Prism (Awakened Chronicles Book 3)

by Harley Austin

  * * * * *

  “I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, Highness,” Carson’s avatar stood in the hall of majesties. Immense white granite pillars hundreds of feet tall lined the seemingly narrow hall that was as wide as a football field and thrice as long. Colossal bronze statues of demigod heroes long passed lined the spaces between the pillars leading up to a dais of many seats encircled within the end room. Other leaders dotted the royal space talking quietly.

  Carissa steeled herself for the bad news she knew was coming.

  “The Seven have terminated their operative. Christie’s bio signature went offline at oh-two-hundred this morning. There was nothing we could do.”

  This wasn’t good news. Still, it wasn’t as bad as she was expecting. “They killed their own agent?” She wasn’t shocked, but it was surprising. “What about Parker and the rest?”

  “We’re still searching. We have some clues, but nothing is panning out so far. Julia has teams fanning out all over the globe as we speak. They have seven newbloods. It’s not going to be easy to keep them hidden. We’ll find them.”

  “I appreciate all that you’re doing, Carson. Thank you.”

  He nodded and then faded out of the room.

  Denton stood beside his sister. “Why Julia continues to work for the Dominion is beyond me.”

  “You know why,” Carissa smiled. “She’s in love with Kari.”

  “Everyone’s in love with Kari after Mitch married her. She’s the de facto princess; they’re the other royal couple. Our very own Kardashians,” he grumped, but half smirking.

  “What’s a royal family without a bit of spice to stave off the monotony?”

  “I suppose. But what’s next? All of Atlantica and Dominion uniting? We could call in the ‘Dark Dominion’.”

  Carissa chuckled. Denton always could make her laugh even when things looked dire. “Carson’s too independent for that. Besides, I prefer the simple alliance of their union. We work well together.”

  He still frowned, but nodded his agreement. The Dark were Atlantica and Atlantica were the Dark—a big part of the clan anyway. Mitch had worked miracles bringing the clans together in harmony and focus. Then again, Francesca had been his true muscle in the negotiations centuries ago. Denton still didn’t know how old she was.

  “It’s going to make things all the more difficult to find them now,” Carissa worried.

  “It will be okay. Julia is exceptional at what she does. She has all of Dominion at her disposal; including the power of the gods. Relax. We’re not through with this.” He pulled her into his arms to offer a hug. We’ll find your princes—”

  35

  C old morning sun light filtered pale blue through the ice and snow into their now very small ice cave shelter. It wasn’t as cold as it could be but both Parker and Romero were wishing for something more than just their insulated tights as they stood on the floor on the now sun-drenched pit of what used to be the ice hotel. The once slushy floor of their melting abode was again re-frozen as their cross-trainer shoes crunched through the hard ice. Wynn and Brayden returned from the other side of the frozen pit.

  “Anything?” Romero asked.

  “Some of the rooms are still intact, but the whole main roof looks like it’s completely collapsed.” Wynn looked up into a bright blue morning sky.

  “Well, we still have a kitchen,” Parker nodded in the direction of the section of the hotel that had not totally collapsed. At least the pantry wasn’t buried.”

  “Great. Because gnawing on a frozen burrito is going to be so much fun.” Brayden grumbled, looking around.

  “At least you’re alive,” Romero chided. “You could have been buried under all of this.”

  “HEY—” all of them heard Tyler call out from across what was left of their hotel. “Over here!”

  It took the four of them only a minute to navigate around the huge blocks of ice to find Tyler, O’Brien and Lear standing next to bare rock that had risen splitting a section of the glacier wall wide open and forming a kind of deep crevasse in the ice several feet wide.

  “Wow,” Wynn looked down into the deep fissure in the rock they were standing on. “This must have opened up last night during the tremor we felt.”

  Tyler pointed at the now uneven floor of their hotel, holding his hand out over the crevasse. “Feel that?”

  They all held their hands out over the edge.

  “It’s warm air.” Parker raised his brow.

  “I guess now we know that this place is geologically active.” Brayden didn’t look all that surprised.

  “It is, but like you said, it’s not supposed to be.” Tyler offered.

  “Well, this looks pretty active to me.” Romero warmed her hands over the crevasse.

  “I wonder what’s down there?” Wynn mused.

  “A lot of heat, eventually,” Tyler offered. “Like the ‘two thousand degree’ kind of heat.”

  “It’s warm. Doesn’t feel that warm.” Brayden moved both of his cold hands over the rising warm air.

  “I’m going to see how far this goes under the glacier,” Wynn entered the side of the ice that had split and descended carefully down into darkness.

  “Not without me you’re not.” Parker peered into the dark opening in the ice.

  “Don’t go too far,” Romero warned. “This whole area is seismic and dangerous now.”

  “We’ll be careful.” Wynn offered as both entered the ice-walled fissure.

  “Famous last words,” Tyler grimaced, watching the two of them disappear into the darkness.

  * * * * *

  “Where is the light coming from?” Parker asked. Both hadn’t traveled more than a hundred yards into the fissure when they began to notice their fissure getting lighter, like a kind of growing twilight. Rock seemed to be mixed with ice that were the walls of the opening as each descended deeper into the Earth. Wynn looked up to see the ice completely covered the tall walls above them.

  “I guess it’s still sunlight filtering through the snow above us somehow.”

  Both moved deeper into the fissure with their tunnel now seemingly getting brighter. Parker ran his hand along the ice where the light seemed to be emanating from.

  “Ah, Dade?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This isn’t ice, buddy. It’s cold, but it’s not frozen. Feel it.”

  Wynn ran his hand along it. “It feels like glass.”

  “Crystallized rock.” Parker offered.

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Why is it lit?”

  “It must be reflecting the sunlight from above us somehow. Like a prism maybe.”

  “How deep do you think we are?”

  “A few hundred feet maybe. It’s not even cold down here.”

  “You’re right. I noticed that a while ago.”

  Both continued their descent into the fissure.

  “Your friend’s nature break just about got him killed last night.” Wynn could see the fissure was narrowing now the deeper they got.

  “No doubt. Brayden got lucky.”

  “I heard your voices last night in the dark. I didn’t realize how much you two really care for each other.”

  “We do.”

  “I guess I just thought—I mean, the way I was raised. We were taught that same-sex couples are just guys in lust. You know?”

  “I get it, Dade. Not true.”

  “I know that now.”

  “Are you going to go find yourself a guy now?” Parker chuckled.

  “I don’t—know that I’m quite into that. I mean I like looking at other guys. I’ve never told anyone that, Parker, just so you know.”

  “Nothing wrong with admiring a beautiful body, Dade.”

  “In the Church it is.”

  “I thought you left the church when you found out it was led by these gods.”

  “I did. But, it wasn’t just the whole goddess thing. I was thinking about leaving anyway. I don’t like the way they treat pe
ople who aren’t part of their clique.”

  “Believe what we tell you or else?” Parker offered.

  “They don’t say it like that, but yea, that’s more or less what happens. It’s soft bullying. They deny that it’s happening, but, that’s what it is. If you don’t agree with them, they instantly hate you.”

  “The goddess you you said you met? Was she like that?”

  “Not at all. Her real name is Kari. Probably one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

  “People? I thought you said she was a goddess?”

  “She is a goddess.”

  “I guess I just never thought of goddesses as people.”

  “They’re just like everyone else, Parker. The only difference is they can kick your ass with—holy shit,” suddenly fell out of Wynn’s mouth as their fissure came to an abrupt end.

  “Jesus—” floated off of Parker’s lips.

  Whatever was lighting the fissure’s translucent crystalline rock—it wasn’t the sunlight from above them. Their natural corridor ended as both emerged from the now very narrow opening into a grand illuminated cavern where more, many, many more, of the beautiful crystalline structures were filling the cave with a soft white glow.

  36

  S o where are they?” Brad watched the images move across a nine-foot wide screen, the ruins of the once pristine ice hotel being transmitted in HD from the extraction team he’d sent to the Yukon.

  “Buried, probably,” one of his team offered.

  “Doubtful. It looks like they were sheltering in the room with the wooden walls.”

  “For a while, until they were buried under all of this mess.”

  “If you really think they were buried, then you can dig them out.”

  The assassin kept quiet.

  “I see.”

  “If they trekked out of here they didn’t leave any tracks. It hasn’t snowed for days,” another of the team observed.

  “Agreed. We would have seen their bodies by now,” Brad assured.

  “There’s a fissure in the ice wall on the far side. They could have taken shelter in there.”

  “Check it out.” Brad’s low calm voice ordered.

  “I did. It goes back only about fifty yards before the ice caves in.”

  “That area has been rumbling with geological instability in the past few days.” The smartly dressed tall woman standing next to him informed.

  “Few days? Unusual.”

  “It appears to have stabilized in the past week.”

  “How convenient.” Brad grew a rare scowl.

  “What do we do now? They’re not here.” The very Hispanic assassin dressed in white winter camouflage offered.

  “They are,” Brad assured. “Follow the fissure.”

  “It’s blocked.”

  “Then I suggest you find a shovel.” Brad terminated the link.

  * * * * *

  The cavern all of them found themselves within seemed to stretch for miles in a kind of massive fissure that looked like it had been untouched for millions of years. As tall if not taller than an indoor football stadium, and just as wide, huge tall and broad square pillars of the luminescent crystals grew like leaning obelisks here and there in groups that sparsely lit the massive cavern like streetlights here and there. But the grand clear crystal obelisks weren’t the only things aglow with their faint illumination. Other loose crystals, usually scattered in small broken shard deposits littered the sandy ground of the cavern everywhere. Green, blue, lavender, clear, white, even gold, and silver looking ones. Other formations sprouted here and there looking like crystalline fungi or tall blue palms with wide scintillating crystalline leaves that lit suddenly with soft noise and then faded quickly.

  The mostly barren cave sprouted wildly with the varied crystalline foliage that seemed to get more and more strange and unique the further back into the cavern they went.

  “How far back do you think this place goes?” Lear took a bite of the almost too hot burrito Wynn handed her. A small stack of red colored crystals burned with an arcane fire that was warm but not too hot when mixed with some of the clearer ones. Wynn had gotten good in the past few days at figuring out which colors of the stones worked well together and which ones to avoid. One of his gloves had been burned almost clean off before they realized that the colored deposits of stone here and there reacted in very stark and unusual ways, like mixing chemicals. Through nothing but brute-force trial and error, Wynn had gotten good at crystal fire building, good enough to heat their waning supply of once frozen burritos and other microwave rations.

  “Miles and miles, I’m sure,” Tyler munched, looking at a new and much larger part of the cave they’d wandered into.

  “It’s like a maze down here,” Brayden grumbled. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of here.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” Romero cautioned. Talk like Brayden’s wasn’t good for morale.

  “I like it down here,” Lear smiled almost giddily. She’d been upbeat ever since they’d left the surface. “I could live down here and never go back.”

  “I like your attitude, Brooke,” Parker sat very close to her, smoothing his hand over the inside of her thigh.

  “Dude, you like more than just her attitude.” Wynn chided with a sarcastic grin.

  “Yea, when are you going to sleep next to me again?” Brayden was only half kidding. In the three days they’d been down here, Parker had been half glued to Lear, mostly at the hips.

  “I’ll sleep with you tonight.” Parker agreed, getting up from sitting next to Lear and seating himself right next to Brayden on his short crystalline bench.

  “Hey, guys,” Tyler showed up with some refilled plastic water bottles that he handed out. The water from the various tiny streams that flowed through the caves was close to hot tub temperature, but at least it was crystal-clear and wet. “I think if we ever get out of here, we’re rich.”

  “How is that?” Romero asked.

  “Check this out. There’s a bunch of these growing out of the stream on the other side of these pillars.” Tyler pulled a near foot-long reflective gold crystal from his sleeve that was maybe an inch square.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Parker’s eyes grew wide along with everyone else’s.

  Wynn took the long, gold-metallic rod. “It looks like crystallized gold.”

  He handed it to Romero. “I wouldn’t know real gold if I saw it, guys. My family grew up pretty poor.”

  She handed the rod to O’Brien. “Oh. Wow. Whatever it is, it’s not gold. Wow.”

  “What’s so ‘wow’ about it?” Tyler asked.

  “It’s like I can all of a sudden feel you—all of you. Like we’re all touching.”

  “You can?” Parker asked.

  She nodded. It only took a moment before all of them could feel O’Brien’s feelings within their own.

  “That’s a really weird feeling.” Romero looked astonished at the empath. She’d never felt O’Brien within her feelings until now. The two of them weren’t as attracted as the rest of them and hadn’t really bonded like the others had. Romero wasn’t exactly interested in sleeping with any of the other women, well, except for maybe Lear. She’d definitely make an exception with Lear, that is, if Parker and O’Brien ever turned loose of her for a night.

  O’Brien handed the golden rod to Lear. “What do you think?”

  The moment her fingers touched the metallic obelisk-looking stone it shimmered with a soft warm illumination all its own.

  “Whoa!” Parker’s eyes widened along with all of the other’s in the group.

  Lear took a sudden and unexpected deep rippled breath. Parker watched her as the metallic crystal dropped from her fingers onto the soft sand by her shoes. She looked dazed. Parker quickly moved to her side once again and tossed the metallic rod away from her.

  “Brooke?” Parker took hold of her. “Brooke? Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “No, no, I’m fine. It was just,” she took a
deep breath. “Really intense.”

  “Really intense what? The thing lit up the second you touched it.”

  “I know. I saw.”

  “It looked like your hair was starting to glow too,” Tyler added.

  “Really?” Parker looked over his shoulder at him.

  “He’s right. It was,” Wynn agreed.

  “What is this place?” Brayden stood up looking around. “It’s like a whole different world down here. These huge pillars glow by themselves. Dade practically cooks his hand with the little shards scattered all over the place, that thing was just broadcasting Bryn’s feelings, and then lighting up Brooke.”

  “I think you’re right, Brayden,” Romero stood. “This place is like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of. We have caverns in Brazil,” she shook her head. “But nothing like this.”

  “Well, something formed it,” Tyler added. “And it’s been down here for probably millions of years. Probably no one’s ever discovered places like this before.”

  “Or they don’t tell anyone if they do.” Wynn added. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what makes these fire crystals light into flame like they do.”

  “I wonder if there are other deposits like the cave we’re in anywhere else …”

  “Awww, you two have a soft spot for the Promethean.” Amethyst approached the mists as the two other Fates looked on. “I just love how you kids grow sweet on the little people.”

  “We weren’t going to let you kill her,” he glared.

  “Oh. Please.” Amethyst faux pouted. “You don’t know me very well, my dear Noah. Christie was the problem child here. She went after Ian and Beau as well before I stepped in muddied up her little plans.”

  Neither had any argument. Amethyst gazed down in the swirling mists at the still dazed Lyris. “And saved her twin brother as well. Did you really think I was going to let her hurt the precious darling?”