Emergence: Return of Magic book 1
Read Emergence: Return of Magic book 1 Online
Authors: D. R. Rosier
Emergence
Return of
Magic Book 1
Author: D. R.
Rosier
Copyright 2016. This is a work of fiction.
Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or
persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without permission.
Katie stood in the field at twilight. The sky was
mostly clear and as the sun lowered down to the horizon, and she could see the
beautiful pinks and different shades of sunset. There was light breeze
that took the edge off the heat of the summer day. It was a beautiful
clear night, or it would be, if the scent of the dying crops around her hadn’t
filled her nose. She looked to the trees at the edge of the field, losing
their leaves and looking sick while the ones beyond looked healthy.
The world was dying and she suppressed the sob before it
could leave her throat. She felt helpless at the insanity of the last few
weeks. She was never really sure if aliens existed, but she’d always been
of the opinion if they ever came they would come in peace. They
hadn’t. Come in peace that is.
It had been a mere few weeks ago when they came from the
sky. It had just been her father and herself on the farm, her mother had
died years ago. It hadn’t taken long for her father’s military service to
be reactivated and she found herself alone. The first thing the aliens
had done was attack the large populations of the cities. They didn’t nuke
the cities, or bomb them. It had been a kind of ray that simply killed anything
alive. Trees, bushes, plants, pets, and humans, they all died.
The radio news had speculated that it was probably some kind
of radiation, the deaths had not been quick or clean, it had taken hours.
There was no fallout, but entering any of those cities was still a death
sentence. After that the aliens had gone after the smaller cities, and
now they were going after the food, the farms, and the small towns. They
hadn’t done as thorough a job yet, there was a lot of land to cover.
She looked down at the dying crops and wondered what was
happening to her body as she stood in the field. The radio had gone
silent days ago, and she knew her father was dead although she didn’t know how
she knew. She felt hopeless, but at the same time she turned and quickly
left the field and walked back into the house. She was pretty sure they
were targeting the food crops only out on the empty plains, because she had
several plants in the house that were still fine.
As far as she knew there had been no landings, no way to
fight back. Before the radio had gone out there had been a lot of
speculation. The invasion was simply eradication from orbit, of that
there was no argument over, it had been the why of it they had incessantly
harped on. Perhaps they would land, but they seemed to be content to wait
until all the humans were dead before doing so.
She shivered and ran upstairs, a part of her mind was in
shock, not really understanding what was going on, not knowing why was a poison
in her mind. There was no fighting back, she was powerless. She
took a long shower and scrubbed her skin, a part of her angry for going out
into the field, wondering what she just did to herself, another part wondering
why it even mattered at this point.
Maybe she should have just stayed out there.
When she got out she wrapped a towel around herself and
looked in the mirror. She didn’t notice any changes. Her eyes were
a warm hazel, her tanned skin from working in the sun most days was still
smooth and healthy. Her long light brown hair still looked
lustrous. She was just twenty years old, back home for the summer before
returning to college for her junior year. Her closest neighbor was miles
away and she felt alone.
Not just felt, she was alone.
She got dressed and had eggs for dinner. As she ate it
finally hit her, there would be no junior year of college. Her roommate
Stacey lived…
had
lived, in Chicago, and had no doubt died with her
city. She would never see her again. Her father, everything she
knew, was simply gone. She felt anger grow in her chest, but it was
impotent, there was no target she could reach.
She tried the radio again, but it was still off the
air. It made her wonder how long things would last, when would it all
break down? She still had running water, electricity, heat. How
long would those things take to break down with no one to monitor and maintain
things? She also wondered how many humans were left. There were
potentially millions in suburban neighborhoods and small towns across the
country and the world, but billions had already died worldwide in the cities.
She went upstairs and crawled into bed, and tried to get
some sleep. She choked off another sob, the false hope and yearning to
see her father and her friends was too much. She seemed to bounce back
and forth between listlessness, and heart wrenching sobbing jags. The
only time she felt normal lately, was when she was doing the chores around the
farm… it was one thing she could still do. Or at least, until she ran out
of feed for the chickens, and oats and hay for the horses. She wasn’t
sure just how long she laid there staring at the wall through a sheen of tears
before she fell asleep.
Katie felt the pounding of the hooves as the horse raced
down an unfamiliar road. She panicked for a moment, she couldn’t
move. She held the reigns in her left hand, a staff in the right.
She tried to gain control of her body and still couldn’t move, she almost tried
to scream when she noticed the large hand holding the staff was old and
wizened. She could see the long white hair bouncing in her peripheral
vision.
She suddenly felt calm, she was still confused but Katie
knew she was in a dream of some kind. She was seeing things from this old
man’s point of view, she could even feel his implacable determination as he
cantered through the woods. The forest around the dirt road looked
different than anything she’d ever seen before. The trees looked more
like towers, the trunks much larger than she’d ever seen before. Some
were easily fifty feet in circumference and grew wider still as the path
continued on.
She wondered where she was, where the man was rather, and
for some reason she thought of Colorado, as if in answer to her thoughts.
But that was… absurd.
The old man stopped in the path and dismounted, although
she didn’t see why, until the old man looked up, he was standing in the center
of a city, elevated off the ground, high in the trees. There was a flash
of light, and she blinked to clear her vision, or tried to, when her sight came
back the old man was in a room, quite clearly a room in that city that had been
above her.
He stood in front of an ornate wooden table, three people
sat behind the table in chairs that looked more like branches, but shaped
perfectly for those who sat upon them. There was a man with golden hair
and bright yellow eyes on the right, he looked human, but she knew immediately
he wasn’t. On the left was a woman in a white flowing robe, she was
willowy, and had very high cheekbones, and an attractive thin face, yet Katie
knew this one wasn’t human either.
In the middle sat another one that was not human.
She looked like the woman on the left, but wore green
armor, and a slight scowl on her face. She also didn’t have her head
covered, and Katie could make out the slightly pointed ears. She sounded
angry but also afraid when she spoke.
“News of Europe?”
The old man shook his head grimly, “I’m sorry queen
Brielle, the Elven lands in England and Ireland have been overrun. I’m
afraid your people there are scattered, what is left of them.”
She spat out the word like a curse, “Humans.”
The room went dark, and she got worried for a moment, but
then she realized the old man had closed his eyes, she could feel his grief and
regret, and a deep sense of personal failure. Yet, she sensed hope in him
as well, tied in with that implacable determination. If only he could get
the queen to listen.
“Will you allow my plan, before they destroy
everything? One day you can return, after your peoples recover, and the
humans grow up a bit.”
He said the last with irony, since the old man was human
himself… mostly.
She laughed darkly, “Do you think that’s possible?”
He nodded slowly, “They know not, that to destroy you
would irreparably harm and eventually doom the very Earth itself. They
act out of fear, and hatred of what they don’t understand. Foolish, but
they are too many, no matter your power… As for me, they no longer listen
to my council.”
The man with yellow eyes spoke, and his voice was deep,
“I do not think we have a choice my queen, if we don’t we may all perish, the
humans simply following later on, dying in a whimper.”
The woman in white spoke with a certainty, “The goddess
Charites agrees, we could fight, but it would just be slow suicide, they
outnumber us by too many, despite being weaker than us.”
Katie was fascinated, the dream had grabbed her attention
in a way that her life had failed to the last week or so. The woman was
some kind of… High priestess. If she remembered her mythology right,
Charites was one of the lesser goddesses of nature and… a few other things she
couldn’t recall. This seemed like a very odd dream though, she’d never
been into fantasy books, and the idea of Elves was ridiculous.
So why this dream? Maybe standing in the middle of
the field had fried her brain a bit after all.
The woman in the middle, the queen shut her eyes tightly
as if wrestling with herself, and then reopened them. A tear fell down
her cheek as she looked up at the old man, but it was the only sign of emotion
on her hardened visage. Her voice was strong, and revealed nothing of her
inner turmoil.
“Very well, what must we do Merlin?”
CRACK!
A loud boom of thunder made Katie jump
out of the bed like she was on fire, her heart beat raced as the rain pounded
down onto the roof. She touched her chest and took a deep breath.
She felt a surge of adrenaline racing through her body, but there was also
more, something she’d never felt before. It surrounded her and seemed to
suffuse the very air.
A line of lightning fell from the sky in her peripheral
vision, and less than a second later, another loud crack of thunder
reverberated through her body, it almost felt as if the house shook.
There’d been no tornado siren, but the storm looked nasty
and with the way things were now, she certainly couldn’t count on one. So
she pulled on a pair of sweat shorts and a t-shirt, and moved to head
downstairs, intending to go to the cellar. She stopped dead however, at
her door. There was a long staff leaning against the wall next to her
doorframe. She couldn’t move for the longest moment, because she
recognized it. It was the staff in the dream, that the old man had held
in his hands.
She was frozen, she didn’t want to touch it, but she
literally couldn’t walk away from it, her body was ignoring her mind’s
insistence to move her ass and get downstairs. She wondered if this was
what it felt like to have a psychotic break. That same strange energy
that she felt in the air around her, she could feel that it was much stronger
in the staff, she was afraid to touch it. For a moment longer she stared
at it in disbelief, and then a sudden silence fell as the wind outside died and
the patter of rain against the roof and her window ceased.
Then she heard it, it sounded like a train, and when she
looked away from the staff she could see nothing but darkness outside the
window. She’d heard that sound before, it was a twister. She
grabbed the staff, suddenly more frightened about being killed by nature than whatever
that could mean for her. She almost dropped the staff from shock, she
felt… something rushed through the staff and into her, but she couldn’t release
it, her hands were frozen. To her frustration, her feet still wouldn’t
obey, she couldn’t move and she needed to run for the basement.
Then she heard the loud creak and crack of wood from above,
the roof was being torn off and she saw her window pane torn away and her room was
filled with the strongest wind she’d ever felt. Then impossibly, she
heard the old man’s voice from her dream, he spoke just one word, but along
with that word also came the meaning of it. Fortify, protect, defend, and
safeguard. Her roof tore off and she grabbed at the door frame with her
only free hand. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on for long.
She’d been so listless, felt so helpless the last
week. She’d hardly cared about life and couldn’t see the point of going
on. But all that changed in that moment of terror, she didn’t really want
to die, and she knew she was about to.
It was insane, but she was just terrified enough to try
it. She closed her eyes and spoke under her breath, the word she’d heard
from the old man, “Munio.”
She felt that… energy surge in the staff and encompass her
as the storm ripped her from the doorframe and pulled her up into the sky…