The Ancients

by Adam-Clay Webb

  “And neither are they alive,” Oga said quickly. “Tell me now, what happens after your children are resurrected?”

  “Don’t sound so concerned, I won’t battle you again. I will use all of my resources, including you and your children, to rid the world of all its meaningless life. And then, we will create new life, and truly be gods! We will be worshipped as omnipotent creators!”

  Oga laughed a little. “You think this is an easy matter, even for us, Kizer?”

  “The only force that could even think of stopping us is The Seven, and so our first mission will be to destroy the remnants of that demon, along with all those who will try to defend this world from its glorious fate.”

  “No, we first have to figure out how to create new human life, and just how much of it we can create with our power over a certain amount of time. Also, how complete will these humans be? Can we implant in them our own will, or will they be susceptible to disobedience? Will they be immortal like us, being sprung forth from our power? Will they have traces of our power that we could build a world army from them and henceforth capture other worlds? We need answers for all of these before we can make any move. Also, with this grand plan at stake, is it sensible to allow the world’s defenders to gather their strengths to fight us?”

  “My, Oga, do not tell me you are wary of these weaklings. This last world war will be our reward for being gods. We might as well enjoy as best a fight as they can offer. Also, these final fights will give me a chance to do some necessary evaluations.”

  Oga hissed.

  “If we cannot be confident enough to battle the earth’s defenders at their peak, then we cannot be fit to lead the new world that will last an eternity. That boy, Lex Leo… I hope he doesn’t disappoint me.”

  “If you treat something this big as a game, you might end up losing, Kizer,” Oga warned soberly.

  “Do remember who I am, Oga.”

  ***

  Kyle’s sword fell from his shaking hand. He was barely standing, his clothes drenched with sweat and torn all over, yet his eyes still firm with readiness.

  Lyoko stood a few meters before him, his staff resting on the wall close by. “You are excelling almost as quickly as Blade, boy. After a few hours of rest, we will--”

  “Are you tired, old man?” Kyle asked, clenching his teeth as he stooped and grappled his sword.

  Lyoko smirked, then laughed a little. “Heh. Very well, then. I will now introduce you to another of the foundation principles of fighting – force manipulation.”

  Kyle listened keenly.

  “Upon mastering this, you will be able to easily defeat almost anyone who you come across.”

  Kyle grinned. His body was aching – he could feel his muscles tearing and growing at a near impossible rate. His hair had become thicker and more beastly. He could feel the essence within the cave making his body stronger and his mind keener by the second. It was a straining, frightening feeling, but one he gladly endured. “Blade, here I come…”

  “Now, I want you to come at me with a fist of a hundred men. Give it everything you have. You already know it doesn’t make sense to hold back against an opponent like me.”

  “Well get ready, Lyoko!” With that, Kyle ran off toward Lyoko. As he moved off, the ground beneath his feet shook a little. His speed, even though he hadn’t realized, had become marvellously increased since his training with Lyoko. He yelled as he reached up to Lyoko, firing a sturdy fist at the man’s face.

  Kyle’s eyes widened as Lyoko caught his fist without effort, absorbing without batting an eye the entire impact. But it was the next moment that would make Kyle wonder just what Lyoko was. The old man, with his other hand, barely touched Kyle’s chest. The boy felt an immeasurable wave of pain pulse throughout his entire body. Also, he felt his body lift from the ground and zoom backward at the speed of a well-fired arrow. He flew out through the cave and crashed into a tree a few meters out, busting through the thick bark and landing abase a huge rock, sending cracks though it.

  The boy uttered a cracked groan. He vibrated with heavy pain. He felt his bones shivering in confusion. He looked out at Lyoko from where he was, his eyes bulging. What the hell…

  Lyoko walked outside toward where Kyle was fixed. “You might not be able to move for a little while,” Lyoko said. “What you just felt is called force redirection – force reversal to be specific. I absorbed the impact of your punch and forced it back at you, multiplying it a few times.”

  “Wh…what?!”

  “This technique will not be learnt quickly. You will become frustrated and will probably not even survive this part of the training, but should you become a fighter who can challenge anyone of substance, you will have to learn this… Huh?” Lyoko was surprised to see Kyle already struggling to stand. With teeth clenched tightly, the boy found his way to his feet.

  “Out here feels weak. Let’s get back inside,” Kyle said.

  ***

  Lex was in a dark place. He could feel it, the unshaken fear that the demons had for Oga. He could feel Maximo and the others shivering. He was vexedly annoyed at them. He wanted to believe that what he felt toward Oga and Kizer was only hatred, and not fear, but the demons’ emotions were synching with his until his ability to differentiate his thoughts from theirs became defective. When his consciousness fully returned, he found himself clinging to iron bars in a strange place. It was also very dark but he didn’t realize it.

  “Where am I?” he asked himself, looking around. “Well…” He was in a cell. “Lash…” He felt something that wasn’t exactly grief. It was a much emptier feeling. He clenched his teeth, wishing tears would come to console him. “With my bare hands I’ll break their necks.”

  “He’s awake!” Lex heard someone say. In a short while, two guards walked up to his cell.

  “This is Iceland, right?” Lex asked. One of the men laughed, triggering the other’s laughter.

  “Something funny?” Lex asked, already very annoyed of them.

  “Think he’s still drunk from last night?”

  “Nah, I didn’t smell anything on his breath. Maybe he’s a lunatic.”

  “Where is Icilda, daughter of Asuri?” Lex asked, ignoring the men’s laughter.

  They looked at him peculiarly, and then one of them started laughing again. A third guard entered the scene. Lex noticed that whatever facility he was in was quite small – there were only a few cells there and it seemed he was the only captive.

  “Come now, let the young man out, you know this isn’t a prison,” this third man said. He looked at Lex. “Hey, we found you asleep on the snow last night so we dragged you in here. The cold would have killed you otherwise. Some looting gang was running about in the area but we got a message that they were all found early this morning so we can release you now.”

  “Come on, Hen, we barely get any prisoners in our detention centre – let’s keep this one a while. Besides, he seems fun, doesn’t he?”

  “Whatever, you dimwits,” Hen said and turned to walk away.

  Lex grabbed two of the bars tightly and in a jiffy they were frozen solid. The wide-eyed men stepped back as the bars of iron shattered like glass. Lex walked out of cell and grabbed the throat of one of the men, forcing him up against the wall and off the ground, looking up at him with menacing eyes. He glanced to his left and right as Hen, along with two other armed men drew their swords, shaking nervously.

  “An icemaker,” Hen said under his breath. “I thought…”

  “Icilda,” Lex said coldly, numbing the man’s throat, his voice as threatening as his glare.

  ***

  “So there, now you know the truth behind the Black War, the truth about the Zagans, and the truth about the gods,” Azar said. Darius was still rendered speechless by the accounts Azar had related.

  The three – Azar, Darius and Viknor, were sitting in Azar’s secret room, where his most secret scrolls and books were, and where his most brilliant ideas were conceived. It was dark in the
re, but these three men had far more light than almost everyone else alive.

  “That boy, then, Lex Leo, grandson of Kizer… He is the reason… the world is still here?” Darius asked.

  “And he is critical in keeping it that way, though in the war to soon come, we will have a much stronger force on our side. The Zagans are with us.”

  “Yet, our enemies are those who have unimaginable power,” Viknor said. “And we will need every bit of strength on our side should we win the war. So tell us, Darius, about this Crystal Eye you mentioned. The name sounds familiar, but back in my days of research, looking into the Crystal Eye was like chasing after a ghost.”

  “Even knowing about its existence is very impressive, wizard,” Darius said. “Information about this item has been top secret for decades. I myself, with the king before the last, created a task force that was goaled with finding and securing this item.”

  “What about my father?” Azar asked.

  “No, he didn’t know about it. His father, King Amorro, gave me orders never to tell anyone, including his own son, about this artefact. Also, I had the heavy task of eliminating every surviving member of the organization that researched this item. After doing that, I was well willing to kill myself as well, but the king had me know that there was a purpose left for me. His last order, before dying, was to continue to protect the secret of the Crystal Eye, and to launch another attempt to get it into Magmalian hands when I saw a king that was fit to wield such a power. Your father, Azar, was unfit, so I withheld the secret from him. He, I hope unlike you, was reckless and ruled by his love for power.”

  “Whatever this item is, you were right to withhold it from my father,” Azar said. “But this power, the world needs it now.”

  “Tell us more about the Eye,” Viknor said, sounding hungry for knowledge of this strange and powerful thing.

  “I have been watching you, Azar,” Darius said. “You and your father had never quite seen eye to eye, and that is good enough reason to trust you. Though you are still inexperienced, you remind me quite a bit of your grandfather.” Darius laughed a little.

  “The Eye,” Viknor reminded.

  “Right. Now Amorro was a better scholar and explorer than he was a king. Always in search of scrolls and books, he often let his underlings run the country without even realizing it. I was his right hand since his kingship, and he always shared his greatest secrets with me, even things he hid from his father, and from the high generals. He had discovered a very powerful creation, one that could give Magma Town the power to conquer the world.”

  Viknor and Azar eyed each other.

  “A few hundred years after Oga had died, tenth-generation sorcerers, powerful arcanines, formed a faction called The Elders. This group was a rogue society hunted down by the Ogal Council. Some literature suggest that this faction was even as strong as the council, but their goal was never to prove it. They never once made an attack on the council, but they were outlaws. They researched and even practised forbidden magic. They fooled around with spells that were strictly illegal, and dabbled in theories that pointed toward resurrection, time travel, inter-planetary travel, blotting out the sun, destroying the moon, terribly powerful things! These men were brilliant magicians who took the art form to a level that even the council was afraid to get involved with.”

  “I always knew I was born in the wrong era!” Viknor complained.

  “The Elders, I have read, was led by a prodigy who had stepped down from being the head of the Ogal Council after leading the war that ended the Ionide race.”

  “Sage Lukia,” Viknor said.

  “Yes. Sage Lukia, also known as the Pegasus Knight, along with the other arcanines, after decades of work, finally created something that would long outlive them, the Crystal Eye. This artefact… since the day it was created, it has been absorbing magical energy from everywhere.”

  “What? How?” Azar asked.

  “The science behind it is difficult to explain, especially since I’m not sure I understand it fully myself. The Crystal Eye absorbs suspended mana, waste mana. Each time a spell is cast, a bit more mana than is precisely necessary is used. The Crystal Eye has been gathering all the leftover magic from every spell for the last twenty thousand years. Each time you spaceshift, the mana that disappears from the cloud-like burst somehow becomes eaten up by this thing.”

  “Then… This item must house more magic than every magician alive combined now possess! Imagine the spells that could be performed with that item! All the limits of modern magic could be easily broken!” Viknor said in realization.

  “Correct,” Darius said. “By now, the eye probably possesses even as much raw power as Oga himself. I am not sure why The Elders created it, but for certain, if this lands in the wrong hands, the world could end easily. Maybe even by touching this stone, even a normal child would become as powerful as Oga.”

  “Imagine… Imagine if Oga gets hold of this,” Azar dreaded.

  “I cannot. That is beyond the reaches of my imagination,” Viknor said. “Darius, did you and Amorro ever get a location on this stone?”

  “… Yes.” There was a heavy silence for a little while. “Have any maps close by, Azar?” Darius asked.

  ***

  “Icemaker, we’re heading into a blizzard here!” one of the guards Lex forced to take him to the Ice Palace shouted over the howling of the stinging, snowy wind.

  Lex held tightly to his horse. “We move forward!” he shouted back. He and two of the guards from the detention centre had been riding for three hours without stopping. It wasn’t entirely that Lex had no sympathy toward how cold the men were, but he simply could not remember what it felt like to be cold. The horses trotted sturdily through the thick frigidness. The snow beneath them was six inches. “We will ride until sundown, and then take short break!”

  “Are you insane?!” the same guard shouted back.

  “You can survive the blizzard!” Lex said. “What you most certainly cannot survive is going against my orders!”

  ***

  Darius pointed to a dot on the map that was only a few hundred miles east of Libson.

  “In the sea?” Azar asked.

  “Nah, there’s a small island there that isn’t on the maps. Its name is Ghost. I read that the Elders created this landmass and hid the item there.”

  “They created an island?” Azar asked in disbelief. Azar had imagined that only Oga and Kizer had such powers.

  “Yes,” Darius continued. “And we found it.” The man smirked on seeing the looks on Viknor’s and Azar’s faces. “That’s right. Almost half a century ago, Amorro and I and seven other men found this island that had kept itself hidden from the world for thousands of years. The island was covered with a veil by the Elders, a covering that made it invisible until you were less than a mile away from it. It’s almost impossible to encounter by chance, but with Amorro leading us, we weren’t relying on luck. The island was only about five or six square miles. In the centre of it was a cave, and of course, within that cave was the most powerful weapon in the world, a weapon that could make a man into a god.”

  “Who knows what it could make a god into…” Viknor pondered.

  “Did you retrieve it?” Azar asked, hoping badly for a positive answer.

  “We tried. There was a powerful seal guarding the stone. As soon as my king reached to touch it, there was utter chaos! A massive earthquake struck immediately, and the cave began tumbling down on us. I grabbed Amorro and we managed to make it out of the cave. But that wasn’t all we were in for! The island began to sink! Also, we were sure we saw shadows, spirits, rushing about! Spirits cannot be fought with swords!”

  “But wasn’t Amorro a wizard of the fifth grade?” Viknor asked. “Couldn’t he have done something?”

  “Yes, he was a wizard, but for some reason, his magic was gone while he was on the island! We had to leave the stone and make a run for it! We made it back to the vessel just in time. We moved as fast as we could. We w
atched as the island sunk and the deathly spirits, the guardians of the stone sunk with their treasure.”

  “So these spirits are the spirits of the Elders, you surmise?” Viknor asked, sounding quite sceptical.

  “Must have been!”

  “Were any of you hurt by the quake or by the spirits?” Viknor asked.

  “That’s the strangest part!” Darius said. “Even though stones fell down on top of us and some of us were even struck by the spirits, none of us had any injury whatsoever! By the time we reached back to Magmalian shore, our country was under attack by the Herculean army. Again. After the attack was neutralized, Amorro called a meeting with us who had sought after the Eye. We had planned to make another journey to search for it, but before that could happen, then king fell ill and died. Just before his life left, he charged me with silencing the team that went after the Eye.”

  Something’s not quite right about this guy’s story, Viknor thought. Suddenly, he was distracted by another thought. “You were tricked,” he said.

  “What?” Darius asked.

  “I know why none of you were injured by the quake.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because it never happened.”

  “Are you suggesting… that I’m lying?”

  “Not really,” Viknor said. “I’ve read quite a bit about The Elders as well. There was one amongst them by the name of Vis, Lukia’s favourite. His specialty was illusions, dreams.”

  “Are you saying…”

  “Yes. All that you saw happen when you got on that island, it was a shared dream triggered by your closeness to the stone. Vis must have set the trap before he died to deter anyone from using the stone. Even the island being invisible until you are right upon it, that sounds like a technique Vis would be able to use. Even from beyond the grave, these arcanines have been protecting their treasure.”

  Darius’ eyes widened and he gasped. “Could it be…”

  “Azar, I suggest we set sail to Ghost immediately,” Viknor said. “This power, it is our only hope of winning the war to come.”

  ***

  There was a thrill on Oga’s face as more of the old scrolls and tablets he was reading confirmed an ambitious suspicion. “Oh dear… They really did make it,” he marvelled, very impressed with the work of his seed. “And imagine, these ‘Elders’ were deviants from the Holy Council.” Oga looked up from the old documents.