Valea frowned. “But something went wrong.”
“Yes, The Shade sought the artifact to unmake his curse. He believed it would unmake anything, but suspected trouble. So, Sarcos, eager to be free of his own troubles, went first...and discovered that time is forever changing.”
She blinked. “What does that mean?” The enchantress considered for a moment. “Is he—do you mean that Sarcos himself is ‘forever changing’?”
The Elem’s silence was their answer.
Valea shuddered. If she understood them, Scaros had ended up a creature constantly shifting of form against his will. She could not imagine that happening without much agony involved, magic not necessarily removing pain from the equation. From what the Elem said, the enchantress also gathered it had been millennia since this had happened. Millennia of suffering and pain that Sarcos surely also blamed on Shade.
But this could not simply be about vengeance. “Sarcos is trying to unmake his own curse, isn’t he? He needs Shade for that, doesn’t he?”
“There is no magic like the Shade. He is neither Vraad, human, drake, or founder. Yet, he is all, also. It was his power that helped stir the entire mechanism to life, but at too great expense...until Sarcos deciphered more of the book.”
“The book...” Valea had tried to remain as patient as she could, but her concern for Gerrod would now not allow her to wait anymore. Still, after what she had heard, the book might be the very thing she needed to save him.
Ignoring the Elem, the enchantress rushed to the ancient tome. As she reached it, she began to sense what felt like more than one other presence and all of them very old. Old as in of the founders.
Without the least care for the age or power of the artifact, Valea flipped book open.
Immediately, voices speaking in what seemed more than one odd language echoed around her. She braced herself and stared at the first pages. There, the peculiar script she had seen on a few other items greeted her.
The idea of having to decipher the script was a daunting one, an impossible one, in fact. However, Valea did not expect to have to do that. “Tell me what it says.”
“It is not what it says, but what it does,” the foremost Elem murmured. “For so very long, Sarcos did not understand that. Even the Shade did not.”
She arched her brow. “And you didn’t show them?”
The Elem were noticeably silent. Then, the foremost answered, “We were not then.”
“‘Not then?’” Valea thought for a moment. “You aren’t from this time. You’re from the past.”
The lead Elem’s leaf face shook. “When the Shade and Sarcos succeeded in partly activating the obelisk, they began the loop. It is our nature to follow the currents of the spell from beginning to end, to ensure that it fulfilled its purpose. We could be when the creators could not. The loop only magnified that ability, putting us both outside and inside time...within the loop itself.”
“You could travel from one end of the time loop to the other and back,” Valea said after some hesitation. Things of pure magic, they were not in the normal sense alive and thus not entirely subject to the rigors of what to her had to be the most stressing gathering of forces. “You were created by the founders and so you existed when they first arranged this spell, am I correct? But when Shade and Sarcos activated it here, you were able to come to this time as well...the end of the loop, so to speak.”
“Yes,” the lead Elem remarked. “With each return of the Shade, the loop stretches that much more forward. It is...a change, at least.”
The enchantress noted the almost wistful tone, but said nothing. There was still something they were not telling her, but Valea knew she had to leave the question of just what for later. “So will you show me how to read it?”
“You must not read. You must listen. Set your hands upon the pages...and listen. Sarcos and the Shade did not like to listen, which is why they took so long to understand...and why we mistakenly believed they would not be such a danger.”
Valea barely paid attention, her hands already gracefully sliding over the two pages. Although the Elem had not said to do so, she shut her eyes and concentrated.
The whispers grew audible. The enchantress felt a moment of concern when she realized that she did not understand the language, yet the Elem had not made mention of any difficulty in that regard. Valea chose to try to be patient.
The foreign words continued to pour into her ears and into her mind.
Then, she began to see images.
She also began to understand.
With a gasp, the enchantress pulled back. She turned on the Elem.
“You should have warned me,” Valea muttered bitterly. “You should have.”
“It could not be helped,” returned the lead Elem. “You had to see it. Only you.”
“I understand...but I resent being tricked.”
“We...had no choice.”
Valea exhaled. “No...they don’t like to allow that, do they?”
There was, of course, no answer from the Elem. Like the phoenix she had met protecting another founder creation, they had been given a duty that they had to fulfill.
And yet...the phoenix had discovered a way around its ancient masters’ madness. It still bothered her that the Elem, who seemed so clever, had not.
“Where do we go, then?”
“Not ‘where’,” the four Elem said together. “But ‘when’.”
Valea exhaled. “Of course. ‘When’.” The exasperated enchantress eyed the obelisk. “But first...will it hurt?”
Once more, the Elem did not answer...which was answer enough for Valea, unfortunately.
IX
Still shaken, Valea appeared a few moments later on the ridge. Ignoring the ever-present purple tinge to this realm, she stared below at the vast piles of old rubble, watching and waiting for the moment. One hand briefly touched the pouch at her side, the pouch where she usually kept items of use to her craft.
“Where are they?”
“Soon,” responded the lead Elem. Then, “There.”
She beheld herself and a single Elem. The lead Elem, she knew.
“Now. Before the loop begins,” suggested the guardian.
They materialized next to her other self. Her earlier self. Valea had already reached into her pouch and removed the small wand she had pulled from the obelisk. With it, she tapped her other self’s shoulder.
The earlier version froze.
The Elem next to the earlier version eyed the newcomers. “So, it will finally happen.”
“Yes,” his later version commented.
“Very well. I will return her to the human city so that it can begin as it must.” The leaves that made up the earlier Elem shivered. “They already sense the changes. This will verify their suspicions.”
“Yes. We must act quickly and decisively.”
Valea did not have to ask who they meant. With their tremendous power, the founders would feel the change in their spell even though for Valea this was all taking place in her past. “Please take her away before I regret this.”
Without another word, the earlier version of the lead Elem stole her other self away.
Valea fought back her unease at what she had done. In one brief but powerful rush, the book had given her the concept the founders had used to make this madness all begin. They had purposely removed certain elements—and certain members of their own kind—from their proper place in time. That had left an opening, for lack of a better word, in time that they had used to make their spell be able to reach back and steal power from their past selves. Valea had not understood exactly all the aspects of it, but that was enough. By taking her earlier self out and replacing her with her later self, Valea and the Elem created a new uncertainty—a weakness, one might say—in the loop that might allow them to correct what Sarcos and Shade had long ag
o started and what Sarcos had now apparently aggravated dangerously in his quest to his torment.
Valea had briefly had sympathy for the dragon man, but seeing the danger he caused and his disregard for all else had lessened that sympathy tremendously. What mattered now was not only rescuing Gerrod and herself, but making certain that what Sarcos had managed would not leak out into the current world.
If it was not too late to stop that already.
“You must be innocence until the final moment,” the lead Elem reminded her. “Then and only then may we reverse what has been done.”
“I understand.” She did not like any of it, but she understood. At least, the enchantress thought so.
With the four guardians accompanying her, the enchantress wended her way through the rubble until they came in sight of Gerrod—as Shade—and Sarcos.
It was time. Valea did as her previous existence had by shouting Gerrod’s name. Both males turned as expected and the scene played out, with the lead Elem repeating what his earlier self had done.
And then Sarcos reached for the pole.
It took all her will to not transport herself to the dragon man and try to prevent him from activating the device. Neither Sarcos nor Gerrod knew that they were already in part of the time spell, that even Gordag-Ai existed in it. The kingdom would move on after this moment, but not the two males nor her. Instead—
The world twisted around. Valea clutched the wand tight.
Courage, whispered that part of Gerrod that had been instilled in the obelisk. Now, it dwelled in the wand, the key Sarcos had used to start the spell. He had left the wand in the mistaken belief that it had to remain in the obelisk, something about which the Elem had never corrected him. Had Sarcos been a founder or even directly of their blood, the Elem would have likely been forced to alert him to his error. Now, that worked in their favor.
The world finally settled again. Valea knew that she and the others were now far, far in the past. She had landed where her earlier self had. Of the four Elem, only the lead one remained. The others had work to do.
“It must be in the tower that it happens,” the Elem reminded her.
“I know. What about them?” The enchantress did not refer to Gerrod or Sarcos.
“The masters...we will do what we can.” It was as near to rebellion as the Elem had come thus far. From what Valea had gleaned, they had managed to convince themselves—or pretend to, at least—that this was for the overall good of their creators’ intentions.
She nodded. “I sense him. Go.”
The last Elem vanished. Once more, though, Valea had the feeling that the guardians were keeping something from her. She hoped she would figure it out.
Slipping the wand back into the pouch, Valea lay down as if unconscious. She recalled how Gerrod had previously come to her after their journey to the past and how his murky features had initially horrified her. The enchantress had little doubt that she could repeat her expression; the simple knowledge that here the curse held sway over the warlock was enough to still shake her. It was the only reason why she had thus far acquiesced to not only what the Elem suggested, but what the book inferred was the only way to undo what Sarcos had done.
Just as before, he rushed to her side. And just as then, Valea responded. That done, she waited while he attempted a spell of his own. The enchantress understood that his spell would fail, but that hers, because of the wand on her person, would succeed.
Valea did as she had been told, first casting them to the base of the gold tower and then, after giving him a false explanation concerning her success, into the imposing structure itself.
And there, they confronted Sarcos.
As he was supposed to be, the dragon man stood in the center of the tower, which was otherwise utterly empty. He was not at all surprised by their presence, of course.
“It should be here...this is where it should be...” Sarcos muttered as his mouth sprouted a row of crocodilian teeth. His nose burst forward, becoming a short snout again. “You are here. I am here. Just as before. It should be here.”
“We are here and we will not be alone soon,” Gerrod commented. “They will be here any moment.”
“But that is how it should be! There is something—” Sarcos glanced at Valea. “No...something’s wrong with her. She’s not right. She should be different. In fact, very different.”
The dragon man did not realize just how correct he actually was. Valea moved the moment he finished speaking, well aware that she had only a second or two before events followed as they had the last time the three had gathered here.
Removing the wand, the enchantress touched it to Gerrod’s back. He let out a gasp.
A ripple ran through the chamber, a ripple of force that only Valea knew meant that she had altered events even more.
“Where did you get that?” Sarcos snapped. “This is all wrong! How can you have—”
Valea suddenly felt as if her insides were turning upside down.
Gerrod tried to pull her to him. “Valea! Keep your grip tight! Keep it—”
But a horrendous force tore them from each other with the utmost ease. Valea shouted his name, but it was lost to the darkness that swallowed them up.
Then, faces formed before the enchantress...but not those of the Elem, as she had expected. Instead, three identical founder faces coalesced. Three faces wearing the same expressions that Valea thought best resembled mild curiosity.
And then, there was nothing.
X
Shade groaned.
“He is not one of ours, they say,” remarked a voice.
“But he bears the mark of ours, they say,” the voice added.
The warlock tried to see, but failed.
“He is permitted, they say.”
Without warning, Shade’s eyesight returned...and he beheld the three founders. They stood as if on some platform that raised them a foot above where he stood, not that the added height was necessary. They were clearly taller than him, taller than any Vraad or human. The trio eyed him with their unsettling, unblinking orbs.
“He is of the us that will be, they say,” came the voice from somewhere nearer to Shade. He glanced that direction and discovered one of the leaf faces there.
“Where is Valea?” Shade demanded.
“Here,” she answered from his other side. “I’m here.”
He quickly looked that direction. Valea’s face mirrored the relief he felt at being with her.
“She is not of us, now or beyond, they say,” the Elem remarked.
“This isn’t what you promised,” the enchantress declared to the magical servant.
“The creators know. We have no choice but to serve,” the creature replied sadly.
“But these are their past, not their present,” Valea argued. “They hold no sway over you anymore.”
It was a reasonable suggestion, Shade knew. In some ways, the founders were ghosts, memories of the past. The Elem appeared to exist beyond their masters’ time, which should have meant that they should have been capable of free choice.
But these are the founders, after all, the warlock thought with some bitterness. So much power, but with little to no understanding of where limits should be set!
“The Shade seeks to teach. They are amused.”
With a silent curse, Shade did his best to shield his thoughts. He eyed the single Elem again, wondering what they had done with Sarcos. Sarcos remained an enigma, a piece of this puzzle that did not entirely make sense to the warlock. Had they simply returned him to his own past or simply eliminated him? Shade could not say why, but the dragon man’s absence bothered him nearly as much as the founders’ presence.
Despite that concern, what mattered most to the warlock was extricating Valea and him from this mad situation. To the three figures, he said, “You have no need for us. Let us l
eave. We are not worth your time.”
Barely had he uttered the last word than he wanted to bite his tongue.
“But time is what this is all about, they say,” the Elem answered for the three figures. “And the key is the Shade. The past and the future can be one. The mistakes can be erased. The—” The Elem made a musical sound with what Shade thought an ominous touch to it. “—will be ascendant once more.”
“Does that mean what I think it does?” Valea murmured. “Are they talking about...altering history completely, removing every race their magic created...removing everything?”
“Yes. Everything...and it seems I am the only reason that they can achieve this.”
“Gerrod—”
The warlock’s mind was already racing. He could think of one way to keep the founders from achieving their fantastic goal. His only concern was trying to save Valea at the same time.
“The Shade will do as they command, they say...in return for the Shade’s companion’s life.”
Even as the Elem spoke, a faint mauve glow surrounded Valea. Before either could react, the enchantress became transparent.
Shade still tried to grab her, only to have his hands go through. She stared back at him.
“In return for her life, they say one last time,” the leaf face remarked.
“What do they want me to do,” the warlock growled. “Let it be done and done quickly!”
Even as he spoke, their surroundings shifted. Now they stood in the huge citadel where the pyramid sat atop the pole. Around them, ghostly figures of other founders moved about in slow motion.
We are not in sync with time, Shade realized. Not yet...
The three founders remained back. The Elem hovered near the pole. Again, Shade had a feeling of wariness, as if something was not right with the situation as it presented itself. He could not imagine what it could be, though, the founders certainly in control of everything.
One of the three peered at the lone Elem. The leaves forming the face scattered as if caught up in a strong wind. They flowed toward the small pyramid, where they reformed into the odd countenance.
Legends of the Dragonrealm Page 29
