by Lucia Ashta
I pushed against her hand. “I mean it,” she said, unyielding.
Maybe a minute passed in which I obeyed—there seemed little choice—and the three of them crouched around me, watching. The scene grew old fast.
Dolpheus tried to distract me. “You should’ve seen it, Tan. Almost as soon as you went into the mind merge, some of the royal guards found us. An errant guard, half drunk, came this way to take a leak. It was blind luck that he spotted us. He alerted the rest of his troop before we could get to him. You were already too far in to bring you back out of it. So Kai and I fought them off. There were a lot of them, and I was a bit worried about taking them on with you so exposed right next to us. But Kai was incredible, Tan. You would’ve been proud of him.
“Where’d you learn to use a sword like that anyway, lad?”
Kai looked embarrassed. He shrugged. “On my own. Mostly by watching the guards fence when I could get away from the kitchens.”
Dolpheus looked at me again, just as he used to, as if nothing had changed. “Your instincts were good with this lad, Tan. He’ll make a fine warrior once he starts training with us. He has a feel for the sword.”
There will be no more us, I thought. There was barely any more me.
I struggled to my feet, ignoring Lila’s complaints and pushing Dolpheus’ hands and eagerness to help away. I wobbled once, twice, as I took in the bodies of dead guards littered around us.
“We need to move soon, Tan,” Dolpheus said. “Once these guards are noticed missing, others will come to find them.”
I turned to Dolpheus, nearly delirious. Every image of his betrayal flashed through my mind another time, as if once hadn’t been torturous enough. I remembered his every thrust inside Ilara. All that I’d seen came out synthesized in the immortal words of every man or woman ever betrayed like this. “How could you do this to me?”
Dolpheus didn’t bother with feigned innocence or confusion. His face fell. He knew precisely what I was talking about. He rushed to justify his actions before I denied him the opportunity, losing his composure, something that had happened only a handful of times in all our years of friendship. “It’s not what you think it is, Tan.” Had those words not also been spoken a million times, by the betrayers that had no real defense for their actions?
“You mean you didn’t stick your cock inside Ilara and then lie to me about it?”
He stared at me with pain in his eyes. But I wouldn’t allow him it. He wasn’t the one betrayed. I was.
“How many laughs did you share at my expense? You both hid it from me so well that I never suspected it. Were you fucking her the entire time I believed she loved me?” I didn’t like the words I was speaking—they could only lead to drama, when the results of this conversation were already clear—but they were helping to restore clarity to my thoughts. I was giving my righteous anger an outlet.
I could feel Kai, and even Lila, frozen, watching the dreadful scene unfold.
Dolpheus’ voice came softly. “It wasn’t like that, Tan. Not at all.”
I stared at my friend, at the face I thought would always bring me comfort in a harsh world. It no longer did. I didn’t want to hear another word that tumbled from his traitorous mouth.
I began to walk away. He reached an arm to spin me around. When he saw the look on my face, he removed his hand. He spoke anyway. “It was nothing to me. Or to her. It was no more than lust. It happened before you fell for her, before I realized she was special to you.”
“Was it just the one time then?”
He sighed. I knew his answer before he said it. “No. It was several times. But it didn’t mean what you think it did.”
“If it meant nothing, why didn’t you tell me?”
“We don’t talk about all the women I have sex with. It didn’t seem important enough to mention.”
“Having sex with the princess of Origins didn’t seem worth mentioning?”
He shrugged. His argument was weak, and he knew it. “It didn’t at the time.”
“And later? Not even then?”
“Once I realized you were really falling for her, I didn’t want you to feel bothered by thinking that I’d had sex with her, when it didn’t mean anything. It just seemed easier to keep it from you, for your sake.”
“You didn’t want me to feel bothered? For my sake?” I stalked past my friend of forever, unsure if I would ever see him again, certain that I didn’t care whether I did or not.
“Where are you going, Tan?”
I didn’t answer. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, one wobbly step at a time.
“Did you find out where Ilara is?”
I wasn’t going to reply, but I did. “Yes,” I said, beginning to make my way down the rock, scrambling with my arms behind me, low to the ground.
“Where is she?”
“Far away.”
“Where, Tan? Where?”
“You don’t need to know, so don’t worry yourself.”
A beat passed in which he realized exactly what I meant by this. “Surely you don’t mean to go alone. To a far off planet.”
“I do.”
“But you need my help. You have no idea what dangers you might encounter on another planet. We’re a team. You can’t go alone.”
“I’m already alone,” I said.
My head pounded, the ground moved in ways it shouldn’t, and I thought that now I would certainly vomit. I could leave a trail of vomit and tears to mark the path of a devastated and betrayed heart. Wouldn’t that be nice? I thought. A poetic end to a life that was little more than a joke to some cosmic force out there that pulled the strings which moved me and everyone in my life toward this one pathetic outcome.
Still, even though I didn’t know precisely how I’d get there, I knew I was making my way toward Ilara. She’d betrayed me as much as the friend I was leaving behind. So why did I still want to cross the universe to find her? I didn’t know. Maybe it was as simple as needing to hear the confession of her betrayal from her own lips. Because a part of me didn’t believe it even though I saw it with my own two eyes, experienced through a third one that I suspected couldn’t lie.
“Tan!” Dolpheus yelled behind me. “Let me go with you! I didn’t betray you, man. I swear it.”
In my heart, within the scraps left of it, I believed him. I wanted to believe him.
Nevertheless, I continued to put distance between him and me.
The path to Planet Sand was one I would have to travel alone.
Holographic Princess
Tanus and Dolpheus’ story continues in Holographic Princess, Book 3 of the Planet Origins series, available at a special low price during the pre-order stage.
Turn the page for a preview of Holographic Princess!
Holographic Princess Preview
Chapter 1
Thunder and lightning storms get my blood boiling as effectively as a suggestive look from a man capable of backing it up with some action. So when even the daredevil storm chasers began to turn back, resigned to seek refuge from the pummeling rain and lightning flashes, sheltering cameras within their rain slickers, I was the only one to persist along the wet and slippery craggy mountain wall.
“You’re crazy, Ilara! Turn back!” a man from one of the popular TV stations yelled at me as we passed each other, heads tilted down against the ferocity of nature. I didn’t answer—there was no way I was turning back—and my silence seemed to concern or infuriate him all the more. “Ilara! You’re out of your fucking mind!” he yelled after me, grinding out the consonant sounds of fucking as if that would call my attention to the fact that I was, indeed, mad. He had no more influence over me than most men, which is to say, very little. I continued on, watching my step, bringing each footfall down solidly across the gray stone before taking the next, clutching the nearly vertical rock wall with my fingers.
A particularly spectacular flash ripped across the sky with a thunderous, cracking sound, loud enough to shake the bone
s of the dead. If the sky had been made of anything solid, it would have shattered to its irreversible end. The lightning was nearly above me. It was one of the few things that tempted me to believe in a god. If indeed there were a god—a power responsible for our creation—then lightning bolts must be its tools, to smite and burn the undeserving. Why did I think this? Because if I were some kind of god, with every possibility at my disposal, I would definitely fling lightning bolts to the ground to shake the faith of humans until they accepted my mightiness.
I wasn’t a god—nor even a believer in one—but the crackling energy alive in the air just then was enough to make me feel invincible. When everything around you is teeming with life, contemplations of its fragility feel impossible.
I marched on, knowing I’d soon have the crown of this mountain all to myself. Up ahead, the last of the storm chasers were about to reach me. After they passed, I’d be alone on this path of ascension. I’d be left to occupy the one place on Sand where lightning converged in a choreographed dance of destruction. The magnetics atop the mountain, combined with the dotting of tall, slender trees that did their best to meet the lightning at its birthplace, drew the bolts to this one remote location. As if the god enjoyed target practice, it hurled lightning to this summit more than anywhere else.
The approaching team was yelling, but their voices were lost to the wind, nearly as powerful as the lightning. With laughable ease, the current picked up the shouts of three men and tossed them aside, refuse in a world where the humans didn’t get to determine what was, and what wasn’t, important. Realizing I couldn’t hear them, the man in front started signaling, pointing frenetically in the direction they were headed, as if I were incapable of noticing my surroundings and the soup of electric energy in which we bubbled. I ignored them, keeping my head down so the rain, which was coming down diagonally, would run off the hood of my jacket.
The path was wide enough for two people to walk it at once. But it was treacherous. In these conditions, it would be stupid to pass anyone. These storm chasers thought me crazy, but I wouldn’t give them cause to think me stupid. I needed to reach the highest elevation where I could view the lightning converge upon this point on the planet. And I needed to get there alive.
I reached a place on the trail where a piece of rock jutted from the otherwise sheer wall. I could get a firm grip on the backside of the rock, so there I waited for the team’s approach. They were close, but their progress was cumbersome. They were burdened with photographic equipment, where I wasn’t. I was climbing this mountain in a storm for myself. They were doing it to capture that one image that would set them apart from all the other storm chasers of Sand.
Right before they reached me, the man second in line lost his footing and nearly fell. It would have been a long fall that ended in a fast death, but his quick reflexes spared him from it. Still, he was shaken when they drew close enough that I could see their faces. They’d taken risks enough for one day.
“I have a good grip. You can grab onto me as you pass,” I said while turning the front of my body toward the rock face. I settled my legs into a solid stance and offered myself as a handhold.
The first and second men didn’t hesitate. Their fingers dug into my shoulders and waist, the hard edges of the cameras within their slickers slid across my back, bony knees rubbed against my legs, and they were past me and continuing down the mountain. The third man stopped next to me until I faced him.
“Ilara,” he said as gently as he could when he had to compete with the howl of wind, the slash of rain, and the rumble of thunder overhead. “Please don’t do this. Turn back with me.”
This man I knew, though I didn’t know him well. I knew he was a storm chaser, that he liked to suck on hard candy as a substitute for smoking, that he liked eclectic music that I’d never heard of, and that he liked to fuck all night long, waking me in the middle of the night to go at it again. If there was anyone I would have followed down the mountain, it might have been him.
“Sorry, honey. I have to keep going.” I didn’t call him by his name because I didn’t remember it. I would have put a hand to his cheek when I said it, but I wasn’t about to let go; my fingers clutched the sharp rock like the lifeline it was.
“You don’t have to.” His attempts to convince me were valiant. The wind whipped, renewed, spanking our backs with our raincoats.
I gave him a coy smile meant to soften the blow. “But I do.”
On that night we’d shared, we’d talked about the storms. In between fucks, we’d talked about the thunder and the lightning, the wind and the rain, sometimes hail, and the exhilaration of all of it. If he remembered what I’d said then, he’d understand that I couldn’t turn around. I’m sure I hadn’t given an explicit reason—because I didn’t have it. My reasons were mostly abstract, but no less important because of it.
I had to push on simply because I had to. Because every part of me urged me onward, to climb ever higher, to reach the source of things—of something. Why? Because I didn’t fit in. I never had. I was different. I didn’t know how or why. All I knew was that I had to do this. I had to reach the top of this mountain, in this storm, on this day, when the lightning had never struck as often or as much.
Atop this craggy demonic rock known for killing anyone who developed the grand notion that he could flirt with immortality or its opposing forces lay something in wait. I might not know what it was, yet I knew it lay in wait for me.
The man with whom I’d shared that one long night, in the bed that creaked when he rocked his body over mine, slunk past me. As if he were clairvoyant and knew we would never see each other again, he moved against me more slowly than the storm warranted. His hot breath started at one ear, crossed my neck, and ended at the other. He brushed his chest against mine. He dragged his dick across my ass purposefully enough to urge me, as determined as I was, to reconsider this whipping storm for a cozy bed and another memorable night with him.
Once on the other side of me, he knew he hadn’t won. “Ilara. Please.” He whispered so that his hot, humid breath tickled the inside of my ear.
“Robby. Come on!” The desperate cry of his colleague was fainter than it should have been. They weren’t far away, even though they hadn’t waited for him. “Let’s go!”
I leaned my head into Robby’s. Our faces were slick from the rain. I parted my lips, and he kissed me. His tongue was hot against the cold of the sky’s waters.
“Oh fuck this,” the first man in line said. “Robby, we’re going.” Then, “Come on” to the man behind him, the one who’d almost fallen and didn’t need encouragement to continue his descent.
“Go. You’re safer in a group,” I told Robby.
“I’ve never seen eyes like yours before,” Robby said, staring, strangely removed from the bullying efforts of our surrounds. “I’ll always remember them, even if I never see you again.” He kissed me another time. “Be careful,” he said and then turned without another word. The forecaster of weather took his forecasting of my life with him and moved down the mountain.
I followed his progress with my gaze until the next strike of lightning ricocheted across the rock with a thunderous roar. “Bye, Robby,” I whispered to no one and nothing, also feeling without reason that I would never see him again. Then I turned my sights back up the path that led toward the heavens, where something as powerful, and as elusive, as thunder and lightning beckoned.
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Also by Lucía Ashta
THE WITCHING WORLD
(YA fantasy)
Magic Awakens
The Five-Petal Knot
The Merqueen
The Ginger Cat *
The Scarlet Dragon *
PLANET ORIGINS
(Space opera)
Planet Origins
Original Elements
Holographic Princess
Purple Worlds *
Planet Sand *
THE LIGHT WARRIORS
(Visionary fantasy)
Beyond Sedona *
Beyond Prophecy *
Beyond Amber *
The Prophecy of Arnaka
The Secret of Namana
A Betrayal of Time
Whispers of Pachamama
“Daughter of the Wind”
(* coming soon)
About the Author
Lucía Ashta, a former attorney and architect, is an Argentinian-American author who lives in Sedona with her beloved and three daughters. She published her first story (about an unusual Cockatoo) at the age of eight, and she’s been at it ever since.
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