A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  Tiva laughed at her earlier anxiety. “This place is another Aeden! Why haven’t we ever come up here to festival?”

  Moon-chaser turned, his wild eyes flashed with… was it exhilaration or dread? “Shhh! He won’t come if we chatter like a bunch of school girls.”

  “I wasn’t chattering, I simply asked a question!”

  Farsa gazed at her with a sympathetic sigh. “He used a poor choice of words, Tiva. Please try to understand, and just relax. We don’t want to break the spirit of the place. It’s no good if he doesn’t come.”

  “If who doesn’t come?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Tiva propped her back up against the trunk, and waited.

  Nobody could help but feel restful in such a place. The soft fizz of the spring sent the gurgling brook on its long journey to some river, and then eventually out to sea. It carried Tiva away to a state of awareness not unlike her best seers’ button experiences. The others almost faded away, as strange light refractions seemed to flit behind a tuft of clouds.

  “Is T’Qinna’s really the only explanation for who I am?” Pahn’s plaintive inner voice whined. “Am I to be denied a chance to tell my side?”

  “No,” Tiva whispered, “but I did call you, and you never came.”

  “I can’t come if you stop believing in me. You doubted me. I can’t help you if you doubt me. It is your faith that makes me real.”

  “Must I simply take your word for everything, then? Are you, little sprite, so hidden from my sight, so far beyond us in wisdom that we cannot question you? If you speak truly, you will not shrink from my small askings. What are they to you?”

  Silence.

  “Little sprite?”

  The strange lights in the mist above began to coalesce. “Where do you get the idea that I am so little?”

  Tiva froze.

  “Don’t be frightened. I only meant that you assume I am little because you only hear my whisper in your head. But you have never seen me. You have never had access to the knowledge I have access to.”

  “What knowledge is that?”

  “Wait and watch with the others.”

  Tiva scowled, and focused on the water, which captured the odd sky lights and made them dance. She felt as though she had eaten a button.

  It came like a pouncing sphinx.

  The thrill rushed over her mind and body in golden waves. Reality folded sideways, and the tree above her became the axis around which the entire universe spun—the Life-tree! Aeden’s Life-tree! Perhaps this is what I’ve been missing all along! What’s Aeden without a Life-tree?

  Pipe music began to float around the tiny pond. Tiva was delighted and surprised to see Kernui dancing and piping on the opposite bank. Is he the one we’re here to meet?

  The music grew wilder, more feral, and intense. Living energy pulsated inside the tree trunk, and radiated into Tiva’s back in soothing, vibrant cycles. How could I have ever doubted you, Pahn?

  Tiva squirmed higher, and arched her back against the bole to get the rejuvenating energy all the way down into her toes. Light filled the ravine as if the sun itself had descended to kiss the mountains. Then she understood; I’m here! I’m really here! I’ve reached the upper realms without a button!

  She thought she saw Kernui hop and twirl up into the hovering brightness, where he vanished. Mist began to fill the ravine, while roaring lights and shadows surrounded the islet.

  A small figure approached over the water. Tiva at first thought it was Kernui, wading across to join them. Instead, a phosphorescent little gray man with a large head and wise dark eyes climbed up onto the tiny island under the oak. He seemed to move among them with a tender childlike ease that touched Tiva with an affection beyond words. The little man made his way around the tree to stand before each of the visitors from Grove Hollow, one at a time. Starting with Moon-chaser, he bent to touch them on their foreheads with the tip of his finger. He came to Tiva last.

  Wonder filled her as the end of his finger pressed in, warm and soft, as though it actually passed through her forehead into her mind. His touch charged her with a wild energy that caused her to feel connected with the tree, the moss, and the water. Then she heard the little creature speak.

  His mouth never moved, but she could see his thoughts as he projected them—not in words, but images—visions of beauty, and a form of wisdom that came from feeling rather than thinking. The music of waters—the curl of fern—Tiva sensed the vibrations of life down to its most primal levels, and beyond. She almost became lost in the kaleidoscope pictures from the little gray man. When she reached her own mind out to ask of him what it meant, however, a chill shoved her back into the Life-tree’s warmth.

  For a moment, she had gotten past the flow of wordless wonder, and captured a glimpse of an intellect, vast and cold. The whole scene began to seem as though it had happened to her before. Something about the little glowing man became strangely familiar and unsettling. She couldn’t place it, but somehow she had been here, and seen him, at some time in the past—or at least seen this place and its strange inhabitant through the eyes of another.

  The thoughts of the fragile-looking stranger then became more coherent—almost like the voice of Pahn, but from a different entity.

  “I come that you may know the Divine Name. For the Divine Name is All, and is in All. Your people lost knowledge of this when they left Aeden. We are here to restore you.”

  Aeden! Tiva reeled with a manic energy. I’m going back to Aeden!

  “The Divine Name is in each of you, and each is a part of the Divine Name. Once you truly believe this, the powers of godhood shall be yours again, for that which is part of the whole shares the strength of the whole.”

  A warning bell chimed in the back of Tiva’s mind; something she had read that day…

  “The wise person never searches for the wisdom of A’Nu in words. The wise know that El-N’Lil is inside their heart. Picture it in your thoughts—you are E’Yahavah, and E’Yahavah is you!”

  Tiva mentally tried to race ahead of the unraveling of her own mind. Something here… Something familiar in this, I’ve read this before… It said the same thing, only with different words... and a warning. Where?

  The creature turned, and rested his whiteless black eyes now upon her alone. For another split second, she saw the icy intellect there. Then the reek of horrible red flowers invaded her nostrils, sickly-sweet, hypnogogic, smothering to what little coherent thought she had left. Red and pink flowers—exploding red and pink flowers like festering open sores…

  Everything went black.

  P’

  Tah found the blossoms enchanting, even if the company was a bit subdued. The late afternoon’s fragrance was almost narcotic.

  The former Master Sage of Sa-utar’s Sacred Academy was quite sure that his eyes did not reflect the same glazed certainty as the others who sat with him in the country estate’s lush inner gardens. P’Tah’s world had unraveled faster than he would have thought possible. Funny what our lives turn out to be built on in the end—surprising what rests upon what, when the foundation is kicked out from under you. What’s funnier is whom you turn to when all the old support pillars collapse.

  He had never married—never felt the need—not since the Academy had gone co-ed in Iyared’s day. Nothing like young female students looking for a father figure that loves them like Pahpo never would to break you of your sordid visits to Ayar Adi’In. Of course, that had only traded one sordid diversion for another in a life that, in the end, really amounted to nothing more than a long string of diversions.

  P’Tah sadly smiled as he looked from face to face. Most of the participants were attractive young women with small children. Too bad really.

  They reclined around a fountain inside the open courtyard of a villa owned by “Volkras the Seer,” a craggy-faced elder with stern unyielding eyes and thick white hair that shot from his head in explosive tufts. P’Tah had come to Akh’Uzan after his last meeting with Ta
rbet, not knowing what he would do when he got there. He found that, for a fanatic, this particular World-end demagogue had many things going for him—strong family values, fiscal responsibility, the courage to think the unthinkable…

  Volkras led a tiny group of families, known facetiously to the rest of the valley as the “Earth Mouthers,” from his country house near the tiny hamlet of Brook Farm. After P’Tah had interviewed him, the well-to-do seer had invited him to stay at the villa—apparently to lend an air of academic credibility to a movement that was anything but academic and credible. P’Tah had politely declined, but Volkras had kindly left it an open invitation in case the Master Sage changed his mind.

  Alone, and shut out of every academy in Sa-utar, P’Tah had shocked himself at how quickly he too had come to think the unthinkable. A scholar needs a wealthy sponsor, after all. Yet here there would be no scholastic inquiry, and only a brief tenure. Perhaps it is for the best—I suppose it will send an ironic message of sorts.

  The sun had just set into brilliant magenta, turning the leaves of the courtyard’s cultivated shade trees to a deep purple—the color of the shrouds that Volkras and his followers, including P’Tah, all wore.

  Then again, I suppose the orb pundits that love Tarbet so much will spin the news any way they want. P’Tah shrugged. They always do.

  The deposed Master Sage watched Volkras speak to his small band of followers from a chair set in front of the fountain. The red light made the water behind the Seer look bloody somehow.

  “Oh great E’Yahavah A’Nu, we thank you for sending your chariot to take us into the heavens, even as you sent it for our father, Q’Enukki, in the days of yore…”

  One of the young women passed around a tray of small clay cups while Volkras spoke. P’Tah smiled up at her as he reached for his drink.

  “Cursed be the human race, who by giving themselves over to bodily pleasures have offended your holiness and your plan to better them by lifting them to a higher plane of existence…”

  P’Tah almost laughed. Rotten time for the old blow-hard to say something like that! The girl with the tray did not return the Sage’s smile, but moved on.

  Volkras raised his voice to a screech. “They will know tomorrow morning, when the earth opens its many mouths under each and every one of them, to swallow every last man, woman, and child! They will know that your seer has spoken your truth, which they heeded not! Send now your chariots; for we are ready to shed these earthly mud huts, and go on to a new plane with the Ascended Ones!”

  Volkras finished his speech with a silent prayer, his hands raised to the sky. Then he waited silently with the rest of his followers.

  P’Tah could see the mountains to the northeast, just over the courtyard wall. At first, the change in the light there was subtle, like heat demons that curled the air above a hot pavement. The reddening hills appeared to writhe in a peculiar agony, while a myriad of strange firefly specks descended over the peaks, and seemed to converge into a single, larger disk of light that hovered for a long while over the heights, against the darkening mountain backdrop. Only then, did a second blue-violet orb streak down to settle directly above the villa, and cast its eerie sheen on the tranquil faces gathered there.

  “Our chariot comes!” Volkras announced, raising his cup to the glowing disk. “It is time for us together to shed these material chains!” He then drank it down, and flipped the cup over to show it was empty.

  All his followers smiled to each other with eager anticipation, and did likewise. P’Tah was the last to drink, with somewhat less enthusiasm.

  The black sorvalis-laced wine in each cup soon paralyzed the hearts and lungs of over fifty remarkably diverse people—common farm maids, wealthy merchants, even a magistrate’s daughter. Last to take a breath, was a former Sacred Academy sage from Sa-utar who wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but found his lungs unable to pull it off in the end.

  W

  hen the last person in the house of Volkras had stopped breathing, the disk slowly circled the villa a few times, widening its arc to include the nearby village of Brook Farm. Eventually its spiral reached all the way to the more densely populated town of Farguti Crossroads to the west. Once there, it began to streak back and forth across the sky, turning at sharp angles.

  Hundreds of people came out of their homes to watch the spectacle. Many cried from the streets, “Look up! Look up! A divine chariot, look up!”

  Others scowled, “It’s just a new kind of astra!”

  To which the more observant would respond, “No astra can turn like that—anyone inside would be crushed!”

  One blacksmith ran from his shop at the commotion in the street, with his apprentice right behind.

  The Apprentice cried, pointing upward, “Go to! Look at that!”

  The Blacksmith gazed into the sky only to see the evening stars. “Look at what?”

  “Can’t you see it?” said the youngster. “It’s hovering right over us—big, round, and purple! It’s amazing!”

  “I don’t see anything, you little muck viper!”

  “How can you not see it? It’s right on top of us!”

  “Get back to work! It’s getting late.”

  Clashes far more violent occurred in the Lower Akh’Uzan region that night, between those who could and those who could not see Volkras’ “chariot.” In Farguti, over a hundred murders were committed—three times more than in the entire previous year. Town elders called up auxiliary constables both there, and at Brook Farm, to quell brawls well past midnight.

  Most who saw the disks gathered in the meadows, and simply stared up at them in wonder. Others cowered in their homes because of the fights, the objects, or both. The disk from Volkras’ villa flitted from one side of the sky to the other, seemingly at random, for some hours. Sometimes it would dip low over certain fields, hover a moment, then move on. Meanwhile, its partner brooded over the northeast foothills, as though engaged in some important interaction with something or someone on the ground.

  The following morning, a farmer went out to harvest his wheat only to find strange spiral-shaped symbols pressed into his field. The stalks fell into patterns so intricate that it would have taken many men hours to accomplish, and then only with much planning and coordination.

  At a nearby farm in Lower Akh’Uzan, a dairyman went out to check on his herd, only to find that someone or something had carved out several of his cattles’ genitals with surgical precision, by a blade so thin and hot that it had cauterized the surrounding flesh in a way that capped off any blood flow. Tongues, eyes, and hearts were also missing. As neighbors gathered to see the mutilations, they began to jabber about the strange lights that some people could see and others could not.

  They looked up only when a man ran toward them from the direction of Volkras’ villa, shouting at the top of his lungs.

  Someone had found the purple-shrouded bodies.

  T

  he Archon watched the crowds gather around the stone legs of the Colossus from his platform between the Guild orb-sender towers. It was his ancestral monument’s seventh anniversary—the number of Divine completion and promise. Avarnon-Set had also promised to fill the astral planes with images of Sa-utar’s sacred festival. Tarbet didn’t like that the mobile orb towers required a large level pavement, and thus needed to be stationed two hundred cubits out from the Colossus. He smiled at the annoyance’s one advantage, however. He was far enough from actual “holy ground” to prevent “legal disruptions.”

  A large-eyed ‘tween-aged girl with a small child in her arms caught Tarbet’s gaze from the nearest row of the audience. She smiled up at him from the pavement, and he gladly returned the gesture. At a distance, she resembled Luwinna, the daughter of Urugim, which made his heart ache briefly. Perhaps the girl was her descendant—a few sub-clans from Urugim’s house had moved back to Sa-utar after the Century War. He glanced away.

  The mob packed itself around the feet and supporting “robe train” of Kunyari
’s statue, and surged down into the sunken pavement around the Obelisks of Fire and Water. It occurred to the Archon that, although he was safe from being interrupted in front of the orb-senders, some self-appointed seer could still subvert proceedings from down on the Obelisk Pavement.

  Tarbet scowled, and barked to his bodyguard, “Who was the dung-head that opened up the Obelisk Pavement to the crowds? How can they see anything from down there anyway?”

  “I don’t know, Revered Father. Nobody ordered it cordoned off. I could ask the Grounds Administrator—he should be here soon.”

  “Never mind that. Send a squad of constables to clear the people out of there. The Obelisks are old—we don’t want them damaged.”

  “By your order, Sire.”

  Tarbet saw his subordinate relay the command to the constabulary booth below the platform. Satisfied, he returned to watching the pretty girl with the baby while he waited for the sender towers to signal that he could begin his speech.

  E

  nkasi—former Assurim immigrant to Akh’Uzan, now fervent warrior of Samyaza’s new holy war—grunted as he waddled like a duck through the thickening crowd toward Kunyari’s aesthetically repulsive Colossus. Lord Inguska had been right; the sacred vestments did impede movement—much more than he had anticipated. He supposed it was better to look ridiculous and be effective, than to only appear effective while he threw his life away on the ridiculous and mundane trivialities of Akh’Uzan.

  Enkasi approached from behind, along the massive stone robe train that ramped up from the pavement to support the rotund statue as a wide, much-needed third leg. His orders were to merge with the gathering crowd from behind, and then descend to the Obelisk Pavement from between the legs of the Colossus. There he would cast off his outer cloak to reveal his sacred vestments, and give his “message” between the two World-end Monoliths.