by Scott Toney
Something was happening below. Her people were driving back a group of mercenaries that had pressed deeper into the city. The mercenaries, the size of minute creatures below, were falling quickly. Riad, Ivanus and I are not there, she thought. We have a real chance to defeat them.
Electric light struck through the fighting below as Ivanus utilized the weapon they had taken from Riad.
Julieth needed to return to their side. Her people might recognize her, but would not know Ivanus and would see Riad as the enemy. She drew an arrow as she dove, firing it into the skull of an attacker charging for Riad, as she landed near him on the street, blood webbing and pooling in the cobble’s crevices.
“That way!” she shouted, holding an arm out toward where she had seen her people making progress. Julieth fired more arrows into the enemy before them as Riad took them on with his bare hands.
Swords glanced off Riad’s cybernetic limbs as if they had never touched him, and he thrust his metallic half forward first, using it as both weapon and shield.
Sweat flung off Julieth’s body as she moved, readjusting quickly to fire her arrows. There were few fire-powder tipped arrows left and she tried saving them until there was an absolute need. Two mercenaries found their way past Riad and she missed the one she fired at with her arrow. With barely a thought she pivoted and thrust her wings against them, knocking both attackers to the street. While pivoting around again she struck one man’s chest with a shot. He cried out in agony as she struck another arrow into the second felled mercenary’s neck, blood spurting from the wound.
Julieth breathed heavily, watching as Riad made progress. She kneeled down over the body of the man whose neck she had pierced. She pulled the arrow from it, realized it was unusable now and thrust it aside. My quiver will be empty soon, she realized. I need another weapon. Julieth reached down and hefted the mercenary’s sword. It was dull and dented, but it would have to do.
An electric charge blasted past her as she stood, colliding with the enemy force Riad confronted. Ivanus looked worn as he joined her side and the two pressed on. Julieth’s bow was now braced over her shoulder as she held the sword firmly before her.
“What do you see in our future now?” she asked Ivanus as they moved.
“There is too much going on, I can’t focus,” he replied.
She could see her people fighting from the other side of the enemy. This segment of the attacking force was pinned.
With a beat of her wings she burst up above the fighting, close enough for the people of Kaskal to make out her face. “Do not attack the borg!” she shouted below as the sound of steel meeting steel rang through the air. “The man with the electricity weapon is with us as well!” At first she was unsure she was heard, but soon some of her people in the back of the fighting looked up to her in recognition, calling out to their fellow defenders with orders. A friend of her father’s, when her father had lived, caught her eyes before charging into battle below.
She angled her wings, soaring down near the man and holding her sword high while landing and charging into the enemy.
Clang! Her sword met a mercenary’s, energy reverberating through the muscles of her arms and shoulders as she parried and struck again. There was dark determination in her opponent’s eyes.
Clang! Their swords clashed again. Clang! Clang!
“Fall back!” the words came from somewhere close to her, on her side of the fighting. Riad and Ivanus are doing too good a job, she suddenly realized. They are driving the enemy against us, forcing us deeper into the city.
Clang! Clang! She moved back, and then shuddered in horror as she watched the man she had recognized be struck in the waist by a sword and fall to the ground, crying out in pain.
An electric glow illuminated the mercenary force as Ivanus’s gun devoured the enemy and sent a static charge across the fighting.
Now, Julieth thought, seeing her chance and hammering her sword against her attackers. Clang! Clang! Their swords battled, before her blade ripped into the man’s torso, ripping flesh and splaying blood. She let loose the sword’s hilt as it drove into the man’s body, and then with one swift movement pulled her bow over her arm with one hand and a fire-powder tipped arrow from her quill with another. She pulled the arrow back and struck it into the fighting.
BOOM! The remaining mercenaries before her were decimated by the blast.
Riad came through their crumpled bodies, reaching down with his strong arms and choking a man before removing a mine from his arm and lobbing it into another group of the enemy.
BOOM! A second major blast sent limbs flying. Men who knew they were outnumbered and doomed screamed above the sound of clashing swords.
Julieth watched as Riad brought his cybernetic hand down to his metallic leg, gripping it and removing a dagger from what had appeared before to be part of the leg’s form.
What remained was a slaughter, with their enemy easily overrun by Kaskal’s force and the abilities of Riad, Ivanus and Julieth.
As the fighting neared its end, Julieth stood on the street staring at the bodies of her people and the enemy. A heavy heat filled her lungs as a haze curled over her. It was not horror that consumed her. She had seen far too much death in her life for that. She was in awe of the power coursing through her veins, and of the fact that she was still alive.
*About the Author*
Scott J. Toney, founder of Breakwater Harbor Books, lives in Virginia with his wife and children. His first book, The Ark of Humanity, is a what-if mer novel based on the story of Noah and the flood. As an author, Toney has become a bard of many genres, from Fantasy and Sci-Fi, to Romantic Suspense, Historical and Religious Fiction.
NovaFall is a short work taken from the beginning of Toney's novel, Bishop: Book I of the NovaForge Trilogy, to be released March, 2014. Toney holds degrees in Journalism and Public Relations and marks his greatest achievement as his family.
Cybilla
by MINDY HAIG
I:
“Will you be here in the morning?”
“You know I won’t. I can’t.”
I threw my arm across my eyes, partly to hide the disappointment I knew was visible upon my face, partly to avoid looking at her with the desperation I knew she could see. “Are you ever going to tell me or should I pretend this is all still just a dream.”
“Oren, what you want is not possible.”
“You told me once that it had been done.”
“One time, Oren!” she said, exasperated. “One time in all the history of man has it been done! Once! Do you not understand that you ask the impossible?”
“One man completed the task, therefore it is not impossible,” I answered stubbornly.
“You frustrate me so!”
“Who was he?” I asked, rolling to my side to face her. I was angry, more hurt than angry really, but enough so that I could overlook the beauty, the simple perfection beside me. I did not gaze into her eyes. I did not long to kiss her mouth. I just wanted my answer, because without it, I could never keep her.
“I don’t know who he was,” she whispered as she ran her delicate fingers over the rough stubble on my cheek. “I don’t even know if he was real or if that is just a romantic tale we tell.”
“Now you’re just saying that,” I said rolling away from her and off my bed. “If you don’t love me, then go and don’t come back, but don’t lie to me.” I reached for my guitar where it stood beside the window. I sat on the bed with my back to her and let my fingers play upon the strings. I knew she could not resist the music, and yet, I didn’t play for her. I played because it was the only thing that soothed the hurt inside me.
She slid close behind me, rested her chin on my shoulder and pressed her cheek to my face. It was a long moment that the music filled the space around us before she spoke. “Oren, you know that I love you. You know that it’s more than that. You are the only man who has ever loved only me. I do not know the place or the task, I only know that onc
e you start this quest, once you pledge your intention, I will have to leave you. And I fear beyond all else that I will never see you again.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because none have ever returned to me.”
I set the guitar down and pulled her to me on my bed. “How many have tried?”
“Three.”
“What became of them?”
“They died,” she whispered.
“Was Quentin Gallagher one of them?”
She shook her head. “Quentin couldn’t do it. He wanted to, he wanted it so badly he vowed his intention. But he was only a man of words, Oren. He would never be able to find the gateway. His vow meant my departure and he went mad with grief. He wrote haunting stories about his loss, he made his fortune, but I don’t think that success brought him any joy,” she sighed. “I didn’t love him the way I love you. Leaving him was not...”
“It’s a gateway.”
She sighed. “You hear only the things you want to hear, Oren.”
“I hear everything you say. I know the risk. But I am willing to die for the chance to live a real life with you, and if I can’t have that, if I’m not man enough for the task, I might as well be dead anyway.”
She sighed. “Do not say the words tonight, Oren. Give me tonight to hold you in my arms.”
“If you aren’t here when the sun comes through my window, I will shout my intention to all the world.”
“Kiss me goodbye then, My Love.”
“No. My kiss is a promise that I will bring you back.”
II:
She was not there when I awoke, nor did I expect her to be, but that never stopped me from asking. I reached over and took the picture frame from my bedside table. I traced the delicate lines of her face with my finger and imagined sweeping her dark hair from her brow. I lay back on my pillow and remembered the very first time she appeared in my dreams. I was only a boy of fifteen, but I thought I was a man. My only love until that time had been music, but I suppose that is the reason this was possible at all.
. . .
Fate works in its own unique way. For me it was a story that I had to read for an English class. It was a short piece in rather large volume of works by a man named Quentin Gallagher. Gallagher had a knack for giving his stories very potent one word names; names that invoked a specific feeling. This particular one was called Dismantled. It was a dark and frantic tale of a painter who’d lost his vision and could not find satisfaction in his work. His restless discontent drove him mad. Needless to say, I was not interested in that story at all. In fact, as a musician, it really sort of irked me. Perhaps it was because some small part of me acknowledged how easily a person with such a gift could find himself in that situation, more likely it was because I was a pompous boy and I thought that could never happen to someone who was truly talented. Anyway, I read it because I had to, and scoffed at his hardship. I was glad to reach the ending.
Until I glanced at the title on the next page.
Ardor.
As I said, I was a bit cocky, arrogant maybe. I considered myself something of a wordsmith. I wrote my own lyrics, so I was poetic in a sense. But the word just jumped out at me with all its implications: fire, fervor, passion.
‘If only you could have seen her.’
That single sentence seemed to call out to me. I read. I finished the story and sat dazed with desire for a woman I couldn’t even accurately describe. The writer captured me in his raw need for this woman he could not have.
I immediately read it again. I drank in every word. I felt every pain from a heartbreak that had to have been real, but likely happened nearly a hundred years before I was born. It did not dawn on me at the time how remarkable it was that the preceding story, which was most assuredly born of this same loss, kept me stubbornly detached, while this tale threatened to suffocate me in emotions my youth did not own.
His final words still echo in my mind: ‘I made a vow that haunts me. My muse gone to the place I cannot follow.’
I sat looking at the ending for a long time. Then I did what I always did when my mind needed clearing; I pulled my guitar across my lap and I played the music his story inspired.
I did not know that sleep had taken me, because when the dream came, I still sat on the floor playing the tune my heart sang. It should have been obvious, I mean, again, I was a fifteen-year-old boy. I’d never had a girlfriend and yet there she lay, on her stomach across my bed. Her chin rested in her palm, her face was just beside mine and her soft breath tickled my ear. She reached out and stroked my hair and I leaned into her touch as though I’d been expecting it.
At last I damped my strings and turned to face her.
“That was lovely, Oren Gale,” she said.
I sat mute. Dark hair shimmered as though each strand had been coated with the evening sky and the stars woke with each tiny movement. It framed a perfect face, a gentle oval with just a slight point to her chin. Long lashes curled away from irises like the ocean on a picture postcard and she smiled the pearl white of moonlight as I hungrily devoured each image my mind made of her.
“Did you like the story?” she asked.
In that moment my dazzled brain tried frantically to make some connection to this girl that still lay upon my bed. Surely I must have known her from school, how else could she have known about the assignment? “No.” I admitted. “I didn’t like it at all. The painter just gave up on his work, on himself, on all he was...”
She began to laugh a little as she sat up and criss-crossed her legs beneath her. “Not that story, My Love, the other one.”
I was looking up at her from my seat on the floor or perhaps I was kneeling in reverence, but she was otherworldly. “How did you know about that? Who are you?”
“It’s getting late. I have to go.”
“Go? You just got here. Wait, how did you get here? Why are you here?”
She smiled. “You called me, Oren.”
I shook my head in denial, but she pointed at my guitar and said; ‘the music has its own voice.’
She slid to the end of the bed, leaned forward and kissed me.
There has never been another woman.
III:
I could have kept my mouth shut and hoped for another night, but it’s possible that the intention of my heart was all the declaration I needed to make. Still, it had been thirteen years since that first kiss on the night the music called my muse to me. I’d found my success, I had all the worldly goods I could ever need, but I could not love anyone but her. So the day had come that I had to face fate or death or whatever it was that kept her from me. I had to find the gateway.
I began my quest.
. . .
She came to me only in dreams for a number of years. Those dreams were too few and too far between. There were times I was desperate for even a glimpse of her. I read that story so many times it seemed that I had written it. Certainly I was living it. If reading didn’t call her to me, I played the music I wrote that first night. But when she came to my dream and we touched, that was all that mattered.
The strangest part is that in all that time, I didn’t even know her name. It was not because I neglected to ask, but she was very skilled at deflecting my questions and occupying the small time we had with more urgent pursuits. Morning would come and I would awake both satisfied and frustrated. And still I longed for more of those nights.
Then came a day when a door opened.
I was touring. My music gave me the opportunity to see the world and temporarily escape the longing and loneliness. But it was on this particular trip that I heard there was to be an auction. The descendants of Quentin Gallagher were selling off the author’s possessions, including his original manuscripts.
I decided right then and there that I would pay all I had to own Ardor.
The story was somehow connected to my muse, and perhaps there was some se
cret in its original pages that would help me find her.
I went to the auction house on the scheduled day. For a man who’d made a good fortune writing, his possessions were few. I browsed the tables eagerly looking for that one thing I needed. I did not want to seem overly eager lest my enthusiasm cause others to be interested. I made note of the item and moved about the room.
A young woman stood frowning near the door. She was younger than I was by a perhaps a handful of years, but we seemed to be the youngest people present. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked me as I stood casually watching the prospective bidders mill around the room.
“Yes,” I answered as I stood beside her.
She looked up at me and gasped. “Are you Oren Gale?” she whispered, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m a huge fan! Wow, I never would have expected someone famous to come view this old stuff.”
“Really? I mean, I wouldn’t say I was famous, but I would have expected producers and actors to be snapping this stuff up like candy.”
“Why? From everything I know about my great-uncle, he was a lonely, bitter old man. He never married. He didn’t have any children. He left all of this to my grandfather to deal with. He was a recluse and all his stories are sort of dark and depressing.”
“I’m sure he inspired many people in his day.”
“Well if they made a movie of one of his stories, I probably wouldn’t go see it!”
I laughed. “Maybe you just think that because your related to...” All the while we were chatting, I had been standing beside her watching the crowd, but at that moment I turned to face this great-great niece of Gallagher, and there behind her was a table of personal effects: a silver pocket watch, an elaborately engraved flask, a sailor’s compass, a large water pitcher, half-a-dozen pairs of cufflinks, ornate quills and ink jars, a pan flute, and an ornate picture frame that was home to the one who owned my heart. “What are these things?” I asked as casually as I could manage the words.