As Alec peered down into the hole he sensed danger nearby. Before he could identify where it was, an enormous force swept him up into the air, making him fly for fifty feet. He twisted and somersaulted in the air, using his energies to prepare himself to land on his feet. He did land on his feet, but with such force he felt one of his ankles shatter. He screamed, as he rolled, and shifted from his Warrior power to his Healer power, fusing the joint back together in a quick, passable fashion, then put his Light power into place, making himself invisible. His opponent was invisible as well, offering to make the battle a difficult, unique one between two fighters who could not see one another.
Very good, little one. You survived the first blow. I’d be disappointed if my first opponent was so easily dispatched, a dominating voice sounded in his mind. How long do you expect to last – five more minutes, ten more?
Alec dropped his invisibility but maintained his Light powers, emitting a pulse of infrared light that revealed a hulking shape just twenty yards away, to his right. Alec dropped his Light power, engaged his Warrior energy, and pulled out a sword, diving forward at Hellmann’s location. He swung his sword, but found nothing in the space he expected Hellmann to occupy. He switched from his Warrior powers to Light powers again, then quickly leaped to the right as soon as he landed.
There was a burst of warm light, and he knew that Hellmann had copied his trick to detect an invisible enemy. Such a simple, clever trick, Hellmann’s voice said, as Alec scuttled away from the location he had been spotted in. He jumped behind a pile of boulders to catch his breath. A deluge of water fell heavily from the sky, covering an area of dozens of square yards, and covering Alec in the chilly liquid, making him sputter.
Before he could react, Hellmann was there, visible once more, beginning to swing a mace down upon Alec’s head. Desperately, Alec switched to his Stone powers, and made the rock beneath Hellmann liquefy into a sinking pit of molten lava, jerking Hellmann away, and giving Alec breathing space to run further to safety.
Bernadina! He called again in desperation.
I hear you Alec, we are ready, she calmly replied, and suddenly Alec felt a strong wave of new power enter his body.
Thank you, Alec said gratefully, using his Light energy again to hide himself as he ran to a new location and tried to figure out what to do. He felt Bernadina’s power and then Perpet’s power as he reached back through her to establish the tie to the other members of the group. Availlen was not connected, he realized.
Suddenly, a gust of wind blew wildly, lifting him off the ground, and buffeting him with stones and dust that were also caught in the powerful gust. Before he could adjust, another powerful burst of infrared light revealed his position within the crashing cloud, and Alec felt a pair of gigantic hands grab him out of the air as both he and Hellmann tumbled down the mountainside until they were below Alec’s companions.
Alec twisted, trying to free himself, without success. Hellmann had used some energy to make himself huge, four times the usual size of a person. One arm pinned Alec against the giant’s torso while the other hand gripped Alec’s head and began to twist it. So you have friends here to watch your final moments? Don’t worry, they’ll only agonize over your death for a few minutes before I finish them off as well.
Alec thrust all his efforts into his Warrior powers to try to battle his way free, but his giant opponent was so strong Alec could accomplish nothing. Panicked, he reach for and seized upon Perpet’s energies then combined them with his own Healer powers, and as Hellmann wrenched Alec’s head, breaking his neck, Alec focused the healing powers onto each individual cell that was being affected, implementing a desperate strategy of instantaneously healing to create new cells, sloughing off damaged ones, stretching out others, within the moment that Hellman’s brutal attack inflicted the damage, as his head swiveled wildly.
The giant completed his slow twist of Alec’s head through three hundred sixty degrees, then satisfied that his work had killed Alec, Hellmann released the body, and let it fall. Alec switched from Healing to Warrior energy, and pulled a knife off his bandolier, stabbing it into the giant gut as he fell past it, ripping downward to do damage, then let go of the knife as he continued to fall.
“What? By the forty eight powers! Are you still alive?” Hellmann shrank back to normal human size as he applied healing energy to himself, and looked at Alec in astonishment. While Alec was pleased to have survived the attack, he knew it was only a short-lived victory, one that he didn’t have time to savor. Alec needed a new weapon, he knew, if he was going to defeat his powerful opponent; he needed to go on the offensive.
John Mark, may I have my translocating power restored, just for this battle? Alec prayed a silent supplication. If he could jump around, he hoped to be able to get behind Hellmann to deliver a fatal blow. He needed something else, because Hellmann simply had too many powers he could use against Alec, and Hellman was able to call upon his energies to a degree that surpassed Alec’s abilities. Without Availlen’s Ajacii energy Alec was at a disadvantage, but he realized that even if he had those powers to use, he couldn’t stand up to Hellmann in battle.
It is not my place to restore that power to you Alec, the powerful voice replied. But there is another power you can acquire that will provide you with the ability to win this battle.
What power? What ability is it? Alec pleaded as he lay on the ground at Hellmann’s feet. Tell me please.
You will know it when you know that you can know all you need to know, John Mark enigmatically answered. I cannot tell you more than that, but that is enough. You are among God’s very best sons, Alec. He loves you and trusts you, and remember, he is omniscient.
Thank you, John Mark, Alec replied, as he grasped the meaning of the hint. I will go.
Alec lay still on the stony rubble, and transported his consciousness into the axis mundi of the ingenairii energy realm. He found himself directly there, and standing above the amulet that he had used so often. His image stooped and picked up the amulet, and his body disappeared from the ruined battlefield.
“Ha! Your puny challenger is no more!” Hellmann thundered at the small group that still stood on the cliff ledge observing the ruined landscape. “He has fled, and left you here to suffer his fate for failure. Your doom is next!”
Hellmann caused his body to expand, growing to gigantic proportions, and caused the stone beneath him to rise upward, raising him to the same elevation as Bernadina’s group, with a connecting causeway providing a path for him to walk directly to them. Availlen stepped onto the causeway in front of the other three, to block the giant’s path. “We won’t be easy to defeat!” he shouted at the ancient, enormous scourge.
Alec meanwhile, stood in the axis mundi, focusing on John Mark’s confusing, daunting words. Knowledge was the key, he realized. When John Mark had mentioned God’s omniscience, it had explained to Alec that the forty ninth power was the ultimate power – the power to see and know and understand and decipher everything.
Bernadina had told him that forty eight powers had been discovered in the days of myth, but the forty-ninth power had never been found. Now he knew that omniscience was that forty-ninth power, and that there was a way therefore by which an ingenaire could find it in the energy realm.
And it had never been discovered by any human, or any member of the races from the legend, because it was a power hidden from men, beyond the capacity of humanity to hold and withstand. Only God could withstand the enormity of being all-knowing.
In a crystallizing moment of insight, Alec realized where the forty-ninth power was hidden. He dropped the amulet, his body was now where it needed to be, in the axis mundi; there was no further chamber that specialized in omniscience, as there were chambers for warrior knowledge or healing knowledge of trans-location knowledge. The axis was the very center of the energy realm – perhaps he should have thought of it as the knowledge realm, he realized – it was the location that had equal access to all the other powers. The axis
was itself an opening to the greatest power – knowledge of all.
The power was a paradox. It was the greatest power, and yet it was an unobtainable power. But God had made it available to mankind in this special place, the precise center of the axis. Alec walked directly across the axis mundi to a spot. The key to the power was faith: only one who had faith in God could hold the power. It would only be faith in God’s power to protect his children that would enable one of them to safely survive the power to hold omniscience within the constraints of the human mind. Alec would have to take a plunge into the openly hidden forty-ninth chamber, and hope that God would grant him protection from being overwhelmed by the powerful knowledge that was otherwise too vast for a human to withstand.
Thank you, father, Alec said reverentially, and then he plunged into the never before entered realm of the omniscient ingenairii.
Chapter 25 – When All is Known
Alec stepped into the energy realm of omniscience in that spot in the precise center of the axis mundi, and saw a flash of light surround him as he entered. From the outside the omniscience realm had seemed like it was only a single point of space, but inside it seemed boundless. He felt nothing as he entered, after seeing the flash occur. He walked further in, and began to run, to sprint, desperate to find a place where he would encounter the energy and feel the power envelope him and saturate him, so that he could gain the ability he needed and return to the battle he had left.
And suddenly he stopped, and fell to his knees. There was another flash, and a searing pressure on his soul and his body for just a moment, then he saw the future and the past and the present, all at once, in all places. He felt his mind expand beyond what it could possibly comprehend or withstand, while at the same time he felt the love of Jesus providing a safety net that bolstered his strength while keeping him whole, maintaining his integrity and giving him the capacity to accept more than was otherwise humanly possible.
He saw Caitlen taking a bath in the palace, and he saw her cuddling a baby who had not yet been born. He saw her falling from a horse as a younger girl, suffering the injury that had given her a limp. He saw Availlen stepping out onto the stony causeway, and he saw Availlen in the past, down on one knee, nervously proposing to a red-headed girl, a lovely Ajax girl, who placed her hands in his as she cried and said yes.
Alec saw Hellmann, when he first gained his new powers. At that time idealistic, convinced that adding the power to speak over great distances would help him to communicate better with his people, to do more good, beyond just his tremendous fighting abilities. Alec knew of the flying powers and the light powers and the spiritual powers that Hellmann had adopted, using a device similar to Alec’s amulet, so that he could go to a place that was like and yet different from the axis mundi.
And Alec saw Hellmann’s lack of faith in God’s abilities to stop him from doing anything he wanted. Alec rose to his feet and saw in the distance the portal through which his spirit would have to come to acquire the Omniscient energy once his body was back in the reality of the mountains. He ran to the portal and through it, locking its location into his memory.
Thank you God, thank you Jesus for letting me know our Father, Alec silently prayed, and then he released all his powers, and returned to the mountains, erupting into reality just steps in front of Availlen, and instantly grasping every one of his powers, as well as reaching back into Bernadina,, and tapping the powers within the rest of the group. He reached backward through the lokasenna into Bauer, and plunged down into the boy’s consciousness, finding the lessons that had been used to call forth demons. They had taught him how to pervert the Spirit power, to find darkness instead of light, to reach into the heart of darkness and draw forth the pain and suffering and hatred; the key to Alec’s battle would be to understand and take advantage of Hellman’s self-loathing, which led to overcompensation through contempt for others.
When the sorcerers had called forth the demons, they had called forth Lucifer’s own energy, the energy that now was all that existed in Hellmann’s soul. From Bauer’s mind Alec plucked the fundamental understanding of the core of Hellman’s soul.
“You’ve returned for your second death?” Hellmann roared at him as he saw Alec reappear.
“No, I’ve returned from a visit with the true source of eternal life,” Alec replied. “Thank God and Jesus.” He saw Hellmann’s soul flinch from the mention of the holy names.
“Your superstitions will not preserve you,” Hellmann roared, and the giant form pounced across the causeway to envelope Alec in a deadly crush.
Alec stood still, and projected his Spiritual power and his Light power and his new–found Omniscience powers together into a shield, a bubble that surrounded and protected him from the huge limbs that tried to squeeze him. It was only a defensive mechanism, nothing he could use to attack with. But for his planned purposes, this sphere would prove to be the decisive tool that would put an end to the battle.
The Light power gave shape to the protective space, an altered form of the invisibility bubble he had created and used. It defined the shape of what he would control, creating a sphere of influence for him. The Spirit energy gave meaning to the sphere, allowing it to protect truth, and to resist falsehood. And the Omniscience was the final element, making it self-sustaining, as complete knowledge was an eternal and unstoppable engine of power. He wove them together in a way that for the moment extended much of his own life and energy into the fabric of the bubble. If his creation was destroyed, he would suffer fatal damage himself.
“Is my faith too strong for you to pierce me?” Alec taunted, knowing what would induce Hellmann to react the way Alec wanted. “Do you want to come into my shield with me? The only way you’ll get to me is if I let you,” he shouted.
The giant swung a mighty fist at the shield, but his punch rebounded from the unpierced shell. Hellmann screamed in rage and frustration. He tried to wrap his arms around and crush the bubble around Alec, again without success. Suddenly Alec made the protective cocoon expand tenfold, and then tenfold again, so that it was enormous, larger than the enraged monster it defied.
“Come in. Come in and see what you find in my Father’s house,” Alec gestured, and a door appeared in the shield, open for Hellmann to enter. “There is room even for you. Come see what battle you can win in here.”
Hellmann dove into the bubble. As soon as he did, the door behind him closed, while Alec stepped through the shield calmly, without any resistance, leaving the evil giant alone inside. Hellmann dove at Alec, and crashed into the inner wall of the bubble, unable to penetrate it. He collapsed from the force of the collision, rose and attempted to reach through the transparent wall to grasp Alec and pull him in.
“Let me out! Let me come and destroy you,” Hellmann shouted. “Your puny life is only safe for as long as you can hold this fragile bubble in place.”
“You’re right,” Alec observed calmly. “It is a paradox, this bubble. It is largely composed of my Spiritual powers, of my faith in God. That makes it both fragile and unbreakable at the same time, for faith is a paradox, the decision to believe in that which cannot be proven.
“But my faith is strong, eternally strong, and so this bubble will endure forever. And unless you come to know Jesus and also have faith in God’s love and power, you will never be able to break out of your dark, pain-wracked prison in Lucifer’s clutches,” Alec explained.
“My faith in Jesus is in the truth, and this sphere is composed of truth. But you are an irreconcilable contradiction. You are convinced of your own immortality, while at the same time you are full of self-loathing, and doubt about your ultimate ability to survive. I have seen your unsupportable false fabric. The lie that you live cannot penetrate the truth of this sphere.”
He gestured and the bubble began to contract, growing smaller. It reached the size at which it began to constrict Hellmann, and he began to shrink, from gigantic proportions to normal human size, then to the size of a rabbit, and finally to t
he size of an insect, still wrapped in the Spiritual bubble.
Alec turned and faced the awe-stricken group behind him. He pointed just past them, angling his finger downward, and they turned to see a brilliant beam of light punch a small circular hole in the side of the mountain where he pointed, a hole that angled sharply downward. Alec lifted his finger and the light beam ended; he walked over to the edge of the small hole, then knelt and lowered his hand to the edge of the still smoking black circle in the ground. Alec let the glowing sphere that contained Hellmann roll across his fingers, and into the hole, then it disappeared, and moments later, the hole sealed up behind it, leaving no trace of the burial that had occurred.
And as soon as the hole collapsed, before anyone could say anything, Alec too collapsed, unconscious.
Chapter 26 – Back to Warm Springs
The group carried the unconscious Alec along the narrow path and through the mountains for three days, until they reached the Sleagh Maith village. Availlen insisted on carrying Alec alone much of the time, determined to honor the great warrior.
“He’s not dead,” Perpet told the others in the village, “but he can’t be roused. There is something missing from his spirit.”
Ajacii and Demons: The Ingenairii Series Page 30
