Captain Reed’s body flew out of the portal at a high rate of speed. He tucked and rolled at the last minute, his boots and arms spraying white sand into the air as he came roughly to a stop.
He quickly pushed to his feet and scanned with his pistol. Looking around the circular room with the round pool at its center, he realized he recognized this place.
He had been here before.
Just as he had in his vision, Harry walked over to the circular pit filled with water and looked down. He saw the SongBird Goddess floating beneath the surface and two, six-foot long serpents slithering around her. The goddess looked up at Harry, and he saw her agony. He could just make out the heavy chain that held her beneath the water line.
Hefting the scepter and taking deep breaths, he readied himself to dive in the pool. He didn’t see the vortex behind him flash when someone stepped through, but the SongBird Goddess must have, for he saw sudden fear in her eyes. Suddenly, a single shot rang out, and a .45-caliber bullet passed through his lung.
Harry dropped the scepter, and it landed at the pit’s edge. He staggered but managed to turn around to face the person who had shot him in the back.
Leo stood there with the pistol in his outstretched hand. His eyes had turned completely black — just like the eyes of the twelve-foot tall being that stepped through the portal to stand beside the young man.
“YOU HAVE DONE WELL,” the deity said while placing a fatherly hand on Leo’s shoulder.
Harry couldn’t stand any longer and collapsed to his knees. He rolled over onto his back, his hand instinctively covering his bloody wound.
“NOW, BRING ME THE SCEPTER OF POWER!” Khaos commanded Leo.
#
Leo swelled with pride. He had pleased Khaos, and that was all that mattered to him. He moved to the pit’s edge and bent down to retrieve his master’s scepter.
He heard rapid, shallow breathing nearby. It was Harry. He was still alive. Leo saw blood pooling where the bullet had passed through his friend’s chest.
Why did I do that? Some small part of Leo’s brain wondered. Why would I shoot someone like Harry in the back? He looked down again at Harry, who was dying at his feet, and the voice in his head grew louder. Leo had grown up without a father, so he didn’t know what it was like to have one, but if he were to choose a father, it would be someone just like Harry.
And Khaos had made him shoot Harry in the back.
Rather than pick up the scepter, as his master had commanded, Leo knelt down next to Harry. “C’mon, Harry. I’m getting you out of here,” he said. There had to be some sort of doctor back at the palace.
“I can’t, kid. My legs don’t work,” Harry replied. A smile flickered at his lips.
The front of Harry’s shirt was completely red with his blood. Leo was surprised that Harry was still conscious. He shook his head in remorse. No! Not Harry, too.
“It’s okay, Leo. You’ve got to save the SongBird Goddess,” Harry said, resting his bloodstained hand on Leo’s jacket.
“No, I don’t. I have to save you,” Leo said matter-of-factly.
Harry no longer seemed to feel the pain, and he smiled up at Leo. “Son, listen to me. Remember that talk we had at the ruins about some things being more important than one’s own life?”
Leo wiped his tears away and bobbed his head. “Yes,” he said.
“Well, this is one of those times.” Harry coughed and clutched his jacket tightly as a spasm of pain racked his body. After it subsided, Harry’s lopsided grin crossed his face one last time. “Save her, Leo.” His body then went limp and lay lifeless.
Leo covered his face with the palm of his hand. Mac, Tae, Brett, Stein, the Awumpai — they were all dead. He was the only one left. He began to cry.
But then Leo felt anger brewing inside him. That monster made me destroy the most decent man I ever met in my life.
Leo spied Khaos’s scepter, which lay on the edge of the circular pit.
“HE WAS WEAK,” Khaos said. “NOW BRING ME THE SCEPTER.”
Leo wiped away his tears on the back of his hand and picked up the fallen scepter. Funny, he thought, I couldn’t even touch it before without being shocked, but now I can lift it easily. He smiled at Atum-Khaos and took one step backward into the watery pool.
The heavy scepter, like an anchor, took him immediately to the bottom of the pit. He knew it wouldn’t be long before Khaos dove in the pool after him, so Leo raised the scepter and pointed it at the chain that restrained the beautiful goddess.
As the dragon-headed serpents swam towards him, he heard a loud splash overhead. Khaos had dived in. Leo knew he should have been scared out of his gourd, but one look at the beautiful SongBird Goddess before him gave him a sense of inner peace.
Even as the first serpent’s tail encircled his waist and Khaos’s massive hand clamped down on the top of his skull, Leo was unafraid. This was his moment. This was his time to accomplish something greater than the needs and wants of his own mortal life.
As the serpent squeezed his waist and Khaos tightened his grip, Leo aimed the scepter at the thick chain and fired. A brilliant light blinded him. His vision returned just in time to see the chain that held the SongBird Goddess fall to the pit’s floor.
#
Outside the pit, it was quiet for a moment, almost serene. If someone had entered the temple at that moment, he or she would have been unaware that a battle for worlds had just taken place in the small circular pit in the center of the room.
And then the contents of the pit erupted from the hole as though someone had thrown twenty grenades into the pool of water, and they had all detonated simultaneously.
The room once again fell silent. Leo, however, heard a loud ringing in his ears as he slowly returned to consciousness. When he opened his eyes, a mouth full of razor-sharp spikes snapped at him.
Instinctively, Leo jerked his head away from the serpent. Its body flailed — a fish out of water. He quickly scooted away and saw that the second serpent lay motionless with its neck at an odd angle.
Rising to his feet, Leo saw that he wasn’t the only one who had survived the explosion. Khaos was regaining consciousness near a wall that Leo recognized immediately; it was the same wall that had started it all, the one with the strange symbols.
Khaos spied him and leaped to his feet, and Leo ran to the other side of the pit, searching for an exit. In the time it took him to realize that there was none, Khaos was upon him.
Khaos picked him up by the throat and pinned him against the wall. “Want to know a secret?” he said in an almost mortal voice.
“A secret? That’s funny, coming from you,” Leo barely managed to choke out. His legs dangled off the floor, and he had both hands wrapped around the deity’s wrist, trying desperately to free himself.
Ignoring him, Khaos continued, “Do you know why God loves you insignificant mortals more than what you call ‘angels’? Your ignorance. You humans, with your miserable mayfly existence, have only your faith to guide you. Angels cannot have faith because they already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists; they interact with him every day.”
Khaos squeezed his fingers around Leo’s neck and was rewarded with the sound of cracking bones. “WELL WE DIDN’T ASK TO KNOW!” he shouted.
“RELEASE HIM!” called an ethereal voice.
Khaos fell to his knees and grabbed his stomach. Leo slumped to the sandy ground, his entire world narrowing to the air flooding his lungs.
Gasping from a mortal blow, Khaos asked, “Why? How can this be?”
Leo lifted his gaze and saw that the SongBird Goddess had risen from her tomb, which was now nothing more than a muddy pit. The scepter of power glowed like a radiant beacon in her delicate hand.
Khaos turned, and his eyes opened wide in astonishment when he saw something he had not seen in over a millennium: the SongBird Goddess stood before him in solid form.
She walked over to Atum Khaos and knelt beside him. After gently laying her hand on him, she said, “You have exceeded you timetable, brother.” Her aura then began absorbing both his ethereal and physical forms.
Before he faded completely from sight, Khaos cried, “DAMN YOU, SISTER! DAMN YOU TO HELL!”
#
Commander Mac O’Bryant knew this was her end, though, if anyone had told her it was even possible to die fighting a hoard of three-legged alien centaurs on a distant planet that was controlled by the precursors to Earth’s own gods, she would have laughed in their face and assumed they were nuts. Well it was a good thing she had no bet to lose over it because apparently that was exactly how she was going to die –– skewered by a hundred Tripod tridents after her co-pilot had been hijacked by a living god.
At her back, a very bloody and worn Fu-Mar growled at their encircling foes. Mac was sure it was his glare alone that was keeping the Tripods at bay. No, she hoped it was that; she couldn’t stomach the thought of being saved as Khaos’s plaything, or worse. She’d already faced that possibility once and once was enough.
Suddenly she wished she’d saved her last bullet. After all this, after losing Tae and Brett, after Joan had risked everything to warn her, she’d still failed to save Earth, save Emma. She’d rather die than watch that failure bear fruit. But then, she realized, it wasn’t in her to go down without a fight.
She cast her gaze around for a weapon and found a knife at her feet in the hands of a dead Mook. The creature had died with its eyes open, war paint smeared across its face, completely free in its moment of death. Mac decided there were worse ways to die.
She grabbed the knife and charged the nearest Tripod.
Her Tripod target stiffened in surprise and Mac found a grin on her face. The creature swept with his trident and Mac ducked. She dove between the creature’s legs and stabbed the knife into its underbelly. The Tripod screamed and reared. Mac scrambled away as the thing came down in a storm of thrashing limbs, its death knells echoing across the vaulted throne room. The shock rippled through the other Tripods.
Behind her, Fu-Mar roared defiance. The Awumpai surged forward as if a tether had snapped; as if he had been merely awaiting her choice.
Mac found herself another Mook knife and she raced to collect it as the Tripods refocused. Her hand closed over the crude hilt. A ring of tridents descended. She closed her eyes and … nothing.
She peeked with one eye and then stared in confusion at the Tripods which seemed to have been frozen in time, their arms drawn back for the blow and the deadly points of their tridents perfectly still in the air.
Fu-Mar roared and chopped four creatures in half before he seemed to realize they weren’t fighting back. His arm dropped, his massive sword dripping gore from its tip and providing the only sound in the room besides his panting breath and the thudding of Mac’s heart in her chest.
“What?” she asked. As if the word had been the key to a spell, every single Tripod crumpled like a marionette with severed strings.
Mac stood in the center of the carnage, struggling to understand what had just happened. Fu-Mar gazed around the room and then he did something that jolted Mac back to awareness, he tipped his head and began to laugh.
Khaos was dead.
#
Leo lay against the wall, unable to move his unresponsive body. His labored breathing was the only sound in the room. Mustering all his remaining strength, he was only able to raise an arm toward the SongBird Goddess, and it was a feeble gesture at that.
The goddess knelt by his side. Stroking his hair, she said, “You have freed me.”
“What about Khaos’s warships?” Leo asked, his voice barely above a whisper. “They’re in orbit … They’ll head for Earth.”
“Shh, shh, it’s all right. Do not fear, little one. My brother’s forces will never reach Earth.”
“What? But how?”
“On my command, they will enter the wormhole, and when they do, it will close around them.”
“But how is this possible?”
“Because you and your friends have freed me.” The SongBird Goddess smiled. “Now that I am free, I am able to manipulate the cosmos once more. It seems I have been forgiven by the Father, the one True God. Your actions have restored my grace and have restored balance to the universe. And for that, I am truly grateful.”
“Then we did it. We saved Earth. We saved them all. My friends, they didn’t die for nothing.”
“That’s right, Leo,” she said, smiling once more. “You and Mac will go on to be emissaries of worlds.”
Emissaries of worlds, Leo thought, not bad for a couple of glorified truckers.
Leo suddenly heard a familiar voice. “Leo!” it called over torrents of wind. Oddly enough, it sounded a lot like his future mother-in-law. Leo turned and watched Mac step through the vortex. The moment she did, it began to shrink closed behind her.
“The doorway — it’s closing!” he yelled, but by the time Mac turned around, the vortex had vanished.
Mac helped Leo stumble to his feet. “What about Harry?” she asked, her voice breathless. Her eyes snagged on the pilot lying at the edge of the pit.
Leo shook his head. “He’s gone.”
“Oh, Harry,” Mac breathed, blinking back her tears. “It happened after all. I’d hoped … I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
Scanning the room Leo saw the SongBird Goddess had also vanished. He and Mac were the only ones left, alone in the tomb at the bottom of an ocean of an icy moon.
Raising his hands in frustration Leo shouted, “So what the hell do we do now, huh? You just leave us to rot so we can find three corpses in the future instead of just one?”
Mac gently laid a hand on his shoulder. “Stop it, Leo. It’s over.”
Angry, Leo shook himself free and continued to yell at nothingness. “No! We save her, and the whole damn universe and this is what we get?”
An ethereal voice cut him off. Gently, the SongBird Goddess said, “Oh, Leo. Even after all you have witnessed. Still, you do not believe.”
A new burst of wind gusted at his and Mac’s hair and after it died down a second voice was heard. A voice neither of them had heard in a very, very long time.
“Mom? Leo? Is that you?”
It was Emma.
As one, they whirled around to see that a second spinning vortex had opened. Mac’s daughter was standing on the lush green grass of her college campus holding her books to her chest. “Mom, what’s going on, what is this?” Her eyes roved over them and past them to the hieroglyphs on the wall and the carved picture of the Europa Moon pyramid.
“Go to her,” the SongBird commanded. “Go to her now for I cannot hold this portal through time and space for long.”
Mac stepped forward as if there were not a doubt in her mind but Leo hesitated.
Mac glanced back and quirked an eyebrow, “You gonna sit around here on your ass all day or are we gonna get out of here?”
Leo grinned and decided that maybe he could have faith in something after all. He grabbed her offered hand and together they leapt through the vortex seconds before it winked out and sealed the tomb for another time.
#
In the tomb, the light faded from the closing vortex, but another softer glow soon replaced it.
The SongBird Goddess returned. She knelt next to Harry, folded his hands on his stomach, and cradled his head in her hands.
Although he couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sleep, faithful one. Your wife and daughters are waiting for you in the afterlife. Your long night is over.”
The angelic goddess gently laid his head to rest next to the circular grave that had been her tomb. She gently kissed his forehead and bade him farewell.
Captain Harry Christopher Reed was dead.
As an afterthought, the SongBird Goddess removed Harry’s journal from his coat pocket. She scribbled something on the last page, her thoughts serving as the ink for an invisible pen. When she finished, she replaced the journal in Harry’s right hand and began to fade from the temple and the mortal plane of existence.
Her departure created a fierce wind that opened the journal to the last page, the page on which she had inscribed these final words: “To the reader of this journal, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen.”
# # #