2289 A.D. - Arcane Darkness: A Paranormal Fantasy Adventure Saga (The Ashlyn Chronicles - Book 3)

by Renee van Dyke

  The spikes receded, disappearing. The flames upon the sand died, leaving only the wood structure still burning.

  A moment later, it began to rain from a recessed sprinkler system mounted in the roof of the dome.

  As the flames were doused, the stanchion again started to lower. Ash waited until it was fifteen feet from the ground before she jumped. Casually, she walked over to what had been the large, top platform and jumped atop it, victoriously. “As is required, I stand atop the platform, and as victor of the games, I claim the right to challenge you for the throne.”

  Steven rose defiantly to his feet, his ire fever pitched. “You have no right to make such a claim. You are not Draconian.”

  “And look who’s calling the kettle, black. Do they know?” said Ashlyn. Her eyes turned toward Antares and then to the crowd. “Do they know that you aren’t Draconian?”

  The audible purring-growls from the crowd, gave answer.

  “You’re nothing but an illusion, a trick.” Ash then shifted form into a female Draconian. “See how easy it is. I can be small or large—like you.” Ash showed them how she could change size, becoming small and then very large—twice the size of Basilisk himself. “Like I said—easy.” She then shifted back into her human form.

  The whispers of those in the colosseum were heavy. They were fearful of their leader and for all the wrong reasons.

  “Does anyone here doubt that I am your leader? Have I not brought our brethren back from the darkness? Have I not built this world, restoring glory to our people? Have I not vanquished hundreds of thousands of humans, sending them into the nexus where they will be tormented forever? Have you not had your vengeance?

  “If not, if you question my authority and ability to lead you, then I accept your challenge now.

  “Is there anyone here who wishes to claim the throne?”

  Ash raised her hand timidly. “Helllooo—I do—I did. Do you ignore my challenge because you are afraid?”

  Steven growled. He turned to the two Dracs holding her daughters. “Kill them both!”

  “No!” Ash sent a stream of gravity waves at the energy barrier, hoping to break it. The dome shuddered, creaking loudly as the barrier drew more power, straining to maintain full containment.

  The two Dracs had their knives out, and gave a last glance to Steven to make sure they still had his consent. He affirmed his order with a nod.

  Ash screamed as she saw the Dracs plunge their knives into the chests of her daughters.

  Angered beyond comprehension, “I damn you all.” The air around Ashlyn warbled as her power grew, and the light around her began to bend. The gravitational bubble, she’d created around her, grew, pushing everything around her away as though it were weightless. Even the massive central stanchion broke like a twig. As the bubble encountered the shield, the dome’s shield began to glow under the strain.

  “C3, G7,” said the soft, distant voice of Steven.

  Ashlyn’s sorrow spoke for her. “It’s too late, Steven. Our children are dead. I’m sorry, my love, but I’m going to kill them all. We’ve lost everything.”

  “Enough. If you want to challenge me, then so be it,” said Steven, expectant that the protective shield was about to collapse.

  Ash looked at her daughters, her face twisting at the sight of the Dracs feeding upon their blood.

  “You made a mistake when you ordered them to be killed. I have nothing left to lose now,” responded Ashlyn to Steven.

  “Did I? Or maybe—or maybe—” Steven shook his head as though he were trying to shake away cobwebs. “—or maybe, you have everything to lose?”

  With the elusive words, Ash couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Steven was slowly regaining a tiny bit of control. Maybe even tampering with the frontal lobe controlling Basilisks’ speech to send her a message—reshaping her own words.

  The energy barrier around the arena flickered, static discharges crackling as it began to fail.

  Sighing, I hope you’re right, Steven. Ash recalled the gravity bubble, shrinking it in size, but keeping it around herself for protection.

  Ash turned to look at Antares. In her anger, she’d forgotten about him. He’d backed up to the gate, as far as he could be from the gravity bubble that had come within inches of crushing him.

  With a wave of his hand, Steven lowered the shield around the arena. He jumped down to the arena floor. “I accept your challenge, human. Face me so that we may finish this.”

  Ashlyn, locked within her bubble, floated past him, going over to her children.

  Seeing the gloating faces of her children’s killers, Ash ordered the gravitational field to break their backs. The three Dracs screeched as their spines snapped. Ashlyn floated them high into the air and out into the arena. Her anger raged and with a mere thought, the Dracs burst into flames. Ash let them scream, wanting them to experience a small bit of the pain she felt in her own heart over the deaths of her children.

  Nearly everyone in the audience was rising, fleeing in fear.

  As Ashlyn’s narrowed, angry eyes watched parts of the Draconian bodies peel away and fall to the floor, she angrily tossed them into the debris of the destroyed Gorgos.

  Dispelling her gravitational bubble, Ash knelt beside her children, tenderly stroking their hair and touching their faces. Tears fell. Ash took their hand, recalling how small their fingers had been when they were born. “They’re so small, so fragile. What happened to us, Steven? Where did we go so wrong?” Her thoughts recalled the feel of their embrace.

  Ash screamed, her body slammed by a heavy stream of electricity.

  Disoriented, the stream pummeling her, Ashlyn reacted instinctually, her subconscious mind erecting the gravitational barrier around her. Freed from the electricity seizing her muscles and lungs, Ash took a deep breath. Her heart was pounding, aching—the pain cramping her muscles slow to dissipate.

  Lying there inside the protective bubble, the recent events flooded back. The horror of her children’s bodies—a reminder of all that had happened—lay just a few feet away. Her sorrow turned to anger against the Draconian people and all they stood for. They were ruthless killers, indiscriminately killing women and children without remorse, even gloating in the victory. It was a society that needed to come to an end.

  Ash rose to her feet and guided her bubble down to the arena floor. The stadium had emptied, no one wanting to become collateral damage in the battle about to ensue. “If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that I can’t trust you. Your act of attacking me while I mourned my children was dishonorable.

  “So, if it’s a war you want—you’ve got it.

  “I’m sorry, Steven—but I have to do this. This is bigger than you and I. Know that I love you,” said Ashlyn within the meld.

  Outside her bubble, Ash ignited a tiny spherical, nuclear inferno. It burned with all the brightness of a small sun. Wincing at the stark light, Steven put his hand up to shield his eyes. As the sun grew, Steven set his stance and bombarded the fusion reaction taking place, countering it. It shrank, his efforts effectively combatting the proton-proton cycle.

  “You cannot do this,” shouted Steven. “It will destroy us all.”

  “I know,” responded Ashlyn as she intensified her effort. The power she was tapping into was limitless and she was intent upon bringing the empire that the darkness had built to an end.

  Again, the sun grew in size. Steven could feel the heat and gamma rays being emitted. He felt the tingle upon his skin and the gift fighting to repair his molecular structure.

  With one hand fighting to counter the intensifying fusion reaction within Ashlyn’s sun, the other opened a rift behind Ashlyn’s sphere.

  The rift began to grow, exponentially enlarging in size as it sought to swallow the gravity bubble.

  As the darkness of the rift closed around her, Ashlyn dug deep. With a shouting scream, she infused all her hatred for the Draconians into a single energy burst, empowering the sun. As she collapsed within her bubble
, she sent a gravitational tether to Steven, pulling him inside the rift with her.

  Chapter 17

  The Nexus

  The light of Heaven disappeared. She was in the nexus.

  Though she had not given the command, the gravity bubble around her evaporated, letting the coldness in.

  Her thoughts went to her children and her love for them. All she had loved was gone. Everyone she had known, dead. Her last human act had been the destruction of Heaven, creating a sun that would destroy everything. “Perhaps, I am the ‘Destroyer of Worlds.’”

  In the dimensionless darkness surrounding her, Ashlyn’s mind drifted. She was in a place of eternal nothingness—a place where one was deprived of all sensory stimuli. Her human mind tried to encapsulate the despair of having no need for food, for water. Never again would she experience a simple human touch or hear the sound of someone’s voice. It was a place of utter isolation, where one’s memories were stolen by the chill of facing eternity alone.

  In this realm—past, present, and future coexisted as one. She was an aberration, a physical creature within a non-physical void. The two concepts were diametrically opposed and near impossible to fathom—though it was her reality.

  “E4,” said Steven through the meld—his words barely above a whisper.

  “Steven!” Ashlyn’s heart soared. “Yes, Steven. E4.” Already, she had forgotten. If not for his voice, Ash realized she might not have remembered. What’s wrong with me? Struggling to focus her thoughts, How did I forget that I pulled him into the nexus?

  Reaching out to him, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Steven—but I kept my promise, I’ll never leave you again.”

  Ashlyn’s senses exploded, her intuition growing a thousand-fold. She could feel the necklace guiding her, giving her a profound clarity. “The tether! The battle between the dark and the light.” Ashlyn’s eyes went wide with panic. “The crystal said the universe had disappeared. It’s all because of me.”

  Ashlyn saw her mistake. When she had pulled Steven into the rift with her, she’d trapped him. And now, like her, his powers were inaccessible. He’d opened the rift, but never closed it. It would continue to expand, to grow ever larger enveloping everything it touched. Inadvertently, she had fulfilled the prophecy. The battle between her and Steven was going to envelop the universe, destroying everything that existed, everywhere.

  “I understand now. They were trying to warn me and I didn’t see it. The whole point of the journey through the cosmos was to show me all the beauty and life we were going to destroy. What have we done, Steven?”

  The paradox of the crystal was becoming clearer. In this place, time did not exist. The past, present, and future would all disappear.

  The nexus began to transform, to brighten. An unearthly world formed around her, a world not belonging to the nexus or the netherworld. It was the crawlspace that exists between dimensions, like a wall between two rooms. This was where the darkness lived, their temporal home—the place unto which Enlil had sent the Draconians.

  The sights before her, those in the sky and upon the ground, filled her mind with wonder. It was a strange world of tinted yellow coloring with highly contrasted dark shadows. For the briefest moment, Ash felt bewildered, unable to explain what was amiss. When it came to her, the distinction was subtle but unnerving.

  There was no curvature to the distant horizon. It was perfectly flat. Ash knew that the horizon should dip below her line of sight at just under five kilometers, but here—even distant objects, thirty kilometers away could be seen meeting the ground. It was a world painted upon a horizontal canvas that had no end.

  In turning around to study the anomaly, Ashlyn was stunned to see dozens of vessels identical to Destiny strung out as far as she could see. Mixed in amongst them were the defensive platforms designed to defend Heaven. Everything was randomly strewn about, some ships lying atop others. It was a graveyard of everything inanimate that had been sent into the nexus.

  The similarity of what she saw now, like the journey she’d taken, struck her as profound. Though she had continued in what had seemed to be a straight line, the journey had eventually returned her to her own galaxy, to her original starting point. It was as though the universe existed along a one dimensional, straight line—where the end was also the beginning.

  And though she couldn’t explain it, she believed that if she were to continue walking in a straight line through this strange new land, she would eventually arrive back at where she stood now.

  “Thank you, Steven. I don’t know how you did it, but thank you for taking me out of the nexus.”

  As for the wasteland around her, there were a thousand sights. The land itself was barren, arid and without vegetation. But rising from the desert floor were three Titanesque stone monuments of Draconian warriors, each a hundred stories tall. They were guardians, symbolically protecting an ancient city that was partially buried in sand.

  It was easy to see that at one time the city had stood as a magnificent tribute to its people. The architecture was refined and distinctly not Draconian. Ash suspected it had been a city belonging to a conquered world, one that the Draconians had taken over and occupied.

  Vessels of all types—massive ships that had once sailed upon the sea and Draconian warships littered the landscape. A few lay side by side, one leaning against a large building on the city outskirts.

  Everything seemed so large, oversized. It made her feel like she was in a world made for giants.

  Of all the wonders, it was the view above her that stole her breath. Hundreds of worlds, all those that Enlil had erased from existence hung in the darkness of a starless sky above her. There was no sun, no source of illumination—no explanation to explain the brightness of day or the sky’s contrasting darkness of night. Everything in this world was an impossibility in a normal plane of existence. The fact that the worlds above weren’t tearing themselves apart by the immense gravitational forces was but one more confirmation to the uniqueness of the expanse where she’d been taken.

  “It’s like a child’s toy box where everything has just been tossed inside.”

  It was then that Ashlyn remembered Steven’s words to his people back at the colosseum. “Have I not vanquished tens of thousands of humans, sending them into the nexus where they will be tormented forever?”

  “They’re alive! Trapped but alive.” Ash had been so distracted by her son’s death, that she’d been blinded by the revelation in the words. It also brought clarity to Steven’s cryptically hidden message within the Draconian leader’s words. He was right, she still had everything to fight for. Perhaps her and Steven could even find a way to erase the events that had taken her children from her.

  “I guess it’s time to find to out what I can and can’t do here.” Ash went to shift form, choosing a naga. “Nothing? Really?” She tried again, thinking of an eagle. Still nothing. She shook her head. “Okay, so it looks like I’ll be walking.”

  Pulling the sword, she tightened her grip on the hilt, trying to bring it to life. Nothing. “Strike 2.”

  Ash then tried to access her Transor powers, calling upon her flame ability. Disappointment framed her face as she again failed. “All right—so I’m not in Kansas anymore.”

  Wanting to see if at least the armor would still work, she touched the center of the pendant. “Dead as a doornail.”

  Ash sighed, realizing that something wasn’t adding up. If her powers didn’t work, then neither would Steven’s. “So—who took me out of the nexus? The only ones with the power to do so were Steven and—

  “Ja’kal!” Ash gasped, her breath abating. Her thoughts went to Ja’kal and how Hadaesia had been swallowed by the rift. Somehow, he had escaped—somehow, it was he who had saved her. She was sure of it.

  Her thoughts shifted to Steven. “If he went into the nexus, he won’t be any use to the darkness. It’ll use him to escape into the netherworld and then abandon him.

  “And without his powers, he’ll be
in human form.” Her concern for Steven heightened. The Draconian apparitions would turn on him. He’d be their enemy.

  A loud shriek from behind broke the silence. A claw swiped her back, flaying her flesh. Before she could turn, a hard blow sent her sprawling to the ground. Landing on her back, spread eagle, her head slamming against the hard ground—she lay there, the wind knocked out of her.

  A loud growl filled the air as the entity came toward her. Ash swung the sword. The apparition descending upon her let out a screech, the wisp of its bodily form dissipating into black dust as the blade sliced the creature in two, killing it.

  Disoriented, Ash let her head drop backward. The pain of the deep cuts on her back were intense. Her head pounded. As she strained to focus her blurred vision, the world turned dark and she drifted off, unconscious.

  ***

  A warm breeze stirred Ashlyn’s hair, its whisking touch upon her shoulder waking her. Ash awoke with a start and raised her sword. She rolled over and came to her feet ready to fight the darkness. She remembered the attack, the pain—and nothing more.

  Because she was alive, she had to assume that she had won the fight. She checked her back and found that the wounds were healed. The attack would have seemed like nothing more than a bad dream if not for the splotch of black dust from the entity that lay on the ground. She took comfort in knowing that at least the gift was still working to heal her.

  Wary of another attack, Ash started toward the city, sword in hand. Uncertain of how the darkness had found her so quickly, she kept a vigilant watch, frequently glancing behind her. Left to her own thoughts, memories of Phillip, Sandee and Christy came to the fore. She missed the sound of their laughter and the times she’d watched them playing together. The ache in her heart endless.

  Though the trek to the city proved to be without further incident, she occasionally observed the ground rippling as animals moved beneath the sand, racing past her toward the city. Only once did the creature passing by her pause, as if it were intrigued by the sound of her footsteps. When Ashlyn cautiously came to a stop, the creature seemed to quickly lose interest, again continuing onward.