Lost Grace (The Reminiscent Exile Book 4)

by Joe Ducie

  My soldiers, my recruits, my students, my crew, my protégés and misfits shared a mildly distasteful look. I cracked my knuckles, had a good laugh, and thought about how far of a run it was to the nearest bar.

  *~*~*~*

  “So, who’s first?”

  I’d shoved the desks aside and cleared some space in the classroom. The room was about fifty feet by thirty, which left plenty of space to get creative. I’d also taken the time to soundproof and tint the windows, as well as add a bunch of minor enchantments which would serve to deter prying eyes and protect me and the recruits from any serious damage.

  Unless any of them were Elder Gods in disguise or genuinely harboured me some ill will.

  Ill… Will. A strange feeling, like I’d forgotten something, tried to bury itself in the back of my mind. I shook the thought away.

  All puns aside, it had been far too long since someone or something had tried to kill me. I was ten thousand years out of my comfort zone but, damn it all, I was a shade bored and looking to stretch my legs a little. Taking it out on these students would help.

  “Are you aware of the duelling standards?” Kara asked. She carried her staff, a thin rod of petrified wood about three feet in length, inlaid with veins of silver, against her shoulder. “What do you use to focus your Will?”

  “Standards?” I was not familiar with no stinkin’ standards. “No punching in the back of the head - that kind of thing? - and I don’t bother with a focus, Miss Denitae. My game is very hands on.”

  “So what’s the point of this then?” Nemin asked.

  “The point, my good fellow, is to bind me at your mercy. I want you to consider me an enemy, one with vital information to the war effort. Wrap me in lashings of Will light so I no longer present a threat. Fair warning, I’ve had some practice at this over the years.” I’d sent more than one Willful fool hurtling across the Void during the Tome Wars. “Call it street duelling for now. Never mind the standards. I want to see how creative you can be, how clever.”

  “You don’t think we can best you, do you?” Elan asked. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against my desk. “You may be surprised by what they teach us here, Arbiter Declan. And without a focus, your intent will be sloppy.”

  “I’m very much hoping I will be surprised, Elan. Now, for the second and last time, which one of you would like to go first?”

  Elan stared me down for a moment and then shrugged. His smile was confident, assured, as only the young can be. He couldn’t help himself from glancing at Tylia, who sat with her legs crossed on one of the chairs pushed to the side, and flashing her his charming smile. She rolled her eyes and gestured for him to pay attention.

  We duelled.

  His style was graceful, despite his use of brute force and rather obvious patterns of strength. Elan wanted to bloody my nose, knock my defences aside, and bind me as directed in lashings of Will as quickly and as forcefully as he could.

  It was a valid tactic. Overwhelm, force me to defend, and then shatter my shields as if they were glass and his enchantments a sledgehammer.

  He was playing by the standards I hadn’t read, though, which made his style oddly formal, predictable. The best swordsman in the world didn’t worry about the second best, because measures of talent suggested certain proficiency, certain rules and codes of behaviour—expected styles and flourishes and point scoring. No, the best swordsman in the world worried about a young, dumb kid picking up a blade for the first time and swinging it wildly, without knowing the rules or the codes.

  Someone who didn’t play by the expected standards became unpredictable.

  And if you became unpredictable, you won. In war as in anything, the unknown would always hold an advantage.

  I’d spent most of my life in grudge matches, from the Academy to the Tome Wars to my exiled adventures in the last year—I was good at fighting. A soldier, born and bred.

  I allowed Elan’s barrage to crack my shields, to reverberate across the air and force liquid light to bleed from the cracks. He barked a rough laugh, happy to have scored some points, I’m sure. I flicked my wrist and summoned a single lashing of Will, a thin whip as fine as cotton but as strong as steel. With another twist of my wrist the whip cracked through the air, under his protective barriers, and wrapped around his left leg.

  He looked down, cursed, and then up again with a snarl as I moved my fingers just ever so slightly towards me.

  The whip recoiled and Elan was hurled up into the air, spinning wildly, before landing with a thump on the hard stone floors. I heard the breath leave his lungs and almost winced in sympathy. He rolled over, gasping and defeated, and I surveyed my four remaining Knights in training.

  “So, who’s second?”

  The next four duels went much the way of the first. I was a lot more experienced, a lot more willing to hurt, which was not necessarily a good thing, but it was useful. I knocked Sardi out in round two, Nemin in round three. Kara had adapted a little bit to my style when it came to round four, but that only meant she fell harder in the end as I encased her hands in heavy blocks of ice.

  Tylia was lucky last, her pales eyes narrowed and her dark blue skin shining with Will light. She was fast, running circles around me and casting varied and slightly dangerous elemental enchantments my way. She’d been reading the right books for battle magic, learning useful invocations, but I was better.

  And by the time I was through training this bunch, they’d be formidable on the field.

  I caught Tylia with a net of Will light, thrown into the air and designed to use her speed against her. The light latched on to the fastest thing in the room, which was her, and wrapped around her knees like a belt cinched tight. She stumbled to the floor and slammed her palm against the stone, ready to keep invoking, but I raised my hand and called an end to the duel.

  “Some improvisation towards the end there,” I said, once we’d pulled the desks and chairs into a rough circle around my larger desk at the front of the room. “By the third round, Nemin, you expected to lose. Bad attitude to have, but sometimes unavoidable. You weren’t wrong. By the fourth, Kara had noted a bit of the technique I was using—a battle stance known as Ass Kickery—and tried to adapt. Tylia, in the last round, your speed is your advantage. But it can be used against you.”

  My students rubbed at their bruises and nodded along. Some of them looked thoughtful. Elan had a face full of scowl. He scratched at his desk and wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “Did we pass whatever test this was, Arbiter?” Sardi asked.

  “Just watch, learn, and keep improving. That’s how you stay alive. Be smart and think as many steps ahead as you can. Sideways, if not forward, you know.” I ran a hand back through my hair and sighed. “We need to start back at some basics. Will Light for Beginners, Volume One.”

  As with many things, the ‘magic’ came down to a matter of will over Will: self-control, determination, and resolve, infused with the ascending oils that burn at the heart of creation. Young Knights, apprentices at the Academy, are taught to do this until they can dive into a book, in whole or in part, and draw forth whatever they needed. Weapons, food, clothing—safe passage through the Void—anything and everything. Intent and imagination, desire, could make fiction a reality. The lie that whispered truth.

  After training and lessons, my recruits—students—shuffled from the room sore but satisfied. I asked Tylia Vale to hang back and answer a few questions for me. Who she was, what was the deal with that word ‘Vale’.

  “I am the last of my kind, Declan,” Tylia said, after considering my questions for a good half minute. “My world was claimed by nothingness, borne on the wings of an immortal monstrosity.”

  That piqued my interest. I knew three short of a dozen ‘immortal monstrosities’. The Everlasting. “What happened?”

  “My race, the Vale, built the Vale Atlantia in Atlantis, where the city found its name. We shaped the earth of this world, and built the Vale Celestia here at the un
iversity. You are human and can control Will light. I am Vale—and I am Will light. We are bonded to the unseen rivers that turn the universe.”

  “And you’re the last.”

  “I am the last. Darkness ate my world. I was just a child of five and remember little.” She brushed a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. Her blue skin seemed to shimmer in the light of the gemstone planetoids far above. “The stars went out, Declan. The land simple disintegrated. I was torn from my mother’s arms and when I awoke all were dead and I was here, alone in the Vale Celestia.”

  “A Voidflood,” I said quietly and cursed the word. A Voidflood could happen when the Willful, the rare few strong enough, tore open a hole into the space between universes. We did that all the time, travelling between worlds, but if control were lost… severed… if the intent turned malicious. Well, I’d seen what happened to Tylia’s people, the Vale, firsthand. Hell, I’d been responsible for minor floods—recently in the storm clouds of Jupiter to cast Scarred Axis and the Shadowman, my rebellious shadow, into the Void.

  “I have been a ward of the Vale Celestia ever since,” Tylia said simply. “Alone, but alive, I carry the legacy of my people.”

  “If you survived, perhaps more of your race did,” I said, not with much in the way of hope or enthusiasm in my voice. Surviving a Voidflood was impossible. Tylia was merely the exception to prove the rule. And the look she gave me said she thought the same.

  “Our world shared trade with Atlantis, with your True Earth, as you call it. We were not of the worlds written into existence by the Willful. We existed before humans started to shape the universe with their words. If any had survived, they would have travelled here by now.”

  “You don’t remember how you made it through the Void?”

  Tylia shook her head and gestured at the awesome sky. “I felt the darkness, I blinked, and then I woke here in this forest under the sky. I remember staring at the moons for so long, before Forge Master Alexas found me.”

  The Void spat her out. The odds of surviving being cast into the Void were so small as to be nonexistent. The odds were better on firing an arrow, blindfolded and dizzy, from one end of the solar system to the other and hitting a target smaller than the head of a pin. No, the odds were worse than that. She had spun through the Void and somehow hit a target. A living, breathing world.

  *~*~*~*

  The peace and quiet lasted about a week before I saw my first ghost in the Vale Celestia. And it was one helluva ghost. An unfair spirit.

  A week. A generous, easy week before I realised I was already caught up in perhaps the most dangerous scheme I’d ever had the misfortune to stumble ass backwards into, in this or any time.

  The Everlasting were in Atlantis.

  I met the first of them in a fancy cocktail bar along the market quarter of the Vale Celestia. There was a plan to meet Tal for dinner, and show her how cool I was with my not-drinking, even in a bar full of booze. True will power.

  I was at the bar early, seated on a fine leather couch and wearing something resembling a suit—a bit of the local fashion—that resembled more of a tight-fitting robe. It was black and severe, and made me look somewhat dark and menacing. I sipped from a tall glass of bubbly water and lime. Saving on the empty calories by quitting the booze, if nothing else.

  A lady in a black-green dress sat down next to me, an older woman, grey at the temples, beautiful, her light brown eyes knowing and large. Her hair fell in gentle curls over her strapless shoulders.

  We spoke politely for a few minutes, passing the time, her casual demeanour putting me at ease.

  “You can’t be any older than thirty,” she said.

  “Oh,” I replied, ever the suffering charmer, “but I feel a lot older.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve too many enemies to die old,” she said.

  I sighed and placed my tall glass on the coffee table, as the cocktail bar hustled and bustled around us. “Not just a pretty face then. Who are you?” I eyed her perfect curves, her sparkling eyes, and realised she was everything I found desirable. A woman tailored to my particular tastes. “What are you?”

  “My name is Saturnia.” She grinned. “I want you to look over at the bar, Declan.”

  I glanced that way, marking the bartender, the bottles of strange and alien liquor on glass shelves, and the patrons standing at the marble bar. An old man and woman, a couple of kids, a lady dressed in red—

  “Oh,” I whispered. “Oh my.”

  The lady in red.

  I met the eyes of my new companion. “What in all the worlds is she doing here? I watched her die.”

  My perfect woman nodded once. “Emily Grace,” she said. “Otherwise known as Fair Astoria of the Everlasting.”

  “That’s her… ten thousand years before I met her, isn’t it? She doesn’t know me yet.”

  “Quite so,” my companion said. “Ageless and yet so young.”

  “She’ll learn.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Astoria.”

  I finished my soda and lime. “You know about me and my future. Are you a time-traveller as well? Which of the Everlasting does that make you, eh?”

  I was fairly certain I was sitting with a god.

  “None,” she said. “My name, for all that it matters, is Saturnia.”

  I rolled the name along my tongue. “That is a nice name.”

  “I’ve always liked yours, Declan. So much… potential. You’re a storybook hero.”

  “What are you, Saturnia?”

  Saturnia smiled. It was, perhaps, the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Their mother,” she said. “The Everlasting are my children.”

  “Ah.”

  Saturnia smiled and offered me her glass of red wine. I declined, though it was a struggle.

  “Are you my enemy?” I asked.

  “Perhaps one day. Not now.”

  “I butchered one of your sons.”

  “Scion was always too eager to please.”

  “I intend to unmake Lord Oblivion.”

  “You may succeed.”

  “I loved your daughter.” My gaze stumbled back to the bar. “Emily Grace… Astoria.”

  “I know. She loved you, too.”

  “Should I… should I talk to her?”

  Saturnia’s eyes flashed. “You’re many things, Declan, but never a coward. Of course you should talk to her.”

  I heaved another heavy sigh and ran a hand over my eyes. “What’s your end game?” I asked. “Is it too much to hope this doesn’t end in fire and blood?”

  Saturnia leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re at war with my children. You’re mortal, for the most part, and have the backing of the Knights Infernal, of factions of men and women who will fight and die for you… but in the end it’s you, Declan. It’s you alone against them all. Fire and blood is all you can expect.”

  “I will destroy the Everlasting,” I said. “I… they are everything that is wrong with creation.”

  “They are immortally flawed.”

  “Can I save Atlantis?”

  Saturnia blinked in surprise. “Declan,” she said, “you are the reason it burns.”

  She disappeared. Faded away. I sat staring at a seat as empty as my soda and lime glass.

  I thought about it, considered Tal, then shrugged. Fuck it.

  I sauntered over to the bar and bought the pretty lade in red—Fair Astoria of the Everlasting, a ghost to me—a drink.

  “One for the lady, and a soda water and lime for me,” I said.

  Astoria met my gaze, that old knowing look, and smiled. “You’re the mysterious traveller from the future,” she said, her voice sending a shiver through me. “Declan Hale.”

  “That I am,” I said. “What should I call you?”

  Not ‘who are you’, but ‘what’? What are you pretending to be? I didn’t dare ask aloud.

  “My name is Astoria,” she said and took a sip of an Atlantean martini. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  W
ell, real names, then. I was already out of my depth. And I’d held this woman as she died not too long ago.

  “Not drinking tonight?” she asked.

  “Trying to maintain a sober streak,” I said, sipping at my fresh glass of soda and lime.

  I’m bar folk. I’m the guy you see drinking alone and lamenting. Not something to be proud of, I know, but one is too many and ten is not enough. Cheaper to drink alone at home, I know, but I think the white noise—the ambience of the right dimly lit bar—makes all the dark and dreary thoughts seem that much deeper.

  I can begin to take myself seriously after enough drink. To believe that my deep thoughts may have some sort of… deeper meaning. Or at least make it feel less like I’m alone in a crowded room.

  Some of us are better in the dim light. Justified. Alone but not alone. Caught between the glass and the crimson wine, we’re somewhat alive. Justified isn’t the right word. I’m not sure if I have the right word, or the right excuse, for what amounts to a supreme lack of self-control and an addiction to the haze of alcohol. Bring on the haze. Days without the haze are like being lost in a maze.

  “I tried quitting earlier this year,” I said. “Even managed to last a few months, but the weight of the world got to me in the end. I suppose it comes down to self-discipline, at some level, but addiction is an ugly thing. No excuses—no one is putting the bottle in my hand. I pick it up every time… but I don’t want to stop, not really.”

  “Do you consider yourself addicted?”

  I shrugged. “Have you ever drunk scotch in a public washroom before eight o’clock in the morning, Astoria? I think that qualifies for addiction somewhere on the scale. Thing about alcoholism, though, is it does it best to convince you otherwise. That toilet scotch is normal.”

  “Think how much better you could be without it,” she said. “What could you do if you got your life in order? Stopped drinking, studied your craft, put your sheer talent and strength to good use. You could be great. You could be magnificent.”

  “Oh, Emily Grace,” I said. “You’re far too kind to me.”