The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities (49 page)

Alec realized that his body was mortally wounded.  He reached desperately for the last shred of ingenaire energy he could grasp, as he felt life ebbing away, and he engaged his Traveler energy
to journey
away from the courtyard, away from Michian, away from the world even.  With a last desperate heave, Alec translocated his body into the axis mundi of the energy realm.

Chapter 28
– The Great Victory

Alec lay on the floor of the axis mundi, feeling the blood seep out of him as the energy of the realm crept in.  He felt the availability of the nearby Healing power, and he let his spirit call the energy to him, willing the energy to seep away from the chamber it was contained in, trickling towards him like a tiny rivulet of spilt milk running across a kitchen floor.  He felt the steady stream of the power reach him, and he grasped it, bathing his internal wounds with the power, then healing the muscles and skin and the other damaged parts of his body.  He slowly rebuilt himself to health, then released his call upon it, and let the power return to its natural boundary.

He had to go back, h
e knew.  Andi needed him, the Aj
acii needed him, the whole world needed him to battle and beat Hellmann.

But he had just proven that it was a battle he could not win.  John Mark had been right – he could not win the battle alone.  Nor could he win it with the Ajacii as allies against Hellmann.  There was no one else he could turn to in the battle against Hellmann except Andi.

Which is what he could do, he realized with a start.  It was the plain answer, the obvious answer to the problem.  He could turn to Andi and fight with her – his soul and her soul together, not a physical battle, not at first, but a battle of spirits, fighting for control of the body Hellmann had usurped.  Alec and Andi were a unique pair of spirits, a unitary being of two spirits, forged into a single, shared awareness by their extraordinary experience in Woven.

As a single, unified spirit they could fight Hellmann as more than an equal – they could seize control of the body.

But what would they do with the defeated spirit of Hellmann once they won the physical battle?  Alec could not imagine forever trying to remain vigilant as the jailer of a hostile spirit trapped within one’s own body, fighting against possession through eternity.  Hellmann had been unable to keep Andi under control while he tried to fight Alec: how could Alec and Andi keep Hellmann permanently bottled up within themselves?

There was a place, a way to banish Hellmann, Alec realized, a desperate means that would carry risks
and pain
, but that promised the only possible permanent solution to the problem.

He was sitting up, but then he lay back down on his back.  He knew what he was about to do.  He prepared an explanation of his plan, at least the initial part, an explanation that could be distilled into a brief flash of thought, one that he could share with Andi the moment they reunited,
so that she instantly understoo
d his intention and could engage in the same battle as he, to carry out the same gambit.

Then he closed his eyes, and he flung his spirit from his body, as he had done when he fought the demon in the energy realm centuries before.  His body resided peacefully as he looked back at it for a moment, then he moved away, and into the Spirit energy realm.  He sped through the Spirit realm, and went to the portal, the portal that led back to their own physical world.  He could see the flows of energy that were trailing away, being used by the ingenairii of the world, and he recognized the darkest of the dark ones, the one that was Hellmann’s use of the energy, which the monster tapped into as his weapon for keeping Andi trapped below his own Spirit.

Alec went to the space between the worlds, the gray emptiness, then he inserted himself into Hellmann’s stream of Spirit energy, and was drawn into the giant entity.  As soon as he was within the tangled psychic entity, he broke free, feeling the wrenching discomfort and confusion he created in Hellmann’s awareness, and darted towards the bright globe he saw below him, the spiritual entity that was the core of Andi.

His spirit united with hers in an explosive union, and he released the knowledge and concept he had prepared, receiving her instant understanding and agreement to comply.  Their two energies became one, and the single entity battered against the unprepared spirit of Hellmann above and around them, grappling for dominance and freedom.

Hellmann was in the midst of an attack on the Ajacii, Alec/Andi realized, and they battled to seize control of their common body, sending Hellmann’s attack off-course, sending the giant body blundering backwards away from the cowering survivors of the Ajacii contingent, shrinking Andi’s body back to normal size as Hellmann focused all of his attention only upon the battle taking place within his possessed body.

Alec/Andi battered at Hellmann, challenging his power, and showing the greater power the two of them exercised, as they both called upon the Spirit power together and combined their energy, male and female, both great, but even greater still as they complemented and sustained each other.

Hellmann fought back, trying to both overwhelm them and flee from them.  The Andi portion of their consciousness grabbed hold of Hellmann and flailed at him, knocking him about as he began to panic.  Alec engaged his Traveler energy, and took their single body to the one place where he prayed he could permanently banish Hellmann from the world.

They arrived in John Mark’s cave, the far off portal of holy power.  They went to the chamber where the power was fearful, when Alec had seen the greatest and worst of holy energy.

Andi’s body, controlled by Alec, containing Hellmann, Alec and Andi, united as they fought against Hellmann, had come to the crypt where the body of the undead Jesus rested on a bier.  Under Alec’s tenuous control, Andi’s body staggered over to the stone casket that held the undead-and-unliving body, its unusual, incomprehensible power emanating and obvious.

“No!” Hellmann roared, as he realized the potential banishment that existed in that chamber.

Alec drove the body over to the casket, and extended Andi’s hand toward the body within, then Alec surprised Andi and Hellmann both, by disengaging his unity with Andi and throwing himself at Hellmann’s greater spirit, taking the unprepared Hellmann with him as he abandoned Andi, abandoned the body, and abandoned the world to carry Hellmann with him on a journey through Christ’s body to Hell.

Alec, No!
Andi cried as he wrenched away from her, and a lingering tentacle of love between them stretched out into nothingness as the gap between them became a gap between worlds.

And then Alec and Hellmann were falling, plummeting into a nether region of pain and hatred and self-loathing.  The dimension of Hell began to pull their two souls apart, apart from each other, as well as shredding each of their individual spirits.  Alec felt the beginning of the end of Hellmann, as the ego and the power and the self-satisfied, self-serving determination began to shred into disparate elements, each warping away to its own part of the hatred and self-loathing that was the whole of Hell.  Hellmann was dying, Alec felt satisfied to know.

But Alec was feeling his own agonizing running of the gauntlet among the denizens and elements of pain in Hell, and he clung with all his might to a core of faith in God and Jesus.  Only Jesus, he believed, could rescue and deliver him from the unending agony of Hell.  He felt their anger and their rejection of the very thought of Christ, and he felt the last particles of Hellmann’s identity dissolve in the face of Alec’s call to the greater God

There was a light reaching down to him, the light of Jesus, he recognized, extended to save him, just as it had before. 
Thank you, my Savior,
he said, and he felt the fiery-cold space that Hell created around him as it tried to isolate his sacred faith from contaminating its pure absence of God.  The light was pulling, breaching Hell’s gates, its space, its isolation of Alec, then it was taking him from the pain and the pressure and the awful conditions. 
Thank you
, Alec thought again, and then he neither knew nor remembered anything else.

Chapter 29 – The Last Chapter

Alec awoke on the stony floor, lying in his own body.  Andi sat beside him, serene, her legs crossed as she sat on the floor and looked at him with peace and tranquility shining from her gently smiling face.

“Is this real?” Alec asked.

“This is real.  It’s more real than anything else in the world we know,” Andi replied, taking his hand in hers.

“You understood the message, and you did the right thing,” John Mark’s voice said behind him.  “
It took you a little longer than
it should have, but you figured it out.”

Alec turned to look at John Mark.   “Couldn’t you have just told me what to do in the first place, and saved all that trouble?”

“You know how prophecy works Alec,” John Mark replied.  “I was as direct as I could be.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Andi said, “because you won!  We won!  You pulled a little stunt you didn’t tell me about there at the end, but it all worked out Alec!  The world is free of Hellmann forever, isn’t it John Mark?” she squeezed Alec’s hand as she asked the question.

“Hellmann is no more, and a painful age of the world is avoided before it began,” John Mark said with a calm smile, circling around to squat beside the two visitors to his cave.  “And you two have been the agents of God that made it happen.”

“What happens now?” Alec asked.

“What do you want to happen?  There are virtually no limits for you two, other than the limits you impose on yourselves,” John Mark replied.  “And because you have the moral compass to limit yourselves, the world will be safe.”

“How did my body get here?” Alec asked suddenly, realizing that he had left it in the axis mundi.

“I thought the least I could do was to retrieve it for you and make it available for your return,” John Mark answered.  “Consider it my small favor.”

“And still, I would like to know, what do we do now?” Andi asked John Mark.

“I would suggest you pick a home, and go there to get ready to raise a family.  You’ve got a start already, you know,” John Mark answered.  “And live the life you want to.”

“Andi,” Alec suddenly rolled over to face her, kneeling.  “Will you marry me?  Or since you’re from the Avonellene Empire, will you ask me to marry you?”

She grinned at him.  “Before I make a big decision like that, I need to know what your prospects are.  How will you support me and our future family?”

“I think we’ll find some line of business,” Alec answered with a grin.  He stood up and held his hand down to Andi, helping her up.  “Maybe we could go into the travel guide business, leading people on journeys across the entire world!”

“Oh?  Do you plan to go see the rest of the world?” John Mark asked, as Alec extended a hand and helped the saint to stand up as well.

“The rest?  What else is there?  We’ve been across the entire land, from east to west,” Alec protested.

“That’s true.  You have seen most of the interesting features of this continent,” John Mark agreed.

Alec looked at him with a contemplative twinkle in his eye, then shook his head.  “We need to go set Oyster Bay free, and re-establish the independence of the Dominion.  We need to put someone in charge of Michian, and we need to end their pointless war against the lacertii.

“And we’ve got that family to raise,” he looked at Andi tenderly.  “If we want to get married and have a comfortable castle to raise the kids in, we better get going.”  They walked to the door and looked out at the unending staircase that rose up out of sight.

“Thank you, John Mark.  You’ve made a great life possible,” Andi said.

“No, thank you.  The two of you have made a great story possible and brought it to a happy ending.

“Farewell.”

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