Earth Awakened, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Authors' Notes
Earth Awakened
The Elemental Wars, Book Four
By S. R. Frederick and K. Gorman
Copyright © K. Gorman and S. R. Frederick 2020
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Proofreading by Zee Monodee at Divas at Work Editing Services.
Cover design by Christian Bentulan at Covers By Christian.
Thank you to Heather and Ryan, both for their service and for their help in developing the characters, plot, and military realism of this book, and to my friend David, who provided one of the boot camp stories.
Chapter 1
May 12, 2003 - Transition Year Twenty-One
Mersetzdeitz
The explosion rocked the building, a deafening roar of light and sound that thundered through Mckay’s bones and shook every piece of soft tissue in her chest. She snapped awake, one arm flailing when she dropped down beside the nightstand. The floor shook under her bare feet as the glow from a flare outside tilted through the slats of the blinds on the window above her.
She jerked her gaze around, wide-eyed.
Where the fuck was her gun? And the rest of her gear?
Outside, the light shifted, and the rev of a far-off engine roared in the distance.
Fuck. She had to move.
Ducking her shoulders to keep a low profile—Swarzgardian snipers carried some very accurate thermal imaging equipment, and the outer wall didn’t look like it was made of concrete—she gave the place a cursory glance, trying to find her missing gear.
From what she could tell, it was a simple, well-built room. And while it rang with familiarity, it was not even remotely the style of bunking she was accustomed to in Preslom.
Actually, it reminded her more of her childhood bedroom at her grandmother’s in pre-war Seola, or of the college dorms she’d researched in high school, before the war had started.
Those were all fucked, though. They’d been by McFarlane University yesterday. Trash and rubble everywhere, half the campus either shot out, bombed, or looted. The rugby field had become a staging area for Swarzgardian artillery.
Artillery that was now, apparently, taking its grievances out in her direction.
Fuck, where was her gun?
She crawled toward the end of the bed, finding a bra and a pair of pants still damp from rain—jeans, not her fatigues. There was a desk in the corner, with a charging device that glowed with a slow pulse. A stack of books sat haphazardly next to it, with more on the floor below it, and—
Her gaze snapped to the left, adrenaline surging into her blood as she spotted the slope of a padded gun bag…
Except, it wasn’t a gun bag. It was a jacket. A very nice leather jacket that she definitely hadn’t had in Preslom. And the words on the spines of the books were familiar.
She’d been studying them last night.
She wasn’t in Preslom. This was Mersetzdeitz.
And she wasn’t a soldier in a war. She was a student, learning to control the new Elemental magic that had gotten dumped into her several months earlier. And the light on the windows wasn’t a flare, or an impending bomb—it was the decorative spotlights that lit up the base of Finnevar’s three towers and cycled through the colors of the Elements.
Green, currently. Earth. Her Element.
She had magic now.
Shaking, she sagged against the bed and let the flood of adrenaline and emotions run through her. Another explosion sounded outside, this time farther off. For a second, the walls of the room wavered in her mind, one half remaining in her dorm in Mersetzdeitz, and the other switching it to the wall of a temporary shelter near the front. The two had an unfortunate similarity in color and tint which fed straight into her brain’s PTSD neuroses.
She gritted her teeth and ignored it, her hand knotting in the tangle of sheets that hung off the bed.
“Fuck.”
It took another thirty seconds to get her breath back down to its normal rate and to force herself to be in the room, rather than on the front. And it took another minute before she could ungrit her teeth and force her tensed-up body to relax.
Fuck, she hated PTSD. It always crawled up when she was sleeping. Vulnerable. Unable to defend herself.
And, lately, she’d been getting more and more of it.
Axariel said it was cyclical. Or like waves on the ocean. She’d have several weeks where she could have some semblance of a regular life, with only the occasional flashback and flinch.
Then, she’d have weeks like this.
She glanced at the electric clock on the nightstand, a thing her trauma-infused brain had mistaken for a Westran communicator.
4:57 A.M.
Four hours of sleep. Well, that was better than usual. And, by the time she located her clothes, made her bed, and splashed water on her face, it would be more like 5:10.
A perfectly acceptable time to get up.
Fuck, she hated this. She was just so goddamn tired, all the goddamn time.
With a heavy grunt, she pushed herself to her feet, grabbed her phone from the desk charger, and headed for the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later, she’d washed her face, rinsed the sweat off, changed into old jeans with a new T-shirt and the leather jacket she’d grown attached to, and walked into the hall outside her room.
Finnevar’s Kenmin Center was a twinned pair of squarish, four-level buildings reserved for out-of-country students, locals who couldn’t afford housing, and basket cases like her who needed closer supervision and a few levels of warding to keep them in line. They sat almost directly behind Finnevar’s immaculate towers, with only the back parking lot and a small garden between them.
As for the towers themselves… well, they were a testament to the Mages’ power.
It had been roughly twenty years since they had arrived on Terra, popping into the atmosphere above Ryarne and Mersetzdeitz with their Lost Tech ships like a goddamn alien invasion, and the entire world had changed with their arrival.
God, she’d been seven, then. She remembered it. Everyone had been afraid, or skeptical, or ready to take up arms. Rumors and theories had snapped across the world like electricity, especially in the early months when the governments were keeping everything hush-hush.
Then, they’d heard about the magic.
Terra hadn’t had magic, previously—none that they could use, anyway—but the Mages did. More than that, they’d had magic for the entire history of their races, and had developed the technology to go along with it.
Imagine—being able to stop plagues, being able to save oneself, being able to simply teleport away from danger. To make deals with magical deities for their help and support—to have those deities actually exist in a feasible, physical, practical way. To harness the power and intelligence of those crystal spirits to power their cities and industries and fast-track their sciences.
With their abilities, the Mages had been light years ahead in development.
But, not anymore. A lot of that had been lost, along with most of their population.
Lür had suffered an apocalypse, so the Mages were refugees. Weird, magic-using, powerful, cross-dimensional refugees that now had a considerable handle and influence on Terran society.
Most of her neighbors were second-generation Lürian—baby Mages with an Element of their own, and parents who had lived through the rough early years of the Transition.
She, on the other hand, held the entire power of one of Lür’s crystal spirits in her body.
It had been an accident, mostly. She’d stepped somewhere she probably shouldn’t have, unknowingly offering herself to the spirit when her intent had only been to defend someone against it. The spirit, Greneinta, had once been the guardian and caretaker of a jungle in Lür’s Southern Hemisphere, a n old and potent Earth spirit that had arisen near the dawn of time to stalk among the trees and rivers, and eventually form a relationship with the local tribe of humans that had adapted to jungle life alongside it.
In her mind, the cat took on the shape of a gigantic black panther, with thick, stocky muscles, a set of massive claws, canine teeth that resembled a saber-toothed tiger’s more than any depiction of a panther or jaguar that she’d ever seen, and Earth magic imbued into every square inch of her form.
Before the cat had unceremoniously attached itself to her soul, it’d been subject to an experiment where Les Amerand, a real asshole of a Fire Mage with a massive amount of black ops experience from both planets and a penchant for military take-overs, had stuffed its crystal into a robotic suit for use as a weapon.
Greneinta had been… extremely effective in killing.
Unfortunately for Amerand, it had also been extremely sentient, extremely hungry, and extremely pissed off that he’d cut off its crystal protection and stuffed it into an ill-made metal murder suit.
It had turned on him, gone most of the way through with murdering him—twice—to save Meese, McKay, and Allish, then transferred its consciousness and power from its old murder suit and into McKay’s soul.
It was a deal similar to the one Meese had made with her Firebird—McKay provided a host to anchor the Elemental spirit’s power and negate the energy drain of Terra’s near-absent magical fields. In exchange, the cat put its entire arsenal of power and defense at her fingertips.
Well, that was how it was supposed to work.
Right now… it wasn’t working at all.
Four months after absorbing the cat, she was still in tense, probationary ‘classes’ with some of Mersetzdeitz’s best Earth Mages, attempting to control a spirit that seemed more intent on using her body as a vessel and doing whatever the fuck it wanted with its power.
Fucking hell. She couldn’t even be trusted in the Mage equivalent of a kindergarten class.
And it felt like she hadn’t made any progress for months.
Axariel, her primary teacher, kept saying it was a mental thing. As one of very few Light Mages in existence, with an ability to assess and heal pretty much any physical wound and the large amount of knowledge that came from living over four hundred years—Light Mages, with their healing abilities, tended to round their lifespans to the nearest thousand—she was likely right.
But if it was mental, McKay wasn’t sure how they were going to get around it. Even before the war, she’d never had the steadiest mind.
At least the cat wasn’t an asshole all the time. It had learned that some places—the grocery store, for instance—weren’t the best place for earthquakes. And it seemed to be working around McKay’s PTSD. As far as she had noticed, the cat hadn’t actually acted during her episodes, only sat up and paid attention.
Which meant that, either it could tell the difference between PTSD and reality, or it would also sit on its ass if McKay ended up in real trouble.
Honestly? She was okay with either scenario. As long as the cat wasn’t actively fucking everything up, a little inaction was absolutely fine.
She rolled her shoulders and stifled a yawn as she turned the next corner. In the early hour, the building was near silent, with only the hum of the lights, the tap of her boots, and the constant rumble of the ventilation system accompanying her thoughts. Only a few students got up at this hour, and the Mageguard that patrolled the corridors had a loose, relaxed air about them.
The elevator made a quiet whir as she took it down to the next level.
It always struck her just how much her life had changed. Not even five months ago, she’d been stuck on the front of the losing side of a war, scraping by and surviving between supply drops, sleeping in temporary prefab shelters, military tents, the husks of bombed-out buildings—any corner she could find in whatever ‘base’ her team set up—and constantly wondering when she was going to die.
And now…
Well, she wasn’t wondering if she was going to die, she could gorge herself in the cafeteria during most hours of the day, and the Mages sure didn’t fuck around with their building design.
It stemmed from having lost so much, she suspected, and from having something to prove. The Mages had lost damned near everything in their old world. Ninety percent of their population had died, suddenly and violently, to the mutated, magic-eating crystal that had taken over, and although they’d taken as much as they could, and had a wide breadth of knowledge stored in the Lost Tech equivalent of hard drives, it didn’t nearly make up for the loss.
When they’d arrived in Terra, they’d had to build themselves up from the ashes.
Well, sort of. They did have the advantage of magic. And power.
But Finnevar and its buildings had been built as a triumph. They had overcome the apocalypse. They had found a new life. They had integrated. They were successful, and they were powerful.
And they’d lavished the student dorms and classrooms with money and pride.
When the elevator doors opened, the sound of water came to her ears, and she stepped out into a hushed, open space with flowing water, thick, integrated gardens, and a series of rich art installations woven throughout.
It was…
Well, she’d never have thought of living in a place like this before. Or that places like this existed to live in. It looked more like the welcoming area for the poshest university she could think of, or perhaps the lobby of a nature-themed art gallery. Or a library. Or an extremely rich mall or airport.
In other words, swanky as fuck and with more attention to detail than she’d ever encountered in a building, and as far beyond her old haunts of military bases and tents and war-zones as the moon was beyond Terra.
Immediately, her shoulders relaxed back. And, as the smell of soil and plants came into her, and the subtle hush that the trees made of the acoustics, the cat inside her gave a slow, happy sigh and settled down.
Good. She didn’t want to deal with random bullshit. Not this early in the morning, and not before coffee.
Moving on autopilot, her feet took her over a small, flat bridge and through a dip in the main pathway. The black-tinted windows of the library opened on her left, showing a dim view of the inside—rows of bookcases, study booths, a few communal seating areas. On her right, a series of small, quiet sitting areas looped through the gardens. Lost Tech network access links sat in every nook, along with outlets and ethernet cables to connect a personal tablet or laptop—Christ, these kids had laptops at school—lending the occasional flicker of a screen through the trees as the links rebooted through their cycles.
The links were a recent development, less than a year old in the public venue, that allowed regular people to connect their Terran-made tablets to some of the basic programs in Lost Tech computing. Anyone with a student ID and passcode could connect to them. More than a few of them had been scattered around the lobby’s sitting areas. The tapping of her boots changed in timbre as she went from hardwood to slate stone and back again, the path mimicking a river channel.
She passed an intersecting corridor that led outside, along with a pair of washrooms—touchless soap and sinks, and toilets whose lids lifted when you approached them and had all sorts of built-in accoutrements for flushing and cleaning your private bits—and angled to the left, where a hallway would take her to the main cafeteria.
This was a more familiar space. Still swankier than anything else she’d ever set foot in before, with the sole exception of some rich guy’s house they’d taken cover at in Terremain, but at least recognizable. Ten sets of round tables dotted the area with curved benches placed around them, and two spots for wheelchairs closest to the main food area. The basics—stuff like breakfast oatmeal, sandwiches, burgers, and fries—were provided at zero cost for residents, with a separate at-cost menu for higher-end luxury items like slices of cake and pie. Two secondary counters offered the usual gamut of carbonated and caffeinated beverages.
One of them served free, all-you-could-drink coffee.
It was, simply put, the one thing that kept her believing in a higher power.
She made a beeline for the brewer, snagging a cup from the sleeve on its left and slapping it down under the spout. Seconds later, the coffee was sputtering out, and the smell of happiness wafted into the air.
