“Here we are,” Kael said, no longer whispering. His eyes locked on the doors, and he looked as if lost in a daydream.
“Are you sure we’ll be welcomed?” Bree asked. It had seemed a silly question to wonder beforehand, but now that she sensed the presence of the lightborn, she feared its anger, feared its very attention.
“I promise you we will,” Kael said as he grabbed the enormous handle with both hands and pulled. “They’re creatures of light and grace. Don’t be afraid.”
Bree breathed in deep and slowly let it out.
“Easier said than done,” she whispered as the door creaked open a sliver.
Kael gestured she enter, and steeling herself for the unknown, Bree took that first step into the lightborn’s chamber.
CHAPTER
7
Kael watched Bree’s enraptured visage and wondered if his face had born a similar look when he first gazed upon L’fae in the deep heart of Weshern. The cavernous room was almost identical, the ceiling dozens of feet above him and curled into a dome. Chains and tubes latched around the vaguely masculine lightborn. He stared at the siblings with his frozen marble face, his emotions radiating curiosity.
“You are not theotechs,” the lightborn spoke into their minds. “Have you come to speak with me, or do you bring news to share?”
His clear words carried a purity to them, and an earnestness that was almost painful to hear.
“Kael?” Bree said. She was hearing the words, too, and for the first time.
“It’s all right,” Kael said. He stood as tall as he could and met the lightborn’s gaze. “We have come to speak with you, for we have questions I believe only you can answer.”
The walls groaned and the chains rattled as the lightborn leaned closer.
“I am A’resh,” the lightborn said. “Who are you two?”
“Kael Skyborn,” he answered. “And this is my sister, Bree.”
The lightborn didn’t smile, but the emotions rolling off him shifted slightly, including an aura of welcoming that relaxed Kael greatly.
“Welcome, Bree and Kael Skyborn,” he said. “Welcome to my home.” Another shift in the aura about the lightborn, this time of worry. “You are injured, Bree.”
Bree pulled her bleeding right arm tighter against her stomach as if embarrassed by the injury.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Indeed, you will,” A’resh said. His hand extended, light wafting off his fingers like mist over a lake. “Be healed, child.”
The misty light swirled as it danced toward Bree. His sister tensed, clearly afraid. The light settled on her body, much of it focusing on her arm. It faded away but for a blazing section across her wound. Kael heard a sound like a soft bell ringing a constant tone, and then the light was gone, as was the cut. Clean skin remained, not even a scar to show the injury had ever existed.
“Thank you,” Bree said, holding the arm before her. Wonder drenched her every word. “I’m … I’m grateful.”
A’resh straightened in his chains, then sagged down, letting them hold his weight. The liquid light pulsing through the tubes momentarily dimmed.
“It has been many years since an injured was brought before me,” said the lightborn. “I do not miss the praise, but I miss the smiles of gratitude.”
A fresh wave of anger mixed with Kael’s relief. How many sick and dying could have been saved on Weshern if the angels’ presence hadn’t been hidden from them? More dead on the Speaker’s hands, if only by inaction.
“A’resh, our questions,” Kael said. “Might we ask them?”
The lightborn nodded.
“Speak them, child,” he said. “And I will answer as best I can.”
Kael took in a deep breath. Where to even begin? He wasn’t certain of A’resh’s relationship with the theotechs. Did he view them as helpers and servants, or prison keepers? Still, there was one name Kael knew would be viewed as enemy no matter what. Perhaps that could ensure he received all the aid the lightborn could offer.
“Your ancient enemy has returned,” Kael said. “The dome has fallen, and L’adim has already attacked our islands with his fireborn.”
A’resh’s aura immediately changed. Kael felt anger and disgust, coupled with an overpowering impulse to drop to his knees in supplication. He glanced at his sister, saw her hands trembling.
“I know of Ch’thon’s death,” A’resh said. “I felt his presence die as if it were my own. The fireborn accosted our protection nightly, and when our dome fell, so too did they fall. But who are you to know of L’adim if you are not a theotech?”
“I spoke with L’fae,” Kael answered. “She showed me the time of Ascension, and the battle waged against L’adim’s forces.”
A’resh’s aura softened slightly. Kael detected a wave of contentedness wafting over him. It was like feeling the sun on his skin after a swim, or smelling the scent of a freshly bloomed flower.
“L’fae was the kindest of us,” A’resh said. “The most hopeful for your race. It would be grand to be in her presence again.” His attention seemed to tighten, returning to the present. “Still, if you have spoken with L’fae, what questions might you have that she did not answer?”
Kael remembered the shock he’d been in, the overwhelming awe of L’fae’s presence. When she’d granted him the experience of the Ascension, it had almost been more than he could handle. Only after having days to ponder, and subsequently being denied entrance by Johan, did he regret not asking many more questions.
“She did not answer because I did not ask them,” Kael said. “Tell me, who is L’adim? What is he? How do we kill him?”
A’resh settled deeper into the chains. His glow cooled, the color remaining the same but the power of it dulling. Kael winced when he heard the ceiling groan under the angel’s weight.
“L’adim is our most brilliant mind and greatest betrayer,” the lightborn said. “But for you to know who L’adim is, you must know who we ourselves are.” A’resh’s hand stretched toward them with a great rattle of metal. He turned it palm upward, fingers spread wide. “Take my hand. I will show you pieces of the past so you might better understand.”
“Is this safe?” Bree whispered beside Kael.
“So long as you trust him,” Kael said. “Do you?”
Bree frowned as she stared up the enormous lightborn.
“They’re suffering for us,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
Together they stepped closer to the lightborn and gently clasped his fingers. Kael expected the same jolting transition as when L’fae showed him the Ascension but instead he felt images building before him. They floated up from the palm of A’resh’s hand, coalescing into colors and shapes so finely detailed it was as if they truly existed, held together in a thin circular frame of shining light. Kael and Bree watched stars dance around a dozen suns, some the color of their own, others deeply red or a chilling blue.
“We do not remember who we were,” A’resh’s voice echoed in their heads. “Nor the worlds we traveled before entering yours. But we feel it, all of us, so strongly in our essence. A million worlds, and they were all merely stepping-stones. Whatever those travels, and for whatever their reason, that age is lost to us. All we remember is this very first moment …”
The scene changed to flowing fields of grass beneath a clear blue sky. Puffy white clouds swirled together, and in their center broke a beam that ripped apart the sky. It was but a flash before it vanished, and there appeared more than fifty lightborn. To see so many standing together nearly took Kael’s breath away. Their figures were similar, bearing slight variations, but somehow Kael immediately recognized both L’fae and A’resh from among their number.
“Why are we here? we wondered,” A’resh continued. “We had no answer. No explanation. But the humans did. They had one clear answer, and they praised us with it without ceasing.”
The clouds shifted, time passing as the image realigned itself. The lightborn we
re still together, but now scores of people surrounded them on all sides. The image swooped closer, turning and shifting to show a dozen sights at once of this frozen moment in time. Sick and injured numbering in the hundreds waited before nine lightborn, eager to receive the misty white light to heal their ills. Another tableau showed men and women with their heads bowed and their arms raised. Kael heard the softest of hymns, as if the combined choir of that legion of people were still singing from that far distant age. Another twist and Kael saw two lightborn speaking with rulers of nations, unwanted gifts of gold and silver strewn about the lightborns’ feet.
“Who were we to deny them?” A’resh asked. “We could not explain where we came from, nor how our mere presence could spare the humans from death. Your people crave presence with divinity. To behold us in our splendor, and call our very existence miraculous, filled their hearts with joy and ours with peace. I still believe they were right. What is an angel to mankind but a being from a time and place far beyond their own?”
The hovering image shifted, seasons changing with a slow and steady march of time. Brick by brick, cathedrals rose from the ground, adorned with the silver and gold the lightborn refused. Existing places of worship tore down their old symbols and replaced them with the wings of the lightborn and their solemn, crystalline faces. More scenes showed the lightborn addressing tens of thousands in the streets of a wondrous city, and another lecturing in the center of an amphitheater that looked greater than all of Lowville.
“We accepted the role given to us and took upon our shoulders the grand task it represented,” A’resh continued. “We did not know our own creator, but our hearts were not filled with hatred, nor prone to temptation of war. The ravages of time meant little to us. Humanity walks a path with their heads down, staring at the few steps ahead of their feet, but we witnessed the great length of the path they walked upon, and we knew the direction they headed. Endless conflict over borders, wealth, place of birth, and color of skin. There would always be the hungry, always the poor. Our lightborn gathered together, and after seven years, we reached our decision.”
A’resh swirled his hand, sending the images scattering out in all directions only for them to suck back into one another, revealing an entirely new image. This time the lightborn addressed the people not as messengers or travelers, but as rulers. Kael saw untold years pass before him, overwhelming in detail, yet a soft voice hummed in the back of his mind, like an echo of a whisper from A’resh, and it guided his thoughts along, giving him understanding. Kael watched the dismantling of armies. The tearing down of the very foundations of societies. And then, at the end, the first drop of blood dripping from a lightborn’s cut finger. Kael watched as it fell to the ground, crystallizing into the elemental light prism he was so familiar with.
“Humans were primitive creatures scrambling in the muck and dirt,” A’resh said. “Yet their hearts were so determined, their will so powerful, they built grand empires despite the death and bloodshed. Or because of the death and bloodshed, my friend L’adim often said. His words should have been warnings to us all, but we did not listen.”
Another shift. Kael gaped in wonder as he watched the light elemental prisms scatter throughout hundreds of nations. From them came the structures, the floating buildings of steel and glass, the heavy platforms carrying travelers heavenward, and the very first suit of Seraphim wings.
“Those first few decades were full of joy and splendor,” A’resh said. His entire presence exuded a feeling of longing and sadness. “We should have known it was only temporary, but we believed the change we desired was coming to pass. The wonder of the light elements, and the imagination it sparked in your greatest thinkers, made us believe the discovery would aid your evolution. And so … we opened the rifts.”
Another change. Kael felt Bree’s hand slip into his, and he shared her fear and awe. The lightborn gathered together in a circle, speaking words that were older than humanity itself, and the air between them ripped open. The rift burned with fire near the outer edges, framing a center of perfect darkness. From that rift marched a legion of fireborn. They cowered before the lightborn, unable to move as holy men in red robes shackled them with chains of iron. A’resh sighed, and despite a clear hesitance, he showed more rifts opening, flooding the world with fireborn.
“We remembered nothing of ourselves prior to setting foot upon your land,” A’resh said, “but we remembered worlds unlike your own, ones with creatures of fire and frost, planets of swirling ash and thunderous storms. Your people still shivered in the cold and starved in the winter months. But with all we’d seen you build with our blood, what might you do with access to fire, or ice, or the ferocity of a storm?”
They need not wonder, for A’resh showed them. Step by step Kael watched the old world begin to match theirs. Machines shifted and whirred, imbued with the power of the stormborn. Kael saw homes of ice in snowy landscapes, the people within warmed by lanterns powered by fire prisms. He saw elemental furnaces melt the earth into unknown metals. Simple platforms used to carry men and women became complicated vessels with enormous wings and domes of protective glass.
And then the images darkened, and A’resh’s frustration and sorrow washed over all.
“As the centuries passed humanity did change, but not in the way we hoped. We became …normal to them. They believed our words were those of God, and surely the wonders and peace we brought to them proved it, but we found the ears of leaders becoming more and more deaf to our wishes. The urgency and fervor with which your people had tried to build our peaceful future gave way to the daily needs to live and thrive. And from that came the wars.”
Kael had seen the destruction of battle before; L’fae had shown him the chaos of the Ascension, the lines of brave men lining up to die. And, after witnessing the fall of Galen and the furious fireborn wantonly burning villages, Kael thought he knew what A’resh would show them next.
It didn’t even come close.
“Dear God,” Bree whispered.
Two armies faced one another, thousands of Seraphim filling the moonlit skies on each side, thousands more soldiers stretching for miles in either direction huddled inside trenches fortified with spikes and wire. Some held bows, others carried long spears and thick shields upon their backs. Machines the likes of which neither Kael nor Bree had ever seen before rolled through the back lines. Some appeared to be cannons, others like metal humans with skin of gold. Great ten-wheeled contraptions powered by the roaring heat of a dozen fire prisms rolled over the ground between the armies, making a mockery of the trenches both sides had dug.
The Seraphim opened fire. The dark night sky turned bright as day. Barrages of fire slammed walls of stone and ice, lightning piercing through it all as if a hundred furious gods were conducting a hurricane. How the Seraphim could track one another or keep in formation was baffling. Perhaps they didn’t. The dead rained from the sky, hundreds at a time. The boulders and ice shattered the bones of soldiers below who were locked in a deadly clash of shields and spears. Cannons punctuated the cacophony, each firing blasts of elements so powerful that a dozen coordinated Seraphim could not match in size or strength. When they struck, little remained of the bodies.
Kael felt tears running from his eyes. The sorrow radiated off A’resh like a cold wind, and he felt powerless to contain his own grief. The image swooped through the battle, miles upon miles, nations against nations in a war scorching green fields and quaint towns to ash and ruin.
“That battle was not the first,” A’resh said as he dashed the images away. “But it was the grandest, known to the world as the Slaughter at Wolf Crossing. When the elements were dry and the blood drained from their soldiers, neither side claimed victory. Neither wanted it. The war ended, but the damage was already done, for L’adim had watched from afar.”
Kael was curious to see this fabled terror, but L’adim appeared before him as any other lightborn, not at all like the crawling shadow L’fae had shown him. Eight other
lightborn stood around him as he lectured atop a hill far from civilization. A’resh did nothing to shield the Skyborns from the aura of rage emanating from L’adim.
“We are not the voices of God,” he shouted to his lightborn followers. “We are not the bringers of peace. We are enablers of suicide. We are the heralds of death. Witness the destruction humanity wreaks upon itself. Our gifts have not brought them up from their pathetic existence. It has only given them grander, wider, and more efficient ways to kill. We have dressed a rabid dog in a suit of gold and expected it to obey.”
“Our very blood heals their wounds,” one argued. L’fae, Kael realized. “Our commands are that they live in love. If we do not speak the words of God, then whatever God exists is undeserving of their faith.”
“You misunderstand me,” L’adim said, turning to her. “I say not that these principles are wrong, or our message was false. I say we are wrong to treat the humans as superior to all else. Why do we assume they are the chosen over all beasts by our God? Why coddle them and protect them yet let the eternal-born bleed daily for their trinkets and weapons? Because they were the first to worship us? What if our arrival had not been to this plane, but to the plane of the fireborn? Would we enslave humanity to further the fireborn’s survival? Would we have them suffer in chains, their flesh cut, their blood drained, only to suffer anew the very next day?”
Kael could feel the frustration and confusion of the silent others.
“All I have are questions,” L’adim said. “Yet you give no answers. Despite our best efforts, we do not have peace. We have warring nations built upon the suffering of thousands of eternal-born. The fireborn are our equal. The iceborn are our equal. They all bear a life far beyond the limits of the humans we have coddled. I say we free the eternal-born so they may return to their own worlds. In their absence we will force humanity to live in peace despite their meager protests. Perhaps, in the decades that follow, they will understand our wisdom is superior to theirs.”
Shadowborn Page 10
