The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5

by Dhayaa Anbajagane

Elizabeth turned her neck. She saw a beautiful woman floating in the air next to her. She was dressed in a glowing pearl-white gown, similar to those from ancient Greece. Her skin was radiant, almost like it was light itself. She wore gold bracelets on both her arms, both studded with jewels that seemed duller than the glow on her skin. Her long silver hair was braided with golden threads, and atop her head was a gold headband adorned with emeralds, rubies and sapphires.

  “Where…am…I,” Elizabeth croaked.

  The lady put her finger to Elizabeth’s lips, “You must not talk. You were drained of all your energy.”

  The lady’s words rekindled Elizabeth’s memory and images of an explosion surged through her mind. She sat up reflexively and her back was immediately struck with a sharp pain. She gasped for breath, taking in big puffs of air.

  The lady stroked Elizabeth’s back, her hands both forceful and gentle at the same time. The pain receded slowly until she could feel it no more.

  “I warned you,” the lady scolded. “Such actions cannot be encouraged in your condition.”

  Elizabeth could reply with nothing but silence. Her body was too weak for her to actually speak. The lady dipped her hand in the water and brought some up, giving it to Elizabeth to drink. She took a sip. It felt cool and refreshing at first, but then it turned nasty. She felt like hot coals were running down the sides of her body, scalding and tearing through her insides. She gritted her teeth over the intense pain she was feeling. It took all her effort to make sure she didn't lose consciousness.

  “Just what are you trying to do?!” Elizabeth yelled out, unable to bear the pain, and then shut her mouth immediately. She blinked in surprise. She was able to talk again. Whatever that lady had done, it had helped her gain a bit of her strength.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  The lady smiled, “Where do you think you are?” she asked.

  Elizabeth sat up, her body feeling strong and confident, and looked around. She could only see water for miles around. There was no land on the horizon. There were no other living beings around. Just her, the lady, and the water.

  “Just where am I?” she asked again, even more bewildered than before.

  “This is the Palace of Being.”

  “It can’t be,” her eyes widened. “I’ve been to the Palace of Being before. It was nothing like this.”

  “Of course this won’t look exactly like the Palace,” she said. “This is the Palace’s Fountain of Youth.”

  “Wait, you mean the Fountain of Youth?”

  “Not that mythical one from Earth’s legends,” she said, “This one is named so because its water has amazing healing properties. It cannot, however, make one immortal.”

  Pity, Elizabeth thought.

  The lady came a little closer to her and whispered into her ear, “Do you want to know what happened to Aliea?”

  Her face turned serious, “Show me,” she said.

  “Remember, it is not the prettiest of pictures,” the lady waved her hand and a small portal opened. It flushed with images of Aliea, images of everything that had happened at Aliea since the blast, images of everything that was happening right now. Elizabeth’s eyes widened, her breathing irregular and strained.

  She could see the Demon Riser. Everything else? It was just gone. All that was left was a bright glow of white with patches of red in some places. She realized that the white was the snow and the red was-

  Lava? her eyes widened.

  “What happened?” she asked. She could feel her heart rate increasing. Her blood pumped through her body faster and faster.

  “Your enemy released a ‘Zeus’ bomb onto your academy.”

  “A Zeus bomb?” she asked. “Some sort of massive explosive?”

  “Not exactly. The Zeus manipulates the atoms in the air to create all sorts of natural disasters. It may not necessarily create death but you can bank on it creating a lot of pain and torture.”

  Elizabeth looked closer at the portal. She could see the blazing winds carrying gallons of rain, tons of snow and ice. Out of nowhere a huge column of red emerged from the wind layer. Red hot lava. A monstrous water wave appeared out of thin air and cooled the lava, creating steam. When it had all cleared up, the lava stood as a pillar of ice, courtesy of the freezing wind. It seemed like the elements were playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. Elizabeth tried searching for people but it was no use. She couldn’t even see the ground, much less any survivors.

  “Do not worry,” the lady said. “Your friends are all right. Aliea is the only one that is on the brink of extinction.”

  Elizabeth lay down again. Her brain went haywire. What could she do to save her home? She was willing to put everything on the line if it meant she could save Aliea.

  “The question you should be asking is why all of this is happening to Aliea,” the lady said. “Not what you can do to save your academy.”

  Elizabeth stared at her. The lady smiled, “I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said.

  “So you can read minds as well,” she mumbled. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Remember. You must find out why all of this is happening,” the lady’s voice faded away. She floated away from Elizabeth, a calming smile on her face.

  “Who are you? What is your name?” Elizabeth yelled but the lady did not reply. She traveled further and further away with every moment that passed.

  The lady made a gesture with her hands, and darkness emerged from beneath the water. It swept Elizabeth into its void, leaving a million questions unanswered in her mind.

  ***

  Kai left Chris and the enemy’s battle camp. His ‘maintenance buddies’ led him outside to a bunch of solo-rider hovercraft, which looked a lot like flying snowmobiles, and boarded them.

  “You do know how to operate one right?” a guy asked him.

  “We’ll just lead the way and you follow,” another said. “I’m guessing you’ve never been to the mothership before?”

  “Never,” Kai shook his head.

  The two guys looked at each other and started laughing.

  “You’re really something, man,” he said.

  “Now,” a deep voice came from behind, and Kai quickly swiveled around.

  A cadet pointed a laser blaster dead-straight at his head. “Why don’t you tell us where you really are?” he smiled.

  Kai raised his hands instinctively. The first thing to do was to show them that he was surrendering. The rest he could plan later. All four of his ‘maintenance buddies’ surrounded him, and trained their laser blasters at his head.

  “Where are you really from?” the tallest one asked.

  Kai kept quiet, trying to find an answer from within his muddled thoughts.

  The cadet pushed him to the ground, “YOU ANSWER WHEN I ASK YOU A QUESTION.”

  “Forget about questioning him,” another said. “Just take him out.”

  Kai panicked. He needed to find a way out of this. He needed to help his friends. He needed to keep his promise to Chris.

  “Any last words?” the cadet smirked.

  “Yeah. Eat this!” Kai yelled but nothing happened.

  The boy desperately tried to control his laughter, “Should I wait for something to happen or-”

  A hovercraft exploded, knocking one of the guys unconscious.

  Kai smiled, “Looks like I can join in on the fun now,” he said.

  A cadet shot at him with a laser blaster. Kai dodged and just thrust his hand out, using his Elementa of Metal to shatter the gun to pieces.

  “My turn. Any last words?” Kai asked.

  “N-n-now listen, bud,” they pleaded. “We were just following orders, we’re just henchmen, trust me.”

  “Fine then. I’ll let you go, on one condition. If I ever find out that you told on me, or if I ever see your faces again, then that’s what’s going to happen,” he pointed to the unconscious guy.

  The boys nodded furiously, “We won’t do anything. You have our word,” they sa
id and ran off as fast as they could, carrying the unconscious cadet with them.

  Kai un-froze his face from that terrifying expression. Acting tough sure is difficult, he thought,

  He got onto the hovercraft.

  Now where is that mothership, he looked around.

  A large pointed top rose from the horizon. That had to be the mothership, no two ways about it. He headed off in that direction with his hovercraft on full throttle. A gust of wind hit him hard in the face, its drafts cold and heavy. He was confused. Winds weren’t possible in Aliea. The force field sealed off the possibility completely.

  A deafening blast sounded, summoning a terrible tremor. Kai was thrown to the ground and his hovercraft exploded. The blast deafened him, leaving his mind filled with nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. He looked at the glowing white light that raced towards him.

  Sorry, Chris, he thought as he watched the growing hemisphere of light. He rolled into a ball and lay on the cold surface, waiting for bright light to swallow him up.

  ***

  Kai found himself on a bed in a large room. He had no clue as to where he was, and he had no recollection of what had happened. All he remembered was a blast and an intense light engulfing him. He tried focusing his mind, trying to remember what had happened after that. A piercing pain cut through, making him groan in pain. He held his head and the pain slowly subdued.

  “Ah, I see you're up,” a voice said.

  A girl, about the same as he, walked up to the bed. She was quite tall and had short raven hair, her eyes matching the dark black of her locks. She wore rimless glasses, which, along with her long white overcoat, made her look like a researcher. Kai opened his mouth to talk but his voice was too soft for even him to hear.

  “Don’t try to speak,” she said. “Your wounds have not fully healed.”

  Kai looked at himself, and then he screeched. First of all, he realized he had no shirt on, which for a thin kid like him was a horror situation. Second, there was a long scar stretching from his neck all the way to his navel.

  “That’s the only wound I haven't treated yet,” she said. She joined her fingers on both hands and pointed them at Kai. A green channel flowed from them and into the scar, creeping around like a ghost.

  Kai felt like a hot white flame was burning him. He gripped his bedding, trying as hard as he could to bear the pain. When the pain finally receded, he looked at himself. The scar had vanished. His body felt more energetic, as though he were back to normal.

  “Okay then, get up, we’ve got work to do,” the girl said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re part of the maintenance crew right? That’s the infirmary.”

  “Wait, the maintenance crew is a healing team?” Kai asked, realizing that Chris would have fit right in with this bunch.

  “Maintenance to the cadets on board,” she raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  Kai could feel his heart in his throat. The girl was clearly suspicious of him. The question wasn’t if she would find out, it was when.

  “Dr. Trisha,” a guy entered the room. “We’ve got some serious cases on level 3.”

  “Very well,” she said while looking down at her desk. “I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll inform them,” the man said and left.

  Dr. Trisha looked at Kai, “I don’t think the rest of the crew is going to get here anytime soon,” she said. “So it’ll just be you and me.”

  Kai recalled frightening off the other maintenance guys when they had tried to threaten him.

  “We’d better run along then,” Trisha said.

  “Y-Yeah,” he stuttered.

  Trisha glanced at Kai again, but glance was an understatement. She looked like she was trying to pry into his soul. Thankfully she didn't ask him any questions. The door slid open and they stepped out into a circular hallway. Kai looked out of the nearest window. His brain went haywire, fear and happiness setting in, both at once.

  Why? One may ask. How can fear and happiness exist at once? Well here’s the answer. The good news was he was inside the mothership. He hadn't really thought about it before, but he must have been brought back into the mothership when they found him in the snow. He was finally right where he wanted to be, hence the happiness.

  The bad news was he could see the raging storm going on outside, and it didn’t take him too long to realize this storm wasn’t a regular one. It just seemed a little too destructive to be a natural disaster. And if it wasn’t a natural disaster, it didn’t take a genius to see what the storm was trying to achieve. Annihilating Aliea.

  “One heck of a storm,” Trisha said. “Too much destruction. A pity Jake wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Wait, Jake?” he asked.

  Must be a coincidence, he thought, Can’t be the same Jake.

  “The guy who’s leading this mission, don’t you remember?” she asked.

  Kai looked at her nervously. He thought he would blend in but he was getting blended instead.

  “Oh well. You must've had a minor concussion. It seems to have messed up your memories.”

  Kai sighed in relief. That was science, always stepping in to make a hypothetical conclusion, even if it was terribly inaccurate.

  “I’ll fix you up when we get back,” she said and walked to the main bridge.

  “So how exactly did I get here?” Kai asked, hoping he wouldn't arouse any suspicion.

  “We had the drones search for any of our men caught in the storm,” Trisha said “You’re the only one we found though.”

  Pangs of guilt sunk into Kai. I hope the other maintenance crew guys made it back safely, he thought.

  He and Trisha walked through another door into a huge room teeming with people. There was a lot of commotion going around, and people were walking all around the place, chatting and muttering non-stop. Kai saw four huge screens hang from the center of the ceiling, each one facing outward in a square-like pattern. Below the screens were high tech computers arranged in a larger square, each one with a cadet about Kai’s age working on it.

  “I thought we were supposed to heal some cadets,” Kai said.

  “The entry to the bay is through that door,” she pointed to a metal door in the corner of the room, “This, on the other hand, is the main deck.”

  Kai compared this huge room to the deck on the Orion. He liked that cozy space much better. He hoped the Orion had escaped the storm somehow. It should be fine since he had programmed it to orbit around Zygrade in case of dire emergencies, but that still didn’t shake off his uneasy feelings.

  Trisha walked to the end of the room and placed her hand on the scanner next to the door. It slid open with a hiss, letting them through into the main bay.

  “Dr. Trisha,” A stout man walked up to them. “We have a batch of cadets that are coming in for maintenance.”

  Trisha scoffed, “You treat the cadets like they’re things, Corporal,” she said.

  “You treat them how you want to, and I’ll treat them how I want to,” the man smirked. “Just fix them up.”

  “Very well,” she stormed out of the bay with Kai trying hard to keep pace with her. “What I would do to take these stupid people down a peg,” she muttered under his breath.

  Kai smiled. He had found a weak link on this ship.

  Line. Hit. Sinker.

  ***

  Chris didn’t have any time to worry that Kai had left her all on her own.

  The enemy General walked to the middle of the camp, “Cadets! Fall in line!” his voice blared.

  She picked herself up and scampered to join the file the cadets had formed. She noticed that there were close to five thousand of them. That was already much superior to the strength Aliea Academy had, and she didn’t even know if this was the only camp the enemy had stationed. It was highly likely there were more camps of the same kind. Aliea might be up against a force of twenty thousand for all she knew.

  She noticed that the metal sphere was
n't at camp anymore. She took confidence in the fact that no one had made a big deal out of it, and convinced herself it wasn’t a nuclear bomb. Kai must have been wrong. All that did though, was remind her that she couldn’t talk to Kai until the activity at the camp ceased. Her communication line to him was open at all times, but she decided to talk to him only when she could guarantee no one else would eavesdrop on them.

  “Forward march!” the General yelled and the formation walked up to the main door. “Open the doors!”

  The heavy doors slowly opened, and light, something that Chris had not seen for a long while now, entered the camp like a ray of hope. But instead of feeling buttery warmth on her skin, she felt cold piercing needles dig into it. She looked at her arms and saw small crystals of ice buried in it. She brushed them off with her hand, her fingers almost freezing from touching their coldness. But then it got worse.

  Gusts of wind, hail and rain burst into the camp, washing and blowing everything away. The scenery turned into a pure white canvas of snow. A huge blizzard had started right inside Aliea. Chris could feel her hands trembling, whether it was from fright or from the cold she didn't know. She couldn't understand how a storm like this got inside Aliea Academy in the first place. It wasn't possible. The force field was supposed to prevent things like this from ever happening.

  Did these people take the force field down? she wondered.

  “Close the doors! Close, close, close!” the General yelled.

  Chris couldn't help letting out a chuckle after watching the short stocky man run around in a fit. She had originally planned to ditch the camp and rendezvous with Kai back on the mothership but that seemed a pretty bad idea right now.

  “What’s with this weather?” A girl came over and asked Chris. She, like most of the other enemy cadets, was around the same age as her. Chris found it unsettling that people this young would sign up for such a cause, but she was pretty sure none of them even knew what they were fighting for in the first place.

  “You there?” The girl asked.

  Chris snapped back, “Yeah, I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

  “It’s nothing,” she shook her head. “I’m Lisara, by the way.”