by Scott Duff
“Kieran’s name,” I said. “When you speak it, I hear something else in my head, suddenly. Why is that?”
“I don’t know. What did you hear?” he asked.
“Bridge of the Way,” I answered.
“You said Kieran’s name,” he said. “You had a similar problem with the Gaelic doctors in the Cahill’s infirmary. Took you a moment or two to speak English again. You will still know exactly who I mean regardless of what words you hear. That is the meaning of a True Name.”
Ethan moved us suddenly away from the two to another part of the world, barren with scorched stone. I was about to ask why when the world burst into life around us. It was a city, crowded with people busy with their lives. We stood on a wall overlooking a large and boisterous trading area. I saw the beginnings of a large portal in the center of the bazaar. The crowd dispersed from the front of the portal and Des’Ra’El appeared standing proudly before it. Kieran stood on a wall opposite us, watching just as we were.
Ethan moved close to me and whispered in my ear, “I believe that Kieran is being shown a memory here, just as I am showing you.”
The portal formed fully, thirty yards across and totally circular. It had a bluish-silvery surface and a golden rim and it just stood in place for a moment. Then a figure passed through. Like the first form Des’Ra’El had, this figure had six legs, but it was a lot more similar to a man from the start. It had a trilateral symmetry with a cylindrical body, kind of like three men glued together, back-to-back-to-back, but the legs and arms rotated more freely and it only had one head. Three sets of eyes rotated on stalks with some sort of antennae radiating from them jutted out from each set of shoulders in front of the head, which held its maw. Its skin was leathery and blue, pulled tight against its muscles and bone.
Most striking of all though was its presence on the energy plane—it was like a black hole denting gravity and pulling in everything else close to it. From the instant this creature passed through the portal, it started pulling in the energy and magic of the realm without regard to anything else around him. People started dying. Des’Ra’El didn’t appreciate that. He struck at the beast with a blast of fiery energy that warped around it, searing space itself closed, and encapsulating the beast. Neither of us could tell what he did within the confines of that space, but we both saw the rush of energy from Des’Ra’El. It was truly massive. He hit the warped space again with enough kinetic energy to level a mountain, shoving it back into the portal. He sealed it off with a savage twist of primal power that had to resonate down the channel.
Ethan stepped close again. “Try not to be noticed. If you are, hide nothing.”
Des’Ra’El cast a net outward many thousands of miles searching for more portals opening in his land. Finding none, he started helping his hurt people, who had already begun to help themselves and were looking to him for security and comfort. When the wounded were being taken care of, he searched through the crowd and mourned and grieved with them for the losses, feeling as deeply as they. Then he found me. Once again, those eyes pierced through Ethan’s memory, all the many-colored rings lined up in their black sockets, and I swear he was looking right at me.
The ghostly Kieran disappeared from the wall across from us. A second later, the rest of the city followed, leaving Ethan and me alone on the barren landscape.
“That was the first appearance of the enemy,” said Ethan. “I only know of three direct encounters, but its’ influence was felt for centuries as it attempted to find ways to defeat Des’Ra’El. Prior to him, it was very xenophobic, feeding on everything it crossed and leaving nothing behind. After that, it was more careful. It studied the worlds it attacked and stole its secrets before it fed. But still, it fed and became more powerful and learned more. It picked its battles more carefully when it crossed powerful opponents and watched Des’Ra’El from a distance.
“The second encounter, I can only show you the beginning,” Ethan said, his voice still a quiet monotone. He wasn’t looking at me either, choosing instead to look around himself. “We do not know what happened here. We see only the results and the name he himself gave it: his Folly. My Brothers and I were given our purpose the instant reality returned after the Folly to guard the secret of its creation and to guard the crypt of a dead god.
“Over centuries from the first encounter, Des’Ra’El’s world grew into a huge population of powerful people, all schooled in the primal tongue and pulling from the primal powers. See how they amass here.”
Ethan placed us atop a fifty-foot tall boulder overlooking a large flat plain of hazy purple stone. Directly across from us was another stone similar to the one we stood on and behind us abruptly rising from the ground was a sheet of dark amber stone, signaling the beginning of a mountain range reaching high into the sky. The sun shined too red in the sky. It gave the milieu a sickly appearance.
Suddenly the plain was filled with thousands, if not millions, of people, all of whom were aimed at us and preparing for war. Not a military battle as I was used to seeing in movies and television, though I supposed the medieval battles came closest. They gathered in ranks of power and tended to weapons and beasts of burden, but the weapons were magical and the beasts looked just as ready to fight as the people, with long, sharp claws and sharper, venomous teeth.
“Another event has occurred during this time. Des’Ra’El has found a Queen, someone to love,” Ethan said in his quiet monotone and he shifted us away some distance away to a beautifully decorated room. We stood in an archway looking into the dazzling spectacle. Light flowed around the room in every color, reflecting off silver and gold surfaces. Gemstones of size undreamed of in my world were embedded in the walls and glowed with their own light. This room was empty of furnishings, but the one just beyond it was loaded with pillows and futon-like sofas of garish greens and blues.
A woman stamped through the room, between Ethan and me and out onto the balcony. We were at the far end of the plain, facing the budding mountain range. Like Des’Ra’El and Kieran, I couldn’t see her aura either, but she was clearly angry and worried. She looked much like Des’Ra’El, too, with a deep red skin and a matching height. Her eyes, though, weren’t concentric rings floating in a sea of black, but a single ring of blue, the color of the healing energies I’d been pumping into Ethan for so long.
A trio of armored figures tramped into the room, removing their helmets as they came. Des’Ra’El was in the lead with the much shorter Kieran on his left. Kieran looked like the Kieran I knew at this point, tall, muscular, jovial, and attentive. None of them showed apprehension at the upcoming battle, or maybe they hid it well. Des’Ra’El swept the woman up in his arms, whirling her around once. The two held a brief communion that I felt obligated to turn away from, just like Kieran and the other red-skinned giant, then the trio left in a flutter of armor and purple cloaks.
“His entire civilization was perched on the precipice,” whispered Ethan, from atop the boulder again. Across from us, stood Ehran, thin and pale, watching Des’Ra’El’s legions part to allow a trio of riders to the front. Even from miles away, I could spot Des’Ra’El in the lead and Kieran on his left riding at the beasts’ top speed to the mountain behind us. I looked back at Ehran and found Des’Ra’El towering over him, watching, too. Eerie.
“The enemy has grown too big,” whispered Ethan. “Too destructive in the universe. He goes to destroy it, to make the universe a safe place for his people and his love.”
The trio closed the distance to the mountain at an amazing rate. The beasts were fast. As they passed, a wave of exultation grew through ranks behind them. The density of the power was terrifying to perceive and the wave itself was titanic in size.
“We must go,” whispered Ethan. “Even as a memory, I cannot protect us here.” I felt Ethan pull us away. Except I was still here and he wasn’t. Panicked, I looked to Ehran across the gap on the other boulder and found Des’Ra’El staring at me. Once again, every concentric ring of color in his eyes was ce
ntered on me.
Stay, Little Brother.
And Des’Ra’El was gone. Ehran sat on the rock surface and waited. I was too busy panicking to sit. This dead, giant inner-tube just yanked me out of a memory of a memory and told me to stay, by my name!
Chapter 47
That’s when I realized why Peter, Kieran, and Ethan kept saying that to me. Why they kept calling me “Little Brother.” I felt so dense. That’s what Kieran meant several weeks back about accepting the familial bond. I’d identified myself as Kir du’Ahn’s “Little Brother.” That’s why the named spells didn’t work on “Seth.” This was just absurd. It was truly absurd and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I was worried about a name at a time like this?
I scanned back to the legions to find the trio finally emerging to the front of the ranks. For the briefest of instants, I caught Des’Ra’El’s glance full on for the third time, but this time without Ethan as a filter. It was incomprehensible. And then it was gone, replaced by a giant, red-skinned, sort of smiling man that shared in my joke but looked away quickly. The trio turned their mounts between the boulders to address the throng of people. The crowd roared in greeting when they rose up swiftly into the air another fifty or so feet above the boulders. With a wave of his hand, Des’Ra’El set a perception spell over the entire plain allowing everyone to hear him. The affect was like the Arena’s spell but that spell would have been impossibly more complex for this size. This was something else entirely.
I wasn’t invited to the party, though. The words he spoke were lost to me. I got the gist of what he was saying as he reached out to his people, his reason for being. He shared in their joy, their love. Then he shared his knowledge of the enemy. That I got in spades as his concepts began to merge with his magic and transcend words. Everyone knew the enemy and everything that it had destroyed. Des’Ra’El turned to the rock face and created a vortex between the boulders in a maelstrom of primal forces. Behind the vortex, Des’Ra’El opened the universe wide, searching for the enemy. There was no place it could hide from him. Nowhere for it to run. It knew it. Des’Ra’El knew it. I knew it.
In the same instant that Des’Ra’El released the maelstrom at the enemy, it made one last desperate move. It moved. I don’t know if it was just pure luck on my part that I wasn’t watching him at that moment or if Des’Ra’El intended for me to watch her, but that’s why I saw what happened—I was watching her while she watched him. It appeared behind her on the balcony and it took her life as the maelstrom hit. Des’Ra’El snapped his attention back over the legions facing him and he jerked the power back, but it didn’t matter. She was already gone and the enemy was shredded. In that instant, Des’Ra’El’s world collapsed to a single point: her. The problem was, he was connected to every point in the universe, so this was more than a conceptual issue. Up and down, left and right ceased to have meaning.
Chicken Little was right—the sky did fall.
The energy had to go somewhere. The energy from all those crushed nuclei and electrons collapsed into a single point. The loss of everything was the only concept I could hold during that incredibly bright and timeless instant.
“We have no idea what occurred around the asymptote,” said Ethan, suddenly at my side again. I was suddenly me again, which was shocking enough.
“Asymptote?” I said, stuttering the word out. We were on the boulder again at the site of the Folly.
“Whatever the battle was, it created an energy spike strong enough to kill every living thing in the universe, including Des’Ra’El,” said Ethan. “He is interred there, beneath the stone.”
I turned and drove my senses down into the rock. What I found there bore little resemblance to either form of the Des’Ra’El I’d seen. It wouldn’t even qualify as a burned out husk or even a deflated, moldy tire. I had to look away.
“This was the first lesson for Walker of Words,” Ethan said, meaning Kieran. “The universe was much poorer for his passing.”
I looked at Ethan as he stared at the rock face in despair. That’s when I realized he didn’t know what happened at the Folly and why. They were a force of nature, re-purposed for a cause. But I did remember. I went through it while he was a part of it. Kieran went through it, too, I think. And Ethan didn’t know what I experienced.
“There’s something different here,” I murmured, looking around. The boulders were in the same place. The plains stretched out in to the distance in their purple haze. The mountain rose into the sky as majestically as before. Still, there was a difference.
“Something’s different everywhere now,” Ethan said, grimacing. “But you see my point about the enemy, right? You understand how powerful this creature is?”
“Yes, Ethan,” I admitted facing him, meeting his eyes. “What’s your point? That this thing is still around? That it alone survived what Des’Ra’El did?”
“It did,” he said. “The third encounter with the enemy. This will be fast.”
Ethan shifted us again through his memories to a mountainous area with a stream running nearby. The thick liquid masquerading as water didn’t quite burble so much as glug as it passed us. This plane’s versions of trees and bushes began to appear in ghostly form then take on more solid form before Kieran and Des’Ra’El strolled by casually on the other bank. This was the Kieran I knew, the first Kieran, tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, and alert with thick auburn hair and bright emerald eyes. Not the frail and thin boy barely breathing that’d given up on life. And Des’Ra’El, too, looked much better than my last vision of him, but nothing close to the un Ethan-filtered version. Still, he didn’t look dead at the moment.
Something nagged at the edge of my perceptions. I couldn’t quite put tongue to groove on what. Kieran had an aura about him, not his aura, but one of Des’Ra’El’s making. It was subtle, coating him, anointing him, I guess. Okay, I admit I had no idea what he was doing to Kieran. Waves of nausea hit me as that nagging feeling turned into severe claustrophobia emanating from Ethan.
Ethan shot skyward as his memory focused on his singular purpose of stopping a breach. There was a breach in progress. I could only imagine that this is what it felt like to be an angel, to have such power and such single-mindedness of purpose.
Stay, Little Brother.
Again, he picked me out?
For the first time, I saw Ethan as he was meant to be as he rocketed skyward. He was amazing just to watch him move as he somehow wriggled his mass between different dimensional planes to propel himself. And he was fast! He intercepted the intruder high in the sky in a collision of white light. One of his Brothers hit the intruder again, knocking him eastward. What was Ethan hit the ground about fifty yards upstream in an amorphous blob, the impact kicking up a small cloud of debris into the air.
I really gotta learn to be faster on the uptake. I knew this side of the story already. The old man was pulling up carpet and saying “Good Night” for the last time. He wanted me here to see something. All I had to do was find the elephant in the room. That and stop mixing metaphors.
The enemy popped into existence ten feet behind Des’Ra’El. I tried to yell, to get the Stone to throw a shield between them, to raise my own shield even, but I was impotent. A harsh word, impotent. I shouldn’t have worried, though. They knew it was there.
The enemy had changed since the last encounter. It had become less than it was, damaged and hurt. It still hated Des’Ra’El to the core of its being, but its core was smaller now. It would never recover what it was. It stood only three feet tall, now, a cylindrical tripod. Its eyestalks were sheered away to one but it still had all three antennae sets waving erratically near its maw at the top of its “head,” and only one appendage left, a tentacle really, that hung limply at its side.
It was still adept at handling the various energies of the universe. I felt it thrill as it began siphoning Des’Ra’El’s life away from him. This was only odd in that I hadn’t felt anything from it before, so why now? The thrill turned abruptly to p
ain when Kieran appeared between the enemy and Des’Ra’El, wielding the sword I’d seen only twice. I recognized the sword’s composition now as Kieran severed the bindings the enemy made to Des’Ra’El to make its siphon. It was made of Des’Ra’El’s magic, the primal force, and the first magic. It was the magic that built the universe.
That’s what was missing, before, I realized. That spark, that drive that was life, to go on, to continue. It had changed when the universe was destroyed and he hadn’t been able to change it back. Or willing, I didn’t know which. My eyes flew to Des’Ra’El to see him still talking calmly to Kieran, ignoring the heated battle behind him. That shocked me back to the battle to see Kieran attacking the enemy at action-movie speeds, cutting away energy shields like rice paper and deflecting the enemy’s violent attacks with a flick of his wrist. Two Kierans at the same time, neither of them was ghostly at all.
Claustrophobia struck at me hard again and my perceptions started closing in on me. I felt Ethan’s Brothers close and I finally knew why as Des’Ra’El gave up his Realm to entropy. Sending my senses out I found I didn’t have to go that far to find the Brothers anymore. The Battling Kieran was closing on the enemy and Communing Kieran was busy repressing his sadness at his upcoming loss. It was going to be close to see who was going to finish first.
Communing Kieran shot skyward as Des’Ra’El committed the final word of power to his spell, sending Kieran home. In the same instant, the second Kieran brought his dull yet gleaming sword down and cleaved the enemy in two with an explosion of power. Kieran was tossed back hard into Des’Ra’El’s back. Unfazed he simply reached around and in an underhanded toss threw Kieran after his first self.