Prism (Awakened Chronicles Book 3)

by Harley Austin

  “Every command has a political component, Julia,” Carson continued. “Rion’s family has been a royal pain in my side for as long as I can remember; and our most important ally. I’ve taken orders from Rion I didn’t like before.”

  “No doubt.” She agreed.

  “Maybe you need to get to know Carissa better?” Dark offered.

  “That’s not a bad idea, Dark.” Carson’s gaze fell on Julia.

  “Yea, not gonna happen.”

  “Actually, it is,” Carson countered.

  “What!?”

  Dark snickered. He knew Carson more than well enough, he’d already smelled this one coming.

  “I want you to get to know Carissa Dark.”

  “You cannot be serious!”

  “I am serious. That’s an order. As of this moment you’re on assignment in Atlantica as special envoy of the Dominion. I want you building rapport with the royal family. Get to know them. Any questions?”

  Julia suddenly looked resigned. “No.”

  45

  N ot from our world?” Brayden’s eyes widened.

  “I know. It’s hard to believe.” Lear began. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

  “Honestly, at this point,” Brayden sighed, “nothing surprises me anymore. Magic rings. Real gods and goddesses are running the Dominion, you’re from another world? What’s next?”

  “The Easter Bunny,” Wynn snarked, his arms folded. He wasn’t buying a word of it.

  “Be serious, you guys!” Romero chided.

  “What are you doing here, Brooke?” Tyler asked.

  “Don’t tell me all of you are just buying this?” Wynn grumped, his gaze incredulous.

  “I’m not ‘buying’ anything, Dade,” Brayden countered. Parker’s head rested in his lap as he stroked Winter’s hair. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there are a bunch of gods running around on the Earth and the more powerful ones are hunting us down.”

  Lear giggled.

  “It’s not funny, Brooke,” Wynn chided.

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s not. But the Seven are not the more powerful. They never have been.”

  “They’re looking pretty large and in-charge to me right now,” Romero countered.

  “I didn’t say they weren’t dangerous, Cierra.”

  “If these good gods are so powerful, why do they let the Seven run roughshod over all of us?” Brayden asked.

  “The gods are just people, Bray; they aren’t omnipotent. They make mistakes just like everyone else. They have their own lives to worry—”

  “Someone’s coming,” O’Brien took hold of Lear’s hand quickly.

  Wynn got to his feet quickly. “Where?”

  “They’re still a few miles away. I can feel them. A lot of them,” O’Brien worried.

  Everyone was on their feet picking up their gear.

  “I’ll carry Winter.” O’Brien knelt down and lifted him from the sleeping bag they’d placed him on. With the strength of a goddess his larger build was still light as a feather to her. They quickly broke camp and moved quickly deeper into the cavern.

  * * * * *

  “The scouts got too close.” The late middle-aged lead agent looked around the abandoned campsite. “They’ve bolted.”

  “How? They don’t have anyone psionic. Not according to their bios.” Another younger agent was scanning his screen on a rugged handheld device.

  “Obviously the bios are wrong.”

  “It says here the O’Brien woman is mundane.”

  “Oh really? Mundane?” The head agent looked at his younger counterpart. “That thing also showing you the Lear woman’s ink?”

  “Well, no; we didn’t know—”

  “Jesus. Put that thing away. It’s about time you kids started using your brains and your own senses instead of burying your noses in your screens.”

  “Yea, well my screen is telling us they’re five miles ahead in that direction,” the twenty-something officer pointed.

  “Well, I guess we’d better get moving then.”

  “If she’s awakened, she’ll know we’re coming.”

  “No worries. These caves can’t go on forever. At some point we’ll get to a dead end.”

  “And then what? You’re going to go toe-to-toe with a goddess?”

  “Do I look stupid?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Good answer.”

  * * * * *

  “Lyris, huh?” Romero asked quietly from the rear of the group as all of them moved at a good pace away from their pursuers as the cave seemed to be getting bigger and not smaller. They’d now entered what was a forest of fragile crystalline flora, all of it illuminated either by itself or by the larger glowing white crystal pillars that jetted out in random directions here and there like illuminated collections of small to massive growths, several the size of buildings hundreds of feet tall.

  “My family name.”

  “You look Human, Lyris.”

  “I like the name Brooke too, Cierra.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Brooke.”

  Lear could tell she been unsettled by her presence on their world. “We look the same because we are the same.”

  “How could we be the same if you’re from a whole different world?”

  “We have the same ancestry. We’re all children of the Yin. Our races are like cousins, actually. We’re just a little order than you are.”

  “A little, or a lot?”

  Lear smiled. “A lot.”

  “How old are you?” Romero asked.

  “In your world’s years, maybe about fifty, I guess. How old are you?”

  “Half that. I’m twenty-three.”

  “I’ve noticed your people age quickly.”

  “How long do you live? Your people, I mean.”

  “We’re not immortal, if that’s what you’re asking. Only a few races are like that. The Ra are one of them. Unfortunately.”

  “The Ra, you mean our gods?”

  “Hmm hmm,” she nodded.

  “It doesn’t sound like you like our gods.”

  “The Ra used to be a benevolent people, Cierra. Not anymore. Now they’re a plague.”

  “But you still want to be awakened by them?”

  “I may not be from your world, Cierra, but that doesn’t mean I’m not caught up in its grasp. You have no idea what your own world even is. Whomever coined the term sheep for the Human race was a master of the obvious.”

  “I don’t want to be like the rest of my people, Brooke. I want to know what’s happening.”

  “I didn’t mean to be insulting, Cierra. But your race can be frustrating sometimes. You’re so isolated from the rest of the Universe, even your own galaxy doesn’t know you. I guess that’s by design. The Yin were a solitary people.”

  “Were?”

  “They don’t exist anymore. The Ra destroyed them.”

  “But you want to be Ra?”

  “Yes. And no,” she corrected. “Who wouldn’t want to be immortal?”

  “Is that what awakenings do? Make you immortal?” Romero’s brows lifted.

  “You’ll be more than just immortal, Cierra. Look at Bryn. She’s beautiful, powerful. The truth is, I had no idea my genes would awaken anyone.”

  “It sort of sounds like you’re a kind of stem cell to us then.”

  “I guess that’s true. I don’t know. Biology isn’t my discipline.”

  “What have you studied?”

  “Not a lot at this point.” I’m still just a teen to my people.”

  Romero chuckled. “I hope I’m as beautiful as you when I’m fifty.”

  “If I awaken you, Cierra, you will be beautiful. Forever.”

  “I can’t die?”

  “Immortal is not invulnerable. Even immortals can be killed. It’s difficult, but not impossible. The Seven have been killing immortals for millennia on this world and the Ra on others. We—”

  Their small party had stopped. Wynn looked at their large cave that n
ow forked into two different massive caverns.

  “Now which way do we go?” Brayden asked.

  “Take the smaller opening.” Lear advised. “It’s going deeper.”

  “We don’t want to go deeper, we want to get out of here,” Wynn advised.

  “I vote we go deeper, like Brooke says,” Romero offered.

  “Is this a committee now?” Wynn asked.

  “I’m with Dade,” Brayden voted. “We need to find a way out of here. The bigger tunnel rises up.”

  “And will trap us eventually when it dead-ends under some mountain. We have these kinds of caves on my world as well. I know how they form.”

  “Then I’m with Brooke.” O’Brien added in her vote, still comfortably carrying Parker.

  “Tyler? Why do you say?” Wynn asked.

  “I like the idea of finding a way out of here, honestly.”

  “Well, that’s three against three, we—hey, where are you three going?”

  “Not three, four,” O’Brien corrected. “Parker’s voting with us. You’re outvoted, guys. We’re heading deeper.”

  The three guys began following. “Not fair,” Wynn groused, “dead people don’t get to vote.”

  46

  T heir tracks are heading down into the cavern.” The scout stood up from the path as platoons of other soldier-agents gathered behind them.

  “That’s odd.” The lead agent looked perturbed.

  “Why would they head deeper? Wouldn’t they be trying to get out? Heading for the surface would be the logical choice.”

  “Yea, obviously these kids aren’t thinking.” The commander pointed. “You two, head up the cavern and scout out what’s up there. You four, open a base camp in that clearing and prep for prisoners. The rest of you are with me.”

  * * * * *

  “We’re not moving fast enough. They’re getting closer,” O’Brien warned.

  “How far?” Wynn asked.

  “Feels like maybe three miles, maybe closer.”

  “They are closing in. We need to move faster.”

  “I’m already tired, Dade,” Tyler complained. “I was tired an hour ago.”

  “We need to throw them off our scent, maybe confuse them; slow them down somehow.” Wynn looked around for some solid rock or crystal to walk on, but all that was part of the ground were their footprints in the easy-to-follow sand through their silica jungle.

  “If they’re anything like the guys who nabbed us last time, I don’t think they get tired. They all looked pretty fit to me,” Brayden advised.

  “Maybe if we could keep them from running?” O’Brien wondered out loud.

  “Maybe we can’t keep them from running, but we could put some stumbling blocks in their way,” Lear offered.

  “How?” Wynn asked.

  “We’re in a prism jungle. It’s kind of a dangerous place if you don’t know what to lookout for …”

  * * * * *

  Something BOOMED low and loudly in the distance ahead of their platoon. Everyone dropped to their bellies as sand and shards of clear and colored crystals fell like rain mixed with fine dust.

  “What the hell was that?!” The lead agent called out into his headset.

  “AAAHH, SHIT!” he heard someone in pain.

  “You and you,” he pointed. “Check it out!”

  A minute later the voices came over his headset. “We got two down and one wounded, Commander. Looks like some kind of concussive land mine. The force blew two of us into some bad formations.” He looked over at where two of the soldiers were now heavily impaled on large crystalline bushes. “We’re pulling shards out of the other one.”

  “Land mine? The first team didn’t have that kind of hardware. Where’d they get the explosive?”

  “You got me?”

  Everyone heard a second loud THUME in the not so far distance.

  “That sounded closer than I expected,” Tyler worried.

  Wynn grimaced but also half smiled. “These assholes don’t learn very fast, do they?”

  “The slower they learn, the better for us,” O’Brien agreed.

  “Don’t be so cavalier, you guys,” Lear chided. “People could be dying back there.”

  “And they’d kill us in a heartbeat as well, Brooke,” O’Brien reminded. “These people are trained assassins. I can feel them.”

  Lear kept quiet. She wasn’t used to being around people with such a careless view of life—especially the lives of others. The crystals she’d arranged to detonate underfoot weren’t so much designed to kill as they were to impede. She hoped no one had been seriously hurt by the blasts.

  “That’s thee more down, Commander. These blasts are getting more and more deadly.” Another voice came over his headset.

  “Yea, I get it. Fall back; and bring in a mine team, on the double.”

  * * * * *

  “How far are they now, Bryn?” Wynn asked.

  “Too far. I can’t feel them anymore.”

  Wynn smiled at Lear. “That was a great idea, Brooke; I mean, Lyris. You bought us some time.”

  “I like the name Brooke,” she reminded.

  “We’ve been running all day, guys,” Tyler complained. “I need a break.”

  “We could all use one, I think,” Romero agreed.

  “We can’t stop,” Wynn urged. “They’re only a few miles behind.”

  “We need to stop them, not just slow them down.” O’Brien had shifted Parker so that he was now asleep over her shoulder.

  They kept moving deeper into the cavern following another set of small shallow streams that moved quickly down the slight incline of the illuminated crystal forest.

  “That’s it.” Tyler sat down. “I’m not going any further. I need to rest.”

  “We need to keep moving, Chase.” Wynn argued.

  “I’m done moving.” His energy was spent. He’d not eaten all day after their breakfast had been interrupted by the soldiers.

  O’Brien offered her hand to help him, but he just shook his head. “I’ll carry you.”

  “I can’t, I’m sorry. I just need to rest for a bit.”

  “Let him get a drink and rest for a bit, Dade. They’re far enough behind. He’s tired.” Brayden assured.

  “I don’t give a damn how tired he is, do all of you want to end up dead?”

  “Give a damn?” Lear repeated. “A dam. That might work!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The way some of these grand crystals react with water, they can grow quickly if you arrange them the right way. There’s enough water here; if we can find the right catalyst shards, we may be able to dam-up and block the whole cavern.”

  “Really?” Wynn looked surprised.

  “These pillars are like granite once they stop maturing. It might take them days and days to get through. IF they get through at all.”

  “Nice, but then how do we get out?” Romero asked.

  “I’ll get us out,” Lear assured. “Somehow.”

  47

  W hat. In the fuck. Is that?”

  A magnificent lattice of mammoth crystalline pillars rose in random directions from the floor of the cavern and into the rock of the ceiling high above, obscuring what lay beyond.

  “Looks like a wall. Or maybe a dam, Commander.”

  “I know what it looks like. Where the fuck did it come from? And how did they get past it? It’s blocking the whole cavern!”

  “Wherever it came from, it’s new. The pool’s still rising.”

  Both men were now backing away from the water inching its way up the shallow incline.

  “They couldn’t have gotten past us. They had to have come this way.” The lead agent fumed.

  “I hear you, Commander. This assignment just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  “Put a sock in it, Lieutenant. Just—fucking get me a Seal team with some demolition experience.”

  * * * * *

  On the other side, water flowed in beautiful scintillat
ing rainbow cascades through the floor-to-ceiling lattice of the new crystalline dam that glowed softly with its own light. Sprays of warm water filled small pools here and there, pools that then overflowed like an illuminated fountain within the massive random structure, only to then re-find its original stream beds and continued flowing on down into the cavern.

  Parker groaned softly and then opened his eyes sitting up onto his elbows. He was surrounded by the others still sleeping quietly on their bags. He could ‘feel’ all of them, including Bryn who was suddenly awake with a start after he’d touched her with his feelings.

  “Shhh,” he felt to her.

  She nodded not saying a word.

  The others felt so tired to him. He didn’t want to wake them. Both quietly got up and moved out of the camp well out of earshot of the others.

  “I didn’t think you could get any more handsome, Winter. I guess I was wrong,” she smiled.

  “Did I change? I mean my face?”

  “I think you did. Nice. I love dimpled chins.”

  “I do not have a dimpled chin, do I?”

  She nodded with a giggle.

  He found a mostly still pool and looked into it. “Whoa! That’s not me; I mean, it is me but, wow. I think I look more like Brooke now.”

  “We both do. We have her DNA.”

  He pulled off his shirt. “Jesus. I look like Dade now too.” He flexed his much larger and deeply cut pecs, looking at himself in the pool’s imperfect reflection.

  “Not. He’s still bigger than you are. I do like your, ah, curves though.”

  Parker caught her staring at his ass. “I feel your thoughts, Miss Naughty,” he turned to face her.

  She moved up to him, her hands touching and sliding over his thicker deeply sculpted pectorals.

  “Oh, I see how you work now. Your ability isn’t ranged. You don’t broadcast like the rest of us. That’s how you evaded the Seven seeing you as a goddess.” Parker’s new mind connected the dots quickly.

  “You’re really bright, Winter. You’re going to have to be extra careful. Your eyes are—”