by Brandt Legg
An iridescent glow surrounded her at all times, an aura of sorts, fluctuating with her energy and mirroring the environment. Dreemelle always appeared calm and exuded a mystical wisdom. Trynn had described her to Shanoah as a woman of light, and that’s how he thought of her. As if the radiant woman had arrived in a sunbeam that would never diminish its magic.
She smiled when she saw him, the way someone does when being observed in adoration by a loved one. He steadied himself for the embrace, for Dreemelle always graced him with a hug so warm and all-encompassing that, for a moment, he felt as if he were a part of her light himself. This time, though, just before she held out her arms, he noticed the look of concern on her face. His gift of telepathy told him what she would never say—that she was worried about him, that he looked too stressed, was undertaking dangerous things, including the use of the herb that she would provide.
However, Dreemelle never uttered such negative statements. Instead she would work those thoughts into a more positive and pleasant conversation. Yet, in his case, or perhaps when she dealt with anybody telepathic, she understood that he knew, reading her face, and she would attempt to be more direct.
Then he was in her arms, and all that melted away, for in that moment, as he absorbed the energy, he felt her powerful healing.
As she released him, she captured his gaze. “Your work is challenging now?” She phrased it as a question, but her tone made it sound more like a fact. “But you’ve made progress.”
“Yes,” he said, testing the word, as if wanting to know if it was true, hoping that it was.
“It is difficult times, especially for the work that you do.”
He smiled, because he knew that was her way of saying he was working too hard, that she could tell, and that the toll might be greater than he could pay.
“Yes.” The rest he said with his eyes, and she smiled, still holding both of his hands in hers as they had come out of the embrace.
“You see such great things.” She paused, her eyes saddened. “And horrible things.”
He nodded. “Long forgotten events in our future.”
Twenty-Nine
Cira, who had remained silent up until then, tapped her father’s shoulder and pointed to the image of the Eysen symbol hidden under the paint of the Salvator Mundi. “But will it help us find the Eysen of Jesus or Leonardo?”
“I don’t know.” Rip zoomed in on it more. “Let me bring up the ones from Savina’s and ours.”
They both studied the three symbols.
“They’re very similar,” Gale said.
“Yes, but also definitely unique. Savina’s working theory has been that they somehow identify each Eysen.”
“Like a Cosegan serial number?” Gale asked.
“Yeah.”
“But why?”
“Exactly.” He continued to study the three symbols while Cira looked over his shoulder.
“Maybe they go together,” Cira said.
Rip watched as Cira manipulated the symbols on the screen and made the newest one insert into the original Eysen from Virginia. “Wow . . . you may be onto something.”
Gale glanced over, checked the symbols, and smiled. “That’s our girl.”
“But this one won’t fit,” Cira said.
“Maybe we need them all,” Rip said.
“Like a puzzle!” Cira exclaimed excitedly.
Rip nodded.
“But what will they all make?” Gale asked.
“A message,” Rip said.
“Maybe it’s like a Rosetta Stone,” Cira said. It was one of her favorite artifacts in all of archeology.
“What’s that?” Gale asked, knowing the answer, but giving Cira a chance to show off her homeschooling.
“The Rosetta Stone was created during the last dynasty of ancient Egypt, sometime around 200 BC, and was discovered at the end of the 18th century,” Cira began, as if reciting a report in front of a classroom of fellow students. “The black-colored granodiorite is about one meter in height, and about point-seventy-five meters wide. It contains three different scripts: ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek.” She paused and smiled, possibly waiting for applause. “It’s so important because all three texts tell the same story, which allowed scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time.”
“A-plus,” Gale said, patting her daughter on the shoulder.
“We won’t know for sure until we get the other ones,” Rip said, “but it is exciting that there is a message, or even a key, waiting to be discovered.”
“Meanwhile, we need to know more about Leonardo da Vinci,” Gale said. “Specifically anything that would tell us where his Eysen might be today.”
“Leonardo da Vinci,” Cira began. “Didn’t really have a last name, as was normal back in his time, so da Vinci translates to “of Vinci,” which is where he was from. Can I have some black licorice?”
“Mm-hmm. Vinci is a town?” Rip asked.
“Yes, and Leonardo really had no formal training. However, he did begin apprenticing at age fifteen, and was accepted into the Florence Painter’s Guild at twenty. Under respected artist Andrea del Verrocchio, he learned the basics of painting and sculpture, and at the same time excelled in engineering, drafting, metallurgy, metalworking, and even chemistry. Later, his lifelong fascination with both anatomy and botany influenced his art and took time away from it.” Cira showed Rip a list of all of Leonardo’s known works that had survived. “And this is a list of all the places where he lived.”
“Good work,” he said, scuffing her hair. “Maybe Booker can put a team on this. We should decide the best use of our time. Where to go?”
“Italy,” Cira said confidently.
“Why?”
“There’s a place there that fits.”
“Fits?” Gale asked. “Hand over some licorice.”
“Yes, where Leonardo or someone could have hidden the Eysen.”
Both Rip and Gale looked surprised that their daughter could have deduced something so monumental with just a few hours of research.
“Where?” Gale asked her.
“Trajan’s Forum.”
“But the Forum’s heyday predates Leonardo by more than a thousand years,” Rip said.
“I know, but it’s also a century after Jesus. Black licorice is the best.”
“So?” Rip asked, then added to the debate as he grabbed the bag of licorice from Gale, “Red.”
“So, I don’t think it’s two Eysens we’re looking for,” Cira said. “Leonardo and Jesus had the same sphere.”
Thirty
Trynn’s daughter, Mairis, still in her teens, had been only two when her mother died. She had no memories of Guin, the woman many considered a greater scientist than her father. Mairis had been taken to live with the Etherens immediately following the loss of her mother. “When I needed my father most, he abandoned me,” Mairis said to her friend, Suu. The two were often mistaken for sisters, both skinny girls with long, thick brown hair. Their distinguishing feature was Mairis’ green eyes, like her father’s, while Suu’s were amber.
Suu had heard this complaint a hundred times, yet always remained patient with her friend. “He didn’t know what else to do.”
“And still?” Mairis replied as they stood on a swinging bridge made of ancient wood. If they had been in the city, the same span would have been constructed of light and metals.
“When is he coming?” Suu asked, knowing this latest outburst must have been brought on by her father’s planned visit.
“Soon,” she said, looking down into a verdant gorge that concealed a deep, narrow river several hundred feet below.
Her father had never told her the whole story of what had happened to Guin, but she’d heard whispers. Trynn and Guin were the most respected of all the Eysen makers, and they had been pushing the envelope of what was possible.
Then the accident happened.
Mairis had heard that it wasn’t her father’s fault, but she
knew he blamed himself, and she couldn’t help but blame him a little as well, believing that if he had just stood up to her, insisted that, as parents, they could no longer pursue such dangerous explorations . . . He should have known that they were not only risking their lives, but that of their daughter.
Her relationship with her father had been tense through the years, made even more so by the fact that he’d chosen his work over her. He’d tried to explain many times that the work he was doing was really for her, for everyone, but she didn’t want that kind of responsibility.
“He’s not doing it for me,” Mairis said to Suu. “I’m just an excuse to assuage his guilt.”
“But he is,” Suu said. “Trynn is one of the greatest minds working to prevent the Terminus Doom. He wants to save the future so you can live in it.”
“Why can’t he save the future while I live with him in the present?”
“He works day and night. He never stops.”
“I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“It’s a race. You know . . . some say we’ve already lost.”
“I’ve lost,” Mairis said.
Suu stared, aghast.
“I know I sound selfish, but I’ve been brought up an orphan. My world was taken away . . . traded for an Eysen.”
“We’ve grown up sisters, you and I, and I know you aren’t selfish, but sometimes you forget all that you’ve been given. The Etherens are your family.”
“I know, but—”
“You have lived with some of the same people who your father lived with when he was a child.”
Mairis couldn’t deny that connection. She felt its importance, that she and her father had both spent part of their childhoods adopted by the Etherens, people whom she thought the most wonderful in the world.
The two girls were silent for a moment while they watched a massive bird fly underneath the bridge. It was a cloud sweeper, their thirty-foot wingspan and gray and white coloring a stunning sight.
“He won’t even tell me how she died,” Mairis said once the rare bird had disappeared back into the low clouds.
“You know what happened.”
“I know what I’ve heard, but how much of that is true?”
“The two of them, making Eysens, were far more advanced than any of the other Eysen makers,” her friend began, recounting the story as if telling it to Mairis for the first time. Mairis didn’t interrupt because Suu’s uncle had worked in the lab, and had been there that day. He was the source of the most information she had, and each time she listened to the story, she heard a new detail. “They were experimenting with different light frequencies, manipulating photons, using raw lightning, drilling atoms . . . trying to compress more energy into the center core of an Eysen, working to make the spheres able to process more information, to last longer.”
Mairis knew in those days there was still an active competition among Eysen makers to increase the processing and energy life of an Eysen so it could last across longer periods of time. Back then, the general population was still unaware of the Terminus Doom, and even some in the scientific community and members of The Circle weren’t convinced it was real, or at least inevitable. But her parents had been deeper in the internal Eysen flow than anyone. They had enabled Eysens, theirs being incredibly advanced even by Cosegan standards, and they had known.
It was clear the world was going to end, that the future was the only hope to save them, a future filled with primitives eleven million years ahead in a time when a calendar laughably only accounted for two thousand some odd years. They had been devastated to learn that the salvation of the Cosegan world and all humanity that came after would be reliant on these primitives who had created a fractured society sick with war, choked with greed, warped to a point of murdering each other, stealing, starving, disease, and stymied by fear. Somehow they were surviving among it all, thinking they were superior. Their technology that they were so proud of were rinky-dink toys compared to Cosegan achievements. It was also extremely dangerous; their arrogance and what they believed they knew for certain of science, of the universe, of time, of themselves, their origins—it was humorous. Yet now, all of that was what and who the Cosegans were depending on to save them.
“It was when they mixed globotite, lightning, and nebula fluorescence energy that it grew unstable.”
Mairis knew it had been her mother’s formula, and she had been at the extraction and combination center, the closest to the impact point. Suu’s uncle and Trynn tried to get there, but the explosion was too big, too fast. It was over in a flash.
Thirty-One
Ovan saw the guardians coming with only minutes to spare. His cameras concealed in the light structures of his building warned him. The old scientist should not have been a suspect; his list of accomplishments was long, and most had benefited Cosegan life. The Circle liked him, but Ovan’s penchant for entertaining private intellectual debates on any subject meant he had associates who were not so respected. He often said, “Anything can be discussed,” and there was a time when no one would disagree.
But things had changed since the discovery of the Terminus Doom. Now, The Circle wanted dissent silenced. Everyone could sense the panic in the air, and perhaps something else, something unthinkable in Cosegan culture.
Revolution.
Ovan grabbed his Eysens, and a few other valuables, and slipped into a hidden light chamber.
Are they here for my work with Trynn? he wondered as he closed off the circuits that would allow the guardians to find the entrance he’d just sealed. Or is it Draycam?
Many of his associates and conversations would have him banished in an instant, but if they connected him to Trynn and the far future manipulations, or Draycam’s radical ideas, The Circle would likely create darker punishments, things not seen in Cosegan culture for a million years. Imprisonment, even death.
Draycam was wanted for a horrible crime: he had been entertaining the thought of killing the Arc and overthrowing the entire Circle. Ovan had warned him that this was too extreme, but Draycam, another scientist, had argued: “There is too much at stake. We are talking about repercussions across the universe for millions of years. The Arc is wrong, and she is narrowing our options, our hope of survival, due to her fear and inability to share control.”
Draycam had been betrayed by a friend and was now in hiding. Ovan wondered if he also was now destined to a life on the run. He’d prepared for such, but still thought there might be another way.
Trynn must initiate the Leonardo da Vinci Eysen today, he thought. It is our last hope.
Dreemelle stared at Trynn, and he felt caressed. Without “Revon,” the mind-enhancing herb she provided, he didn’t think he could begin to finish the Eysen insertions, get them to work, to find the correct answers, make the right decisions, and yet she was another kind of drug. He needed that, too.
“Are you still confident of the dreams you leave?” she asked, her voice a song that inspired great deeds.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation, always touched that she referred to the Eysens as dreams, as if they were something conjured in the imagination of starlight. It made his hard task seem something more divine.
“Yes . . . I think you are sure of your course, but millions of years are difficult to navigate.”
He recalled the time of their first meeting, when he’d explained his intent with the Eysen—at least as much as he could tell the stranger. She had equated his mission to that of moving one grain of sand across an entire coast of sand during low tide with the intent of placing it next to specific grains of sand on the other end before high tide, while under the threat of a tsunami. He had thought that was quite a decent attempt at an analogy to explain his situation, and yet it was so much worse, so much more difficult than that even began to describe. Still, he held on to her words, particularly on the days when it all seemed outrageously impossible.
“One person trying to save the world, what are the odds?” he said, not expecting her
to answer.
“You have some help,” she told him, smiling, her ageless opal skin glowing even more. “But one person can do anything. Why would it take more when one person is connected to everything?”
She always had encouraging words, and he believed she was powerful enough to help him beyond just supplying the herb. However, he hadn’t come to think about that. He needed to complete the transaction. He was always racing against time—the thing he knew did not really exist, but the description of it governed the points in the future he was trying to alter, and therefore he was trapped in compliance with a cosmic clock he did not recognize.
Thirty-Two
Ovan composed a coded message to Trynn. It would be impossible for anyone else to read, yet it was still the risk only a condemned man might take. He would touch his strand and send it only if they breached his veil.
Trynn wanted to ask Dreemelle a thousand questions. For days after each encounter, he would be drenched in the curiosity of her spirit. Who was she really? What was the source of her radiant beauty? Where did the Revon herb grow? The last question was the greatest mystery, or perhaps they were all connected.
So many things existed in the Cosegan world that would be unknown to future humanity. Trynn knew that hundreds of thousands of years before his time, there were even more minerals and practices, and they were openly used and sought after, but now only a few like Dreemelle and the most evolved Etherens knew of certain things. The Etherens protected globotite, and Dreemelle knew where to find the Revon herb, what it was for, how to dispense it. These were the old ways.