by M C Ashley
“Quid est veritas?” the door asked.
“Deivoluntatem,” I said.
“God’s will,” Zea said.
The door opened and we stepped inside, as the room lit up, and Zea let go of my hand. I was greeted by a hollow place. Gone were the vibrant gardens lit up by the spiraling glass ceiling and the fountains that had nurtured the now dead plants were empty. The Silver Fortress was supposed to exude life from its very presence. But there was nothing but the neglected shell of my former home.
“Who is it that you brought with you?” an older woman’s voice asked.
“A Sentinel,” Zea said.
I turned to see a woman who looked about sixty with short gray hair. She gazed at me intently, almost knowingly.
“Hello, Sentinel,” she said. “My name is Mara Van Denend. Welcome to what’s left of the Gray Forum.”
Chapter 5
1
Before I could offer a reply to Mara, Zea seized me by my trench coat and drilled me into the wall. She stared me down, her face scarlet with rage.
“Why the hell did you try to kill yourself?” she asked.
I trembled, not quite prepared for this. “I panicked,” I said, feebly. “I thought I was going to die, so I figured I’d take as many of them out as possible.”
“Quit lying to me! You—”
“Zea!” Mara yelled. “Enough! Release him!”
Zea glared at her, then at me, and finally let go of me. I brushed myself off and focused my thoughts.
Memo to myself, I thought. Suicide is a turnoff for some women.
I turned to Mara and scanned her for a moment, making sure she posed no threat to me. To my surprise, I registered very little of the Christening within her. If this woman had ever been one of us, then her powers had faded many years ago. Even though she showed outward signs of being around sixty, it was no indication of her actual age. I’d known many people who were over five hundred years old and they didn’t look a day over eighty, with some even managing to pass as forty. Then again, I also knew people who’d messed up invocations that had caused them to age prematurely. We didn’t have any definitive answers, but the Gray Forum had hypothesized for years that it was all but impossible for us to ever die of old age.
With our kind, you couldn’t judge based on appearance alone. With baseline humans this was less true, because more than likely a man who looks and acts forty is going to be forty. In contrast, one of my mentors had the age of a fifty-seven-year-old woman, but the body and mind of a teenage girl who had just found out how to sweet talk her parents into letting her stay out past curfew.
To her credit, Mara was trying to gauge who I was as well, so I decided to quit worrying about what I didn’t know and instead focus on her.
She was garbed in a simple, fading gray robe with a sash embroidered with the emblem of a sword, most likely salvaged from the Silver Fortress. She had charcoal gray hair that extended to the back of her neck, slightly sloping cheeks, dull green eyes, and was about two inches shorter than Zea. I looked back and forth between the both of them, trying to guess if they were related in some way. Zea had just enough of this woman’s features to make me suspect they were mother and daughter, but without any definitive proof, I couldn’t make such a judgment.
In the back of my mind, though, was a nagging feeling, one that told me I knew something about her.
“I know who you are,” Mara said, shocking me back to reality.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“You are Blake Azarel, son of Lucien and Nane Azarel.”
I instinctively tensed up. “Okay,” I said. “It seems I’m at a disadvantage here, Champion Van Denend.”
She flinched for a moment but then smiled. “You misunderstand. I may wear the sash of a Champion Psionic, but I am not one of them. There has not been a Psionic of any rank since the fall of the Silver Fortress.”
“Yet you know who I am.”
“The insignia on your trench coat gives you away. The Archives were left unharmed in the attack, so I have been reading up on my history.”
“I find that hard to believe. Administrator Vivas may have placed many wards around them, but if she died, then anyone could have grabbed them. And seeing as she’s not in this room right now, then that leaves me to believe that the Archives were taken away by the Sanguine Collective.”
“One would think, yet I found them when I first came here and they are still in my possession. It was in them that I read about your exploits.”
“What are you talking about, Mara?” Zea asked, looking at me skeptically. “How could he be in the Archives? He’d have to be over a hundred years old.”
“I was pondering that myself. The Archives do state that Guardian Azarel was here during the fall, but there is no record of his death.”
“Which seems to have worked out in my favor,” I said.
Whoever Mara was, she was knowledgeable about the way we had worked before this “fall” she mentioned. Clearly Naomi Vivas had died, but somehow the Archives had stayed intact, even though that defied everything I knew. Then again, this was becoming a feeling I was unfortunately getting more accustomed to by the moment.
I don’t like change.
“But enough about me,” I said. “I’d rather figure out how you lovely ladies ended up living in my old stomping grounds.”
“It is a simple enough tale,” Mara said. “I found this building while fleeing Vice City and managed to unlock it thanks to what little power I had. I stayed here for some time, but grew lonely. Eventually, I found a woman with the Christening flowing within her and brought her here to safety. However, the mother died giving birth to Zea. I have raised her as my own ever since.”
“Well that was a delightfully diminutive piece of exposition.” I could feel a horde of metaphysical daggers pointed at my back. I grimaced at my lack of tact and turned around to Zea. “I’m sorry about your parents.”
She softened up. “It is okay,” she said. “Mara has been an excellent mother.”
I turned to Mara. “So you’ve been here for a while. What have you been doing?”
“Surviving, Guardian Azarel,” she said, shortly. “The world is a far different place than yours.”
“So I noticed. But isn’t it far more dangerous for you to be exposing yourselves to the Sanguine Collective? Why was Zea out in Vice City?”
“Zea was gathering supplies for us,” Mara said. “We alternate on who leaves our sanctuary behind so that no one sees us too often or guesses that we are in league with one another.”
“A reasonable plan,” I said. “I’m also guessing that one or both of you is quite skilled in illusion summoning.”
“Indeed. I have trained Zea in the illusionary arts. However, as you noticed, these are weak disguises at best. The power needed for a full illusion around the body takes up too much energy to maintain. To make up for this, we work together on the illusion right before one of us leaves. It is almost impossible for anyone to see past it, unless they are sufficiently powerful enough, as you are.”
I smirked. “It’s a gift.”
Mara offered a grin.
I stepped back for a moment, something in the background having caught my eye. I kicked myself for not even bothering to check out my surroundings during the middle of my conversation. Not knowing what was around you was a good way to get yourself killed by an unseen trap.
But I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried about the state of decay in the Silver Fortress and how I knew nothing about how it had happened. Mara said that I’d been there during the fall of the Gray Forum, but I had no memory of it. The last thing I’d seen had been my parents.
I was in the gardens, the place where Psionics and Sentinels went to whenever they wished to rest in-between missions or lessons. It was our unofficial meeting place where we discussed the news of the day or caught up with old friends. Back when it had been fruitful, the gardens had been filled with plants from across the world, each one representin
g a member of the Gray Forum.
I moved forward, feeling something tugging at me. I knew the feeling intimately; it was the call of a death mark. I was about to head into the location of where one of my friends had been killed.
Mara and Zea called out to me, but I ignored them. I needed to know which one of my friends had died. Had it been one of my parents? A member of the High Court? One of my mentors? A member of the Dream Team?
I walked to my left, feeling that I needed to see something there. A broken pillar lay before me, its chiseled form reduced to a burned facsimile of itself. I knew very few Psionics or Sentinels who could have caused this to happen.
Akemi, I thought. Akemi Tyson. No.
Akemi couldn’t be dead. She was powerful—far more than I was. She was the greatest fire invoker to have ever been part of the Gray Forum.
I stepped back for a moment, trying to recollect the last memory I had of her. Just like everything else, it was seven years ago at the latest. We were headed out to a barrow in England. Something about a ring. We needed to stop a necromancer. Brian Poole had given us the story after the owner of the ring had almost killed him. My father had given the okay for the Dream Team to stop whoever was responsible.
Why couldn’t I remember anything after that?
“Are you okay?” Mara asked. “Do you sense something?”
“A presence,” I said. “A death mark. But it’s…faded. I think…I know who made it.”
When people of power are killed, they leave behind traces of themselves on the spot where they died. The stronger the practitioner, the stronger the death mark they leave and—depending on their alignment—the more likely it could assist or hurt any setting it was left in. For example, the Michigan Triangle formed in 1896 when a group of dark Sentinels attempted to take control of a storm spell crafted by the shaman Misquamacus, scourge of the New World. When both parties succeeded in killing each other, the spell erupted, causing them to be sealed within the Great Lakes forever. The Gray Forum had tried to get rid of it, but Misquamacus was a powerful man, even in death, making such attempts futile.
“Impossible,” Zea said. “The Gray Forum was wiped out a hundred years ago. You can’t be more than thirty.”
“Twenty-seven,” I said. “I know, I know. I look younger. We suffer from the same curse. You’re probably really sixteen.”
“Twenty.”
“Whatever.”
“This place is filled with death marks,” Mara said, interrupting us. “Both from the Forum and our enemies.”
I knelt down and touched the pillar and was forced back into a vision of the past.
2
I was searching for a woman with red hair. It wasn’t Akemi. I had other reasons for wanting to see her. But why would I choose her over Akemi? I’d known her ever since I was a child. We were a part of the Dream Team. Was she important to me? Could she help me fight back against these beasts?
Akemi stood by me, her red hair blazing as the fire she’d invoked surrounded herself. She was bleeding all over her body and I didn’t have a scratch on me. Either my dream-self wasn’t representative of the real me or I really hadn’t been injured in this moment.
The gardens were still alive, but most of the plants were in flames. The body of a small child was strewn across the upper balcony, as a vampire grabbed a little girl and fed off of her hatred. I saw other bodies scattered across the gardens and gasped when I knew who they were: half of the High Court. No one should’ve been able to kill them while they were all together, let alone if they were by themselves. I trembled in terror, praying that my father and mother were not among them. To my brief relief, I didn’t see them anywhere.
“Hey, boss, get down!” Akemi yelled.
I instinctively ducked, as double contingents of fire rained down from the top of the building, incinerating a vanguard of vampires entering the room. One of them was able to escape the inferno and headed to our direction, but Akemi had prepared for him and the remainder of her invocation scattered around us, incinerating the vampire before he could touch me. Akemi knelt down for a moment and regained her breath.
“Using too much, boss,” she said, as I picked her up. “You can’t stay with me. You need to make sure they’re safe.”
“We’ve lost too many already,” the dream-me said. “That’s half of the High Court lying dead in the middle of our sanctuary! They’re killing the kids! We need to get as many people as we can out of here and regroup!”
“You know we can’t do that.”
We heard the howl of an unimaginable creature and froze in place.
“What was that?” Akemi asked.
“It can’t be,” I said. “But the energy signatures…it makes sense. They sold their souls to summon them! That’s why the vampires attacking us have no strategy to their attack! God help us if I’m right!”
Right about what? I thought, but before I could get an answer, the foundations of the Fortress shuddered and I heard an explosion rip through the council chamber.
I gazed upward through the upper windows and noticed that my skin was numb. A dark portal had opened where the council chamber had once been. A mass of tentacles exited the recesses of the portal.
“What the hell?” Akemi asked.
“Hell has nothing to do with that,” I said.
The vision blurred and my sight extended ten feet to the front of me at best. It appeared as if some amount of time had passed, because I was limping, or so I thought. I looked down and found that I was in the middle of a teleportation circle. My body was numb. Akemi looked at me and shook her head.
“I’m sorry, boss,” Akemi said. “But I told you to leave. If I can’t get it through your thick skull then I’ll force you to do it. We need you. You’re the strongest of us all now that half the Court’s gone. Get to your family and see them to safety.”
Another explosion resounded throughout the gardens, as a horde of vampires entered from all sides.
“Incinerate Everything!” Akemi shouted, as a column of flame surrounded her.
A vast fire erupted in front of her, consuming everything in its path, melting through the titanium remains of one of our broken security doors.
Akemi fell to the floor and coughed up blood. I tried to move and heal her, but I was still bound to the teleportation circle. Howls of demonic beasts echoed through the gardens and over fifty vampires entered the room. Akemi stood up and balled her fists.
“I’ll hold them off,” Akemi said, blood ebbing down her fingers. “You have to save Meredith, Brother.” She smiled and impaled a vampire with her dagger. “We can’t afford to lose our newest members. Tell Brian I said ‘Yes.’”
Grinning wildly, Akemi shouted something I couldn’t understand and I watched as a vast inferno appeared out of nothing and wiped out everything in its path. The flames continued toward Akemi, as she simply sat down and watched it with disinterest. Grief filled me as I activated the circle knowing that I had just lost one of my best friends. Then the vision faded away.
3
I fell down and face-planted into the floor. My nose was bleeding and I rubbed it against the ground. I turned around to see Zea and Mara standing over me, confused expressions on their faces.
“What the hell was that?” Zea asked, offering her hand to me.
I rubbed my temples for a moment and then accepted her hand. She pulled me up from the ground and I shook my head.
“I saw…what I was doing when the Gray Forum was attacked,” I said, my fingers trembling. “I was there, so why—why am I alive? What happened there?”
Chapter 6
I reviewed the death mark I had just seen, replaying it in my mind. The more I watched it the more I was able to figure out what had happened.
The High Court members lying dead on the floor—I knew every last one of them. They had knighted me during my induction into the Sentinels, but now they were gone.
Antoine Lavoisier, the greatest alchemist Psionic the Gray Forum had ever see
n. Zvi Aharoni, the Sentinel commander of our black ops group and the man who’d taught me how to defend myself with any weapon imaginable. Parul Ghosh, one of the few Psionics who could cause sound itself to become corporeal with her amazing voice. Inji Aflatoun, a pioneering Sentinel who was one of the first to bring drawings to life with their abilities. Hubert Woodcock, our foremost expert on all things plant-based and the one who’d been one of my primary trainers during my youth. Miguel Cordero, who was famed for using his telekinesis to make himself walk after he was paralyzed during a fight with Supay, Incan god of the underworld.
All of this was useless information now. They were dead, having been killed by something powerful enough to murder six of the strongest members of the Gray Forum. Alone they were strong, but together they were unstoppable. What could have killed them like this? A final release could, but the Sanguine Collective rarely if ever were able to convert Christened individuals to their side, as only the Christened could use a final release.
“They’re all dead,” I said, staring at the pillar where Akemi had died. “They died before I could reach them. What was I doing? Who was I trying to save?”
I sighed, wishing I knew more. I could feel a gnawing in my heart and I held my chest.
“I need to find another one,” I said. “If I can find someone else I was close to, then maybe I can piece together what happened.”
Zea approached me and stared at the pillar. “There are many places like this in the Silver Fortress,” she said, frowning. “So many powerful men and women died, leaving their mark for all with the power to see their last moments. I’ve never experienced what you have, but when I pass by them I catch glimpses of the past. I never want to see them again, so I avoid them. Don’t seek them out, Blake. The only thing you’ll ever see is your grief replayed repeatedly. The more you see your friends and family dying the more you shall lose of yourself.”
“But I have to know what happened,” I countered. “If I can just piece the puzzle together then maybe I can figure out how I got here.”
