The Keepers Of The Light (God Stone Book 2)

by Andrew Schafer

  “I’m afraid only time can heal the pain in your heart,” the giant said, then it paused as if listening for something. “Ah, beneath your fear is something else… anger. But you misplace your hate. You are not angry with me, human girl. Your anger is with Azazel. Why do you attack me with the magic weapon?”

  Strangely Gabi could understand the words, but she wasn’t sure how that could be. Yet she could. Its voice was calm, and its words were clear. Gabi spoke Spanish and English perfectly. She spoke the Maya language Tzotzil pretty well too, but the giant wasn’t speaking any language she knew. Or, wait, was it speaking all of them? The thing’s mouth wasn’t moving when it spoke. She realized she wasn’t hearing him with her ears; she was hearing him in her mind. There was something else in that voice though, something strangely familiar. His voice had a fatherly tone. It was so unexpected. No, there was something else – his voice was not just fatherly, but was that of her own father, Andrés. It’s my papa! Her heart ached at the sound of her father’s voice, and the realization nearly broke her.

  “I’ve upset you with this voice? I’m sorry. I thought it would be familiar… comfortable. I can change it.”

  “No.” Her throat constricted with emotion. “Please don’t.” She answered quickly, not understanding why, only knowing she wanted to hear her father’s voice more than anything.

  The giant stood, looming over her. “I am King Ogliosh of the nephilbock. Mine are peaceful people from a time long ago. We seek only to open the door that takes us home. Your Andrés was killed not by me but by my enemy.”

  She hadn’t said her father’s name, but she had thought it. It must be somehow reading her thoughts. The mention of her father and the word killed in the same sentence caused her heart to catch. Its enemy? The dragon? She looked up, noticing it was looking down expectantly, as if waiting for her to speak, but before she could, her father’s voice returned.

  “Yes, that’s right – my enemy is what you call a dragon.” Ogliosh nodded sagely. “I know your pain, Gabi. I am sorry for your loss. I only wish I could have stopped the soulless beast, but I was fleeing for my own life after waking to find Azazel trying to kill me.”

  So it was reading her mind.

  Her father’s soothing voice rang out in her mind again as the giant continued. “Gabi, I am listening to your thoughts. Everything you think, I hear. Your mind is like a room with a door. The door is open, but you can close it. Focus your thoughts on my voice. Feel me inside your mind. Can you feel my presence?”

  Gabi thought back, Yes.

  “Good. Now push the door to your mind closed. It should feel like a pressure. But before you do, understand when you feel me press against your mind you will need to open the door for us to communicate. If you don’t open the door, I can’t come in. Try it now.”

  Gabi focused on the giant’s presence in her mind and immediately she could feel it in her head. As directed, she thought about the room and the door. Her brows furrowed as she concentrated, visualizing the door shutting. Suddenly the giant was gone from her mind and everything was still. Her thoughts were hers and hers alone. Outside of Gabi’s mind, she felt the giant pressing on the door. Now she pictured herself opening it.

  “Excellent! You see, when we are not talking or when you want to think about something you don’t want me to hear, simply shut the door. If I want to talk to you, I can press on the door. If you want to talk to me just think to me. Excuse me now,” Ogliosh said. Turning, he walked back and picked up another large boulder and brought it back to the opening.

  Gabi felt the boulder hit the ground after the giant let it fall from his arms. King Ogliosh turned back to face her, ambled over, and peered down at her with his strange oblong eye. Slowly he knelt; his giant knees popped, echoing through the corridor. Then he placed one of his large six-digit hands flat onto the floor and shifted into a sitting position, crossing his large legs. He rested the strange hands on his knees as if preparing to meditate. Even sitting he was still much, much taller than her.

  Her heart began to slow as the feeling of imminent danger passed. With the giant sitting down and the late-day sun pouring into the opening, Gabi could really look at the strange being. She stared at its odd six-digit hands resting on its knees. Black veins spiderwebbed just under the surface of its waxy, pale skin. She wondered oddly if its blood was black too. Most of its skin was bare, except for his loincloth of what she guessed was jaguar hides and a tunic made of what almost looked like lizard or snakeskin. But she couldn’t imagine the size of the creature necessary to make a tunic this large, and there were no visible seams in the garment. Some form of leather hides, wrapped and stitched, covered his massive feet. He was covered in scars – old battle wounds, she guessed. She let her eyes wander to his face, which was also scarred and wrinkled. His lower jaw protruded with a bad underbite, and his mouth seemed to be overcrowded with teeth. Then, suddenly and quite terribly, he smiled. The crow’s feet on each side of the giant’s eye folded up like the bellows of an accordion. But it was the smile that made her want to run out of the opening and jump from the mountainside. Every tooth in his enormous mouth was large, sharp, and stained the brown color of old rusty blood.

  Seeming to sense her discomfort, he closed his mouth.

  King Ogliosh looked nothing like he sounded in her mind, and as she gazed upon him, she could only see horror – until, that is, she let her eyes meet his. There, surrounded by unbearable ugliness, she found something so beautiful it must have been fueled by magic. The long oval orb shone brightly with colors spun in different shades of blue, like Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night come to life.

  The giant was sitting. She could run. She could take off and run for the opening right now before it was too late. She could find Sarah. Sarah! Where was Sarah? She could go now before he ate her or smashed her. But she didn’t move.

  “I’m not going to hurt you… or eat you for that matter. Your mind is fuzzy, and you don’t remember exactly what happened to you or to your friend Sarah,” the giant said in her father’s soothing voice.

  Her face flushed as she realized she had thought all this with her mind open. She felt almost guilty as the giant continued in the same tone her father had used when she was little and afraid to sleep alone – the tone he used to convince her it was going to be okay and there was nothing to fear.

  “It’s going to be okay, Gabi – let me explain. Your Sarah was using the magic weapon against me, which is understandable – she was scared. I tried to stop her while being careful not to hurt her. You were scared too. You backed away, fell, and hit your head. Your friend ran off into the woods. I assume she went to get help – that’s what I would do.”

  Was that what happened? Gabi wasn’t sure. No matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t remember how she got here. She remembered Sarah shouting and gunshots, but then everything went fuzzy. She was so confused and scared, but if the giant was going to hurt her, he would have already done it, right? She wanted her parents back, and she wanted the dragon that killed them to die for what it did, and where was Sarah? What if she didn’t come back? She tried to hold back tears, but they spilled over, running down her face as she began to shudder.

  “Your friend will get help and come for you. In the meantime, you are safe here with me. The day is late, and darkness will soon follow. The jungle at night is no place for a young girl alone. For now, tell me about your world, Gabi. Tell me of this magic you wield and what other magic your kind possesses. In return I will tell you of Azazel and how she can be killed.” Then his voice changed to one of sympathy. “I can feel your pain. Stay with me and your parents’ deaths will be avenged. I don’t know how, but the God Stones have been assembled into the Sound Eye. Others are coming, and I must prepare for their arrival. We can talk while I work.”

  She didn’t understand that last part, but she knew she didn’t want to go off alone into the jungle, especially not at night. She also didn’t know why, but she trusted this… creature. And she
wanted to know more. She wanted to know what he knew, and she wanted to know about the dragon.

  Sarah felt hands under her arms and the sensation of being pulled.

  “Sarah! Sarah, can you hear me?” a voice whispered urgently.

  “What’s happening?” she moaned and tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t respond. Without warning, as if being plugged into an outlet, her mind connected with her body in a flood of pain and her eyes flung open.

  Sarah screamed.

  “Sarah! Please don’t scream. It will be okay,” the voice whispered.

  But Sarah didn’t care… couldn’t care, and she screamed again. Then a hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her scream to a horrible moan.

  “Sarah! Listen to me! It’s Juan! I am going to help you. You are injured, and we are going to need to set some bones and get you to help, but right now you must not scream.”

  Agony. White-hot agony seemed to come from every part of her. One of Sarah’s eyes opened, and she fixed it on her tormenter, screaming beneath his hand. His face was panicked, and he spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. She couldn’t understand it all, but it sounded like he was asking for a syringe from the med kit. She tried to turn her head, not wanting to see herself. Instead she saw what was left of the utility truck – a broken cab resting upside down against a tree, almost unrecognizable in its twisted shape.

  Around her, others spoke with a quiet urgency. “Give her two,” she heard a voice say as everything began to close in. The pain became distant as her consciousness began to slip away. She reached up with the hand that still worked and grabbed a fistful of Juan’s shirt. Her jaw hung strange and slack. But she forced the words. “Ga… Gabi! Please! Oh god… Juan! It has… Gabi!”

  Sarah’s eyes rolled back, showing only the whites as her hand fell slack to her side.

  47

  I Thought This Was the End

  Saturday, April 16 – God Stones Day 10

  Petersburg, Illinois

  “What do you mean, ruin the end?! I thought this was the end!” But Garrett knew better. As quickly as the words left his mouth, he knew this was not the end. He suddenly felt sick. Not sick, different. Physically something felt different, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  “No way, bro! No – you know this isn’t the end. You just said it yourself a second ago – we have to get started.”

  The strange sensation was in Garrett’s hands. It started as a tingling, but now the sensation was all the way to his elbows and his hands were burning. Not painfully, but enough to notice. He held up his hands, looking at them for the first time. His skin was a dark charcoal color, like it had been burnt. They all stared in silence at his strange hands and arms, his grey-black skin fading as it disappeared under his short sleeve tee shirt, but no one else looked surprised – only him. “What the…”

  He felt his heart suddenly racing. The dragon! Had he been burnt and hadn’t realized it? He rubbed the top of his hand briskly with the palm of his other. A section of the grey-black skin peeled off, revealing something else underneath – markings of some kind. It was hard to tell in the low lantern light, but his skin was definitely lighter in color underneath. However, there were thin red and black lines crisscrossing in some strange designs. Garrett reflected back on the dream, then finally spoke. “You are hereby reborn of dragon blood and fire.”

  Lenny and David looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  “Holy crap, guys… Holy crap!” David thrust two fists in the air. “It’s all true!”

  “Where did you hear that?” Lenny asked quietly.

  “I dreamt it,” Garrett said, still staring at his hands as he flipped them over and back, again and again. He couldn’t believe how different they looked. It was frightening. He squeezed them into a fist then flexed his fingers out, expecting it to cause pain, but he only felt the tingling. “Why, what do you think it means?”

  “We know what it means, Garrett,” Lenny said, standing to pace. “That’s what we need to tell you. Turek’s prophecy told of everything that happened. It said you and your sages would kill a great giant and slay a dragon.” He drew in a hesitant breath. “But then the chosen one would die in the depths of an ancient river, only to be reborn of the dragon blood and fire.”

  Time seemed to stop as the small room fell completely silent.

  Garrett finally spoke. “Turek’s book says that? Specifically, that?”

  David nodded, examining the strange patterns on Garrett’s hand where the burnt skin had flaked away. “Yes, and so much more. These marks, I think they are runes. I wish Pete were back – he would know for sure, but I have seen similar ones in some of the fantasy video games I’ve played.”

  “Fantasy video games?” Garrett asked.

  “Hey, everything comes from somewhere, right? I mean I’ve seen giants, dragons, elves, and magic in video games too, and who would have thought any of it was real until now?”

  Lenny stopped pacing and turned to Garrett. “The people here, the Keepers, they believe Turek—”

  “Wait, Lenny,” David said. “Just stop – this will be easier if we show him.” He turned to Garrett. “You think you can walk?”

  Garrett handed the tray off to David and threw back his blanket to find he had a pair of shorts on. A clear tube protruded from his lower leg, connected to a large bag of liquid hanging from what looked like an old wooden coat rack near the head of his bed. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before. “What the hell is this doing in my leg?”

  “It’s an IV,” David said. “It’s how we kept you alive for the last ten days. Normally it would go in your arm but, well, they weren’t sure that was such a good idea given the burns.”

  “You sure he’s ready?” Lenny asked.

  Garrett reached down and ripped the tape off his leg then proceeded to yank the IV out, which hurt way more than he thought it would, but he did his best not to let it show. “So, let’s go see whatever this is you need me to see. I have to know what’s going on.”

  “Slow down, buddy!” Lenny said.

  But it was too late. He was already swinging his legs off the side of the bed. “I need to get up. I need to understand, and I need to see James. And why in the hell are we using lanterns? What’s wrong with the lights?”

  Lenny grabbed Garrett’s arm and steadied him as he stood. “No power, man.”

  “Because of the fire on the square?” Garrett asked, swaying as his head swam.

  David moved forward to help. “No, no power anywhere. As far as we know, the whole world could be without power.”

  “Maybe I should throw a little golden glow at you and see if we can get you tip top?” David said.

  “Does it still make you pass out?” Garrett asked.

  “Oh, hell yeah. I have no control over it. The glow comes and it’s lights out. Now, granted, I haven’t been using it much over the last ten days. People have to be hurt, so I just been trying to help Coach, since they don’t seem to care much for him anyway. Oh, and I do any basic healing for the others when there is a need. But these dicks didn’t trust me to try it on you. Afraid I would interfere with the natural order of things. But hell, now that you’re awake we can give it a go?”

  “No, not right now. Let me do this – besides, I don’t want you passed out. I want you with me.”

  David beamed a bright mustached smile as he and Lenny helped Garrett get dressed.

  It was nice to be out of the dobok and in a pair of real pants. The pants weren’t his from before – he supposed everything he ever owned was gone – but the green cargo pants were a perfect fit, loose and comfortable. Lenny handed him a tee shirt and a brown, hooded knit sweater. Moments later he made his way out of the room and into a hall or tunnel. He really didn’t like being underground. He had had enough of tunnels to last him a lifetime, and he longed for the sun.

  After a short walk they reached a doorway where a man stood on guard. Garrett didn’t recognize the older man with a scruffy greying beard. He assumed h
e was a guard by the rifle slung over his shoulder. The man looked flustered at the sight of Garrett. Garrett didn’t think much of it at first, figuring he was just surprised to see him awake, but then the man did something unexpected, something Garrett found very odd. The man dropped to his knees and bowed, placing his forehead on the ground.

  “Are you okay?” Garrett asked, kneeling down to check on him. The man looked up in surprise, then his eyes settled on Garrett’s hands. The man quickly ducked away, pressing his head back to the floor. Garrett frowned. He was a second-degree black belt – he had been bowed to plenty, but not like this. No one had ever got down on their knees and put their head on the floor. That was weird.

  They exited the hall and crossed a plain-looking room, filled with several tables and chairs. A cafeteria maybe? Then they made their way into yet another hall. Two turns later they were standing in front of an unassuming, gunmetal-grey double door.

  “You ready for this?” Lenny asked with a wry smile.

  Garrett crinkled his brows. Ready for what, exactly, he wanted to ask, but they were being so secret about it he thought it easier to play along. “I guess so.”

  David pushed open the doors.

  They entered an expansive room lit with lanterns that hung from hooks mounted on the cinder block walls. Row upon row of chairs were lined up, all facing him. Judging from the podium before him, he had entered onto a makeshift stage. The chairs were empty but the room was not. It was full of people. They were grabbing the chairs and stacking them in a corner, clearing the room as if preparing for a dance. Some people Garrett recognized as classmates, neighbors, and other members of the community, but others Garrett didn’t recognize at all. As soon as they noticed his entrance, all motion stopped and the room fell eerily silent. Everyone stared at him. The only motion now was from the opposite side of the room, where people continued to quietly flood in. Within seconds the underground auditorium became packed with people.