“Portal,” he whispered, coming to his feet. She watched as he began to hum, and then somehow still in his own voice harmonized with it, finally making a chord of three notes. Kaia could feel the vibrations, slowly at first. As the second note was added her hands and feet began to tingle and by the time the chord was complete her entire body was trembling with the force of it. Her jaw dropped as Bijan’s hands lifted into the air and, right before her eyes, something that looked like nothing less than a rip in the fabric of time itself, appeared.
* * *
He had no choice.
Bijan knew he couldn’t leave Kaia there on Earth, in her dimension. If more sycophants came, and he knew they would, she would be defenseless. At least if she was with him, there was a chance. If the Vloveks got to her first, there would be none. He would only need twelve Shinzarn hours to do it, to give himself the energy his body required, and then he’d bring her back. That was all.
It was the only thing he could think about, opening the portal. It took every last inak of energy Kaia had just given him to sing one into existence before collapsing to the floor. It would grow. It would grow over a period of minutes and it would be okay.
“Bijan!”
He heard her call his name from a faraway place, from the other end of a cave, perhaps. But what was she doing in a cave? She wasn’t on Shinzar yet, they were still on Earth. He tried to say her name, but couldn’t bring himself to speak.
When she called to him again, her face suddenly appeared before him and he felt like smiling. He was smiling, wasn’t he? He would be back soon and everything would make sense. Why did Kaia look so worried? They had found each other. They’d found what many Shinzarns never find, at least, not the Zar. It was so rare. Something so beautiful as to be ethereal, and the subject of legends among his people.
That it had been her, the daughter of his mentor, the one whose life he’d taken an oath to protect in front of all Zar on the day of her birth...it was something he had never seen coming. Yet there she was. They had swayed, they were the fah, the yin, to the other’s feh, the yang. Two halves of a whole, swaying, moving as one, and yet could she even be on Shinzar for very long?
What if she couldn’t? What if he took her there only for them to discover she had to return to Earth’s dimension in order to live? Shinzar would remain at war, all Shinzarns would die. The Vloveks would forever and ever continue trying to capture Kaia. Once they succeeded every known dimension would be in danger, and even those unknown. For with all five talismans the demons would be able to find every last one.
Bijan heard and felt a low rumbling sound, and realized after a few seconds it had come from him. Kaia was speaking frantically to him but he couldn’t hear anything except the noise low in his throat. Then her mouth was on his and he felt a fire ignite. It began as a literal burn to his lips, spreading slowly through his head. He could feel his mind lighting up, heat travelling into his chest, heart picking up pace.
She was giving him life.
* * *
Her hair lifted, static electricity making it stand nearly on end. This time when she tried to remove her mouth from his, anger fuelled her thoughts, ordering Bijan to release her. They came apart with a pop. Eyes wide, Kaia felt her hair fall along her shoulders and back, the static feeling dissipating. Turning, she stared in awe. The rip she’d seen Bijan open had grown to at least five feet tall. And for the first time, Kaia could see.
Slowly she rose to her full height, taking in the large, red sun and the smaller blue one above and to its left. The sky was red; there were no clouds. A canyon of silver-grey rock rose to the left. The world was barren, like a desert. It looked so hot, shades of darker reds moving to medium and then lighter as far as the eye could see. Once, she could tell there had been trees, for their black trunks clawed into the sky. There were no people. There seemed to be no life.
It couldn’t be. It simply could not be. The place Bijan had spoken of lay there before her, and yet still she doubted her own eyes. She reached out, marvelling when her hand went right into the portal, through it, as though there were no barrier there at all. As though it were nothing more than a normal doorway to walk through, and she gasped softly.
“Shinzar,” Bijan said, using the bed to haul himself to his feet.
“But it’s so...dead.”
“Yes,” he said, coming to stand shakily next to her. His eyes looked so sad, still mostly white and yellow-pink, and Kaia’s heart broke just a little at the sight. “It is.”
She couldn’t doubt anymore. After all, Bijan was there, and she’d experienced the sycophants for herself. She’d seen things in her mind that spoke of truths she’d never have been able to dream into existence on her own. And the Nake glowed.
Looking down, she picked it up, cradling it in her palm. It glowed so brightly she could barely force herself to look directly at it, but she did. Her eyes moved back up to the portal, which by now was over six feet tall and just wide enough to fit one man.
“It’s real,” Kaia breathed. “Bijan, it’s really real.”
He nodded, reaching out and taking her hand. She turned and looked at him and closed her eyes, steeling herself to wake up and find it had all been a dream. “Show me,” she said, slowly reopening her eyes.
Bijan moved forward. And Kaia followed.
Chapter Fifteen
As soon as he stepped foot through the portal, his energy began to return. He wasn’t sure how exactly he looked, but if Kaia’s reaction had been any indication, he supposed it must be pretty bad. Her hand tightened around his even as he sank to his knees, forcing her to fall with him.
“Are you okay now? I mean, you’re going to be okay?”
He nodded, taking a few deep breaths to center and calm himself. “I will be in a few hours.”
“It’s so quiet here, Bijan. I don’t hear the sounds of war.”
“I chose a place I was certain they wouldn’t be returning to.”
Her eyes were taking everything in and he could feel her heart racing through the air but also through the tight clench of their hands.
“Come,” he said, fighting to get his feet under him again. “There’s a cave in that rock formation.”
She nodded and helped pull him up. Slowly they moved forward. Bijan’s eyes were darting everywhere looking for any signs of Vloveks. The flat expanse between where the portal had opened and the side of the cliff had no cover, but the Vloveks wouldn’t return to this place. After all, they’d already gotten what they’d wanted from it. They’d gotten Kana.
Every step made it harder and harder for him to even want to keep going. He was more drained than even he had realized. If not for Kaia’s breath of life, he would have been gone twice now. In such a short amount of time, the Protected had become Protector, and he found himself willing his legs to keep moving. If for no other reason than to switch the roles back to what they were meant to be.
Only the steady, fast rhythm pounded out by her heartbeats kept him going.
The cave entrance was still well-hidden between two outcroppings just a step up from ground level. He crawled up that foot of height, Kaia at the top pulling at his hands to help. Quickly they moved into the darkness of it.
“I can’t see anything,” Kaia whispered. “How do you know it’s safe?”
“Stop!” Bijan panted, unable to take anymore. He stumbled to the floor, landing in a face-down sprawl.
She was at his side. He could feel her. The beating of her heart hadn’t slowed; it was steady and strong. He held onto the feel of it pulsing through him, imagined Kaia in perfect detail behind closed eyelids from the imprint he’d taken of her in her living room. When she leaned closer his eyes popped open. Bijan didn’t want her to try giving him breath again because if she did and couldn’t stop it, it would be her death.
“No kiss,” he rasped, feeling the effects of the translation spell wearing off. He simply could not maintain it in his current state, and so it would go.
* *
*
Kaia couldn’t be certain how long she sat there leaning against the cave wall with her hand resting on Bijan’s back. It was only the steady rise and fall of his body and the slow creep of warmth through the leather-like vest that reassured her he was all right.
Her thoughts were scattered, hopping from one unbelievable thing to another, replaying the nightmares she’d had in her mind and overlaying them with what she now knew. Seeing the faces of her mother and father, her real mother and father, so clearly as they held her and sang to her. Memories from when she was so young. She didn’t believe people could remember that far back, but perhaps it was different for her since she wasn’t ‘people’ after all.
The Nake looked so different here. Not in the cave, specifically, but on Shinzar. Its glow wasn’t nearly as bright as it had been on Earth. It was more warm and soft than blindingly brilliant. She supposed it was the strange colors here; the reds imbuing everything with a haze of sorts that made her eyes smart just a little.
Somehow she wasn’t in freakout mode. Kaia herself wasn’t quite certain why. It was just this feeling of rightness that everything had to it. Of belonging. Of being exactly where she was meant to be all along. If Bijan’s story and their subsequent journey to a different planet in a different dimension were all nothing more than some sort of illusion, Kaia found herself hoping to never come out of it.
Taking stock of her body, she noted that she felt lighter, though not overly so. It was cool inside the cave, but not damp. She didn’t feel chilled but also didn’t feel warm. The one thing she was more certain of than anything in that very moment was that she could feel Bijan. What was that thing that had happened between them before they’d come over here? She remembered swaying with him, feeling whole, like the very last puzzle piece had been slotted into place.
He had been her protector. This she now knew. And yet he and her father, a man she could recall so very little about, had thought her to be in enough danger that they had sent her to another time and place alone. Kaia supposed on some level she should be angry about that; about being cast off to an alien world without anyone there to help her, or to even know whether she’d be okay.
But, she reasoned, her father must have known she would be. Because what kind of parent would just abandon their only child without checking on the destination first? She wondered about the Vloveks, wondered about the war, wondered about all the little details Bijan had not told her in his hurried explanations. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but the slow, steady beat and evened-out breathing of the only one she could ask, told her that her chance would not come any time soon.
Kaia lay next to him on the floor, pulling his arm around her body, shoving him so that he was more on his side than his belly. She pushed her back into his front, closed her eyes and welcomed the silence of Shinzar even as the low buzz she now associated with Bijan enveloped her. She was tired, so very tired. She would just sleep until Bijan was back to himself. The last thing she saw on the backs of her eyelids, in such exquisite detail she would have sworn she was seeing him for real, was Bijan’s face.
* * *
The first time he awoke, he was keenly aware of her presence like an envelope of serenity. He tightened his arm around her, knowing he’d made it past the critical point and was slowly returning to his normal Shinzarn self. He buried his face in her hair, inhaling her scent with each and every breath. He basked in the rush of blood through her veins.
There was no sound in the cave itself save that of her sleeping breaths. Soft and evenly spaced, they soothed him further into the blessed sweetness of sleep.
* * *
She turned, frowning as the hard stone floor dug into her flesh. Rolling over to face Bijan, she smiled at the return of color to his skin, at the strength of his pulse. His eyes were still closed, but his arm remained in place. The Nake’s glow made him ethereal to her eyes, as though he were no more real than a fleeting thought. She felt the weight of his arm on her waist and the warmth of his breath on her hair. Yet she needed something more, something to convince herself that he...and she...were really and truly there.
Kaia turned her face upward and nudged herself closer. She leaned in and touched her lips to his. Unlike the coldness from before, this time his lips were warm and pliant and she pressed even closer. Her hand travelled up his arm, to his shoulder, on to his neck where her fingers snaked around beneath his hair. She pulled him into her, though in her mind it was Bijan pulling her into him.
When he hummed against her, her body vibrated. When his tongue traced her lips, she moaned. When his mouth opened beneath hers and his hands lifted her shirt, she knew without a single doubt left, that she had come home.
Chapter Sixteen
Kaia awoke knowing instinctively something was wrong. She felt it in every cell of her being, and noticed within a split second of opening her eyes that Bijan was no longer with her. Her pulse skyrocketed and she jumped to her feet. The Nake’s light told her no one was near. Pebbles skidding beneath her feet, she hurried toward the front of the cave.
Two feet back from the entrance, she ran into something solid, unforgiving and invisible. Crying out, her head throbbed as she landed on the cave floor. Kaia rose again, moving forward slowly with hands outstretched. She felt it beneath her fingertips, smooth and ice cold. Hands roaming everywhere, touching, feeling, yet there was no give.
“Bijan!” she called out, her own voice echoing in her ears. Leaning up against the wall she couldn’t see, Kaia closed her eyes and he appeared in her mind. He was whirling in the air, twisting at a dizzying speed, hands flying out as yellow, white and blue flashes sparked from his body. Then a large green-grey monster seemed to come out of nowhere and slam into Bijan’s body, knocking him to the ground.
“No!” Kaia cried, banging against the wall. In her mind she could still see him, and he wasn’t moving. “No, no, no!” she bellowed, slamming the butt of her hand into the solid mass before her.
Her eyes opened wide in shock and terror as the wall became suddenly visible and shattered like glass, falling to the floor. It took two blinks for her to realize she was free. She had to find Bijan. She didn’t know where she was, what she was doing, or how she could possibly help him, but it was an instinct greater than that of her own will to survive.
* * *
He shoved himself up, palms and fingertips digging into the inch of dust covering the ground. His knees barely registered the whisper of a moment where they steeled his body to rise. He stood at full height and plunged into the depths of all he had learned, summoned the vision of his kilana and prepared himself to strike.
That’s when the full picture of Kaia filled his mind and he almost choked on it. She was running. She was out of the cave and she was running right toward him. He turned, hearing the cacophony of demons surrounding him. There was less than a minute. They hadn’t noticed her yet.
Fury filled him at the thought of Kana/Mulmak getting his hands on her, on the Nake, and he turned to jab a white-hot bolt of light at the nearest Vlovek. It shrieked in pain as the black death swirled from Bijan’s left hand and shot into the next nearest demon, radiating its brilliant darkness throughout the sycophants encircling him.
There was one more demon and yellow and white gathered heat in his right hand as he crouched down. He knew it would come nearer to inspect, thinking he had been wounded. He waited for it. He could hear a first tentative step even as his gut told him Kaia was nearly upon them. When she called out his name over the demon’s cries, Bijan spun around and shot the bolt of death directly into the Vlovek’s belly.
He didn’t even see it turn to ash. Kaia was in his arms, knocking him back a few steps, clinging to his neck and burying her face in his chest. He squeezed her hard, even as his body began to heal from the few injuries he had sustained.
Kaia pulled away from him, looking down at his right arm. A foot-long gash covered elbow to wrist and she gasped, reaching out to touch.
* * *
<
br /> Her eyes widened as the cut began to disappear. Slowly, from both edges, healing itself, moving towards its own center where the cut was deepest. Her fingertips followed its ascent from his wrist, smooth skin with no scars. Nothing left but the dark blood that appeared almost black here on this planet.
“How?” she whispered.
“We must move,” Bijan said softly, wrapping an arm around her. “I caught this clutch before they reached the cave, but there will be more when these have been missed.”
“Bijan, I broke through your wall. Your...magic invisible wall. It became visible and it shattered like glass.”
That stopped him just as he’d meant to take a step forward. “How?”
“I don’t know. I was furious with you for trapping me there, and I could see you fighting in my mind...” Her words trailed off as she looked all around them. “Where are they? Where are those things I saw?”
“Defeated. They are former Shin possessed by Vloveks. We call them sycophants, and there are tens of thousands more.” He looked around, heightening his sense of hearing, but they seemed to be safe for the moment. “I have to find out if the rest of the Zar who were with me are still alive.”
“Shin? Zar?”
“The classes of people. I am Zar, as are you. Shin are those without magic.”
She nodded. “And once you discover how many Zar are left?”
“Then,” he revealed, “we have to destroy one of the other talismans with the Nake.”
Kaia swallowed hard. She was frightened, and knew that he could tell with this strange bond of theirs.
“Kaia.” His voice was so soft and deep she barely heard it. “I’m back to my full strength. I should return you to Earth.”
Startled, she grabbed hold of his biceps. “No! Bijan, I’m staying here with you. I want to help you. I need to. I can’t just sit over there trying to lead a normal life now, don’t you see that?”
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