The Return To Erda Box Set

by Beca Lewis

  It turned out, I am royalty. But as soon as I could, I put a stop to the practice of bowing. I am just like everyone else. It was only an accident of birth that I am a princess. But since I am, I can choose how I’m treated.

  And now, most of the people of my father’s Kingdom of Zerenity have learned that I was sent to the Earth dimension to keep me safe. In retrospect, it had been both dumb and cruel. Royalty could send their child away, but everyone else had to hope that Abbadon would not target their village and their children. They felt it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t.

  If people were waiting outside for us this time, I didn’t see them because instead of landing outside the Castle, we slipped through the open roof of the atrium. That was a surprise to me. I had no idea that the atrium roof opened.

  This time the people waiting for us were people I knew—every single zonking one of them. Even the metal toadstools were there. And if metal toadstools could look happy, they did. That meant there must be food, but at that moment I didn’t care. I looked at all those people, and I couldn’t believe how happy I felt.

  Even Pita and his brothers were there. I didn’t think that Teddy the Whistle Pig would be at the Castle since his home was underground, but I saw Teddy standing at the edge of the crowd, looking like a huge bear.

  It was Teddy that yelled, “Pumpkin toes!” as the bubble dissolved around me. I love the silly names he makes up for me, and I wish I were clever enough to make some up for him. But instead, I let myself be wrapped up in his big bear arms.

  In spite of the danger I could feel all around the Castle, inside there was celebration. A beautiful spread of food was ready for us. Little name tags told us where to sit. At the head of the table was Earl, otherwise known as Coro, the commander of the storms. His wife, Ariel, sat next to him. She ruled the wind. I could see the two of them holding hands beneath the table, which made me love Earl even more, even though he scared the ziffer out of me when he raised his voice. Seriously, even the trees trembled when Earl spoke.

  It was a huge table, and yet somehow we could hear each other. The roof of the atrium had closed, but since it was a clear roof we could still see the sky, and the atrium overflowed with trees and flowers. It was a magical space.

  Zeid and Beru sat beside me. The Priscillas hovered everywhere. They flew from shoulder to shoulder, sometimes bestowing kisses.

  Ruta claimed to dislike their attention, but I knew it wasn’t true. I had learned to see the smile he tried to hide. When Ruta laughed, he sounded like a garbage can lid rattling, or a frog croaking depending on what he was laughing about. But Ruta’s smile was soft and sweet, even though it was rare. He sat beside Beru with the Ginete on his left.

  All of my teachers were there. Niko, who led our team and tried to teach me how to fight and defend myself even though I knew he thought of me as clumsy. He is right about that.

  Aki sat with him. I used to call her Miss Floaty before I knew her name because she floated instead of walking most of the time. Aki was in charge of my flexibility and meditation practice. She was also the one who had told me the story of the two brothers in the metal space ship shaped like a snake that had seeded the two dimensions and started this whole thing. I needed to talk to her more about that.

  Professor Link, the man I called Pinhead until I knew his real name, was beside Aki. Now that I knew that they could all read my mind, I realized that they all knew the names I used to call them. I flushed thinking how rude I had been. They all smiled at me.

  Zut, they were reading my mind again. I realized I didn’t care. It was Link who kept us all in contact all the time. I had missed his voice in my head, and his attempt to help me remember my magic skills. Now that he was back in my head, I couldn’t have been happier.

  My teachers. I hoped that the practice I had done without them would make them proud of me, but I knew that desire was something I had to squash before they discovered it. They would not let me live it down. Still, I did harbor a hope that what I had done would please them. Maybe that need would never go away, and I would have to live with it.

  Across from me sat Leif and Sarah. I was surprised because I had never seen them at the Castle before. I knew them both from the Earth dimension, and now they lived in this one. Or was it the other way around? It always confused me.

  I thought that Leif and Sarah were first from Erda and then went to Earth and then returned, but I wasn’t sure. I did know that Suzanne was first from Erda and traveled back and forth between the dimensions as a bridge between the two Realms.

  Suzanne had told me that Earl and Ariel had lived in the Earth dimension to bring together some people in Earth who needed to meet. We called them the Stone Circle. Johnny was a member of the Stone Circle. But then Sarah and Leif had been members of that circle too, and now they were here. See? Confusing.

  What made some of this possible was the fact that Earth time and Erda time move differently. So, although Leif and Sarah were in the Earth dimension a long span of time for Earth time, in Erda time they hadn’t been gone long at all. Once I started thinking about the whole dimension and time travel thing, it confused me.

  It was Sarah who answered my unspoken question, “We started here, Kara Beth, just like you. We left before you did out of a desire to learn more about the Earth dimension. We hoped to impact it in a good way and to enlarge our understanding of life. What we didn’t know was that we would forget where we had come from, just as you forgot.”

  “When Leif returned with Suzanne’s help, he began to remember. When he came to visit me in the Earth dimension, he started to tell me about who we were here. So before I returned to Erda, I had remembered who I had been here.”

  “It’s a good thing, too,” Aki piped in. “Sarah, as the Oracle, was able to help you remember sooner, which made it possible to defeat the Shrieks and Shatterskin.”

  “So while you were gone, there wasn’t an Oracle here?” I asked.

  “Until Abbadon decided he wanted to rule the planet, there wasn’t a need for me. We all thought it was safe for us to visit the Earth dimension,” Sarah answered.

  “And then it wasn’t,” I whispered.

  “And then it wasn’t,” Sarah agreed.

  Deadsweep Fifteen

  I thought we would have our meeting right after dinner, but I was wrong. Earl took charge and said that everyone needed a good night’s sleep before we began our talks about how to defeat Abbadon’s latest weapon. So far, I hadn’t heard anything about it. I didn’t have its name, and I had no idea what it did. I knew nothing about how far away it was or what was going to be required of us.

  When I tried to ask someone, they would shush me. I hate being shushed. That’s why I think Beru and Ruta especially love to do it. They like to see my reaction.

  The Priscillas always pretend that they don’t know anything, but I was discovering that it was almost always a lie. The fact that they had been speaking to Berta when I thought no one was paying any attention to me proved my point. But I was proving it only to myself because no one was listening. They were too busy shushing me and enjoying each other.

  I finally gave in to enjoying dinner and stopped trying to get answers to my questions. It would have been stupid not to. The food was incredible and diverse. I knew so little about how food arrived on the table, that the possibility that it was produced magically crossed my mind. Perhaps there was a species of beings that only prepared food, and I hadn’t met them yet. My mind drifted away to imagine what they might look like and how they cooked, not noticing that everyone was staring at me. When I broke out of the daydream and brought my attention back to the table, everyone started laughing.

  Ziffer. They were all watching my daydream. I wanted to huff at them and tell them to get out of my head, but then I realized how much I had missed them not being in my head and I started laughing with them. When the
metal toadstools started doing a version of a laugh—think of shaking a can filled with stones because that’s what it sounded like—I could barely control myself.

  “Do you like that?” Teddy asked, referring to the toadstools laughter.

  Wiping my eyes as the tears ran down my face from laughing so hard, I nodded. “Did you program that?”

  “I got bored,” Teddy responded, which prompted another round of laughter.

  After dinner, Zeid took my hand and said he would see me in the morning. I was disappointed. I had hoped to spend some private time with him. I had questions to ask him and feelings that wanted to pop out and express themselves.

  “We have to wait, Kara,” Zeid said as he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “It’s childish for me to ask why, isn’t it?” I said.

  Zeid looked at me with such a sad expression that I knew it wasn’t easy for him either.

  I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. And for a brief moment, I felt his arms go around me. It wasn’t nearly enough, and it didn’t answer any questions other than that we were in this together. Whatever “this” was.

  “I’m walking you to your room,” Beru said dragging me back to the present.

  “Just like old times,” I answered. “Only this time I know where we are going, and how to find my room.”

  “And this time, I am not going to lock the door,” Beru laughed.

  “I know why you aren’t,” I replied. “But I still don’t know why you did.”

  We both laughed. Beru wasn’t going to lock me in because she knew I had figured out how to unlock doors, all doors, anywhere. But I still didn’t understand why she had locked the door in the first place. Then it dawned on me. Perhaps it was so I would practice unlocking them.

  By then I was in my room. Beru gave me a look, turned and left the room, and then locked the door behind her. “Real funny, Beru,” I called out and with a flick of my wrist unlocked the door.

  I swear I heard Beru say, “That’s my girl,” but it was probably only wishful thinking.

  *******

  Aki came for me in the morning. Not the way most people do, of course. She didn’t knock on my door, or shake me as I lay in bed, or even sit in a chair waiting for me to wake up. No, Aki was hanging in the air, eyes closed, lying on her side, with one arm under her head and another hanging down into space. I had seen her do that before and I knew that there was a ledge of some sort she was laying on that was invisible. But still, it was quite disconcerting.

  Besides, the last time she had been waiting for me to wake up was after I had been injured during the attack on Shatterskin. I felt a frisson of fear to see her lying there again.

  I was instantly awake. “Is there something wrong?” I croaked, not having used my voice yet that morning.

  Aki yawned, stretched like only a goddess of some kind could look stretching, and said, “No, just thought it would be lovely to have a little chat before meeting everyone else.”

  Aki slipped off the invisible edge and stood by my bed. As much as I tried to deny it, I was a teeny, tiny, bit jealous of Aki. To start with, Aki was so beautiful it was hard to wrap my head around it. Ethereal wasn’t quite the word because she was also so grounded. That didn’t take into account what she could do, like hang in the air, and float across the floor.

  The first time I saw Aki I wondered if the form that I saw her in was her true form. Standing by my bed, Aki’s pale blue eyes glowed in the half-light coming through the curtain. She smiled at me, and they turned dark blue. I almost had the feeling that Aki could twist herself around and turn into a wisp of smoke, or slither across the floor without making a sound.

  Aki flicked her long pale white hair into the air, and for a moment she did hang there just like a wisp of smoke. And then she was gone. In my head, I heard her say, “Meet me in the training room, little one.”

  Back to “little one” again. I didn’t mind. Anyone who could turn herself into a wisp of smoke just because I imagined that she could had the right to call me little one anytime she wished.

  As I pulled on my clean leggings and tunic—one of the many benefits of being in the Castle again was clean clothes every morning that I had nothing to do with making clean—I wondered if the second half of what I was thinking was also right.

  I thought about the story Aki had told me of the two brothers traveling in the snake-shaped space ship through the universe for thousands and thousands of years.

  How old is Aki anyway, I wondered. And was she one of the people on that ship, or one of their descendants? Besides, I still didn’t know if it was a true story or not.

  “True enough,” was the answer I heard.

  Deadsweep Sixteen

  If I had thought I was going to the training room to have tea with Aki as we sometimes did, I was utterly mistaken. There was no chatting involved at all. Instead, Aki ran me through the most intense flow training I had ever experienced. From the moment I walked through the door, she had me going. At the end I was breathing so hard I thought I would pass out. Then she told me to sit, meditate, and intentionally bring my heart rate down and slow my breathing so that by the time we finished I was taking only a few breaths a minute.

  “Could be a little better, Kara,” she said indicating that the lesson was over. “But on the other hand, it’s better than I expected.”

  There was no time to reply to her comment because Beru was at the door. Beru didn’t speak. She didn’t say anything about my slow walking or drained face. Instead, she took me straight to Niko who was waiting in the outside training space. All I could think was, “Oh, no!”

  Niko turned to me, and I knew I was a goner. He started commanding, and I had no choice but to do what he said. Jump, kick, dodge, get out of the way, get in the way, throw lightning at a target, and spin in the air, fly to the tree and back, over and over again.

  After what felt like a hundred hours, Niko raised his hand and motioned for me to sit down. I tried to sit but ended up falling on my butt. “An elephant could sit more gracefully than that, Kara Beth,” Niko said.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I muttered, as I tried to sit upright but kept tilting to the side with my legs sprawled out in front of me.

  When I realized that Niko had left the practice space, I lay back down and stared at the sky, too tired to try and figure out what had just happened. No wonder they had fed me so well the night before. At first, I had been upset that I hadn’t had any breakfast yet, but at that moment I was glad. It would have never stayed down.

  “So what if I was an enemy right now,” I heard. “Could you get up and fight me?”

  Lifting my head enough to see who was talking, I saw Leif standing in front of me holding a staff. Not like the ones that we used for fighting, although I supposed he could use it for that. It was much fancier.

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “And that’s a cool staff, Leif. Never saw you with that before.”

  Leif looked at the staff in his hand and smiled. “It is, isn’t it? I’ve had it for a long time. And right now, you need to try and take it from me.”

  I started giggling. “That’s funny, Leif,” I said, lowering myself back down to the ground with a groan. “But, I am too pooped to play right now.”

  “Who said we were playing, Princess!” Leif said in a voice I had never heard before.

  A split second later I felt the ground shake, and a bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky just missing my outstretched arm.

  I screamed, “What the ziffer!” as I rolled away from the lightning blast. The sky had grown dark, and I could barely see Leif encased within a blue haze. I had seen the blue haze before, but it had felt warm and soothing. I could scarcely comprehend that Leif had been that soothing blue haze because the man I knew as Leif was standing in fr
ont of me holding a golden staff high into the air. He wasn’t looking warm and soothing at all. I had never seen anyone look so terrifying.

  “Again, Princess?” Leif yelled striking the staff once again into the ground.

  This time I expected the lightning and rolled closer to Leif hoping he wasn’t planning on striking himself. It worked. The bolt landed yards away from me. But if Leif thought I could take his staff away from him, he was mistaken. Even if I had any energy left to fight him, I had no idea how to do it.

  “What do you have, Kara?” I heard Professor Link ask.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I answered as I rolled again, watching Leif’s staff come down.

  “You have us, ask for help,” I heard. “Help,” I squeaked, as the lightning missed me by a fraction of a second, and the ground shook, and the sky grew darker ready to split open again.

  Then I realized I had something else. First, I knew that Leif would never hurt me. Then, I remembered when the Priscillas and I were inside of Shatterskin trying to destroy something we had already destroyed. We won by recognizing that we were looking at an illusion. Was this another illusion?

  Thinking of the wise and gentle Leif that I knew, I shouted at Leif, “This is not you!”

  Within seconds the dark skies, the blue haze, the lightning disappeared, and Leif was standing before me with one of his rare, but beautiful, smiles.

  I looked around the practice yard and saw everyone else was there too. Everyone. Standing around us. Waiting. Nothing had changed. There was no place where lightning had struck. No shattering of the ground. It had been an illusion.

  I staggered to my feet and started swearing every Erda swear word I knew, vaguely remembering I still had no idea why every curse word in Erda began with a z.