Unknown

by Paul Kelly

  “OK,” replied Greg. “But you have to stay inside the house.”

  Elijah agreed instantly, bobbing his head up and down like a demented chicken. But in his head, he was already wondering: why can’t I go outside? I bet there’s something really fun outside. And, mummy went outside but she wouldn’t tell me why. Why didn’t she tell me why?

  “OK, I’ll stay here, you go hide,” said Greg.

  “No…” replied Elijah, shaking his head and taking Greg’s hand. “All the good hiding places are in here. You go into you and mummy’s bedroom and count there. With your eyes closed. And facing the wall.”

  Greg surveyed the bare room, with its two chairs and plain wooden table and shrugged. He allowed himself to be led by the hand and pointed towards the far wall of his bedroom.

  “You stay here and don’t peak!” commanded Elijah, enjoying bossing his dad about.

  “Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…”

  Elijah ran out of the room laughing with glee. He went to his room first and hid under Truth’s cot, but that was too obvious. Then he went to the sitting room and tried to squeeze under the old armchair, as he had when he was a baby. But he wouldn’t fit. Then the door caught his eye and he walked up to it. Beside it was a window and Elijah jumped up, trying to see what was so much fun outside.

  “Ten, nine, eight,” came the steady voice of his dad from the other room. Elijah jumped and clung onto the window ledge. Outside, his mother walked by, holding a basket. Inside the basket was a loaf of bread and some fruit and… but then Elijah’s arms gave out and he fell.

  “Five, four, three…”

  Elijah opened the door to surprise his mum, but even as he did so, he saw her walk straight past the house. Elijah walked out the door and closed it behind him.

  “Ready or not here I come!” said his dad in a mock stage whisper. But Elijah had already forgotten about the game. He wanted to know why his mum wasn’t coming home. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then he began to walk after her.

  Sybil dismounted Xanthius and stood on the roof of the temple. Solomon stood on the other side of the roof, staring moodily into the distance. Just five feet away, Yvonne kneeled beside Elijah who was asleep and drooling onto the stone roof. Nice.

  “This is what was so important?” she demanded of Xanthius.

  “Hush, girl and get over here.” commanded Yvonne, rising to her feet. Sybil forced down her irritation and walked towards her. As she got closer, she noticed that Elijah wasn’t sleeping. His eyes were open. This didn’t look good.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked Yvonne.

  “He’s trying to create an infinity loop to make your Islands fall out of the sky,” answered Yvonne.

  An intense feeling of shock and betrayal suddenly overpowered Sybil. “I didn’t think he’d ever really be able to do it,” she said, her throat tight. She stepped back from the Seer. Why had she ever let herself trust them? Why had she ever let her guard down?

  “I need you to help,” said Yvonne, staring at her intensely. “He will be tested. Time does not like to be told what to do. It shall try to divert him from the correct course.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t divert him off the side of this roof,” growled Sybil.

  “If you don’t help me, everyone on your Islands will die,” replied Yvonne, her gaze like ice. “The Wyverns are on every Island by now. They will kill every one of you for the pain you have inflicted on them and your Pulse-Masters are far too weakened to stop them.”

  “You brought me here to tell me this?” asked Sybil, rage taking hold of her. She grabbed Yvonne by the collar, readying the Pulse.

  Yvonne’s expression didn’t change. “That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not Elijah will be diverted from his path and the Sky will not fall as it should. It will be another Fall, except instead of just one Island, it’ll be every one of them.”

  “You’re not making sense,” growled Sybil. “There’s only one way for things to fall and that’s down!”

  Yvonne shook her head. “You’re missing the point, Sybil. Elijah was never chosen just to make the Sky fall. He was chosen to make things right. To bring things back to the way they were. If you help him, he can do that.”

  Sybil stared at the old Seer with an intense hatred. All she wanted to do was toss her from the roof of this cursed building. Instead, through gritted teeth, she said one word: “Explain.”

  Elijah followed his mother for ten minutes. He wanted to confront her and ask her where she was going but he was afraid she’d be mad at him for leaving the house without permission.She approached a small house on a street which Elijah didn’t know. The house had a green door and wooden shutters which were closed. Elijah walked around the house, trying to find a way inside. Behind it, he saw a garden, with a wooden fence. One of the posts was broken at the bottom and hung lopsidedly from the frame. Elijah struggled under it, imagining that he was a daring explorer. The wood scraped his back, but that just added to the sense of adventure. He ran up the garden. It couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet long but to Elijah it felt like a marathon. He reached the end of the house, gasping for breath and looked around himself furtively. He knew he was doing something wrong and he didn’t want any grown-ups to catch him. The back door to the house was open and Elijah snuck inside. He could hear his mother’s voice and he followed it, stepping as quietly as he could through the bright interior.

  “Can we get them out?” she asked.

  “It’s too late for them,” another voice answered her. “We have to take everyone we have already and leave this city.”

  “We can’t leave anyone behind,” replied his mother. “Either we all go, or none of us do.”

  “That’s not safe. I swear, I thought someone was following me earlier. We can’t stay any longer.”

  Elijah leaned against a hall wall, listening to the conversation in what he assumed was the sitting room. What was his mum doing? Who were these people? They kept talking, but Elijah wasn’t really listening. He began to think that maybe he should just reveal himself and ask her. He was alone in this strange house and he wanted to be close to someone he knew. Then there was a banging at the door. It was loud and angry. It wasn’t someone asking to be let in, it was someone telling you that they were coming in. Elijah ran down the hall and into the kitchen. He hid around the kitchen corner as the door fell from its hinges with a crash. From inside the sitting room, there was the sound of panic and muffled voices. Elijah turned towards it and saw five people bearing down on him. His eyes widened in terror.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  The nearest face said, “What’s a kid doing here?”

  And then his mother was there, her face shocked and her eyes scared.

  “Elijah you shouldn’t be here!” she whispered.

  “Why didn’t you come home?” asked Elijah lamely.

  From the hallway came the sound of heavy footsteps. The remaining four grown-ups rushed past Elijah and into the kitchen but were blocked by the men who had broken down the door. They were Guardians, Elijah realised. His parents had always told him not to go near the Guardians.

  Suddenly the small space was filled with shouting and screaming and far too many people. One of them ran at one of the Guardians who withdrew a sword, sweeping it in a wide arc and taking off his arm. Blood fountained up and Elijah screamed and ran into his mother’s arms. His mother held him and backed away from the scene and back into the sitting room. She held Elijah close and whispered into his ear.

  “We’re going to play a game of hide and seek, now Elijah,” she said.

  “But I’m already playing hide and seek with dad,” wailed Elijah.

  “It’s OK,” soothed his mother. “You can play it with me too. I need you to hide under there and you have to promise me, no matter what, that you will be quiet,” Elijah nodded and she fed him under the sofa, squeezing him in tightly. It was da
rk and dusty and the carpet was thin and rough. From the kitchen came the sound of screaming.

  Elijah looked out from under the sofa, staring at his mother’s feet. Gradually, voices drifted towards him.

  “You stand accused of harbouring fugitives of justice,” a man’s grunted.

  “You call this justice?” asked his mother, her voice angrier than Elijah had ever heard her. Somehow, that scared him more than the swords and the blood and the screams.

  “How do you plead?” the man’s voice continued, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “Will it make a difference?” asked his mother, but Elijah knew she wasn’t really asking the question.

  “No,” replied the voice and there was the sound of steel scraping on leather. A terrible sense of wrongness suddenly gripped Elijah, an awful awareness dawning on him. He was in a nightmare and there was no way out. The Guardian stepped towards his mother, his footsteps echoing in Elijah’s ears as if they were in a cave. Elijah tried to move out from under the sofa, to stop this man who was going to hurt his mother. But his mum had pushed him in too tightly, he couldn’t move. There was a rushing sound as steel met flesh and his mum moaned in pain and fell to the ground. She landed on her side, one hand extended outwards, towards Elijah. Her blood began to flow across the carpet and stained Elijah’s hands. He screamed then and he kept screaming and screaming until nothing but darkness enveloped him.

  Elijah started, falling out of the timeline and looked around himself. He had returned to the black void and his soul shook in the darkness. He could not scream, he could not cry, he had no voice in this place. His soul trembled at the memory of his mother’s death. No, not a memory. It had been so much worse than a memory. He wanted to scream and roar and curse the darkness. The Voice of Time had allowed him to accept the death of his father. It had allowed him to accept the death of his sister. But he couldn’t accept this. This was too much. He didn’t care about equity and peace. He didn’t care about being the Aontaithe. He just wanted to make the Skylands pay. He reached out and he took the strand of the timeline that lay before him. He took it and turned it and twisted it and wrought it into a circle. There was a flash of light and a screech of cosmic proportions and in the pitch black of the void a dark power filled him. He closed his eyes, feeling it chorus through him, bursting through every vein and vessel, becoming a part of who he was, the pain of his mother’s death melding into him. He opened his eyes and above him the Skylands loomed as close as ever before. Throughout it all a single brightly coloured ribbon flowed. Elijah threw the power of infinity at it and the ribbon flexed and blurred, straining against his will. Elijah roared, pulling all his power together and threw it at the single strand of the timeline. He missed. Suddenly, thundering in his ears, was the sound of drums. It struck the power of infinity, bouncing off it and forcing it off-course. It crashed into the side of the Island of Damon, shattering rock and debris that had hung there for over two hundred years. Elijah turned, towards the source of the beat, rage lighting his eyes. Sybil stood before him, her grey uniform splattered with blood, her eyes resolute.

  “Don’t do this, Elijah.” she said. But Elijah barely heard her. In his ears, there was a fierce rushing noise, as if all the sands of time were falling.

  “Why not?” he asked, grief and pain fighting for their place in his frazzled mind. “They have murdered everyone I love! They deserve to die!”

  “You cannot murder an entire nation Elijah! This isn’t why you’re here, this isn’t the man I know!”

  “You know nothing about me!” shouted Elijah, tears in his eyes, the power pulsing through his veins, demanding to be released.

  “There has been so much death already, Elijah, please!” begged Sybil, her voice pleading in a way Elijah had never expected. “Let’s do things better, together.”

  Elijah knew what the right thing to do would be. He knew what the logical thing was. The Voice had sent him here so that he could return the Skylands to the earth peacefully, so that he could make the world whole without another drop of blood. But emotions aren’t rational, they aren’t reasonable. They just are. He didn’t care what was right or what was wrong. He didn’t care about his destiny or the fate of EarthSky. They had killed his mother.

  “No,” he said and threw the raw timeline at Sybil.

  Sybil had never been the best negotiator but she had not expected Elijah to try and kill her. She dived across the roof, just narrowly avoiding the blast of bright light that shot from him. It caught the side of her sleeve and Sybil watched in horror as it began to turn to dust. She ripped it from her body, leaving her in just her vest. The top of her uniform was dust before it even hit the ground. That put an end to negotiations. A dozen feet away, Elijah’s attention had returned to the Skylands, his face a mess of grief and rage. Sybil was still exhausted after her fight with Tommen but she was not going to let him destroy her home. He was more powerful than her, she knew. But he was emotional, he wasn’t thinking straight. She could stop him. The beat of the Pulse sounded steadily in her mind and she threw it at him. It seemed to slow down as it approached him, the raw power of infinity that leaked from Elijah cushioning the blow. But it was enough to get his attention. He turned from the Skylands, rubbing his head, and fixed his gaze on Sybil.

  “Please don’t do this,” she tried again, a small part of her hoping that saying ‘please’ might change his mind. But Elijah was passed reasoning with. His face was haggard, a terrible determination in his eyes.

  “The Skylanders must pay for their crimes,” he replied.

  “Can’t you hear yourself?” shouted Sybil. “I’m a Skylander! Do you blame me too?”

  “All will pay.”

  Sybil was ready for the attack, but even so the sheer power behind it almost killed her. She threw herself to her right, flattening herself against the Temple’s roof as a vast flat ray of the timeline cut the air above her like a scythe. Across the roof, she noticed Solomon and Yvonne cowering in the square hole that she assumed must lead down to the rest of the Temple. The roof of the Temple was rough against her hands, the stone unsmoothed in the assumption no one would ever see it. Or ever have to fight for their life atop it. Above her, a steady rain of grit and dirt had begun to fall from the sky, showering Sybil’s bare shoulders. She looked up. The Island of Damon had begun to shake violently, the power of infinity already working its way through rocks that had hung there for hundreds of years. Further away, she could see the other Islands also shaking, Elijah’s power slowly infecting them. Sybil knew that her intervention hadn’t bought her much time. As with the top of her uniform, the strands of the timeline which held the Skylands together would slowly be devoured by the power of infinity. Before her, Elijah breathed heavily, his hands on his knees, destroying the world clearly being a very tiring duty. It was time he took a break. She feinted, sending a beat of the Pulse towards the side of his head. Elijah dodged sluggishly to one side, the new power he wielded allowing him to now hear the Pulse. At the same time, Sybil quickened the beat in her mind, coiling it back into a whip and snapping it out. It struck Elijah in the shoulder, the cushion that surrounded him taking most of the blow, but still forcing him backwards. Which was just where Sybil wanted him. Using all her might she threw the Pulse down in one concentrated burst, as sharp and precise as an arrow head. It fell with the speed and inevitability of a thunderclap. Elijah looked up, sensing it coming, but unable to avoid it. It hit him with the force of a thousand tonnes and he dropped like a rock, falling flat onto the Temple’s roof. Sybil gasped for breath, pulling in great lungful’s of oxygen as fast as she possibly could. Across the roof, Yvonne sprinted towards Elijah’s prone body.

  “He’s alive!” she reported.

  Sybil shook her head in wonder. That blow would have destroyed a house. Above her, the Island of Damon trembled in anticipation, huge clumps of earth and stone starting to peel away from it and crash into the desert below. She could feel the Pulse screeching in protest as El
ijah’s power slowly consumed it. She was so tired, but Sybil knew that there was still one thing she had to do. She reached for the Pulse, listening to its panicked, erratic beat as the power of infinity slowly unravelled it. She reached for it, but she didn’t embrace it, she didn’t make it a part of her. No, she knew exactly where the Pulse belonged, where it had always belonged. She closed her eyes, sensing the beat as she had done since she was a child and moving it, directing it and guiding it back towards the Wyverns. Elijah’s power had cut the bonds that tied the Pulse to her Islands and she couldn’t change that. The Skylands would never be the same again, she knew. But that didn’t mean anyone had to die. In her mind’s eye, the beat of the Pulse flowed across the world, a brilliant ray of light that flooded the Skylands. And she flowed with it, watching and listening as it returned to the Wyverns, the slow beat of drums sounding everywhere. It required little guidance, it knew where it belonged. And all across the Islands the Wyverns began to change, consumed by a light brighter than any that had ever shone from them before.

  And without the Pulse to hold it aloft, her Islands began to fall. Huge plains of land slowly drifted down into the desert and across the Burninglands. But they fell slowly, calmly and not with the terrible vengeance Elijah had sought to exact. Instead, they moved smoothly downwards, as if they were pieces in a child’s puzzle, returning to where everything had first started. Their descent cast a shadow over the Temple and over all the world. Sybil could feel them move, could feel the earth sigh with relief as they returned. As she flowed over them, she felt more at one with the Pulse than she ever had before.

  An age later, Sybil opened her eyes and she knew that the Pulse was gone and her Islands were earthbound. She had destroyed everything about her home that set it apart in the world and in doing so she had saved it. She wasn’t sure whether to feel elated or depressed. She looked up to see Xanthius standing there, naked. Not the sight she had been expecting. He kneeled down in front of her, holding her gaze.