Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (16 page)

Somewhere deep inside me, something clicked solidly into place. Desire and understanding mingled together, and I intuitively stretched out my arms towards the twinkling pinpricks of light. Warmth filled my chest, radiating out to my limbs as I took in the sight. Gradually, it shifted to a tingling excitement that seemed to fill every cell of my being. In the way that a bird, never having made the journey before, knows its path of migration, suddenly I knew mine. It felt like home. Only a home I had never known.

It was a map. But it was no ordinary map. First of all, it was everywhere, surrounding us. Though we could walk from one side of it to the other in a matter of moments. Secondly, it was inexplicably alive. The tiny lights were grouped together into what were, unmistakably, galaxies.
 

"Where is Earth?" I asked, inherently understanding that I was looking at our own universe.
 

Almara moved to a galaxy on the far side of the frame, using his fingers to first twirl the galaxy, I suppose it was the Milky Way, and then slow it. Carefully, he pointed.

"In there," he said. "Easier to spot than many, with all that gold swimming around inside it."

And he was right. The tiny speck of light he pointed to did have a different color than the surrounding lights. It was noticeably brighter and glowed with a slightly orange hue.

"And we," he said, walking over to the other end of the frame, "are over here. You can see the planet Aria right here." He pointed to a tiny spot that was barely visible against the glow of stars surrounding it.

“How do you know we’re still on Aria?” I asked.

“Do you think I could ever forget my own homeland?” he asked, irritated. “Keep up! Did you learn nothing during your long hours of study?”

I looked back and forth between Aria and Earth, contemplating the distance between the two.
 

"Ok," I said. "What's next?"

Almara smiled, his eyes twinkling with delight, and then he raised both of his arms out as wide as he could and quickly thrust them together, cupping his hands as if catching a fluttering firefly. As he did so, the entirety of the frame collapsed in an instant, leaving nothing but a slim string of lights. Some were brighter than others, and it was these that were the most aligned along the string of planets. Others glowed more dimly, spread out from the central line.
 

"What is this?" I asked. But I thought I already knew.
 

"It's the Fold, of course."
 

Of course. I could see it now. The millions of other lights hadn't disappeared completely; they were still all around us, floating in new orbits, but now they were dim, almost invisible, against the brightness of those along the line. Tiny ripples of twinkling folds stretched out from the line, a gently glowing fabric, now folded and pulled together.
 

The planets of the Maylin Fold. And there, at the very end, vibrating violently in its own tiny piece of space, the light that represented Earth. Almara ignored it, focusing his attention to another planet closer in, but I couldn't take my eyes off it.
 

Home.

Jade stood next to Almara, their two heads close together as they inspected the planet we would be targeting: Aeso.

"You," he said to Jade, "keep your eyes here. Focus your mind on our destination. Let every other thought go. Fire Mountains. Yes?” He pointed to a bright little sprite of a planet. She nodded. Almara strode over to the pile of sticks he had built on the beach. He stood over the wood, placing his hands face up directly above the tallest part of the pile, and closed his eyes. His fingers twitched. A moment later, a thin, blue beam of light peeked through the spaces between the wood.

“What is
that?
How did you do that?”

"What is the matter with you?" he said, cutting me off before I could finish the question. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't have an answer that he would believe. Until he stopped thinking I was Brendan, I would just have to keep playing along.

He stared at me suspiciously for a moment, and then walked back to Jade, who had her eyes glued to the tiny blue dot. Beneath the string of lights the medallion hovered, and he carefully removed the chain from the pendant as it hung in midair.
 

"Here," he snarled. "Make yourself useful." He tossed the thin chain in my direction and I just barely caught it before it landed on the beach rocks. I stood there like an idiot, wanting to help, but not understanding how. 

"Now what?" I asked.

He ignored me and approached the beam of light again, gently placing the ruby in the center until it, too, was balancing in midair.

"Now," he said, his fingers grasping absently, looking for the chain. I tripped on a rock as I jogged over to the light and nearly crashed into him. I recovered at the last moment and held out the chain. He looked at me expectantly, and then at the ruby. I stretched out my arm and held the thin strip of gold over the blood red stone, releasing it into the light that was shining brighter and brighter now through the wood. The two precious items met in midair, swirling around each other, and then molded together in an instantaneous, blinding flash. 

He walked over to where Jade was standing.

"Bring it over," he whispered into her ear.

"How?" she breathed through her concentration.

"If that is true magic in your veins, you will know how."

I squirmed with jealousy, too clumsy to be asked to do her task. But I watched each movement hungrily, wanting to take in every tiny detail of the process.
 

She took a step towards the fire, and with her the entire frame moved. Carefully putting one foot in front of the other, never taking her eyes from the light of Aeso, she brought the entire universe of stars over until it hovered over the ruby.

"Now, lower it slowly,” Almara breathed.

Jade’s eyes slowly lowered, and the blue orb descended towards the spinning ruby under her hard gaze. It hovered at the top, and then all at once enveloped the stone as if it were a droplet of water covering a grain of sand. Jade stepped back from the scene without being instructed. Some part of her, either in her memory or in her blood, remembered how to do this. I silently vowed that next time it would be me in her place.
 

"Sit," Almara commanded us both. I had never seen him so focused.

We all sat around the light, watching the spinning spectacle as it danced in the beam.

“In your mind, see the mountain. From your lips, speak the summoning.”

We chanted.

“In fire and gold

The fortune sold…”

Three times, memorized an hour before, we chanted. 

The ruby stopped spinning and hung silently. Then, when the last word fell from our lips, both it and the frame dropped heavily to the rocks beneath the wood. The map of the cosmos disappeared, the tiny lights exploding all at once in million tiny puffs of smoke, and the light from the ground was immediately extinguished. Thick, white smoke billowed up from the pile.

Almara looked back and forth between us both.
 

"Is that it?" I asked stupidly. "Did it work?"

Jade's eyes held her father's, though whether he recognized her from centuries ago or just ten minutes ago, I couldn't tell.
 

"Take it, child," he said softly to her.
 

She stood up and bent over the wood, digging out the ruby from beneath the branches.
 

When she held up the red stone, the morning sun shined its light through each facet, sending a shower of tiny red pinpricks of light all over the beach. Almara sat back, a wide smile on his withered face.
 

Our ticket to the Fire Mountains was now in our hands. Though whether we would survive the journey, I didn’t yet know.

We all exhaled deep breaths of relief. I hadn’t realized how tense my body had become, and now my muscles seemed limp and lifeless. I sagged against the rocky shore, but my curiosity soon took hold, overpowering my exhaustion.
 

I pulled myself upright and leaned over the remains of our experiment. The wood was still stacked neatly in a pile, but when I poked it with my finger, the pieces crumbled. Carefully reaching my hand into the ashes, I found that the remains were ice cold. When I drew back, frosty smoke poured off my skin, as if my fingers were made of ice.

Almara ignored me, but Jade leaned over to look. I grabbed a hunk of driftwood sitting next to me and used it to poke around in the ashes, clearing away the charred remains of the sticks. Where the light had burst from the ground, a singed, narrow pit remained.
 

“How did you do that?” I asked Almara. “Get the power to come out of the ground like that?” But he was done with my stupid questions. He looked up at me from underneath heavy brows with a measure of contempt.

I was surprised when Jade answered me.

“He was pulling rock power,” she said. “We can all do it, anyone with the blood of a seer. I expect even you could manage it.” She smirked, but I couldn’t tell if she was joking or really trying to take a jab at me. She shrugged. “Actually, just about anyone could do it with training. We all descend from stone.”

“Will you show me how?” I asked.

“I can try,” she said, looking down at the ruby, her fingers moving over the small crevices in the surface with tenderness. “But I need to rest first. Here.” She extended her hand and I reached out and took the link, which dropped heavily into my palm. Then she lay back onto the rocky beach. She seemed quite comfortable against the hard, uneven surface. Her stone power reached out to these elements, made peace with them, drew comfort from them. She looked like she could be resting on a cloud of fluffy cotton, while the same rocks beneath me jabbed and poked. I shifted my weight against them and studied the link.

The gem was largely unchanged by the transformation. It didn't glow or emit heat, or show any other sign that it had just been blasted by dustfire. But it did change in one perceivable way; it was now fused, permanently, with the gold chain from the medallion. The tiny golden links of the necklace were still perfect, unmelted and unchanged by their connection to the ruby, and they wrapped around the red rock in wild twists. I doubted that anyone could ever separate the two again.

But one thing troubled me as I inspected the link. I had expected, somehow, to see Jared's mark on it when it was complete, and I held it up to Almara for his inspection.

"I thought it would have the mark," I said, "like the ones you left for me." Like the ones he had left for Brendan.

"No," he said, taking the ruby and holding it close to his face. "Those were clues meant for you and you alone. I melted the gold first, in that case, and painted it onto the paper before fusing the link. How else would you have known it was left for you by me? You could have ended up on the other side of the universe, unable to ever return, had you picked up the link of someone untrained."

Though he was speaking to me, and his eyes were focused on the present, his hands seemed to act of their own accord, and his arms suddenly lifted the ruby into the air above his head.

Both Jade and I acted at the same moment.

"Oh, no you don't!" I said, reaching him first. I tackled him and together we grappled, scattering beach rocks in every direction. I wrestled the ruby from his clutching fingers, and he moaned a long, low wail of complaint.
 

"What is it with him?" I said, panting. I handed the stone to her.
 

She was standing now, as alarmed as I had been. But she only shrugged as she took the ruby. A tiny smile played on the corner of her lips, as if, despite his repeated attempts to escape us, there was something about his insistence that she admired.
 

Almara stayed on the ground, confusion drawing conflicting expressions on his face. Jade held out her hand to him, but he didn’t take it. He rolled over on his side, facing the sea, and slowly rocked his body up and down. Apparently, Almara’s focus was exhausted. I watched with regret as insanity overtook him once more.
 

Concern erased the smile from Jade’s face, and her eyes didn’t leave his form for several minutes. She sat down across from him, keeping a watchful eye as if he were a toddler who might escape her care at any moment But he did not make any further attempt to take the ruby.

I sat down and turned my face up to the sun. I was drained. Just in the past thirty six hours I had fled a village full of angry giants, jumped no less than five times, and created my first interstellar link.

"Let's all have a rest," I said, trying to stifle a yawn.
 

What I didn't say was the main reason I wasn't ready to jump. Jade and I were two inexperienced kids working on a ridiculously complicated piece of magic with an ancient, insane wizard. We had no idea whether we would reach the Fire Mountains, or even if we would survive using this link. What if he had used the frame incorrectly? I shuddered as I imagined our deaths, floating in space far above our intended target.
 

I pushed the thought aside. I at least wanted to be awake when I met the next monster on this journey.

Jade lay back, but cautiously this time, her eyes still fixed on her father. Slowly, her tense body relaxed again with the knowledge that the links were safe and out of his reach.
 

I rested my cheek against the cool, flat surface of a smooth stone. At least I had found one rock that wasn’t digging into my skin. I faded into sleep with the warm sun at my back, and soon the bed of stone might as well have been a soft mattress, for I was just as gone from the waking world as I would have been on any feather bed.
 

Hazy, comforting dreams floated across my consciousness for what felt like many hours. Misty, relaxing images kept my body calm and my mind far away from the stressful cares of our journey. My mother’s face smiled gently and spoke words I couldn’t quite make out. Then I ran through flat, empty fields that stretched out before me in an endless expanse, the joy of speed lifting me as I pushed harder and harder. I flew across the grass, the sky growing dark and a starscape unfolding above me, each glowing sun filling the sky like grains of sand in a bowl. And when I finally fell to the ground, my vast and curious energy spent from the flight, the stars began collapsing into me one by one. They came slowly at first, but then faster and faster until a funnel of light was pouring down into my core from the far reaches of space, piercing my body with their energy in a giant rush. When the last of the stars had gone, only I was left, blind and alone in the black. But fear didn’t come from my solitude, only peace, and the feeling that I could stay that way forever, and be forever satisfied.