As Daelen had approached Kullos’ inner sanctum, preparing to face his gravest challenge, the only thought on his mind had been that he must not fail, to save all those that he cared about. He had made virtually no sound and lowered his power signature to make a stealthy approach. Kullos would expect him to attack the way he always did. He couldn’t know that he’d been trained by an amazing mortal girl to think more clearly. Catriona had had quite the effect on him.
Further to that, he had a plan to keep her and the others out of this. When Daelen struck Kullos, he planned to do so swiftly, suddenly unleashing his power to stun him while he opened a Prismatic Sphere portal, not to StormClaw in this time frame, but the StormClaw of about an hour ago. He hadn’t used his time travel powers for years, but as Jessica would probably say, it was like riding a bike. Besides, it didn’t need to be perfect. Dreya had let it slip that the Chetsuans had been safely on Tempestria since last night, so there was a nice wide margin for error. One hour or two would make no difference. Either way, when Cat and the others tried to travel to StormClaw in the here and now, they would find the containment field had been changed to block them out. Then they would be safe.
Keeping to the shadows, creeping along the narrow corridor, Daelen had seen Kullos sitting on his throne, deep in concentration, putting together the pieces of what Daelen assumed must be his dimensional control device. It was fashioned into the shape of a sword, and it was becoming more and more complete in front of his eyes. He had no idea how he was doing it, and that wasn’t just his lack of technical knowledge talking. He had never even heard of such a thing being done before, but he had told the truth about Kullos being a brilliant engineer before he became their Greatest Shadow Champion…before he ‘gave in to chaos,’ as Dreya liked to say.
Still thinking tactically, Daelen had decided to wait a few moments. He knew Cat and the others wouldn’t leave the battlefield without first doing all they could to maximise their allies’ chances. That would take time, so once again pulling on Catriona’s training, he knew he could afford to be patient. The more complete the control device, the more stable would be the access to Heaven’s Surrender, and by inference, the more stable the weapon itself would be. He used Kullos’ own distracted state to creep carefully closer and closer.
Five more minutes, and the control device was as complete as it was ever going to be: Kullos held in his hand a fully forged sword, missing just one small detail. Like many swords of that quality, there was a socket built into the hilt, about an inch in diameter, where a jewel should fit, but it seemed Kullos didn’t have that jewel. Still, the device was complete enough that it should work just fine for his purposes.
The time to strike was now.
Daelen burst out of hiding, powered up and slammed a cannon blast into his nemesis. He managed to grab the sword by the blade and wrest it from Kullos’ grasp. It hurt like hell, even with the protection of the gloves of his combat suit, but he wasn’t going to let pain stop him. Before Kullos could recover, Daelen opened his Time portal and knocked him through it. He didn’t waste energy on closing the portal – it would close by itself in a minute. He shifted the sword to his other hand, this time holding it properly by the hilt. Through the portal, he thought he saw a familiar-looking bird diving towards the opening, but it closed too soon, and the bird was left stranded on the other side. That was it. No more interference…or so he thought.
*****
As he forced the battle closer to the centre of his facility, Kullos pulled more of his essence from where he’d left it in his pocket dimension so long ago. He didn’t need to be touching his control device to do that. Proximity was enough. He grew to five times his normal size, ripping Daelen’s base apart as he did so. In this case, size really didn’t matter, except to make him harder to miss. The real problem was that a shadow warrior’s natural state extended into extra dimensions which, in the mortal plane, were simply too small to contain their essence. That’s why they had to shed those parts in the first place. The control device was supposed to help a shadow warrior reclaim his higher dimensions up there, not bring them down here. He could rip reality apart just by being here in his true form. Until that moment, Daelen had allowed himself the faintest hope that if he could keep hold of Kullos’ control device, he wouldn’t need Heaven’s Surrender. Using that weapon required direct, physical contact, so if Kullos couldn’t use it, Daelen had hoped that his recombined self would have the power to destroy his enemy without recourse to that weapon. That hope was now dashed. There was no other way.
Before he could do it, however, now that his base was in ruins, Daelen could see a blueish glow coming from outside, shimmering like some kind of portal. Even as he fought Kullos, trading beam cannon blasts, he flew high to investigate. To his astonishment, it was indeed a portal, but far larger than any he had seen before. It looked like it could consume his entire base and its grounds, it was so big. Standing in front of this portal, apparently unawed by the power arrayed around them, were three very pissed-off-looking young women, dressed in white, black and red.
“How are you here?” he demanded. “How is this even possible?”
“We are the Guardians of Time and Magic,” they announced in unison. “You helped make this possible.”
If Jessica were there, he was sure she’d be saying, ‘Well, that’s not creepy at all!’
He supposed he should have expected those three to find a way around his powers, but the shadow warrior had others that he was sure they couldn’t counter. All he needed was an energy barrier and sources of power other than himself.
Feigning a retreat from Kullos’ continued onslaught of power, as his enemy tried to regain the control device, Daelen moved the battle closer to the remains of his portal room. The room was ripped apart, but his portals were still there, shimmering away. They were dwarfed by the one the Guardians had opened, but he had six of them, each linking with another facility on another world. As he focused, he could connect his essence to the control systems that maintained all his permanent portals and pull that power into himself.
As the three young women watched, the portals flared open. They could see the power flowing from all those worlds as dark storm clouds seemed to cover the island. They prepared to join the fight, but Daelen began to glow with that same power. Daelen used some of this energy to grow so he could match Kullos’ new size, but he kept some back to use in the space between himself and the three mortals, who found that they were trapped behind some kind of magical seal.
“I’m sorry, Cat,” he boomed, “but I must be sure that you and all those that I care for are safe! I must make sure that neither you nor anyone else will be hurt when he and I destroy one another. That means that I must do this alone!”
“No, you mustn’t!” Cat snapped, viciously. “You are not going to fight alone. I won’t allow it. Now let us in!”
Daelen ignored her, and continued, “I know you say power isn’t everything, but I hope you can now see that sometimes power is precisely what you do need. In the end, it’s the only way!
“After all this is over, any part of me that remains could be dangerous, so you’ll have to put me in Michael’s Tomb. He won’t need it anymore – he’ll be free at last!”
“But Daelen, you don’t have to die!” Catriona implored him. “We can find another way if you just listen to me and let us in!”
“There is no other way, Cat,” he insisted.
With that, the battle of the titans began anew.
“Kullos, you have taken so many lives. So many of the people of this world have died at your hands! No more. It ends here and now! I tried to stop you before, but I couldn’t stop all of it. Now I can. The time has come to pay for all the lives you have taken!”
With an almost demonic scream, Daelen fired off his beam cannon pouring more of his power, more of his essence into it than ever before.
Kullos waved his hand, deflecting the deadly beam, so it hit only his side. Instead of taking a severe injury, Kullos received a deep gash, an open wound, but nothing more. This fight was not going to be short.
As Dreya and Mandalee watched the epic battle unfold, they could see that Daelen was clearly losing. Dreya and Mandalee combined magic and physical weapons to try to break through the barrier that Daelen had formed around them, but it was futile. Dreya was running out of spells and Mandalee was running out of weapons – something neither had believed could ever happen. Together with Catriona, they had one trick left up their collective sleeves, but even with the extra help and last-minute training from their otherworldly counterparts, they couldn’t be sure of the results, so they were trying everything else first.
Cat tried to use the power of the barrier itself to feed her magic, but it wasn’t an anti-magic field, it was magic mixed with technology, and she didn’t know how to counter that by conventional magical means.
“No, Daelen!” she cried. “You’ve got to stop. Power is not the answer; you must find another way. Dear gods, it’s going to happen all over again. Daelen, please! You’re going to destroy everything! Listen to me!” she screamed, but the shadow warrior simply ignored her, assuming it to be nothing more than the distress of someone who loved him.
“Michael paid the price of death for me, so many times and for so long, but in the end, it was always going to come down to this: I always knew I’d die in my final battle.”
“That’s right, you will!” Kullos boomed, speaking for the first time. “Because I’m going to kill you and destroy this sickening world of matter, infested by these fleshy mortal creatures. This corporeal, mortal life is vile and disgusting. It’s an infestation and must be exterminated. It was never meant to be!”
“Is that you talking, Kullos, or IT?” Cat challenged him.
“What!” both shadow warriors exclaimed at once.
“Yes, Daelen! IT!” Dreya shouted. “When I told you that he’d gone over to chaos rather than darkness, I didn’t know how right I was!”
“That’s why he went off the rails in the first place!” Mandalee told him.
“‘Off the rails’?” Cat wondered, quietly, as an aside.
“Jessica expression,” she whispered back.
Cat nodded.
“Is this true?” Daelen demanded of Kullos. “Did you surrender yourself to IT?”
“It was the only way to beat the Enemy!” Kullos insisted. “It still is! How else are we to defeat one of the Creator’s elite warriors? You know I was an engineer. I tried everything, but there simply wasn’t enough power in our entire realm to do anything more than beat her back. So, I had to think outside the box, outside the cosmos, beyond reality itself!”
*****
Kullos had thought that if the Enemy were unmade, there might even be a way to undo the terrible damage she had already inflicted on the shadow realm. In his lab, he had changed the focus of his research, working in secret, not to try and fight the Enemy, but to open up a small tear in the fabric of reality. Believe it or not, gentle reader, that was easier. Existence is more fragile than one might expect, considering it has the power to contain literally everything. He finally succeeded. It was a pinprick, no more, and Kullos had enough technical skill to block IT from actually entering except on his terms.
He made a deal – IT would give him the power to build a weapon capable of unmaking their Enemy, and in return, Kullos would do something for IT.
*****
“And what’s that?” Daelen asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kullos replied. “Destroying this filthy, disgusting world and ending the stench of life that infests this whole mortal plane!”
“So, in answer to my question,” Cat concluded, “it’s both of you talking.”
“You see, Daelen?” Mandalee called out. “Kullos and IT are of one mind – that can’t be good!”
“Exactly!” Daelen agreed. “That’s why I’m doing this – to destroy him and save your world! This is my Fate: to give my life for you!”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Daelen, will you please give your ego a rest just for once?” she demanded, desperate to make him understand before it was too late. “You told me you’re not a hero, so stop acting like one! This is not all about you, it’s bigger than that! Let us in!” she screamed.
He continued to ignore her – she was just upset; she didn’t know what she was saying.
“You need to listen to her, Daelen!” Dreya commanded, adding her voice to the chorus.
Mandalee tried to get through to the shadow warrior, saying, “She’s already stopped both of us from making choices that would have ended the world. You have to let her stop you, too!”
Daelen did not respond. He’d said all he had to say. They didn’t understand, but they would in time.
Turning to the other two Guardians, Cat threw her hands up in the air and growled. “Right, that’s it. I’ve been ignored for the last time. There’s no other choice. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” they chorused.
“Stupid mortals!” Kullos roared. “He’s not going to end the world! I am!”
Too late, they realised that while they’d been trying to get through to Daelen, Kullos had been building his power. By doing it slowly, carefully, he’d been able to power right up without anybody noticing. With a sudden burst of speed, he channelled that power at Daelen. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but it stunned him enough to loosen his grip on the control device. In one move, Kullos had it in his possession.
“Thanks for the distraction, mortals – I couldn’t have done it without you!”
*****
Catriona looked up from the Chronicles and raised her staff, ignoring the searing pain in her arm and called out, “Hear me! I am Catriona Redfletching: Red Guardian of Magic, Defender of Balance, Keeper of the Keys to Time, Bearer of the Chronicles of Magias. By the authority of the Great Ancient Archmage, I command you to stop!”
Her resounding voice seemed to fill the cosmos itself and made both Kullos and Daelen pause even before the Time magic began to take effect.
At her command, with the backing of her two companions, Time itself froze, not just around the battle scene, but everywhere within Daelen’s containment field.
*****
This was how the Guardianship worked, gentle reader, how it still works: There are powers they can access individually, independently. Then there is a greater power that can be wielded through the co-operation of two. The only rule is that they must never be used against another Guardian, or the Guardianship shall be broken and can only be re-established under the terms that allowed their initial creation.
I am currently exploiting a loophole in that rule – Aunt Mandalee has not acted against the current Red and Black Guardians – I have. The White Guardian is just using her own independent powers, technically within the bounds of the Chronicles. I have Guardian-like abilities, but again, technically, I am not a Guardian, so I can act against those two, keep them locked in my bedroom, trapped in Time, and yet the Guardianship remains intact. Don’t get me wrong, I’m breaking any number of laws, but I’m not breaking the letter of the law of the Guardianship.
Anyway, as I was saying, as you might have guessed, the ultimate power of the Guardians is something that can only be done with the agreement of all Three Guardians working together, which I continue to call the ‘Power of Three’ to wind them up. The Power of Three is exponentially greater than the Power of Two, but whether that could ever really stop me, I honestly don’t know. In mock battles and simulations, they were powerful enough, but between you and me, gentle reader, I wasn’t really trying. The whole idea is moot because I would never go against Aunt Mandalee. When I first told the Guardians my idea for an Illegal Time Intervention, if she had said ‘no’, that would have been an end to it. But in her view, it sounded too much like one of my mother’s ridiculous radical plans for her to disagree. In my eyes – though not in the eyes of the law – the blessing of one of the Original Three counts more than the opposition of the other two.
Regardless, the Power of Three includes the power to Freeze Time and Manipulate Events within that Temporal Reference Field. (A technical term for move stuff about to their hearts’ content.)
*****
“Was that speech strictly necessary?” Dreya asked.
“Well, maybe not necessary as such,” Cat allowed.
“Flair for the dramatic, remember, Dreya?” Mandalee quipped.
“Of course.”
“Listen, this isn’t the time for jokes,” Cat scolded them. “We have to join the battle whether Daelen likes it or not. We’re the Guardians of Time and Magic; neither of them has the power to prevent us.”
The barrier couldn’t stop them either because it was not as constant as it appeared. It just flickered on and off so fast, you couldn’t usually see it, but the Guardians could move Time along frame by frame until they found a nanosecond when there was a gap. Then they could cross the non-existent barrier.
“Quickly,” Cat implored the others, “there isn’t much time.”
Mandalee spoke up to object to that. “Cat, if we’ve stopped time then surely there is no time, by which I mean time isn’t an issue so we can take all the time we need…if you see what I mean.” Damn, she wished she could explain these things better.
“Now you’ve both done four ‘time’s in one sentence,” Dreya grumbled. “I’m having a go next!”
“It doesn’t work like that, Mandalee.” The druidess shook her head. “Look, I don’t fully understand it yet myself; I’m acting mostly on instinct here, and I don’t have time to explain. I just know we only get one shot at this and we have to act fast. And Dreya,” she added, “I just told you this isn’t the time for jokes.”
Dreya, who seemed to have gone rather pale, shrugged. “It’s the end of the world. This is the only time I’ve got.”
“No,” Cat disputed, frowning, “it’s not the end of the world because we’re going to stop it!”
“That’s the thing,” the sorceress replied. “I think it’s a bit late for that: look.”
Cat and Mandalee followed her pointed finger, and Mandalee gasped, “Dear gods! Is that what I think it is?”
“I believe so,” Dreya replied.
What she had seen was that Kullos now had both hands full. One hand was holding his control device, while the other held something else, some other technology. None of them could positively identify the device, but within the Frozen Time field, it had flashed. Since it was pretty unlikely that Kullos had chosen this moment to take a selfie, they had to assume it was Heaven’s Surrender. Daelen, too, in the few seconds it had taken them to completely stop Time, had already begun to form a new energy barrier that must surely be the Wish. The fact that they were frozen in the moment after activation changed nothing: they had still been activated, and nothing could change that.
“Can’t we go back a few seconds? Try again?” Mandalee asked.
Dreya went further, suggesting, “We should leave them like that for eternity. Just keep Time stopped in a bubble here. Think of it: two powerful renegades contained forever; threat ended. Why risk tampering with the situation?”
“I wish it were that simple, Dreya, I really do. But apart from anything else, I don’t have the knowledge to achieve that. Time has stopped inside the bubble, but it hasn’t for the rest of the universe, and the imbalance can’t be maintained for long. Perhaps one day the magic you suggest may be possible, but here and now we have to act with what little we have and pray to any gods who will listen that it’s enough. As for going back in Time and trying again, Mandalee, don’t you think our counterparts would have done that if it were possible? I know I have ridiculous radical plans, but even I would try ‘go back and change it’ before ‘let’s make a whole new world’!”
“So, what can we do?” Mandalee pleaded.
“Don’t worry,” Cat grinned, “I have a ridiculous radical plan!”
“Oh, well that’s alright, then,” Dreya breathed, sounding much relieved.
“Absolutely!” Mandalee agreed, looking equally reassured. To Dreya, she remarked, “For a moment there, I was worried she might want to do something completely sensible.”
Dreya’s eyes widened in horror at the thought. “Then we’d really be in trouble!”