but when I did she jerked away from me.

  “You don’t understand,” I said more calmly. “Earth is…sick. It’s not like here.”

  She laughed sarcastically through her tears and gestured around at the landscape. “You don’t think this is sick?”

  “This is sick. But so is Earth, just in a different way. Here we fight demons and monsters to try to make things right. On Earth you don’t even have a chance of doing that much. The Earth I know is barren.” And the Jade I knew would wither in a place like that.

  “But on Earth I could hide.” Her voice was small and miserable, and her giant green eyes fell to the ground.

  I put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “There is nowhere for us to hide. I know it’s hard and it’s horrible, but it’s true. Things aren’t going to get any better by us doing nothing. We can’t get around this one.”

  She refused to meet my gaze.

  “We have to go through it to get to the other side. There is no one else.”

  I released her and turned to Almara.

  “So you really think I’m this champion person?” I asked. He nodded. “But I don’t know any magic. How can I get the book if I don’t know how?”

  He shrugged. “We always thought the champion would know what to do. We didn’t think he would be untrained.”

  “Ugh!” Jade groaned, her temper flaring again. “This is ridiculous!”

  “Look,” I said, “if you want to break the book from whatever weird enchantment it’s under, be my guest. I’m just trying to figure out how to move us forward here.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and glared.

  “Fine,” she sniffed, wiping tears angrily from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “Father, show Aster how to conjure the magic so he can get the book. Go ahead.”

  He smiled.

  “Well, that’s not a bad idea,” he said.

  She turned and stormed off, taking the rocks two at a time, mumbling curses to herself.

  “We’ll do it tonight,” I said. “When we stop for the night. Ok?”