The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5

by Dhayaa Anbajagane

  “Of course, he’s way better than me,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t get us down onto Drakon. Now go sit down, and I’ll land this thing.”

  It took another half hour for Taylor to completely land on Drakon. It should have taken much less time, but she accidentally overshot the ship on her first try, passing right by the planet instead of getting caught in its orbit. Luckily she didn’t mess up too much for them to get pulled in by any of the massive celestial bodies.

  Q couldn’t help grinning in the situation. There was just so much irony between what Taylor had said and what she had done.

  “Shut up,” she mumbled when she noticed the look on his face.

  “It’s okay, Taylor,” he chuckled. “These things happen to everybody.”

  A dark aura started to form around her, “One more word out of you and-”

  “Yes ma’am!” Q saluted and stood still. Taylor could get really, really scary when she did that. He wondered if it was his inborn battle instinct speaking out whenever he saw the darkness and felt fear. Taylor’s Elementa of Darkness seemed like a direct contradiction to his rare Elementa of Light. Carlos said there wasn’t anything of that sort though, and he was usually right about such things.

  Ten minutes later the ship had breached into Drakon’s atmosphere that was filled with nothing but dark storm clouds, and headed down to the surface. Q looked at the holographic screen and noticed the thick fog all around them. Sudden flashes of lightning lit up the ground below. Loud claps of thunder shook the ship with every wave of sound, and the downpour of rain played a musical orchestra with its water-on-metal sounds.

  With each bolt of lightning Q gained enough light to scan more of the surface. A small oval-shaped city lay before them, and a towering castle stood at the very center. The castle had two pillars at either end, rising up about five hundred feet off the ground, and the central one rose to twice that height. They were all circular, starting off from a wide base and tapering off into a sharp point at the very top.

  “That’s the Palace of Darkness,” Taylor said.

  “Wow.” That was all that Q could say in the face of such a domineering structure. He could feel a sense of fear grasp him when he looked at the building. It was the same feeling he got when he saw Taylor surrounded by her signature dark aura.

  Maybe everything related to the Dark Knights is supposed to cause fear, he thought.

  The closer the ship got to the surface, the more Q could see of the city itself. The whole place was dark. The stone and metal buildings around the castle were all painted in colors that were only very subtly distinguishable from blackness of the night sky.

  All of a sudden, a brilliant flash of lightning shot right at the holographic screen and the feed cut off. The ship’s lights died down and left them with darkness.

  Q’s body moved involuntarily. He stretched out his hand and summoned his life energy. He imagined it flowing out of his fingers and collecting into a sphere above his palm. A small stream of light flowed out his fingertips, forming a spherical lamp in his hand and lighting up the cockpit.

  The ship’s metal front split into two and slid away to reveal a glass viewscreen. Q was taken aback for a second because he had always thought transport ships had fronts made of solid metal. This ship though clearly had a viewscreen that lay hidden inside a thin gap in the metal.

  Kai must have added a viewscreen, he realized. His mind refocused onto the matter at hand.

  “What just happened?” Chris asked.

  “Lightning bolt hit the ship,” Taylor cursed.

  “What?” Q’s eyes widened. “Does that mean-”

  “Yup, the engines are out.”

  Q’s mind stayed calm, and he tried to think rationally without letting the fear get to him. A ship without an engine wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Frankly, it was much worse.

  “How far up are we from the surface?” he asked.

  “About a mile,” she said. “I’m putting us in a glide right now, but we’re still going to pick up too much speed to actually be able to land.”

  Q turned to Chris, “You specialize in the Elementa of Wind right?” he asked. “Can you try to create an updraft below the ship and slow us down?”

  She shook her head, “The storm surrounding us is too violent for me to use my Elementa properly. The air pressure around the ship is in a very delicate balance. Any external prodding might make it tip and the unstable pressure could create a twister.”

  “This ship can’t handle a twister,” Taylor said.

  “Exactly,” Chris replied.

  “Okay here’s an idea,” Q said. “I can create energy suits for all of us with my Elementa of Light. We can use those to leave the ship and safely glide ourselves down to the ground.”

  “The ship will land in the middle of the city if we abandon it. We can’t do that.”

  “We could program it to land outside the city.”

  “We’ve lost all controls after the lightning bolt hit,” Taylor said. “All systems are down. We can’t even contact anyone.”

  “Well,” Q said. “There’s only one option left.”

  “What?”

  He pulled Taylor out of her seat and sat down, “I’m piloting now,” he said.

  “What? But the systems are down.”

  “I don’t need the systems,” he threw his hand into the air and focused, feeling every little bit of life energy inside him.

  “Q, there’s only a little more than a thousand feet left to the surface.”

  “Perfect,” he said. He felt his body become hotter, and his joints turn rigid. His life energy was overloading him.

  All ready, he thought. He concentrated and let his energy out in one short instant. He felt it rush out of him like a river. But the air around them remained exactly the same; stormy and dark.

  “Ummm, Q?” Taylor asked. “What are you doing?”

  A massive tunnel of white formed around the ship and extended, connecting it directly to the central tower of the Palace of Darkness.

  “You made that with your Elementa of Light?”

  Q nodded, “I’ve gotten pretty good at it now.”

  The ship shook as the tunnel restricted its movement, forcing it to change course and follow the tunnel’s path instead,

  Taylor immediately picked up on what the course change meant. “Oh my god,” she gasped. “We’re going to crash into the tower.”

  Q nodded.

  She looked at him, “Stop it. Now.”

  “Too late.”

  They were all thrown about as the ship crashed through the tower’s stone walls and halted with a screech. Q wasted no time in picking himself up and looking around at the damage. Surprisingly most of the craft had stood the crash. Only the hatch door had been completely ripped off.

  Kai really outdid himself, he thought. There was no way a regular transport ship would have suffered that little damage from such a crash. Kai must have reinforced the entire ship’s body with high level tech.

  Q walked out and stepped onto cold stone floors. He immediately heard a high-pitched noise ring through the air. Five knights in dark armor activated their laser blasters and closed in on him, a fear-instilling, dark aura sifting through the air around them, their weapons aimed right for his head.

  He sighed, “Boy, I really didn’t think this through.”

  ***

  1-4

  Taylor heard voices coming from outside the ship.

  “State your purpose, cadet!”

  She checked her Dark Knight battle armor and quickly made her way outside. She walked up to Q, scanning the area around her as she did so.

  This is just a hallway, she sighed. She had been worried Q would crash the ship into the main throne room. The last thing she wanted was to worsen things between her and the Empress. Things were already bad enough as they were.

  “Dark Knight, are you okay?” a Knight asked her.

  He probably thinks I was being held hostage, she thought
.

  She stood in front of Q, between him and the Knights’ weapons. “Stand down,” she said, her battle armor amplifying her voice into a powerful burst of sound. “He’s with me. He is not the enemy.”

  The Knights hesitated a bit, their guns still trained right at her.

  Need more credibility, she realized.

  “Stand down, Knights,” a voice boomed through the air, a voice that Taylor knew all too well.

  A girl, accompanied by two guards, walked out into the hallway, from behind the Knights. She wore black silk robes with no sleeves, similar to the sleeveless gowns of the ancient Greeks, only hers seemed like they had been woven completely out of darkness. She had long black hair that fell all the way to her calves, and her moon-white skin radiated a warm glow. She looked at everyone with her cold, dark eyes, her hand twisting the obsidian-shaded ring on her finger.

  “Your Highness,” the Knights quickly went down on one knee, and Taylor did the same.

  “Rise,” the Dark Knight Empress said as she made her way towards Taylor and Q. “I trust you have brought a healer with you?”

  “Here,” Chris walked out the ship, armed in her leaf-green, Tinkerbell-like battle armor.

  “Glad to see that all of you made it safely.”

  Q glanced over at the tattered ship. “Yeah, safely,” he chuckled.

  “The storms on Drakon do get quite turbulent at times,” the Empress said.

  “I’ll say, we would have crashed into the city if I hadn’t used my Elementa of Light to change our course.”

  The Empress looked confused, “The city is completely uninhabited.”

  “What?” now Taylor was confused. “When did that happen?”

  “A lot has changed since you left, Dark Knight,” she said.

  Taylor remained silent.

  “We shall go somewhere where we can talk,” the Empress said. “There is much to discuss,” she turned to Chris. “Especially for you, healer.”

  Taylor deactivated her helmet, lifting it off of her head and taking in a breath of fresh air.

  A collective ring of gasps went around all the Dark Knights.

  “The Night Witch!” they all yelled.

  Oh god, Taylor thought.

  “We’d better get moving quickly,” the Empress said quietly, and led them back into the hallway she had come out from. Her two guards scurried beside her as she swiftly walked across the stone floors.

  Q walked close to Taylor, “What was that all about?” he asked. “A Night Witch?”

  Taylor sighed, “It’s a complicated story.”

  He raised an eyebrow but kept quiet.

  The Empress walked down a few floors and led them into a vast hall. A lonely fireplace blazed at the end of the room, shrouding a small region in its light. A large stone roundtable sat near the fireplace, its base fixed to the ground. The Empress clapped twice and torch fires on the walls light up.

  “Come,” she said and sat herself at the table, right next to the fireplace.

  Taylor sat down next to the Empress, while Q and Chris sat on the opposite side. The two guards remained at the entrance, their backs to the table.

  “So umm, Madam Empress, why exactly have you called us here?” Q asked.

  “Please. Call me Andrea,” she said, her look much colder than her voice. “And to answer your question. The Dark Knights have a certain situation that we haven’t been able to solve. Our healers are not capable of the task.”

  “Someone’s been injured?” Taylor asked, making the obvious connection.

  Andrea hesitated, “I would not go as far as to say that. We are unsure of what has happened at the moment.”

  “I’m guessing this is a very high ranking Dark Knight?” she asked.

  The Empress nodded, “It’s Razy.”

  Razy, Taylor clenched her fists. Of all the pompous idiots in the world, it just had to be Razy.

  “I know you and he weren’t on the best of terms in the past.”

  “That’s an understatement,” she muttered.

  “Okay, so what’s wrong with this Razy?” Chris interjected, a little curious to know what she had been called in for.

  “It’s a little hard to explain. It would be easier to show you. Will that be fine?”

  Chris nodded.

  “Guards!” Andrea called out. The two men at the door turned around, their backs straight at attention. “Ask someone from the medical chamber to report here immediately,” she said. “Tell them the Empress requests clearance to visit the patient.”

  The Empress herself needs clearance? Taylor wondered. Just what is wrong with Razy?

  “Yes, your highness,” one of them bowed and trotted off while the other maintained his position right at the entrance. Silence took over the proceedings until Q decided to break it with one of his slightly off-topic questions.

  “So is the Palace of Darkness the only occupied building on all of Drakon?”

  A small smile of amusement curled onto Andrea’s lips, “We are not the only inhabited tower on Drakon,” she said. “This city used to be packed with Dark Knights but a few years ago we decided to branch out our forces across Drakon. Right now there are thousands of Dark Knight outstations all over the planet. The Palace of Darkness is just the main control center.”

  “Well for a main control center your towers sure are vulnerable. I was frankly surprised to find there was no force field around the place.”

  The smile dropped back to her usually cold face, “We had deactivated the force field to allow your ship to land next to the Palace,” she said. “However, we did not expect you to crash straight into it instead.”

  “Umm…sorry about that.”

  “Your Highness,” a well-built man strode in. He took off his helmet, revealing a dark skinned face and sharp cheekbones. His eyes were a void-like black, and his salt and pepper colored hair was the only sign of his age. An aura of confidence emanated from him as he walked across the room.

  Taylor felt like she had seen the man somewhere else before and yet she couldn’t put a finger on why or where.

  “Commander Reagan,” the Empress said. “Thank you for coming.”

  Chris’ eyes immediately widened. She jumped out of her seat and turned around to face him.

  Commander Reagan’s face showed surprise at seeing Chris, but then quickly shifted back to its initial emotionless expression. “Ah, Christina,” he said in monotone. “I did not expect to see you here.”

  Chris looked right at the man and smiled, not a smile of happiness, but one of pure melancholy.

  “Hello, father.”

  ***

  1-5

  Taylor didn’t know how to react.

  Pieces of the puzzle were finally snapping into place. Commander Reagan seemed familiar to her because his face resembled Chris’. Chris had been adamant about coming on this mission because she‘d wanted to see her father.

  To be perfectly honest though, the Commander didn’t seem to be as eager to meet his daughter.

  He stood there staring at Chris for a few seconds and diverted his gaze to the Empress. “The medical team is ready, your Highness,” he said. “We can go visit the patient.”

  “Very well,” Andrea stood up. “Come along then.”

  Taylor was in a fix. It was obvious that Chris really wanted to talk to her father, and it was also obvious that her father didn’t want to. She wanted to help Chris out but at the same time she knew they had to get going.

  “Are you coming or what?” Q asked from the entrance, his face unfazed by what had just happened.

  I’m going to have to let this go for the moment, Taylor thought. She took Chris’ hand, “C’mon, we have to go.” she said and led her away. They followed the Commander into an elevator and went down. A minute or so passed and they were still sinking.

  “Where exactly is this medical facility?” Q asked.

  “It’s deep underground,” Commander Reagan said.

  Weird choice of location, Ta
ylor thought. One earthquake could potentially wipe out the whole facility. Of course, the Dark Knights would always claim that the facility was indestructible. But Taylor had seen far too many indestructible things being destroyed to actually believe in the validity of that term anymore.

  The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. A wide, metal-lined corridor extended in front of them. They stepped into its emptiness, becoming a part of the silence between the silvery walls.

  “This the infirmary?” Taylor asked, a fair bit of scepticism in her voice.

  “We’re twenty floors beneath the surface,” the Empress said. “The rest of the infirmary is in the nineteen floors above us. This floor is specifically for high level patients only.”

  Just what has happened to Razy? Taylor wondered.

  “Open shutters,” Commander Reagan said.

  “Opening,” a robotic feminine voice resonated through the walls.

  A mechanical hiss went through the air and smoke rose from the wall to their right. The whole metal structure retracted back up into the ceiling, revealing a thick wall of glass behind it. A room lay on the other side of the transparent wall. It was completely white, with glaring bright lights shining from the ceiling. A wide table stood in the center, and a boy lay on it.

  No.

  He was strapped to it.

  Taylor caught a familiar glimpse of red hair and she immediately knew who he was. “Razy,” she mumbled.

  His arms and legs were secured to the table, and he lay completely still, silent as the desert winds. Circles of orange light glowed around his wrists and ankles, holding him down.

  They used energy cuffs, Taylor thought. Energy cuffs were like force fields. They were made of raw energy and were impossible to break through with physical strength alone.

  “Where are all the Dark Knight healers?” Q asked.

  “They are all resting,” the Commander said. “This boy’s condition has been driving them to exhaustion for the past two weeks. Even when we were told you would come to aid us, the healers still had to work around the clock just to make sure Razy didn’t lose his life before you arrived.”