“We have to talk,” Fionn said, while Harland brought the rental car to pick them up. “C’mon.”
Chapter 6
Back of the Napkin Explanations
The sun shone through the windows of the coffee shop. The place was almost empty; most people had gone home for the day after the attack in the fair. Fionn saw the waitress approaching their booth. The four of them were the only customers. The waitress left a bag of ice and refilled their cups of coffee.
“Your food will be ready soon,” she said and left them.
Fionn examined Gaby’s friend, focusing on the sword he had left resting on the side of the seat. Harland seemed to be distracted, looking for something in his datapad, streaming something from the aethernet.
“You are being a crybaby, Alex,” Gaby said to her friend, who was sitting next to her on the left side of the booth.
“No, I’m not. It hurts like I was hit by a freight train,” Alex was, holding the bag of ice on his shoulder.
“First, you don’t know how a freight train hits,” Gaby sipped her coffee and fell silent for moment before continuing. “Besides, this is hardly the strangest thing you will see today.”
“What do you mean?” Alex had a confused look.
“I will let them explain that to you,” Gaby’s concern showed on her face. “They have something to ask you…” She never finished because Alex interrupted her.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting in front of you,” Alex startled Fionn. This certainly wasn’t the kind of reaction he was accustomed to when someone found out who he was. “You are my childhood hero. I have devoured every book that has been written about the war, the Twelve Swords, and you. Of course, I assume that half of them are wrong. Most mentioned you died under mysterious circumstances and yet here you are. Wait a minute, wouldn’t that make you around a hundred and thirty-three years old?” Alex said in one go, without breathing.
“Forgive him, he tends to be a motormouth when he is excited,” Gaby excused Alex, rolling her eyes.
“It’s ok. And I prefer to say that I’m only thirty-three, I don’t count the missing century,” Fionn replied, trying to keep his composure with a polite nod. Fionn shuffled in his seat, as the thought of having a fan made him wary and uncomfortable. But he was starting to trust Gaby, and she trusted Alex. Maybe a leap of faith was in order.
“I have so many questions I want to ask,” Alex continued. “About your sword and about the Light Explosion that came from the destruction of the Onyx Orb. Is it true that you beat a succubus and a raiding gang before you were sixteen, all by yourself?”
“Yeah, it’s true. Listen, I’m sorry, but we are tight on time here. Once we finish this I will answer any question you have,” Fionn interrupted him. “You might have heard of Professor Hunt’s recent disappearance and…”
“Can we trust him?” Harland interjected, looking up from the datapad. Judging by his expression, something was perturbing him. He addressed Alex. “You are a curious person with an interesting file. Studying an advanced degree in a field not many can understand. You come from a family of scholars from the Straits. You have a couple of medals in archery. Otherwise a model citizen… and yet you have a rap sheet, with several arrests due to unruly behavior and countless fights. This says that you even beat a police officer once.”
“In my defense, he hit a homeless man with his baton, just for standing in his way. And I know who you are: Harland Rickman from the Foundation,” Alex replied, staring at Harland. For a brief second, Fionn saw tiny sparks coming from Alex’s fingertips that hit the metal on the cutlery, rattling it. “I know your work. I even agree with some of your ideas. But you need to do your homework. Those records you mentioned? They are wrong. And I don’t like the tone of your voice.”
“Guys, we are getting sidetracked.” Gaby put a conciliatory hand over Alex’s. “And he is right.”
“Look, Harland. Not many people jump in front of others to save them from a monster, Gifted or not Gifted,” Fionn added with a raised eyebrow. “Besides, he is carrying Yaha, and that sword has a mind of its own. I know. He is on our side.”
Alex looked at Gaby confused and murmured, “Gifted? Yaha?”
“That’s what he calls our abilities. The Gift. Yaha must be the sword,” Gaby replied.
“Look, as I said, I will answer your questions later. First, do you know what this is?” Fionn asked, taking the damaged circlet out of his jacket, the one they took from the creature they had faced at Carffadon. He tossed it to Alex, who examined the item in detail for three minutes until his eyes opened wide and then closed. He rubbed his forehead.
“Aww crap. I can’t believe that someone is doing these in miniature,” Alex left the circlet on the table. “Although that would explain the attacks on the universities and labs all over the country.”
“What is it?” Harland asked.
“Long version short, it’s a puncher that can open a portal for an incursion. I saw one like this in action ten years ago,” Alex replied, sure of his answer. “Although it was bigger, about the size of a horse. Not as polished as this one. More like a test prototype. This one looks mass-produced.”
“How can you say that? There hasn’t been an incursion since the war,” Harland countered.
“Not reported, but trust me, there was one. Gaby was there and I have the scars to prove it,” Alex lifted his shirt and showed his bare chest covered with long scars on his right side over the liver. The scars were as long as an adult man’s hand. “My liver got chopped by a creature that I’m sure wasn’t from here.”
“He’s right,” Fionn added. “I saw those scars multiple times on felp orcs that had tried to escape from the Blood Horde. The creature that makes them can render itself invisible. And it is really hard to kill.”
“We had to kill what? Twelve? Twenty?” Alex asked Gaby, covering his scars.
“Something like that.”
“All by yourself?” Fionn asked. During the war, he had hunted one of those creatures and it had been a difficult task. And he had training. Gaby could have fended off the creature as she had training, but Alex didn’t seem the kind of person that had combat training. “I take it that’s when your Gift woke up.”
“If you mean my abilities, yes. And we had help, from a hunter that was around there at the time. He taught us how to kill the monsters ourselves,” Alex explained. Fionn waved his hand, signaling him to continue. “It was a sports tournament for schools around Theia. Gaby had just transferred to mine. Some crazy cultist arrived with that machine at the nearby rainforest and the shit hit the fan. The rest is history, I guess. It wasn’t pleasant. I survived, but I lost friends there. That’s why I developed the bow and started to train. I don’t want others to go through that kind of ordeal all over again. The nightmares are already hard to deal with.”
Gaby hugged her friend, while Fionn felt Harland’s gaze upon him. The downside of having the Gift is that nightmares, already bad enough for those that had suffered traumatic events, were more vivid and harder to forget. It made Fionn wonder what he had missed when he decided to retire. Gaby and Alex had seen and survived things that many brave men during the war hadn’t. He respected that, even admired the fact that both had managed to find a way to keep the nightmares at bay. Izia would have been proud of them.
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” Fionn asked Gaby.
“It wasn’t my secret to tell. And I thought you wouldn’t believe me about the incursion. Almost no one does. However, Alex has proof of that. One of his friends, who passed away last year, had it all recorded. And Alex has been harassed because of it.” Gaby evaded Fionn’s gaze as she wasn’t keen to dwell further on that topic.
“When the government finally arrived, they tried to force us to lie or risk prison to cover their asses. They knew about the cult and did nothing. So when I didn’t comply first, they faked my rap
sheet, or most of it,” Alex said sheepishly. “If it weren’t for Gaby’s family, or the hunter, or Professor Hunt, who vouched for me to enter Mercia, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I owe you an apology then,” Harland replied, looking embarrassed.
“It’s ok, I get that a lot.” Alex smiled.
The waitress arrived with their food, burgers and sodas, milkshakes and fries.
“Do you want anything else?” She asked.
“We are fine, thanks,” Fionn said with a polite smile. The waitress left.
“Back to the circlet, what else can you tell us?” Harland smiled back at Alex.
“As I said, it’s basically a puncher,” Alex replied, wolfing down a burger and drinking his soda.
“Alex, for a moment remember that not everybody has the knowledge you have on advanced physics, cosmology, and high energy engineering. Keep it simple, please,” Gaby interjected.
“Fine,” Alex replied, annoyed, taking a few napkins from their holder. “Ok, let’s assume that this napkin is our reality, the universe we exist in. Then you add another napkin and so on and so forth, all neatly nested and folded into a tight package that we call our dimension.” He showed the folded napkins to the group and continued.
“Then you have other dimensions, above and below, whose energy states vary. They are in theory inhabited by beings that can’t interact directly, but do so through others. Y’know, possessions, voices in your head, that kind of thing. That’s because of our dimension’s fundamental physical make-up. Sound familiar? Metaphysics and philosophers call them the Last Heaven and the Infinity Pits. Heaven and Hell,” Alex said matter-of-factly. Although Fionn wasn’t dumb, he was having trouble following Alex’s train of thought, between his thick accent and Fionn’s lack of knowledge about advanced physics.
“Now let’s say you want to cross from one dimension to another as a shortcut to somewhere else, you need to punch a hole…” Alex punched a hole through the napkins using a pen. “…through reality, which takes a considerable amount of energy and time, besides the need to transform whatever you want to transport through the hole into a stable form of matter for that dimension. Size matters here, as massive objects can only pass in sections that can be translated to the rules of our reality.”
“And how does that link to that circlet or Hunt’s disappearance?” Fionn asked.
“Well, as you know, he is a proponent of archanotechnology, the fusing of science and magick that gave us the warptrains. Part of his research project dabbled in the premise that the Akeleth weren’t mythical beings, but a precursor race that had something similar to the ability to travel faster than light, even planetary teleportation technology. As far as I know, a teleportation spell is really useless because of its technological appropriation, so he tried to circumvent those limitations.”
“I saw the report,” Harland added. “He believed that he had found something in the ruins below Belfrost a year ago.”
“He and others call that Stringspeed, basically traveling between the folds of the napkins and breaking the lightspeed limit. And the description he gave to that legendary technology is slightly similar to what we have here. The incursion we witnessed ten years ago seemed to confirm his initial guess, and that’s why he searched around for that, tracking thaums and dark matter. You know, the residuals from a spell or an incursion,” Alex continued. “The thaums are related to gravitons somehow, not so harmful to humans, I think. That’s because they are too weak to interact if not funneled properly through a conductor. That’s why he left Mercia to join that private school. Ravenstone, I think. They are the only ones I know of that have the knowledge and equipment to track it. Last time I heard he had found a massive amount of thaums generated in modern times, bigger than anything else seen, in several places.”
“Where?” Fionn asked, already suspecting the answer. He just needed the confirmation. A part of him wished he was wrong. There were times when being right was not always a good thing.
“Lemast was one. The Long Horn Valley was another. According to Hunt, the Light Explosion punched a hole through dimensions, and for a few seconds, the passage between them was open. I shudder to think what crossed. And I still wonder how that happened,” Alex finished, taking another sip of his soda. The table remained silent for a while.
“We blew it,” Fionn broke the silence, stealing the plate full of fries from Alex.
“What? Who?” Alex asked, surprised.
“Me and the previous owner of that sword of yours. My best friend, Ywain. During the battle of Long Horn Valley, we found the power source for much of the Blood Horde’s magick and technology. I guess they got confident because they brought that massive black Onyx Orb, the size of a mature dragon, to their camp. We infiltrated their camp during the battle and hit the Orb hard with the Tempest Blades to break it. The problem was that we didn’t know that it had so much energy stored or what was inside,” Fionn explained. “It exploded and took half the armies with it. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“And how did you survive that? Records describe it as akin to a thermonuclear explosion,” Alex said with his eyes wide open. “It leveled the whole place.”
“I have no idea. I just woke up a few days later, my body healing the burns at an accelerated pace. Part of the Gift’s awakening process, I guess. But let’s go back to what you were saying.” Fionn cut off that line of conversation, unsure of going further. Even now his memory of the event was blurry, not because of the years that had past since then, but because he truly couldn’t recall the memory clearly beyond the waves of pain from his burned nerves while they healed.
“I’m inclined to believe that Hunt thought he wasn’t the only one pursuing such clues. He became paranoid and his research was sidetracked,” Harland added. “His notes were missing from the file.”
“That’s when I had the dream and went looking for him,” Gaby interjected, stealing Alex’s soda and drinking it, much to the chagrin of her friend.
“His assistant might have more information about it. But I don’t know her,” Alex said. “And I have no way to contact her.”
“So how does that circlet thing work?” Fionn asked, changing the subject. “I remember that the person wearing this muttered some strange words before it fully activated.”
“He was wearing it around his neck,” Gaby added, shuddering at the memory.
“Oh, that’s just… Look, from what I can deduce, it is some type of miniature portal. It uses these runes to cast a spell, these crystals to harness the thaums, the superconductors to carry resulting energy in a closed circuit, and then uses a body as a tether to merge with the being and be able to exist,” Alex explained while pointing with the pen to the runes and the circuitry of the circlet.
“I still don’t see why he went through so much trouble developing that thing when there are stories of demons able to exist in our reality before this was invented. You have fought them before,” Harland added, turning to Fionn, remembering the stories his friend had told him.
“Maybe the aim is to make the process more stable, unlike a regular spell, or to create some kind of hybrid soldiers that combine the creatures’ powers with something resembling a human mind that can follow orders. Or even to bring larger things,” Alex said. “Those are the only explanations I can think of. And all of them are scary.”
“As I see it, the fact that someone wants to develop a more powerful version of this is concern enough to solve this case fast,” Fionn replied and then sighed. He could feel the gnawing fangs of a migraine starting to chew his head. He just hoped, no, prayed to the Heavens that no one had thought of bringing him back. The last time he roamed the world, Fionn ended up losing most of the people he loved, including Izia.
“Do you mind if I order another burger? The downside of this ability is that I burn blood sugar as if was it was, well, candy, and the migraines hit me like a mule,”
Alex broke the silence this time.
“You haven’t been hit by a mule either,” Gaby replied.
The four of them signaled the waitress and ordered another round of burgers. Fionn noticed how Alex had to eat a considerable amount of food just to stave off a migraine, even more so than Fionn usually did. Alex’s Gift seemed to require so much energy just to work. So that’s how it looks to others, he thought. No wonder Harland often looked surprised at the amount of food Fionn could eat. Even Gaby had to eat more than usual. However, unlike Alex, she did it with proper manners and elegance. Sometimes the Gift came with downsides. In Fionn’s case, and while it wasn’t apparent, the healing factor that helped him to overcome lethal injuries didn’t come painlessly. Once he broke his arm and could feel and hear the bones resetting and melding together during the night, and no painkiller had an effect on him. He couldn’t but wonder what drawback Gaby’s Gift had. Fionn then turned his gaze to Alex and his sword, Yaha.
There was a certain familiar air around Alex, the way he laughed at Gaby’s comments and the glee he took in eating. But the most telling sign was that sword: the hilt, with the six golden open wings and the pommel covered in brown leather with the two straps at the end hanging down, ending in two golden clasps. He had once held that sword in his hands, while he was teaching his best friend Ywain during the war how to fight with a sword. It had been lost along with its owner after of the war, under mysterious circumstances.
“Can I ask you a personal question, Alex?” Fionn asked.
“Sure, I mean, you are the Greywolf,” Alex replied, putting down his second burger. “You can ask whatever you want.”
“Where did you get that sword?” Fionn asked bluntly.
“This?” Alex lifted the sword and handed it to Fionn. It felt heavy, but Alex handled it with ease. “It’s a family heirloom. It belonged to my great-grandfather. I got it along with his journals in a box after my granddad passed away.”
The Withered King Page 8