by Joseph Calev
I didn’t want this to end. Here I had a million questions about my provenance, and his first words were that we had no time.
“Mordriss is coming, isn’t he?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m sure you guessed, but I’m Avarus. Your father.”
Though he had the countenance of a snarling grizzly, he was still family. I opened my arms and moved to hug him, but he shoved me away.
A tear fell down Raynee’s cheek.
“There are some things you need to know. Important things.”
Though our meeting wasn’t as emotional as I’d dreamed, this was still my father. I had to do something, no matter how small. “Very well.” I held out my hand. “I’m Jason.”
My hand shook as my father just stared at me.
“No, you’re not.”
The three of us jumped back.
“That was just a name to protect you, to keep you hidden.”
“Then what’s my real name?”
“The same one your mother and I gave you before you were born. Your name is Mordriss.”
26
The name Mordriss echoed through my body. My knees grew week and my breathing slowed while I noticed Sareya and Raynee stepping away from me. How could I ever be that monster? And yet there was my father, glaring at me through years of hiding and toil. My dreams of a normal life were destroyed.
It was clear now why Mordriss always wore a mask. He never wanted to reveal to the world that the real culprit was in their midst, so well hidden that even he believed himself innocent. Of course, he had not murdered me with the rest of the villagers. He needed me alive.
“He’s not Mordriss,” Raynee demanded, but my father didn’t flinch.
“That’s his name. My wife . . . It was her favorite. But I suppose it sounds different now.”
“But I didn’t kill anyone!”
“Not yet, you haven’t.”
The hut was bare, save for a basic cot in the corner. It was surprising that such a powerful man would avalate such simple and filthy accommodations. He peered out the window at the horizon, which formed a bright line where the sun had just set. We wouldn’t be alone for long.
“I’m sure you have many questions, but we need to focus on what you need to know. That I’ll show you. Only then will you understand.”
He sat on the floor and lifted his forehead. One-by-one, each of us placed a hand on top. We were back in the desert world.
It was a bright day, though the sun was obscured by a gray haze over the sands that painted the sky white while the winds skirted the dunes. My father was making the same journey through the desert world that I had multiple times, only this time it was for real.
While I had been greeted by an overzealous Jamol and a pensive Ilyos, my father was instead met by the stench of burning corpses strewn across the remains of the village. Standing in their midst, with her arms held wide, was my mother.
The version I’d met was already weary from years. Here, she was radiant and not much older than I was now. Her eyes glowered at him while her hair was smooth and skin free from years of sorrows. He stopped on seeing her, and from both of their bewildered looks, neither had expected the other.
“What happened to the turnips?” my father asked.
“Practice.”
“You’re practicing to kill turnips?” he said playfully. “Not much of a challenge, is it?”
“Well.” She drew nearer. “If this were a duel. But that’s not much fun.”
He plugged his nose from the smell, then waved his hand and the bodies disintegrated.
“You have a strange sense of fun.” He laughed, but she didn’t share it. With a similar wave, she put every corpse back.
He jumped back just as a black stain appeared on the horizon. They poured forward in the thousands. There were shouts and cheers as they advanced. The hooves shook the earth. When they reached her, a lone warrior separated from the mass.
“See what I have done to those who defy me!” she shouted.
She lifted a head and threw it at them. The horseman drew his scabbard and moved to a full charge.
“Are you so foolish as to disregard my wrath?” she called to them while my father looked on with a smirk.
My mother was calm while the warrior’s armor gleamed from the dust storm that enveloped him. When he reached her, he lifted his sword for the kill, and she had the widest grin.
One jump was all it took. With an eight-inch stiletto blade she easily somersaulted over him and sliced the marauder from the skull down to the torso. His horse never stopped moving, but his body soon collapsed over the side and joined the others.
The entire army stood in silence, then one-by-one each dismounted and bowed across the sands.
“Fear and loyalty,” she said to my father. “Building an empire.”
She lifted her hands high, then bellowed to the crowd “Hear me, my soldiers! The world will cower under our steeds. We will topple the empires surrounding us. We will build a force that will be feared for all history, for we are the horde that never stops. A thousand generations will grow up in fear of our names.”
“Very impressive,” my father said. In complete view of the horde, he collapsed to the sand and bowed. “You have my interest, and likely my heart as well.”
This was how my parents met. Normal parents meet on blind dates, parties, and bold approaches at the park. Mine met on a battlefield of corpses and prostrating warriors. I was beginning to long for someone who just watched a tablet.
We were back in Oreca Gifted. My father was there, but stood at the front of the room. He was a professor. The lecture was on the intricacies of time correlation in cenosance. My mother stood at the back with a big grin. While he talked, she danced as if in tune to the mathematics. Several times he had to stop the lesson while barely holding his laughter. This was how I preferred to remember them.
Once he finished and the students filed out, she ran up and jumped into his arms.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?”
“Maybe I have.” He kissed her. “He’s coming.”
She grabbed a quick kiss, then essonated away. Algard’s gaunt form entered. He wore the same dark suit and looked little changed from the one I’d so recently pissed off.
“I see you’re unfortunately making progress.”
“That’s of no consequence to you,” my father replied.
“Oh, but Avarus, it is. You and I both know what waits out there. Your findings will be noticed, and then we’re all dead. You need to stop this foolishness.”
“That’s what thin-minded men always seem to think of progress.”
“Regardless, I cannot allow it.”
My father laughed. “Well, look at you. Receive a promotion and you’re all the sudden giving out orders, playing top of the roost. And yet you’ve forgotten one important thing.”
Algard reached out his hand, but my father calmly resisted the blast, then resonated Algard’s legs and arms apart until he hung like a toy doll in midair.
“You call yourself a master, but I’ve always outclassed you, haven’t I?”
“You can take the school by force,” the catatonic Algard mumbled. “But they’ll never follow you. You’ll inherit an empty building.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” My father tossed the helpless Algard into a wall.
The poor man struggled to his feet while eyeing my father’s hands. It had taken my, Raynee’s, and Darstan’s best to hold Algard, but my father was playing with him. I looked at my own hands. Was this the genesis of the Mordriss I was to become?
“We all respect your unparalleled knowledge of resonance and cenosance,” said the master in a meeker tone. “I don’t recall anyone having such mastery of two forces.”
My father only nodded while glaring at him.
“But you need to stop this. There are some things not worth doing. I admire your enthusiasm, but there are other aspects—”
“Such as?”
“You
’re going to draw attention! You certainly must know how much damage that will cause. You don’t need the math for that.”
“Not possible. You always were inferior at figuring the details.”
“Then I have no choice but to ban you,” Algard stated. “You will be removed from all records. This school will never again welcome you.”
“This school will never be what it was. You want followers, not discoverers.”
My father exited the room while continuing to confront the defiant Algard.
We orasated to a bright room. Outside bloomed endless fields of flowers. My mother lay on a couch, her belly bulging and her face sweating despite being a tepid day. She stared quietly at my father, who had worn through the carpet with his pacing.
“I’m so close,” he said. “There’s just . . . something I’m not seeing.”
“You’ll find it soon enough,” she said. “I know you will.”
He stopped, then as if in an afterthought leaned down to kiss her.
“Remember that night in the desert?” she said in a sultry manner, and I looked away. “How I wish to be back there right now. Maybe not the heat . . . but the excitement, the glory.”
“No one to tell us what to study,” added my father.
“Damn time correlation,” she said. “It’s not the same anymore.”
My father stopped, put his finger on his lips, and stared outward.
“Maybe—”
Then my mother screamed.
We orasated to the delivery room. My mother was dressed in a light blue gown while three nurses frantically rushed around her. Her pupils were nearly popping out, her hands still held the torn-out bed bars, and she shrieked a bone curdling cry.
“This isn’t supposed to happen!” she screamed.
“What the hell is going on!” my father asked the nurses.
My mother dropped the right bed bar, reached out her arm, and resonated a nurse against the ceiling.
“We don’t know,” a nurse said frantically to my father. “It’s supposed to be painless . . . natural.” She leaned toward him. “Something’s wrong.”
My mother’s stomach lifted into the air, nearly bending her into an upsidedown U, and another nurse was pinned to the wall. Her hand was splayed out now, reaching desperately for something, anything.
“Make it stop!”
“Please, Avarus,” one of the nurses said while pulling herself together. “Wait just outside.”
“This isn’t natural,” he pleaded.
“Please.”
He tore open the wall, then walked through it. From the new hallway, two more nurses charged into their room. Their eyes were blank. None had a clue.
And then came a sound that I’ll never forget. My mother echoed a loud piercing wail as the fully grown Mordriss began to rip open her stomach and enter our world. Shrieks echoed through the room and my father collapsed to the floor. His mouth opened to cry but nothing came out.
Her screaming reached a crescendo in a bursting sound, like a moist clam pried open, and the entire wall was coated in blood. She gargled as the blood poured through her throat, and with one last gasp she was dead.
A torn limb flew out of the room while my father only froze in terror.
“What the—!” a nurse screamed, then came the sound of her, too, choking on her own blood. Her head rolled to the doorway before it burst apart.
My father’s face was both wet with tears and white with terror as he tried to crawl toward the splattered remains of my mother, but he was unable to move. There were more cries, the crack of bones, spraying of blood, until only one nurse remained. She was backing slowly through the doorway.
Those were the last steps she took. From behind, someone resonated her into the air, then pulled her torso in half. And then I saw him. I saw myself.
My deep brown hair had grayed a bit, and my skin was now poorly shaven with a few wrinkles, but my eyes and physique were all there. Raynee gasped. She was far more used to my movements. I truly was Mordriss.
He glared at the lifeless body, whose head still stared at him as if asking “why.”
Mordriss laughed, then incinerated it.
My father covered his head and sobbed.
He wore a suit slightly unbuttoned and without a tie, as if returning from a party. Some of my mother’s intestines hung from his shoulder. After a snap of a finger, his suit was new again. Upon noticing the coiled-up man, Mordriss knelt down to him while my father tried not to look.
“Greetings, Father,” he said with half a smile.
My father continued to cry.
“Your idea worked, Father. It really did. Aren’t you proud?”
“What did you do?” Father in a hoarse voice. “My wife—”
“Poor Father,” Mordriss said in a sinister tone. “You really don’t know yet, do you?”
For a moment, Mordriss looked at us and smiled. I almost swore he saw us.
“She was a traitor. Tried to stop me.” He grabbed my father by the chin and glared into his eyes. “We can’t have that now, can we?”
“What do you want?”
Mordriss scanned around. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? You taught me everything I know, so I owe you a few minutes.” He stood. “I’m going to tidy up a bit here. You stick around, and then we’ll discuss how this moves forward . . . or doesn’t.”
Mordriss walked past my father, who resumed cowering. Just before leaving, he turned.
“And don’t go anywhere, Father. I will find you, and I won’t be patient like I was with Mother.”
He left, and my father let out a loud scream while arching his body against the wall. He collapsed, defeated. Then his cries stopped. There was something still in the room. It was moving. Whatever it was, was alive.
After looking back for a few seconds, he crawled through the blood and torn corpses into the delivery room. He kept low not for fear of Mordriss, but to avoid seeing the remains of his wife.
One of her legs dangled by a ligament from the bed, while both arms were splayed off either side. Blood dripped from every end. There was a light cry, then a wail. It was a baby.
I was in the delivery room.
My father shielded his eyes, then sat up slightly and lifted my newborn self from my mother’s carcass. He looked around again, then essonated a portal and jumped through it.
We were back in the hut in our own time. My father sat on his cot with his head downward.
“Time travel. . . . I thought everything would be better, but Algard was right.”
Raynee stood next to me and grabbed my hand. When I tried to release it, she held on.
“So, he’s not Mordriss,” she stated out loud.
“It depends,” my father replied. “Did he kill all those people? Not yet.”
We stood there in silence. The horizon outside turned orange.
“In some other timeline, your mother and I had a baby. You grew up in this world, not on a fake one, and had everything a child in the paramount dimension desired. I solved the mysteries of time travel, and taught you everything. That was a mistake.”
“So, what do we do now?” Raynee asked.
“Nothing,” my father said glumly. “Algard was right. I thought it was impossible to go back farther than the machine itself, but I clearly miscalculated.”
The sky was a deep red now. My father stood and walked toward it.
“We can’t kill him,” he said. “I just thought you should know the truth, before—”
The plains erupted in fire, and I knew our time was up.
“I’ll stay with you, Father. Until the end.”
“No, you won’t. Your mother and I weren’t good people. I know that now. We killed turnips. We enjoyed torturing them. We were arrogant. You’re none of that.”
“But we’re family,” I said.
“No, we’re not.” The fire roared. “You were the single good thing a bad man did in his life. Make what’s left of yours into something better. Create new
universes. Bring some good into this world that I fouled up.”
He lifted his palms, and ten thousand horse warriors appeared before us. They lifted their swords and bows, then charged toward the horizon while shouting in unison.
“This is the way your mother would’ve preferred,” he said somberly, then avalated away the hut.
“We’re staying,” Raynee said, squeezing my hand.
My father walked through the advancing horde. The entire sky now swirled in fire.
“No, you’re not.” He essonated a portal and shoved us through, while in the distance, a dark figure appeared from the fire.
Raynee, Sareya, and I stood before the school. Most of the student body was there, looking at us in amazement.
There would be no easy way to do this. Mordriss was coming, and we had no way to defeat him.
27
My father was gone, and our entire adventure was for nothing. There was no secret to stopping Mordriss. We were the same person, I now knew, but from separate timelines. For the last few weeks, I’d desperately wished that I’d been born to the same advantages of everyone else in this dimension, and now I knew the consequences. The version of me that was Mordriss had received everything growing up, and had become the worse for it.
With the demon about to arrive, my thoughts turned to Raynee and Sareya. Mordriss must have reasons to keep me alive, but how would I ever hope to protect them? How could I prevent him from taking absolutely everything?
The entire student body had surrounded us now. Their arms and legs were all spread wide, ready to attack. I glanced behind me, but there was no one. Then I scanned their faces. None were happy.
Raynee stepped back and prepared to counter, but I gently grabbed her hand. There were a hundred of them and two and a half of us, counting myself as the half, of course. We stood no chance against a coordinated attack.
Revis stood at their front with the biggest smirk. I spotted Henry and Sarlat in the crowd and smiled at them, desperately trying to defuse the situation, but all I met were frowns.
Revis stepped forward.
“We had to do it,” I stated. “We needed to know—”
