Preserving the Ingenairii (59 page)

“Jeswyne needs me,” Alec replied.
 
His hands twisted and grasped hers.
 
“There are ingenaire powers we have never seen before.
 
Remember a few days ago, you said it was a shame we couldn’t travel like those restorer animals?

“We can.
 
When I was in the energy realm a long time ago, before my battle with the demon there, I found a place where the energy exists to travel to places, to translocate,

“Jeswyne has been captured by her uncle, and he is going to marry her off to whoever provides a convenient ally.
 
Stracha, I can’t imagine that girl being handed to someone as a political favor,” Alec released his stress.

“Alec, what about the rest of us?”
Stracha asked.
 
“Do you remember where we were when you came back to us?
 
We were in a river of refugees trying to escape from the pending fall of Three Rivers.
 
Now look at us!
 
You have the Dominion ready to win the war, and feeling ready to restart life.

“Are you ready to give all that up to save Jeswyne?”

She saw the anguish in his eyes.
 
“Are you really ready to take this risk for that girl?
 
Does she mean that much to you?”

“God help me, and Bethany
forgive
me.
 
Jeswyne and I lived together for all those months in the forest, Stracha.
 
I wasn’t an ingenaire, and she wasn’t in an imperial family.
 
We were two ordinary people.
 
We took care of each other, we helped each other, we talked to each other, we laughed and shared with each other, and there was never any problem between us, only affection.
 
Really something deeper than affection, but we could never put a name to it,” he told her.

She listened to the sound of his heart in his words.
 
“What can I do for you, Alec?” Stracha asked.
 
“If you really want to do this, how can I help?”

“Thank you, Stracha.
 
There’s nothing you can do.
 
But you will know where I am and what I’m doing,” Alec answered.
 
“You can do one thing,” he added.
 
“Please pray for me.”
 
He lay down.
 

“Now?
 
Here?
 
You’re doing this right now, in my tent?
 
Is this really necessary?” she asked, but as she spoke, she looked at his face and saw the tranquility that denoted his spirit had left his body to venture into the ingenaire energy realm.

Chapter 45 – The Search for New Power

Alec was wandering in the healing realm, measuring off his steps, trying to gage how deeply he was penetrating into the emptiness.
 
He stood and tried to remember the dimensions of the power realm, and the relative locations of the various components.
 
He turned and looked behind him; there was no sign of the way back to the real world.

Alec veered to the right, and hoped he was maintaining a straight line.
 
Somewhere in that direction he would find another dimension, or possibly the central axis, the real goal he sought.
 
If he could find the axis, he could try to find the talisman, and with the talisman, he thought he knew a way to acquire a new power – the power to translocate, the power to go to Michian and find Jeswyne.

He walked onward, ignoring the tempting concepts the energy tried to lure him with.
 
His steps continued to move him forward, though he had lost count of the number of steps he had taken.
 
There came a sudden subtle difference and then he felt resistance to each step.
 
He flashed back to the beginning of his training as an ingenaire, when he had faced the challenge of trying to leave the energy realm while holding his link to the power.

It meant he had reached a boundary!
 
This was the place where healer energy and some other energy realm intersected.
 
He turned and began to walk along the boundary, hoping that it would take him to the central axis.
 
He strolled deliberately along the boundary, aware that he was taking far more time than he had ever spent in the energy realm, other than during his encounter with the demon.

The boundary seemed to stretch forever, and Alec began to worry that he had not remembered correctly how the realms and the boundaries came together at the axis.
 
He tried to remember what the axis was like, but only came up with images of plants.
 
Green growing plants, hungry roots digging into the soil, the joy of feeling sunlight energize his leaves were all his mind could grasp, and he realized that he had been in the boundary area with the plant energy realm, and the temptations from that power were leaking over, starting to affect him.
 
He allowed himself to stray slightly back to the healer realm, relieved of the confusion of the plants, and continued onward.

Abruptly he came to a hard wall, an invisible limit that stopped him in his tracks.
  
Alec pressed hard but could not penetrate the resistance, despite his struggles.
 
He stood there, and decided to try a risky strategy that seemed like his only solution.
 
Closing his eyes, he struggled to force himself into a warrior mode.
 
The pain was intense; the healer energy resisted the warrior image as strongly as it could.
 
Focusing completely on the task at hand, Alec started at his feet, changing his sandals to boots, and then he moved up, changing the linen tunic to leather pants and a jacket.
 
He buckled on a sword belt, and crossed his chest with knife bandoliers.

He opened his eyes, pulled out a sword, and as he did so, he felt himself pulled upward and outward, and he flew through the space of the energy realm into the warrior energy dimension.
 
As he traveled, awkwardly, he felt himself pass through the central axis.

The healer energy no longer burned his body as he felt the warrior energy replace it in his system.
 
He stood there, pleased that he at least sensed the axis as he passed through it from one realm to another.
 
Now though, he faced the question of managing to land
himself
in the axis.

He began to undergo the transition again, beginning to revamp his image into that of a healer, while also trying to add his spiritual image elements.
 
The edifice he was building was awkward, and painful, but he sensed that his image was losing its grounding in the warrior realm as he kept adding and subtracting items and concepts.

Slowly his image began to move, it hovered and floated and tried to find a point where it could solidify ties to the various streams of energy Alec was calling upon.
 
He had a flash of insight, and realized that the times he had taken power from other ingenairii of other houses had been instances when he must have filtered the energy through the axis to make it compatible with his own.
 
Retaining his three-sided image, Alec began to reconstruct the memory of the multiple powers he had absorbed when he had destroyed the coup leaders in Oyster Bay, and he felt himself whirling and spinning, buffeted by the various tugs towards different houses, and then his feet were on a solid surface, his pain was gone, and he knew he had broken into the axis of energies.

Alec opened his eyes, and looked around.
 
He could see again the many walls, the barriers that separated all the energy realms.
 
They were visible through the foggy atmosphere.
 
And there on his left was the translocation realm.
 
Now he had to find the talisman, and find a way to use its power to manipulate his access to the translocation energy.
 
Alec cast his eyes down, and began to shuffle his image along taking slow, measured steps as he allowed his eyes to sweep broadly from side-to-side, alert for any flash of gold or jewels.
 
He walked clear across the axis to the edge of the stone ingenairii powers, then turned, and began crossing towards the plant powers, still carefully observing the floor, until he imagined he saw a glint in the near distance to his left.

Shaking with eagerness, Alec strode over, and saw the talisman truly lying on the floor, its chain lying atop and to the side of it.
 
He bent
over,
his every inch of existence focused on grasping the talisman, picked it up, and held it at eye level, inspecting it carefully.
 
“All ways lead to the tree of life and all energy comes from the axis mundi,” the inscription still read on the back.

****
                                                                                                   
****

Stracha was standing in her tent, feeling crowded by the half dozen officers who were with her staring at Alec’s inert body.
 
He’d laid in her tent for over 48 hours now, unconscious and unresponsive to all the stimuli she had tried.
 
The army officers were concerned, gravely concerned, by the story she had told them, a story which they really couldn’t grasp except to know that she feared the worst.

As they stood there a hissing sensation filled her ears for a split second, and then Alec’s body disappeared.
 
“Where did he go?” a colonel asked, looking directly at her.

“I have no way of knowing, but I actually think this may be a good sign,” she bravely replied without knowing why.
 
“I will alert you if he returns.
 
Whatever he is doing, it is something that no other ingenaire has ever done.”

****
                                                                                                   
****

Alec had used the talisman to pull his physical body back into the energy realm, reconnecting with his spirit in the central axis.
 
He was ready now to carry out the effort to
force
 
his
body to receive a connection to a new power.
 
He set his mind and traveled into the translocation realm, and felt the energy suffuse him as he began to grasp the concept of setting an image and then calling upon the power to become part of the image.
 
But there was no access for a spirit to reach this realm, or through which an image could take the power back into the material world.
 
Alec walked through the translocation realm, trying to judge where a portal could be located, his body and the power conforming to one another more and more as he stayed within the confines of the realm.
 
He sensed a weakness in the barrier at one spot, and as he watched, he saw a stream of the energy go through the barrier at a slow, steady pace at another spot, like a mist seeping through woven fabric.

That could be the restorers, he reflected as he watched the energy depart.
 
He didn’t think he needed to rely on the same entry location as the animals, so he went back to the apparent weak spot in the barrier and tried to crash through it.
 
The wall was resilient.
 
It seemed to give way slightly, but it did not tear.
 
Stepping back, Alec pulled out his sword and slashed at the spot, then slashed again on the back stroke, and stabbed aggressively.

And with that, there was a small opening where there had been none before.
 
Alec slashed again and again, calling upon his warrior powers and despite the pain, channeling them into the sword, making it a greater weapon than it had ever been before, and he felt the barrier give further.
 
He stopped and looked, and saw that there was now a fist-sized opening.
 
Re-sheathing his sword, Alec placed his hands within the ragged opening and pulled mightily, tearing the opening further so that it was large enough for a dog to pass through.
 
With a final heave, Alec tore again, and the barrier was further rent, so that there was space enough for his image to enter and exit.