by John Hook
She reached down and unrolled the cloth between us. I think I actually gasped. When the cloth had unrolled flat, Rox appeared, standing on it. Or something that looked like Rox, except she was translucent in places and she wasn’t looking at us. She also seemed almost two dimensional. She kept repeating the same motions… furtive glances and then a run. Then it repeated in a loop. She didn’t actually run anywhere. She stayed on the blanket the whole time.
I could feel sorrow like a fog descend on me as I reached out, knowing I wouldn’t be able to touch her.
“What is it, Saripha?”
“It’s a wraith.”
“A wraith?”
“It’s a gossamer slice of glamour that Rox, wherever she is, is sending out. They have been appearing to me in Ohnipoor. She is trying to get in contact, so I assumed they had been appearing to you too.”
“I thought I was dreaming or going mad.”
“She probably isn’t even aware she is doing it. However, some of her training with me has awakened a part of her that is capable of doing this.”
I watched the ghostly image of Rox, a mixture of heartbreak, anger, and guilt rising in me.
“Can this help us find her?”
“I’m hoping so. And possibly strengthen your bond with the blue power.”
“Whatever it takes for me to find her.”
“Then let’s begin. First, just start with basic breathing exercises. Breathe in. Breathe out.”
I always felt a little bit silly when we did this, particularly when Saripha kept narrating, talking me through the exercises. I knew it was a pre-hypnotic induction and apparently I easily entered that altered state, but it always sounded like those New Age things that made your eyes roll. However, shortly, my thinking about it evaporated and, as always, I found myself seeming to sink further and further down into my body. As I settled into the quiet and opened my eyes, I realized Saripha was still speaking, although she appeared to be completely in a trance.
“Quentin, can you hear me?”
“Yes.” I was startled by my voice in the quiet. It almost didn’t sound like me.
“Slowly reach very deep within yourself. At the base of your spine is a blue light. Do you see it?”
I closed my eyes. All I saw was darkness. I was impatient.
“Keep breathing. Stay calm. You can do this. Reach deeply inside yourself.”
I slowed my breathing, hoping to keep myself from getting too wound up, but then I felt myself start to sink. Actually it was more like floating. I was feeling suddenly lighter but for some reason I floated down. I saw a blue light. The glow brightened and then withdrew some, over and over, like someone was using a bellows on it. I realized the bellows was my breathing. I drew in a large breath, filling my chest. The blue was so bright it was almost white in places. I touched it and snaking tendrils of light wrapped like vines around my fingers and hand and wrist and up my arms, and then my eyes were open and I was looking out into the room again, except there was a slight blue tint to the scene.
“Good, you have joined with that which is deep within you,” Saripha said, still seemingly in a trance.
I saw blue tattoo covered every inch of my skin so intricately that the skin itself appeared blue. It was glowing, giving off blue light to the whole room.
“What do I do now?” I asked, holding my blue glowing hands in front of my face.
“Focus on Rox.”
“But you said it is not really her.”
“It is a piece of her, a shard of her glamour. Your blue entity is a matrix. You can pull her into you and sense the biological substrate. Like the data encoded in a photograph, it can connect you to her. It can maybe even tell you where this wraith came from.”
“What is my power, that you think it can do this?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. However, I believe it somehow changes organic structure. That is why it can’t be taken from you.”
“You know this how?”
“I’m a keen observer of nature. Beyond that, you are going to have to trust me.”
In the moment, I decided that was the best thing to do. Saripha had been able to have this whole conversation with me while maintaining her trance, but I didn’t want to push it. I could feel a connection to her inside me. She was somehow enhancing what I could do without controlling me. I had to make my own choices.
I stared at the wraith that was Rox and not Rox, perpetually running, afraid of something behind her. The glow that was around my body moved like a sleeve away from my body and enveloped the wraith. As I concentrated, I found I could increase the detail of the Rox figure. I was using memory to fill her in. Memory that tore at my heart as I longed for this blue power to make her real. It did not exactly, but like photo enhancement, the memories made her more detailed. Then I discovered I could slow her down. Finally I was able to make her stand in one place with her eyes locked on mine. They were so sharp and real looking that I thought I might cry.
Suddenly, I was standing next to her.
“Where are we?” I asked Rox. I could sense her. I could smell her. She was real.
“I don’t know,” Rox answered, and it startled me, although I found I had expected an answer.
We were in a hallway carved out of rock, like the tunnels that led away from Haven, but I didn’t think that was where we were.
“Hurry!” she shouted and ran for the next bend in the corridor, where she stopped.
“Rox?”
There was something odd in her face. There was love, I think, sorrow, fear and something malevolent and violent. I was used to this dark shadow that emerged from her, but this expression was something I had never encountered.
“Whatever happens, this wasn’t your fault, Quentin.”
With that she disappeared around the corner.
I ran after her. However, as soon as I turned the corner, I skidded to a stop. At the end of the corridor, in a silhouette so dark that I almost thought it a statue, was the Angel. Her wings were unfurled, her claws were out, a gossamer dress that did little to hide her stunning nakedness, even in such deep shadows. The beautiful illusion draping such savage atavism.
I stormed down the hall towards her, my muscles pulling tight in my chest. And then I stopped. As I moved closer and my blue light shone upon her, I realized she was not in shadow. She was black. The dark, glossy black of polished stone, her eyes golden with a red center. A beauty of form that was unimaginable if you did not see it.
“There is nothing further for you to do here. Rox is gone.”
And suddenly I was back in the room with Saripha. Energy coursed through my body, making me twist in ways a body was probably not meant to twist.
“Quentin, concentrate,” Saripha shouted with urgency but without panic. “Take control of your body!”
I focused all of my concentration on the middle of my chest and began deep breathing. My body began slowing and I kept myself upright. As my breathing made me drop down more in my body, I lowered my area of focus from my chest to my groin and, with it, the blue of my skin was absorbed and disappeared. Finally, it was just me, Quentin Case meditating.
Saripha opened her eyes, emerging from her trance. She seemed excited. “From what I sensed, you did better than I thought.”
“What did I do?”
“You are beginning to merge with the blue power. It is becoming part of you.”
“I don’t know if I like the idea of merging with another entity.”
“I’m not sure that’s what it is.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know that yet.”
I looked back where Rox’s wraith had been, my eyes widening. Saripha followed my gaze and I heard a small, audible gasp.
Instead of Rox, it was a frozen image of the Black Angel.
“The Black Angel. What is she?”
Saripha had no answer. I wasn’t expecting one.
9.
The girl ran in terror through the cornfield. She
might have been about ten years old with blue skin, black hair, and feathers hanging off her ear. I wasn’t in the scene. I was a disembodied observer with my point of view shifting. Sometimes I was low to the ground and could just see her feet pounding the mud as she ran by. I could hear her screaming, but it was as if the sound was very far away. Sometimes I was above her and every so often she would turn and look up fearfully. She definitely looked up, not behind. At first I thought she was seeing me, but I somehow knew that wasn’t true. I would need to see behind my point of view to see the real source of her fear, but I could not. I had no volition in this dream. I was an observer only. I could not act.
I was wondering what had happened to the man I remembered. The one who had been with the girl when I had this dream or vision before.
Then the corn around us burst into white flame. I could feel the searing heat and I heard the girl’s scream.
I shot up in bed, fully awake. Strangely, it wasn’t fear I felt, it was a deep sorrow. Someone sat up in bed next to me. For just a moment, disoriented, I thought it was Rox and reached for her. Then I realized it was Saripha. She looked at me as if she could see what was going on inside me and then her eyebrow went up.
“What did you see?”
“I was in that field again. The blue girl was running. She was afraid of something, but I didn’t see what.” I told her as much as I could remember about the dream.
“And you couldn’t help her.”
Saripha was intuitive as always. I hadn’t even hit on that thought yet.
“So what are these dream fragments about? My inability to save the woman I love?”
Saripha shook her said. “No, as upsetting as that might be for you, these dreams aren’t about you. You are being shown something. That’s why you’re disembodied. You’re a mere observer. You’re being told something.”
“What’s the message? I’m assuming blue people connects it to the blue alien within me.”
“I don’t know. It’s unfolding slowly. I’ll help where I can, but this message is for you and you’re going to have to find the key.”
“Is this Rooni’s doing?” We both looked around in the dark, but if Rooni had a part in this, she was long gone now.
Saripha shrugged. “I’d suggest not looking too hard for answers. They’ll come when they’re ready.”
“You’re right. That work we did with Rox’s wraith was draining, but I feel rested in spite of the dream. I think we’d better grab the others and get moving.”
We said goodbye to Paul and the others. Blaise stayed with the Rockvale warriors to help them manage things and to make sure the Grays didn’t find them, or handle them if they did. We were a large enough group heading into uncharted territory. We didn’t need to have a larger fighting unit with us.
So we set out, myself, Saripha, Izzy, Kyo and Anika. As always, Kyo carried both her short sword and long sword as well as a small spool of very long cord she had woven. She would disappear, scouting, but since we weren’t quite sure where we were going, she would circle back with regularity. Of course, one had to just trust in that as she was silent and you never knew she was there.
Izzy had his bow strung on his back and carried two quivers of arrows. He also carried a carved club that Roland had given him for any close-in threats we encountered, although mostly he used it as a walking stick whenever Roland wasn’t around.
I had come to realize that Anika had many different forms that she/he appeared as, but the differences within a gender were subtle. Right now she was a muscular, brown-skinned redhead whose eyes watched the surroundings with a hawk-like intensity. She was easy to talk to when you engaged her in conversation, but when we were on the march, she stayed focused. Even when relaxed in conversation, she retained a certain amount of intensity that, I had noticed, the Dark Men found intimidating. Izzy seemed not the least bothered by it and clearly found her—or his—exoticness and intensity quite exciting. She carried a thinner staff made of very hard wood that she had polished and could wield almost like a sword. She did carry a bow on her back that Izzy had carved for her, but she was only just learning to shoot under Izzy’s guidance.
Saripha looked as she always had. Ageless, with white hair, a blue shirt and jeans with a woven bag across her shoulder.
I had my usual short sword tucked into my belt. Anything else I found too encumbering. I liked having my hands free.
We really didn’t know where we were headed. From things Gerod had said, it was somewhere to the West. Finding Zaccora from Rockvale had been relatively easy. There was only one way through the mountains west of Rockvale and Zaccora was at the other end. No one knew what was over here, this far west. We headed in a generally western direction following the easiest lay of the land and then looked for a high mountaintop. We climbed up, finding one that should have a good survey of what lay beyond. The view from the top of the mountain was breathtaking, but it made us realize how difficult our task was going to be.
As we looked from our high perch, we saw a vast, unsettled wilderness area. Think forest, many lakes, nearly countless passes and low mountain valleys. You could easily pick almost any path in almost any direction and end up somewhere. The trouble is, without knowing where Antanaria was, you could end up even hundreds of miles from where you wanted to be. Beyond the lowlands on the other side of the mountains stretched a large desert. I had no idea if that was part of the same desert I arrived in or if it was a new desert. If Antanaria was somewhere in that desert, it could be even harder to find.
“Anyone have any ideas?”
“Don’t you think it strange that Gerod didn’t give you directions, given he has an interest in your getting there?” Izzy asked.
“Yes. In fact, I find this whole setup strange.”
“So you are just going along with it…”
“…because I don’t have anything else I can do that might help me find Rox,” I finished.
“This might not help you find Rox either,” Izzy said hesitantly.
“Surely you aren’t accusing Gerod of lying to us?”
“Ah. That occurred to you then.”
“It’s all we have to go on. Gerod wants something. We need to figure out what it is before he decides to attack Zaccora.”
“And if he does so while we are gone?”
“I don’t think he will.”
“Because we took out the bridge?”
Izzy looked at me.
“That will just slow him down,” I said. “However, there is something he wants and I think he wants it before he attacks. We’ve got to figure out what it is and take control of it.”
“You don’t think Zaccora can hold him off?”
“They might. They’re brave fighters and they have a lot of heart, both the Zaccorans and our own Rockvale fighters. However, if I can prevent the battle, I’d like to.”
Unexpectedly, there was something between a bellow and a roar behind us. We spun just in time to see a large creature charging up. The higher elevations supported a very odd variety of creatures that had evolved large bodies and defensive weapons. They were easily provoked to attack, although most weren’t carnivores from my few encounters. They seemed to consume native vegetation. However, their attacks on invaders were fierce and relentless and, for that reason, demons largely stayed away from the higher elevations.
This creature had the appearance of an extremely large bull elk with leathery skin that was almost like armor. It had extended fangs that were sharp for ripping thicker vegetation and it had a single antler that rose up on its head and cascaded over its raised forehead and down its snout. The result was that when it charged, head down, the bony material, which had to be rock-like in its strength, cut a deep furrow in the ground and would slice any of us it encountered.
We sprang out of its way and scrambled. It turned nearly instantly, without raising its head, and charged in my direction. Izzy got off an arrow, but it penetrated no further than the surface layers of the skin. The moosedozer di
dn’t even notice. As I ran, an arm grabbed me and lifted me into the tree above. Kyo had me, but then we both leapt away and the creature reared its head up, bellowing, and shattered the thick branches we were standing on, splintering wood everywhere.
It spun as quickly as it had before and charged us with its head down once more. Dirt and rock spewed to either side as it laid open the earth. I had no idea how it could see doing that, much less change direction.
“I’m going to see if I can get it to charge over the cliff side of the peak.”
I charged ahead, hearing Kyo shouting with some alarm. I headed to the edge of the mountain, the creature picking up speed. I was keeping my body in straight alignment as I ran, trying very hard not to give the creature any signal that I would feint away at the last moment. Unfortunately, doing so meant the last-minute change in direction was going to be more difficult.
I ran right to the edge of the precipice and then threw myself to the side, being careful to fall a little back as I did so. Amazingly, the creature wasn’t fooled for a moment and it spun immediately away from the edge of the cliff. In fact, I was lucky that it had such an unbelievably tight spin radius, because it actually turned sharper than I had and the plow-blade-like antler missed me. However, the force of the wave of dirt and rock threw me over the cliff. I reached blindly and managed to catch a thick root or branch growing out of the side of the cliff near the top. I was momentarily blinded and couldn’t see what it was. I also didn’t care and was grateful to not see the drop beneath my feet.
Still half blind, I used my short sword to dig into the hard-packed earth and rock cliff face and managed to pull myself up. Anika reached over and yanked me up the rest of the way.
The creature wasn’t stopping. It hadn’t even slowed. It just kept picking different targets.
“Anika, I’m going to get its attention and try to lead it down into the forest, away from all of us and this small area on top the mountain.”
“I should do that.” She winked at me. “I’ve got longer legs. You need to stay here with the others and focus on your mission.”
“And cheat Izzy out of being the only one here who managed to keep his lover with him? Not on your life!”