12. Turn #2
Charlie wondered if they shouldn’t do that now.
But he knew that they couldn’t. Seeyr was here.
And without the information from her, they couldn’t get back home.
So they had to stay in the maw of the monster and hope to escape before that maw shut.
He sidled along the back of the wall. He wanted to keep near the stairs, but maybe there were weapons or something down here he could use.
“You won’t be teleporting out of here, Wyvern,” the Kaly-slice said with certainty.
“Really? Because I’ve done it before. Or I will do it. I just need to have a talk with Seeyr and then we’ll be on our way,” Fiona said with her hands fisted.
“Ah, yes, the future. This glorious future where everything is sunshine and roses!” The Kaly-slice laughed. “Again, get in the cage and see what happens!”
“In the future, you are hunted. You are so pathetic. Slices of slices. Running for you little half-lives.” Fiona shook her head. “It’s inevitable.”
“But you’re here and now I know–”
“But are you here?” Seeyr asked softly.
It was so soft that, at first, no one knew who had spoken. But then all eyes were upon the other Immortal in the cage. She had walked up to the bars, but did not touch them. Charlie knew that they were spelled to hurt. Badly. His heart ached. She had her eyes, but she looked so gray and ghostly.
The Kaly-slice slowly turned around. “I’m most definitely here. This is my creation. The Order. The Confessors. The rules. Everything is mine. There will finally be some semblance of peace.”
“But no one will ever know your role in this,” Seeyr continued. “Wyvern told you, didn’t she? There is no trace of you in her past.”
“No trace of Tanis perhaps, but perhaps I will simply have shifted to a new form. What does it matter? It will be me,” the Kaly-slice retorted with an angry light in her eyes.
“You’ve cut yourself off from yourself, Kaly.
Truthfully, you shouldn’t even be called that.
The others–like Artemis and Roan–have, at least, acknowledged that they are different from whom they once belonged to, but you still think of yourself as the whole,” Seeyr continued in that quiet way.
“You will get to experience that wholeness again. Sooner than you think. And you will be horrified by what you’ve done. ”
Charlie felt a stab of satisfaction–and relief–as Seeyr spoke of them returning to the future and the Kaly-slice becoming a part of Caemorn again. That meant they succeeded. That meant that things were still going to plan even though things had seemingly spun out of control.
“There’s no escape, Seeyr. Not for them or for you,” the Kaly-slice told her in no uncertain terms. “With a bare thought, this whole place will be filled with my people.”
“You haven’t called Roan yet? You haven’t told any of your other selves about us, have you?” Fiona took a step towards the Kaly-slice, whose head whipped around.
“I really wouldn’t come so close to me, Wyvern. Or you’ll find yourself trapped in a soul gem,” the Kaly-slice warned.
Fiona stilled her forward movement. “Why haven’t you told the others about us yet? Why this whole charade?”
“I wanted to hear what you have to say,” the Kaly-slice shrugged.
“Now you have,” Fiona pointed out. “Everything we say, you reject. You claim that the future we come from is not set.”
“Tell me how you move through time, Wyvern?” The Kaly-slice asked.
“Ah, that’s what you’re looking to know,” Fiona shook her head.
“You don’t know. You can’t remember. You tell me about forgiveness.
But the truth is that you don’t even remember all that you need to forgive.
Your mind is still a shrouded place. You like it that way,” the Kaly-slice mused.
“Tell me how you move through time and I’ll let you keep it that way.
Do not and I will have Roan unearth every horrible thing you’ve forgotten. ”
Charlie had sidled around the outer edge of the cell chamber so that he was nearest the bars.
He could smell the metal. Cold, hard, sharp.
There was something of the storm on them.
Ozone. That was the magic, he supposed. Seeyr was just a few feet away.
She was staring at Kaly out of those silver eyes that he could not see in the present time.
There were dark shadows beneath them and her jaw was clenched as if she were in pain and trying to hold back cries.
Charlie studied the cage’s lock. It appeared like nothing more than a normal lock.
There was no key there, of course. It would be on the Kaly-slice or maybe on the guards up above.
The hasp was slender. The lock was insubstantial.
He could have crushed it, snapped it, jerked it open easily.
If it were normal. But it was not. He imagined closing his hand around it and feeling his skin burn as black smoke rose up into the air.
And no matter how hard he pulled upon it, it would not open.
The metal would not bend or break. He would just continue to burn.
Suddenly, he realized that Seeyr was looking at him. There was a sad smile of greeting on her thin lips. He nearly jumped back at her regard of him because it was so unexpected. It was like a ghost looking at him.
“Are you not going to tell me, Wyvern?” The Kaly-slice wheedled.
Seeyr made the eternity symbol with the pointer finger of her right hand in the air. Charlie opened his lips but she shook her head. Do not speak. That was what she meant.
“It’s my power alone, Kaly,” Fiona lied.
Kaly did figure out how to use the gates, because that was how they created the faux-Lasting they had stormed. Yet though that was true, Seeyr didn’t speak out loud whatever she had to tell him. And he knew it had to be about the gates and time.
“Then there’s no harm in telling me, is there?” the Kaly-slice huffed with laughter.
“You think because you wear the body of my First Fledgling that you might have the power to do it yourself,” Fiona accused.
With Seeyr’s left hand, she made a motion of turning a dial.
He frowned some more. What did that mean?
Was Fiona to make the eternity symbol–Daemon’s symbol–on the gate and then someone turned the gate like it was a massive dial?
But how, when one made the symbol, the whole gate became a doorway made of flying stars. There was no physical way to turn it.
“How do you go through time, Wyvern?” the Kaly-slice repeated.
“Why do you want to know? Is there something in the past that you wish to undo? Or do you wish to see the future that we’ve told you about?” Fiona asked, her tone taking a more dangerous lilt. “Because I could show you that, Kaly. I very much would like to take you with us.”
Seeyr was repeating the two actions. The eternity symbol and then the turn. Charlie shook his head to demonstrate he didn’t understand. She needed to give him more information!
“You want to take me into the future?” the Kaly-slice burbled with laughter.
“Oh, yes, I want you to see what the future is. I want you to experience it. And then Caemorn can take your soul and absorb it,” Fiona said.
And then she moved. Or rather teleported.
Between one blink and the next, Fiona went from in front of the Kaly-slice to suddenly beside Seeyr.
She was behind bars. Shock clouded Fiona’s features.
She grasped the bars to shake them before letting out a shrill cry and snatching her burning hands back.
The smell of charred flesh filled Charlie’s nostrils.
“I told you that there would be no teleporting out of this room,” the Kaly-slice said as she slowly turned around and took out of her pocket a black soul gem.
Charlie had never seen a black one before.
The others were always glowing and almost pretty.
Reds, greens, purples, yellows. But he’d never seen black.
His skin crawled as he looked at it. It was like a void where all light went to die.
He shrank back and nearly brushed the bars. He jerked his shoulder away from them.
“What is that?” Fiona asked.
“This?” The Kaly-slice flipped it between her fingers expertly. “It absorbs and redirects powers. I’ve been working with it to do that to you as we talked. How do you feel, Wyvern? Weak? A little tired? Want to lie down?”
Fiona put a hand to the center of her chest as she staggered backwards. Seeyr caught her and stopped her from falling down.
“Starvation from lack of blood has a similar effect, but it takes a rather long time. And why let all that energy go to waste? So I just slowly and discretely siphon it off here. You use more of your powers and more goes in. There’s a twin of it up there.
” The Kaly-slice gestured to the far off ceiling that held a dark gem surrounded by a metal cage.
Likely the same metal that created the dungeon.
“I wasn’t expecting it to put you in there when you teleported.
But it appears to have done quite a good job in any event. ”
“You cannot do this, Kaly!” Fiona cried.
“Why? Because the future won’t allow it? If we’re all fated to have that future then it will come no matter what,” the Kaly-slice reminded her. “But maybe the future isn’t so set. Maybe you can mess up so royally that it doesn’t happen. Maybe you just did.”