An Echo of Things to Come

by James Islington

  “One of us has to go after her,” said Erran.

  Davian nodded his agreement. “Fessi’s the only one who can reach her in time,” he observed.

  “And you’re the only one who she’ll listen to,” added Fessi wryly. She shook her head. “She’s been acting strange ever since the eletai. We should have kept a closer eye on her.”

  Erran grunted his agreement. “Fess, take Davian. You won’t catch her if you have to account for two of us. It’s not as if Geladra here has any proof of wrongdoing, or any way that she can hurt me if she decided to try.”

  Davian exhaled heavily, then leaned down and gave Asha a quick kiss of farewell. “I’ll see you soon,” he said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

  Before Asha could respond, Fessi grabbed his arm, retracting the time bubble so it encapsulated only the two of them.

  They started toward the Boundary.

  “So. You and Asha looked like you were getting along,” observed Fessi.

  Davian gave her a dry look, and said nothing. They were setting a reasonable pace, though it was a quick walk rather than a run; they had discovered that it was more efficient for maintaining concentration to move at that pace, meaning that they could ultimately get farther, faster.

  “Is that Ishelle up ahead?” he asked, squinting at the wall of energy. They were nearly there.

  Even as he spoke, there was a flicker of movement from the Boundary.

  Davian watched in horror as the light near the distant figure of Ishelle simply … melted, revealing the archway that had been outlined by kan. Through it, he could see more of the barren, cracked ground that they currently stood on. Nothing else, though. No enemies.

  Ishelle walked through the entrance, and Davian held his breath.

  There was the slightest flash—a purple glint of light that danced over the archway.

  And then nothing.

  Ishelle was on the other side.

  “Fates,” breathed Fessi. “We’re too late.”

  “No we’re not. Come on,” said Davian, pushing forward again.

  “What?” Fessi blanched. “No. We can’t go through.”

  “Erran’s still here if something happens, but we need to catch her. Something’s wrong, Fessi. Ishelle may be impatient and reckless, but this is different.”

  Fessi said nothing, but her expression told him that she thought the same. Ishelle hadn’t been the same since the attack, but she hadn’t wanted to talk about it and none of them had pressed. They’d all put it down to it being her way of dealing with what had happened.

  He saw indecision sweep across Fessi’s face, along with a flicker of fear. Still, she squared her shoulders determinedly.

  “Let’s make it quick,” was all she said.

  They approached the archway and Davian pressed forward without hesitation, followed closely by Fessi. Energy pulsed and rippled around them, a roaring, thrumming torrent of motion and light, close enough to make Davian flinch back every time that there was a flicker brighter than he’d expected. The darkness of predawn was slowly beginning to brighten to a violent orange in the east, visible through the translucent wall all around them.

  And then they were through.

  Davian breathed out as they emerged into Talan Gol. “Ishelle!” he yelled as they finally got within hearing range, Fessi dropping her time bubble.

  Ishelle didn’t turn, didn’t seem to hear him. He tried again and this time she glanced over her shoulder, frowning. Her eyes were distant, unfocused.

  Then they cleared, and the blood drained from her face.

  “What in fates in going on?” Ishelle asked in horror.

  “We’d like to know the same thing,” said Davian grimly. “But right now, we need to get back.”

  He turned, and his heart dropped.

  The archway was filling with energy again.

  He took a faltering step toward it, but he already knew that it was too late. Within moments, their exit was gone.

  Fessi let out a cry as she saw what had happened, and Davian closed his eyes, trying to push through kan. To his horror, it seemed … slipperier, here. Far harder to grasp. He gritted his teeth, eventually getting a handle on the dark power, using it to examine the space where the archway had been.

  The Boundary appeared significantly different from this side. There were more mechanisms, other mechanisms, but they were somehow obscured. Hazy to look at, as well as heavily protected. Completely inaccessible.

  And the doorway—any sign of the doorway—had vanished.

  He opened his eyes and reoriented himself, making sure that he was focusing on the right section of wall. They had just come through it.

  But when he looked again, there was still nothing.

  His stomach twisted. It made sense, he supposed. You didn’t build a door into a prison and then allow it to be unlocked from the inside.

  He turned to look at the two girls. Ishelle was watching him blankly, confusion still her foremost emotion, though fear was beginning to take more of a hold as she started to comprehend the situation. Fessi, though, had seen what he was doing and already knew what his expression meant.

  “We can’t open it?” she asked, her voice small.

  Davian shook his head, fear slowly welling up inside of him as he contemplated what had happened.

  “It’s gone,” he said softly.

  “We’re trapped.”

  Chapter 43

  Davian stared into the Boundary, peering through the translucent blue-white river in a desperate attempt to see any sort of motion on the other side.

  He’d been doing that for a couple of hours now—though it felt like longer. He, Fessi, and Ishelle had decided to take it in turns to keep watch, trusting that Erran would come looking for them at some point. There had been no sign of rescue, though. If Erran had come, the wall of energy hadn’t been weak enough for them to spot him, nor to let them reach him mentally.

  Davian stretched muscles stiff from tension, giving a nervous glance across to where Ishelle sat cross-legged on the hard ground. She was pale and drawn as she gazed vacantly into the wide-open wastelands of Talan Gol, which the dim rays of dawn now fully illuminated.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.

  Ishelle didn’t respond for a moment, then turned and gave him a wan smile. “About as you’d expect.” She rubbed her hands together absently, though the air was already turning warm. “Responsible. Myself, but … responsible.”

  “You aren’t,” said Davian quietly. Ishelle had been confused and terrified when she’d realized where they were, and a Read of her—with her permission—had confirmed Davian’s concerns. She had gaps in her memory, black spots; to Ishelle’s mind, one moment she’d been at the outpost, the next in Talan Gol.

  Reading her had confirmed something else, too.

  Kan was much harder to use here.

  It had taken Davian almost a half hour to successfully make contact with Ishelle’s mind, even with her as a willing participant. Whenever he tried to use the power here, for anything, it just … slipped away. Using kan in Andarra had been like handling ice. Here, it was as if the ice melted whenever he grasped at it.

  “I should have said something sooner.” Ishelle had turned back to her inspection of the surrounding countryside, though there was little to see. Just flat, cracked, baked, and lifeless dirt for … miles. A mountain range broke the horizon, but it was so distant that the shapes rising from the ground were little more than a brown, shimmering outline.

  Davian wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, glancing east at the rising sun. It felt hotter than it should have, particularly as the light itself seemed wan, as if there were actually clouds in the clear blue sky. “Probably. But I’m not sure that it would have changed anything,” he said quietly, privately berating himself again for not noticing that something was amiss sooner. Ishelle had admitted that she’d been having blackouts like this since the eletai attack—though never for anywhere near as long, a
nd never waking to find that she was somewhere else. “We might have told you to rest a little more, but I can’t say that we would have done anything that would have prevented something like this.”

  He was about to say more when Fessi abruptly appeared, breathing hard and looking utterly drained from the effort she’d just expended. She had volunteered to scout the vicinity for any threats, using her ability so that she could do so without being seen. Davian had no idea how she’d been able to alter her passage through time here at all, let alone for the ten minutes for which she’d been gone—but she had evidently managed. Her control over that ability continued to astound him.

  “What is it?” he asked her worriedly, Ishelle turning to watch the other girl, too.

  Fessi took a second, hands on her knees.

  “Movement to the north. A lot of movement,” she gasped out eventually. “I didn’t get close enough to really make them out, but … I don’t think they’re human. And they’re coming our way.”

  Davian’s heart dropped and he rubbed a hand over his face, glancing once again at the Boundary. He’d been reluctant to leave this area, hadn’t wanted to venture out into Talan Gol itself, in case Erran figured out where they were and found a way to reopen the door.

  Now, it seemed that they didn’t have a choice.

  “We need to find shelter, then—somewhere to hide. And water,” he added quietly, glancing again at the unusually warm sun.

  Fessi gave the wall of light a reluctant glance, obviously thinking along the same lines as Davian, but nodded brusquely. “I haven’t seen anything but if we head west, perhaps we can—”

  “That direction.”

  Fessi and Davian both turned to Ishelle, whose brow was furrowed as she indicated a point slightly north of the rising sun.

  Davian and Fessi exchanged a glance. “Why do you say that?” asked Fessi cautiously.

  “There’s something over there. Water. Shelter. A cave, I think.” Ishelle shifted uncomfortably as she said the words, her tone becoming defensive as she looked up and saw their expressions. “I know how it sounds. I wish I could explain it, but I knew almost as soon as we got here. I didn’t want to say anything, because …” She sighed. “Well, because I knew you’d look at me just like that.”

  Davian frowned at her. Ishelle thought that she was telling the truth, at least. He glanced at Fessi. “How much time do we have?”

  “Not enough for a discussion,” said Fessi. She gazed at Ishelle worriedly.

  “We don’t really have any better ideas,” observed Davian, giving Fessi a slight nod to indicate that Ishelle wasn’t lying.

  The dark-haired girl hesitated, then sighed. “True enough,” she agreed heavily. “Give me a minute to catch my breath, though. If we run into trouble, I want to make sure that I’m able to get all three of us away.”

  Davian and Ishelle both nodded. Ishelle glanced at Davian uncomfortably, then resumed her study of the wastelands as Davian and Fessi both watched her with a slight frown.

  Davian eventually shrugged silently to Fessi, then closed his eyes, focusing. Kan was hard even to sense here and harder to use with accuracy once he eventually grasped it. Still, what he wanted to do now was basic enough.

  He hardened kan, then carefully set a large arrow into the ground that pointed in the direction in which they were intending to head. He didn’t think that Erran was foolish enough to open the doorway and come through, but if he did, then he’d at least have a general direction in which to start looking for them. Besides, Davian felt better leaving something behind to mark this location—there were no landmarks to speak of in the surrounding geography. If the door through the Boundary still existed on the Andarran side, finding this spot again might be important.

  “I’m ready,” said Fessi after a few more seconds. She paused. “If we see anything that we need to avoid, I can probably shift all three of us outside of time for … maybe a few minutes. After that …”

  “If it comes to it, just do what you can,” said Davian, receiving a short nod of acknowledgment from Fessi.

  The three of them gave the Boundary one last, reluctant glance, and started walking.

  They headed northeast, Ishelle taking the lead, though Davian kept a sharp eye on her. The sun was well above the horizon now, uncomfortably warm but still casting an unusually wan light. More than once Davian squinted overhead, trying to see whether the Boundary was responsible for filtering the sunlight. He was fairly confident that the energy formed a complete dome—otherwise, if nothing else, the eletai could never have remained contained for so long. But the sky above looked clear, not at all like the torrent of power visible at the edges of Talan Gol.

  They pressed on until the sun was close to its zenith, the Boundary to Davian’s left retreating farther and farther into the distance until finally it was no longer visible on the horizon. Once it had faded from view entirely, the journey was surreal: everything here looked the same, and only the position of the sun confirmed that they were not simply walking in circles. Everywhere he looked there was just dry, cracked ground and endlessly, unnaturally flat horizons, broken only by occasional distant shapes that may or may not have been hills. The sun beat down with desertlike intensity, its heat then reflected up at them again from the hard-packed earth.

  They walked mostly in silence and the longer that passed, the more uncertain Davian became about his decision. He wiped more sweat from his brow and licked dry lips. These were truly wastelands, vast, not the desolate buffer that met the Boundary on the southern side. If Ishelle was wrong—and he knew that they were taking an enormous chance in trusting her in her current state—then they were in serious trouble.

  There was something else, too. Something that he hadn’t mentioned to the others yet.

  There was absolutely no Essence here, or at least none that he was able to detect. Even the sunlight didn’t seem to be providing the small amount of energy that it normally would, and his self-made Reserve, which he’d been carefully maintaining since they had left Tol Shen, was now running dangerously low.

  Before long, he was going to have to start drawing Essence from his companions to survive.

  “Up ahead,” said Fessi suddenly, her tense tone startling him from his thoughts.

  Davian slowed, squinting in the direction that Fessi had indicated. At first he didn’t see anything except a small rise some way away.

  Then his eyes widened.

  It was only just visible, but there was now a cloud of dust billowing upward in the distance, drifting across the wastelands.

  “I thought you scouted in the other direction,” he said softly.

  “I did.” Fessi’s brow was furrowed. “That can’t be the same group that I saw.”

  “We’re not too far.” Ishelle looked over at them. “Five minutes at most. We’re aiming for that hill.”

  Davian shook his head. “And if that army is coming this way? We should go around, maybe wait for them to pass. Another hour wouldn’t be the end of us.”

  “Agreed,” said Fessi.

  Ishelle hesitated, then shook her head.

  “There’s more. More are coming from everywhere,” she said softly. She pointed directly north. “In five minutes, we’ll see another cloud, and then another. They’re massing.”

  Davian blinked. “How do you know—”

  “I just do.” There was an immense frustration in Ishelle’s voice, and she stared at them pleadingly. “I wish I understood this, too, but right now, you’re going to have to trust me. There’s no getting around them, Dav. Where we’re headed is the best place to hide. Probably the only place.”

  Davian glanced at Fessi, who grimaced. “It’s not far. And if she’s wrong, I could probably get us away again.”

  Davian stared at the cloud of dust ahead, then came to a decision and reluctantly nodded his acquiescence.

  They pressed on, this time with more urgency in their step, though Davian didn’t go so far as to ask Fessi to use her ability jus
t yet. The dull flat brown of the world was barely broken by the hill that Ishelle had pointed out; if they had not been heading directly toward it, Davian wouldn’t have given it a second glance. Still, as they drew nearer, he realized that it was a slightly different color and texture to everything around it. Craggy and jagged rather than uniformly worn. A darker shade of brown, and not just because of the shadow that it cast.

  He glanced across at Fessi, who was frowning as she studied it, too.

  “What do you think?” he murmured. There was no one around to hear—no one for miles, as far as he could tell—but the eerie, lifeless silence of this place made speaking quietly seem appropriate.

  “Whatever’s creating that cloud of dust isn’t far away,” said Fessi grimly. She nodded to the north. “And Ishelle wasn’t wrong about them having friends.”

  Davian inclined his head; he hadn’t failed to spot the second cloud rising off to their left.

  Soon enough they were in the shadow of the small but steep-edged hill, allowing Davian’s eyes to adjust. There was indeed an opening, though it was barely wide enough to accommodate an adult’s frame, and not much taller. The hole at first appeared natural, but he soon noticed that the ground remained perfectly flat as it disappeared into the darkness, unnaturally straight compared to the jagged rock everywhere else.

  He paused, listening for a few moments at the entrance. There was an odd sound coming from the cave mouth—a sighing, as if a gentle breeze was blowing through it.

  “We should get inside,” said Ishelle. “That army’s not too far away.”

  She vanished into the narrow passageway.

  Davian grimaced, exchanging another uncertain glance with Fessi before shrugging and following Ishelle silently into the murky opening. He concentrated as he walked, fumbling with kan a few times before finally grasping it, questing out for any signs of Essence—and therefore life—ahead.

  There was nothing, though.