Kelsam

Esar scanned the dispatch that Kelsam handed him, then slammed it down on the table and stormed away. “Damn it, Gerimon! What the hell is he thinking? Never mind, I can guess what he’s thinking. Someone’s got to marry his daughter. Can’t have her taking as long as her mother did to find a husband. Only thing to do is drown every eligible man in Elorhe until they find one.”

The words were loaded with bitterness, and not really fair to the king, Kelsam thought. But Esar and Gerimon had not parted on good terms, and rather than let the grievance fade, Esar had cultivated a grudge with the same meticulous care that Kelsam would give a delicate seedling.

“Do you think . . . there’s a chance he’ll come out all right?” Kelsam asked carefully.

“Hell if I know,” Esar said. “Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t.”

“Esar!” Surely he didn’t truly think that some poor unknown boy would be better off drowned?

“If he’s rejected, that’s one thing,” Esar said. “But if he’s chosen as the Prince Ethereal, that could be even worse. We can’t keep putting our faith in the Ocean, Kels. Something is wrong with her. I don’t think this is a coincidence.” He paused in front of Naomi, who had been watching him silently as he paced the room. “Well? What do you think of this turn of events?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to know what you dreamed about last night,” Esar said, leaning in to stare at her.

Naomi met his eyes defiantly. “I didn’t dream about anything last night!”

“You’re sure? You’re sure that you didn’t just forget what you dreamed?”

“I’m sure,” Naomi said. “Why? Why would it matter?”

Kelsam was wondering that himself. Naomi wasn’t a Tresuan, and he’d never heard anything about Rispara having prophetic dreams.

“What about before? In your world?” Esar asked.

Naomi exchanged a look with Jason. “Sometimes I dreamed about my father,” she said softly.

Esar cursed and turned away.

“I was never sure if they were just regular dreams or not,” Naomi said. “Maybe they were. Just dreams, I mean. Normal—”

“Did you tell him you were coming here?” Esar demanded.

Naomi jumped up, stretching on her toes so she could get as close to his face as possible. “What do you mean, ‘here’? I didn’t even know ‘here’ existed! God, what do you expect me to say? You keep talking about all this stuff like I’m supposed to know about it, and I don’t, okay?”

Esar took a deep breath and tempered his tone for his next question. “What do you know about your father?”

“I know he went off and started a cult,” Naomi replied. “He started freaking my mom out. Like, one day he was just this normal guy, the next day he started talking about how he could do miracles and help everybody ascend to a higher level of being, or something.”

“Miracles?” Kelsam repeated.

“Yeah. Healing the sick, stuff like that.” Naomi looked over at Jason.

“We can’t prove . . .” he began, then sighed heavily. “My mom had metastatic ovarian cancer when she was in college. She thought she was gonna die until she met Kaethar. He healed her with some kind of magic. And he told her Rith—your Rith—could give her the magic, too.”

Jason looked right at Kelsam when he said it.

“I see,” Kelsam said. So the idea of Rith returning somehow had spread as far as the other world, bringing false hope to people who hadn’t even received the gift of vitricity in the first place . . . the thought made him queasy. “That explains a lot, I suppose.”

“And you said you dreamed of him?” Esar asked Naomi.

Naomi frowned thoughtfully. “I think so. Not a lot. Like, maybe once or twice a year. And he’d say he missed me. That he needed my help. He seemed nice in the dream, but . . .” She shifted her footing. “I thought that was maybe because it was all in my imagination. He was acting like I wanted a dad to act. Not like who my mom said he was. She was scared of him. She said if he ever found us, he’d hurt us.”

The picture in Kelsam’s head of the world Naomi and Jason left behind was growing darker and darker. Before meeting Esar he’d never met a child without two parents, but it must have been common in such a dangerous world. Perhaps Naomi and Jason considered themselves lucky that their mothers had survived childbirth. Giving birth was so dangerous without the benefit of vitricity.

“And you said his name is Kaethar?” Esar said.

“Yes. Do you know anything about him?” Naomi asked eagerly.

Esar frowned. “Not much, but I do know he’s dangerous. Your mother was right to keep you away from him.”

Naomi’s face fell. “Oh. I was hoping you could tell me more, though. What makes him dangerous?”

“For one thing, he’s a dreamwalker. You were likely indeed meeting him in your dreams, not simply dreaming of who you thought your father might be. You probably know more about him than anybody else.”

“It seems like nobody knows anything about who he was, or where he came from,” Naomi said. “Jason and I, we were both trying to find out what was up with him. It’s one of those weird unsolved mysteries, right? Kaethar and a couple of his followers just disappeared without a trace about sixteen years ago. So I was trying to find out some more, and I was lurking on this message board where people were posting their theories and stuff, and then Jason posted about how one of the people who disappeared with Kaethar was his father and I had to DM him—”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Do you understand what she’s talking about?” Kelsam asked Esar quietly. Esar shook his head.

Naomi slapped her hand to her forehead. “Oh, sorry. Um. How do I explain? There’s this thing called the internet, it’s kind of like—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jason groaned. “What happened is that we found each other, found out the connection, did some more research. And yesterday we met up at a museum to try to talk to a guy who might know more—somebody else who we figured out was linked to Kaethar. An archaeologist named Jim Thompson. But we never got a chance because Naomi doesn’t know what every five-year-old knows, which is that you don’t go around touching stuff in a museum!”

Naomi made a face at Jason. “I already said I was sorry!”

“First you two show up, and now this Adrin Remyer person is going into the Ocean as we speak,” Esar said. “Damn it. Seems like the worst possible moment for us to saunter into Thaliron. There has to be some other way.”

The color drained from Jason’s face, as if Esar was pulling away his hope of an easy return home.

“What about Dacrine Wyess?” Kelsam threw the suggestion out quickly. “I can go alone, if you don’t trust a letter, ask her to come here and help fix the door.”

Esar’s eyes narrowed. Yes, Dacrine had played a role in the experiments with the symbic device that left so many gaps in Esar’s memory, but—

“She repudiated the project, Esar,” Kelsam went on. “She apologized. And she knows more about ancient technology than anyone else except—”

“Let me think for half a second, Kels!” Esar snapped. Kelsam fell silent.

“Don’t talk to him like that! He was trying to help!” Naomi jumped to his defense, glaring at Esar with righteous anger.

“It’s all right—“ Kelsam began.

Esar pushed by Naomi and headed for the door.

“Hey, you can’t just—“ She tried to catch him, but Kelsam called out for her to stop.

“Better to let him go cool down for a while and think.” He knew it was the stress, not anything that Kelsam said, that put Esar’s temper on a hair trigger, but it still stung when Esar lashed out at him.

“He’s a jerk,” Naomi said. “Because he can see the future, he thinks he can treat everyone like crap?”

Kelsam was very, very glad that Esar was out of earshot when she said it. Not because he feared how Esar might react, but because he knew how much the words would hurt.

“It’s not like that,” Kelsam said.

“Then what is his problem?”

“The last person who went into the Ocean never returned,” Kelsam said quietly. “And that person was Esar’s brother.”

“Why did he go into an ocean?” Naomi asked.

“Because there’s a spirit in the Ocean who protects Elorhe and chooses who will marry the heir to the throne. Raen—Esar’s younger brother—wanted to marry Princess Jocyanë, so he went into the Ocean to see if he was worthy to do so.”

“Hang on. So if you’re not worthy, you drown? That’s screwed up!” Jason gasped.

“Oh, no! If the Ocean deems a candidate unworthy, they just get tossed back up to the shore right away, maybe spitting up a little seawater, but no worse for the wear.”

“But not Esar’s brother?” Naomi asked.

Kelsam shook his head. “He went in the dead of night, with no ceremony or anything. Only the princess knew where he was going. And no one ever saw him again.”

“But nobody saw him go in, right? What if he just ran away, or something?”

“That wouldn’t be like him,” Kelsam said. “He was . . . determined. Not the sort of person to shirk his responsibilities. Or to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Well, now I feel like a jerk.” Naomi sat down with a thunk.

Jason raised an eyebrow. “Just now?”

Kelsam interrupted before Naomi and Jason could start fighting, asking a question about their world. He kept asking questions until Esar returned half an hour later.

“We’ve got to go. All of us. Together. I don’t like it, it’s too soon, it’s going too fast. I thought we’d have more time. I’m sorry, Kelsam.” Esar looked up over Naomi’s head to meet Kelsam’s eyes, then he looked back down at the girl.

“You need to learn to channel your vitricity. Your instincts obviously aren’t enough. Here.” Esar dropped an incand into Naomi’s hand, and bright light immediately shone out of it to fill the room.

She yelped and let it fall to the floor. The light went out, leaving an afterimage that danced across Kelsam’s vision.

“What is that thing?” Naomi asked.

“It’s a device that turns vitricity into light. An incand.” Esar picked up the discarded sphere and used it to create a much smaller pool of light, the sort Kelsam was accustomed to seeing from a hand-held incand powered by human vitricity.

“Normally it requires a conscious connection to light it up. Apparently you’re just leaking vitricity through your skin. If we had an ambient meter here, it’d be reading at maximum,” Esar said.

“Does that mean she’s radioactive?” Jason asked, scooting further from Naomi.

“It means she’s dangerous, if that’s what you mean,” Esar said. “But she’s also in danger. Take it again, Naomi. This time, I want you to keep it from lighting.”

Esar held the incand out to Naomi, who squeezed her eyes shut as she took it from him. The light burst forth once more, then it dimmed slightly, then blazed brighter still. Both Kelsam and Jason shielded their eyes while she tightened her fist around the incand, but the light still shone through in bands between her fingers.

“I can’t stop it,” Naomi said through clenched teeth.

“It’s like breathing. Take a breath in, but with your vitricity, not your lungs.”

Naomi took in a deep breath with her lungs and held it. The light wavered, but didn’t get much dimmer.

Across the room, Jason looked to Kelsam with a question in his eyes, but this odd lesson was just as confusing to Kelsam. This wasn’t a problem that most people ever experienced with their vitricity. For Kelsam, it was truly as natural as breathing, but it was that very nature that made it impossible to explain.

“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Kelsam said.

“Oh yeah? How else am I supposed to try?!” Naomi’s exasperated reply was accompanied by an erratic flashing from the incand, and Esar took it from her hand.

“Kelsam’s right,” he said. “You’re slamming yourself into a wall instead of taking the time to stop and look for the door.”

“You’re the one who shoved the thing into my face,” Naomi said.

“It’s called an incand.”

“You didn’t even tell me how it’s supposed to work!”

Esar turned the incand over in his fingers. He would know all about slamming himself into walls out of frustration and impatience from vast experience. Now he was pausing to look for the door.

“It was discovered in ancient times that certain clays were able to conduct vitricity,” Esar said. He put the incand in Naomi’s hand. Kelsam closed his eyes as bright light filled the room once more, but Esar kept on speaking in a low, droning tone. “The first and simplest application of that property was the production of incands. In time, people found that the lumps of clay produced better light and lasted longer if they were fired. The best incands are high-grade ceram spheres of uniform composition. Metallic and mineral dopants may be added to change the color of the light.”

Kelsam opened his eyes. The light had nearly gone out of Naomi’s incand. All that remained was a dim glow, barely visible in the room’s ambient light, pulsating slightly in time with Naomi’s breathing. And while Esar went on about various doping agents used in incands, the sphere in Naomi’s hand went dark.