The Last Archon
Atlantean Knights Book One
Richard W. Watts
Thomas Plutarch
Contents
Newsletter
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Review Request
About the Author
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Prologue
Battle roiled through the ether.
Bel-Tarran stood within the center glyph, arms outstretched, hands cupped around the funnels of power. The warmth of the Axiom surrounded him in slowly rippling waves of golden light that spun in flame-like tendrils as it drifted upward into the crystalline darkness. He lifted the burning eyes of a sun-god toward the twinkling constellations above the rolling Sahara grasslands.
Darkness and space, even time, parted for his sight, and he beheld a frozen moment. Another set of glowing motes hung against the night. Their bodies blazed with the light of the Axiom as they fell. Armor and weapons and the vague emanations of sorcery fell with them. The black shape of the Worm thrashed in anguished rage beneath their comets as it tore through the boundary, four of its heads visible, no two alike. Even in the space between moments, its form shifted like eels under a film of oil. Only the gaping, mindless mouths remained constant. Shadows bled from the ragged edges of the gate. At the nadir, two figures stood, locked together in twisting light and darkness.
Time returned in a rush, and with it, his friends’ deaths lashed Bel-Tarran’s spirit. Sparks of life, of possibility, of reality, winked out one after another over the storm-wracked shores of the island. He tensed against whispered echoes of pain and terror. His soul rebelled at his task, but he tightened his grip on the currents of power from the Axiom.
Bel-Tarran took a slow, deep breath. A whispered prayer left his lips. “Creator, forgive me.”
He pulled.
For one singular instant, his consciousness touched every blade of grass, every buzzing fly, every rustling tree for a score of miles in every direction. And then they were gone. Life flowed into him, torrents of reality, a vast, unfathomable river. It inundated Bel-Tarran, lifting him free of mortal bounds, and his consciousness rose in living flame.
He screamed, and his voice was the crashing ocean.
He leapt, and the earth groaned beneath his passage.
He flew, and the storm raged in his wake.
The Worm shrieked from its nine-fold mouth as Bel-Tarran descended upon it, and the wrath of a dying sun consumed the darkness in its flames. The very bones of creation thrummed at the horror of its voice. The bedrock shattered beneath the heat and the weight of clashing realities as the gate collapsed upon them.
Violent energies reduced the marbled steps and porticos of the Academy to a fine, white fog of burning dust. The gilded arches of the palace crumbled to ash. Statues of heroes twenty meters tall toppled and shattered. The ocean thrashed and boiled, reaching up with greedy, foaming fingers to pull Atlantis down.
Bel-Tarran collapsed as the fire of the Axiom finally ripped free. He landed on soft, powdery soil. Empty, drifting upon his heartbeats, he lifted a hand and looked at the thin coating of gray ash. They had won. But at what cost? Sorrow and guilt billowed over him, and tears streaked over his grime coated face.
He still lay weeping when the sun rose, bloody, over a new desert.
Chapter One
Fire still ravaged the house. Smoke billowed from inside the two-story home, pouring out of the shattered windows in thick columns. Firemen had the blaze contained to the back corner of the house now, but flames still flickered sullenly through the open doorway.
Lights reflected from the streams of fire hoses. They flashed from a firetruck, two patrol cars from Atlanta PD, and two ambulances, revealing a small crowd of coughing kids. Most huddled together in clumps, staggering in shock or being interviewed by police. One girl sat off by herself on the back of an ambulance as EMS personnel treated her burns. She stared at the smoke without blinking. First responders wrestled another girl onto a gurney. She cried uncontrollably, tears spilling over the red and black ruin of the left side of her face.
Worst of all, a line of motionless forms lay stretched across the grass, covered in plain blue sheeting. Everyone ignored them as they tended to the living.
Deckard Riss stood on a rooftop three blocks away from the chaos and peered at the images in his hands, ringed by glyphs of light. The warmth of the Axiom pulsed in time with his heartbeat, drawing sights and sounds into the window he’d made.
“Thirteen, fourteen. All of them injured to various degrees and at least eight dead.” He glanced at Hayden, who stared over the edge of the roof at the tendrils of smoke drifting up into the night sky, hazy against the city lights beyond. The boy wore his armor, including the hawk beaked helmet. The bulk of the brassy metal made him look bigger than he was and obscured his face, but Deckard could read the frustration in the set of his shoulders and the nervous clenching-unclenching motion of his hands.
“Can’t you do something about the flames?” Hayden asked without looking.
“I could,” Deckard said, “But the authorities have that in hand. Our priority is the person responsible.” Hayden shook his head but said nothing.
Deckard returned his attention to the small scrying portal he’d conjured. An effort of will shifted the focus in a wave of color. A detective in a police issue breaker interviewed one of the party-goers, a young girl with frizzy black hair and wide dark eyes.
“...was an explosion. Next thing I know, everyone is screaming and running from the kitchen. Then Theo comes out.“
“This Theo, he wasn’t running with the rest?”
“No! He was doing it! I don’t know how, but he was shooting fire around like he had flamethrowers in his hands.” She gulped and started to sob, shaking her head. “He...He was l-laughing! It w-w-was like...he was a different p-person…” She broke down.
Deckard panned away to a pair of detectives, one male, one female, speaking by an unmarked car. “...Same thing. Boys went to get high, someone pulled out the box, next thing you know there’s a Prime trying to kill everyone.”
The female cop sighed heavily. “Damn Shard is a menace. Does anyone know where the k
ids got this batch?”
“Not yet. We’ll get them back to…”
The view in the scrying portal shifted again to a group of three young men huddled on a curb, wrapped in sterile blankets. The youngest was a Hispanic kid. He stared at the covered corpses of his friends. The other two argued in hushed tones.
“...keep your mouth shut, Lamar.”
“C’mon, J.P.! What if he did it on purpose?”
“No way Chains could know Theo would flip out like that. Just shut up and let the fire take care of the evidence. They can’t hold us for drugs we don’t got…”
Deckard released the Axiom and let the portal unravel into motes of light. “Okay, two persons of interest.”
Hayden turned to peer up at Deckard. “Who we got?”
“A young Prime named Theo is the pyrokinetic responsible for the blaze. I’ll hunt him down and see that he’s treated for shard overdose.”
“So you get Firestarter. Who do I get?”
“One of the partygoers mentioned ‘Chains’ as the dealer.” Deckard regarded Hayden’s smirk cooly. “You know him, I take it?”
“Not personally, but he’s a Prime in the criminal database, so I’ve been keeping tabs. He’s a punk pusher for the Bone Dogs. I’ll find him.”
Deckard frowned but nodded. “Fine. If you can locate him, try to find any stashes of shard. Victims keep mentioning the box, but all of the containers in police custody are destroyed. I need an intact container.”
“Find Chains. Find the box. Got it.”
“Contact me when you’re done. If I can, I’ll join you to back you up.”
“Won’t take me that long, old man.” Hayden smiled. He ran to the edge of the roof and leapt off. Summoning a bar of energy in a flattened C shape, he hooked it over a sloping stay for an industrial powerline and sailed out of view.
Deckard shook his head, smiling faintly. Arrogance and energy always seemed to go hand in hand. If the boy knew how impressive it was to see constructs summoned so fast, he could float after felons using his swollen head for a blimp.
Reaching for the Axiom himself, Deckard ran through the thought-forms he had been taught on the shores of a now-shattered island three thousand years earlier. Power flowed in, warm and sweet, and slowly lifted his booted feet from the roof. He rose, armor weightless, dark green tabard and hood flapping gently in the wind as he glided toward the fire.
Deckard ignored the cries from below as he entered the hazy cloud of smoke. He reached out a hand and scooped some of it into a hollow ball of energy. He chiseled glyphs of connection and seeking into the globe of smoke with his will and flooded them with Axiom. The smoke within swirled and spun, creating a miniature tornado within the vessel. It bent to the north.
Archon oriented to follow the tracking spell and sped away like a hunting falcon.
Chapter Two
Theo shivered as it crawled through his mind, skittering over his thoughts like a spider. He ran, breath rasping in and out in panicked bursts. Shadows raced over the alleyway as he sprinted toward the vague glow of humanity at the other end. He leapt a toppled trashcan, and the smell of spilled garbage filled his nose. He tasted rot.
A strange euphoria filled him, and he began to slow, but the spider in his mind pushed him again. He should run, wanted to run, needed to run. He could suddenly feel the burning gaze of his pursuers on his neck. His legs picked up speed.
A rush of air and a brilliant light scalded his eyes, blinding him. Terror and anger flared with it. His spider mind shrieked with his voice, and he reflexively called upon his power. Skin bubbled and burst in his palms, and fire roared forth in a screaming cone, bathing the end of the alley in terrible heat.
The fat beneath his skin writhed and shifted as he pushed more and more fuel into the base of his palms. His frame shrank and his belt loosened. His sweat-stained shirt hung limply from too thin shoulders.
A new fear wormed its way into his brain, but the spider hissed at him, and he continued throwing ever more of himself into the flames. Skin blistered and bubbled and sloughed away on his forearms and face. He panted, unable to draw a good breath in the fantastic heat. His legs shook and with a final stuttering cough, the flames died. He collapsed onto the blessedly cool stone of the alleyway.
In his hazy vision, the last four feet of the alley glowed a bright orange-white, both street and brick walls. In the middle of the kiln stood a man made of light, holding a bar of brilliant sun horizontally across his form. The enemy floated above the ruined street, wreathed in tendrils of steam and wisps of smoke.
The spider shrieked at him, biting at his mind. Fight, flee! Light was death, enemy was death, sleep was death, death, DEATH! Theo tried to obey, but his feeble twitches only succeeded in curling him up. His wasted body ached everywhere.
The golden form of the enemy drifted closer and knelt down beside him. The spider bared its fangs with Theo’s mouth. A glowing hand reached down to touch his forehead.
The spider screamed in despair as the enemy ripped it from his mind. Theo tried to scream too, but whimpered instead. Then the pain receded, and he heard someone speaking in a rich, soothing voice.
“Rest, boy. All will be well.”
Theo sighed and slipped into darkness.
Deckard stared at the emaciated form of the young man he’d been chasing and loosed his hold on the Axiom. The light he channeled faded. The poor fool had burned off half of his own face, not to mention the damage to his internal systems in using up so much body mass at once.
He looked over his shoulder at the damage done to the brickwork and asphalt of the alley. They were getting more powerful. He’d known apprentices who couldn’t harness a third of the fire this boy threw around on instinct. To contain this threat, they would have to find the source.
A crackling sound brought his attention back to the slumbering boy. The unmarred coffee-colored skin of the boy’s upper back began to darken further, as though staining with ink before his eyes. It resolved itself into a firm silhouette the length of a man’s hand that peeled away, becoming three dimensional. A chitinous thing, with articulated plates and a dozen multi-jointed legs protecting a worm-like body, solidified. It twitched and spasmed as it died, unraveling into black mist and dissipating before it could fall to the street.
Deckard watched it die, sudden rage washing through him. He clamped down on his anger, hard. Now was not the time. The boy needed medical attention.
He stood to his feet and absently traced the form. A circle of glyphs lit around the boy’s body, and a disc of light appeared inside them, lifting the unconscious young man into the air. Deckard lashed the disc to himself with his will and they rose together over the city. Atlanta’s lights winked in blissful ignorance from the buildings below and from the man-made mountains above him. He spun them toward the closest hospital and set off.
Hopefully, Hayden wouldn’t have any trouble subduing his quarry, either.
The gunshot rang in Hayden Lucas’s ears as he slammed the fridge door into his opponent’s face. The dazed man slumped to the floor. Before Hayden could turn, ropes grabbed him at the waist and flung him bodily through the air. Hayden summoned a shield just before he flew through the apartment window. Glass and wood shattered against the plane of golden, translucent light and exploded outward in a cloud of debris. He registered a couple street lights and several shocked people running for safety before his momentum died, and he plummeted toward the street three stories down. He spun and flung his right arm in a circular motion, creating a whip of energy as he did so. It whirled to wrap about a broken street light, then pulled taut. He clung to the rope of sorcery, turning his fall into a wild, tumbling swing. Hayden slammed into the brick side of the apartment building with a grunt. His shield winked out.
Looking down, he kicked off the wall with booted feet and released the whip. He fell the
last eight feet in a shallow arc and hit the pavement with a well-timed roll. Groaning, he’d barely staggered to his feet wh
en a long chain launched out of the window and wrapped itself around the railing to the third-floor fire escape.
The source of the chain, a squat, muscular man in jeans and a sleeveless Atlanta Falcons jersey, stepped up onto the broken sill, glass crunching under his boots. The line of steel links ran to the meat of his right forearm, where it wrapped around in several manacle-like loops, then disappeared under his skin.
The man sneered down at Hayden, flexed another heavily muscled arm, and a similar chain extended and wrapped itself around the window frame. He calmly stepped off the sill, and the chains slowly lengthened, links rattling as they gently lowered him to the sidewalk. The chains unwrapped themselves and reeled back in, until only three feet dangled from either hand.
“You gonna pay for that window, freak.” He walked toward Hayden, idly spinning one length of chain.
Hayden spread his hands and stepped one foot back as though confused. “What’re you mad at me for? All I did was kick down your door, knock your buddy unconscious with your fridge, and tell you to come with me quietly.” He pointed a finger up at the broken apartment. “That was all you, Chains.”
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