Aster Wood and the Child of Elyso (Book 4)

by J B Cantwell

  “You believe me?” I asked her.

  She shrugged.

  “Didn’t want to,” she said. “Not at first. Been chewing on it all night. Now this.” She paused, looking down at Kiron’s link resting in my palm, and I saw that she had tears of her own forming in her eyes. She looked out across the dead fields that had been in our family for generations, now lost to the disintegration of the planet’s natural systems. The breeze played with the errant strands of her gray hair, and she smiled. “Let’s go back inside. I think we need to talk.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We were back in the attic. All of us. Cait held my hand tightly in hers. After my most recent abandonment, she seemed determined to never let it go again. The floorboards creaked beneath us as we picked our way through the mess. I was happy to see it in the light of day. Whatever drive I had felt to dig through this place before was now tenfold. The mysteries stored up here had been long forgotten by my family, nearly lost forever and protected by the elements by nothing more than a slowly rotting metal roof. Now that I was back, maybe there was more to discover. Maybe now that I knew the Fold, knew my enemy, I would be able to find something of use to bring back with me other than just gold.

  We all followed Grandma towards a specific place in the room, the dust brought up by our footsteps dancing in the hazy light. She found what she was looking for and began rummaging through a pile of boxes stacked on the far side of the room. I had never made it this far when I had been searching the attic before, had never seen what was hidden here, and I stopped beside her, curious.

  She pulled down a small cardboard box from high up on a shelf. In front of it, a larger box, heavy with books, had hidden it from me before. She gripped it in both hands and steadied it on the shelf before her.

  As she opened it, I realized that, if I had found this box, I wouldn’t have bothered with it. Within it were the usual attic discards. Books, a shard of rock, a large saltwater pearl, and what looked like a family album. She quickly found what she was looking for, a small, leather-bound book, and opened it towards the back. Turning to us, she read.

  “October 9, 1879,” she began.

  I gasped.

  She went on.

  “My name is Brendan Wood. I came here, a year ago now, from the planet Aria, in search of gold. Using a link crafted by my own hands, I opened the pathway between the planets within the Maylin Fold and Earth, hoping that this place was as rich with ore as legend has told it to be.

  “Upon entry, I was wounded. Immediately, I tried to forge a new link to take me home, only trying it after several days and at the point I felt certain death was near. It did not work.”

  She paused, flipping deeper into the book. Then continued.

  “October 22, 1905

  “I have tried to pass the knowledge I bring from my ancestors along to my two children, William and Grace. Grace seems to be the most likely to possess magic of her own, and it is with her that I have put in the most effort. Though I fear that now, after many years of believing my tales, she has grown past the age when such things are acceptable within the culture of Earth. Though I have tried to sway them, and also my beloved wife, over the years, there is no magic in this place to prove my own born abilities. What’s more, the frame has faded, and it has been many years now since I have been able to plot a link at all. I fear the loss of its power is a bad omen for both the people of Earth and the Triaden. Without the ability to travel, the quest of my father, Almara, will be gravely affected. Gold, while not as easy to procure as we originally predicted, I have discovered and saved over the years. Though it is of no use without the means to awaken its power.

  “Almara sent me to this place with a link of his own making, a tricky piece of magic meant to guide me back to his location upon my return home. Believing his abilities inferior to my own, I waited some time before attempting to use it to return. By then, I was smitten with the girl who rescued me from the fields I now look out upon. Perhaps my lack of desire to leave her has had an effect on the link’s vitality. I know not. What I do know is that, though I have tried Almara’s link, year after year, it has yet to show its magic. I fear what this could mean. Perhaps the Earth is yet too far away for the link to work. Perhaps the opposite is true, and the closer it gets to the Triaden the less accurate it becomes.

  “But what I am the most concerned about is what the lack of activation on Almara’s end could mean. He was meant to work the magic over the link as he went along on his journey, but no life shines from the page when I try to use it to return. Has he died? Has the Triaden fallen to the power of the Corentin? Is there any trail at all to follow? I have no answers.”

  She flipped through the pages again. Every inch of my skin was prickling with excitement. Never before had I so desperately wanted to read a book.

  “October 17, 1924

  “I do not know if the magic has been passed down to my children, but if it has, it does not show itself here. I have done all I can to train them in magical law, but alas with no power to work with, I suspect they have, by now, brushed it off to an old man’s musings and forgotten their years of education.

  “This may be my last entry. Of late, my chest feels heavier than it should, and I find it unlikely that I will last another season. Alas, I have nothing new to report in any case.

  “I am sealing the last link I have created and leaving it among my possessions for later generations to try. I have spent a lifetime attempting to return to Aria, and with that focus have missed much of the wonders my life here has presented me with. There is no magic here, not of the traditional sort. But I feel something else here that I was missing in the Triaden.

  “I did not intend for Earth to become my home, and yet it has. Despite all of my attempts over the years to forge a return link back, none of them have ever worked. Now, as I near the end of my life, I have come to peace with the fact that this is where I have come to belong. When I die, I will say farewell to Earth and my family here as though I had been born into this land a son.”

  She said the last words softly, then closed the book and handed it to me.

  I stared at it, opened it and flipped through it’s pages.

  It was a diary.

  Brendan’s diary.

  The television was on again. I had read the diary through twice already, as he had only written once or twice a year during his time on Earth. Now I sat staring at Cait, amazed at how easily she was distracted by the characters on the screen.

  Mom now wore the same lost look that Grandma had had all night long. But Grandma was up, busying herself in the kitchen, getting ready to feed us dinner. She seemed renewed, full of energy, with more bounce in her step than I could ever remember seeing her. She was a very old woman, and yet she showed the vigor of someone half her age now. She hummed a song I didn’t recognize as she chopped carrots next to the sink.

  “We need to talk about our plans,” I said. Mom’s eyes fluttered as though my words had awakened her.

  “Plans?” she asked, looking confused.

  “We need to go after Dad,” I said. I looked up at Grandma, and she gave me a curt nod.

  Now that we were all in a tentative state of agreement, at least about where I had been for the past eight months, I figured it was time to get moving again. Dad had taken the gold. Why, we didn’t know. Finding him was our best start along the path to getting our hands on enough gold ourselves to do the job back in the Fold.

  “I still don’t understand why we need your father for all of this,” Mom argued, unwilling to give in completely. “I have a little money saved. Can’t we just buy the gold you need?”

  The thought hadn’t escaped me, but no one in my family had ever had much money. Sure, when the world had still been a healthy and abundant place, the family farm had provided sustenance enough for all of Brendan’s descendants that had come after him. But aside from a thin gold band Mom had worn when she and Dad had been married, I had never seen anything of much value. Even that tiny trink
et, I think, had been handed down. It had been all we could do to hang on in the cities, hiding from the rain in the giant towers that rose up on every side, fighting to survive just like everyone else. The only other gold I knew of had been here, in this house. And now it was with Dad.

  Still, it was a valid question.

  “How much gold do you think you could buy with the money you have?” I asked.

  Mom looked back and forth between me and Grandma, shrugging.

  “I bet that, between the two of us, we could probably afford a couple of necklaces like the ones you saw in the attic,” she said. “That’s what you were looking for, right? Necklaces?”

  I sighed.

  “I wanted the necklaces as a starting point,” I said, trying to sound gentle. “Even if we find Dad and get back all the jewelry, it won’t be enough. We’ll need more than that.”

  “Well, how much then, Aster?” she asked, smacking her hand down on the side table and standing up. “Where do you expect to find all this gold?”

  “I haven’t figured it all out yet,” I said, defensive. “And I need a lot. At least a stone the size of my fist.” I held up my hand and clenched it. Then, looking at just how much that was, my heart fell a little.

  “Oh, great,” Mom said sarcastically. “Well, that should be no problem, then.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I argued. “I’m not making this all up, Mom. I’m just following the lore. So no, I don’t know where we’ll find all that gold. I guess we’ll have to be looking for a while, won’t we?”

  We stared at each other, both heaving with anger. Finally, she turned her back to me and slumped onto the sofa, defeated.

  “I think we should leave in the morning,” I said to the room.

  Originally, I had planned to come back to Earth, grab the gold from the attic, find whatever else I could sell or steal and then return immediately, leaving Cait here in Mom’s care until I succeeded in my plans. Or failed. I hadn’t expected a journey once here, and now that more and more secrets were coming to the surface, I felt it would be stupid to leave Mom, and especially Grandma, behind.

  Under normal circumstances I would have been nervous to see my father. I had never known him, not really, and what memories I had were riddled with frightening events, harsh glances, wild words not meant for a four-year-old boy to hear. Few memories I had of my time with him were good, and I found I often had a hard time remembering him at all.

  But now, under the veil of the Corentin’s power, a reunion that had once seemed uncomfortable had become a terrifying prospect.

  Part of me wanted to see him, needed to desperately.

  Most of me wanted to stay far away.

  All of me had no choice.

  “Mom,” I said. “We have to.”

  “But he’s—” She stopped mid-thought, and I could tell she was struggling to reconcile her experience with my father and the reality that now faced her. “He’s crazy,” she finished, her voice nearly a whisper.

  “But he can’t be,” I argued, not really knowing if I was right or not. My own stomach tightened at the thought of coming face to face with him. All of my experience with the man was the opposite of my proclamation. “We have to remember,” I continued, “that this all starts and ends with the Corentin. Everything that has happened on Earth for the past hundred years, the droughts, the crimes, the rains, it’s all the Corentin’s doing. He thrives on making people suffer, on controlling them.”

  It was what he was doing to my dad. That was my argument. But it died on my lips. It was too terrifying to imagine now, sitting in comfort in Grandma’s living room, that the Corentin’s grasp could stretch through the cosmos and reach all the way into the inner workings of my father’s mind.

  No, not just my father.

  Brendan’s grandson.

  Almara’s descendant.

  The Corentin’s enemy.

  “I don’t even know where he is,” Mom argued. “He could be anywhere by now.” It was clear she had no desire to see him again, whether his madness was born to him or caused by an evil force she could barely begin to understand. “Isn’t there some other way?”

  I sighed.

  “It’s the gold,” I said. “We need the gold, and he took it.”

  “What do you need gold for?” she asked. “I’ve never understood why people become obsessed with jewelry and other useless things. You can’t eat it. It won’t house you. It won’t protect you. So why bother?”

  “Gold isn’t useless,” I said. “Not in the Fold. The planets were all knocked out of alignment centuries ago by people stealing the gold that kept them balanced. It’s crazy powerful, Mom. A tiny speck of gold is enough to open a portal to the other end of the universe. People raided the inner caverns of the planets, stole it all so that they could travel and do all kinds of magic. They didn’t get it.”

  “But why didn’t they just replace what they’d taken?” she asked. “Why not just put it all back the way it had been before?”

  “The guy who did most of the damage, Jared, eventually tried to reverse what he had done. But gold is so rare that he was never able to find enough to rebalance the planets. So he set a spell. He drew Earth towards the Fold, thinking he’d be able to get the gold from here and realign everything.

  “But then everything went completely haywire. He died from the effort, and once Earth started moving towards the Fold, things started to really fall apart.”

  I stared across the room, imagining what it must have been like when things first took a turn for the worse. Jared must have been terrified.

  “There is no gold there,” I went on. “And if we don’t find it here and bring it back, things on Earth will get worse and worse until the Corentin has just as much power over us as he does over the people back there.”

  Cait shifted in her seat. Her eyes were still on the TV, but I wondered if she was listening.

  “Who is this Corentin person?” Mom asked.

  “Only the most evil person you could ever imagine,” I said, almost laughing and then thinking better of it. Cait shifted again. “Trust me, Mom. We all want Earth to stay as far away from him as we can manage.”

  “But Aster,” she said, her eyes focusing again. “Earth is a planet. How are we supposed to control an entire planet?”

  I stared at her and realized I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t have the trajectory of how, exactly, to fix every single thing that was wrong. I was just one piece on the board in what was a much larger game.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said. “All I know is that, if we can get the gold, it’ll help. It’s the whole reason Brendan came here in the first place. There are people back there, wizards, who can help us once we have it.”

  “I don’t understand why it has to be us, though,” she argued. “If there are…wizards…or whatever these people are, why can’t they handle things? We’re just normal people, Aster.”

  “You are,” I said, picking at a piece of dried skin on my arm. It was coming off in flakes now. “But I’m a Wood. And so is Dad. It’s kind of our duty, I guess.”

  “I’m already half-packed,” Grandma said, bringing a huge bowl of vegetables over to the kitchen table. I hadn’t realized she had been listening. “We’ll leave in the morning.”

  “But Cathy,” Mom started to argue.

  Grandma held up her hand, silencing her.

  “Listen to me, Dana,” she said. “I’ve lived most of my life now dealing with the curse of all this hanging over my family. And I know you’ve had your fair share of it, too, but it’s not the same. I sent my son away, nearly sent his father away before him and probably would have if he had lived to today. I heard the stories as they were passed, and I ignored the truth in them. I ignored the history until it became, in my mind, myth. Well, it ain’t myth. Not anymore.”

  She turned back, walking into the kitchen and taking a plate from the oven. She paused with the food in her mitted hands, looking through the window out onto the fields, her
fields, stretching as far as the eye could see, dead and withered.

  “It’s time,” she finally said.

  She set down the plate on the counter, removed the mitts and brushed her hands across her apron. She untied it from behind her back, slipping it over her head and folding it neatly.

  “It’s time for me to go get my son.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  After dinner was over and Cait was asleep, I made my way back up to the attic, bringing a flashlight and another lamp with me. I still had work to do up here, and I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  I started shuffling through the same box Grandma had gone through. The family album was worn, at least a hundred years old, and I flipped through it, searching for clues. Stoic faces looked back up at me as I saw, for the first time, the man who had set all of this in motion.

  In the very front of the album was a picture of Brendan and a woman on what appeared to be their wedding day. Brendan’s face was dark, tanned from long hours spent working in the sun, and his skin seemed to shimmer like it was painted with gold. The technology of the day meant they couldn’t smile for the photo without blurring it, so they sat perfectly still, their faces slack. But his eyes were bright. Like he couldn’t believe it had been his good luck to jump across the universe and find his new wife, the woman sitting beside him.

  The book was smattered with images of the farmhouse, in much better repair and before the shingle roof had been replaced with the coated metal sheeting, resilient against the rains. Every ten years or so a newer photo would crop up, dated along the bottom edge of the page, the house surrounded by thick, vibrant fields of corn. Images of Brendan’s family became more common as the technology of the age changed, and soon the people smiled for the pictures. In one, which must have been taken around Christmastime, the four of them sat around the dining room table we had just eaten dinner at. Brendan sat with his hand on the table, gently placed over his wife’s. The children, nearly grown, smiled up at the camera, clearly excited by the festivities. The last photo in the book was, again, of him and his wife. Brendan’s hair had grayed by this time, his face had paled, but he still had that look of vibrance about him, a shine to his skin that hinted at something humming beneath it. I wondered for a moment if my own skin looked like that in photographs, if I had the same hint of power flowing through me.