"Thank you," I told her. "We'll take it from here."
I jogged over to the golems and spoke with the closest one. "Are you the help Fjoeruss promised?"
One in the center of the front row stepped forward and spoke in a monotone voice. "We embody the power you seek, but we must touch the barrier for two minutes to bring it down. Once down, you will have ten minutes before it is restored."
"How do I command you?" I asked.
"Verbally," the golem replied. "For further help, please say 'instructions'."
"Instructions," I said.
"These golems are programmed to accept a wide range of verbal commands," it said in a lecturing tone. "The command 'move' plus a direction will tell the golems to move in a certain direction. The command 'attack' will instruct the golems to attack the shield. Manufacturer's warning: These golems are not enhanced for other forms of combat and will break if used in such a way." It stopped speaking and stepped back into formation.
"Twenty golems," Elyssa said. "I hope that's enough."
"Can you believe he put a warning label on these things? I said. "You'd think he was afraid I'd sue if they didn't work as advertised."
"I'm sure it amused Fjoeruss," Elyssa said. "We need to inform my father about our mission before we go." She checked the time. Only fifteen minutes had passed, but that might be the difference between life and death if things went wrong in the Glimmer.
We took the levitator down to the war room and found Thomas still poring over data with Cinder.
"It appears Fjoeruss sent us help," Cinder said.
I waved away further explanation. "Yeah, I saw the golems. Cora agreed to help with the Mzodi fleet."
Thomas raised an eyebrow. "I sense a 'but' in there somewhere."
"We promised Cora we'd to go to the Glimmer and deliver a package to Evadora," Elyssa said. "She requested we do it before embarking on war."
"It appears with Fjoeruss's golems we have the final pieces of the puzzle in place," Thomas said. "If they take down the barrier, we can do the rest."
"Cinder knows how to use the golems," I said. "Just in case you need to move them before then."
"We should be back by the time the Mzodi fleet arrives," Elyssa said. "If we're not, you need to go without us."
The commander nodded. "I know." He strode across the room and shook my hand. "Good luck." He turned to Elyssa, embraced her, and planted a kiss on her forehead. "I'll see you soon."
She smiled, eyes growing misty. "I'll see you soon, Dad."
"If you see my parents, please let them know," I said.
"I believe they went with Kassallandra to meet with other Daemos leaders," Thomas said. "There appears to be some fracturing among the houses."
"As usual," I muttered. "Is it Yuuki this time, or Godric?"
"Both," Thomas said. "Your father and Kassallandra can handle the problem."
"I hope so." Dealing with Daemos politics was about as much fun as smashing my balls with a ballpeen hammer. I took Elyssa's hand. "Let's git 'er done."
She chuckled. "With such a commanding redneck tone in your voice, how could I refuse?"
We went back up to the hangar bay and requested a portal leading to the Fairy Gardens behind Arcane University. That earned us a puzzled look from the portal coordinator, but she obliged without question. The portal opened in front of Colossus Stadium since that was the closest image she had on her arcphone, but it was good enough.
The portal winked away after we stepped through it, leaving us before the massive gates leading inside the stadium. The gates hung open, displaying the sorry state of the field inside. Cracked mud and blasted boulders, the remains of stone goliath golems, littered the arena. I resisted the urge to walk inside and revisit a place I hadn't seen since the latter days of the war. It was one more nagging item on a long checklist that needed repairs, but it was low on our priorities.
Elyssa and I headed left down the wide walkway, its surface cracked where the massive tragon had tromped on its way to help us destroy the aforementioned golems. Even the outside of the arena was pocked with black marks that looked like burnt blood.
The walkway ended at a black iron fence which, in turn, led to a gate. We went inside the gate and headed down a path that led through a thick forest and eventually to a burnt-out mansion Shelton had destroyed during a flight with a shape-shifter named Mr. Bigglesworth. We stopped short of the forest and detoured toward the pond just outside the forest. I expected the Lady of the Pond to leap up from the water and ask us our business, but either she was on vacation, or she didn't care I was about to violate her watery home.
"I hope I remember all of Cora's instructions." I took the pebble from my pocket and gripped Elyssa's hand. "Ready?"
She looked uncertainly at the water. "I'm going to be really mad if this doesn't work."
"I doubt Cora would punk us." I spoke the magic words and rubbed the stone. "As above, so below." We jumped into the water.
The surface rushed to meet us and swallowed us whole without a splash, without a sound. For an instant there was a void. My guts seemed to turn themselves inside out and I felt the urge to puke, but it passed so quickly, it barely had time to register. Open air hit me, followed shortly thereafter by the ground.
Elyssa landed lightly on her feet. I stumbled forward and caught myself with one hand.
I stood and examined myself. Everything seemed to be in place, but I felt disconnected from reality, as if I'd fallen down the rabbit hole.
Elyssa turned in a circle. "Looks the same."
The world rippled like water and I staggered, my senses thrown off balance. "Yeah, not the same." After a moment, my equilibrium returned and everything seemed hunky-dory. We walked to the edge of the forest. Looking into the darkness, I felt a terrible foreboding.
"Scary," Elyssa said. "This reflected world is creepy as hell."
I gulped. "Good thing I have the cure for a sense of impending doom."
She sidled closer to me. "What's that?"
"Just follow my lead." I took Elyssa's hand and started skipping through the forest. "A-questing we will go, a-questing we will go, hi-ho the merry-o a-questing we will go."
Elyssa joined me for the second round of singing and we burst into laughter when we reached the other side.
"It worked," Elyssa said. "I'm not nearly as scared as I was before."
"Skipping and singing usually works," I said. "It also confuses the monsters lurking in the dark."
The blackened ruins of the grand mansion spread out before us and some of my levity faded. Shelton had demolished half the structure with a huge flaming meteor in his futile attempts to kill the Flark, Mr. Bigglesworth. I still remembered it like it was yesterday.
"We should hurry," Elyssa said. "Remember what Cora told us about the reflections."
Cora had warned us about the soulless denizens of this world—reflections of ourselves who, at this very moment, were racing to catch us and steal our souls. I shivered and jogged around the back of the mansion. Behind a stand of trees, we found the crack in the world. I'd had my fill of crawling through dark tunnels during the terrifying journey into the bowels of El Dorado, but it seemed dark tunnels hadn't had their fill of me.
Elyssa and I dropped to hands and knees and crawled inside, our way lit by a small orb of light I channeled. Once we reached the end of the tunnel, my stomach completely abandoned me, dropping like a rock at the sight of the rift. Cora's description hadn't done it justice.
"Oh god," Elyssa said, and pressed her back against the tunnel wall.
I got down on my hands and knees and peered down into the bottomless expanse of stars. In addition to being bottomless, it was also topless and sideless. The only hint that I wasn't about to commit my body to the wastes of outer space was the crack in the stars about a hundred yards across from us.
"Cora, if you ever wanted to prank us, now is not the time," I muttered, and ran my hand out into the void and found something solid but invisible. "There's a bridge." I couldn't hide the relief in my voice.
Pale-faced and ashen, Elyssa reached out a hand and felt it too. "I think I'm going to be sick."
I gripped her hand. "I've never seen you so scared."
Her violet eyes grew large. "Falling through an endless void, wasting away and helpless to save yourself—doesn't the thought terrify you?"
My gorge rose at the thought. "Why did you have to tell me that? No I'm going to have nightmares."
Elyssa jerked. "We have to go. Our reflections will catch us if we don't hurry."
Faced with such terrors as this void, I'd almost forgotten about the other horrors somewhere out in this reflected world rushing to catch us and steal parts of our souls.
I took Elyssa's hand and we stood. "One, two, three, go!"
We ran. The invisible bridge kept us from a fate worse than death, and brought us safely to the other side. We entered the crack there and crawled through the tunnel. Emerging on the other side, we found a world of crooked black trees and purple grass that writhed like snakes as we walked through it.
The looking pool, a black foreboding pond, waited in the middle of this surreal scene. Wasting no time, I rubbed the pebble and reversed the previous incantation. "So below, as above."
We jumped.
Another flip-flop of my innards, my entire body seemed to turn inside out. We sailed from the pond and landed heavily on the other side. I rolled to my feet and staggered in a semi-circle as my ear canals struggled to find balance. Elyssa grimaced and grabbed a nearby tree for support.
I stumbled on something hidden in the tall purple grass and fell on my ass. The thick scaly blades felt waxy to the touch. As I pushed to my feet, another sight stopped the breath in my throat. A huge green moon hung suspended above a mountain shaped like a crooked witch's hat. Sparkling like jewels on a necklace, the other realms encircled the green hunk of rock Cora called the anchor stone.
White clouds swirled in blue skies on one world, while another glowed sullen red with streaks of black. Zooming my vision on the spectacle, I saw a desert realm, one that looked like a giant snowball, and one that was black as night. Hovering above the moon like a specter was a swirling darkness that could only be one thing.
"The Abyss," I murmured.
Elyssa followed my gaze. "Have you ever felt insignificant as a speck of sand?"
"Right now." My throat felt dry, senses numb. "Is this real?"
"Yeah." Elyssa blinked and shook her head. "We need to head to the Soul Tree." She took out her arcphone and studied the directions Cora had given us.
I climbed up a nearby tree, careful of the thorns and spikes on its bark and looked over a forest of similar trees. Though I wasn't high enough to get a true view of the land, our target was clearly visible on the horizon, a massive umbrella of white branches spreading like the protective arms of a mother over her children.
The tree looked miles away from the crooked mountain. "If the queen lives in the mountain, why would Evadora be way over at that tree? How could a little girl survive the wild?"
"Nature is her domain," Elyssa said. She motioned me down. "Let's get moving."
I dropped to the ground and we headed past a large glowing mushroom and onto a narrow trail between the trees, their twisted branches forming a dark tunnel lit only in spots by glowing fungi. The glow only made the shadowy forest look even creepier, so I channeled another sphere of light and sent it hovering over our heads. "I still think a flying broom would have been primo for this mission."
"Cora said it would expose us to the queen's eyes," Elyssa said. "The last thing I want to worry about is the plants rising up against us."
"Yeah, but if the queen controls nature, wouldn't every animal around here be spying on us?" The deeper we went into the forest, the darker it seemed, so I sent my light ball floating higher to illuminate more of the path ahead.
The branches above us burst into a cacophony of squeaks and a flurry of wings. I screamed at the top of my lungs and threw up a shield around us. My screamed trickled off to a croak when I realized a flock of birds was the source of my terror. One of them landed on the shield and looked down at us with curious feline eyes. Webbed black wings like those of bats flapped as it gained balance, but its body resembled a bird, and its head, that of a house cat.
"I don't know what frightened me more—you or the bird things," Elyssa said.
I peered closer at the little monster. "Freaky." I lowered the shield and the bird-cat—did that make it a bat or a card?—flew away to join the rest of the flock circling overhead. "I hope those aren't the minions Cora warned us about."
"They're kind of like flying cats," Elyssa said. "I think they're cute."
"Cute as a felix?" I asked.
"There's cute, and then there's beautiful." Elyssa shook her head. "Knowing that felix was Kaelissa somehow cheapens the experience."
I noticed something white reflecting from beneath the trees and sent the light ball questing deeper off the path. It revealed a mound of bones several feet tall. Some of the skulls might have come from small horses. I sucked a breath between my teeth. "Holy farting cats. I think those things are carnivorous."
"Duh, they're cats," Elyssa said, though she seemed a bit more wary all of a sudden. "If they eat such large prey, maybe they wouldn't be good pets."
I imagined them swarming over an animal like piranha, stripping flesh away like a sandblaster. "Let's hope they don't eat people."
"I say we pick up the pace," Elyssa said, looking up at the swarm. "Just in case."
Our walk turned to a jog over the rutted uneven ground, spiky limbs trying to snag our Nightingale armor as we passed by. The armor responded as it would to a knife, hardening to deflect the thorns.
When we reached the edge of the forest, the bent bough of a giant tree arched off the edge of a cliff, bridging the gap between our side and the other. But when I stepped closer to the edge, my knees went weak as jelly. Cora had told us about this shattered world. She'd warned us about the treacherous land. Nothing could prepare us as we gazed over the cliff and into the infinite vastness of space.