The possibilities and delight of it nearly drove him mad, and Thannis smiled.
The Beau’Chants were about to heavily invest in the santsi business.
28 - Visions - Wayran
Kali, my daughter and goddess, who I have bequeathed to the world. Her arms wrap around the globe, protecting it from the ones on whom she sits in judgement.
She is the new goddess of time and of judgement, and is the one who brings things to life or to an end. Kali will watch over the world once I am gone, and the fate of us all will be in her hands.
She will stand guard against another rise of demons, and shall meet them with a wrath and fury powerful enough to scour the world of their pestilence.
Note on this entry: Perhaps a bit much, yet still accurate enough as to what Kali can, and was born, to do. I felt the need for some reverence today.
- Journal of Robert Mannford, Day 142 Year 34
Wayran stood atop the sand dune staring at the hulking warrior across from him. Yet something was different.
He looked down into his hand, and saw a book. The book he had brought back from the Wastes. The wind picked up and he felt sand rasp against his cheek. He turned his head slightly to shade his eyes, then started.
The man with the metal face and glowing red eyes stood beside him, and yet, as Wayran recovered from his shock, he noticed that the strange man was not looking at him, but rather at the dark warrior. The red-eyed man’s wide conical hat and cloak were somehow unaffected by the blowing sand.
“We have little time left, Wayran Spierling.” The strange man’s words came into his head, though Wayran had not seen his mouth form the sounds.
“We?” Wayran questioned. The dream was odd this time: he wasn’t as scared, and he felt almost like he was a spectator rather than participant.
“Give me the key!” the warrior yelled at them.
“Hurry, get to the door. He will follow.” The red-eyed man sprinted down the dune.
“I can never open it!” Wayran yelled as he followed.
The hulking warrior transformed into a giant black snake. Glowing orbs, like santsi, pulsed along its back as if it were diseased, and the great serpent opened its mouth to show golden, sword-like teeth.
Wayran’s panic began to rise. This snake was faster than the others had been. He wasn’t going to make it to the door.
“Quickly!” the red-eyed man’s voice screeched in Wayran’s mind.
“You open the door! You must know how,” Wayran yelled back.
“The answer is in the book. In the book!” The red-eyed man turned away as Wayran slid down the dune. Sand was ripping at his skin on the wind, but he didn’t care, as the dune behind him was collapsing from the weight of the giant snake.
Something black streaked past him. The red-eyed man put up a hand, but the snake’s body smashed into him, and the red-eyed man shattered into a thousand pieces.
The snake turned and found Wayran; it morphed into the tall handsome man who held twin hunting knives dripping with blood.
Flash.
They were no longer outside, but within the Jendar complex. They stood in a room dominated by a console beneath a wide glassy surface stretching across the top of the wall and ceiling.
The tall man was still with him, but kept shifting forms between the dark, metal-clad warrior and the tall man. “Enough! I will not allow you to let that thing decide all our fates.” The tall man pointed to the console at the front of a great machine.
“But we have the keys, we can end this,” Wayran heard himself say.
Three vertical slots dominated the face of the console, each designed to fit the appropriate key. Above the three oddly shaped slots was a large word written in Jendar.
A word Wayran recognised.
“Kali,” he read aloud. “She can stop everything …”
The words died on his lips as the tall man’s knife slashed across his neck.
Flash.
Wayran shot upright with a scream.
He was in a dark room, and his back was killing him. In fact, he felt like he had been in a fight. Oh, that’s right, he thought. He had been in a fight – with Matoh. The memories came flooding back as he realised he was no longer in the nightmare.
“Ah, good, you’re up.” said a rough-looking man, giving the bars a whack with his cudgel. The sound made Wayran wince against the headache now throbbing in his skull. The rough man didn’t look happy, and had the uncanny resemblance of a prison guard.
Ah, yes. He had been taken to the lock-up after what had happened during the fight.
Wayran shook his head. What had actually happened? There had been pulses of energy, yet at the time he hadn’t thought that strange. He had felt the need to keep fighting, to allow the energy to take its course. He remembered the feeling of being thrust into something much bigger than a grudge match with his brother.
“What was it?” he wondered aloud.
“You and your brother’s stunt ruined the initiation ceremony, that’s what. Could’ve killed people, stupid bloody idiots,” the guard growled at him. “Now get up, you’ve got a visitor.”
“Kill people? No, there was something else going on. I –”
“Save your excuses for someone who cares, kid.” The guard cut him off and rapped his cudgel on the bars again. “Like I said, you got a visitor. Save your words for him.”
Wayran stood up and went to the bars to look out into the gloomy light of the hallway beyond his cell, and saw Chronicler Talbot.
“We’re locking up soon, you’ve got ten minutes, Chronicler,” the guard huffed, and walked to the end of the hall to wait where he could still see them both.
“Wayran, my boy,” Chronicler Talbot said, almost breathless. “Are you hurt? I heard you and your brother were involved in some sort of malicious stunt at the ceremony? I was worried after you ran out and didn’t return. Who were you chasing?”
“I’m fine. Just sore is all. I didn’t catch him.” Wayran looked sheepishly at the Chronicler, not knowing if he should share about the red-eyed man. Yet circumstances couldn’t get much worse. “I thought I saw something or someone who was at the Jendar complex. I thought they somehow followed me back to New Toeron.”
“Really?” Chronicler Talbot looked amazed. “A stowaway? But how could they have got onto your uncle’s ship without being noticed? It flies, for goodness sake.”
“I don’t know, Chronicler,” Wayran sighed, “it doesn’t make much sense to me either. I don’t even know if I’m just seeing phantoms and imagining the whole thing.”
“I wouldn’t discount the possibility this being is real just yet.” Chronicler Talbot leaned in and pulled the book Wayran had found in the complex from beneath his long coat. “This journal talks about so many things I don’t understand, but it would seem that Robert Mannford was not completely alone at the end. He talks about these beings called NREs more than once, and from the context it seems these beings were not human. Are you sure there was no one else in that complex?”
A shiver ran down Wayran’s spine. Part of him had wanted to believe that the man with glowing red eyes was just a hallucination, and now to have someone else voice the possibility of his being real terrified him.
“Did you happen to find a woman’s body? He keeps referring to a woman named Kali in what I’ve translated so far.” Chronicler Talbot’s finger was tracing some words in the book. “He talks about her living longer than he did, but she must be thousands of years dead as well.”
The memories and visions flashed through Wayran’s mind in a blur. The word “Kali” resonated like a thunderclap in his mind. “Kali’s not a person, it’s a machine. A machine that has great power.”
“How do you know that?” Chronicler Talbot asked.
“Because I’ve seen it.” Wayran remembered it now. He and Matoh had poked their heads into that room, but as there was nothing in there but a console which hadn’t responded to their touch, they had left it without another thought.
Chronicler Talbot narrowed his eyes in thought, but indulged Wayran and wrote the symbols for Kali in Jendar in the dust on the floor.
“I’ve seen those symbols.” Wayran said. He now remembered the console flashing through his visions during his fight with Matoh. He should have thought of it earlier. “They were on the console of a giant machine within the complex.”
“Was it still running?” Chronicler Talbot’s voice had taken on a tense edge.
“Well … it didn’t turn on when we touched the console, but most of the complex still seemed to be working.” Wayran thought of his visions. “Though I can’t be sure. Matoh and I might have wrecked a few things on our way out.” He grimaced.
The Chronicler’s face went white.
“What is it?” Wayran had never seen the Chronicler look so uncomfortable before.
“Mannford talks about Kali waiting in judgement …” Talbot’s hands flipped the book open and found the page he was looking for. He began to read: “… She will wait for the thousands of years which I cannot, and she will judge whether mankind has changed. She will decide if they have reconnected with Tiden Raika and the great planet they reside upon. If found lacking, she will scour the planet clean and tear down the destructive and pestilent civilisations that once again mar the face of our home.” He stopped reading. “Can it be true? Surely these are just the ravings of a madman.” Chronicler Talbot seemed to be imploring Wayran to confirm his conviction.
The vision at the end of his fight with Matoh came back to him. The wave crashing down onto New Toeron, the cities full of death, and destruction on an unimaginable scale.
“I don’t think so, Chronicler.” His heart began to pound. “I think those old myths about the Ciwix, about the catastrophes at the end of the Jendar civilisation, may be true.”
Chronicler Talbot’s legs wobbled and the big man thumped down to the floor. “But … what do we do? What can we do? Where do we even begin?”
Clarity came to Wayran as if he had been dropped in a vat of ice. His dreams were more than just dreams. They were visions. Just like when Matoh was about to crash and he had seen how he could save him. This was the same, yet on a massive scale. He was seeing possibilities, and he knew what needed to happen.
“There is a door, a door with three keys. The console! The console is the door.” He looked at Talbot, who was staring at him bewildered.
The answer is in the book, the red-eyed man had said in his dream. “We need to translate that book. Everything – because I think this Kali is still working, and our time is running out.”
“Jailor!” Chronicler Talbot shouted, “I need you to release this young man immediately!”
“Stuff that, old man.” The guard spat on the stone floor. “I don’t know what nonsense you two are going on about, but that kid stays where he is. You don’t like it, take it up with the Doyenne; she runs the Academy and I’m answerable to her, not you.”
“It’s alright, Chronicler,” Wayran said. “I need to think, to make sense of some things I should have paid more attention to. Just get everyone you can working on translating that journal.”
“Come on, time’s up.” The guard moved towards them and looked to be in no mood for discussion.
“Alright, I’ll be back soon though.” Chronicler Talbot dusted himself off, regaining his composure. “I have more questions, a lot of them.”
Wayran nodded, and watched the Chronicler leave.
So the red-eyed man, his visions, all of it, might just be real. His mind was still reeling at what that meant as he sat back down on his bunk, but as the shock wore off, purpose began to grow within him. He felt a sense of urgency, the pull of something greater than himself, just like he had during the fight with Matoh, just like he had in the Wastes.
He knew what he had to do.
Find the three keys, or else Mannford’s invention was going to destroy the world, just as it had done over three thousand years ago.
It was insane, but Wayran knew he was finally seeing the truth of it all.
He had to get back to that complex, and he had to find the keys.
He might be stuck in a cell this night, but his soul had never felt so free, his vision had never been so clear.
End of Book 1 of the Syklan Saga.
Visions: Knights of Salucia - Book 1 Page 33