“No, I didn’t,” I argued bitterly, clutching my head anyway, because it really did hurt at the moment. “I didn’t play football last night. I fought a goddess-eating monstrosity that went after my friend. And then I found out that he helped kill you, like he said before, except that you were the one that went after him.” I looked at him, feeling more angry than all the times he had grounded me combined. “You left us behind. You didn’t tell us where you went. And then you didn’t come back.”
My father hung his head, looking ashamed, and shattering all my happy memories of him.
“I wish that wasn’t true, son. I wish I had done better.”
“How am I even talking to you right now?” I demanded, still clutching my aching head. “You’re dead. Your soul, or projected body, or whatever we use to be Challengers, burned itself out. Your real body took a bullet to the head and bled out on your study floor. I saw them put your body in the ground. Why are you showing up here, now, instead of before, when Mother and Rachel and I all really needed you?”
I had never dared to speak to my dad this way before. And when he covered his own head and began to weep in front of me, I wish I hadn’t chosen to right then.
“I’m sorry,” he heaved, trying to master himself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—” the words sputtered out of him like a car trying and failing to start, over and over. His grieving, sagging face emptied the rage right out of me.
“How are you still here?” I asked, much more softly and fighting tears of my own. “Are you real? Are you a ghost? Or are you gone for good, and I’m just crazy?”
“You’re not crazy,” my father said, as he regained his composure. “And no one is ever gone for good. They just change and go someplace else. I wish I could come back to you in person. Believe me.”
We both fell silent for another minute. The flame in the fireplace crackled. I didn’t remember it being lit before.
“So where did you go?” I asked. “Are you…” I swallowed. “Are you happy there?”
“I went somewhere better than I deserve,” my father replied. “I can’t remember or describe it when I come and see you. But my only grief now is leaving you all behind the way I did.”
“Why did you do it?” I demanded. “How did you even know about Cavus?” I hesitated for another moment, then let another fear out of my mouth. “Did Stell send you after him?”
Did Stell get my father killed for good? was what I was really asking. Did she betray me? Is it my friend’s fault that I’m hurting so much?
But my father shook his head.
“She didn’t even believe in him back then,” he answered. “She thought he was just a bad dream she had as a little girl. One to help her process losing her family and her planet and her people. She had no idea he was still looking for her.”
“So how did you know?” I persisted. “Last time, you said you were training me. I came here with all kinds of combat knowledge I never remembered learning from you. You said I might become a Challenger, too. How did you even know that?”
My father sighed, still covering his face with folded hands.
“The power went wrong, son,” he admitted. “Too much of it stayed with me when I left Avalon. Some of the Ideals, and the gifts from the Paths I walked. They let me see things that were coming. As I grew older, they became more intense.” He leaned forward a little more, and started to move his hands from his face. “Worlds were burning. Something sick and hungry devoured them. Turned them into a private hell inside his belly. Trapped the people in them for all eternity. Dug around for Stell, and made her watch them suffer, then took her somewhere else, where I couldn’t see what he did to her.” He took a deep breath, as if even remembering made him very tired. “But then everything would unwind, and a figure I couldn’t see would crawl out to stop him, and Cavus would turn on the figure. But I would always wake up before I saw how it ended. I dreamed that same dream, and many others like it, over and over.”
“When did they start?” I asked, feeling the heat from the fire, still wondering why we had bothered to turn it on in our Texas home to begin with. “How often did you have them?”
“I had the first one just before I left Avalon for the last time, while everyone was still celebrating my victory over the oncoming Tumult. I tried to warn Stell, but she told me not to worry about it, that it was just a bit of trauma from facing down two Tumults at once. She said lots of Challengers had bad dreams after stopping something like a Trial, but they always went away in time. I took her word for it and left.” My father shook his head again. “Then, I’d have the dream again after every birthday or special event. When I finished school. When I met your mother. When I married her. She wouldn’t remember the nightmares, no matter how many times I told her about them, just like the rest of Avalon. Then, the night you were born, the dreams changed again.” He took a deep, wheezing breath. “The figure that faced down Cavus was you.”
My father stood up, and began to pace. “You looked exactly as you were, fresh out of the womb. Bandaged up in hospital clothes. A patch covering where your umbilical cord had been. You shouldn’t have been able to crawl, or even lift your head, but somehow, you moved in his way, and everyone knew you were challenging him, and then the Umbra and all of the army gathering at his feet descended upon you. I woke your poor, tired mother up because I couldn’t stop screaming. Her family thought I just couldn’t handle being a new dad. I took the night shift every night for two weeks because I felt so guilty, and because I was afraid I’d have the dream again. When I finally did get a whole night of sleep and didn’t have it again, I thought everything was fine.”
He stopped pacing in front of me long enough to shake his head. “Then, on your first birthday, the dream happened again. Only you looked a year older, and in it, you somehow crawled out of your crib and toddled across the stars to get in Cavus’ way, and he fell on you with a rage, an army of gibbering demons at his back. Your poor mother had to slap me awake or I’d have kept you from sleeping that night. I was too ashamed to tell her about the dream, and when your sister was born, and nothing happened that night, I thought it was over, and that I had gotten better. But the dream came back your very next birthday, with you once again toddling in front of a world-eating nightmare and trying to stare it down with your little eyes.” My father swallowed. It was something I had never seen him do back when he was alive. “This time, I tried to tell your mother about it.”
“What did she say?” I asked. This was wrong, I thought. Dad was always the one the rest of us went to when we were scared. Dad was always the one calming down Mom, or me, or my sister. He didn’t get scared himself. It just didn’t happen.
“She laughed. ‘What were you talking about,’ she said. ‘You’ve never woken up like this before,’ she said. ‘You’re the bravest, steadiest man I know, and always have been,’ she said. I thought she was joking,” my father said as he shook his head. “I thought she was trying to preserve my pride, or my dignity, and I felt like I had failed her by making her feel obligated to even bother. But she kept insisting that I had never woken up screaming before, and she did her best to soothe me back to sleep. A few days later, she insisted that I had never woken up that night as well. It was just like the times I tried to tell her about Avalon.”
He looked down, his face full of frustration as he continued speaking.
“It happened again on your third birthday, only this time you were babbling baby nonsense at all the monsters before they attacked you. Once again, your mother insisted that this was the first time I ever had this sort of dream, and it faded from her memory even sooner. I just started bottling it up inside again. Started sleeping in the guest bedroom every night after your birthday. Somehow, no one ever noticed. The three of you never even noticed when we started celebrating your birthday a few days after the real date. You all kept referring to it as a freak circumstance.”
“Really?” I asked, honestly not remembering him ever d
oing that. John Malcolm sighed again.
“Exactly,” he answered. “That, there. The one or two times I confessed about it, you all had that baffled response every time. I thought the whole world just decided to blink every time I had the nightmare. I worried I was going crazy, and talked to pastors and counselors about it. They either prayed for me or gave me a bunch of plausible explanations for it, and it was enough for me to feel better and just deal with it. Then you started growing up into the man you are now.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “The man you raised me to be.”
“I didn’t mean to!” he snapped, wincing afterwards. “I didn’t mean for you to take all those risks. You keep telling everyone I raised and trained you that way, but the truth was, you just started watching me one day when I wasn’t looking, and made your own decision on how you wanted to be. I tried to talk you out of it. Told you it was okay to protect yourself, that it was the smart thing to do sometimes, but you wouldn’t listen. You just threw my own behavior back in my face, and after Avalon and everything else, it was too late for me to figure out how to change my behavior without breaking your heart, your mother’s, and your sister’s. So I started guiding you then, trying to direct you to things like community service, and just using your words to stop the bad guys, thinking it would keep you from taking bigger risks. I remembered when you stopped Christina’s bullies with your words alone, and I felt relieved and proud of you. I remembered you charging behind me to save Davelone’s family from that burning car, but you stayed behind me, let me do the dangerous stuff, and waited until it was safe to help out. I thought I had pulled it off. That I’d found some special way where I could raise you to be a good man and still be safe, even though our world eats good men, is wired to smash them apart so they don’t threaten the galaxy with change.” My father turned his head to look at the fire. “Then the son of probably the most powerful man in the country tried to take advantage of an unconscious girl, and you got in his way.”
“Rhodes,” I answered. “I tried to talk him out of it.”
“I know, son,” my father answered. “I talked to everyone I could. The people at the party all told the same story. You did everything I taught you to. And when none of it worked—because the safe choice isn’t supposed to always work, it’s just supposed to keep you safe—you still didn’t move. You just stood between an unconscious girl and harm’s way.”
“But,” I started to say, before a sob slipped out of my throat. I had started crying, and I didn’t know why. “But it’s what you would have done. I was afraid…” I had to blink then. My vision was getting blurry, and words began to feel weird in my throat, for some reason. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be proud of me.”
“I know,” my father choked back, hand covering his face again. “It’s all my fault. It’s why I always tried to show how proud I was of you, and that you didn’t ever need to earn it. I guess I didn’t try hard enough. So you started walking down the same path my nightmares said would kill you. Even then, though, I still hoped they were just nightmares. Until I talked to Rhodes,” he ended in a hard-eyed snarl.
My own teeth ground together. I remembered the man, the contempt he projected toward me at our last meeting. I remember him bowing and scraping before Cavus, swearing that he had, in fact, murdered my father, revealing his ‘suicide’ to be nothing more than the heinous slander it really was.
“He said he murdered you,” I spat, still raw over it after all this time. “He made Val and Sam and Kayla all say you were a horrible monster that had killed yourself.”
“That figures,” my father said with a long sigh. “I failed them, too.” He looked back up at me. “How are they now?”
“Safe,” I replied. “They’re with me on Avalon. Val talks to me now, a bit. I don’t know about the other two.”
“They were bait,” my father admitted. “I remembered thinking that. Bait that no one else tried to save off the streets for some reason, unless our own family decided to take care of them. I had gotten that paranoid. But I knew that if your mother and I didn’t attempt to help them, you’d ask why one day. I was too weak to handle that. So we took them in.”
“The day we found your body,” I answered slowly, and hoarsely. “Social services suddenly showed up, as if by magic. Out of nowhere, there were other foster parents in town to take care of them. People who had never cared before, and somehow they zipped right through the approval process. I should have been more suspicious.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” my father sighed, looking downward. “We were up against enemies we gained over a thousand years ago—a thousand years on Earth, at that. Aegrim’s custodians, charged by Malus to free him one day.” He looked back up, meeting my gaze. “I didn’t learn about them myself until it was too late. I should tell you as much as I can, now.”
“I’ll take it,” I growled. “If it will help me kill them.”
He took my bloodlust in stride. Didn’t even blink.
“Good boy,” my father said instead, giving me a nod. “Kill them all. Don’t let them anywhere near your mother or your sister. I’m sorry I didn’t do it for you.”
I felt proud of him.
Because if I ever could go back in time, I’d do exactly that, the first chance I got, felonies and five o’clock news be damned.
“Nobody alive today anywhere really knows exactly what Malus is,” my father said in a rush. “I was able to learn that much, before they got me. Some ancients say he’s the opposite of Invictus, like how some people believe the devil to be the opposite of our Christian God, but it’s a useless comparison. From what little I could find, the ancients feared Invictus even more than they did Malus. To them, they were both old things that bumped around in the dark, powers from a forgotten age that were best left undisturbed, and unknown. But many monsters that could speak claimed to hear secrets from Malus, and Aegrim was one such creature.”
“What is Aegrim, and what is Vinclum?” I asked my father.
“Cosmic Wyrms,” my father answered. “Said to be the greatest of the oldest remaining dragons. Most of them passed quietly into the night, went into slumber, and never woke up. But Vinclum and Aegrim both refused, and the powers that existed at the time feared them both for it. As best as I could tell, the old races begged Vinclum and our ancestors to battle Aegrim, and they both agreed. Our ancestors didn’t know that the Expanse feared them just as much as the two Wyrms, and I don’t know all the details on that. I do know that they called Invictus their patron, and that they tore down Aegrim’s strongholds on over a hundred worlds. They battled all the way back to our planet, where they finally struck him down. Then something else happened, some sort of betrayal from those who had begged us to save them. Aegrim was bound instead of slain, and we were all bound with him. I don’t know the details beyond that. Even finding out that much was difficult.”
“How did you even learn anything at all?” I asked, confused. “I didn’t learn anything until I broke into a hidden part of Avalon.”
“I know,” he said, pacing again. “Stell didn’t know any of this, either. She just knew our people made great Challengers, because she looked at individuals, instead of how our people behaved as a whole. She was cautious anyway, and prevented us from projecting our bodies back to Avalon or its sister worlds. And if she hadn’t Called a descendent of someone who had bonded with Aegrim, she might have never been noticed.” my father shook his head again. “But Aegrim’s people had been watching us from the shadows all this time. I don’t know how they hid so well. Probably with magic the rest of us couldn’t use.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering the magic that Rhode’s people had wielded to summon Cavus and finally capture me. “That was some unfair bullshit. But you still haven’t said how you learned all of this.”
“Because when I returned to Earth, I kept far more power than I should have been able to,” Dad answered. “Far more muscle strength. Even a little bit of magical foresight, which Stell would have sa
id was impossible.”
“She does say that word a lot,” I said dryly, smiling in spite of myself.
“I know,” my father answered. “I wonder if she just likes pleasant surprises. But when Rhodes talked to me, he revealed the fact that he knew about my dreams. I don’t know how he knew about them when everyone else forgot right after I told them. But he could describe Cavus perfectly, and said the Umbra had contacted him. The monster had told him about Stell, and her worlds, and that it was going to invade them, and go after Stell personally. And that Cavus said an ugly, stupid boy would get in his way, because that happened every time he went after Stell. Then I went mad,” Dad finished, his head hanging in disappointment. “I let him get to me. I was so surprised and shocked and afraid, he was able to string me along. Listen, son.” My father turned back to me. “There are other ways to leave Earth, once you’ve been to Avalon. I know you can’t,” his voice suddenly caught. “I know you can’t create a projected body right now, but there are other locations it can travel, beyond Avalon’s worlds. Rhodes gave me one. It was part of a trap that had led me to Cavus, part of what eventually killed me, but just know that there are places beyond Avalon, and Challengers can travel to them. I’ll give you the locations I found, because you need to know about them. You have other enemies besides Cavus and Rhodes, and they’ll come after you one day, if you pull off what you’re trying to do here. And you will, son,” my father said firmly. “You are the one thing everyone, be they man or monster, has underestimated. Including me, despite how much I love you.”
I awoke some time later, having seen my second ghost in as many days. I was back in my manor’s bed. I was alone for once and surprisingly, still dressed. Someone had pulled off my armor and boots, but that was the extent of any liberties they had taken.
But my arm itched, and when I reached to scratch it, I felt something like paint on it. I looked at it and found that someone had written—not tattooed, but written—the word ‘love’ over and over on my arm in Woadfolk script, leading all the way up to my armband. When I looked over to the table next to my bed, I saw a note and a crown that looked like it had been braided out of twigs, leaves, and flowers. It was a fragile thing, not made by an expert, but I thought it looked to be made with care, and I had to wonder who had made it, and why. The note helped my groggy mind figure it out.
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