James
An ear-deafening sound rang out, like the metallic rumblings of enormous clockwork engines, causing him to jump two feet into the air. It was less of a sound and more of a feeling prowling through his chest. Pain. Blazing pain. It roared inside his bones while the silence pressed in, suffocating him till he couldn’t pull air into his lungs.
He jumped back, but his fingers were still on the Orb, attached to the stem from where it grew. They were glued to the surface, and the vine did not budge. He couldn’t remove them if he wanted to.
But he didn’t want to. Not really.
Not even as his heart raced with the numbing terror he had tried so hard to forget.
No one in the cave reacted to the husky roar of engines. Or to him groaning in pain. Or to the bright threads dancing around them in the pale blue haze. Realization hit him like a ton of bricks.
Everything in the last three seconds appeared to be happening inside his own skin, because it was.
With a snatch, James lost his balance and was hurled through space and time while his arrow tattoo sparkled in front of his eyes. Yet his feet were planted in the garden bed, his fingers touching an unmoving Orb. He cried out, but no sound left his throat.
Reality slammed into him suddenly. Soon, he picked himself off the ground with what he could only describe as the world’s fastest and most brutal hangover. The headache made way for an icy panic as he properly took in his surroundings.
He was back in Japhaia the day the invasion came.
“What the hell!?” Again, his voice had no sound.
The blue haze evaporated to reveal a sight he hoped to any god never to see again. The river, their tent, the barrel of fire with his ódir sitting next to it.
James stared at his much younger self in horror. The boy was barely more than skin and bones, and pale like a ghost with blonde hair and almost white lashes. He stared with the utter incredulity of a man who’d never realized how sick he’d been. The boy looked like a ghost fading out of the world.
“No, don’t do this! I don’t want to be here!” But James’s voice had no sound. He stood helpless, watching himself lose everything again.
It was a day James had fought to forget for as long as he’d lived. He had tried everything. Nothing he was proud of. And nothing helped. There was no way to escape the memory. It gripped him, tugged at the back of his mind day and night. He wore it like a scar. Between one moment and the next, he was that boy again and heard her echoing cry.
If he closed his eyes on a sleepless night, he could still hear her. The angel who called herself Lani who appeared before a small little boy. He remembered the fear he’d felt at her presence.
Being that boy again, James felt the same fear chilling his bones. And how that fear disappeared as soon as he realized his ódir couldn’t see her. She stood beside him, and he looked straight through her.
“Help me,” the boy said, and she smiled, misty-eyed.
She was there for him. He’d been sure of it. So consumed by chaos, he believed every fairy story he ever heard and reached out for her, begging the angel to save them. And she touched him.
“NO!” she screamed with an agonizing pain that shook his very core as his blood became fire for the span of a minute, and he screamed too.
In that moment, she was nowhere. Her scream echoed inside his mind. He didn’t understand. She had reached out with such love, only to fly away. Was it because of the ships in the sky? Because of him? Because of that other shape? Cause there had been another shape behind her, blue and white and snarling like a banshee.
All he could do was look up, so he looked up at the ships making their slow way over the city. The prowl became a sound, roaring in their ears. Alexandre’s head snapped up.
“Ódir, ytir!” his brother-of-heart shouted, tugging at the boy writhing in agony to sit up while dousing out the fire. One of the akatian ships was above them proper, a circle glowing on its prow.
One moment. That was how long it looked beautiful.
Screams reverberated between walls and banks. The ship fired at everything that moved. The riverbank was no longer desolate but teeming with people fleeing the unprovoked slaughter. Alexandre hauled the boy to his feet, struggling down the promenade with one arm around the boy and the other gripping two bags. Jaw set, with a grim look in his eyes.
Years later, James recalled a symbol he’d seen. He saw it now, as he watched through the boy’s eyes those last moments play out. There on the angel’s belt, clear as day, glowing in the firelight. A circle with a tree at its center, holding infinity within its branches. It would be a part of him for as long as he lived. And now he knew its name: A’yursha.
The protector of the akati. The Fatestitcher. Mother of the Guardians.
James learned to forgive Lani in time, leaving behind that hurt boy in the past where he belonged. But that day, his hopes had lifted and been crushed within minutes. He was young, after all.
James, the boy, cried out desperately. “No, please! Help me!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll keep you safe. I promise. Jamie, I’m here. I’ll never abandon you. I swear, on your life and mine.” His brother helped him stand up on his own two feet and secure the bandages, ignoring the surrounding chaos.
He patted him on the cheek and winked, but there was a wild look in his eyes. The vision of the angel seemed absurd now. Forgetting the imminent danger of the death-ships in the sky, James let his arm fall again, eyes never wavering from the place she’d appeared. Craning his neck as they got further and further away.
A new burning sensation made the man look down. The sleeve had slipped, revealing a fresh tattoo. It had hurt, but James was so proud of it. A symbol of an open-ended circle with an arrow running through it. The beginning of the spiral that would become the mark of an officer in the Insurrection. He stared at it, both there and somehow outside himself.
It glowed. The once-repressed memory came crashing back. And with it came a myriad of memories he thought he’d buried.
He remembered the pain. Remembered blood becoming fire. Days of screaming and his ódir talking, soothing. Remembered metal walls and amber lights.
He remembered an alley and lying in a pool of his own blood. Running. Dark waters. A tree in a circle with an arrow.
Need gripped him. Need to know what had happened that night. What forces had clashed above their heads? He clawed at the shreds of memories, escaping one by one in a blue flash. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember how they survived or how those two boys escaped the invasion.
Only that his brother-of-heart had been there. Alexandre Kollisi had been there. And James hadn’t left his side since.
They had both been obsessed by the Angel in the days and months that followed. It took Alex a long while before he admitted that, for a moment, he had seen her, too. It had been such a relief. Even more than noticing that he didn’t crave yijo guo anymore.
Whoever Lani was, and whatever her purpose was, she had cured him of an ailment and addiction that no one recovered from. That had to be enough. In time, James grew up accepting the fact that he’d never see her again.
But Alex retreated into his own world, poring over texts, insistently nagging the few engineers that remained out in the open. He became obsessed with the akati, the Veil, and the stories of A’yursha and a group of beings called the Old Guard.
Nothing but hearsay. Fairy tales. But he wouldn’t listen to reason, so James put out fires where Alex burned bridges. Negotiated deals, where Alex’s temper got the better of him. James became his compass, reigning him in. A witness to the horror of Alex’s mind slipping deeper and deeper into mania, becoming cold and distant, and fickle.
“I let you go, brother,” James said to the image of the young Alex with a lump in his throat. “Come back to me.”
James grew up learning by necessity to make the best of a bad situation. Became a thief by profession and very good at it. He wasn’t humble by nature, but he thought himself a tactful man. Life involved work for a syndicate on the side, and the Syndicate for a living.
Joining a rebellion had never been on his list, but his brother insisted on his own crusade against the akati. Ever since the night the invasion came to turn their already hellish existence into fragments.
Now, in the Orb’s light, he saw why.
Alex pulled Jamie out. Took him and a few others to a desolate plateau to the south of the Wastelands. There, they survived as a team, working together. There they flourished, joined by thousands who also held a grudge.
He wasn’t about to abandon his ódir over a difference of opinion. Even if those opinions came with solutions he wasn’t a fan of. If Alex wanted James to steal a random rock from a temple, he’d travel the realms.
James didn’t need to know why. No one questioned the head of the Syndicate. This was the assignment he’d been given. Deep down, James knew this was the biggest job yet, and he couldn’t afford to screw it up. He had the rock. He had chosen it, laid his hand on it.
Setting off any alarm would mean never seeing the stars again. That included somehow escaping back to the Base.
James might be loyal to the cause because of his ódir, but he was not naïve. He grinned. Kollisi’s captain thrived under pressure.
