Chapter 1
I had been sensing, with no small amount of unease, the enormous amounts of anim growing in the distance. It was hard not to notice, considering how it dwarfed my own anim by so many multitudes that it was hard for me to get even a little bit of an idea of just how much anim was contained by the person in the distance. Was it a person? Before I’d met Pykon and the rest, I wouldn’t have ever considered it. Surely, no one person’s body could contain that much energy, it would destroy them, I would have reasoned. It felt more like a natural disaster than a person. An erupting volcano, an earthquake, a tornado…
It hadn’t really occurred to me, until I started to sense it, that I was perhaps the only person on the peninsula that could sense anim. The population was mostly Melusian humans anyway, and the vast majority were farmers and their families. It wouldn’t make sense for any of them to be able to sense anim. In either case, nobody else seemed to think that something was wrong, aside from the fact that their animals had been acting spooked and all of the phone and internet lines were down. I’d been trying to get word out for days about the presence on the horizon. Surely, at the rate the anim was growing, someone from the mainland would figure it out eventually, but did we have that kind of time?
I’ve seen the world nearly end a handful of times, and I’d been witness to magic literally knitting things back together, bringing people back to life, reversing destruction. I’m not afraid of death, per se, but it isn’t exactly an experience I like going through. I felt certain that the presence on the horizon was going to be one of those world-ending catastrophes for my friends to thwart, and it had been a long, long time since my pitiful amount of anim and healing magic had been enough to sway the tide of battle. Still, where could I even go to get away from the destruction? Even if I left for the continent, would that be far enough?
I got my answer soon enough. I’d been on high alert for days, trying to keep my livestock and pets calm in the face of what was probably going to be terrible and brutal annihilation, when the first signs of fighting began. I was too far away to see them with my eyes, but I could sense them in the distance, flares of anim arriving in the same place as the presence on the horizon. There were dozens of them, swarms of people with amounts of anim that I could never even dream to have. The presence quickly turned hostile, and the fighting began. To my shock I could see, with my eyes, the explosions of anim in the distance. Beams of energy tore through the atmosphere, so massive that they were visible to me from where I stood, mouth agape, on my front porch. With each beam there came the terrible, shuddering coldness of a mass of anim disappearing. Death. They were dying. The presence on the horizon was killing them in an instant. I prayed that my friends weren’t there.
My prayers were in vain.
One of the masses of anim suddenly came hurtling through the air away from the horizon, closing the distance in a frightening amount of time. My feet were carrying me down the steps of my porch and into the woods before I fully registered what I was sensing— it was Zanni. Zanni. Zanni. Almost as an afterthought I lifted myself into the air and flew through the trees at a speed I was sure I wasn’t normally capable of. Zanni! His anim aura was faint but still there, thank the gods. He’d been thrown away from the battle, traveled hundreds of miles in mere seconds, and had crash landed in the forest. In my forest. I was there in mere seconds as well. A line of broken trees and a huge crater marked his location. I flew down toward him at a reckless speed, landing beside him so hard that my knees shook from the impact.
“Zanni!” I shouted, even as I hovered my hands near his face and cast my healing spell. He looked awful. His black hair was matted with blood and dirt and mud, his battle armor mostly shredded and tattered. He had a few broken ribs, I could tell. He wasn’t breathing, at first, and that frightened me enough that I doubled down on the healing magic, drawing anim out of myself so much that it hurt. I didn’t care, I couldn’t let Zanni die. I couldn’t!
“Come on, kid,” I gritted out, hot tears streaming down my face. “You can’t!”
To my immense relief, Zanni took a sudden gasping, shuddering breath, his eyes flying open. He scrambled to turn to the side and retch, one arm around his ribs and the other bracing himself on the still-warm floor of the crater. I didn’t like the amount of blood that he threw up, but I breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless. I kept up my healing magic, moving to concentrate it on the broken ribs. Zanni spat out some more blood, then turned to look at me, wide-eyed.
“Miss Aila?” he wheezed. I managed to give him a grim smile.
“Sure am,” I said. He started to say something else, but I shook my head. “Don’t talk yet, let me fix your ribs. You look like you’ve been through hell, Zanni.”
“I— ” he started, but I shushed him with a stern look. “I’ve gotta get back—”
“Oh, just shut up and let me heal you,” I interrupted, frowning. “I’m going as fast as I can.”
“S-sorry,” Zanni choked out. “B-but, I, Dad, he—”
“I’m sure Oryz is fine,” I lied. “Just hold on, okay?” I braced myself and poured more anim into the spell, wincing as it burned. The dazed look on Zanni’s face cleared a bit, and he actually started to look alarmed.
“M-miss Aila, you—” he started to protest, but I shook my head.
“Just as chatty as you were when you were little, Zanni. Do you ever shut up?” I teased through gritted teeth. He didn’t laugh. “C’mon, you know I wouldn’t do this for just anyone, right?”
“Thank you,” he said, quietly. I laughed. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked a few seconds later. I rolled my eyes.
“What happened to shutting up and letting me heal you?” I asked. “You landed near my cabin.”
“Oh!” he said, eyes widening even further. He looked so guilty. “Oh, shit, I didn’t realize we were this close to your—”
“No swearing,” I said, swatting his shoulder with one of my hands, even as I kept healing him.
“I’m an adult, you know,” he protested.
“You’ll always be a kid to me,” I replied. I eased up on the speed of the spell, the burning sensation dulling a little bit. I could tell I was drenched in sweat, panting like I’d run a marathon. “There sure is a lot more of you to heal now, though, so I guess you are an adult.” He snorted.
“I’m not that much younger than you, remember? Or are you getting senile in your old age?” he goaded. I shook my head. He was starting to look a lot better now, no longer pale from the blood loss, no longer holding his ribs gingerly. He hadn’t tried to sit up yet, though.
“Was Pykon at that battle?” I finally asked. He sighed, and that was all the confirmation I needed. “Is he…alive?”
“I…I don’t know,” Zanni said quietly. “He shielded me, I think that’s the reason why I crashed here instead of just getting instantly vaporized like… like most of the others.”
I swore under my breath. “Just what the hell are we dealing with, here?” I asked.
To my shock, it wasn’t Zanni that answered me. I can’t sense anim while I’m healing someone, and so I hadn’t felt anyone approach. Evidently, Zanni had been too distracted to notice him, either.
“That thing is calling himself Geyros Obra,” someone said from the treeline behind me. Zanni and I both flinched, startled. Zanni scrambled to sit up while I whipped around, healing spell abruptly stopping in favor of a ball of destructive anim appearing between my hands. I wasn’t even remotely on the same level of fighting capabilities as Zanni was but I was not going down without a fight.
Stepping out of the trees was a being I had never seen the likes of before. He looked human: two arms, two legs, a torso, a head. There were even five digits on each of his hands. He had catlike dark eyes, a small nose, sharply pointed ears, purple skin and white hair. And he…there was something about him that felt divine, somehow. I’d never met a god or any other divine being but, somehow, I just knew.
“Nova,” Zanni said behind me, relief in his voice. I saw him collapse back to the ground out of the corner of my eyes. Frowning, I released the anim ball in my hands, reabsorbing the energy back into myself.
“A friend?” I asked Zanni. He nodded. I turned my focus back to the purple-skinned man. Well, judging from the general physique and the deepness of his voice, I assumed this was a man. “I’m going to keep healing him,” I warned him. I turned away from the newcomer to kneel back down beside Zanni, restarting the spell with a flash of anim. Zanni let out a sigh and relaxed back into the ground.
The man, Zanni said his name was Nova, started making his way down the side of the crater and made his way around to Zanni’s other side.
“Why are you here, Nova?” Zanni eventually asked. Nova grimaced.
“Everyone else from the battle is either dead or…incapacitated,” Nova answered.
“My father…?” Zanni asked. Nova shook his head.
“Dead,” he said. Zanni made a pained noise. I looked up from Zanni’s bruised ribs.
“What about Pykon?” I asked. Nova looked up, meeting my pleading stare with his own, apologetic stare.
“Sir Pykon…” Nova trailed off, biting his lip. “Is one of the unlucky ones.”
“Unlucky?” I asked. Nova shook his head.
“He isn’t dead, but… Obra is keeping a few of the defenders alive for…some reason,” Nova said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t have time to go into specifics. Obra could get bored at any moment and come to find us, and we don’t want to be here when that happens.”
“But where will you go?” I asked.
“Off planet,” Nova answered. My eyebrows lifted. “Somewhere else, somewhere to buy us some time.” He turned to address Zanni. “Zanni, you might be the only hope we have left to defeat Obra. We have to—”
But whatever he was going to say, he didn’t get the chance to. A deafening explosion sounded in the air above us and I barely had time to look up, my thoughts going haywire as the mass of anim I’d sensed on the horizon was suddenly hovering right above us.
It was…horrifying. It looked human, at first glance. Pale white skin and bright red eyes, red hair streaming all around it like fire. It was also distinctly not human, some kind of black, oily presence occupying the same space but distinctly not the same as the human body. I couldn’t get a sense of it, but blessedly I only had to look at it for a few seconds. Still, in those few seconds my brain kind of went…sideways. I felt someone grab my hand, heard shouting, and then I was just not there any more. In less than a breath, I had been…put somewhere else. A perfect, cloudless lavender sky greeted me as I blinked, barely comprehending that I was no longer having to look at the…thing that had been in the sky.
“Miss?” I heard someone saying, but I couldn’t stop blinking in shock. I slowly lowered my head, taking in rolling fields of yellow…plants, of some kind. They looked like ordinary grass and, yet, they didn’t seem like any plants I’d ever seen in my life.
“Aila?” I heard Zanni say, but my ears were ringing. It sounded like he was very far away. I slowly turned to look at him. “...Aila?”
“That’s Miss Aila to you, kid,” I answered, still blinking in shock. Zanni was still in the position he’d been before we’d…gone somewhere else. He was propped up on his elbows but otherwise flat on the ground. We weren’t in a crater any more. I noticed a stone building in the distance behind him.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Zanni said, flopping back down fully onto his back. “I thought he…I thought Obra broke your mind or something.”
“He should have,” Nova said, and I turned my attention from Zanni to him. Nova was staring at me in awe. “A normal human shouldn’t have been able to look at him for even a split second without going mad.” There was some kind of buzzing in my brain, some sort of…wrongness, now that I thought about it. I shook my head to try to… I don’t know, dislodge it?
“Well, she may not be as strong as us but Miss Aila trained with me and Mr. Pykon when I was a kid,” Zanni said. He groaned. “I don’t think my ribs are fully healed yet…help? Please?”
I reached out to heal Zanni, but my movements were alarmingly slow, and my anim felt like…sludge.
“Oh, yes, of course!” Nova sputtered, scrambling to kneel back over Zanni, reaching out a hand and casting an enormously powerful healing spell. To my surprise I could feel it washing over me, too. I wasn’t physically hurt, not really — a little bruised from my hasty descent into that crater to help Zanni — but I could feel it doing something to my mind. I became aware of a wicked headache that I could feel the magic working on. This guy was powerful. He made my healing spell look like a joke. Less than a joke. I felt a sudden wave of vertigo, which was interesting because I was kneeling on the ground.
“I knew it, looking at Obra did something to you after all,” Zanni said. I looked up from where I’d bowed my head and braced myself on the ground. I nodded.
“Hold on, I’ll finish healing Zanni and then I’ll—” I heard Nova say.
“Help her first,” Zanni demanded. After a beat of silence, he added, “Please?”
“The way you talk to gods, I swear, you got that from your father, didn’t you?” Nova grumbled.
“Y-you’re a god?” I asked, hating how much my voice was trembling. I felt a hand land on my shoulder, blinking and shifting just enough to see that Nova was now kneeling beside me, one purple hand on my shoulder, arm draped across my back, and the other was hovering near my head. A different spell spilled out of his grasp. I didn’t know how I could tell it was different, by all accounts it should have been a bog standard healing spell but there was something else about that I couldn’t grasp. The buzzing in my brain ebbed away. I felt the headache vanish. Terror, that I hadn’t realized was still gripping me, also faded away. I felt like I could breathe again. Like myself again.
“What was that?” I asked. Nova shook his head, removing his arm and hand from me.
“We’ll have time for questions later,” he said. He flashed me an apologetic smile even as he turned to finish healing Zanni. I shuffled so that I was also facing Zanni, extending my hands.
“Let me help,” I said. My own spell washed out of me, spreading from my hands to Zanni’s bruised ribs. Zanni looked grateful, and Nova looked surprised. Zanni laughed.
“Well, Sir Elated Observer God Nova, Your Holiness,” Zanni started with a teasingly mocking tone, “she’s got nothing on your healing abilities, but she’s one of the best healers back on Meliné, period.”
“Really, now,” Nova mused, not taking his eyes off of where Zanni’s ribs were appearing to be literally knitting themselves back together rapidly, shifting back into place across Zanni’s chest and abdomen. He didn’t need my help at all, but I still kept casting.
“Well, I don’t know about one of the best, but I know a thing or two,” I quietly explained. Nova seemed surprised.
“You really haven’t been paying attention to Meliné, have you?” Zanni asked. I could see Nova frown even from where I was positioned beside him kind of awkwardly.
“Well, I sure am paying attention now,” he grumbled.
“Where are we, anyway?” Zanni asked. Nova let out a big, long-suffering sigh.
“We’re in the sacred realm of the gods,” he answered, after a bit of hesitation. “Mortals aren’t supposed to come here, but I didn’t have any other choice.”
“...is this heaven, then?” I asked, lifting my head to look around. Rolling fields for miles, a brilliant purple sky…I could believe it, that this might be heaven.
“No. This is just simply where we gods reside.”
“And you…weren’t supposed to bring us here?” Zanni asked.
“No,” Nova grumbled. “I’m going to get in so much trouble with the elder gods, I just know it. I know they won’t even try to understand why I did it…”
There was so much I didn’t understand. Too much. I looked up to see Zanni frowning in confusion too.
“Oh, good, at least I’m not the only one that doesn’t understand what the hell’s going on here,” I said. Zanni nodded with a little laugh.
“And not one mortal but two,” Nova continued complaining. “So much trouble.”
“Why?” I asked. Nova sighed, shuffling around so that he was facing me side-on. I scooted back a little, turning my attention to where Zanni had, apparently, broken an ankle in either the fight or his crash landing.
“Let’s just say that many of the gods, especially the older ones, have something of a…bias against you denizens of the universes,” Nova hedged.
“Why is that?” I pressed.
“I’ve never understood it, myself.” Nova sighed. “The closest thing I’ve ever gotten to a good answer is that species from the universes just have such shorter lifespans compared to us Observers that it’s depressing to have you around. That’s the answer I get from the kind of Observers that refer to you as “mortals” even though we aren’t immortal ourselves, just very long-lived.” He frowned. “In any case, bringing anyone here from one of the universes has been illegal for a long time now, longer than I’ve been alive.”
“Well, sorry to be a burden,” I eventually said. And I really was sorry. “And…thank you for not leaving me there to die.” Nova looked like he wanted to say something, but eventually he just nodded.
It took a few more minutes, but with our combined efforts (mostly Nova’s) we got Zanni all patched up. It was a relief, seeing him able to stand without issues.
“Let’s get you some new clothes,” Nova said, also standing. I got to my feet as well, feeling dizzy and trying hard not to show it. Zanni, of course, noticed immediately.
“Hey, are you alright Miss Aila?” he asked. I nodded, trying harder to hide the dizziness. “Oh, shit, you aren’t.”
“I-I’m fine,” I lied. “Just dizzy. Used too much anim, I think.”
Zanni was much, much taller than me — that jerk, how dare he get taller than me, what happened to the cute little kid I’d trained with all those years ago?! — so the hand on my shoulder was more of a burden than a help. Nova though, to my surprise, was actually right around my height.
“Let’s get you some food, then,” Nova said, grabbing my arm to steady me. I nodded, letting him lead me toward the stone building ahead, a worried Zanni trailing behind us.
“Thanks for not trying to just carry me,” I said. I was so focused on walking. One foot in front of the other. I was exhausted.
“Are you kidding?” Zanni replied. There was a nervous edge to his voice, but he was talking in that cheerful way he always did. “I just recovered, I don’t need you kicking my ass and making Nova here have to heal me again.” I laughed. As if I could even put a scratch on him. That little kid I’d trained with… he’d become so strong, so quickly. Fighting threats from outer space on a near constant basis did that to a person, I supposed.