The Brothers Locke, page 24
Dana glared at both Von Strauss and Bando. It was her last act of defiance. Whatever would happen after this was on their heads, no matter what. Gently, she placed her left hand on the smooth surface of the monolith. It burned and cooled her palm simultaneously. Then, a sudden calm. It felt as if it was no longer solid, but thin like a mist, encasing her hand with some unseen force, down through her arm. She retracted suddenly, the sensation frightening.
“Go on! Open it!” Bando barked again.
Dana took a minute to compose herself. Was it true, she thought? Voices were now speaking from somewhere. What were these words she was hearing in her mind? They made no sense, yet she understood them. They were not of any language she had ever heard, but their meaning clung to her soul.
And then, she smiled.
“Fine. You get your wish, Bando.”
She inserted the Key, and without hesitation, turned it clockwise. Upon doing so, the Spire shuddered. A shock wave went through the ground, flowing through to the valley beyond. The intricate veins of the earth lit up, their designs and connections pushing against the surface as if they wanted to break free and spread through the air.
“Oh no,” Mouth muttered to himself.
“Brothers,” Echo cried out.
The waves of unseen energy continued to flow from the base of the Spire and out through the valley. They suddenly settled down to a low hum again, and then silent. Bando and Von Strauss waited for more, but nothing followed.
“There must be more,” Bando said.
As if on cue, Bando got his wish. Thunder rolled in the mixed sky above. Night and day swirled together, twisting their opposing facades overhead as the thunder claps grew louder with each moment. The Spire released its own moan, a sickly humanoid sound.
The lock turned the Key back again, releasing its hold on it and dropping it to the platform below. The slot unfolded, growing in size with each perfectly shaped circle that sprouted from the origin. A brilliant, yellow-white light poured from inside, but it didn’t blind them, just bathed them in its glow.
Bando raised his hand, feeling the light flow over his palm and down to the platform, spilling out into the valley. He smiled and laughed maniacally, his goal achieved.
This was beautiful.
This was majestic.
This was his legacy fulfilled.
Small motes of light spilled from the bottom of the Spire as if they were beads falling from an overturned bowl. They bounced against whatever they touched and then floated gracefully back into the air. Each had a strange, unique shape. Some appeared to have appendages, some were encased in rings of energy, and others surrounded by flowing ribbons of blue-grey light that trailed off like loose threads. They were alive, thinking, moving.
Dana casually left the platform and returned to her friends, leaving Von Strauss and Bando to bathe in their success. She stopped just in front of them all, her head bowed, her hands clasped together against her chest, and her eyes closed.
“What is this?” Von Strauss asked, his tone a mix of worry and wonder.
“It is the beginning, Von Strauss. That’s what you are seeing. The beginning,” Bando answered enthusiastically.
“But what is …”
Von Strauss’ voice trailed off as he recognized the floating motes of light gathering in front of him, at first harmless but gradually becoming more aggressive. The motions seemed threatening. He backed away, but they would not leave him. The more he moved, the more they pursued him.
Again, the boom of thunder echoed throughout the sky above, this time so loud and deep that the ground shook beneath them. It was a cue. What had been a mix of night and day above had immediately turned black.
“Get up,” Dana instructed her friends, untying them as she did so. “Get up and move away from the Spire. Back the way we came.”
They didn’t understand at first, but a loud shriek from Von Strauss erased their questioning and replaced it with urgency.
The motes of light were combining to take the form of hundreds and hundreds of humanoid specters, their forms incomplete but manifested enough to show they were not friendly. Whatever they had released from the Spire did not have benevolent intentions for those that had disturbed their sanctuary.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Von Strauss cried as he ran from the platform.
Bando stood still. He was surrounded by an incalculable number of these orbs. Their strange limbs, shapes, and ribbons all violently wrapping around his body. His hands, feet, torso, neck, and ears were all being pulled and tugged.
“What is going on?” Kale asked as he and his friends continued to walk away.
“Keep walking Kale. Just keep moving, normally,” Dana instructed.
The shrieks from Von Strauss and Bando were calling on his curiosity. He wanted to look back. They all did. But Dana kept pushing them forward. This was not for their eyes.
The Bascelics’ wings flowered in defiance, but that only encouraged the spirits to seek them out. They too were enveloped by the lighted entities, their wings slowly pulled and stretched, their necks wrapped in ribbons of light and spindly fingers.
Disembodied voices could faintly be heard from the entities, each one distinct in tone and age. Some giggled like small children. Others moaned like the aged and the sick while a few babbled endless streams of sentences, all in a variety of languages that were alien.
Von Strauss had run as far as he could. There was no escape. A large ribbon of ethereal light shot out from the cluster of motes, snaking its way through his body. It then shot around to the Bascelics and finally back to Bando, tethering them all together. They screamed in horror, but it was futile.
Another bellowing rumble of thunder from above shook the valley. At its end, the tethered light pulled at its captives, their bodies turning briefly into glowing skeletons before being incinerated in a flash of fire, the last flecks of their existence falling to the ground as burnt ashes.
Bando was the last to go. The expression on his face was not of fear or terror, but of utter disillusion. He had believed in a lie. He had fought for his own demise. In his last moments, as his body turned to fire and ash, he realized he’d die without the one thing he had sought in life: purpose.
Mongrel had sought to chase the teens, but before it could reach them, the spirits intervened.
Puzzled by the creature, the mass of glowing orbs just hovered for a moment. Some pecked at it like birds, others touched its skin and then let go. Mongrel protested with growls and swatted at them, all to no avail.
They left him alone but only to gather together in an even larger cluster. Without warning, the spirits shot through the monster’s body. The beast howled as the spirits had their way with it. But the invasion was short lived, and as quickly as it had started it also ended.
The creatures left Mongrel in the darkness, his name whispered on the air. Perry, they said, like children singing a song. Mongrel slumped over, catching its mass before falling on its face. It breathed in heavily, and then unexpectedly, tears flowed down its deformed face. The beast whimpered as the memories of who he was before Dr. Psi’s experiments flooded his mind.
Whether the spirits had mercy, pity, or just plain confusion about what to do with such a creature was unclear. Mongrel knew it had been given its name back. Perry, it thought, unable to form the words with its mouth. Perry had a family. His family that he was supposed to go home to but never did.
The beast turned from the Spire and started off into the darkness, confused but enlightened, and desperately wanting to go home.
“Keep walking,” Dana repeated every so often.
“What happened to them?” Jocelyn asked.
“No time for that,” Echo said.
It did not matter. The spirits had taken notice of them, and now thousands of these entities were descending on the only living things left in the valley. Some passed overhead and then circled back, spinning around the group as if curious. Much like they had done with Von Strauss, the curiosity turned into a chaotic and aggressive formation.
“What do we do?” Mouth asked.
No one knew an answer.
The spirits were forming into larger entities now behind the group. Dana stopped walking, turned around, and extended her arms out wide as if to protect her friends who stood behind her. The spirits moved in closer and gathered around Dana, much the same way they had Bando.
“Dana!” Bulk shouted.
Sharp started towards her, but Bulk Brown held him back. This was beyond him. It was beyond any of them.
Dana gasped suddenly, and her friends feared the worse. The spirits collected into one string of energy, recoiled, and in one motion, shot through Dana’s body. Their path then split into hundreds of smaller streams as they exited her, twisting in the air but avoiding Bulk and the teens. They were headed back towards the Spire.
Although she appeared to be unharmed, Dana was petrified in place, her arms stuck at her sides and her mouth frozen in a gasp. As the last threads of light passed through her, she was allowed to exhale, collapsing onto the ground. Sharp went to her side and helped her back to her feet.
“What was that?” he signed to her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Sharp. I’m fine. It’s over,” she said.
One final roar of thunder filled the sky above and within seconds the spirits broke down into small orbs once again, then to smaller motes, and finally into mere specks of light, all returning to the Spire. The empty blackness of the sky had returned to a mix of day and night. The ground beneath them no longer felt agitated. She was right. The worst had passed.
“I don’t even know what to say, really. We actually lived through that!” Kale said.
This realization took another second or two for everyone else to accept, but once they did, smiles and laughter broke out. Even Bulk Brown, as rough and grumpy as he had been, embraced this moment of celebration. The teens all hugged each other, chattering at the same time about how they couldn’t believe they had survived. Kale tried to hug Bulk, but that was a bit more than the mercenary was comfortable with.
It was time to go home.
***
The group continued their conversation as they started the long walk back to the forest. As painful as this was on their already sore bodies, a long walk was not so bad at this point.
“How did you get here anyway, Bulk?” Mouth asked.
“Yeah, we had to fight a lake monster to get here. How in the Dea did you get past that thing?” added Echo.
“It seems that a group of teenagers had made The Ostiary so mad that he wanted anyone, anyone at all, to go after them. They had even gotten his pet Barry injured.”
“Barry? That thing’s name is Barry?” Mouth laughed.
“Yes, the man was very upset about his pet,” Bulk continued sarcastically. “I had to play five games of crab racing before he’d give me a boat. All I had to do was tell him I was hunting you down. I guess we’ll figure out a way around that when we get back there.”
Mouth and Echo couldn’t help but laugh. Kale just shook his head at how ludicrous the story sounded. Jocelyn didn’t really believe him but finally started laughing so infectiously that it broke through Kale’s distrust and drew a chuckle out of him as well.
Sharp noticed Dana was not laughing. In fact, she wasn’t even with them. He turned around to see that she had stopped walking with them a while ago and was just staring back at the Spire. Unable to call to her, he trotted back to where she stood and tapped on her shoulder.
“What’s going on?” he signed to her. “We can go home now.”
“Sharp,” Dana spoke his name as if she was remembering him, not addressing him. “You are a brave and wonderful boy who is going to be a brave and wonderful man. I can’t tell you enough how much it touches me that you didn’t give up on me, even when I gave up on myself. I have no idea how this would have gone if you hadn’t come after me. I wouldn’t have told them to go back, you know, the other Children of the Spire. They would have consumed all of you and never stopped.”
She was still facing the Spire as if she was deliberately not looking at him. He didn’t know how to approach this. They had a lot to talk about, and he wanted to explain to her that he wasn’t just some dopey kid with a crush. His feelings had gone beyond that now. He took a step back and just listened to her as she continued to blankly stare at the Spire.
“I hope you don’t break too many girls’ hearts. And no, before you say anything, I know it's not a silly crush. You and I are just connected on something that’s deeper than that, almost like family. I can’t …” She stopped to sob. “... I don’t know what else I can say. Just, thank you. I’ll always look out for you.”
Sharp noticed this sounded strangely like a goodbye.
“No one has ever cared about me that much. I will honor that friendship wherever I go.” Dana turned to Sharp, a river of tears flowing down her face, and grabbed his hand. He didn’t know what she was doing until she placed the Key of the Spire in his palm, closed it, and smiled at him.
This was a goodbye.
“What are you doing? What are you saying?” Sharp signed, his eyes welling up.
“Keep it safe, Sharp …”
Her words trailed off as her body slowly started to glow. Sharp’s heart began to beat so hard he thought it was going to burst through his chest. When did this happen? Why was this happening? Is this really how this was going to end?
His brothers noticed and rushed towards where Sharp and Dana were standing. By the time they got there, she would be gone. Her body was vanishing. Every strand of her hair, every line in her face, the color in her eyes, all of it was disappearing with tiny flecks of that same ethereal light from the Spire, as if each one was a tiny eraser, removing her from the Dea.
“Dana! Dana!” the others each called out.
Sharp tried to speak. He wanted to say something. He wanted her to hear is voice before it was too late. His insides were turning upside down, a pain he had never felt before. Why couldn’t he just force himself to say something, anything right now?
Try as he might, Sharp’s body would not cooperate. He lowered his head and cried. Dana’s body was little more than a glowing outline now, her face ghostlike while her body faded. Like an angel, her hallowed form placed Sharp’s lowered head between her hands as she kissed the top of his head. For a brief moment, he felt her hands on him.
The last of Dana dissolved into specks of light and glided away on the wind, like the petals of a dandelion caught in a spring breeze.
She was gone.
Bulk, Jocelyn, and Kale stopped their advance as they realized it was too late. Sharp was standing there alone, his sobs growing with each passing moment.
Mouth and Echo carefully approached him, their hands going to his shoulders gently. He didn’t move at first but then forced himself to stop crying as best he could. He looked up at his brothers, who themselves were tearful. They had never experienced anything like this before and couldn’t imagine how much this was hurting Sharp. He wiped the tears from his eyes, but they soon returned. Echo and Mouth hugged their brother tightly, doing whatever they could to ease the pain. They patted the back of his head and just held onto him as long as he needed.
Sharp thanked both of them, showed them the Key, and handed it to Mouth. He didn’t want to hold onto it. It was not how he wanted to remember her.
There was something that meant much more. He looked down at his leg and the bandage he had worn since Dana had wrapped up his wound in Black Harvest Forest. He had felt silly the last few days for carrying it around, his leg had healed a long time ago. Now, he was thankful he kept it.
This symbolic good-bye stopped the tears and held back the emptiness in his stomach. Carefully, he removed the dried bandage from his leg and wrapped it around his wrist, the last bit of her that was left behind.
***
SIX MONTHS LATER
Losian Bearn was a community for wayward children who didn’t have parents, came from broken homes, or just needed an alternative to the normal way of life in the East. It was close to Pharracrop, and the adults that ran the facility — a massive 100-acre compound — had close ties to the High Council.
Ikon had suggested it for the brothers as well as Jocelyn and Kale. There they would not be wandering around the Dea, used by mercenaries, harassed by Air Brigands, or coerced into any other highly illegal activities. Their records had been wiped clean by Councilman Awolowo, who expected them to stay out of trouble for the foreseeable future.
Jocelyn and Kale had other plans. They had made a deal with each other long before this that they would travel and see the East. While Losian Bearn was a nice deal with its free room and board, hundreds of children and teens of their own age, and a high-tech facility that proved very hard for them to turn down, they had grown accustomed to being on their own. They had families back in the West, but for now, they wanted to take a few months to disappear from anyone who knew them and just relax.
The Brothers Locke, however, took up the offer. They had been on the run for so long, and their stint as Master Thieves had proven more trouble than it was worth. Interacting with other teenagers was a big plus. They had spent so much time around adults who were the farthest thing from good role models that the staff of Losian Bearn was a shock to them. These people were more like school teachers or highly educated camp counselors than what they had ever experienced before. It took two months just for the brothers to stop expecting something wicked to come their way.
There was one huge reason though that convinced the brothers to stay at Losian Bearn. Bulk Brown, the former mercenary and leader of Solas, had retired from that lifestyle and taken up a position at Losian Bearn. Even though they gave each other a hard time, the brothers and Bulk had a bond that was the closest thing to family the brothers had had since leaving home. He was an uncle to them, a crazy uncle, but one nonetheless.
