by C. Gockel
His headpiece crackles with Steve’s voice. “Status.”
“All the scientists are dead,” Bohdi says. “Searching for Amy and Durga.” Bohdi’s words are detached and distant to his own ears. He doesn’t feel distant, he wants to set the forest on fire. Amy would survive, but Durga ... He scans the foliage and sees broken branches and trampled undergrowth in the direction of the savanna. Bohdi starts off at a jog in that direction, sending projections ahead as he does.
Suddenly, a cry splits through the mountains. “Momma!”
Bohdi’s projections hone in on the sound. He sees Amy crawling toward Durga, her green hair twisted and filled with leaves, her pointy elven ears caked with dirt. Their daughter is crying, one of her wings is hanging limply, her hair is in disarray, and her face is covered in grime. Lemurlikes are stalking toward her.
Bohdi screams, and the Lemurlikes next to Durga erupt into flames. Eyes going wide with fright, Durga screams and the world rocks.
The Lemurlikes, now walking torches, stumble and fall in the underbrush, setting it alight. Bohdi almost sobs as the fire approaches Amy and Durga. The magic marble in his hand is almost out of charge; with a snarl he tosses it to the side—the tree it hits catches on fire. Pulling another marble from his pocket Bohdi slips through the In Between, and emerges in the flames next to Amy and the sobbing Durga.
Durga throws up her arms and one of her wings. “Daddy!” she cries and begins to cough. Bohdi cools the fires on his skin. Covering his wife and daughter with his body, he sends his projections as far as they will go. He finds a cliff of solid rock on a mountain between the forest and savanna. He pulls the last marble from his pocket and slips into the In Between, Amy clutched awkwardly with one arm, Durga coughing in the other.
For moments that stretch too long they are in the In Between. Amy and Durga are heavy, and the marbles aren't as powerful as Laevithin. Bohdi reaches with his memory for the cliff face, pulls with his mind—and then brings them back into the universe two feet above the cliff. They crash to the ground and Durga screams in shock. The sound pierces Bohdi’s ears and the world rocks and sways. For a horrible moment, Bohdi thinks the rocks beneath them will collapse and crumble. He sends out projections, looking for another safe place to land and sees flaming trees tumble to the ground, setting the forest alight as they do.
Durga whimpers, the world stills, and Bohdi takes a deep breath. Amy is still silent and unconscious. Bohdi’s last marble still has some power; he can’t use it to heal Durga’s injuries or create a World Gate home, so he presses it into Amy’s hand. Steve’s voice crackles in his ear. “Bohdi, status update?”
“I got them. We’re safe for now.”
Durga whimpers, “My wing hurts,” and Bohdi can’t do anything but pull her onto his lap.
“Should I send in a team?” Steve asks.
Bohdi cranes his neck to look out over the forest where he just came. The World Gate site is now a raging inferno. “Negative. There is a forest fire. I’ll wait for Amy to wake up. She’ll bring us home.” He looks down at her and adds, “She didn’t sustain injuries severe enough to kill her—she should wake up pretty fast.” Her heart has stopped a few times. Whenever that happens her recovery takes a little longer.
“Fine—let us know if your situation changes.” He hears Steve take a long breath. “We have your location on satellite; if need be, I’ll come get you.” He means he’ll create a World Gate for them. Steve can do it, but he hates it, he says it gives him a three-day hangover without the fun part—and he’s hosting a peace accord today.
“Will do,” Bohdi says. He watches from the barren mountain top as the fire catches on a breeze and jumps through the trees. His projections hear the screams of the Lemurlikes. He imagines this will cause a row when Amy wakes up; he’s destroying her creatures and their habitat. He is too angry to care.
He kisses his daughter’s head—she smells like dirt and soot. “Sleep,” he says, closing his eyes and imagining the neural electrical patterns of deep sleep dancing in her mind. She slumps against him and he waits.
x x x x
Amy wakes up on her stomach, a pain in the back of her head, and cold, hard stone beneath her. She takes a breath and smells soot; for a moment she isn’t sure if she is awake or dreaming of Nornheim.
Raising her head, she sees billowing clouds. Pushing herself up, she sees Bohdi sitting a few feet away from her, Durga asleep on his lap, one of her black wings askew. He turns and looks at her, his eyes practically glowing in the smoky sunlight. His jaw is hard, and he’s frowning. He looks furious.
The events of the past few hours slowly come back to her. She doesn’t blame him for being angry—he should be angry. She should have believed him when he told her Durga was showing World Walk readiness, she shouldn’t have brought Durga to the office, and she should have brought her home the instant she retrieved her in the Tenth Realm.
“I’m sorry,” Amy says quickly. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Bohdi’s jaw sags, his head jerks and he looks quickly away. Amy blinks. He looks surprised, but why?
Walking on her knees, she goes over to him and Durga. “I better fix her wing,” she says, hands at her side. She’s afraid to take their daughter away from her husband’s arms. She nearly got their child killed, and just thinking about it makes her arms shake. Not meeting her gaze, Bohdi gently lifts the sleeping Durga from his lap. Amy holds out her arms for their child—but they’re still shaking. As soon as Bohdi sets Durga in her embrace, Amy’s whole body sags, and she feels tears prickle the corners of her eyes. She puts a hand on Durga’s chest, the smoke is giving her a horrible suspicion … she concentrates. “Her lungs are burned,” Amy whispers.
“I didn’t have a choice!” Bohdi says, and she can hear the tension in his jaw when he speaks. Rage, at her? She deserves it.
Not knowing what to say, Amy wills the cells on the surface of Durga’s alveoli to regenerate and hastens macrophages to clear away the debris as the old cells slough away. Then, she focuses her magic on the injury in her daughter’s wing. In less than a quarter hour, Durga is almost completely recovered; Amy doesn’t wake her, giving her body time to finish, and her mind peace … Bohdi has been completely silent since Amy’s awoken, and she is sure they are going to fight. She takes a breath, steeling herself for what is coming. “It’s done,” Amy says.
She expects a tirade about listening to him, in believing in him.
“I destroyed your pet project,” he says, tersely. One side of his lip turns up, and he looks down at the ground.
Amy blinks, confused. Then she looks out over her shoulder in the direction the smoke is blowing from. Her jaw sags, and she gasps. The forest that is the Lemurlikes’ only habitat is going up in flames. Her elven ears flick forward, and she catches the sound of screams of the Lemurlikes above the crackle of the flames and the boom of falling trees. She closes her eyes and sends projections down through the burnt corpses of trees … there are charred bodies everywhere.
“I would do it again,” Bohdi says.
Amy’s eyes go to him. His nostrils are flared, he isn’t looking at her, and Amy feels utterly hopeless. He isn’t angry at her, he’s angry at himself. Bohdi would die for her and Durga over and over again, she’s never doubted it. But more than that he would kill for them; and to Bohdi, no matter what he says, that is hard … a reminder that he is Destruction, that he is the force that brings endings—to the deserving and the undeserving.
Amy swallows. “I can bring a bunch of marbles back with me next time and regrow the forest …”
Bohdi’s eyes snap up to hers, and she sees anger but also fear there. She looks away. She can’t die—she can be flayed alive, and torn limb from limb, without the relief of death. He never wants her coming back to this realm.
“They’re important, Bohdi—they’re the only new people.”
He tilts his head sharply, and the stitches in his neck glint brightly against his brown skin. “Even you’ve said they’r
e not close to the Homo erectus’ level of development. They are—were—a dead end.”
Amy sucks in on her lip and looks away. They can’t be a dead end, she can’t let that happen. She closes her eyes. “But they’re the only hope the Nine Realms has for regeneration next time.”
“The Magical Renaissance has just begun!” Bohdi says. “We’ve got colonies in the clouds of Venus, on Mars, and on Jupiter’s moons—not to mention Niflheim!”
“It’s just begun, and our society is already getting old. Young people take magic for granted, they don’t want to put in the study necessary to understand how it works.”
“Steve isn’t Odin!” Bohdi shouts.
Amy’s brow furrows. “No, he’s not, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be!”
“He’s not a dictator,” Bohdi hisses.
“No, Steve is the spider behind the scenes, pulling all the strings! Sometimes we do the pulling for him.”
“We’ve always wanted to, though,” Bohdi rejoins, sparks hopping from his fingers. “He’s never asked us to do anything we’ve found morally repugnant or wrong.”
“Because he still knows he needs us,” Amy says. “He will forget, Order always does.” She sighs in exasperation. “Even he knows it, that’s why he agreed to keep magical beings away from this realm. So the Lemurlikes could develop on their own, in their own way.”
“He’s not a savage, Amy!” Bohdi says.
“You don’t know what the future will bring, maybe he won’t be savage enough,” Amy snaps back.
Bohdi looks away, and she feels her heart sink. She doesn’t want Steve to become like Odin, or for Bohdi to have a showdown with him. Neither does Steve—that’s why he gives Bohdi and her so much free rein—and at the same time protects them from those who might exploit their power. He knows he needs change, and he is enlightened enough to know Order can be its own worst enemy.
She takes a deep breath and tries a new tactic. “We don’t know if these people will be the next definers of the Trinity,” Amy says softly. “But wouldn’t it be great to see what they become?”
“They won’t become anything,” Bohdi snips. “You’ve tried—you gave them thumbs—they didn’t start making tools. They’d rather kill and eat each other than leave their forest home.”
And that’s true. Amy looks out over the rapidly burning forest, Durga’s weight growing heavy in her arms. “We need to give them another five hundred years. I’ll replant the forest and—”
She stops, one of her projections seeing something that makes her jaw drop and her heart stop. “What is it?” Bohdi says, suddenly up and at her side, staring out at the devastation, his gaze hawk like, predatory and dangerous. “Get us out of here, Amy” he says.
“Don’t your avatars see it?” she whispers.
“See what?” Bohdi says.
Instead of trying to give him directions to what she sees, Amy closes her eyes and imagines the scene appearing before them. She feels magic moving through her with unusual force, she opens her eyes to see her own illusion shining before them. It is of a family of Lemurlikes—the burning forest is behind them, and they’ve moved out onto the savanna. An enormous catlike creature, the size of a small elephant is crouched in the grasses before them—but it doesn’t strike them. One of the Lemurlikes has picked up a piece of flaming wood and is brandishing the makeshift torch in front of her like a sword; the cat creature is cowering before the comparatively tiny blue hominid.
With a roar of fury and fear, the cat slinks off in the other direction. The Lemurlikes congregate and then begin breaking apart a single, lone dead tree on the plain. Each taking a branch, they spread the fire among themselves, and begin walking deeper into the savanna, the forest fire approaching the forest edge.
Amy stands and clutches Durga closer. “I won’t be coming back here anytime soon, Bohdi,” don’t worry.” She turns in place, taking on the inferno that was the Lemurlike’s former home. So many of them had died … but if they hadn’t been motivated to leave the forest, they never would have begun using tools and flame. Her magic would prevent her from creating such a blaze. “I couldn’t make something new without you.”
He looks at her with one eyebrow raised. She doesn’t think he believes her.
“They’re your creatures too, now, Bohdi. You gave them fire.” And it’s true. They needed his fire—the danger, the destruction—to become something new.
Rubbing his jaw, he looks out across the forest, which is rapidly becoming a blackened plain. He doesn’t look angry anymore. Her elven ears tremble with the sound of trees falling and fire crackling. At last he says, “When you do come back, bring me.”
“Of course,” she says, as he turns around. They usually are in on each others’ schemes and projects and are seldom apart for very long.
Touching his stitches, he says, “There’s something you should maybe know—”
Amy’s eyes get wide and she says, “I just realized something—”
“Durga might cause earthquakes.” The words leave their lips at the same time.
Amy smiles. Bohdi looks down at the ground. When he raises his eyes again, he’s smiling, his orange eyes almost glowing. She feels a familiar warmth, a zing of connection and desire that is always there. Just sometimes it is closer to the surface.
“Let’s go home,” Amy says. Tonight, she thinks, they will cause earthquakes of their own.
All Stories by C. Gockel & Contact Information
The I Bring the Fire Series:
I Bring the Fire Part I: Wolves
Monsters: I Bring the Fire Part II
Chaos: I Bring the Fire Part III
In the Balance: I Bring the Fire Part 3.5
Fates: I Bring the Fire Part IV
The Slip: A Short Story (mostly) from Sleipnir's Point of Smell
Warriors: I Bring the Fire Part V
Ragnarok: I Bring the Fire Part VI
The Fire Bringers: a Short Story
Other Works:
Murphy’s Star, a short story about “first” contact
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