Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (21 page)

“Thanks,” I said, the clicking of my uncontrollable teeth quieting.
 

She sat down next to me.
 

“It would be nice, you know, if you could not snap at me every time I open my mouth,” I said.

She looked both hurt and surprised at my words. Was she so unaware of how her attitude had been changing?
 

“Look,” I said, “I know this is hard.“ She stared at the floor of the cave, unwilling to meet my gaze. “But I’m doing my best here, alright?”

She nodded, rolling a tiny pile of pebbles back and forth between her palms. They, too, caught the same glow of the rockfire, though their heat seemed not to bother her.
 

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that sometimes I feel so…”

“Angry?”

Her head popped up, and she seemed surprised that I shared an emotion with her.
 

“Yes,” she said. “None of this has gone the way I thought it would.”

“I know,” I said.
 

But I wasn’t the one smashing rocks to dust back on the beach.
 

She put her head on my shoulder and heaved a big sigh.
 

“So, what are we going to do now?” she asked. Almara sat silently across from us, his eyes on the stones.

“Well,” I said, “I figure if the Corentin knows where we’re going, there’s nothing we can do to change that. All we can do is keep him from knowing exactly where we are at each moment.”

She sat quietly for a couple of minutes, watching the rocks. The red and orange undulated over the surface of the stones like fire inside coal. We all stared at them, mesmerized by the glowing dance.
 

“Aster?” she said softly in her small, childish voice. “When is this going to be over?”

It killed me to hear her talk like this, both because I wanted to fix things for her, and because I wanted it to be over, myself. I was worried about Jade, more and more every day. Her behavior was becoming increasingly strange. And hostile. But I shared the same wish she did.
 

When
was
I going to make it home to Earth? I kept hoping, as these days passed by, for someone, someone who knew what they were doing, to swoop in and magically make things right. But so far, no such person had appeared. While I did feel resolved to continue the job myself, it didn’t take away the hope I had that a savior would arrive to do it for me, and soon.

I didn’t have an answer, for her or for me. I had thought that all I would need to do to set things right was find Almara. That he could make a link to send me back, and maybe he still could. But how could I want that now? The imbalance of the Fold was exaggerated by the proximity of Earth. Even if I did make it back home, what would be left of my world after long?
 

I had read that, when the first drought hit earth two decades before I was born, half the population of the planet perished in just a few years. After the rains came again, the people flocked to the fields, celebrated. Then they realized that the poison from high up in the atmosphere was falling to the ground with the rain, killing the crops. Most people congregated in the towns and, later, the big cities. Soon, only the major metropolitan areas were places people could survive. The larger cities had water treatment facilities that could handle the toxins. And, as time went on, they built giant glass towers where our food was grown.
 

Things had settled down. After a while of being consistently fed, the population fell back into the normal rhythms of life, or at least the
new
normal. Mom told me that things used to be different, that after the change in the planet’s ecosystem, the people had changed, too. Meaner, she said, and more cruel than before.
 

But I wouldn’t know. It was just normal life to me. Though, after all I had seen, I doubted that life on Earth would remain as I knew it for long. Change was coming, and unless we did something to stop it, or found someone who could, none of us would survive.

Jade fell asleep on my shoulder, her question unanswered. I looked down at the top of her blond head, white-blond like me, and wondered what lay ahead for us. And for everyone.

“You’re not Brendan.”

His voice was low, but not quite accusing, coming out of the dimness, reaching for me. It was a statement of fact.

I stared, not willing to believe that he could be finally be coming around. Until this moment, Almara had been some combination of child and pet. Always needing care. Always needing supervision. But now…

“No,” I said, “I’m not.”

“Your voice,” he said. “It’s not the same. I didn’t notice it before. You look so much like him. But then, with the blindfold…”

“Yes,” I said. “I tried to tell you, in the beginning, but you didn’t—you couldn’t believe me.”

“What is your name?”

“Aster Wood.”

“Wood.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am Brendan’s great, great grandson.”

“And Brendan?”

I hesitated, not wanting to bring him pain. But the relief I felt at no longer having to pretend to be Brendan was overwhelming. I went on.

“He died a long time ago.”

Almara sighed heavily and put his forehead down into his palms.
 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We tried to tell you before.”

“No, don’t be sorry, child. In war, casualties are to be expected.” He rubbed his temples with the pads of his thumbs, then raised his face and rested his chin on his knees. He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Who is she?” He motioned to Jade’s sleeping face.

“Your daughter.”

“Daughter.” His tone was even, unsurprised. “I don’t remember a daughter.”

“You wrote us this letter.” I dug through my pockets carefully, trying not to jostle Jade. “You left it for us in a dragon’s cave.” I passed it to him.

His eyes pored over the paper, confused.
 

“I say here that ‘she is the key.’ The key to what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We were hoping you would tell us that.”

He shook his head back and forth as he studied the letter.
 

“I don’t remember,” he said sadly.

“Do you remember anything?” I asked.
 

He raised his deep, tired eyes and stared into mine.
 

“Burning. He burns us.” His eyes grew wide and wouldn’t let mine go. He seemed determined to make me understand.

“He, you mean the Corentin?”

“At first you think you can fight it. You hold on. You keep the goal in mind.” Two tears fell silently to his cheeks as he spoke. “But in the end, there is nothing left but you and him. I just—I just want it—to stop.” He dropped his head back into his hands and rocked his body forwards and backwards on the cave floor.

“But it is stopping now. Isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, you seem better. In the beginning you would forget who I was every five minutes. But now, now you’re remembering, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to remember,” he said to the floor. “I want it to stop.”

Emotions swirled in my gut. Despair was the first. I understood. His torture at the hands of the Corentin was akin to Jade’s. And the prisoners’ beneath Stonemore. And every other person who had been touched by the evil of the one being intent on bringing chaos and misery to our little corner of the universe.

But anger also flared.
 

“You can’t give up,” I hissed. “You are Almara, one of the greatest seers of all time. It’s your job to fix this. You made the choice, just like me, and now that choice can’t be undone.”

He shook his head vigorously at my words.

“It’s too late,” I said. “People are depending on you.” Butterflies danced around in my stomach as I realized that he was listening, he was understanding. Was there still hope that he could help us? That I wouldn’t have to carry this journey alone? “
I
am depending on you. She is, too. You have to fight him again, force yourself back from wherever you’ve been, and help us fix this.”

“When I die,” he said, “I don’t want the last feeling I have before the world around me fades to black to be the burning.” He was pleading with me now. “I can’t have that be the last thing I feel.”
 

In the far reaches of my brain, a memory of death, an eternal space filled with stars, flitted to the surface.
 

“It won’t be the last thing you feel. I died once.”

He looked up.

“What?”

“It’s true,” I said. “I was gone. It was Jade who saved me. She told me my heart stopped for over a day before her magic started to work on me. I was gone, and there was no fire.”

“What was there?” he asked.
 

“Peace,” I said. I picked up a tiny rock from the cave floor and rolled it between my fingers. “It’s not your time now. You fight with us, and when the time comes for you, you’ll have peace. No burning.”

“No burning?”

I shook my head.
 

His whole body seemed to relax, and his shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted, like a man who hadn’t slept without fear for a hundred years.
 

Perhaps he hadn’t.

I sat at the mouth of the cave and watched the heavens slide across the sky for most of the night. Thoughts of my father flitted in and out of my mind, and I wondered where he was now. While it seemed unlikely, the little kid in me hoped that it was the Corentin who had made him what he was, not his own actions. Did the Corentin’s power extend as far as the tortured mind of a man back on Earth? I wrestled with the thought, unable to reconcile that possibility with what I had witnessed during my own time with him.
 

Someone was to blame. Either my father for refusing treatment for so many years. Or the Corentin for bringing this upon him. Upon me.
 

The warmth brought to my body from Jade’s rocks lingered in my bones. It joined a different kind of warmth, a fire of my own, really. Deep in my belly a knot of anger was writhing and growing.
 

This
Corentin
. Was he a man? A monster? Both? It didn’t matter. The only difference the answers to those questions made was in determining how I intended to destroy him. And I
was
going to destroy him. I was still a kid, that was true. And I didn’t know how or when I would accomplish it; maybe it would take until I was an old man like Almara before I figured these riddles out. But I would do it. Laid out in front of me like playing cards on a table, the tragedies and injustices of my life and the lives of most everybody I had met in the Fold pointed back towards him. I wanted him gone, and once he was, I would take the life he had stolen from me back.

But I wondered, why? What was the reason that this…being…had become so monstrous? I thought about the things that drove people on Earth to act in these ways. Power. Love. Wealth. These were the explanations adults would give. The words floated in my brain, but I couldn’t attach meanings to them. Was power so addictive that it would eventually make someone desire to
burn
another person from the inside out? Power was something I had not experienced much of during my life so far. In fact, I had felt completely powerless until jumping to the Fold.
 

Suddenly my body tingled with excitement as I remembered myself running through yellow grass beside giant, agile horses. And then another memory, Cadoc fading away as the smoke inside him burst out of every open pathway. And then another, the sound of a hundred iron locks releasing their bonds, and a hundred starved men walking from their cells.

I realized that I had experienced power, I just hadn’t known it when it was happening. But the experiences that gave me a feeling of power had, mostly, been born from helping another. The things that made me powerful had been from the result of doing something good.
 

Did the Corentin’s burning serve any such purpose?

Thinking about him made my whole face turn down into a snarl. No. The answer to that question was no. There was no purpose other than pure evil in what the Corentin had done to Almara and Jade. No reason that could ever be justified enough to torture and kill and destroy.
 

It had to end.
 

As the brightness in the sky began to cover over the shining of the stars, I walked back into the cave to rouse my companions.
 

They were already awake. Sitting next to each other, they both stared into the rocks in silence.

“Ready to go?” I asked.

They didn’t answer, but both of them rose to their feet and collected their things. I tied my shirt over Almara’s eyes, and, holding his hand, led him out of the cave.

We walked for a time in silence, the covering over his eyes slowing us down. After a while we came to a rough trail worn into the rock. We stopped walking, unsure of what to do.

“Should we take it?” Jade looked nervously over her shoulder. Almara stood hunched, holding onto my hand like a young child trapped somewhere terrifying.

“Yeah, I think we should,” I said through ragged breaths. “It will be easier for him.” I inclined my head towards Almara. “And I don’t see how it will make us any more exposed than we already are.” Up here on the bare mountain, with nothing but a tiny spattering of bushes from time to time, we were already too visible. Whether taking the hard path, or the one carved into the rock, if someone had eyes on this place, they would find us.

We started walking again, and Jade fell into step beside me.
 

“What are we going to do when we get there?” she asked. “We have no idea what we’ll find.”

“I know,” I said, kicking a pebble out of my path. “Erod said it was locked in the mountains. How do you lock up a book? In a cage?”

“Oh, it’s not in a cage,” Almara said from behind us..

“How do you know?” I asked.
 

“It is why our quest took so long,” he continued. “Why we could not simply come here first. We needed the champion to retrieve the book.”

“Champion?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, turning his back to us. He fiddled with the top of his shirt collar, and beneath the fabric I saw the shadow of words, tattooed onto his back.