Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (83 page)

“And that is Des’Ra’El,” Ethan whispered,
nodding toward a hulking purple mass that approached from along the
river of thick azure liquid that wasn’t quite water. It flowed
forward quickly toward Ehran on six legs that held aloft the base
of the chitinous body. It vaguely looked like an eighty-foot inner
tube filled with moss and lichen in purple, tinged in pink, going
flat in places and bulging in others. Not a good coloration. Ethan
moved us back away from Ehran as it closed on him. It stopped a few
yards away and physically did nothing. Magically, though, it
started probing and tearing at Ehran in ways I couldn’t begin to
comprehend. That thing took him apart and put him back together
just to take him apart again. I felt like I should have been
horrified, if I only knew what it was doing to him. It sank slowly
to the ground on its six legs and when it touched the ground, it
changed.

In its place sat a man of immense
proportions. Easily fifteen feet tall when standing, his facial
features were child-like, with a pug nose, round eyes, and a small,
pursed-lipped mouth. He had shoulder-length hair of corn silk
yellow that matched the tunic-like garment he wore, the only thing
he wore—no jewelry, no weapons, and no shoes. His skin was a deep
red as if he was perpetually sunburned. He had no aura and no sense
of power around him, much like Kieran when I first met him, so I
knew not to trust that.

But his most striking feature was his eyes.
I’d gotten used to seeing the double iris in the eyes of elves. It
was a part of their magic and part of the geas that bound them. The
color of the second iris mirrored that part. MacNamara’s elves had
the bright orange of the rising sun, Summer had the fiery red of
the midsummer day, and Winter had the bluish-white of long-frozen
ice. But for this, they still had the iris, the pupil, and the
white of the eye in each. This giant had none of that. Where his
eyes should have been was blackness filled with many different
rings of color, never really seeming to focus on anything, just
dancing constantly around in the sockets. It defined weird. It got
downright creepy when he looked directly at me through Ethan’s
memory and all of those rings lined up. I felt like he was actually
seeing me through Ethan’s memory. That couldn’t be possible. Could
it?

Ethan pulled us up again and we watched from
above and the giant healed the body of Ehran and greeted him. They
talked for a long time but I couldn’t hear anything from here.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “It’s only
recently that I’ve been able to speculate. But he’s only part of
what you need to see. Keep watching. I’m going to move a little
faster for a while.”

True to his word, Ehran and the giant started
moving rapidly around the countryside, as if reviewing some scenic
pageantry we couldn’t see. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there
was something to see in the terrain. Ghostly images appeared
everywhere they went—buildings, people, animals. As they interacted
with these ghosts, Ehran slowly became, well, happier, less morose,
less filled with sorrow. The chasm in his soul began to mend. And
the giant sighed with relief.

“This is what he’s been waiting for, all
these millions of years,” Ethan said. “This is when Ehran begins as
the Bridge of the Way.” I watched as Ehran turned from a
conversation with a ghostly giant to Des’Ra’El and smiled. Then his
aura literally sucked down into his body and all of I saw of him
was his physical form, just like in the forest when we first met. I
had to remind myself that this was Ethan’s memory.

“Kieran’s name,” I said. “When you speak it,
I hear something else in my head, suddenly. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. What did you hear?” he
asked.

“Bridge of the Way,” I answered.

“You said Kieran’s name,” he said. “You had a
similar problem with the Gaelic doctors in the Cahill’s infirmary.
Took you a moment or two to speak English again. You will still
know exactly who I mean regardless of what words you hear. That is
the meaning of a True Name.”

Ethan moved us suddenly away from the two to
another part of the world, barren with scorched stone. I was about
to ask why when the world burst into life around us. It was a city,
crowded with people busy with their lives. We stood on a wall
overlooking a large and boisterous trading area. I saw the
beginnings of a large portal in the center of the bazaar. The crowd
dispersed from the front of the portal and Des’Ra’El appeared
standing proudly before it. Kieran stood on a wall opposite us,
watching just as we were.

Ethan moved close to me and whispered in my
ear, “I believe that Kieran is being shown a memory here, just as I
am showing you.”

The portal formed fully, thirty yards across
and totally circular. It had a bluish-silvery surface and a golden
rim and it just stood in place for a moment. Then a figure passed
through. Like the first form Des’Ra’El had, this figure had six
legs, but it was a lot more similar to a man from the start. It had
a trilateral symmetry with a cylindrical body, kind of like three
men glued together, back-to-back-to-back, but the legs and arms
rotated more freely and it only had one head. Three sets of eyes
rotated on stalks with some sort of antennae radiating from them
jutted out from each set of shoulders in front of the head, which
held its maw. Its skin was leathery and blue, pulled tight against
its muscles and bone.

Most striking of all though was its presence
on the energy plane—it was like a black hole denting gravity and
pulling in everything else close to it. From the instant this
creature passed through the portal, it started pulling in the
energy and magic of the realm without regard to anything else
around him. People started dying. Des’Ra’El didn’t appreciate that.
He struck at the beast with a blast of fiery energy that warped
around it, searing space itself closed, and encapsulating the
beast. Neither of us could tell what he did within the confines of
that space, but we both saw the rush of energy from Des’Ra’El. It
was truly massive. He hit the warped space again with enough
kinetic energy to level a mountain, shoving it back into the
portal. He sealed it off with a savage twist of primal power that
had to resonate down the channel.

Ethan stepped close again. “Try not to be
noticed. If you are, hide nothing.”

Des’Ra’El cast a net outward many thousands
of miles searching for more portals opening in his land. Finding
none, he started helping his hurt people, who had already begun to
help themselves and were looking to him for security and comfort.
When the wounded were being taken care of, he searched through the
crowd and mourned and grieved with them for the losses, feeling as
deeply as they. Then he found me. Once again, those eyes pierced
through Ethan’s memory, all the many-colored rings lined up in
their black sockets, and I swear he was looking right at me.

The ghostly Kieran disappeared from the wall
across from us. A second later, the rest of the city followed,
leaving Ethan and me alone on the barren landscape.

“That was the first appearance of the enemy,”
said Ethan. “I only know of three direct encounters, but its’
influence was felt for centuries as it attempted to find ways to
defeat Des’Ra’El. Prior to him, it was very xenophobic, feeding on
everything it crossed and leaving nothing behind. After that, it
was more careful. It studied the worlds it attacked and stole its
secrets before it fed. But still, it fed and became more powerful
and learned more. It picked its battles more carefully when it
crossed powerful opponents and watched Des’Ra’El from a
distance.

“The second encounter, I can only show you
the beginning,” Ethan said, his voice still a quiet monotone. He
wasn’t looking at me either, choosing instead to look around
himself. “We do not know what happened here. We see only the
results and the name he himself gave it: his Folly. My Brothers and
I were given our purpose the instant reality returned after the
Folly to guard the secret of its creation and to guard the crypt of
a dead god.

“Over centuries from the first encounter,
Des’Ra’El’s world grew into a huge population of powerful people,
all schooled in the primal tongue and pulling from the primal
powers. See how they amass here.”

Ethan placed us atop a fifty-foot tall
boulder overlooking a large flat plain of hazy purple stone.
Directly across from us was another stone similar to the one we
stood on and behind us abruptly rising from the ground was a sheet
of dark amber stone, signaling the beginning of a mountain range
reaching high into the sky. The sun shined too red in the sky. It
gave the milieu a sickly appearance.

Suddenly the plain was filled with thousands,
if not millions, of people, all of whom were aimed at us and
preparing for war. Not a military battle as I was used to seeing in
movies and television, though I supposed the medieval battles came
closest. They gathered in ranks of power and tended to weapons and
beasts of burden, but the weapons were magical and the beasts
looked just as ready to fight as the people, with long, sharp claws
and sharper, venomous teeth.

“Another event has occurred during this time.
Des’Ra’El has found a Queen, someone to love,” Ethan said in his
quiet monotone and he shifted us away some distance away to a
beautifully decorated room. We stood in an archway looking into the
dazzling spectacle. Light flowed around the room in every color,
reflecting off silver and gold surfaces. Gemstones of size
undreamed of in my world were embedded in the walls and glowed with
their own light. This room was empty of furnishings, but the one
just beyond it was loaded with pillows and futon-like sofas of
garish greens and blues.

A woman stamped through the room, between
Ethan and me and out onto the balcony. We were at the far end of
the plain, facing the budding mountain range. Like Des’Ra’El and
Kieran, I couldn’t see her aura either, but she was clearly angry
and worried. She looked much like Des’Ra’El, too, with a deep red
skin and a matching height. Her eyes, though, weren’t concentric
rings floating in a sea of black, but a single ring of blue, the
color of the healing energies I’d been pumping into Ethan for so
long.

A trio of armored figures tramped into the
room, removing their helmets as they came. Des’Ra’El was in the
lead with the much shorter Kieran on his left. Kieran looked like
the Kieran I knew at this point, tall, muscular, jovial, and
attentive. None of them showed apprehension at the upcoming battle,
or maybe they hid it well. Des’Ra’El swept the woman up in his
arms, whirling her around once. The two held a brief communion that
I felt obligated to turn away from, just like Kieran and the other
red-skinned giant, then the trio left in a flutter of armor and
purple cloaks.

“His entire civilization was perched on the
precipice,” whispered Ethan, from atop the boulder again. Across
from us, stood Ehran, thin and pale, watching Des’Ra’El’s legions
part to allow a trio of riders to the front. Even from miles away,
I could spot Des’Ra’El in the lead and Kieran on his left riding at
the beasts’ top speed to the mountain behind us. I looked back at
Ehran and found Des’Ra’El towering over him, watching, too.
Eerie.

“The enemy has grown too big,” whispered
Ethan. “Too destructive in the universe. He goes to destroy it, to
make the universe a safe place for his people and his love.”

The trio closed the distance to the mountain
at an amazing rate. The beasts were fast. As they passed, a wave of
exultation grew through ranks behind them. The density of the power
was terrifying to perceive and the wave itself was titanic in
size.

“We must go,” whispered Ethan. “Even as a
memory, I cannot protect us here.” I felt Ethan pull us away.
Except I was still here and he wasn’t. Panicked, I looked to Ehran
across the gap on the other boulder and found Des’Ra’El staring at
me. Once again, every concentric ring of color in his eyes was
centered on me.

Stay, Little Brother.

And Des’Ra’El was gone. Ehran sat on the rock
surface and waited. I was too busy panicking to sit. This dead,
giant inner-tube just yanked me out of a memory of a memory and
told me to stay, by my name!

That’s when I realized why Peter, Kieran, and
Ethan kept saying that to me. Why they kept calling me “Little
Brother.” I felt so dense. That’s what Kieran meant several weeks
back about accepting the familial bond. I’d identified myself as
Kir du’Ahn’s “Little Brother.” That’s why the named spells
didn’t work on “Seth.” This was just absurd. It was truly absurd
and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I was worried about a name
at a time like this?

I scanned back to the legions to find the
trio finally emerging to the front of the ranks. For the briefest
of instants, I caught Des’Ra’El’s glance full on for the third
time, but this time without Ethan as a filter. It was
incomprehensible. And then it was gone, replaced by a giant,
red-skinned, sort of smiling man that shared in my joke but looked
away quickly. The trio turned their mounts between the boulders to
address the throng of people. The crowd roared in greeting when
they rose up swiftly into the air another fifty or so feet above
the boulders. With a wave of his hand, Des’Ra’El set a perception
spell over the entire plain allowing everyone to hear him. The
affect was like the Arena’s spell but that spell would have been
impossibly more complex for this size. This was something else
entirely.

I wasn’t invited to the party, though. The
words he spoke were lost to me. I got the gist of what he was
saying as he reached out to his people, his reason for being. He
shared in their joy, their love. Then he shared his knowledge of
the enemy. That I got in spades as his concepts began to merge with
his magic and transcend words. Everyone knew the enemy and
everything that it had destroyed. Des’Ra’El turned to the rock face
and created a vortex between the boulders in a maelstrom of primal
forces. Behind the vortex, Des’Ra’El opened the universe wide,
searching for the enemy. There was no place it could hide from him.
Nowhere for it to run. It knew it. Des’Ra’El knew it. I knew
it.