Inside, a cube that looked like it was made of semi-translucent black marble was nestled in a recess cut out of hard foam. It was twice as big as one of her fists with swirls of crimson and greens moving across its face and through its core, as if the stone were filled with some kind of energy.
Diggs checked the rest of the bag and found what appeared to be a plastic collar and a headset with an attached microphone. Maybe the cube was some kind of a high tech communications device they made at Rune Corp. The box in which it was housed didn’t seem to be reinforced for radioactive material, so she figured that it was safe to handle.
She took the cube out of its case and almost dropped it as she felt the stone pulse and vibrate in her hands. She knew it was only stone, but it felt like it was alive.
She set the cube in front of her on her kitchen table and put the headset on. There didn’t appear to be an on-off switch anywhere, but as soon as the headset was securely in place, she felt a slight vibration in her cranium, and a blue light came on that was recessed into the front of the collar.
Diggs was hesitant to put the collar on. For all she knew, it could be an electric device like the kind used to train dogs.
She paused for only a moment.
Screw it, she thought, as she fastened the collar around her neck. It was a little big at first, but it slowly constricted until it fit snuggly.
“Whoa,” she said, but the words came out of her mouth as if they were amplified and with an echo attached to them. No, not an echo—it was more like there were two voice tracks of her words being replayed together, offset by an almost imperceptible amount of time.
“What the hell is this?” she said, her voice filling her small condo.
No sooner had the words escaped her mouth than her brain was flooded with shapes and symbols she had never seen before. It was as if someone were projecting a movie across her field of vision, even while her eyes remained open and she could still see the world around her.
She was startled at first and ripped the headset off. The blue light on the headset dimmed, and the images in her mind vanished.
Diggs walked over to her refrigerator and pulled out a can of cold beer.
She sat back down, took a large gulp, then set the can down far away from the cube. The last thing she needed was to spill beer on this thing.
She took a deep breath and slipped the headset back on.
The images and symbols reappeared in her head, but this time she was ready for them. She found that as she moved her eyes, she could activate different symbols just by focusing on them. She decided to concentrate on the only symbol that looked familiar to her—the ? sign.
A video started to play in her brain. It was Chris Moran and he was addressing himself.
“Hi, me. This is me talking to you. Boy, have I got a lot to tell us about,” Chris said with a dry laugh. “Before I get started, let me just say that this is all going to sound like total horse crap to you. I know that. It will go against everything you believe, or rather, don’t believe in. But hear me out. You’ll be glad you did.”
Diggs reached over and picked up her beer. She had a feeling she was going to need it.
“First things first,” Chris said. “As much as you’ll be tempted to, just don’t say anything out loud while you’re watching this. Only talk when I tell you to. Trust me. It’s for your own safety.
“Where to start... The company you work for. Rune Corp? Yeah, they have nothing to do with knowledge management research and development. Ready? The company is focused on recreating the lost language of creation. That’s right. The company is capturing, storing, studying, and using magic. Let that sink in. This will make more sense in a minute.
“We’re talking about magic words and magic phrases that were used to create the Earth. You, my friend, are a subject matter expert in magic. Well, the old man used to refer to it as energy, but it’s most definitely magic as far as anyone else is concerned.
“Imagine a computer language where the output is life. Instead of ones and zeros, we use sounds. Everything has a sound. Even black holes. We capture these sounds and put them together in different ways to form a language—one that’s been lost for a long time and has to be pieced together word by word. Next time you go outside, listen. Go for a walk in the woods and really listen. What you’ll hear is life’s computer language playing itself out in real time. The only difference is that we’re able to understand it and to even use it using the cube.”
“That thing around your neck? That’s an enunciator. It’s got some serious high tech microphones running all throughout it that let you intonate multiple sounds simultaneously, just like the Drayoom. Using your voice like that is something that normal human throats can’t do. We only have a single vocal fold. Go listen to the Tuvan throat singers from Mongolia some time. They hold their necks in a way that creates a makeshift second fold. Lets them make some pretty awesome noises, like running water from a stream—crickets chirping. Natural sounds like that.
“But that’s nothing compared to what the Drayoom can do naturally. I’ll tell you more about them later, but in short, they’re a species closely related to humans, even though they’d never admit that. The difference is that they can hear and speak creation words, also known as magic, and we can’t do either.
“So along with the enunciator collar, the headset lets you hear Dragon words for what they really are and also to pick up on creation words that are used all around you every day. Gives you the proper aural feedback to make the whole thing work. Ever hear a deaf person try to speak? Even the ones who are pretty good, you can still tell the difference because they aren’t hearing themselves. The headsets take care of that.
“Together, they let you hear and speak the words of creation. The dragon tongues. Yes, I said dragon. There are four of them, and a long time ago, they taught the first Drayoom, Abred, all of their words. When Abred used these against them…well, they decided to take them back, and the four Drayoom families have been trying to recreate the four parts of the languages ever since. And no, they don’t look anything at all like they do in the movies. They’re more like forces of nature, and they don’t have scales.
“So why don’t you remember any of this? And what about the cube? Let’s just say that Rune Corp uses some of these magic words to erase the memories of its employees every time they leave work. I’m out on a special pass right now. Heading over to the Earth Clan in Scotland to track down some baddie who’s after Merrick. That’s a different story, too. In order for me to come along and help bail them out, they had to let me keep my memory intact outside of the building. But as soon as the mission’s over, I know they’ll just wipe me clean again. So, I left this little care package for us, and I’ve been counting on us tracking down this locker and learning about the cube and magic on our own outside of Rune Corp and seeing what our entrepreneurial brain can come up with.
“I’ve made several of these tutorials, but I’m just going to go over a few more items in this first one. One thing to watch out for... This cube is made of something called divinium. It’s actually a new element. Kind of a living stone with a memory. Does the cube have a personality as well? You know, I never really thought about that. Either way, it’s alive, which means it probably has a creation name, although strangely enough that’s one of the magic words I’ve never heard before. The divinium helps humans and Drayoom tap in to their inner energy. Magic. Chi. Whatever you want to call it. Here’s the catch. Every time you use the cube, you lose a little bit of your internal energy. Too much of this thing can take years off your life. Trust me. And if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you can accidentally inflict some serious damage on people around you, so be careful.
“Rune Corp has a way of restoring our energy through Oodrosil. That’s the name of a living yew tree. And yes, that is yet another story. But you and I don’t have access to our own magical tree away from the company, so until we figure out a way to restore our internal magic or to oper
ate this thing properly, we need to use it sparingly. That is a very important point to remember.
“Final thing, for now. Look at the screen in front of you. See those markings that sort of look like they’re on a musical staff? Those are phonetic symbols that you need to learn. When they’re stacked on top of each other like that, it means they’re all said at the same time—like a chord made up of words, instead of notes. The word in front of you right now is a simple action word that means to float. I’m going to teach you just that one word to stave off your curiosity and to convince you that all of this is real. Look at the symbols and listen.”
Diggs focused on the symbols in front of her and listened as a strange tonal chord filled her head. It wasn’t English. Wasn’t any language she had ever heard. But it was also strangely familiar.
“Now,” Chris continued, “keep looking at the symbols, open your mouth, and try to repeat the sounds you just heard. It’s a layered word, but you’ll get it if you practice enough. The key is to not think too much about it. Just hear the sound and then mimic it back. Keep repeating it until you’re able to say it out loud on your own. Nothing will happen probably, because you don’t know the names of anything that you want to float, but you’ll know it when you get it right. This much won’t drain too much of your life force, so practice away.
“After your brain has digested what I’ve told you, play the other tutorials, and soon enough, you’ll be as proficient at this stuff outside of Rune Corp as you are when you’re at work. Just remember, we’re a natural. That’s why we were hired in the first place.”
The video stopped playing, and Diggs stared blankly ahead. If this was a trick of some kind, it was the most elaborate one she had ever witnessed.
She watched the symbols still floating in her mind and played back the audio of Chris saying the word again. She tentatively opened her mouth and tried to imitate it. To her surprise, even though she did not get it right, the tones coming from her mouth were at least similar, and she could see how this could work.
Again and again she tried, until, at last, the word she said sounded exactly the same as the one Chris was saying, and the cube pulsed a bright white. She looked around, but nothing was floating. It was as Chris had said. She didn’t have enough of a vocabulary yet. She knew a single verb, but no nouns.
As much as she wanted to continue, Diggs felt tired and worn out, as if she had been mentally straining for hours instead of the half hour or so she had spent actually using the cube.
She removed the headset and the enunciator. She listened.
The hum of the air conditioner.
The squeaking of her ceiling from her upstairs neighbors.
Everything around her was man-made, and now it all sounded one dimensional and flat to her.
“Hello?” she said, her own voice sounding fragile and weak without the power of the enunciator to amplify it. Having heard the language of the dragons for just this short amount of time, her perception of life had already changed dramatically.
She had been shown a richer way of perceiving and communicating with the world, and she knew that things would never be the same for her.
She looked again at the cube as it gently pulsed with reds and greens.
Chris had said that just practicing that one word wouldn’t drain too much of her energy, but she felt unnaturally tired all the same. She knew that she should probably rest—that she had all the time in the world to unlock the secrets of the cube and the information stored within. She also knew that if she played her cards right, she could figure out a way to make money off of this thing—maybe even enough to quit her job and to go fishing for the rest of her life.
Diggs stood up, poured the rest of her beer down the sink and started brewing a fresh pot of coffee.
She had a lot more to learn, and it was going to be a long day and night.
CHAPTER 4
PRINCE TAKEHIKO STOOD at the opposite end of the parking lot from Officer Diggs’s condominium building, waiting. In actuality, however, he wasn’t really standing as much as he was floating on a bed of air an inch or so off the ground.
He silently thanked both his ancestors and the royal family that he was blessed by Araki and that the mighty Wind Dragon loved him enough to raise him above Terrada’s dust and dirt and filth.
And that was how it should be.
Not only was he the Prince of the Fuugoshujin, the Wind Family, but he had also been raised since childhood with the same knowledge as their Keepers—the monks who trained themselves to remember each creation name and word that had been collected by Araki’s followers since the time of creation.
And what a collection of words that was.
Each of the four Drayoom families was dedicated to rebuilding the languages of their respective patron dragon, but the Wind Family was further along than any of the others.
The Prince’s spies had told him so.
One day not so long ago, one of his most valuable spies had told him of a fifth group of Drayoom, however—not a family to speak of, but a group formed by the old Ard Righ, or High King, of the Earth Clan—the one called Ohman. The spy told the Prince that the same Ard Righ who had abandoned the Earth Clan years previous had splintered from the old ways and had started his own family in the world of the humans.
After that, it had not been difficult to find this new group.
Even though the physical and magical security surrounding the Rune Corp building was extremely well done, the Prince had been able to feel the massive amounts of energy surging behind its walls even when he had stood miles above the earth in one of his many floating outposts throughout the world.
The Prince also had heard firsthand accounts from his spies in the Earth Clan of how mere humans, including the abominable offspring of the Ard Righ by a human wife, had been transformed into mighty warriors by wielding cubes made of divinium. Each of the dragon families used divinium, and each had access to its own store of this magical element—the stone with a living memory.
But his reports implied that the Rune Corp cubes were different.
They were rumored to hold the magic of more than one element, something that the Wind Family divinium could not do. That alone was motivation enough for the Prince to remain away from the Cloud City, watching Rune Corp and waiting.
He had done so for the last six months with nothing to show for it, but he remained undaunted.
Following his intuition, a month or so ago, the Prince had decided to follow one of the humans below, a police officer who seemed to also be observing the company.
And finally, his efforts had born fruit.
Even though he could not see anything with his eyes, he could feel the divinium in the police officer’s condo.
All the Prince had to do was to take the magical stone from the human and hope that it was indeed a sample of the same divinium that Rune Corp was using.
He was tempted to storm the officer’s abode immediately and to take the cube by any force necessary. But one thing the Prince had learned in his life so far was that patience was indeed a virtue.
He decided that it would be best to wait for the human to stop using the divinium before he made his move. After all, he was about to claim one of the potentially most powerful weapons his family had ever known, and he could not afford to make a mistake. Luckily, the divinium was in the hands of a human who would have no hope of surviving his attack.
Prince Takehiko sat down on a bed of cloud vapor and began to meditate. Soon, he would claim a great victory for himself and for his family. And even though he had been taught not to covet praise or fame, he was looking forward to seeing the astonished expression on the Emperor’s face when he handed him the mysterious Rune Corp divinium and the keys to the Wind Family’s future.
CHAPTER 5
IN THE HEAT of the summer morning, all Merrick wanted was a nice cool breeze, and possibly to be sitting outside under the branches of a yew tree. Instead, he circled his enemy, ready to fight to the death
if need be.
He watched for any hole in his opponent’s form. As per the style he had been studying for the last six months, he tried to keep his body hard and ready to strike while also making sure that it remained soft and fluid, poised to avoid any attacks from his opponent.
After Merrick’s first foray into the world of the Drayoom and magic, he had quickly come to realize that being able to fight without magic was a critical skill. He made a resolution to lose weight and to get in shape on his own, without any help from magic. After months of exhaustive work, his body was finally where he wanted it to be.
In fact, his entire life was where he wanted it to be.
When he had returned home to Tysons Corner close to six months ago, he had taken care of a few things immediately. First, he had proposed to Mona, and she had accepted. Next, he quit his job and started working for Rune Corp full-time as its senior vice president, the CEO’s second-in-command.
He recalled his first couple of months at Rune Corp and slipped to the left as his opponent threw a quick jab to his face.
Merrick’s first goal as senior vice president was to prepare for the next time he and his co-workers would have to go to battle.
He hired a martial arts instructor as a company employee and provided classes to any of his people who wanted to learn. He also hired some other employees with very specific skill sets and formed a group called the Alphas. They were Rune Corp’s elite fighting squad of twenty men and women who practiced both martial arts and the words of the dragons, developing both their physical and their magical prowess.
Merrick had also created a new division both to weaponize the dragon words they had gathered and to create weapons out of divinium to be used in combat.
He had known that creating a weapons division was a risky venture, which is why he was so strict about the testing procedures used in the lab. Even though Bradley had blatantly broken the safety protocols, Merrick still couldn’t stop thinking about him and was committed to helping him however he could.
The Equilibrium of Magic Page 3
