Ultimus Thesaurus: The last Treasure (Era of Change Book 1) (23 page)

If I could not make the temple and the island disappear, I could still change what happened to them. It was not easy to keep up with the speed with which the book operated, since the truth was modified with every word I wrote, but soon I saw the first results.

My friends awakened from their sleep and the prince almost completely lost his connection to reality. He did not notice what happened around him and so the inhabitants of the island soon escaped his control. Only when we had all escaped the vicinity of the ritual did I begin to interrupt it. I did not directly influence it as I previously did with the temple, but instead I modified the things the prince was doing so that the ritual ultimately failed.

The power of the fire waned and soon it was hardly even reaching higher than the temple and then only as high as one of the houses. Now the prince noticed what I did, but even his last desperate attempts to counteract me soon failed. The fire disappeared and the clouds moved back in front of the sun. Nothing more than charred earth and the remains of the stone of power lay before the prince now and I could see that his anger began to grow.

Aton’s torment had reached a new high and I was sure that he would soon die now that the stone was slowly losing its power. Without thinking of what would happen I dashed to the stone, but now there was nothing that prevented the prince from destroying us all. 

He unleashed his power and pillars of pure fire broke out of the earth, until barely any space was left. The people were running about wildly and one after the other fell through the flames.

I still ran further in the direction of the stone, but when I put it in my hands the prince grabbed me and I saw the rage in his burning eyes.

“Is it all just a game for you? Do you not see that it is my destiny? This book, how did you get it?” he yelled at me and finally he understood that this book was the one that he had searched for.

He grabbed the book out of my hands and threw me near the flames by the square. Already during my impact I could recognize, as he wildly browsed the book, that the pen to control it was still in my possession. Luckily he did not seem to know that it was worthless without the pen. In my hand I saw the stone of power that was completely covered with ash, which I now slowly removed.

Without being able to see where Aton was, I could nevertheless tell by the power that the stone emitted. But I also noticed that the strength of the stone rapidly degraded while I held him. Even if I did not know why, the stone urged me to throw it. I adjusted my aim and threw it through the flames and smoke, far over the entire place, and when it reached its destination, the destruction and fire stopped and Aton rose from the ground.

“After so many centuries it almost seems not possible,” the prince said to himself while thumbing through the book.

As Aton rose from the ashes and the smoke, the fire that had engulfed the whole place mere seconds ago disappeared. Now they faced each other again - the Sun King and the dragon prince.

“Isn’t it wonderful, old friend? After all this time, even after your death, we see each other again today and once again I will be victorious,” said the prince and closed the book with a sign of his hand.

There was another spirit that controlled Thamyris now, but it would now finally also be the last. I was sure that the king would stop the prince and so I stood at his side.

“Oppressive, to know that one is dead and yet alive. This book does not belong to you, it never has. Your hunger for power and your thirst for knowledge have always been the origin of your corruption. The truth behind everything is in this book. You do not want to use it; your intentions have always gone beyond that. You will destroy it to correct your past mistakes, isn’t that so?” asked the king and made me realize something terrible.

Was I truly just like prince Marko? I also wanted to destroy the book at the beginning of this journey because I was afraid of what it might reveal, but in this moment I was not even sure anymore if my intentions were purer than those of the prince.

“Even if you have always believed that, so I still conceive no abhorrence for my past. It was you who kept it from me, just because you thought that I was unable to bear it.”

The king approached the prince and he showed him the stone of power in his hand.

“This is what remained of me. This is the power that I sealed away to ward my people against the dangers of this world. I have sacrificed much just like you, but the truth, the history, must not be another victim of the war. If you unleash the knowledge of the gods into this world it will never be the same again. Are you ready to make this sacrifice? Because I wasn’t at that time and I am not ready for it now, not even today.”

More and more power withdrew from the stone and strengthened the king, but he soon realized that the prince had damaged it beyond repair. He needed more energy to anchor his soul in this world and even more to fight against the prince, but in the end this was all that remained of the once legendary might of the Sun King.

“I have observed nations, kingdoms and whole continents as they slowly sank into time, and now I also witness the power of the Sun King drying up like sand. Once I saw you as equal, perhaps even as a nemesis, who would once bring upon my end, but today I know that your love for this world will again and again be your downfall.

You had the power to shape the world, to control this whole planet and to create new life, but at the end you have given up everything, only to lose. Today is your last day on earth, the day on which I myself will haunt you even in your dreams in which you were previously nearly invulnerable,” the prince said and brought his power back into focus.

He was weakened by the ritual, because none of us lost consciousness at the sound of his voice, but we felt the burden of its presence on our shoulders and it forced us on our knees. Only the king resisted the might of the prince and was now ready to use the remaining power of the stone.

I saw how the stone began to erupt and how its once so glossy exterior became faint. Now the king dropped the stone and charged right at the prince. The speed and power of the two was inhuman and with each shock of their clashing fists, I could feel how the air around us formally tore apart.

It did not take long before the king fell to the ground overpowered by the prince. I could see the book lying on the ground far away on the former grand square which had now become a battlefield. I rushed over to it and wrote as fast as I could in order to help the king but it did not work as expected. An old almost broken trident appeared next to him and it was as if his time had come, because no matter what I did, nothing happened.

“I remember. When I broke your weapon and ended your life. History repeats itself, old friend,” said the prince and laughed while the king, in spite of his wounds, clung to his weapon.

“You're right history repeats itself, but nevertheless it is never exactly the same. Remember that everything you need is right in front of you, Jacob,” were the last words of the king, who raised his trident to the sky and opened up the clouds again.

This time, however, the radiation of the sun focused on the prince and it burned his skin, so severely that he fell to the ground and no longer moved. With a smile the king closed his eyes and after the trident disappeared and the stone before his feet disintegrated to dust completely, his body changed back to that of Thamyris.

Finally he was freed from his nightmares, in the place in which he had relinquished his second chance. Everything had ended where it began, but the prince was still alive and even if he was now weakened, so he was still conscious.

He crawled around like an insect, injured and maltreated he now held on to the hope that our forces had also reached their limits. His curses and screams had lost their power and so we gathered and stood before him; all the people who were left, except one.

Lucia truly changed sides against all my expectations. She helped the prince back on his legs and supported his weak body. Not much was left of the power that once kept us on this island, but I overestimated the power of the book.

“I will go with him. He has the power and the will to save my father. I know that you have changed, but in your heart you are still the same. You have betrayed us all and thus you made me forget what it means to be loyal. This is a battle that each of us must fight alone and as much as I would have liked to consider differently, so you are still convinced that this book must be destroyed.”

Her words may have been the truth and still she couldn’t see behind the lies of the prince, who never really intended to help her.

“He also fears the power of this book and just as I he wants to destroy it. Why are you trying to turn back the time? Our mistakes brought us here, but let them not destroy even more. This book can be retained as long as we deprive it of its power. I was warned to directly influence the destiny of this world and you too shouldn’t play god,” I said, but her decision had already been made.

“You played god with the lives of all those who I loved and now you deny me a chance to save them? What kind of person are you? Again and again you try to tell me how much you regret and yet there is a possibility that this repentance becomes redundant. Let me use this chance and I will be on your side. This day calls for a further decision. It is in your hands, what my destiny becomes.”

I believed that it was not fair to force a decision from me in such a moment, but in the end I just had no choice. To choose the life of Lucia instead of that of all the others would have been human, but it would have been just as wrong.

“I will not let you go. Not this time. I have the book and even if you go with him, he will not be able to help you without it. The language in which it was written, I have never seen anything like it before and I doubt that he can even read it. After all the time he sought it, he not even recognized it immediately. His lies and his treason against all of us go further than my own. Can’t you see it, Lucia?” I exhorted again, but her eyes showed the expression that I had already once seen in the eyes of the prince.

I did not know whether it was his influence that guided her, or if the corruption that struck her was born from her own.

“You are wrong, Iago. I trusted you and to you I would have even given my life. Your betrayal goes further than those of this poor being that is fighting since thousands of years alone for its survival. We are all alone now and that was your decision.”

Now the prince stood by himself and he needed all his power to sustain it.

“This book once belonged to my kind, and it shall belong to me now. Only a true king can read it and not a simple man. The time will reveal to me what has always been my fate,” he said with a heavy and tormented voice and moved slowly in my direction.

I was sure that he had no idea how to understand the language, just as I knew that we were still inferior in an open confrontation. Therefore I decided to give him the book; because without Magnus nobody could read it and Jasper also knew that. He had hidden the key on his corpse and only there we would find what we needed.

The Sun King was convinced that I had the understanding to stop the prince, but I could only hope that he was correct in that assumption.

To believe in something from the bottom of your heart is always difficult. It means to stand against all those, who do not believe it and it is often synonymous with betrayal. The decision that Lucia made, was based on the belief that it was the right thing to bring her father back to life. For me this was not a betrayal of our friendship, but only of the principle of life itself. I did not know whether it would be possible at all and I could not believe in it, because the conviction for such an act was a gift that only some possessed.

It was both her love to a person who she had always admired and my hatred against the deeds of the past that separated us. Nothing could ever make us cross this endless gap in front of us, and so there was just one end to all of this – death. For me the question remained of what an end like this might be. The prince was never on the side of a human and thus he saw the life of Lucia only as a means of exerting pressure on me and even Lucia knew this.

My possibilities were few and so I could only watch as the prince took the book into his hands and also the tool to control it. This power and his influence together were a dangerous combination, but I too believed in something. I was sure that I could make it, stop all this, and at the end get to a point where everything can be compensated for. There just had to be value in it, an objective that could replace the loss that I had summoned into this world.

For Lucia this was not achievable and this is probably a general fact that not even the mightiest could overcome.

I saw how the prince disappeared in a cloud of black mist that slowly dispersed in the air. Nothing remained of Lucia or him and now we were on our own again.

Without a ship it was impossible for us to leave the island and now that the people had lost their homes, they too were without meaning. 

It was therefore up to us to compensate for this imbalance and we started by burying the dead, among which was also Tybalt himself. When I saw his corpse before me, I recognized the man who had once forced me to do unspeakable things. Even if I had wished for his death, I knew that these people had no faith which they could really turn to because they were just under the spell of the stone of power. They were nothing more than puppets. Granting them the honour of a funeral seemed to me the only right thing to do in the end.

I looked at the large destroyed square, even up to the collapsed temple and missed the big fire that once reached up to the limits of the sky. And the city that once knew no night, now knew no day at all. Almost invariably it was now covered with darkness, interrupted only by a few hours of the day that robbed more of our hope than it was able to give.

Now we only had one choice, we had to build a new ship, but none of us had an idea how you do this. For this reason we decided to use the wreck of old ship of the pirates as some kind of general layout. We agreed that it was more important to construct a ship that worked as one that was perfect.