It was into the night, and the temperature had begun to drop before Mandalee came around.
Sensing her friend was with her, she croaked, “Cat? Why am I freezing cold and wet?” Opening her eyes, she then saw that she was devoid of clothing. “And also naked?” she added.
Cat smiled at her friend and joked, softly, “Well, I told you this pool was too cold and shallow for skinny dipping, but would you listen?”
Mandalee tried to laugh, but it hurt too much, so she stopped and just asked, “Is Shyleen OK?”
The leopard came over and nuzzled her friend, ‘I am right here, do not worry. Please thank Cat for me – communicating her way is difficult.’
Mandalee relayed the message, then asked, “Cat, where’s Daelen?”
“Still flying around out there, I expect. I was waiting until you recovered so you could reassure Shyleen. She was a bit wary of me at first; she was hurting so much. I didn’t dare risk Daelen dropping out of the sky and scaring her, so I told him to go away.”
Mandalee raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You’ve certainly got him well trained, now.”
Catriona's eyes twinkled as she replied, “That’s the general idea.”
It was what she’d been trying to achieve on Earth. She allowed Daelen to believe he was training her while she got on with the real task of training him to pay attention to her. Heaven’s Surrender was a terrible weapon and when the moment came, it was imperative that it should be under Daelen’s control. Cat agreed wholeheartedly with that, but the way she saw it, Daelen himself was a powerful weapon, and his power also needed to be under control. Specifically, hers. She would have liked a few more days to work on him, but circumstances had dictated otherwise. Hopefully, it would be enough.
After a quick telepathic exchange in the language of leopards, Mandalee told her friend, “Shyleen says he is welcome to join us, so you can call him.”
“OK,” Cat agreed, “and while I’m doing that, I think you should dry off and get dressed.”
“Well, only if you’re sure you’ve seen enough of my body, Cat.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen enough,” she laughed, “and don’t think I’ve forgotten my promise to, shall we say, tweak it a bit here and there? Still can’t do it, yet, but I swear I’m close.”
With that, she left her friend while she called for Daelen to come down.
*****
While he had been flying, Daelen had found no evidence of any other intruders on the island. Sadly, though, he did find casualties: the invading force had torn the StormChaser apart where she was anchored in the harbour, and her crew were all dead. He wept for them – they had deserved better – but there was nothing he could do for them now, except whip up a storm to push the ship away from the harbour, into the bay, and allow it to sink, giving them all a sailor’s burial at sea.
As he did so, however, he realised Catriona’s original travel plans had been vindicated, because nobody had even noticed the unremarkable Dolphin patrolling the waters. His elegant ship had drawn focus, while the very nondescript nature of the other vessel had spared it from harm. As difficult as it was for his ego to accept, he knew he was going to have to start listening to her more in future. His power, he dared to believe, allied with Catriona’s intelligent mind and Mandalee’s extraordinary battle prowess and fierce loyalty to her friend, might just be enough to turn the tide in the coming conflict.
As soon as his three companions were sufficiently recovered to travel, before leaving the island, he felt it was important to check his base for any signs of intrusion. As they searched the building, Mandalee took the opportunity to thank Daelen on behalf of Shyleen as well as herself.
“Without your training, at least one of us would have died today.”
The shadow warrior shook his head. “That was all you. I may have helped you sharpen your edge a bit, but that’s all.”
‘In the contest between predator and prey,’ Shyleen insisted in Mandalee’s mind, ‘a sharp edge can be the difference between life and death.’
Mandalee was mid-translation when they reached the door to the portal room and Cat yelled, “Stop!” and slapped Daelen’s hand away from the handle.
“What’s wrong?” Daelen asked.
There was a lot of higher planar energy behind the door, which was to be expected – it was powering the permanent portals – but something was different. Wrong. There were two different signatures. One was Daelen’s. The other was the same as what she had sensed outside Justaria’s house. “Don’t you sense it?” she asked.
Without her warning, he knew he wouldn’t have noticed, but thanks to her special ability of paying attention, he could now clearly see the word ‘trap’ laid out before him.
In case whatever-it-was, was monitoring the door, somehow, Cat decided to take an alternative route. Shapeshifting into a mouse, she used woodshaper magic to make herself a rodent-sized hole in the skirting board, which she extended into a tunnel into the portal room. Overhead, she felt rather than saw a strange kind of light travelling in a thin focussed beam across the face of all the portals. She didn’t know what to make of it, so she tried to project a sympathic image to Daelen.
‘Don’t shift back,’ he warned her. ‘If you interrupt that beam, you could die.’
Now that he knew there were no sensors on the door, he opened it, trusting that it was safe.
“What’s wrong?” Mandalee asked.
Peering into the portal room, without crossing the threshold, Daelen pointed to a small metal box to the left of the portals. Mandalee had no idea what it was, beyond a thing of technology. All she knew was that it hadn’t been there before.
The shadow warrior identified it as a bomb. “An explosive device, triggered to explode the instant anyone steps through one of my portals and interrupts the beam of invisible light it’s emitting.”
He employed a similar tripwire system himself on his Earth base, to ward against intruders, though his version was non-lethal.
Mandalee, however, shook her head and insisted his theory didn’t make sense. “Why didn’t I set it off?”
Daelen admitted the Cleric of Nature was right.
Shifting back well away from that invisible light beam, Cat asked, “Could this technology be designed to detect you, specifically?”
“Yes,” Daelen agreed. “Of course, Kullos couldn’t have known that I’d taught you to make your own portals. If I hadn’t, I would have naturally come back to StormClaw this way and set off the bomb. He wouldn’t have wanted either of you to trigger it.”
“That’s nice of him,” Mandalee remarked, acidly, knowing full well it wasn’t an act of kindness.
Daelen confirmed it. “He just wanted to make sure I took the full force of it.”
“How bad would it have been?” Mandalee wondered.
“Difficult to say without setting it off.”
“OK, never mind. It’s fine,” she assured him. “I can quite happily live the rest of my life without ever knowing.”
Seeing that Cat, ever curious, had wandered over to inspect the device, he stepped forward to warn her against getting too close.
Rather than reply, she let out a gasp and frantically surrounded the device with thick walls of rock. No sooner was the device fully encased than it exploded. She desperately fought to keep her walls from shattering, trying to reinforce them with compressed air but within seconds, she was fighting a losing battle, until a shimmering bubble of higher planar energy surrounded it.
“It’s OK,” Daelen told her, striding forward and laying a reassuring hand on her arm. “You can stop now.”
By now, the rock had been completely obliterated by the raging inferno. The energy barrier had expanded to block all access to the portals, but now it was holding firm, keeping the continuing explosion contained within.
“My containment field will hold it back until it burns itself out, and then dissipate,” he explained. “But I think we’d better go before anything else happens.”
The others nodded. With StormClaw compromised, it was clearly too dangerous to stay. They would be better off back on the Dolphin in open water.
*****
“What actually happened in there?” Mandalee asked, as they quickly made their way to the coast.
Cat explained that she’d seen the display on the device flare up, presumably in response to Daelen’s presence in the room.
“A proximity sensor,” he realised. “A backup system in case I managed to avoid the primary tripwire.”
What he didn’t know was how Catriona, who was unused to technology, could have recognised the danger so quickly.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. Perhaps it was thanks to her exposure to technology on Earth, or maybe it was just her instincts at work. Either way, when the light on the box changed colour, she knew she didn’t like what she was seeing and acted, although clearly, she had underestimated the power of higher planar energy and her shield of rock and air was not enough.
“No,” Daelen admitted, “not by itself. But your quick thinking gave me time to save five precious lives.”
“Five?” Mandalee wondered.
Daelen nodded and explained that in addition to two mortals and one leopard in that room, the blast would have travelled through the portal to Earth and ripped through his base, killing Sara and Jessica.
“Even I wouldn’t have escaped unscathed,” he told them.
The blast wouldn’t have killed him, but it would have led to a serious injury. Between that and the fifty-strong force, he would have expended a great deal of energy, and the loss of the StormChaser would have forced him to use his powers to cross the Ocean. Kullos could then have tracked him there and forced a confrontation before Michael and his forces could join him. All of which would have tipped the balance of power massively in Kullos’ favour.
“Kullos could have won the war today,” he concluded, “but he underestimated what the four of us can do now that we’re a team.”
Cat pounced on that. “Oh, so we’re a team now, are we? Not just pesky mortals who desperately need to be trained because our power could never match up to yours?”
“Your powers don’t match up to mine,” he insisted, indignantly. Then he smiled and added, “Fortunately, power isn’t everything.”
“Finally!” Cat cried in victory, rewarding him with a hug. “Although, I admit power does have its place.”
“In the end, I’d say we all trained each other,” Mandalee decided.
‘Like Daelen says,’ Shyleen put in. ‘A team.’
Having seen the power of one small bomb powered by higher planar energy, Cat could scarcely imagine what Heaven’s Surrender would be capable of. But if Daelen StormTiger was listening to her at last, maybe there was hope for the world yet.
*****
Under cover of darkness, the Dolphin launched a small wooden lifeboat to quietly pick them all up and bring them aboard. They all immediately went below decks. The vessel then drifted away, slowly at first, then faster as Cat encouraged a perfectly natural breeze to pick up and accelerate them discreetly away, joining the regular shipping routes between the two continents and blending in with all the other vessels going about their ordinary business.
“Will they be OK?” Mandalee asked, after a while. “Sara and Jessica, I mean. With StormClaw compromised, what if something gets through the portal to Earth?”
“They’ll be fine,” Daelen assured her. “With us gone, there’s no further value in attacking this island. Any invaders intent on attacking my base on Earth would have to find the right portal – remember there are six of them. I’ve also left a message to warn the Chetsuans to arm themselves, just in case. You’ve sparred with them both, so you know they’re quite capable of taking care of just about anything or anyone that might come through.”
“A powerful wizard—” Mandalee began.
“—Would have a bit of a shock when his powers failed against those magically resistant bodysuits,” he reminded her.
The assassin nodded. She had first-hand experience of how well that worked.
“Plus, if they did find themselves in more trouble than they could handle, I’ve enhanced the perception filter surrounding the place, so it now works as a containment field, preventing anything from crossing, except authorised people.”
Mandalee nodded her understanding, “So, Sara and Jessica could escape your grounds and your enemies couldn’t follow. You’re right. I’m worrying over nothing. I’m just sorry I had to leave them without saying goodbye.”
Daelen shook his head. “It’s not goodbye. You’ll see them again.” He hoped. “Now, try not to worry any more. That goes for you, too, Cat,” he added, although she had so far voiced no opinion on the subject. “Get some rest.”
Mandalee left for her cabin with Shyleen.
To Daelen, Catriona seemed far away, mind on other things as she gave him a distant smile and left for her own cabin.
Alone at last, aside from Pyrah, Catriona was stretching out her sympathic senses, receiving an update from far across Tempestria, before sending out a message of her own.
‘Back home. Island all clear. Third portal from left. Caution: Earth defended. Good hunting.’
*****
As my mother and her companions head for a new continent, gentle reader, where Kullos' army awaits, this seems like an opportune moment for me to take a break. Just before I do, however, I find it curious that the argument I made to the modern-day Black and Red Guardians was much the same as what my mother said to my father a thousand years ago. We can’t afford to go on, like it’s business as usual. Things have changed and we must adapt to those changes. The events I have been relaying are some of the most pivotal in Tempestrian history. They are, as Aunt Mandalee put it, events that ought not to be tampered with any more than they already have been. Unfortunately, the void-creature has been busy tampering with these events, tampering with Time, which means we need to tamper some more. But not in the surgical way my Aunt tried here. It’s not enough to simply get the Timeline ‘back on track’ anymore. We need to win. And to do that, in my opinion, we need to change the rules.
To further demonstrate that point, in my next instalment, I will show how, if the Original Guardians hadn’t completely disregarded the rules, none of us would be here today.