Message Bearer (The Auran Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

‘...have brought him here...’ The voice
came from far away.

Seb’s eyes flickered. He
felt himself rising from a timeless void.

‘...your father will...’

Images formed in his
mind. Wicked, black eyed creatures. Daggers cutting flesh. His flesh.

‘Will he live?’ The voice
was familiar. A face came to mind, pale, almost grey. Yellow eyes.

‘Live?’ An unfamiliar voice,
older, gruffer. ‘I’m surprised he’s still alive as it is.’

‘Me too, he’s a tough
one.’

‘Tough, or just foolish.’

An image flashed across
his mind. A terrifying visage, a contorted face of fangs, dripping with drool,
the mouth wide open, exposing a bottomless pit of darkness. The dark swelled,
encompassing everything.

He heard himself scream.
Then silence.

***

Seb opened his eyes, the effort painful,
as if the lids were muscles atrophied from under use. He sat upright, noticing
straight away the absence of pain from his side. He glanced down, tentatively
feeling the bare skin, the flesh now completely unblemished aside from a pale
white line, barely an inch across.

‘Stone me,’ he said,
pressing the scar, not quite believing what he saw.

He took a moment to scan
the room. It was a simple place, more a dormitory really. Aside from the bed he
was in there were several more arranged at regular intervals throughout the
room. Next to his bed stood a chest of drawers with a jug of water and a half
full glass on it.

He swung the sheets back
and lowered his legs to a cold wooden floor. He stood, relishing the feeling of
movement without pain, before striding to the small window.

Outside, dimmed in the
fading light of a setting sun, lay a large lawn, expertly maintained, that
extended far into the distance. Immediately before him, next to the building,
was a gravelled drive which trailed off into a small copse to the far right.
Beyond the lawn the grounds of the building became more unruly, with large
bushes and shrubs competing with the lawn for dominance. Nature dominated by
the farthest reaches, with a massive wall of conifers obscuring the hills that
he could just about make out in the distance.

‘A bit different to Brightford,
I presume?’

Seb spun round, his
stomach knotting. Cade stood a foot inside the door that he now let shut behind
him. Bruises covered his face and his right arm hung in a sling.

‘Ever so slightly,’ Seb
said. He nodded towards Cade’s arm, ‘What happened?’

‘It’ll heal. It always
takes longer when it’s sheol poison.’

‘Sheol?’

‘I’ll come to that.’ Cade
said. ‘How about you, you feeling okay?’

Seb absently felt his
side, nodding slowly. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘That black sludge?’

Cade smiled. ‘The algae?’

‘It’s gone?’

Cade nodded. ‘When there’s
no wound to heal it just dries up and drops off.’

‘I thought it didn’t
heal? That it was just a temporary thing?’

Cade nodded. ‘Correct.
Once we got you here we had help from more
powerful
sources.’

Seb sat down on the bed,
his legs suddenly feeling weak. ‘You should market that stuff you know, it’d
make a fortune.’

‘I think we’d have a bit
of a problem explaining where we source it from.’

Silence fell. Seb stared
at the floor and shook his head, so many questions coming to mind.

‘What happened to me,
Cade?’

He was suddenly aware of
tears filling his eyes, his voice sounding meek, almost child-like. He coughed,
shaking his head again as he tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. He
let out a long, drawn out breath.

‘You okay?’ Cade said.

‘Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s
been a bit...stressful.’

‘You’re not kidding.’
Cade nodded back to the door, ‘You up for a walk? I’ll see what I can fill you
in on before you meet the Magister.’

‘The who?’

Cade smiled. ‘Come on.’

Seb
followed in silence as they left the dormitory. They emerged into a wide
corridor. A worn carpet filled the centre, leading towards a closed wooden door
in the distance. Faded paintings hung on the walls, the kind sold for a tenner
at a junk sale. The air smelled of damp.

‘Where are we?’

‘It’s not really a simple
answer.’

‘Try me.’

‘Geographically, we’re
just at the northern boundaries of the Lake District, not far from Carlisle.’

‘Anywhere I’ve heard of?’

‘Not really. You won’t
find this place on any map.’

‘Why am I not surprised
to hear that?’

The door at the far end
opened as they arrived at it. A young man, probably about his own age, came the
opposite way. The man’s face was caked in mud and something redder. Looking at
him, their eyes meeting, Seb saw the dried blood caked around the man’s eye,
the socket puffed up. The man saw Cade and his head dropped instantly. He
silently edged past them without saying a word.

‘What happened to him?’
Seb said as they made their way down a wooden staircase that creaked with every
step.

‘Combat practice,’ Cade
said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. ‘I didn’t think they
still taught that to be honest.’

‘Who don’t?’

‘Let’s get outside first.
We can talk there. This place makes me claustrophobic.’

They reached the bottom
of the stairs. A heavy-looking set of large, wooden doors stood before them.
Cade pushed them open as if they weighed nothing. They stepped out onto the
gravel outside, Seb slowed, savouring the freshness that washed over him,
breathing it in.

‘Come on, you can get a
good view from up here.’

Seb followed as they trudged
up a set of slate steps that ascended a grass slope towards a stone gazebo at
the top, the structure showing its age, cracked and worn by the elements.

The air was cooler up
here, the chill nipped at him, but it was a good sensation that made him feel
alert. Refreshed, he turned back. His mouth dropped.

‘What the hell?’

They’d left a building of
some kind, he was sure of that. A big one too, at least three floors. But then
why, when he looked back down the path where they’d come, where the stone steps
had seemingly morphed into rough, uneven rocks, did he now look at a crumbled
ruin of stone and foliage?

‘That’s not possible,’ he
said.

‘What do you see?’

He looked at Cade and
then back again. ‘Is that meant to be some kind of joke? I see a bloody ruin,
that’s what I see. But I know that can’t be true. I just came from there.’

Cade nodded. ‘Nope, it’s
true, that’s what’s there. At least, that’s what the Unaware see.’

‘What?’

‘Look again,’ Cade said,
nodding towards the ruin.

Seb looked, shaking his
head. What kind of trip was this? Yup, there it was. A ruin. A broken,
knackered, stone ruin. What was he meant to be looking at? He opened his mouth
to speak, ‘I don’t -’

Then it happened.

The view became smudged
at first, like looking through a windscreen during a thunderstorm. He shook his
head and blinked, but the distortion only grew. An uneasy feeling sprouted from
his spine as pieces of the image began to change, ruined stone being replaced
by solid slate, crumbling square holes suddenly making way for gleaming
windows. The transformation continued for several seconds, the mirage peeling
away, revealing a gothic looking mansion underneath.

‘That’s just…’ Seb couldn’t
stop shaking his head, ‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Have a seat, Kid.’

Seb opened his mouth to
protest. No way was he going to sit on that rough slab that had once passed as
a seat. But the slab was gone. A burnished wooden bench stood in its place.

‘Is this whole place just
one big illusion?’ he said, running his hands along the bench. It was
definitely real.

‘Like I said, to the
Unaware it is. I’ve not seen the ruins for about seventy years.’

Seb collapsed onto the
bench. ‘Seventy years?’

Cade sat alongside him. ‘Give
or take a decade or so. It’s hazy before I took the Oath.’

‘You must have a damned
good surgeon.’

Cade laughed at that. At
least he had a sense of humour.

‘So, are you going to let
me in on what’s going on?’

Cade nodded. ‘Shortly,
but first I need some information from you.’

‘I’m not sure what I can
tell you, but go ahead.’

‘Why were you at the
church that night?’

‘I don’t know really. I
wonder about that a lot. The night. I like the night, always have.’

‘But why the church?’

‘Like I said, I don’t
know. I seem to get drawn to places. Nothing specific about them. They just
seem to appeal, like, you know, on a subconscious level.’

Cade frowned, his eyes
looking left and right as if mulling over something.

‘Where else do you go?
Can you name any other place you’ve been drawn to?’

‘Interesting line of
questioning.’

‘It’s important.’ Cade
said, the tone of his voice not inviting any room for sarcasm.

‘Okay, I’ll play. Another
one that always seems to get me is Bleasedale Circle.’

That made Cade sit up. ‘The
stones in Lancaster?’

‘Like I said, I like to
wander. Why, how is this relevant to what happened?’

‘It just confirms my
suspicions. You’re drawn to these places as you’re a Latent. The first test was
testing if you could see Skelwith.’

‘Skelwith?’

‘The mansion. But those
places are special. The church used to have an access point to a Way before it
collapsed. Bleasedale’s the same, although that one has been sealed for
centuries. The Consensus is still weak there though, which is what’s been
drawing you in.’

Seb blinked and waved
both hands up. ‘Okay, now it’s your turn. All I just heard was some crazy shit
followed by a bit more crazy sprinkled on top.’

Cade laughed again. ‘Fair
enough. You’re going to hear a lot more about this soon but let me give you an
abridged version for now.’

‘That’ll do for now,
anyway. I doubt my brain can take too much of this Matrix stuff today.’

‘That analogy isn’t too
far off the mark.’ Cade said. He shifted round on the bench, his yellow eyes
fixing Seb with a stare that made him uncomfortable.

‘Right, Seb. Imagine that
the world you know, this world, is just one of many realms that exist in one,
massive reality.’

‘A bit like the
multiverse thing?’ he said, smirking inwardly at the one random fact he could
add to the discussion.

‘Not quite. Take this one
universe
, as you call it. Imagine if that universe was shattered into
several pieces. Where once civilisations existed side by side, they are now
separated by vast distances of time and space.’

‘Wow, this is getting
heavy,’ he said, pinching the sides of his brow.

‘I won’t go any further
on that for now, brighter people than me will explain it better than I can.
Just for now accept the premise that Earth exists in a fragment of an old
universe. That this fragment is known as a Shard, and there exist many other
fragments out there, also called Shards.’

Seb nodded slowly. Part
of his mind, the part that worked with facts, with logic, told him that this
was obviously bullshit. How could this guy know? This guy with the ninja skills
and the yellow eyes? The same guy that had saved him from possessed people with
blood like oil and eyes as black as night? He processed it over and over, and
slowly his logical mind began to concede that perhaps this guy was worth
listening to. Hell, how else could he explain the mansion appearing trick?

‘Okay, I’ll accept that
premise. I’ve heard something sort of similar before, so it’s not too Twilight
Zone just yet.’

‘Give it time. That’s
just the tip of the iceberg.’ Cade continued, ‘Finally, imagine that the cause
of this Sharding was a great war that ripped apart the very fabric of reality.
Imagine that the survivors of this war fled the chaos that remained and found a
new home in the Shard that was the furthest, most distant place away from the
horror that remained. Imagine these beings lived amongst the natural inhabitants
of that realm, hidden in plain sight, masking their true nature.’

‘Earth, our universe,’
Seb said, his eyes wide as his brain worked at a hundred miles an hour. ‘That’s
the Shard. You, Sarah, those things. You’re all part of the lot that came here?’

‘You pick things up
quick. Although not many of the originals are left. I was born a human, here,
on earth, as are most of the other Aware. The sheol were here already, but not
in the form or the number we know now.’