by Evan Currie
Caleb shot a glare at the old man that was easily ignored. “Where’s Elan?”
“She left,” Merlin answered. “And I’m a little busy, so if you’d like to return to the island, you know the way to the transport.”
Merlin shifted his focus away, and Caleb had to blurt out rapidly before he left, “Wait!” He threw up his hands. “What do you mean she left?”
The image of the old man looked evenly at him for a moment. “I believe the concept is as simple as it can possibly be made. She. Left. Which word is giving you trouble?”
Caleb glared at him again, but once more it had little to no effect.
“Where. Did. She. Go?” he ground out through clenched teeth.
“Lemuria.”
Caleb blinked, having no response for that.
“Huh?”
Okay, he had a response, just not a good one.
“While you were reading, she went and did the insane thing I warned you about and asked your help to stop,” Merlin said acerbically as he glanced over the book with disdain. “I do hope you learned something worthwhile from it.”
With those words, Merlin turned away and vanished into the ether as Caleb stared after him in stunned silence.
Chapter 7
It was dark when she arrived.
No, not merely dark. There was no light at all, and for a moment Elan stood alone in the abyss with all sense of direction other than down taken from her. It only lasted a few short seconds before her armor began filling in the details of the space around her.
It was a typical transport room, or so she presumed from what she could see in the odd monochromatic rendition of the area around her supplied by the armor.
“Power is down,” Merlin’s voice told her. “You’ll have to locate the emergency reactor and bring it back online.”
“That sounds incredibly complicated,” Elan said. And incredibly dangerous.
She knew a little, now, about reactors. Namely, they were something Merlin didn’t trust her anywhere near due to the potential for disaster.
“The emergency system is thorium-based,” Merlin answered. “Low power but stable. It won’t return full functionality to the center, but there is no chance of you blowing yourself into lunar orbit with it either. I’ll load information and instructions to your display. Just do what it tells you.”
Elan sighed, a little annoyed by Merlin’s tone, but as the instructions appeared on her display, she started to walk as they directed.
The emergency systems were not far from the transport center, thankfully, so she found the reactor easily enough. Turning it back on was a simple matter of throwing a mechanical switch and waiting for the system to slowly wind back up to full production. Lights appeared on the reactor itself first, and she peered at them as they started to blink off the system check.
Green lights were good. She’d come to understand that much with some ease. The absence of red was even better, though there was a single yellow that caught her eye.
“Merlin?” she queried as she walked over to it.
“Not an issue,” Merlin said. “It’s merely informing that the fuel store is below optimal. We might have to worry about it if we wanted more than a decade of power, but if we’re still around in a decade, I believe we’ll be able to scrape up more thorium to feed the system.”
“If you say so.” Elan shook her head. “What next?”
“Command center,” Merlin answered. “No matter what is decided here, we need better information than we have. You’ll need to physically reactivate the intercepts system, as well as all the surveillance devices that have survived.”
Elan nodded and started walking as soon as new directions appeared on her display.
*****
The command center was a large spherical room, the controls set in the very center at the end of a long spire bridge. Elan was glad she wasn’t afraid of heights, though much of the effect was dulled by the monochromatic nature of her suit’s enhanced vision.
The bodies still sitting at their stations threw her for a moment when she saw them, but if the death she’d seen up close and personal hadn’t broken her, a few dried and withered corpses weren’t going to cause her to freak out.
“Duty unto the last breath.”
“What?” she asked, looking up slightly as the disembodied voice of the old EI caught her slightly by surprise.
“Merely commenting on the souls still residing here,” Merlin answered. “You’ll need to move the one in the center station, I’m afraid.”
Elan grimaced but moved to do the job. She tried to be gentle, she really did, but the lightest touch caused skin to break off and even disintegrate in places. By the time she’d managed to get the body pushed to the floor of the circular area, it was missing large patches of skin, bone showing clear through, and she was certain she’d managed to dislocate, if not entirely amputate, at least two limbs.
Still, the grisly work was done in a few moments, and she carefully brushed down the seat before slipping into it herself.
“What next?”
“Activation sequence. Touch the spaces as I highlight them on your display.”
Elan nodded slowly, eyes widening as the controls around her were illuminated unnaturally. She realized quickly that, without her armor, they would still be dark, and Merlin was merely showing her the way through the pictures laid over her eyes. She reached out to gently tap the highlighted sections in turn. When she finished the sequence, a low hum sounded around her, and the first of many lights flickered into existence.
They were stars in the distant sky at first, though there was no sky to be seen. Then, as more light became available, the illumination cast by them began to give more form to the room than her armor’s night vision was capable of.
The spherical chamber was massive. Her armor informed her simply that the far wall was no less than five hundred feet away, and that meant another five hundred behind her to the wall there. She hung five hundred feet over the bowl of the floor and just as far beneath the dome of the ceiling, and all that scale came into focus as the lights of the command and control center lit everything up.
“System checks are now responding beyond basic emergency levels,” Merlin said calmly. “Lemuria command and control is online. Activating security monitors. Redirecting feeds to you.”
Elan’s breath caught as images began to appear around her, projected on or perhaps originating from the walls of the sphere. Demons and people, all moving about the center of what looked like a dirty yet oddly impressive city, so much larger than she’d ever imagined, even after seeing the humans’ city with Caleb.
It’s . . . impossible. It’s too big, Elan thought, stunned as she looked from image to image, trying to get a sense of scale, but it was too hard. “Is . . . is that Lemuria?”
“The fallen city, yes,” Merlin responded, his tone dark. “The last of the great cities to fall to the demons, as you call them . . . perhaps the only one they bothered to take intact, almost as though they wanted to rub in just how far we’d fallen.”
It was clear, as she looked around, that beneath the grime and the decay, the city had been majestic . . . once. Now, though, it struck her more as an abomination. Everywhere she looked there were demons walking in the open, humans cringing and cowering under the yoke of their masters . . . or worse, clear signs of those who’d already surrendered to the demons’ influence and were beginning the change.
“Security systems are less than fifty percent operative,” Merlin said, breaking into her musing. “Impressive . . . and surprising. I would have expected nearly that much from normal maintenance losses alone. The demons couldn’t have bothered even trying to deactivate them. Arrogance.”
Elan wasn’t listening too closely. Her attention was focused on the images as she shifted from one to another. Everywhere she looked there was violence and pain, not merely demon on human—though there was enough of that to be found—but also demon on demon. More of the latter, she real
ized as she watched a demon being ripped apart for some slight she hadn’t seen.
She grimaced, her lips curling up, and tried very hard not to feel anything for the beasts. She didn’t want to feel sorry for them, didn’t want to see them as beings with feelings.
She didn’t want to see Kaern’s face in their misshapen forms.
“It’s a den of filth,” she said finally.
“It is indeed,” Merlin told her. “However, it is a very large den of filth, and that is the concern. Worse, what we’re seeing here are the weakest and least dangerous ones of the lot. There are much worse above your head than we can see, Elan.”
She looked up reflexively, remembering that the images represented the city above.
“I understand,” Elan said, pushing the chair back on an invisible slider and taking a seat on the floor, folding her legs under her as she continued to look out at the images.
“What are you doing?” Merlin asked.
“Observing,” Elan said. “I was unable to do this from Avalon, so I came here. This is where I need to be . . . for now.”
Merlin fell silent, allowing her to begin breathing deeply to allow her mind to flow as she’d read in the book. There was too much to do and not enough time to do it in, but she had no choice. Clearing her mind, Elan slipped deeper into her own consciousness and then, finally, into the dreaming once more.
Uncertain what to do, Merlin receded from the center, leaving his charge . . . and erstwhile commander . . . dreaming with open eyes as horrors played out all around her.
*****
Merlin shifted his primary focus back to Avalon and immediately accessed the probe information from the local islands he had detected demons on.
What are they up to? Merlin wondered as he watched a construction in progress.
They were building, in stone monolithic slabs, giant circles that not even his probes could entirely see. It meant very little to Merlin, but he was well aware that there were many things about the demons that neither he, nor those who came before, had ever entirely figured out.
Does this have to do with their magics? he asked himself as he watched.
The probes he was forced to use had many more limitations than he would prefer. Unlike military devices, they had never been designed either for stealth or for in-depth intelligence acquisition. The sort of information that a naturalist would need just didn’t always mesh with the sort of information a military strategist would want. Still, he would make do with what he had.
Merlin set the probes to automatically watch over the island chain and report back whenever the demons did anything unusual. Unfortunately, everything they were doing was unusual. He had no doubt he was about to be swamped with data, and Merlin was quite certain he had no parameters yet to allow him to filter it down to anything useful.
It was in the middle of doing this that he felt a slight tug on his attention and shifted focus just slightly to find that, to his surprise, Caleb had never left the island. With the probes watching the demons, Merlin shifted his full focus to the library once more.
*****
“Merlin!”
Caleb had grown beyond frustrated. He had been calling for the aggravating entity for some time with no response. He needed to find out what had happened to Elan, and Merlin was the only one who could tell him. However, the arrogant and frustrating entity was nowhere to be found.
“Abyss damn you, Merlin! Where are you, and what happened to Elan?”
When no response came, Caleb slammed his fists down on the table in front of him in frustration, succeeding only in bruising his hands. While he was cursing under his breath and rubbing at his tender flesh, Merlin shimmered into existence unnoticed behind him.
“You rang?” Merlin asked with a desert-dry tone, startling Caleb nearly a foot into the air. The elemental intelligence watched with an almost bored curiosity as Caleb caught himself only an instant away from twisting an ankle or worse. “Jumpy sort, aren’t you?”
It took Caleb a few moments to get his heart rate and breath back from the start he’d just received, during which time he was glaring openly and angrily at Merlin. The intelligence merely stared back, entirely unimpressed.
“Where did Elan go?” Caleb demanded when he had reacquired full command of his faculties.
Merlin merely raised an eyebrow, staring him down for a moment. “I believe I already told you.”
“Lemuria. Where is that?” Caleb demanded.
Merlin scoffed softly. “And if I told you, would it mean anything? Would you prefer coordinates or directions?”
Caleb stared, confused, not understanding any of what Merlin had just said.
“Um,” he started uncertainly, “directions?”
“Certainly.” Merlin smiled at him, pointing off in the distance. “Swim that direction for eight hundred miles, cross six hundred miles of land—most of it desert—and then swim another two thousand miles. That will see you right there.”
Caleb stared, jaw hanging open as he silently looked between Merlin and the direction the entity was pointing. It took him longer than he wanted to admit to remember the transport system, but when that caught up with him, he reddened angrily and glared at Merlin once more.
Merlin was still entirely unimpressed.
“You sent her that far? Why?” Caleb demanded.
“She insisted,” Merlin told him. “She wants to kill demons.”
The bloodred tone of Caleb’s face vanished in an instant, his skin turning a pallid white as the blood drained away.
“There are demons there?” Caleb whispered fearfully.
“There are demons everywhere, boy.” Merlin laughed outright. “However, Lemuria is the center of demonic activity on this entire world. There are more demons there than anywhere else.”
“And you let her go there?”
Merlin gazed evenly at the boy—young man really, just as Elan was a young woman—and gestured casually. “I am not her parent nor her keeper. I’m not even an adult nor an authority. My purpose is not to tell you what you can or cannot do. I am here to help you do what you choose to do—nothing more, nothing less. If she wants to take the fight into the teeth of the enemy, I will advise, I will offer suggestions, but ultimately that choice is hers and hers alone.”
“This is insane,” Caleb mumbled, stepping unsteadily away from the table and shaking his head. “How could you let Elan, of all people, run off to do something like that? She’ll get killed!”
“You all die.” Merlin shrugged.
“Not at our age!”
Merlin actually smiled at that, amused deeply. “Youth. You think yourselves immortal, but I’ll tell you now that in the scope of the universe, it makes no difference whether you die at eight, eighty, or eight hundred. A few decades or even centuries is nothing to the universe. You’ll be an infant to me the day you die, whether you lie down now or a millennium from now. If Elan chooses to make something of her time, I’ll not stand in her path.”
“Crazy. You’re both crazy,” Caleb mumbled. “I need to talk with Simone . . .”
“You know the way,” Merlin said dismissively, turning away. “I have things to keep my attention. See yourself out.”
With those words, the entity vanished into the ether, leaving Caleb to stagger his way out of the room. He bumped into two tables and the wall because he was focused on nothing but the thought of Elan facing an entire city of demons.
Simone would know what to do.
He hoped.
Behind him, in the empty library, the now forgotten book glowed briefly before fading back to its normal unobtrusive appearance.
*****
The book was an intelligence of its own renown, though those days were long gone when it had been discovered by those who set it inside the library of Avalon. One of the ancient treasures, items of power left by the one who created the universe and everything within, the book had been at the center of more than one pivotal moment in the history of the world, and now i
t seemed it had found another.
Two people had touched it, two souls capable of standing against the flow of time and not drowning in the force of it all. Only to those who could withstand the current of time would the book impart knowledge. For anyone else, the power it could offer was worthless at best . . . destructive at worst.
The book was awake and reached soft tendrils of awareness out to the world around it. Sleeping no longer, it became aware of the situation with something akin to alarm.
The enemy had not only reached this plane but had all but conquered it.
How had it gotten this bad?
The book could still reach those it had touched, though only the two most recent were still among the living. So it was limited in what it could perceive, particularly as one of the two was currently wandering down a rather drab hallway and was observing nothing of interest.
The other was sitting at the center of a now ancient security network.
The book shifted and vanished from the library entirely.
*****
Elan’s eyes were open, but she was seeing nothing with her conscious mind. She had sunk so deep into her subconscious that she felt the deep-seated vibration of the dreaming just a slight shift in focus away. She rode that feeling, right on the edge of sinking into the dreaming fully or being ejected violently back into the real world, but managed to keep her balance.
She could see the room around her. Somehow even the images projecting behind her were visible, and her hearing could pick out what sound was being reported on the image she chose to focus on. Time was moving in a sluggish flow as she shifted focus smoothly from one to another, looking for something . . . something she didn’t really know but hoped she would recognize when she saw it.
Despite her enhanced perception, a light glimmered into existence behind her without her taking any notice of it. It hung there for a moment before descending slowly and fading away just as it contacted the back of her head.
Elan didn’t notice the moment at all. She remained intent on what she was doing as she tried to follow the directions she’d found in the book and Kaern had imparted to her before . . . well, before they had been parted. The dreaming was a powerful ocean she was trying to tame, a task as impossible as it might be in the real world. Most of the time she just tried to ride the surging tidal force, hoping not to be thrown clear back to the real world before she could finish her task.
