Extinction (20 page)

The creature paused and ceased its wail.

Then it shot forward.

It sailed through the air, its horrible white eyes widening and its front legs extending, sharp as blades. As the monster came down, a strange pulse of energy sizzled through the air. The creature’s limbs went limp as it tumbled toward the ground. Anna and I stepped to either side, and the creature crashed between us, rolling on the fungus. Its body lay immobile.

Anna didn’t wait. She plunged her blade deep into the creature’s long, gray neck, where its chitin-like armor didn’t protect it. As the blade entered, the thing gave a sharp hiss. Anna twisted the blade and withdrew it, the metal covered in a purple slime so dark that it could almost be called black. The creature gave a final quiver before settling into stillness.

I turned back to the tree. Its side had been gnawed on, and from the puncture silvery sap spilled out, covering the fungus below.

“Where did that thing come from?” Anna asked.

I shook my head. The answers to that question were too horrifying to consider. Somehow, the
Radaskim
had penetrated the
Elekai
home. If there was one of those things, there could be more.

“We need to find the Wanderer,” I said.

We came close to the tree and circled around its wide trunk. On the other side lay a cliff, falling into darkness. We had come to the end of the forest. If the Wanderer wasn’t here...

Anna pointed. “There!”

A human body, covered in a light brown cloak, lay not far off, still. I ran forward, suppressing my desire to scream.

“No...”

I knelt beside the Wanderer, touching his shoulder.

Slowly, he stirred. He wasn’t dead. Not yet.

His eyes opened, completely white. It was hard to read them, but I could tell he was in pain. From the way he held his torso, it wasn’t hard to see why. Blood stained the front of his robe, soaking between his fingers.

“Alex...” he said, voice raspy. “They came. We fought them above, but they...”

The Wanderer coughed – that action must have sent him into horrible pain.

“Don’t speak,” I said. “We’ll get you to the lake.”

The Wander gave a slow, weak nod.

“Come on,” I said to Anna. “We need to carry him.”

She sheathed her katana, and helped me lift the Wanderer. He wasn’t too heavy. He closed his eyes, and though he continued to hold his torso, the red still leaked out. Such a wound would take hours to bleed out, but the poison might work faster. If we had arrived a little later, it might have been too late.

We all but ran. We found the path and ran up the twisting incline. The Wanderer’s eyes were shut, and his body had stiffened.

Our breaths came out heavy, and my heart pounded at the exertion. I pushed myself beyond what I thought possible. I kept my eye out for additional threats, but the forest was silent and empty. If there were more monsters, they weren’t here.

Five minutes later, we crested the final incline, finding the pink ichor of the lake glittering ahead. The dragons still lay there, bathing. Anna and I ran forward, the ichor accepting as we plunged into it.

The Wanderer fell face first, and immediately sunk below the liquid’s surface, as if the ichor itself recognized the need for haste. The Wanderer sunk further into the depths, falling downward and away. He was getting quite distant, now, veering toward the center of the pool. At last, he did reach the center, near the leg of a slumbering dragon. There, his movement ceased. His form showed wavy from the liquid in between.

Anna and I had watched in silence for about thirty seconds, when the liquid began to hollow out in the center, forming a depression in the surface of the pool. The depression deepened and widened, and an emanating wave pushed Anna and me back to the shoreline. The ichor continued to rise, even as the center of the pool emptied. Anna and I scrambled onshore. The Wanderer was
down
there. The center of the lake had emptied of all ichor, and it whirled, pushed back by some unseen force.

I could see the Wanderer standing there, his face shrouded within his cowl. He lifted one arm, as if in command. A line formed in the water between us and the Wanderer, and from that line, the water parted, forming a corridor.

The dragon nearby came out of his sleep, looking down at his master with white eyes. The dragon’s positioning had not changed; the ichor had remained around him, not wanting to disturb his rest.

The path from us to the Wanderer had been fully carved from the lake. Walls of pink ichor rose on either side, as if frozen in time. At the end of this narrow path, the Wanderer beckoned us to come forward with a single hand.

“Does he really want us to...?” Anna asked.

“Come on.”

I grabbed her hand, and we walked into the canyon. The lakebed sloped down to where the Wanderer waited, his face masked in shadow.

I felt as if I were approaching a god. Maybe I
was.

As we neared, the shadow no longer covered his face.

At last, we stood before him. He wore a small smile, and there was no evidence of his wound from before.

Anna and I would have our meeting with the Wanderer.

N
o one said anything for a long while. The Wanderer’s eyes glowed white within his cowl.

He was the first to speak.

“There is little time to speak, Alex. We both know the end is near. As you might have guessed, the
Elekai
were attacked. This morning, we tried to fly to Los Angeles. But Askala guessed our intent. She caught us on the open fields, and many
Elekai
fell. Almost all the
Elekai
rest in the pool.”

“What about Askal?” I asked.

“Yes, he is here, too,” the Wanderer said. “I suppose in one of the further caverns.”

“How did that...
thing...
get in here?” Anna asked.

“It was not only from above that we were attacked,” the Wanderer said. “Several burrowers found their way into the caverns. That one disturbed my meditation in the Sacred Grove.”

I thought “disturbed” was too light a word for what the Wanderer had suffered.

“How long will it take for the dragons to heal?” I asked.

“For some, not long at all,” the Wanderer said. “As for the rest...they will be ready in time for the final battle. That is, if there is a final battle to be fought. Los Angeles must be saved first, but I dare not let the
Elekai
fly there. They will not be ready.”

“Then how are we going to save the city?” Anna asked. “That’s why we came.”

The Wanderer looked at her with solemn eyes. “I will come with you. With luck, I may be able to turn the tide.”

“What?” Anna asked. “How?”

“You’re riding on our spaceship?” I asked.

Somehow, it was hard to imagine the Wanderer doing that.

“Yes,” he said. “I’d rather fly on a dragon, but there isn’t time for that.”

The Wanderer was probably the only person who could honestly say that.

“But...how are you going to stop the
Radaskim?”
Anna asked. “It’s just you, and there are
thousands
of them.”

“There is only one way, for which I must pay the ultimate price. I must release the hidden power of the
Elekai.
It is the only chance, I think, to save the city.”

Hidden power? The ultimate price?

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you...”

The Wanderer’s eyes seemed to answer the question that I left unasked.

Whatever the Wanderer had planned, it would cost him his life.

“The Releasing...it involves my giving up my power. It will allow me to directly control the
Radaskim
dragons. I’m unsure how long it will last, or even if it will work. It’s the only chance I see.”

“And it will kill you?”

“Yes.” The Wanderer’s eyes seemed to focus on something far away. “I can do this, because there is now another, to take my place...”

It was then that I realized he was talking about
me.

“Wait...you want me to become...” I didn’t even know what to call it.

“My time to lead has passed. Askala has grown too powerful, and she has forced our hand...” The Wanderer gave a bitter smile. “It is the same, on every world. She forces our hand before we’re ready to play it.”

I had no idea what the Wanderer was talking about. All I knew was that he wanted me to fill his shoes, and that was something I could never do.

“You mean – I have to lead the
Elekai
when you’re gone?”

The Wanderer nodded. “Yes.”

“Why not one of the dragons? Why does it have to be...?”

I shook my head. There was
no
way I was up to this.

“This is your world,” the Wanderer said. “This is your fight.”

The Wanderer gestured upward – above the rim of frothing ichor, the nearest dragon’s head was visible.

The Wanderer continued. “They were the first to lose their world, millions of years ago. On each world, we make a home like this for them. We’ve saved the genetic blueprints for every species located on our home world, Askalon. You see the trees, the plants, the life of Askalon within these caverns.” The Wanderer turned back to me. “The Askala have already fought their war, but through the xenovirus and the
Elekai,
they are preserved, for as long as we exist in the universe. But the time of humanity has come, as it has come for every race discovered by the
Radaskim.”

I guessed I understood what the Wanderer was saying. This was our war. Our fight. And if the Wanderer was going to die,
I
was the only one left who could take control.

“If it’s the only way...” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“No,” Anna said.

The Wanderer turned to her, his face questioning.

“I don’t understand why Alex has to die. Isn’t there another way?”

The Wanderer looked down at us. He said nothing at first. After what seemed an eternity, he spoke.

“Alex was chosen by the
Elekai,”
the Wanderer said. “He was chosen by me. And Alex accepted the call.”

“That doesn’t answer anything!” Anna said, frustrated. It was all she could do to keep herself in control. “Why
him?
And why does
he
have to die?”

“Anna...”

She didn’t seem to hear me, instead focusing on the Wanderer, demanding an answer from him that he couldn’t give.

The Wanderer waved us up the path. We looked at each other before following him. As we walked, the ichor closed behind us. It wasn’t long before we stood on the white, crystalline shoreline. The dragons continued to slumber in their healing trance.

“You ask me why he is to die,” the Wanderer said. “The process of converting Askala requires a giving up of the spirit, similar to what I am going to do. When you ask me why he in
particular
has to die, you are forgetting something important: in the end, we will
all
die, sooner rather than later.”

Anna didn’t respond. The Wanderer had a good point: it seemed unimportant to focus on the death of a single person when, most likely, we were
all
going to have to face that death.

All that the Wanderer had told me before came back: on hundreds of worlds over millions of years, the
Radaskim
had invaded and the
Elekai
had resisted. The
Elekai
always chose a champion to fight the
Radaskim.
That champion, on each of these worlds, had always failed, in the end. The
Radaskim
were always too powerful to be resisted, crushing all who stood in their way. Earth was just a tiny planet in a vast universe. What was one death compared to all that?

“There are many things I do not know, Anna,” the Wanderer said. “Many things I will
never
know. I do know that Alex must face Askala, that he has been chosen by the
Elekai
to destroy her. He can only do so by infecting her. And yes, it involves dying.”

“But, why the sacrifice?” Anna asked. “Can’t he just infect her and get away. Or...”

“The...transformation,” the Wanderer said. “It is hard to imagine
how
such a thing might be accomplished without death.”

“Wait...” Anna said. “Transformation? What transformation? You mean Askala, or...”

“Askala will become
Elekai.
I don’t know what that will do to Alex, but it certainly involves his death.”

“So, is there a chance that it won’t?”

“There have been...times...where we thought we won,” the Wanderer said. “Just on a few worlds. Always, the champion had died, the
Radaskim
faded...but in time, they came back, more powerful than ever...”

The Wanderer went quiet, thinking. Anna waited for him to continue.

“I see that you care for him very much. And Alex will need that. Love is the only thing that makes the darkness of the world worth enduring, and you humans have a lot of it.” The Wanderer paused. “No one knows what happens in the heart of darkness, between the Champion and Askala. Only the Champions know, and they are all dead.”

As the Wanderer spoke, Anna’s hope died in her eyes. Watching that was more painful than anything I could ever remember

“But none of us
must give up.
Despite the costs we
all
have to bear – there is
always
hope.
Always.”

The Wanderer looked across the lake, toward the entrance of the cavern.

“We must not linger here. Take me to your ship.”

***

W
e swam through the lake and reached the far shore, leaving the glittering cavern behind. The Wanderer led us up the twisting tunnel until we reached the roots covering the opening. The Wanderer raised his right hand. The roots unknotted and retracted into the floor and walls, revealing the glowing night. For miles upon miles, the fields emitted a pale, pink radiance, and in the distance, shining hills rose.

The wind blew warm as we stepped out of the Xenolith. The roots once more enclosed the opening.