Stormfront

by John Goode

  He checked the weapon for balance, and swung the sword horizontally over his head and then vertically. “Thank you.”

  I wasn’t sure what good an ice blade would do against a giant, but I understood all too well the desire to need a weapon in one’s hand. I also decided to find him a blade to suit him and to be careful that it did not remind him of his soul sword.

  We followed Caerus farther into the castle, all of us waiting for something to happen. Turns out we didn’t have to wait long at all. The moment we made it past the portcullis, three giants in armor jumped us.

  Before Hawk or I could react, the new Regent of the Crystal Court bellowed, “Dėfaire!” Molly was the only one of us who did not stare, surprised, at Caerus, who had never spoken so loudly before.

  One of the giants was in the middle of swinging a club the size of a rougewood at us when its arm began to lose shape, as if it was blurring. Within seconds, it began to shed particles of itself, a process that was not painless judging from the scream the giant gave out. The club, its arm, and now its shoulder were gone. Relentlessly, the effect moved across the giant’s body, gathering speed. Within another span of seconds, what was left of the first giant blew away in the wind, like ashes from an old campfire. The effect spread to the other giants who had watched their brother’s demise with muted horror. They turned and tried to run, but they never got more than a half step away before they too vanished into a cloud of nothing.

  It was easily the most impressive spell I had seen anyone from the Crystal Court cast.

  “What was that?” I asked, completely shocked.

  Caerus turned and answered, “Justice,” and then propelled herself at great speed farther into the castle.

  Hawk said to me as we followed, “Remember when I said gemlings didn’t feel emotions like we do?” I nodded. “I was completely wrong.”

  I had to agree with him.

  We heard a few more roars and then screams of pain from the next room, and the three of us ran in to find it clear of giants. This was a massive dining room, housing a table that was easily thirty feet tall with chairs built to fit giants, of course. We couldn’t see the top of the table from down on the floor, but Caerus was looking at something with interest.

  “Hawk,” she called down, “you need to see this.”

  The prince looked to me, and I nodded as I closed my eyes and concentrated. A sheet of ice formed under his feet and then grew over them, locking them in place. “Hold on,” I told him as an ice pillar formed under him and propelled him upward. I had to give him credit. He didn’t cry out as he balanced with no control at all. Whatever was up there was enough to upset him, and he practically broke his ankles trying to free himself from the ice.

  “You ready?” I asked Molly.

  “Ferra, what happened down there under the workshop?”

  A thousand words fumbled through my mind as I struggled to find the ones that would be the least distressing to her. Finally I just said, “Bad people died, and you were freed.”

  She paused as if waiting for me to elaborate.

  “Up you go,” I said, forming the ice beneath her.

  I pushed her skyward before she had a chance to ask more questions. The less she knew about Wolf and that horrific creature, the better. She saw whatever was on top of the table and covered her mouth in shock at the sight. Alarmed, I formed the ice beneath me and shot up, hoping whatever it was we could handle it. The instant I stepped onto the tabletop, I saw….

  A giant-sized golden harp lay on its side on the table. The pillar of it was an exquisitely carved fairy woman. Hawk’s reaction to the carving warned me before I reached the small group looking at the instrument.

  “Is she alive? Caerus, is she alive?” I’ve heard the voices of people who are terrified. Hawk was terrified to touch the harp. Then I realized what I was seeing.

  Oh, by Logos, that was his mother.

  “The harp has been magically altered,” Caerus explained as she scanned it. “One can only assume she was transformed, which would mean she is still alive.”

  “None of that sounded like you know if she is alive or not.”

  “I don’t, Hawk. I wish I did. All I know is that harp was once your mother, which means she could be changed back.”

  “Then change her back!” he commanded.

  Caerus snapped with a frustrated “I don’t know how!” which caused Hawk to take a half step back. “Transformation of living beings is far beyond my arcane knowledge. The best we can do now is to get her out of here and have someone more skilled make the attempt to retransform her.”

  This answer didn’t seem to please Hawk, but it didn’t do anything to further anger him, so it was a good thing. “How do we move it?” I asked. Hawk shot me a look, and I amended, “How do we move her? My apologies, Hawk’keen.” He nodded and stared down at his mother.

  Before anyone could answer, Olim came running into the room. “However you are planning on doing it, do it faster. Charmant and his people are coming. I slowed them the best I could, but it took me more effort than I was ready for to get up that damned plant.” She stopped shouting to catch her breath.

  “Charmant,” Hawk growled, looking toward the doors.

  “Who?” I asked Caerus.

  “Insane prince who seems bound and determined to start a fight with us, no matter what.”

  “Then we give him one,” Hawk said, gripping his ice blade.

  “No,” Olim said, forming an ice pillar under her to get on top of the table. “Kane and my sister are still on Earth, and we need to get to them.”

  “Because you don’t trust your sister,” Hawk said more than asked.

  “Because I am not sure your beloved is capable of handling your father and because the second Kane is in trouble, Demain will make her move.”

  There was an explosion from outside, and the sound of troops being rallied.

  “Open the portal,” Caerus said to Hawk.

  He closed his eyes and held his hand up. Seconds later, a portal opened in front of him. The tiny, talking lizard was waiting again. I was about to ask how the prince had gained the ability to do that when the first couple of people moved through the doorway.

  “They’re here,” I called out.

  “Woogie, help me pull this through,” Caerus said as she began to cast a spell on the harp.

  Instead of moving, Woogie said, “I appreciate the sentiment, but if this is for me, I have nothing that goes with it.”

  “Now!” the sapphire barked at him.

  “Hawk’keen!” a voice called from the doors. “Running away again?”

  Olim looked at Hawk. “Ignore him, he is trying to buy himself time.”

  “Is this thing solid gold?” Woogie asked when the harp refused to move.

  More troops flooded in. A few of them looked like they were spellcasters.

  “Get your mother to safety,” I said to Hawk. “I’ll hold them off.”

  “What?” Molly exclaimed. “No, you can’t go down there.”

  “I have to buy us time,” I explained to her.

  “Why?” Olim asked. “They can’t possibly get up here in any hurry.”

  As if in response, one of the humans “down there” grew to giant size. He was handsome for a man, but that was not the thing that caught my attention. It was the giant sword he was pulling out as he walked toward the table. “I said I was going to own you, Hawk,” he bellowed. “I meant it.”

  “Go!” I called out, summoning my ice. “I’ll slow him.”

  “How?” Olim asked, upset. “Let me guess, just throw ice at him and hope he stays put?”

  I ignored her and looked to the giant prince coming at us.

  “This is your problem, in fact it is your entire race’s problem. You want so badly to prove yourself to some god that doesn’t care about you that you’ve all become martyrs waiting to happen. You can’t freeze something that big. It’s impossible.”

  “I have to try.”

  “
No,” she said, shaking her head. “You just have to realize that every fight doesn’t need to be fair and just. Sometimes, you just need to win.”

  She turned to the giant man and gave him a wicked smile.

  “I see you, witch,” he said, turning his attention to Olim.

  “Not for long,” she responded and gestured her hand at him.

  At first nothing happened, and then he stumbled and dropped his sword to the ground with a deafening clatter.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  When the man brought his hands up to his eyes and let out a bloodcurdling scream. His huge body lurched back a few steps and his people scattered away from him. “What did you do to me, witch?” He put his hands in front of him as if blind, and I could see what Olim had done.

  She had frozen his eyes solid.

  They were cloudy, and judging from the way his face was swelling up, it was incredibly painful. He lost his balance and began to topple backward, causing the rest of his people to run for their lives. As he hit the floor the spell faded, shrinking him back to normal size.

  “Form ice under the harp,” Olim said to me. “I’ll push it through.”

  I just nodded and began to ice the table up under the harp as she put both hands out toward it and called out, “Get out of the way!”

  Hawk and Caerus moved to the side as Woogie flew up, away from the harp.

  I kept the ice as smooth as possible as Olim let out an arctic blast of wind that began to push the harp through the portal. Molly, who was immune to changes in temperatures moved toward my ice and then produced a set of spikes on the bottom of her feet. Using these for traction, she began to push the harp as well.

  The entire table shook as Charmant’s spellcasters began to throw spells at us trying to stop our escape. Once the first part of the harp slid through the portal, Woogie looped his tail around the back of it and began to pump his tiny wings furiously as he pulled it in.

  “Caerus,” Olim said, not pausing in her spell, “shut those damned spellcasters up.”

  Without even a word, the gem flew over the table and let out a subsonic pitch that was just beyond my range of hearing. I could hear a few people down on the floor yelling that they could see her and target her.

  Which was almost instantly followed by screaming and the sound of fighting.

  I had completely forgotten about the rest of the gems.

  The harp slid completely through the portal just as the gems shut down the last of Charmant’s casters. Caerus called out to her troops. “Full-phase retreat. We will rendezvous at Alpha.”

  The gems bobbed once and took off out of the castle.

  “Where are they going?” I asked.

  “Back down to the ground and then home. We’re done here.”

  “I will find you, Hawk,” Charmant screamed from the floor. “No matter where you go, I will—”

  Before the prince could respond, Caerus floated over the edge of the table. “Charmant, stop talking. Now.” The handsome man paused. “I lost my father here, and if you are very lucky I will not bring the rest of my people back here to finish the job we have started, which was deposing an unjust, maniacal ruler. Rule your people and give constant prayer that the Crystal Court has better things to do than to erase you and your band of idiots from this realm. Because I assure you, we can do it.”

  Wisely, Charmant kept his mouth shut.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Caerus said, floating through the portal without a backward glance.

  I waited for Molly to go through and then followed.

  By the time I walked through, I could hear the panic in Hawk’s voice again.

  “…ell me you can turn her back.”

  He was talking to the small lizard thing about his mother, and it did not sound like the small lizard thing had much hope about restoring the fairy queen.

  “It can be done, but transmorphagenic magic is a tricky thing.”

  “Can you or can’t you?” Hawk asked again.

  “Can I turn her into something other than this hideous harp? Yes. Can I turn her into the same woman she was? Not likely.”

  “You can’t say that,” the prince said, looking like he was going to throttle the Woogie.

  “Of course I can. The words just came out of my mouth, didn’t they? What you mean to say is ‘Please oh please, Woogie do not let that answer be your last,’ followed by ‘Use your formidable knowledge of magic to bring back my mother. Out of everyone in the realms, I know you can.’”

  Hawk said nothing.

  “Well, I am sure those words will come sooner or later,” Woogie mumbled.

  “Please work on this while we’re gone?” Caerus asked him. “In the meantime, can you send us to Earth?”

  “This is the queen, correct?” Woogie asked Hawk, ignoring the sapphire’s request. Hawk nodded eagerly. “And she has rooms here, as in personal rooms with things she has touched a lot? Like clothes and possibly a hairbrush?”

  “She has a personal room on the fifth floor. She has a huge table where her servants comb her hair! I am sure there is a brush there.”

  Woogie looked at the harp and then back to Hawk. “She needs servants to comb that little bit of hair? What is she, a baby?”

  Hawk’s expression slid past anger and straight into murderous instantly.

  “Woogie, please!” Caerus exclaimed. “Work on the queen and send us to Earth before he kills you.”

  Woogie looked at Hawk. “Are you angry at me?”

  Hawk said nothing in the form of words, but I heard something akin to a growl come from deep in his throat.

  “Well, then, let’s get you moving!” Woogie exclaimed step-flying well out of Hawk’s reach. “There will be a small sense of disorientation as you sync up with Earth time. Try not to vomit.”

  “We’re going where?” I asked, confused.

  “Kane is on his home world trying to delay Oberon,” Olim explained.

  “Here we go!” Woogie said, a portal roaring open in front of him. “One at a time and keep your eyes closed until you are all the way through.”

  I saw Hawk go through without a pause. Next was Olim followed by Caerus. Molly gave me a small smile. “Here we go,” she said, echoing Woogie’s exclamation. She vanished in a haze of light, and then it was my turn. I followed and felt my ears pop again as I walked from one world to another. The air smelled awful, and I heard screams as soon as I crossed over.

  “No!” I heard Hawk roar, despairing, which brought my eyes open in a second.

  Just in time to see Oberon plunge his sword through Kane’s chest.

  We were too late.

  Act Four: Homecoming

  “There is no place like home.

  Not even home.”

  Unnamed Kansas girl who was the

  sole survivor of the deadliest tornado

  to hit Kansas in a hundred years.

  Chapter Eight

  JEWEL USED to have this crazy idea.

  To be fair, most of Jewel’s ideas were crazy, but this one was crazier than the others.

  She believed the feeling of dread you get when you know you’ve made a mistake was actually your future self trying to send you a message that what you were about to do is a bad idea. The problem, she would say, was that since you were sending yourself that message, you already screwed up and did the bad thing, which meant there wasn’t much you could do about it.

  The second I arrived back home, I knew I had screwed up.

  Well, not screwed up yet, more like I am about to screw up and here is a helpful text from the future that says: OMG U SUXXOR! DNT DO IT!

  Of course, future you doesn’t actually send what the screwup is, so all I’d have is a rude text with horrible spelling, ’cause future me obviously is too cool for actual words.

  Anyway, the second we appeared out of the portal, I knew I had made a mistake. I wasn’t sure what the mistake was, but I knew it was coming and that I should’ve followed my first instinct and not let th
e group split up. Of course this instinct comes from a lifetime of watching Scooby Doo where they are always stupid and split up, and they have to rescue the stoner and dog from Old Man Whatever at the abandoned amusement park.

  I don’t know if I was the stoner or the dog in this analogy, but I do know I had a bad feeling and it wasn’t going away.

  “Kane,” Ater said in a quiet voice. I looked up at him, startled that I had just been standing there contemplating the wrongness of all this and didn’t even notice what was going on in front of me.

  Athens was on fire.

  Not all of it and not a huge fire, but there was smoke rising from all over the town, and I could see a few licks of fire on one or two rooftops. Again my first instinct, which was run toward the town, was the wrong one, and I stopped myself before I took half a step.

  “Someone’s been busy,” Demain commented, sounding a little too appreciative to my ear.

  “Ater, Kor, go scout the town,” I said, ignoring her. “We need to know what we’re going up against. Ruber, we’re going to need some kind of base of operations here outside the city.”

  “We’ll be back,” Ater said, taking off toward the town, Kor right on his heels.

  Ruber flew upward and began to scan the area. We were outside of town, so I don’t know what was out there that would be useful, but anything was better than standing out in the open waiting for someone to find us.

  “You tossing orders off sounded a lot like Hawk,” Demain said once we were alone.

  I locked eyes with her. “Does it? How does this sound? You screw me over once, and I will wish you out of existence. No talk, no explanation. I am just going to wish you were gone, and trust me, lady, you’ll be gone. I’m not stupid. I know you’re just waiting for your chance to grab the seed. Here is your one warning: don’t.”

  Her smile was plastered on her face to prevent her from looking shocked as hell, and we both knew it. She didn’t move for several seconds, and when she did it was to take a small step back. “I am but here to serve.”

  “Bite me,” I snapped as Ruber came flying toward us.

  “There is a small house up ahead; it will give us some cover.”