by Steven Novak
“Come on, already! I’m right here! Come get me!”
All at once, the voices stopped. The moment they’d disappeared, a blinding ball of light erupted from directly in front of him. Swallowing the darkness entirely, the incredible glow replaced the black void with yet another made entirely of white. Carrying with it an odd heat, the light instantly turned the slippery dry, and the cold, warm. Using his forearms to shield his eyes, Tommy peeked cautiously through the cracks between his fingers and into the light with squinted eyes. From the whiteness came another whisper. Condensed, this time it was a single voice, feminine, soft, and familiar.
Dreamily it whispered his name. “Tommy?”
Lowering his hands from his face, Tommy watched as a ghostly, bluish figure emerged from the glow; its edges were blurry and stretched, extending backward to an epicenter of warm, white oblivion. The figure seemed to be barely more than an outline; without form or volume, it was two dimensions given shape in a three-dimensional world. Despite the oddness of the bizarre thing, almost immediately Tommy Jarvis recognized something within the odd play of sparkling and bending lights.
Confused and unable to move, he watched as the wiry figure of bent light approached and came to a stop less than ten feet away. Reaching forward, it extended its twisted, glowing arms in his direction. A shape on the area slightly resembling its face curved gently into a smile.
In a shaky, confused voice, Tommy uttered a single, unbelievable word: “Mom?”
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CHAPTER 70
DAYDREAMING ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER
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The crowd outside Zanell’s modest underground dwelling continued to grow for days. Since the rumbling of the dark army above began to shake the city, she had yet to address them. Her reluctance had not stopped the crowds from slowly swelling. The most devout of followers chose to set up camps outside her door, waiting patiently with their families for whatever words of guidance she might choose to offer. From the perspective of the citizens of New Tipoloo, it was Zanell who had brought the children of the prophecy into this war, and it was the children who had rescued many of them from the clutches of Prince Valkea and guaranteed death. The Fillagrou prophecy was the truth, and its speaker the truth teller. They would wait as long as necessary to hear her words, and they would wait with baited breath. They had been saved, and being saved is among the most life-changing of all life-changing experiences.
Zanell, of course, found the whole thing rather silly.
She was no savior. She wielded no magic powers, and her words or actions would in no way alter the course of things to come. She was as much at the mercy of the tides of the universe as they. The only real difference was that she was aware of this fact. There was no such thing as hope. Hope implied possibility, and possibility was simply an illusion. Sprawled out on the fabric of her dusty cot, Zanell stared at the ceiling with her enormous sleepy eyes. In New Tipoloo, hidden hundreds of feet below the surface of the forest above, the days often blended together. Night came only when the candles had been dimmed. Day emerged once again when they were relit. While life here had proven itself often dreary, it was her life and it would continue to be her life for some time more.
The day was rapidly approaching when this would change. The crowds outside her door remained mostly silent, showing a remarkable amount of patience and consideration despite the fact that she was essentially ignoring their desire for words of hope. A part of Zanell wished she could offer them something, anything at all to let them know she cared and that she hadn’t forgotten, because she did, and she had not. The reality was she knew she couldn’t. It was not her place to do so; it never had been. The end game grew nearer with every passing hour, and this was simply the way things needed to play out. This was the way they had always played out.
Sitting up, she grabbed hold of the blue candle flickering on the table near the foot of her bed and gazed into the flame for a moment. By the time this tiny flame had burned the wax of the candle to a nub, everything would have changed. The families gathered outside would have long since given up on her, and shortly after that, the city of New Tipoloo would be little more than a memory. Lost, its inhabitants would instead choose to dedicate themselves to a different cause entirely. New players would have reluctantly joined the fray, and a war that would shake the whole of the universe begun. All that had come before would pale in comparison to what came next. Many would die, and those who did not would suffer greatly. Though Zanell understood happy endings were as much an illusion as possibilities, all too often even the illusion could prove difficult to attain.
Things were only going to get worse before they got better, as things tended to do.
Leaning forward, Zanell pursed her lips together and softly blew the flame from existence, immediately bathing the room in darkness. Lowering her head to the cot below, she rolled to her side and away from the dim lights of the city streets peeking through the cracks in her door, then closed her eyes. Right now she wanted simply to sleep, to sleep and forget about everything that had happened and even those things yet to occur. Unfortunately for Zanell, the concept of sleep was little more than a vague remembrance. These days, her life had become a rambled mess of jumbled, nonsensical dreams. Whether she was awake or otherwise made no difference; the dreams did not stop. Even now, from the safety of her tiny dwelling, curled on her side with throngs of believers teetering on the brink of a wonderful sleepy oblivion just beyond her doorway, Zanell’s mind drifted from one end of the universe to the other. The distance traversed proved much too much for any single being to fully comprehend, including her. Much of what she witnessed was familiar, while more yet proved so strange and unexplainable she’d never understand its purpose and wasn’t likely meant to.
She could see her brother Pleebo, shivering among the dying trees of the freezing Ochan forest. His pale, wiry body was racked by indescribable pain. Lifting his forearm to his mouth, he bit down on his bruised flesh to keep from screaming as a regiment of Ochan soldiers searched for him in a chilly, cascading fog and enormous mounds of black snow. He was alone and frightened and dying, wondering how much longer he could survive in that awful, hellish place. Sobbing into his icy flesh, his mind wandered to his little sister, Zanell, completely unaware that she could see him and was doing the same.
In the dungeon of the tyrant king, Zanell watched as Roustaf dangled from the ceiling in his tiny cage. The incredible pain brought to life by the loss of his friend had transformed into anger the likes of which the little man hadn’t felt in years. Before the night was through, it would have consumed him entirely, changing him into someone else, changing him into someone he didn’t necessarily want to be.
Across from Roustaf, helpless behind her own set of steel bars, the pink-skinned body of Tahnja shook wildly, due mostly to the incredible, biting Ochan cold. Her people were not accustomed to temperatures such as this, and she feared she would not last much longer. The sound created by the chattering of her teeth echoed across the dank, lifeless hallways. Gazing in the direction of Roustaf, she noticed that the little man was still sitting with his back to her. He’d been this way for hours and hadn’t spoken a word since returning to the dungeon with Donald. He looked lost, lost and unwilling to find his way back. This hurt her far more than the cold.
Far away from the terrifying chill of Ocha, Zanell spotted a massive group of determined rescuers, including Fellow Undergotten, Christopher Jarvis, and Owen Little emerging from the underground tunnels of New Tipoloo and venturing forth cautiously into the humid night. As the Red Forest would become more and more crowded with Ochan soldiers and beasts of burden, their journey would prove considerably more dangerous than they originally planned, and their chances of survival slimmer than they hoped. Each was aware of this fact, and it ultimately made no difference. Fellow Undergotten patted Chris Jarvis reassuringly on the shoulder. Though it did little to change their situation, the tiny gesture proved exactly what Chris needed.
Blasting from one world to the next in a fraction of a fraction of a second, Zanell neared the doorway to Aquari. A squawking, tired Scarbeak came to a sliding stop in the sand, kicking clumps of soil into the air and encasing it in a cloud of dust. Leaping from its feathered back among the cloud, the scarred Ochan Krystoph gazed briefly over the relatively still waters behind and the twirling, glassy-black night sky above. This place was a paradise; this place was a war zone. Recalling the incredible black light he watched pour from the pink-skinned child and devour hundreds of Ochan ships and thousands of soldiers with indescribable ease, for an instant Krystoph wondered if any of Fluuffytail’s crew could possibly have survived the attack. Lowering his head, he looked away. It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the artifact dangling from a piece of twine wrapped around his muscled neck. He had his reasons for stealing it from the king originally, and his reasons for hiding it. He too had his reasons for wanting it back. Kragamel would pay for what he’d done. This was Krystoph’s mission. This was the reason he continued to breathe, the only reason.
At the doorway to the world of man, Zanell watched as an indescribably large force of Ochans continued to gather. Monsters with necks reaching higher than the trees leaned forward and tore away chunks of earth surrounding the puddle leading to the hundredth world, then tossed them aside with frightening ease. In time, what was once a puddle would become a lake, a vast lake large enough for an army of snarling, angry creatures to pass through. This would be their greatest and their final conquest. For those who called the world on the other side home, the invasion would come quickly and violently.
History had shown all too often that this is a trait endings generally share.
In that strange, still-undiscovered world, bathed in sweat as the aches in his back continued to cause him a considerable amount of discomfort, Zanell watched as Ed Williamson stood in his modest backyard, blissfully unaware of the storm on the horizon. His wife hadn’t spoken in days. She missed the children, and she was worried for their safety. Ed feared this would happen the moment she announced her desire to become a foster family. Worried for the feelings of the woman he’d spent the majority of his life with, he had warned her repeatedly not to get too close to Nicky and Tommy. Edna attempted to listen to her husband, understanding full well that there was, in fact, some common sense in his words. Ultimately, though, she failed, and she was heartbroken because of it. High above Ed, clouds of foreboding had begun to gather in the grayish sky. Within the hour, the downpour would begin. The rain would continue falling for weeks, well into the start of the invasion.
Sometimes the universe knows, and sometimes the universe cries.
Somewhere clean, white and eerily silent, Zanell caught an ever-so-brief glimpse of a weary eyed Nicky Jarvis as he opened his eyes. As quickly as it arrived, however, it faded away.
Eventually Zanell knew she would manage to wrangle something resembling sleep from the turmoil of her mind. She knew this because it had already happened, the same as everything else. When she first inherited her powers, she was intent on somehow making sense of them, on finding some sort of meaning hidden among the madness. Now she had begun to realize how incredibly foolish an idea this was. She was searching for what couldn’t be found, for significance in places significance simply could not exist, nor should. The universe is far too complex and layered for such a simple, trivial, biological concept. The universe is endless. The universe is infinity. Infinity has no desire to be categorized, studied or made sense of. For infinity, endings and beginnings and answers mean nothing. For infinity the equation is thus: Why would one ever hope to find an answer, when questions alone are far more interesting?
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The story began in:
FORTS: FATHERS AND SONS (Forts #1)
And concludes in:
FORTS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS (Forts #3)
Clink the links above to order a copy today!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Novak is a writer, illustrator, graphic designer, podcaster, and lover of all things full-blown nerdy and vaguely nerd-related. He currently resides in southern California, where he lives with his wife of over ten years, Tami. Sometimes he forgets to shave and because of this he often sports a rather shaggy beard. Liars and Thieves is the second novel in a the Forts trilogy with the final installment due later this year.
His work can be found at www.novakillustration.com
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