The Return To Erda Box Set

by Beca Lewis

  Once our feet started moving towards the table and I could see and smell the feast that had been laid before us, I realized how hungry I was. So I led the way almost running the last few steps.

  A metal toadstool was by my side within seconds with extra food, and I was so happy to see it, I patted it on the shoulder, or what passed as a shoulder.

  I knew they were machines, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have feelings and I was sure that this was the one that almost always waited on me. I had named it George, and when I said, “Thank you, George,” I swear it smiled at me. Or at least sent smile vibes.

  I wasn’t the only one that was hungry. No one spoke as we all dived in. When the first round of hunger was satisfied, I asked about the people we had sent back in the Sound Bubble.

  “They are all resting comfortably,” Sarah said. “Amanda asked me to give this to you.”

  Sarah reached into her pocket and pulled out a note, and handed it to me. It was simple, and in a child’s handwriting, but it broke my heart.

  It said, “Thank you for coming for us, Princess Kara Beth. The Mayor said you would. I hope you can save him, too.” It was signed Amanda and she had drawn hearts all over the page.

  I hoped we could save him, too. It was why I was so anxious to go. I knew that we only had a few days at the most to get the thought-worms out of the infected people. But first, we had to stop the infection from spreading. The Ginete and the Whistle Pigs had figured out how to stop the Shrieks and Shatterskin so their plan might work for Deadsweep too.

  The problem was, no matter how good their plan was, we were the ones that had to execute it.

  “And that’s why you need to sleep first,” Sarah said, getting up from the table.

  As I walked back to my room, I missed Beru so much it was painful. She always walked with me and then said goodnight at the door. Zeid wanted to walk with me, but I had shrugged him off.

  It was amazing that he still liked me. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but sometimes the need to do what had to be done was the only thing driving me. Zeid and I would have to wait. I had to trust that he would understand because I wasn’t so sure that I did.

  Deadsweep Forty-Nine

  I was so tired I thought I would fall asleep right away, but instead, in my mind, I ran over and over again what Pita and Teddy had planned for us to do. It seemed simple enough. They had tested it on a small scale so they didn’t see why it wouldn’t work on a large one. But there it was again. It was easy to test something in a relatively closed environment, but what about out in the real world?

  Although I thought I hadn’t slept at all, Pris sitting on my face prying my eyelid open told me that I had. I would have said something harsh to Pris, but that would have made her even more excited about doing it again.

  The only way to get Pris to stop doing something I didn’t like was to pretend that I did. As hard as that was, it was easier than getting Pris to do something I wanted her to do. No amount of begging or asking or demanding would ever get Pris to do something unless she chose it herself.

  There were times I thought she wasn’t really like that. Instead, she was showing me what stubborn looked like. Other times, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Pris was the poster child for the phrase, “don’t tell me what to do.” Anyway, this time I pretended that I loved her sitting on my face playing with my eye even though my first response was to shove her off with one hand and strangle her with the other.

  At least I had her confused, because when I smiled at her and said “good morning,” she looked at me, trying to figure out if I was playing her. I kept my mind closed so she wouldn’t hear me thinking, “Gotcha!”

  I had showered the night before, and clean clothes were waiting on my bed. At least this time I knew I had undressed myself. In the past, I hadn’t been so sure. I still hadn’t gotten to know the person, or people, in the Castle who took care of all these background things for me, like clean clothes and unlimited food. I hoped they would forgive me for not thanking them personally because, for now, all my attention was on Abbadon. Someday it wouldn’t be.

  Teddy had told us that the Priscillas had a solution for cleaning up all the thought-worms, but we had to disable the worms first. That was what we were up to today. We were going to Kinver to find the brothers and Beru and try out the latest gadget from the Ginete and Whistle Pigs scientific team. We had to trust that Aki and Suzanne were handling whatever was going on in Eiddwen.

  However, the fact that they hadn’t called for the Sound Bubble to bring my father back to the Castle was worrisome. But, I couldn’t go there in my thinking at the moment. Maybe bringing him back to the Castle wasn’t needed because there were no thought-worms in Eiddwen. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  Even though the Kingdom was in trouble, I knew that some of the Ginete and Whistle Pigs were in what we called in the Earth Realm, “hog heaven.”

  Never before had they been called upon to invent so many new things, or find answers to what seemed to be unanswerable questions. Abbadon had done them a favor. He had awakened a skill in them that they hadn’t had a chance to use before.

  When this was all over, I wondered what they would do with their awakened curiosity and ability to provide solutions to problems. I knew it couldn’t be stuffed back into the bottle. We would have to find a beneficial reason for them to continue to invent cool tools.

  Their latest invention was designed to disrupt the signals directing the thought-worms. After experimenting with the worms that had not yet entered a host body, they found a way to stop them from moving. That meant they wouldn’t be crawling into anyone’s ears. That was the good news. The bad news is that it didn’t remove the worms from the people’s heads. Once in there, something else was running the worms.

  Once again, we were working with Earl and Ariel. Earl, or Coro as the commander of the storms, didn’t need salt water this time, just walls of water. Because wireless signals don’t pass through water easily, he and Ariel would build a wall of water around the town of Kinver.

  The idea was that Abbadon wouldn’t be able to direct any worms inside the wall of water. We would only have to deal with the programming already running in the thought-worms themselves. Inside the wall of water, we would stop the remaining worms with the devices that Teddy had brought us.

  They were tiny hand-held transmitters designed to disable the signals running the machines inside the worms. I would be ramping up the voltage using my famous, fabulous, ability to produce lightning. I said it that way to myself to give myself courage. If I couldn’t generate enough electrical charge, the transmitters might not be strong enough to disable the signals inside those disgusting worms. So there was no choice but to make it happen.

  Once we stopped the thought-worms, I was supposed to use the power of the bracelet to stun the infected. Then they would be netted and dropped below into the holding rooms prepared for them. It was a repeat operation of what we had done at the schoolhouse, only this time we were ready to deal with the worms themselves.

  It doesn’t sound hard at all, I said to myself. But the fact that I had to generate two sources of energy worried me.

  There would be one more step that the Priscillas had been working on that would get rid of all the stunned thought-worms for good. I had heard rumors that it was much like the insects that ate the melted green blobs that had been the Shrieks. But I had no idea what they were planning to use. I just hoped it didn’t involve me doing any more energy releasing. In spite of assurances from the rest of the team that they would be helping, I was worried out of my mind that I wouldn’t have enough power, energy, magic, or whatever it was to pull off the plan.

  That left Leif and Sarah staying at the Castle working on removing the worms from the infected without killing the host. Niko had confided in me that they were playing with the idea of time, along the same lines as t
he Sound Bubbles and the portals.

  There was nothing I could do to help them. I had to concentrate on what we were going to do. Trying to make it simple for myself, I thought that all we had to do was stop the thought-worms, disable the infected, save the town, and then the Kingdom. Oh, yeah. Easy.

  Deadsweep Fifty

  After Pris pried my eyes open, she told me that everyone was meeting in the atrium for food, and then we were leaving. One thing no one had told me yet was how we were getting to Kinver. I assumed either by Sound Bubble or dragons.

  It was just getting light outside by the time we had eaten. I had to force myself to eat. I knew that without food my energy level would only last so long, magic or no magic. Teddy made sure our transmitters were in order. Link checked my bracelet, which didn’t really need any checking. I think he just wanted to make sure I knew he would be watching over us.

  Once everyone settled in, Link asked, “Are you ready?” I nodded, but I still didn’t hear a Sound Bubble or see any dragons. Finally, I asked, “Okay, I give up, how are we getting there?”

  “Well,” Zeid said, coming up beside me and holding my hand. “Like …”

  That’s all I heard before I felt for a split second that I was coming apart and then put back together again. But not in the atrium. Somewhere else. But I knew where I was. We were on the road that overlooked Kinver.

  “What the ziffer? Zut, and confound it. Couldn’t someone have told me that was going to happen? Phew. What was that?” I said, as I bent over at the waist trying not to faint.

  “Pretty fun, huh?” Zeid said.

  “No. Not so much,” I answered, wishing I could slap the smile off of everyone’s faces. On the other hand, Zeid, Niko, and Ruta looked so pleased with themselves I ended up smiling at them. “Okay, it was a little fun. But how did you do that?”

  Niko answered, “It’s Zeid’s thing. We just went along with it. Since he brought all of us with him this time, we’re going to give him a minute to recharge. But this was the fastest way and the least obvious.”

  All I could think of was how much I wanted to learn how to do that myself. While we waited for Zeid to recover, I looked around thinking about the last time I was on this road. I had just left Eiddwen and was coming to visit the people of Kinver. At that time I would never have guessed that I would return this way, or for this reason.

  After a few minutes, Zeid said, “Okay, I’m ready,” and we started walking towards the town. I thought that it would’ve been better not to be so out in the open, but Link had worried about us walking through the brush in case the thought-worms were waiting there. And traveling the tops of trees wasn’t an option this time. Meadows surrounded Kinver, not trees.

  I knew that Cahir and his wolf pack had run across the country the day before to be here with us, and once again they would watch the perimeter of the village. Their job was to keep all the villagers inside, infected or not infected. Up above us, I could see dragons circling, but without Suzanne, I didn’t know how to talk to them.

  The one problem with our disrupting plan was that we might also disrupt our signals between Link and our team. But it was something we were going to have to put up with. Once we turned off the disruption, we would be connected again.

  As we got closer to town, we could see that something was wrong. But it was not what we expected. Unlike Dalry, which had been completely destroyed, Kinver looked perfectly normal. All the buildings were there, and the gardens well tended. Except there weren’t any people around—not one. The closer we got, the more Kinver looked like a ghost town.

  Our plan had been designed to stop worms, and disable the infected, but what if that wasn’t what was happening here? What were we going to do? Where was Beru? What about John, James, Thomas, and Pete? Or Liza and her mother? Where were the people of Kinver?

  There was nothing. It was even more frightening than what we found in Dalry. At least there we knew what was going on. In Kinver, we were clueless. No worms. No people. Nothing.

  Behind us, Coro and Ariel waited with the walls of water which were useless until we found the worms. What had Abbadon done here? Had Deadsweep already killed everyone? And if so, where were they?

  It was Ruta who saw the problem first. He had been looking towards the forest that circled Kinver, while we were focused on the town.

  “Stop,” he said, and pointed towards the trees in the distance.

  We all turned to look and saw nothing other than trees. But something didn’t seem right.

  “Are those trees moving?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ruta answered. “But those aren’t trees.”

  “Zut!” Niko screamed. I had never heard Niko scream before, but I knew why he had. What looked like trees were moving faster, towards us, closing a circle around us. We were trapped.

  “Can you get us out of here, Zeid?” Niko whispered.

  At the same time, I called out to Link. “Do you see what is happening?”

  There was no answer. Nobody could hear us. Whatever had kept Beru from staying in contact was preventing us from contacting Link.

  “Zeid,” Niko whispered again.

  “I can’t,” Zeid said through clenched teeth. “I have no power at all.”

  I didn’t either. It was as if a switch had turned off everything magical or powerful thing about me. I had nothing.

  We watched helplessly as the moving, twitching things came closer, encircling us. To our horror, what had looked like trees from a distance were writhing worms. What was moving them, I didn’t know. All I could see was the millions of worms heading our way. All for us. It took just one to make us crazy. Maybe these worms would do more than that.

  I had one thought. We had to get help. I peeled the button that Link had given me off my skin, and before anyone could object, I stuck in on Zeid and pushed it. Within a split second, Zeid had disappeared. I hoped it was true that it would take him directly to Link. It was our only chance.

  “Good thinking, Kara Beth,” Niko said. “But you should have gone.”

  I shook my head. If we died that day, Zeid would make an excellent King, and I would have saved at least one person that I loved. That would have to be good enough for me.

  The three of us stood back to back waiting for the worms. I hoped it would be over quickly, but I had a feeling that Abbadon didn’t plan it that way.

  We held hands, and I prayed.

  Deadsweep Fifty-One

  All sorts of thoughts flashed through my head as that wriggling tree of worms came closer. Maybe it was true that before you die, you see your whole life flash before you. Because in those few minutes as I watched those ugly things inch their way towards us, I saw myself as the child called Hannah that I had been back in the Earth Realm.

  I watched myself playing with Ben, my little brother. I saw myself hug my dad as he read to me out on the back deck. My mom was in the kitchen making cookies for us. It was all so normal. No wriggling, smelly, disgusting worms were working their way across our yard to do whatever horrible thing they were going to do to us.

  I forced myself back to the present. Those times were over. It was here and now that I had to deal with. I remembered Aki telling me to keep my eyes open. I didn’t want to. If I lived through this, I knew that picture would forever be burned into my brain. My hatred for a man, if Abbadon could be called a man, was fueling that familiar fire inside of me. I waited for it to surge up through the ground and out through my hands, thinking I could at least blast one tree and we could run past it to safety. But nothing happened.

  “We seem to be in a force field of some kind,” Niko said.

  “Then how come I can smell those things?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  “I think Abbadon is projecting that so that we will feel even more afraid,” Ruta said.

  By th
en the worm trees were less than five feet away. If I would have stretched out my arm, I might have even touched one that was reaching towards us, but I’m not that crazy. I still had hope that Zeid had returned to the Castle and Link would be sending reinforcements. “You better hurry,” I said to Zeid, and then in case he was listening, I added. “Since I haven’t told you this, let me tell you now before it’s too late: I love you.”

  Two things happened. First, a wall of water fell on us. So much water that if I had opened my mouth, I might have drowned. Then as we were sputtering and trying to breathe through water, I felt something grab me by the shoulders and pull me straight up into the air.

  Too frightened to scream, I watched as the wall of water continued to fall over the worm trees. As we moved sideways through the air, dangling from what I could see now were dragon claws, I watched what happened on the ground. The tree of worms stopped moving and then began to fall over until a huge pile of worms lay on the ground. Or at least that was what it looked like because by then we were so high up it was hard to see what was happening.

  As grateful as I was to not be in the middle of those worms, flying through the air in the clutches of dragons was not a picnic either. Their claws were digging into my shoulders, and I started to shake from the cold, and probably the shock of what had almost happened.

  Watching Ruta and Niko fly through the air almost made it worth it though. Ruta had his hands over his eyes. Poor Ruta. On the other hand, Niko was acting like he was a bird. His arms extended, his coat flapping in the breeze, a big smile on his face. Who knew Niko had a secret wish to fly?

  Even though it seemed an eternity, it was probably only a few minutes until the dragons reached the forest. They carefully lowered each of us into a waiting tree which had kindly opened its massive trunk to receive us. Once we were settled, the dragons released us, and the tree closed again. Within minutes I felt warm and comfortable as the tree sent waves of heat to us. I felt as if I could stay there forever. I sent a prayer of thanks to the dragons hoping they could hear me, and leaned into the tree and kissed it. The tree shivered, and I giggled. It was a release of tension and an overflowing sense of gratitude for the community of beings who had protected us.