Wyrmspire (Realm Keepers Book 2)

by Garrett Robinson

  “I already told them I would!” she said, panicked. “How do I explain that?”

  “However you have to,” said Blade, interrupting in a hard voice. “Yell and scream at them. And if they still insist on taking you, walk out. Sleep on a bus bench if you have to. You’re eighteen. It’s not like they can hold you against your will.”

  “Nobody’s sleeping on a bus bench,” I said. “Come on, Blade. She can’t just walk out on her family.”

  “Why not?” he snapped, his eyes flashing with anger. “I did it for practically the whole siege of Morrowdust. What, just because your family lives are all perfect, I’m the only one who can take a fall when the team needs it?”

  “That’s not what she was saying,” said Tess. Her hand slipped forward to gently fold around his arm. “It’s just different with all of us. I couldn’t walk out on my parents, either.”

  The burning in Blade’s eyes died as he turned to look at her, but the frown didn’t leave his face. “Okay, fine,” he said, though clearly it wasn’t. “But you obviously can’t go to this Medicorp place or whatever.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks, genius,” grumbled Raven.

  “We’ll sort that out in a minute,” I said. “After we talk to Greystone and figure out exactly what’s going on here. Tess, will you call him?”

  Tess gave a meek nod. “Sure.”

  “Okay. How does it work?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve never done it before. But let me try.”

  She went back to her bedroll and sat down, folding her legs across the relative comfort of the blankets. She pulled out the stone that would let her “call” Greystone—despite myself, I was already starting to call it the “telestone” in my mind. She just sat there, staring at it.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Try harder.”

  “I’m not even sure I’m doing it right,” Tess complained. “I don’t know for sure what I’m doing.”

  I sighed and sat down facing her. One by one, the others sat by us until we were in a sort of circle, with me on one side and Tess on the other.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try this. Try reaching out with your power. Like, picture Greystone being really close by, and try to talk to him with your mind. Like you could if he was in your sight.”

  Tess nodded. Her brow furrowed as she thought hard. And then, all of a sudden, her eyes went white. Her whole body jerked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He’s there,” she said in wonder. “Don’t you see him?”

  I looked around. “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “One second.” She sat there without a sound for another moment.

  “Is he talking back?”

  “Yes,” she muttered. “He’s a little bit ticked off at being woken up. Apparently I’m the only one who can see him.”

  “Ask him if there’s a way for us to tap in,” I urged.

  Another moment of silence. Then, “He says that if we all make contact, we’ll all be able to speak to him at once.”

  “Contact? Like how?” said Miles, confused.

  “Like holding hands,” said Tess.

  “Kumbaya, people,” said Blade with a grin. “Let’s do this.” He reached over and took Tess’s hand. She twitched at the contact and looked like she might withdraw her hand, but then her fingers settled as they wrapped around his.

  “This isn’t the time for jokes,” I growled. But I took Miles’ hand as he held Blade’s. Raven took mine on the left, and then Calvin took hers.

  As soon as my fingers met Miles’, I could see Greystone. He appeared thin, whispy and ghostlike, but it was him. He was standing in the center of our circle, looking down at all of us, irritated.

  “What’s this all about?” he snapped, his sharp, ornery voice cracking like a whip in my mind. “I’m exhausted beyond belief. I just saved a city from certain and utter destruction. I deserve at least a few hours to myself.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us Terrence was on Earth?” I retorted, cutting straight to the chase.

  Greystone stopped short and stared at me. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth turned in a frown.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t get all snippy with us. You’re the one who’s been keeping secrets. I want to know exactly what’s going on, Greystone.”

  Greystone sniffed. “There is much ‘going on,’ as you put it, that is far beyond your comprehension.”

  “Don’t try to pull that with me,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “I’m not in the mood. Obviously you know something. I command you to tell me what you know about Terrence and why he’s on Earth.”

  Greystone spluttered and snarled. But he was bound by oaths, oaths sworn in magic that he had to obey my commands. I didn’t use the privilege often, but this was a special case.

  “Come on,” I grated. “Out with it.”

  Greystone fell silent, glaring at me with beady blue eyes. His mouth twitched.

  “Terrence was once a Realm Keeper,” he blurted.

  “What?” cried Miles.

  I nodded. “I thought so. We’re the only ones who can go back and forth.”

  “Yes,” Greystone admitted. “He was the Keeper of the Mind before Lady Tess.”

  I glanced over at Tess to see her looking up at Greystone, her face awkward and uncomfortable, one eye hidden deep within her hair.

  Greystone continued. “He betrayed and killed the other Realm Keepers in the outlands of Yarvan. He killed two of them with Mind, and when that power left him, he took up his sword. He is a mighty warrior, even without magic.”

  “How could you possibly think keeping this a secret would help?” Blade demanded. “What, you were afraid we’d follow Terrence’s lead?”

  “What good would it have been to tell you?” Greystone retorted.

  “Maybe we would have been prepared when he started hunting for us on Earth,” said Raven, furious. “My parents want to take me right to him.”

  Greystone’s eyes shot wide. “You must not go.”

  Raven shook her head and looked skyward. “Why does everyone think I’m so stupid that I’m just going to walk into his trap now that I know that it’s there?”

  “Hold on,” Calvin said, shaking his head. “This doesn’t jive. You told me when we first got here that if a Realm Keeper killed another Realm Keeper, they were banished. Stripped of their powers and sent back to True Earth. Why didn’t that happen to Terrence?”

  Greystone glowered. “I do not know for certain.”

  “Guess,” I said.

  “I was not even certain that Terrence was going back and forth to True Earth until now,” Greystone said, as angry as I was. “How can I know how he does it?”

  “It’s got to be Chaos,” said Tess, barely more than a whisper in the silence of the cave. “I mean, right?” She looked around at all of us as though expecting a response. “They must have empowered him somehow. Given him the ability to travel.”

  “If Chaos can send people to Earth, why haven’t they gone there already?” Miles countered. “They could send their forces through to conquer it without even having to worry about Midrealm.”

  Tess’ eyes fell. “Oh.”

  “No, Lady Tess may have the truth of it,” Greystone said. “Chaos cannot travel between the Twin Worlds. But it can corrupt. It can pollute the essence of a spell. Perhaps Chaos found a way to manipulate the magic that surrounded Terrence as a Realm Keeper and harness it, to keep that aspect of it alive.”

  “But how does he still have magic?” asked Tess. “He was the Keeper of Mind, but we’ve seen him use all six elements.”

  “I believe that this, too, is the influence of Chaos,” Greystone said, his voice low and sorrowful like a mourning father. “We know that Terrence must have been planning his betrayal for months, if not years. Chaos must have seduced him long ago. And the forces of darkness must have come upon a way to transfer the power from the other former Rea
lm Keepers into Terrence.”

  “Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re telling me that Terrence has the powers of all six Realm Keepers?”

  “Yes, though not their strength,” said Greystone. “Not yet. But each time we see him, he has grown stronger and stronger. It is only a matter of time before his mastery of each element rivals your own.”

  “We’ve got to take him out before then,” said Blade. “If he’s got us outnumbered, and he’s got the same strength with magic that we do, we don’t stand a chance.”

  “That time is swiftly approaching,” said Greystone. “Which is why it is all the more urgent that you carry out your mission in haste. The dragons can give us the power we need to overcome Terrence’s armies. And you can give us the strength we need to overcome his magic. Remember, though he has the same powers as you, he is but one man. The six of you may wield yourselves more effectively because your six minds battle his one.”

  I nodded. “Okay, fine. What else?”

  “What do you mean, what else?” said Greystone, his nose twitching in irritation.

  “What else do we not know?” I asked. “Any other secrets you’ve been keeping from us. Lay them all out now. I don’t want any more surprises.”

  Greystone rolled his eyes. “Even one who knows everything there is to know in the world—even one who knows as much as I do—may still be surprised. But very well. There are things…aspects to being a Realm Keeper, that I have kept from you. Now that you know of Terrence, however, it seems foolish to keep them any longer.”

  Greystone sighed, and his ghostly form before us settled on to the ground to sit cross-legged. “The first thing you should know is that Realm Keepers are immortal. From the moment you first traveled to Midrealm, your bodies stopped aging. They will never age again until you die.”

  My heart leapt into my throat. Without warning, I felt like the cave was spinning around me.

  “Cool!” said Calvin.

  “What?” snapped Miles. “Cool? How is that cool?” He turned his furious face to Greystone. “You mean we’re never going to get old? Become adults?”

  “You are already adults,” Greystone said. “I know that on True Earth, things are different. You are coddled from a young age, never allowed to assume the mantle of adulthood until you are well into your third decade. But here, it is different. Here, if someone is ready to marry and bear children while still in the prime of their youth, they are allowed to do so. Encouraged, even. Lord Calvin is on the threshold of adulthood. By our standards, the rest of you should have been several years already into your adult lives.”

  I looked up at the Runegard with a new understanding. Cara was Captain of the Runegard, leader of all five thousand of the mighty warriors across Midrealm, and she was only nineteen. Darren couldn’t have been older than eighteen. Elanor, Queen of Athorn before she died, was in her early twenties and had ruled for several years already. I’d thought that all of them were special, exceptional because of how young they were. But now I realized it was more likely that people like them were the norm here in Midrealm, rather than the exception.

  “Okay, in that case,” said Calvin, breaking into my thoughts, “I am going to start claiming my rights of adulthood.” He looked at me intently. “That means the next time they serve wine at the—”

  “No, Calvin.”

  He pouted and looked away. “Well, it was worth a try,” he muttered.

  Tess held up a hand, like she was in a classroom waiting to be called on by a teacher.

  “Go ahead, Tess,” I said. “We’re not exactly taking turns.”

  “How old is Terrence?” she asked.

  Greystone sighed. “He was the Keeper of Mind for five hundred years,” he said, sounding as though it was a great effort to utter each word. “He was the oldest Realm Keeper in known history.”

  I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Not only did our most powerful enemy know everything about us, and Greystone as well, but he was five centuries old. That was a lot of time to grow smarter, wiser, and stronger.

  “What if we don’t want to live forever?” Raven asked Greystone. “What if we want to live out a normal lifespan?”

  Greystone shrugged. “The magic, once enacted, cannot be withdrawn. Your bodies are now eternally youthful. You will not age, neither here nor on True Earth.”

  “Wait, wait,” Miles said, the shock still sinking in. “The same thing will happen back home? How are we supposed to explain that? I mean, after we graduate college and whatnot, don’t you think people will realize after a decade or two that we still look like high school kids?”

  Greystone nodded, his face growing even more grim. “Yes, and that brings us to the next matter of grave importance. On True Earth long ago, the Realm Keepers established a group of guardians. They are like the Runegard in that their sole purpose is to protect the Realm Keepers. They have had many names throughout the centuries. Now, they are called the Association.”

  Blade snickered. “Nice nickname,” he commented. “Why not just call them ‘The Group’? Or ‘The Multiple People?’”

  Greystone’s steely gaze fixed on him. “They do not have a name because they are invisible. No one but the Realm Keepers know of their existence or their goal. They are incomprehensibly wealthy. They have existed since before the first scribes began to etch words into the pages of books. The number of members is small, but they have a network of contacts that span the globe. Their sole purpose is to guard over the Realm Keepers’ sleeping bodies, and so they have amassed arms and soldiers, a private army whose only reason for existing is to guard you when you are in Midrealm.”

  “Holy cow,” Calvin said. “Um, yeah, this totally sounds like another thing you should have told us from day one. If we could get to these guys somehow, we could spend almost all day in Midrealm. We’d win the war in a month.”

  Greystone shook his head. “No. There are ways to contact the Association, but you cannot risk it. I strongly suspect that Terrence must have turned them to his side. Otherwise, they would not allow him to live on after his betrayal of the other Realm Keepers. So whether he has deceived them, and they are helping him unawares, or whether they know full well what he has done and are supporting him, they are no longer safe. You must keep yourself concealed from them.”

  “Hard to keep ourselves hidden if we don’t even know who or where they are,” Miles muttered.

  “Simply live out your lives as normally as you can,” Greystone said. “Do nothing to attract attention. Keep to yourselves and your families. And above all, stay away from this new plot of Terrence’s on True Earth.”

  “We should probably all delete our Facebooks, too,” Calvin said, looking around. “No online presence. I’ll take down my blogs.”

  “Blogs? As in plural?” asked Miles. “How many do you have?”

  Calvin held up a hand and tilted it back and forth, unsure. “About five or six, depending on how you count them.”

  Melaine looked at Miles uncertainly. “What is the blog?”

  “Forget about it,” I told her. I looked around at the others. “Calvin’s right. No more online anything. Don’t ever say the words Realm Keeper or Midrealm on the phone or in a text. They probably have ways of tracking that kind of thing.”

  “We can come up with code words,” Calvin said excitedly. “We can call Midrealm, ‘That Place with the Stuff,’ and we can say we’re ‘Superheroes’ instead of Realm Keepers.”

  Raven stared at him. “Amazing. You should play the next James Bond.”

  Calvin glossed his fingernails on his shirt. “I know, right?”

  “Do not trust anyone,” Greystone said. “I assume you have not told others on Earth of your journeys here?”

  Blade chuckled and shook his head. “Of course not. They’d think we were insane, and they’d lock us up.”

  Greystone nodded. “That is good. Keep it that way. Anyone you told would be a risk. They could mention it offhandedly to another, and soon it would
find its way to Terrence. You must not let him find you.”

  I sighed. I’d woken up in Midrealm angry and nervous. Now my emotions were spent, and I was drifting back toward exhausted. “Okay,” I said. “So we need to get back and do some damage control. Raven, you’ve got to get with your parents and tell them you don’t want to go to research place, immediately. Everyone else, scrub your internet. Get any mention of yourself off the web. Sun comes up in four hours, so we’ve got that much time back home to do as much cleaning as we can.”

  The others muttered agreements. Miles yawned, and Raven’s eyes were drooping. Our bodies here in Midrealm had only been asleep for a couple of hours, so I knew we wouldn’t have much trouble drifting off back to sleep. The adrenaline shock of Greystone’s revelations was drifting away.

  Greystone eyed me, looking as though he wanted to speak. His shoulders shifted as his eyes darted away, then back.

  “Lady Sarah,” he finally said. “Perhaps I was wrong not to tell you about Terrence.”

  “Gee, you think?” I said. But my anger was now a dying ember.

  “It is possible,” he admitted. “But you must understand. I have spent five centuries fighting by Terrence’s side. Half a millennium. In all that time, I never once suspected what he would do. I could never have predicted it. And because of that, my former charges—the Realm Keepers before you—lost their lives.”

  I shrugged. “I get it. But it’s not your fault. Evil is evil. And it can dress in some nice clothes sometimes. You just want to believe the best about people sometimes, and it can lead to some mistakes.”

  Blade snorted. “Okay, of all things I would say about grandpa here, ‘sees the best in people’ is not one of them.”

  “I only see the worst in you because you keep it so close to the surface,” Greystone growled. “I have had to dig deep to find the good.”

  Blade’s brow furrowed. “Thanks? I guess?”

  “I get what you’re saying, Greystone,” I said. “And I appreciate it. Just…don’t keep things from us in the future, okay? We’d rather know. We’re all in this together.”