by Greg Dragon
Once they were inside, Lenorela locked the door, which Alysia noticed had rows of books on it to make it disappear into the other shelves. A prison of books, she thought. Somewhere, on Earth, in a crowded library, reading, is a nerd who dreams about a place like this.
Lenorela began to climb one of the ladders and motioned for Alysia to follow her. They climbed up to the second floor, walked around the room to the other side, and then ascended another. They continued this until they were near the top. Alysia looked down and was quite surprised at the height to which they had climbed. One slip now would be death, so she gripped the railing just in case Murphy’s Law reared its ugly head.
“Here we are,” Lenorela said. She touched a book that receded automatically, causing a panel of the library to collapse upon itself. Stairs led down through this new portal, and the witch brought her right hand up and it began to glow like the hottest torch. Alysia didn’t bother to ask, choosing instead to follow closely as Lenorela descended into a tight hallway that opened up to a tiny room barely big enough for the two of them. Once they both stepped from the stairs, the library’s door resealed itself, and the stairs moved to form a new wall where their entrance had once been.
“Did you build all this, Lenorela?” Alysia asked, and the witch nodded her head with pride. She lifted her glowing hand and the light seemed to pull in upon itself until it became a glowing orb inside her palm. She dropped the orb and stepped back, then gestured for Alysia to touch it.
Alysia knelt down and touched the ball of light. It reminded her of a plasma globe and reacted very much like one when her warm hands touched it. The light rose from the orb to consume her arms, and then it became a tall column that widened into the form of a door. It was a bright, white rectangle on its end, with hard traces of yellow along its edges to outline the portal.
Alysia, who was still kneeling, looked up at Lenorela with a look of surprise, and the woman held out a hand for her to take it. She was helped up to her feet and Lenorela faced her and held her shoulders. “What I just did, you will be able to do as well, even in my absence. The ball, the portal … all of it. All you need is this room and this ring.” She took one of Alysia’s hands and dropped a black object into it. Alysia looked at her new ring and saw that it was in the shape of an ouroboros, which was a thin, heavily detailed dragon that was snacking on its own tail.
The ring had a weight to it, and when she slipped it onto her right ring finger she realized it was too big for her. Suddenly the ring animated and the dragon writhed a bit and swallowed more of its tail until it was a perfect fit. Alysia stared at it, her eyes wide with horror as she tried not to flinch at the tiny living thing that was on her finger. “Lenny, is this ring alive?” she whispered, and Lenorela threw back her head and laughed.
“It’s just an illusion, sweetheart. He won’t grow and eat you up, or burn your finger, or any other nightmarish thing that you can imagine a tiny dragon would do. It’s Ert magic. See? Pull your sword now, and use the hand that has the ring on it.” She stepped back into the shadows and folded her arms in anticipation.
Alysia pulled Euphoria from its sheath and held the sword out in front of her. The ring made contact with the hilt and began to spread its blackness over her hand and finally her arm. All the way up to her right shoulder spread a beautiful display of ebony scale mail. It was perfect armor, adorned in areas by small, decorative rubies, and at the elbow was a wicked spike that completed the nightmarish gauntlet.
“This is amazing,” Alysia said, moving her arm around to test its mobility. “I had silver armor that would grow from my sword, back when I was fighting the demons. It would cover my whole body though, depending on the level of danger I was in. But this armor feels stronger. Is this a gift of the Erts as well?”
“Ert armor,” Lenorela said. “Made for the commanders—they are the ones who wear black. Actually, the ring that I just gave you is highly coveted. You could use it to buy your own kingdom here in Yalem. That is how valuable it is.”
Alysia looked at her with shock in her eyes. “Why would you give me something this valuable? I mean, we’re cool, but you don’t really know me, Lenny. What if I say, ‘screw the world,’ and use this to get a big house like yours and a handful of demon servants?”
Lenorela laughed again. “A handful? That ring will buy you a legion. I gave you that ring because I do know you. My powers extend beyond what you can see and touch, my dear. I can read into your very nature, and like I’ve said before, you are the daughter or sister I was meant to have. So don’t overthink it. Just enjoy it. The threats that you will be facing inside of that portal will make anything in your past seem like a walk in a flowery park. You will need this armor, and as it evolves, you will grow into a formidable warrior of the Erts.”
“Can I see your armor?” Alysia asked as she sheathed Euphoria. The scale mail retracted back into the ring, which glowed red for a while before reverting back to its black origin.
Lenorela held out her arms with her palms up, and though she wore rings on every finger, the dragon on her left middle finger glowed red and encased her entire body in a slick, oily metal, broken up by a network of hexagonal cracks. Her eyes were the only thing left that was recognizable as Lenorela. She looked like a cybernetic ninja warrior, barely visible in the shadows.
“I’ve fell several stories and lived due to this armor,” she said, her voice muffled from behind the mask that covered her entire face. “As you can see, it evolved past the scaled arm to this. Yours will become something different, I imagine, since you use swords and not elemental magic.”
The armor worked its way back into her ring, and the robed beauty was once again in front of Alysia, smoothing the front of her silky dress. “Any more questions?” she asked.
Chapter Four
It was during a late high school baseball game that the light appeared. It appeared beneath the tiny stands where the parents of the Monarch High Purple Bulldogs cheered for the tall, lanky boy at bat who was two strikes in and feeling the weight of the game on his shoulders.
Two other boys were inching off of second and third base, and the eagle-eyed pitcher kept them honest while the catcher signaled for another curve ball from hell.
Someone should have noticed the woman who emerged from out of nowhere to stand below those stands, but the tall kid had swung true and the ball was flying at such a velocity that it was obvious that the outfielders would never touch it and the Bulldogs had won the game.
Alysia looked around and tried to get an idea of where she was. The first thing that struck her was just how out of place she was among the blue jeans, t-shirts and sneakers that everyone else was wearing. She was in a red ornate robe with an ancient sword strapped to her waist, her hair in braids, decorated with jewels.
She hadn’t been gone from her world long enough to know what it would mean if she was seen. Someone would see the sword and assume she was a crazy person. Then they would call the police to come out and collect her. With no family and friends to remember her in a time where she didn’t belong, jail was not an option, and she couldn’t afford to entertain the delay.
The last thing she wanted was to use Euphoria on a fellow human being, and she couldn’t imagine taking the life of someone’s father or son.
Wherever she was, she would need to figure things out quickly, blend in with the locals, and seek out Chaos’s portal. The world was right but the time period was wrong. Everything seemed off about these people, and that was not limited to the way they dressed or looked. The sky was clear, unlike the time when she was still a normal girl, when you could always look up to see one of the floating fortresses or any number of atmospheric satellites helping to keep them connected.
Lenorela had mentioned time being of little concern on Yalem so she wondered if the portal had taken her back to an age before the one she knew. The crowd was still cheering and screaming for the homerun and she took off running towards the parking lot behind the stad
ium.
A few high schoolers were standing by their car, smoking cigarettes, and when they noticed her they looked frightened, staring at her as if she was a ghost. “Yo,” said the tallest boy as she approached them, “is that thing real?” He was staring at her sword, Euphoria.
Alysia still didn’t know what she was meant to do, but she was out of her element and did not like the mystery behind it all. She said, “Realer than real, kid. Pretend you didn’t see me.” And with that, she took off running between the cars at a speed too fast and effortless for a human being to maintain. This made the teenagers flee in horror, since they were fully convinced that she was dangerous.
She broke onto the campus itself where it was dark and deserted. She looked for a way to get inside but the doors were barred and padlocked, the windows blocked by bars welded into the surrounding walls. It gave the place an atmosphere of imprisonment and Alysia felt lucky for the high school that she attended in her own time period.
The dusky sky was turning to night fast, and she was still dressed like an agent of Yalem. She thought about this fact and tried to reason where the best place would be for her to change her clothes. According to Lenorela, there was a portal being opened somewhere, a portal that would grow to become the size of a door large enough to squeeze in giants, demons, and their monstrous pets. To find out where this thing was she would need to use her training.
Alysia would need to investigate using the senses gifted to her from the Erts. But first she would need to find out what time period this was. She hoped that it wasn’t one of the horrible time periods on old Earth, before technology had exploded and made things better for everyone. The cars in the parking lot had tires and gas tanks, so she knew that it was at least a hundred years before the time that she knew. The teenagers were dressed in bright colors and baggy clothes, and the cars were more compact than the seventies or eighties.
A poster caught her eye as she walked into the central area of the school where a large, purple “M” had been painted on the ground, protected by four metal posts through which draped a purple, velvet rope. The poster had a photograph of a boy and a girl dancing in a too-perfect prom setting. Above it all, the words 1993 Monarch Senior Prom told her everything she needed to know.
Alysia thought about history class and the nineties. A woman like her, someone who would be in college and still young enough to be up on the trends would not be—a noise brought her around and she slipped behind the nearest building to see if she could locate its source.
The grass was tall and littered with discarded plastic cups, plates and other disgusting, unmentionable refuse. She waded through it to gain the far side and it took her out to a yard that had a severable free-standing wooden buildings that seemed to have been built on top of cinder blocks.
She slipped across the dirt to one and then climbed the steps to listen at the door. There was chanting going on inside, light and harmonic, but wicked enough to cause the skin on her flesh to crawl. Alysia walked around its wooden balcony and peered inside one of the caged windows. Air caught inside her throat when she saw several adults—teachers, she assumed, due to their age—seated in a circle holding hands. Candles ran around the circle in front of them, and in the center of this display sat a tiny girl whose eyes betrayed a mind that was lost and wandering off in a faraway place.
Portals came from sacrifice, this Alysia knew. Though Lenorela didn’t say that the light would take her directly to the evil that she was meant to eliminate, here she was in front of it. Euphoria seemed to find her hand on its own, and she walked back to the door, planted her feet, and then jumped, spun and kicked it open with a powerful kick.
The first woman belched out a wicked, ear-splitting scream, and the other five were on their feet, rushing towards her with their claws out. Alysia somersaulted backwards, landing in the grass, backing up to give herself room as the six demons took on their real forms and made to surround her. Their leader spoke. “Ert puppet. Why are you here? How do you know of this place and what we do?”
Alysia said, “Chaos can see through all of you, can he not? Well here’s the thing. Lord Chaos. I am going to shut down this operation and save my world from what you did to it when you recruited me into your demon war. This is the past, and you are here, somewhere, so it means that you cannot interfere no matter what you try.” She gave the woman a cruel smile and then switched Euphoria to her dominant right hand where the contact with her ring forced the armor to run up her arm.
One of the men leaped forward and swung a claw at her head, but she threw her right arm up, bearing her elbow and his hand found the spike instead. She kicked under his elbow, then his ribs, before spinning to deflect the knife of another demon. This is how it went for the next few minutes as the six tried to dominate Alysia Knight. Above them was a hunter’s moon, large and white, an eye of judgment for the battle going on between the Turevila and the Ert chosen.
Alysia fought like a demon herself, bloodied from the claws and bruised from kicks, but Euphoria was dripping with demon ichor, and this was due to the severed arm and head that lay at her feet.
There is an element of humanity that we cannot learn from taking self-defense classes or simulating fighting with our friends. It is the raw drive to survive under the most extreme of circumstances. Everyone isn’t built with it, and many of us tend to give up when the chips aren’t in our favor. James Knight, Alysia’s father, cultivated the survival instinct within his daughter. Years of action as a US Navy SEAL, and years of fighting before and after as a top Dan in his martial arts school, had made it a part of his very DNA structure.
The Knights—what they affectionately called their family—only knew survival. Alysia was never going to go down easily and this she demonstrated as she cut deep into a demon, then kicked his spent corpse from off her blade before throwing up her armored arm to defend against another.
The fight had been going on for a brief five minutes, but to Alysia it felt like two hours. She had killed her share of demons when she was first introduced to Chaos, but they were the equivalent of yellow belt practitioners of martial arts—too new to challenge the might of her seasoned sword-arm. These six however were like demon black belts, and with every cut, kick, or punch that she delivered came a scratch, bite, or stab from one of them.
One of the many lessons that her father had taught her was that in situations like this, when surrounded and fighting, a smart warrior would carve a path and then run for higher ground. She was now on the steps of the first building with her back to the broken ritual and the young girl who was still seated and staring out into nowhere.
The stairs were narrow, so the four remaining demons had to find new ways to get to Alysia. This was more difficult than they wanted it to be, so for the time being they came at her via the steps. Only two of them had weapons, but they all had claws and seemed to be impervious to the pain that Euphoria dished out. Seeing this, Alysia focused and struck to maim or kill whenever she could. Since the demons didn’t feel pain they were relentless, and they kept coming at her despite being run through, slashed, or kicked in their vitals.
The wounds they delivered to Alysia were taking their toll, and she began to feel the burning of her arms from the fatigue of fighting too long. Desperate and at her wit’s end, she swung wildly to force them back, then dashed into the classroom to grab the girl. The little blonde-haired waif was light so Alysia was able to cradle her in her arms, kick open the back door, and take off running as fast as she could.
Instinctively the child reached up around her neck and hugged her for support. The gesture gave Alysia life, empowering her to run faster in order to get away from them.
One of the demons had gotten his leg cut so badly that when he made to give chase, it twisted horribly and gave out, forcing him down to the ground. Still he used his one good leg and hands to crawl after Alysia while the other two ran with a singular purpose.
Alysia was ahead of her pursuers when a sudden
realization came to her about the demons. They would not magically give up once the girl was away, and the people whose bodies they had taken over would be lost forever. If she was going to save the girl, all the demons would need to die, and despite her aching arms, this was something that only she could get done.
She pulled up short of the fence that surrounded the school and placed the girl gently on the ground. Euphoria was throbbing with power when she pulled it out again and faced the two demons running towards her. They should have been hilarious in the way they appeared. They looked like parents from an eighties sitcom, one with a thick moustache and the other in a patterned dress and wig.
Alysia spun violently and swung her sword, then spun again and swung the other way. The first slash caught the exposed claw of the eighties sitcom father, and the second caught his neck right above the shoulder. He dropped with the force of the blow, twitching as he laid in a puddle of blood. The woman, who Alysia had assumed was the leader, backed away slowly. She was one of the remaining two survivors, and the other one was still several yards off, crawling, trying to catch up with them.
Eighties mom moved, sudden and unexpected, and Alysia was on her back fighting with her armored forearm jammed up against her face. Claws found her ribs and she screamed out in pain, using her free hand to punch repeatedly at the woman’s side. She was heavy and smelled foul, and the claws were making her feel weaker and weaker.
She threw up a knee to throw the demon off, then rolled to mount her and put two hands on Euphoria’s hilt. She drove the blade down into the demon’s mouth, then pulled it out and slid it into one of her darkened eyes. The life rushed out, loud and wicked, and the sword trembled as it sucked in all of her power.
When Alysia stood up, the pain in her side worsened and though she was curious to see how much damage had been done, she was too afraid to look down at her side. She limped over to the final demon, who had rubbed his knees raw crawling after them, and drove the sword into his spine, all the way down to the guard. As she made to remove it, something happened, and it felt as if Euphoria had become a hot, electric wire.
