by Jade Alters
Emery,
Memory Trap,
He comes in as if on cue, as if alerted by some primeval alarm of competition for mating rites. Like his masculinity has somehow been threatened. If it was anyone else but Hoster, I’d have believed it. But that goofy smile of his obeys no conventions. One second I’m blissfully unaware of anything in the pitch black world of sleep. The next, the dreamscape of Clearlake Academy bursts into life around me. Hoster enters on a crackling bolt of lightning. This time, the light beam deposits him on the patio beside the pond, instead of inside it, like I designed it to. He stands with his hands on his hips, proud nose pointed at the sky of my memories. His hair is much shorter now, and almost completely brown. He much more closely resembles his physical form.
“Now, how’d you do that?” I ask him. I cloak how impressed I am behind a curtain of disappointment.
“Maybe…I’ve been practicing a lot more than I let on,” Hoster admits.
“You altered the nature of my memory trap from outside, didn’t you?” I challenge him. Hoster boots a pebble across the cobbled pavement around the pond like a bashful child. “Splendid. You made yourself some kind of backdoor and now I’m sure any old Astral could just waltz in-”
“Hold your tongue!” Hoster declares, “Any old Astral. You dare say such things in the presence of the great infiltrator? The man who single-handedly compromised the memory trap of the great Emery Dalshak?” I start out ready to lash back at him, but the sheer pride in his puffed-out chest is just too much. I break out into a laugh wilder than any I ever have. My head bucks up and down from my knees. I rock over both sides of my stony bench. It isn’t even that particularly funny to me - it’s more how ridiculous the Great Emery Dalshak sounds in light of all my recent accomplishments. “Hey…you alright?” Hoster asks after four seconds of wheezing.
“It’s just…” I start to wind down. Heavy breaths help me sit up almost straight again. They help me find Hoster’s innocent face. I can share with him all I want and he still might not understand. The things expected of me…and the things I’ve delivered. “Lately, I don’t feel so great.”
“Emery,” Hoster’s voice softens. He swoops around me to the bench. His leg brushes against the side of mine. His Astral fingers slide over the leg of my own mental form. It’s all energy and illusions, but his fingers feel awfully real sliding across my thigh. “I’ve been in this place…I don’t even know how many times anymore. I’ve spent maybe half that time trying to figure it out. It took me that long to move a lightning strike a few feet to the right. You built all of this! Whether or not you feel like it…you are great.”
I look up from the ground, where my eyes have been digging a hole between my feet. I find Hoster’s eyes full of something almost like pity. Only, it doesn’t make me feel bad. It doesn’t poison my mind, like Mother warned me. Hoster’s lips smile, while the lines around his eyes morph into an expression almost entirely opposite. His mouth reflects how he wants me to feel. His eyes show the contents of his heart. Whatever it is, it’s working. My stomach turns, but not in a way that makes me sick. My chest rises up, suddenly short of breath, but not from physical strain.
“Thanks,” I manage to spit out. But it was too quick, too ungrateful. “Thank you, Hoster,” I try again. I turn my head towards him as I say it. Both our faces light with surprise at how remarkably human I sound. We hang there in the air, mere inches away, until Hoster springs up from our bench. He turns around to face me, in front of the little pond that’s served as his prison more than once.
“If you liked that little speech, boy, do I have a surprise for you,” Hoster spouts. He dons that same mask of comical pride for a few seconds while he puts his hands in an odd position. The look vanishes, to be replaced with tense lines of concentration. His left arm crosses his chest while his right fist inches out from his body.
“Interpretive dance?” I take a page from Hoster’s own playbook and prod him. His eyes remain clamped tight. Hoster’s left arm swings out in a wide arc. He pops his right fist open and thrusts his open hand to the sky of my memory.
“With a twist,” Hoster smirks. I slide back to the very edge of my bench when the water of the Clearlake pond shoots up in a beam of foam and crystal. Ribbons of liquid split out like a hundred strands of frayed hair. They swirl around Hoster to the air in front of him. They weave and kink around one another. They split into smaller and smaller pieces, each with a purpose of their own. Each plays a role to form a liquid message, floating in the air between us. You. Me. Heritage Ball? It says.
“You…you want to go with me?” falls out of my disbelieving lips.
“Want to…” Hoster chuckles, arms and fingers still frozen in position to maintain his message. “I want you to go with me! I heard the Academy puts on this dance, and…well, I guess it doesn’t matter who goes with who. As long as we go together.” Hoster breaks out in tense laughter. I should have known. Hoster doesn’t realize that, as a member of a founding family, I have no choice in the matter of attending the Ball. And for now, he doesn’t need to know.
“Well, if it doesn’t matter, whichever way…I suppose we could escort one another,” I say, purposely dry. But, watching Hoster strain to float his message between us, my mask lasts only so long. The first crack in it ripples across my lips. They curl up into a giant, toothy smile that hardly feels like it belongs to me. “Hoster, I’d love to go to the ball with you.”
“Thank God,” Hoster sighs. He swings both arms up to the sky. His water-letters spiral up tiredly to the sky and burst like liquid firecrackers. I feel a pang of guilt at how much more grandiose he had obviously planned it to be, before I stalled him. I stand up to catch Hoster in my arms when he stumbles. I plant a kiss on his smiling lips before I have a chance to hesitate.
The surge of emotion rips my memory world wide open and scatters it to fleeting thoughts across both our minds. We’re left on our backs in different rooms, wide awake with huge smiles glued to the ceiling.
Sealbreaker Showdown
Rock,
The Broken Academy, Rec Field
I can’t believe the day is already here. I thought it might be soon, but not this soon. I’ve only seen Emery a handful of times since her lips crashed into mine. They haven’t again since that day. Our meetings have been purely for lessons of strategy and grappling. I can’t tell if the tension between us is athletic or something more primal. But she did well. She learned how to locate someone’s center of gravity while watching for others targeting hers. In days, Emery mastered grappling maneuvers and hold-breaks that took me months. It all led here. The Rec Field. The game I’ve been dreading since the day Emery Dalshak walked back into my life.
“Welcome, Sealbreaker fans!” the announcer thunders out over the field. His voice rattles the grass under my shoes. A hundred times before, it’s been a sound that rattled my bones with excitement. Today, it gives me a shiver too powerful to shake off. “To the clash of two star teams: an old favorite and a newcomer to the scene! Both were bound for greatness…until today. Only one of these two meteoric teams will shoot to the upper leagues of this year’s Sealbreaker bracket!”
I stand at the forefront of our team. My fellow Runner, Soerilla stands beside me at the front between teams. Behind me is the newest addition to our team. The Disruptor who’s changed the nature of every game I’ve played with him. But, for once, my mind isn’t on them. My mind is on the bodies on the other side of the front. The only thing I’m concerned with at the moment is the dark-tan Disruptor of the opposing team with golden eyes more calculating than a computer keyboard.
“Which will it be?” The announcer’s boom shakes me back to reality. A match is about to start. I’ve never been so unfocused. “Silver Spark?” The announcer gives the crowd a chance to rise up in applause. They command an explosion of claps and screams admittedly louder than anything Silver Spark had at the beginning of the season. That is, in no small part, thanks to the very Disruptor I have my eye on. Emery Da
lshak. “Or Cypher Stream?” The roar for Silver Spark is no match for the chaos that consumes the Rec Field at the sound of our team name. The sound alone is enough to sting my eardrums. The shockwave from the stomps is the drum-roll that heralds the quickening of my pulse. “Begin!”
My heels cut grass before the announcer’s echo works its way out of the air. My muscular pistons fire me across the field, straight for a row of three Sealbreaker pins. A blur approaches me from the right, just three steps short of the pins. I dig my feet in and jerk back from Emery’s flying elbow. I throw a foot out at the back of her leg, but she jumps over it. We meet eyes in the seconds it takes both of us to reset positions. There’s not an ounce of hesitation in either of us. Just like I taught her. Soerilla races out past us, neck and neck with the Runners of Silver Spark.
I feign a strike at Emery, which she braces for perfectly. Only, instead of charging low with my shoulders, like I motioned I would, I dive to the side, into a somersault. Emery stumbles after me, arms reaching to stop me. She misses me by inches. I snag a pin from the grass and chuck it sideways before I even have a chance to feel my ancestral powers pump back through my muscles. It frisbees out, straight into Soerilla’s fingers. The second she clamps down on it, she zips off at Vampire speed to accumulate as many others as she can.
Pins sail backward to Bryant and the rest of our team while Emery throws an elbow into my ribs. Muscle absorbs most of the blow but it hurts like a bitch. I throw a merciless punch at that pretty face, the one I just want to grab and pull into mine. Emery steps back from it just in time. That’s when I notice the pin by her foot. I see, the second after her dodge, that she noticed it too. Emery makes the mistake of dropping for the pin, instead of keeping her eyes on me. I leap into a kick that lifts her an inch off the ground. The grunt that escapes her hits me harder than any strike I’ve ever endured. Her hand shrinks an inch away from the pin. I reach for it myself. I’m stricken both with a surge of pride and a sting of pain when Emery snags my arm. She yanks me off-balance and away from the pin.
Emery gets her hands on the pin by her feet at the same time I slide to one of my own. We leap up at the same time. We shoot the same glance out over our respective teams. We’re the last two to get our own pins. Emery throws a hand out at me. I see the power flare up in her eyes a second before her invisible trick whizzes past my face. I don’t give a thought to what it was - portal or prison, not sure if she missed me intentionally or not - though she hasn’t pulled a punch yet. All I can spare a thought for at just that moment is hawk. I leap into the air. For a blurry second, all physical sensation leaves me. When senses return, they’re not those of a human. I have the telescoping sight, razor claws and thin sleek wings of a bird of prey.
I slice wind on my way over Emery’s head. She snaps a portal into existence in my direct path. It takes all of my raptor strength to flap myself onto a new path, just around the illusory window. A buzz of energy whips past my head. I swoop down between Soerilla and Serge, who’s trying to snare her in a similar illusory prison. I turn sideways to bank a tight turn around Bryant as he lets loose a column of corruption along the ground, straight for Serge. I ride a breeze down to the grass and pluck up a pin in each talon.
I rise to circle the Rec Field until one of my teammates’ pins wears off. I watch for the inevitable change in stance that comes with the effects of MED-F. The sudden flight of their abilities from their bodies. On my airborne watch, no one goes more than thirty seconds without their abilities. I zip by over them immediately. I drop pins from the sky, into their overhead hands.
All the while, I dip and soar around Emery and Serge’s onslaught of tricks. Portals, illusory beams and glassy projectiles fling up around me. I leave a wake of feathers flickering behind me as I tilt mere inches out of the way. I stay high as long as I can, watching my well-oiled team at work. Soerilla keeps a steady flow of pins on the ground to match my rain from above. Bryant clears the way for our Goalstone with endless columns of corruption spiking up around him. Silver Spark’s striker can’t hope to break through his barriers of twisted, blackened earth. It’s not like a strike from above is feasible for them, either. Not while I span the field with each sonic snap of my wings.
Our Goalstone plunks down the chute. The score horn blasts from wall to wall around the Rec Field. We drop it in twice more before Silver Spark’s Cavalier, that Dragon girl everyone’s been fussing about, heaves their own Goalstone down their chute. They kick back, hard, but it looks no less like a victory for us. That is, until I swoop down to restock my talons with Sealbreaker pins. They flash out to grasp a pair that glints in the sun from above. I’ve already got my bird-sight on the next cluster I’ll go for, and which teammates need them the most. Maybe my mind is too far ahead. I feel the snare around my skinny raptor ankle too late.
I turn my beak down to see a glassy lasso looped around my leg just before Serge yanks me sideways, out of my flight path. If he was the only Dalshak Magician I was dealing with, I’d twist my way out of it, but I know better than that. I spot the portal Emery’s opened for him to toss me into straight ahead. I’ll never make it out of this snare in time. But then, it’s a trap designed for a hawk. At the command of my focus, my body slims to the shape of a single, compact muscle. My wings and legs move in to be absorbed by the rest of my shifting form. My feathers flatten down to a sleeve of seamless scales. As a snake, I slither right out of the loop that finds no traction on my smooth body.
My noodly body sails down straight for the ground. Serge makes the experienced Sealbreaker Captain move of shifting his attention back to Soerilla and the rest of my team. He knows he can’t afford to have two Disruptors on the same threat for long. I still feel the whip of Emery’s temporal tricks all around me. She’s trapped me in her sights and she won’t let me go. Which means I have to put others in her sights, if I want a chance to play my role. I stay a snake to wriggle around Emery’s flung portals and mind-traps, until the Rec Field’s grass jumps up at my face. At the very last second, I see a different body for myself in the heart of my mind. My tissues and bones reorganize themselves to make it so.
Four powerful legs shoot out from my skinny rope of muscle. They dig claws into the earth as my body grows and my head lifts up on an extending neck. The spots still pop through my cheetah fur when I explode into a sprint through the heart of the Sealbreaker battlefield. Emery opens three portals in my path. I dig flexed paws in the grass to pivot around each one. I sweep every pin in my path backward, toward Bryant and the rest of my team. The Goalstone scrapes forward while I zip around between the legs of those fighting around it. I alter my path to cross between as many other players as I can. My own. Members of Silver Spark. I use whatever bodies I can to break the line of sight between Emery and me.
I open my jaw to scoop up a pin for myself. My fanged feline mouth chomps down on grass and dirt when the pin vanishes into an illusory void just its size. I look up in shock to find Emery with a hand over her head. She waits for the corresponding portal to open over her, to drop the pin she stole from me right into her hand. It doesn’t. I can tell from the paleness that overtakes her face that her clock has run down. Suddenly, she can’t remember even the oldest trick in her book.
I dig my paws in to break for the next nearest pin, only to find I can’t. I don’t have paws anymore. My fingers feel alien to me as they clump a fistful of useless dirt beneath me. I’m left on all fours with the sudden, strange sensation of being trapped in one form. Human. How could I be so damn careless? screams across my mind. After all my preaching to her about keeping her mind on the clock, I’ve forgotten about my own limits for the first time in two years. I shoot off like an Olympic sprinter from my all-fours launching pad, for the closest pin to me.
A cone of crimson heat burns a crisp, black streak through the grass in front of me as Cece hauls her Goalstone nearby. Before the flame can turn on me, a shield of corrupted earth rises up to break its flow and open me a path to the pin. I launch again, on
ly to be slammed from above. It’s a slender frame that hits me, but with the added force Emery gets by leaping from the top of Bryant’s corrupted columns, she tips me right over.
The two of us tumble through the grass, locking hips in an attempt to come out on top. She manipulates my weight perfectly, using momentum just like in our practice sessions. Damn! I knew she was learning fast, but in this thrashing brawl I get the feeling she’s even held back in our morning sessions to mislead me. I can’t help but smirk at her dirty tactics. At how effective her cunning is against discipline I thought was ironclad. Unbeatable. She keeps one hand flat on my chest, one wrapped around my shoulder to flip me with the force of our roll every time I almost pin her. It forces me to let her take the top, lest I risk wasting more strength than I need to. Emery’s thighs and pelvis mount mine. When she feels my muscles surrender, she flattens my back in the grass with two hands on my chest. She grins down at me in her victory, breasts pinched together and pushed up to peek through her collared Sealbreaker button-up. If we were anywhere else - hell if we just didn’t have an audience - I’d have sat up to kiss her again. But Emery’s been so fixated on besting me, she doesn’t realize I rolled right over the top of a Sealbreaker pin. I smile right back up at her as I shift.
My fuzzy little tail wraps around the pin, as deft as an extra little hand. My frame shrinks under Emery’s hands until they loosen in confusion. She struggles with something most people will never have to deal with, especially on such notice - how to restrain a capuchin monkey. I hardly give her a chance to figure it out. I grasp her shirt with my tiny feet-for-hands and pull myself out of her hold right through her legs. I pop out behind her just before she tries to scissor her thighs closed on me.
The second I’m free, I jump into the air and latch onto Soerilla as she passes by. I ride her shoulder to the opposite side of the field. As soon as I’m clear of Emery, I jump again. I stretch my arms out to the sky, envision feathers and shoot back up as a hawk. Silver Spark sinks their Goalstone again, but the buzzer is followed directly by the game-ending horn.