Beside him another man lowered the horn he’d just blown the blast from. This man was smaller, thinner, more weaselly. He glowered at us with hate, but also with fear.
The gargantuan muscle-bound guy raised his hand and pointed directly at us. I felt like he was pointing directly at me. As one, the entire army of creatures turned to follow his outstretched finger, gazing at us with hate and malice.
“Kill the Realm Keepers!” the man bellowed, his voice carrying clearly across the now-still afternoon air.
Behind me I heard the clanking of metal as Cara raised a plate-gloved fist high. “Protect the Chosen!” she called out.
The army of blackness poured toward us across the field, dashing aside the remnants of the human army like chaff. Cara and her guard cut through the last few creatures between us and the portal, and then we were running, flying across the grass. The portal looked too far. Risking a glance over my shoulder, I could see the creatures gaining ground. More were circling in from the sides, and they were going to reach the portal before we could.
“Rearguard!” cried Cara, and she turned to face the army of monsters. I stopped at the command in her voice. For an insane moment I wanted to turn and help her fight.
“Keep going!” shouted Greystone, grabbing my arm and thrusting me toward the portal. It was only a few dozen yards away. Greystone waved his staff at the creatures swarming on either side. Walls of crackling blue electricity erupted on either side of us and flew into the crowd, roasting the clustering throngs of monsters, who fell to the ground twitching and screaming. Greystone stopped at the portal and motioned us through.
I almost leapt into the blue, swirling energy, but I turned and looked back. Cara was still behind us, fighting with her guard, surrounded by what humans had still managed to escape slaughter. But they were disintegrating. The entire force was only minutes, perhaps seconds away from death.
I turned to Greystone. “Tell her to run!” I shouted.
Greystone looked at her sadly. “She will not,” he said.
“Try!” I told him. Exasperated, I turned to the fighting. “Cara!” I shouted, trying to be heard. “We reached it! Tell your men to come back with us!”
She didn’t so much as turn her head. I wasn’t loud enough. I wasn’t used to yelling across a chaotic battlefield where men and monsters were fighting and dying.
“Come on, Sarah!” said Miles. I turned to see all the rest of them standing just outside the portal, waiting for me. Greystone put a hand on my shoulder.
“Go through!” he commanded. “They are giving their lives so you can have yours.”
“They can come with us!” I screamed, batting his hand away. I turned back.
I could see the huge, muscular man, still on his hill, still far away. He was looking at me and smiling. There was so much hatred and cruelty in that smile, it made me shiver. More than anything, I wanted to turn and run into the portal. But it wasn’t right to just leave all these people here to die. There were hardly any of them left, just Cara and less than a dozen of her men.
“Cara!” I screamed, as loud as I could. “CARA!”
I clenched my fists and pounded my legs as I screamed, and all of a sudden the ground erupted. A massive chunk of earth that Cara and her men were standing on rose up like a suddenly growing mountain, flinging all of them in our direction while launching the black creatures the other way. With a roar the army began to swarm around the sudden hillock that had sprung up before them.
I looked at Greystone, relief on my face. “Nice job,” I said.
“I didn’t do that,” he said.
Before I could ask him what he meant, Cara leapt back to her feet and, much to my relief, didn’t turn to fight again. Instead she shouted a command to retreat and booked it right for us. I couldn’t believe anyone could run that fast in so much armor. She looked faster than Miles on the school track. Her men followed. One of them stumbled. She turned to help him up, cutting down two of the monstrous frontrunners that loomed over them both. Then they were fleeing for us again.
I turned. It was time to go. I couldn’t be sure if they’d reach us in time, but we’d done all we could do.
“Through the portal!” I shouted. “Come on!”
I grabbed Tess and flung her into the blue energy. She disappeared with a sharp zapping noise. I hoped like crazy that she was okay. Blade jumped through after her, then Raven and Calvin jumped through together.
I turned one last time. Cara and her men were only thirty feet away. Greystone waved his hands, and a blast of wind swept over their heads and pummeled the front few monsters, knocking them back. Cara tripped and nearly fell, but she recovered.
A strong arm wrap around my waist. I heard Miles shout, “Time to go!” and he jumped with me through the portal.
It burned. Kind of. Burning only happens to the outside of your body, but this was a burning sensation throughout the whole thing, inside and out. And even deeper, into my mind, my soul. It felt like my body was dissolved into molecules and scattered to the winds, and yet I was still conscious and could still see. Thankfully it didn’t hurt too bad. Then I felt my body stretching, and then —
Pop.
I was flung onto a grassy green knoll as though I’d dived out of a moving car. I rolled over and over several times before finally ending up on my back.
For the second time that day, I lay breathing heavily and staring up at a bright blue sky.
Then I heard more pop noises. I pushed myself up onto my elbows quickly to see the other side of the blue portal. Soldiers began to fall onto the grass out of the blue oval of energy.
“Holy cow, that was awesome!” said Calvin’s voice close by.
I ignored him and leapt up, checking that everyone was there. Tess. Raven. Miles. Blade. With me and Calvin, that was everyone. Cara, too, was on her feet, lining her men up on this side of the portal. There were only six of them left. She looked over her shoulder at Greystone.
“The portal!” she said. “Quickly!”
Even as she spoke there was a popping sound, and one of the Shadow creatures fell to the ground before her. Three of the soldiers leapt forward, burying their blades in the thing. Another three came through and were hacked down.
I turned to Greystone. “Close it!” I shouted. He ignored me, his eyes closed, his fingers twisting in and around each other and quiet murmurs coming from his lips. He either couldn’t hear me, or couldn’t answer. Several more Shadows popped through, and this time two of them managed to find their feet before Cara’s men could take care of them. One of the soldiers was struck down, his armored form clattering to the grass and his sword sliding from his limp grip.
Desperate, I ran forward and picked it up. Miles and Blade came with me, looking unsure of what to do without weapons of their own. A Shadow was fighting Cara. It slammed a black-mailed glove into her gut, causing her to double over. I leapt forward with a cry, swinging the sword desperately. I didn’t even hit it, but the creature reeled away from my wild attack. One of Cara’s men took it down.
Cara straightened and looked at me. I was shaking, adrenaline pumping through my body as I tried to keep the sword up. It was much, much heavier than I’d thought it would be. She reached over and removed it gingerly from my grasp.
“…dremarcus boreath!” cried Greystone suddenly from behind us, his chanting suddenly rising to a fever pitch. There was a flash that made me close my eyes, and when I opened them again the blue portal was gone.
Stunned and still shaking, I fell to my knees in the grass. Cara, amazingly still seemed fresh, wiping her blade clean on the grass before re-sheathing it. She went to one of her soldiers, a man clutching a wound in his side, and knelt to inspect it.
“I think you cut that a little close, old man,” said Blade.
Greystone looked at me and pointed a finger at Blade. “This one is exceptionally rude.”
I nodded, still breathing heavy. “Takes one to know one.”
“I, at least, have
some right, what with having saved your lives…” Greystone made a show of counting on his fingers. “…Three times now,” he finished.
“Our lives weren’t even in danger before you brought us here, bro,” said Miles testily. His chest was heaving, and his limbs were twitching. “I can’t believe we…that was nuts.”
I knew what he meant. Images from the battle were frozen in my mind. I’d never seen someone die before, and then suddenly I’d been in the middle of a real life battle.
“Why are you doing this to us?” Raven practically shouted. “We’re just kids, man.”
Greystone shook his head, making his wild white hair spin like helicopter blades. “Perhaps that was true once, but you are no longer ‘just’ anything.”
That did it. Now that the portal, along with the monsters, was gone, I was ready to find out what this was all about. “It’s time you told us what’s going on,” I said to Greystone.
He shook his head firmly. “We don’t have time yet. There is one more thing — ”
I stood up, shook my head even more firmly, and folded my arms. “No. Make the time.”
Greystone glowered at me, his fingers twitching on his staff. But I wasn’t having it. I’d been kidnapped to who knows where, thrown into the middle of a battle in which I couldn’t even defend myself, nearly killed, and then thrown through an apparently magical portal to yet another who-knows where. We must have been in the middle of some national park or something, since I didn’t see a city or even buildings around for miles, and I had no idea how we were supposed to get home. My glare back at Greystone was just as firm as his, and twice as nasty.
Finally he broke the staring contest, looked uneasily at the horizon, and reached into his robe. “Very well. Make the time, you say?”
He produced a crystal globe. It was nearly see-through, but it had a purple tinge. It was small, only a couple of inches wide. Greystone dropped it on the grass, then smashed it to pieces with his staff.
There was a fwoomp noise, like someone had cut the power to a pair of speakers. Suddenly the air around us was shimmering. Greystone, the others and I were inside the shimmer, but looking off to my right I saw that Cara and her men were not. They were outside our globe, and they were frozen in place. At first I thought they were holding still, until I realized one of the men was mid-step and couldn’t possibly hold that position.
“Whoah,” said Raven beside me. “What did you do?”
Greystone huffed. He sat, coming to rest as though on an invisible chair, ripped a tobacco pipe from his pocket, and lit it with a snap of his fingers. “I made the time.”
SARAH
WITH TIME STOPPED ALL AROUND us, I had my first chance to really look at our surroundings. We were on a hill in the middle of nowhere. There was a stone platform on the top of the hill, with a low roof held up by marble columns. On one side of the platform, six stone pillars not unlike the ones with the colored stones from earlier were arranged in a row.
Far off in the distance — I thought it might be south, since the sun was setting to my right — there was a range of mountains, their snow-capped peaks tickling the sky. In the opposite direction, there was a column of black smoke rising from beyond the horizon. If I had to guess, I would have bet that smoke was from the battle we’d just teleported away from. Far to the east of us there was a great forest that looked like it had to stretch for hundreds of miles, and to the west, it was only grasslands until a faint glint on the far horizon that might have been the ocean, or just a really, really big lake. The only sign of life that I could see were birds wheeling far above us in the sky. They, like Cara and her soldiers, were frozen in place.
“Dude, if you can do this,” Calvin said, gesturing to the bubble of time that surrounded us, “Why don’t you just do it all the time? Stopping time is like the best super power ever. You can get out of anything. You could have won the whole battle back there. Just stopped everything, run up and down and taken everyone out.”
Greystone’s eyes grew wide with obviously fake shock. “Oh my goodness, you’re right! I never, ever thought about that in all of my nine hundred years as a wizard.”
“You’re nine hundred years old?” I asked, flabbergasted.
“Older,” he said. “But I’ve only been a wizard for nine hundred years. Before that I was an accountant.”
“Wow, you look amazing,” said Blade. “I mean, before, I thought you looked terrible, but considering your age and all…”
I shot Blade a nasty look. How could he be making jokes right now? This wasn’t some game; we’d just seen people killing and being killed. Calvin, I kind of understood. This was his dream world, and he probably still didn’t even believe it was all real. But I did. I still felt the sting on my shoulder where that creature had touched me — the same sting I was sure Blade was suffering from his blackened, cracked knuckles.
Greystone looked at me and pointed at Blade again. “I have decided that I will be ignoring this one.” He turned to Calvin once more. “And as to your half-witted question, no, I cannot do this whenever I wish. It requires a crystal like the one I just destroyed. Those crystals are quite complicated to acquire. They only form in the cave of a dragon when touched once a decade by the light of a blue moon, that sort of thing. I just used my last one. All because your leader,” and here his gaze found me again, “was impatient and couldn’t wait twenty minutes to hear an explanation of what’s happened to you.”
“Whoah,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m nobody’s leader.”
“Oh, no, indeed, of course not,” Greystone exclaimed, confusing me further. “And yet I cannot but kowtow to your every whim. I am, after all,” he gave a disgusted snort, “bound to serve you.”
“You have to do what we say?” Raven asked.
Greystone looked at her sharply. “I have taken an oath to do that, yes,” he said. “An oath I have never broken in all my centuries. But it is quite…flexible.”
“We’ve never seen you before,” Miles pointed out. His arms were crossed upon his chest. “You haven’t been taking orders from us for centuries.”
“So very astute, good sir,” said Greystone, rolling his eyes.
“We aren’t the first Realm Keepers, are we?” Calvin asked eagerly. He was laying on the grass, his stomach to the ground and his head propped up in his hands. He was looking up at Greystone like the wizard was our grandpa and was about to tell us the most awesome story ever.
“Calvin, what’s a Realm Keeper?” I asked. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“I’m figuring it out as I go, cuz,” Calvin said, smiling over at me. “You may be class president, but I’m better equipped for this kind of stuff. Don’t let it get to you.”
Greystone shook his head. “Unfortunately, I’m beginning to believe that’s the case. They have stories in your world, yes? Tales of magic?”
“Uh-huh,” said Calvin eagerly.
“And you read them?”
“Oh, all the time,” Calvin gushed. “I mean, the best ever is definitely Lord of the Rings, but Sword of Truth is good, and I liked Game of Thrones, but my parents wouldn’t let me watch the show — ”
Greystone sighed and waved his hand. Calvin’s lips kept moving, but no sound came out. The old wizard looked at me. “He’s exhausting.”
“He’s right, though,” I said. Calvin had realized that we couldn’t hear him any more and looked annoyed. He tried yelling, but still nothing. Then he grinned and started mouthing what I was pretty sure were bad words. “He’s gonna have a better handle on this kind of thing than any of us.”
Greystone seemed to think about that for a moment, and then he fixed Calvin with his clear blue gaze. “If I give you back your voice, do you promise not to prattle on endlessly until what’s left of my hair falls out?”
Calvin nodded, wide-eyed.
“How reassuring,” said Greystone sarcastically.
He snapped his fingers once again. Calvin said, “That was awesome! Hey Sarah, gue
ss what I said while — ”
“Not now, Calvin,” I said. “Time may be stopped, but I’d still rather do this quickly. Just pay attention. Go ahead,” I told Greystone.
I expected him to scoff at me again. Instead, he looked at me curiously, bowed his head, and said, “As you wish, my Lady.”
Everyone was clustered around now. Even Blade and Raven looked interested despite themselves. Seeing it, Greystone smiled slightly, then began to speak.
“Once upon a time — ”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Blade.
“Blade!” I said. Blade rolled his eyes and fell silent.
Greystone dropped his cold stare at Blade and continued. “Once upon a time, there was magic in your world, just as there is in this one. Not everyone had it, but some of us did — among men, magic wielders like me were called wizards. All elves have magic, though some have more, and some have less.”
“Are they Christmas-type elves, or Tolkien-type elves?” Calvin asked. “I mean, are they small, or tall as a human?”
Greystone looked annoyed at the interruption. “They are usually taller. Why?”
“Just curious,” Calvin said offhandedly. “That’s the cool kind of elf. I’d be really disappointed if — ”
“Shut up, man,” Miles said.
“The world stayed this way for many, many centuries,” said Greystone. “Millennia, even. It was not a time of peace, not entirely. Men have always fought. I imagine it is the same on True Earth today. But compared to what was to come, those were happy times. Nations fought, but they reconciled their differences in the end. There was fighting, and theft, and greed; but there were also great deeds, heroic acts, and the building of tremendous civilizations. All the flaws and all the finery of the races of True Earth flourished, fueled by magic. And then Chaos came.”
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