Page 10

Crossing Chaos

Sinrik’s grip on her arm tightened before he could stop himself. The wind whipped as he hurried with her up the endless steps. A gust hit him and he wrapped his arm around her waist. “I can’t have you flying off into the chasm,” he yelled over the howling.

“Thank you!” she yelled back, the words swallowed by the monstrous breath assaulting them. The wind was always strong across the bridge, but it was brutal in the winter.

Once they survived the bridge, his hold only tightened as he escorted her to the massive arch that resembled a funnel, decreasing in height and width with every step you took. At the end of it, massive stone doors stood with weatherworn carvings and swirling patterns on its surface. As they approached, a low rumble shuddered through the archway, followed by the grinding of gears hidden deep within the rock.

Slowly, the doors parted, not swinging in or outward but retreating into the ten-foot-thick walls. They came to a jarring halt and the massive force of it was felt through the body, beginning at the feet. They passed through a narrow opening big enough for a single human, into the vast cavern as the gears in the mountainous walls returned, grinding the doors shut.

The howl of the wind cut off, leaving them in dense, centuries-old cool air.

“Oh wow,” Beth whispered, the words a soft echo in the vast cavern carved into the mountain’s belly before them. Stone pillars served as walls and lined the way while their tops disappeared into the shadows above.

He took her arm again and led her along a sand-colored stone floor that danced with the reflections cast by massive torches on each pillar. He forced himself to take smaller steps, trying to allow her time to absorb the once in a lifetime experience. He sure would never forget the first time he walked through those doors.

The scent of old parchment, burning oil, and something metallic hung in the air. Something told him operating those doors required some type of explosive power to get it off to the races.

A slow exhale left his lips. He always forgot how different the world felt inside these walls. Felt like chaos wasn’t just studied—it was contained, pulsing beneath the surface like an unspoken presence.

He tightened his grip and pulled her forward. “We’ll sight see later,” he muttered, aiming for the passage at the end leading into the vast chamber where the Pillars waited.

Beth snapped her gaze to one of the fleeting figures in gray robes that moved through the halls beyond the pillars, faces hidden by hoods.

She whispered, “Who are they?”

He lowered his head. “The Rift Monks. There’s only ten of them. They’re like the Shaolin Monks of the Gobi. They train the apprentices and play nanny to the kings.”

Beth exhaled, voice low. “It feels like a graveyard.”

Sinrik didn’t look at her. “It kind of is.” He pointed to the left. “The Lower Archives start there. That’s Oblivion’s domain. He’s known as the historian. Studies the history of chaos. And over here,” he nodded on the opposite side. “Is the Warden’s Hollow or Volkan’s domain. He studies the powers in chaos. Literally. He has an entire floor just for testing, breaking and rebuilding. And behind that is Nexus’s domain. The Architect of Patterns. If chaos has a shape, he’s the one tracing it. And then on the opposite side of the mountain is The Gloam Sanctum.”

“Mercy,” she muttered. “Sounds terrifying.”

“The Psychologist of Chaos,” he said. “Studies all the nutjobs that cause it and all the poor bastards that get caught in it.” He paused a beat. “And you already know what’s beneath us,” he muttered, eyeing her.

“Oh God,” she whispered, the instant horror on her face making him grin. His gaze lingered on her. He realized he enjoyed bringing that reaction and for a split second, something stirred within the dark goop of his lost memories. And then it vanished.

His fingers tightened around her arm again, another instinct without a trace or reason and yet as strong and necessary as the breath moving through his lungs.

The Pillars had their reasons for this meeting and Sinrik had his. But what he needed would come not from one of the Pillars but a particular apprentice. Zahir Malik—the enigmatic Northern African handpicked by Noctis for his exceptional people reading abilities. His superpower was identifying exactly what tactic somebody was using when manipulating.

Sinrik was ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine percent positive she wasn’t knowingly manipulating a single thing, but the scans didn’t lie, she was doing something. He wanted to know if the apprentice had ever encountered anything like it and all the attached information that came with that.

The air in the formal meeting chamber shifted to noticeably warmer. More fires were lit but the torch lights barely reached the high, vaulted ceiling.

“That’s them?” Beth whispered, her words shaky as they walked toward the far end of the room.

“That’s them,” he confirmed at the four thrones cut right into the mountain, each shaped differently—some jagged, some smooth—but all of them ancient works of art holding their esteemed custodians of chaos.

“They’re watching us,” she barely whispered.

“That’s what they do,” Sinrik reminded just as quietly.

He led her to the exact center of the four and stopped.

“Welcome,” the Pillar from the farthest throne on the right said smoothly. “I am Nexus, the architect of patterns in chaos. In my shadow is my apprentice, Mr. Elias Ward.”

He gave a slight nod, and the next Pillar announced, “I am Noctis. I study the human mind in chaos—what drives men to destruction and what destruction leaves behind.” His dark eyes sharpened with the slight tilt of his head. “Behind me is Zahir Malik. He is learning all that I have to teach him.” He looked at the next Pillar.

“I am Volkan,” the giant man muttered, his voice roughened, likely by his early years of violent discourse. He leaned forward a few inches, his watchful eyes moving over Beth. “My study is chaos itself. How it manifests, how it moves, how it takes.” His hard gaze came to rest on her face. “My apprentice is Colton Graves.” He leaned back slowly.

“And I am Oblivion. Historian of chaos,” the final Pillar said, his gaze lit with possibly amusement. “My apprentice is Soren Kai. I understand you have a gift of persuasion. Perhaps you can teach me so that I might wield it on my thick-skulled student.” Though his words were welcome and even kind, the Asian face with wise wrinkles bore no such hospitality.

Beth’s face turned up to Sinrik and he gave her a slight nod. She looked at them. “My name is… Elizabeth Sweetling. I once would have denied my persuasive powers, but now… I won’t. I can’t deny it, even if I don’t understand it.”

Sinrik had hoped to learn more about her as a passive bystander and his first payment was her full first name. Elizabeth. He regarded the Pillars, finding them locked in silent study.

“What has convinced you about your powers, little one?” Oblivion asked.

She again glanced up at Sinrik and he gave her permission to speak with another nod.

“Well… it was more than one event,” she began hesitantly, the lilt in her voice lacing the ancient hall with an audible silk. “I… seem to have more persuasion when upset or…emotional.”

“Please,” Noctis, urged with a low eagerness while locking all but his two pointer fingers together. “Educate us.”

More like entertain, judging by the gleam twirling in his gaze.

“Well… when we were on the road once, I had a… a dream.”

“Is this recent?” Noctis asked.

She nodded. “Yes. Two days before I came to be with, uh… Mr. Sinrik.”

“Might we know who you were traveling with?” Noctis asked again.

“It was a group of us. My husband and… Spook, and Samuel, and my sister. Zodak was with us and the triplets. They have unusual names.”

All eyes remained fixed on her, waiting.

“Fetch, Fathom and Fin.”

Oblivion’s eyes lit with wonder. “Go on.”

“We were on our way to pick up a woman in the northeast.”

“A relative?” Volkan asked.

“No,” she said, her voice thick with hesitancies.

“A very important journey with many complicated details,” Noctis offered, getting her gasp and nods.

“Yes. Very important and very complicated. I think I need to tell you everything before getting to my initial explanation.”

“Please do,” Noctis urged. “That we may properly understand.”

“Well…” She took a breath, glancing up at Sinrik, the turmoil in her gaze bringing his mouth to her ear.

“Speak only what you feel you should. You owe them nothing.”

She held his gaze for many seconds and the odd weight in her stare struck him with the urge to walk her out of there. She gave a nod and faced them.

“What I’m going to tell you will sound terribly hard to believe. But… here it goes. I think I need to start with my husband who received a bite from one of his Twelve.”

“Twelve?” Volkan, asked.

“Twelve men or friends who… serve with him to protect the swamps where we live.”

“And this friend bit him?” Oblivion wondered.

“On purpose, yes. Because my husband asked him to. Because he’d been bitten by many bats during a fight with his… wife. His wife, uh… trained bats and crows and ravens all her life. There was trouble in our swamps and Nitro, the one who was bitten was the leader of the hatch she lived in.”

“Hatch?”

“The term they use for small communities in the swamp,” she explained, officially having all their undivided attention. “And Nitro was attempting to move Felix, the bird lady, to another location because her residence was in a location they deemed unsafe. She didn’t want to leave her birds and… during his effort, a romance formed between them. At this time, the Twelve had agreed to all find wives—they were celibate before this—” she cut in, further convoluting the story. “It was decided—possibly with my persuasive help—that it was better for them to be married. This was before I even had a clue about my gift—” she quickly added. “And they all agreed to marry. So, it was decided we’d throw a kind of ball and invite all the females in the swamp for the Twelve to pick from, then we decided to just let them each pick a handful from the whole lot and only invite those to the ball for them to pick from.” She paused. “Mercy, where was I?”

“The bite,” Oblivion helped smoothly.

“Oh yes,” she hurried, glancing at Sinrik and whispering, “I’m… hot!”

The panic in her face brought him before her, blocking the view of the Pillars as he began unbuttoning her outer coat, suddenly not sure he wanted them knowing she was pregnant.

“I can do it,” she fussed, swatting his hands off.

He stood behind her and helped remove it, snatching her hat off too as watching eyes all lowered to her mid-section, bringing a detectable freeze to each of them.

“I tend to run a little hotter in my condition,” she said, directly answering the wonder from their assessing gazes. “Where was I,” she mumbled, keeping the gloves on. “The bite,” she remembered, pacing a little as she organized her thoughts. “I’m trying to formulate a gist here.”

“We don’t mind all the details,” Noctis hurried while Sinrik took in her beauty even while being bundled in the black insulated overalls with a thick matching sweater.

“So, a romance formed between Nitro and Felix and there was a little fight between them, a misunderstanding, and she agreed to move all her birds if he agreed to a bat-tie with her.” She paused, facing them. “A bat-tie is what they call a fight, or a means to settle civil disputes. But the law forbids men to fight women, so she challenged him to fight her bats because she wanted to show him that they were capable of protecting her better than he could. She intended to use them as a shield and if he managed to penetrate that shield and reach her, she’d agree to move. If not, she got to stay. Well,” she said, full-on pacing now as they all listened intently to the bizarre story unfolding. “He did manage to breech the wall of bats, and it nearly cost him his life. She screamed and they attacked him.”

“How many bats?”

“Thousands,” she gasped.

“She housed thousands of bats?”

“No, she housed and trained what she referred to as her generals. The bats were everywhere in the swamp but it’s the generals that controlled them and she controls the generals. And in only seconds, every inch of his body was riddled with bat bites, all of them bleeding and it was suddenly a rush to save his life. My husband ended up giving him blood and… his life was saved,” she gasped then cleared her throat. “Well, fast forward a day or two and Lesion, the Swamp’s doctor of… sorts, developed a serum from his blood. He’d wanted to use the bat saliva in his system in a way that would… I guess help him. Only Felix gave him five times the dose she was supposed to— accidentally,” she quickly added, protecting her reputation and proving his growing angel theory that had crept in recently. “And it turned him into…” she gasped, shaking her head. “Into something we first thought was terrifying because he bit her but then we realized he actually hadn't hurt her.”

“What was this serum?” Volkan marveled, astonished with the rest of them.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “But it changed him. And not just temporarily.”

“And he bit your husband intentionally,” Noctis said.

She nodded and proceeded with her story, introducing them to thirteen Creole Kings with cognitive gifts. “What sort of gifts?” Oblivion asked, his eagerness entirely unhidden.

“All sorts,” she said, sounding just as amazed. “But what you need to understand is what they do with them in their dreamscape.”

“Dreamscape?” Nexus cut in. “What is this?”

“It’s a virtual reality they created that allows them to link all of their abilities to find other gifted humans all across the world. In fact, we were on our way to getting one such woman when we encountered Mr. Sinrik’s soldiers.”

“When you had the dream,” Noctis said, remembering.

“Yes! And when I woke, I had this…very bad feeling. And then when we passed a place along the road, I suddenly knew we were supposed to stop.”

“I don’t understand,” Oblivion said. “This is not a gift of persuasion, but a gift of vision.”

She stared at him, then glanced back at Sinrik, her look troubled before returning it to the Pillars.

“Did you always have this ability?” Noctis asked.

She shook her head. “No. I thought it might be the pregnancy, but… I’m pretty sure it was the bite.”

“The bite your husband received,” Volkan confirmed.

“No,” she said, quieter now. “The one… my husband gave me.”

Everything froze in Sinrik as the data from the scan returned to him. “There were traces of it in her readings,” he confirmed to the Pillars as her gaze found his and locked on tight.

The Pillars were in a whispered discussion while Sinrik tried to understand what was happening in his own head and how it was connected to what swirled in her mysterious and yet knowing gaze.

“Tell us what happened when you encountered the place in your dreams,” Oblivion said, drawing her from his gaze.

“I told them to stop,” she began quietly. “Seer was driving.”

“Seer?” Noctis cut in.

“Samuel,” she corrected. “He also has a gift. He can see things about people when he touches them.”

“Mirror-touch synesthesia,” Noctis marveled.

“Seer let off the gas when I said it and my husband told him not to stop, it was too dangerous. And as we continued on, the feeling that we needed to stop grew to… unbearable and I… I yelled for him to stop again and this time he did. Too abruptly. He said he didn’t do it. That I had. My words did. But I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.

“What was at this place?” Volkan asked.

“Women and children being held hostage by some very bad people. We rescued them… took them with us.”

“Tell us more,” Nexus urged. “About your gift.”

“Yes,” Noctis pressed. “When did it happen again?”

“On our way back.”

“From picking up this woman,” Oblivion said.

“Yes… only, she ended up not coming with us.”

The room shifted with yet another twist in the plot.

“My sister also has a gift,” she began. “She also sees when she touches people. But she draws it. We don’t always understand all the exacts of the drawing, but… there was one particular drawing she did before we left, it was… I think it’s called a bistable image. Three people looked at it and they all saw completely different things. The problem was, it was relevant to the entire mission and… my husband panicked, sure we’d screwed up and something bad was going to happen because… Seer said he’d seen a bad outcome if I didn’t go with him on the mission, and here we’d been instructed to get this woman and she chose to stay, he… he was worried it would bring the bad outcome.”

Her emotions cut off her words and the sound of it strangled Sinrik’s muscles.

She wiped her face, her breaths shaking. “And when I was taken, when I asked Morgue to take me and leave my friends alone, I know for a fact he blamed himself. But I had to,” she assured, her grief bringing Sinrik just behind her. “I just knew, like I knew we were supposed to stop at that place, that I was supposed to go with him, and I was supposed to meet Mr. Sinrik.”

“And do you know why yet?” Noctis pressed quietly.

She lowered her head and Sinrik carefully put his hand on her shoulder as she whispered, “No.” Again she wiped her tears. “And every time I want to demand he take me back, I can’t. Because whatever I’m here for isn’t finished. And… I was hoping coming here would answer whatever it was that insisted I meet him. And… I think I’m… I need food. I’m so dizzy.”

The entire room lurched when she fell as Sinrik caught her limp body and lifted her in his arms.

Every Pillar and apprentice surrounded him with a very troubled Nexus at the forefront. “Bring her to one of the resting chambers,” Nexus hurried. “We’ll have food brought.”