She could save her mother. All she had to do was jump off the peak and let it be consumed by fire. But how many lives could she save if she could somehow take the Pillar away. If there was even a chance that she could eventually convince the Pillar to work for her, it could save countless lives. She could create Illadar, save the Fae, and punish Cain for everything he’d done.
Tears streamed down her face. “I’m sorry, mother.”
23
Jak threw every ounce of strength she possessed into the telekinetic shield. The dragon, who hovered not far away, continued its barrage, but she did not back down. She screamed, closed her eyes, and hammered all her will power against the dragon’s assault.
Ripple.
Silence surrounded her. She opened her eyes to see that white corridor, the same one she’d seen before, but this time there was something different. Someone was walking toward her, a woman. She had beautiful brown, flowing hair.
“I am so sorry, child.” The woman’s voice flowed around her, as if in an embrace.
Jak’s eyes stung, but she faced the stranger with a head held high. Based on past experience, she knew who this woman was.
“You’re Eve,” she said. It was not a question. “Our ancestor, the companion of Adam.”
The woman nodded. “I am, and I am so sorry for putting you through this.”
“Really?” Jak said, still feeling the tear stains on her cheeks. “Are you really sorry?”
“Some of us come to Earth with a higher destiny, a greater responsibility.”
Had there been somewhere to sit, Jak would have done so. Every part of her had been pushed to the point of exhaustion. “Well, I did it in the end, I made the hard choice. And now I’ve lost my only remaining family.” The tears began to flow once again.
“Child,” Eve stepped closer and raised a hand to brush the tears off of Jak’s cheeks. “I know there is nothing I can say to make it better. Even the knowledge that we made the right decisions, that our sacrifices will benefit millions to come, even that is not enough.”
She was right, it wasn’t. So Jak said nothing.
“You have proven yourself heroic, Jak.” Eve continued. “Very few could have done what you did. As such, I will grant unto you the power of space. It is the highest gift given to mortals, the highest we are even capable of comprehending. Use it well.”
And before Jak could say any more, to ask what this power of space entailed, or maybe learn a clue that would point her to the third Pillar of Eternity, the room flooded with a bright light.
Ripple.
She was back on the mountain top, the dragon fire still raining down on her. Jak lay on her back, her shield still holding, though she knew it wouldn’t for much longer. She couldn’t see what was happening with Cain. But there was one crucial change to her situation.
The Pillar of Eternity, a white beam of high magic, sat comfortably in her hands.
Cain was laughing below, oblivious to what had just happened above him, oblivious to what Jak now held. The tool to their salvation, to the salvation of everyone.
She rose to her feet, staring at the polished white surface, the perfect inverse of the first Pillar of Eternity she had found. Different but in a way, soul mates, bound to each other.
She tapped it hard on the ground, willing its magic to activate, to discover what terrible, what wonderful secrets it had to unfold.
Time did not stand still, not as the other Pillar of Eternity had done. Instead, her mind became more...open. That was the only way she could describe it. An awareness, not unlike the link she established with the Fae, spread out from her. Complex arithmetic, letters, numbers, and more ran through her mind. She understood little, but she knew what she could do with it. The Pillar was guiding her thoughts, much as the first Pillar had done to help her understand its complexities. Her awareness of space...bent in on itself, folding, collapsing.
She winked out of existence on the top peak of the mountain, and instantly appeared several feet above, on top of the dragon!
She gasped, the strange sensation of being two places at once running through her before she caught her bearing, glancing around at where she had traveled.
The dragon stopped belting fire at the tip of the mountain, suddenly realizing that someone was on its back. Its head swung from side to side as if trying to get a good look at who straddled its back. Jak held on as the wings buffeted its body about, one way, than another. She was going to fall off if she didn’t do something quick.
She focused on the Pillar. She had to try and use it again. The stream of numbers and letters reappeared, enveloped her, and she folded space in on itself once again, this time taking the dragon with her.
And suddenly they were several miles away, by a different mountain peak. This power was incredible! There was no way she could have made that jump so fast, even with the power of time that came from the other Pillar.
The dragon stopped roaring, confused. Hopefully if she left it here, it woudn’t come back to attack them. But Jak had to get back and face Cain. She concentrated and...
Ripple.
She now stood on the stone platform, at the base of the stairs that led to where the Pillar of Eternity had once resided.
Cain stood facing away from her, and a dark corpse lay at his feet. Her mother.
A mixture of grief and anger rushed through her. “You killed her!” she yelled. He would pay, there would be blood!
Cain turned to her, surprise flickering over his mutilated face. Jak noted with a hint of satisfaction the slight widening of his eyes as they found the white Pillar in her hand. But she would not give him any more time to react.
Dimly aware of the staff guiding her, she tapped into its powers once again.
In the blink of an eye, she materialized next to Cain, grabbing him from behind and activating the Pillar of Eternity once more. The two of them rippled off the face of the mountain, leaving nothing but two scared humans and a pile of corpses in their wake.
Jak reappeared with Cain in tow, but this time they were miles away. She could not count how many, but it was as far away from the mountaintop as she could manage. Nothing but blue ocean spread out in front of her. But she didn’t have much time to look as they began falling. The Pillar had brought them hundreds of feet above the ground, falling into an empty sea with no land in sight.
She let go of Cain, kicking him away and throwing a fireball at him for good measure. He blocked the fireball but the force of it propelled him further away from her. His face was a mix of shock and rage.
“You will soon pay!” he said as he tumbled away from her towards the depths below. “Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.”
And before he could do or say anything more, Jak activated the Pillar and the earth rippled once again.
She found herself back on the top of Mt. Knot. Marek and Seph were there, gathering around one of the corpses. Marek nearly jumped when she materialized no more than ten feet away.
“What just happened?” said Seph. “We hid once Cain arrived and didn’t see much after that. Karlona…” he trailed off and stared down at the ground.
Jak took several steps forward and knelt next to her mother’s dead body. Her eyes were open, but the green light that typified the Shadow Elves was gone. Her neck was bent at an unnatural angle, the clear cause of death.
Jak gasped out a sob. “This was too great a price,” she cried aloud, though she wasn’t talking to Seph and Marek.
She still held onto the white staff, the reason they had come all this way, and the reason Karlona was now dead. She had the second Pillar now, but she wanted nothing more than to throw it away after what it had required of her.
But she knew that would be foolish. If anything, the new Pillar was now more important. She couldn’t let it go and make her sacrifice meaningless. She had to use it for good, to make her mother’s death worth something. To save the lives of others.
She bent over her mother’s body and sobbed, while Seph an
d Marek looked on. Jak hardly noticed the minutes go by, or the hours. Sky Fae returned, knowing the battle was over. They hovered around the fallen, their eyes somber, and their heads bowed.
In the hours that followed, they set about cleaning things up. The demons that remained alive had long fled, gone from the moment Jak had taken Cain away and dropped him in an ocean thousands of miles away. But there was still the bodies of the dead to deal with.
They built a cairn for Karlona first, a pile of stones built up at the exact peak of the mountain, where the white Pillar of Eternity had once stood, under a great stone archway. That seemed fitting, the body would be sheltered there, though it did nothing to replace the hole that now resided in Jak’s heart. It took several hours, but Marek, Seph, and all the Sky Fae pitched in, each gathering a single rock and placing it on Karlona’s body until she was completely covered.
She sat on the steps for some time after that. Seph neared and sat beside her, placing one arm around her shoulder. There was nothing he could say or do, but she was grateful to know he was there. After several minutes, she leaned her head against his shoulder. Perhaps this was the real reason he had been meant to come. Not to save them from the dragon on that ridge, but to be there for her when Karlona died. Had the Pillar known this would happen all along? Or was it someone else? What about this all-knowing God Seph kept talking about? Was He or She behind this?
But she did not get angry. Being angry at nothing would serve no one. She could so easily direct her anger at the Sky Fae, at the Pillar of Eternity, or at that ethereal God, if such a person even existed. But even she knew that doing so would not bring her mother back. What was past was past. She could only hope to create a future her mother would be proud of.
She stood, using the Pillar of Eternity for support. Seph, startled, rose to his feet after her. His eyes radiated concern.
“I’m okay, Seph,” she leaned forward and kissed him gently. “Thank you for being here. I was wrong to want you to stay at the camp.”
“I wish I could have done more,” he said and choked on the last word. Those were tears forming in his eyes.
Jak put the staff down and wrapped her arms around him. “I don’t blame you.”
“But maybe if I had chosen a brand like you said…” but Jak put one finger to his lips to quiet him.
“You can’t let yourself go down that path. I know. That’s what I thought after the day my father died. And yet if that day hadn’t come, I would never have come this far. I’d be nothing but a student Gifter in the College of Skyecliff. The Fae would continue to be persecuted, and Cain would be unleashing his evil on the world. I would be powerless to stop it.”
He returned the embrace, hugging her tightly against his chest. Jak closed her eyes and enjoyed the closeness of him, the warmth they shared together.
“What do we do now?” Seph asked.
“We leave,” said Perchel, alighting near them, his wings adjusting to keep him balanced then folding up behind him. “We have given the word that every one of our number is to join yours in the valley you spoke of. It won’t take us very long by air, though we won’t be able to carry you the entire way.”
Jak stared to the side where she had placed the Pillar of Eternity. “I think I have a decent idea of how to get there in a hurry.”
Everyone pitched in to collect the dead demon bodies and pile them together on the large stone platform. Even though they couldn’t afford the time to give these demons a proper burial, it was worth giving them some respect. Each one of these demons had been a person after all. Someone had loved them.
Marek pitched in without complaint, though he said little to Jak. He probably didn’t know what to say. She had just lost her mother, and Seph was already there to comfort her. Jak drew closer to where he worked, picking up the body of a demon together and carrying it to the large pile.
“Are you okay?” he asked before she could say anything.
A flood of answers filled her mind. Of course she wasn’t okay. Anyone could see that. And what kind of a question was that to ask anyway? She had just lost her mother! And in a way, Marek was responsible for all of this. They had only come to Mt. Knot because of what he said. If it hadn’t been for him, her mother would never have died. Jak felt fury bubble within her, and she closed her eyes as she fought it down.
Because, Marek had been right. The Pillar of Eternity had been exactly where he said it was. Whatever had happened with Marek had also set them on the correct path. Now she had the second Pillar of Eternity, and it would not be long before they recovered the first. She had only to find the third and everything could be set right.
She opened her mouth to reply to Marek, though not to answer his question, there were no good answers to that question. “I’d like to apologize for the way we’ve treated you before now. You were right all along,” she said, holding the white Pillar in front of her. “It was here the whole time.”
“You had no reason to trust me,” he replied with a shrug. “I get it. It’s like that one time when my parents caught us with sticky fingers. They thought we were getting into the jam.”
Jak paused with her mouth open, a slow smile creeping onto her lips. “But we weren’t getting into the jam, were we?”
Marek returned the smile. “Of course. Stealing honey is totally different.”
Jak chuckled, “So you’re saying when something looks suspicious…”
“It’s easy to jump to the wrong conclusion,” he finished.
“And how is stealing honey any better than stealing jam?”
Marek shrugged again with a smile. “It’s not. But that doesn’t mean they were right.”
“Not the perfect analogy,” Jak said, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Okay, maybe not. But it made sense in my head.”
Jak nodded. “Well, at any rate, you’ve proven your point. And we recovered the second Pillar because of you. I won’t doubt you again.”
Marek nodded. “It’s okay. Again, I understand why you didn’t trust me completely. I’m honestly surprised we got this far.”
“Well, perhaps I trusted you more than I realized.” said Jak. “But I’m glad you came back. I still don’t know how you survived, but I’ve seen and learned enough over the last few days to believe what you say.”
He shook his head and stared away from the mountain, into darkness. “I wish I could tell you more. But I don’t understand it myself. One minute I was dying. The next, I was somewhere else, months had passed, and I knew I needed to find you.”
“It’s a crazy story,” Jak conceded. “But almost too crazy not to be true. And now we have the proof that we should have trusted you all along.”
“So what does that mean?” he said.
“It means when we get back, I’ll make sure you are welcome with us. You’ll have a life, possibly even a seat on the council if I can convince the others. Whatever strange connection you have, it worked this time, we may need it again.”
“I’m not even sure I have a special connection as you call it. In fact, a part of me feels like my responsibility is ended now that you have the Pillar of Eternity.”
“Do you not want to join us?”
“No, no, I do. It’s just I’m not sure what else I could contribute.”
Jak thought about it for a moment before saying, “at the very least I will be glad to have you there. After my father died, you’re all I have left of Riverbrook. And now with mother…”
She couldn’t finish the thought. But Marek understood. He reached out one hand to touch her shoulder. “I understand. I’ll try to be there for you even if for nothing more than moral support.”
Jak felt the tears welling up in her eyes again. She rubbed what she could away. “There’s one more thing, Marek.” she said, speaking hastily. “I know we never talked much about what you said to me shortly before the battle of Foothold, but…”
“It’s okay, Jak.” Marek put a hand on her shoulder. “I got past that. And I’m not
going to intrude on anything you and Seph have.”
“Thank you.” Jak let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “I cared...care about you a lot, Marek. I’m sorry that I never realized…”
“It was a young boy’s dream. And I will admit there are times when I deeply admire what you’ve become. Perhaps in another life we could have had a relationship. But it worked out differently, and I do not regret what has happened.”
Jak nodded. Yes, in another life she might have been together with Marek. They had teased each other about it when they were several years younger, before either of them were capable of such feelings like love. At the time, she had been repulsed by the idea of marrying her best friend and living together in her father’s cottage long after he passed on from natural causes instead of at the jaws of a demon. What a life that would have been. There was definitely something attractive about the thought. But Marek was right again. Their lives had worked out differently. And she did not regret it either.
That thought surprised her. After everything, the death of both parents, the loss and return of Marek, and every hardship she and her friends had undertaken, she still didn’t regret the life she had. That was different. A few months ago, she might have said otherwise.
“I’m glad to have you back, Marek,” she said, getting back to her work. “When we join back up with the others, we’ll have to catch up. There’s so much that I haven’t told you.”
Marek smiled, a warm smile that spread over his face. “I’d like that.”
24
They continued working until all of the demon bodies were arranged in a single pile. Jak lit it with her Flamedancing brand, and they all stood for a while to watch the bodies burn, a beacon on the mountaintop.
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