“What the hell was that?” Jonathan said. “Felt like Araki, but that makes no sense that we’d be able to use the Wind Dragon’s magic to get all the way here just to be kicked out by Wind Magic once we were getting close.”
“Look at the trees, Jonathan,” Merrick said as he pulled out the piece of divinium given to Cara by the Keepers. “People talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees, but I think in this case we haven’t been able to see the trees for the forest.”
Merrick held up the piece of divinium that he had assumed had been shaped to look like a branch in order to give him the clue about coming here. He reached up and snapped a small branch off of one of the shimmering black trees next to him. The tree shook almost imperceptibly, then grew still again.
Merrick held the two pieces in front of him. Comparing them side-by-side, it was obvious that the piece of divinium Terrada had given the Keepers had not been molded into the form of a branch, but was instead an actual branch from a tree of solid divinium.
The two branches were not identical, just as no two pieces of nature ever were, but they were clearly related to each other, just as two different parts of the same fractal.
Merrick placed his hand against the trunk of the tree next to him and felt the same magical power he felt from the cubes.
The Forgotten Forest did not contain the hiding place where the divinium was kept. Instead, the trees of the Forgotten Forest actually were the divinium that Merrick sought.
At last, he had found the source of the Rune Corp divinium, and there was such an abundance of the magical stone that the potential he saw in it left him dizzy. There certainly was more than enough divinium to arm all of the Rune Corp employees with magical weapons, to create enough cubes to collect and test dragon words for the next hundred years, and to expand their lone building into a proper campus.
“This is it,” Merrick said. “This is where Ohman got his divinium from. But there’s so much of it here, I don’t understand why he didn’t bring more of it back to Rune Corp.”
Jonathan looked around and shrugged.
“If he had to go through the trip we just went through each time he wanted some,” Jonathan said, “maybe he only came back to get more when he absolutely had to. Should we gather some pieces together and head back now that we know where to get it from?”
Merrick shook his head.
“I think you’re right about Ohman. There’s no way he went through this every time he needed more divinium. It would explain why we only have so much of it back at our building, but there must be something still that we haven’t figured out.”
Still curious, Merrick continued moving forward, still holding the two branches of divinium in his hand while Jonathan followed behind him. The forest was not as dense as it was back when they had first started flying, and they were able to walk freely again. Gradually, the number of black trees surrounding them increased until there were more of them than there were of the regular trees. Within another half hour, even the ground beneath their feet had turned black, including the dirt, the grass, and even the insects.
Soon, they were surrounded completely by a forest of gently pulsing divinium. Gradually, the canopy of branches and leaves above them began to close in and block out the light from the sky, until it was as if they were walking through a shimmering, dark landscape of divinium at night.
After another half hour of walking, even the glow from the divinium trees began to dull until Merrick and Jonathan found themselves standing in complete darkness.
Merrick very carefully uttered a word from the Fire Dragon that created a small group of purplish, glowing globules that danced around each other, giving off a weak but discernible light—enough for them to see by as they started moving forward again.
In addition to the lack of light from above, the sounds of the forest had also stopped. Merrick felt as if they were intruding in a place in which they were not supposed to be. He felt like he did not belong there—that he was not welcome.
But still, they pressed on, although even more slowly and with greater caution.
After another hour of walking slowly through the black landscape, the canopy above began to open once again, and light from above illuminated more and more parts of the forest. The trees and the grass and everything else made of divinium began to pulse with color again, and even the breeze began to circulate again.
Merrick extinguished the Fire Dragon spell and looked eagerly ahead. Not only had the canopy above thinned enough to let the light in, the trees in front of him were getting farther apart as well. Merrick thought he could see a clearing opening up in front of them about two hundred yards ahead, and he urged Jonathan to follow closely behind him.
They made their way faster as Merrick sensed that they had finally reached their destination. As they neared the clearing, Merrick saw an enormous divinium yew tree at its center, its colors strongly pulsing as if it were the living heart of the forest.
They neared the edge of the clearing, and Merrick saw something that he had not realized had been missing from the forest this whole time. Unlike with other forests, this one had not contained any fallen trees, or splintered branches or even leaves on the ground. Now, as he and Jonathan looked down, the forest floor was littered with dead and fallen divinium branches as well as dead insects and small animals, as if everything in the forest came here exclusively to die.
Their feet made crunching and snapping noises as they came up to and stopped at the clearing’s edge. To Merrick’s right was a withered and bent tree that sagged as if the weight of its own limbs and leaves were too much of a burden for it to stand for much longer.
Merrick and Jonathan looked at each other and then back at the clearing. Unlike the forest surrounding the clearing, the area around the mighty black yew tree was immaculate. Merrick nodded and raised his leg, moving to place a foot on the shiny black grass in front of them.
Before his foot could land, both he and Jonathan were pulled back and down by roots and branches that slithered and wrapped around their legs like serpents.
They had come so close but were now anchored firmly against the ground by the trees that surrounded the clearing and that were obviously guarding the mighty yew.
Merrick lay on the ground, barely able to lift his head high enough now to even see the yew tree at the center of the clearing. The giant tree didn’t send Merrick any images, but Merrick felt something emanating from it that was so familiar that he immediately recognized the magic for what it was.
There was no mistaking that Merrick was feeling the power of Oodrosil.
In fact, as he strained to keep his head high enough to see the mighty tree, he was sure that it was an exact duplicate of Oodrosil, but made from divinium instead of wood.
“I don’t understand, Oodrosil,” Merrick said. “You’re our friend. You were Ohman’s friend. Why are you stopping us? Why didn’t you want me to learn the secret of the stone—that divinium isn’t a stone at all, but that it’s really a living part of this forest.”
Silence.
“Maybe that’s not the entire secret,” Jonathan said, straining to speak while cords of divinium branches wrapped around his neck held him fast.
Merrick lowered his head so that it rested on the forest floor. If the fact that divinium was a tree and not a stone, wasn’t the entire secret, then he didn’t know what the rest of the secret was. And he wasn’t going to figure it out lying on the ground, unable to even move.
Merrick felt the heaviness of despair and fatigue wash over him.
He knew there had to be a way out of this—some solution that would allow them to move forward and to communicate directly with the black yew tree.
Merrick closed his eyes and tried to rest.
Soon, he fell asleep and dreamed of his first weeks at Rune Corp and also of his first visit to Annoon. His unconscious mind was beginning to piece together a puzzle that his waking brain had not even realized was there to solve.
W
hen he awoke, he looked up at the dying tree next to him, and he knew what to do.
CHAPTER 77
OODROSIL SHOULD NOT HAVE been surprised that Merrick had made it this far. Even though he was not the blood son of Ohman, Merrick reminded the mighty yew of its old friend in many ways.
At the same time, Merrick was also very different from Ohman. It seemed that Merrick could be surrounded by the truth and still not see it.
Even now, he lay trapped at the edge of the sacred clearing where once Abred and Gwynfyd themselves had once lived in harmony, at peace with all the elements.
Other than Ohman, Merrick and the human by his side had made it farther than anyone else since Abred. But Merrick had still not proven his readiness or his worthiness to move closer and to touch the source of Oodrosil’s magic.
Regardless of Merrick’s fate, Oodrosil had more to worry about at the moment, as the battle at Rune Corp was about to begin.
If Merrick proved himself worthy, then he would be allowed to continue on and to learn more than he had dreamed possible on this journey. If Merrick did not prove himself, then he was already lying in his final resting place.
He would eventually die and himself become a piece of divinium—a part of the living forest of Abred.
CHAPTER 78
THE RUNE CORP BUILDING shook and rattled as if under siege by an army. The reality of the situation was much worse.
Not only were the Emperor’s Wind Warriors descending on the building by the hundreds from above, but twisters and hurricane-force winds were pummeling the Rune Corp walls. Without the extra physical reinforcements and the magical wards, the building would have ceased to exist after the first wave of the attack.
For the fifth time that hour, Cara wished that Merrick were here with her. Her people could have used his power and his leadership to rally behind. But she understood that he couldn’t be everywhere and that he had no way of knowing for sure that the Emperor was going to attack so soon.
At least he had been prudent enough to have Cara and Bradley return to Tysons Corner just in time to lock down the building and ready the employees. And because they had used the last six months to bolster the wards and the physical security of the building, securing the place had been relatively straightforward.
Cara walked the lobby floor, making sure everyone was in place and ready to do their best.
Rune Corp’s lobby was filled with parts and pieces of Terrada. Plants, patches of grass, boulders, pebbles, dirt, flowers, and the mighty yew, Oodrosil, made the inside of the building look more like the outdoors than most of the actual outdoors still remaining in the heavily built-up area of Tysons Corner.
Almost half of the company’s two hundred plus employees were outfitted with data cubes and sat in the lobby wherever they could fit, ready to defend the building and its secrets. They sat in clusters, chanting words in Terrada’s tongue to repel individual attackers whom they could see on the video screens that had been lowered to cover the insides of Rune Corp’s shielded windows. The scene reminded Cara of some strange version of the hippie sit-ins used to protest the Vietnam War that she had learned about in history class.
On the video feeds, Cara witnessed a scene that she never thought she would see in Tysons Corner.
Presumably at Oodrosil’s direction, giant boulders rolled over and flattened entire groups of Wind Warriors as they tried to make their way to the walls of the building. Trees bent and stretched, their limbs wrapping around the legs of the attackers and tossing them into their own gusts of winds so that they were dashed against the walls and the plastic shielding of the building like bugs against a speeding car’s windshield.
But the Wind Warriors also fought back. Cara winced as she saw one of Oodrosil’s trees uprooted by a hurricane-force blast directed at its base.
Her employees, although not physically outside in the fray, were doing their part to stop the invaders as well. Each group had a leader who directed the efforts of the cube-bearing employees under his or her command. Sometimes, they would send a stone or a piece of wood from a neighboring building as a missile toward one of the attackers.
Mostly, they used the earth beneath the feet of the warriors against them. They raised huge chunks of concrete and asphalt from the parking lot and hurled them at the warriors. Even the employees’ cars were being sacrificed as they were rolled end-over-end onto groups of Wind Warriors by the upheaval of the ground beneath them.
The other tactic the Rune Corp employees were finding to be most effective was to create sudden holes or trenches in the ground in front of the attackers and to let them run headfirst into them.
Everything was being executed perfectly, and everyone was doing their best, but with the sheer number of warriors that continued to descend from the sky, Cara feared they would still be overwhelmed.
Even as she watched, first a few, and then dozens, and then even more of the Wind Warriors reached the walls of the building. They began pummeling the structure with concentrated bursts of wind that amounted to invisible wrecking balls pounding away at the building and its shielding.
To their credit, her employees remained steadfast with their efforts, although she could already see the signs of premature aging creeping up on some of them as the use of the cubes drained their internal energy levels.
Without Oodrosil restoring the dwindling life energy of her people, Cara’s army of humans would soon be unable to fight, even with the cubes at their disposal.
Cara heard a sudden roar from behind her and saw Merrick’s full team of twenty Alphas running through the lobby at full tilt with Master Banzo and Gus at the front of the formation. She had almost forgotten about them, but they must have been downstairs in the lab being outfitted by Bradley with the latest weapons available, because she had never seen them so heavily armed before.
Each of the Alphas wore a divinium battle suit, making them look more like superheroes from a movie than the small corporate army they really were. Each also carried a primary weapon made of divinium. Bradley must have been cannibalizing older data cubes to get the extra divinium long before Merrick had suggested it to him. Whatever he had done had worked. The Alphas carried pulsating spears, katana swords, broadswords, axes, bows and arrows, poles, and short swords. Around their necks, they all wore the battle-hardened versions of the enunciator collars, and their heads were protected with lightweight helmets that provided full auditory and vocal enhancers so that they could use the power of their divinium weapons to their fullest.
Cara knew that it was suicide for the twenty of them to go against the swarm of attackers at their gate, but she smiled a little because she also knew that each of the men was a trained fighter specializing in close-in combat.
She watched as they shouted in unison like a group of possessed, high-tech marines, before diving head-first into a spot on the wall that opened up to the outdoors just long enough for the last one of them to make it through. In only the few moments that the portal was open, the inside of the lobby was immediately engulfed in heavy winds that knocked several of the employees over where they were sitting. The sudden change in air pressure made even Cara’s ears pop, and the roar from the winds and the battle outside was deafening.
Thankfully, the millisecond the last of the Alphas was outside, the hole in the wall closed again, and the employees were able to regroup and continue their attacks.
Cara watched on the video screens as the Alphas engaged with the surprised Wind Warriors. They had grown comfortable trying to break through the Rune Corp defenses, but she could tell that they hadn’t expected much one-on-one fighting.
With Master Banzo at their head, the Alphas formed up like a modern day Roman phalanx and moved slowly but steadily through the forces of the unprepared enemy. Cara looked closer as one of the Alphas who seemed a bit smaller than the others landed a heavy mace blow that crushed the skull of one of the invaders. The blow was effective but clumsy, and by the way the person moved, she could tell that he was not one o
f the regular Alphas.
When he turned his head, she could see why.
As unlikely as it seemed, the person she was watching was Bradley.
Cara was already doing her best to not join the battle outside. She knew that her place was inside to guide the troops and to be the last line of defense if necessary, but seeing Bradley out there fighting made her want to join them even more.
She slammed her fist against the wall and cursed.
Bradley had built most of their advanced divinium weapons, so he knew well enough how to use them, but he wasn’t a trained warrior. The fool wasn’t even properly healed and rested from losing his leg yet.
Suddenly, she saw a huge fireball erupt in the middle of the fight, and for a second Cara thought that Merrick had returned. Another and another erupted, scattering the Wind Warriors with looks of horror in their eyes as they tried to cope with the magic of Sigela suddenly being called into play.
And that is when it struck her.
Bradley had moved away from the rest of the Alphas and was now the center of his own swirl of death. Fireballs launched from his mace, searing the enemy. High-pressured columns of water appeared out of nowhere, forcing their ways into the throats of attackers and drowning them as they stood.
Bradley was using words from every dragon other than Araki, and chunks of concrete and asphalt rose up and crushed any Drayoom who tried to stop him.
Cara’s mouth hung open as she witnessed the destruction a single man—a human—was able to bring to the Wind Warriors. She waited for him to slow down and to weaken, knowing that he only had so much internal energy he could use before running himself dry, but he kept on going.
Maybe it was some aftereffect of having the new leg. Cara didn’t know, but she couldn’t help but smile as the Wind Warriors were pushed back before the might of the Alphas and the berserker madness of…Bradley.
Cara let herself have hope, but then she realized what the enemy troops were doing. They weren’t retreating. They were making room.
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