The Huntsman of Adamos (Quartet)- draft

CH IF HE WEREN’T BORN TO BE…

At the fortress built on the southernmost shore of the continent, the breeze was warm and tangy with the sea air. Soon the Southern Castle would be a school for healers and mages, and a home filled with the laughter of a family as it had been for centuries before... Daisy stopped the thought, it was time to move on. She had thousands of years of life ahead of her, and she believed Kaleth’s last words to her, she would find love again in the place she least expected it. She had to believe it to keep from falling into despair. Her soul still ached for her sealed one.

Yuri looked around amazed at how much Daisy had done. Kalen seemed unimpressed, the Southern Castle had never been his home. His mother had left the place built by his father’s love the day he had died, months before Kalen was born and only returned to spend the day on rare occasions. She had never slept in the walls she had shared for centuries with his father. Kalen had never known his father except through the mem-vids Kaleth had left for all his children to teach and encourage them. Everyone had always told him how great a warrior his father was and about the great love story of his parents, but it was hard to imagine that his father could have loved his mother more than he and his uncle did.

Kalen had never known his insane brother Damien who had tried to kill them all, and did not remember his warrior sister Betha, who had died to protect him. They were stories from the Great War, like his mother and father’s epic battles to destroy the Devourer and his dark kingdom. It was said his father had crossed back from the Light through the veil of death with the Celestial Army to aid the his mother, War Oracle, as she stood with his half-brother, the King of the Flame, and his uncle, the Last Huntsman against the Prince of Darkness, his queen, and their armies of necromancy creatures. While the space fleet had blasted the overworld rift into the Dark Nebulae with the weapons of light the War Oracle and her battalion of techs had created with the help of the Last Mage. Truly as the last who possessed the magic of the Atlantian Royals, if his family had failed, the universe as they knew it would have fallen to the hunger and chaos of the Devourer.

Kalen flipped through a book his eldest sister Asha had shown him, one their father had written notes on the final battle only days before his death, and years before that battle happened.

“What about this one Davin wrote on the Genosaurs?” His mother and uncle were sorting books into different boxes and talking about people Kalen had never met or barely remembered from childhood. The humans had such a short lifespan compared to Aethereans. If they weren’t born to be a Huntsman and an Oracle, they would both be scholars or some such boring thing...

“Can I go swim yet?” Kalen whined, “Please...”

“Fine, Fish. Go drowned yourself.” His mother answered tersely but he was out the door before she finished. His uncle’s laughter following him down the hall.

Daisy frowned at Yuri. “You shouldn’t encourage him.”

“I think you’re right, if he wasn’t born to be a guardian, he would be a fish.” Yuri grinned at Daisy who scowled, then he asked, “Have you seen my mother’s book of prophecies?”

Daisy looked into the box on the desk and answered honestly, “It’s not here. Perhaps someone already took it home with them. I have boxes for Karstien, Jenna, and Abrieth, and those shelves are for Asha and Shadz.” She couldn’t help the slightly sad tone she had.

Yuri made the face again as she scolded, “Stop that. I’m fine, Yuri. It has been 116 years, 8 months and 33 days. This place was meant to be a home filled with love and children, and soon it will be again. Asha already has her next ten fertility cycles tracked.”

Yuri eyebrows shot up. “That’s twenty children if the twin thing for Royals holds up, how does Shadz feel about that?”

Daisy laughed as she held out the last book to him, a manual on ancient magical weapons with Kaleth’s notes on the ones he’d made scribbled through it. Yuri scowled as he looked at it, Damien's tampering with this book had almost gotten them all killed… twice.

She announced in amusement. “Like Shadz has a choice, he may be the last and most powerful mage of his house, but he is helpless to tell her no. That is why she calls him Mine, and has since she could talk.”

Yuri flipped through the book and put it in Abrieth's box then he reached out and pulled her into a hug. “You’re being very brave. It is hard to let go of this place, but I think you are doing the right thing.”

“It was hard to accept that he was really gone, for so long I expected to see him in my visions or in the Room of Light like I did before the last battle. But I have never seen him again. Never felt his ghost, nothing, not even here. It made what he told me so much harder.” Her voice tremored slightly, and his arms tightened around her. All the pain and grief she had refused to feel during the war overwhelmed her after the war and she had taken her surviving children and left their homeworld for almost a third of a century. “Let’s go see if Kalen has managed to drown himself yet.”

Yuri took a deep breath, inhaling her scent of moonflowers and citrus wood and sadness. “You’re an amazing woman, and my brother was lucky to have you. If you ever want to talk about what happened in those last moments after the battle, about what he said... I’ll be happy to listen.”

“Yuri, you carry the grief from two wars in your soul, even if you can’t remember the first one. I won’t burden you with more.” She pushed away from him and walked out of the room.

Yuri leaned against his brother’s heavy mahogany desk before walking around and lifting the sheet that covered a large picture above it. His niece Asha had painted this portrait of her parents after the birth of her twin younger sisters. Instead of looking out at the room, Daisy and Kaleth were looking at each other as he held her like a bride. It was a moment of pure love captured in oil paint and canvas, and enchanted to last forever. Daisy had refused to take it to her house outside the crown city, refused to even look at it since Kaleth’s death because he had lied to her about them having a future after the war when he knew he would die before their son was born.

Yuri’s heart ached. “I’m sorry, brother, I’m trying to help her, but I don’t know how.”

Outside on the beach, Kalen was swimming stealthily in from the sandbars and Daisy floated in the tide pool. Yuri watched amused as the 115-year-old tried to surprise his mother only to be splashed. It was almost impossible to sneak up on an oracle.

“My Lord, I require a favor,” Daisy called out to him as he walked across the warm sands.

Knowing her request already, he bowed to her, “Anything you wish, my lady.”

Kalen was crouching on the stone ring around the tide pool, eyeing them suspiciously.

“I wish for you to catch me a fish.” She grinned at Kalen, who turned and dove with haste into the waves, he almost made it to the sandbar before Yuri caught him. In another few years, Kalen would be able to out-swim even Allura and Karstien.

“Your Fish, my lady,” Yuri laughed as he dumped a still squirming Kalen into the tide pool.

Giggling Daisy seized her son and tickled him. They played and swam until the moon began to rise. Finally, changing clothes and gathering their boxes of books, they wished goodbye for two weeks, when Kalen would go to Arborea and the Huntsmen’s Academy for the summer.

Daisy looked between her boards, scowling, it was worse than she thought. Through the link that some of the boards shared, she could see Shadz was writing. He had been her student in science, and she had been his student in magic. Her comm chimed and she answered.

“Hello, Asha, Shadz, how are my grandbabies?”

“Not yet,” Asha laughed and Shadz grumbled something Daisy didn’t quite hear about making babies, instead of getting sleep.

“Just wait till they’re born, if you think you don’t get sleep now. How are the protection enchantments coming?”

Daisy was staring at the writing on the board with the readings from the time stream. Some of the Dark entities has escaped the final battle and fled back in time. It also showed the time machine had been used to go back to the event horizon of the cataclysm twice, but she couldn’t scan beyond it. The scans showed the single trip she and Shadz had taken to confront Kaleth after his death. Her husband had known for years that he would die before Kalen was born, he had even made her a widow’s ring, but he had lied to her about their having a future together. Daisy looked at the white gold band as she listened to Shadz explaining the magic and tech they would need to get through the E.H..

‘Beloved of Kaleth, and My Beloved in Time Eternal’

Daisy’s heart didn’t hurt as much when she read those words as it once had, but she still resented the secret he had kept from her. “That’s good, Shadz. And Asha, you’re sure the healing magic will work to protect those we are bringing back forward?”

“Yes, Mom, between the glyph shields and the healing potions, everyone will be fine without the armor you and Shadz will be wearing to get here.” Asha sounded so confident in her mother and husband’s ability to overcome this difficult task.

“Get some sleep, kids, I’ll see you in a few days, I’m taking Kalen to Yuri’s for the summer. I am hoping we can go and be back without your brother being the wiser,” Daisy said tiredly.

“The King should be informed of our attempt to aid his grandmother.” Shadz deep voice was emotionless, but Daisy could feel his disapproval.

“Shadz, the invisible part of the note had your great-grandfather’s signet on it and that is the only reason I told you. We are not telling Karstien, he would try to stop us, or want to go with us and he has a kingdom to run. My decision is final, we go, we do our job, and we tell everyone after we get back.”

“I understand, Oracle,” Shadz acquiesced.

“Goodnight, Mom, get some sleep or I’ll make you.” Asha added in a lovingly teasing tone, and the comm beep end of transmission.

Daisy tapped on an unlinked board. She had everything they needed. Specialized armor, weapons, tech bundles, she had even had Kaleth’s ancient lightning sword repaired. She pulled up the calculations needed to put them at the coordinates and date Yllumina had provided and set up the Relic of Time.

An hour or so later she was startled to turn around and see Kalen staring at her through sleep glazed eyes.

“Mom?” he mumbled sleepily,

“Oh Kalen, you startled me. Why aren’t you in bed? You have exams tomorrow?”

He gawked at the Relic of Time as its clockface turned toward him. “What’s that?”

She flinched, realizing he had never actually seen it. “Just an old project I needed to configure for my new project,” she answered evasively, steering him out of her lab and toward the house, “Again, why are you up so late, you have exams?”

As she guided him into the house, he muttered, “I had a weird dream, but it felt so real.”

“What did you dream, sweetie?” She asked nudging him with her power to forget what he had seen and want to sleep.

He yawned repeatedly as he talked. ”I... I dreamed that Karstien and Uncle Yuri and I were chasing you through the forest... Uncle... yu... Yuri shot an arrow at you and... and pinned your skirt to a... a tree.” Sitting on his bed, he blinked at her, “The weirdest part was that his arrows were tied with green bindings instead of brown bindings.”

Daisy eased him into bed and tucked him in with a kiss on his forehead. “Now that is weird. And I don’t think your uncle would ever shoot at me, imagine how grumpy I would get.”

Kalen laughed tiredly, “Would you beat him up in the sparring swords again?”

Daisy smiled, “Most likely. He still can’t beat me with swords.”

She brushed his hair away from his face, he looked so much like his father, sandy blond hair, golden amber eyes, and strong jaw and cheekbones. Someday he would be as tall as his father and as broad shouldered, but for now he was barely a teenager, and a lanky one at that. She loved him more than anything, would do anything to protect him and his future.

“Sing to me, Mom.”

“As you wish, which song?”

“Uncle Yuri’s song.”

So, she began to sing, and her son was asleep before the second verse finished.

Back in her lab, the Relic watched her pacing and working, humming as it prepared for another journey through time. She talked to it through numbers and symbols, but it understood her needs without language. It had been created to serve her and the King; it would always find its way to one of them if it became lost again. Its floating clockface watched her turn off the lights and lock the door. It would wait.