Transcending the Legacy (32 page)

The heavy lethargic curtain the hybrid
Dweller has thrown over me is fading suddenly. I didn’t want to run from her, but I had to before it attacked. I felt its temperament stirring inside, about to blow and I needed to get out of there. I ran as fast as I could away from all of them for their own safety.

Through the clearing fog in my head, I hear Xander’s voice like a beacon of light.
“C’mon, Nate. Fight it, cousin.”

The hybrid
Dweller’s hold on my mind loosens suddenly allowing my thoughts to break free. What has happened to make it weaken? Not wanting to think too long on it and chance it’s return with vengeance, I tell Xander my thoughts.
“I won’t let it take her, Xander. If it means my death, so be it.”

I mean e
very word. If I have to hold this hybrid Dweller in me to keep her safe, I will die with it before I let it loose into this world again. Suddenly, I feel the strength of Xander’s presence expand as he sends me another thought.
“Nate, you don’t need to runaway. Ira is here with me. We won’t let the hybrid Dweller take Jes or you.”

He is too close, I can feel him right on me.
I get up from the cavity I am hunkered down in and dart across the main passage into another side cavity. Still free of the hybrid Dweller I think,
“I can’t let it take her.”

Xander’s forceful energy comes at me through his thoughts loud and clear.

“Nate! It won’t take her! None of us will let it take her! I won’t let it take either of you! I promised! I won’t break that promise
, cousin!”

Suddenly, a series of images saturate
my mind; Jesca stepping down into an opening in the earth, holding onto a ladder. As she steps away from the ladder, a fire pit rises in the middle of the room. I remember this room, this kiva from Sebastian, Xander, and Jesca talking about their visions.

Oh no! She is about to perform the ritual! My panic is
suddenly quelled by a constricting haze settling back over me. Son of a bitch! The hybrid used me to see where she was. I can’t let him take back over! If he does, he will attack her through me! I think of Sam, fighting for control of his body and soul beyond the veil. I remember him having Jesca in a strangle hold, a dagger against her throat. He stopped it. He surfaced the heavy fog of Michael’s evil soul and he stopped the control. I can surface it too. I send my thought to Xander,
“I won’t either.”

My feet touch down on the hard ground in the kiva. With the lanterns our only light, the sacred room is cold, dim,
and damp. I hear the wind howling above me and the rolling thunder sounds oddly closer.

The warm smell orange glow of kindling wood animates the murals on the kiva’s walls.
Luke is stoking the beginnings of fire in the middle of the kiva as Ms. Olivia lays a thick woven blanket down on the ground in front of the fire pit. I notice one has already been placed on the other side. I walk over to the vacant blanket and sit down, facing the fire.

“You can hear the outside world in here
because of the ventilation hatch,” says Ms. Olivia as she sits on her own blanket. She continues explaining, “It is above the opening into the kiva.”

“What is it for?” I ask.

Ms. Olivia takes hold of a tightly wrapped bundle of hay-like leaves and branches and places the tip over the growing fire in the pit. “For the spirit to rise,” she says.

Luke rises from the center of the kiva and walks back into the shadows.

I hear Ms. Olivia soft whispers as she hits the bundle of branches. She opens her eyes and begins waving the smoking bunch of branches into the air. She walks around the now blossomed fire to me. She begins waving the tightly woven grass and leaves in front of my face. “Rub your hands in the smoke,” she says placing the sage and cedar under my hands, letting the smoke rise into them as I rub them together.

Olivia whispers, “Sage and Cedar. Both burned together will keep evil spirits from entering this sacred place and allow purification of your soul.”

As I breathe in the fume, I feel my body lighten and my mind become heavy. Ms. Olivia turns and leaves me, going back to her side of the fiery pit, and sits on her blanket.

Her face glows beyond the flicking flames of the fire, her whispering ritual becoming a voluminous chant now.
I don’t understand the chants; they are spoken in her native language. Even though the meaning of the words is lost with me, their mystical dominance in this room takes precedence over me quickly. Seemingly hypnotized, I stare beyond the fire at Ms. Olivia. Her features suddenly transform into the amber eyed shaman from my vision.

*
* *

The shaman’s lips move as the voice of Ms. Olivia escapes them. Bit, by bit, the voice deepens until it is only the shaman’s tone leading the ritual. This isn’t real. I’m in the kiva. I tell myself to rise, but I’m motionless, in a vision. I see an open palm moving toward me out of the corner of my eye. It is the copper medal the shaman passed to Onawah’s mother in my last vision. I look up into the woman’s eyes as my hand extends to collect the medal. She tries to holding back the tears rimming her eyes as she places the medal in my palm. As it touches my skin, it instantly warms my hand, the tendrils of heat ribboning through the veins of my arm, my chest, my core follows quickly. All of a sudden, the medal begins to glow brightly, reflecting native symbols along the native symbols along the rim.

The growing fieriness running along my skin seems to rise in one spot; just above my chest, I look down and see the Copula resting just below my neck gleams with an afterglow that warms me in unison with the growing warmth of the ancient native medal in my hand.
Feeling overcome by the building heat stirring within me, my eyes close.

*
* *

When I open them, the glowing medal in my palm is gone. I look up in the direction I had seen Onawah’s mother and she is gone.

I look beyond the quivering blaze and see the warm golden glow the flame casts
in Ms. Olivia’s eyes. Her voice rises forming a singsong chant and her eyes remain fixed on me in heavy concentration.

The
heated Copula suddenly cools to a soothing warmth and a tingling vibration just below my skin. Just like the sensation of the medal in Onawah’s hand, I feel tendrils of tinkling heat fissure and diffuse into my arms, under my chin, onto my face, spreading into my abdomen and along my folded legs.

The flames suddenly rise, causing me to blink.

*
*  *

The shaman is sitting across from me again chanting faster. The brothers, the gentlemen, the men Onawah loves flash in my mind along with the shaman pulling me toward the mounds, the kiva. My mind releases the images as I feel my body lighten like it had in the vision before. Onawah looks down suddenly. Is she feeling the same sensation I do?

I am still sitting on the floor, unmoved,
but the lightening feeling continues. I notice Onawah’s mother backing away from me, covering her mouth with her hands. She is frightened. What does she see?

The shaman’s crooning intensifies, filling each syllable with his passion as a messenger for Onawah.
The drumbeat echoes through the sacred room as I feel myself continue to disconnect from the ground.

Unexpectedly, I feel the same sensation of myself peeling away from Onawah’s body.
I leave the ground and rise up, levitating above the entire kiva, looking down at the scene of the sacred ritual taking place. I look at Onawah’s sitting form, her head tilted up and the amber glow of the medal in her palm beams rays of light in every direction, covering the entire kiva in light. Onawah’s mother falls to her knees and stares wide eyed and mouth gaping in fright.

The sound of commotion and yelling comes from the opening above us. I look through the opening and see his face, the dark
haired brother struggling to descend the kiva’s ladder.

I look back down at Onawah, her olive eyes are fixed upward fastened on something beyond our world.
Onawah does not flinch as the dark haired soldier yells her name, but her mother does. She rises quickly and looks up into the gape. She waves her hands and shakes her head as she hisses her native words at him. I watch her turn and pace along the far end of the kiva’s walls tears streaming down her face and holding her shaking hands to her trembling lips. Abruptly, someone drops from the recess above. I see the familiar uniform of the soldiers in the vision, but I don’t see anything else because two native guards drop down on him and hold him down to the ground. Watching this soldier struggle to break free, I feel my own heart break sensing that it is has to be one of the brothers attempting to save Onawah from the legacy.

Rapidly the wildfire from the pit beneath me rises high, blinding my view of the soldier struggling to break free from the natives. Instinctively I shield my eyes from the heated assault as the brother’s yell swells, “Onawah!”

*
* *

“Jesca!”

Hearing the call of my name sends a spike of adrenaline through me and I’m snatched from the mystical trance I am under. I look around me and see that
I am still above the flames of the fiery pit just as I was in the vision. Instead of looking down at Onawah, I’m looking at myself kneeling in front of the fire, my eyes wide and fixed upward into the heavens. I see the struggle to my left. Nate! He is trying to break free from Luke’s hold. In an instant, my hovering spirit is siphoned back into my body.

He can’t do this! It is my purpose, my choice! Hearing Nate and Luke’s struggle, I force my eyes open to see Nate strike Luke across the face. Luke goes down instantly knocked unconscious by the blow. My eyes feel so heavy and my body feels weak. I try to keep my sight on Nate, but everything goes dark as my eyes shut me out from the world, from Nate.

It is Nate’s electrifying touch on my shoulder that gives me some strength
to open my eyes again.

“Nate, no,” I mumble lazily.
My words come out muffled as I try to pull farther from the spellbound coma I’m under, but I can only pull so far. The disconnect, it is already happening.

Ms. Olivia’s
urgent chanting battles to overpower Nate’s panicked, quick words.

“Jesca. I don’t have much time! The hybrid
Dweller!” He groans loudly like he is struggling with the being within him now.

I try to formulate more words, but they come out
slurred. “Let me go, Nate. This is my…”

I feel both of Nate’s hand take
hold of my shoulders. He pulls me to him and wraps his arms around me. His hold sends a familiar spike of warmth and healing course through me.

His words are breathless as he tells me, “The moment I met you, I knew I had to protect you, love you.”

“You have,” I whisper raggedly.

I feel my body slowly waking and I lift my arms from my side to try and push him away. “I have to do this. It is my choice,” I say with more force.

Nate breathes in shakily as he rests his lips next to my ear. “What if it has never been your choice, Jesca?”

Those words strike a chord in my mind.

He said those words during our fight by the truck when the hybrid
Dweller tried to attack me. Had he planned this since that moment?”

Nate continues, “Just as the legacy runs through your blood, it runs through mine.”

The brothers. Oh my God, she was torn between them. She left to fulfill the legacy and one sacrificed himself for her.

As the imaginings of Nate and Xander’s relation to the two brothers solidifies in my mind, my heart clefts in two.
I try and use all of my gained strength from Nate’s received energy to push him away, but he only embraces me tighter.

His voice cracks and draws in a breath as he says,
“I choose you, Jesca. I choose to set you free, to live, to fight for our world…to love. Love Xander with your whole heart, Jes. Do you hear me?”

I can’t keep my heart from breaking and my soul from crying out to him. I wrap my arms around him and tell him,
“I love you, Nate.”

“I love you
, Jes.” The words slip from his lips carried by his final breath and his body leans into me, weighted down with the sacrifice he has made.

I hold him to me and cry, as the earth beneath us begins to tremble
, I open my eyes. I see particles of dirt and dust rising from the ground, hovering all around the kiva. The dirt and dust begins to collect and spin around Nate and I. Holding him to me tightly, I watch in fascination as a radiant glow ascends from us through the shaft of the kiva, out into our world.

* * *

I follow the illuminated, spirit-filled dust as it shoots from the mound into the sky, like a rocket aimed directly at the three stars in my visions, Orion’s belt. As soon as it strikes, a ripple of amber energy spreads across the sky in every direction. In the ripple, small orbs of light begin to descend on the earth around me.

I see the guardians fighting; Siobhan, Nick, Elisha, Jake, Corinna, and Sam are battling
the Dwellers attack side by side. Ira, Cale, Lathan, and Seth are battling the birdlike Dwellers and the waves and waves of human Dwellers trying to attack the mound. Just as Ira climbs on top of a wounded beast, one of the orbs of light comes to rest on the creature’s body, quickly absorbing into the torso.

Ira pulls back, frozen and in awe of what he is witnessing.
He slides from the mutant hawk and watches what happens next. Suddenly, a ripple course over the beast’s body. Ira slides from the mutant’s body. The birdlike creature blinks its sharpened eyes, shifting from the onyx darkness of the Dweller to its true honey brown color. Rapidly, it rolls over onto its talons, begins to flap its wings then rises, taking flight.

The orbs continue to shower on all of
the Dwellers occupying creatures and humans. As quickly as they free the vessels, they rise up toward the three stars of Orion’s Belt.

Seth, Cale, and Lathan gather around Ira as the guardians stop fighting
and look on at the orbs mission, to cleanse our world and bring about the rebirth.

*
* *

A startling burst of sound jolts my body, waking me from my vision and funneling me back into the kiva.

My eyes
are still closed as I rock Nate in my arms. I know his presence the moment he touches my shoulder.

Xander.

I hear him breathing through the sob growing within him as he wraps his arms around me. I see his hands rest on Nate’s back, encircling him too. His ragged sobs grow and he holds both of us in his arms.

I’m not sure how long we cry and hold onto each other. Time was standing still for us as we held on.
At some point, someone wrapped a blanket around the three of us.

After a while,
the guardians enter the kiva, circled around us, close their eyes, and laid their silent thoughts upon us. When they come to take Nate from Xander’s and my arms, I sit and watch the embers of the fire pit expire, Xander remains by my side.

I am the first to break the silence between Xander and I. “He wanted us to live.”

I look over at him just as he nods and stares off into the dulling embers.
I uncross my legs and tuck them under me, rising unsteadily, but standing on my own two feet. I look down at Xander, still staring off beyond the light smoke still rising from the pit. I stretch my arm out and open my hand to him. He looks up at me, eyes red and swollen. Slowly he raises his hand to meet mine and I help him rise from the kiva floor. We climb from the sacred place and walk along the fallen rocks in the main tunnel. Dim sunlight shines through the opening at the far end of the passage; entrance back into the world.

As Xander and I exit the tunnel side by side, the heavy clouds above part just enough to send multiple rays of amber sunlight upon the valley in the center of the mounds.
Humans and creatures are peppering the valley alive and free to live in our world with no fear of capture.

I feel Xander’s hand take hold of mine as
we watch our world’s new cycle begin.