“Sha…Shaman Blackroot?” Amir said, struggling to get his bearings. He searched his mind for memories. They began coming fast and furious. He’d been in a fight. He’d been with…
“Glory! Where’s Glory?” Amir struggled to rise, but his muscles lacked the strength. Blackness threatened to take him back into its sweet embrace. He drew on his inner strength to fight the darkness off. I’ve got to find Glory, he thought.
The chief shaman’s face went in and out of darkness before coming back into focus and staying there.
“Calm down, boy. I told you I’m not that good of a healer nowadays. It’s going to take you a few hours to get your strength back.” The old shaman glanced over his shoulder and said something Amir couldn’t make out.
A giantess wearing chainmail and a tunic emblazoned with the king’s insignia knelt down beside the shaman and placed a hand on Amir’s chest.
“See that he stays quiet until I get back,” said Shaman Blackroot. “I’ve got to talk to the king.”
“Yes, Shaman,” said the giantess. “He’ll be here when you return.”
The chief shaman rose and walked out of Amir’s field of view.
Amir glanced around as much as he could, seeing little except for guards in heavy armor moving to and fro with weapons at the ready. He noticed several younger shamans intermixed with the guards. The shamans were casting spells. The sound of two guards talking behind him drew his attention.
“…yep, all dead except this one.”
“Must’ve caught our guards by surprise. They’ve all got head wounds. What were this one and that young giantess doing with our soldiers? The corporal should’ve sent them away. They were too young to fight.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” said one of the voices. “The corporal’s dead. So is the young giantess. Too bad. I’ve seen her at the practice yard. She’d have made a good soldier one day.”
Realization of what the voices were saying and who they were talking about swept over Amir. He glanced at the giantess holding him down. When he tried to catch her eye, she turned and stared at the tunnel wall.
“Where is she?” he asked, trying his best to keep his voice steady. “I need to see her.”
The giantess looked at him. Amir thought she had kind eyes.
“It won’t do any good,” she said. “Your friend’s gone. Nothing will bring her back.”
“I need to see her,” Amir said between clenched teeth. “If you were me, you’d want to say goodbye to your friend, wouldn’t you?”
The giantess glanced around before looking back at Amir, then nodded and helped him to a sitting position.
Looking around, Amir noticed Shaman Blackroot talking to King Ironfist and one of the king’s generals. From the waving of arms and heated voices, he assumed they were having a major disagreement. He cared not what they were doing. He only had one thing on his mind—Glory.
Glancing to his left, he noticed six capes spread out by the wall. Booted feet stuck out of five of the capes. A wrinkled set of feet in sandals stuck out of the sixth. The capes were soaked with blood. He noticed a strand of long brown hair partially sticking out from the top of one of the capes. A yellow flower was clipped to the hair. Tears welled in Amir’s eyes.
“I…I need to go to her,” Amir said.
Without argument, the giantess helped him to his feet and half-carried, half-dragged him to the covered bodies. She sat him down nearest the cape covering Glory, then turned away.
With trembling hands, Amir pulled back the part of the cape covering his fiancée’s head. His stomach lurched at what he saw, and he hastily placed the cape back.
“I will find your murderer, Glory,” Amir whispered. “I will hunt this human in black down and tear him apart piece by piece. I will not rest until I find him. I swear it.”
Reaching out with his right hand, Amir unclipped the yellow flower from his beloved’s hair and held it in his palm. A drop of red clung to one of the petals.
Glory’s blood, he thought. Tears formed in his eyes, and he wiped them away. When he did, he noticed that something small stuck in the center of the petals was reflecting the light of the overhead light-globes. He looked closer. It was a splinter of yellow glass.
No, he thought. Not glass. It’s part of the Heart-stone. It must’ve gotten stuck in there somehow when Glory was near the Sanctuary Vault. An image of the shattered Heart-stone came to his mind. The stones on which he sat gave out an emotion of sorrow and loss. The whole mountain did. The Heart-stone kept the mountains quiet. Without it, the land may well be lost. Amir wiped something from his eye. So will I. Glory and I were destined to live the rest of our lives together. Now we’ll always be apart. It is too much to bear.
The mountain shook. Small pieces of rock fell from the ceiling.
It’s already started, Amir thought. He placed his free hand on the cape covering Glory. Nothing mattered without her. All that mattered was finding the black-armored human and making him pay for what he’d done. I swear to you, Glory. I will devote my life to learning sword and spell so that the next time the human and I meet, it will be his last.
Amir looked at the yellow flower in his palm. It was already starting to wilt.
He began to cry.
Chapter 7 – Message from the Past
_________________________
As Jeena approached the library’s massive double doors at the top of the stairs, the feeling of dread that had been building ever since her conversation with the Lady increased. She tried keeping her emotions under control for her bondmate’s sake, but some must’ve slipped through because a feeling of concern came to her through her ring.
Stopping in front of the doors, Jeena recited a calming mantra she’d been taught during her first year of priest training. The tenseness in her muscles relaxed. She turned away from the doors long enough to look out over the city she loved. The reddish glow of the setting sun reflecting off the alabaster white of the city walls in the distance gave the buildings an ethereal effect. Four obelisks, one in each cardinal direction, dominated the buildings around them. The obelisks themselves were dwarfed by the uppermost branches of the Tree of Light. The Lady’s tree was just beginning to take on a silvery glow as were the leaves in the stand of silver elms in the central park.
Jeena let the peace she felt flow into her ring and down the link to her bondmate. The feeling of concern disappeared to be replaced by one of boredom.
Jeena smiled. “He hates meetings, does he not?”
“I calculate you are correct,” said Danny. “I also calculate you are putting off the inevitable. You do remember we have a meeting scheduled with the most powerful leaders in the physical galaxy in another forty-five minutes, don’t you?”
Jeena knew all too well. Taking a final look at her beloved city, she turned and pushed on the massive double doors of the library’s main entrance. They opened as easily now as they had when she’d been a little girl first coming to the library to escape the memory of the deaths of her parents and sister. The library had been her refuge from what she’d seen as a cruel and unforgiving world. As the years had passed, the knowledge she’d found in the scrolls and books of the library had given her comfort and hope. In the writings of the ancients, she’d found the peace she’d been seeking. The writings of High Priestess Shandristiathoraxen had been especially important in convincing her to accept a calling to the priesthood and service to the Lady.
“It is strange how the world works,” Jeena said still speaking in her mind. “All those years I served the Lady, and I never knew my ancestor, High Priestess Shandristiathoraxen, had a connection with the person who would one day be my bondmate.”
“Strange?” said Danny. “Perhaps. Or maybe not so strange. Every living thing has freewill and can choose their own paths, but at the same time, paths have been laid out for us to follow if we so choose.”
“Are you talking about ‘the One’?” Jeena asked.
“No, not really,” replied Danny. “I
am talking about someone or something much greater than any living thing, or any demon, or anything else, for that matter. I am talking about the Creator.”
Jeena remained in front of the open doors without stepping inside. “You believe in the Creator, Danny?”
“It is only logical,” said Danny. “I may be a gas-based life form instead of a carbon-based one, but I take peace in knowing that someone greater is in ultimate control.”
“As do I,” Jeena said finally mustering the courage to step through the doors.
Six floors of the library’s upper levels loomed above the main antechamber. Row upon row of shelves stacked with scrolls and books were visible on the upper floors even from where she stood. She knew the writings of untold authors numbering in the millions from dozens of races were stored on the shelves. From her time at the library, she also knew many of the writings were magical in nature. The combined energy of tens of thousands of magical tomes stored above and below ground radiated around her.
A set of dark stairs leading to the library’s lowest levels drew Jeena onward. Down she went. Each step she took convinced her more that something horrible waited below. She raised a hand and ran it along the walls of the smooth-cut stone until it gave way to the rough rock of the deeper levels. Still she went down. Finally, she reached the bottommost floor. Intuition told her that here was where she’d find what she sought.
Opening the door to the ancients’ preservation chamber, Jeena entered a long, dim-lit room. Only a few light-globes spaced along the roughhewn granite walls provided any light. The room was quite large, really more a cavern than a room. A score of work desks and tables lined up in a row was outnumbered by dozens of shelves stretching from one side of the vast cavern to the other. The magic from the preservation spells of the ancients that kept the aged scrolls and books from crumbling to dust were pervasive in the air.
Unlike the other times Jeena had been there, the room was nearly empty. Chief Librarian Elisinsar, the young elf scribe Therso, and Wizard Scout Telsa were the room’s only occupants. They stood near a table studying a small box the size of Jeena’s hand. At the sound of the door’s opening, the three looked up.
“Ah, Jeehana, this is coincidental,” said Elisinsar. “I was just about to send for you. I think we may have discovered something important.”
The news didn’t surprise Jeena. Walking over to the table, she glanced down at the small box. It was a simple affair made of a black, metallic-looking material. She sensed energy coming from the metal; not magic energy, but pure Power. Without asking permission, she picked the box up. It fit easily in the palm of her hand. The metal felt warm to the touch. For some reason, the metal seemed familiar to her as if she’d felt the material before.
“What is it?” Jeena asked. “What is inside?”
“What is it?” said Elisinsar. “I think I will let Wizard Scout Telsa explain that. As for what is inside, we do not know. We have not opened it.”
“Why not?” Jeena asked. “I mean, if you think it is important, why wait for me?” Something inside her told her the box was the key to what they’d been seeking. The memory of the tears on the Lady’s face made her hope she was wrong.
Elisinsar reached out and removed the box from Jeena’s hand. “We have not opened it because it is not addressed to us. The box was discovered last week among the scrolls dating back fourteen thousand years. Those are the scrolls created during the time period that the dragons Tharantos-Lindeshatr said the yellow gem was destroyed while in the keeping of the Ecarian giants.”
Jeena lifted her gaze from the box to glance at the chief librarian. “Why wasn’t I informed about the box earlier?”
Elisinsar shrugged his shoulders. “This is only one of a thousand things we have discovered during our search for information about the Ecarian giants. As you know, it is almost as if someone intentionally made sure nothing about the Ecarians or the yellow gem remained in the library. Except for a few hints here and there, we have found very little.” He nodded his head at the young elf standing to his right. “That is, we found nothing until our young scribe Therso translated the words on this box.”
Jeena turned to look at Therso. The scribe’s face appeared a little pink in the light of the glow-stones.
“There were only three lines of words, High Priestess,” said Therso. “I am sorry it took me so long to translate, but it is in a dialect of ancient Letian we have only begun to decipher.”
Jeena smiled at the bashful scribe. He was only slightly younger than her. “You do not have to apologize, Therso. I have not forgotten how only you among all the scribes were able to translate the prophecy in the Rhyme of the Eighth Prophet of Reoarz that predicted the bonding of the elf friend and me.”
The scribe’s face turned bright red.
“Uh, it was nothing, High Priestess.” He glanced at the chief librarian before looking back at Jeena. “I am sure any of the scribes could have done the same. I was lucky.”
The chief librarian handed the box back to Jeena.
“Do not let his modesty fool you, Jeehana,” said Elisinsar. “I spent a full day trying to translate the words on this box before I got wise enough to hand it off to Therso.”
The chief librarian pointed at three lines of symbols on what appeared to be the lid of the box.
Jeena recognized the symbols as ancient Letian, but they were somehow different. “All right, I give up,” she said. “What does it say?”
The chief librarian nodded at Therso.
The young scribe gulped. When he spoke, his words were barely above a whisper. “Uh, the first line reads ‘From the High Priestess of the Lady of the Tree.’ The second line spells out a single word that I think translates as ‘Ecarians.’”
“What about the last line,” Jeena asked without taking her eyes off the box.
“The last line was the hardest to translate,” said Therso. “I suspected it spelled out a name, but it took me a while to figure it out. You see, the name did not come about until after the time of the ancients. I had to decipher individual letters by correlating with—”
The chief librarian cleared his throat. “The high priestess does not need to know how you translated it. Just tell her what it says.”
The scribe’s face turned even redder than before. “Uh, sorry. Uh, based upon my best guess, the last line reads ‘For Jeena’s eyes only.’”
Jeena looked away from Therso and to the box before looking back at the young scribe. “To me? Are you sure?”
“Uh, High Priestess… Well, I—”
“He may not be sure, but I am,” said Elisinsar. “I would take his translation guesses over the sure knowledge of other scribes any day. The box is addressed to you, Jeehana, and the writer used your familiar name instead of your proper one. From what we have found out, the High Priestess Miandriathoraxen reigned during the time of the Ecarians’ disappearance. Whether she is the high priestess mentioned in the translation, I cannot say.”
Jeena turned the box over and from side to side. Other than the smallest of indentations on one side of the box, it appeared to have no openings or hinges of any kind. Frustrated, she turned to the chief librarian. “How do I open it?”
Elisinsar nodded at Telsa. “I think I will leave that answer up to our wizard scout here. I believe she has the knowledge which I lack.”
“Telsa?” Jeena asked, becoming more curious by the moment. “What do you know about the box?”
The visor of Telsa’s battle helmet was raised, making her eyes clearly visible. She glanced at the stone floor before looking back at Jeena. “The metal of the box isn’t from this world, Jeehana. In fact, it isn’t even a metal.”
“Then what is it?” Jeena asked, beginning to grow frustrated.
Telsa grinned. “What is it? It’s something that shouldn’t have existed here fourteen thousand years ago.” She touched the leather-looking sleeve of her deactivated battle suit. “The box is made of the same material as my battle suit. The mater
ial forming the box is in activated mode, which is why it looks like a metal.”
Jeena held the box up in front of her eyes. Sensing similarities between the box and her bondmate’s battle suit, she nodded. “I thought it felt familiar. How do I open it?”
“Without destroying what’s inside?” Telsa asked. “That I don’t know. I think you’re going to have to figure that one out by yourself. Battle suits can only be activated and deactivated by the owner of the suit.”
The external speaker on Telsa’s battle helmet crackled, followed by the voice of Telsa’s battle computer, Raj. “Actually, that is not entirely accurate, Wizard Scout. If someone’s DNA is close enough to the owner of a wizard scout’s equipment, they could also activate it. Remember when Wizard Scout Shepard gave a set of his equipment to his brother, when we fought the vampires under Old Drepdenor? Wizard Scout Myers was able to use his brother’s gear because their DNA was similar.”
“He has a point,” said Danny using the miniaturized speakers in Jeena’s ring.
Jeena tapped her foot. “I have a meeting with Rick and the others in twenty minutes. If you have something to add, Danny, out with it…please.”
“Humph. Carbon-based life forms are in such a hurry sometimes. As Rick would say…fine. What I wanted to point out is that a part of Rick was placed in you before you were born, and a part of you was placed in him. That connection is much stronger than any near DNA match by siblings. I calculate you could activate and deactivate one of Rick’s battle suits if you had a need. Raj and I have conducted an analysis of the box’s material. It is indeed the same as a battle suit.”
“Are you saying the box is constructed from one of Rick’s battle suits?” Telsa asked.
“Negative,” said Danny. “That was not my intent.”
Jeena took her eyes off the box and stared at her ring. “Then why are you telling me this?”
A short pause. “Uh… It was an interesting concept. I calculated you would appreciate the information.”
Jeena looked back at the box. “What I would appreciate is being told how to open the box. Could Rick open it if he were here?”
Wizard Gigantic (Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles Book 9) Page 7
