by Matt King
“You’ll follow after me, right?” Bear asked.
Ion’s voice was barely audible through the hum surrounding him. “Prepare yourself.”
The force pressing down on him as Ion began to swing him around nearly snapped him in half. Finally, the world stopped spinning and turned into a streak of light as he went flying toward the Pyrians. He hit the front of the group and barreled through them, coming to a stop with his feet skidding through the surface of the street. He looked up to see a line of writhing Pyrians in his wake. The rest looked at him with unblinking eyes. They were segmented, like Talus’s insect eyes, and they descended on him screaming shrieks of rage.
Bear raised up and slammed his fists into the ground. The street buckled around him, sending up shards of earth that pushed the Pyrians away. He quickly grabbed one of the chunks and used it to swat a nearby soldier into the fire, then slung the eight-foot slab toward the mob, flattening some and scattering the rest.
Ion came screaming out of the sky to land in the middle of a group of Pyrians. The layer of energy around his shell drained from the top of his sphere and gathered along the center, widening until he looked like a miniature version of Saturn. A squad of Pyrians charged. Ion moved through them too fast for Bear to see, darting around like a bullet. When he came to a stop, his energy returned to place, and the group of Pyrians took turns dropping to the city floor, their bodies sliced in two.
Bear looked for Cerenus. He soon found the fight with the mystery champion still raging at the top of the canyon. The man with the mirrored face pummeled Cerenus with fists of fire.
“We’ve got to get up there,” Bear said.
“Stay with the Pyrians,” Ion replied. “I will see to Cerenus.”
He took off without debate, streaking toward the fight. He was halfway there when a creature came roaring from his right, filling the sky. Its wings stretched from one side of the canyon to the other. At the end of its long neck was a diamond-shaped head like a rattler. It opened its mouth and shot out a stream of something like looked like a thick bolt of lightning, sending Ion careening into the distance. Riding on the creature’s back was a thin woman with dark red hair.
Ellia.
Bear barely had time to recognize her before his thoughts went to the rest of the Tria. I have to stay away from Mordric.
He turned to see the Pyrians running away, but they weren’t running from him. Through the fleeing army, a stationary figure appeared. His black robe moved with the wind of the fleeing Pyrians. Mordric stared across the gap from him.
“No,” Bear whispered.
He tried to move, or at least to look away, but Mordric’s eyes held him, burning brighter as they seared into Bear’s mind. The pain was instant.
And then it was gone.
He blinked, trying to make sense of his new surroundings, only to have the confusion wiped away and replaced with a sense of familiarity and calm. This is the room where Meryn and I first slept together. It was Balenor’s world, only not as dreary and rainy as he remembered it. The sky was a serene purplish-red. Doors leading out to the balcony stood open, letting in the cool breeze from the thick grove of trees outside.
For a second, the air around him seemed to shift, like the world became translucent somehow. A spark in his gut told him to run.
No. I belong here. This is where I want to be.
He walked out onto the balcony. The smell of the air made him inhale involuntarily. It was so sweet. Below him was a crescent waterfall. Like Niagara Falls, he remembered. The thought of Earth made him happy. How he missed it.
But this is just as beautiful.
He watched the water cascading over the edge of the cliff. It disappeared into a trench so deep, he couldn’t see the bottom. A fine mist ringed the edges of the chasm.
A voice to his left interrupted his silence. “We were happy here once.”
Bear looked over and saw Meryn standing beside him. Meryn with her striking blue eyes that looked like bottled lightning. Meryn with hair that shimmered with flecks of gold and a voice that pulled him in at the very sound.
How could he have missed her in the room? His thoughts were muddy. Maybe I was asleep before. She must have been with me the whole time.
“We were happy,” he said. “I wish we could stay here forever.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Her voice turned dark. When she looked at him, it was like she was sneering at a rancid piece of meat.
“Meryn, what’s wrong?”
“You and I, John. What we are doing is wrong.”
“No. Please don’t say that.”
“You know it though, do you not? Surely you must have felt it by now.”
He held back the words on the end of his tongue. Yes. Yes, I have.
“I am a god of the Circle. I create life. What do you have to offer me, John Lawson, that I could not create myself, that I do not have millions of versions of already on the worlds that are mine?”
“Nothing.” He couldn’t believe he was saying the word, and yet, did it make it feel less true?
She turned away from him and looked down at the water disappearing into the shadows. The way she stared at it, he could tell she was looking through it to the things that made up the world he could only see on the surface. She lived life on a different plane. Where he saw love, she saw atoms and nerves and the energy that binds them.
“Your people believe life is a circle,” she said. “It is not. It is birth, death, and transformation. A circle returns to the point where it began. Life never does. Life moves forward to its end.”
“What’s at the end?” Bear asked.
“Me.”
Her hand slipped over top of his. His skin warmed at her touch.
“We cannot be together now. You know this, John. But as life moves forward, so, then, could we.”
She glanced again to the waterfall before returning her searing blue eyes to him. She tightened her fingers around his as he shied away to watch the water tumble into darkness. There is a way, he thought. I could have her if…
His eyes followed the spray of water as it disappeared into the shadow.
Not a death. A transformation. She’s reached the end and I…I could meet her there.
The image of the waterfall shifted, momentarily breaking his chain of thoughts.
“You know what you must do to have what you desire,” Meryn said.
He nodded, dreamily, almost as though he couldn’t control his body. His hands gripped the rail. It’s so close. I can see the end.
Then, like a bullet shattering glass, the world exploded from view, shifting from the pristine world of Balenor’s back to the streets of Soraste’s. He looked around for Meryn but saw Ion instead. Beyond him, Mordric took to the air, grimacing as he rose.
“Are you back?” Ion asked.
A bolt of pain ripped through Bear’s head as he gained his bearings. When he looked up, he was only a few feet away from the fire still raging from the explosion. Mordric had nearly walked him to his death. He backed away quickly, suddenly aware of the heat on his skin.
“Are you back?” Ion repeated.
“Yes,” Bear said. “Did Mordric—”
“You should not be near him. Leave Mordric and Tiale to me. Take care of Ellia.”
Bear nodded and quickly looked away from the rising Mordric. Tiale sat on the ground at his side, smiling. Bear stumbled away from both of them, his body gradually healing with each step. Though the pain subsided, it didn’t totally go away. Not every wound Mordric inflicted turned out to be physical.
That wasn’t Meryn, he told himself. She wasn’t the one saying those things.
But he was. Mordric preyed on what was already in someone’s head, which meant that on some level, he was the one who believed Meryn wasn’t truly in love with him.
He pushed it out of his mind as best he could and instead focused on Ellia’s shroud ahead of him on the street. So far, none of her familiars had come out of it.
He stopped when he saw the red of her eyes behind the swirling black haze.
“These people aren’t a part of this,” he said. “You want to fight me, let’s do it where it’s just the two of us.”
“I know you,” she spoke from behind her curtain. Her voice flowed like honey, thick and sweet. “The Lawson man. I know what scares you.”
“Then you know it isn’t you.”
The shroud around her swirled faster, becoming so thick it seemed solid. He lost sight of her eyes. What had Ion said about her? That she was vulnerable if her shroud was broken? He looked around and picked up a shard of the fallen stone wall from one of the buildings. A smoldering fire still burned on its face. The section of wall probably weighed a couple hundred pounds. He gripped it like a knife and tossed it end-over-end at Ellia.
A thick arm shot out of the girl’s cloud to knock the shard away, snapping it into pieces. Little by little, a hulking figure took shape from her black shroud, with eyes that were as red as hers. Bear froze when he saw its face. A nightmare version of Talus emerged from the swirling darkness. His skin didn’t have the gray prism stone covering. Instead his body was pitch black. Thin strands of Ellia’s shroud trailed off the horns of his head like embers escaping a fire.
If Ellia thought a familiar of Talus would scare him, she was dead wrong. Bear charged forward, ready for a fight.
The monster ran to meet him.
Just as they were ready to crash into each other, Cerenus and the other champion flew into their fight like a pair of out-of-control meteors. The mirror-faced warrior slammed into Ellia’s familiar, disintegrating it as he flew tangled with Cerenus in his grip. They rocketed past and hit the side of a building. A green gas erupted from the wall. Seconds later, an explosion engulfed them. Bear turned away from the rush of heat. When he looked back, both men stood encased in glowing shields.
The mirrored champion looked toward Ellia, whose shroud was gone as she tried to recover from the blast. He shouted to her in a language Bear couldn’t recognize. His voice sounded like Ion’s—deep, mechanical, and reverberating.
Ellia stumbled at first, then started to run away from the blaze.
“Catch her before she gets away!” Cerenus yelled.
Bear took off after her. The girl was quick, but his legs were longer, and his strides closed the distance quickly. She looked back over her shoulder just as he was nearly close enough to grab her. With a single chant, a wall of black smoke shot out of the earth between them. He was running too fast to stop. His shoulder crashed into the wall, which felt like solid stone until it split apart into trails of black dust as his momentum carried him through.
Ellia lay before him with her arms propping her up on the ground. A streak of blood leaked out of the side of her mouth.
“Where’s the machine?” Bear asked. He could barely look her in the eye. Red lights pulsed around her irises. They looked like suns.
The witch stayed silent.
He slammed his fist to the ground beside her, hard enough to splinter the stone. “Tell me!”
“We need no machine,” she said. She started to laugh.
Bear backed away slowly as she continued to laugh. He looked around until he saw Tiale sitting by herself in the middle of the street, surrounded by brawling champions. The little girl sat in the middle of it all and never blinked her fiery eyes. She stared at the ground like she watched something beneath it. She reached out her finger, inching it toward the smooth street.
As soon as she touched it, the earth shook beneath Bear’s feet.
He’d never been in an earthquake before. The sensation was like standing on an angry ocean. He fell to his knees on instinct, pressing his limbs to the undulating street in hopes of steadying himself. Ahead of him, Tiale was a blurred vision. He tried crawling toward her only to fall after only a few feet.
And then, as quickly as it began, the earthquake subsided. Tiale’s finger hovered above the ground, shaking as the city still vibrated from the shock. Stones trickled off the sides of the cliffs. Scared voices cascaded from the buildings on both sides. Tiale ignored it all. She continued to stare through the earth to whatever she saw beyond it.
“Finish it!” Mordric cried. He kept his attention on Ion, seemingly struggling to keep Soraste’s champion at bay using a cocoon of light streaming out of his hand.
Overhead, the sky flickered like a TV losing signal. He felt like rubbing the eye coverings of his mask to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
The sky dissolved.
What he’d seen as a storm-ravaged sky fell away, slowly revealing the colossal machine buried in the crust of the planet set against the stars of midnight. He craned his neck to see the top of the machine now that Tiale’s illusion had broken. The yellow lights around its rim were barely visible above the fog of dirt kicked up by its arrival. The machine looked unreal, like a painting. Nothing could be so enormous.
He looked again at Tiale. She hadn’t been causing the quakes at all. She’d only been disguising the real cause.
The ground shook again as the lights on the drill started to cycle around its hull. Bear thought to steel himself against the tremors, but there was no need.
He couldn’t move.
Like he’d been flattened by a truck, Bear slammed to the ground. No matter how hard he tried to struggle, an invisible force held him down. His head turned involuntarily, craning until the cheek of his mask pressed against the street. When he looked across, he saw Ion pinned to the ground beside Mordric and Ellia. The Pyrians running through the city started to fall like stones, but not because they were pinned like Bear. They shook as though they were being ravaged from the inside before falling still, their weapons dropping harmlessly to the ground beside their lifeless bodies.
All of the champions’ eyes were forced toward the center of the street. Toward Tiale. She sat on her haunches, rocking slowly as she stared at the ground.
“Stop this,” Mordric said. His long braid vibrated against the street. “Take us away from here, Tiale, before this machine explodes.”
Tiale continued to stare. A smile cracked her face.
“Foolish girl!” Mordric growled. “I am your father and you will do as I command!”
“You command,” Tiale muttered. Her voice quivered. “Command.”
A flash of white light shot from Mordric’s hand. It slammed against the side of Tiale’s face, momentarily breaking her stare. Her hand drifted to her cheek.
“You will listen.”
Another shot from his hand rocked her head.
“You will obey me, child!”
Tiale looked at her hand as she brought it away from her face a second time. Her eyes slowly turned toward her father.
At once, the force keeping Bear pinned to the street lifted. He jumped to his feet just as Cerenus came rocketing out of the sky. He crashed into Bear, sending them both tumbling backward.
Bear came out of the roll first. He made sure Cerenus was still breathing before facing the Tria again. The mystery champion stood over Tiale, looking between her and the other two with his mirrored mask, then finally to the drill towering overhead. He backed away from her and lifted Mordric and Ellia off the ground. They sped off into the night sky, disappearing through a cloud.
“Do we have a plan?” Bear asked as Cerenus stumbled beside him. Ion floated into the group, now free from Mordric’s clutches.
“I don’t suppose it has an Off switch,” the godclone said.
Ion’s face swirled red. “The machine has no seams. If its hull is penetrated, or if any attempt is made to disrupt the flow of the catalytic agents inside, the bomb will go off immediately. As it is still above ground, only sixty-five percent of life on the planet will die if we were to set it off now.”
“That includes us, doesn’t it?” Cerenus asked.
Ion didn’t answer.
“We came here to save everyone, not just a few,” Bear said.
“There is no other choice,” Ion said. “Cer
enus does not have the necessary power to form a synapse large enough to send it elsewhere. We can still save the remaining population. It will not be a total loss.”
Bear looked around, as if the answer might be sitting on the ground next to him like a hammer he’d forgotten he had. All through the streets, people still ran screaming from the fires that burned in the buildings. There’s got to be some way.
“We must hurry,” Ion said.
The ground shook again as the drill buried deeper in the planet’s crust. The yellow lights raced around its shell.
“I’ll create a synapse to destroy part of it and set it off,” Cerenus said.
Bear held out his hand. “No, wait.” He turned toward Tiale, still sitting on the city street, staring straight ahead. A wave of fear nearly paralyzed him at the thought of confronting her. If he was wrong, everyone would die.
“You want to die sooner?” Cerenus asked, following his eye line. “We don’t have time for this.”
“It’s the only shot we have to stop it,” Bear answered.
He knew he couldn’t fight someone like her, and he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to physically hurt her anyway. She was so young. He had to believe she didn’t realize what she was being made to do.
He stowed his helmet before he approached her. Maybe if she saw he was just a man, she wouldn’t be as likely to fight. He walked gingerly despite the aftershocks from the drill. The girl made no motions as he approached. Her stringy hair, still with bits of moss in it, hung straight over the sides of her face. He dreaded looking into her eyes the most. It was like staring into the eyes of the devil.
He glanced one more time at the drill before he spoke. It looked like it was nearly all the way through the crust.
“I know we’re supposed to be enemies,” he said. “But we can put that aside to save lives. The people on this planet aren’t involved.”
Tiale stayed quiet.
He hurried to make his point before there was no time left to do anything. “I can tell you’re not like the others. You’re not like your sister or Mordric. I saw what he did to you. You know he only wants to hurt people, but I don’t think you do.”
