Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son

by J B Cantwell

  I remembered now, sitting in a cave on the side of the Fire Mountains with Jade as she tried to explain that I had to give something of myself to the rocks in order for them to give back to me. That I had to pour myself into them. But, on that day, I poured only my misery and fears. And I received no response in return.

  She held the staff out to me, and for a moment my curiosity was stronger than my fear. I reached out for it, my heart hammering.

  I grasped it, and again it clung to my fist. I was unable to let go. I panicked and began shaking it back and forth, but it stuck firmly to my skin.

  “Find her,” the Watcher repeated. I turned towards her voice, relieved at hearing it, as I had begun to get lost in the swirl of confusion and pain.

  Find her.

  Jade’s eyes floated easily across my vision again. Instantly, the staff became smooth and slippery in my grip.

  “Now open your eyes,” she said.

  I hadn’t realized that they were closed. I opened them and saw the Watcher standing before me, the veil of Jade’s emerald eyes draped over my sight like colored lenses. The Watcher approached, and her own silvery orbs matched up with Jade’s like puzzle pieces.

  I let out a long, shaky breath. The staff felt good in my hand, but not as it had before. The heat of it had coursed through me on the other occasions I had held it, strange and gripping. Now, its weight had the effect of balancing me, as if I had been walking around these worlds on uneven ground the entire time, and now my feet stood suddenly level.

  I smiled.

  “It’s not what I thought,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Do you understand now?” she asked. “Do you see why you have come to be in this place with this task?”

  I leaned the staff against a tree, releasing it easily. Then I picked it up again, testing it. This time, the fear lasted only a quick moment before I was able to replace it with the hope I felt, however small, about our ability to succeed.

  But I didn’t understand. Not at all.

  “No,” I said. “If I am this person, this champion, then why—”

  “You are not the champion,” she said, her face growing serious. “You are not chosen by anyone or any family or any fate other than that you have made for yourself.”

  “But then, why me?” I played with the staff, letting it slip between my palms.

  “Because you are still here,” she said. “Because you have prevailed despite the evil that surrounds you.”

  “So this I my job just because I survived? It’s all just chance?” Part of me felt a little cheated, despite the fact that five minutes ago I had been plotting how I would escape back to Earth and never return.

  “It is not chance,” she said softly. “It is not chance that you have made the decisions you have made. That you have befriended those you have come across. That you have risked your life several times now to try to shift the course of time to suit your ideals. Another could have done it, perhaps.” She approached me and rested both of her hands on my shoulders. “But no other could have done it as you have done.”

  I felt the staff slip easily between my fingertips.

  “Then why did the staff come to me?” I asked. “How could I have possibly found the one tool powerful enough to succeed?”

  She laughed then, for the first time, and the sound startled me. It was low and clear. It was music.

  “Child, the staff did not come to you,” she said. “You came to it. And now that you have found the power that was within you this whole time, you can take that power where you wish, to the next instrument beyond this wood, if that is your desire.”

  I gripped the staff tightly, amazed at how just minutes before something that had brought me so much fear now brought such incredible comfort. It seemed to be the only thing anchoring me to the ground, more powerful than any gravity could ever be. Part of me felt that, if I were to let it go, I would float away into space. I had no desire to trade it for any other tool.

  “This branch,” she went on, “serves now as a bridge, spanning the great distance between who you are today and who you will become. But even the strongest bridge cannot keep you from jumping over the side, if you so desire. You will make your choices,” she said, reaching out and brushing the hair from my forehead. All traces of the pain in my head were gone. “And what will transpire, will transpire. I will watch.”

  “And what if I don’t come back?” I asked. “What if the worst happens?”

  She tilted her head, smiling gently.

  “The next age is coming. With or without you. Perhaps even without me.” She turned to go. “But someday, in human days, or in a thousand thousand millennia, the spinning top of all life will right itself once more. The only question is, who will be there to see it?”

  She did not wait for me to respond, and instead began making her way through the trees. With each step, her body sunk deeper into the swamp, until finally only the ringlet of vines she wore on her head remained, floating on the surface of the murky water.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I was going home.

  I was sorry to see the Watcher go, but no longer frightened. Maybe I would die this afternoon, and it would all be over much sooner than I ever could have expected. But she would witness it. She would see it all, and I wouldn’t be alone.

  I didn’t feel that I would abandon my task now. I understood that I had taken it on myself, that I had made the choice to press on and level the Fold. And the choice was what gave me more power than any staff could. Even if whatever comforts Earth could still offer were to tempt me to stay, I would return here to finish what I had started.

  The Watcher had already known the truth about me, that I had the strength to believe anything was possible, though she had let me discover it for myself. Where before I had been focused on home, now I understood that my journey wouldn’t be as simple as making it back to Earth. Everything mattered now, not just my childish desire to run home and hide. I remembered Kiron, back in his little cottage explaining the way travel through the planets in the Fold worked, and I realized that that scrunched up piece of paper he had used to illustrate space was what my life had now become. The page was me. The holes were the people and experiences that had made me who I was. And each location on the map of my life was crunched up tight in that crumpled ball, making unlikely neighbors of my mother and Jade. My father and Kiron. Earth and Pahana.

  This crazy journey wouldn’t end. Ever. Life had become more complicated than I had expected, but in a wonderful sort of way.

  I turned and looked out from the shade of the trees, suddenly hungry for more.

  The chaser hung heavy in my pocket, and a plan began to form in my head. I needed to get back to Stonemore. I had so much to do, and I felt oddly pressed for time.

  For a brief moment, an image of enormous ocean waves flashed in my mind and sunk my heart in my chest. I would never be able to make it across that ocean.

  One thing at a time.

  The bugs hummed loudly, but I wasn’t scared of them anymore. I stepped down closer to the edge of the water, the mud sucking at my boots as I neared it. I had come here on Pahana’s back, but no great animal awaited me to ride atop it across the swamp. I looked at the staff, wondering if simply possessing it would be enough to allow me to float. It would be a cold, wet trip back. Testing it, I placed the bottom tip of the wood below the water into the deep, soft mud.

  Instantly, the lilypads that covered the water’s surface gathered on the water before my feet. I stared at the path, unsure. Then, sticking out a tentative toe, I took a step onto the green.

  It held. My weight pressed down into the muck, as if sinking gently into a muddy bank, soft but solid. More lilypads gathered in front of me, and I took another step.

  My insides felt light with excitement.

  All at once, a path emerged before me as all that grew in the depths of the murky water rose to form a bridge on the surface. I wiped the thin sheen of sweat from my forehead, and
took a few more steps. Once ten feet from the bank, I stopped and looked back. From here, the little dwelling was invisible, hidden by the tangle of trees that made up its walls. It was, I thought, the safest place I had been since arriving in the Fold. Maybe even the safest place I had ever been. And now the vision of it melted away, camouflaged completely by the hub of life that surrounded it, and I doubted that, after I left this place, I would ever find it again.

  My feet sunk just deep enough into the water to wet the tops of my boots. I gave a little jump, and the water splashed around the edges of the walkway. But it held. I felt oddly certain that the thin sheet of plants would have held my weight if I had been as big as an elephant.

  I turned away from the tiny island that had been my respite these past few hours and began the walk out of the swamp.

  This time as I made my way slowly through the place, I saw the life that surrounded me. Joining in the chorus of the humming insects, birds gradually let themselves be seen from the tree branches. Off to one side, two giant turtles basked in the sunlight, soaking in the heat of the morning. I concentrated on the water, wary of swimming beasts hidden in the depths below my feet, but except for a long, thin river snake, no other water life appeared. At first sight, it surprised me; my more recent experiences with snakes me expecting the thing to emerge from the water, enormous and lethal. But as my breathing slowed, it swam away, slipping through the water effortlessly.

  Gradually, the vegetation beneath me changed. First, the lilypads were slowly replaced by long, thin reeds, woven together like the net of a basket. I imagined them stretching up towards the surface to hold me, driven by the power of the wood as it touched the water. Driven by me. I followed the path without much further thought, leaving it to trust that I would eventually reach solid ground again.

  But my way back had me crossing an ocean, not a valley. And the path I had inadvertently created had steered me not back towards the mountains of Riverstone, but to the sea. Over the course of the morning, the swamp gradually became stream, the stream river, and finally it turned one last corner and I saw the waves of the ocean beating methodically against the shore, pushing in against the current of the river.

  I stopped, suddenly frightened at the sight of the surf up ahead. The water of the river flowed towards the great expanse of ocean, pushing past me as if I were no more than a boulder plunked down into the middle of its path. I lifted one boot, testing the strength of the bridge again, unsure. Would it hold atop those violent waves? I had no other way. I pushed on until I stood at the edge of where the river met the sea.

  Beyond, the waves raged. I told myself that I could just run right back if it got too rough, and watched as the moss changed to seaweed as I took my first tentative steps out onto the ocean. The waves pushed past me just as the water in the river had. But I was protected from the currents and the wind, as if I carried with me a bubble of calm, gliding along the surface of the water.

  But I was anything but calm. Behind me, the waves picked up again, blocking out my view of the shore. I tried desperately to steady my breathing as I moved farther and farther away from the safety of solid ground.

  I had only two choices. Go back to the island, or keep moving forward.

  I imagined the Watcher, somehow seeing my trial and fear from the depths of the swamp, calmly observing that which she was already expecting to happen.

  With each step I took, the waves increased in size, became more violent. If the sun were not shining directly overhead, I would have thought a storm was hovering over the spot. The surf was more intense than anything I had ever witnessed, battering the sides of my bubble as if determined to burst it.

  For hours I walked, only my feet getting wet from the water, the sweat running down my cheeks from the burning sun. After a time, the hours began to blur together. I became tired, but didn’t dare stop moving. I wasn’t sure that, if I had prepared myself in some way, things would have been better. But I had prepared myself in no way at all. When I had set out that morning, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I would be crossing the ocean tonight.

  And day did become night. The stars shone down overhead and the staff slipped back and forth between my fingers, and I was steadied along my uneven path across. The waves still roared on every side, relentless, their angry moans unmuffled by my strange, clear shelter. The plants that kept me afloat slipped away into the water as I passed, so that each step I took moved my tiny island further and further away from that castle. From her.

  I thought of home.

  My stomach was still full from the strange elixir the Watcher had given me, but I found myself thinking of pancakes. My mouth filled with saliva as I imagined my mother standing over the pan, and before me a tall stack of the fluffy things, dripping with syrup too sweet for this world. Maybe Grandma would be there, too, and the three of us would sit at her old kitchen table. We would gaze out the window between bites, savoring the comfort and joy of filling our bellies to the top while the world roared outside.

  This was what I wanted to do when I got back to Earth. Before I set out again. Before I left them again, maybe forever. I became lost in the fantasy, and soon I was dreaming, each step I took making me less aware of the strange reality I was walking through. The ocean around me, the seaweed at my feet, disappeared. The feeling of the staff in my grip became a fork in my fingers, and I was gone.

  Yellow light filtered in through the tattered farmhouse curtains, dust motes dancing in the hazy beam.

  She sat across the table from me, smiling at me as though I had never left.

  Mom.

  Her hand reached towards me and I put mine into it. Warmth flooded through me at her touch. I was safe. All of my fear gave way to trust. She spoke, but I heard no sound. I wanted to hear, but the only sound was the gentle rustle of wind through the leaves outside, the creaking of the house as it settled around us, the sounds of the farm as though we weren’t there at all.

  My father walked through the front door silently. He came to the table, placing a hand on my shoulder. I started and looked up at him, then gaped as he sat down next to me. He didn’t belong in this place, here in my fantasy. Something was wrong.

  Grandma offered him a plate, but he refused it. My mother placed her hand on his arm, too, speaking in words that hung silent in the air, unheard by us all as though we were in separate rooms.

  But he ignored them both, staring at me with immediate, urgent eyes. I didn’t want to meet those eyes, didn’t want him here. But something was different in them. I stared, trying to figure out what the change was.

  He opened his mouth, speaking only to me. But again, no sound. I moved in closer, dropping my fork, dropping my mother’s hand, thinking that maybe if I just got near enough to him I would be able to hear. Why had he come? He leaned in close, cupping both hands around my ear as he spoke into it. His shortly stubbly whiskers scratched the side of my face.

  “Run.”

  It was almost a whisper.

  I sat back, confused. His clear eyes stared back at me. Lucid. Sane.

  Then, the bomb went off right at the dining table, the house, my dad, my mom and grandma, everything burst apart, pushed away from me. A million scraps of what had been my life ejected from the spot where I sat. Tiny pieces of my world caught the wind and blew away like confetti. Obliterated. My hair blew in a stiff wind. I stood up from the chair, which had remained, stuck now in the acidic mud where the house had once stood.

  I turned around and around in a circle, searching for the cause. But my family was already blowing away, now part of the dried bits of paper that were already headed for the horizon.

  Then the rain came.

  The first drop hit my cheek. Then another drop on my arm. The tip of my ear. My head. My flesh sizzled, and I opened my mouth to scream.

  I ran.

  I had to get to shelter. But I couldn’t move at the speed I had become accustomed to. Instead, the weak, limp gait of my body back on Earth was the one that propelled
me forward. Quickly, my heart started beating too hard, my breath started catching in my throat and my chest contracted painfully. I felt the sting of the rain on my exposed arms and neck. The open expanse of abandoned farmland lay before me in every direction, and the little vegetation that had grown since the last rain shriveled and died on the stalk as I staggered past.

  Beside me, a great, armored boot as long as my arm splattered the mud. Rough spikes stuck out of every side, making a weapon out of each inch of the metal. I craned my neck back and saw the beast hovering above me.

  He seemed to be part air, part human, part monster. Black smoke swirled around his form, which towered twenty feet above. On his long, dark face, flickers of a man’s face, hollow and gray, fought for control. Eyes rimmed red with malice darted across the landscape, searching like a hunter for prey he couldn’t see. For me.

  He doesn’t see me.

  I turned, running faster. But my feet were sticking in the mud now, and there was nowhere for me to go. None of the old farmhouses that used to dot the countryside still stood, long since eaten away by the force of the corrupted elements. The flesh of my arms burned red, and small blisters began to form with every new, stinging drop.

  I pulled my feet out of my boots, sinking fast now into the earth, and ran barefoot across the fields. Behind me the sound of the Corentin’s pursuit raged, rattling the inside of my skull. I ran like this for hours, days, or maybe only moments. He stayed right behind me the whole time, forever searching, smelling the air like a wild animal, his huge, muscled arms occasionally swiping at the space my body had occupied two steps before. I couldn’t stop. There was no rest.

  Then, suddenly, he was gone. The wind stopped, the rain disappeared, and the hot breath of his pursuit was no longer crawling down the back of my neck.

  I slowed, clutching at my chest, heaving, crying out in sobs too dry for tears. The fields were suddenly as empty as they had been when I had started my flight. I felt a strange tingling sensation on my skin and, looking down, saw that the burn marks from the rain were disappearing. Thin wisps of poison slowly leached from my body, evaporating into the hot summer air, infecting it. For a fraction of a second, relief flooded me as the agony was slowly taken away.