Hybrid Saga 01 - Hybrid (42 page)

Cautiously, Jarred stepped through the half meter thick portal and gazed across the expanse of the room. The entire chamber seemed to be made of the same alloy as the morphing object that had allowed him entry. Obviously, it had only been a visible portion of the much larger object he was now standing in. The chamber was spherical in shape, its inner surface area a cloudy black, as opposed to the outer metallic composition, which seemed to move and sway gently, almost making it seem like it was a living breathing thing. Even the floor, which was smooth with strange symbols engraved into it, swayed and flowed as the rest of the sphere did. It was a bit disorienting as it seemed as if the ground was in constant motion. He could see no lighting fixtures of any kind, nor the same glowing algae that lit much of these mountain caverns, but the murky waves that flowed across the chamber’s surface seemed to radiate its own, creating a gentle whirlwind of dancing bands of shadow and light.

A sort of flattened pyramid, the only real structure in the chamber, was situated in the center of the room, each of its sides lined with a stairway which climbed to an elevated altar of sorts. Jarred moved towards the structure and ascended the nearest of the stairways, making his way up to the altar where his eyes grew wide with recognition. Embedded in the altar, the hilt of a sword he had seen many times, stood erected like an antennae, pointed up towards the rounded ceiling, a small amount of the blade partially visible above where it sank into the murky, flowing surface of the altar. He had held this weapon in his hands, carried into an unknown waiting darkness, more times than he could remember. The dream he had always had and could not escape.

This was the sword. He felt suddenly compelled to reach out for the hilt, and immediately realized that it had not been this place that had been summoning him, but the sword itself. It was the presence that had drawn him here. The chamber itself seemed to tremble with excitement, the waves of its murky surface whirling more intensely and brightly. Jarred reached for the hilt and grasped it, feeling an immediate charge of energy. The chamber around him become so bright he was forced to close his eyes to shield them from the harshness of it. The radiance penetrated and engulfed him. It felt as if he was being swept up into the flow of the now rapid waves of energy and he suddenly had no sense of his bearings. He could no longer tell if he was standing or floating, upright or upside down. He wasn’t even sure if he was still in the chamber. He glimpsed images that he could not fully comprehend, they flashed across his vision in such rapid succession. The sensations were overwhelming and more than his body or mind could handle.

And then the noise stopped. Everything stopped.

Jarred opened his eyes and found himself no longer within the confines of the strange chamber, but in the dark void of space. The universe loomed before him, far smaller than he knew it to be. It was a young universe. He watched as galaxies and solar systems were formed, star by star, expanding rapidly into the black emptiness. In his mind, he understood that he was not physically there. These images were being shown to him.

His attention was drawn to a star with worlds surrounding it. Lush worlds that would be full of life. An ominous shadow fell over the planets and then the sun they circled. A wave of energy lashed out from a source he could not see and the worlds were destroyed, blown apart by the devastating blast. The sun was not spared from its world’s fate and as the energy wave engulfed it, the glowing star became suddenly pale and small, exploding in an horrific super nova before caving back in on itself and vanishing from existence. More stars and worlds followed, all obliterated in the wake of the massacre. The war. This was what he was being shown. A war that ravaged entire galaxies before Jarred’s own sun had even come into existence. The carnage continued until Jarred felt he could no longer bare to be shown any more and then it finally ebbed. What was left of the universe became quiet and still. The war was ended.

No. Not ended. Peace was not found. Something had halted the destruction, for Jarred could feel that the force behind it wanted to continue. A sliver of light appeared out of the devastated ruins of so many obliterated worlds and quickly drew closer. As it neared, he immediately recognized it as being the same spherical object, or one similar, to that which he was currently in. It was a vessel. Something about it, or aboard it, had hindered the devastating rampage, and now it fled. It was to be hidden from the destroyers. Locked away for all time, so that life could return to the universe.

It found a virgining system, with a world that would one day support life. It was there that the sphere stayed hidden for millennia, the
Guardians
who had fled with it, ensuring that the secrets within remained hidden.

But those who once wielded the power would never stop searching for it. Foreseeing that the hiding place of the sphere may one day be discovered, and knowing they themselves would not always remain to defend it, they spread its contents across the worlds that circled the young system’s star and infused a part of themselves into the lush world, who’s beings would require the strength it gave them when the time came that evil returned to claim what it had lost.

Jarred’s eyes shot open as if he had been awakened from a startling dream and he found himself back in the hidden chamber, standing with his hand still firmly grasping the hilt of the familiar sword from his dreams. He felt both mentally and physically exhausted, his mouth and throat dry, every muscle in his body aching. He tasted salt on his lips and realized that he was drenched in sweat. How long had he been standing there? The strange episode had seemed to last only a few minutes, but he felt wiped out, as if hours had passed. Releasing the death grip he had on the sword hilt, he flexed his stiffened hand and fingers. He felt the sword call out to him again, but ignored the compulsion for the time being. He needed to rest and try to get his head around what he had just experienced.

Had it been a waking dream of some kind or a shock induced delusion? Or had it been a true vision of the distant past somehow passed on to him through his contact with the sword? If it was true, what did it all mean? That was the bigger question. What ancient secrets did this
vessel
hold? More importantly, what did it have to do with him? The vision had suggested that the
Guardians
, the beings that had supposedly brought the vessel here, had left a part of themselves behind to strengthen any future inhabitants of the world. He didn’t like to admit it, but it sounded a lot like the bogus myths about his own kind that he had always balked at. Half human, half God. It was an absurd story and a ridiculous explanation for what was most likely an evolutionary mutation of some kind. Of course, if he was so certain of that, why was he trying so hard to convince himself?

This all seemed too big for him and he was too tired to think about it anymore. At least for now. He would have time to sort it all out later, once he had made it out of here and back to the surface . . . with the sword. Jarred stood and turned to look at the weapon that was driven into the altar. He could feel it calling to him. It wanted to be released from its prison. No, not a prison. It was something else. This place . . . this vessel. It was also . . . a vault. And now it had been opened. The sword longed to be released. For
him
to release it. And though he could not explain why, he felt the overwhelming need to do so. He
wanted
to remove it from its berth. He
needed
to.

Stepping forward, Jarred reached out to grasp the hilt of the weapon again, this time not being thrown into some shock induced vision state or jolted by a wave of blazing white energy. Instead, he felt tendrils, of what seemed like a kind of static electricity, that danced between the weapon and himself, not painful or awkward, but warm and . . . strangely comforting. It felt . . .
right
. He pulled up on the sword, and without the resistance he expected, it began to slide free from the altar. There was no visible seam in the altar for the blade to have been slid down into it and as the sword rose, it made it appear as if he was withdrawing the weapon from a liquid and not a solid block. When he had pulled the sword’s full length free from the altar, it showed no visible sign it had ever housed the weapon at all, appearing to have sealed itself closed behind the exiting blade.

Jarred looked away from the altar to the sword he now held out before himself and all of his questions faded to the back of his consciousness. He was suddenly filled with a sense of relief, as though a weight he had not known was their had been lifted free of him. It felt as if he had not been able to breath before and was drawing unrestricted air for the first time. He felt free. Or perhaps
it
did. Though he had seen and held the weapon so lucidly in his dreams, gazing upon it now, he knew that they had failed to convey its true majestic presence. The double edged blade was sleek and elegant, and though it did not appear to give off light, as the surface of the sphere did, it seemed to have a glowing radiance of its own. A spirit that shone so brightly, Jarred could feel its warmth penetrating him.

So completely absorbed with the sword, it took Jarred a moment to register the dimming light in the sphere. Glancing around, he realized that the flowing waves that had danced across its surface had now ceased, leaving the chamber strangely still, the once murky bands of swirling color solidified into a cold and lifeless grey. A sudden chill ran down Jarred’s spine and he felt the powerful urge to leave. An urge that wasn’t entirely coming from himself. He looked back to the sword, curiously, the compulsion growing stronger. Not wasting the time to speculate on the origin or purpose of the warning, he began to slowly back down the altar stairway.

He hadn’t made it more than a few steps when he began to feel a slight vibration in the darkening floor. By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairway, it had increased to a steady rumble. Luminous fissures began to appear in the now near black surface of the sphere, expanding quickly, like fracturing glass, into what resembled a series of glowing white webs. The sphere continued to shake violently, the glowing fracture lines flickering erratically, and Jarred set off at a run across the chamber, heading for the still open portal that led to the outer cavern.

Leaping through the opening, he had to immediately dive out of the way of a falling slab of rock that came crashing down next to him. The entire cavern was rocking from the turbulence caused by the unstable vessel. However it had come to be a part of this mountain, its strange, new activity was clearly upsetting the entire rock chamber. Cracks were forming across the wall face in which the sphere was embedded, chunks and entire sheets of rock falling away, exposing more and more of the vessel.

Jarred continued to back away, watching as the fissures in the rock wall climbed to the cave ceiling, dislodging more falling boulders and rock slabs. The cave floor was becoming more unstable, beginning to break up in places and as he passed by them, he could see that the large support pillars were struggling to remain intact under the pressure of the near seismic activity. Cracks began to form up their lengths, one breaking off from the crumbling ceiling. It stood for a moment on its own, but slowly began to lean, eventually falling into the pillar next to it, causing a change reaction of collapses.

Caught in the middle of the falling towers of rock, Jarred leapt away from the crashing debris, rolling to his feet between two piles of rubble, only to find himself in the path of another falling pillar. With no time to react or dive away, and though it was a useless defensive gesture, he instinctively threw his arm out to shield himself from the massive structure falling towards him as he fell back between the piles of rubble. Assuming he was a split second from being crushed, he was surprised to feel his arm pass through the falling pillar. As he hit the ground, he saw half of the stone tower, the portion that should have crushed him, fall at a slight angle over top of him, hitting the two piles of rubble before rolling away to rest on the ground a meter from his position. The other half of the pillar laid just below his feet, an impossible clean cut edge along its surface where it had been severed . . .
by his arm
?

Jarred looked to the hand that had apparently done the impossible and found it clenching the sword he had forgotten he was still holding. It had sliced straight through the thick stone pillar, as if had been nothing, and somehow it had felt as if he himself had been the one cutting through it. Casting the strange thought aside, Jarred rose to his feet. There was no time to contemplate the meaning of anything he was experiencing. The cavern was coming down around him, though that concerned him less than the current state of the spherical vessel, which was now completely visible and free of the rock wall that had held it, hovering above the ground. Its surface was so covered in the bright glowing fissures, it appeared almost as a floating ball of light.

Terrified, but unable to turn away, Jarred quickly back away, working his way down the crumbling steps to the rising pool of water at their base. The tremors and collapsing rock had increased the flow of water seeping from the numerous gaps and cracks in the cave wall. Slabs of rock continued to crash down upon the crumbling monument and into the water all around him, but he continued to watch the now spinning sphere of light. It had become almost unbearably bright, whirling in the air like a ball of fire. Pieces of rock that fell from the ceiling into its path were instantly crushed into dust particles.