Chronicles of Ara: Perdition Read online

  S’n Te motions to the professor in response to a sudden burst of smoking grass and weed. Taebal has joined them, floating above ground just feet overhead. He is larger by thrice than the other dragons, all of whom have backtracked to the perimeter. Taebal interrupts the remaining flame with his breath, then walks inside the formerly blazing circle.

  Windy tree ash sparks fire and he extinguishes new progressive blazes with spit and snot.

  Taebal. Ages following his drowning.

  Searle turns to the mystic. “On a technicality, do you still need my answer?”

  The other dragons back off further, awaiting Taebal’s next move.

  “She has reached the Infinity Pass,” S’n Te responds. “He has returned,” he says, lifting his chin in the direction of Taebal. We are too late.”

  “Too late?” Samantha intervenes. “They couldn’t have been gone more than a minute.”

  “Ms. McFee . . . the expected perspective is most frequently the safest, it not?” S’n Te responds.

  “How do you know my name? I don’t know you.”

  She is not convinced of her statement, though she needed to affirm. Just in case. A sense of self-preservation, of safety. Like the rest, Samantha is still under the effects of the last Abeyance, still under the usual confusion wrought from the correction. Unlike the others, her impairment is already settling. They do not know that she has been bluffing, in part, as she spoke, nor that flashes of memory continue to interrupt her dissonance as she sews together her strands of thought.

  Samantha has sensed that she may be alone in this proclivity for recall, save for perhaps X, and she is correct. That she accepts X’s idea of the Abeyance and she is plagued by glimpses of memory allows her the firsthand insight that there is certainly more happening in the moment than meets the eye.

  Nothing is as it appears comes to mind.

  As she has heard consistently in her lifetime to ever-increasing relevance.

  Then she remembers again . . .

  Nothing is as it appears because it cannot be—

  And she forgets. As if nothing was retained.

  “Despite any similarly prodigious gifts as the boy’s,” S’n Te vaguely comments as if he’s read her mind, instantly derailing Samantha’s train of thought, “what you cannot know is how long it had taken them to travel from here to there. And now the dragons have returned. We are too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Samantha shouts, inadvertently echoing her earlier comment. “They just left.”

  S’n Te continues calmly, not visibly bothered by the elements. “The Infinity Pass is our furthest star, within which is hidden the secrets of all of existence. Man, immortal . . . until now, that star has never been breached,” S’n Te explains. “To an immortal, the very attempt at attainment is forbidden. Space-time has completed its final correction on the will of the gods, which they planned as a precaution to contain the former muse upon her expected return.”

  “You speak nonsense,” says X.

  “You have been ill-advised,” he replies, facing his accuser. “There is well more to what you call the Abeyance than has been considered within your flawed Measures.” X checks his anger and does not respond. Samantha’s puzzled expression further informs the mystic and he walks toward her, ignoring the flame. “Neither the length of time they have traveled nor the distance can be determined by human standards. The girl you knew as Adriel was taken and her transport reappeared in a blink of an eye, hmm?” Samantha glares at him. “There are no further options,” he continues. The ground quakes and still more timber sways and falls. As the others struggle for balance and shield their eyes, S’n Te elaborates. “The immortal, Ara, was an outcast,” he says. “She was exiled as a threat to the gods’ natural order. Had she been terminated when you had the opportunity, her mortal incarnation could never have returned to their realm and your world would have been left alone.” S’n Te redraws his attention to X. “As for you . . . the Infinity Pass could be breached only by the muse-incarnate and only under this most extreme of circumstances. They foresaw this with Ara. They themselves caused the scourge they sought to prevent; gods of judgment can be most dangerous, and yes, to your thought . . . although human, Adriel is still alive and awaits a new adjudication by her immortal family. Or so they believe. She has returned, as Ara had planned and her family had expected. You were compelled to interfere,” he accuses, “but you did not go far enough. I did try to warn you.”

  “You never—” X protests.

  “You are as weak as the man you once knew as your professor,” S’n Te says. Searle overhears the words and ignores him. “The lessons he imparted were applied literally—”

  “No!” X anguishes. He glances at Searle. “He believed in me,” he laments. “He was the only one who ever believed . . .”

  S’n Te leans in closer, and X steps back. “If truly nothing is as it appears,” the mystic resumes, “then your literal conclusions have done us all a grave disservice.” X stands his ground. “As a result, Ara has breached the Infinity Pass, her incarnate has returned to the immortals, and the will of the gods has been enflamed.” He turns to Daniel. “The earth bleeds because the gods knew she would not take the life of the girl she thinks is her daughter, your daughter,” he says, bellowing over the elements while pointing to Samantha.

  “Professor . . .” X forlornly appeals to Searle, who looks away in response.

  “Ara’s oath has been realized,” S’n Te asserts, “and she has returned to the side of Eron, who once again possesses the most powerful weapon I have ever created,” he adds with a hint of regret. “The muse’s fate shall be decided by her alone, and earth passes first in the process of that decision. Your only hope to retrieve and destroy her has expired as you have assured the future will live and die with Mirkwood.”

  “Mirkwood . . .” Daniel says to no one in particular, himself exuding a glint of recognition.

  “There was only one muse!” X cries.

  “There was only one!” S’n Te snaps. “And now that Ara has been . . . suppressed, others will claim her station.”

  “Suppressed? But Ara’s sisters were never as powerful as she,” X argues.

  “Perhaps,” S’n Te responds, tired of the fight. “Perhaps not.” S’n Te approaches Taebal, then turns to Searle. “Tell him, I said nothing about her sisters.” X ponders the response. “And you, you above all should have understood why the boy deserved The Truth. He should have made the difference. Your protecting him has caused this.” Searle exchanges concerned glances with his confused charge.

  “He has nothing to do with this,” Searle replies. “Any of it.”

  “Then I truly have failed you.”

  Samantha looks to the remaining group, quickly losing her remaining strength. As she tries to stand, she is reminded that she cannot feel her legs. Her head pounds. She believes she may be concussed. She feels useless, and so she watches. She watches the mystic and his interactions with the others.

  S’n Te looks to Taebal, who, as if in response, suddenly vanishes. The disappearance was not forewarned. There was no shimmer, no glow, nothing as previously described in a written fairy story or approximated in any oral tradition by a scop or father to son or even in a comic book. The reality is no evidence of reality, no record whatever of the dragon’s presence. What has passed could never be retrieved as, for all intents, Taebal was never there to begin with.

  And then Taebal reappears, as if he was present all along.

  As before, there was no warning. Samantha’s impulsive reaction is to question her senses and dismiss the goings-on entirely. My eyes are playing tricks on me. None of this is happening.

  She turns away and turns back, and yet all things remain.

  “Nothing is as it appears,” S’n Te says. Again, the familiarity; Samantha believes she may have pondered this statement scant seconds ago and more than once, though she cannot recall the context. Meanwhile, the other dragons remain, poised to attack. The mystic van
ishes as well. And then he returns. “Where there is no reason,” he adds, “there is no future.” He turns to the boy. “Only misdirection.” The word resonates. “And The Truth remains in the portal—the gate—beyond the rabbit hole.”

  He nods, thoughtfully, to X. The prodigy picks up on the gesture as something more, and he is immediately stricken. He’s challenging me.

  S’n Te, again, vanishes. “Master S’n!” Searle shouts. Samantha and Daniel maintain their positions and look to the professor. Searle looks first to them, then to X, then to the ground in despair.

  Without warning, X suddenly grabs the arm of his mentor. They too disappear into the ether, leaving Samantha and Daniel alone with the spirits. In bittersweet response, she finds herself mulling over one of her father’s most favored songs as performed, aptly, by his favorite group, The Doors—

  This is the end. My only friend, the end . . .

  The Over-dwellers attack the dragons as fire pierces the clouds from above. Again. Reinforcements are coming and this time, the roar is louder and more threatening than ever.

  And Daniel perishes first, overtaken by all manner of debris that continues to fall from the sky as the world fulfills its promise and, finally, implodes.

  Samantha is numb, incapable of reacting further.

  Skyscrapers fall in the New York City distance. Seas churn and overtake ground. An airplane engine shudders and falls through the clouds as the sky drips its blood.

  But Samantha does consider that the last thoughts of each of the humans, save for herself, must have been a jumble influenced by noise and image representing two things.

  The first: chaos. The second: yesterday.

  How did we get to this point and what could we have done differently . . . yesterday?

  It is then that Samantha McFee, daughter of a thoughtful man of prominence who, she further contemplates, may or may not still be alive, makes a fateful decision:

  I will not die today.

  And immediately, as if betrayed by a supernatural act of defiance, the decision triggers another memory that had been lost within the recent Abeyance—words once said to her by her father upon beginning their reading of The Hobbit for the very first time: “There is reason for everything,” he explained. And she recalls that those words were impressed upon her from that very instant; they also remained relevant and frequently recalled throughout their estrangement and beyond, to their reconciliation until forgotten and then . . . corrected.

  Reason for everything, she extrapolates, including the existence of Project Ara as referenced by Adriel, following a quickly dismissed contemplation that the child may not be her natural daughter for reason she cannot figure. But there then evokes another issue that begs her immediate consideration, another issue that other men and women of such logic and capability would also, naturally, tend to question under this circumstance: There are no accidents. As she realizes that she has regained feeling in her lower limbs and is able to use her legs and stand, she ducks away from a falling and rotating propeller blade and concludes: If there are no accidents, there is only intention.

  She ponders the impossibility of her action, as her legs were trapped under a fallen tree just seconds ago.

  The riddle is solved when she remembers another phrase she’s heard elsewhere: And if intention is deceptive . . . then they were right all along. Nothing can ever be as it ap—

  She does not complete the thought; there are other plans for her. The ground splits beneath her feet and she falls, flailing, into the rabbit hole . . .

  PERDITION

  BOOK THREE

  ON THE THIRD MEASURE OF CREATION

  PERCY BYSSHE AND MARY SHELLEY

  A MONSTER

  A GOD

  “My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step,

  they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”

  – William Golding

  Addendum from X

  I’ve reconsidered. Hold a minute.

  I should share something else with you before we go. Please allow me my moment, no need for a last cigarette or a meal or anything. I don’t smoke anyway.

  Allow me to briefly catch you up and punctuate my resentment.

  What is it, I mean precisely what is it, that you have been presented with so far, including these letters and such?

  The truth is what you are reading is the collected contents of Samantha McFee’s dedicated work computer, containing the entirety of her “Project Ara: Confidential” file that I’ve formatted into an extended eight-volume narrative. Do you recall those moments, as portrayed in Creation, that took place atop the Empire State Building’s observatory deck, and then the subsequent few seconds at the U.S. Embassy in London, where Sam is employed, when her computer read File Transfer Complete and then File Deleted From System?

  That’s exactly it. I transferred the updated file, in full, back to myself where it belonged.

  And I admit to a certain rage upon reviewing and explain-ing its contents.

  Have I told you I'm furious? I mean, honestly.

  Truly. I have nothing to lose now by exposing this much and from the bottom of my heart I hope you all suffer in your final moments. Together we could have prevented this nightmare and now, now we find ourselves at war’s dawn, the war that was plotted so long ago between man and his soul, triggered by a poisoning of his art, that will soon evolve into larger, supernatural conflicts of man and god, demon and god, of man and demon . . .

  To us, these conflicts will occur and conclude in seconds and result in the universe’s final shift. To the rest, as neither their sense of space-time nor reality follows human measures, the conflict will last eternally but end the same.

  Black. Nothing.

  Not even a star.

  We’ve had more than enough time to fix this mess, and oh, how I warned you.

  Ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The original with Kevin McCarthy, the 70s remake with Donald Sutherland . . . either, or. I’m that guy. The guy no one believes, who has had all the proof anyone ever needed if only they would have listened.

  The concept of our world’s end was never science fiction or fantasy. No, far from it. It was in the cards from the beginning, bound to happen one day (anything that begins comes to an end one day) but you know what? I think I get it now.

  This whole thing about Ara, the corrupted muse . . . you all probably thought it was a fairytale. Am I right? You were incapable of even considering that the supernatural, which we cannot explain, could be a legitimate factor in this equation, and so you ignored me from the get-go.

  IT WAS THE DETERMINING FACTOR!

  Like I said, I’m furious, and so we have allowed ourselves to destroy ourselves by unleashing the power of our imagination without regard to consequence, when I could have fixed it for all of us, if only you had listened.

  I had planned on presenting the entirety of my findings in full within six more volumes after this one and then considering this matter closed, against any sense of logic, with a happy ending. I was hoping for that miracle, regardless of my personal beliefs, though I wouldn’t admit to this before. However, what I’ve learned so late in life resulting from a thoughtless snap decision to forge a writing career for the betterment of mankind (that is, if you consider my lofty brand of journalism as authentic writing of any sort; what do I know, maybe you’re all snobs and that’s the problem) is that a human being—maybe this too is due to DNA but on this I’m admittedly clueless—only hears who they choose to hear.

  Open-mindedness died long before your calling, apparently. But, you know, I shouldn’t be too surprised. I’ve always thought of life as a matter of ebbs and tides anyway, of falling rocks and avalanches, and superballs bouncing and careening everywhere and everyplace (not the same), and true flow existing only in death. Peace, that is. Calm.

  How in some uncharacteristic capacity I look forward to my long-deserved final rest because, sincerely, the toll this has taken on me has been far too great anyway. You all, o
n the other hand, I don’t give a damn about anymore.

  I just wanted you to know.

  In the meantime, I would like to present something new to you. I wrote the following, a roadmap if you will, six months ago when—true confessions—I (still) held on to a bit of hope. Chances are you won’t see any of it now but, in the slightest chance miracles do exist, read on.

  The idea was to make my findings more accessible. Why I continue to bother, especially now, with maybe a day left . . . Scratch that. This is just another effort to show you there has always been a solution, and I will do whatever I can to rub it in.

  Because you killed me too. I vacillate there, but on the real I'm deeply resentful.

  I loathe each and every one of you.

  To the words . . .

  This present volume is the second of eight (meaning one has already been released if you’re not as mathematically inclined as I). Eight, to represent the “resurrection” analogy I mentioned earlier. Seven more volumes (or six including this one) and I will conclude my Measures of Creation in grandiloquent fashion to: a) convince you of the legitimacy of this endeavor, and b) convince you of my legitimacy.

  Then I will take my long-deserved rest.

  If you haven’t figured it by now, I’m giving you novels for all intents—my life’s work adapted into an accessible format for you, the masses. Not quite beach reads, but they will all come together in the end. (Have I said that before?) Trust me.

  Each of the remaining volumes will take place in various time periods as did Volume One, which I titled Creation for your convenience as Genesis was already taken, and the more accurate Pre-Genesis was pretentious even for me. In Creation, Thomas McFee, an author, disappeared for nearly two years (twenty months to be precise) following his sojourn in London to visit Donovan Bradley, an antiquarian. Before he reunited with his publisher following his return, no one knew of McFee’s whereabouts.