Asharielle and the Hidden Realm, page 3
The delicate features of her face rose in his mind, and he frowned at what he saw. Over the course of the day, her expressions had cycled through shock, fear, horror, disbelief, exhaustion and then utter blankness. It was the blank look that worried him the most. It suggested that she was not processing anything at all. He only hoped that she found the strength to cope and that she could find her way back to him. Groaning, he hauled himself to his feet, but standing made his dizziness worse. Determined not to collapse, he grabbed hold of the nearest tree for support.
He had never been ill a day in his life. And yet he could feel it deep inside of him—something was wrong. Admittedly, he was completely exhausted and, if truth be told, he was a little out of practice with his fighting skills. It had been many years since he had needed to engage in prolonged warfare, let alone the short but fierce battles that had taken place over the last two days.
Many years ago, in a more primitive period, when The Guardian had first helped him jump back in time, fighting to survive was a pre-requisite for living. Even back then, Kyron had always been watching and waiting, ready to instigate a full-scale manhunt at the slightest hint of his presence. At first, he had done nothing but fight to stay free. But then, as time flowed on and humanity began to advance, he had learned how to evade such attacks before they occurred. Finally, he learned how to hide his energy signature. Sometimes, if he were lucky, he could spend a whole human life span in a single country. Other times, he would slip up and have to run to protect the secrets he held.
Like the necklace.
He grimaced. Counting Amira, this was the second time he had been a complete fool in his guardianship of the necklace. Once, in the 1400s, he had found himself growing confident and yes…a little cocky with his ability to protect it. He had become complacent with village life and his feelings for the weaver’s daughter had led to his downfall. She had been a spirited youth and, somehow, she had crept inside his heart. Like a silly fool, he had gifted her the necklace when she found it in his belongings. How could he not? But Elizabeth had refused to keep it hidden. It had been his undoing, for in such undeveloped times, how could such a treasure not be remarked upon by all who saw it?
Though he had managed to escape with the necklace, the punishment Kyron cast upon the village had been brutal. He could still remember the fire that burned in his chest as he watched Elizabeth call to him from the pole she had been tied to in the village square, even though she saw her fate in the corpses of men, women and children that lay strewn across the ground.
And what did he do while Kyron gutted her?
Not a damn thing. Like a thief in the night, he had stolen away from the village, the necklace safe in his hands, and guilt and anger heavy on his back.
It had been a brutal lesson, but he had learned it well, or so he thought. In the ensuing years, he had tried to stay out of sight, especially upon his return to Australia. For a while, he had been able to pass as a common human, but the last few weeks had changed all that.
He had been using more and more of his hue to help Asharielle. Her death at Crystal Creek had activated her hidden genetic coding before the assigned time, and he had been forced to enter the school to help suppress the hue that she had begun to emit. He thought he had successfully masked it, but Kyron still found her.
Events had escalated and Asharielle had never had time to adjust, nor find out the whole truth about who she was. At some stage, he would have to tell her. But not just yet. They both needed rest, and he needed time for his hue to regenerate.
It worried him though. He had never had to use so much of it before and he had never felt this empty. Having to fight Kyron in the girls’ bathroom had taxed his strength. He had then used up more hue last night when he tried to heal her shattered wrist, and more again during the battle. Thank goodness Nick had stepped in or the fight could have ended very differently.
He had never fought the Kryak before. They were a new and deadly threat and he had been outmatched several times. It was only his ability to weld the hue that had pushed him through the fight as far as it had.
Well, that’s not exactly true, he admitted. There had been that one moment when he had been fighting the feline Kryak. Asharielle, though afraid, had met his gaze, and somehow, he had known what she would do. For a moment, he saw a strong woman filled with courage, strength, and a willingness to fight for others. In setting the feline Kryak alight, she had saved his life.
In a selfless move, she also would have stepped through the portal. Ryder knew he could not let Kyron take her. She had yet to comprehend the gravity of the situation they faced, and the thought of what he might do to her snapped something inside him. Desperate to stop her, he had summoned Dragon. He hadn’t even known he was capable of it. He had lived so long that many things that should have been remembered had fallen into the abyss of discarded memory.
Having a dragon merge with his soul had returned the memory of their first encounter to him. He still remembered the awe he had felt upon first sighting the creature that dominated the secret cavern beneath the mountainside. In all the time he had lived as one of the hued men, he had not known such a creature existed, nor had he ever seen or heard of another. Even now, rumours of dragons existed purely because of his loose tongue during a few drunken tavern visits across time.
An agreement was struck, whereby he would accept Dragon’s blood into his veins. He remembered feeling both fascination and fear as his lady drew the glowing liquid from beneath a scale on the giant creature’s paw. After working with some special equipment, His Lady held up a vial of plain orange blood. She explained that she had locked the life force of Dragon’s power deep inside the cellular material until such time as it was needed, for if she had not, the force would have caused him to disintegrate upon injection. Even after, a fever had raged beneath his skin for three days before his body accepted the presence of an alien substance.
She had told him it would provide him with the immortality needed to complete his task. He had accepted the role of Watcher readily and, until now, he had never realised that there might have been further consequences that could arise from having the blood of a dragon within his veins.
Shaking his head, he pushed away from the tree and gathered his scattered firewood. Arms full, he turned, shook off the dizzy feeling and began to retrace his steps back to Asharielle. Though he wore no shirt, he did not feel the cool breeze that blew against his bare chest. If anything, he felt hot. Burning hot.
Chapter 3
As the sun disappeared below the tree line, Asharielle felt grateful for the fire that held back the encroaching darkness. She was nervous. The forest was a dangerous place at night, especially when you were by yourself. To calm herself, she focused only on the egg that glittered in its fiery nest. A rustling on the edge of the clearing drew her gaze, but it was not Ryder. He had been gone a while now, and she hoped that he would not have to leave when he returned with this latest batch of firewood.
So many people kept leaving her.
Mum and dad.
Jack.
Amira.
Aunt Janice.
Josh.
Nick.
But Jack was not dead, neither was Josh or Aunt Janice. Seeing her brother through the portal had torn at her soul. She had bashed her fists against the glassy shield and called to him, hoping for some response or recognition, but he had just sat there in that woman’s arms, unmoving. His stillness stunned her, and his inability to process that she was near made her want to scream until her voice gave out. He didn’t even blink.
Catatonic was the word that came to mind.
She could only suffer through the horrid realm of her imagination as her mind assaulted her with visions of what might have happened to him. She had felt, and still felt, the anguish of her parents’ loss deeply—but Jack had been there. He had seen their parents die. The thought made her feel as if she had been stabbed in the chest all over again. She just wanted him back, and she knew that she would endure anything to be able to hold him and watch the light return to his eyes.
A sense of purpose sparked to life inside her and for the first time since her parents died, she felt her resolve strengthen, and the numb haze she had been in for most of the day started to dissipate. Jack needed her, and when Ryder returned, they would make plans to rescue him from Kyron. She blinked, drew in a deep, cleansing breath, and tucked several loose strands of hair behind her ears. After acting like a statue all day, the movement was painful.
To move on, she decided, you had to accept what you could not change. The experiences she had been through were horrific and not easily dismissed and there was no magic pill that would make everything better—not for her or Jack.
Was it only five short months ago?
If she could, she would go back and scream at the silly girl who practised pouting in the mirror as she dreamed of foolish things. She would tell her that adoption meant proof—not absence—of love. But hindsight was a horrible feeling, and no matter how much she wanted to, she could not help, nor could she save the naïve girl who had run off into the forest that night.
If she were to rescue her brother, she had to leave that girl behind. In her mind, a child’s bedroom appeared. It was something her mum had taught her to do, and she was grateful for it. She mentally opened the door, put the innocent little girl that she had been inside, then closed it, sealing her away.
Next, she thought about the night she had lost her life. The Guardian of the Ancients had changed everything when he’d pierced her heart and merged with her soul. Kyron had made it worse when he’d killed her parents. Aunt Janice had tried to fill the void but, though she had come to admire and love the woman, her aunt could never replace the deep and abiding love of her family. Then Ryder had entered her life as Kye. He had tormented her, fuelling her anger but also pulling her like a magnet into his sphere of existence. She was now forever bound in a tale of heroes and villains not of her making.
Up until now, she had let herself drift along helplessly while Ryder had pulled and dragged her where he wanted. She had mindlessly gone along with him; partly because she was still traumatised, but also because she was so used to being told what to do by her parents and teachers. But that had to change.
For the last few days, the disbelief that such a reality could exist had overwhelmed her. No one had asked her if she wanted to join this mad quest to save the world. Finding out that she was the linchpin on which everything hinged didn’t help either. But this was her fate and there was no escaping it now. Again, she created another room in her mind. In it, she put all the events that had occurred since the night of her death. Then she shut the door, placing a single word upon it.
Acceptance.
The only way to move forward was to accept that this life was real. Jack was her quest…the world could wait!
She would get her brother back, along with Janice and Josh and his mum. She would stand by the side of the good guy and fight the bad guy. Hopefully, they would win because she was willing to storm through any obstacle or person that tried to stop her from saving her brother.
She realised that there were many questions she wanted to ask Ryder. She knew he was a Watcher. Nick had been one too, and they had access to the hue, a glowing blue energy that could be used to shape and control the world around them. To her, it looked like magic, but to Ryder, it was a natural part of who he was, as natural as his foot or his arm or his face. According to both men, it was this energy that Kyron wanted so that he could carry out some nefarious plan that would affect the world.
What she didn’t understand yet, was that if Kyron was so ticked off with the world, why didn’t he just nuke the earth and move on to the next planet? She didn’t even know if that was a valid question to ask. Though nuclear technology was humanity's most destructive weapon, it didn’t mean that an ancient being would consider using it. It made her wonder about the world that Ryder and Nick had grown up in. Even Kyron had come from another planet, which suggested advanced space travel.
As advanced as I think our society is, do our ancient immortals view us as primitive?
And then there was the unicorn. He was what this whole thing was about. She had just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, according to Nick, she lived because the unicorn was trapped inside her. He had communicated with her this morning when she had been tempted to go with Josh into Kyron’s lair. To stop her, The Guardian had shown her flashes of the past and the future. What she had seen was beyond devastating.
If Kyron succeeded, Earth would become a cold lifeless rock in space. The fusion at the earth’s core would stop. Rotation of the planet would cease and the magnetic field around the planet would be ripped away, leaving it boiling on one side from the irradiation of the solar winds, and a dark frozen wasteland on the other. The concept made her ill and she had to fight down nausea that churned in her stomach.
Because of those visions, she had not gone through the portal.
It felt strange, having an entity inside her that was the guardian of a repository of an unlimited source of hue. His story was unique. He had once stood upon an ancient battlefield and offered his life to save a woman known as the Mother, who was the creator of all. Thousands of imprisoned beings awaiting slaughter willingly gave their lives, pouring their life force into this man instead of letting Kyron drain them of their hue. Because of this, he changed the course of history, destroying Kyron’s plans and saving the planet—but at a cost. The containment of such a large quantity of hue had changed the man into a single unique entity, that of a unicorn. She had once thought that the unicorn was simply a necklace. Now she knew better.
She heard the clack of firewood hitting the ground and she turned to stare at Ryder. The fire illuminated his skin as he stacked more wood beneath the egg. She watched as he stoked the flames, and apparently satisfied, he turned to her and let his eyes roam over her body as if he were looking for injuries. She was fine, but Ryder wasn’t. The Kryak had torn his shirt to ribbons during the battle, shredding his chest. Though the fight had taken place hours ago, fresh blood still oozed from the claw marks. The sight drew her from her stupor.
“Ryder, you’re bleeding,” she said, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. She moved to his side and staunched the wound with her hand, ignoring the stiffness in her legs. Up close, the gashes looked bad, and the crusted blood around the wounds told her he had been slowly bleeding all day. He was a mess. Dried blood had painted his torso and legs red. How had he kept going throughout the day? Why hadn’t she seen it? That little voice inside her head began to curse. Why didn’t I help him or do something to stop the bleeding? She stared up into his face and saw how flushed he was, and it made her realise that some of his wounds could be infected.
“You’re hurt. Why aren’t you healing?” she said as the light from the egg pulsed brighter. It lit up the wound on his shoulder, and she hissed at the damaged muscle she saw beneath the torn skin. He needed medical attention. She scanned the clearing, but Ryder grabbed her chin and tilted her gaze back to his.
“In a second, the light will become too bright,” he said, then he pulled her up against his chest and wrapped his arms over her head like a shield.
“Close your eyes, Ash.”
She did, burying her head into his chest just as the light flared against her eyelids like a small sun. Nestled against his skin, the coppery scent of his blood was unpleasant, but the sound of his heartbeat distracted her. When the light dimmed, she pulled back from his arms and looked at the egg. It was still glowing, but it was what surrounded them that she found fascinating.
A large, translucent dome encased them, as if someone had taken a giant glass bowl and placed it over them, except it wasn’t glass at all. It seemed to be a barrier made of energy, but it looked more fluid than fixed. Soft pastel colours moved and swirled over its surface, yet she could still see the stars in the sky.
“We’re safe for the night,” Ryder murmured in relief before slumping to the ground. He rolled awkwardly onto his left side where the skin of his chest and arm held only bruising. “This dome is a barrier that will shield us until morning,” he said. “Even Kyron cannot get in here now. The egg is protected.”
She wanted to ask, ‘What is it?’ but bit her tongue when she saw his eyes close. Worried, she dropped to his side and placed her hand across his forehead. Feeling the heat radiating from his brow, her gaze fell to the wounds on his back, shoulder, and chest. She needed to clean them before infection set in; some of those Kryak had been poisonous.
She spied the bucket of water and realised how thirsty she was but, more importantly, she thought she could use it to clear the blood so she could determine how severe his wounds were.
She needed a cloth. She spotted the remains of Ryder’s shirt, but it was outside the barrier. If only she had left her jumper on yesterday afternoon… Determined to help him, she cupped her hands in the bucket and drank first, then smoothed her hands across his forehead. It roused him a little and he caught her hand in his. Green eyes searched for hers and she frowned at his lack of focus.
“Was worried about you, Ash. After the battle, you seemed to shut down.”
Tugging her hand away, she dipped it back into the water and returned it to his brow. She smoothed her fingers over his temples, gently massaging along his cheekbones and down to his jawline. When she got close to his mouth, she removed her hand and wet it, starting the whole process again. “I’m okay, Ryder. It’s been a lot to process but I want to save my brother. Right now, though, I’m more worried about you. Your wounds might be infected.”
