Chapter 45 - Power Unleashed
The Great Ones, drawn inexorably back to the Temple had only moments to understand what was happening there. Fighting to maintain their sense of themselves – they looked to each other like shimmering outlines. Power was continuing to build inside them, the power they would need to cleanse and renew their world.
They knew the Ciriot were in the Altar Room and that Jonko, Keleb and Pyr were resisting them – giving them the time they needed to understand their new form.
When the Ciriot fired their disintegrator beams at them, the final and crucial piece of knowledge came to them. It showed them how to free the energy bonds holding their physical shapes and how to reshape themselves if they chose. They let themselves become energy beings, and merged their minds into a single entity. Their fragile human shapes could not wield the world’s power that was now building to a crescendo in the Temple, but the three-fold mind of their energy shape could.
Whatever legends told of the mythical Tymorean fortress, they fell short of the real truth. In that other-dimensional place – the Guardians’ power, shared as it was between all the Royal Tymoreans, became available to the chosen ones.
In times past, this power had been bound as the murals were shaped, back at the dawn of each Great Age. The information that the Ciriot had gleaned from Aeronite minds, was several millennia out of date. The last Great Ones, had bound the power within the Altar. To free their power, the Altar had to be destroyed.
Jordan, lost brother of the Great Ones, would be the sacrifice. His mind when they touched it was proud to serve life – even if it meant his death. Better that it was him, tainted and corrupted by enemies, than his innocent brother, Pyr. As Kek made his killing stroke, he heard, “You will not be forgotten. Your blood will help seal the power again, once the world is cleansed. Yours, and Vila’s.”
As Jordan’s blood spread over the altar, like oil over water, it began to change, to glitter in gold and silver flecks. His body became insubstantial as the power of the Guardians began to push through the Altar – as water does through cracks in a dam.
The Great Ones in their new energy form, could now comprehend the full truth.
The alien Ciriot had not won – they were paying the ultimate price for their betrayal of the Aeronite race, and their hubris for thinking they could defeat the power of the Guardians of Peace.
In desecrating the altar, the Ciriot had broken the bonds of the world’s power. They had been burned away. The loyal Tymoreans were untouched. These three, Halflings and foundling, had proved their courage, their worth, their purity of belief.
Healing energy touched the three unconscious forms. Jonko began to stir first, feeling like he had been thrown against a wall. He remembered the Ciriot burning up and the brilliant light coming from the Altar. It was gone now. He slowly pushed himself to his feet and nearly tripped on chunks of stone as he turned. The chunks glittered with gold and silver. Then his mind recognised that the Altar had exploded, and somehow he had survived.
Before despair overcame him, he felt a familiar presence in his mind. “Jon, you Kel and Pyr have to leave here. Go to the ship.”
He tried to call back to Krys and Tymos, but his mind seemed to echo the chaos outside of the Temple walls. The air inside was beginning to smell foul and he knew he would need the headpiece of his armour. He began to crawl over the rubble to where he had been standing before the explosion.
Instead he found the legs of Pyr, and with the power of desperation, he tossed pieces of rock off the smaller figure. He didn’t realise he was crying, incoherent tears of utter failure until he heard muffled sobs from the still figure. Pyr was alive. His armour had protected him.
Jonko helped Pyr to his feet and in a moment of relief and concern, hugged the child. Their armour made it awkward, but it helped him to reaffirm that he was alive.
The child pulled free and looked around. He pointed to a broken section of the parapet. Jonko remembered Keleb and went to the gap. Pyr was pointing down, and he opened his helmet.
“I can see Keleb, but where are Jordan and Vila?”
Jonko recalled all that had happened. Keleb lay on the rubble in the meeting room. A short distance from him, Kellex’s body was partly hidden by the rubble. The bright green of his robes showed under the cream coloured stones.
To one side, the rubble was flecked with silver and gold, like the altar, and Jonko realised that place was where Vila died. The answer came to him. “Jordan and Vila chose to fight with us – their bravery has been recognised by the Guardians. They have taken their spirits into their aegis. The sparkling rock is all that remains.”
Pyr went very still and Jonko was concerned for him, but after a moment he said, “Yes, you are right. They are free…and happy.”
Jonko saw Pyr relax, and spoke to him. “We need to help Keleb. If my transmitter still works, we will transmit down. For that we need to be close together.”
“I think we need to hurry,” Pyr agreed. “I can feel this room trembling.”
On materialising on the lower floor, Jonko returned his transmitter to its pouch and began tossing rubble off his friend. The tremors could be felt through the floor here too. When the Altar exploded, Keleb had been thrown over the parapet and stones had fallen on him. Once his head was clear, Pyr pulled his hands from his armour gauntlets and touched Keleb’s face. Deathly pallor was replaced by a pinkish tinge. Jonko kept removing rubble, wondering if Pyr had something of Tymos’s healing gift. Keleb groaned and tried to sit up.
“Lie still until we get the rest off this off you,” Jonko said.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Keleb muttered.
“I know. We have to get to the ship.”
“Where would we go?” Pyr asked. His eyes were wide with fear and were moist with unshed tears.
“To the forest,” Keleb answered, not needing to think. The idea had come to him with a fleeting sense of Tymos. “We are alive. We must trust the Guardians and the Great Ones to protect us.”
Pyr looked around the Temple as if he preferred to stay there. Keleb sensed his fears of going into the chaos.
“The last of the shields have gone from here. The air is mixing with the foulness outside. If we stay here, we will have to breathe that poison. The ship has untainted air. We can fly it to the forest where there are plants and animals that are protected from the poisons and corrupting influences.”
Keleb was glad that Pyr didn’t ask whether they could enter through the shields of the sealed forests.
Jonko had his transmitter out again and asked Keleb if he still had his.
“Yes,” Keleb confirmed after checking.
“Okay, let’s all stand together. Kel, we will activate them at the same time and try to go out to near the ship,” Jonko directed. “Hold your breath, and Pyr, close up your armour.”
The safeguards built into the transmitters aborted the process, causing them to materialise under the rear colonnade of the southern chamber.
The miasma of glowing dust, hanging like a sickly fog, told them all they needed to know. Transmitting through that would be fatal.
Keleb trotted back into the chamber and returned in a few minutes with two water soaked towels. He handed one to Jonko. “We need to put this over our heads – to filter out some of the stuff from the air. Pyr will have to guide us.”
“I’m ready,” Pyr said, straightening at the trust given to him.
Jonko and Keleb took a careful look at the first stretch – the steeply rising terraced garden, before covering their heads. This part they could manage by feel. After that, Pyr would have to take a hand of each of them and lead.
They ran, trusting Pyr to guide them over the flatter ground. Both Jonko and Keleb breathed sparingly, for even with the wet towel filtering the air, the smell of it was nauseating. At the ship, Pyr released them and activated the airlock opening. It was a tight fit for three armoured figures, but they needed to save all they could of the air on the ship. Pyr closed the hatch after them and flushed the air from the lock before opening the inner hatch. Jonko and Keleb were gasping for air, and collapsed onto the floor. Pyr took the air hose from his armour and gave them each a forced burst of air. He was relieved when they both began to breathe normally.
Even as he relished the untainted air of the ship, Jonko forced himself to stand and walk to the cockpit. He started the engines and looked at all the gauges. Fuel was low. He hoped it would be enough to get them to the nearest forest.
Keleb and Pyr activated the sensors and the navigation computer. The view screen had been targeted to the Temple, and as the picture formed on the screen, Keleb saw the glass dome roof of the altar room shatter and begin to fall. He could still feel the trembling of the ground through the floor of the ship.
“Strap in,” Jonko yelled a warning, distracting Keleb from wondering if the whole Temple would collapse.
He and Pyr had barely obeyed, when Jonko blasted upwards on the landing jets, just enough so that he was off the ground before accelerating level to the ground. As he slowly climbed to what was once tree top height, he used his instincts to head for the nearest forest. The compass was no help, as it was gyrating wildly.
Keleb at the nav computer could do little to help. He gave a course to follow based on stored coordinates, but there was no way to check their heading as he could not get a signal through to the orbiting satellites.
“Kel, I need your help,” Jonko said after a few minutes.
Keleb forced his way to the co-pilot’s seat and took hold of the spare controls. He added his strength to Jonko’s to hold the shuddering craft steady.
Pyr subsided into a state of shock. He had seen Jordan and Vila die. They were the only family he had known and loved. The Great Ones were also his family, but he didn’t know where or what they were now. He was probably going to die and would never get to know his real father. The ache of loss and longing overcame him.
The journey was tiring, even with two pilots using their full strength to maintain control. Jonko was trying not to dwell on his perceived failure to prevent the Temple being destroyed. He had sensed Krys telling him to get out, but she might have been a ghost. The Ciriot had seen her and her brothers beginning to materialise, but their disintegrators had frayed the shimmering forms into strands of energy.
Keleb shared his frustration – wishing he could have been as good a warrior as Jonko and Tymos. Not only that, he could sense the injuries of the world in the planet’s aura and suffered with it. Unconsciously, he began a low voiced meditation chant to calm himself. After a while, Jonko began to echo him, to push his own negative thoughts aside.
Pyr heard them, and a trace of hope entered his mind. He wasn’t alone. He still had friends in Jonko and Keleb. And his other siblings were alive – or he would have sensed their ghostly essences as he had those of Jordan and Vila.
The aircraft came to rest on the nearest piece of flat ground to the forest. The fuel gauge had been reading empty for a few minutes. The ship would go no further. Regardless, Jonko turned off every system, except the air circulation, and even that showed a dismal reading.
“What now?” Keleb asked. “Do we stay here until the air runs out or run for the forest and hope to get in?”
“There is only a few days air left,” Jonko told him. “And no fuel to run the engines to charge the batteries to purify the air. I don’t think we have a choice – we have to trust the Guardians to preserve us.”
“Yes!” Pyr agreed, standing straight and meeting the eyes of the older Tymoreans. “We have done everything we could…we are not like the Ciriot or Kellex and his kind. ..” his voice trailed off.
“You are right, Pyr,” Keleb said. “If we were meant to die, why did we survive and the Ciriot burn up? I helped Tymos to set up these havens. I think he might sense us here and come…”
Jonko was thinking of what they would need. “Pyr, we need any portable air supplies, do you know if there are any?”
“Yes.” He trotted to the rear of the ship.
Jonko took spare weapons from a locker and began to check them. Keleb went to get the last of the long life rations they had stored on the ship before leaving the Estate as well as something to carry them in.
Pyr returned hefting two spare air cylinders and went back for more. He returned finally with two spare helmets for the armour.
When they had divided the equipment, attached the spare cylinders to the armour and checked each others armour was air tight, only courage was needed to leave the craft. If this venture failed, they only had a few days left.
Outside, the winds were fierce. They could feel them buffeting the craft, and when they emerged, they needed to hold onto safety lines that they had tied to each other. But even standing together, they were blown off their feet. Rather than try to stand again, they crawled inch by inch until they reached the shimmering barrier.
Jonko and Keleb kept Pyr between them and mustered all their knowledge and intuition about protective screens. Their attempts to enter, by merging their power with that of the screen failed. A concussion of power knocked them back. They tried again with the same result. As they rolled over to try again, they heard Pyr gasp over the suit comm. They glanced at him and then looked in the direction of his outstretched arm.
A firestorm, the like of which they had never seen before, was approaching them with such speed they could only stare at it like stunned hoppers. In a moment they reacted, reaching the ship again was not an option, the only chance they had was to crouch as close as possible to the barrier and with Pyr between them again reaching for power to preserve them.
The leading edge of the firestorm seemed to hover before them, the sky flashing and brilliant. Kryslie stood before them as their eyes recovered from a particularly brilliant flash.
“Hurry,” she urged as a seam appeared in the force screen of the forest. Her friends obeyed, noting that her unarmoured form was even then fraying back into pure energy.
The forest screen closed behind them; their ship, if it had survived, could not be seen. A wall of brilliant light passed over the forest as they collapsed to the ground in relief and to collect their thoughts. After a while, Keleb opened his armour and took a deep breath. The peace of the forest, the vibrant life and the undisturbed twitter of birds and insects brought peace to his soul. Jonko and Pyr followed his lead and each found it was easy to forget their worries.
Pragmatically, Pyr announced, “I’m hungry!”
His companions laughed – as they suddenly realized that it had been far too long since they had last eaten. Although unpractised, they had learnt how to live off the land. It was now time to practice and Pyr had a lot to learn. There was no way of knowing how long they would need to fend for themselves.