Therefore, we couldn’t ascertain the survivors’ conditions yet.
“What about Grandpa Xavier, Grandma Viv, and their group?” Aida asked, wiping more tears from her face. She stayed close to Vita, who was days away from giving birth. This whole debacle wasn’t good for the young fae’s health, especially since she was about to deliver an unknown type of hybrid.
“They’re down there, somewhere,” my father replied. “We don’t know where, though. We only have eyes on Rose and Ben’s crew. What’s that showing so far?” he asked, checking the telescope feed.
“They were moving across islands, most likely searching for Ridan,” Field answered. “But they’ve stopped. I guess they saw what happened. We couldn’t exactly see them, since they used a cloaking spell to move across the waters, but the telescope is set on a blood spell to follow them around, so… I guessed.”
We took a couple of hours to simply recover and organize ourselves a little. We’d suddenly been tasked with telling hundreds of families that their loved ones were either dead or missing, without knowing which was which, on top of having our founders still missing somewhere on Strava. It took me a while to stop myself from randomly bursting into tears and to really focus on what lay ahead.
The grief itself didn’t subside. It simmered and morphed into a dull anger, the kind that burned through me and demanded that I take action—though I didn’t even know what I could do, at this point. None of us knew, for that matter. We were all baffled and stunned, unable to formulate anything coherent or even remotely useful.
Draven retired to the archives for an hour, then came back with an armful of scrolls. He’d had Druids and incubi scour the Druid Archives over the past couple of days, looking for more information about Strava and its solar system. Back then, we’d been under the impression that we might’ve missed something during the initial planetary scans.
In hindsight, we couldn’t have done things any better. The way we’d lost the dragons to those flashing creatures stung the most, since we’d always seen them as the fiery aces up our sleeves, our deadliest advantage—and they were an endangered species, too.
Aida was the first to make a reasonable decision. “We need to let the families know,” she said. “I can’t do it alone. Vita, Serena, Grandma River, can you please help me?”
They all nodded, then followed Aida out of the room, joined by Grace and Lawrence. I could only imagine what was going through their heads right now. Victoria and Bastien were back in The Shade. They were going to hear about Jovi and Anjani soon. Someone needed to tell Heron and Avril about Jax and Hansa. My heart broke into a thousand little pieces, but I held on to a sliver of hope that both couples had made it out alive. Hope was all I had left, anyway.
“Do you think the hostiles will keep the survivors alive?” Bijarki asked, staring at the vitals screen. I could see the rage burning red hot in his aura. He looked remarkably calm, considering his emotions.
“Probably,” my father replied. “Otherwise, they would’ve destroyed them then and there.”
“How many do you think made it out?” Bijarki asked.
“I’m not sure. At least five, maybe six hundred,” Harper said, then exhaled. “We’ll have to review the ship footage, but, honestly, I don’t think I’m up for it right now. I can’t watch that destruction all over again.”
“We need to set this pain aside,” Lumi interjected, her tone clipped. “There’s no time for crying and broken hearts. I’m sorry. Hate me all you want, but you all know I’m telling the truth.”
It didn’t sit well with any of us, but I was the first to nod. “The swamp witch is right,” I said, looking around the control room. “Derek and his group are down there, and we don’t know if they’re okay. Ben and my mom are down there, too, with their team, and they’re the only ones we have eyes on. They’re not doing too great either, given the fact that they’re a dragon short. We’ve lost an entire fleet down there. And we don’t know what kind of creatures we’re dealing with, yet.”
Arwen scoffed. “I’ll handle that,” she said, then nodded at Shayla, Viola, and the Daughters. “We’ve managed to retrieve two male and two female flashing creatures from Strava’s orbit. How about you ladies help me make some sense of what the hell made them so powerful?”
“The bodies will be waiting for us in one of the medical rooms below,” Viola replied. “They’re kept at temperatures below zero degrees, just in case.”
“Okay, then let’s cut them up and see what they’ve got to tell us,” Arwen said matter-of-factly. “We’ll draw blood and store it, too. If we’re sending care packages to Strava, we should definitely include Perfect juice for Rose and Lenny.”
She then walked out, accompanied by the Daughters.
A minute passed in heavy silence. Our task list had shrunk, since two of the most pressing matters were being dealt with—breaking the bad news and performing an autopsy on the hostiles we’d managed to bring back.
That left us with the biggest issue on our plate yet.
“What about Strava?” Bijarki asked. “How do we get our people back?”
My father sighed, scratching the back of his head. “An all-out attack will not work. They’ve made that painfully obvious,” he replied.
“We need some autopsy results first,” Harper agreed. “We need to know what we’re dealing with, because, right now, the odds are not in our favor. We could bring in a whole army of witches, warlocks, and dragons. Those things won’t give a damn. They’ll swarm us by the thousands, moving so fast that we won’t even have a split second to retaliate.”
“Okay, so what the hell do we do?” Phoenix shot back, visibly aggravated. “We can’t just sit here!”
“I didn’t say that we should!” Harper replied, her hands balled into fists.
They were both angrier than I’d ever seen them before. I felt the need to step in.
“I know this is nothing like what we’re all accustomed to,” I said, demanding their attention. “But we can’t let that distract us from our usual protocols. What do we do when we have an unknown hostile?”
Phoenix blinked several times, then sighed. “We study it and its attack methods.”
“Right. And what do we do when we can’t just walk into a place?” I replied, raising an eyebrow.
Harper and Phoenix looked at each other, then back at me. Both nodded.
“We find another way in,” Harper breathed.
I nodded. “So you, Phoenix, Caspian, Bijarki, and my dad can focus on that,” I said. “We also need to find a way to get in touch with my mom’s team.”
“I might be able to help, but I’ll need to fuse a couple of spells together for this to work,” Lumi replied. “I’ll need a few hours.”
“That’s fine. It’s not like Strava’s going anywhere,” I said. “This is a challenge, and we need to treat it as such. We don’t cower. We inquire, we ask questions, we get answers, we make a plan and, last and certainly not least, we take action.”
Draven spread several scrolls on the table in the middle of the control room, motioning for us to gather around. We all got up and got closer, and he pointed at several pieces of text written in faded ink on waxed paper.
“There isn’t much in the archives about Strava,” he said, “mainly because none of our delegations made it there too often. But I was able to find these extremely old texts. And when I say extremely old, I mean written by Druids in now-dead languages. They’re at least fifteen thousand years old.”
“Please, tell me there’s a way to translate them,” Harper murmured, staring at the scrolls.
Lumi sighed. “Again, I could help, but it would take longer than the time I think we have to work with,” she replied.
Draven shook his head. “It’s okay, I managed to find a couple of words that made it into our modern language. They’re both names, actually,” he explained. “One is ‘Draenir,’ and the other is ‘Bogdana.’ Bogdana is actually mentioned in a footnote a couple of times, but t
he name Draenir pops up repeatedly in these scrolls.”
I frowned, slightly confused. “Okay, how does this help us, then?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about Draenir, but I do remember the name Bogdana,” Draven said. “It’s quite unique. I know of a very old fae named Bogdana. She was known to live in Sherus and Nuriya’s kingdom.”
Bijarki then gasped. “Oh! I remember! I heard other fae talk about her during history classes in Luceria at some point.”
“You were taking history classes?” Field replied, raising an eyebrow.
“I was looking to enrich my knowledge,” Bijarki returned defensively. “Anyway, if I’m not mistaken, Bogdana is said to be the oldest fae still living. And I mean tens of thousands of years old.”
Draven thought about it for a second, then nodded slowly. “Then this would make sense,” he replied. “If Bogdana is that old, and since she shows up in these scrolls about Strava, I think it’s safe to assume she was there. She might be able to tell us something. Anything would help.”
And so, in the span of hours, still reeling from such a catastrophic loss of life, we’d finally made some progress on the information side. In my mind, which was still hazed by grief and despair, the next step seemed pretty obvious: we had to find Bogdana.
The more we knew about Strava and our new enemy, the better we could plan our next move and get our people out of there alive.
Caleb
“We’ll have to find Bogdana,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the scrolls.
They were the closest thing we had to a viable lead, and, given our dire circumstances, they were, in fact, a sight for sore eyes—even though we couldn’t understand any of the writing on them.
“Sherus and Nuriya will be more than happy to help,” Hazel said.
Tejus sighed. “Do you think? They lost plenty of warrior fae with our ships.”
“They’ll help,” I replied. “We’re allies. We gave them all the information we had when we asked for support troops. They will understand that this was out of our hands. Besides, they’ll want revenge against this unknown enemy, and if Bogdana can tell us something about them, they’ll help us find her.”
“Good,” Hazel said. “Then we’ll have a—”
The double doors burst wide open. In came Blaze and Caia. They were both livid. They’d gotten the news, and I felt gutted once more. It tore me apart to see Blaze like that, but there wasn’t anything I could do to make him feel better.
“What do we do?” Blaze asked, his tone clipped.
“For now, we’re planning,” I replied, keeping my eyes on him.
Blaze was about to burst into flames, seething with the same rage and helplessness that we all felt. “My dad’s out there somewhere,” he hissed. “Alive or dead, I want him back. What can I do?”
“You can take a deep breath,” I said to him.
We’d barely gotten a handle on things, and, as much as I understood his emotional state, I couldn’t allow for any kind of regression in our group. We were already missing our founders, along with my wife and her crew. I couldn’t lose any more people.
“Blaze, we’ll find another way in. I promise,” Harper replied, her voice trembling.
Caia gently squeezed his arm. The grief in her azure eyes was impossible to ignore.
Blaze exhaled, then placed a smartphone on the table, on top of the scrolls. It looked like it had been through a lot, but it was still functional.
“This came via an interplanetary travel spell,” the young dragon said. “They found it on the platform on top of Luceria not too long ago. Maybe an hour, tops. Nobody saw the light bubble coming, and, since the spell wore off on landing, there was just the phone left. It took a while until someone came across it when the shifts changed, and staff went on a routine patrol on the roof, too. The staff didn’t know who it belonged to so they brought it over to us after asking around.”
My instincts flared, and I immediately made some connections and recognized the phone. “That’s… I know it,” I said, then turned it over. There was a small dandelion sticker on its back. “It’s Sofia’s.”
My spirits were instantly lifted. I unlocked the screen first.
“Someone removed the passcode settings,” Hazel observed.
I flipped through its files and found only one new video, apart from what we’d already seen after Ben and Rose’s first incursion to Strava. They’d worn cameras connected to their phones in order to record everything, including their retracing of Derek’s steps to the cave. It was part of any rescue or investigation protocol. I looked at Hazel and the others, then tapped open the file and played the video.
My heart skipped a beat as Rose came up on the screen. She was somewhere in the jungle.
“Hey, Caleb, honey. We only had one interplanetary spell left, and we wanted to use it wisely,” she said. At first, I got angry, wondering why they hadn’t used it to come back, until I remembered that neither Rose nor Ben would leave their parents and the others behind. I couldn’t blame her. I probably would’ve done the same in the end. “Listen, we ran into some serious trouble here, and it’s nothing like what we’ve dealt with before.”
I exhaled, then turned the phone volume louder. We all listened carefully to what Rose reported from Strava.
“Given that you’ve got eyes on us, you might’ve figured some bits out already but, still, here we go… There were creatures in those cave pods, but not what we would’ve normally referred to as ‘endemic species,’” she said. “Apparently, over a century ago, this planet used to be inhabited by the Draenir. They dabbled with genetic engineering and wound up creating this hyper-intelligent hybrid creature named Ta’Zan. After that, there was a plague that pretty much wiped them all out, except Ta’Zan, who went into hiding and started creating his own hybrids. He called them Faulties. They went inside those pods because it was the only way that they could survive the plague. They went into stasis and were supposed to stay there for about three hundred years, assuming that the virus would die out by then. It only affected the Draenir, so once they were gone, the virus would have no more bodies to infect.”
I pressed pause for long enough to draw a quick conclusion.
“Well, now we know what a Draenir is,” I muttered, giving Draven a quick nod, then hit play again.
“By the time we first started surveying the planet to build that resort, the virus was already gone. Claudia accidentally awakened Ta’Zan and his Faulties. Five hundred of them, just like we’d assumed, initially,” Rose added. “But some of them were left behind. Ta’Zan isn’t just some bioengineering genius; he’s into freaking eugenics. Building the master race and whatnot. We ran into one of his Faulties in the woods, on our way to explore the diamond colosseum we’d seen east of the lighthouse, and she told us some of these things. Thing is, Ta’Zan abducted Mom, Dad, and their group.”
I held my breath for a second, then nearly crumbled as I listened to the rest of the message.
“Apparently, they’re all okay, since Ta’Zan is lifting genes from them to build his so-called Perfects. They’re these superfast and downright deadly creatures,” Rose said. “I have never seen anything like them. They’re like the best of all worlds, and they nearly wiped us off the face of Strava. Kallisto, the Faulty I mentioned, deceived us and sold us out to a bunch of Perfects inside the colosseum. They’re so fast, they cause loud pops whenever they move, like mini-sonic booms, or something. It’s the sudden air friction, I think. They have wings, and they can fly at supersonic speeds. They’re able to release fireballs, and they have monstrous strength. There’s still a lot we don’t know about them, but we understood their purpose.”
I hit pause again, just to give myself a second to digest and think it all through. I looked at the rest of our team, and they were equally stunned and petrified.
“The creatures we brought back from orbit,” Draven said. “Those are Perfects.”
I nodded slowly and pressed play for the last time, as w
e were going into the last part of the video message.
“I’ve left a couple of notes on this phone with all the technical data we’ve gathered, along with some biometrics,” Rose said. “You know, physical descriptions, abilities, and names of all the creatures we’ve encountered so far. They’re incredibly fast learners, too. We first dealt with them by the lighthouse. Not sure you saw that, but Kale was able to teleport us all out of there. But, when we met them again in the diamond colosseum, she couldn’t. They had something to block her from using her natural magic abilities.
“Caleb, there’s still a lot we don’t know about these Perfects, but we know they’re looking to spread out. Ta’Zan creates them fast, too, within hours. It’s like hundreds of them, each day. We don’t know how many are there, right now, but we got our hinds kicked by just four of them. Kallisto helped us escape in the end, probably because of how the Perfects treated her. Apparently, there’s tension between the Faulties and the Perfects, for obvious reasons. The Faulties are being used for domestic service or are outright shunned, while the Perfects are like… I don’t know, remember Hitler and his ‘perfect Aryan children?’ Well, that, plus a lot of supernatural abilities.”
My blood ran cold as I began to understand the full extent of what was coming out of Strava, as well as the danger that Rose and her team were in.
“There was an unexpected upside. Lenny and I found out that we could drink Perfect blood to bring ourselves closer to their level, physically speaking. It seems to work for vampires… Perfect blood just amps us up. It’s crazy weird, but it came in handy, and it evened the playing field for a couple of minutes. We’re going to go look for Ridan, now,” Rose added with a trembling voice. “Hopefully, he’s still alive. He fought bravely to give us the window we needed to get away from the Perfects. But it wasn’t enough. I’m telling you, Caleb, a single Perfect can take on a dragon and cut through its hide with so much ease. It’s terrifying. The only thing that gives me some comfort is the fact that Ta’Zan would rather keep Mom, Dad, and the others alive, so he can lift as many gene samples as he wants. He’s mass-producing Perfects and reclaiming Strava. Then, he’s taking his Perfects out into the universe, and not one of us will survive if we don’t find a way to stop them. It’s why we all chose to send you this message and stay here, instead of coming back.
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