The Egg (Return of the Ancients Book 4)

by Carmen Caine

  I noticed Rafael and Jareth were doing the same.

  “What is it?” I nervously asked them after a while.

  We’d left Samantha’s place behind us and stood in the middle of a black grove of trees. The surrounding shadows seemed different now, more oppressive. Almost evil.

  “Maybe we should go—” I began uneasily.

  But before I could even finish, the ground beneath us caved in and we sank to our knees in foul-smelling mud. The stench made me gag. Something unholy slithered around my ankles and I screeched.

  “What is it?” I gasped in rising hysteria, flailing in the dark, stinking water.

  When I didn’t get an answer, I really got scared.

  “Rafael! Jareth!” I screamed at the top of my voice.

  I sloshed forward in a panic. I couldn’t find my footing in the muck and slipped, getting a mouthful of dark liquid. It tasted worse than it smelled, and I struggled to my feet, coughing and gagging.

  Suddenly, Rafael loomed in front of me, reaching down to grab my forearm and bodily lift me out of the swamp and out onto a dry patch of land.

  “I didn’t think of this!” I half-sobbed, holding onto his strong arms.

  “Hush,” Jareth said, unexpectedly appearing at our sides. “They’re coming after us.”

  “They?” I shrieked.

  It was dark, but there was enough light from the cords running in the conduit that I could see the scowl illuminated on his face. He pointed to the large dark shadow of what looked like a willow tree hanging over the black swamp water. It was barely visible in the dim light. The long branches were swaying gently as if in the wind, but then one of the branches dropped into the swamp and swam towards us.

  As it got closer, I could see it was a sickly pale serpent with gray scales and red eyes that glowed in the dark.

  I was far too rattled to even begin trying to direct my thoughts in any useful way that might have stopped it.

  “Let’s run!” I yelled.

  “This way,” Rafael urged.

  His fingers clamped over my wrist and he pulled me towards the light cords, away from the swamp.

  The serpents followed. More and more dropped from the tree, slithering through the swamp water to crawl out after us. Our feet made squelching sounds as we ran, the serpents at our heels. Hissing and jumping at us, they were driving us away from the infested marsh and back towards the conduit.

  It was terrifying.

  Finally, we reached the conduit, and the snakes suddenly disappeared.

  We stood there, looking at each other in confusion.

  “Let’s go,” I said in a hoarse voice. “They might come back.”

  Jareth nodded and we took a step, but then Rafael dropped to one knee by the light cords and lightly skimmed his elegant fingers over them as if he were playing an instrument.

  The muscles in his jaw flexed.

  “What is it?” I asked hesitantly.

  I wanted to leave the place. The serpents might choose any moment to return, and I didn’t want to be there if they did. But as Rafael’s face turned into sharp lines and hard angles of worry, I found my concern over the serpents supplanted with a growing feeling of apprehension.

  “What is it?” I repeated more urgently this time. “Is it bad? It kinda … looks bad.”

  He was outright scowling. It made me realize that I’d never really seen him scowl before.

  Finally, he murmured as if thinking aloud, “The light … it’s corrupted. It carries darkness with it.”

  I shivered. I didn’t know what it meant, but it certainly didn’t sound good.

  Jareth looked alarmed.

  I was about ready to get all upset again, but then I felt myself frown in confusion. I mean, how could the light be pure when it was being manipulated by a dark, oily lizard in order to control a human or Fae a dimension away?

  “Isn’t that to be expected?” I asked.

  But Rafael wasn’t really paying attention to either of us. He’d separated a strand of light from the others to peer at it closely.

  Both Jareth and I moved to squint over his shoulder.

  The cord looked like a bright white glow stick filled with light. And the longer I stared at it, the more I could see something dark running through the heart of it. It was black and moved like hordes of tiny evil ants.

  “Its core is rotten,” Rafael whispered. “The light itself is ancient, pure … but it’s rotting.”

  Jareth’s face hardened with concern. But he wasn’t staring at the light. He was moving swiftly to the dark trees clustered nearby.

  “Hey, watch out, Jareth!” I hissed in warning, afraid the serpents would return.

  But he wasn’t listening to me.

  He reached out to touch one of the trees, but the moment he did, it melted away.

  I blinked in surprise, realizing that they weren’t really trees at all. They were twisted shadows, dark shadows so dense they appeared solid.

  “What is it?” I gasped.

  But Jareth didn’t reply. Words seemed to have left him. He just stood there, very still.

  I whirled back to Rafael who was still inspecting the light cord, perplexed. Choking, he stood up in horror, his face turning white in an instant.

  “Back!” he commanded us in a gasp. “Run from this place! At once! And don’t look back!”

  I turned on my heel, poised to run.

  But then Jareth’s dismayed whisper announced, “It’s too late, Rafael.”

  I know Rafael told me not to look back, but I did. I mean, Jareth had said it was too late. I followed his gaze to where a shaft of light pierced the inky darkness around us, slicing through it like a laser to melt the shadows. Shaft after shaft peeled the darkness away like curtains to reveal great massive cords of light twisted around each other, cords that came from all directions, streaming into the tree to form a solid pillar of light rising endlessly up into the sky. It was so bright it was hard to see.

  “We’ve been walking in the Shadows of Death,” Jareth said in a hoarse whisper.

  Dawning comprehension mirrored in our eyes, but by the time I realized what we were seeing, it was too late to do anything about it.

  We were standing in front of the Tree of Life.

  Chapter Thirteen – The Blue Thread

  We stood there, speechless, staring at the Tree of Life—the pillar of the dimensions. Looking down, I could see it spiraling into an endless chasm of darkness. Looking up, I saw that it stretched for an eternity into the midnight sky above.

  I wanted to run away, but it was too late.

  There really was nothing we could do. The three of us had already seen the tree, and Rafael had told me before that it only took one look to kill it.

  “I don’t understand,” I heard a voice say. I realized a few moments later that the voice had been mine. I continued roughly, “You told me in Avalon that we’d have to think horrifying thoughts to walk through the Shadows of Death before we even reached the tree.”

  Yes, I’d been afraid and scared. But I knew I hadn’t thought anything awful enough to destroy the Tree of Life.

  But Rafael wasn’t really listening to me. He’d crouched down again next to the cords, his handsome face drawn into a deep frown of concentration.

  “These cords give life to the tree,” he mused softly. “They’re like roots, if you will, roots that feed the trunk from this dimension.”

  Crossing his arms, Jareth waited for him to continue.

  When he didn’t, I prompted, “And?”

  Rafael shook his head as if waking from a dream. Rising to his feet, he brushed his blond hair back from his face and looked directly into my eyes.

  “The Lizard People have tainted these cords, Sydney,” he announced. “They’ve already barged through the Shadows of Death and this corruption reveals that they used the worst nightmares of humanity to do it. Wars. Atrocities. Human suffering—” He choked then, unable to continue.

  I just stared at the cords. I could
n’t speak.

  Rafael took a few minutes to just breathe and then continued in a stronger voice. “We’ve been following the path they blazed with evil. The Tree has been dying for some time and it’s near its end. It’s dying … and the other dimensions as well.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  Jareth’s brows yanked up before he gave a bitter laugh. “Then Melody labored all those years for nothing. She wanted me to destroy the tree, to free us from the other dimensions. But the Lizard People have already done the job for her.”

  As I turned to gape at the tree, Rafael replied, “It won’t free the dimensions. It’s going to kill them all. Her plan would never have worked.”

  So Earth was already dying?

  I shuddered. I had a clear view of the Tree of Life standing before me. Even though it was almost dead, it was still beautiful. It filled me with awe and despair at the same time.

  Rafael stepped up close behind me. I could feel his hard chest against my back.

  “Our fate lines end with the destruction of the Tree of Life,” he said quietly. “I always thought that meant we would be the ones to destroy it.”

  “As did I.” Jareth dropped his voice into a whisper as he joined us.

  “We’re here to witness and share its end,” Rafael murmured.

  “Share?” I asked then. “I mean, we’re just going to die with it? Is there nothing we can do? What about my Blue Thread?”

  They didn’t answer. They didn’t have to. I already knew that saving the tree was something far beyond any of our skills. And as for my Blue Thread. Well, they didn’t know any more about it than I did.

  I turned my attention back to the Tree of Life rising before me.

  The whole situation was hard to believe.

  I felt numb.

  As we watched, lightening lanced out of the sky followed by a loud crack of thunder. A large shard detached from the tree’s trunk, turning black as it fell into the endless chasm below. And where the shard had been, dark spots of decay now revealed themselves. Gray and black threads woven deep into the heart of the tree itself.

  There was no saving it. It was rotten to the core.

  “We can’t win. We never even had a chance.” I choked as I realized the full horror of the situation. “The only way to stop the Lizard People would have been to destroy the Tree of Life—which we can’t do without destroying the dimensions. And it doesn’t even matter. The Tree is already dying. We’re all doomed anyway.”

  As I spoke, the light in the stones and cords around us dimmed before sputtering out to leave only big, black slabs of stone.

  I’d thought that I’d felt utter despair before but I’d been wrong. The devastation that ran through me was a burden so heavy that I could no longer stand. I fell, gasping, to my knees.

  There wasn’t a choice for me to make. The Tree of Life was corrupted.

  It and everything else would die.

  I really don’t know how long we stood there. It must have been for a long time. I dimly recall hearing more loud cracks of thunder as large chunks of the tree continued to break off.

  But then Jerry broke the spell. As a particularly loud boom of thunder rattled around us, he suddenly woke up. Jumping out of my sweatshirt pocket, he leapt straight to the ground and skittered towards the tree trunk, choosing a path that led up a steep incline.

  “Jerry!” I screamed, lunging for him.

  I almost caught him. I felt his tail slip through my grasping fingers, but he was quicker than lightening, jumping onto the light cords and darting from strand to strand as if he knew exactly where he was going.

  I ran after him, not caring that he was headed straight for the disintegrating tree. Jerry was family to me. I could hear Jareth and Rafael calling out, but I didn’t hear what they said. I just kept running, my eyes on the tiny mouse scurrying before me, leading me up and up, closer and closer to the decaying tree.

  The ground beneath my feet trembled and shook. From the corner of my eye, I saw that things were escalating dramatically as at least half of the tree fell into oblivion.

  As I watched, time slowed to a crawl as a flash of light lashed out to scorch the place where Jerry—just a millisecond before—had been.

  I screamed.

  The loss wrenched my heart.

  I collapsed, and I knew that I would never forgive myself for bringing the first being that I’d ever loved to the Second Dimension—to his death.

  I mean, I knew that we were all going to die here, it was only that I’d just not wanted Jerry to die by himself. The thought of him being terrified and alone, freaking out and trying to run home in his last moments was suddenly just more than I could bear.

  I gasped and every tear that I’d ever wanted to shed, every tear that I’d refused to let myself shed over the years, streamed down my face.

  “Welcome, Sydney,” I heard a familiar voice speak.

  Sobbing, I looked up to see TopHat holding out his hand. Reaching down, he lifted me to my feet and wiped my tears away with his thumb. His face was kind, understanding, and he was smiling much the same way Al smiled at me—like a father.

  “You are crying. That is good,” he said as if he were proud of me. “Feelings are meant to be felt, not bottled away.”

  As he spoke, I suddenly recalled the Coke bottle in the Hall of Mirrors.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but a Coke bottle suddenly rose up from the ground to encapsulate us both. Apparently, my thoughts were powerful here, but I was too distraught to give it much thought.

  Bending down, TopHat held his hand close to the ground and said, “Welcome home, my friend.”

  To my complete shock, I watched a tiny fluff of fur leap out of a sudden shaft of light and drop into the palm of his hand.

  “Jerry!” I screamed in a strangled sort of way. Happy tears mixed with hysterical ones streamed from my eyes.

  TopHat rose and kissed Jerry lightly on the head before dropping him into my outstretched hands.

  I kissed Jerry’s pink nose and hugged him close.

  Looking through the bottle that encapsulated us, I saw that Jareth and Rafael stood on the outside. They were shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear their voices. I could only watch as they pounded on the glass with their fists.

  “What is it?” I asked TopHat, turning to him. “What are they saying?”

  He didn’t answer me. Instead, he said the words that I was least prepared to hear.

  “This is it, Sydney,” his voice echoed in the bottle. “This is your Blue Thread.”

  My heart stopped. “What is it? What is it?” I gasped.

  I glanced around in all directions before frantically whirling back to him, terrified that he wasn’t going to answer and that he’d just leave me to guess.

  But he didn’t. Well, not entirely, anyway.

  Clasping his hands behind his back, he began to pace a little, or as much as the bottle permitted. And adopting a sing-song voice, he began to speak like a storyteller. “The day the Tree of Life knew that the Brotherhood of the Snake had pierced the Shadows of Death, it sent a seed out to the dimension beyond. A seed that would wait for the day that it would sprout. This seed wandered through the lands as years passed. And then centuries. And then finally, the day arrived when the seed knew it was time to come home. The seed picked a human. The most ordinary human it could find. A human with no special talent. Just a human that represented the most ordinary of the ordinary.”

  I stopped breathing.

  I knew then. I knew he meant me.

  I felt all color drain from my face as I stared at Jerry, cuddling up in the palm of my hands. He’d told Rafael before that he was a seed. He was a seed of the Tree of Life—a seed that had picked me?

  “Why?” I asked with a shuddering sob.

  A compassionate look crossed TopHat’s face. “This seed must sprout and give birth to the next Tree of Life, Sydney. And the seed has chosen you to help it.”

  “Why me? I’m t
he most ordinary of the ordinary!” I insisted, hysterically this time. I was shaking so hard that Jerry was jerking up and down in my hands.

  Tears blurred my vision. Clutching Jerry tightly in one hand, I wiped my face with the other and rounded on TopHat to demand an explanation.

  But he wasn’t there.

  He’d gone, leaving me alone in the Coke bottle.

  Whirling around, I began to pound on it, searching for Jareth and Rafael on the other side, but the bottle’s glass had grown so thick I couldn’t see out of it very well. I could just see that there was light on one side and a growing darkness on the other.

  I stood there in rising panic.

  I was trapped. And in more ways than one. I mean, I understood the imagery of the bottle. I’d created it myself when I’d subconsciously acknowledged what TopHat had said—that I had trapped my feelings in a bottle. But I was trapped in other ways, too. I didn’t know what to do next.

  “I get it,” I shouted, striking the ever-thickening glass. “I bottled my feelings and I should feel my feelings. I get it. Is that my Blue Thread?”

  But the glass didn’t break. It just grew thicker.

  Jerry wriggled in my hand, and I looked at him then, part of me unable to believe any of this was really happening.

  “Why did you pick me if I’m nothing special?” I asked him.

  He just stared at me, twitching his whiskers.

  The ground trembled again, and the light outside began to shift away as the darkness rose to consume it.

  Fear crept down my neck.

  “That’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked Jerry, turning on him again.

  I shrieked, nearly dropping him as living threads of light crept around him to form some kind of egg around his tiny furry body. I could see his little black eyes looking at me.

  And to my horror, I realized that more than half the egg’s threads were black.

  “No!” I cried, dropping to the floor as I tried to peel the threads back to free him.

  It didn’t work.

  The faster I pushed them out of the way, the faster they replaced themselves.

  I gave up with a sob, aware that the darkness outside was marching inexorably on.