‘Danny, you surprised me there! I do not think I have seen anyone shift realms that quickly before,’ Thinking Stone remarked in his beautiful mahogany voice. ‘I can see it glowing now. You succeeded. You retrieved the ruro!’
The tree that was Thinking Stone appeared to be smiling. Perhaps it was the way the warm breeze lightly moved its branches. Or perhaps it was something else altogether. The sun shone, illuminating a clear, bright blue sky. Here was a beautiful, gently sloping hill-side overlooking a wide valley of woods and rivers, an unspoilt paradise. Overlooking this grand vista was Thinking Stone's home rooted in the soil of this land that he loved so much.
Danny looked down. In this realm things were at a higher intensity, everything felt faster, more energy-like than the denser environment back home. Here everything was a little more vibrant, each sensation a little stronger. The colours were brighter, each sensation intense like a strong dark chocolate. It was both more real yet somehow more dream-like than the normal Earthly realm.
Danny's chest was a translucent gold in the centre. It was lit from within. He could see his heart pumping and his lungs engaged in their steady work. There in the centre, just forward of his organs, lay the ruro globe. It was pulsing slightly. It had constantly shifting gold continents surrounded by a misty swirling ocean of blue.
‘You and your friends did well to reach the Akashi realm,’ said Thinking Stone. ‘And it is a great honour to visit the Arkstone. She is the mother of all trees. There is so much to tell you. One day you will discover many secrets. But now you must face the future. For that, you must know the past. It is a terrible past, my friend.’ Thinking Stone stopped.
In this higher energy realm Danny had the use of all four limbs. Danny began to climb Thinking Stone's branches. Soon he had reached the first ledge in the branches some six feet up. He had about half that distance to go before he would reach his favourite cradle higher up in the branches. Here, he and Ben would often sit and watch the world drift by. A few minutes more and Danny had reached his nook. He sat back and allowed the limbs of the tree to encompass him.
The soft telepathic voice of Thinking Stone said, ‘It is better I show you how it all happened. Fall asleep and come with me my friend.’
Danny soon fell asleep. He felt himself lifted up from his energy-body in the Sapient realm. He followed the spirit of Thinking Stone as the two drifted out into space. Danny and the tree spirit travelled for some time till they approached the Earth. They stopped and looked, watching the beautiful Earth spinning. Danny gazed at the Earth's aura. It was a marvelous cloud of whites and blues extending brilliantly into the inky darkness.
Thinking Stone's spirit self looked the same as his usual oak-like form but not quite as solid. The colours were replaced by a ghostly outline. A line of light-blue energy drifted away into space connecting them to their distant, sleeping energy bodies.
Suddenly everything Danny could see went into a great blur of backward flowing movement. The next moment it was as if a car made of pure energy had run straight through him. And then another and another - impact after impact, yet he stayed where he was. He was unhurt. He yelled out to Thinking Stone in alarm. Thinking Stone sent him a beam of blue light that instantly pacified his mind. Danny's out-of-body self went icy cool in response as the light hit and penetrated. He felt detached from the situation and just observed. As the blur slowed down Danny noticed that he was now still but the Earth itself was spinning backwards at an incredible speed. And then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The Earth resumed its slow rotation forwards. Everything looked the same, but it felt different, like he had stepped into a completely different reality.
‘Welcome back to life-planet Earth Danny - minus just over six thousand years.’
‘Have we gone back in time?’ Danny asked.
‘No, not really. Time does not really exist. There is only the eternal 'now'. A now that contains the imprints of the past and the meandering dreams of the future. However, I have accessed the Earth’s Akashi record. And rewound it about 6000 years.’
‘So this is about 4,000 BC then?’ Danny observed after a moment’s pause.
‘That is how Earth-humans in your own realm might describe it I believe. Now watch Danny. Look over your left shoulder.’
Danny shuddered. How could something so simple be so hideous, so utterly grotesque? It was suspended in space, malevolent, powerful. It was so dark as to be almost beautiful, poetically evil perhaps. The light appeared to fall into it and simply disappear. It was as though it were made from the absence of light.
On closer inspection, its body appeared to be a single cloud of black, congealing phlegm. It was a thick substance that constantly shifted erratically. The cloud reminded Danny of a pool of tar that had been picked up and pulled into rough shapes. Globules and stalactites of black substance hung within the otherwise empty body. Deformed arms trailed here and there.
The whole thing moved like a crab. Yet its deformed tentacles darted with the speed and mechanics of an insect. It was vast, the size of the moon.
Inky jets of blackness spewed at great speed from its body, seemingly at random. The jets looked like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue. The creature tasted its victim. It moved closer, edging toward the Earth awkwardly in fits and starts.
The Earth’s magnetic fields changed and suddenly, a hail of meteorites rained down upon the creature. A force field around the entity became apparent. As each meteorite struck it disappeared harmlessly into a cloud of dust. Danny thought he could see the aura of the Earth intensify, reaching out toward the creature.
The Earth was acting as a single organism, trying desperately to attack this thing. She put out great bolts of lightning toward it, frying the thin atmosphere of space. The black cloud jolted violently as the hundreds of millions of volts hit one after the other. Further meteorites stormed down but it remained undisturbed, strengthened even.
At the centre of the creature’s cloud-body could be seen a black rotating globe with a wispy red aura. Dark continents moved upon oily seas. As it approached the creature cast a shadow over the whole planet.
Danny was terrified but hypnotised also. If he looked within the eyes of the creature would he ever escape their pull? The eyes were randomly placed within the black congealing cloud that was the creature’s body. They looked apathetic but hid an infinite hardness, a deep, glacial anger. He did not know if it was actually there, or just in his mind, but from somewhere his senses were activated. He was aware of a stench of rotting, cancerous flesh. He felt contaminated by the creature's presence and its deadly smell. He was also deeply afraid.
The thing continued to approach the planet. The attacks from the Earth grew less frequent then stopped altogether. For some time after the fight the creature just lurked, waiting for the kill.
An area of the creature stretched and pulsed as though insects were bubbling under the skin. Then a great pod-like arm burst forth from within the inky blackness of its body. The pod fell across a huge swathe of land around the Earth’s equator. The creature seemed to engorge with light. It began to pulse more regularly. The blackness dispelled and became blue, then yellow, then once again to black. But not the dull blackness it had been before. It was now a brilliant illuminated blackness. It seemed to pull every ounce of light back into itself.
The dark cloud that was its body became flattened. It extended hugely in size, becoming an oval disc. The countless eyes elongated then disappeared altogether. The tongue-like jets of blackness stopped flickering outwards. The arm that had extended from the dark creature was still aimed toward the equator. The arm-like pod pulsed as blue and yellow globules raced from the Earth to the ethereal disc that the creature had now become.
Danny noticed that the aura of the whole planet was weakening. He felt tears well in his eyes and a gnawing coldness spread across his heart. The planet itself seemed to be crying. Within the black disc he could see skulls and broken bones imaged in its surface. People were wandering dazed in the deserts, children dying of thirst. Withered mothers carried their shrunken babies who clung desperately to the breast. Dying cattle lay emaciated upon the ground. Salty tears of the herders fell namelessly to the dust.
The disc grew until its surface was as wide as the Earth itself. The pod withdrew itself back into the disc. The disc shone bright white for a moment and then shifted. It was still there but it had become translucent. The creature was now invisible. By adjusting his eyesight, making it lazy, almost blurred, Danny could still see the outline of the creature. It was growing. It was no longer a disc. It was becoming a sphere encompassing the whole Earth within itself. It had, in effect, consumed the entire planet.
Still clearly apparent and circling like a satellite within the invisible sphere was the remains of the black creature, a dark globe. It was the heart, and brain, of the creature. A new atmosphere now quietly cloaked the planet. Killing it, slowly, softly, surely.
With tears still burning in his eyes Danny turned his head back to the right. Thinking Stone’s spirit self was still there. It seemed to Danny that Thinking Stone nodded. They left the 'dream' of Earth's past and headed back to their energy-bodies. Danny found himself still sat within the little nook of branches some nine feet off the ground. He stretched a little and adjusted his eyes to the daylight.
Thinking Stone's deep and sonorous voice rang cleanly through Danny's mind, ‘What you saw actually happened - but over millennia. And still it is not over. The creature is called the Elif and even now it lives here. Its mind is one of the most powerful forces on your planet. It is a creature that can seriously weaken an entire planet. Indeed, that is what an Elif eats - planets.
‘For aeons it hid, incubating, biding its evil time. It would assimilate a mind here, a mind there, much as a dog pack will scavenge for easy pickings. For millennia we protected the Earth. We kept the Elif weak. Then a great and dangerous force disturbed the whole solar system. The creature knew its time had come. It had to strike before the Earth and the solar system made it through to the space and time of Aquaria. Aeons of frustration, millennia of hatred would find an outlet. After so long hiding in the shadows it showed itself and attacked once again.
‘After the Earth had failed to drive it off, the Elif engulfed her. It cut her off from the cosmic forces - and the nourishment she so desperately needed. The Earth spirit, Sofia, is brave indeed. The cradle of life, of mankind itself, grew steadily drier. Nothing would grow. The desert sands sprang up as if from nowhere. A dusty murk veiled the sky. The wells gurgled then choked with dust. The air grew grey and stale. The birds kept low. The ancient cities began to crumble. The great civilisations that had grown again since the ancient floods sank slowly into the new deserts. Every leaf drooped, every tree dying. The sparkle of life all but vanished. All the time the Elif drank of the Earth's life like a vampire. Millions upon millions starved.
‘Those that survived were changed. The rule of evil became the law of their land. The time of Eden, the eternal dance of energy, was nought but a long forgotten memory - a fairy-tale. Generation after generation fell prey to war. Evil became second nature. Hatred dwelt in almost every heart, lived in almost every home. And today hundreds of millions have killed and died without even knowing what possessed their minds or perverted their hearts.
‘The Elif lives in many realms at once, swapping at will should danger threaten. Its body feeds on life-force, its mind on pure thought energy. Greedily, it sucks up the power of plants and animals. It is always hungry, never satiated, always looking to dominate. It can possess a mind before it is aware of even the slightest change. Boundaries of time and of space have little meaning for it. But still we kept it at bay.
‘It had its sights on the Earth for tens of thousands of years. When the two-leggeds first built their great ancient cities, their pyramids and temples, its jealousy knew no bounds. It couldn't abide the thought that they might in the future master themselves. Whilst the Earth-humans were but tribes scattered here and there it waited, letting its prey grow fat. But soon it had to attack, whilst it still could. Some on your planet called it “The Fall”. It is recorded in all the old texts. Some on other worlds have called it "The Affliction" or "The Spirit-Plague". But few know of the Elif, only its effects. It keeps itself well hidden. Not all life-planets have been so attacked, but again, not all have survived.’
For a long time Danny sat in silence, simply watching the birds and the swaying of the trees. As if the environment sensed his mood, a light rain began to fall.
‘I am sorry to intrude upon your thoughts my friend,’ Thinking Stone intoned eventually. ‘But I have more to tell you. We have found a way to end the Elif.’
‘You mean to kill it?’ said Danny who wished immediately that his words had not sounded so defensive.
‘That is not the term I would choose.’
Danny felt an anxiety move from his belly upwards.
‘We have found its Achilles’ heel. There is a frequency, a nemesis frequency. At sufficient power it would neutralise the Elif. It must be delivered to the heart of the creature. The ruro globe in your chest will amplify your powers and your mind. It will enable you to deliver the frequency. But, it knows. It knows all about you. It has many powerful people in its employ. Besides, there are others who crave the ruro for their own ends. You must enter the Elif's mind, and deliver the frequency, before it is too late. Prepare yourself Danny.’
A powerful sound jarred his brain. It was strange and painful, frighteningly, raw. It was if his cerebellum itself was vibrating, creating a strange loud frequency from within. The sound felt like it was created by his brain rattling in his skull. Danny's breath burst out in anxious gasps. Taking control he made himself calm down by slowing his breathing.
‘That Danny is the Nemesis code. It is the secret work of aeons. Its existence is something we hid even from you. And now it is stored in your mind.’
‘Thanks for telling me!’ Danny cut in.
‘There is not time to explain everything son. You must go now. We will be with you in any way we can,’ and with that Thinking Stone fell silent.
Danny had gone white with shock. What could he possibly say in return? Who could he turn to? He felt alone and insignificant, he thought he might have known such feelings in the past but they were nothing compared to this.
With one swift intention Danny left Thinking Stone, and the Sapient Realm, far behind.