Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
PART TWO
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
More From The Author
About The Author
The Irispire Portal
Robinson Castillo
Copyright @ 2019 owned by Robinson Castillo
All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior consent of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Designed by:
Faye Diana Fernando
[email protected]
For Francesca.
PART ONE
One
I remember the day Halcyon Inc. announced they invented the first flying car. It was July 21, 2152 AD. I was living in New York at the time, and I was jogging through Central Park when the news alert came on my visor. I had to sit down on a park bench to watch the entire unveiling. The car used electromagnetic tech, and only floated five feet off the ground. Also, it had to be traveling on an opposed polarizing surface. To say it was expensive is an understatement. Changing all the road surfaces alone would have cost into the trillions. Not to mention the gargantuan electric bill that would have sent the world into a third energy crisis. They ended up scrapping the project, but it was revolutionary for its time.
Oh how far we've come. It's now a mere three hundred and fifty years later, and I'm dangling out of the back of a flying ten-ton delivery truck, twenty-five thousand feet in the air, with an ogre crushing my windpipe inch by angry inch. The only things keeping it from completely crushing my neck are my hands desperately trying to pry its huge fingers apart. But, if I succeed in making it let me go, then I'll fall and die. Damned if I do, I guess.
This was a bad idea. Astraea, you better be on your way! I need help!
I'm running out of options. The longsword I dropped less than a minute ago, is now rattling on the trailer floor nearly thirty feet away. Beads of sweat are dripping down my face, the rushing air blowing them dry. It hurts to move my jaw. This bastard, or one of its two dead ogre friends, must have broken it. Both those ogres are sizzling on the ten-ton's cargo bed — dissolving into a yellowy brown ooze. They broke my nose too. It snapped, cracked, and popped when one of them punched me in the face earlier. The pain from breathing through my nostrils is hot, sharp, and throbs all through my sinuses.
I engage my core, bring my legs up, and I kick the ogre's face with my heels. The thing grits its teeth and tusks, reels back and punches me in the face with its left fist. My head snaps back. The inside of my mouth fills with the metallic taste of my blood. Then it hits me again, and again.
The skyways are packed. Cars are whipping by me. Their drivers and passengers have strange looks on their faces. Half look worried and are probably wondering if they should call the cops. The other half are probably wondering if they should start filming. If they did start recording, though, they'd see the ogre as a giant blur on their screens when they try to watch it later or live-stream it to the world. That's the thing with magical creatures; they distort radio waves and mess with photons so you can't get a clear picture of them.
'Oh hey, what do we have here?'
The voice inside my head startles me, but it's about time she showed up!
Astraea! Where the hell have you been?
'Vacation,' she answers.
Well, get out of my head, and help!
My ethereal friend, Astraea, can't do much. She's got no physical form. She can't punch an ogre in the face or hand me the longsword I dropped. But what she can do is distract.
The ogre punches me in the face again, and my head explodes. It throws its head back in a guttural laugh. But when it opens its beady red eyes to look at me, Astraea materializes in front of it in the image of another ogre and roars. The distraction works! The ogre strangling me lets go and brings its arms up to defend itself.
I gasp for air as soon as the ogre releases me from its grasp. Then gravity takes over, and I drop. My heart jumps out of my throat. I manage to grab hold of one of the truck's stabilizers with my left hand before I fall. My two hundred pound bodyweight, however, continuing on its downward momentum, comes to a sudden stop, causing a severe tear in my rotator cuff. I scream loud. I hang there for a moment catching my breath, thanking my good fortune and reflexes. Then I swing myself up onto the truck's trailer.
I survey the scene. Inside the trailer is a rampaging seven foot tall ogre — its muscles shifting and tightening under its pinkish-gray skin. The ogre is buck naked, but, like all demonic creatures, it is void of sex and is missing any anatomical features common to creatures of this world. This naked ogre is swatting away, in vain, at my diaphanous friend in the shape of another ogre. Then Astraea disappears completely, and the ogre lets out a frustrated scream. It huffs and puffs, frantically looking around until it turns its red eyes in my direction and charges.
I grit my teeth and run towards it with my dislocated left arm swinging limply at my side. Then I somersault roll between its strides. It tries bringing its giant fists down on me, but misses, and ends up making dents in the trailer's steel floor. I roll up, and run towards my sword near the front of the truck, past not one, but two dead ogres.
I pick up the sword with my functional right arm. The pommel, which is a silver ball with a placid angelic face carved into it, glows a soft yellow light at my touch. My hand vibrates with the buzz of healing magical energy as soon as my fingers wrap around its handle. The top of my right-hand rests beneath the cross-guard, which look like angel wings with fine feathers etched into the solid silver. It takes a quick moment for my left shoulder and arm to heal enough for me to be able to grip the weapon with both hands. I squeeze it tight, and the swirling surface pattern on the dark Damascus steel blade shines with a silver-chromatic glimmer.
The ogre grinds its teeth and tusks. I wait for it to charge. It's one on one; my kind of fight. It huffs and puffs towards me with a half-ton of demonic anger behind it. I swing my sword up and then down in a ribbon cut, the true edge of my indestructible blade slicing it from left shoulder
to right hip. Then I thrust my sword through its abdomen, with the ogre impaled up to the glowing, angel-wing cross-guard. The anger in its eyes subsides until there is no life behind them. Its hot breaths, strong at first, but quickly weakening, warms my face and fills my nostrils. It falls to its knees. I pull my sword out, and it falls lifeless on the truck floor, emitting an acrid smell as parts of it dissolves into a yellowy brown ooze.
Two
Dang it, my neck hurts.
'Oh, quit whining. And stop dropping your sword,' says the voice in my head.
"Easy for you to say," I say back, aloud. "There were three ogres before you got here. And show yourself already. You know how talking to thin air freaks me out."
‘Fine.’
Astraea appears in front of me as if she's walking towards the front of the truck. She's not physically there. She's still in my head. For her to manifest so others can see her too, like she did with that ogre, takes a lot of energy to accomplish, so she does it sparingly.
She always appears to me in the image of Emily Johns, my first love, at different stages of our relationship. This time she appears to me as Emily circa 1997 — our senior year. She has straight brown hair, and blond highlights, arranged into crazy spikes by strategically placed hairpins. She's wearing waist-high cargo capris, and a gray tank top with The Backstreet Boys' debut album cover silk-screened on the front, and a list of tour dates on the back. She turns her head and smiles at me. I admire her cute upturned nose, her hazel eyes, the alluring Cupid's bow curve of her mouth, and am momentarily taken back to our youth together. Astraea gets into the passenger seat.
I give my sword a quick flick, and the ogre gunk flies off, leaving it spotless. The hilt remains aglow with yellow light, pulsing as it continues to heal my injuries. The silver-chromatic glow of the swirling surface patterns along the blade fades, and goes back to flawless dark gray Damascus steel. I sheathe it at my side, and it slaps reassuringly against my thigh as I walk to the back of the trailer. I close the trailer's open loading doors. Then I walk to the front of the truck, get in the driver's seat, buckle my belt, and flip the truck out of auto-drive.
It is June 6, 2502, AD. Late evening city traffic fills the skyways. Millions of flying cars are crisscrossing in strings of multi-colored LED lights. I live in Minneapolis/St.Paul. Home to three hundred forty-nine million people. The original twin cities are at ground level, and above it are ten, floating, Manhattan-sized districts hovering at different heights and shifting spaces, all inside a climate controlled dome made of trillions of nanobots. I am flying through District Ten, my home district, with District Eleven floating over two thousand feet above us.
"So seriously, where were you?" I ask Astraea.
She leans back on her seat.
‘Puerto de Paz,’ she answers, with a rolled R, and a sigh of fond memories. ‘Port of Peace. You should take the time to go there — beautiful beaches, hot guys...’
Astraea is a celestial. She's a citizen of that oh so mysterious, eternal, and vast, spirit world. But she also belongs on our plane of existence. She can come in and out of both planes freely as part of her function. The ancient Greeks would have called her a daemon (with an 'A'), Vikings would have called her a Valkyrie, and Judeo-Christian-Islamic types would call her an angel.
Emotion to her is like air to us humans. Places like Puerto De Paz, where she can bask on good vibes of people on vacation, is equivalent to us breathing in bucolic, morning, country air. A warzone to her, however, would be like us breathing in rancid, sulfurous, and polluted air, which we can only get through with unending bouts of coughing, and gagging.
"Well you know I do love the hot guys, and all," I say to her, "but between ogres and this little number, I can't seem to find the time to travel."
I reach behind me keeping my eyes front. I feel around blindly under my seat and find an open carrying case. Then I slide the case from under the seat, revealing a metallic gray arrangement of cylinders and tubes — a clunky-looking thing, about the size of a puppy.
At the sight of it, Astraea squirms in her seat.
‘Whoa,’ she says. ‘That's a bomb. What the hell have you gotten yourself into this time?’
"Don't worry. The ogres didn't get a chance to arm it. I kinda hitched a ride on their truck while they were en route."
‘En route to where?’
I think about it for a moment. "I don't know," I answer.
‘Well, I guess the smart thing to do would have been to follow them, let them make the drop, plant a tracking device on the truck, diffuse the bomb, then track them back to where they came from.’
I sway my head from side to side. "Yeah."
‘But instead, you decided to hijack a truck in midair, get in a fight with not one, not two, but three ogres. BY YOURSELF! Lose your sword in the process, and then end up dangling from open truck doors, thousands of feet in the air.’
"In all our years working together, I've never claimed to be smart."
She laughs a little — Emily's throaty laugh.
‘Well, your sense of self-awareness has always been your one redeeming trait,’ she says.
"Thanks. I'll take it. And, for the record, you were supposed to be here helping me out. But nooooo. You had to go on vacation, leaving me to fend for myself."
‘How long was I gone for?’ she asks.
She genuinely doesn't know. Astraea doesn't function on earthly time. She's in and out of planes, so she's a horological nightmare. Calendars, seasons, clocks — all of it means nothing to her. She could be gone a year on our plane, but to her, it could feel like she's been gone two minutes. It's one of the sticking points of having an angelic sidekick.
"You were gone three years," I tell her.
‘Wow! Three years? Sorry, I lost track of time. What have you been doing while I was gone?’
"Oh you know, this and that. I did start planning a new campaign and started looking for some players. Also, Kyle gave me a new I.D. New name and everything."
‘Ooh lemme see.’
I press the 'home' button on the applicator on my wrist, and a holographic window about the size of twenty-first century smartphone pops up in the palm of my hand, asking me for my password. I enter it, the Halcyon chime rings out, and the home window pops up with the word 'Halcyon' written in white lettering across a blue field. I swipe through my windows to a holographic projection of my driver's license. I press the projector button so that my I.D. is floating in between our seats. Then I turn towards Astraea with a neutral face, no smile, to match the face I am making in the photo.
She knits her brows as she reads my information.
‘Nyyx Mara,’ she says. ‘That's a little contemporary for you. I thought you were more into old fashioned names. How did you come up with this name, Nyyx?’
"I kid you not, a fricken random name generator."
She smiles. ‘Nyyx Mara. I like it.’
She continues to scan my I.D. Then she snorts, holding back a laugh.
"What? What's so funny?"
‘Oof, Kyle is slipping,’ she says. ‘There is no way you could pass for 26. You look at least 35. Maybe you could pass for 30, tops.’
"No," I say, with an incredulous breath.
‘What are you talking about, look at those smile lines and those crow's feet. And is that gray hair?’
"What the hell?" I roll down the window to look at myself in the truck's side mirror. I have a bruise on the left side of my face. It must have covered the whole side once, but now, with the help of my magic sword, it's shrunk to the size of my palm and continues to get smaller. The edges of it go from purple with bits of red, to black and blue, to yellow, and then finally settles down to my light brown skin tone.
I inspect my face for signs of age. New wrinkles have sprung up on my forehead, refusing to go away when I bring my eyebrows down. There are faint crow's feet and soft smile lines on the sides of my face. I try to smooth out my cheeks, but the wrinkles remain. They're not deep, but they're
certainly more noticeable than before. And, my goodness, there is a group of grays hanging out on the top of my head.
"Ah, crap. I'll get Kyle to change my age to 30. But I ain't going any higher, you hear me!"
Astraea laughs. ‘I wouldn't worry. Your mom looked like a fox well into three thousand.’
I lift my chin to look for neck folds. Thankfully, there are none, but there is a huge bruise, also shrinking, in the shape of an ogre's hand. It still hurts to breathe through my broken nose, but I watch as my nose cracks, sets itself back to the middle of my face, and heals somewhat straight.
My lower back and right shoulder still hurt, but that should disappear in about two minutes. I should be all healed up thanks to The Destroying Angel sheathed at my hip. I give my longsword a little pat.
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Mom looked pretty good well into her 3,680's."
‘Heck yeah, she did. She didn't look a day past 45, and was still rocking hip-huggers.’
I nod, wrinkling my nose, finding it a little strange the conversation somehow pivoted to how hot my mom was.
‘So what's the next step?’ she asks.
"I gotta dump this truck. And you have to turn over some rocks in the spirit world, 'cause there are all kinds of strange happening here."
Astraea turns back and looks behind her seat at the three dead ogres behind us. These things stink something awful as they sizzle and decompose, but they'll be gone in an hour or so, leaving no evidence that they were ever here.
‘Oh my goodness, you're right,’ she says. ‘There were three of them?’
"Yup," I confirm.
Astraea leans back in her seat and exhales a whistle. ‘Ooh boy.’
"Tell me about it," I say.
She scratches the top of her head. ‘But I don't get it. Why waste your time with ogres? And to deliver a bomb? If you're gonna summon three terrifying baddies, surely you wouldn't use them as henchmen to blow something up. You could hire anybody to do that for you — no need to waste energy on summoning and conjuring these things. And if you are going to spend the time and energy to summon them, wouldn't it be better to use all that energy to summon something with a little more oomph? Maybe then, if your purpose were to cause death and destruction, you wouldn't have to resort to using bombs in the first place.’
The Irispire Portal Page 1
