Chaos Trapped

by Eric T Knight

  Kasai looked down at Karliss. “It ends with your death.”

  Gray flames erupted from the ground around the Guardian’s feet. They moved forward and surrounded Karliss, then began to climb the stone encasing him. He fought desperately to get free, but there was nothing he could do. Already he could feel the heat building. In moments the flames would reach his face, and he would die in agony.

  Karliss cast about desperately for something he could do, anything at all. That’s when his eyes fell on something he’d forgotten all about.

  The crystal. It lay where he’d left it, at the base of the rock formation. What drew his attention to it was the fact that it had changed from yellow to orange and was pulsing slowly, the change in color doubtless due to Kasai’s nearness.

  Karliss got a crazy idea. He’d probably end up dead, but he might be able to take Kasai with him.

  He reached for the wind. He needed no words for this, only a thought.

  The crystal lifted into the air and began moving toward Kasai. Busy looking at the key fragment in his hand, the Guardian didn’t see it approaching.

  “This world is mine now—”

  His words were cut off as Karliss launched the crystal at him, putting every bit of his remaining strength behind the thrust.

  The crystal hit Kasai hard enough that he staggered forward, hard enough that it punched through his body. Kasai looked down in disbelief at the tip of the crystal, protruding from his chest.

  The crystal was glowing a bright, angry red and pulsing rapidly. A high-pitched whine was coming from it, steadily increasing in intensity.

  Kasai touched the crystal to try and force it out of him, but when he did there was a crackling sound, and he jerked his hands away in pain. Focused as he was on the crystal, Kasai didn’t watch where he set his feet, and when he took a step back he stepped on some loose stones and started a small rockslide. He slipped and fell down the slope.

  Now that Kasai was distracted, Karliss realized that the stone encasing him didn’t feel as tight. He fought against it, and with the sound of pottery breaking it cracked away. The ground no longer held him as it once had either, and he managed to pull himself free.

  Down the slope Kasai was on his knees, fear etched on his inhuman features as he fought to rip the crystal free. His hands were completely blackened now. The flesh around the wound was searing like meat on a fire, and noxious, oily smoke was rising from it.

  The light from the crystal was so bright it was blinding, the high-pitched whine deafening. Karliss knew whatever was going to happen was only moments away.

  There was no time to summon the aranti. Karliss lurched to his feet and ran for the cave.

  As he dove inside, there was a brilliant flash of light from behind him, so bright it turned the interior of the cave a lurid, bloodred color. A heartbeat later there was a massive concussion that lifted him and threw him forward onto his face. He hit the ground, the wind knocked from his lungs. Rocks fell from the ceiling all around him, and there was a sudden, sharp pain as one landed on his leg.

  Karliss lay there on the floor of the cave, trying to draw breath, trying to force his scattered thoughts into order.

  As his hearing returned, the first thing he became aware of was the unearthly wailing coming from outside.

  Then he realized that the ground was still shaking. Whether it was aftershocks from the explosion, or spasms from Kasai’s power he didn’t know. Nor did it matter. More rocks fell around him, and he knew the cave was close to collapsing. If he didn’t get out of here soon, he’d be crushed or buried alive.

  A large rock was lying on his right leg. He tried pushing at it, but he couldn’t budge it.

  More rocks fell, one of them glancing off his head and making him see stars. A crack appeared in the cave floor, raced across it and up the wall. The very earth groaned.

  Karliss gave up pushing at the rock pinning him. It was far too large for him to move with muscle strength. He forced himself to focus through the pain and confusion, gathering the power of the wind to him.

  Then he channeled a burst of compressed air at the stone. It shifted enough that he was able to pull his leg free.

  He stood. His right ankle throbbed painfully, but when he put weight on it, it didn’t buckle, so it wasn’t broken. Nothing else seemed broken, and though he was bleeding from numerous wounds, none of them seemed too serious. He briefly considered going deeper into the cave, taking shelter in the masters’ dwelling, but quickly discarded the idea. Being trapped in there would only mean his death took longer.

  He hobbled to the entrance of the cave, picking his way around falling stone as he went. More pieces fell from the ceiling, and the floor bucked hard enough one time that he fell to his knees.

  The entrance was mostly blocked with fallen stone, but another compressed blast of air cleared away enough stone that he was able to crawl through and back into daylight.

  Kasai lay halfway down the slope. The creature had been torn completely in half. The legs were still attached to part of Kasai’s torso and bent at odd angles. His head, arms and shoulders were still attached to his upper torso, and he was pushing weakly at the ground, his head moving side to side. Shards of the crystal lay everywhere, dark now, the energy contained within it spent.

  And then someone new appeared.

  Chapter Forty-four

  A shadow appeared beside the wounded Guardian, clearly visible even in the bright daylight. It grew larger, then seemed to split open. Three figures emerged from it.

  The first had gray hair and ancient features. His face was crisscrossed with fresh, livid scars. The two who emerged behind him wore black, hooded robes. Blue tattoos etched their pale faces.

  The first figure held out his hand. The shadow swirled around his hand and coalesced into the shape of a black staff. He bent over and plucked the fragment of key from Kasai’s mangled hand. “I hoped I could count on you to retrieve this for me, and it appears I was right,” he told the Guardian. “It looks like you’ve paid quite a high price though.”

  “Help me,” Kasai rasped.

  “What’s this?” Lowellin asked. “You can’t heal yourself? One of the greatest of the ancient Shapers, and you can no longer Shape yourself?” He touched the scars on his face. “I know that all too well, sadly. The result of spending too long in the same form, I expect. That and the power you lost from those millennia you spent trapped in the Gur al Krin. There’s always a price to pay.”

  He held up the key fragment. “You thought you were so close. You thought this would give you the power to rule this world. But I have a secret for you. There is no power here. Not for you. Not without the other two pieces. You were duped, my brother. Used by the Devourers from the Abyss for one purpose. To retrieve this for them. I want you to know that they are grateful. Not grateful enough to help you, of course, but grateful all the same. Enough so that I have been ordered to end your suffering.”

  He touched the end of the black staff to Kasai’s forehead. As the staff touched the Guardian it changed, becoming a liquid shadow that flowed across his skin. Kasai howled and tried to slap it away, but his arms barely worked, and the shadow was insubstantial. There was nothing to get hold of.

  The howl turned into a scream of pain as purple lines spread out from the shadow. They flowed across Kasai’s torso. Sparks rose from them, and they began to sink into his body, eating away at him like acid.

  Kasai screamed and thrashed. Soon there was nothing left but a shapeless mass that sank into the ground and disappeared. The shadow coalesced once more into the shape of a staff and flowed up into the scarred man’s hand. He looked up the slope at Karliss.

  “This wouldn’t be possible without you, Karliss. You see, Kasai suffered from the same problem as I do. His exposure to the ingerlings during the war left him tainted by chaos power from the Abyss. As you saw, the crystals the masters left to guard the pieces of the key were designed to react rather violently when they came into contact with chaos p
ower. Which means neither Kasai nor I could have opened the vault. I needed you for that.”

  His words staggered Karliss. Had he been used all this time? He and Kasai both?

  “It was well done, don’t you think?” the scarred man continued. “I knew the fragment was here somewhere, but not where it was, and I had no way to retrieve it. Fortunately, I was not without tools. I had Kasai, and I had you. For all his power, Kasai was remarkably easy to manipulate. It has always been his weakness. All I needed to do was plant the seed, to convince him that this object would give him the power he desired. And then I set you in his way. It was me, you see, who gave the other clan the idea to move west, which led to Kasai destroying them. A few words whispered to their tlacti on the wind was all it took. From there events sort of…unfolded.”

  Karliss stood there staring at him, unable to completely process what had just been said. All this time, all that he and his clan had been through, and through it all he was being used? It was staggering, horrifying.

  “But enough about me. I have other places to be and things to do.” He glanced at the two black-robed figures flanking him. “Kill him. Be quick about it.”

  The two men stepped forward. Each held up one hand. Purple sparks began to play across their palms, building in intensity quickly.

  Karliss reached out for the aranti to carry him away, but he knew as he did so that there wasn’t time. Already one of the men was drawing his arm back…

  There was nothing to do but let go.

  All the barriers he’d built and so carefully maintained between him and the wind, he simply let them go. He surrendered himself completely to the wind, let it and the aranti blow through him.

  A purple bolt of chaos power lanced out and struck him square in the chest—

  But he was no longer there. His body had dissolved into the wind. He flew upwards and away.

  The End

  The story continues in

  Shadow Hunted

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  Special Thanks

  I want to take a moment here to say special thanks to the following people (in no particular order, because they’re all awesome!): Edwin James, Scott Reid, Tony Gallo, Jeff Bawden, Abbie DeVault, Gayreth Walden, Alex Campbell, Cherish Kasner, and Dillon Spears.

  I needed beta readers and I needed them fast and you all came through. You’re the best! Thanks so much.

  About The author

  Born in 1965, I grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that my primary form of escape was reading.

  At 18 I escaped to Tucson where I attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering I liked writing, I tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when I realized that I had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up.

  After graduating with a degree in Creative Writing in 1989, I backpacked Europe with a friend and caught the travel bug. With no meaningful job prospects, I hitchhiked around the U.S. for a while then went back to school to learn to be a high school English teacher. I got a teaching job right out of school in the middle of the year. The job lasted exactly one semester, or until I received my summer pay and realized I actually had money to continue backpacking.

  The next stop was Australia, where I hoped to spend six months, working wherever I could, then a few months in New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands. However, my plans changed irrevocably when I met a lovely Swiss woman, Claudia, in Alice Springs. Undoubtedly swept away by my lack of a job or real future, she agreed to allow me to follow her back to Switzerland where, a few months later, she gave up her job to continue traveling with me. Over the next couple years we backpacked the U.S., Eastern Europe and Australia/New Zealand, before marrying and settling in the mountains of Colorado, in a small town called Salida.

  In Colorado we started our own electronics business (because, you know, my Creative Writing background totally prepared me for installing home theater systems), and had a couple of sons, Dylan and Daniel. In 2005 we shut the business down and moved back to Tucson where we currently live.

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  CHAOS TRAPPED

  Book Four of

  Chaos and Retribution

  by

  Eric T Knight

  Copyright © 2018 by Eric T Knight

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover by:

  Deranged Doctor Design