Third Earth, page 7
This was the dangerous part for me. Combining minds with a creature more powerful than myself meant I might get lost in its consciousness. I’d managed to find my way out of the minds of a dragon and four other sleeping sun larvae, but I still knew the risk.
Temnon slowed the molybdenum molecules to form an ultra-dense metal sphere to protect us. The darkness within the hardened sphere helped me shut out the harsh light and concentrate. I closed my eyes.
Deep inside my own head, I found my ocean of truth magic. I dove into the liquid light, splashing the magic. The splash spread above me and hovered midair like shining stars.
Hello again, I thought to my magic.
I knew my magic was as much a part of me as my body and soul, but I still liked talking to it. In the past, my magic had been notoriously uncooperative, and being polite and clear helped me get in right frame of mind to control it.
Hello, my magic answered, twinkling with happiness. Are we going to search another mind?
Yes. Another sun larva. We must confirm its existence.
Done.
Oops. I had to rephrase my intentions. Technically, the formations we’d already witnessed were confirmation enough. My magic couldn’t lie any more than my mouth could.
Excellent point, I told myself, but searching its mind will show us if it’s developing properly.
My magic hummed. That is truth. Proceed.
Just what I wanted to hear. I reached out telepathically with my consciousness until I found a vast and content being. I searched the mind for any trauma or restlessness. I found only peace. I sailed quite a distance into the boundless cosmos of self-awareness, immersing myself in its state of being. The cognition part of the brain focused on a slight difference within itself.
It noticed my team floating through its innards, but we were still safe. It’s perception of time differed from ours. Several thousands of our years equated to a week or so in a sun larva’s life. I’d complete my examination and be long gone before this planet-sized baby got curious enough to wake.
Look there, my magic alerted me.
Off to the right I found the flow of Earth 22’s planetary magic. I drifted over to check it out. I was no expert…or actually…sixteen-year-old me probably knew more about this process than anybody living. Yikes. What a terrifying realization.
Earth 22’s green-tinted planetary magic flowed, unhindered and plentiful, right through the heart of the baby sun. That was great. My own planet taught me the surest way to wake a sun larva was to cut off the flow of magic and starve it. But in defense of my ancient ancestors, they didn’t know a creature lived inside the planet when they banned magic. No one knew.
This baby slept in comfort and health.
Another successful mission, I told my magic.
Wait.
Wait? Why? Suddenly, the sun larva’s whole brain activated, surrounding me with colorful splashes. This was new. Did I wake it?
Breathless, I waited for something to happen. If the sun larva consciously shifted from asleep to awake, I had to get my friends out of the core immediately. Claude’s warning about messing with nature blared like an alarm in my head. Awake sun larvae caused earthquakes on the planet’s crust, and I doubted Po Lan’s skyscraper pyramids had any seismic dampening technology.
The splashes coagulated into blocks of color. They rotated and flipped, connecting Tetris-style into a full-immersion movie. A female solar phoenix, the adult form of a sun larva, sped on rounded butterfly wings across the universe like a shooting star. She happened upon another of her kind nestled over a cloud of raw matter and magic. The round curves of her wings were warped and torn, and her dim light pulsed only sporadically. Painfully, her twisted wings set the cloud of matter and magic on a spin, the first step in developing a new planet.
Impressions, rather than words, passed between them. The first approached, brilliant against the darkness of space, and warned the second to stop and find a better nesting place.
The dim solar phoenix returned her regrets. Huddled over the cloud of dust, she shared her memory of getting caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole. The black hole feasted on her stored energy, drawing her light into its glutinous black maw. Determined to give her offspring a future, she’d fought for eons, flying and straining against the circular current of its calamitous pull until she inched her way free. Shriveled and near death, she floated to this cloud of raw matter and deposited her precious egg.
She had no choice. She had to place her egg here or deny a future colony enough members to bond into a sun. Without her child, the failed colony would collapse into another black hole and bring danger and death to all. The healthy phoenix mourned her plight, for no mother should have to place her child in a cloud of tainted magic.
Tainted magic. I saw it. Within those tattered, disfigured wings, black, glittering particles spun among the bits of space dust.
A cold grip of panic crushed the air from my lungs. I recognized that magic. It was the same dark filth used by Vi Lorina. I picked it out of the cloud of contaminated, stolen magic when I separated Vi from my sweet friend Nemantia. It drifted away when the demons of Sixth Earth destroyed Vi’s physical body. That same magic twinkled in the swirling vortex that nearly sucked me and Lumi into space. Did the Fulcrum send Vi’s magic here?
No, my magic answered, unbidden. This image occurred long in the past.
I quelled my panic and watched. The healthy phoenix stayed with her injured companion, offering support and nourishment, until the nesting was complete. Then with mercy and compassion, she returned her injured kindmate to her colony, to be healed by the united power of her sun.
Continuing her search for a place of pure magic for her own egg, the healthy mother flew with new caution. How would tainted magic affect the unborn? Eons later, she completed her nesting and returned to her colony. What would the future reveal? As she reentered the glorious light of her sun, she shared the experience.
The worry exploded, multiplied by hundreds of minds, each as vast as the universe. The memories of colonies past flooded into my mind, adding to the worry—the speculation—the unknown.
What will the future reveal?
What will the future reveal?
Trillions upon trillion of repetitions poured onto me. Visions of phoenixes, past and present, their travels and hopes, their worlds and suns, hit me with the force of a tidal wave. Drowning me. Helpless, I circled, caught in the currents of overwhelming emotions and endless memories. Lost in infinity.
This isn’t how I’m supposed to be.
I swam, fighting against the current, fighting to break free. My wings beat steadily against the floods of color, light, and terror.
Beat. And again. Keep flying. Fight your way out.
After eons, the beat of my wings rang in my head.
“Agnes! Agnes!”
I recognized that word. It was my name. I did it. I broke free of the current. The images faded. The last thing I saw of the sun larva’s mind was the memory of the tainted magic. The black twinkle faded until only darkness surrounded me.
“Say something!”
What? Oh, right. I could talk, but my mouth didn’t want to open. I heard cursing, felt shaking, and saw nothing, until oddly dimmed blue light flashed in the darkness
Then a cool breeze blew my white hair, and light shone into my wide-open eyes. I thought I was lying on my back. Slowly, ever so slowly, the light sharpened into colors and shapes, but they seemed unreal.
“What will the future reveal?” I heard myself mutter.
“Don’t cuff her!” an angry female hissed.
“It worked last time,” argued another yowling voice.
A furious scuffle sounded to my left. Soft fingers brushed my face, and I worked to make my eyes focus. A tall figure knelt over me, his arm under my shoulders, and a face sharpened out of the blur—a familiar, anxious face, topped with blond hair.
“Tem?” I heard myself say.
“She’s back,” he said.
I turned my head to the scuffling, and two cats wrestled on the floor, one yellow, the other gray and white.
“Hey, knock it off,” Temnon yelled at the cats.
The gray-and-white cat escaped its opponent and scampered over to me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I remembered her and nodded. “Hi, Lumi. Sorry I scared you.”
“I wasn’t scared. It doesn’t matter to me if you lose your mind.”
I sat up. “Liar.”
Lumi crawled into my lap and purred. I dragged off my gauntlet to stroke her fur and check my watch. I’d been inside the sun larva’s mind for over three hours. No wonder Temnon panicked and transported us all out of the core.
“What happened, Agnes?” he pressed. “Did you get lost in the sun larva’s mind?”
“No.” My fingers played with Lumi’s ears. “Well, maybe, in the end. I stopped to watch a—I don’t know what it was. An image of the past? Maybe a genetic memory? Its whole mind lit up with pictures. I was surrounded by a story, with feelings and bright colors.”
“Sounds like a dream,” said Lumi.
“A dream?” I repeated. “Maybe. But why did this baby dream about adults it’s never seen?”
“Hive mind,” Grimmal said, glaring at Lumi and shaking his fur. “Shared memories and experiences.”
“That sounds possible.” Worn out, I pressed my face into both hands. “Hard to wrap my head around it.”
Temnon relaxed and sat on his heels. “It probably didn’t mean anything, Agnes. Just the dream of a sleeping baby. Let it go.”
But I couldn’t let it go. How could a sun larva know about solar phoenixes from before it was born? And why did the solar phoenixes know about tainted magic? And the dream I had in the airport shuttle yesterday? That dealt with the future being unchanged. Were they related? I just didn’t know. Maybe it wasn’t the sun larva’s dream after all. Maybe I got lost inside its mind and watched my own hallucinations.
“Ugh.” I groaned. It was getting hard to tell what was real and what was a dream.
“Can you walk?” Temnon asked, standing and reaching out a hand to me. “Everyone’s waiting, but I didn’t want to alarm them in case you were fine. Are you?”
That was a good question. My mind swam with jumbled questions and my legs stung with a persistent pain. I had this nagging sense that what I witnessed related to me. In a big way.
What will the future reveal?
8
I Urn a Paycheck
I stuffed the vexing image of tainted magic swirling around the unhatched egg into the back of my head to deal with the present. Taking Temnon’s outstretched hand, I let him help me to my feet.
“I’m good,” I said. “Let’s go report.”
Grimmal and Lumi flanked me and shifted into a saber-toothed tiger and a sleek snow leopard to discourage any more unwanted hugs. Blue light swallowed us all and transported us into the throne room of the High King of Earth 22.
As my vision cleared, a thunderous applause broke out. I slowly turned in a circle to observe a wall of people. Po Lan’s throne room was more of an indoor coliseum than a room, with thousands of citizens crammed into benches stacked from the floor to the glass ceiling arching two hundred feet over our heads.
“Oh, jeez,” I whispered, my hands trembling with social anxiety.
Temnon put a supportive hand under my elbow, and Grimmal and Lumi lay down by my feet. I nodded tightly to Claude and Adrina, to let them know I was mostly okay. They glanced at each other; worry passed between them.
We stood near High King Po Lan’s throne in the center of the arena on a patterned gold-and-silver platform. Soldiers, in silver armor with a purple sash mirroring the king’s toga, encircled the platform. Every other soldier faced the opposite direction—to better see threats, I guessed. Behind them stood a circle of big, dark, metal urns.
The king’s ornate, cushioned throne pivoted to face any direction, a smart idea, but wasted on Po Lan. He had way too much energy to ever sit down.
“We have long hoped to connect to our origins,” Po Lan announced dramatically to the crowd. Magical acoustics spread his voice throughout the coliseum. “How fortunate our own cousin from Second Earth is the discoverer of the life-bringing solar phoenixes. She, herself, has traveled to our core in search of a mighty larva. Let us hear her report.”
The arena quivered with anticipation. Po Lan’s subjects had contracted a bad case of royal vigor. With excitement held in check only by curiosity, they waited for me to speak.
I forced my spine upright and made eye contact with Po Lan’s forehead. It was less intimidating than directly meeting the eager gleam in his eyes, I was already so nervous my voice trembled. I swallowed the lump of anxiety in my throat. Reports were the worst part about these missions, and Po Lan invited several thousand friends. Lucky me.
“There is a sun larva inside your planet,” I said, clasping my hands to stop them from shaking. “It seems healthy. So, don’t mess with the flow of magic, and you’ll all be fine.”
They cheered with raucous enthusiasm. Unfortunately for me, a three-sentence report wasn’t enough. Questions blasted me from all directions.
“We must hear more, cousin.”
“Tell us of this creature.”
“Tell us of every moment.”
Lumi growled softly by my hip. I felt the same way.
Arch Mage Adrina stepped in to rescue me. “Let’s unite our wizarding talents,” she suggested. “You show me. I’ll show them.”
“Of all certainties,” Po Lan agreed. He dashed over to perch on the edge of his throne, ready to spring up again if necessary.
“You know telepathy?” I asked Adrina, not understanding.
“No, but I know telekinesis,” she said. “Trust me.”
Concentrating, I formed mental pictures of the sun larva’s massive ribs and beating heart and opened a telepathic line to Adrina. In response, she sent her rainbow magic off to the urns behind the soldiers. The lids flew off, and a zillion grains of sand, dyed in various colors, lifted into the air. As I sent her an image, she replicated it with the sand, each grain acting like a pixel on a computer screen. She even added shading and a touch of color to balance out the blinding whiteness. It was seriously cool.
The sand moved as my mental image did, and the crowd absorbed every moment, oo-ing and ah-ing at the round organs and pulsing heart. I even showed them my journey into the baby’s mind, Adrina’s sand artistically portraying the vast enormity of its consciousness. I skipped the private moments of the solar phoenix mothers, and then concluded with a wave of peace and contentment that touched each of the thousands of minds.
They cheered almost loud enough to shatter the glass dome. These people were way less constrained than the nobility of First Earth.
“You telepathically shared that feeling with everyone?” Adrina gaped at me as she returned the sand to the urns.
“Yes,” I breathed, even more tired out then before.
“You are incredible. I had no idea of your power.”
“And what about your sand? You’re a talented wizard and artist.”
“My thanks.”
Po Lan vaulted to his feet, and with arms wide open, he sprinted to me. Lumi casually stepped between us, and he amended his display of gratitude to emotionally pumping my hand in a Second Earth handshake.
“My dear, brilliant cousin,” he gushed, his voice still carrying to the crowd, “I can’t begin to express my joy. This day will go down in our histories and become a national holiday for generations to come. Adrina,” he said and beamed at his arch mage, “we will expect the same show annually, on the anniversary of this historic moment.”
“Excellent idea, High King,” Adrina agreed.
Po Lan circled the platform like the announcer in a pro-wrestling match.
“In addition to her brave service,” he called to his citizens, “Arch Mage Agnes has bequeathed a priceless book of Second Earth’s history and achievements to us.”
Another roaring applause broke out. The king waited in the center, hand out expectantly, but nothing happened. Confused, he shrugged at Adrina.
“Where is the book?” he asked. “Ranah is supposed to bring the book.”
Adrina joined the soldiers’ darting glances. There was no cringing little weirdo in sight. One soldier touched his helmet, activating a telepathy stream.
“I haven’t seen him since last night’s flame art display,” Adrina said.
“High King,” shouted the soldier, approaching and saluting with a sharp downward stoke of his hand. “The book—it’s not in the archives. The Keeper of the Histories says Ranah failed to deliver it yesterday.”
“Are you certain?” Po Lan leaned back in surprise when the soldier nodded in affirmation. “Such irresponsibility is very unlike him.” Then he pointed to the exits. “Find him,” he commanded the soldiers, “and bring back my book.”
They dashed off, golden streams of telepathy crisscrossing above their heads. It was an odd and anticlimactic ending to the ceremony. The weird little dude was probably in the kitchen trying to impress the maids with my history.
“This shame is unbearable,” Po Lan told me. “You’ve been nothing but helpful, and I seem to insult you at every turn.”
I understood how he felt. I’d unintentionally insulted my friends so many times. “I’ll replace it if it isn’t found,” I offered, sagging unexpectedly with exhaustion against Temnon.
“I’d be eternally grateful.”
“Miss Agnes is quite worn out from her excursion,” Temnon said. “Please settle her account so she may return home and recover.”
I was worn out—far more than I had been after past investigations. Was it the dream? Or nearly being lost in another’s conscious? I wasn’t sure of anything other than my legs hurt and I wanted to sleep. But Third Earth and the dragons still loomed on my horizon.
“At once.” The High King clapped his hands and uniformed men hauled in pallets full of heavy, metal urns, much like those containing Adrina’s sand. “Your fee, as agreed, but you must know the service you have rendered is far beyond the value of this common dust. We have treasures worth much more.”
