Unknown

by Paul Kelly

  “The War on Time is over!” he was shouting. “Every nation has agreed to the peace and those that did not have been shown the error of their ways. Why do the Breaches persist?”

  “We are working to close them,” an elderly woman answered. “But it takes dozens of Seers to close a Breach and only one to open one. And the work is risky, many have died already.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the king, in the kind of aggravated, hushed tones you never want to hear from someone in authority. “We killed every Seer who did not agree to the terms of the peace, did we not? Why is this still happening?”

  “You must understand my emperor, those who were not initially open with their discontent are increasingly hard to locate. Many are citizens of nations which disappeared during the first period of timeline change. Records of them literally do not exist anymore. And your recent directives against us are making things more difficult. Being forced to wear these symbols so openly makes us targets.” She indicated the diamond surrounded by a circle that was stitched into the hem of her robe. “Even those Seers who supported you are beginning to feel like they cannot make a life in Aubrey. It limits our supply of volunteers.”

  The emperor took a deep breath. “Nobody is trying to make you a target Celine. I cannot control what the people do. But these Breaches, they have to be stopped, they are killing so many.”

  “I live to serve your imperial majesty,” Celine smiled obediently. “And I understand the necessity of these measures. But it is difficult to get the word out now that we are forbidden from meeting in groups.”

  “We gave you all your own quarter in this fine city Celine, I think it is a small thing to ask for you not to congregate in large numbers. You know how dangerous just a few renegades together could be and you cannot speak for them all.”

  “You forced us into this quarter,” corrected Celine, her smile wooden. “Such an action has not made you popular.”

  The emperor nodded his head in what he probably thought was a wise and meaningful way. “You know that there is no help for it. We need to know who the Seers are and we need to know where they are at all times. I do not see any alternative to stopping these Breaches.”

  “Give us back the respect we once had before the War on Time. Reopen our schools and hospitals, win back the hearts and minds of a people you have worked so hard to estrange – then there will be no shortage of volunteers and the rebels just a minor nuisance.”

  “You always sought to instruct your betters Celine, rather than be instructed by them. But the days of Seers playing games with the world’s leaders are long past.You just concentrate on closing these Breaches. When we can be sure that the Seers of Aubrey no longer pose a threat, we will of course remove these emergency measures.”

  “Thank you, your majesty.” The old woman turned to leave, slowly shuffling out of the throne room. Elijah stayed, watching the emperor with a fixed gaze. He didn’t trust him. It was something about the way he talked, as if every word was dragged across silk. Or maybe it was just because he knew how this story ended. The emperor turned to the other two advisors who stood in the room. “Have you heard back from Galgala and Ekriam yet?”

  The first of them nodded, a plump middle aged man who wore a large gold chain which flopped against his belly. “Yes, your imperial majesty. They have all agreed to the Silence. They will put the necessary measures in place in their own nations.”

  The emperor nodded. “It has to be simultaneous, do you understand? The timing has to be exact. The Seers are too dangerous to be allowed mount a response.”

  “What about the remaining Breaches Sire?” the other advisor asked, a small thin man who looked like he could turn on his side and become all but invisible.

  “Celine and her people will close as many as they can before the Silence comes. Those that she does not close we will leave open. They will burn themselves out in a matter of months, provided no new ones are opened.”

  The advisor bowed low. “And of Celine herself?”

  “We cannot play favourites,” intoned the emperor in leaden tones. “Every one of them is a risk. When it comes to it, I will take her tongue myself.”

  The vision faded. With a start Elijah realised he was back in the small cavern with Solomon and in front of him was an apple whose form glittered with rainbow threads. Instinctually, he pulled the threads, whatever power that he was cursed with working its magic as he stared at it, fast-forwarding time. Within seconds, it was mouldy and reeking, moments later it was but a brown stain on the floor of the cave. Solomon clapped his hands in glee.

  “Brilliant, just brilliant, you’re really getting the hang of this! I am turning out to be an excellent teacher if I do say so myself. And I do.”

  But Elijah wasn’t finished. He could still see the threads of the timeline, forming a translucent, rainbow apple where the flesh of the fruit had once sat. He moved it back and suddenly, the apple began to reappear, slowly recomposing and forming the perfect red it had been but a second ago. Solomon started, surprised and frowned slightly. But the power still filled Elijah, he could feel it radiating through him, the force of the vision still fresh in his mind and he pulled at the thread again with his mind, or whatever part of him it was that could rend time at will, and once again the apple began to collapse in front of him. Then he brought it back. Then he destroyed it. Again and again until the power left him and spots danced in front of his eyes. He fell back, gasping for breath. The timeline left the apple and returned to lurking just on the edge of his vision.

  Solomon’s eyebrows rose. “So I think you’ve learned lesson one pretty well…”

  “I think,” rasped Elijah, his mouth dry and raw. “That I am entitled to a few answers here. Why do I keep seeing these visions and why do awful things always happen in them? Didn’t anything nice ever happen in the past? What is a Breach and what is the ‘Tear’, you know that thing that Ash said. And lastly, and most importantly, when are we going to rescue Truth?”

  “I set the lesson plan here…” replied Solomon frowning but he saw Elijah’s firm, yet exhausted gaze.

  “Fine. You want answers, I’ll give you answers. All Seers see visions of the past when they first discover their power, personally I think it’s the Voice’s way of letting us come to an understanding of it. It lets us see how the gift of Prophecy has been used in the past in the hope of guiding our hand today. But I’ve always been a romantic.”

  “What’s the Voice?” interrupted Elijah starting to get slightly worried about the fact that the old man who had taken him to join a secret organisation that lived a dozen feet underground was hearing voices.

  “One question at a time. The Breaches are what happens when you do a bad job of manipulating the Timeline. Or space in general. It is particularly common in the building of Tunnels…”

  “Manipulating the timeline-,” interrupted Elijah again. “That’s what I want to know. Then I can go back, before all this started. I can fix it, my dad, Truth, everything.”

  “You have to visit the Voice of Time first,” replied Solomon. “And even then it would not be easy. It can take as many as six Seers working together to go back as much as half an hour, let alone days. Why do you think we are losing this war? If we could do it, do you not think we would have gone back and made it so the War on Time didn’t happen? Nothing is ever that easy. And the further back we go, the more risk there is of opening a Breach. Even going back a few days is a risk these days. During the War on Time, it was easier to do but now the timeline has become so broken and so fragile, that any change, no matter how subtle, can cause a Breach. The world might have moved on, but our power still suffers from that war.”

  “Why isn’t anything ever easy? Can you at least tell me when the next raid is? I need to go back there. I need to rescue Truth.”

  Solomon hesitated for a moment. “There is a plan in place. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while… if it works, we may be able to save ev
eryone at once. Every single prisoner of the mines. But you will have to be patient. Now,” he clapped his hands together, smiling. “Something tells me it’s lunch time soon!”

  “I’ll eat here,” replied Elijah picking up the apple. “I want to train some more.”

  “Wait-,” started Solomon before Elijah’s teeth sank into the red fruit.

  The dull, penetrating taste of rot instantly hit Elijah’s tongue. He chocked, spitting out the piece of apple. It skidded across the floor. Elijah stared at the offending piece of fruit. Aside from the bite he’d taken out of it, it looked flawless.

  “What was that?” he groaned, feeling like he wanted to wash his mouth out with soap.

  “That’s what an apple tastes like when you force it back and forth across its own timelines,” replied Solomon.

  “Why?” asked Elijah still staring at the inconspicuous piece of fruit in his hand. He felt betrayed. When a piece of fruit can betray you, you know you’re in trouble.

  Solomon shrugged. “It died. You brought it back. That’s just what happens. When something dies, all that was good about it dies with it – and you can’t change that.”

  Elijah couldn’t get to lunch fast enough after that. Some people might be put off their food by the taste of rot. Elijah just wanted more food to force the taste away. Preferably something with about ten chilies in it. As they entered the cavern, he noticed that twenty large, white mats had been set up all around the room. Dozens of people had already begun to sit down on them, clutching bowls of soup taken from a huge black vat in the centre of the cavern. The atmosphere was hot and stifling, despite the massive area.

  Elijah grabbed a bowl from a teetering pile beside the vat, only now realising how hungry he was. Ladling a generous portion of soup into it, he took a seat on one of the white mats, near the back of the cavern. He gulped the soup down greedily, wishing that its consistency was just a fraction thicker than water and that the taste of the apple didn’t still plague his tongue. He had just finished when suddenly the whole room erupted with a brilliant, blazing light. Elijah shaded his eyes, staring around himself as over twenty Seers shone brightly. He was not alone anymore, he realised with a start. That meant as long as he could outrun the rest of them, the Skylanders would never capture him again. Always nice to know. He turned, looking for the source of the light and saw a Wyvern, walking through the cavern calmly. A couple of the other Seers glanced in its general direction, but most just returned to their soup.

  “I thought only the Skylanders had Wyverns?” asked Elijah as the beast stalked past him, its talons making a click-clacking noise on the floor.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about the Wyverns,” replied Solomon. “To be honest, there’s a lot you don’t know full stop.”

  Elijah watched it, unable to move his gaze. The animal looked familiar. It couldn’t be the same one, could it? He shook his head. He was just seeing what he wanted to see, seeing coincidences and providence when there was nothing there. He stood up, bringing his bowl out to a neighbouring cave, where a copper basin filled with cold water stood. He washed it quickly, then returned to Solomon who was onto his second bowl. Elijah waited impatiently as the old Seer finished the soup. This was taking far too long, he had to learn. How was he supposed to save Truth if he didn’t know how to use this power of his? Every moment spent here was another one she was spending trapped in those mines. He drummed his hand impatiently against the cold, rocky ground. It felt like an age until Solomon was finally done and they returned to the cave to resume their training.

  “Lesson two,” began Solomon. “Inanimate objects. You will find they are very similar to animate objects, but it takes longer before your power has any effect on them, simply because it takes longer for them to decay.” He placed a clay pot before Elijah. “Move its timeline forward by fifty years.”

  Elijah sighed. “How is this helpful?”

  “Guardians wear armour. If you want to get past it, you’ll need it to rust. Now my rapt pupil, destroy that pot!” He waved a finger in the air dramatically.

  Elijah shrugged and reached out for the rainbow of colours at the edge of his vision. Bright tendrils of the timeline flashed for just a second and then the cave was gone.

  Elijah stood on the side of a cliff, overlooking a vast crater. All around him, the desert stretched for miles. He was aware that far in the distance, the sound of the Siren could be heard, its high pitched wail irritating even at this distance. Around him a group of desert nomads were huddled together, their fingers pointing upwards and speaking in the quick panicked tones of the terrified. Elijah followed their fingers. Above him, one of the Skylander’s Islands was shaking. It is rare to see something of that size shake. Elijah imagined that it must be what the sea looks like to a bird. It was terrifying. When you see a floating island for the first time, your mind rejects the possibility. After a while though you get used to it. It because stable, a normal part of the sky. Seeing it shake felt like seeing the sun start to wobble. It made Elijah feel that something was very wrong with the world. This feeling was reinforced when large chunks of earth began to fall from the sky. It started as dust, so small and inconspicuous that it was caught and tossed about by the wind before it ever reached them, becoming part of the swathes of sand that travelled through the air in the desert. Then small pieces of grit began to fall, the nomads voicing early complaints as they began to sting their faces like hail. Then the first pebbles fell. One struck an elderly man who fell instantly, as if he was a puppet who had his strings cut. There was a gasp of disbelief from the nomads, quickly followed by a primal wail of terror and running. A crying woman dragged the dead body behind her as the pebbles fell with lethal speed. Elijah was terrified too, even though he knew the stones couldn’t hurt him. He flinched as each one passed through him, hitting the ground with a hiss. Vast chunks of rock began to rain from the sky above him, falling in huge dark swathes, obliterating the sun as they fell, a dark curtain of earth. Above him, the Island of Carthos began to tilt towards the south, like a saucer teetering on the edge of a table and even at this distance Elijah could hear the screaming of its inhabitants. The shaking increased, the Island seeming to vibrate in the air above him, more chunks of rock and earth falling around Elijah and crashing into the desert sand. And then it fell.

  It did not fall slowly. Somehow, Elijah had always expected it to fall slowly. As if something so large and implacable would resist gravity’s force better than the smaller pieces of rock and grit. Instead it crashed to the earth with all the power and force one would expect a continent sized asteroid to have, as if gravity was simply making up for lost time. It fell in a blur, a million tons of rock and earth warping the air as it fell, making a mirage of the whole world. Black dots peeled away from it as it fell, Elijah’s brain making them out to be Wyverns, fleeing the catastrophe. It hit the ground with a sound louder than the human mind can fathom. It was a never ending crash that shattered Elijah’s eardrums and smashed his skull from the inside out. And as it hit the ground the sand rose to meet it, rising like a wave to embrace the Island. Elijah stood on the edge of the crater but still it shook the ground around him, throwing the sand in the air and crafting a sandstorm that tore across the land, flying through Elijah and making him into a part of it. The wind howled through the air, as if all the air displaced by the falling Island had formed a mob and decided it was time for revenge upon the earth that had so disturbed it. It picked up the sand and tore through the air with it in tow, transforming the world into subtle shades of brown and beige. Elijah stood at the lip of the crater as the storm raged around him and stared at the fallen Island. It lay broken in the crater, a black mass before the sandstorm, huge chunks of rock and earth split and fractured into crumbling towers of earth and deep pits of utter darkness. Buildings lay collapsed around it, the scream of the Siren gone now and the sharp bright colour of blood tainting the fallen rocks. And somewhere amongst all the confusion of the fallen buildings and the
broken earth and the dead bodies, a baby began to cry.

  Elijah opened his eyes and gasped. He sat on the ground shaking for a few minutes as he tried to process what he had just seen.

  “The Fall?” asked Solomon, his voice sympathetic.

  Elijah nodded numbly. He could feel the power of the raw timeline filling him, but he didn’t have the energy to use it. He felt drained, exhausted. Slowly, he let it dissipate, the threads of rainbow which slithered across the cavern floor slowly receding to the edge of his vision.

  When Elijah spoke, his voice was cracked and weak.

  “Water?” he asked.

  Solomon passed him a leather water skin.

  Elijah took it and drank deeply. “Why am I so thirsty?” He asked after draining the bag, not wanting to talk about what he’d seen and feeling like changing the topic of conversation was the most mentally healthy thing to do at this point.

  “You talk when you see the visions,” replied Solomon. “Why do you think it’s called the power of Prophecy?”

  “So that’s why they take our tongues,” Elijah replied, unsurprised by the revelation. People always said that Seers could tell the future. Some even said that they caused it. An unfair accusation Elijah felt. It wasn’t his fault most of the future was so awful. It did keep company with the past and the present. Those sort of friends were bound to have a negative influence. “Did I say anything interesting?” he asked Solomon.

  His teacher nodded. “Apparently that rescue plan you were hoping for is going to go ahead. Tonight.”

  Tonight. Elijah felt both elated and terrified. He’d wanted to rescue Truth as soon as possible, he just didn’t know if he was ready. It didn’t matter, he reminded himself. He needed to be ready.