CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Other Side of Immortal
I kicked him in the face.
He wasn’t Christian.
The unknown man went sprawling on the floor.
I landed gracefully on my feet and turned to Brandon with an angry snarl. “Nice ring you’ve got around your neck.”
He returned my gaze sans my smirk. “Okay,” he said, raising his hands in mock defense. “Christian is not here. I don’t know where he is.”
“After what you put me through, did you really think I wouldn’t be able to spot an imposter at first sight?”
“I thought I might get away with it. You were fooled so many times. You even thought I was Christian,” he said, defensively crossing his arms.
I snarled again before pausing and looking at my surroundings for the first time. It was a place that had been written about in fairytales—a forbidden city. I thought the castle above ground had been magnificent in its own way, but it was nothing.
Before me was the entrance to Nhagaspir. A domed, vaulted ceiling greeted me. It was as though the walls themselves whispered things about me, whispered thoughts communicated through particles that they did not have to air. The walls were patterned like the shining gold scales of a dragon, each one carved individually. No. The gold carved itself, following instructions of a god, and seemed to shine internally. They flashed together like the thousand eyes of an angel. I stared back like a defiant daughter, a rebel, who had finally come home.
The man on the floor got up after being kicked and when he stood up, his face looked completely different. He was as gruff as a Viking, with heavy bones in his head and thick lips.
“I’m Axel,” he said.
I looked at him like I was bored. I was bored. “I don’t know why I bothered coming down here.”
“Beth…” Brandon said, hesitating on how to proceed.
“I don’t want to talk to you. Even though I have forgiven you a thing or two, I want to talk to Pricina,” I instructed coldly, waving him off and looking at the grand ceiling over my head. “Don’t speak to me and get her.”
Brandon was silent, and I was thankful because I was seriously considering if I still wanted to cut his tongue out.
He swallowed and rubbed the scar on his neck. He took a deep breath and started explaining anyway. “I know you’re annoyed we haven’t found Christian. We have been looking for him, but we’re not miracle workers or superheroes. Axel and I brought you to our helicopter pad, and we flew from Athabasca across the border into the Yukon and then to the foot of the mountain. We got you set up in the castle and I went back to Edmonton. I have called Christian every time I’ve had an opportunity and I have never once got an answer. I went looking for him. I looked everywhere—every one of his favorite haunts. It seems like he’s nowhere. No one has seen him as Christian Henderson, as Rogan Cormack, or any of his other aliases. I called Hilary and Mabel in Belfron, and nothing. I called other people too. It’s like he was wiped off the face of the planet. One would think that you’d be able to get in touch with him if you were able to move a stone as your personal elevator.”
I shook my head impatiently. “I haven’t been able to. Can’t you see the sword in my chest?”
Brandon looked sharp but also baffled.
“I can see it,” Axel observed. “It’s very elegant.”
“Elegant?” I huffed, feeling a whisper of the pressure the sword was inflicting on my chest.
A grin spread across his broad face. “Yes. There are many ways to establish a connection between two immortals. It’s been hundreds of years since I saw something like this. So beautiful!”
I glared at him. “You’re ogling my chest.”
He backed away. “Sorry. I should go. I’m supposed to be in the meteor room.”
Brandon put himself between me and Axel. “I’ll take you to Pricina. She’s in the tsunami room. There are several other immortals, spread out over other rooms. You can meet them later.”
He began leading the way out of the gold room into a dark corridor. All the corridors that led from the gold room looked dark, like leaving the sun in order to enter outer space.
Brandon kept talking as we stepped into the darkness. “I was hoping that you would be able to find Christian if you went into his heart.”
“Trying to get me to fix your mistake?”
“Look, trying to kidnap Christian would have been impossible for only Axel and me. When dealing with us, he wouldn’t have had to hide his immortality. He would have had fewer limits,” Brandon said, his weird thick accent returning, then disappearing. It was like he didn’t know how he should talk or what character he should adopt to give himself the best advantage while conversing with me. I’d already rejected him so thoroughly. He returned his voice to a neutral North American accent and continued, “The best way was to get you and then get him to come after you. That was the only method that would have worked. As it went, I don’t know if he was taken by someone with better manpower than us or if he disappeared on his own. It seems impossible to think that he wouldn’t be trying to find you if he’s not a prisoner somewhere.”
All that time, I’d just thought Brandon was being a jerkface for not getting in touch with Christian. It had never occurred to me that he had tried and failed. The idea filled me with fresh panic.
“I’ll look for him,” Rhuk suddenly suggested. It had been floating by my side so quietly that I’d almost forgotten it was there.
I sucked in my air and through my tension managed to ask, “Can you do that, little rock?”
“What?” Brandon interrupted. “Did you just call me your ‘little rock’?”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to my pet rock. Its name is Rhuk, and yes. You can’t hear it speak?”
Brandon took a step back. “No. I couldn’t.”
“That’s too bad,” I said to Brandon with an angry condescending sneer. “Please try,” I said softly, addressing Rhuk.
I expected Rhuk to lift off the ground and disappear down the corridor, but instead, it rotated slightly as if focussing its attention in different directions.
“What are you doing?” I asked it, patting one of its turrets.
It bounced a little under my palm. “I have been asking the other rocks what they have seen. Now that they know what they’re looking for, we should be able to find him, but it might take some time depending on how many rocks we have to talk to.”
My brain did wild calculations, counting how many rocks were between Tombstone Mountain and the Canadian Shield and then how many were between us and New York. Paris? Belfron? Fiji? It would have been easier to count the stars in the sky. Wouldn’t talking to every stone take a million years?
Brandon interrupted. “I can’t believe I’m being excluded so you can talk to your rock.”
“By the end of tomorrow, every rock on earth will be looking for Christian. Even the diamonds in lady’s rings. Get comfortable,” it said.
That sounded more hopeful than I originally thought. I turned my attention toward Brandon. “Rhuk is going to search for Christian. We’ll see if it does a better job than you. Where are we? I thought you were taking me to see Pricina.”
Brandon quickened his step and we left the darkness and moved to a hallway with more light. It had a glass ceiling. At first sight, I thought we were looking at the night sky, with stars lit above us, but that was impossible. We were miles below ground. Finally, I realized we were looking at the ocean. The lights I saw were not stars, but bioluminescent sea creatures, lighting up to show not just white, but also crimson and blue. I paused and gazed upwards. It was breathtaking. If I had to lay a guess as to what the architect had been intending to imitate, I would have said the feeling of walking through a comet’s tail.
Brandon stopped, slowing his footsteps on the floor that mirrored the view above. Colored lights were over us and under us. I caught up to him, our footsteps echoing on the floor, even though I wasn’t wearing shoes. The empty space begged any sound to fill it.
As we walked, Brandon continued, attempting to sound reassuring, “I wouldn’t worry about Christian too much. We weren’t worried about him when we picked you up and left him behind. He’s one of the most powerful gods this planet has ever known.”
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I didn’t like to tell him how that fact had changed, or how far Christian had fallen. Brandon was useless anyway, and I swore to myself that if he ever got in my way again, I’d do worse than cut off his head. Until then, I decided to give him one more chance to be useful in exchange for asking for my help in his rescue. Perhaps he would come in handy.
“This is the moon room,” he said as he invited me in.
The room Brandon introduced me to was an enormous half sphere, like the moon was hollow and we were entering it. The walls should have shown the backward shape of the craters formed in the moon’s mantle, but instead, the white stone walls were decorated with ornate semi-circles. Carved into the stone walls were peacocks resting in the crook of the moon, women leaning against the curve of the moon like it was their lover, a two-headed dragon grooming itself while staring listlessly at a moon in the distance.
The light in the room was unusual because it came from only one place in the floor, but that point of light moved along the outside curvature of the room. The shadow created unusual shapes and made the carvings on the wall look like one thing when the light shone on them from the left, only to look like something completely different when the light shone on them from the right. It was almost as though the person who designed it had the perspective of someone who had actually been on the moon. The light that shone on the moon was not filtered through an atmosphere. There was only hard light.
The furniture in the room was a large crescent-shaped sofa where everyone could only look at each other.
Brandon offered me a seat. Rhuk stopped in front of me bobbing itself up and down. It wanted me to put my feet on it, so I did.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” Brandon said. “I mean, I’ve known immortals who could command the elements, but I’ve never seen a mineral act like a pet or see an immortal chat with one. The elements Pricina commands don’t seem to be able to offer affection—only facts.”
From what I had learned inside Christian’s heart, a mineral having a personality shouldn’t be impossible or even strange. Rhuk was merely able to communicate with me better because I was in control of all elements. That included all the elements that made up Rhuk’s body and all the particles between us. Were the other immortals not trying to learn the language of the hundred and twenty-five elements or were they unable to?
I couldn’t say because the Other Christian had given me everything and I hadn’t had to work for the knowledge in the same way. I had no idea what barriers presented themselves to people who couldn’t learn directly from a greater god.
“Get Pricina,” I ordered softly.
Brandon disappeared from the room. When he bought Pricina back with him, his face was pale and her cheeks were rosy to accompany the telltale smile on her face. If I had to guess why, it was because her method of convincing me had proved so much more effective than his and she was rubbing it in his face.
“Bethany! You’ve arrived.”
I crushed my teeth together and stood up to greet her. “For the record, I dislike being called Bethany.”
She squinted. “It’s a very traditional name. I’d be proud to have a name so steeped in tradition. However, I will call you Annabeth if you prefer.”
“I like being called Beth.”
“It’s too short,” she said disapprovingly. “Beth is fine for everyday use, but we cannot call you the Goddess Beth. It sounds terrible. You need an extension for special occasions and times when people wish to address you formally.”
“Fine. You can call me Bethany when a formal occasion arises, otherwise don’t,” I said. From what I knew about Christian, a name was only a temporary thing. She could call me whatever she wanted.
“Perfect,” she said with shining eyes before sitting down across from me with Brandon beside her.
As we both sat down, the crescent-shaped sofa rose off the ground and moved slowly around the room, as if to give a perfect view of the art carved into the walls. I snapped my fingers and Rhuk bounded up next to me while I tucked my feet under me. The white light and black shadow had a chilling effect, almost like we were in outer space, flying by the surface of the moon.
“Let’s talk about Christian,” Pricina said in measured tones. “He is the oldest of the gods we have left. He was tasked with correcting our problem with the magnetic field, but he couldn’t fix it on his own. He merely held the north pole in place for five hundred years like those stories of Atlas holding up the sky. Then one day, his mind broke and he couldn’t hold the pole in place for another minute. That was roughly a hundred years ago. Various immortals have tried to hold the poles where they should be. The north pole is going crazy. Half the time it’s in Siberia. Many gods have tried to control it in Christian’s place, but none of them were as good as Christian and the attempts hurt them… irreparably. Christian doesn’t know who he is, what power he used to wield… anything. He’s confused, but he’s in much better shape than the others.”
“What happened to them?”
“They don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they should be doing. The work they did disfigured them. They wander around the village. I have to explain about them in case you see one of them. It’s very likely. There are dozens of them wandering around.”
“Do you have to care for them?” I asked.
“No. They’re immortal… until they’re not… but we don’t know when that happens until one of them turns up dead.”
“They die then?”
Pricina nodded. “Yes. Christian is the only god who could command an Iron Room.”
“An Iron Room?”
“It’s a room designed for giving the best view, for lack of a better word, of the iron river that creates the earth’s polarity. We have other rooms for controlling other aspects of our planet: tsunamis, meteors, earthquakes, and even storms. Our best immortals are busy stopping the earth from destroying itself. One of them is stopping California from detaching. I work in the tsunami room. I don’t need to stay there all the time, but I do need to check up on it most days. I can usually stop disasters from happening, but as you have lived on the surface, you’ll know that I haven’t been able to stop them all. Some of them shouldn’t even be stopped because the consequent rearrangement of the tectonic plates is an improvement in that it provides a more stable structure.”
“Do you prevent a lot of calamities?” I asked.
“I do.”
“What can you do?” I asked Brandon, leaning forward.
“I can heal myself. Obviously, not as well as you, but I can heal others with their consent. That was how I managed to pull off double heart surgery by myself.”
“I wish you’d stop congratulating yourself for that,” I said with a little sting in my voice. “It wouldn’t have been possible if Christian had not been on such a high level and I am still suspicious of why you were willing to do it in the first place. If I could, I’d unravel your mind to uncover your mysteries. However, I do find it interesting that you are able to heal other people.” I knew that was outside my abilities and I wasn’t sure if King Christian could show me how to heal another person. I guessed it was outside his power too.
“I can heal other people better than I can heal myself,” he admitted with a wry smile. “I want them to be well more than I want to be well myself.”
I sighed and twirled a strand of my hair between my fingers. “How did you become immortal?”
“I took control of my cells. Once someone learns that it’s possible to do so, anyone can do it, but it isn’t a good thing for most people.”
I leaned forward. “Why do you think that?”
Brandon looked like he was trying to stop himself from sneezing, his discomfort obvious, but he still attempted to answer me. “It’s knowing something you shouldn’t know to the hundredth power. You have control over yourself, so why shouldn’t other people have control over themselves? You start to realize that people die because they want to. They’re banking on it. They’re hoping to be spared from the long-term consequences of what they do. They live their lives like it’s the last day of work so it’s okay to flip everyone off. It’s too much for their little minds to handle if they understand that the consequences of their actions can have effects that are everlasting.”
“Do you know what happens if they choose death?” I whispered.
“I don’t,” he explained quickly. “I don’t know where people’s spirits come from or where they go. Just that they are. Your spirit is not your brain, not your heart, not your body. You know that too if you’ve pulled a bullet out of your own brain. How could you make a decision with a bullet in the part of your mind that makes decisions? Something inside you can think without your body. That much I know.”
Slowly, Pricina started talking as the hard light lit up half her face like she was a moon in the first quarter. “It’s not our privilege to know what path lies on the other side of death. That is exemplified by many common threads of life. You only get the experiences won by your own choices. The rest is only in your imagination. So, we can imagine what death is to those who experience it. Something happens to that part of them that is not their body, but we can’t know. We decided to keep our bodies and move forward that way.”
“Go on”
She obliged. “I can only know how far immortals can go from what I’ve seen. We can arrange our cells. We can rearrange matter. We can organize the cells of others. The highest I have ever heard of is a god who can create matter. I’m sure you know that flies in the face of the laws of thermodynamics, which most people think are the cornerstones of God’s laws. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but I know that it can be. I just don’t know how to do it myself.”
I smiled an evil little smile. “Do you need me to chain you up in the castle? I could arrange that. Apparently, that’s the best way for a god to uncover their potential.”
Pricina laughed. “That castle is designed especially for the manipulation of matter and it was designed perfectly… flawlessly.” The evil little grin on her face matched mine. “You’ll never guess who designed it.”
I groaned. “Christian?”
“Bang on, my girl,” she chuckled victoriously. “He made it, though obviously not for you. I put parts of another house inside it in order to give you some modern conveniences, but the guts of that castle have been there for over four hundred years. It’s a brilliant design. When it’s not in use, there are not even windows and it gets swallowed into the mountain. He built it as a training ground for the weak.”
I remembered how weak Christian thought the lesser gods were.
Pricina smiled a sorrowful smile and regarded Rhuk. “It’s so obvious that you are being personally trained by him. That was another reason he built the castle, so no one would be personally trained by him.”
“Why wouldn’t he be willing to train anyone?” I asked, confused. He had been such a careful teacher when he dealt with me.
“To keep everyone away from him,” she said. “All those years ago, there was something he wanted, beyond fixing our planet, beyond raising gods… he wanted something for himself…” Her eyes met mine. “I wonder how he will react when he is healed and he looks back over everything he has accomplished, lost, forgotten, and retrieved… how he will feel about the strange thing he picked up on the beach when he was meant to be mining.”
Pricina wasn’t being very cryptic. I didn’t think she was trying to be. She was trying to be polite as I did get the feeling that she wasn’t trying to offend me. She was genuinely curious. If he had chosen a lover earlier, perhaps a goddess, and taught her how to hold the south pole, they could have flipped it hundreds of years ago. Yet, he hadn’t. He had waited until he had been on the very edge of death before choosing me… a dying child. Once he returned to his greatness, what would he think of me?
I smiled at her. There was no need for me to be curious. He intended to raise me up to his level. He had said as much. I might not have been what he wanted all his life, but I would be what he wanted in the future.
So, I took no offense and bobbed my head as I had no other answer to give her.