The Future King

by James Riley

  “Ask Ellora—she’ll tell you,” the old man said. “I wouldn’t trust a word this boy says.”

  “Don’t worry about it all, Fort,” Cyrus said, his hands beginning to glow with black light. “I’m so sorry he brought you here, but I’ll figure out a way to fix what he’s done before I send you back. It shouldn’t take long, and you won’t remember it anyway. Just hold on for one minute—”

  “Oh, we don’t have time for that,” the old man said, and before Cyrus could object, Fort was back at Glastonbury Tor just a few feet behind his friends walking toward the tower.

  “No!” he shouted, making the others all jump and whirl around.

  “Whoa, what’s wrong?” Rachel said, looking for the source of a threat. “Is Damian coming back?”

  “No, it was … ,” Fort said, then trailed off, having no idea what to tell her.

  “It was … ?” Rachel asked, while Jia just looked impatient. “A headache? You just yelling out ‘no!’ for fun? What?”

  Fort sighed. He’d have to tell them something. But what? Cyrus had seemed pretty convinced that Fort shouldn’t have heard anything the old man had told him. He wasn’t wrong there, since learning that his father might be in danger would definitely make Fort look for a way to save him. Maybe the same thing would happen with Jia and Rachel, too, about their warnings.

  But what if Cyrus was wrong, and they needed to beware this queen of Avalon lady, whoever that was? Cyrus hadn’t said the warnings were actually wrong, had he?

  Either way, Fort had to find out what was going to happen to his father, no matter what Cyrus thought about it. And that meant talking to the one person who knew.

  “Cyrus reached out to me, using his magic,” Fort said finally. “He brought me just a few hours into the future and showed me a place we should go after we get the book of Spirit magic.”

  Ellora’s eyes widened. “Cyrus reached out to you? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, probably in this same place now,” Fort said, shaking his head. “It was all really confusing. But someone said that something might be happening to my father, that he might be in danger. And that I needed to ask you about it, Ellora.”

  At this, the blood drained from Ellora’s face, leaving her pale in the dim light of the dome. “But it’s not yet time,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what will happen if I tell you now. It has to wait until you’re committed—I’ve seen it. I can’t tell you what causes the war until—”

  Jia jumped at Ellora’s last words. “What do you mean? I thought Damian destroying London sets off the war.”

  “That, and adults learning magic,” Rachel said, giving Ellora a suspicious look. “Which you wouldn’t tell us more about, other than that it’s Dr. Ambrose who figures out how to do it.”

  “Because if I told you more, you might … take it the wrong way at the moment,” Ellora said, looking miserable. “We should go, now, if we’re going to get to the book before Damian—”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going to happen to my father,” Fort said, both needing to know and deathly afraid of actually finding out. But he couldn’t go on if something was going to happen back at the Oppenheimer School, and he’d be too late to save his dad. Was Colonel Charles going to send him away? If that was the case, what could a queen of a strange place do to save him?

  More importantly, if she could do something, shouldn’t he consider it?

  “Tell us how adults learn magic, too,” Jia said. “If there’s something else we’ll have to do to stop the war, then we need to know about it now.”

  Ellora nodded, looking dejected. “I do know something about your father, Fort. And I can tell you all how adults gain the power over magic. But none of you are going to like it. And this really isn’t the time. If we waited, you’d come to accept what needs to be done with Spirit magic. But now … I just can’t be sure.”

  “All we’re going to do with Spirit magic is destroy it,” Rachel said.

  Ellora gave her a pleading look. “Please, you don’t know what we could accomplish with it—”

  “Tell us what’s going to happen with my father!” Fort shouted.

  “And the war!” Jia added.

  Ellora turned away but nodded. “Just remember, you asked to see this now. I wanted to wait until you were ready.” She raised a hand glowing with black light, and for the second time, Glastonbury Tor disappeared around Fort.

  But this time, instead of a cozy dining table, he found himself in a familiar spot: the medical bay at the Oppenheimer School. And there was his father, lying in a hospital bed, just like he’d left him.

  Only now there were a number of Healing students surrounding him, with Dr. Ambrose standing close by, watching carefully.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ellora said quietly. “But it’s here that everything goes wrong.”

  - TWENTY-ONE -

  WHAT DID SHE MEAN, EVERYTHING was going to go wrong? Fort pushed through the assembled students, passing right through them insubstantially, to reach his father. Thankfully, nothing looked like it’d changed since the last time Fort had seen him.

  But maybe something was about to?

  One by one, the students on each side of the bed raised glowing blue hands over his father, then sent the Healing magic into him. As they did, Dr. Ambrose seemed to be taking notes, her eyes on the machine readouts, but as far as Fort could tell, nothing was happening.

  As each spell was cast, the student would then return to where the book of Healing magic sat on a nearby table and read it over.

  “She’s having them try different spells on him to wake him up,” Jia said. “Looks like stronger magic than they’ve mastered. So maybe it’s both practice and an experiment to see if they can wake him up?”

  “Are they going to hurt him?” Fort asked Ellora, his eyes on each of the Healing students. He didn’t know any of them that well, but if it came down to stopping them to save his father, he wouldn’t hesitate to teleport them a few miles away.

  Except he couldn’t, not watching from the past. Here, he was completely powerless.

  “No,” Ellora said, her eyes on the floor.

  “When is this?” Rachel asked.

  “A few months from now,” Ellora said, and Fort’s throat tightened. If his father was still here at the school, then that meant Colonel Charles had sent Fort home without his father. Did he even know his dad was here, rescued from the Dracsi? Or did this future Fort now have no idea his father was even alive?

  He reached out to touch his dad, but his hand passed right through him.

  “None of these seem to be working,” Moira, one of the Healing students, said to Dr. Ambrose. “Do you want me to try a different spell?”

  “No, I … wait,” the doctor said, leaning in closer to one of the machines. “What’s this? It’s almost like—”

  Out of nowhere, Fort’s father bolted up in bed, surprising everyone in the room, including Fort himself. They all leaped backward as Fort’s father began to shout out words Fort had never heard before, words that disappeared the instant Fort heard them. As the words continued, blue light began to glow from his father’s body, just like whenever a Healing-magic user cast a spell.

  But that wasn’t possible. His father couldn’t be using magic!

  “What did you do?” Dr. Ambrose shouted at the students, but they all looked as surprised as she was. “Is one of you doing this?”

  “No!” they shouted as the glow grew brighter, filling the room, before it exploded out from his father, blinding both the students and Fort’s group.

  And with that, his dad fell back to the bed, unconscious once more.

  “I recognized that spell,” Jia said, sounding shocked as Dr. Ambrose called for help, and several medical personnel came running in, all talking at once. “It was the same one Moira just cast. How could he do that? He can’t have access to the magic!”

  “And even I can’t hear someone else’s spell and repeat it,” Rachel s
houted from elsewhere in the room over the nurses and Dr. Ambrose. “What is going on here, Ellora?”

  “It’s exactly what you think it is,” Ellora said, not facing any of them. “I shouldn’t have shown you this, especially you, Fort. It wasn’t fair, and it’s something we can fix.”

  “What happened to him?” Fort asked, not able to pull his eyes off his father as the nurses tried to wake him again without any luck. “What did he just do?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Ellora said. “By which I mean, no one knows. But after Dr. Ambrose sees this, she comes up with a theory and shares it with Agent Cole and Colonel Charles. She thinks that when the Old One restored your father to human from his Dracsi form, he remade him into a human being just the way the Old One remembered them. And the last time he would have seen a human being was from before magic disappeared.”

  Jia gasped. “Dr. Ambrose had some kind of odd neurological readings from him when we brought him back,” she said. “And they matched Sierra’s readings. Does that mean—?”

  Ellora nodded. “She thinks that whatever changed in your dad’s head, Fort, was what allows us to use magic, but not adults. And by putting it back the way it should have been, the Old One not only gave your dad access to magic, but at an even more advanced stage than we have. Like if we’re exercising a muscle, he was just given a bodybuilder’s version.”

  “No,” Jia whispered. “If she knows that much, she could have Healing students try to duplicate it in other adults. And that would lead to …” She trailed off, staring in horror at Fort, who hadn’t caught up yet.

  “Lead to what?” he shouted, not liking her expression at all. “What is going to happen to him?”

  “He’s fine,” Ellora said. “But she uses that knowledge to experiment on TDA soldiers, under orders from Colonel Charles. And her experiments work. She figures out how to give adult soldiers the same access to magic your dad has, a more powerful version of what we have now. And that, combined with Damian’s attack on London, leads to war.”

  Her words hit Fort like a hammer to his gut, and he shook his head in disbelief. If his father’s condition led to a war, then it was ultimately because Fort went looking for him and brought him back. So all this was his fault?

  “This doesn’t have to be a problem!” Rachel shouted, as the medical professionals gradually gave up, leaving Dr. Ambrose and the Healing students staring at Fort’s father in wonder. “What we’re seeing hasn’t happened yet. All we have to do is stop it. How hard can that be? We just have to fix Fort’s dad—”

  “He’s already fixed,” Ellora said, looking nauseous. “He’s how humans are supposed to be, and how we are, having grown up with magic. She explained it all to the colonel, but I didn’t understand most of it. Something about nerve bundles in your brain, and how not using them early on would have led to them being used for something else, I guess? But since magic existed when we were born, we could use them, even without knowing it.” She shook her head. “It’s all beyond me, but I can take you there if you need to hear it from the doctor.”

  But hearing more about it was the last thing Fort wanted. He felt the room begin to spin as he realized everything he’d set into motion. Just by rescuing his father, not only had Gabriel revealed Damian to the Old Ones and almost given them power over him, but now it turned out that his own father was the source of adults gaining magic.

  And he’d seen firsthand what that led to: a tsunami used as a war weapon. Not to mention that Rachel and Jia had witnessed massive outbreaks of diseases in American cities from Healing soldiers and Hong Kong being set on fire.

  An entire world at war, and all because of Fort.

  Cyrus had tried to warn him, back before Fort had gone to the Dracsi world. He’d said Fort would lose someone, which apparently meant Gabriel, who now hated Fort and had been expelled over his actions. But Cyrus had also said it’d lead to a dark future, and this had to be it.

  And it was all his fault.

  It took him a moment to realize the others were still talking, and he tried to steady himself by paying attention again.

  “So then Healers could replace that nerve,” Jia said, and Fort noticed her hands were shaking, oddly. “It wouldn’t even be complicated. No wonder the world goes to war … all other countries would need is one Healer to … to do it, and …” She began to tremble, and Rachel reached out to her, but she shook her head. “No! We need to stop this, now! Ellora, how can we make sure it doesn’t happen?”

  Fort clenched his fists, knowing there was only one way Ellora could intend to fix things. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said quietly. “She wants to go back in time and stop me from rescuing him.” And there was no way he was ever going to let that happen.

  The others were silent for a moment before Rachel spoke up. “You’re not the one who builds an army from this,” she told him. “You might have made it possible, but you didn’t make the choice to go to war, Fort. This isn’t your fault, and we’re not going to stop you from rescuing your dad.”

  “But what if there’s no other way?” Jia blurted out. “We can’t just let the world go to war without trying to stop it!”

  They’re right, Fort, he could hear his father saying, but even in his imagination, the voice seemed more distant, like it was disappearing. This isn’t your fault. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. And you know what my vote would be here.

  Of course he knew. His father would want to save everyone, because that was who he was. Who he is.

  But he couldn’t lose his father again, not just when he’d gotten his dad back! It was too awful to even think about—

  “Well, that’s not even an option, so don’t worry about it,” Ellora said, shocking Fort out of his thoughts. “It’s not possible, not with the Time magic we know. The past is set. But the future, that’s something we can still change, like Rachel said a few minutes ago.”

  What? Fort looked around the room in surprise as he suddenly began to feel hope again. “So I could just go back to the school, take my father way, and hide him?” he said. “And that’d stop the war?”

  Ellora hugged her arms around herself tightly, not looking at him. “Unfortunately, no,” she said. “It’s way too late for that now. There’s nowhere you could take him that they wouldn’t track you down, and they wouldn’t stop hunting you. Your Colonel Charles will make it his mission to do just that if you kidnap your father.”

  Fort deflated immediately, feeling dizzy again. Of course it couldn’t be that easy. He’d made the choice to rescue his father, and now he had to deal with the consequences.

  “So what options does that leave us?” Rachel asked, giving Fort a worried look. “There has to be some way to stop this!”

  “There is,” Ellora said, sounding almost like she was pleading with them. “If we get the book of Spirit magic, we can use it ourselves. We could take away our leaders’ desire to go to war, all their paranoia and hate. We could stop it before it happens, no matter who has access to magic!”

  Wait a second; she was right! They could use Spirit magic to fix things! That must be what Ellora had been talking about all along, but she couldn’t tell them, not without sharing everything about Fort’s father. With Spirit magic, they could keep the whole world from going to war, just like King Arthur had used it to keep Camelot peaceful. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible!

  “No!” Rachel shouted, making Fort jump. “There has to be another way. We can’t just take away people’s free will like that. There must be something else we can do to stop the war!”

  “The only other option we’ve found is … terrible,” Ellora said. “And it’s why we didn’t tell you how it happened. Forsythe, I wanted to spare you from finding all of this out. You never needed to know, not if we used Spirit magic.”

  “What’s the other way?” Fort asked, dreading her answer.

  “The only other way to stop the war,” Ellora said, taking a deep breath as the medical ward faded out around them,
replaced by Glastonbury Tor again, “is to remove your father from time, completely.”

  - TWENTY-TWO -

  REMOVE HIS FATHER … FROM TIME? Fort fell to his knees in shock, barely even breathing.

  “Fort!” Rachel shouted, diving to his side to make sure he didn’t fall. “She’s exaggerating. That’s never going to happen.”

  “If we don’t use Spirit magic, that’s the only other choice we have,” Ellora said. “Healing magic won’t work—it’s too complicated to remove part of his brain without damaging it forever, and there’d be questions as to why it was done. Believe me, we’ve looked into every possibility, and it’s either send him away forever, or use Spirit magic.”

  Even with Rachel supporting him, Fort felt the ground beneath him begin to sway, like the world was spinning away from him. He’d have to lose his father … forever?

  “We’re not killing anyone!” Rachel shouted at Ellora. “How can you even say that’s an option?”

  “I don’t want it to be!” she shouted back. “And it wouldn’t kill him … he’d just be frozen, not knowing any time had passed. Only he’d never be brought back, at least not while any of us are still around.” She shook her head. “This is why I wanted to wait to tell you. The later I told you, the more you’d have gotten used to the idea of Spirit magic, and the more open you would have been to it.”

  “I’ll never be used to it,” Rachel told her, then turned to Fort. “We’re not going to do anything to your dad,” she said to him, and gently helped him to his feet. “We’ll find another way.”

  “There already is another way,” Jia said, giving Rachel a sad look. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Ray, but we can’t let this war happen!”

  Rachel just stared at her for a moment. “What did you see, Gee? In the future? I mean, I saw things no one should ever have to witness, but it seems like yours was even worse.”

  The question seemed to surprise Jia, and her face contorted through several emotions before she finally settled on resignation. “I saw … me,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “My future self was there, in Hong Kong, waiting there … waiting for me. On top of a roof, where I could see everything happening. It wasn’t like she knew I was there for sure, but I think she—I—remembered what I’d seen, and made sure to be there at the same time, when I arrived.”