Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1)

by Van Allen Plexico

  We walked on for some time, exchanging no further words, and the open hostility between us faded somewhat with the miles. The temperature around us dropped a few degrees, and the violet sky, like my mood, darkened.

  At last the bronze sand gave way to sandy soil, then in rapid succession to sparse grassland and to thick, lush growth. At about that time, the hazy line on the horizon at last resolved into the edge of a forest, broad as the world.

  “And thus we have crossed our desert,” I said.

  Evelyn nodded. “Feel any different?”

  I thought about that for a few seconds, then genuinely surprised myself with my answer: “Maybe so.”

  Another hour’s walk brought us to the forest. We stopped, drank some water from Evelyn’s bottle, and surveyed this sudden and dramatic change in scenery.

  “This is amazing,” she said, staring at the twisted, contorted conglomeration of every type and size of tree imaginable.

  I could only laugh, knowing what she had yet to see.

  “Getting close now,” I said, in response to her unasked question. “In we go.”

  I indicated a nearly invisible path leading, tunnel-like, into the forest’s depths, and we started forward again.

  Rich, organic smells enveloped us. Tiny insects swarmed about us once or twice, but quickly dispersed before becoming too much of an annoyance. The temperature, which had hovered well within tolerable ranges for some time, grew hotter, and the humidity increased to uncomfortable levels. Shrugging out of my long blue coat, I rolled it, tied it, and looped it over one shoulder. Within my boots, my feet felt as tired and cramped as I could ever remember. But we were getting closer, so much closer…

  After a time, the woods grew so dense on either side that one scarcely could have penetrated them, making it all the easier to remain on the cleared path. Other than climbing over an occasional exposed root of gargantuan size, or skirting a standing pool of black water of indeterminate depth, we made good and steady progress.

  After about three hours of walking, the path ended. It vanished at the base of a huge oak tree. Coming to a halt, I sat on a fallen log off to one side and watched with amusement as Evelyn stared upward to where the tree vanished into the thick green canopy of branches above, then looked around for any other possible path we could follow, and finally, failing that, turned to me with a look of exasperation.

  Wordlessly I stood and led her around the right side of the tree, stepping carefully over the big roots, and indicated a series of small notches cunningly cut into the trunk. They had been cut in such a way as to make them extremely hard to spot from anywhere other than directly in front of them.

  She studied the notches, her eyes widening as she understood what they were for.

  “Your secret hideout… It’s a treehouse.”

  I smiled.

  Looking up at the tree’s mammoth heights again, she emitted a long, low sigh. Then she shrugged.

  “And I suppose you want me to go first, right?”

  “Actually, yes—for reasons that will become apparent soon enough.”

  Narrowing her eyes, she studied me for a moment, then took hold of the trunk and began to climb. I followed after her, admittedly enjoying the lovely views of nature thus afforded.

  Soon we had attained a fairly lofty height and were moving into the bottom of the sea of branches and leaves that resembled nothing so much as a ceiling over the lower portion of the forest. The notches in the trunk led us unerringly through what appeared to be narrow, randomly open areas amid the limbs. Evelyn was a good climber, for the most part giving me the impression that I was actually holding her back. It mattered not. We were not going far. Or, rather, not far up the tree.

  After I had followed her up through the thickest portion of the limbs, wherein our route had curved around and back such that we could no longer see the ground, I called a halt to our climbing and released my right hand from the hold. Leaning out, I took hold of the threads of the Power that pulsed invisibly all around us and twisted carefully. A horizontal, blazing circle of blue flame sprang into existence about six feet out from the tree trunk, just below her and a bit above me.

  Evelyn looked at the portal, then back at me.

  “No.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s our doorway,” I said. “Just hop on through.”

  She looked down at the thick jungle of branches, with the ground a good distance below that. She glared at me.

  “This is why I had to go first? So I can test it and see if it still works?”

  I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise.

  “Actually, I had not thought of that, but it is certainly a fine idea and an added bonus.”

  I laughed, then motioned with my head for her to go on.

  “This is the only access point I have ever found,” I said. “The only alternative is to climb back down the tree and, well, turn ourselves over to Baranak.”

  She muttered something unintelligible, then asked, “Where will I land? It’s not this far up, on the other side, right?”

  “I would roll with the impact,” I said. “I’m sure you practiced that in your military training at some point.”

  “…Right.”

  “And try not to miss the portal when you jump.”

  She glared daggers at me.

  I shrugged.

  “Seemed like a reasonable enough warning.”

  A low growl emanating from her throat, she released her left hand and her left boot and leaned out from the tree trunk. Taking a deep breath, she leapt out and dropped through the center of the blazing circle, vanishing.

  “Good job,” I muttered, climbing up to the level she’d just evacuated. Gesturing again, I caused the circle to drift closer to the tree, until the flickering blue flames nearly touched my boot. Then, with the utmost dignity, I stepped gingerly off the tree and dropped through the burning hole in the sky.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Evelyn struggled to her feet in the midst of a thick growth of weeds as I dropped gently to the open ground nearby. She glared at me.

  “You knew the exit was barely any distance above the ground here,” she growled.

  My expression was one of utter innocence—a look I had long ago perfected, but could never use effectively on those who truly knew me.

  Her eyes narrowed as she brushed the shredded foliage from her flight suit.

  “And where you landed—that’s closer to where the tree was. I didn’t have to jump out that far.” She folded her arms and fixed me with a withering stare.

  I smiled.

  “Exciting, though, wasn’t it?”

  Before she could reply, I gestured at our new surroundings, and she halted in mid-exclamation, looking around.

  We stood a the bottom of what appeared to be a narrow ravine, with rough, gray walls close in on both sides, and only a narrow opening at either end leading out. Far overhead, the sky was a deep black with no stars. A pale light flickered over us from some unseen source beyond the opening.

  “This is… something else,” she commented dryly. “You really know all the best places to take a lady.”

  Ignoring her, I walked toward the nearer opening and climbed out. There, one of the two sheer walls ended, giving way to a dropoff, and leaving me standing on a narrow, stony ledge. Evelyn hesitated for a moment, perhaps still angry, then followed me through and joined me on the outcropping. She peered over the edge, gasped and involuntarily jerked backward, stumbling.

  I grasped her arm and pulled her back, understanding then that the vista she gazed upon, so very old and familiar to me, was quite new to her, and extremely disconcerting.

  We stood overlooking an endless drop. The world opposite the rock wall behind us could not have been emptier. A void of blankness extending beyond the mind’s comprehension, it laid siege to the senses and spoke great volumes of nothingness.

  Evelyn looked at me, uncomprehending.

  “Bottomless,” I said. “Or rather, simply empty. The
difference is meaningless here.”

  She looked down again. The ledge protruded out over, and into, utter blackness. Not so much the blackness of a deep, dark place. More like the blackness of the ending of the universe, if such a thing can be imagined or described adequately.

  “Come on,” I said with a wry smile. “There are greater sights to see, yet.”

  Her eyes widening, she followed me as I walked a bit further around the curving ledge and then began to climb up the cliff face. A dim but growing blue light flickered from above, providing our only illumination, and soon it became apparent that we were being illuminated not by some benevolent star but by a shifting, twisting azure aurora that crackled and writhed like an angry dragon high up in the empty heavens.

  The climb was not so difficult a task as it looked. We made quick progress, and the way grew easier as we went. Somewhere ahead of us, a low roar grew steadily louder. After several minutes our path up the cliff curved around to such an extent that we could no longer see our starting point below us. Some moments after that, I could finally see the shelf above us that I was headed for. From that shelf, the full extent of our locale could be viewed and appreciated. I slowed, considering just what her reaction to this next wonder might be. Then, amused at the prospect, I hoisted myself over the edge and reached back to help her up.

  As she topped the edge and scrambled onto the flat, hard surface, she looked up, and her mouth opened and the blue fire sparkled in her eyes as she beheld the true glory of my most secret sanctum.

  The shelf we stood upon represented only a small outcropping of a vast, floating island, hanging suspended in a black void of nothingness. To our left, very close at hand, a tremendous river disgorged its contents in the form of a mighty waterfall cascading over the island’s edge, the torrent curving around and disappearing somewhere beneath us. To our right, away in the distance, perhaps directly opposite the waterfall, a continuous roar resounded from a torrent of water gushing up and over that edge. Bigger than a geyser, it looked like a waterfall turned upside down—which is precisely what it was.

  Evelyn looked at the waterfall, then at the gusher. Back and forth. Finally, she turned to me.

  “Is that—is that the same—?”

  “Yes. The same river. It wraps around the island. If we stood on what looks like the underside to us now—and we could, gravity somehow working that way, here—you would see the same thing you see now, but reversed.”

  She regarded me with an odd and rather uncomfortable expression that involved one eye squinting closed and the other eyebrow arching high. I took this to mean she was attempting to come to grips with the entire concept, but had not yet fully accomplished it.

  I could not blame her. For many, many years the combination of beauty and natural-law-defying physics of my private cosmos had left me in silent awe. Eventually, I had gotten used to it, or as close as one could ever come. Yet it still worked some small magic upon me, as few other locales could.

  Truth be told, I had been extremely fortunate to happen upon such a place, many centuries earlier. Almond-shaped, the sky island measured approximately ten miles long and a five miles wide. Rocky hills protruded upwards at the center of both sides, sloping down past thick forests of strange blue trees to grassy slopes, followed by the cliffs that girdled the equivalent of its equator. I had never discovered how this strange flora could grow in only the light of the aurora, and I had never cared enough to find out. This was one of the more exotic realms I had ever encountered, and when it came to its botany and its physics, it kept its own counsel.

  I allowed her a few moments to soak in the strange beauty, and unexpectedly found myself staring as well at the majestic waterfall to our left. Something about it spoke to me then, as it never had before. My eyes were drawn to the edge, to the point where the smooth, glassy slab of water made its ninety-degree turn and, taken by the forces of chaos, shredded into a torrent and vanished from view over the side. What a powerful metaphor for life, I thought then. We live forever in the “now,” in that brief instant of the present. Trailing out behind us, the past churns and boils away from us, chaotic and turbulent but all too quickly lost from view and gone. And ahead, the future is a smooth, tranquil stream of possibilities and eventualities, all shapeless and waiting to be formed. All of life consists of that edge, that razor-thin line between the two, where hope and possibility meet reality and resolution.

  Another thought presented itself then. For me, that river leading up to the edge would always flow, a never-ending stream drawing from a limitless source. For mortals such as Evelyn, though, the pool was quite finite. Sooner or later, for her, no more water would flow over that edge. This realization pressed itself upon me with considerable urgency and served to remind me once again of the absolute futility of allowing myself to grow close to a mortal. I resolved to redouble my efforts at keeping her at arm’s length, despite her admittedly appealing traits.

  Finally, one last troubling possibility ran through my mind. Was my pool truly bottomless, truly infinite? If three-quarters of the gods could die in only a brief span of time, how safe did that leave me? I knew then that this possibility had gnawed at me for some time, subconsciously, and eventually I would have to face it. Not now, though, I told myself. For now, I had work to do.

  Leading Evelyn up the slope, through the strange, wiry blue grass, I indicated a low cave entrance set into a rocky area just ahead, and we made for it. Bending under the opening, we entered a space entirely dark until I raised my left hand and tweaked the flow of the Power around us. Torches along both walls flared to life, revealing what amounted to my living room and storeroom. Boxes, mostly, and crates. A few random doodads I had picked up here and there. Little in the way of furniture, beyond a small table and one folding chair, since I had never intended to bring anyone else there.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” she said, looking around, her distaste as obvious as her sarcasm.

  “Its only priority has ever been secrecy, and at that it excels,” I replied.

  Evelyn inspected several of the crates, which were actually high-tech sealed storage devices.

  “Water,” she observed. “Canned food. Camping supplies. Fuel.” She looked back at me. “How did you ever manage to get all this stuff here?”

  “Don’t ask,” I replied. “It was neither quick nor easy.”

  Nodding idly, she returned to her inspection.

  “Books. Journals.”

  “You should leave those be,” I said flatly.

  Eyeing me, she closed the lid on that box and dug around through the ones next to it.

  “As you can see,” I said, “there are plenty of supplies here.”

  She nodded, then stopped and looked at me, frowning.

  “You were in exile for a thousand years, you said.”

  I nodded.

  “So, just how old is this stuff?” She poked at the packaged contents of another box. “The food, the water?”

  “We are far enough in the Above that they should still be perfectly fresh. In local terms, they have only been here a short time.”

  Finding a cup that didn’t look too dirty, she filled it with water from a barrel. She sipped at it carefully at first, then downed it in one long swallow, sighed and smiled.

  “Tastes fresh to me.”

  She refilled it, then refilled the bottle we had finished on the journey.

  After another long drink and a sampling of the contents of a few food packets, she regarded me quizzically.

  “So—here we are,” she said, looking around. “Charming. And this is supposed to advance your cause… how?”

  “It was our immediate destination,” I said, “because it offers safety and sanctuary and a respite from our travels and troubles of late. But I do not intend simply to hide out here. I have a bit further to go yet, and then things should begin to turn in my favor.”

  “You?”

  “What?”

  “You said you had a bit fur
ther to go yet.”

  I sipped at a cup of water, set it down and regarded her.

  “You might wish to stay here while I attend to my task.”

  She looked around at the sparse accommodations.

  “Stay here?”

  “I know it is not the most luxurious of accommodations, but—”

  “That’s not the problem at all,” she said angrily, cutting me off.

  I pushed on.

  “It would be safer for you. There are very, very few places where this plane is congruent with anywhere else—at least, anywhere the others are ever likely to go. This is as remote as any place in the larger universe can be. No one will find you here.”

  I gestured at a pile of cushions lying against one wall.

  “And it’s comfortable enough… There are plenty of supplies… It might get a bit boring, but I am sure you could manage for as long as it took. Considering the time difference this far into the Above, you would scarcely know I had gone before I returned.”

  “If.”

  “What?”

  “If you returned. That’s the problem. If.”

  I frowned.

  “Come on,” she said. “Nearly every force in the universe is out to catch you. If one of them does, you might never return.”

  She looked around at the interior of the cave again.

  “And, as much as I would miss your sparkling wit and charming personality, the worst part seems pretty obvious: I would be trapped here for the rest of my life.”

  I sighed.

  “Point taken. You will come with me.”

  She nodded.

  “In fact, you might wish to remain there.”

  It was her turn to frown.

  “There? Where?”

  “Our next destination. For the moment, I will say only that it is neither your Earth, nor anywhere else in your Terran Alliance. It is, however, in your plane, your home universe.”