Dire Destiny of Ours (5 page)

He took out an arcphone and tapped in the information. "Anything else, sir?"

I took one last look around the room and shook my head. My heart felt unbearably heavy. Nookli chimed. I looked at my arcphone and saw a text message.

Justin, did you make it? We got away and portaled back to Queens Gate.

The message was from Shelton. I threw up a fist and whooped. "They made it!" I turned to Nightliss, hugged her, and spun her around. "Shelton and Bella are alive!"

Tears formed in her eyes. She buried her face on my shoulder and sobbed with what I knew had to be relief. I set her down and wiped at the tears forming in my eyes. "Nelson, please deactivate the portal blocker."

I tapped out a quick text to Shelton.
I knew the universe wouldn't let a jackass like you die. Nightliss and I are fine. We're about to take a portal to Seraphina. Be safe.
Truthfully, I knew I could open an omniarch portal from here and have them here in a jiffy, but having almost lost them I wasn't about to risk it on this journey. I sent the text.

"Are we ready, then?" Nightliss asked, her green eyes bloodshot from crying.

"We're ready." We stepped into the silver circle around the Alabaster Arch. I knelt and willed the circle to close. The static rush of aether filled the air. There were no controls to the arch. I simply concentrated on it and willed it to activate. I could almost sense another world an instant before the air within the arch columns began to flicker between ultraviolet, gray, and white. A klaxon bellowed as the energy within the arch built with a loud hum. The smell of ozone filled my nostrils. With an electrical crackle, a gateway split the air vertically before blinking open horizontally to reveal a blue sky and a wide plain covered in reddish grass.

I turned to Nelson. He and the other Templars flashed a synchronized salute. I gave them a thumbs up and stepped through the portal with Nightliss.

Hello, Seraphina.

Aside from red grass and blue-tinged trees, Seraphina didn't look a lot different from Eden. I willed the Alabaster Arch to deactivate. It blinked off behind me. A warm breeze rustled the tall grass surrounding the obsidian slab upon which the arch sat. I looked around for other arches but saw none. Either the builders hadn't constructed Obsidian Arches and omniarches here, or if they had, they were elsewhere. It was strange enough seeing an Alabaster Arch aboveground.

"We're on a skylet." Nightliss pointed to a bank of clouds drifting just past the end of the plain.

I walked through the grass toward the clouds. Before reaching the end of the grass, my foot found open air. I shouted. Nightliss grabbed my arm and jerked me back. Heart pounding, I took a closer look at the grass and realized it grew out from the sides of the cliff, giving the illusion I had several more feet before the edge. I dropped to my knees and looked over the precipice.

A clearing in the clouds revealed a huge water vortex swirling in a green ocean far below. The cliff face angled backward beneath us and vanished into mist.

"I don't see where the cliff enters the water."

A smile graced Nightliss's lips. "As I said, a skylet." She drew in a deep breath. "Oh, how I've missed you, Seraphina." She looked at me. "Until this moment, I didn't realize how much that was true."

I was too busy trying to understand her first statement. "Are you saying this chunk of rock is floating in the air?"

She nodded and pointed at the vortex. "There is a tremendous updraft of aether beneath us. Sometimes it creates these whirlpools, while other times it merely makes the sea appear as if it's boiling."

I looked back at the arch. It must require a great deal of aether to power. In Eden, the arches usually sat above ley lines, magical power conduits, which provided them with ample energy. Apparently, the aether vortex beneath us was the provider of aether to this arch. It might also explain why there were no other kinds of arches here.

Another very important question occurred to me. "How in the dickens are we supposed to get down from here?"

Nightliss looked around. Her eyes lit on something and she motioned me to follow her. A waist-high stone pedestal with a gray gem the size of my palm on top of it sat near the cliff edge. "This is the skyway. I hope it works." She held a finger toward the gem and zapped it with a burst of Murk. The gem glowed. As if someone had unrolled misty gray carpet, a cloudbank formed a path into the sky.

I felt my stomach lurch at the thought of stepping onto clouds with nothing but thin air between me and a vast, sucking maw in the ocean thousands of feet below. Nightliss tested the skyway with a foot. She grunted with satisfaction and rested her full weight on the clouds.

"It appears to be working." She stepped onto it all the way.

Butt cheeks clenched tight enough to crush a soda can, I gripped a handful of the red grass like a tether and gingerly placed a foot onto the cloudbank. It felt as solid as the ground beneath me. "How long does the charge in the skyway last?"

"Once activated, it cannot turn off while it has passengers," Nightliss said. "It gathers aether from the air around it for power."

"Could someone turn it off at the other end?" I imagined a cartoon version of me running in midair before plummeting a thousand feet to my doom.

She shook her head. "We can only turn it on, not off from the gems."

I just hoped there wasn't a roadrunner waiting to pull the plug the minute I stepped onto it. My other leg didn't want to join the first on the cloud. I tried to move it, but my stomach knotted. I wasn't particularly scared of heights, but looking down at such a distance while having to rely on otherworldly magic would probably make anyone think twice.

Elyssa needs me!

Just a single thought of her was enough to vanquish my hesitation, though my butt refused to unclench. I stepped onto the skyway. Several seconds passed. I didn't plunge to my death, but we didn't move either. "What now?"

"You simply will it to take you to a destination." She looked ahead. "I believe this will take us to the capitol city of Tarissa.

Take us to Tarissa!
I thought without hesitation.

Like the moving pathways at Science Academy, we commenced moving forward, even though the cloud path itself didn't seem to move at all. The breeze in my face accelerated into a stiff gust, which grew into a howling gale.

"You must have given it a very urgent command," Nightliss yelled above the noise. "I suggest you turn on the wind buffer."

Wind buffer on.

Nothing changed. I looked at her. "Um, how?"

She laughed. "I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you. You must think the words in Cyrinthian, or visualize your intent."

I'd learned to speak some Cyrinthian during my early days of Arcane tutelage. In other words, I was about as fluent as a toddler.
Mommy. Daddy. Poo-poo!
I took out Nookli and opened a translator program I'd installed long ago. It quickly provided me with the words I needed. I transmitted them with my mighty brainwaves and the ghostlike cries of the wind abruptly vanished.

"Much better," Nightliss said. "It is important you learn as much as possible before we arrive."

I moved to sit down on the skyway and a cottony puff of cloud rose to meet my posterior. It felt as plush as it looked. A backrest formed and allowed me to lean back. I laughed like a kid. "This is cool!"

Nightliss smiled and sat down. Another cloud chair met her posterior. "It is a rather nice way to travel."

I looked down with a sudden desire to see the landscape beneath us, and the cloud beneath my feet vanished. I yelped, and jerked up my feet before realizing the transparent area was still solid as ever. "I visualize my intent or command it in Cyrinthian?"

She nodded. "I believe this particular path is part of the Imperial Skyway Daelissa ordered built after she overthrew the Trivectus government. It is a little faster with better options."

Her comment made me think of something. "Does Seraphina have Obsidian Arches or omniarches?"

"There are ruins of arches scattered across this realm, but they are not organized like the ones on Eden." She touched her chin thoughtfully. "I vaguely remember there being talk of functioning arches, but that was so long ago, I can't be sure."

"It's almost like Seraphina was the first place where they built Alabaster Arches, and by the time they got around to making them on Eden, they'd refined the process and maybe invented a few new arch types."

"You are probably correct." Nightliss didn't seem all that interested in the subject.

I took in the view beneath me where the green ocean waters met the verdant land of a small island. Thick mist rose in the distance, obscuring the horizon. "Is there any way to tell how far away we are from Tarissa?" I pulled up the maps feature on my arcphone. "Nookli, where are we?"

Nookli flashed a big question mark after a moment to show it didn't know what in the hell was going on. "Justin, you are lost," my phone said with absolute certainty. "There are no Indian restaurants nearby."

I shook my head at my poor confused phone and stuck it back into a pocket.
We ain't in Kansas no more.

"I cannot say." Nightliss turned her gaze forward as mountains appeared in the mist ahead. Rather than go over them, the skyway went between them and into a wide valley where the air was clear. A sparkling river wound its way through a forest of blue and green hues. Flocks of brightly colored birds soared beneath us.

I whistled. "Beautiful."

Nightliss abruptly stood. "I remember this place." She looked at me with wonder. "This is the Ooskai Valley. My family was forced to move here during the Great Exile."

I turned back to her. "The Great Exile?"

"After my people, the Darklings, rose up to demand representation on the Trivectus, they were banished to this continent, Pjurna." She waved an arm as if to encompass the land. "Daelissa and I were very young at the time and hadn't yet discovered our affinities."

"Were your parents Darklings?" I asked.

She nodded.

"What did they do during the Seraphim War?"

Nightliss looked down. "They died long before the war."

I grimaced. "I'm sorry."

"There is nothing to be sorry about." She sat back down. "When Daelissa discovered she was a Brightling, she demanded they return her to the Brightlands—that was the term the Brightlings gave to the lands they controlled."

"Wow, she was a bitch even when she was a kid."

"She was always the difficult one." Nightliss rested her chin on one hand. "When my parents refused to send her to the Brightlands, Daelissa ran away. My parents wanted to go after her, but feared they would be imprisoned for breaking exile."

I patted her shoulder. "Your poor parents."

Nightliss blew out a breath. "They had hoped the Trivectus would grant them an exception due to Daelissa's affinity as a Brightling. They hated living here." She shuddered as if the mere thought was too unpleasant to bear. "My parents were no angels."

I snorted. "Technically, they were."

She gave me a cross look. "You understand my meaning."

"Your parents were willing to callously use Daelissa's Brightling affinity to escape exile."

She nodded. "Daelissa didn't want them going with her because she didn't want to admit she had Darkling parents."

I shook my head. "That's awful. I guess a lot of Darkling parents have to deal with that kind of garbage from their Brightling kids."

"Actually, that's not true." Nightliss gazed into the distance as we reached a towering waterfall at the end of the valley. "Two Darkling parents or two Brightling parents almost never have a child of the opposite affinity. Daelissa was one of the rare exceptions."

"What about if a Darkling and a Brightling mate?" I asked.

Her lips peeled back in horror. "That was not allowed."

I narrowed my eyes. "Hang on. Are you saying you'd never be attracted to a Brightling?"

"It simply is not the way things are, Justin." She shuddered.

I groaned. "Nightliss, I love you to death, girl, but that's gotta be the most prejudiced thing I've heard you say."