by Azalea Ellis
“Truly?”
My scales shifted, catching the last light of the dying sun. “Truly.”
She bowed to me. “I will follow you, Godkiller.”
Packed aboard the fighter ship were the people Captain Milan and the others had managed to save. Quite a few who’d come through the Shortcut as volunteers, but hadn’t had the Sickness, had been rescued or fought their own way out. Many of them were families of those who’d volunteered, and a good number were still children. There were some Players, and even a few human soldiers.
The weight of the living cargo was enough to slow the medium-sized ship, as it had never been meant to be crammed so full of people, but it was still faster than any pod we’d have been able to find, and could fly toward our destination in a straight line instead of needing to follow the half-destroyed roads.
The groups that formed, including our own, were sporadically loud with chatter and gravely silent, as we tried to distract ourselves from the missing voices and, in doing so, only reminded ourselves of them again.
Many of the passengers stared at me when they thought I wasn’t looking, whispering together about my appearance. I wondered if I should be embarrassed or offended by this. I probably would have, not so long ago. I might have even been disturbed by the further deviation from the body I’d once worn. But now, I felt oddly detached from them and their opinions. It was obvious that they would stare, because I was so different than them. I couldn’t even bring myself to care what they thought.
Torliam directed us to the middle of the ocean, and, with a little trial and error, we got close enough to the island for it to appear past whatever Skill-based obscuring barrier they’d erected. Despite their protections, we’d found the Remnants with ease compared to the God of Shaping and Molding.
Adam scoffed. “What is this, Atlantis?” Then he went silent, frowned, and shook his head. “No way.”
The ship lowered itself to the water and tentatively slipped past the barrier. As we passed through, a wave that felt like sinking through warm jello passed over my body.
Two of the Remnants met us on the beach, one holding up a hand to stop us from continuing on.
The other had both his hands pressed to a glowing crystal orb raised on a pedestal, similar to the ones in the cavern beneath the palace, or that the Shortcut engineers had used to make the anchor tower. He frowned, and I felt a glow of power from him. Behind us, the view of the surrounding sea disappeared, replaced by an all-encompassing, roiling fog which stretched beyond the spherical barrier in every direction.
I stepped out of the ship along with my teammates and Captain Milan, eyes roving and Wraith searching for danger.
“Welcome,” one of the Estreyans said in smooth English with barely a hint of an accent. “Our scryer saw you were coming, and had us prepare accommodations for those who have been rescued. Please, have them follow me.”
Captain Milan’s eyes narrowed, and she made no move to bring them out of the ship.
He smiled. “They may stay in the ship if they wish, but now that we have once again shrouded the island, you wouldn’t be able to fly away even if you wanted. We have food, baths, and a place to sleep. Why not come?”
The other Remnant turned to me. “Are you Eliahan’s daughter?”
Zed snorted beside me, and I resisted the urge to do the same. Instead, I said simply, “I am Eve Redding, of the line of Matrix.”
That was apparently enough for him, because he bowed and they both started walking away, with a motion for us to follow.
After another moment of hesitation, Captain Milan called for the people she’d rescued to follow as well, and they spilled out of the ship, trailing after us like a long, blobby tail.
The beach opened on to a single-lane, paved road that wound over the island like a snake. We passed houses and shops and community buildings. The idea that this Estreyan village had hidden here on Earth for who-knows how long was somewhat surreal.
As we passed, the villagers shouted to each other in a language that seemed to be a mix of formal Estreyan and accented English, word spreading almost faster than we traveled. We arrived at a large stone hall and were taken to an open-sky courtyard at its center, where there was a large, flat basin of water.
The refugees were led on from there, and Captain Milan went with them to make sure they were safe and had everything they needed.
“Your families have been eager to see you,” the guard said. “I will bring them. Our leader will grant you an audience shortly.”
Zed and I shared a quick look, and then turned to Sam, whose smile seemed a little unsure. “It’s strange, to think about my family,” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen them. It almost seems like their son is a completely different person than me. I barely remember who he was.”
I could understand the sentiment.
A young couple and two people who were probably their parents came over to us, looking around as if searching for someone. They all had fair coloring, and the woman, the mom, I realized, was short and still somewhat cherubic-looking. Despite their similar coloring, their eyes traveled over and past Sam without stopping.
My heart sank, and I took a deep breath to brace myself. “Hello,” I said, stepping forward to meet them.
The grandparents startled obviously, but the parents were a little more contained.
“Hello,” China and Chanelle’s father said. “Are you…”
“My name is Eve Redding. I was friends with your daughters, both of them.”
“Was?” the woman repeated in a faint voice, her lips already starting to tremble.
“I thought Chanelle was still alive,” her father said, gripping his wife’s hand and tensing as if the news was trying to crush him into the ground.
“She passed away only a few days ago,” I said. “There was a massive attack by a non-mortal being.” I cleared my throat awkwardly.
“Were you there?” her grandfather asked. Unlike the younger two, who made careful and constant eye contact, he and his wife ogled at my ‘deformities’ blatantly.
“I was.”
“Was it quick? Did she suffer?” her mother asked.
Should I tell the truth? That just seemed cruel. I didn’t think Chanelle would want to impress the full horror of her gradual deterioration, recovery, and horrifying death onto her family. “She didn’t suffer.”
While the four of them asked me more questions, some of which I blatantly lied about, another group of people I could only assume were Sam’s family hurried over to my teammate, drawing him away and into tearful hugs and platitudes.
The rest of us tried not to watch. I Jacky didn’t have family of her own, and Gregor’s only family had either been assassinated or was encased in the body of a wooden puppet.
A haggard-looking man with grey stubble covering his jaw stood in one of the paths leading to the little courtyard. He looked at Adam, Adam glared at him, and with a nod and a sad quirk of his mouth, the man turned around and walked away.
My mother walked out of a side door, striding confidently. She seemed completely unsurprised to see us. She spared a quick, almost twitchy smile for Zed, her eyes pausing on him for a few seconds. Then her eyes turned toward me, and looked me up and down deliberately. She pressed her lips together. “I see that you didn’t take my advice.”
Beside me, China and Chanelle’s bereaved family members seemed to sense the tension and withdrew, clinging to each other for support.
Torliam’s eyebrows rose as he looked at my mother, and then his expression hardened.
Zed just sighed, looking away from her with a faint wince on his face.
My jaw clenched, and I stood straighter, the scales at my sides shifting subtly in agitation. “Did you know what was going to happen?”
She scoffed out a fake laugh. “How could I possibly know you’d turn into…that?” She waved me up and down. “No. But I knew you were involved in something dangerous, both for yourself and for the world. And I have a
ccess to the news channels. It seems I was right, hmm?”
“Silence yourself, woman.” Eliahan’s voice rang out from the entrance to another hallway.
My mother’s look of self-righteous censure morphed into a full-blown scowl.
Eliahan was accompanied by a wizened old man and a tall woman, whose hair was so dark a black it gleamed blue in the sunlight. The woman led the trio, and she sighed, tossing a look to Eliahan. She turned back to the rest of the room and asked the humans to leave. “You will have further time to reunite with your children when we are finished here. But for now, I must speak with them on urgent matters.” She spoke in English, and held a kind of authority that reminded me of Queen Mardinest, but less vicious and more calmly self-assured. “Is it time our aid is needed?” she said, looking at me.
I laughed angrily. “Is it time?” I repeated mockingly. “Pestilence is now free of whatever shackles the God of Shaping and Molding had placed upon it. It attempted to kill us, and succeeded in killing a ton of other innocent people, along with one of my teammates. One of my other teammates placed her spirit in the body of a puppet to avoid that same fate, and the world is pretty much deteriorating at the rate of a rotting carcass. Which is what the entire population will be, soon.” I took a deep breath, feeling the rumble of my anger in the air. “I think it’s well past time.”
“I understand your anger, but we have done what we must. We could not leave this place to fight with you. The fate of our worlds is much more important than the loss of a single battle, or even the lives of many. We have bought you time, experience, and a second chance.”
I bristled, but kept silent.
“I am Ester, once of the line of Matrix.” She paused to let the fact that we were at least distantly related sink in. “We are the Remnants, and we have fought against Pestilence since the days before the arrays were closed and we became trapped here.” She walked to the basin of water and looked down into it, eyes distant with memory. “You are not the first to find the God of Shaping and Molding. My people and I discovered him, and though we were not meant to put an end to this, he accepted our aid and what power we could funnel to him. He created this place for us. We have hidden, and we have lent our power to the Champion without ceasing, and we have waited for the spark of prophecy to be born among our children with the humans.” She shot a repressive glare toward Eliahan, then.
My anger had gone from a roar to a simmer, but none of it had disappeared. “Even if you had to stay here, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have warned us. You could have said something about Pestilence. Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”
She shook her head. “If we had told you anything more than we did, you would be dead.” She looked up from the basin, her own eyes strangely reflective, as if they were mere films over deep pools of water. “The eldest of us was but a child when we became trapped on this forsaken planet, but she was chosen for the mission because she had been granted a Bestowal by the Oracle. She has some ability to see the future, though only one path can be made clear with each attempt. She has searched ceaselessly, since we first became aware of your existence, and the answer has never changed. In every future where you came to us for aid, having survived Pestilence, you are angry at us for keeping this secret and leaving you to fail. We were told by the god himself when this island was created for us that one day, when the spark-of-hope found him and convinced him to aid them, despair would follow hope, the world would fall, and only in this darkness would we once again have a chance to eradicate the source. Our scryer found no path that would allow you to survive long enough to do this, if all was made clear to you before the right time.”
My scales settled down as my anger lost its outlet.
After the initial meeting, Ester took us to her home and brought some of her people to examine Kris while we continued to talk. Ester had a big open room on her ground floor that looked kind of like a dojo, but with Estreyan symbols and designs burned into the wood floor over most of the room.
The Remnants she called were happy to help, and, rather than showing consternation at Kris’ condition, seemed quite fascinated, almost excited.
“So, can you fix her?” Gregor demanded, arms crossed over his chest.
They shared looks with each other before speaking. “There is nothing wrong with her. She is not broken, merely sub-optimized.” The speaker turned back to Kris, who sat in her puppet form atop her chilled human body. “Her Seeds should have been transferred along with her spirit, if she wanted her new body to continue functioning properly.”
Gregor scowled. “You’re supposed to put her spirit back in her old body.”
The Remnant huffed at him, as if amused. “Well, I can’t do that. But I can keep her alive by helping her form a Seed core within her new body.”
One of the others cleared her throat. “If the problem is that the new body is…less than aesthetically pleasing for the housing of a young girl’s spirit, I can help with that. I have some prowess with physical transmutations. She’ll be able to do everything she could as a human, once I’m done with her. I’ll even make her look the same.”
Kris seemed okay with that, judging by the double thumbs-up she shot to everyone.
The group got to work setting up Kris’ body and the puppet within a couple of the symbolic circles burned into the ground. They started cutting shallow symbols in the human corpse’s skin and brought out a few more of those crystals that seemed to be used for a lot of their non-Skill based extraordinary exploits. Supposedly it was technology, but really it looked like magic to me.
While we watched and waited, we talked with Ester, who was my…great-great-great grandmother or something. “So, do you know how to actually fight Pestilence?” I said.
She sighed wearily. “We do not. His power is not like our own. From what we could glean from the ancient texts, which were old even when our people lived on the old world, Pestilence draws power from the void, the breaks,” and here she used that same Estreyan word I’d heard before, which had no equivalent in English, “which exist in the emptiness of the space between worlds. Its body is an anchor point, similar in concept if not execution to the anchors used for the teleportation devices I believe your kind have dubbed ‘Shortcuts.’”
I nodded. “We guessed that.”
“Truly?” She sounded surprised.
“My brother is the Veil-Piercer,” I said. “He can see cracks in the world, and when he opens them, it creates a portal to…another realm, I think. Maybe an alternate dimension of some sort. It seems that within that realm, the Sickness does not progress. Pestilence’s influence doesn’t reach there. Zed has been training his Perception, and he believes he can see a different kind of connection in Pestilence’s chest, when his covering of bugs is destroyed. We assumed he was hiding his core in another realm.”
Excitement took over Ester’s stoic features and she leaned forward to grab my forearms. “Do you know what would happen if you were to bring Pestilence himself into this other realm? Tell me more about these cracks in the world.”
Zed cleared his throat and nonchalantly opened one to show her, instead.
Chapter 42
There is only one sin and it is: weakness.
— Swami Vivekananda
Ester was fascinated by the Other Place, as well as the different colored cracks Zed saw, but couldn’t touch. Before the first group of Remnants she’d called could even finish with Kris, she’d sent for others to work with Zed. “There is no time to waste,” she said, smiling widely and pressing her hands together despite the cold still wafting off her from her trip to the emotion-draining realm.
Their research was postponed for a little while, when the people working with Kris finally finished their preparation. The little crystals glowed, smoke curled up from the symbols on the floor, and Kris’ dead, human body arched.
At first, that seemed to be all, but then the crystals flared brighter and the air above Kris’ chest started to sh
immer. The sheen grew till it was filled with a small but obvious sparkling ball of Seed material, darker than the Seeds Torliam had once provided NIX, and oh-so-faintly purple.
Once they had drawn all they could, the tiny Seed core floated over to Kris’ new body, where the chest plate had been removed. It settled in her chest, and they worked quickly to put the puppet back together.
Then, the woman who’d promised she could “transmute” Kris’s body moved to stand over her, hands waving through the air like she was sculpting invisible clay, or maybe playing an exotic instrument.
The puppet’s wood grew skin-toned, then morphed, till the joints weren’t bare and the structure looked like a real body. Kris grew hair and her features extended from the wood and refined to look delicate and human.
In a few minutes, she was a miniature version of the child she’d once been.
I expected her to grow at that point, but the woman lowered her arms and stepped away. “There,” she said with a nod, her tone satisfied.
Kris stood up, examining her new body with consternation. “I’m…tiny,” she said, her voice high-pitched due to the size of her voice box.
The woman frowned down at her. “Well, yes. But you’re quite lovely, now. I never promised I could make you huge. I can transmute things, I can’t just take matter from the ether.”
Kris stared up at her, mouth falling open. After a couple seconds, she rallied. “I have four arms.”
“Well, you can still unscrew the second set, if you want. I made sure you didn’t lose that modular exchange ability.” The woman grinned with pride.
Apparently, there wasn’t much to be done about Kris’ new body. Ester informed me that making her mostly human again was already pretty much a miracle, with what Skills they had available to them. Perhaps someone on Estreyer could help, but she doubted it, unless they happened to have the perfect Skill, or we found two people with a Skill combination that could work together.