Reawakened

by Dean C. Moore

  “Ancestral magic is powerful magic. We just need to infuse the best part of your father and all his ancestors before him into the blade, so they can fuse their fighting prowess with yours. Likely you’ll need their help if you plan to keep breaking swords and living to tell about it.”

  He smiled. He liked Aba; he couldn’t help it. She was a nice combination of sass and substance; as reality-embracing as she was eager to transcend that reality with her access to secret knowledge. “I’m up for that,” he said.

  “Magic doesn’t scare you?”

  As he became more and more lost to the character he was playing, Soren said, “Well, yes. I suspect it was used against me. It was how I lost this fight. I had beaten all of the best fighters on my own. Then the most hopeless of the lot, got his second wind and came at me as if possessed. The more I think about it….”

  “Yes, well, there are a lot of possessed people in these parts. Some black warlock is believed to be behind it. No one is quite clear on all that he’s up to. Whatever it is….”

  She had been hammering away as she talked. Before she could finish fixing his sword, some demon broke through the wooden walls of her barn. The horses all around her, in their stalls, riled, whinnied and bolted out their stalls. She grimaced at them. “Fine animals, until you’re in more need of help from them than just a ride.”

  Soren flashed on Aba and her blind huntresses in their lair back in his timeline, surrounded by dragons, thinking she probably didn’t even realize the degree to which her own psyche was attempting to heal wounds from the past—even prior to the alien queen’s interventions.

  The creature before them, demanding his full attention, snapped Soren back into the moment. It sported the armoring of a Baja desert horned lizard, only in the form of an upright humanoid. Its arms and head and legs had spiked, horny extensions so it didn’t need to carry weapons. Lastly, its tongue lashed out at Aba with the flexibility and length of a whip, coiling multiple times about her neck and constricting. It would continue not until it choked her but until it severed her head. It was already drawing blood, the micro scales of the tongue’s surface echoing the ones along the lizard’s body.

  Aba was already articulating words of power, albeit in a breathy, distorted fashion, considering the pressure on her larynx. For a black woman she was turning an impressive shade of purple; Soren, forever scientific-minded, wondered how that was possible. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him. The bloodshot veins scrawling across the whites of her eyes were forming intricate, cobweb patterns that did not look random, or simply the result of an inflammatory body response—they were part of the magic she was casting.

  When the last strands of the web were in place across her eyeballs, lasers fired out both her eyes at the horned demon. The lasers’ heat compounding inside the opened mouth of her attacker caused him to reflexively bite off his own tongue. Aba started unwinding it from around her throat even as she temporarily blinded the creature with the lasers. Then she tethered the creature with its own tongue, serving as a lasso, to her anvil. “It’ll make a good guard dog,” she said, even as it hissed at her and yanked at the anvil, trying to break the cord. “And when its eyes and its tongue heals, even more so. And he’ll mind his manners with me from now on, I imagine.”

  “Hmm, kinky,” Soren said, but felt he had no more to say on the matter. “And my sword.”

  “Yes, where were we?” She raised her hand and healed the wound in the side of her barn. All Soren could think was whoever this bad ass warlock was, he’d picked a fight with the wrong lady. And if the metal smith was no exception, he’d definitely come to the wrong village hoping to put it under his thumb.

  That’s when Soren realized that that part of the fantasy was a consequence of the alien queen being inside Soren’s head. A part of her knew he was here to free them all from the yoke of her tyranny, and strangely enough, she was providing him the fodder to work through the problem in this and possibly many other alternate realities. Why? Could she tutor him even in his quest without feeling him much of a threat? He supposed she could; he shivered at the realization.

  The smith smelted the steel until the blade was whole again, melting into one piece in the fiery pit of her cauldron; the sword floated atop it like a lone barge at sea.

  As Aba concentrated on infusing the blade with her latest words of power, Soren’s mind once again linked to her past, seeing the drama that had led to this one. In the time of King Arthur, she had been the knight and in need of a blade, but in need more of confidence for a fight he was sure he was going to lose. He wanted to flee, but such cowardice would have been even harder to bear. The metalsmith servicing the knight that Aba once was in that other lifetime must have read the expression of fear on his face well enough to “infuse the sword with magic.” Whether the smith had any magic at all was a matter of question, but the confidence relayed wasn’t. Her lie, or her magic, whichever was to blame, did the trick. As a knight he felt so indebted that his soul couldn’t rest until he’d repaid the debt; hence Aba’s incarnation as the magic-endowed smith of this world.

  But the alternate reality was more layered than that. The demonic beast that had broken into her safe space…she had been the subject of a wizard’s attack in yet another past life, and fared poorly. The sense of vulnerability had carried with her like a scarlet letter across many lifetimes, informing even her present as the blind huntress. So long as her soul sported that scar, her bravery would always be, to some degree, mock bravery. And so, this drama behind her now, she was one step closer to being more fully in the present.

  And the laser eyes? Soren wondered. How could a person living in this time know about lasers? At once he saw the answer. The blind huntresses had come here to get in touch with their oversoul—the part of themselves that was aware of all lifetimes, not just the one that held them prisoner in this or that timeline at this or that point in history. Such an informed perspective was vital if they were to fully come into their power. And in the moment the beast burst through the barn, she was able to push her fears to the side, and find a solution from the calm stillness of her mind, a place devoid of all emotion, out of the many solutions that her future lives had for her. To do that, Aba had had to detraumatize her past through successful repetition of this drama and others just like it enough to override the kneejerk reflex of panic and fear that started so many lifetimes ago when the first beast burst in on her and got the better of her.

  The proof in hand that the alien queen was living up to her promise, there was little Soren could do for now but back out of here. He wasn’t going to win this argument; he wasn’t going to entice any of the huntresses away from the alien queen’s grips. The longer he stayed the more he himself would choose her as a deliverer over the path he’d chosen for himself back in the present.

  As much as he knew it was time to go, the fact was, his history as a knight in this world was already calling more loudly to him. The mix of neurochemicals in his head was how the alien queen was doing it; the cocktail had been created by an invading army of microbes and bacteria that subtly influenced the way he thought and felt.

  He had to win this battle for King Arthur. Much depended on it, and his heroism or lack thereof would make all the difference. The band was already small and outnumbered; it could scarcely survive his defection. The drama was so real in his head that not even the beast’s protests and ordinarily pushy manner could pull him out of it, nor could he force his way onto the stage of Soren’s mind as he usually could. The triad magic was no match for the alien queen, either. Natura, still psychically joined to Soren and the beast, feeling and sensing what they were sensing—rapidly excreting more microorganisms to overpower the cabbalistic nanites infusing him, concocted by the alien queen—all that was just buying him a dim conscious awareness of how he was being manipulated; it couldn’t free him.

  What severed the link finally was the baby’s scream.

  Natura was giving birth to Vima.

  *** />
  Soren found himself back in his body, gasping. To his surprise, his erection had yet to go soft, and already Vima was crawling her way out of her mother’s womb—on her own.

  The infant rose onto her two legs to stand before him, ripping the cord out of her stomach and rapid-healing the wound with her magic. She stared up at Soren whose butt was still firmly planted on the apex of the pyramid; he couldn’t have stood if he wanted—he was in too much shock.

  “Hurry and get dressed, you fool,” Vima said. “The world you have returned to is not the world you left. The alien queen has completed her experiments and arisen once again. The world that was once yours and free is now hers and enslaved.”

  ACT THREE

  INITIATIONS COMMENCE INTO THE NEW WORLD ORDER

  EIGHTEEN

  The location: a stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere; the terrain flat; the weather bearable. The sun nearly directly overhead; and the saguaro cactuses dotting the landscape all looked to Ramon like they were giving him the finger.

  Vima hovered on her airbike, still an infant, still in the buff, eying Stealy and Ramon, and shaking her head. “Can’t believe I’m saddled with you two losers.”

  Ramon smiled. “God, she’s verbally abusive, too. Victor is going to want in on this. He lives for verbal abuse. You think the triad magic will work, you know, with the occasional fourth?”

  “Moron.” The whispered reply came from Vima’s and Stealy’s lips at once, prompting Ramon to mumble, “I guess all venomous vixens think alike.”

  And then they were off, Vima zooming ahead into the lead on her airbike, Stealy racing to keep up, not used to being second to anyone on a bike—including the flying kind. “How’d she come by an airbike?” Ramon’s question was of the thinly-disguised-grumbling-complaint variety.

  Stealy shook her head. “He goes from deciphering ancient medallions that are entirely impenetrable to anyone else to not being able to come to the simplest conclusions on his own. Proof that pussy warps the minds of males something terrible.”

  Ramon grimaced. “Ah! The Natura Cabbala magic the Soren triad engendered. I guess that explains the weird waspish vibe coming from her air bike, which looks more alive than we do; which is saying a lot, considering the live wires we are.”

  “Open the damn portal, motor mouth. That larynx of yours isn’t a Ferrari, if you’re jonesing for heavy metal of your own.”

  Still with no idea where they were going, Ramon linked with their minds, held his right hand out, palm chakra up, and blasted them open a portal.

  “Been meaning to ask you,” Stealy said, “since when can you open portals through time and space?”

  “So long as it’s somewhere on Earth, I can go there, doesn’t matter where in time. A gift from Victor.”

  “When did he become so charitable?”

  “Not charity. Victor is always happy to send others into harm’s way if it keeps him safe and he can learn from their mistakes.”

  “Comforting that the more things change, the more they stay the same,” Stealy said, shooting them through the portal behind Vima.

  Ramon gasped at the sight of the Borobudur Buddhist temple from up close. Numbering among the great pyramids of the world, it was swarming with Buddhist monks cloaked in vibrant orange robes. “Look at the monks! Their prayer formation. Their lotus positions are set in a mandala configuration. They’re focusing and amplifying the magic of the temple.”

  Stealy didn’t respond, focused more keenly on tracking Vima’s winding path about the temple for which there was no natural corollary on the ground, making it harder for Stealy to intuit the best way to keep her in sight. She was no doubt concentrating to bridge the gap with her stealy magic that would help her get her hands on any illusive treasure.

  “Look.” Ramon pointed to the standing monks, arms held wide in prayer and heads tilted up to the sky, standing in the archways of the temple at its base, the ginormous roots of ancient trees which should never have grown so huge, framing them. They were feeding off the same surging energies the trees were feeding on.

  “The energy moving through here is incredible,” Ramon said. “Partly it’s the siting of the temple on intersecting Ley lines, but the monks are tampering with it. Even the giant bells and the Buddha statues adorning the pyramid are affecting the flows of energy.”

  “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Stealy said. “My stealy magic has gotten a lock on something that the rest of my mind is having trouble getting around.”

  Vima had found the opening in the earth she was looking for, disappearing into it just ahead of them. “Great.” Ramon groaned. “Just when I thought we would finally dig up some treasure from the past that didn’t involve going into some underground labyrinth. Mole Man, I am not.”

  Stealy, following the scary buzzing wasp sounds coming from Vima’s air bike and its wings flickering faster than a bee’s, descended into the hole in the ground behind her, without slowing and without hesitating. Personally, Ramon would have preferred some slowing and hesitation. Both seemed prudent. What did they really know about Vima anyway? Other than, if anyone had the key to the alien queen’s rebirthing magic, surely it would be she. It stood to reason. Perhaps that was justification enough to throw caution to the wind.

  “This tunnel, surely we can’t be the first to traverse it,” Ramon said.

  “It’s opening in response to the Natura Cabbala magic of Vima’s air bike. Without such magic, there is no such passage to the center of the earth; the portal would not open.”

  “Huh. I should have known that. I mean, I am the mandala magician.” It had never occurred to him that space-time warping geometries would ever fall under the province of anyone but a mandala magician. But here was magic that could procure similar effects. For the first time, his “seeing” into the true energy blueprints that described the patterns of chi energy coursing through the planet seemed less laser-like, and fuzzier.

  “Whoa! What the hell?” Ramon tried to get his mind around what he was seeing. “It’s an upside down pyramid. Why is the point focused toward the center of the earth?” He knew Stealy could have no answer for him. He was just thinking aloud, praying aloud for an answer to pop into his head actually. “Of course! This thing is some kind of transmitter, shooting energy through the center of the earth, where the magnetic core informs and shapes the magnetosphere about the earth. This device could well amplify its transmitting distance in such a manner.” His mandala magician’s mind, well given to such riddles that hinged on mathematical physics for a deeper understanding of them, continued fishing for missing pieces to the puzzle. “The temple structure down here—a strange mélange of rare earth minerals and metals fused into crystal lattices. It’s almost as if…. Of course, the engineers are using the psychic energy of the chi flowing through the planet, amplified by the monks, to continually enhance the crystals transmitting power. This thing has never stopped transmitting from the time it was built, still hoping to pierce the veil of darkness in the cosmos. But what is it transmitting, and to whom?”

  Ramon had no idea, and Stealy seemed as if she were in a trance; he wasn’t sure she was even listening to his ramblings. Perhaps it didn’t matter; there was no denying that the triad magic was enhancing his prescience; simply being in the presence of the two girls was driving insights much faster than working alone in Victor’s Penthouse, even with his mandala magic inscribed into its construction to assist his meditations. “Why would such advance technology avail itself of such primitive engineering? It could only be! The aliens had to make do with what this primitive planet could offer them. When their own technology came up short, when they could not salvage or recycle any more from their crashed ship—they had to figure out how to make do with the psychic energy the locals could procure for them that their spirit science coming up short could not. Have those aliens been trying to get back to their timeless existence, trying to free themselves from time itself for all these millennia, waiting for this transmitter to
finally power up?” Ramon felt his mind was finally circling around the heart of the mystery.

  “The missing pieces, Ramon, can likely only be filled in by answering the question of why Vima brought us here.”

  “Think, mandala magician,” Vima’s voice resonated in his head.

  “Even if this thing managed to power up,” Ramon mumbled, “built on primitive technology like this, relative anyway to what they were used to, to transmit messages in their sophisticated language, it would have to have used some kind of shorthand. Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough power to transmit much of anything at all. That shorthand, that’s what you came to get our hands on.”

  “Precisely,” Vima said.

  “With it we have a way for Soren and the beast to make progress with writing warding magic that might just flush the alien queen out of our midst.” Ramon felt comfortable that the final piece of the puzzle was in place. But something was still needling him.

  That’s it! “We have to change the settings on the antenna. Right now it’s transmitting to the cosmos, broadcasting an ever-widening cloak to hide the Earth from the alien queen’s civilization. But that civilization is no more and she is here. We have to refocus the antenna directly at her, and instead pulse this energy out through the entire planet. That much energy, focused on such a small target, relatively speaking, that’s the second half of the equation.

  “With the antenna refocused, and the cabbalistic shorthand in Soren’s and the beast’s hands….”

  He didn’t need to finish the thought, because Vima was already at the console. Like any telescope focused on the stars, the computers managing the lensing on this transmitter needed new instructions to change the shape of the lenses that made up the telescope. Vima was providing the ancient alien computer, located halfway along the length of the “telescope” or inverted crystal pyramid—itself an immense crystalline supercomputer—with those instructions now. But how? She couldn’t fit the alien language in her head any more than the rest of them; there just wasn’t enough gray matter to go around.