“The Fist fail to see the grand design,” he said, leading her toward a far set of doors. “That this, neither my squalor nor their seeming opulence, are the limits of possible aspiration. Were they a little less content I suspect they would.” Then he sneered. “Even glittering gold should not blind one to greater possibilities. There is always more gold. Better horizons.
“Complacency is death.”
They passed on to the other side, Jess feeling increasingly wide-eyed as she looked around the large space. It was mostly intact, filled with decay and ruin just like the rest. These people had done nothing to restore any semblance of the greater past all around them. It was truly a mutant town and she wondered how Arclyss had become so unique among them. But it was a big city. Perhaps there were castes; others like Arclyss in other parts, better amenities, better conditions.
“You are worthy of more than just our help,” he was saying. “You are worthy of our sacrifice. That was their purpose once. They have clearly forgotten it.”
And they were going through the next set of doors even as she began to get an uncomfortable sense of foreboding.
Suddenly she was very tense.
“Here,” he led her to the side in the smaller, darker area, found a hidden access in the wall and pushed it. A section slid back—the first sign of active technology. He took a nearby torch from its holder and, at his lead, they were through and descending another set of stairs. Soon they were winding down and down, further and further in the tight passage with no other doors or other passages leading off. Jess began to feel the walls closing in as Arclyss finally reached a door at the bottom and stopped, torch bathing the small space in strong, shifting firelight.
He was tremendous in the cramped foyer.
“I have waited for this day,” he said. She craned her neck to look up into his eyes; tried not to swallow hard and couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to appear nervous but she was. Terribly so. Everything was conspiring to shake her in that moment. Not least of which was her sudden fear of that place.
“I did not know when you would return,” he said. “But I knew I would be ready when you did.”
Return?
Her heart was pounding.
And he opened the door and passed inside. She jerked herself into action and followed.
“I hope I have done my part,” his voice echoed into a much larger space. A dark space. He was busy lighting other torches. When done he tossed the one in his hand to a pile of wood that caught and roared across a huge metal bowl, filled with kindling. Flames roared upward from it like a giant bonfire, lighting everything dramatically all at once.
It was a cave. A big cave. Echoing with every small sound. Carved into a perfectly domed space, towering many stories overhead. And there, at the center …
A giant statue.
As Jess began to tremble, eyes locked to the colossus at the center of the room, Arclyss stepped proudly to a spot near the bonfire bowl. He extended his arms to the sides, presenting the entire, cavernous room, as a game show host might present the big prize.
“Welcome back, my priestess.”
CHAPTER 44: THE GATE
It was her.
“Your absence has been long,” Arclyss was saying; a distant voice. A faraway sound. “The timing of your return, perfect. All is as you predicted.”
Her heart was now pounding so hard; pulsing in her ears; she could scarcely hear him, a dull echo in her ears as he continued.
“The statue was made after you left us,” he looked to it, following her gaze. “To remind us.”
By then the spine-gripping chill was shooting hard all the way through her, from head to toe, seizing her like a vice—even as her entire body filled with icy denial.
This was all wrong.
Impossible.
But there it was. Right at the center of the room …
An altar, a shrine, more like, dusty and unused for ages, melted candles and other artifacts at the base, remnants of what might once have been offerings, all fronting on …
The girl from the dream.
A stone statue, twenty feet high, huge even in that palatial space, carved in perfect, exacting detail. Wearing the same armor—the exact same armor she wore now—she looked down, disbelieving, confirming it—every plate, every crease, every seam—holding the same sword, etched in as fine a detail, extended overhead in one hand, a cry of battle on her determined stone face. A Kel face. It was the reflection from the panel, the Kel girl from the dream, hair flying about her head, legs spread in a snapshot of action. Whoever the sculptor they clearly saw her charging to the fight. A force to be reckoned with. Whoever the artist they captured the image perfectly. Every shocking detail. The statue was a perfect copy of what she’d seen in her dreams.
In my memories.
She shuddered in witness of it.
After everything, after finding the armor and the sword, vivid elements of that persistent mental imagery come to life, after everything she’d done, everything she’d learned, everything that was said, everything she’d been told and now this ...
She should’ve seen it coming.
All the pieces of the puzzle had been there all along, piling up, and with this final chunk fell neatly, impossibly, into place.
It was uncanny.
But how could it possibly be?
It can’t.
She stared long and hard at that oh-so-familiar face. Big, stone, statue face. The exact face from the dream. The one that looked back at her so clearly in the reflected surface of the shiny panel, looking at her now. So disturbing, that experience, looking into her own eyes in that dream world—my eyes!—a Kel girl, and now here she was, fully awake, looking straight at it again …
My face.
A giant, real-world representation of the same. Confirming for her it was not a dream at all, as she’d suspected, but a memory. That girl in the dream had been real.
That girl had been Aesha.
I’m not a herald, Jess realized in one mind-expanding moment. I’m not here for the priestess.
She felt her whole body vibrating.
I am the priestess.
Everything had become disconnected. Her whole world … unhinged.
Like she was barely there at all.
I’m Aesha.
But it was true.
She shifted for balance. Nearly fell.
It’s me.
Arclyss gestured. “As I say, we have waited a long time.” His voice penetrated the buzz in her head. It was as if a thousand jumbled little shapes rotated suddenly to reveal … the truth. Like a mighty lock slamming home, and the certainty of it rocked her to the core.
“How … ?” was all she could manage. Her first and only word. She wasn’t sure who she was asking; the air, the walls.
There were no answers.
Arclyss lowered his arms and came to her.
“The How of it may be beyond us,” he said. “All we can know is that Aesha is gone,” he pointed to the statue as he walked, indicating the giant representation of the Kel priestess—the giant representation of her. He came closer, stopped and stood beside her, filling her peripheral vision. “And Jessica is with us now.” He laid a hand on her shoulder and it snapped her sharply to the present.
“What matters,” he said, “is not how that connection might be, or how it came to pass. Only that you’ve found your way.
“You have returned.”
Her voice fell to a whisper.
“Who am I?”
Now, more than ever, the answer to that question …
In the pause she felt his hand acutely; concentrated on it, hanging on tightly to that tiny little anchor, afraid she might fly away. At any instant.
“You are you,” he said simply, as if it were a silly question.
She took a moment to breathe. To just breathe. To be there, to orient herself, to hold herself upright.
But it was all true.
All of it.
She’d b
egun to notice other things. Other things in the cavern she was afraid to see, most specifically an obvious relic of technology, something from those final days; half as big as the statue and situated off to the side. A ring of metal, maybe ten feet across, standing on end.
A gate.
Arclyss followed her line of focus.
“The World Gate,” he said. “Hidden with the statue. We have kept its secret.
“It is what you seek.”
She swallowed. More memories, cascading; flooding, an absolute torrent of them.
I’m Aesha.
Come forward in time. Somehow, some way, standing there in the present as Jessica. Totally different person ...
Totally the same.
She was herself. You are you. She struggled with Arclyss’ words. Held to them.
Struggled desperately to accept them.
I am me.
Aesha.
Jessica.
She was there and that was all that mattered, as Arclyss said—I made it! A tremendous relief overtook her amid the turmoil, one she could not explain, and as the world continued crashing in upon her the absolute truth of it, beneath the thin veneer of impossibility—a veneer that not long ago would’ve been a solid, granite wall of conviction—crystallized, so sharp, so real, the veneer flapped harder and was all but gone.
Bodies. Forms.
Like wearing a different costume, playing a different character but still her. The reality of her separated from the chatter and she saw herself for who she was.
Timeless.
Galfar’s talk of puppets came to mind and she reeled harder, zooming in and out of those points of view, alternating like a flickering flame between feeling scrunched to a tiny ball and feeling a hundred feet tall.
Things were shifting. This was far from over. Bigger and bigger blocks fell into place, knocking loose others as they did, restructuring the whole of her being. Her perception until now had been through the filter of modern life, through the filter of Jessica, who she was right then, right at any given moment and perhaps through the memories of a short existence. But—and she realized this now, though it had been unknown to her at the time—her perception had always and also been through the filter of Aesha, and perhaps others—she had to consider that possibility as well—and all at once that shuddering flood of clarity was roaring impossibly through her, knocking aside everything left standing and opening her mind with such volume she began to shake out of control.
It finally blew her completely out of her head.
Arclyss noticed the difficulty with which she was hanging on.
“Stay with us, my priestess,” he steadied his grip on her shoulder. Steadied his grip on her, holding fast, watching her change before his eyes. He must certainly see it.
Her imminent departure was very real.
“It is a shock,” he acknowledged. “Recognition is not always an easy thing. You must not leave us.”
Denial continued its battle against this rising expansion of consciousness, perhaps the only thing keeping her in place—that last, desperate insistence that it couldn’t possibly be true—but she could see that was a battle that would very soon be lost and she must find a way to accept what was real or go mad. When she eliminated all other possibilities the truth was all she had left.
I was Aesha. Now she was Jessica.
Who she was then, who she was now …
Her true identity, her true self …
Unchanged.
Arclyss beckoned her to the gate even as a fresh wave of epiphanies battered her to higher and higher states, such that the entirety of her perceptions thrummed with a force that nearly overrode all else. All contact with anything physical had taken on an elusive quality, an escalating intensity she began to fear might become permanent and all at once she was terrified she might lose her grip entirely and be gone, never to return.
But Arclyss was moving, she with him. He kept his hand on her shoulder; connecting her, guiding her gently as they walked, maintaining physical contact and holding her steady in the process. Talking to her, keeping her there. As if knowing this was exactly the thing to do. To give her no more time for dangerous introspection.
He was saying something about the gate.
“This is the way to the Other Side,” he extended a long, dark arm. “It was central to what you were protecting at that time. It is the gate to knowledge.”
They stopped before it.
Driven by some unconscious memory Jess reached to her back and grabbed the sword from its sheath. It slid free with a crisp schiiing! and was in her hand, catching the firelight.
Arclyss eyed it with her.
The key.
She stepped away from him and went closer to the thick metal ring, swallowing down the momentous. Arclyss continued talking behind her, but stayed where he was as she went ahead.
“Before the great burnings all was lost,” he told her. “We have kept this safe.”
Slowly Jess turned the sword side to side, studying the tiny, precise engravings along its length. She lowered it and stepped up to the gate’s base, on automatic. The base was wide, metal, crossed with grooves. The gate itself was of the same metal, about a foot thick all the way around, wound with heavy cable, evenly spaced symmetrical blocks of some specific function laced with obvious signs of technology. All of it inert. Not a blinking light, not a sign of current, not a hum—not anything to indicate it was even remotely working or even capable of working. It was covered in the same layer of dust as everything else, making it look for all the world like no more than another carving. A statue. Not unlike a replica of the fictional device in the movie Stargate, at least in shape and, she had to assume, function.
This thing went somewhere.
Far.
The Other Side.
Arclyss remained where he was.
“After your departure,” he said, “I suspect all was lost. I have no other information to give you. I know not where this goes. I knew only that you would need it.”
She held the sword down and to the side, turning it this way and that, lining it up with parts of the gate, judging angles and fit, images flashing at the edges of recall.
The key.
She found the slot.
“Thank you,” she lowered the sword and turned to face him. “Thank you, Arclyss.” She was coming down from the high of vast displacement, of both time and scale, settling once more on that plane of terrific purpose. Action.
Arclyss smiled.
“Go, my priestess. Restore us.”
She thought to say more, to go to him, to hug him for his faith, as the teenager in her was suddenly compelled to do, for being the one who saw the truth, who saw through the muddied past of whatever had gone before, of all the wrong interpretations and all else that stood in the way and, in the end, safeguarded the very thing that would give her the means.
But there was too much, and too little, to say. And so she merely gave him a nod, turned to the gate and, without hesitation, thrust the sword through the waiting slot.
It came alive.
Popped, with an instant discharge, one that should’ve startled her but didn’t, followed by a crackle that rippled the air. She withdrew the sword and stepped back as a blue arc raced around the inner ring, forming a full circle that then crawled across toward the center until all points met, closing like an iris of electric blue energy. As it went it shimmered and smacked the air, an acrid buzz that spoke of untold power.
She sheathed the sword and looked once more around the cavernous room. Harsh blue light now competed with the blazing light of the bonfire, shadows everywhere, both natural and artificial, flickering sharply in the stark illumination.
I am Aesha.
And she was back.
Your priestess is back.
The truth of it gripped her.
With one more glance at Arclyss she faced the electric field and, not giving herself even a second to consider what she was doing, what might be on the othe
r side or even how—or if—the thing truly worked …
Stepped through.
CHAPTER 45: DESTINY
Cee knew Voltan did not approve. Neither did she care. From the moment she brought Kang back into the fold there had been ripples of dissent. She stood now with her Praetor in the observation briefing room of the Dasaad, his command dreadnought, along with their three military chiefs and, to their mutual discomfort, Kang.
Throughout the entire conference Voltan had made little effort to conceal his displeasure.
“I see nothing to compel us to take more measures in that direction,” he was saying. “Though we hold this world in our grip it is yet a monster.” As he said this he glanced at Kang. Whether intended as an insult Cee couldn’t tell, but Voltan did not let go the opportunity to subtly remind them they shared this high-level session with a beastly interloper. Kang listened quietly on his translator, saying nothing.
Voltan went on. “Compared to their numbers we are quite small. Even with your additional forces there are a hundred thousand of them for every one of us on this expedition. And while they have no viable solution against us, they are in many cases armed and capable of high degrees of improvisation. We must continue to allocate our efforts carefully.” He looked to the wide window and the Earth far below. A real window, this room a special vanity for viewings and meetings during relaxed times. Technically this was a time of war, but the people of Earth could do nothing against them.
“We’ve finished rounding up what world leaders we can,” Commodore Gread reported, head of their tactical operations. “Many have gone underground, leaving us with a scattered group of former heads of state still at large. Whether they ultimately connect with or contribute to any emerging resistance remains to be seen.”
Voltan returned his attention to the room. “These are exactly the sorts of things we’ve expected. Further, we can expect pockets of insurgency, terrorist attacks on forward installations, possible assassination attempts and the like.” He stood a little straighter. Spoke to his commanders. “Continue tracking anything that flags our established markers. Maintain your strike forces on alert. Be ready to respond where and when dictated.”
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 51