Looming war threatens everything Fate holds dear
Fate’s reunion with Finn has given her the courage she needs to confront the dark forces poised to claim the immense power stored within the Keep. But a deadly game of deceit is playing out behind the scenes, birthing what may be an even greater threat. As war bears down on Fate and those she loves, her only hope is to break her blood oath as Keep Guardian in order to lure the final battle to unexpected realms, where surprising allies are gathering forces.
To get there, Fate must fight. She will fight for her childhood friend, whose formidable warrior skills are under the control of an ancient evil. She will fight for her father and dear friends, each of whom are prepared to die for her. And she will fight for the future she dreams of having with Finn.
Will Fate succeed in keeping her world from shattering, or is she headed for sheer destruction?
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Chapter 2 – Fate’s War
Lapis Philosphorum
The curved sanctuary walls were awash in flashing crimson lights when Fate, Sithias, Gerdie, Finn and Eustace raced through the door. Farouk sat in his cage, his monkey-sized body kicked back in a relaxed pose and fox-like face strangely serene under the noisome barrage of warning bells.
Brune was there too, leaning against the wall with arms folded. She was dressed for a mission, decked out in full body armor and blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun. Fate’s stomach tightened at the sight of her. Only a few short weeks ago, an infection had mutated Brune into a Gorgon. But then Farouk had miraculously cured her, and this was after informing everyone that finding a cure in time was highly unlikely.
Suspicious indeed.
The snakes covering Brune’s head were thankfully gone, along with the scales and fangs, all replaced by flawless features, bedroom eyes and full lips. Not that her good looks bothered Fate. Though she could’ve done without the double take Finn had given Brune upon her remarkable transformation.
What troubled her most was the secrecy going on between Brune and Farouk. She’d interrupted too many hushed conversations, and had even caught Brune coming in from two scouting missions after Farouk had explicitly warned against any such outings.
They were working on something together. Fate knew it in her bones, and she hated being left out, especially since she was Keep Guardian. It was her duty to know everything. Just because Brune had held the position before, didn’t mean Farouk should be deferring concerns and strategies to her during this time of looming war. They’d both assured her this was not the case, but she wasn’t buying it.
Fate slowed her pace when she saw how relaxed each of them looked. Was this was some sort of cruel joke? She didn’t know what to think anymore when it came to those two.
Farouk’s vast history with the Keep may have made him the guiding force behind every group decision, but Fate had never been entirely at ease with the sly creature. Anyone who mixed perfectly good words into his own convoluted versions was suspect in her mind. It was amazing she was able to understand his odd speech patterns in the first place. And for all she knew, there might be all sorts of double meanings behind everything he said.
As for Brune, Fate would never fully trust her cantankerous great-aunt the way she had come to trust Gerdie. Not after Brune had chucked Fate into the Book of Fables without a single care for whether she survived or not. She’d said it was to save the Keep, but she’d really done it to save herself from rotting away.
Plus Brune was pushing to be Fate’s proxy again. Fate’s desire to be free of her oath as Keep Guardian was stronger than ever, but not if that freedom meant dying. She didn’t trust that Brune would be content with being a stand-in. She could easily hold the position permanently if Fate met with an untimely end–an opportunity Fate wasn’t about to hand over.
Darcy and Mason burst through the door in a panic. Both looked mussed, as if they’d just climbed out of bed, which they probably had. Ever since Mason had found the courage to stand up to his hen-pecking girlfriend, they’d been getting along like never before. Fate could hardly stand being around them. They were always kissing and inevitably disappearing to their room, a romantic indulgence she wished she could share with Finn.
Renewed frustration set in. It wasn’t fair. Darcy was the same age as her and no one was concerned about protecting her virtue, least of all Mason.
Darcy did her best to smooth the black fringe of her bangs back into place. She tried for her standard Cleopatra expression of cool detachment, but failed since her pale complexion was made clownish by the smear of her dark red lipstick and heavy eyeliner. Mason’s geometric haircut, which he used to gell into stiff Anime spikes, fell in dark, irregular points over his fine Asian features. His shirt was on inside out and his shoes didn’t match. It was obvious they’d both dressed in a hurry.
Everyone gathered around the large table, which through some means of anti-gravity, hovered a foot off the floor in the center of the room. Gerdie stood on her footstool with her ears covered. “Can somebody turn that off?” she yelled.
Farouk straightened and pressed a button on the keyboard of his control panel. The alarm and flashing red light ceased, dropping them into instantaneous silence.
Fate frowned at him. “Is there a real emergency here, or were you just torturing us for a laugh?”
Farouk stood and leaned with the point of his nose close the bars of his cage. “That was a drill, of which you messbacled.” His slanted gaze slid to Brune. “Please explainate their shortgoings.”
Brune pushed away from the wall and strolled down the length of the table before stopping in front of Fate. “For starters, you failed to show up in full armor and gear. You do realize you’re nothing without them.” She glanced at Finn, particularly at the runes inked on his temple. “Unlike your boyfriend here, whose weapons and protections are already built-in.”
Fate ground her teeth together.
Brune moved on, focusing her forbidding gaze on Gerdie, Eustace and Sithias. “And you three…what do you have to show for three weeks of research on Kaliena’s weaknesses?” She gave them no time to answer. “Zero, zip, zilch, that’s what. In the meantime, Kaliena has seized another three hundred and fifty-five quadrants.”
She gestured to Farouk, who held his bronze pointer stick poised over the detailed map of the Keep’s two hemispheres spread over the table’s surface. He tapped each circle, triggering the 3D projections of both halves of the Keep, where they rotated above the map. One half was dark and only a small portion of the other half was lit.
“As you can well see, Kaliena now ownjugates over eighty-five percent of the Keep,” Farouk informed them. “I previsionate she’ll have full governation of the Keep within the next five days or less.”
Fate’s pulse quickened. “Why the sudden acceleration? Just a few days ago, you told us we had at least a month.”
Farouk’s devil-pointed ears sagged a little. “That was when I still had connectifications with over half the Keep. After losing these latest quadrants, I can no longer be exacturate with my diagnostifications.”
“If that’s the case, how do you know we only have five days left?” Finn asked.
“Because of this.” Farouk triggered the schematic of the Keep and the massive rings sweeping around it. One of the rings was no longer rotating.
The full ramification of what this meant slammed in and Fate’s nerves skittered. The Keep was located in the darkest edge of space, a place called the Chaos Region. The rings protected them from the harmful emanations of a roiling ocean of wild, multidimensional magic and psychic energy storms. Before the Golandon had put the rings in place, droves of their population had succumbed to the destructive energies and had gone on killing rampages. Thousands of the insane had been imprisoned underground. Eons had passed since then, but Fate wondered if their bones were still piled somewhere deep inside the Keep.
The warm touch of Finn’s hand on the small of Fate’s back woke her to the present moment as Farouk explained the importance of the protective rings to all the others. “Are you alright?” he whispered in her ear.
She nodded. Smiling, he dropped his hand and returned his attention to the meeting. Her skin grew cold where his palm had been. She shivered with the need to rest against him and forget the trouble pressing in on them from all sides.
She was tired, and not just physically. Her exhaustion ran as deep as the soul. She’d been dealing with one crisis after another from the moment she was first trapped inside the Book of Fables. The six months she’d spent within the book’s hidden realm of Oldwilde had been harrowing. Had it not been for Finn, Sithias and Gerdie, she never would’ve survived.
Yet even after escaping the cursed book, surviving was all she’d been doing since then. Most of all, leaving Finn behind in Oldwilde had broken something deep down inside. Her determination to get back to him had been the driving force behind everything she had done since entering the Keep. That’s what had kept her alive when forced to face the monsters it contained. Now that Finn was back with her, the tenacity she’d come to rely on for fuel was no longer required, leaving her emptied of all energy reservese.
She needed to find a way to recharge. And fast.
“The Chaos Region is the source of many omnivasive entities, some of which are known in your myths and legends as gods and demons,” Farouk continued. “Most of you are already acquaintiformed with the Mortcarion Apocrypha, but we should revisit for Sithias and Finn’s sake.”
Fate noticed the telepathicgram projector in his hand before he plugged it into his control panel. She wanted desperately to excuse herself. She’d experienced the horrific recording two times already, but she held still and braced herself as a sheet of misty particles formed over the center of the meeting table.
The image of the three-eyed seer, Vasha, flickered into view. Her dry voice scraped the air, grabbing hold of everyone’s minds as she guided them through the story of the Keep’s origins and its builders, the Golandon, an exotic blue-skinned race born with six arms. Fate tensed when Vasha’s narration came to the birth of the chaos god. The intensity of the images gripped hold as she was forced to witness, once again, the entity’s churning mass of darkness destroy the Keep’s protective force field and merge with the High Priestess. She clenched her fists as the dark power transformed the woman into the fierce, black-eyed Kaliena they had all come to hate and fear.
Farouk stopped the recording. “I guesstimate Kaliena’s plan is to bring the force field down by blockending all six rings.”
Fate pressed her fists into the surface of the table until her knuckles ached. “That’s crazy. She knows what the energies will do. She watched her people go nuts and kill each other. I know she doesn’t care about us, but why would she risk her own sanity?”
“I suspiciate she plans to wake another chaos entity and governate it to merge with her, as she did before.”
Fate’s blood went cold. They were dead meat if Kaliena managed to pull that off.
Eustace cleared his throat. “I have a differing thought on that.”
All eyes fixed on him and Fate grew hopeful. Her father had always been her pillar of strength, forever providing the firm ground on which she had stood for most of her life. Being at odds with him had only shaken her foundation even more.
“I don’t believe Kaliena’s physically strong enough to be the vessel for such an immense energy as a chaos entity,” Eustace offered. “For some time now, I suspect she’s been working on achieving the legendary alchemical substance known as the Lapis Philosphorum.”
“Do you mean the Philosopher’s Stone?” Fate asked.
Her father’s expression softened into surprise when she spoke directly to him. A sad pang spread through her chest as he nodded.
“Whoa,” Mason exclaimed as he rubbed his eyes and looked suddenly awake, “that makes total sense! He Who Must Not Be Named used the same thing to restore his body and power.”
Eustace frowned. Fate could see her father’s patience had run thin with her fellow fantasy geeks. Mason and Darcy were the last relics of her old life as a writer. They were fans of an accidentally successful book she’d authored. Unfortunately for them, they’d made the innocent mistake of following Fate into danger. Worse yet, there used to be three of them. A golden Chinese dragon had eaten Lincoln. Poor, overly enthusiastic, yet brave, Lincoln.
It was time Mason and Darcy returned home, where they’d be safe again. Hopefully, Gerdie would find the right forgetting spell soon so they could be sent back without worrying that they would remember the Keep and expose its entrance to the entire world.
“I hardly think we can compare the stuff of fiction to the very real and miraculous achievement of transmuting base metals into an elixir of life,” Eustace insisted.
“Uh huh.” It was clear Mason didn’t see the distinction.
“Even if we could compare this to pure fiction, which would be preposterous,” Eustace muttered the last part with a roll of his eyes, “the necessary amounts of elixir required to restore any sorceress in a degraded state such as Kaliena–or wizard, as you’ve mentioned–would be gargantuan. As far as I know that wasn’t the case.”
“But he did it all the same,” Mason insisted.
Eustace’s shoulders sagged with exasperation. “Yes, well, you have a point.”
Before Mason could press the subject any further, Darcy rubbed against his arm like a purring cat and shushed him. A far cry from what she would’ve done only a few weeks before, which would’ve been to berate her boyfriend in front of everyone.
Farouk’s spine straightened as he narrowed his eyes on Eustace. “Why didn’t you notellify me of this opinionation earlier?”
“Well, it’s not my opinion. It’s more of a theory, and has remained so, up until I finished my research of the Great Work this morning. There’s still one stumbling block though. Crystal is the base compound for the formula, and Kaliena would need a lot of it. I’ve searched the records for any vaults storing that much crystal and there are none.”
Farouk sank into his chair, his snout pinched as he stroked his tail anxiously. “That may not be absopletely true…” he trailed off, deep in thought.
Brune edged closer to his cage. “You’re thinking of the core, aren’t you?”
Farouk shook off the blank stare he’d fallen into. “Yes, and it would explainate why one of the rings has stopped moving.”
An instant knowing came over Fate, something she’d grown accustomed to since her initiation as Keep Guardian. She could’ve done without the excruciating download of all the Keep’s history into her brain, but she certainly enjoyed being able to ask any question concerning the Keep and know the answer in a blink. Though this particular knowing wasn’t from the download. This was a memory from when she’d been wearing the helmet of Hermes Farouk had given her to wear during her initiation. After the download, the helmet had freed her consciousness to go anywhere her thoughts would take her.
Her overzealous curiosity about who had built the Keep had taken her into the bowels of the arcane structure. That’s when she’d first seen Kaliena, asleep in her shrine. Or so she’d thought. A Golandon cyborg scientist had revived her at that same moment with some sort of liquid he’d concocted in his mad scientist laboratory. Kaliena had woken and had sensed Fate’s presence. She was none too happy about it.
Fate had had to make a hasty retreat.
Looking back, Fate wondered if what she’d witnessed was the making of the elixir of life. Before discovering the scientist’s laboratory, she’d seen the maintenance robots delivering glowing sapphires, which the scientist had used to make the liquid. The Keep’s core was a mystery, even to Farouk, though he’d often theorized it was most likely comprised of solid crystal.
Fate pushed away from the table. “Dad’s right. Kaliena has the elixir of life and she’s been mining the crystal from the core to do it.”
Brune looked at her like she was deranged. “How would you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been down there. None of us have. The core’s impossible to get to.”
Farouk stood and gripped the bars of his cage. “Fate knows. She was there.” Brune opened her mouth to argue, but he raised a hand to stop her. “We must work speedidly. Any further flawmage to the core’s crystal will bring all the rings to a grinding halt.”
Sithias, who still looked horrified after listening to Vasha’s story, whiffled his wings nervously. A brown feather fluttered to the floor. “What happens if all the rings ssstop rotating?”
Farouk leveled his gaze on the 3D projection of the Keep. “We descend into madness, which usually begins with severical paranoia, followed by prolongated fits of terror and the need to protect oneself from what is perceived as danger.”
Sithias shivered. “You mean we’ll end up killing each other the way the Golandon did?”
“Disfortunately, you are exacturate.”
This concludes Chapter 2 of Fate’s War.
CLICK HERE to read Chapter 3.
