Part 19

Kole dreamt of Kalisse and the other guardians. He saw their faces and heard their laughs. He awoke to their screams.

His eyes opened, but a black haze clouded his vision. And as the shock of his dream subsided, he felt his mind begin to slide back downward into sleepy blackness. He blinked hard and forced himself to inhale the "breath of birth" - the breathing technique used to generate life energy, but degenerated into yawns of unquenching depth.

"Boney, what’s going on?" Kole managed to speak.

Kole paused to listen only a moment, and the thick darkness began to curl back into his mind. He heard nothing from the voice of the bonesword.

"Jhebon?"

Nothing. Kole tried to stand, and his legs were numb. Tingling and distant, he pulled some energy from the ground and stamped his feet several times, continuing to breathe deeply. The sound of his stamping barely made it to his ears. He felt his energy draining back down through his legs as the blurriness began to dissipate from his vision. Black melted slowly away to shades of blue. Finally, he could see his hands on his knees.

He pushed his legs to straighten and he stood and looked around. The world was a blue and shadowy shimmering light-etched terrain. Rocks were crystalline, and reflecting some unknown light source. Vague outlines of spiny plants danced to some unfelt breeze, and sparked slowly with incandescence. Kole wrinkled his brows and tried to wriggle some energy from his "third eye", but like his true seeing eyes, it was very slow to wake. His legs tingling, Kole stamped again, and the chiming energy found its way up through his forehead. The third eye woke, and he focused on his surroundings. Tiny creatures swarmed around him, and passed through him seemingly unaware of his presence. They consumed each other and gave birth to others in a steady pattern.

Kole tried to make sense of what he saw. The details of the terrain were exactly as he remembered it from the night before, but crystalline and translucent. The world sparked in violets and blue, occasionally energy would arc between the tips of the rocks. And suddenly, a vision came to him...

An egg without a shell. Deep inside, the yolk was still golden and healthy, but the outermost part of the white of the egg had turned bluish-grey and spotted with black slimy growths. And they moved.

Kole felt cold now. His legs were numb again, and tiredness began to creep up through his legs to his torso. His eyes, although seeing these extraordinary lights, wanted to shut. He felt almost weightless and empty, and waited for some elemental breeze to wash him away.

The egg appeared again, and the blackness covered the outside. It began to throb. It twitched twice, then exploded outward in chunky globs of black.

Kole flinched away from the vision, and he felt his body flood with adrenaline. His legs now felt like they were being woven with electric pins. He stumbled back one step, and his legs chimed with an electric buzz. His weight returned and his mind began to clarify. Blue light. Electricity. Why were these lights familiar to him? Not familiar as if remembering a dream, but it was much cleaner and sharper, as if etched into his memory.

Then he recognized the feeling of the memory. It was a trance lesson that was implanted in him when he was being trained by the Shinn. The trances were so deep that many experiences were placed deep in the instincts of the students, not to be remembered until needed. Kole began to access the information.

Parallel to the living world, this was the plane where all dead spirits that did not move on to the transformative planes were left trapped. These creatures were the consumers of spirit energy, and if Kole did not find a way out of this plane, he would decay until he became a permanent resident.

True Shinn can easily shift into planes like this in order to invisibly pass through the living world, or communicate with the elementals on the lower planes. If Kole had stayed with the Shinn masters long enough to complete his training, he would have learned how to travel into these planes... and undoubtably how to return from them.

He tried once again to contact Jhebon Metit, and received nothing in return. Kole remembered saying something to Jhebon about not helping too much. He quickly dismissed the thought that Jhebon would maintain silence to teach him some kind of lesson. Jhebon was pompous at times, but not cruel. Either way, Kole was on his own to find a way out of this.

He tried to replay his lessons from all those years ago. He had learned to adjust his body’s vibration only slightly. Never enough to get him completely into other planes. He had intended to continue to exercise those abilities during his resting days at the City-In-The-Sea, but never did. Why didn’t he? Regret began to melt into fear. Why hadn’t he finished his Shinn training? He would be comfortable on planes like this if he was a true Shinn warrior. He would be able to phase in and out of the physical world, connect directly to the primal elements, and travel to the temple on the moon to meet with other Shinn.

Why did he leave? A sound flashed through his mind -the sound of a crossbow bolt entering flesh and crunching against neck cartilage. He knew that sound, and he felt something black churning in his stomach.

When Kole was a toddler, something upset him and he knocked his mother across the room. He remembered the look on his mother’s face, and it had scared him. For the next week, or what seemed like a few years to a toddler, she did not pick him up, and tried to keep him content with toys and food, always at a distance.

"Is that where it began?" Kole thought.

As he aged, he became an angry child. His interactions with other children were punctuated by increasingly worse outbursts of strength and other strange phenomena. The children either teased him or hid from him. Kole’s parents grew increasingly cold toward him, as they realized that he was quickly becoming something they could not handle. Eventually, they consulted a Magan to see what could be done with him, and at eight years old, he was taken to train under the Shinn masters on Tagga.

The training world of the Shinn is one of the outer worlds, isolated and barren. Kole had difficulty adapting to the strict discipline of the Shinn Masters, but he quickly learned how to focus and channel the energies that had erupted through him. He learned that some children like him were born with a naturally pure channel to the elemental energies. Left untrained, those energies he channeled would have grown to levels that would either cause him to become a mindless servant of the elementals, or to literally self destruct. His parents and the Magan who contacted the Shinn had given him the chance to become one of the legendary Soldiers of the Moon, the Guardians of True Balance, the Mystic Warriors known as the Shinn.

And yet, he never could forgive his parents for sending him away.

His teachers were stern, but fair, and they allowed him to visit with his parents for one week after his third year on Tagga. His parents marveled at his crisp red uniform, and how much he had grown, and he remembered now that they hesitated when he moved to hug them.

He returned again to his parents when he was twelve, and he was surprised to see how much they had aged. His mother had stayed very distant from him on that visit, and his father tried to compensate by asking him to show him some "tricks"`that he had learned. He did, and watched his father’s pride shift into something simpler. Kole had demonstrated how channelling energy into a stick could crack a boulder, and when the rock split with an ear-piercing boom, his father’s wide eyes were not filled with wonder. Kole had felt and understood for the first time that his parents were afraid of him. Upon his return to Tagga, his teachers told him that their fear was normal. Expected. Kole thought about all the years that his parents were trying to raise him, there had always been fear in their eyes.

As his training in the next few years became more rigorous and challenging, his connection to the Shinn as a family grew. At seventeen years old, Kole visited his parents again, and discovered that he had a baby sister. His mother had been pregnant the last time he visited, and they hadn’t told him. Now, his parents seemed content in their life without him in it, although for the first time, it seemed that their fear of him was beginning to soften. Liana showed anything but fear of him. She was intrigued with her big brother, and followed him around during his entire visit, asking him questions about what he did and trying to get him to play with her. Kole felt nothing but annoyance from her the first day, but when the week was over, he began to wish he could stay to play with her.

The years went on, and as it grew closer to his time to complete his Shinn training, he opted to stay in Tagga rather than visit his parents at the age of twenty-two. His teachers did not seem to give him any extra nods for being so focused on his studies, but merely stepped up his training regimen.

Kole felt his throat tighten at this memory.

At twenty five years old, he learned of demons advancing on his village at home on Earth. He argued with his teachers that he should be able to leave to help defend them from the attacks. His masters were stern, as usual, but empathetic. They allowed him to return.

Kole swallowed hard as he felt the darkness begin to swirl in his stomach.

End Part 19