The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5

by Dhayaa Anbajagane

  “Thank you for that compliment,” she splashed a good chunk of water onto Alicia, who covered her face protectively.

  “I was raised in a large family,” Alicia said once their mini water-fight ended.

  Elizabeth stopped making ripples in the water and paid attention.

  “My great-great grandfather moved from Spain to Mexico in the late 1700s. It was a horrible choice if you ask me. Ever since we reached the continent my family was completely broke, and it seemed pretty hard to make a living. But they somehow managed to get by. Then my generation came along. I’m the oldest of ten siblings - four boys and six girls.”

  “WHAT?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “In this day and age my mom and dad had ten children together. The financial burden of ten children kept piling up on their already penniless lives. At our lowest hour a man in a black suit came by our house, told us he was recruiting for a high class school and that he wanted to take me there. My dad and mom were against it instantly.”

  “Of course they’d be against it,” she said. “They wouldn’t want to part from you.”

  “They didn’t want to lose a potential worker for the family.”

  Elizabeth fell silent again. She regretted asking Alicia that question.

  “The man said he’d pay my family’s expenses for the rest of their lives if they let me come, and so they allowed me. Imagine how surprised I was when he suddenly whipped out a portal and dragged me into it. I thought he was an alien shapeshifter disguised as a human and that he was going to take me to his ship to experiment on me.”

  “Wow, that story took an unexpected turn,” Elizabeth laughed, and Alicia joined is as well. “You know, I wonder what your parents would say if they saw you now.”

  “Maybe I’ll find out,” she said. “This trip is my last mission.”

  “What?”

  “I’m retiring from the Academy after we go back home.”

  “You’re talking like you’ve been doing this for forty years.”

  She chuckled, “Sure feels like it.”

  “Why all of a sudden?”

  “I need to go back home, Elizabeth,” Alicia looked up at the sky. “Back to Earth, to Mexico.”

  “Really? You want to go back to THAT family?”

  “Yeah, I think they need me. But that’s not my only reason,” she turned to Elizabeth, a smile on her face. “I met someone.”

  “Okay, I’m getting more and more confused.”

  “I met a guy at the Area 51 facility. They’d called Aliea for a pilot once and I was assigned to the job. That’s when I met Kyle.”

  “Wow,” she said. “So you’re going to settle down with him?”

  “What? Of course not.”

  “Then?”

  “I don’t want to give halfhearted effort to what could turn out to be the biggest part of my life.”

  “Well. I’d hoped to say you sound like an unrealistic young adult, but you don’t sound like that at all.”

  She laughed, “When I told the Commander about it he said the same thing; that I was too young to be making big changes just to fall in love with someone.”

  “Well, he’d be right on that part.”

  “He’d be right if this job was what was important in my life,” she said.

  “Okay seriously. Stop making me confused over and over again.”

  “Try to think of the happiest moments you’ve ever faced. No, think of the ten happiest moments. Does even one of them involve you going on a mission? Or even anything remotely connected to Aliea?”

  Elizabeth thought hard, partly because she wanted to prove Alicia wrong, and partly because she was curious herself as to what her happiest moments were.

  “There isn’t a single thing related to Aliea’s missions is there?”

  She hesitated a bit and then shook her head.

  “The only things that goals and achievements drive is passion and curiosity. We’re all intellectual beings not because we’re smart, but because we can feel happiness when we’re together with one another. Seems like my race has forgotten that little by little over the years.”

  Elizabeth didn’t know how to reply to that. The statement ran through her mind over and over again. Every time she thought of it, she couldn’t help admitting that Alicia was right. Every single moment of happiness she felt was only from a human connection she’d made, not from the self-satisfaction of finishing a mission, or discovering something new. Those made her satisfied, not happy.

  Alicia stepped out the water, “You better think about that, kiddo, else life will just go by, and you’ll still be searching for the happiness that was right in front of you.”

  ***

  2-4

  Q stood on the cold stone floor, his eyes looking straight at Idhren who was standing on the other side of the room. Well it wasn’t as much a room as it was an arena, a rectangular-box with cold-colored metal floors and dull stone walls.

  “Shall we start then?” Idhren asked, his voice faintly echoing off of the walls.

  Q nodded. He cleared his mind of any cluttering thoughts and focused on his breathing, bringing it down to a steady flow.

  Idhren raised his staff into the air, and muttered something too quiet for Q to hear. The staff’s crystal orb glowed a rich aquamarine, the intense rays basking the walls in a mystical hue.

  He raised the staff, “Come warrior!” he yelled and hit the wooden base against the floor. A burst of wind shot out in a circle, picking Q up and tossing him onto the ground.

  Q picked himself up, positioning himself to defend another attack. A torrent of winds shifted around Idhren, clouding him in a mask of dark air.

  The Elementa of wind, Q thought.

  That was one of the tougher Elementa to deal with, mainly because it could manipulate any sort of air, and air was something that was almost always all around them.

  He focused his mind, feeling a pool of energy with him and imagining it flow into the air around his hands. A tinge of red emerged from his fingers, turning into a roaring five-foot flame on each of his hands. He spun around to gain momentum and released the fireballs straight at Idhren.

  The flaming blobs shot through the air, leaving behind a faint trail of red. They spun around Idhren, flowing through the fast winds that ran around him.

  “Is that all you can do?” he asked and pointed the staff at Q.

  The flames flew out of the vortex and headed straight at him. He dived to his side and the flames flew just over him, sizzling when they hit the walls.

  That’s a burn spot they’ll never get out, he thought.

  A series of soft thuds entered his ears. He jumped onto his feet and saw Idhren walking to him, using his staff as a makeshift walking stick. The winds around him had subsided, but Q knew Idhren could summon them whenever he wanted.

  He needed to find some other way to beat this guy. The room was pretty much useless at helping him out. Stone walls didn’t help at all since he didn’t control the Elementa of Earth.

  And the metal walls? The Elementa of metal was an insanely hard Elementa to control, let alone master. It took so much training to perfect that he hadn’t even tried controlling it.

  Wait. Metal, he thought.

  The floor was made of pure metal, and the ceiling was metal too. He threw his hand up at the ceiling above Idhren. The High Priest paid no attention and continued walking towards him, his staff glowing even brighter than before.

  He focused harder, trying to force a good chunk of life energy into his attack.

  C’mon, he thought. Don’t let me down now.

  A small spark flickered from the ceiling.

  Q smiled, Gotcha.

  He brought his hand to the ground, and a hundred bolts of red lightning shot between the two metal surfaces. All around the room a haze of red shone through the air, but smack in the spot where Idhren stood, was a sphere of calm. It was almost as though that region of the room were in a completely different dimension he couldn’t affect. />
  For a second, Q really thought Idhren had created his own force field. Who knew what these Druids could do?

  Then he realized what was actually going on. Idhren had pressurized the air around him to form a sort of high density shield of air. Air was one of the best insulators against electricity. Q’s could get past the normal insulation power of air, which is why the lightning was easy to create, but denser air had much greater insulation power, which meant it was harder for lightning to pass through it. Once the air got to a high enough density the insulation strength would be so great that lightning would never be able to get through it.

  And that’s exactly what had happened.

  Damn it, he thought.

  “You will need more than parlor tricks to beat me, boy,” Idhren said and with one simple swing of his staff, dissipated the entire storm of red lightning.

  Q was starting to doubt if he could ever beat this guy. That lightning storm was one of his strongest attacks, and this guy took less than a second to counter it.

  “You have yet to show me your true power,” Idhren pointed his staff at Q, and a blast of wind shot at him.

  Q instinctively threw his hands in front of him. A wall of translucent white rose from the floor a few yards away and isolated him and Idhren from each other. He looked through the translucent barrier and saw a wide smile across Idhren’s face.

  “A barrier from the Elementa of light,” the High Priest smiled.

  The orb at the top of his staff went from aquamarine to bright white. Loud thuds came from the white wall and small cracks started to form all over it.

  The wind, he thought.

  Idhren was concentrating the air into high density regions and ramming it into the wall, almost like a sledge hammer. Q tried to channel out more of his life energy to strengthen his barrier, but he knew he faced a far more fundamental problem - he had no clue how he’d put up that barrier. The key to mastering an Elementa was creating visual cues to help set up a wave-skill, and right now Q had no cues at all.

  The thudding stopped abruptly, and Idhren took a few steps back, swirling his staff around before pointing it to the ceiling.

  “Extieum,” he said.

  A funnel of wind shot out of the staff, like a raging tornado, and crashed through the barrier, shattering it into nothing. Q flew through the air once again, this time hitting the stone wall before slumping to the floor.

  Ugh, he thought.

  He’d been utterly defeated by the High Priest, even though the man had only used his Elementa of wind.

  Idhren calmly walked over to him, the soft thuds of his staff accompanying his steps, “That was a good battle, my boy,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you beat me,” Q said.

  It wasn’t the nicest thing to say but he was genuinely stupefied. He was pretty sure Elizabeth would have felt the same way if she’d found out about this. He’d just used three different Elementa, and lost to a guy who used just the Elementa of wind.

  “Do not misunderstand. You have potential greater than all the strongest warriors combined,” he said. “But you do not possess the skill set you need to tap into that potential. Your powers have been at their strongest when your emotions surged through you, yes?”

  Q nodded.

  “That is the sign of a lack of perfection in your wave-skills,” Idhren sighed and paused for a bit. “It’s decided then. You will be trained on your general wave-skill while focusing more on the great Elementa of light.”

  “Trained? By whom?”

  Idhren smiled, “I’ve heard the High Priest is a very good mentor.”

  ***

  2-5

  Q opened his eyes and the darkness of the night greeted him. He had to admit it felt scary to sleep all alone in a medieval like room. He couldn’t help but feel someone would try to assassinate him while he was asleep, and the fear only accelerated when he recalled the whole intruder situation that had happened earlier on.

  Unable to go back to sleep, he walked over to the room’s only window. It had a wide wooden frame, about six feet in width, with a smooth, high-quality texture on its surface. He looked out at the scenery before him. The dew on the grassy lawns below caught the moonlight and glittered like hidden jewels. The moon itself was not very visible, hiding behind the dark clouds that ran across the lower regions of the sky.

  It had been a hell of a day, from the Thanonian attack to the hot spring to the battle he had with Idhren. Interestingly though, Carlos seemed completely unsurprised that Idhren had beaten Q comfortably.

  Maybe he’d expected it all along, he thought.

  His brother often turned mysterious at times. He would refrain from giving him pieces of information until what he felt was the optimum moment. And the optimum moment was usually the last possible moment.

  Q was expecting his brother to tell him about some old age connection he had to Idhren, but his brother had been quiet on that aspect. It seemed very likely that the two of them had known each other for a long time, even though Idhren said Carlos hadn’t come to Armorica in the last five years.

  To him it seemed as though Idhren had been Carlos’ teacher, and that idea made even more sense since both of them had very good control over the Elementa of wind, with Idhren being way better than his brother.

  Q stared out into the open, letting the images of the night wash his thoughts away. The actual capital city was a beautiful place. The houses were simplistic and medieval, with stone walls and roofs. There were of course the larger two-story houses that were also made of stone but of a much more refined and polished kind.

  In between all this architecture, Q noticed a faint shadow pass the outer palace boundary, lingering for just a second before fading into the dark. He looked hard, squinting his eyes to get a better image, and made out an outline of a large group of people heading deeper into the housing region of the city. Honestly, he felt he’d just imagined the entire thing. The shadows in the darkness were almost invisible, and were probably just as easy to conjure up in one’s imagination.

  A loud shriek tore through the quiet night. Q gripped the windowsill, a chill passing down his spine. Another scream broke out, this one sounding farther away and a little dull, as though the person had been muffled.

  Q stiffened. Not my imagination, he thought.

  He rushed out of the room, somehow maneuvering through the dark corridor and reaching the room at the end. He didn’t bother knocking but barged in.

  A confused Idhren sat up in his bed, his hands reaching out for his staff. Q panicked at first and realized the High Priest couldn’t see anything through the darkness. To Idhren he could have been just about anything from a cookie-selling girl scout to a sword-wielding assassin.

  “Idhren something weird is going on,” Q said.

  “Ah it’s you,” he retracted his hand back from his staff. “What happened?”

  “I saw some shadows.”

  “Yes, sometimes we have people running around at night. I cannot for the love of me figure out what it is they do. Maybe parties.”

  “I heard screams.”

  Q could see Idhren’s shadow hunch forward, his hands on his face.

  “Screams you say?”

  “Yes. Heard them twice,” he said. “The second one further away than the first.”

  Idhren clapped his hands twice and four white lava lamps dully lit the room. He stood up, already dressed in his white gown, which apparently doubled as a nightgown.

  “I suggest you go rest,” he grabbed his staff and walked to the door. “I will look into this immediately.”

  And with that he left the room.

  Q didn’t think he could relax after what had just happened and so he just stayed in Idhren’s room, whiling away time by looking out his window. Soon he realized he was subconsciously trying to be on the lookout for any of those shadows.

  Idhren finally came back into the room, when the sun was just peeking over the horizon. A man stood next to him, his face a little ner
vous.

  “Intel spent the last four hours scouting around for information and leads.”

  It’s been four hours? Q thought. He hadn’t noticed the time go by at all. Rather, how had he been able to stare out a window for that long?

  “We’ve confirmed ten missing civilians.”

  “What?” his eyes went wide. “Then those screams were…”

  “The civilians. Yes. Many families report hearing screams from their loved ones’ rooms before finding out they’d vanished.”

  “Those shadow men are on a kidnapping spree.”

  “It seems so.”

  “I hope you found out the kidnappers identities?”

  “I believe so.”

  “It seems so uncharacteristic to think a civilian would do something of this sort,” Q said. “You guys seem so kind and peaceful.”

  “That statement still holds true.”

  “What?”

  “Our kind is neither morally nor skillfully enabled to perform something so disastrous. This was an outside job.”

  “Then…”

  Idhren nodded grimly, “The shadow men were not from Armorica,” he said. “They were Thanonians.”

  ***

  3-1

  Elizabeth sat in her room, staring at the room’s large doors. The waning sunlight strained through the lacy, transparent curtains that hung over the bed like a sort of canopy.

  It was nearly nightfall and Alicia still hadn’t come back. She’d bonded quite well with the pilot, and felt pretty bored when she wasn’t around. And so the entire day had passed in pure silence. She never left her room, other than for her meals, and no one came in.

  She’d kind of expected Carlos or Q to come by at least once, but nope, those two seemed to be on some other agenda for the time being.

  Should have gone to the hot spring, she thought.

  The last few rays of sunshine shone brighter than before, as though they were going down pridefully.

  And then she saw it.