The Realmwalkers: Chapter 1 Part 1

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The Realmwalkers: Chapter 1 Part 1

“Wait,” Jaya said suddenly, “why do you wear the mask?”

Interrupted in his thought, Sarkis took a deep breath and held it for a brief moment before answering, “My face was heavily damaged long ago, and other than covering my horrific visage, it aids in my breathing along with some other effects.”

Jaya felt sorry for asking. “Oh.” Still, it piqued more curiosity. “May I ask what happened?”

Sarkis sighed slowly. He’s never liked having to tell this story. “I do not like recalling these memories, but I have not told the story in a very long time. A few centuries before you were born, I came to be, on an island once called, Arcadia. I believe you call it, The Isle of Magista, now.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve always wanted to visit the Council of Magista.”

“Yes, they rule there in your time having finally conquered what was left of the force mages I failed to wipe out. You see, I was one of them, and I was a prodigy–the prodigy. No one could create a sphere of force greater than I. Before I broke away after finally seeing the truth behind their agenda, I was able to create a twenty-three foot sphere. I kept training while I devised a plan to lure them all and release a sphere twice that size, which would have the equivalent destructive force of a hydrogen bomb from Earth. I was willing to sacrifice myself to usurp their plans, but God found a way to intervene, though I melted my face and much of the front of my body creating a sphere, that, for a brief moment, was hotter than a white dwarf star.”

“Haos, that must have hurt so incredibly.”

“To be honest, I barely remember the pain. The force knocked me out, however, a certain entity I shall not name protected me from the blast. Instead of being fully healed, I have been eternally punished with this deformity. Although God is forgiveness eternal, it does not like suicide, even in the case of martyrdom. Death is meant to be sacred, revered, and respected as the catalyst of a new beginning.”

“And not to be used as an escape nor a weapon.”

“Exactly. You do catch on fast.”

Jaya huffed a short laugh. “Sometimes answers just come to me, like right out of thin air.”

“Well, it helps that you actually listen, though you listen like a predator waiting to strike.”

Jaya blushed and smiled, receiving that as a tasteful compliment. “Well, I’ve always got so many thoughts going on that I have to really focus on what people are saying or I just don’t hear them.”

Sarkis laughed. “My wife was just like that, too. It would seem that first-timers have a way of attracting themselves to one another. They often find that others seem to refuse to understand our ways.”

Jaya giggled heartily, knowing well the struggle. “Ugh, I thought I was just bad at keeping friends. So, was my cousin Efir a first-timer then? He and I always got along so well.”

“I believe he is, yes.”

She giggled again. This time trailing off in memory with her gaze.

“Are you ready now?”

Jaya let out a soft moan as her smiling face relaxed, and then she cleared her throat. “I’m, uh–sorry. Just reminiscing.” she stated as she shook her head a bit. “I am ready, though.”

“Good, because, even with our powers, time is not on our side.”

“But, why is that?”

Sarkis caught his breath halfway, honestly surprised by her question. He took a serious breath before answering, “Perhaps we can finish this talk in the Temporal Nexus, where I can better affect time, yes?”

Jaya not only heard the annoyance in his tone, she could sense it in the way he asked the question. It was his first rhetorical question. “Um, sure. Let’s go then.” She said that trying not to sound dejected, but she knew she failed. It didn’t matter as Sarkis was quick to send them there while she was saying it.

Her mild sadness quickly came to a halt as they stood five feet from the edge of a floating island under an orange sky, though there were no suns to be seen. Nothing had a strange orange tint, just a rusty orange, cloudless sky. Instead, it was full of floating islands in varying sizes. There was one in her initial view that was easily the biggest and full of clocktowers varying in height with a scattered build making it look chaotic, and not organized to allow one to see the most clock faces. They were all built out of the same ochre brick and the same rusted metal clock faces that all read different times with different amounts of hours. Some were even more complex with three or four hands, or many clock faces on one tower.

As she looked at other islands, she could see that some of them had people on them. On the closest one that was maybe half a mile away, she could see two people sparring, one with a spear in black leather armor, and the other with samurai armor and a wakizashi. She watched as the spearman killed the samurai, then the samurai disappeared, only to reappear at one end of the oval-shaped island. An island similar to hers in length, maybe 100 feet.

“That is another hero in training from your world.”

“Now that is really neat. Does he save the world?” she asked, looking at Sarkis.

“In a way, yes.”

Jaya looked back and hummed as she smiled. It was then that the hero turned to look at them, as though he sensed her staring. It made Jaya gasp lightly and catch her breath before saying, “He certainly looks like a hero.”

“Come. We must not let him lose focus.”

She went to smile, but then panicked at what to do to warn the hero as the samurai had quickly moved in for an overhead strike, but the hero spun even faster, parrying the strike, then jumping and spinning with his own strike with the blunt end across the samurai’s face, removing the mask. She could tell that he was having fun with his training and went back to smiling before turning to catch up with Sarkis.

Once near the center, he stopped and faced her, ever so somber with his posture. Jaya stopped about ten feet from him, expecting maybe a fight.

“Are you ready for your first lesson?”

“Yes.” She responded with a nod.

With that, he turned ninety degrees to his right, and she could tell that he spread his legs wider than his shoulders before twisting at the waist to face her, then holding up his arms at a similar wide angle. “What do you see?” Sarkis asked plainly.

As much as Jaya wanted to give him a sarcastic answer, she didn’t want to fail her first lesson. They are typically the easiest. She creased her brow and squinted her eyes a bit. She noted that, at this angle, he looked like the letter Y. She then moved around him a bit until he looked like the letter X. Then, without her trying, her mind began to draw lines between the vectors that are his arms and legs, and then was able to fill in the sides and move the shape to his side, turning it in three dimensions. “So, first I saw the letter Y, then the letter X, but then somehow I saw a tetrahedron.”

“Very good. No doubt the nanobots are aiding you in problem solving. Now, the tetrahedron is the smallest shape that can be made in three dimensions. Some will argue that the seed is, but that is for another lesson. It is also good that you noticed the two dimensional shapes. Have you made that correlation yet?”

It was funny to her, because, just as he was mentioning the letters, she somehow knew the base chromosomes for male and female look like Y and X respectively. She found it curious that they would show up in the base shape, much like how The Leyline of Creations looked like the infinity symbol at first.

“Exactly. Much of Creation has patterns, especially at the atomic level. This lesson has two facets, in that, it is not only about the basis of the structure of reality, but also a lesson in noticing every facet of the problem.”

“Yeah, like, don’t take things at face value, and all.”

“Yes, I… suppose that is another way to say it.” He said with a hint of annoyance.

Jaya smirked at his annoyance. “This was also a lesson in distraction, as in how you tried getting out of answering my question.” She raised an eyebrow, but gave him an impatient look.

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