Deimos took up the tale. “Yeah, we did, Bestla, because what we’re about to tell you changes everything we’ve thought we’ve known all our lives. And explains what started us on our search an hour ago. So, to continue: at the conference the attendees were stunned to find out that there were people who’d come who not only worshipped the old way, but were the old ways. They were real hereditary witches that could actually practice physical magic.”
The other teens exchanged stunned looks.
“The hereditary witches asked for cooperation from everyone there in doing a full-on divination because they’d been unable to find out what was going on by themselves,” he went on. “With everybody’s energies helping, they were finally able to get the answer, which was chilling. The demons mentioned in such places as the works of John Dee and other historical manuscripts of witchcraft were getting ready to break through the Veil that separates What-Lies-Beyond and the material realm where we live.”
“What?” Suttung cried.
Amalthea said, “It’s true. So, after the panic about the discovery died down, the AFA was created on the spot. The news of the discovery of the threat against Earth soon spread at lightspeed among those who worshipped the old religions. Those worshippers then donated money to fund the space program, as it had also been found out that the attack would come from beyond the reach of the magic of Earth. The hereditary witches stepped into the leadership of the AFA to screen every person who wanted to go to the Moon and stop the invasion. They needed to make sure the volunteers were either hereditary witches or were people who had enough natural magical ability. Plus, you know, also have the technical skills needed to make a Moon colony go.”
“This is a hell of a way to learn that all of us kids were born some kind of witch,” Suttung said.
“Hey, wait a minute. If there’re demons, aren’t there gods and goddesses and angels and good spirits, too? Why aren’t they helping?” Bestla challenged.
“‘The Gods help those who help themselves.’ That’s what my mother says,” Amalthea replied.
“What do you mean by that?”
“My mother says that They help us in the exact proportion to the effort that we provide. The more we do, the more They do.”
“Were we born to have some kind of destiny or something in stopping the demons?” Suttung broke in.
“No,” Deimos said. “We don’t have a ‘destiny,’ but we do have a duty to join in the fight to hold back the demons. That’s what the adults have been doing off and on since the demons first started to attempt to break through a year ago. Our parents and the others have managed to beat them off each time, but it’s been getting harder lately and the adults need our help.”
“This has been going on for a year?” Bestla gasped.
Deimos nodded.
“They want us kids to fight demons? We have absolutely no kind of training in doing magic! How can they expect us to help?”
“But we’ve all been trained, whether you realize it or not, Bestla,” Amalthea said. “Think back on all the things we’ve been doing all our lives: memorizing rituals for god and goddess worship, performing mental meditations in tandem, practicing Tai Chi in groups, and so on. It all had a purpose—to lead us Moon children in learning how to work together and be in sync with each other. Even to having all of our birth names be names of moons in the solar system, we’ve been groomed from the start to be a community.”
“You mean an army,” Bestla said sourly.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Amalthea said. “The point still is: our parents are out there fighting and need our help.”
“Well, all right!” said Suttung. “Let’s all get out there and kick some demon butt!”
“How?” Bestla asked.
Amalthea replied, “The last thing we apparently need to do is realize that everything we’ve been practicing is real. My mother says we need to remove the last block from our collective sub-conscious.”
“In what way are we going to do that?” Suttung asked.
“Let’s hold hands and do a quick guided meditation,” Deimos suggested. “I suggest the ‘Rainbow Stairs’ one. But instead of the happy place behind the door once we get to the bottom of the mental steps, how about having the realization that what has been said is true, and that all we need to do is take it into ourselves?”
“Perfect, Deimos!” Amalthea exclaimed.
The twenty-two teens joined hands in a circle and Deimos did the classic ‘Rainbow Stairs’ meditation fast and smooth. Soon young men and women were dropping their hands from their neighbors’ as incredulous wonder flooded through each of them upon opening their individual mental doors.
“It’s–it’s amazing!” exclaimed a girl. “It’s like magic!”
“You mean, it is magic,” Amalthea corrected her.
“But what, exactly, should we do to help?” Suttung asked.
“I saw our parents holding back the demons, who looked kind of blobbish, with some kind of light beams. Why don’t we envision, I dunno, a giant hand or something?” Deimos replied.
“Yeah! Then we can punch the demons right in the face!” Suttung said with enthusiasm.
“Blobs don’t have faces,” Deimos grinned.
“You know what I mean!”
A cheer rose from all the others at Suttung’s idea.
Amalthea smiled. “Hey, Deimos, if a giant hand punching a demon in the face gets everyone behind the idea, let’s do it.”
The teens crowded with enthusiasm into the airlock room and cycled through it to exit the station. They went to stand behind their parents and the other adult colonists on the dust of the Moon’s surface and looked up. Worryingly, there was no longer just an amorphous blob appearing and disappearing in the perpetual night sky. Now there was what looked like a hole overhead with ugly clawed hands and feet and heads trying to wriggle their way out.
“Eeek!” Bestla’s voice shrieked in all the teens’ helmets. “There are demon faces now!”
“Don’t focus on that. Focus on what we’re about to do instead!” Deimos’ voice replied. “Everybody ready?”
“Ready!” they chorused back.
Deimos led them in another guided meditation to create free-floating energy over their heads as the first step. Some of the teens were able to form energy in a variety of colors, but about half had only empty space above them.
“I can’t do it!” yelped a boy, and others took up his panicked cry.
“Try imagining tapping into the colony’s power sources!” Amalthea suggested urgently. “Maybe that will help!”
The teens tried again, and this time everyone could feel through the soles of their space boots the thrum of the Moon base step up a couple of notches.
“It’s working!” squealed Bestla, as now an eerie blue colored energy manifested over her head which hadn’t been there before.
All the other teens who’d had empty space above them also manifested the same blue energy as Bestla. Deimos then guided them all into forming their disparate energies into one huge, multi-colored fist aimed straight at the hole in reality.
“On the count of three, put all your effort into sending our fist flying at the demons! One, two, three!” Deimos said loudly.
The multi-colored energy shot away from the teens and power-housed its way through the adults’ magical efforts towards the break in the sky.
“Look!” cried Suttung with excitement.
A crystalline light appeared behind the demons and sped towards them at the same rate as the fist flew at them from in front.
“It has to be from the Gods! They’re helping us!” Amalthea shouted excitedly.
The two energies met in a blinding flash of light with the demons squarely between them, like a piece of glass between an anvil and a hammer strike. With a despairing cry that was more felt than heard, the demons shattered. All the colonists, teen and adult alike, started jumping up and down and high fiving each other in celebration as space returned to its normal
appearance above the Moon.
Later, over dinner in their apartment, Jane and Richard asked their daughter, “How on Moon were you kids able to pull that off?”
“Well, when we teens accessed our magic, some of us had problems powering the image. I suggested visualizing tapping into the colony’s power sources to help them form their magic. What I didn’t take into account was that we weren’t just doing imagery anymore, but something more. So some of us, like Bestla, actually tapped the atomics instead,” Amalthea said.
“So, you mean to say you all gave a nuclear-powered magic face punch to the demons?” her father asked, chuckling. “That’s something they’re probably going to take a while to recover from.”
“It’s all very interesting,” Jane said thoughtfully. “We’d never thought about using science to back up our magic. You’ve opened up what promises to be a very interesting field, young lady. Good work.”
Amalthea glowed from her mother’s praise.
“Yes, indeed,” Richard said. “We may have built the technology, but you kids live it. And next time …”
“Next time, we’ll all be able to face-punch the demons with magical science!” Amalthea finished with a grin.
Susan Bianculli wears the titles “Mother” and “Wife” most proudly. Another is “Author” for her The Mist Gate Crossings series, as well as several short stories in several other anthologies besides this one. To learn about the other things she’s had published, check out: susanbianculli.wix.com/home
Weight
Renee Whittington
From beneath a mound of gold coins and baubles accumulated over centuries, the dragon Emarys rose from the pit she slept in to greet the day. Coins spilled down her sides, falling to piles at her feet as she wriggled forward to settle a collar of gold-plated chain mail around her neck. She sighed with relief at its heaviness and donned the rest of her adornments—golden, chain-mail greaves about her hind legs and similar vambraces about her forelegs. She slipped several gold coins into a pocket in one of the vambraces.
Emarys gazed eastward, where the first rays of sunrise would soon peek over the horizon. She trembled with longing and hurried down the corridor separating her sleeping chamber from her day cavern and stretched out supine on her landing ledge.
As the sun rose Emarys crooned at it, lost in its lucent glow. The sight of it dazzled her with its brilliance. Nothing in the universe could be so beautiful, and she twitched with the urge to fly into it, even as the wiser part of herself fought the urge, aided by the metal she wore.
The sun inched above the horizon. Emarys welcomed it with a glad cry and watched as it rose above the trees into the brightening sky. When it cleared the treetops, Emarys launched into the sky, wings spread. It was time for breakfast.
She did not notice the ragged figure hiding in the rocks behind her.
What was I thinking when I decided to climb to the dragon’s cave? Merka asked herself.
She clung to an almost sheer wall of stone. Tufts of grass or spring flowers sprouted from cracks in the expanse of gray, but mostly it was just rock. She stood on a narrow shelf of stone that served as a pathway from the city of Chardon below to the cave of its guardian. A wall of stone pressed against Merka’s stomach, and nothing but air touched her back.
She resolutely stepped over a muddy patch and fought down her terror of slipping. Not that falling to her death would be much of a loss. What was one less thief to Chardon? But it would be a great loss to her Gran, who was recovering from a heart seizure. Merka squeezed back tears and forced herself onward. It was bad enough leaving Gran with Skinny Meg, who had no more attention than a sparrow.
A day up and back, wait until the dragon left to hunt, steal enough to pay Gorodan back for the loan—plus interest—and get away fast. That was the plan. Emarys was rumored to have a hoard of gold in her cave. Why steal from people who needed their money, when she could steal from a dragon who didn’t?
She heard a leathery, whomping sound. Merka pressed herself against the rock as an immense sha-dow cloaked her. She looked up and saw the underside of Emarys’ body as she leapt from her ledge. Merka stared with awe. Emarys’ scales glittered, and she flew with a grace that any bird must envy.
Merka continued forward until the path expanded into a wide lip of stone that jutted out from a cave entrance. Criss-crossing lines of claw marks showed where Emarys had landed over countless years. Merka looked out at the open air. There was Emarys, flying eastward, so far away that she looked dark. Merka rested on the ledge briefly but soon stood and entered the cave.
The first cavern she came to was nothing but rock and tapestries. Light came from glowing spheres set into the walls. Merka began to wonder if all the stories about Emarys’ hoard were just stories. A cushion-topped ledge, suitable for sitting on, curved along one wall. Did the dragon host visitors? She peeked into the small but empty guest bedroom. Apparently, the dragon did.
This is all very fascinating, Merka told herself, but I need to hurry. She crossed the tapestry cavern to where the passage narrowed and walked along it until she came to an immense, interior cavern—and stood rooted to the floor.
Gold coins and trinkets lay everywhere, piles of them spilled about, more gold than Merka had ever imagined existed in the entire world. Merka stepped inside onto the hills and valleys of coins. On a whim, she sank to her knees and stretched out on her back, literally lying in the midst of a small lake of gold. As she did so, a gentle breeze seemed to flit over her for a moment before dying away.
How is this possible? Merka wondered. And then outrage sizzled. Gran and I sleep in filthy alleys every night. I can barely keep us fed and clothed. Everyone I know begs for crumbs that fall from the fingers of the wealthy, yet this dragon, this, this … creature … has enough gold in just one of these coins to feed me for a year. Just a few of them could feed all the beggars of Chardon for a lifetime—with gold left over! Yet she does nothing with it. How dare she?
Merka scrambled to her feet and untied the cloth tube from around her waist that served both as her belt and as her carry-bag. She wasn’t strong enough to manage sacks of gold, and even the filled tube she tied back around her waist made movement too awkward for her underfed frame. She had to put most of the coins back because the extra weight interfered with her balance. In the end she took only twenty coins from a lake’s worth.
But she could pay her debt to Gorodan. She could afford a room for herself and Gran and buy warm winter cloaks. She could even apprentice herself—and not to the Thieves’ Guild, either. Relieved, Merka set off back down the mountain.
Emarys was finishing her fifth head of cattle when she felt the warding spell impinge upon her senses.
Someone is taking my gold!
She jerked her head up from her meal and peered toward her cave, eyes narrowed as fear overtook her. This far away, she could see no detail. Emarys shook the coins from her vambrace pocket and let them fall near the carcass she had just eaten; the herdsman would find them. Then she dashed across the field and took off into the air, arrowing toward her cave.
When she finally saw the girl, Emarys could barely credit the sight. That scrawny child is the thief? She can’t have taken much. Still, I won’t have children climbing to my cave. If one succeeds, I’ll have dozens.
Hovering in place, Emarys positioned herself in the girl’s path and blew a small gout of flame at her. She carefully controlled it, but it got the girl’s attention. She yelped, cowered, and slowly moved toward the cave as Emarys directed her.
Sweat poured from Merka’s palms as Emarys herded her back into the cave. I’m dead now. Emarys will kill me! When Merka reached the ledge she dashed inside the outer cave and waited there, shaking.
The light behind her went dark, and she heard the scrape of claws against rock, the rustling of wings as they were folded close against a body, and the steps of clawed feet.
Turn around … Merka, a voice said in her mind.
Merka found she could move,
even with legs like jelly. She faced Emarys.
The dragon was the most beautiful yet terrifying creature Merka had ever seen—scales of deep orange along the upper side of her body and wings, with scales of pale gold all below. Her eyes were huge and amber, engulfing her pupils. Around her neck she wore a heavy collar of gold chain mail. A bracelet or anklet of the same encircled each leg.
You do not resemble the usual thieves who come here, Emarys said into her mind as she cocked her head. Are you here at your own behest or another’s?
Merka bit her lip. “My own,” she said. “I owe a debt I can’t pay, and I decided to come here.”
The dragon blinked. You accept responsibility for yourself. Refreshing. Emarys moved deeper into the cave, curling up before Merka’s only exit. And very odd. What persuaded you that my gold was yours for the taking?
“Nothing—until I saw how much of it you have,” Merka admitted. “You could feed all the beggars of Chardon with a handful of this—and all the highborn, too. But it just sits in this cave while the beggars starve. But you don’t care. You have no idea how we live.”
Ah. And because I have so much more than you, I am expected to just let you and, I presume, the starveling others, take, and take, and take. Well, I am a dragon. I do not deal that way. I earned every ounce of this gold or was given it as a gift. I have a need for it. Your ignorance of that need does not entitle you to take what is not yours.
“What need could you possibly have?” Merka demanded. “You hunt each morning and spend the rest of the day in here. You don’t do anything!”
I need not explain myself to a thief, the dragon pointed out, but I will, because you have asked. I pay the herdsmen in gold for the cattle I eat. I teach. I advise the King, Queen, and their heirs and guard this kingdom from invaders. I am the source of all magic cast in this realm, and I train mages to use it wisely. I need the gold to weight me to the earth. Without it, I would become entranced by the sun, whose creature I am, and fly into it. Every time I fly out to hunt, I take that risk; it is why I wear gold on my person. You cannot know how much of a lure the sun is to me.
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