Hard Reign

by John Hook

  “I want to try something a little different this time.” Saripha was starting another training session and it had been getting harder and harder for me to keep going again, just as it had in Ohnipoor. It always seemed to go this way. I’d start out enthusiastically because I trusted Saripha, but after a while it just didn’t seem like I was getting something accomplished.

  “Different would be good,” I said, trying to be humorous, but it came out grouchy. Saripha seemed not to notice, but I’m sure she did.

  “I want you to enter a meditative state and then I’m going to use a technique that will put you in a receptive state.”

  “Like hypnosis?”

  “Yes, in a way. I will then whisper in your ear, making suggestions and asking you to do things.”

  “And I won’t remember any of this when you bring me back around?”

  “Oh no, I hope very much you will. You should be aware of everything as we do this. The technique merely renders you a little less stubborn and a bit more cooperative.”

  “And what will I be doing?”

  “I’m going to ask you to trust me on this. I don’t want you having preconceptions or expectations.”

  “I think I gave those up when I died and woke up in Hell.”

  “Not as much as you might think.” Saripha tilted her head, waiting for an answer.

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  I went through my routine that, taking about ten minutes, lowered me into a meditative state. I always felt like I was floating just slightly off the floor when I entered it, although, in fact, I was firmly planted. I also felt more deeply sunk into myself, which almost sounds contradictory, but it just was. These feelings were what told me I was where I wanted to be and I had gotten so I could just float there, not thinking about anything.

  Saripha sat just behind me. She reached around and pressed against my solar plexus. It felt like a gentle touch at first, but energy emanated from her hand and pressure began to build until something changed position inside me. She struck two points on my back with the heel of her hand. Again, they seemed like soft blows, but something radiated out and it was as if my spine was rearranging itself. The room was no longer there and I was floating in a void. Then shimmering points of light appeared, not like stars, but all different colors like lights in a colored mist.

  I realized Saripha was with me, still sitting at my back. I heard a sound like flies buzzing in my ear, and I realized it was Saripha whispering but I couldn’t hear words. The buzzing became more like musical notes, strange, maybe electronic ones, but were unlike anything I had heard. They made me think of odd tribal music like you would hear on some documentary about aborigines. The sound became fuller and richer and I almost lost the full sense of my physical body. My hands came up and were fully glowing blue. I had an erection, but I didn’t think of it as sexual so apparently the perpetual teenage boy piece of my brain was shut down. It was part of a powerful wave of energy flowing through my body.

  I wasn’t really thinking in the normal sense, in spite of this clumsy linear narrative. I can’t capture the state I was in. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t dreaming. I was definitely in an altered state. I began just doing things with no idea what the intent was. I suspect I was being guided by the unintelligible whispering from Saripha that had now become complex harmonics and seemed to emanate from everywhere at once.

  I passed one hand over the other and the blue stylus appeared, suspended between them. It glowed an even brighter blue than my skin. I picked up the stylus and began to sketch a circle and then I shook my head. It was a funny, imperfect circle. I had never been able to draw. This wasn’t my medium. Immediately the imperfect circle unfolded and became paper and I began to write in a language I had never seen before. I looked at the stylus. My attention became drawn to the music around me. Then, in the way that things can happen in dreams with no logical connection to what happened moments before, I found I had eaten the stylus. I picked up the paper and began to sing in tones I had never heard from myself before and the words flew off the pages like birds and the pages became a circle again, becoming more and more perfect as it receded into the distance. Although it was receding, the circle became bigger and bigger until it formed a world, at first of rocks and volcanos, and then the birds, or whatever they were, glided around the planet and became an atmosphere. Mountains became covered in white and green with cooling blurred bodies of water as clouds formed above.

  At first this seemed blissful to me, but then a sense of danger crept in. I made motions with my hands and crystals formed around Saripha and myself. In the cocoon I formed, the music became muted but I felt safe. I could hear the buzzing again. And a single word.

  “Return.”

  When I pulled myself up from the floor of the lodge, Saripha was sitting across from me and Azar and Rooni were watching me from the table. I felt a strange combination of calmness and strength. I could still see almost everything that I had experienced in my head, which surprised me, but I could tell it was going to fade.

  “I don’t know what you slipped me, but I think we should market it.”

  I looked over at Azar, who was watching me intently.

  “Yes, very impressive. It fits with what we’ve put together. A very dangerous power until mastered.”

  “You know what my power is?”

  “We know what it can ultimately do. We still need to learn what its more mundane aspects are.”

  I looked at Saripha. She nodded to let me know that Azar was projecting to both of us. Rooni too, I suspected, though I don’t know why.

  My sense of otherworldly calm was still on me, but I wanted someone to start telling me what they were on about.

  “Can you finally explain this to me?”

  “Some of it. I am old now and I have seen a lot. Other things I have learned from these books kept by my people, most of whom are dead. Rooni has been helpful as well.”

  “The cat?”

  “She is far more than a cat,” Saripha injected.

  “Indeed,” Azar agreed. “Saripha is herself an old and wise soul, and she and Rooni have crossed paths in many lifetimes and in different forms. But Rooni is truly an ancient traveler.”

  This was driving me bananas. I certainly had learned in this world and in working with Saripha, that there is far more to the universe than what we skim from the surface. I had experienced some of the deeper mysteries and even had just returned from such an encounter. However, I still liked things to be rational and pragmatic, especially when I thought that the things that needed to be done were rational and pragmatic.

  “How does any of this mumbo jumbo help me?”

  “Let me tell you a story about this world.” Azar held me with a steady gaze. “I don’t know everything, just pieces. However, it may help a bit. This world was not always like this. It has, in fact, changed many times. Ours is the most ancient race of this world. There was my kind, the Azaroti, and an even more ancient race that lived in garden cities.”

  “Was Ohnipoor one of them?”

  I think Azar stopped to get a picture for what I was thinking. “Ah, where Kanarchan was. Yes.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “That ancient race created a series of guardian powers. We don’t know why or why it didn’t keep them from being wiped out. These powers were bound in talismanic containers and hidden away.”

  “Talismanic containers? The platforms.”

  “Yes, an absurd use of such power by those who truly don’t understand what they contain. Same for the Shades, who have no idea of the power each talisman contains and simply use a fraction of the capability. Each power has a higher octave which operates on the fabric of the cosmos itself. They only tap into a local derivation of that power.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing with mine.”

  “Yes, and there is much you can do with that when you learn how to wield it. We suspect that most of the higher order powers are dangerous because they are on a cosmic scale, but yours
is key and that is why they want it.”

  “They?”

  “The ones who appear as angels.”

  “The ones who changed this world? What happened to that original race?”

  “No one knows for sure. It happened long before the angels came. We really only have legends and most of those have probably been distorted.”

  “So what happened to this world?”

  “There was a rift. It was a tear in the fabric of the universe. There was some supposition that the ancient race was sucked into it. Others believe they knew of it and fled.”

  “What is a rift?”

  Azar thought a moment and shrugged. “I don’t have the right words or pictures to send to you. A hole in reality is an imprecise analogy. Shortly after, the dead arrived. And about the same time the Animal people like Kanarchan showed up. They lived in tribes and began to care for the dead. We had little to do with either, according to the histories, but the Animal people left us alone.”

  “Where did they come from and why?” I asked. I was still having a hard time getting my head around this and getting it from a demon made it even harder.

  “I’m not quite that old, but no one who wrote these things down seemed to know.”

  “No one talked to the Animal people?”

  “Or the dead.” Azar grinned, which always made him look more like a demon. “Demons, as you call us, at least ourselves, Shawaz and the Azaroti, tended to keep to ourselves. Then the angels showed up. They came through the rift. A few at first. No one bothered with them. No one saw what they really were. Not angels. They stole those forms from another race they slaughtered.”

  “They are the ones who massacred your kind? Why?”

  “They were doing experiments. Created the stupid races. And then they discovered the nature of glimmer. That’s what they call it, what you call a glamour. A biological substrate that forms around the dead giving them lifelike properties. They found something about it and began herding up the dead and putting their cruel and stupid demons in charge of them. They created monsters like the Magister and put them in charge. The Animal people, who considered the people to be in their care, rose up, but the angels were too strong. They too were slaughtered until a deal was brokered. A council was formed, populated by some rebel Animal people but also some who decided to cooperate. The Council was a puppet body that allowed some rebels, like Kanarchan, the ability to protect some of the humans.”

  “And I take it that when Kanarchan killed jackal-head, the Council and that deal were dissolved.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do they want?”

  “No one really knows. Except they want the guardian powers. Yours in particular.”

  “And my power is…?”

  “The ancient books never said. They merely referred to it as ‘Sky.’ Saripha stumbled on it in her meditations, guided by Rooni.”

  Saripha looked at me. “It seemed to be tied to storytelling whenever I looked at it. A typewriter that could change a world that Janovic had created. Tattoos on the skin. Tools creating words. If we knew how to control it, it could probably reshape worlds.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I wasn’t sure I believed it, but it made me dizzy thinking about it.

  “And they can’t take it from me?”

  Saripha looked at Azar and Rooni. Azar looked at Rooni, then back at us.

  “The power is like a seed. Once planted it takes on your genetic patterns and winds its way through your entire nervous system. If they tried to strip it out, they would lose it.”

  “However, they have implied I could give it to them.”

  Saripha shook her head. “So far, we’ve turned nothing up on that.”

  “And if they had my power and could make full use of it?”

  Saripha was thoughtful for a moment.

  “This is where Rooni comes in. As you have guessed, I think, Rooni can communicate with Azar. She can communicate with me but it is more limited.”

  “Not quite as limited as it is with me.” I looked at Rooni. She squinted her eyes.

  “You remember I told you there were many places the dead can go to and she guided me here. According to her—and most of this comes from Azar—the angels come from one of those places and they want to remake these worlds.”

  “Remake?”

  “The only way to do that is to destroy the worlds that exist and start over.”

  “And how do they survive that?”

  “Part of what we don’t know.” Saripha shrugged.

  I thought about this for a moment. “You know, I liked all this a whole lot better when I was just killing demons.” I turned to Azar. “No offense.”

  “I’m not a demon.” He sneered playfully.

  “You still are fighting demons. It just has a more cosmic backdrop now.”

  “Which brings the question… do I have any practical abilities for the more mundane things I’m trying to do?”

  “Remember your fight with the Shade, Baron Steel?”

  “Of course. What about it?”

  “As you described it, you invoked the blue power to transform elements of the air and your blue form into hardened crystals.”

  “Well, actually I thought he was the one doing that.”

  “It was you.” Saripha smiled. “However, in a sense it was him. You were letting your unconscious weave a story that resulted in local changes in molecular structure. That’s what you have to learn to harness.”

  “And how long will that take? I’m pretty tired of all this mystical stuff.”

  Saripha laughed. ”Nice to see great power doesn’t change you, Quentin. I think that knowledge is enough. There is no practice. You now have to learn to use your power in the world.”

  “Then we can leave?”

  I looked around the room.

  “I’m up in the mountains with a witch, a demon and a cat.” I shook my head. “If I ever get to write this down, no one is going to believe me.”

  17.

  “I really like the blue hair.” Anika winked at me. Izzy grinned. Roland just looked a little confused.

  I stayed for two more days at “the lodge” with Saripha. Most of the training for those days involved various forms of meditation. Both Rooni and Azar ignored us and Rooni left the first day. Finally we left. Azar guided us to the edge of the mountains where we picked up on landmarks that led us back to Zaccora to join the others. I was relieved to be back with friends and able to think about what our next moves were. The blue hair comment made me remember how my glamour had changed. I appeared pretty much as I always had, except my hair was blue. I had initially thought of putting some effort into changing it. However, the way the glamour bodies worked was that you appeared the way you thought of yourself. To get it to appear differently took great effort and was hard to maintain. Anika could make herself appear as either gender because she or he really thought of him or herself that way at different times, so her or his body changed as thoughts changed. I’m not sure why I manifested the change in me as blue hair, but that is what seemed to come most naturally.

  We were gathered near where we had blown up the bridge connecting the two sectors of Zaccora on either side of the river of lava. A small wall of debris had been built up. With me, besides Izzy, Anika and Saripha, were Roland, Kyo, Taka and Blaise. Izzy and I leaned on the wall.

  “Anything change while we were gone?” I looked at Roland.

  “Not much. No sign of the Shade. Since they can no longer make excursions into our part of the city, they occasionally lob over arrows. Random shots. Don’t ever hit anyone. We have maintained patrols around the perimeter and have fortified the rooftop positions to make sure no one tries to get in.”

  “How long do you think we can remain in this standoff?” I asked.

  Roland shrugged. “I don’t know. As long as they are leaderless, which they seem to be, maybe quite a while. There’s no easy way for them to attack. We took that away from them. Any attempt to move numb
ers of their forces around the city walls would be immediately detected by our scouts.”

  “What if they did launch a full-out attack? Let’s say more than one prong to the attack. All their forces.”

  “The problem is, we don’t know what ‘all their forces’ entails. I have a rough idea how many of the Dark Men remained loyal to Gerod. However, you said they’re allied with the gray demons. We don’t know what we are looking at since we never had time to determine their homelands. We also don’t know how they got into the city without detection, so I’m guessing underground caverns.”

  I looked at Roland and then at Taka and Blaise as a thought occurred to me. Blaise must have seen it on my face. He shot me with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Bingo!”

  “If there’re caverns under that part of the city, there may very well be branches that run under this part of the city.”

  “We thought of that.” Roland shook his head. “We have looked everywhere and found no sign of underground chambers anywhere. The lava flow may have cut them off.”

  “And I suppose there is equally no way for us to sweep down on them and defeat them once and for all.” I looked at Roland.

  “No. We’ve got no way to move large numbers of troops through the various access points. We have no idea how well armed they are and we’d likely have the disadvantage of having to chase the demons down into caverns they know and we don’t.”

  “So is this like Berlin. We just stay on our sides of the lava and wait?”

  “Might be if we could eliminate the charismatic leader, the rest would collapse,” Blaise mused.

  “Might work,” Roland said. “Unfortunately, we have no idea where he is.”

  “From what I can tell, he has taken on a lot more in this sector than Zaccora. This skirmish may, in fact, be a low priority for him. The Magister seemed to be a captive. Looks like Knightshade is Shade, Manitor and Magister rolled up in one, answering only to the angels. Knightshade may or may not be a threat to Gerod, but in either case, Gerod is in bed with the angels.”

  “I don’t understand what happened to Gerod....” Roland’s face clouded.