by Dusks, Rydre
"You're going to follow me, and you are not going to stray," said Velzae. I looked at him, suddenly surprised by his appearance. He glowed brightly, and down along his arms were soft, rounded feathers like that of an owl.
"What is this place?" I asked as Velzae walked across the roof. I followed.
"This is the realm of darkness that SolTansra currently fights within," Velzae answered. "Very few of the gods from our family can see and enter this place without my help. Stelliot is one of the only beings who can see both realms at the same time, most likely due to his mixed genetics."
I halted abruptly as Velzae headed for another rooftop, getting ready to jump. He paused and looked back at me. "I told you to follow--don't lag behind." He dashed forward and leapt, sailing through the air for a moment, then landing neatly on top of the neighboring building.
Swallowing my surprise, I took a brave sprint forward and jumped off the roof as Velzae had. The gap passed under me, and I landed on my toes and rolled to reduce shock. I'd taken jumps like this before in Strejca training.
"Why are you the only one who can pass so easily through realms besides Crane?" I asked as I caught up to him.
"SolTansra entrusted the task of knowing the realms to me. It is in my godly name. If you were still fluent in godspeak, you would know that siyari means life, and dendo is the word for 'passing.' GaenVrellec can travel through realms because of the drug that Dentrin loaded him with."
We sprinted and jumped across several other rooftops, notably keeping a distance from the massive shadowy beasts in the distance. "So if 'siyari dendo' means the passing of life, what does 'ikio elle' mean?" I had to ask after catching my breath from the fourth leap.
"'A punishing act,'" Velzae answered, not winded in the least. "Or in other words, the shadow side of protection."
"I should've guessed," I uttered.
"In the shadow realm things happen at a much faster rate," Velzae declared, keeping his eyes ahead of him. "I am sure you understand this by now. This is the method I took to 'teleport' with Stelliot when I pulled him from your yard on that fated day. By the time we reach the gates, only a minute or two will have passed, and Blank will be meeting you about thirty seconds later. Therefore we can't delay here."
"Oh, and I thought it had something to do with the terrifying giants that are watching us."
"Those too," he replied quietly. "Yet those are something that we godly children cannot fight yet." His pace quickened into a light run across the top of a hotel, and I followed without pause this time.
Jumping across the city happened to be much faster than weaving around the buildings on foot. Within ten minutes we'd reached the eastern gates, drab in appearance and protected with steel. I wondered how Blank's explosives would do against such a reinforced gateway.
"I'm going to take you to the road Blank is driving down. Make sure she aims right, and not at the gates themselves. She needs to target the control panel in the guardhouse there." Velzae pointed to a station with an open door. Four robotic guards stood stationed across the expanse of the structures, one in front of a guardhouse, the other three evenly posing in front of the gates.
"Why are... the guards in this realm?" I wondered, gasping for breath.
"Non-self-aware robots are soulless, and soulless beings show within the shadow realm. You'll see them again once I bring you back. Are you ready?"
I looked around myself, taking in the appearance of the dark atmosphere for just another moment, then nodded.
Velzae placed his hand on my shoulder, and the world shifted back around me, growing lighter. The purple skies of GreyCross came back, as well as the busy sounds of the street. I stood on the sidewalk several yards away from the gates and concealed by a thick beam connecting to an awning above my head. The light pulse of the hovercycle came from behind me, and I moved just in time to see Blank slow the bike as she approached, noticing me as well.
She pulled up to the sidewalk and stopped. "How did you get here so fast?" she asked, looking surprised.
I glanced around me to indicate Velzae but saw that he'd already taken his leave.
"Velzae," I explained, coming closer to her and glancing in the direction of the gates.
Blank moved out of the way so I could straddle the bike. "He said to aim for the guardhouse."
She opened her backpack and drew out one of the packages. It was small enough to fit in her hand. She untied the string around it and took out the second bundle, tying them both together. "This should be enough of a punch."
One of the guards had finally spotted us, and he lifted a rifle in response. Another touched his ear as if getting a radio message and looked over at us.
"Here's what we do, Crow," said Blank. "You ride close enough for me to throw these, then zip back down the road as fast as you can. I'll shoot them from a distance."
"I trust your aim."
Gradually at first, I turned the hovercycle around and moved closer to the gates. Before getting too close, Blank threw the explosives with a perfect arc, and I turned the bike around and started back down the road just as the guard turned around to see what had landed behind him. I heard Blank draw her gun and watched in the mirrors as she shot between the guard's legs and struck the packages with a little luck and intricate timing. There was no fire with this bang, but instead a complete blast of pressure that tore apart the vicinity and sent a rush of dust and force down the street. The hovercycle swerved from the sudden push. I flipped one of the thruster switches before the bike could flip to its side, leveling it out and turning a corner to escape the rest of the debris.
Blank laughed a little, holding onto me tightly. I stopped the bike and peeled off her hand that still held her gun, keeping it away from pointing between my legs.
"S-Sorry--Just got a little excited."
I smirked and turned the bike back around. "That was rather dramatic for just trying to open up a pair of gates."
After most of the dust had cleared, I maneuvered around stopped cars and rode back down the street toward the chaos.
"Makes me wonder why no one's tried it before," Blank mused.
My smirk became a grin. "No one except a pair of gods are insane enough to blow up the eastern exit."
The blast had blown apart not only the guardhouse, but all the guards as well. A couple arms were left several yards away, but that was all I saw of the robotic remains. The explosives had created a clear hole in the guardhouse and had knocked off the right steel gate from its hinges. Although Blank's intention had been to destroy the mechanism sealing the gates, it had done much more than that. There was an opening now due to the broken frame, but the gate blocked any real exit. The gate itself had lodged diagonally into its own destroyed frame.
Blank's face fell when she saw this. "Perhaps one package would have worked out better."
I heard sirens in the distance and knew it was time to think quickly.
"I'll call Va'th," Blank offered.
I shook my head. "No, I can take care of this."
She watched me expectantly, ready to question as I closed my eyes and took a couple steady breaths, recalling the courage and belief I'd gathered up back with the SM. Letting go of my worries with an exhale, I lifted my hand, keeping it lax, and imagined sending away the broken gate with an unseen force. I heard a grinding wail of metal, then opened my eyes and directed my focus to my task. The gate didn't burst out of its frame like I'd imagined, but it did slide out from the lodged position and crash to the street with a boom and a massive cloud of more loose dust.
Dropping my arm, I accelerated and hovered over the collapsed gate, leaving the city limits along with any trace of sirens behind us.
22
Science to Supernatural
"What was that?" Blank asked not long after we'd left the gates. I'd been expecting her question.
"My amplified abilities as Dentrin's test subject," I replied. "Normally, I should only be able to stop injustice, but the prototoxine made me able to do a
select few other things if I put my mind to it."
"Ah, makes sense. See, I was never gifted with anything like that."
"Well, you would have had to have been born a goddess."
"About that..."
I glanced at Blank in one of the mirrors, waiting for her to continue.
"I'm not exactly human, Crow."
Instead of shock like I figured she was expecting, I rolled my eyes. "Am I really the only god who had no damn idea I was one?"
Blank nudged me. "Stop being so spiny about it. I didn't say anything to you in Roavo because you were a self-proclaimed atheist and never would have believed me. I also didn't think you were a god and didn't think there was any point befriending you."
"Did Rook know?" I asked.
"No, I kept it a secret. I was convinced he was LasNuk because of his sheer luck, but that wasn't exactly a conversation that I wanted to start."
"So who are you then? If you're not just Blanca Stone?"
"TorRhea. The Goddess of Desire. I'd had dreams of SolTansra since I was very little, so I had an invested interest in the gods but kept quiet about it. No way that my father would have ever believed me."
I sighed. Things happened so quickly around me now that it was hard for my mind to keep up.
"Are you... upset?" Blank questioned.
"What? No. Just mad that I didn't get to experience my godhood until very late."
"Cheer up, Crow. You made it through life like a human, which is more than what we other Crei can admit to. I can't imagine living in camp as one of the female inmates with no connection to the gods."
I kept silent, now brought back down to a sullen, pensive state as I surveyed our surroundings. Iason was eerily beautiful outside of the city. The sky was a bit less smoggy but still purple. In the distance over the mountains was the setting sun. The horizon was aglow with vibrant reds that struck the wispy clouds to make swirls of fuchsia. The plant life flanking the worn away road was a deep emerald, lush from rain and thick with health. Despite the country's taint, the north was mostly untouched. As traffic had not passed through the area for many years, the road had begun to grow life of its own. The hovercycle's thrusters blew wiry weeds down flat as we passed by them, and overall the area was quiet save the wind across my ears and the occasional chirp of a burrowing animal somewhere off in the distance.
After an hour, Blank and I took a short break to eat. I hadn't felt hungry since waking up in Saydea but knew it was smart to get something on my stomach. Blank seemed equally as nondescript about eating, but did it anyway.
"So Velzae really didn't reveal much of a plan to us," Blank commented after she was done with her energy bar.
I finished taking a hefty drink of water from a bottle and screwed the cap back on. "Iasona sunu serepa, the sun snakes, used to be found all over the southern half of the country. That's what my adoptive father told me, anyway. Velzae said the power I'd used on one of the sun snakes was what would help us. He told me to go back towards AbujruJenza." I looked out over the flat green fields. "Unfortunately, sun snakes have been extinct for years. After the spread of corrosion and toxic waste, they all died off. Some of them ended up preserved in AbujruJenza, but that's the extent of my knowledge. What I can assume is that Velzae wants us to go back to AbujruJenza and revive the snakes. They've got to have had some kind of special ability or power to rival a god."
Blank frowned slightly, unscrewing the cap of her own water bottle. "But... you can't bring things back to life. You only bring judgment on things that have turned against nature."
"Right," I agreed, "but I can also cleanse. Probably due to Dentrin's tampering. I've turned a sun snake back to normal. And I'm guessing the rest is where Velzae comes in. He's the only god aside from Sol himself who can manipulate life as he pleases. I don't expect Velzae to just sit around and watch Crane murder our efforts."
Back on the overgrown road, it took another sixty minutes sped up past two hundred miles per hour to get close to the first town. As morbidly curious as I was, my instincts told me to stay away entirely. I smelled death for miles before approaching, as well as a strange sickeningly sweet scent that was pungent enough to influence my sense of taste. Blank had to cover up the lower half of her face with her shirt, although I doubted it helped much.
We passed a sign that read Welucoma ta Crua, though I didn't feel so welcome. I turned the bike off the road before reaching the start of the town and headed more directly south through tall grass and over animal holes. The grass blew back in waves from the bike's air, but I had to avoid the larger animal holes in fear that the hovercycle's precise wind pulses would go off balance.
"Crua, huh?" Blank wondered over the rushing wind. "Probably one of the settlements overrun by plague. Who knew something so dreadful could be resting just beyond the walls of GreyCross?" she said mostly to herself.
"Dreadful?" I wondered. "GreyCross is corrupt too, but for different reasons. There's no place in Iason that's worth preserving anymore."
After another break and a little over another hour, we'd made it to a dilapidated bridge just before the start of Esha. I didn't recognize this side of the town, but I'd had a different view from the sky. The bridge was long, covering a wide river that ran straight across our path and appeared to lead down toward AbujruJenza, past the mountain range. I took my time across the bridge, lowering the air pressure of the bike down enough to keep the old structure from creaking as we rode along it.
We made it across without much trouble, and the first structures of Esha began there. I recognized the hospital a distance away, lit up from the parking lot lights, but first had to park at a fuel station, as the hefty tank was almost empty. After Blank and I had filled up on fuel as well as grabbed something a little more substantial to eat, we rode back out and away from the cagey and confused stares of locals.
"The guy at the register seemed pretty alarmed to see foreigners," Blank noted as I let the hovercycle cruise down the main street at a lazy pace.
"Can you blame him?" I asked. "Esha's one of the only small towns in Iason that's inhabitable, at least to my knowledge. If I were a local I'd be wondering just what in the hell two people obviously from GreyCross were doing this far south, too."
I parked in the lots outside the hospital and walked inside with Blank. Chances were since Rook had ended up with a serious injury, he would have been immediately escorted into the hospital.
I approached the woman at the front desk, paying no attention to the dank smell and gloomy interior. "I need to see my friend Rook. Purple hair and short. He was in a fight out on the streets a couple days ago, and promptly got shot with a Jux by a twelve-year-old."
The woman stared at me in utter confusion.
"Ma'am?" I pressed. "Please. Just tell me what happened to my friend. He had to have come in here."
She looked from me and then to Blank, then down at her computer. "R-Right, sure. Let's see... Rook? Do you have his last name?"
I rolled my eyes. "Rook" wasn't even his real name. Why would he reveal his surname to anyone? "No. He can't be that easy to forget."
Her eyes lit up as she discovered something she was looking for on the screen. "Oh, that's right. He refused to give us any identification. Shortly after being treated for his injured leg, he escaped his hospital bed, and we have been unable to track him down. I'm sorry, sir, but he left the hospital a day ago."
I sighed. "He shouldn't be traveling on a leg like that."
"Are you really surprised, Crow?" Blank spoke up. "This is Rook, after all."
I shrugged, turning away from the desk. "Well, now I'm not sure what to do. Velzae said to come to Esha, so I assumed he needed us to meet back up with Rook and Tienny, but they aren't here."
"Then we move onto our next plan, and that's with the sun snakes," Blank replied with adamancy. "Don't worry so much about Rook. I'm sure he's just fine. He always is."
After thanking the woman for the information, we left the hospital and climbed back onto
the hovercycle. I knew I had to keep strong for this next part of the trip. I was just concerned about bringing Blank into the mess. And with Stelliot somewhere off in a dimension even Velzae couldn't reach... and with Crane... I mentally bit back my greatest fears. All I could hope was that Stelliot knew how to defend himself, just as he'd shown me in Ifearor. It wasn't enough, though. I wanted to fly to pieces with panic. I had done my best to suppress the feeling of dread since waking up in the tank in Saydea, but as time passed my skin prickled with steady, accumulating coats of anxiety.
As if knowing I was in the middle of severe worry, Blank pressed a light kiss to the side of my neck. "Don't be so tense. Let's just go ahead with our plans and see if things fall into place."
She was right. With a deep breath I started up the bike once again and coasted down the rest of the main road, heading for the mountain range.
By the time we'd reached the hills the hovercycle was no longer of use to us. It couldn't scale mountains, and I was afraid of the expanse of jagged rocks down all the steep cliffs. But before I could slow and question just what we were going to do then, Blank twisted in her seat at the heavy beat of metal claws on dying grass and a rush of heat from an orange, fiery blaze behind us.
I'd almost completely forgotten about Siivash.
"What is that?" Blank exclaimed, already fishing for her gun.
"Blank, no!" I threw my hand over the top of her firearm and brought it down. "That's Siivash. He was a gift from Velzae to me."
"He's a...? He's safe?" she wondered in blatant confusion.
I waited for her to get off the hovercycle before I did. Then I walked forward to pat Siivash's nose. The mechanical dragon snorted hot smoke and lowered its head in greeting. It was then that I noticed Siivash's sail-like wings were oddly bent. Walking around in confusion, I took hold of one of its hinges and tugged on the mechanism a little. "Siivash, unravel your wing."
The dragon's body gave out a whine as it attempted to stretch out its joints. One of them had caught the fabric of the wing and had torn it open. The fibers were jammed in the gears, beyond fixing unless I cut it loose and repaired it at a shop. I closed my eyes and touched the mechanism, trying to see if I could fix it myself, but it just wasn't the right time or object for my abilities.