Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Did you enjoy the story?
About the Author
Acknowledgments
The Stone of Power
Keepers of Earth, book 1
By Kimberly A. Riley
©2016
Elephantine Publishing, LLC.
www.elephantinepublishing.com
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.
Cover Designed by Najla Qamber Designs www.najlaqamberdesigns.com
For my birds, Pipsqueak and Baby, who kept my days interesting by stealing keyboard keys, chewing computer cables, annoying the dog, and being a general nuisance.
Prologue
Over the years, I have had many names, but today I am known to you as Earth.
Living planets, like myself, are scattered throughout the galaxy, each seeking a protected place among the stars. My position near a small, saffron sun affords me various benefits, including the ability to sustain life, but others have challenged me for dominance over the course of our history that stretches back to an age long before humanity.
My first opponent arrived when I had just begun to create life, forcing me to fight. My creations tried to protect me, but they were young and bound to the oceans. In order to preserve myself, I had to sacrifice all but a handful of them. Turning away from the sun, I allowed a thick coat of ice to cover me, killing them. When a being dies by my hand, I can siphon its strength for myself. Eventually, I overcame the other planet and took its power. What remained of the enemy world became what you call the moon.
I began again with those few survivors. Great creatures I made, certain I could mold one of them into a super-being—a guardian. Before I could finish, another threat came for me.
I poisoned the air, once again slaying my creations. As they suffocated, I used their energy to strip the other world of water, destroying it. It orbits the sun to this day, covered in dry, red sand.
Time passed as I perfected and tested my creation. I watched as they evolved, inventing languages and tools. These creatures became known as humans.
For a hundred centuries, they tried to appease me—their failures as great and as numerous as their accomplishments.
Finally, they had matured and met my approval. I handpicked the most talented to protect me, bestowing additional powers upon them to ensure their success, and in exchange, they live their lives to serve and protect me—these are my Keepers.
Chapter One
Jupiter shimmered in the distance, the Great Red Spot raging across the surface like a swirling orange and red iris. From Raptor’s perspective, the planet seemed about the size of a basketball and supplied the brightest source of light in the sky. The sun wavered like a distant candle burning in the deep void of space.
She admired Jupiter for a few moments—its whirling clouds and the faint dots of its moons dancing around it. Her reflection appeared like a ghost in the glass canopy of her plane, showing an eighteen-year-old with fair skin and a slim build. Reaching up, Raptor brushed a wayward strand of auburn hair out of her face.
A sharp pain pulled at her shoulder when she lowered her arm, causing her to wince.
The fight had been an annoying exercise in wasting her time. A seven-ton beast had decided to rough her up as she tried to calibrate a sensor she was leaving behind on an alien planet. The beast got a missile in the side for its efforts. Raptor felt bad about having killed it, but gentler methods would have taken up valuable time.
She grumbled to herself as she rolled her shoulder. It had been a few hours since the injury, and it already felt better. It would finish healing soon enough.
The sensor she had placed was one of several about twenty light-years from Earth. The sensors normally measured the solar system as being in the same position, but this time, they all had come back with different results. This was impossible, unless the space around the sun had stretched, making the solar system appear in different places at the same time.
It could only mean one thing: the universe was trying to rip Earth apart in an event called a shift. As a Keeper, it was her duty to stop it.
Other universes, known as dimensions, existed simultaneously with Earth’s universe. These dimensions appeared as long strings. Thousands of them, possibly hundreds of thousands, stretched across the universe. The Keepers had confirmed about a hundred dimensions in their local region of space alone.
Jumping to a dimension led into a completely new universe. Most were tiny, but a few supported their own worlds, aliens, and often a new set of rules to go with it. Changes could be subtle—the speed of light was a little faster or gravity had a weaker attraction. These differences added up and produced new worlds with properties that could not exist on Earth.
The dimensional strings were not static in the universe. They fluctuated, changing positions, fighting with each other, and consuming sources of concentrated energy. The Keepers did not know where this energy came from, but they hypothesized the dimensions absorbed it from the greater universe.
A shift happened when the dimensions moved, for any reason. Most of the time they were harmless, but a few weeks ago, one shift started to snowball out of control.
At least two volatile dimensions warred with each other over a source of energy. In their attempts to claim it, they had tangled up Earth and a few other key dimensions in their conflict. The Keepers could not tell which dimensions fought and which ones were bystanders.
If the Keepers did not fix the shift, and soon, the warring dimensions would stretch the solar system into thin strands. Then it would pull the strands apart, like they were spaghetti noodles. Once they were finished destroying the world, they would continue with their war, wreaking havoc across all dimensions.
“You’re back!” Mouse chirped over the intercom. “You gotta come see this!” The transmission ended with an electronic beep.
Raptor pressed her thumb to the intercom button. “Anyone else back yet?” She let go of the button.
“Almost everyone, but you really gotta take a look at this.”
“Describe it.”
“It’s a letter detailing the plans to detonate a bomb on Earth, unless we can disarm it by midnight,” Mouse said, his voice rising in pitch as he ran out of breath. “Just come quickly, okay?”
“On my way.”
Mouse made it sound like the attack was personal. The question was, who threatened Earth and how did they manage to send a letter to the Keepers to do it?
Raptor sighed to herself, not wanting to speculate further about it.
Pushing on the control stick, she nosed the plane toward the icy surface of Europa—one of Jupiter’s moons. Directly below her was Cilix, a crater on the moon’s surface. It reminded her of a pebble dropped into a pool of water and frozen in time. As she descended into the crater, the Keepers’ base became visible, buried under the ice. The base was arranged like an equilateral triangle, with three different facilities connected together by long tubes.
The plane jolted, like a car hitting a speed bump. All sensations of being in freefall vanished as an Earth-like gravity pulled on her body. She had entered the gravity well for the base.
She maneuvered the craft toward a platform marked by a red octagon. The plane landed, and she started shutting it down by flipping switches on the control panel.
Raptor closed her eyes and waited as an automatic system lowered her plane into the Keeper base through a long tunnel. She felt a heavy vibration around her as the doors clanged shut above her. A clunk followed underneath her as a clamp locked onto the belly of the plane.
Several minutes passed before Raptor could climb out of the cockpit and make her way out of the hangar. She headed down a long hallway toward one of the other buildings, her mind mulling over what she had to do next.
The Keepers had dealt with dimensional shifts like this on a smaller scale. This one was building up to something a lot worse. Nine major dimensions had diverted from their normal positions. The best way to untangle the mess was to collect a powerful artifact from each dimension called a Quester Stone.
The Stones controlled their dimensions and the energy inside of them. The Keepers could draw the extra energy out of the dimension using a tenth Stone called the Stone of Power. This would break the stalemate and everything would spring back to normal—in theory anyway.
Over the years, the Keepers had managed to find nearly all of the Stones for the major dimensions, but they had not started to collect them yet. Some of the Stones were already in the Keepers’ possession. Others were too dangerous to keep and were hidden in remote locations. Guardians, known as Questers, protected the rest and few would allow the Keepers to take their Stones. Unaffected by the events taking place, they had no reason to cooperate. The Keepers would take them by force if need be, but the longer they held the Stones, the more likely it was their Questers would come for them. The Keepers had to grab the Stones in quick succession, use them, and return them before their Questers retaliated.
Raptor touched a button on the side of a large, circular door. The door split down the middle and slid open. Once she stepped through, she pushed another button on the other side, closing the door. She made her way to the computer room where she knew Mouse waited.
Inside the room stood a massive triangular computer, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Two sides had monitors and other standard computer hardware. The third side had wires and cables plugged into it everywhere.
A slight boy, about fifteen years old, sat in a swivel chair at the left station of the computer. He had amber colored skin and kept his black hair pressed along the top of his head in a faux-hawk.
Mouse spun around to face Raptor as he rubbed his palms together. He then pointed to a message on the screen:
Your challenge: On November 1, at midnight, I will detonate a specialized weapon I have created, unless you can stop it. Attached are the coordinates of the weapon’s location.
You will need something far more powerful than yourselves to defeat my weapon. Perhaps the most powerful of all objects will be enough to stop it. Fail to solve my challenge, and I will annihilate the world. It will be entertaining for at least one of us, I promise.
She scowled, anger tightening her stomach. Halloween had already come and gone for much of the world, and it was currently nighttime over the Americas. “We’re not going to stop it.”
“What? Why? But all those people …”
“That thing’s a trap, and I’m not letting—” A searing white light filled Raptor’s vision. It burned like staring into the sun for too long. She grabbed onto the desk’s edge and waited for it to pass.
Earth wanted to communicate with her.
A feeling of great need passed over her, like being hungry or thirsty, but without the discomfort associated with either.
“Rap!” Mouse stood halfway out of his chair, a frown contorting his lips. He reached over and touched her on the arm.
Raptor shook her head as her vision cleared, though her heart raced and her stomach quivered. It had been a long time since she had felt that particular sensation as intensely as she had now—not since Earth had instructed her to seek out new Keepers about five years ago.
“I’m okay,” Raptor said. “It was Earth.” She hated when the planet entwined its emotions with her own.
“What does it want?” Mouse asked.
“I think there’s a Keeper down there.” As the words left her lips, another lighter sensation of ease and confidence entered her mind. She knew she had heard Earth correctly.
Mouse’s mouth hung open. “Now? After all this time? Keeper of what?”
Raptor shot him a glare.
“Right, sorry, doesn’t work like that.”
Earth used emotions to speak, and it had taken Raptor years to learn how to interpret what the foreign feelings meant. It sometimes communicated through dreams, but those were infrequent. In addition, Earth’s emotional range was limited. Anger, fear, need, and confidence seemed to be its scope of understanding. It could vary the intensity of the emotions or direct them at objects or people, but nothing else.
Mouse asked, “Okay, but seriously, why now? It’s because of the shifts, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Raptor rubbed her forehead. A new Keeper? About two hundred years ago, there were four Keepers: Bringer, the Keeper of fire; Godlin, the Keeper of earth; Aerion, the Keeper of air; and Venom, the Keeper of plants.
Venom was Earth’s first Keeper, and he had led the group until Raptor joined with the other new Keepers. Earth had chosen her as its new leader and herald. Whenever it needed the Keepers to do something, it sent its instructions to her, which she then relayed to the others.
Raptor knew she was missing something. The feeling of need had not lifted from her completely. She glanced up at the letter, and the sensation lightened considerably. The bomb. She wondered if she was supposed to go after it as well.
The sensation of confidence passed over her again.
“Well, that just figures.” Raptor threw her hand at the monitor. “Not only does Earth want us find the new Keeper, but we have to disarm the bomb too.”
The intense emotions lifted as Earth departed from her mind.
“Raptor, what does this part mean: ‘more powerful than yourselves’?” Mouse asked, his finger hovering under the line on his screen.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, “There’s plenty out there more powerful than us.”
“Such as Quester Stones?” Mouse offered as he swiveled around in his chair to face her. “And we have to get the Stones anyways cause of the shift.”
“And the most powerful of those is the Stone of Power.” Raptor narrowed her eyes, staring at the letter.
“It could stop a bomb, couldn’t it?” Mouse’s eyes widened, his eyebrows shooting up toward his hairline.
“Depends on what’s powering it. It’s only interested in explosive material when it’s in the act of exploding, otherwise there’s no energy for it to absorb. Of course, we need that Stone for the shift
s and only a non-Keeper can retrieve it.” The Stone of Power hated the Keepers. It would kill them, if it was given the opportunity. However, it would leave a normal human alone.
“Uh, didn’t you shove the thing into Tenebris?” Mouse shuddered. Raptor knew he had good reason to be frightened. The laws of physics differed there enough to render things like guns useless—an unfortunate consequence, considering the dimension teemed with monsters, giant, terrifying monsters with faces made of teeth.
“And now we have to go get it. I feel sorry for whoever gets picked.” She grinned a bit.
Mouse frowned at her, his eyes narrowing. “That’s mean.”
“I’ll protect them, I promise.” She placed her hand over her heart, as in a pledge, reassuring Mouse.
A young woman with a round face and light brown skin walked in. “Raptor, Mouse,” she said in a soft voice, addressing both of them. Eighteen-year-old Walker had jet-black hair cut in a bob. Her long bangs often hung down over her face, covering her eyes.
“Tell me you’ve got good news,” Raptor said.
“It’s bad. I’m trying to untangle the dimensions. I have bought us some time, but I can’t keep this up forever.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Raptor said. As the Keeper of dimensions, Walker could see the invisible threads of the different dimensions, manipulate them, and even use them to travel between the dimensions, but she was not strong enough to prevent the shift.
“We’ll need as many of the Stones as we can collect.”
Raptor motioned to the monitor. “Come read this.”
Walker stepped closer, reading the screen.
Mouse gazed down at his hands, counting on his fingers. As the Keeper of computers, he excelled in areas of math and code. Counting to himself calmed him when he felt nervous, and Raptor knew he only used his fingers when he got into numbers past a million. It was some crazy system he used involving the positions of his hands in relationship to the desk to help him keep his place.
“Dear me,” Walker said when she finished reading.
“Earth is ordering us to take care of the bomb, and I think we may need the Stone of Power to stop it. It also told me there’s a new Keeper down there.”
Stone of Power (Keepers of Earth Book 1) Page 1
