Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2)

by J B Cantwell

  "Let's all have a rest," I said, trying to stifle a yawn.

  What I didn't say was the main reason I wasn't ready to jump. Jade and I were two inexperienced kids working on a ridiculously complicated piece of magic with an ancient, insane wizard. We had no idea whether we would reach the Fire Mountains, or even if we would survive using this link. What if he had used the frame incorrectly? I shuddered as I imagined our deaths, floating in space far above our intended target.

  I pushed the thought aside. I at least wanted to be awake when I met the next monster on this journey.

  Jade lay back, but cautiously this time, her eyes still fixed on her father. Slowly, her tense body relaxed again with the knowledge that the links were safe and out of his reach.

  I rested my cheek against the cool, flat surface of a smooth stone. At least I had found one rock that wasn’t digging into my skin. I faded into sleep with the warm sun at my back, and soon the bed of stone might as well have been a soft mattress, for I was just as gone from the waking world as I would have been on any feather bed.

  Hazy, comforting dreams floated across my consciousness for what felt like many hours. Misty, relaxing images kept my body calm and my mind far away from the stressful cares of our journey. My mother’s face smiled gently and spoke words I couldn’t quite make out. Then I ran through flat, empty fields that stretched out before me in an endless expanse, the joy of speed lifting me as I pushed harder and harder. I flew across the grass, the sky growing dark and a starscape unfolding above me, each glowing sun filling the sky like grains of sand in a bowl. And when I finally fell to the ground, my vast and curious energy spent from the flight, the stars began collapsing into me one by one. They came slowly at first, but then faster and faster until a funnel of light was pouring down into my core from the far reaches of space, piercing my body with their energy in a giant rush. When the last of the stars had gone, only I was left, blind and alone in the black. But fear didn’t come from my solitude, only peace, and the feeling that I could stay that way forever, and be forever satisfied.

  The odd warmth of a fading rockfire, popping and cracking not unlike wood might, was what finally brought me out of my dreams. Jade must have grown cold and made it while I slept. It was one of her specialties, I had learned during our many months together, and very handy when there was no wood about for a fire. She lay next to it, curled up like a baby. I rolled onto my back and stretched. The peaceful enchantment of my sleep still hung around me. I felt relaxed and oddly calm, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened over the past few days. As if everything was good and right with the world. As if I were still floating in my dreams, without sight or sound or care.

  Then I sat up.

  I looked around, expecting to see Almara hovering close by, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “Jade,” I said. I nudged her shoulder. “Jade, where’s your father?”

  “What?” Her sleepy voice was quiet and dreamy.

  “Where is Almara?” I asked, growing alarmed. I jumped to my feet, scouring the beach for him.

  “What do you mean?” she asked blearily, sitting up and pushing her blond hair out of her face. “Isn’t he here? Oh, I had the nicest dream.”

  “No!” I said, the strange peacefulness disappearing in an instant, sucked from my body as if by a vacuum. I ran to the edge of the water, scouring the shoreline in each direction, but he was gone. Turning, I saw the low cliff of rock that stood at the edge of the beach. I made for it and scrambled upwards, nearly falling fifteen feet back down to the ground in my haste. At the top, green grassland stretched out far into the distance. No trail of footsteps was smashed into the blades. No sign of which direction the old man had headed. And in the direction of the water, the beach disappeared behind larger cliffs. If he was on it, he was invisible to me.

  Jade was on her feet at the water’s edge below, looking around wildly. I picked my way back down to the beach along the edge of the cliff.

  “Do you have the link?” I shouted as I reached the bottom.

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “The link! Did he take it?”

  My question finally permeated her brain, and she shook her head, pulling the ruby out from under her shirt and holding it out. I dug into my pocket and pulled out the Kinstone.

  “Ok,” I said, trying to think rationally. “He doesn’t have a link. Not that we know of. So he left on foot. Right?”

  Her eyes were getting that faraway look as the experience of facing her greatest fears battered her.

  “Jade, I can’t figure this out without you,” I said. “Don’t freak out on me.”

  Her eyes met mine, and for a moment I thought she was breaking right in front of me. But then resolve crept in, replacing her terror. She nodded.

  “Did you see anything up there?” she asked, motioning in the direction of the grassland.

  “No,” I said. “No sign of him.”

  “So he had to have walked on the beach,” she said. “Unless—” her eyes drifted out over the choppy ocean waves.

  “No,” I said. “No, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do you know?” she asked. She was trying hard to keep it together, but her hands shook as much as her voice.

  “Because we can’t think that way right now,” I said. “Simple as that.”

  The golf ball sized pebbles that covered our portion of beach, smoothed from thousands of years of battering on the edge of where the sea met the land, stretched out for miles in both directions. It betrayed no footsteps.

  “You go in that direction, I’ll go this way,” I said. “If you don’t find him in an hour, turn back and meet me back here, ok?”

  “Ok,” she said, breathless as fear and courage battled for control of her mind.

  I didn’t wait for her. I didn’t know if she would be able to do what I was asking. To search, again, for her father. It seemed that soon, if not today, she would split from the strain of not finding the relief she sought from him.

  But I didn’t have time for that now. Almara was out there, somewhere, and I had to find him fast, before he slipped from between our fingers, lost to us and our cause forever.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I ran. My feet crunched through the rocky shore like iron against bone as I bolted away.

  Ugh! Why couldn’t he just do what he was supposed to do? Why did this all have to be so difficult? An image flitted across my brain, a fantasy I had long had about forcing my father to take his medicine, forcing it down his throat with my pudgy five-year-old hands. That little boy in me was convinced that the pills he refused had, in fact, magic within them. And it was just his stubborn will that stood between him and I. Father and son.

  But this was different. Something about Almara’s affliction made me think it couldn’t be fixed by a trip to the pharmacy. It wasn’t that simple.

  None of this was simple.

  So I ran.

  I kept my speed contained. At top speed, the world around me would turn to a blur, and the details would get lost in the wind that tore tears from my eyes. But I was grateful for the speed I did have. I could get much farther than Jade in the same amount of time. I hoped she wasn’t wandering aimlessly along the beach. If she let despair crush her will, she didn’t hold any hope of finding him.

  Why hadn’t we heard him go? He was an uncoordinated, hunched old man. And yet he had left us without displacing a single pebble on the beach, without making a sound. Months of being on the run had made me a light sleeper, always waiting for attack, always listening.

  But I hadn’t been sleeping lightly, not today. I had woken up in a haze, with the tendrils of sickly sweet dreams hovering about me. And Jade, too. Hadn’t she said something about having had the nicest dream?

  The beach was empty. The knolls that rose up along the edge changed from rock to sand gradually across the miles, and no caves hid in the crevices. It was just the ocean, the rocks, and my flying boots. The landscape became almost dull; flat text
ures whizzing by. I found myself looking for abnormalities against this monotone sheet of beach instead of the man, himself.

  A scattering of driftwood brought me up short and I slowed. As I passed I took the time to check behind each piece large enough to hide a man, looking for his hiding body.

  And then I saw it. Fluttering in the breeze, a worn, brown strip of fabric had torn on a branch, stabbed onto a jagged piece of driftwood. The edges were frayed, rotten from centuries of wear. I stopped, ripping the linen from the wood.

  “Almara!” I shouted. Not even an echo of my own voice rewarded me. Only the steady beat of the waves answered my call.

  The place seemed empty, but I couldn’t figure out why. I had seen photos of beaches, far beyond the reaches of my city back home. In those images, people walked hand in hand on the sand. Seagulls strutted, owning their small piece of the world. The laughter of children, made silent by the snapping of just one instant in time, rang through my ears as I flipped through the pages of the old photo albums.

  Here was silence, too, behind the thrum of the ocean. Too much of it.

  I started running again, shouting his name out every minute or so, pausing to listen for a response.

  Then, suddenly, the rocky part of the beach ended, morphing into flat, gray sand. The tide had gone out here, and the sand was hard where the sea had weighted it with water. A most welcome sight met my eyes as my feet crossed over the threshold of stone beach.

  Footprints.

  I picked up speed.

  “Almara!”

  I let myself run all-out, trying like mad to reach him before some other unknown ill did. Chills were scurrying up and down my spine. The dream. The silence. The disappearance. Something was very wrong.

  The footsteps went on and on. I ran for miles, the tears from the wind mixing with tears of frustration, drying after only moments on my cheeks. I ran so fast that I ran right past the end of the footprint trail, only realizing after another quarter mile that the path was lost.

  I stopped, gasping, and turned to search the beach. It was empty, blank as an artist’s page.

  But up on the hillside along the edge of the beach, a strange, dark figure caught my attention. He sat at the corner of the precipice, his legs folded neatly beneath him, and looked out over the waves. His skin was the darkest I had ever seen on any man, black as if burned to charcoal, and his hair hung down heavily onto his shoulders in long, locked spirals. He wore no shirt, and his lean muscles shone sweaty in the heat of the day. It looked like he had sat in the blazing sun for a century, slowly baking to a crisp beneath its relentless heat.

  His stared out to the sea, his gaze a focused beam, his eyebrows furled in concentration.

  “Hey!” I yelled up at him, made uneasy by his intensity. “Hey, what are you doing?” I started walking slowly in his direction, momentarily distracted from my pursuit of Almara. But his eyes never wavered from the fixed point on the water below, his mouth turned down into a grimace.

  It was only when I wondered what it was he was staring at that my veins filled with ice. Dread weighted every inch of my insides as I turned, forcing myself to search the one place I had no hope of rescuing Almara from, to see what the stark black man up on the cliff saw.

  And there he was, far out, too far out, in the ocean. Only his head still remained above the water, his body inching ever deeper, closer and closer to a watery death.

  NO.

  Images of Jade’s tortured face flashed in my mind. Then the worried face of my mother. The dead fields of Earth. My father in the street in nothing but underwear, ranting at the top of his voice. All things lost with the loss of this one man’s life. It was all I could do to not fall down onto my knees. Oxygen seemed to stop making it to my limbs, and my chest clenched and burned with the horror of what I was witnessing. With every ounce of energy I could find, I shouted into the wind.

  “STOP!”

  I was running again, though I couldn’t remember starting to move. In a moment I was back at his footsteps, at the point where his shuffling gait had turned to meet the sea. I splashed into the water. Maybe I could make it to him. I was his height, and stronger. His nose was still above the waves.

  I trudged myself through the water, throwing myself recklessly into the cold, merciless arms of the ocean.

  “Stop!” I yelled again, this time I almost cried the word. “Don’t! You have to stop!”

  But he did not.

  A large wave knocked me backwards, and I found myself underwater despite the fact that my feet could still touch the bottom. I stood up again, choking. The top of Almara’s head still stuck up.

  I was frantic. I had to find a way to get to him, but if I kept pushing on, I would drown, myself. I flailed, searching all around for a clue, an idea, something to help me reach him. Something that would float. I didn’t have Jade’s power. I couldn’t call rocks up from the sea floor to carry me to Almara. I needed a boat, but a more impossible wish I could never have made in this empty place.

  Wood. Boats are made of wood. Wood floats.

  The large branches of driftwood that littered the beach caught my eye, and I turned back, pushing through the water with every ounce of energy I had left.

  Choking and gasping, I ran over the wet sand. I picked up the first branch I saw that seemed large enough. Thick as my midsection and as light as Jade’s tiny body, I hoisted the log up and ran back, hoping I wasn’t too late.

  His head was gone, disappeared beneath the waves.

  As soon as the water was up to my thighs, I threw down the log, using it to steady my body as I fought my way out again. One by one the waves battered me, trying to knock me underneath the surface, but I didn’t let them. I couldn’t let them.

  You can do this. Just hang on.

  I concentrated hard, watching, calculating every movement of the water. Somehow I managed to stay upright. When my shoulders were beneath the surface, I lifted my toes from the sand and began kicking. If I hadn’t been so panicked about rescuing Almara, I would have felt relief, for the log did its job and kept me aloft. I hugged it close to my chest, unwilling to let it go, not at any cost. He had to be here somewhere. I took a deep breath and plunged my head beneath the waves.

  The salty water seared my eyes, but I kept the pried open as I searched through the murkiness for him. I pulled my head up, gasping for air, and then thrust it beneath again. Again and again I did this. He had to be here. I had just seen him. It had only been moments.

  Suddenly movement, the only movement I had seen under the surface, caught my eye. I kicked towards it, and he came into view. Still standing upright, taking small, purposeful steps deeper and deeper into the sea, Almara walked to his death. His robes and hair flew around him as if he were caught in a wild, swirling windstorm. I tried to call out, but my voice was inaudible here in the deep. Instead I sucked in a throat full of saltwater. Stunned, I instinctively fought for the surface, heaving out the water from my chest as soon as the air touched my face.

  Don’t quit. Don’t give up.

  When the coughing subsided, I took a huge breath of air and plunged again, this time stretching out both arms, one gripping the log, one reaching towards Almara. The edges of his robes tickled the tips of my fingers, and I grappled wildly with the fabric until I had a full fist of it in my hand. I pulled and pulled, but he was dead weight in the water and didn’t try to save himself. Little by little, I somehow managed to raise him a few inches off the sea bed. I grabbed his arm and heaved him upwards, my head breaching the surface again, shortly followed by his. I gasped and gagged on the water now swimming in my lungs, but I held him fast.

  He didn’t cough and sputter as I did, only stared blankly into space with clouded, white irises. My legs kicked under the waves as I tried to move our bodies to shore. Slowly, we inched closer and closer to the beach until my feet mercifully found the sand beneath us.

  I lifted my eyes to the cliff above, and as I did so the strange, dark man turned away.


  I wanted to call out to him, to force him to stop. He had done this to Almara, I was sure of it. There wasn’t much fight left in me, but in that moment I was willing to use what I had left to face him, to battle him, to make him pay for this thievery. The taking of the man who could lead us all to salvation.

  But as he walked away, and his head slowly bobbed out of sight, I knew that I was too late. And too weak.

  The hard knot of resolve that had begun growing when I had first seen Almara, the astonishingly damaged remains of what once had been a great man, grew another layer thicker. With every enemy we encountered, every sadistic ill we experienced, the knot grew, and I saw in my mind, like a broken record, all we had been deprived of.

  I would beat them. I would beat them all.

  The waves pushed us closer and closer in, threatening to knock me down as I all but carried him to the land. But while they battered at Almara, my feet held fast beneath me. When we made it to shore, we finally collapsed in a heap, the water still pushing up over our legs.

  “Urrrg,” Almara groaned, the first sign from him that he was still alive. I rolled him on his side and a stream of water gurgled up out of his mouth. Now, finally, he coughed, and soon the majority of the salty brine was free of him. His body settled as the racking hacks subsided, and he lay on his side, staring blankly into space, lifeless but for the rattling breaths that came in and out of his body automatically.

  I lay back, not caring that half of my body was still in the ocean, and stared at the sky above me, letting my frustration and anger and helplessness go for just long enough to appreciate the fact that I was still alive. Billowing clouds floated overhead, slowly bunching together, growing larger, darker. I breathed with them as they slowly joined one another, mixing together, a system of life.

  Almara shivered on the shore next to me, and the jolt of his body next to mine brought me out of my stupor. I rolled over and stared into his clouded eyes.