“I’m not.” I said once again and turned around, lifting my legs as I seated myself back the right way, facing the front of the Dragon. I couldn’t tell if Freya was looking at me or not, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t care anymore.
She was probably going to talk to me about this sometime later, and we were probably going to have a tense conversation about what happened. But I really, really didn’t want to.
Speaking of what happened, Nyx and Acnologia didn’t speak a word since the Dragon caught me mid-fall. I waited for a few minutes, thinking they would speak the first words, but they didn’t, and so neither did I. This wasn’t some petty contest we had. It was more of just us not wanting to speak about what had just happened.
Idiots.
I was certain those two felt perplexed about what they’d said and the reaction it had evoked, while I honestly just didn’t want to talk about it at all. Preferably ever, but that was probably hoping for too much. So I was fine we didn’t talk about it for the course of this journey at least.
I’m sorry, I said, hoping the two heard me.
I got no reply, and heard nothing of the two voices until nearly an hour and a half had passed and the clouds had begun to dull.
“Diablo, I believe we are here,” the Dragon said.
I nodded. “Take us down.”
The Dragon rose for a split second and then ducked, pulling his wings in. We shot through the clouds, and a chilling sensation passed through me once again. Acnologia quickly opened up his wings and we hovered in the air before gliding down to the ground.
It was especially dry down here, and my skin turned rough just from being in the open. I smelled smoke and burning wood in the air and glanced forward.
“Well then,” I said. “I assumed it was going to be two rivers when they told us this was a delta.”
Nope.
A large volcano stood about twenty miles away from us, and a wispy trail of smoke floated from its top. Two streams of boiling magma—one blood-red, and the other ocean-blue—flowed on either side of the volcano, meeting together at the delta and moving forward as a red-blue flow of pure fire.
That looks as pretty as it is dangerous. We were still a hundred yards from the rivers’ meeting point.
I dropped all the previous thoughts and emotions I’d had and decided to focus on just what was happening before me for the moment. Heslia had told us this was where he’d sensed the oddity, which meant we had to be on our topmost mental state if we wanted to find anything of good use.
Well, at least I have to be.
“Wow.” Freya glanced at the rivers of fire, and then at the surrounding regions. There was literally nothing else on the horizon beside the volcano. It was flat, dark lands all around.
Am I supposed to feel relieved by the simplicity, or worried by it?
“What do we do?” The elf turned to me. “Heslia said he felt the oddity here, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m not sure where exactly we’re supposed to look. Heslia didn’t come here himself obviously, so he has no details to provide.”
“And the elves that did never came back.”
“Exactly. Our lead brought us up to here, but after this it’s more of just guess and play.”
“What we usually do,” she chuckled.
“At the moment, that volcano seems to be our best bet.”
“Because it’s a volcano?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s also the only other landscape in our immediate vicinity. I don’t know you but I’d take searching a volcano compared to searching a large desert.”
“Good point,” she said. “Fine, we’ll head to it then.”
“Do you wish for me to fly you both to the Volcano?” Acnologia asked.
I looked past the delta, to the mountain. Twenty miles. That would be a hard walk to make, especially considering the air was already dry and dusty, and the heat would just get worse the closer we went to the thing.
“It’s probably better to fly,” Nyx said.
“Ahhhh.” A voice exhaled into the air.
The ground beneath us rumbled, and in seconds a dark twister rose from the edge of the delta. I focused hard, into the darkness, but I didn’t have to.
The formation broke off in a second, and two forms stood before me—a woman dressed in armor of white and blue, and a man dressed in hooded robes of pure black. Even though they were a little far away, I was able to make out a third form, a black-haired elf with—
“FREYA?!” I jerked my head to the side and noticed that the elf was no longer here.
“What the heck?” Nyx said. “When did they take her?”
“I noticed absolutely nothing either,” the Dragon said.
I looked at the two forms before me. Who are they? I stepped closer, and my ears picked up on their conversation.
“So do we knock them out?” the lady asked.
“He wanted them alive,” the man said. His voice was soft, but still loud enough for me to hear the words from so far away.
I lifted Dawnbreaker from its sheath, and held it at waist-level, with the sharp blade pointing right at them.
The lady looked at me, then smiled. “Oh, goody. A fight.” She turned to the man. “If anyone asks, it was self-defense, okay? He attacked us first.”
“Do what you wish,” the man said.
She hunched low, getting into attacking position. “Let’s see what you got, Diablo.”
I froze. She knows my name.
The next thing I knew her fist buried into my stomach. I smashed into the ground, and cratered the surface. The lady kept going, punching my chest and ribs multiple times. Snaps came from within me, and pain exploded through. My breath slowly died out of my lungs, and my head felt light now.
My vision pulsated, and the sight before me filled with spots of odd colors. A fist headed straight for my face, but all of a sudden it stopped, hovering before me like time had frozen. I looked to the side and saw the man next to the lady, with Freya still in his hands. He now held the elf by the waist, keeping her at his side, while his other hand grasped onto this lady’s wrist, preventing her from smashing my face in.
“That is enough.” His tone was stern. “We need him alive.”
“Awww,” she said. “Oh well, just a knockout then.”
She retracted her fist in a flash, and sunk it back into my stomach. I gasped, and life quickly left my body, before I could even attempt to fight back. This power was overwhelming. It was too much for me to handle on my own. It was too much for all of us to handle at once.
My vision flickered, as the colored spots fought for control over my mind. And then the blacks won.
“You didn’t kill him, did you?” the man’s voice echoed into my mind, just as I lost the last traces of my consciousness.
“If he dies he’ll just resurrect back to life,” she chuckled. “We all do.”
***
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A silence yelled before me.
A silence that did not hold the sounds of peace and solitude, but one that was wry with doubt and trickery, one that held deep secrets that it knew I should learn of, but yet was the farthest from telling me of them.
My eyes remained closed, and I focused, sending out my thoughts with all my mental strength. Nyx.
The spirit did not respond. I frowned. Should I call out to Acnologia? Would the Dragon even respond in the first place?
A laugh echoed through, breaking the silence like a beast would a glass wall. My eyes shot open, gathering the images around me. Huh, I blinked. Just darkness.
This hadn’t been the first time such a thing had happened. But even then, I felt unease.
The laugh subsided now, and in its place sounded a chuckle, with the tone gentler than before.
I looked around. Who are you?
“Do you not recognize me?” the voice said, ending the sentence with another chuckle.
I don’t have the faintest clue. But that’s usually
how these things go.
“You seem quite confident, Eternal.”
I smiled. It’d be hard for a voice to beat me up now, wouldn’t it?
“It wasn’t hard for this voice to take you to the past, once upon a time.” He stressed on the last word.
My chest tightened, and the images of snakes and bears, of dragons and volcanoes, all rushed into my mind, like a forgotten dream. Words stuck to my throat, as though a part of me did not want to find out I was right. And yet, I still forced the phrase out.
“The Time Lord.”
“So you DO remember me,” the voice chuckled. “How wonderful.”
I looked through the darkness, trying to find some kind of a form, and yet seeing none. “What do you want, Horace?” I asked. “Why are you here in my spirit space?”
“Ah, so you realized,” he said.
“It is my space. Of course I would know.”
“For some reason, I’d expected you to take longer to figure that out.”
“It certainly would have if this hadn’t happened to me before,” I thought. “And more than once at that.”
“It seems like you have eventful things happen in this space.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Don’t tell me this was an honest mistake or something.”
“I wasn’t going to,” the man said. “This is—how shall I put it?—a conversation to catch up on things.”
“Catch up?” I frowned. “What did you mess up this time?”
“That’s kind of a cruel way to say it, don’t you think?”
“Not sure there’s another way,” I said. “How are you even here anyway? The boundaries between times can’t be that arbitrary to let something like this happen.”
“Oh they are. Trust me.”
“They need to be stricter.”
“As for how I came here,” he began. “I was looking into this future—one of my favorite things actually—when I saw a few interesting tidbits happen around you. Surely, you didn’t expect me to stay all calm and content in my own time when I knew I could come visit you in your unconscious state?”
My eyes narrowed. Unconscious?
Images of a lady in silver robes and a man in black ones emerged in my mind. My stomach knotted, re-living the punch that had left me collapsed.
Those two are Eternals. I grit my teeth. Great. Now I have this to worry about.
“Oh, don’t fret, Diablo,” the Time Lord said. “You will have plenty of time to worry about THAT particular thing when you wake up again.”
“What did you do this time?” I asked.
“Eh?”
“Don’t act innocent, Horace.” I grit my teeth. “The last time an Eternal made an appearance in this world, you had forced her into this time.”
“Ah, that’s what you’re talking about.”
“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about,” I said. “What did you have to do with the reappearance of two more Eternals?”
“Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
“That only works for people who have a conscience.”
“You’ve been on the offensive since I began speaking, Eternal,” Horace said. “Perhaps…you already know of what I am going to speak, don’t you?”
I froze, but my eyes looked straight on, unwavering and completely focused.
A chuckle escaped into the darkness.
“So, you DO know,” he said. “How? Did your spirit friends realize it already?”
No words left me, and if they tried to, I’d forced them back in. I couldn’t speak here. I just couldn’t.
The chuckling roared into laughter, and the Time Lord’s amusement echoed through the black all around me.
“Is this what you came all this way to talk about?” I asked. “Seems like a waste of time.”
“A trembling set of hands don’t exhibit confidence, Diablo,” he said.
I clenched my fists, snapping my shaking fingers into a frozen position. “Don’t avoid the question.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is what I came here for.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“You’re quite the hypocrite, Eternal. You told me to not avoid the question, and yet, you do the same.”
“For a man with a lot of suspicion behind him, you certainly act like I’m the criminal here.”
He chuckled. “I’m not the one familiar with the scent of blood, am I?”
My chest tightened, and I stopped rubbing air between my fingers. I hadn’t even realized I was doing that.
“Replying with silence?” Horace asked. “You know, Diablo, many people think silence is a void of words, but I believe in the right setting, such a thing is a striking expression of emotions. And most of the time, that emotion is fear.”
“Psychoanalysis. Good job.”
“This reminds me of a conversation we had before,” he chuckled. “Your lack of hesitation to deny something is both amusing and worrying at the same time.”
“You’re saying that to me?” I asked. “All you’ve done since you got here is say things you think I feel, and all just to try and rile me up.”
A chill permeated the space around me, and my body turned colder in an instant. The black around me began to turn darker. Was that even possible?
“The time for games has ended, Diablo,” the Time Lord said. “You know what is happening to you, do you not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Of course you know. At the start of your new life in this time, you were averse to spilling blood, you were confounded after killing just ten people. And now, you’ve taken down three armies of thousands of soldiers each within a span of three days. Each time you didn’t hesitate to slash your sword. Each time you didn’t turn a glance to the streams of blood that you’d tapped into.”
I smiled. “Are you calling me a murderer, Horace?”
Silence spoke back, and I waited for no further response.
“It was nice speaking to you,” I said. “And by that, I mean it was an absolute waste of time. I don’t know what this was supposed to be—you talking to me like this—but from what I can tell, you yourself don’t seem to know either. I’ve got more important things to worry about, so if you have nothing to offer me, I’ll have to be on my way.”
Silence spoke back once again.
Idiot. My fists clenched.
I concentrated on the space around me and snapped my fingers. The darkness folded away, receding away like molten magma flowing in reverse.
I gasped as a sharp pain shot up my chest, and my vision changed in an instant. Cold stone floors were beneath me, and my hands rubbed against their rough surface. Dusty air clouded up my forehead, with many a cobweb decorating my tunic. I sat myself up, inclining inch by inch till I was upright. There wasn’t any pain in my body though.
I sighed. At least I have that going for me.
“Diablo,” Nyx spoke.
Yeah, hi.
“Who spoke to you this time?”
I blinked. You knew?
“This has already happened twice before, right? When Acnologia and I were blocked out of your spirit space, I mean. It always happens when there’s someone else trying to speak to you.”
I nodded. Horace came by.
“What?”
“The Time Lord?” Acnologia spoke.
DING!
Familiar Storage has been activated. ‘Acnologia, the Shadow Dragon’, has been retained within the familiar storage system. You cannot store any more familiars.
I frowned. Again?
“I believe it’s an automated process that happens every time you fall unconscious, Diablo,” the Dragon said. “Which, to be perfectly honest, has happened more times than we would have liked.”
“What did Horace want?” Nyx asked.
I closed the screen. “Not much.”
“Really?” the spirit asked. “Usually he’s pretty dead on with his agenda.”
“Well, thi
s time was different,” I said. “Where are we now?”
Stone walls stood around me, but the one to my right was a barred door. This was not a familiar sight, but still enough to describe where I was.
A prison.
“No clue who put us here though,” Nyx said.
Well, it’d have to be those two Eternals, wouldn’t it? I asked. There was a dull darkness on the other side of the bar, with no sounds floating and no forms walking.
It was empty.
“I’m not sure,” Acnologia said. “Those two talked about a third person. There is someone else involved here.”
Great, another enemy, I thought. Just what I need.
“Can you get out of these bars?” Nyx asked.
“I can try.” I stepped up. My arm pulled back, and I concentrated for an instant, loading my fist with energy first. I slammed my hand into the wall, and a boom thudded into the air, echoing through the darkness.
That was probably not a good idea, I thought, staring at the still-standing barrier.
“Shadow Travel?” Nyx asked.
Can’t. This place is restricting my powers. I looked around. You can feel it too, can’t you? I don’t think I can even cast any of the Dark Arts spells while I’m in here.
“Yeah,” the spirit sighed. “Damn it.”
It’s fine. We can just wait. We’re going to have to meet with these new Eternals sometime anyway. I still need to know where they came from.
“Horace didn’t give you answers?”
I shook my head.
“Well, that sounds like him. Even if he does like to make a good boast once in a while.”
He wasn’t that willing to give me information this time. Probably realized that things didn’t work out well the last time he’d done that.
“I’m still surprised he did not ask you about anything,” the spirit said. “Why did he even try to talk to you then? Seems like a lot of work for no reason.”
I shrugged. Beats me. He’s weird.
“By the way, I’m done looking through our maps, and we don’t have anything but this prison cell on there at the moment.”
Expected. Any sign of Freya?
“None.”
Damn. I rapped my knuckles against the floor, and the rebounding sounds lingered within my mind.
The Eternal: A Boxed Set (World of Ga'em Book 6) Page 87
