The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy)

by Krista Gossett

  “You could have told me you had jumped in! I barely had time to hold my breath!” Rienna growled out thickly, the husky residue of desire having congealed it to something more menacing.

  Ashe got to his feet slowly, expecting she might just kick his feet out from under him if she was intent to hover over him, but she allowed it, although she watched him like a falcon watches lunch. The look on his face made it obvious that he knew that wasn’t really why she was this angry; he had gone a bit far with overwhelming her, teasing her, and he telegraphed an apology with his eyes again. He was really good at that.

  “I barely had time to hold my breath and then I finally catch it and you’re throwing me in—” and that was as far as she got before Rienna started to look around in awe. Again, her breath was stolen away, but this time it was her own doing. To say this place was incredible was a huge understatement. It was damn near impossible and it made her dizzy.

  Aside from the stream she had not been so fond of, there were these lush fruit bearing palms and vines here. The ‘sky’ around them was sparkling like the sands and they shifted with the illusion of passing clouds on an oddly textured atmosphere. To her right, the lush expanse dipped down into a valley of rock and flora she had never seen before and she could see no end. To her left, in the distance she could see a huge palace of sand. Without realizing she was doing so, she started to walk towards it but Ashe had grabbed a handful of her now-damp dress to stop her. He was still on the ground and it was that or the ankle and she would have kicked his ass for tripping her. She shot him an unhappy look but he shook his head and stood up, draping a soft absorbent blanket around her (an odd thing to bring in his pack, but useful), rubbing her arms instinctively before dropping his hands away and looking at the castle.

  “That’s all illusion, Rienna, and certain death. There are plants that way that have a sort of power of illusion and they are even more monstrous that the carnivorous plants that Melchior had told us about. These are even hungrier, since not much comes here willingly. We’re heading towards the valley.”

  Rienna nodded, but did not look away just yet. Try as she might, she just couldn’t see a glitch in the illusion. She gave up and followed after Ashe, who was once again setting off without her. She began to wonder why he needed her at all, since insofar her only real use had been keeping him from hitting his ass on some slippery rocks. She sighed as softly as she could, berating herself for very nearly thinking too much about his ass.

  Instead of getting stuck in her unreliable head, Rienna took to focusing on the beauty of this surreal world around her. Despite the fact that it was surely still evening in their world, this place was lit up like a slightly overcast day, a mute white light that was bright but not overly so. As they descended down the steps in the rock, Rienna’s eyes studied the beautiful wonders—lavender butterflies so diaphanous they appeared to be ghosts, beetles that could shift their colors like jungle lizards, plants that curled away from her touch like a shy lover. Rienna would gasp or laugh lightly and sometimes she would catch Ashe watching her for a moment with a kind of satisfaction she didn’t quite understand. Belias would sometimes wear that enigmatic look when he studied people and he would never tell her what it meant. She pretended she didn’t notice and let it secretly warm her inside.

  There were strange trees that grew sideways along the drop of cliffs, seeming to need no soil but gripping and drinking from the reddish wet rock face they clung to. As they descended, Rienna did not feel so overwhelmed by the sheer size of this place, but even walled off in this valley, it was still an enormous canyon of rock and life, an isolated ecosystem but no less intricate than any in the world above, if that was truly where she was geographically at all. They might have ‘fallen’ here, but it seemed more like another dimension altogether. She could feel this place thrumming with magic, not like theirs but resonating with her all the same. An odd sensation and foreign to her since she never felt magic before, but instinctively she knew it for what it was. She had felt it on her skin, felt it through elemental aided abilities, but never from somewhere deep like this.

  “Ashe, is this place really below the desert?” Rienna asked, unsure of exactly where she was anymore. She had expected for there to be some great stream of sand piling like an hourglass, but without any way to go back up, this place would just fill up eventually.

  “Yes and no,” Ashe answered, thinking of how to explain it. “The whirlpool itself is a kind of illusion; it’s more like how it shows itself as a gateway. In relation to our world, we are technically below the desert. But this actual place—and the books call it Calderon—it is not really a place on our world but more like a pocket crafted by old gods from earth to… practice creating different forms of life. You may see versions of these plants in our world, but you will not see these exact ones because… well, they were, in a sense, incomplete or failed experiments… for the old gods’ purposes anyway. Like most things, you’re not going to be able to put together their reasoning behind it.”

  Rienna took this all in and observed as she listened. “Where did you learn about this?” she pushed, needing to know more.

  “You mentioned him earlier, but it was Pierait that got me thinking about it when he was telling us about things he read in Morgaze. The books that mages kept for themselves. In all of the chaos of the elder fading away, I had taken a few books and one, simply called Calderon, had caught my attention. At first, it seemed like a work of fiction, but there were all these diagrams and pictures detailing the place like an explorers’ journal and at the end… well, I won’t give away everything just yet, but it’s why I wanted to come here. You have a role I can’t play or I might have been foolish enough to come alone. I might have waited until we faced Myceum, if we come out of that in one piece, but ennui and restlessness jump-started the party a little early. I know for a fact that if that book is telling the truth, we might just be getting a weapon there’s no way in hell Myceum has their hands on.”

  ‘A role he can’t play’ he said. It was both a relief that he hadn’t just brought her along to seduce her and also a disappointment. She wondered if he could have brought anyone but others had wisely turned him down…

  “A weapon? You told me it was old magic,” Rienna said, wondering if this was a good idea. Rienna was a planner and didn’t like all these secrets.

  Ashe shook his head trying to think of the right words. “Not technically a weapon, per se, no more than a book is a weapon, but it is more like a… definite advantage,” Ashe corrected.

  Rienna was tiring of the cryptic explanations here and realized that was about as much as she was getting out of him for the time being. It took her a moment to realize they had gone down as far as the canyon went and they stood in the maw of a massive yawning cave draped with purple and silver strands of hanging moss. Ashe stood there and Rienna realized his face was stern and he was focusing on her now. She frowned back in response.

  “You have to go in alone. The ones inside… well, they won’t reveal themselves to men,” Ashe explained, his face scrunching in apology. Ah, so that was why she was chosen. “I meant to tell you more before getting here but it came up quicker than I thought.”

  “To men. I take it you’re not using that in the broader sense, like mankind, but you mean males in general,” Rienna supplied, nervous and a little angry that she was finding her use but not getting any closer to really knowing her role here. Her eyes chided Ashe for this game, but she knew that he was playful and stubborn and she was only ever going to get enough from him to suit his plans.

  Ashe nodded brusquely and added an apologetic shrug.

  “There’s nothing I can really tell you from here, but you will soon see what I mean. I wouldn’t let you go blindly in if I thought it was dangerous. I just want you to have the full effect of this moment to yourself, Rienna, so try not to glare at me like you’re mentally punching a hole through my head.”

  Rienna laughed at the painfully twisted look on his face and s
oftened her features enough to calm her frazzled nerves. She realized that she was dried off now and pulled her shoulders back, handing Ashe the blanket and turning her back to him to face the cave. She threw him a nervous smile over her shoulder.

  “Wish me luck!” she tossed back unsurely. However, she intended to have the last word and she deliberately swayed her hips as she walked, in a way she had learned that men could not resist looking. She might not be versed in feminine wiles, but she picked up a thing or two.

  “You won’t need it,” Ashe assured her, his voice ruminating in the distance, in a way that let her know it was working. “It seems dark but after you, well, walk in a way… ah, you’ll see.”

  It took a great deal of discipline not to laugh at the fumbling of his words. For once in her life, a woman’s victory was one she did not mind having.

  Ashe had been right; once she walked into the dark twenty or so steps she noticed a dim light that grew brighter as she walked. This cave did not seem unused as their exit from Mythec had been; it even appeared oddly kept like a home, glowing mushrooms acting as sconces along the cavern walls. It wasn’t as huge as it had appeared to be from the outside; the ceiling was hardly higher than the ones you find in most homes and it only seemed to be 50 feet across at the widest points. Rienna had come to forks in the tunnels and she had been unsure at first, but then she would realize that the lights were only ever lit in one of the possible routes and she had the feeling that they were leading her.

  Rienna had been walking for quite a while and became unsure as she walked down a path that narrowed to about 15 feet across and appeared to stop at a dead end. She was getting the sinking feeling that she might be lost but continued along to the dead end anyway. She stopped in front of the solid rock and sighed heavily as she confirmed the only path was the one she came down. She lifted her hand to touch the wall before turning back and her hand passed through it instead, making her snatch her hand back fearfully. She knelt and tried this ‘wall’ and her hands passed through everywhere she tried. She stood and took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Using her feet and hands she took a few unsure steps forward and opened her eyes reluctantly at first, but they shot open to the limit of their range once she realized what she was looking at it in this enormous chamber.

  Winged unicorns.

  Chapter 3: Nesting Dolls

  It had been years since Finn had thought to return to a Reishefolk settlement and in the days since he and Verity had come to find their companions, they had both run out of ways to be useful. Verity had admitted to Finn that she knew very little about Folk except that they had come to be over 200 years ago on the Vieres continent and many of them weren’t overly fond of water so they hadn’t really crossed over onto Stoneweld often or by choice at that. She had admitted that meeting Dinsch and then Finn, she had wanted to stare but had to make do with stealing glances until her curiosity had been satisfied. Finn had laughed and told her that most male Folk are more than happy to be stared at by beautiful women, no matter what the reason.

  Verity told him that Reishefolk were bolder than most where that was concerned and south of Mythec there was one such place upon the steep red cliffs of Terra Massif, perhaps the place his father’s journal had mentioned. It was one of those secluded places however, since it was so high up and windy. Attempts to use technology or lift systems were often dashed to pieces during construction and eventually the Reishefolk resigned to conducting business with others at the bottom of the Massif. Verity told him that the Reishefolk there would tuck their wings and freefall past the rough winds on the way down and open them like a parachute near the bottom. To go back up, they would fly until they hit the current and let the winds carry them upwards to the top. The winds did not reach the city itself (the city of Windbreak) and it was idyllic and peaceful and full only of Reishefolk or the ones who would brave being carried up by them past the harsh winds. It was hardly safe—the winds have been known to loosen the grips of the birdmen and send their wingless passengers plummeting to a nasty death.

  Finn had been slightly curious about the place; although he admitted to Verity that very few places where a majority of one type of Folk lived was bearable to him. He liked the Bryfolk because they were mindful of humans in a way that other isolated Folk were not. He told her that Folk who lived isolated from humans often adopted too much of their animal instinct and even resorted to using language that was more noise than words. He hated that anyone with a diverse heritage would become selfloathing or selective of one or the other. Finn took pride in his genes, however they came about, and refused to believe one could be superior to the other. He admitted he could communicate with birds, but like humans did, there were also birds that held their prejudices against him. Although Verity was no stranger to the birds and the bees, Finn had politely hinted that Bryfolk did have the tendency to… congregate intimately like their animal ancestors. A good deal of Reishefolk had adopted the ideal that human taboos and sexual conduct trumped their own bird instincts. Again, Finn made it clear he was not beholden to either.

  Verity had laughed and made him blush when she had chimed in with “Oh, you mean screwing like bunnies!” Her laughter rung out high and girlish as she slapped lightly at his shoulder. “I was a mother once; you don’t need to mince words with me, darling!”

  Finn had frowned a little sadly at that. He knew Verity’s story but what she had said stabbed at his heart just then.

  “Verity, you never stop being a mother once you are one, you know,” Finn softly said, looking down at his feet humbly. “A mother is still a mother to everyone else. At least, you sure do like to mother me a lot.”

  Verity wasn’t saddened by this; truth was not something she shied away from and he was right. She slapped at his shoulder again and laughed, “I guess a mother always knows when she’s needed then.”

  It’s hard to say just when the two of them had decided to make the trip but they did not wait until night and they did not sneak away. Finn had picked her up and flew her over that wall of the south gate while her laughter rang out girlishly. They set about walking after since Verity had warned that the air currents on the way were less predictable than at the base so they would make the rest of the journey on foot.

  As they walked in comfortable silence, Verity remembered that conversation she had had with him in the days before they had decided to make their journey to Windbreak.

  Hatching-births sounded like a messy business so when outsiders saw it, they could hardly how contrary it was to anything they could imagine. The birth of birds hatching from eggs was started by a series of slow cracks to the shell and a scraggly featherless awkward creature plopping out of the wrecked incubator they had grown in. Human births were painful affairs, bloody, goopy agony followed by a squalling wrinkled being tethered by a gory rope that had sustained it as it grew inside the mother.

  The birth of a Reishefolk was something entirely different. Once the egg was fertilized inside the mother, in a very human fashion, what happened next was sometimes unpredictable. If both of the parents were Reishe then there was no doubt what would come next, but there was no telling if a hatching-birth was in order if the father was not (a Reishefolk woman could not bear human children and it would result in miscarriage—she laid eggs and for some reason, shells would not form around the child to incubate it and it would be ‘born’ far too premature). The Reishe gene was not particularly dominant but it was always a probable occurrence where it existed in the genes of one of the parents. The child would not be born with feathers or wings unless they were hatched, that much was certain. Several months after conception, if it were meant to be a hatching-birth, the mother would lay an egg. The scary part was that unless it was sure that the baby was to be Reishe, it was very much as painful as a miscarriage and could very well be one if blood emerges rather than an egg.

  The egg that emerges is no bigger than a chicken egg at first but it is not a plain white thing but usually speckled like the type of bird t
he parent gene determines it to be. Speckled by design but the color was often more like a sort of Easter egg if Faberge had gotten his hands on it. The egg was usually jeweled or metallic or even glowing in appearance but the material, despite the appearance, was just as worthless as the shell of any egg and would crumble to dust once no longer needed.

  Over the next few months the egg would grow at an astounding rate to the size of capsule large enough to hold a young child rather than an infant. Now Reishefolk, when first being spliced, were discovered to be sterile. They were the last of the folk to receive a break in fertility but their 0% fertility rate had become 100% once they had introduced the more birdlike concept of the offspring developing partially outside of the mother’s body. Unless the egg was destroyed (and this was not done easily), the child growing inside was guaranteed to see birth.

  In any case, the mother’s role was pretty much over after the egg exited her body and it was traditionally the father than would guard or warm the egg, although warming was not necessary. The oddity of these eggs was that the internal make-up was still more human than avian and the child was blanketed in a kind of uterine wall and fed through an umbilical system so that Reishefolk do have belly buttons despite their birthing.

  Once the huge egg was ready to hatch, the slow cracks would spread rather quickly. The egg would be watched carefully, since it was hard to say how the child was positioned inside of it. There was no birth goo or blood despite the original contents; the walls of the egg would absorb the moisture and what was left at the bottom of the eggs was the powdered remains for the child to rest on. The child often had to be picked up or turned on emerging since they rarely ever hatched lying perfectly upon the powdery bed. What lay there upon hatching was a clean soft human infant with the down of a chick and two perfectly downy cherubic wings upon its back. If they make a noise at all, it was usually a birdlike coo, but more often than not, they slept entirely through the whole miraculous event.