Chapter I
The Off-Worlder (and the secret gateway)
In the ancient caves of Istandria, which lay out on the outskirts of Kira Mandi, there was an old and silent chamber in a cave, just to the north of Mount Recuma. The air there was damp and wet from the nearby River Lutisia, which coursed by along a shallow indentation in the cave’s white sand floor. Here and there, among the pillars of felmir stone, there were scattered pockets of red and blue sand. A single imralde tree, a white-stemmed type that only grew on this part of Urshan Dai, had sprouted up from one of the hills of sand in the almost still shadows of the high-vaulted chamber.
In ancient times, long before the War of Sanka, the war between Simkadans and Mandians, many people across the planet Urshan Dai came here often to find solace and rest. Today no one except the magicians known as Quilli visited the place. Aside from its interesting pathways, it was a forgotten place, a temporary resting area for the few willing enough to pass across the Kiopic Desert’s barren ruins and weathered heat.
The stones of the old chamber lay damp and glistening in the morning rays of Light Star when the two Quilli, who had set out from Istandria an hour ago, arrived at the place, still feeling the salty tingle in their eyes from the desert outside. They were both quiet and introspective, and although they looked calm, they were full of anxious thoughts about the mission they had set out to accomplish. While the city of Istandria had slept in the still late darkness, they had awoken early to meet here. Their mission, like most Quilli, was known only to themselves.
One of them was a man, an astrologer; the other, an old woman. The man was a tall man by Istandrian accounts, with vivid, insular eyes and a deep-set jaw that he moved here and there with an interesting twinge when he was thinking deeply. The woman was much shorter and solid looking, an old woman with chiseled, placid eyes that belied her curiosity in almost everything. As they were moving up the red stone path, a dove-like bird, with white wings, fluttered its feathers in the darkness, and then flew off into the shadows.
“Did you see that, Penave?” the man, whose name was Ashtar, asked the woman. They had both just arrived up a stone pebble path leading up from the cave’s entrance, a tortuous, winding trail leading out into the desert beyond.
“It was an isalax,” said the woman, her mind almost elsewhere. Partly distracted from his question, she was scanning the upper tier of the chamber, where the light played on the wavelets of water.
“What does it mean?” asked the man. Like many Quilli, Ashtar saw the events in the world with a giant purpose. An animal moving past might mean an imminent rainstorm or an impending terrible event, depending on the nature of the event’s direction. For the Quilli, omens were not trivial or meaningless but a necessity of life. Ashtar was always watching the people and events around him for signs of trouble or blessing. Often, in this day and age in Istandria, he found himself witnessing the former of the two.
“I think it means the portal will open, as planned,” said the woman. “I have already foreseen it in the water. The omen, I believe, is for you alone.”
“I for one am uncertain Abeorn will awaken.”
“He will awaken if we keep our minds collected.”
The man stooped down and felt the sand with his fingers, while Penave lit a lumin-globe light in her palm to illuminate the cavern. The soft, green neon light started out as a small ray and slowly began to radiate out over the soft, hardly stirring Lutisian waters.
“This sand is soft,” Ashtar said. “Will the Diagram hold its pattern?”
“I have tried Diagram here three times before,” said Penave. “I usually use some salt paste and a holding spell to maintain the geometry.”
“And you are sure the Dinjin inras want us to do this?” He stared dubiously at Penave, as she placed the globe on a ledge, near to where they would be working.
“I am certain they want us to. But as you may know from the Writings of the Past, their skill is limited by their enemies’ knowledge of their purpose. We are less known, and that is to our advantage. Everyone knows they are trying to awaken the Ancient Sleeper, and that is the problem. Is the time you set approaching, Ashtar?”
“The time is close, almost a tenth of a gyra.”
“Let us proceed then.”
A minute later, Ashtar glanced at his time piece on his finger and told Penave to begin the Diagram at a precise second on his time piece. At the cue of the astrologer, the old woman got down on her knees on a multi-colored quilt and with a wooden stick, began drawing a large series of symbols in the ocean-like sand of the chamber.
An hour later, Penave had completed the Diagram, a vast of array of concentric circles, emanating outward from each other in the red sand. Each layer of the circle contained a line crossing it in a vertical line. The geometrical design was known as aya, and it pulsated both thoughts and Life Being into beings when it was done in the right way and with the proper mindset, which had to be still and concentrated throughout the process. Penave had worked all her life on ayas, and by now, she found the task easy. What was not so easy was finding the right time to build them. That had been Ashtar’s duty as the astrologer.
Over the next few minutes, Penave worked on refining the Diagram, which rested on the Gateway to Dinjin, also known as a praxis in the Old World Tongue. Through the Gateway, she could see nothing but the shadows and light that lay beyond the invisible portal, but here and there, she could see, with her subtle vision, faint vacillations and colors, which were often never witnessed by most people in her world. For this reason, Penave was an inra—or in western Simkadan dialect, an ajnir. She could see through dimensional fabrics, and she could telepath with beings all over the planet, as did all of her ilk. She could also see the movement of time before it appeared, and she was able to see and feel the thoughts of the past in her mind, as if they were her own memories. It took blind trust of one’s instincts to do this. Many years she had doubted these abilities and their veracity, but in her old age, they had become a comfortable habit.
Ashtar stirred his finger in the soil beneath his feet and pulled out a small golden bell from his pocket. This was used to align the gate, to clear the air, so the transfer could happen with greater ease. Rapidly, he began dinging it in the soft, golden light penetrating in through an aperture in stone from above their heads.
“Quiet,” whispered Penave.
Ashtar stopped ringing the bell and then stepped backward in the light, and in the dim blackness beyond the Gate, they saw a creature, a dark shape, appear in front of the praxis, near to where the water flowed into an indefinable cavern. The creature’s eyes were black and shaped like opals, and its snout was long, like a horse. It raised a finger of warning at them, and after glaring at them with imperturbable eyes for a few seconds, vanished. At this, Ashtar became distraught, and the bell fell from his hands, and his eyes quivered, but he was not too surprised: he had seen this type of being before.
“It is a chimera, designed to scare,” said Penave. “It is nothing. It will pass into the Beyond.”
“Such terror they breed.”
“Ignore it,” said Penave. “Tell me the time, and I will send the the pulsation.”
In a minute, after the man had calmed down and regained his senses, he raised the bell and looked at the time piece on his wrist. When the second stroke fell on the minute he had decided upon hours ago using his horoscopy device, he again signaled to the woman with his index finger upraised.
At that same moment, in the village of Calcamane, in the world called Dinjin, a boy left his underground den in the hills of Munyu. His name was Taka, and he was the first born son of Calcamane’s javiz, or local seer. Since ancient times, it was always the tradition that the javiz’s children weed and attend to the Grove of Xalan, the place where the tomb of the Off-Worlder, named Abeorn, had slept for centuries, almost not breathing and in a state of suspended hibernation.
Taking his favorite air paddles in hand, Taka raised himself from the ground, leveraging all his hands straight out beside him to propel himself through the air, sailing, as it were, with the help at his back of the planet Eroma’s crisp energy wind, which had hung languid still all night but now blew westward towards the Grove of Xalan. He had to meet his teacher, Zast, at fifty gyromes, and he had no time for walking in his hard light form, and the wind was strong enough to help push his weightless energy body through the air rapidly.
The Grove of Xalan was about two miles down the main pathway from the village of Calcamane, an old weather-beaten trail that meandered all the way from Plem Tills to the eastern mountains of the Gyan Shree, where the deepest energy fields on Eroma lay. As Taka made his way down the ancient road, the energy wind shifted, changed direction, then lay still and quiet. Taka had not wanted to shapeshift—the transformation process still made his eyes water when he did, as it did many other Eromans—but he was late, and he had no other choice but to turn into a pratyl bird as quickly as he could. When his eyes stopped watering, he reached the grove, where the light from Eroma’s Portal Light Field—the sunlight of that world, an aperture of light in the sky called Shashem—sprinkled in through the high, bending fzan trees and illuminated the resting place of the Off-Worlder. The Portal Field had only shifted only forty-five gyras ago to a green amber color, one of twelve spectrums of light the energy gateway provided annually in periodic rotations to help light their world. It was the time of year that Taka liked the best. The trees grew higher in this period, their highest growth period of the year, and the water energy fell from the skies frequently but in brief but intense storms, making the air profound and fresh and moist. Already the fazan trees looked brighter and more purplish than a week ago, when he had last been to the sanctuary.
As he arrived in the grove, Taka noticed a tree had fallen in the middle of the grove, just grazing the corner of the white resting place of the Off-Worlder but not damaging the glass bed chamber. As a bird, Taka perched on one of its branches for a moment, then flicked his wings once before suddenly returning to his hard light form as a boy. Slowly, he hauled the light, purplish tree to the edge of the grove, where he manifested a sickle in his hand from his thought and sliced it quickly and efficiently, dicing it into five separate logs, which he proceeded to chant over in apology to the tree in the ancient dialogue of Sazn. He saw the spirit within the tree motion in gratitude at him before it left—it had been trapped in the dark bole at the base of the trunk—before disappearing into the circumference of Eroma’s ether sky.
When he returned to the side of the Off-Worlder’s resting place, the real surprise for Taka—and the greatest surprise for every villager in Calcamane in decades—confronted him. As he glanced through the clear cut glass of the tomb where the white bearded, austere-faced sleeping man lay, he saw that the chest of the man was moving up and down very slowly.
Chapter I
The Off-Worlder (and the secret gateway)
In the ancient caves of Istandria, which lay out on the outskirts of Kira Mandi, there was an old and silent chamber in a cave, just to the north of Mount Recuma. The air there was damp and wet from the nearby River Lutisia, which coursed by along a shallow indentation in the cave’s white sand floor. Here and there, among the pillars of felmir stone, there were scattered pockets of red and blue sand. A single imralde tree, a white-stemmed type that only grew on this part of Urshan Dai, had sprouted up from one of the hills of sand in the almost still shadows of the high-vaulted chamber.
In ancient times, long before the War of Sanka, the war between Simkadans and Mandians, many people across the planet Urshan Dai came here often to find solace and rest. Today no one except the magicians known as Quilli visited the place. Aside from its interesting pathways, it was a forgotten place, a temporary resting area for the few willing enough to pass across the Kiopic Desert’s barren ruins and weathered heat.
The stones of the old chamber lay damp and glistening in the morning rays of Light Star when the two Quilli, who had set out from Istandria an hour ago, arrived at the place, still feeling the salty tingle in their eyes from the desert outside. They were both quiet and introspective, and although they looked calm, they were full of anxious thoughts about the mission they had set out to accomplish. While the city of Istandria had slept in the still late darkness, they had awoken early to meet here. Their mission, like most Quilli, was known only to themselves.
One of them was a man, an astrologer; the other, an old woman. The man was a tall man by Istandrian accounts, with vivid, insular eyes and a deep-set jaw that he moved here and there with an interesting twinge when he was thinking deeply. The woman was much shorter and solid looking, an old woman with chiseled, placid eyes that belied her curiosity in almost everything. As they were moving up the red stone path, a dove-like bird, with white wings, fluttered its feathers in the darkness, and then flew off into the shadows.
“Did you see that, Penave?” the man, whose name was Ashtar, asked the woman. They had both just arrived up a stone pebble path leading up from the cave’s entrance, a tortuous, winding trail leading out into the desert beyond.
“It was an isalax,” said the woman, her mind almost elsewhere. Partly distracted from his question, she was scanning the upper tier of the chamber, where the light played on the wavelets of water.
“What does it mean?” asked the man. Like many Quilli, Ashtar saw the events in the world with a giant purpose. An animal moving past might mean an imminent rainstorm or an impending terrible event, depending on the nature of the event’s direction. For the Quilli, omens were not trivial or meaningless but a necessity of life. Ashtar was always watching the people and events around him for signs of trouble or blessing. Often, in this day and age in Istandria, he found himself witnessing the former of the two.
“I think it means the portal will open, as planned,” said the woman. “I have already foreseen it in the water. The omen, I believe, is for you alone.”
“I for one am uncertain Abeorn will awaken.”
“He will awaken if we keep our minds collected.”
The man stooped down and felt the sand with his fingers, while Penave lit a lumin-globe light in her palm to illuminate the cavern. The soft, green neon light started out as a small ray and slowly began to radiate out over the soft, hardly stirring Lutisian waters.
“This sand is soft,” Ashtar said. “Will the Diagram hold its pattern?”
“I have tried Diagram here three times before,” said Penave. “I usually use some salt paste and a holding spell to maintain the geometry.”
“And you are sure the Dinjin inras want us to do this?” He stared dubiously at Penave, as she placed the globe on a ledge, near to where they would be working.
“I am certain they want us to. But as you may know from the Writings of the Past, their skill is limited by their enemies’ knowledge of their purpose. We are less known, and that is to our advantage. Everyone knows they are trying to awaken the Ancient Sleeper, and that is the problem. Is the time you set approaching, Ashtar?”
“The time is close, almost a tenth of a gyra.”
“Let us proceed then.”
A minute later, Ashtar glanced at his time piece on his finger and told Penave to begin the Diagram at a precise second on his time piece. At the cue of the astrologer, the old woman got down on her knees on a multi-colored quilt and with a wooden stick, began drawing a large series of symbols in the ocean-like sand of the chamber.
An hour later, Penave had completed the Diagram, a vast of array of concentric circles, emanating outward from each other in the red sand. Each layer of the circle contained a line crossing it in a vertical line. The geometrical design was known as aya, and it pulsated both thoughts and Life Being into beings when it was done in the right way and with the proper mindset, which had to be still and concentrated throughout the process. Penave had worked all her life on ayas, and by now, she found the task easy. What was not so easy was finding the right time to build them. That had been Ashtar’s duty as the astrologer.
Over the next few minutes, Penave worked on refining the Diagram, which rested on the Gateway to Dinjin, also known as a praxis in the Old World Tongue. Through the Gateway, she could see nothing but the shadows and light that lay beyond the invisible portal, but here and there, she could see, with her subtle vision, faint vacillations and colors, which were often never witnessed by most people in her world. For this reason, Penave was an inra—or in western Simkadan dialect, an ajnir. She could see through dimensional fabrics, and she could telepath with beings all over the planet, as did all of her ilk. She could also see the movement of time before it appeared, and she was able to see and feel the thoughts of the past in her mind, as if they were her own memories. It took blind trust of one’s instincts to do this. Many years she had doubted these abilities and their veracity, but in her old age, they had become a comfortable habit.
Ashtar stirred his finger in the soil beneath his feet and pulled out a small golden bell from his pocket. This was used to align the gate, to clear the air, so the transfer could happen with greater ease. Rapidly, he began dinging it in the soft, golden light penetrating in through an aperture in stone from above their heads.
“Quiet,” whispered Penave.
Ashtar stopped ringing the bell and then stepped backward in the light, and in the dim blackness beyond the Gate, they saw a creature, a dark shape, appear in front of the praxis, near to where the water flowed into an indefinable cavern. The creature’s eyes were black and shaped like opals, and its snout was long, like a horse. It raised a finger of warning at them, and after glaring at them with imperturbable eyes for a few seconds, vanished. At this, Ashtar became distraught, and the bell fell from his hands, and his eyes quivered, but he was not too surprised: he had seen this type of being before.
“It is a chimera, designed to scare,” said Penave. “It is nothing. It will pass into the Beyond.”
“Such terror they breed.”
“Ignore it,” said Penave. “Tell me the time, and I will send the the pulsation.”
In a minute, after the man had calmed down and regained his senses, he raised the bell and looked at the time piece on his wrist. When the second stroke fell on the minute he had decided upon hours ago using his horoscopy device, he again signaled to the woman with his index finger upraised.
At that same moment, in the village of Calcamane, in the world called Dinjin, a boy left his underground den in the hills of Munyu. His name was Taka, and he was the first born son of Calcamane’s javiz, or local seer. Since ancient times, it was always the tradition that the javiz’s children weed and attend to the Grove of Xalan, the place where the tomb of the Off-Worlder, named Abeorn, had slept for centuries, almost not breathing and in a state of suspended hibernation.
Taking his favorite air paddles in hand, Taka raised himself from the ground, leveraging all his hands straight out beside him to propel himself through the air, sailing, as it were, with the help at his back of the planet Eroma’s crisp energy wind, which had hung languid still all night but now blew westward towards the Grove of Xalan. He had to meet his teacher, Zast, at fifty gyromes, and he had no time for walking in his hard light form, and the wind was strong enough to help push his weightless energy body through the air rapidly.
The Grove of Xalan was about two miles down the main pathway from the village of Calcamane, an old weather-beaten trail that meandered all the way from Plem Tills to the eastern mountains of the Gyan Shree, where the deepest energy fields on Eroma lay. As Taka made his way down the ancient road, the energy wind shifted, changed direction, then lay still and quiet. Taka had not wanted to shapeshift—the transformation process still made his eyes water when he did, as it did many other Eromans—but he was late, and he had no other choice but to turn into a pratyl bird as quickly as he could. When his eyes stopped watering, he reached the grove, where the light from Eroma’s Portal Light Field—the sunlight of that world, an aperture of light in the sky called Shashem—sprinkled in through the high, bending fzan trees and illuminated the resting place of the Off-Worlder. The Portal Field had only shifted only forty-five gyras ago to a green amber color, one of twelve spectrums of light the energy gateway provided annually in periodic rotations to help light their world. It was the time of year that Taka liked the best. The trees grew higher in this period, their highest growth period of the year, and the water energy fell from the skies frequently but in brief but intense storms, making the air profound and fresh and moist. Already the fazan trees looked brighter and more purplish than a week ago, when he had last been to the sanctuary.
As he arrived in the grove, Taka noticed a tree had fallen in the middle of the grove, just grazing the corner of the white resting place of the Off-Worlder but not damaging the glass bed chamber. As a bird, Taka perched on one of its branches for a moment, then flicked his wings once before suddenly returning to his hard light form as a boy. Slowly, he hauled the light, purplish tree to the edge of the grove, where he manifested a sickle in his hand from his thought and sliced it quickly and efficiently, dicing it into five separate logs, which he proceeded to chant over in apology to the tree in the ancient dialogue of Sazn. He saw the spirit within the tree motion in gratitude at him before it left—it had been trapped in the dark bole at the base of the trunk—before disappearing into the circumference of Eroma’s ether sky.
When he returned to the side of the Off-Worlder’s resting place, the real surprise for Taka—and the greatest surprise for every villager in Calcamane in decades—confronted him. As he glanced through the clear cut glass of the tomb where the white bearded, austere-faced sleeping man lay, he saw that the chest of the man was moving up and down very slowly.