The Destinia Apocalypse (The Starguards - Of Humans, Heroes, and Demigods Book 4)

by Raymond Burke

  “Was I supposed to save my father?” Zane asked herself. She looked at the Time Empress, but there was no forthcoming reply from her; just silent support.

  Grief washed over Zane at seeing her father’s body and the senseless death he had endured. Synther, Destina, Archron, and Netherlord were already dead so her father had been avenged. Were Spearhead and the Surge as guilty? Yet, here they were fighting against Destina’s dream. But Zane was determined to have her father’s sword, if only to give it to Aristedes as his birthright.

  Her wish was her command as a flash of white energy burst from her mind and Zane found herself portalled to the Surge world beside her father’s grave. She gazed down around her. The world had almost been stripped of the old Surge bodies by Destina and Archron for building material; a desecration of death.

  This was the home of Solitude, Zane suddenly realised. Instinctively, she looked around for him, but knew whatever timeline she was in, Solitude had long left. She wondered how he was, how the rest of the Multiforce were doing. Most of all she missed Aristedes.

  Sighing, she transformed back into her physical body. She looked down at her father's grave wondering what to do. She had no tears though she was as sad as she could ever remember. Maybe she was more grown up now or maybe she was used to death. She didn't like either thought.

  “Hey, sis!”

  Zane jumped at the voice behind her, hardly sensing the portal open disgourging its occupant.

  She couldn't believe her eyes. “Aristedes!” she ran over and jumped into his arms, forgetting she was taller and heavier, knocking them both to the ground.

  “Hades' dong, you're heavy, Zane! You've changed!” Aristedes laughed. He sat up and took a good look at her.

  Twisting onto her knees. Zane laughed, too, then something occurred to her; two things really.

  “Hade's dong? That's an Uncle Helexius curse. Have you seen him recently? Where are the Astrals? We're fighting a war! We need you!” She gushed on, explaining what had happened to her after Netherlord tried to kill her on Home. “And you look. . . different. . . older.” She saw the guarded look in his eyes, her suspicions confirmed.

  Aristedes had taken his time getting up and leaned against a little boulder. “Yes, I'm from sometime in the future.” His smile was soft, though Zane could see more lines and strains upon his face. His black hair was a little longer and more curly. And his manoeuvre suit, though still based on the Multiforce uniform Lynn Kellis had issued once upon a time on Zero Star, was fuller and all dark blue, no white trim or flashes.

  “Time, the warrior-prince,” Zane sang with a flourish.

  Aristedes smiled easily. “Something like that.” He was regarding her with curiosity, which made her uneasy.

  “So, tell me, what's happening with the Astrals?”

  Aristedes shook his head.

  “Zeus and Hades holding hands!” she cursed, “just tell me!”

  “I can't. You know that!” His predicament was as impossible as Zane's statement.

  “Ooooh,” screeched Zane. “Now I know why people hate us Astrals. How infuriating that's is! Tell me,” Zane pleaded.

  Another shake of his head.

  “So why are you here?” a frustrated Zane asked.

  “I came to see you. To say I'm proud of you, that you found father.”

  Zane's eyes smarted. “Thank you. That's nice. For an end of the world speech. You're scaring me.” She held back her tears.

  “I forgot, you're still not as strong as me,” he joked, both thinking of a time long ago on Consention Base.

  “Am, too,” came her customary reply, her laughter dying out. Now it was her turn to study her brother. “Stop joking.” Her voice was quiet. “You're in a war, too, aren't you?” She quickly held up her and hands in submission. “I know, I know, you can't tell me. But I know goodbye words when I hear them.”

  Aristedes' smile was a grim line. “I don't know what will happen.”

  “But you could die?”

  Aristedes raised his left shoulder in a shrug. “We all die.” A casual statement.

  “You're an idiot,” Zane complained. “You know what I mean?”

  “Anything can happen in this war.”

  “Is it the same war?”

  Aristedes thought about it. “Yes and no.” Before Zane could ask, he said, “And that's the truth. A different cause, a different front, a different time, a different foe. But the same war. Ish!”

  That confused Zane even more. “There's something beyond the Storm of Stars! Hades' balls!”

  Enigmatically, Aristedes said, “There's always something beyond.”

  “Spoken like a true Astral,” she huffed.

  “I wish it wasn't always so.”

  Something in his voice made Zane ask, “Are you afraid?”

  Aristedes smiled so happily, it made Zane well up.

  “No,” he shook his head easily, “Not now I've seen you.”

  “Oh, shut up!” she guffawed, thinking he was teasing her.

  “I'm serious, Zane.” His smile had dropped. He addressed her earnestly. “You're the brave one. You've been alone for years, apart from your family, discovered your powers alone, grown up literally with no one to help you. You shouldn't have had to.”

  “It made me who I am!” she replied more bravely than she thought.

  “I know, but you're my little sister and you endured so much alone. I haven't been alone—”

  “Oh, so you are with Starshina then?” Zane interrupted, her cheeks flushing at Aristedes' indignant look.

  He sighed heavily. “Yes, I'll give you that one—”

  “Married? Kids?” Zane pried more in askance.

  Aristedes tilted his head, shaking it in amusement. “As I was saying, or trying to say is that I came to find you at this exact time; to see you at your bravest. To be inspired.”

  Zane realised her mouth was open in shock, surprise, and half laughter. “You must really be on the brink of Hell if you need inspiration from me,” she tried not to laugh, seeing how solemn Aristedes was. She stopped short as another thought occurred to her.

  “Am I going to die?” she asked softly. Why otherwise was her brother being so nice to her? Complimenting her. Not that he had been anything other than that. But his behaviour. . .

  But Aristedes grinned after a little ponder. “No, you're not going to die. You just have to do what you're going to do!”

  “Meaning?” She stared at him in confusion. “I don't even know what I'm going to do. What do I do?”

  Aristedes lips curled upward again. “You'll do what you were meant to do.” He jutted his chin toward the grave.

  Zane followed his gaze, turning back as a glint of light caught her peripheral vision. “Aris. . .”

  He was gone.

  “You have got to be kidding me!” Zane screamed at the sky. “Grrrrargh!”

  She sat alone for a few minutes. Frightening thoughts suddenly occurring to her.

  Was Aristedes really here? Did I dream that? Zane stood paralysed by the grave. Why would I have dreamed it?

  There was nothing to suggest he had been here even around the boulder where she thought they had fallen. The ground was a mess anyway.

  Zane was tempted to cycle back in time, but decided against it. One, she couldn't be bothered. And two, she didn't want to find out she was crazy. The only way to go was forward.

  She slowly approached the grave and combed away the compacted dirt from on top the body. She found herself annoyed at how shallow the grave was compared to normal standards.

  “Oh!” she gasped at the sight and smell.

  Only bones were left now, Zane suspecting the soil was highly acidic with all the Surge metals leeching into the ground not helped by the bombardment from the Earth fleet during the Axalan War. However, the sword looked as good as new. She unwrapped her father’s bony fingers from around the hilt and folded his arms back across his chest. The few tufts of brown hair she smoothed back and she kissed h
is cheek.

  Anger flared up inside her. The injustice. The senseless loss. Maybe Aristedes was right.

  “No, I won’t see you like this,” Zane said in a determined voice.

  She stood up, brushing the dirt off her clothing followed by her hands. She knew what she had to do; what Aristedes had expected her to do. Energising herself into her white energy state, Zane voyaged back through time. The timestream flowed around her, colourful, silent, sense-tingling. Zane didn't let the branching and twisting side-streams distract her. She had her destination. Not back to Aristedes, but further, back to the point which had changed her life.

  And she watched and waited for her moment.

  “Over my dead body will my sister join you,” Lord Aeon was saying.

  “So be it. Kill him,” Destina coldly ordered.

  Aeon raised his sword, ready for the attack.

  “Spearhead!” At Destina’s command the Surge released Synther’s powers and he flared up into his Lore being.

  Aeon brandished the sword ahead of him, but before he could defend himself. Synther blasted Aeon with corrosive Lore energy.

  Zane intervened. She split the temporal field around her father so he existed in two dimensions at the same time—two potentials in time . . .

  Aeon seemed to blur in the blast and swayed uneasily as Synther stopped.

  . . . allowing one of the Aeons to die, still holding his sword, his body smouldering . . .

  . . . while the other lived, unnoticed by Synther, Destina and her sons.

  Before the Surge's energy-negation fields kicked back in, Zane pulled her father into Phase space. Quickly she time-ported them forward into the future Surge world.

  Xathanius, Lord Aeon of the Astrals hardly had time to figure out what had happened to him when he found himself staring down at his alternate doppelganger in his grave.

  “It worked!” a delighted Zane sang. She reverted to her Astral form, hugging her astonished father hard around the waist.

  “Zane? Is that you?” Xathanius, Lord Aeon of the Astrals looked between his daughter and his dead self in the ground. He lovingly hugged his daughter back, still confused. “What happened?” He tried to get his head around the vision before him.

  Zane spent almost an hour recounting all that had happened to her and what was about to happen, especially to him in the nightmare past.

  “Those traitors!” Aeon spat, gritting his teeth. “My own aunt! My own sister!”

  He had not been prepared for the news of what had followed in the wake of his demise. And his had not been a glorious death. He had not saved anyone with his death. It was unnerving to see himself interred.

  He exhaled slowly, calming himself. “I am thankful it was my father who buried me. But I’m sure he would be glad to see me rise from the dead.” He peered down at Zane. “But your powers, they hadn't manifested when I last saw you. How did you save me?”

  Zane's answer came with a tinkle of laughter. “You were the cat, father.”

  “The cat?”

  “Yes, remember the lessons Phasia taught us about that cat in a box that was alive and dead at the same time?”

  “Yes, vaguely.” Aeon's brows knitted in remembrance.

  “Well you were the cat, I was the box, and the Knights Destina looked in the box where you were dead. See?”

  Aeon grasped the image in his head. “Kind of; you’re brilliant,” he ruffled Zane’s hair, Zane still hating it. “But how did your powers develop to such a degree?”

  One thing at a time, Zane decided to herself. No need to upset him about Spheron's sacrifice. So she told him the other news she had saved.

  “Well, father, it seems I'm a Loremaiden!”

  The look of shock on Aeon's face took Zane aback. Then she laughed. “I only found out myself a few hours or millions of years ago in the future, depending on how you look at it.” She laughed at the paradoxes. “But it seems Synther's virus experiments affected Millennius, the results of which bypassed you, but ended up in lil ole me!”

  Aeon looked down, sorrowful. Zane knew he was blaming himself for some reason.

  “Father, you couldn't have known. They kept everything from you.” But her face brightened. “But you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way, for I wouldn't have been able to find and save you.”

  Aeon caressed his little girl's face.

  “I'm fine,” Zane consoled him. “I'm still me.”

  They embraced again, before Aeon turned to his grave. “Can we cover me up again, please? It's a bit disconcerting.”

  The two of them spent a few minutes re-interring Dead Aeon, as Zane dubbed him, building a low cairn-like structure from nearby rocks. Aeon resisted saying a few words at his own funeral. That was just tempting fate.

  “Now what?” Aeon asked. He looked up into the swirling skies. The planet wasn't too welcoming and had well-earned its stature as a place of death. He wouldn't miss it.

  “We join the land of the living,” Zane replied, as eager to leave.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Gladly,” Zane smiled at her father. She held out her hand for her father to take.

  Bursting into her temporal form, to both their amazement Aeon’s sword burst into flame, Phasia’s magenta fire. He held the sword aloft and the blade sang in vibrant energy, a repeating sound reminding Zane of a heart beat; her father’s? Phasia’s? She did not know.

  Aeon sheathed the sword and the flame extinguished itself.

  “That's new!” was Aeon's understated comment.

  “Our queue to go, no doubt!”

  With that, Zane thrust her arms into the air, a portal spiralling out in front of her. They rode on the chronal streams, slipped through universal fissures, and jumped across temporal fields.

  And when they exited, Zane and Lord Aeon landed right in the heart of the war.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The flying fortress battled through space, flanked by the nebulous brain-like Chryrians.

  >All aboard the Lady Elisabeth< called out Force, good-naturedly.

  >The what?< Valtare psyed from the crew compartment, wondering if he had heard correctly.

  >I could see her in your mind, Valtare<

  >Stay out of my mind!<

  >Hey, no problem. Geez, tetchy. All I'm saying is that Van Tager may have gifted me powers for the wrong reasons, but she’s brought us together in this war, so I’ve named our spacecraft after your wife. This lady can also pack a mean punch<

  Valtare rounded on him ready to grab his non-corporeal body, but a flash of memory punched into his mind—a young boy, pushed, verbally abused, bullied in a baseball park by a large man, the boy falling flat on his back at the same moment two fighter jets from the nearby Air Force base fly over, the boy staring up in wonder as he always did, and in that moment wishing he was in one of those metal saviours, flying away, free, escaping—

  >Whoa! That's not embarrassing!< Force shook his head breaking the memory. He tried repressing the dark memory, even if it was the over-riding reason he had joined the Air Force and then the E-Corps.

  Valtare smirked. >Your father made you like this?<

  >You want to talk about your wife?< Violent thoughts swirled around Force's mind.

  >Not particularly< Valtare scowled.

  >Then let's not talk about my father<

  >Fair enough<

  >No problem< Force frowned. >Now we have to fight this Hyper-God<

  >Hyper-God?< Gordell was intrigued entering the cockpit. He had stayed clear of their psy-spat, having no interest in their memories.

  >Well, you know Hyper-this, Hyper-that connected to the Storm of Stars< Force joked. >We must be fighting a Hyper-God?< He grimaced, trying to concentrate on being a virtual pilot flying a living metal castle through space.

  There was thoughtful reflection as his musings spread across the minds of the other anti-Storm of Stars forces.

  >Force you may have something there< psyed Gordell. >Phasia, Millennius, Cosmogod, and Spearh
ead split your forces; find and attack the other strands Arcanaut discovered. They may be separate entities, but the Storm of Stars are as Force aptly suggested, Hyper beings; gods nestled within gods, within gods, etcetera, anchored at different points in space and time via cosmic strands, for energy and control yet connected through a single Hypermind. We must find the Hypermind through the cosmic strands—its nerves and control system<

  The Antiqchronals and Fifths re-deployed their forces. Each of the particular capabilities of each of the Five peoples were needed in order to destroy the strands and trace it back to the Hypermind. Arcanaut supplied the best temporal and spatial coordinates he could for the Hypermind nodes finding sixteen such strands. The five Peoples now amalgamated their numbers and the sixteen Hypermind strands came under attack.

  Millennius led the largest force of Lore, Surge, Chryrians, and Zater Jen. The Surge could absorb and dispel the Storm of Stars’ energy, while the Lore just plainly ate it up. The Chryrians added a psionic element. The Storm of Stars were assaulted physically, psionically, and temporally as the Zater Jen tore into temporal nodes. They kept the Shadow Stars at bay, who also guarded the largest of the cosmic strands, which through the eyes of the attackers sloped off and down a dimensional warren.

  The elusive strand reminded Millennius of the Great Rift, all gnarled and lashed together in some great cosmic Gordian knot. The more they hacked at it, the more loose energy filaments cohered together. Millennius knew they had to find the right place to unbind it all like a ribbon waiting to be unwoven. But they didn’t have the time. Brute force was required.

  The Zater Jen could sense discord in the strand, weak areas of temporal stress. They exploited it to great effect, shearing it apart.

  KREEESH!

  The sudden shattering of countless Zater Jen shocked everyone, death cries reverberating horrifically through their minds.

  >Universe, what happened?< psyed Millennius across his forces.

  >Resonance!< psyed a Zater Jen called Trittoni.