by Oxford, Rain
“No, she’s saved. We need to find out what I’m missing before we run out of time. We have eight minutes.”
“Why are you calm, then? Obviously, you know something you’re not telling me.”
“Deception one-oh-one: Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. I do know what’s wrong, but I don’t know why. The history books. All the red books are history books, and they are in every house. Why is history so important here that everyone would have a book in their house? The same book… no. They’re not the same.” He went inside one of the cabins and I sighed before following him in. “They all look the same on the outside, but look. The one they had at the snake village was much bigger.”
He plopped down on the ground and looked through it. “There’s no mention of why they fear magic here. There’s no mention of magic at all.”
“Why would there be in a history book?” I asked.
“Humans fear magic, too. Their history books are full of wars, but also witch burnings. These people fear magic even more, so there should be something about people being killed for doing magic or how magic destroys people. Something. Why is there no magic in these… No magic… There’s no magic.”
“There is, though. There’s magic all around us.”
“Not all over, and not always, but there is magic missing. I have tried several times to do magic when it just flickered away. One minute, everything will be fine, and the next there’s a blank. That also explains why I couldn’t heal the world completely. Now magic is being erased in history. It is possible that a lot of history is missing, as well. I’m going to try and heal it again.”
He closed his eyes just as the room turned red. “Wait, Dylan, look.” I went to the window and after a moment, Dylan opened to door. The sky was deep red. It wasn’t the bright red of a sunset, but the darker crimson of lava. It was incredibly sinister. “Get on with your healing,” I said, shutting the door.
He sat down against the door and closed his eyes. The moment he closed his eyes, I felt like I was being watched. The temperature of the room cooled considerably and it got a little darker. No sound whispered in the night inside or out, not even a slight wind.
He gasped and I could feel energy pulsing out of him. It was an energy we hadn’t encountered before, and it was coming from inside him. As I moved closer, he waved me off, but it took several minutes before he could catch his breath.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s rejecting me. How long---”
“Seventeen minutes,” I interrupted. “I don’t understand why you keep asking me that.”
He stood up and faced me. “Because your memory is changing, because something is watching us, and because if we don’t heal this world in three minutes, we will die,” he said. He was very close now and looked into my eyes as if searching for something, even glanced from eye to eye. “Your eyes are still mismatched,” he said.
“Yes, it’s a genetic abnormality; it’s permanent.”
“No, it’s a dragon abnormality. Your eyes changed when Rojan was suppressed, which means, either Rojan is still here, or…” He trailed off, clearly dreading his next thought.
“Or what?” I asked, hardly more than a whisper.
“I don’t want to worry you.”
“Oh, ‘We’re going to die in three minutes, but don’t panic or anything.’”
“No, you can panic about that, I just don’t think you should know where we are just yet,” he said. He was rambling and started digging through the books.
“So you know where we are? It’s not the future?”
“Yes, I know exactly where we are, and no this isn’t the future. Every time I connect to another world, it wastes minutes we don’t have. The time we have diminishes faster the more magic I use. We have to figure this out now. How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” I answered. He winced. “What’s wrong with me feeling fine?”
“Nothing, except I think you’re wrong. I think you’re blocking your pain. Or maybe I am. Sit down.” I pulled the chair from the table over and sat. “Stay there for a minute,” he said, heading for the door.
“Why? What are you getting?” I asked.
He stuck his head back in the open doorway. “Nothing, I just didn’t want you to try and save me.” He disappeared outside.
I ran after him, but the door slammed closed as I reached it. After a lot of struggle, I determined that the door wasn’t budging, so I used the chair to break the window.
By the time I caught up to Dylan, it looked a little like a nightmare. Dylan radiated magic to the point that he was glowing. He didn’t even need a shield, because the power was so strong that it would keep anything away. Still, the energy had a gentle feel to it, as if it were healing magic. Healing magic strong enough to burn through metal. Lovely.
What was worse was the blackness, the moving shadow, surrounded him. In the red light of the sky it was easily visible, like a black hole among stars. The closer it crept, the brighter Dylan’s energy became. “The woman said it didn’t attack magic users,” I said.
“It attacks those who reject magic. I have been rejecting my own magic because I didn’t want it to grow out of my control. I never wanted to be more than in control of myself. My magic is becoming stronger the more I use it, but I lose control the more I reject it.”
When the darkness reached his foot, there was a familiar flash, bright enough to drown everything else.
We were back in the forest, but it was more like we were in a dream than really there. Standing in front of us was a god. After the five gods I had met so far, including Tiamat, this one didn’t look particularly frightful; his appearance bordered on average with medium length, medium brown hair, hazel eyes, and black clothes. The power emanating from him, though, caused my skin to crawl. It wasn’t that his aura was menacing, it was just really copious.
“Nice to meet you, god of Skrev,” Dylan said in a foreign language. Apparently Dylan’s magic was still working on me to make me understand.
“And you, young Noquodi. I am called Araxi. How interesting that you speak the language of the gods.”
“I was not really able to learn. It is through my magic that I am speaking Enochian now,” Dylan said. “Kiro tried to teach me…”
The god grinned. “Then you do not yet understand. All Noquodi are encouraged to learn to speak the language, but none will ever become fluent in it. Enochian is not a language made of words and sounds; it is the language of our being, our magic. Only someone with Iadnah magic can speak our language. Others can merely learn to imitate the sounds.”
“I guess it is another strike against me,” Dylan said.
“To the other gods, yes. They will feel it is blasphemy and that you think of yourself as one of us. Many of my brothers believe that you want to be more powerful, but I was watching. When the little vampire girl would not be healed by your magic, you resorted to other methods. Why were you so determined to help someone that I know your people consider to be a monster?”
“Sure, humans have vampire lore, but she was a little girl who needed food. It isn’t her fault her food is blood. I bet vampires have human lore, too, and are all terrified that humans are torch-wielding maniacs with wooden stakes in their pockets.”
“You refused to use your magic to help yourself because you were afraid of it, but when someone needed your help, you never hesitated. Any other Iadnah would suspect you of being fake, but I was in your head.”
There was no surprise in Dylan’s expression. “That’s been going around a lot. You were in my head, I was in yours in a sort.”
“You felt the soul of my world and instead of turning away, you continued trying to heal it.”
“Why make a world like Skrev, though?”
“On other worlds, people dominate. They fight and can easily destroy the world, but on Skrev, people and creatures live in balance. Because of the tears in time and space, the balance was broken. Made wo
rse is that my people now fear magic. This creates more damage. In the unending cycle, my world is on the verge of collapsing from time and space and my Noquodi has gone into hiding.”
“Did you threaten him?” Dylan asked.
The god shrugged, which struck me as odd. “Only a little.”
“I’m sure he will return when the world is healed, if he’s allowed back. I must know it’s difficult for a Guardian to stay away from their world for long. I miss the feel of Earth’s magic, but Duran is my home.”
“Then we will make a deal. Help my world and take care of it in the absence of my Noquodi, and I will defend you from the other Iadnah.”
“Dylan, think before you agree,” I warned.
The god didn’t miss it though; he looked at me. “Speak freely, dragon child. You offer him sound advice and should not be afraid to do so.”
“It isn’t like I would disagree to help anyone. Especially if his Guardian isn’t doing the job,” Dylan said to me in English. I sighed.
He was a very caring and friendly person, but he was too quick to agree to help. “Just because you are willing to help every single time, doesn’t mean you should agree ahead of time. What if his view of helping conflicted with yours?” I regarded the god. “If a man was killing dozens of people a day with magic, and for some reason you decided to tell Dylan to deal with it, what would you have Dylan do with the man?”
“Kill him, of course,” the god said.
“And what would you think is right?” I asked my friend.
“Imprison him in a dark hole with no chance of ever seeing the light of day again. Oh, and he could only ever eat mushy peas for the rest of his life. And put a clock in his cell so that the constant ticking can drive him insane. A drippy faucet, too. Killing him is too good for him.”
The god was staring at Dylan as if he were completely insane. “I am glad I was not too far into your mind. I think I should never visit it again. That being said, I wonder if my sister would trade Noquodi.”
“We’re not sweaters. So what about if I help you when you need it, but I solve the problem my way? As long as I’m not currently helping Earth, you tell me the problem and I will fix it.”
“No other Iadnah allows their Noquodi a choice.”
“Sure, and I’m sure any one of them would do what you say, when you say it, but I have good ideas and I can carry them out. I’m also pretty stubborn and dense at times; I could spend days twisting what you tell me to do around until I like the outcome.”
“I could kill you.”
“And piss off my girlfriend? Am I really worth that?”
“But you are already about to die.”
“Yes, I am aware of that, in about one minute,” he said.
He looked unfazed. I sighed again. I needed new friends. Or maybe we needed a third friend; one who would smack us both when we planned out our next adventure.
“If you need help against another god, call for me. If my Noquodi does not return, or if he needs assistance, I will summon you, but allow you to choose how you will solve the problem. I make this deal in the confidence that my sister probably won.”
“Won what?” he asked.
I poked him in the stomach for being an idiot. “Won in the best Guardian contest, stupid.”
“Oh, well, I accept the modified deal then. But I need your help. I need to heal Skrev, and it’s rejecting me. I need to do so in the next minute or I will be no use to you as a Guardian because I’ll be dead.”
“My world has been allowing you to help it the entire time. However, it has been abused and neglected by the people, and you will have to be stronger than the damage done to it. You have the ability to heal it, but you must use more energy than you have ever had to use before. If you cannot heal it in time, then my world is lost and I will have to start all over again. Tiamat will also have to find a new Noquodi.”
“Save Sammy and Mordon,” Dylan said. “They’re not your people and they need to live.”
“The damage to my world is too great at this point. If I took anyone from the world, the void will open completely and nothing would survive that. I am too powerful, and you will have to be as powerful as a god to save them. You could take them and save yourselves without healing the world, but the void will open just the same. You would be buying yourselves a miniscule amount of time at the loss of every world in the universe.”
“I hope it’s a long time before I meet you again,” Dylan said with a scowl.
The god laughed. “I hope I will meet you again.” With a bright flash, we appeared in the village, just as we were before, minus the shadow. Thunder cracked across the sky again, but it was snow, not rain, that began to fall. It wasn’t cold enough to snow, but such laws of physics appeared to be broken today.
Dylan sat right in the middle of the dirt path and put his face in his hands. “I can do this,” he said.
He got to work on healing the world. Even as he worked, I started feeling sick, almost like I suddenly realized my body was aching. When the energy started pulsing from Dylan with the strength of his magic, it became difficult to breathe. As the seconds passed, it was getting more and more difficult to remain standing.
Dylan opened his eyes and they glowed brighter than I had ever seen them. A wave of nausea took me down. I could breathe, but I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I still had to watch over Dylan, though, so I saw when the energy exploded. It was hard to follow, but there was definitely some lightning and fire in the explosion, and I barely ducked in time to prevent massive burns.
Taking a good breath, I looked up. We were back in the cabin with Sammy and all the townspeople. Everyone, including Dylan and I, were breathing heavy. In fact, several people were unconscious. I immediately stumbled over to Sammy, who was crying on the bed. My body felt shaky and I couldn’t fully stand.
Welcome back, Rojan said.
I reached for Sammy and he lunged for me.
“Cover his eyes,” Dylan warned.
The moving darkness crept into the room through the doorway, as the wood was still shattered, and the people who were still conscious began screaming and scrambling to get away. Dylan reached out and grabbed my arm an instant before the room filled with a blinding white light. I suddenly felt weightless and the pain faded away.
When it cleared, and my eyes adjusted, we were back on Duran in front of the Dylan’s cabin. My pain returned, but it wasn’t as bad as before. Dylan flopped back in the grass. Sammy wiggled out of my arms and crawled over to Dylan to hug him.
“Dada hurt?”
“Yeah, honey, but I’ll be okay. Where do you hurt?”
“I’m okay, Dada,” Sammy said bravely. Dylan pat his back gently. “Mama’s chest hurts.”
Dylan held up his hand and a small ball of glowing green energy formed and hovered over his skin. “Go give this to him.”
Sammy easily wrapped his tiny fingers around the sphere, climbed to his feet, and brought it to me. He didn’t hand it to me, though; he pressed it against my chest, where it was instantly absorbed into my skin. I figured it would have been cold, but it was actually really warm and all of the pain in my body quickly melted away. “Thank you. What happened? I’m confused.”
“I’m not surprised you’re confused; you’ve been suffering with increasingly low oxygen for nearly five minutes. I sealed the cabin air tight to keep that shadow monster out, and I told you we had twenty minutes.”
“So when we returned to the cabin we started suffocating? I felt messed up before we got there.”
“You felt messed up because your body was oxygen deprived and it was blocked from your conscious mind. It took me a while to figure it out, but your memory was changing. You first said I only spent a minute trying to heal the world and then you kept changing your answer. Rojan was missing. Several times I felt like I was suffocating. Nothing felt right, not even my magic. Mordon, we never left the cabin.”
* * *
“How could we not have left the cabin?” I a
sked.
“I think we were actually in something between my mind and the soul of the world. Everything around us was some symbolic avatar of the world. None of it was truly real, but it was affecting us and we were affecting it. That’s why Rojan was missing; he was watching over us. The entire time we were in what we thought was a time bubble, I was actually sitting there, trying to heal the world. That’s why your time was changing; Rojan was keeping time for us. You ‘remembered’ what he was seeing. Remember the clicking sound the cell of the door made?”
“When it locked?”
“Yes. There was no lock on the door. It was locked because it made the locking sound; it was only locked in our minds.”
“Then how did you pick it?”
“How did I pick an imaginary lock? With the imaginary lock pick I imagined keeping in my bag. Obviously. A mathematician never reveals his secrets.”
“You mean magician,” I said. He shook his head with a knowing smirk. “So it was all a test created by the planet that you had to pass to heal it?” It sounded a little appalling. No one should be punished for trying to help.
“In a very subjective, generalized sense, yes, sort of. But this world had scars from way before Tiamat defeated Vretial. It was abused by those who shunned magic, and then here I come, denying my own magic, and trying to meddle with it. Of course it was cautious.”
“It’s a planet. I know they generate nominal energy, but they can’t have personalities,” I argued.
“You can’t see the souls of the worlds. Something I know about magic, and I don’t know how I know it, is that magic retains purpose. Magic is imprintable, and a world functions on magic. How could a world, surviving and thriving on magic, not create a semblance of that same purpose? And then you have the gods, who create the world, the people, and the animals around their own desires and intentions. The worlds do each have a personality, strengths, weaknesses, and a very, very simple consciousness. But all of the worlds can influence and be influenced by its magic.
