Gabrian limped over to Malgore's staff and picked it up. Esephalia stirred with a groan, and Aurelius went to help her up.
“What happened?” she asked, looking around suddenly. “Where’s Malgore? The relic . . . ?”
“Gone,” Gabrian answered, coming up beside them. “Reven pushed him through the portal, and Malgore somehow managed to take the relic with him.”
“Then we’ve truly lost. There’s no way to follow him without the relic. He’ll find what he was looking for in the past and return with it here, more unstoppable than ever.”
“How does the relic work?” Aurelius asked. “If he took the relic with him, is it still possible to open a time portal from here?”
Gabrian shook his head. “There is only one relic and it exists in all times. It is very old, and indestructible as far as we know. The same relic that existed in your time, Aurelius, exists in ours. All that changes from one time to the next is its physical location.”
“Wait, so, then how could Malgore take it with him? Isn’t it already in the past?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know it was possible to do such a thing. There could be serious consequences of uniting the relic from our time with the one from the past.”
“Then maybe we don’t have to worry,” Esephalia said. “Perhaps the relic destroyed Malgore when he reached the other side.”
“Perhaps, or perhaps there are now two relics in Aurelius’s time. In either case, the world as we know it could be changing drastically with Malgore in the past.”
Aurelius frowned. “I thought you couldn’t change time.”
“Not if your reason for going back was to change the past, but Malgore went back accidentally. So long as he doesn’t somehow alter the set of circumstances which led to Reven pushing him through the portal, he won’t ever undo his reasons for travelling back in time. If he is smart, and we must assume that he is, he will return to a point in time after he left, so as not to alter the circumstances by which he travelled back in time. Reven has unwittingly given Malgore complete freedom to change the past. What he did was . . .
unfortunate
.”
Aurelius frowned. “Hold on. This relic thing opens a portal from itself to itself, from one point in space and time to another.”
Gabrian hesitated. “Correct.”
“Always the same point in time?”
“Yes . . . unless one were to find the gates of time. Then they could change the time they are travelling to, but the Gates have been lost for untold Millennia.”
Aurelius was grinning from ear to ear.
“What is it?” Esephalia asked.
“Then we have nothing to worry about! Malgore is dead.”
Gabrian’s eyes narrowed. “How can you know this?”
“The relic in my time is located in the heart of an asteroid in deep space.”
“Deep space?” Esephalia echoed.
Aurelius gestured to the sky. “Where the stars lie.”
Gabrian’s eyes widened. “In the ether?”
“Yeah that’s it. I forgot what you people called it.”
“But that’s impossible, is not?” Gabrian asked.
Aurelius shot him a funny look. “Impossible? I make my living travelling through space . . . I mean
the ether
—or I did, before someone used the relic and sucked me into this crazy world.” Aurelius waved his hand to dismiss the baffled looks he was getting. “Anyway, without a spaceship like mine, there’s no way to safely travel through the ether. Malgore will die in minutes of reaching the other side.”
Gabrian looked unconvinced. “Do not underestimate him. He may be harder to kill than you realize.”
Aurelius gestured to the staff Gabrian was leaning on. “Doesn’t he need that stick to use magic?”
“No, that just focuses his power, making him stronger.”
“Aha . . . well, all the same, a few million miles from Meridia in an airless environment, I don’t think even magic can save him. And if it does, there’s always Reven to . . .” Aurelius trailed off with a frown, suddenly realizing that Malgore wasn’t the only one who’d just met a certain death.
Esephalia reached out and grasped Aurelius’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know he was a friend of yours.”
“He saved my life. More than once.”
“As you saved his,” Gabrian pointed out. “He may yet be a hero if what you say is true. His actions will have rid us of a great evil.”
Esephalia shot the old man a quick look. “And perhaps unleashed and even greater one.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Gabrian said.
Aurelius shook his head. “What’s she talking about?”
Gabrian and Esephalia held eachother’s gazes for a long moment before Gabrian explained: “You are stranded here now, Aurelius. Whatever consequences Malgore’s actions have had, one thing is certain, wherever the relic is now, we don’t know of it. If Malgore had somehow managed to escape with it, at least we’d know where to look. Now anyone could have it. Until it is found once more, you are in grave danger. All of us are. The Watchers will awaken.”
Esephalia grimaced. “If they’re not awake already. You needed to get back to your time quickly, and now that’s no longer possible.” Turning to Gabrian, she went on, “We must take him to the high council. They’ll know what to do.”
Gabrian met her plea with a frown. “The Elves do not have all the answers.”
“And who does? You?” she demanded.
Aurelius shook his head, and interrupted the argument with an upraised hand. “Hold on. I have an idea.”
“I’m listening,” Gabrian said.
“I know where the relic was in my time. If I’m right, and Malgore died on the other side of the portal, then chances are his remains, and the relic, are still there.”
The old wizard’s eyes widened slowly with dawning realization. “We must hurry!”
“Why?” asked a familiar voice.
They all turned toward the sound and saw Lashyla standing at the other end of the rocky chasm, looking dazed and sleepy.
* * *
They explained everything to Lashyla on their way to the
Halcyon Courier
, but she never lost her expression of wide-eyed childlike wonder. That was no doubt partly because she’d never flown before. She was gripping the armrests of the her chair in the cockpit with white knuckles as they took off, and moments later her gaze was darting nervously as she watched the clouds rushing past the viewports in gauzy white streaks.
“I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
She shook her head. “I th-think there’s a vessel like this one in Meria, but it . . .” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, to steady her frayed nerves. “It no longer works,” she said, opening her eyes once more.
Aurelius held her gaze with a frown. “Really? I didn’t see it there.”
She shook her head. “It’s sunken on the sea floor.”
“Ah . . . okay.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I told you,” Aurelius said. “We’re heading into the ether.”
She nodded slowly, as if she understood, and then resumed her anxious silence. The others weren’t any less worried. Esephalia and Gabrian hid their wonder and fear a little better, perhaps because they were used to flying Gryphons, but they were sitting far too rigidly to be at ease.
Aurelius had the ship’s nose pointed up at a steep angle, clawing for the stars. Due to the damaged inertial compensators, he had to accelerate more slowly than he would normally, taking an hour to escape the atmosphere when normally fifteen minutes would do. As they passed cloud layer after cloud layer, the sky steadily grew a darker and darker blue. When the first stars began twinkling into view, Lashyla let out a gasp.
“We’re travelling from day to night!”
Not really knowing how to answer her, Aurelius just sent her a big grin. Soon the stars were out in full force and the sky was black.
“I never knew it was possible . . .” Gabrian marvelled.
“Never say never, my wrinkly friend.”
“This is blasphemy,” Esephalia added, her voice quavering. “If the high council knew—”
“But they don’t,” Gabrian said, cutting her off sharply.
The cockpit fell into an uneasy silence as they roared out through the last wisps of atmosphere. Out of curiosity, Aurelius toggled through his rearview displays to see what the planet behind him looked like and how it had changed in the millennia since his time. When he saw the planet’s surface disappearing far below, veiled by a thick layer of clouds, his eyes widened and he felt a sickening sense of unreality sweep over him. Just to be sure, he set the computers to filter out the clouds, and suddenly he saw the world in its entirety, as it was now. It was only vaguely recognizable as Meridia—vaguely in that it was still principally green and blue, with touches of brown showing through in the drier places, but nothing else seemed familiar. The continents as he’d known them were mauled beyond recognition, reshaped and formed as though a giant had used them as his own personal sandbox. The oceans were broader. The polar ice caps all but completely gone. High mountains ringed the continent from which they'd left. It was a very different world. . . .
Aurelius switched off the displays. Whatever had happened to his world, to civilization as he had known it; that was not his concern. He would return to his time and live as though he were none the wiser. Whatever calamity had befallen Meridia had probably happened many hundreds or thousands of years after he’d been born anyway.
Aurelius began searching back through his flight logs to find the course he’d flown the day that he’d accidentally tumbled through time. It didn’t take long to pinpoint the exact spot in space where he’d disappeared. He marvelled that he’d never thought to do this sooner, to at least retrace his steps.
He set course and a few settings in the autopilot, and then settled back in his chair. “It’s going to be a few hours before we reach our destination. I could get there sooner if my ship weren’t damaged. Actually—” He rose from the chair and started aft. “I think I’ll go work on that now.” He stopped in the entrance to the cockpit and turned. All eyes were on him.
“What should
we
do?” Lashyla asked.
Aurelius shrugged. “Get to know each other?”
Lashyla frowned, her gaze finding first Gabrian, then Esephalia. “I think I’d rather go with you,” she said, and rose from her chair.
Esephalia nodded and also rose. “Myself as well.” Lashyla sent her a quick glare, which the elvish woman returned with equal ice and a very bland smile. “Move along princess, you're blocking the aisle.”
Gabrian turned back to the fore. “I’ll just stay here and enjoy the view.”
“Okay.” Aurelius beckoned to the two women. “Follow me.”
* * *
It took Aurelius less time than he’d thought it would to fix the inertial compensators and shields. They’d overloaded their capacitors by drawing too much power to compensate for the forces when he’d crashed through the time portal. It was a simple matter of finding their capacitors and splicing them in where the old ones had burnt out. The hard part was crawling through the cramped access corridors in order to find and replace the burned-out components.