Inside the temple, a few moments passed in complete silence. Gabriel woke first, his eyelids fluttering open. He pushed himself to his feet, staring in awe at the machine, blinking against the beam of light that shot up through the ceiling.
Jodi stood up next to him. “What’s it doing?” she said.
“I don’t know. I think it might be working.”
Pete moaned and they rushed to his side. His face was pale and he was bleeding heavily from a bullet wound in his thigh. Gabriel removed his belt and wrapped it around Pete’s leg. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “We just need to slow down the blood loss.”
“Thanks,” Pete said with a grimace. He looked like he was on the verge of passing out again.
All around them, people began to recover. The shadowfriends lurched to their feet and went running up the stairwell. Reeves drew his pistol and ran after them, followed immediately by Starling. The two of them returned a moment later. “You’d better come outside,” Reeves said. “It might not be safe in here. Besides, I think you’ll want to see this.”
Reeves helped Gabriel lift Pete, and they all left the temple together. The first thing Gabriel noticed was that the shadowfriends had retreated back to their vehicles. They were locked safely inside their trucks, staring in horror up at the sky. Gabriel turned and saw the beam of light radiating out of the temple, focused straight up into the heavens.
For a few minutes, it seemed that the entire world fell silent. The moon continued its slow arc across the heavens, sliding in between the sun and the earth. As the eclipse reached totality, a cold wind stirred up across the surface of the planet and true night fell from one end of the globe to the other. Suddenly the sky was a cold black veil, jeweled with a billion shimmering stars. The Milky Way galaxy rose up beyond the horizon, impossibly bright, impossibly large, and the trolls shivered with fear, exclaiming that the sky was about to swallow them whole.
The beam of light from the machine shot into space and scattered, splitting off in a thousand different directions all at once. Like a web, the rays of light spread across the sky. For a moment, it seemed that the entire heavens wavered like a mirage. Then the moon continued its descent, sliding gently down the sky towards the horizon. Behind it, the giant red planet emerged, a heavenly body long forgotten to modern man but known in legends as Niburu the Destroyer. For a brief while, Niburu cast its pale red glow over the earth. As it did, the shadowkind emerged.
Humans fled in panic as ogres, goblins, minotaur and a thousand other strange creatures appeared. Traffic ground to a halt, blocking freeways and arteries of major cities all over the world. People abandoned their cars, their offices, and their homes to watch the surreal transformation of the world around them. Landscapes shifted, morphing into combinations of what they were in reality and what their reflections had been in the Shadow world. Towering skyscrapers twisted into odd amalgamations of metal and stone, too crooked to stand upright, and yet somehow not toppling. Mountains shifted, rivers moved. Villages full of shadowcreatures appeared in the midst of bustling cities.
And then Niburu began to move, slowly following the moon’s path toward the horizon. The first rays of sunlight struck the earth like a nuclear bomb, and a great wailing went up among the shadowcreatures. Frantically, they raced for the shadows and dark places where they might find sanctuary from the burning yellow sun. Then, by the thousands, they began to fall, their dark shapes billowing out in the wind, their shadowy countenances burning to ash before they even hit ground.
On the remote mountaintop plateau of Tiahuanaco, the shadowfriends slammed their vehicles into gear and retreated into the jungles as fast as they could drive. The trolls thrust their spears into the air and let out a victorious cry, and Gabriel couldn’t help but smile. In the temple behind them, the machine wound down, all of its energy spent, its purpose finally complete. Then, as if it had only remained standing all these centuries to fulfill this single moment, the temple collapsed.
The gigantic stones made a groaning sound as they caved inward, crushing the machine and burying it forever. A cloud of dust rushed up into the air. And then it was over. Gabriel glanced over and saw Reeves staring uncertainly at the rubble, clutching his pistol like it was the only thing left in the world that he could trust.
“I hope you know what you just did, kid,” he said.
“He just saved you,” said Jodi.
One of the trolls reached out and patted Gabriel on the shoulder. There was a moment of silence as they absorbed it all. Humans and trolls… humans and shadowkind. And then Pete made a sound.
“Uh, not to ruin the moment,” he said, clearing his throat. “But Gabriel didn’t save me yet. I’m kind of bleeding to death over here.”
Julia gasped. “Oh, good lord! Reeves, get him to the plane!”
Reeves grunted and lifted Pete off the ground. He started walking towards the plane. The rest of the group followed, except for the trolls. Gabriel turned and noticed that they were still standing there. “What will you do now?” he said.
One of the trolls smiled and pointed at the dirigible. “We find our families,” he said. “We make new homes. Thank you, Gabriel.”
After a quick farewell, Gabriel watched the trolls climb into the airship and fire up the furnace. They took immediately to the sky, eager to locate their families and start a new life safe from the Shadow. As they lifted into the sky, Gabriel looked north across the surface of the lake and thought about how far they had come.
He couldn’t help but wonder if the Black Palace was still out there, somewhere. If it was, the Shadowlords had probably barricaded themselves inside. They could survive the touch of sunlight because they were once human, but they didn’t like it. It weakened them. The slaves were probably already escaping.
Gabriel wondered if Pete’s parents were among the survivors. He wondered about Julia’s husband, too. It was Alfred’s letter that had started the whole thing. Was it possible that he was still alive, maybe with the other captives of the Shadowlords? Gabriel doubted it. It was probably just another trick of the Shadow, a way to both weaken D.A.S. and trick Reeves and Julia into revealing the location of the last statue.
“It’s time to go,” Reeves said. Gabriel hadn’t even heard him return. He turned to face the older man.
“I had to do it, Reeves,” he said apologetically. “I couldn’t let the Shadow destroy the trolls, or the rest of those poor slaves.”
Reeves put a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and followed his gaze out over the water. “Last year, I asked you if you were ready to be a hero. I told you everything that it meant, everything you’d have to sacrifice. Do you remember what you said?”
“I said I was ready.”
“You did, and today you proved it. Look at our world. Things haven’t been like this since… well, since before recorded history. But the truth is, this is the way things were meant to be. Men changed it all, thousands of years ago. Today, you put it all back the way it was. You knew that many people wouldn’t like what you were doing. You knew that some would suffer, and that some wouldn’t trust you, but you did what you had to. That’s the kind of decision that heroes make, Gabriel.”
“I don’t feel like a hero.”
“They seldom do.”
Gabriel sighed. “Things are never going to be the same, are they?”
“No. But we’ll survive.”
“Pete’s parents are probably out there,” he said. “Alfred might be, too.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. But for the moment we have other priorities. We need to get Pete to a hospital.”
“Right.”
They walked back to the plane in silence, contemplating everything. A few minutes later, they took off. Jodi’s new wolf friend, her brother curled up on the floor by her feet like a puppy. He didn’t seem bothered in the least by the humans around him, or even by the flight. Gabriel could tell that there was a bond between them that went deeper than words. He noticed something else about Jodi, too.
&
nbsp; “What happened to the cane?” he said as the plane climbed into the sky.
Jodi glanced at him, a baffled look on her face. “Cane? Oh, you mean the cane. Come to think of it, I don’t know. I haven’t seen it since… since before I followed you into the Shadow world.”
Gabriel gave her a mischievous look. “You’ll never get rid of it now. It’s part of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When it returned to the Shadow world, the cane lost its physical form. But it was still part of you. The cane came from the old world. It was a relic, an enchanted item.”
“Enchanted? You mean like magical?”
“Yes.”
Jodi rolled her eyes. “Stop playing with me. There’s no such thing as magic.”
Gabriel smiled. He held his hand out, palm facing the ceiling. A blue flame appeared there, hovering in the air. Jodi’s eyebrows shot up. Gabriel laughed, and the flame dissipated with a wave of his hand.
“Everything’s different now,” he said. “You’d better get used to it.”
A doctor in Bolivia stitched Pete back together and gave him some antibiotics, and then they began their long flight home. Everyone had stories to tell, but for the moment, they were all too tired to talk. Instead, they took turns napping and watching movies on the satellite television, and they took comfort in the simplest truth of all. No matter what became of the world, regardless of how things changed or what the future might bring, they still had each other. As long as that was true, they were going to be okay. As long as they were together, D.A.S. would never fall.
The End
Click here to find other exciting titles by Jamie Sedgwick:
The Shadow Born Trilogy
The Hank Mossberg, Private Ogre Mysteries
Aboard the Great Iron Horse Steampunk Series
The Tinkerer’s Daughter Steampunk Series
Karma Crossed
The Darkling Wind
Shadow Rising Copyright 2011 by Jamie Sedgwick
Cover art copyright 2012 by Timber Hill Press
All Rights Reserved. All characters, events, and situations in this book are purely fictional and any resemblance between these and real people or events is coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1470026481
ISBN-13: 978-1470026486
Shadow Rising (Shadow Born Trilogy Book 2) Page 24