by D M Wozniak
“Keep reading,” Reddles says, his arms folded and legs spread apart.
“Andrej IX was full of wine before the first course of Xian squid was even served. By the time dinner was over, he could hardly stand on his own. The queen had already left the room—she was livid. Before desert and smokes, the servants opened the balcony doors to let the king wave to the commoners, out on the square, five stories below. The cold wind blew in from the north so strongly that it extinguished some of the candelabrum. I had a second fragment hidden underneath my cloak, which I used to weave a subtle membrane. Nobody saw the shimmering in the darkness on the balcony.”
I collapse to my knees in the sand.
“What does that mean? A membrane?” Reddles asks.
“He used voidance to push him over.”
Reddles flashes his teeth. “Then this all the proof we need,” he says, staring off into the distance. The muscles in his jawline clench.
Suddenly, he steps around the book and Chimeline, past the shelter of the tarp, and approaches the campfire. Despite the rain, it still rages.
Reddles throws in the king’s coiled parchment. For a moment, he stands in the rain, watching it burn.
When he returns, he rubs his palms on his thighs, as if this subtle act of treason has left residue. But he doesn’t say a word. His face is still coiled with rage.
I am moved by his display of both logic and courage.
“There is a gap in time,” says the daughter. “A few days.”
“Most likely due to all the chaos,” I add.
“Or traveling. The next entry, he is back in Winter’s Baiou.”
Reddles clears his throat. “You sent him back here?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of these entries are of his searching,” she continues, flipping the pages. “He’s using something called a membrane.” She looks up. “Wasn’t that how he murdered the king?”
“Same, but different. This type of membrane is used to breathe underwater.”
She turns back to the book. “He’s using a makeshift buoy as a marker. Some piece of painted wood tied to an old anchor. He moves it every day, as his search progresses further from shore and down Blackscar.”
She utters a murmur of surprise. “The Lady Marine is mentioned here.” She glances at me curiously. “You left her here?”
“I did,” I answer with a sigh. “I had to return from my honeymoon when the king died.”
“But your wife remained?”
“I didn’t want her trip cut short. She had many dives planned. She wanted to find her cursed Pygmy Seahorse.”
“What?” Reddles asks.
I wave the thought away. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I chose the university and the king over Marine. Right after I promised her the exact opposite. It was a profound mistake. One of many.”
She turns the page and freezes.
“Oh, my.”
“What?”
“An interesting development,” she begins. “Dem’s wife witnessed me today, in my true form. Underwater, fifty yards down within Blackscar. I cannot believe that she was going that deep. Brash for someone of her limited power. I was in my membrane...”
She pauses.
“What?” I ask.
She looks at me with a worried expression, her brow furrowed.
“Whatever is written down there, you can read it out loud.”
She swallows, turning back to the book.
“I was in my membrane, completely naked and undisguised. I had assumed that my dives were the only times when I could be myself completely, without the prying eyes of this world. Such was not the case.”
She glances at me before continuing.
“My first instinct was to kill her. She had seen too much. But then I realized that this would only draw more attention to me and my work. Dem would come back here, looking for answers. The man is exhausting.
“Besides, the young beauty seems like a climber. It’s why she pursued Dem in the first place. Well, I can make her climb a bit more.”
“Why don’t you move onto the next page?” Blythe softly advises.
The daughter nods and complies.
I look away, into the rain, almost wishing I was in it.
“These are more passages dealing with Marine,” she says. “He told her that he was an empowered. He told her about the Axiondrive. She is agreeing to keep silent. To search for it with him.”
“Just move on,” Blythe says.
I’m still watching the storm, barely able to hear the daughter flip multiple pages.
She clears her throat.
“It is exactly what I feared. The stone is massive. At least ten yards wide and twenty yards long. It’s at the very bottom. So far down that it’s in complete blackness without voidlight. When I try to move it, with either voidance or brute force, it doesn’t budge.
“It is the most frustrating feeling in the world to float next to it. On one hand, I can feel the enormous power at my fingertips, through the membrane. There must be billions of resources inside.
“The problem is, I cannot tap into the stone’s power in order to raise it myself. It’s so heavy that voideath would occur. I need other voiders. I must think on this. Break up a large problem into smaller problems and solve each individually.”
The daughter shakes her head while turning the page. Meanwhile, I interject.
“Thus, the war. Ever since it began, the king forced me to send almost all voiders south. They weren’t being used on the field of battle. They were being used to raise the Axiondrive.”
“He keeps visiting it,” says the daughter. She’s about halfway through the tome. “Every day he dives down.”
“For what purpose? Is he trying to raise it?”
She shakes her head, then looks back at me in confusion. “What is voidspeaking?”
I sigh. “Mander was able to somehow speak to people within their minds. Using voidance. He did it with both Marine and Chimeline.”
“Well, he’s voidspeaking to others using the Axiondrive,” the daughter says.
“What is this Axiondrive?” Reddles asks.
The daughter points out to sea.
“It’s just their word for it,” I explain, and then I turn my attention back to her. “Who is he voidspeaking with?”
“I...” She whispers something to Blythe.
He replies in more whispers. As both of their voices escalate, I realize that they are conversing in their effulgency language.
“What is it?” Reddles asks loudly, cutting them off.
The pair looks up at him, and then to me. “He’s speaking with other empowered,” the daughter says. She looks petrified.
“I don’t understand—what other empowered? I thought he was the only one.”
“He’s the only one here,” she says.
“Remember I told you that the Axiondrive powered a great ship?” adds Blythe. “A very long time ago? It crashed here in Xi Bay.”
“Right,” I answer. “It came from across the sky.”
“Across the sky?” Reddles asks, ducking slightly to look outward past the white tarp and into the storm. “Are you mad?”
Blythe flashes him a look that flirts with impatience.
Colu laughs. “Get used to it.”
“Please keep reading,” I say to Blythe’s daughter.
“The problem is the lack of clarity. There is a delay. Not quite a fullbell. It makes it very hard to communicate. The voices are muffled, as if they are being spoken through a wall. They say it is the water. It acts as a dampener. But I barely hear enough.
“They were waiting for this glorious day. The moment of first contact by one of their own kind. My own kind. Someone who is awakened. The halcyon days are near.”
“What does all of that mean?” Reddles asks, but I hold out a hand to quiet him.
“Our ship fell out of a field of time into stars, and from them onto this world. But the original field of time is so immense that they don’t know w
here we are. They only know when we are. They need my help.”
The daughter looks up, her petrified expression growing upon her face. “He’s promising to help them find us.”
“How?”
She flips the pages, and suddenly the words are replaced by dots and lines.
“What is that?” Reddles asks.
“Stars.”
“It’s the painted ceiling in the Celestium,” Blythe adds.
“They tell me that I must find three pulsars. Special stars that rotate, emitting a beam of energy. Just like a lighthouse, this energy can only be seen when the pulsar faces us. If I locate and measure the three of them, they can find me.”
“The three lighthouses,” I murmur.
Blythe and his daughter begin feverishly talking in their language again, while Reddles kneels down in the sand and grabs my forearm.
“Tell me what is going on.”
“There are others,” I say.
“Others?”
I shake my head, as I try to simplify my thoughts for this man, who knows nothing of the empowered or the enervated. “Even though it was buried underwater, Mander was somehow able to use the power of the stone to speak to his kind. They come from very far away.”
“Who are they? What do they want?”
Blythe breaks from his effulgency language and daughter, addressing the commander.
“They are evil,” he says. “And they want everything.”
The daughter begins to cry, and Blythe puts his arms around her. Beyond them, a bolt of lightning pierces the turbulent waters, and the canopy ripples in a chorus of crackles.
Her mouth is open. She’s rifling through the book, turning the pages frantically.
“The rest are blank,” she cries. “This is the last entry. It’s...” Her finger touches the corner. “It’s from two weeks ago.”
“It is alright,” Blythe says softly to her. “The Unnamed will provide. Remember, he always provides.”
“What does it say?” I ask her. “The last entry.”
She looks up at me with glassy eyes that reflect the storm.
“They’re coming.”
To Be Continued...
Age of Axion
Book Two
Coming 2020
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About the Author
D.M. Wozniak is not nearly as interesting as the worlds and characters he creates, except, perhaps, for the fact that he has six children—three of whom are triplets. He lives in the close suburbs of Chicago with his wife Michele, five daughters, one son, and a massive Labrador.
For decades, he has been reading speculative fiction novels by the likes of Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons, Neil Stephenson, and Patrick Rothfuss, and somehow found the time to write one of his own. And then one became two.
A software architect by trade, his interests also lie in photography, independent music, and wasting money on his Porsche 911. Oh wait… forget that. He had to sell it.
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Copyright © 2019 D.M. Wozniak
ASIN: B07M7LT1ZM
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.
All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Kathryn Rosa Miller.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Part One: The Girl from Scorpiontail
A Letter from the Lady Marine
A Black Substance
The Second Ring
Voidreaming
Dinner with the King
A Walk in the Moonlight
The Laboratory
Part Two: The Effulgent
The Rise and Fall of Master Voider Democryos
Voidreaming
Cages
Introductions
Yerla
Voidreaming
The Lesson
One Does Not Own the Dark
The Third Shape in Yisla
Voidreaming
Something in the Water
Anaxarchis' Camp
Leaving Fiscarlo
Part Three: The Skullman
The Winds of Gales
Red Petals
il-Colu
The Goodwin Massacre
An Audience with the Redskull
Gravestones and Moonspit
A Chance at Life and Voidance
Cleanthes' Test
The Spy from Prainise
An Orange Line
Entombed
Voidreaming
Giving in the Tent
le-Sante
Part Four: The Man Behind the Veil
The Foundation
Worchot's Words
Weeping Willow
The Edge of a Kingdom
A New Presence
The Bell Tower
They Believe in You
A Walk in the Park
Eleutheria
The Weight of a Soul
Mander and Reddles
Temberlain’s Ashes
On the Way
The Celestium
Three Lighthouses
A Circular Rift
In Soteria
Faith is Wrapped in Silence
Owning the Dark
She is Both Here and There
Somewhere
Halcyon Roadmap
To Be Continued...
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