by S M Briscoe
Coming around a bend in the current tunnel he was in, he heard a faint noise. A gentle, constant rustling in the distance. Freezing in place, he listened. It took a moment for the noise to finally register. Water. It was running water. Moving quickly down the passageway, he could begin to see an opening. Light from outside the tunnel danced across the walls of the opening, being reflected through a partial curtain of falling water. Reaching the tunnel’s end, he stepped up to its sheer drop edge and peered through the thin streams of falling water, some splashing over his head and face, down into what was another large open cavern, similar to, but a fraction the size of the one he had first entered with the Toguai. A centralized pool of water took up most of the chamber, kept full by the constant flow of water that leaked through the cave ceiling in several spots, also resulting in more of the elaborate rock formations he had seen earlier.
Jarred’s eyes were finally drawn to the chamber’s far end where he was astonished to find what looked like a monument or temple of some kind, appearing to have been constructed from the stone cavern itself. A wide set of steps led from the edge of the pool up to a large flattened surface upon which rows of elaborately designed stone pillars stood, rising from the smoothed floor to high ceiling. Centered between the lines of tall pillars, a massive, rounded protrusion, metallic in appearance, sat nestled in the rock wall, almost as though it was on display. The focal point of all of the surrounding architecture. That was it, whatever it in fact was. It was what had been calling to him. It shone in his perception now like a bright beacon, beckoning him towards it.
He looked around for a way down from the tunnel opening, which hung a good twenty meters up from the large pool of water below. He wasn’t so concerned with the drop, as the water looked deep enough. The trouble was, once he got down there, he wasn’t quite sure how he would make it back up. In the end, it didn’t really matter. He was going down there regardless, and would just have to find a way out when he came to that point.
Stepping off the ledge, Jarred dropped down into the pool, plunging deep into the freezing cold water. He resurfaced, the breath catching in his chest from the shock of the frigid water, and immediately swam the distance to where the ground level rose and he could stand and walk up the monument steps. Ascending the short stairway, he made his way through the rows of stone pillars that led him towards the far wall of the chamber, and the large circular object protruding from it, though as he grew nearer his focus was drawn away from the object itself to the ground before it. Unintentionally, his hand drifted up to touch the spot on the back of his neck, which bore the marking; The Mark of the Hybrid, as Orna had called it; that was as much a mystery to him as was his past. Though many times the size, it was unmistakably the same symbol he saw etched into the stone floor at his feet.
It could not be a simple coincidence. He hand never seen the symbol replicated in any fashion anywhere in the system. Finding it here was a confirmation of so much of what Orna had told him. That he was meant to come here. That it held answers to who he was. He could hardly deny it now, though the skeptic in him still wanted to find another explanation. He couldn’t think of one though. He couldn’t think of much at all, his mind unable to focus on anything but moving forward. The marking on the floor, his marking, was as good as an invitation. One that was for him and him alone.
Jarred stepped forward to stand before the orb-like object in the wall, finally returning his attention to it. It was twice his own height with an equal width, and seemed to be embedded in the cave wall, as opposed to being built or mounted over it. Its surface appeared smooth and untarnished, which was remarkable, considering how long it may have been here. He couldn’t be sure, but he felt, intuitively somehow, that it was an ancient thing. An artifact from a time long past. Reaching out a hand, he placed it on the object and immediately felt a jolt. Stepping back, he pulled his hand away to examine it, but almost immediately realized that he hadn’t actually felt the physical jolt himself. The strange feeling had come from the object itself. He had felt it, much like he had felt the summoning presence before. It had reacted to him.
Jarred took another step back as the object seemed to come to life before his eyes. A set of wide set eyes appeared to open from nowhere in the metallic surface, glowing red orbs, which he instinctively knew were weapons of some kind. He kept himself perfectly still as they seemed to watch him for a long moment and he wondered if the object was preparing to attack. When none came immediately, he allowed himself to breath again. Between the two red eyes the object began to move as if it were liquid, a shape extending outward like an arm, reaching towards him. He moved to take another step back, but thought better of it, glancing at the set of watchful orbs. The thick, metallic arm came to a stop in front of him at waist height. The head of the object continued to morph, a shape taking form on its surface. Jarred watched in amazement as the outline of a human hand materialized before his eyes.
The object was then still.
Sensing what it wanted him to do, Jarred took a step forward, hesitating a moment before placing his hand into the imprint at the end of the extended arm. When nothing immediately happened, he glanced up at the set of glowing eyes, not sure if he should be expecting some sort of reaction from them. His attention was quickly drawn back to the arm of the object as it began to quickly morph again, forming a seal around his hand, trapping him. Startled, he attempted to pull himself free, without success, his eyes darting again to the watchful orbs that he was certain were preparing to blast him with some kind of vaporizing ray.
The blast never came. He was not vaporized. And after a moment, his hand was released, the arm being drawn back into the central mass of the object, its eyes also closing and vanishing into the metallic surface as if they had never been there.
The object was still again.
The seconds seemed to pass like hours and Jarred began to wonder if the object’s strange interaction with him had been the extent of the display. He realized that it had not been as its metallic surface began to stir again, giving off the appearance of a murky liquid. Surprisingly, the bizarre alloy, if that’s what it was, began to part, a circular portal forming in its central mass and growing until it had pulled back beyond the cave wall surrounding it. Inside was another chamber.
Cautiously, Jarred stepped through the half meter thick portal and gazed across the expanse of the room. The entire chamber seemed to be made of the same alloy as the morphing object that had allowed him entry. Obviously, it had only been a visible portion of the much larger object he was now standing in. The chamber was spherical in shape, its inner surface area a cloudy black, as opposed to the outer metallic composition, which seemed to move and sway gently, almost making it seem like it was a living breathing thing. Even the floor, which was smooth with strange symbols engraved into it, swayed and flowed as the rest of the sphere did. It was a bit disorienting as it seemed as if the ground was in constant motion. He could see no lighting fixtures of any kind, nor the same glowing algae that lit much of these mountain caverns, but the murky waves that flowed across the chamber’s surface seemed to radiate its own, creating a gentle whirlwind of dancing bands of shadow and light.
A sort of flattened pyramid, the only real structure in the chamber, was situated in the center of the room, each of its sides lined with a stairway which climbed to an elevated altar of sorts. Jarred moved towards the structure and ascended the nearest of the stairways, making his way up to the altar where his eyes grew wide with recognition. Embedded in the altar, the hilt of a sword he had seen many times, stood erected like an antennae, pointed up towards the rounded ceiling, a small amount of the blade partially visible above where it sank into the murky, flowing surface of the altar. He had held this weapon in his hands, carried into an unknown waiting darkness, more times than he could remember. The dream he had always had and could not escape.
This was the sword. He felt suddenly compelled to reach out for the hilt, and immediately realized that it had not been this
place that had been summoning him, but the sword itself. It was the presence that had drawn him here. The chamber itself seemed to tremble with excitement, the waves of its murky surface whirling more intensely and brightly. Jarred reached for the hilt and grasped it, feeling an immediate charge of energy. The chamber around him become so bright he was forced to close his eyes to shield them from the harshness of it. The radiance penetrated and engulfed him. It felt as if he was being swept up into the flow of the now rapid waves of energy and he suddenly had no sense of his bearings. He could no longer tell if he was standing or floating, upright or upside down. He wasn’t even sure if he was still in the chamber. He glimpsed images that he could not fully comprehend, they flashed across his vision in such rapid succession. The sensations were overwhelming and more than his body or mind could handle.
And then the noise stopped. Everything stopped.
Jarred opened his eyes and found himself no longer within the confines of the strange chamber, but in the dark void of space. The universe loomed before him, far smaller than he knew it to be. It was a young universe. He watched as galaxies and solar systems were formed, star by star, expanding rapidly into the black emptiness. In his mind, he understood that he was not physically there. These images were being shown to him.
His attention was drawn to a star with worlds surrounding it. Lush worlds that would be full of life. An ominous shadow fell over the planets and then the sun they circled. A wave of energy lashed out from a source he could not see and the worlds were destroyed, blown apart by the devastating blast. The sun was not spared from its world’s fate and as the energy wave engulfed it, the glowing star became suddenly pale and small, exploding in an horrific super nova before caving back in on itself and vanishing from existence. More stars and worlds followed, all obliterated in the wake of the massacre. The war. This was what he was being shown. A war that ravaged entire galaxies before Jarred’s own sun had even come into existence. The carnage continued until Jarred felt he could no longer bare to be shown any more and then it finally ebbed. What was left of the universe became quiet and still. The war was ended.
No. Not ended. Peace was not found. Something had halted the destruction, for Jarred could feel that the force behind it wanted to continue. A sliver of light appeared out of the devastated ruins of so many obliterated worlds and quickly drew closer. As it neared, he immediately recognized it as being the same spherical object, or one similar, to that which he was currently in. It was a vessel. Something about it, or aboard it, had hindered the devastating rampage, and now it fled. It was to be hidden from the destroyers. Locked away for all time, so that life could return to the universe.
It found a virgining system, with a world that would one day support life. It was there that the sphere stayed hidden for millennia, the Guardians who had fled with it, ensuring that the secrets within remained hidden.
But those who once wielded the power would never stop searching for it. Foreseeing that the hiding place of the sphere may one day be discovered, and knowing they themselves would not always remain to defend it, they spread its contents across the worlds that circled the young system’s star and infused a part of themselves into the lush world, who’s beings would require the strength it gave them when the time came that evil returned to claim what it had lost.
Jarred’s eyes shot open as if he had been awakened from a startling dream and he found himself back in the hidden chamber, standing with his hand still firmly grasping the hilt of the familiar sword from his dreams. He felt both mentally and physically exhausted, his mouth and throat dry, every muscle in his body aching. He tasted salt on his lips and realized that he was drenched in sweat. How long had he been standing there? The strange episode had seemed to last only a few minutes, but he felt wiped out, as if hours had passed. Releasing the death grip he had on the sword hilt, he flexed his stiffened hand and fingers. He felt the sword call out to him again, but ignored the compulsion for the time being. He needed to rest and try to get his head around what he had just experienced.
Had it been a waking dream of some kind or a shock induced delusion? Or had it been a true vision of the distant past somehow passed on to him through his contact with the sword? If it was true, what did it all mean? That was the bigger question. What ancient secrets did this vessel hold? More importantly, what did it have to do with him? The vision had suggested that the Guardians, the beings that had supposedly brought the vessel here, had left a part of themselves behind to strengthen any future inhabitants of the world. He didn’t like to admit it, but it sounded a lot like the bogus myths about his own kind that he had always balked at. Half human, half God. It was an absurd story and a ridiculous explanation for what was most likely an evolutionary mutation of some kind. Of course, if he was so certain of that, why was he trying so hard to convince himself?
This all seemed too big for him and he was too tired to think about it anymore. At least for now. He would have time to sort it all out later, once he had made it out of here and back to the surface . . . with the sword. Jarred stood and turned to look at the weapon that was driven into the altar. He could feel it calling to him. It wanted to be released from its prison. No, not a prison. It was something else. This place . . . this vessel. It was also . . . a vault. And now it had been opened. The sword longed to be released. For him to release it. And though he could not explain why, he felt the overwhelming need to do so. He wanted to remove it from its berth. He needed to.
Stepping forward, Jarred reached out to grasp the hilt of the weapon again, this time not being thrown into some shock induced vision state or jolted by a wave of blazing white energy. Instead, he felt tendrils, of what seemed like a kind of static electricity, that danced between the weapon and himself, not painful or awkward, but warm and . . . strangely comforting. It felt . . . right. He pulled up on the sword, and without the resistance he expected, it began to slide free from the altar. There was no visible seam in the altar for the blade to have been slid down into it and as the sword rose, it made it appear as if he was withdrawing the weapon from a liquid and not a solid block. When he had pulled the sword’s full length free from the altar, it showed no visible sign it had ever housed the weapon at all, appearing to have sealed itself closed behind the exiting blade.
Jarred looked away from the altar to the sword he now held out before himself and all of his questions faded to the back of his consciousness. He was suddenly filled with a sense of relief, as though a weight he had not known was their had been lifted free of him. It felt as if he had not been able to breath before and was drawing unrestricted air for the first time. He felt free. Or perhaps it did. Though he had seen and held the weapon so lucidly in his dreams, gazing upon it now, he knew that they had failed to convey its true majestic presence. The double edged blade was sleek and elegant, and though it did not appear to give off light, as the surface of the sphere did, it seemed to have a glowing radiance of its own. A spirit that shone so brightly, Jarred could feel its warmth penetrating him.
So completely absorbed with the sword, it took Jarred a moment to register the dimming light in the sphere. Glancing around, he realized that the flowing waves that had danced across its surface had now ceased, leaving the chamber strangely still, the once murky bands of swirling color solidified into a cold and lifeless grey. A sudden chill ran down Jarred’s spine and he felt the powerful urge to leave. An urge that wasn’t entirely coming from himself. He looked back to the sword, curiously, the compulsion growing stronger. Not wasting the time to speculate on the origin or purpose of the warning, he began to slowly back down the altar stairway.
He hadn’t made it more than a few steps when he began to feel a slight vibration in the darkening floor. By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairway, it had increased to a steady rumble. Luminous fissures began to appear in the now near black surface of the sphere, expanding quickly, like fracturing glass, into what resembled a series of glowing white webs. The sphere continued to shake violently, the glowing f
racture lines flickering erratically, and Jarred set off at a run across the chamber, heading for the still open portal that led to the outer cavern.
Leaping through the opening, he had to immediately dive out of the way of a falling slab of rock that came crashing down next to him. The entire cavern was rocking from the turbulence caused by the unstable vessel. However it had come to be a part of this mountain, its strange, new activity was clearly upsetting the entire rock chamber. Cracks were forming across the wall face in which the sphere was embedded, chunks and entire sheets of rock falling away, exposing more and more of the vessel.
Jarred continued to back away, watching as the fissures in the rock wall climbed to the cave ceiling, dislodging more falling boulders and rock slabs. The cave floor was becoming more unstable, beginning to break up in places and as he passed by them, he could see that the large support pillars were struggling to remain intact under the pressure of the near seismic activity. Cracks began to form up their lengths, one breaking off from the crumbling ceiling. It stood for a moment on its own, but slowly began to lean, eventually falling into the pillar next to it, causing a change reaction of collapses.
Caught in the middle of the falling towers of rock, Jarred leapt away from the crashing debris, rolling to his feet between two piles of rubble, only to find himself in the path of another falling pillar. With no time to react or dive away, and though it was a useless defensive gesture, he instinctively threw his arm out to shield himself from the massive structure falling towards him as he fell back between the piles of rubble. Assuming he was a split second from being crushed, he was surprised to feel his arm pass through the falling pillar. As he hit the ground, he saw half of the stone tower, the portion that should have crushed him, fall at a slight angle over top of him, hitting the two piles of rubble before rolling away to rest on the ground a meter from his position. The other half of the pillar laid just below his feet, an impossible clean cut edge along its surface where it had been severed . . . by his arm?
