Andrew gawked at Godlin, his mouth hanging open. “You’re immortal? Am I?”
“Not immortal, just ageless. If you’re anything like us, then you will reach about twenty-something and stop aging. You’re also harder to kill, but you can die from plenty of things. We think Earth does it to avoid training new Keepers every generation. The newer Keepers are all about your age.” He motioned at Andrew with his free hand.
“But how?” Rubbing his hands on his pants, Andrew wondered what it would be like to live for two hundred years or more.
“I really don’t know. Earth’s not real big on explaining itself.” Godlin chuckled to himself.
“What was Venom the Keeper of?”
“Plants, and he was the first of the Keepers.”
Andrew realized he had brought the story to an abrupt halt. “Sorry, continue.”
Godlin inclined his head and said, “Venom had been the leader of the Keepers since its origin, until Raptor joined. For the first few years, she deferred decisions to him, but then she ordered the unthinkable. We were to hunt down a child and kill him. Earth provided no reason as to why; it just directed us to a small town in Australia and to a boy about nine years old.”
“A kid?!” Andrew interrupted. Too late, he clamped a hand over his mouth and glanced at Christine. She did not wake up. Relieved, he lowered his hand and asked in a softer voice, “Why would you kill a kid?”
“The Quester Stone of Power had taken him over.”
It was the Stone the Keepers sought. Andrew trembled just thinking about being in the same dimension as a lethal stone, let alone seeking it out. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
Godlin pressed his lips together tightly. “Not at first, but I wish we had. Venom convinced Raptor to spare him, and the world nearly ended because of it. He wreaked havoc across Earth and several dimensions. I’ll spare you the details of the fight, but we separated him from the Stone, and Raptor delivered the final blow.”
Disgust filled Andrew as the corner of his lips curled.
“I know this is hard, but Earth was right. We didn’t know it at first, but the boy was already dead. He had fallen off a cliff, and the Stone took over his body, like a parasite, just pretending to be an innocent child. We never found out how the boy had come to possess the Stone in the first place.”
“The Stone of Power can bring people back?” Andrew turned pale at the prospect.
With a pained expression, Godlin said, “He was more like a mindless zombie. The Stone of Power was just keeping the body alive and using it. It’s intelligent and unpredictable, and that’s why we don’t take chances with it.”
“Are all Stones intelligent?”
“Thankfully, no.” Godlin gave him a smile of relief.
“Then what happened?” Andrew leaned forward, curious to know how Bringer had died.
“That was the catalyst for Venom. A few months later, it all came to a head.” Godlin looked up at the sky, clicking his tongue. “After the events in Australia, Raptor took over leading, and Venom quickly became jealous. He thought Earth had made a mistake creating the new Keepers. He accused Raptor of being too aggressive, rash, and misguided—a danger to us all.”
Checking over his shoulder to see where Raptor had stalked off to, Andrew leaned in closer to Godlin and whispered, “Is she? I mean, is she dangerous?”
“We have powers. We’re all dangerous.” The corner of his lips pulled up in a lopsided grin. “There’s a difference between dangerous and what Venom was accusing Raptor of. He believed she would betray the Keepers and that it was his role to stop her by any means. Bringer tried to reason with him, but …” Godlin let out a sigh, covering his mouth with his hand. “Venom was too disillusioned at this point to recognize the truth. He forced a dimensional portal to open, but just partially. Bringer stumbled upon it by mistake, and it killed him instantly.”
Andrew grimaced. “That’s terrible.” His stomach felt queasy, and he did not want to know any more details of how the Keeper had died.
“Raptor was furious.” Godlin flipped the dagger resting on his leg over, rubbing the hilt. “I don’t know how, but she stripped Venom’s powers away and disconnected him from Earth. He can’t ever be a Keeper again.”
“She has the power to do that? Where is he now?”
“He’s in an insane asylum, under heavy medication and guard.” Godlin turned away, peering out into the darkness. “Raptor’s almost back.” He pressed his lips together and said nothing else.
Andrew took a note from Godlin and went quiet. He decided to keep any other questions about Venom to himself. He felt bad for Raptor. Bringer’s death obviously caused her anguish.
Raptor stepped into the light of the fire. She picked up a spare log from the ground and set it on top of the glowing embers. It lit up after a moment. “It’s got a meal with it that it’s been working on for a while. I think once it finishes, it will move on.”
Trying to steer the conversation away from Venom, Andrew asked, “What’s this white worm thing anyway?”
“Think of a giant worm crossed with a mantis and not very bright. If it decides we’re a threat, then it will attack us, but otherwise it’ll leave us alone.”
Andrew managed a soft, “That’s good, I guess.”
Raptor lowered herself to the ground, sitting with her legs stretched out.
Andrew asked, “After we get the Stone, what happens next?”
“We disarm the bomb, Christine goes home, and you decide to go with her or to come with us.” Raptor seemed to study him with a penetrating gaze, as if trying to determine his answer.
“And if I go with you, what will I do? How can I help?”
“You heard us talking about the shifts?”
“I didn’t understand it fully though.”
“We’ve a lot bigger problem than a bomb, but I can get to that in a minute. If you come with us, you commit to becoming a Keeper and start your training. You join us on this mission, and you don’t look back … ever,” she said, growling the last word.
Andrew knitted his eyebrows together. The realization he was never going home struck him hard. “Everything? I have to leave everything? Can’t I at least say good-bye?”
“That’ll appear suspicious, and this mission will take several days to complete. It’s much easier for you to vanish tonight and never return.”
“What if I say no?” He wanted to know the full consequences of both options before picking one side or the other.
“Then this conversation ends right now, and we send you home. I’ll assume that your powers never manifest and you never see us again.” Raptor shrugged, appearing indifferent.
Torn by the ultimatum, Andrew felt both choices held a degree of sacrifice. “I have to decide right now?”
“I can’t keep telling you things and not expect you to stay. The more you know about the universe, the bigger of a danger you become.” Like a teacher judging a student’s merit, she stared down her nose at him.
“How can I make a decision like this? I don’t know you, and I don’t know if I can trust my feelings anymore either.” Frustrated, he grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed it between his fingers. It felt like sugar, tiny crystals digging into his flesh. He relaxed his hand and the grains fell away.
Raptor pinched the bridge of her nose. “Andrew, you haven’t been under Earth’s influence since we stepped into this dimension. Its range is limited. Whatever you’re feeling is just you.”
Andrew sat back, surprised by the news.
“I know I’m asking a lot, but you have got to decide.”
“Why did Earth pick me?” Vindictive Stones, ensnared dimensions, and a talking planet were ripping away the reality he thought he knew. He needed to find his place in it all.
“Because you have a talent Earth thinks the Keepers need right now. These shifts are serious, and if we don’t stop them, the world ends.”
Godlin nodded along to Raptor’s words, his eyes closed.
Andrew rubbed his hands on his pants, trying to dry them from the sweat forming on his palms. His parents would think someone kidnapped him or he ran away. It would not be easy on them. Still, they would have his sister to take care of them, and eventually, they would move on. Right?
His friends would miss him too, but Christine had always been an excellent friend. Maybe she could explain what had happened to him. … But maybe it would be better if she went along with the ruse. He would also have to give up his dream of becoming a doctor and helping out people.
Although becoming a Keeper would mean helping people, just in a different way. He would be helping to protect Earth. As soon as he came to this conclusion, an unshakeable sense of belonging settled on him. He knew where his place was.
“Tell …” Andrew paused and swallowed hard. He worried he was making a mistake, but he knew if he did not at least try, he would regret it for the rest of his life. This was the first time in his life he had really felt adventurous, spontaneous, alive. He had always sensed his life had been missing something, and now the Keepers were offering him a way to fill some of that void. It shocked him to know he wanted to join them more than he wanted to go home.
Andrew cleared his throat and restarted with confidence, smoothing a hand down the front of his shirt. “Tell me about the shifts.”
Raptor smiled at him. “I’m going to explain Quester Stones first. There are many different kinds of Stones, but they have a few things in common. They control how a dimension works—its laws, basically. As far as we can tell, all dimensions have at least one Quester Stone associated with it, but most dimensions have several Stones.”
“Earth is our universe’s Quester Stone?”
Frowning in disagreement, Raptor said, “Other planets in the universe are also Quester Stones. Not every one, but there’s a fair number of them. Other dimensions have their own Stones. The dimension of fire is controlled by the Stone of Fire, for example.”
Andrew shifted his legs under him, so he was sitting on his knees. “You said they control laws in the universe? How’s that even possible? I thought those were constants.”
“The constants are constant—speed of light, things like that. We’re more talking about how, say, weather works. Like a Stone that can make it snow in the middle of July.”
“And no one has figured this out?” He found it odd people would not notice such unusual changes in the weather.
Raptor lifted a hand into the air, like an airplane lifting off. “You have to leave the planet to see the changes. These things aren’t breaking the laws; they are the laws. So when someone observes something strange, like snow in summer, they find a natural explanation for it. They don’t connect it to a small, insignificant object.”
“Snow in summer doesn’t sound natural to me.” Baffled, Andrew could not think of a place where snow in the summer would be natural. Maybe it could happen in Russia or somewhere high in the mountains.
“It does if a massive volcano or two blows up and lowers global temperatures. Cause and effect, you know. It happened in the eighteen hundreds. A Quester decided that it should snow forever. That’s how the Stone of Ice was found.”
Andrew shivered, imagining what dealing with snow year round would be like. “How did you fix it?”
“There were just four Keepers then. We found the Quester and determined that she wasn’t a threat, just naive about her newfound powers. Once we explained it was hurting the planet, she stopped,” Godlin replied.
“And you said Questers were people that controlled the Stones?” Andrew asked.
“Right. Questers get powers from their Stone, depending on what that Stone can do,” Raptor said. “Now, this leads us to the shifts. We have several dimensions all tangled up right on top of Earth.” Raptor leaned over and grabbed a stick from the pile of wood. She used it to draw in the sand.
Andrew leaned in closer to watch the markings she made.
“Imagine this is our universe, compressed down into a single line.” She drew the stick through the sand. “Now these lines are the other dimensions,” she said, drawing a pair of lines perpendicular to the first. “Normally dimensions are just hanging out, crossing here and there through the universe. Now here’s Earth.” Pressing the stick into the ground, she made a small hole. “And this is what we’re dealing with.” She scraped the stick through Earth several times. “A bunch of dimensions all knotted together. This isn’t normal for them, so they are pulling apart and taking Earth with them in the aftermath of their fight.”
“I thought the dimensions were like pages of a book?”
“You have to remember, you’re dealing with a huge universe. A book is just a metaphor to describe why it’s so hard to move between them. For this, you need to think of the dimensions like strings, crisscrossing the universe at different points along it.”
“The universe is both a page and a string at the same time?” Andrew frowned in confusion.
Raptor tossed the stick onto the fire. “Now you’re getting it. At least, that’s the best that I understand it. This is not my field of expertise.”
Rubbing the back of his neck, Andrew tried to follow along. “Okay, you have a giant tangle of dimensions. So how do you stop it?”
“We’re only concerned with nine of the larger ones, which we call major dimensions. If we can use the Stone of Power to untangle them, then the rest of the dimensions should all snap back to their proper places. It means collecting nine powerful Quester Stones scattered across several dimensions. We know where most of them are, but—”
“Raptor,” Godlin grunted, interrupting her. He rose, turning to face the forest with his dagger gripped tightly in one hand. “It’s the Whisperers; they’re coming, and the worm is starting to get up.”
Chapter Five
Scrambling to his feet, Andrew expected a Whisperer to come bursting into the middle of the camp at any moment. “What do we do?” His heart beat rapidly, like a mouse under the watch of a conniving cat.
“Wake up, Christine!” Raptor scooped up the spare branches of wood and dumped them onto the fire. The white flames flared to life, expanding the bubble of light. She grabbed one of the large branches and used it as a torch.
Andrew shook Christine’s shoulder until she woke up.
“Hmm. What?” She let out a yawn.
“We’ve got to go!” Andrew said, helping Christine to her feet.
“Are the Whisperers back?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She took hold of Andrew’s hand and pulled herself up.
“Not yet, but they are coming,” Raptor said. She stepped up beside Godlin and offered him the Stone of Fire. “If that worm comes, let’s try the shoot-it-in-the-face-and-make-it-go-away method.”
Godlin grinned as he gripped the Stone of Fire.
“Everyone, stick close,” Raptor said as she took off at a hasty pace, leaving the protection of the campfire. Andrew tried to keep up, but the fine sand made walking laborious. Each step became harder than the last.
“Stop!” Godlin called out. Coming to a halt, Raptor let out a soft hiss.
“I see them,” she said. She turned her back to Andrew and Christine.
Andrew shuddered, feeling eyes on him. Peering out into the darkness, he could see something this time. A bipedal creature stood in the shadows. He assumed it was a Whisperer. It stood a lot taller than him, but he could not make out anything else. Several creatures moved around behind it, all of them a foot taller than the first Whisperer.
“The Emperor is here,” Raptor whispered. She offered Godlin the torch. Taking it from her, he handed her the Stone of Fire in return.
“Try talking before you shoot them in the face,” he muttered.
Andrew put a hand up to the torch to block the light. The smaller Whisperer stood rigid but confident. The others shuffled around it like nervous dogs.
Andrew leaned closer to Godlin. “Is that the Emperor? The shorter one?”
Godlin nodded, his attention foc
used on Raptor. She stood at the edge of the light, and the leader of the Whisperers faced her.
A low whispering sound came from the Emperor, but there were no words.
“Can she talk to them?” Andrew whispered to Godlin.
He hissed at Andrew, “Yes. She’s the Keeper of animals, remember? Be quiet.”
“They aren’t an—” Andrew started to say, but Godlin shot him a glare, and he went quiet.
Andrew strained to listen. With only one creature speaking, he could pick out the inflections. The Emperor strung long lines of sounds together in complex ways. Whenever Raptor spoke, it was shorter and the inflections not as complicated.
Its glowing eyes darted over to Andrew for a moment. It made a curious sound, causing Raptor to shudder. Andrew shifted in place, his heart racing in his chest as he watched. The Emperor reached a limb up and motioned to Christine.
Christine gasped and shifted closer to Godlin.
Raptor started to move toward Andrew, without saying anything. He gave her a questioning look, wanting to ask why the Whisperers were interested in Christine.
Raptor slowly wagged her head back and forth in an exaggerated motion, warning him not to speak.
A growling sound came from the Emperor. Andrew flinched, and Godlin stepped toward the monster. Bowing her head, Raptor looked like a scolded child as the Emperor continued. She peeked up, the color in her face draining. When she tried to respond, the Emperor cut her off with a sharp sound.
Raptor gave Godlin a fleeting glimpse as she spoke in a low voice, “Get ready.”
Andrew gulped, hearing the panic in her voice. Raptor held out her hands, supplicating the Emperor, and started to speak again.
Godlin whispered to Christine and Andrew. “We’re going to run. We have to get to the Stone of Power, but it’s near.”
Andrew sucked in a breath, digging a toe into the loose sand, preparing to leap into a run.
In the distance, their campfire went out as darkness consumed it.
With a final whoosh of breaths, the whispering sound stopped and a great log sailed into the middle of the small group. Godlin jumped back, pushing Christine out of the way. She stumbled and almost fell out of the light, but Andrew snatched her by the belt and pulled her back.
Stone of Power (Keepers of Earth Book 1) Page 6