The Eye of Elektron: A Clean Urban Fantasy (The Sumrectian Series Book 1)

by Leigh G. Wynn

  “Ansel… What has happened to you?”

  He did not need to explain. When his eyes flew open, the hollow eye sockets told her everything. Mouth slightly open, he stumbled forward and directed the halo from the Eye of Elektron at Dawn. Even as his icy cold breath drew closer, she could not bring herself to move an inch.

  Suddenly, within the hollow sockets, a pair of familiar blue eyes suddenly materialized. “Shut the gate… Dawn… close it now,” he implored between raspy breaths.

  He still knows my name. She stared into those piercing eyes. It’s him.

  “Trust me…”

  Gritting her teeth, Dawn turned the Eye of Elektron in her hand once more to the left. The halo around Ansel’s wrist disappeared. He nodded to her, satisfied. “Go tell Delia… She will know what to do.”

  Dawn frowned. “Do what?”

  But Ansel did not answer. He gave her one long look before he started once more toward Vance.

  Trust him. She told herself even though she feared she had unleashed a monster.

  Blair, Delia and Kai ushered the last of the Crimson prisoners out of the gate, farther away from the Morvyanns looming above the grounds.

  One more. Dawn squinted at the last unconverted Morvyann in the sky while she ran down the hill. An idea formed.

  “Blair, we’re shutting down the last Morvyann in line!” she announced before she even reached the gate.

  “Crazy human, what are you talking about?” Blair said, her eyes wide.

  “You can fly. Take me up with you so I can turn off the vessel from inside. They are far enough away to not cause too much damage when they fall. We just need to tell people to stay clear of the area. Delia, please, send a word to the other Sumrects.”

  Blair bit her lip. “You are out of your mind.” She exchanged a glance with Delia. The old Sumrect appeared reluctant, but she understood they needed all the help they could get.

  “I’ll cover you from the ground,” she said.

  Looking surprised at Delia’s response, Blair leaped into the air.

  “Thanks, Delia! It’s time we showed Vance what humans are capable of,” she said before she spun into the gargantuan red-beaked eagle once more.

  ✽✽✽

  No, that cannot be possible. No one was as shocked and terrified as Vance. The lympham vaenos could have only belonged to one Sumrect, and that same Sumrect already had his powers stripped away by an Etherian. Next to him, Regina breathed rapidly.

  “It’s Ansel,” she whispered. “The spell has been broken…”

  Vance swung at her, but Quinn inserted himself between the two and seized Vance’s wrist.

  “Have you forgotten who you are?” Vance spat.

  Quinn narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t you dare touch my sister.”

  Vance staggered back. He viewed Quinn’s insolence as further confirmation of his worst fear. The tables had been turned. The Etherian spell had been reversed. He remembered Praeus standing by the doorway, observing everything in silence. Cold sweat broke across his brow.

  Failure was not an option.

  With all his might, he slammed his fist into the ground right above Crimson Cavern.

  ✽✽✽

  It had been years since Ansel channeled dark forces, but he controlled them with ease. The earth rumbled. An enormous fissure split the rock beneath his feet. He jumped to avoid falling into the chasm. At once, he pushed the Morvyanns far out into the ocean and shoved the Eye into his mouth. Then he dived directly into the fissure, spinning as he did so into a massive indigo bunting. He used his powerful claws to scoop up two petrified Crimson workers who had lost their footing and fallen down the cleft. Meanwhile, his nostrils burned with the same pungent scent of evil he had grown to recognize well before his imprisonment in the cave.

  Except this time, it smelled delectable.

  He clenched down on the Eye of Elektron in his mouth, feeling it burn on his tongue. The orb was his only anchor to reality. Without it, his mind would have been gone long ago, numbed by the powerful Etherian force running through him.

  With a turn of his shoulders, he burst through the expanding chasm and accelerated high into the air. He placed the humans down far away from the crack in the earth before he returned to the edge of the fissure. When his feet touched the ground, he morphed back into Sumrect form.

  Carefully, he removed the orb from his mouth with one hand and rested the other, palm down, over the steam emanating from below the surface. Within seconds, the steam solidified into ice, which began to fill the gap.

  An explosion overhead broke his concentration. Ansel looked up not a moment too soon to see a vortex of dark matter plunge down at him. His unique deep blue shield sprang up at the last instant, drawing the attention of surrounding Sumrects and Morvs. The vortex dispersed upon contact.

  “You leave me with no choice, Vance!” he boomed above the clamor. His blue form stepped onto the ice and advanced uphill toward Vance, dissolving the deluge of electricity that the Crimson soldiers and Morvs fired at him. Ansel took each step with deliberation, as if to give Vance one last opportunity for redemption.

  Yet his warning was met with a shrill, maniacal laugh.

  The ground shook even more violently while the fetid smell drenched the wintry air. More ice formed to fill the widening fissure.

  Ansel quickened his gait. He swung his arm forward in a circular motion so that a ring of dark fog materialized around Vance.

  Vance’s blue shield erupted around him, accompanied by a chilling howl of agony. But instead of dissolving upon contact, the dark fog blended in with the shield. It seemed to feed off the blue electricity because the fog expanded farther and farther away from Vance.

  “Ealon!” Vance gasped for air as his shield darkened. “You… feed the very monster you try to keep dormant!”

  Ansel was now close enough for Regina’s attacks to strike his shield. They bounced off without causing any damage. He did not fire back, knowing that she never had intended to kill him. Instead, he directed all his attention to Vance.

  “Stop, Uncle Ansel! Please!”

  Moira’s plea sounded faraway in his head. He blinked away the distraction.

  “Let Dad go!”

  He fought the urge to glance back, but he could not ignore her voice.

  Quinn’s icklians zipped past Ansel’s head toward the only part of him that was not invincible. Even though he knew right away Quinn had not missed him by accident, Ansel tore his eyes away from Vance’s darkened shield and threw the vunn over a weeping Moira a few hundred feet away. The vunn fended off the icklians without a problem, but the diversion cost Ansel his grasp on Vance. A potent force knocked the Eye of Elektron out of his hand and another sent him rolling down the icy fissure.

  When he finally slowed himself to a stop, Vance had fallen to his knees, gasping for air, and his shield had reverted to its normal color. As Ansel regained his footing on the slippery ice, Vance remained crouched like the beast he worshiped.

  It was then that the hooded Etherian floated down the hill like a ghost and inserted himself between the brothers, stopping Ansel dead in his tracks.

  “You have failed to deliver your promise.” Praeus snarled at Vance.

  “Give me another chance!” Vance begged. “I’ll trade you! Two hundred souls!”

  “We Etherians do not barter with the weak!”

  “You saw what happened. You saw I had the prisoners ready—”

  “I saw you crumble under attack, and I see before me nothing but a defeated Sumrect.”

  “Praeus, the spell can be reversed…,” said Regina.

  The Etherian shook his head. “You have not yet caught the eye of new light. You can never reverse the spell.”

  “But the bearer of light is still here! We just have to find her!” Vance shuffled forward on his knees.

  “The Etherian notices all… He”—Praeus suddenly pointed a thin white finger at Ansel—“is the catcher of the eye.”

 
“He was human minutes ago! It’s not over yet! I’m the lord of air, conqueror of Earth, and I will be the one to catch the Eye of New Light!”

  Praeus ignored Vance’s desperate entreaty. “You have broken the Etherian promise, and you must pay.”

  Ansel took a giant step forward. “Praeus—”

  A loud screech interrupted him. The great red eagle dived to tap Ansel on the shoulder with her beak before swerving up toward the last vessel in the sky.

  Praeus scoffed, leaning down to sneer into Vance’s face. “The bearer of new light is trapped inside a soon-to-be lifeless vessel. How will you catch her now, I wonder?”

  Both Vance and Ansel spun to look at the Morvyann groaning in the air.

  “Time to pay up, Atma!”

  The body of the hooded Etherian dropped to the floor like a broken puppet while the smoky ethers of his being fluttered to Vance and entered him through his orifices. Vance squealed in agony. His body writhed as it fought against the invasion of sinister forces.

  “Stay back!” Ansel warned Regina and Quinn, brandishing his hands. In front of Vance, an amorphous opening manifested in this reality—a portal to the Ethereal domain. He would never allow an Etherian to dwell in the body of another blue Sumrect.

  The earth beneath his feet rumbled in hunger, cracking the very ice he stood on. The opening sucked in the world like a black hole, warping the space around its edges. Ansel held open the portal with one hand while he grabbed onto his brother’s arm with the other. To keep the portal open required so much of his powers Ansel could neither think nor see. He dug his heels into the icy ground and fought with quivering arms to keep the portal from closing. Only vaguely was he aware of Lorenzo and Winston to his right, now locked in combat with Regina and Quinn.

  The portal sucked the Etherian away from Vance’s body, detaching it from its host. Praeus’s horrific, high-pitched wail split Ansel’s mind in two. Shaking his head to regain clarity, Ansel clung to his brother with every fiber of his being until the gray ether entered the portal. As it did so, it generated enough force to push Ansel back along the ice.

  Just when the Etherian vanished from the world and Ansel allowed his arms to drop, Lorenzo fired an icklian at Regina, who, in response, backed into the shrinking portal.

  “No!” Ansel lunged at Regina, but she had come too close. The opening sucked her in from behind. The last things Ansel saw before the portal closed were her outstretched hand and terrified, guilt-ridden eyes.

  “Regina!” Quinn cried, his eyes glued to the spot where his sister had vanished. He did not even resist the silver ropes that came to bind him.

  Ansel swayed in his stance. His brother’s lifeless body crumpled to the ground from his loosened grip.

  Something was not right.

  When he rushed to Moira and took the crying child into his arms, he could sense the dreaded sensation—a deep freeze creeping from the center of his chest into his brain. Without the Eye of Elektron, he did not trust himself to suppress the Etherian forces.

  “I’m so sorry.” He repeated those words in a low voice until a fog fell over his mind, and his speech became slurred.

  Dark forces always had a way of finding each other…

  “Ealon…” Praeus roared in Ansel’s head, overtaking all his senses. “What you took from us… we will take from you…”

  Ansel blinked furiously, trying to focus on the terrified child in his arms.

  “Uncle Ansel! The Morvyann!”

  Moira sounded miles away, but her voice was enough to penetrate the fog.

  “Look! The Morvyann!” Moira repeated. Louder.

  At once, Ansel glanced up and saw that the giant vessel was vibrating so intensely it started to vanish. Horrified, he realized what Praeus had meant.

  The Etherian was calling the machine to its domain.

  Dawn!

  “Stay here with Lorenzo!” Ansel made Moira promise him. Without morphing, he darted into the sky toward the fading vessel. Dawn. He kept reminding himself. The singular thought burned through the deep freeze, propelling him forward.

  Up ahead, the great Eagle hovered next to the last Morvyann, screeching and flapping its wings with an urgency which Ansel understood immediately. As he passed the vessel’s belly, he blasted open the entrance.

  Come on, Dawn.

  But she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Dawn!” he screamed.

  Still, she did not emerge.

  The fog in his brain lifted, and Ansel watched the vessel disappear right before his eyes.

  ✽✽✽

  Dawn had reached the control room when the Morvyann began to grunt and vibrate. The lights in the chamber flashed on and off as the Morvs lost their organization and fired balls of electricity into the ceiling. Inside the frenzied inferno, each breath was a battle. She sprinted to the basin, focusing her sight on the ring of pulsating blue lights while she dodged the electricity whizzing past her ears. If she could only get to it—

  Her hand came within inches of the blue lights when everything changed.

  The engine stopped; the Morvs froze in their attacks; the lights ceased their pulsing. A sudden chill mixed with a stale odor circulated through the machine. Out of nowhere, ice spread over the control room, coating the panels, floors and Morvs.

  What is happening? Dawn’s eyes searched the control room frantically.

  Suddenly, a gust of wind encircled her, carrying with it a hair-bristling whisper.

  “Amber… Bearer of light… Gatekeeper…” The ice continued to spread until it covered the entire room and plunged the temperature to a numbing degree.

  “Who are you?”

  “You have… what I seek…”

  “Who is speaking?” Dawn spun in the direction of the wind, but she could not locate the speaker.

  “Soul for power… power for soul… You have foiled our plans once too many times…”

  The frost was on her now, a thousand fine needles creeping up from her toes to her calves.

  “Open the gate to Earth, Amber…”

  “I’m not Amber! I’m Dawn!” she said through the excruciating pain.

  “But her soul lives… Open the gate…”

  “No!”

  “Silly girl! Open the gate… or you will never see your daughter again!” The Etherian hissed in the wind while the frost encased her arms and chest. She dropped to her knees, overwhelmed by the pain.

  “Never! You don’t belong there…” she managed, gasping for air as the ice took hold of her throat.

  His shriek of wrath reverberated through the icy chamber.

  Dawn felt her throat seal up. Ice filled her mouth cavity and ears. Her vision blurred. The lights dimmed. The Etherian’s howls grew distant.

  Right before Dawn closed her eyes, a familiar and loving face floated into view as though to take her away.

  If this was death, so be it. She breathed out one last time.

  Then… there was nothingness.

  Chapter 27

  She sat up in a tranquil field of lavender. A warm breeze caressed her bare shoulders, bearing with it the mellow, soothing scent of the flowers. Not far in front of her stood a large easel and canvas. The place felt familiar. She had been here many times before, but she could not recall its exact location or name.

  In a white shirt, beaming with joy at the sight of her, a painter stepped from behind the canvas and walked toward Dawn. The sun had cast a bright halo upon his wavy hair. Dawn immediately recognized the twinkling blue eyes and bow-shaped lips, yet she noticed no visible scar on his face.

  “Welcome back.” His voice sounded cozy yet faded.

  Where am I? she wanted to ask. However, she lost her ability to speak in his hypnotic presence.

  He cupped her cheeks in his hands and pressed his forehead against hers, reminding her of a truth she had long forgotten—that this suspended moment in time had always been, and was never lost, an eternity perched upon an instant of knowing. In such a way he held her, unt
il time ceased to exist.

  Then, he kissed her lightly on the brow, and a jolt of electrifying shock raced through her body.

  Her eyes flicked open, the lavender field vanished, and Dawn found herself lying in bed, staring into Ansel’s worried eyes, an inch away from her own.

  “Thank God you came back,” he said.

  Dawn shifted in discomfort.

  “What happened?” Parched, she could barely utter the words.

  From the large Edwardian windows and high arched ceilings, she could tell they were back at Chesterfield. She brushed aside a strand of hair that had fallen into Ansel’s eyes, and as she did so, her fingers came across the gnarly scar on his temple.

  “Ansel!” Everything from the past two weeks rushed to the forefront of her memory.

  “Shh…” Ansel placed a finger on her lips before backing away from the bed. He hurried to the pitcher of water on the table by the window and poured a glass.

  “The Morvyanns! Vance! And the Etherian! What happened? Where is everybody?” Her head throbbed as she pulled herself into a sitting position.

  “Drink up first, and allow me to explain,” Ansel said, handing her the glass of water.

  Gratefully, Dawn accepted. She drank until the haze cleared in her brain. Ansel waited, leaning against the window, wearing a smile of wonder on his face.

  “The last thing I remember was seeing you inside the Morvyann.” Dawn set the glass down and wiped her lips. “How long has it been?”

  Ansel raised an eyebrow. “You have been unconscious for a few days. Fortunately, I got to you in time. I’m quite the healer myself if you don’t mind me bragging, but you had me worried.”

  A few days?

  “Did we win? Where’s Henry? Is Vance gone for good?”

  Ansel came back to sit at the foot of her bed, his penetrating eyes gazing straight into hers.

  “Henry is safe here at Chesterfield, eager to see you. The people of Tempeia won, thanks to you… You saved more than just my life that day.” He reached over and laid his hand over hers.

  “As for my brother… The Etherian, in his frustration, attempted to inhabit Vance’s soulless shell of a body. Had he succeeded, the consequences would have been disastrous. Luckily, I was able to separate it from Vance.”