The Elementalists

by C Sharp

  Finally, another close lightning strike knocked out power to the McClellan home just before lunchtime, and their link to the spreading global disaster went dark. Chloe and her mom sat close together on the sofa and watched the dead screen in silence for a long time before finally rising to share a cold cheese sandwich and tepid bowls of split pea soup. Even as they ate and bustled about the kitchen, they stopped to hold hands often or interrupted what they were doing to offer a reassuring squeeze or kiss to the top of the head… Words seemed meaningless now.

  After lunch, Audrey presented Chloe with a secondhand iPhone 5s, but cell phone signals were down and Chloe didn’t have the heart to turn it on to only see it fail. They were completely cut off from the outside world. As a consolation prize, Audrey led Chloe to the hallway closet, where she’d stashed multiple five-gallon jugs of water, lanterns and candles, batteries, a crank radio, and a wealth of industrial-sized canned food from the back pantry at Pete’s. She showed off her survival supplies with a smile and a shrug.

  Chloe buried her face in her mother’s chest and wiped her tears away on her sweater. She’d listened. It was the best present that her mom had ever given her.

  • • •

  The effects of the migraine were completely gone by lunchtime, but the waves of nausea were replaced by the growing weight of anxiety in her gut. The house was filled with a charged stillness in the afternoon hours as Chloe sat by the window with Shipwreck in her lap. She listened for the frantic babble of birds overhead and shut her eyes, waiting for the collective scream of humanity’s demise to reach her thoughts. Instead, as the early twilight stretched across the yard with long shadows and golden light, Uktena’s will sounded in her mind. COME, he said with the word echoing.

  She dressed warmly and put on her favorite running shoes—just like she’d worn in the latest nightmare—and she picked up one of her mom’s new flashlights on the way to the door. With her hand on the knob, she looked back to meet Audrey’s worried watch from the sofa.

  “I have to go,” Chloe said.

  “Where?” Audrey asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The pond,” answered Chloe anyway, wondering if she should say more.

  Audrey’s nod said: I trust you. “Will you be back for dinner? We still have a cake to eat,” Audrey reminded her with a crack in her voice.

  Chloe swallowed and answered quietly. “I don’t know; I think so… I love you, Mom,” she added with more conviction.

  Audrey smiled, and despite it all, her tired face was instantly radiant again. “I love you, too. You be careful, honey. I’ll be here waiting when you get home.”

  Chloe left before her mother could see her tears—she could at least protect her from that. They started falling cold across her cheeks as she walked up the snow-covered driveway and crossed the street into the woods. She did not run—in no hurry to reach whatever waited for her ahead—and she wondered if she would ever run for something as simple as joy again?

  The stark woods were baked orange, and Chloe’s head cleared a little more with every inhale of the crisp winter air. She looked down at her feet as they crunched across the thin layer of snow over dried leaves, but unlike in her dream, her shoelaces remained in tight knots, and the fading glow hung on the horizon in the west, not to the north.

  She climbed the last rise toward the place where the high chain link fence was supposed to be, but the entire length of posts and wire had been yanked roughly from the ground and carried away to an unknown destination. Ahead, she could see the lightning tower unmanned, but still standing and fully operational. As she passed underneath, she could hear the slow scraping sound of the outer conductivity shell, and her hair stood with the static charge.

  Below, the observation platform had been removed from the pond’s surface and tossed into the woods nearby. The remaining construction vehicles and a few black SUVs had been piled unceremoniously in a makeshift blockade on the road, and the uprooted fence was wrapped around them and stretched between the trees across the entrance. Chloe descended the hill to the pond as a collection of deer bolted away through the woods on the far side.

  As she stepped to the familiar rocky edge, silvery movement glinted below the water. Uktena’s giant horned crown emerged slowly from the center of the pool. The black slits in his eyes narrowed as his long serpentine neck rose up. He had grown since Chloe had last seen him. Now his hovering head was almost as long as a school bus, and she wondered how the rest of him could still fit within the confines of the little pond.

  “It has begun,” he said.

  Water streamed from his scales in heavy rivulets, and Chloe had to squint as she looked up at him, shining now almost like a polished mirror as the last light of day reflected off him. “What happens now?” she asked.

  “Soon Kadru, Queen of Serpents, will wake,” Uktena declared with finality. “The four bulls will claim their kingdoms, and the Great Rut will begin as they compete for the right to mate with her… Her brood will bring about the final death of your world.”

  Uktena’s gaze shifted as another figure emerged from the woods. Chloe turned to see Kirin approaching from the same spot where they’d entered while playing hooky on the second day of school. He waved with wary eyes locked on the dragon.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding almost casual. “I stopped by your house right after you’d left. Your mom told me where you’d gone.”

  “I’m glad.” She took his hand, and he kissed her forehead as the slamming of car doors sounded from the other side of the barricade.

  Chloe squeezed Kirin’s hand tighter, but was relieved to see Stan picking his way through the debris soon after. She felt another little swell of gratitude as she caught sight of his big toothy grin from afar. Then Ezra Richardson’s steadfast scowl followed a few seconds later, and he carried something large over his shoulder.

  Uktena watched quietly as Stan raised his hand. “Hey, dudes. I ran into Ezra at the grocery store and he said a voice had commanded him to find you.” Stan began to chuckle, “and I got to admit that I’d heard the same thing… So, here we are.” Stan removed a half-smoked joint from his coat pocket and lit it with a heavy drag.

  “Stan?” Chloe hissed.

  He shrugged. “Whatever, dude; it’s the end of the world.”

  Ezra stepped closer and heaved what appeared to be a giant riding saddle to the ground before Uktena. The dragon did not react. “You okay, Lightning?” Ezra asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” With a closer examination, she noticed that the oversized saddle had been handcrafted with a close attention to detail, including stitched images of flying dragons through the leather edging. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been working on it for a couple months now,” Ezra admitted, “though I wasn’t sure why until yesterday.”

  Chloe turned back to Uktena, who’d been watching intently. “Why did you call them here?”

  “I did not call them. You are the spirit who summoned them and binds them together.” Uktena studied the four kids, looking from Ezra, to Stan, to Kirin, and then back to Chloe. “Earth, air, water, and spirit—just like with the Five Claws of the dragon.”

  Chloe looked across the three men in her life and realized only then how true it was. “But what about fire?” she asked. The only answer was the approaching racket of loud pop music followed by the slam of another car door. Chloe turned, expecting or maybe hoping to see Liz appear. Instead, a shrill voice and a blaze of red hair cut through the fading daylight.

  “Goddamn it, I broke a heel!” Kendra shouted before noticing the odd meeting before her. “What the hell are you all doing here?” she hollered before noticing the even odder creature that presided over them. “What the hell is that?” she shrieked.

  Chloe ignored the escalating barrage of screams and profanity as Ezra moved to intercept Kendra’s freak-out. She turned back to Uktena, who watched it all with an unreadable calm. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Ripples of lightning swa
m across the dragon’s gaze once more, and Chloe felt an echoing tickle of electricity within. “Five Elementalists to match the five Elementals.”

  “Elementalists?”

  “The Dragon Riders of old. They were the ones who imprisoned my kind long ago and foretold of our return on the Tianlong Cauldron… They have awoken again in you.” His words echoed in Chloe’s mind as if she had voiced them herself. “The prophecy spoke of Five Claws rising at the Ascension, not four, but it is only because of you that I live… Perhaps this is all part of the plan as you said.”

  The five teens came together for the first time. Kendra was on the cusp of a nervous breakdown with only Ezra able to hold her still, but all of them felt a stirring of joined power between them. The air and ground itself seemed to vibrate with anticipation.

  Lightning flared in Uktena’s gaze. “If we are to stop the Great Rut from happening, we will need to fight together.”

  Chloe felt an intense rush of euphoria and dread at the same time as her eyes followed Uktena’s focus to the saddle waiting between them.

  “It is time to ride,” he said.

  The Mother of Doom

  The rumble rose from the deep. For more than fifteen hundred miles, the ocean floor trembled along the Mariana Trench, at first subtly, with barely enough force to make the sand dance on the lightless ocean floor, but gradually stronger as the sound of the wrenching earth grew. The whole Pacific shelf lurched as a massive fissure opened in the bed of what had previously been untouched ocean. Billions of tons of water were displaced in an instant.

  The groan of the shifting fault that followed was staggering, audible all the way to Arizona in one direction and to India in the other. And yet somehow, what sounded like an animal roar rose above the tumult. From below the deepest point of all the oceans on earth climbed Kadru, Queen of Serpents, wriggling out of the pit like a newborn snake escaping from its shell. But Kadru had been called Tiamat by the Babylonians, and Illuyanka by the Hittites, and she was older than all the civilizations of man.

  She fought her way into open water and started to swim up the five miles of cliff to reach the higher ocean floor. She’d grown larger during her slumber—stretching on for miles and more than a hundred feet thick at her widest point. She was covered from snout to tail in overlapping layers of supple black scales. In ages past, she had blocked out the sun when she’d reared up and opened her cobra’s hood.

  Even from 35,000 feet down, she could hear the screams and confusion of the humans—it made her swim faster. She hadn’t fed in two thousand years, and she would need to eat her fill before she went into estrus again. Soon after the Ascension, the Great Rut would begin, and she longed for the battle that would see which of the four dragon bulls might win her favor. All of the cataclysm and death to come would be in her honor.

  She would return upriver to the hot jungles of the eastern mainland to rebuild her nest, and once the humans had been broken and the five territories were established, the males would come for her. The brood that would spout from her womb would pick the earth clean of humanity and usher in the dawn of the next age.

  In only a few minutes, her massive black form slipped over the lip of the trench and turned west, continuing toward the surface at a more gradual climb. The wave that preceded her would gather strength as it went. Before it found the islands of the South Pacific, it would reach speeds of more than five hundred miles per hour and have climbed ten stories into the air. Another wave rocketed in the opposite direction, toward the islands of Hawaii and the West Coast of the Americas. Soon, all around the Pacific, terrified faces would turn toward the water and offer their screams to the return of mighty Kadru.

  Hundreds of millions of their jabbering, insufferable lives would be silenced in an instant, but that would be only the beginning.

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