TWENTY-SIX
Aba regarded the other blind huntresses in the barn. Her Guyanese accent was as pronounced as ever when she said, “I assumed you all got what you needed from our little stay inside the alien queen’s head—in that deep, deep computa’ mind o’ hers.” Her people had a way of repeating words for emphasis and substituting “a” sounds for “er.”
The rest of them grunted their agreement and their amusement at her testy comment. They were arrayed in a six-pointed star configuration about their wizard Augustus in the center.
“And Augustus,” Aba said, shifting her focus to him. “You’re a weak link we can scarcely afford where we’re going. We need to know that your budding dragon morph nature will not leave us in the lurch to protect yourself when the going gets rough—and it’s going to get very rough.”
He groaned and lowered his eyes, searching his own mind, heart, and soul for the truth. Clearly the fear weighed heavily on him. He was not a man of honor. He was not brave. He was simply powerful and cunning and genetically bred to get more powerful and cunning over time by knowing when to beat a hasty retreat. He was not of the fools-rush-in, hearty stock of the huntresses. And right now might be the best time for him to exit the stage.
But for once his fears were working in concert with the huntresses’ ambitions. The return of the alien queen would be his death knell. She would not permit the existence of anyone whose warding magic could keep her out of their heads or help them to avoid her detection. She would turn everyone on the planet to hunting him down, including every wizard she would be able to toy with easily upon her return. By then she would have amassed the mental power she needed to hack her way through the savant’s upgraded defenses that for now kept their world hidden from her and the minds of its people off line.
He snorted his next few power breaths in the manner of the budding dragon morph that he was. “I’m with you out of cowardice, not out of bravery, and I’m not ashamed to say it. You are blazing the trail of the safest path for me into the future.”
Aba snorted. “I suppose, coming from you, that answer is both honest and just what we needed to hear, considering our trust issues.” She nodded to the others to begin the ritual.
For their part, they would be doing little but centering their minds and summoning all of their psychic energy into the present moment, now that it was no longer trapped in past lives, thanks to the healing magic of the alien queen. The irony had not been lost on anyone in the room.
The rest was up to Augustus. It was his spell that would open the portal to the next world. And he couldn’t have performed the magic if he hadn’t healed his own psychic wounds from past lives when he too dwelled in the powerful mind-space of the alien queen.
He began painting his greatest canvas yet, much as he’d painted all the others, allowing the lights to swirl from his hands, and his hands to drag over the canvas like Jackson Pollock electing to smear paint instead of toss it from a can.
The only sign that the magic was any different this time was the disturbance in the barn. The dragons were already feeling the pull of the portal and voicing their protests, their roars combining like a choir of angels—from hell. They found themselves flung violently through the portal as it opened, squawking in protest. All but one. The dragon morph. Who had no choice but to reveal his true nature now. There was no way he was going through that portal, so what choice did he have?
He morphed part way into his human form—keeping the dragon’s wings, flapping them to get lift off the ground. He used his eyes to open a tiny wormhole for himself to escape into, and allowed it to suck him in and close in about itself before it deflected Augustus’s magic, or possibly devoured their world. Very generous of him, considering dragon morphs were seldom prone to those kinds of considerations. But he must have been hinging his bets on the hope that he could come out of his own self-imposed exile. And he must have figured the blind huntresses and Augustus working together might just be his get-out-of-jail-free pass.
Augustus and the six blind huntresses got sucked into the portal together—the blind huntresses showing the whites of their eyes—an indicator that they were switching to their alter egos, ready for battle. That was more than he could say for himself.
The fact that the much larger beasts of far greater mass got sucked through the portal first and not the lighter humans spoke wonders for the force of the oversouls to which the humans were now all connected. But the extra gravity Augustus felt was not that of oversoul enlightenment; it was more that of a black hole, a gaping void at his center, just ravenous enough to devour all of creation. Would it swallow up all of their hopes and dreams as well—the alien queen the least of them?
***
Augustus took one look at their new surroundings, so far away from Earth, and all he could think to do was to open the portal again and escape through it—leaving the blind huntresses behind to make sure what was before them didn’t follow.
But his use of magic had drained him. He was stuck here, like it or not.
All he could do was pray that death came quickly. These blind huntresses had a way of keeping him alive well past any desire on his part to remain among the living; they’d done it once before, and they seemed just as determined to do it again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Natura, come out, come out, wherever you are.” The tone Soren took with her this time was friendly and playful. He liked what she’d done with the place, and so did the beast.
She’d given the Yucatan Peninsula a complete makeover. Soren ran his hand through the shimmering water—that was flowing uphill. He wasn’t quite sure yet how she’d pulled that off. Yes, he could sense the microscopic lifeforms now, transparent, created with the Natura Cabbala magic. They were swimming upstream like salmon, and their bodies, being primarily water, were literally dragging the river upstream with them. The dawn’s early light was catching the creatures at the right angle so that the water shimmered, the way soap bubbles phosphoresced.
Soren continued his exploration of the forest, figuring this was part of the game; she wanted him to admire her handiwork, and he was happy to. The trees…. Some of their trunks twisted in complex knots—topological math brought to life. So, Natura had borrowed some of the alien queen’s warding magic used to ward off their kind and keep her mind virus-free; And if he stepped through the portals formed by these elaborate intertwining tree trunks? No doubt he’d find himself in another parallel universe—whose laws functioned along the lines of the universe whose qualities were keyed to the shape of the portal itself.
He doubted she’d had the nerve to step through any of these gateways herself, but the fact that she was willing to entertain them was promising. The childlike Natura had a thing for Narnia-like fantasies, but if the themes were too grown-up, she begged off. She was busy healing the inner child that was damaged in her youth with her nature magic, her talking animals, her pixies and faeries. Anything too scary, and forget it, she was out of there. But reflecting on what motivated her gave him an in.
He raised his voice, let it carry through the forest. “You know, you’re a mommy now. And Vima…” Soren made a whistling sound like a tire deflating. “Trust me, she’s got a hurt inner child that’s going to need doctoring aplenty, before she sics those demons on the rest of us and makes us pay for her many-thousand-year imprisonment as a fetus stuck in amber. Only you can bring her around, Natura. Of course, that means going places you’re not sure you’re ready to go yourself, scary places.”
He continued his exploration of the forest. He discarded his robes, walking naked. In Natura’s world, such things were permitted without being interpreted as a pretext for foreplay. In an Eden-like state, being raw was as natural as breathing. He let the nanite swarms covering his body, these days like so much designer tattoos, fly off him, to join the forest; their magic was now one with the magic Natura was wielding. He hoped what once scared her—those creepy nanite swarms all over him—that didn’t terrify her any longer, w
ould help make his point for him. Attached to trees like weird lunar moths, his nanite swarms blended fine.
There were plenty of trees in the forest that had taken on a different nature entirely. The Natura Cabbala magic had blended the genes of the various tree species with human and animal genes, seemingly at random, but Soren was sure that here, too, Natura was exerting her effects. The tree before him, which was surely a Willow tree in a past-life, looked more now like a giant English sheep dog, its long, grey-white hairs covering watermelon-sized fruits that looked suspiciously like eyeballs staring back at him, and were indeed tracking with him, as he hiked through the forest.
Several of the knots in other trees which birds were using to build their nests were in fact gaping mouths, like Venus fly traps, waiting only for the babies to hatch to spring their traps. The needle-like teeth were just long enough to ensure the babies escaped, but not the parents. Perhaps each generation of birds just got to bear one set of young because the kids were just too genetically different from their parents to do anything but start a new species anyway. Maybe the forest’s diversity was tied to these alterations along with so many others. It was another promising sign that some parts of the forest were a bit more dangerous than others.
“It’s creepy, huh?” Natura said, staring at the same tree he was looking at with its many needle-fanged mouths harboring many families of birds. “It weirds me out.”
“The forest is a work in progress like the rest of us, I guess. You’re still learning to play with the new Natura Cabbala magic. Still, these early results are impressive.”
“I know why you’re here. You can forget it. I’m not following you into the stars. You go save the universe from Victor. I have my animals and forests here on Earth to attend to.”
“You notice, you’ve gone beyond doctoring just the animals. Your nature magic is expanding of its own accord. Off world, you’d discover many new ways to build forests and manage them. Those insights in turn might give you what you need to aid the suffering of some of your creatures.”
“I know rationalizations when I hear them.”
“Think of the Amazon rainforest, and all the cancer cures it has given us. There are creatures on this world and forests too that will not respond to your magic. Perhaps because the genetic tampering of the transhumanists is too sophisticated, or the damage done to the ecosystems so complex, you can’t understand it well enough to undo the cancers spreading through them. But with what you learned off world…you may be able to simply borrow nature’s solutions from elsewhere. Think of all those dead worlds that had to come back from the likes of scientists and wizards alike who knew only how to wreak havoc and destruction.”
She sighed. He could tell she was caving. “You know I don’t do scary. And your very adult worlds rife with violence are too much for me.”
“Something tells me they add insult to injury to the already damaged psyche of your daughter. You may well have to learn to navigate them for her sake. Maybe to heal the child in you any further, you’ll have to learn to heal it in her.”
Natura groaned, dipped her walking staff that was once solely a product of cabbalistic magic but that had since been made over with the Natura Cabbala magic used to create the uphill-flowing river. The shimmering microscopic lifeforms swirled up the staff, traveling high into the sky, forming a water spout. Out the top of that spout shot flying fish that flittered from tree to tree, gulping down moss and insects before finding their way back to the river. It was her way of relaxing her mind so she could decide for herself how swayed to be by Soren’s remarks.
“Okay,” she uttered finally, “I’ll do it for Vima.”
“You sure I can give the beast permission to scare you?”
“You better not.”
“You’ll have to learn how to make a forest suitable for Halloween, for the days when the kids want to be scared for the fun of it. And you’ll need to design forests even scarier if you’re to help Vima through her tormented dreams.”
“Huh.” Soren could tell she was using the Halloween forest idea to get around her own reservations about scary takes on nature. He was goading her in the direction he wanted, but was she ready to take the leap?
The beast was taking the stage in any case.
His nano swarms flocked back to his body, and so did his robe. The beast lunged for her, barking in his raspy voice, “Now!”
His tackle, along with her scream, had taken them both through one of the portals that one of the knotted trees had grown around.
Natura laughed the moment after she screamed. Soren was secretly pleased by his handiwork from backstage of his own mind. But her scream upon arriving at the other side of the portal conveyed none of the surprise and delight; just sheer terror.
ACT FOUR
CELESTIAL WIZARD WANNABES
TWENTY-EIGHT
Responding to his loud moaning, Soren grabbed the spear sticking out of Player’s chest. “If you’re trying to reprise our homoerotic moment way back when, good one. You really stuck it to me this time.”
Soren, ignoring him, concentrated hard. He needed the beast for this; only his strength would do the trick. Even with his nanite-reinforced body, this was a spear forged on an alien world, jammed through Player and into a rock made of alien material—both were a good deal harder than he was used to. Even Player’s elemental magic wasn’t doing shit with the stone that held him fast, or the spear.
Working in concert with the beast, Soren yanked the spear out of him.
Player’s moan climaxed in a gasp. “Was that good for you? Because that was definitely good for me.”
He gazed down at the gaping wound in his chest. “I see this planet doesn’t come with atmospheric nanites that heal you in a pinch. That’s a real shame.”
Stealy entered the picture frame of Soren’s consciousness—up until this moment he had not sensed her—and put her hand to Player’s chest, healing him at once. “Can I fill your hole, too?” Player asked. The fact that his sass was returning was both a good and a bad sign. It meant he was using it as a shielding mechanism to deflect the stress he was feeling, but at least he was deflecting it.
Soren helped him to a standing position while taking in the rest of the battlefield. Those complex wall-size battle scene paintings hanging in museums that took an hour or more to take in had nothing on this place.
Natura was kneeling down to wipe the face of a soldier, perhaps because she didn’t think his prettiness should be obscured by the blood and gore. Soren supposed the fact that she was ignoring his lethal wounds meant that she was deflecting the stress she couldn’t cope with in her own way.
Soren did a headcount to make sure everyone was accounted for. They were. That was a good sign. For now, however, most of his posse was caught up in the raging battle, too busy defending themselves to really comprehend what was going on around them.
That job fell to Soren and the beast. They sensed the problem at once. The Natura Cabbala magic was protecting them from the alien queen’s mind all too effectively. The beast had transported them all to her location; she was infesting another world, gathering strength, preparing for her return to Earth. And this strategic move, meant to get them inside her head, was an opportunity to start practicing from now how to turn the tables on her.
The good news was that the Natura Cabbala magic was working so effectively that the master race’s alien queen did not sense their presence at all; not even as one of her loyal subjects she was only too happy to uplift—as she had done before. The bad news was that this meant the drama they were involved with had nothing to do with any of them; and so could not offer any life lessons that would elevate and empower his posse—and without such ongoing upgrades to their psyches—the queen would find her way into their heads eventually and enslave them the way she had the others.
Soren and the beast were already contemplating how to let her inside their heads just enough to make the dramas unfolding about them relevant to them, while also allow
ing Soren and his people a chance to get just as far inside her head, learning what made her tick. That precarious balancing act was going to be no easy stunt to pull off.
Soren studied how his people were fighting—in threes. Interesting. Their triad magic was fortifying them in ways Soren wasn’t sure he completely understood. Moreover, it had played a part in landing them all in the same place. The topological knot of a tree that Soren and the beast had jumped through—its hub—the portal itself—was framed by three pointed “petals”. The triad magic had very possibly coaxed him to jump through that portal versus all the others he could have chosen. The interactions of the various forms of magic they were all wielding were creating effects that even he and the beast working together with the aid of Soren’s mindchip couldn’t fully comprehend. The synergy effects were a kind of wild card that could be played against the queen. It might be premature to get overly excited, but Soren felt he had his first clue on how they could turn the tables on the queen. The idea would require investigation. It was time to make his move.
***
The Player triad guarded the treasure between them, their triangle formation shielding the new elements Player was synthesizing. He didn’t need to face the manifestation; he could see it in his mind’s eye, so he could keep his body turned outward against their attackers as Aeros and Airy were doing.
As soon as he brought a new element into being, Aeros synthesized the nanites with it, making new microscopic robots out of compounds that included the new element; the new nanites were stronger, more nimble, more versatile—able to cut through their enemies in ways conventional weapons could not. And as soon as their enemies adapted, Player came up with a new element, to renew and augment their defenses. Without the new elements from a periodic table keyed to this world, their weapons would have been far less effective. But with all that, they were just treading water, waiting for Soren and the beast to figure the way off of this battlefield before they all lost their heads.
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