World warden, p.1
World Warden, page 1
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Chapter 1. Mercy
Chapter 2. Oscar
Chapter 3. Boyfriend
Chapter 4. Captive
Chapter 5. Shimmer
Chapter 6. Anger
Chapter 7. Doubt
Chapter 8. Family
Chapter 9. Dream
Chapter 10. Flying
Chapter 11. Thrum
Chapter 12. Thorns
Chapter 13. Trap
Chapter 14. Housework
Chapter 15. Maw
Chapter 16. Bouquet
Chapter 17. Water
Chapter 18. Eyrie
Chapter 19. Light
Chapter 20. Bait
Chapter 21. Reprieve
Chapter 22. Ledge
Chapter 23. Atoll
Chapter 24. Papa
Chapter 25. Lyrana
Chapter 26. Archaeus
Chapter 27. Balance
Chapter 28. Fire
Chapter 29. Climb
Chapter 30. Crystalline
Chapter 31. Her
Chapter 32. Free
Chapter 33. Back
Chapter 34. Home
Chapter 35. World Warden
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Copyright
World Warden
By Albert Nothlit
Wurl: Book Two
Now that colonists Elias Trost and Tristan MacLeod have learned of the existence of another intelligent species on this planet, their life on New Skye has become even more perilous. Dresde, the ruthless wurl queen, has kidnapped Elias’s brother, Oscar, along with the egg of a rival queen.
Oscar Trost finds danger and privation under Dresde’s reign, but he isn’t alone. A small group of humans from the original colony ship, long lost from memory, live on the eastern continent as slaves to Dresde’s horrific whims. In order to survive, Oscar must find his courage and prove himself to these others while he awaits the rescue he is sure will come.
Elias and Tristan have to find Oscar and the egg, and fast. Every day their search becomes more desperate. But sprawling between them and Dresde’s lair is the untamed alien wilderness, teeming with threats from ground and sky. And in the vast ocean they must cross lies something else—something ancient that should not be disturbed….
For Luna, Lorena, and Uriel.
Chapter 1. Mercy
ELIAS TROST trudged through the mire, followed by his maybe-boyfriend and three wurl with silver scales.
He glanced over his shoulder. Tristan MacLeod walked a few paces behind, panting with effort but tireless as always. Tristan’s gaze was fixed on the treacherous ground before him as he picked each step with care. He was slightly taller than Elias, and he had a buzz cut that was beginning to grow out a week after they had left the colony of Portree. Tristan’s bushy eyebrows gave his face an appearance of forceful intensity when he furrowed his brow with concentration, as he was doing at the moment. His square jaw was firmly set with evident determination. Tristan was always clean-shaven, even when out in the wild. Elias supposed Tristan was careful about his appearance because of the rigid discipline of the Colony Patrol, but he secretly preferred to see Tristan’s cheeks shadowed by dark stubble. In Elias’s opinion, it gave Tristan a gruff aura he found hard to resist.
Elias checked his link before he focused on the way ahead once more. The sleek steel contours of the wrist-held computer reflected the diffuse light all around him and showed him a brief reflection of his own face. Although Elias was the same age as Tristan, nearly seventeen in the long years of the world of New Skye, he looked younger because of his paler skin, his smooth cheeks, and the sharp lines of his trim, angular face.
His features were rather ordinary, with the exception of his eyes.
Elias’s eyes were not a hazel shade of brown like Tristan’s. His irises were iridescent, mesmerizing, and most definitely not human-looking. Elias had seen himself in a mirror many times since the change, but he did not think he would ever get used to seeing the shifting colors, white and pink and neon green, threading themselves in thousands of different shades every time he contemplated his reflection. He had not been born with such eyes. They were part of the legacy of Sizzra, the Spine wurl queen, with whom Elias had spent many harrowing months. He did not know what the colors meant, but it did remind him of a vow he had made to the weakening queen before she had allowed him to go back to his family.
He had promised to watch over her unborn brood.
It was a vow he meant to keep.
A loud huff to the right made Elias glance in that direction. It was hard to see more than a couple of meters away because of the fog that surrounded them, but as the hulking shadow of a Spine wurl approached, he recognized Narev, one of his three other companions. They were big creatures, standing as tall as Elias on six muscular legs. Narev’s body, like Vanor’s and Siv’s, was covered by metallic-looking scales of flawless silver. They looked like impenetrable armor, but Elias knew that they were not indestructible. He had seen creatures cut through them like an oar slicing through still water—creatures with sizzling talons and huge membranous wings. When he closed his eyes, Elias could still picture the carnage left behind by Dresde’s assault a week earlier, and he knew that the images in his memories would haunt him for a very long time.
Narev approached even more until he was walking next to Elias. His many legs sank alarmingly low in the quagmire they were crossing, but he did not appear to be worried about being trapped. In fact his movements were graceful, coordinated, and efficient. Elias’s eyes roamed over the dozens of long, wicked spines that covered Narev’s back, sides, and shoulders. Like his scales, they were silver. Most of them ended in sharp tips with serrated edges. A few of them were shorter since they were growing back to replace others that had been fired before. Elias had never been on the receiving end of Narev’s spines, and he did not want to be. He had seen firsthand how fast and how far an adult Spine wurl was able to fire his spines, and how deadly such an attack could be.
Elias placed his hand on the side of Narev’s neck.
“Don’t worry,” he told him. “We should be out of this swamp in a kilometer or so.”
Narev swiveled his spade-shaped head to look at Elias fully, fixing him with a gaze that was alert and attentive as it emanated from all three of his eyes. They were red and glowed softly in the foggy atmosphere, reminding Elias of the electronic lights of the security system he would sometimes see outside the genetics lab back in Portree. However, whereas a year ago Elias would have been terrified of looking into the eye cluster of a wurl, now he was reassured. Through physical contact with Narev, Elias could feel the gist of the wurl’s emotions. Narev was as determined as Elias. He was also curious. And a little bit bored.
“I wish there were a quicker way around this awful place,” Tristan complained. He had caught up to Elias, and they were walking next to each other. Immediately behind him, the outline of Siv was barely visible at the edges of the fog. Vanor was nowhere to be seen, but Elias could hear him very well. As the largest of the three wurl, it was never difficult to know where Vanor was.
Elias smiled, then grimaced as he felt the furtive brush of something large and many-legged crawling on his neck. He slapped it, shuddering. His hand came back slimy, and he wiped it on his pants.
“I agree,” he grumbled. “I never knew there could be so many mosquitoes on this planet.”
“Just another of the wonderful consequences of you saving the world,” Tristan replied, grinning conspiratorially.
“Right. Yay, me. We should figure out a name for these winged bugs.”
“What’s wrong with ‘mosquitoes’?” Tristan asked.
Elias shrugged. “That’s the Terran name, and these insects are not the same. They do suck blood, but they’re bigger. And they are sparkly.” He said that last part while pointing at the smear on his pants leg. The mosquito analogs could have, in fact, been beautiful, if they had not been so infuriating.
“Fine,” Tristan conceded. How about ‘murder drills with weird screw-shaped stingers’?”
“I… was actually thinking of a scientific name,” Elias clarified. “You know, genus and species.”
Tristan blinked. “Right. You go right ahead, then. You’re the scientist. I’m going to call them mosquitoes, if that’s okay.”
Elias swatted another one, which was buzzing next to his ear. “Let’s keep going. Part of me wishes we hadn’t taken this route.”
“Me too, but this is the quickest way,” Tristan said after checking his link for a moment. “If we’d avoided the swamp entirely, we would’ve had to circle around going north or south. It would’ve probably added a week to the journey, to say nothing of mountains or hills we’d have to climb.”
“I know, I know. And we’re almost through.”
“Yeah. I wonder if Vanor will let me ride him again,” Tristan commented, halting briefly because one of his feet had sunk more than usual in the muck. He tried to yank his leg up, but ended up leaving his shoe behind. “You’ve got to be—”
Elias chuckled, offering Tristan a hand so he could steady himself while he reached down, cursing. He found his shoe, emptied it as much as he could of its disgusting contents, and put it back on.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to ride them if we don’t have to,” Elias told him, gesturing at the wurl around them. “Narev is carrying the pack, and that’s heavy enough as is. We don’t want any of the wurl to struggle with the terrain more than needed because of our added weight. As soon as we’re out of this place and back on more solid ground, I’m sure they’ll let us ride them again.”
“I hope so. We go much faster that way, and the faster we travel, the faster we get to… her.”
Elias nodded, and his expression turned somber. He looked ahead, almost as if he were able to see the distant destination he wanted to reach as fast as possible. He tried to use his eyesight to pierce the ghostly fog that surrounded him on all sides, but to no avail. As far as he could see, the landscape was a dull shade of whitish gray. Sometimes the desiccated trunks of trees would come into view, like sentries watching over the marshy land. They soon disappeared behind Elias and his party, and with few landmarks in the interim to the next one, it felt as though they were making no progress at all. Elias wanted to run, to race to the edge of the continent so he could surge over an entire ocean and get to the volcano where she waited.
Dresde. The Flyer wurl queen. The one who had slain Sizzra by taking advantage of her weakness, attacking in the middle of a storm like a coward.
The one who had taken the priceless white egg in which the next Spine queen slumbered, ready to hatch.
The one who had kidnapped Oscar, his little brother.
Elias closed his eyes briefly.
Oscar, please be okay. I’m coming.
Almost as if sensing that something was wrong, Tristan placed his hand on Elias’s shoulder. Elias opened his eyes, surprised. Tristan gave him a warm, reassuring smile. He said nothing, but Elias understood. He took Tristan’s hand, squeezed it, and the two of them walked hand in hand for a while.
Despite everything that was happening, there was a bright spark of joy in Elias’s chest because he was with Tristan. Elias wasn’t sure if he and Tristan were official boyfriends, but he did know that he loved Tristan and always wanted to be by his side. Tristan hadn’t reciprocated with the L-word yet, but Elias didn’t mind. He knew that Tristan cared about him. Enough, in fact, to leave everything behind and join Elias in a mad dash across an entire continent with no idea of what might lie ahead.
About an hour later, Tristan called for a halt, and Elias agreed. The two of them stopped next to a cluster of fallen dead trees that offered a slight improvement over the moist and muddy terrain they have been traversing.
“I’m so thirsty,” Tristan said. He walked over to Narev, who crouched slightly and allowed Tristan to unhook one of the smaller backpacks from his spines. He took out a couple of water bottles and tossed one over to Elias.
“Thanks,” Elias said as they both drank. It was hot out, which was to be expected given the fact that it was early summer. However, Elias had never been in a swamp before.
He had also never seen so many bugs before.
They rested for only a couple of minutes before the ceaseless insect assault became too much to bear. The arthropods appeared to be drawn to Tristan and Elias, although they seemed to leave Vanor, Narev, and Siv alone. Some of them were large, like the mosquitoes, but the majority were much smaller. They crawled on the tree trunks, splashed in the mud, and flitted through the air. Elias spotted something that looked like a miniature frog skimming on the surface of the swamp. When it looked as though it was going to bump into the tree trunks, however, it deployed a set of three gossamer wings and took off in a small burst of muddy droplets. Elias followed the creature, marveling at its striped body, and was wholly unprepared for the multi-legged arachnid that jumped out of a crack in the rotted wood of a nearby trunk, snatched the winged frog out of the air with black segmented pincers, and disappeared with its prey into the mud with a faint plop.
Elias could not suppress a faint thrill of fascination at discovering so many new species he had never seen or heard of in his life. Months and months ago, he had read the account of Dr. Thomas Wright, where the pioneer colonist described the dazzling biodiversity of New Skye. Elias had found it hard to imagine what that must have been like, but he was finally beginning to understand. Now that the Life Seed had been returned to where it belonged, the planet was teeming with life.
They set off again, and although it took another miserable hour of constant effort, Elias’s feet eventually touched solid ground. A few minutes later, he could tell they were out of the swamp for good. Although the fog had not let up, the sun was beginning to go down, and the heat was no longer stifling. A mild breeze blew from the east too, bringing with it a welcome relief from the stench of decaying plant matter that had surrounded them in the swamp.
“We made it,” Tristan declared triumphantly. His shoes and pants were caked with dried mud all the way up to the knees.
“Yeah. Now I really want a shower, though.”
Tristan nodded enthusiastically. “I’m going to jump straight into the next lake we fi—”
Vanor growled suddenly, loudly enough to drown out the end of Tristan’s sentence. The other two wurl stiffened, and both Siv and Narev flared out their spines.
Elias exchanged a worried look with Tristan. All three wurl were looking at the sky.
“Back-to-back,” Tristan ordered, his words clipped and efficient. “Weapons out.”
He pulled his shock spear, which was slung across his back, in a practiced and fluid motion. The hiss of static electricity as he activated the slender double-tipped weapon was accompanied by a dull flash of blue-white light from either end.
Elias echoed Tristan’s motion, but instead of a shock spear, he pulled out a long iridescent spine that was the same color as his eyes. The tip of the spine was stained red, and it was nearly twice as long as any of the spines on the adult wurl who were now backing toward where Elias and Tristan stood, all three facing out and appearing to scan the sky.
Elias felt more confident with his weapon in hand. Sizzra had given it to him, and it had become Elias’s constant reminder of his link with her and the world itself. Although the spine was very light and appeared hollow, its edge was sharp enough to cut through most things, and its wicked tip could pierce metal. Elias knew from experience that, with enough force, the spine was able to cut through even the reinforced scales of the Flyer queen. Elias had wounded her with it in their last encounter.
With Tristan’s back against his and the Spine wurl all around, Elias studied the sky in earnest. The fog was thick, and even out of the swamp it limited visibility so much that his surroundings were no more than a blur of shifting white and gray, a landscape of muted sounds that carried strangely over the hot, oppressive atmosphere.
These were the perfect conditions for an ambush. Elias recalled the knowledge he had gained from Sizzra’s ancestral memories, and he knew that Flyer wurl would often attack when the environment shrouded them from view. They were sneaky, quick, and deadly.
A faint shadow passed directly overhead. Siv growled and fired a single spine upward, but it hit nothing. In the wake of the shadow, a faint current of displaced air brought with it a smell Elias had already learned to associate with Flyers. It was an intense stench that reminded him of burning rock or melting metal.
The smell triggered the recall of much more recent memories in Elias’s mind. He remembered a field littered with the dead bodies of Spine wurl. He remembered Sizzra collapsing lifeless as a storm howled around them all. He remembered Dresde most of all, towering above him, majestic, taunting.
Cowardly.
“Stay sharp,” Tristan said curtly. “It’s coming back around.”
“I’m ready,” Elias replied. He wasn’t afraid. His every muscle was tense, alert, ready to react to the inevitable strike.
The shadow passed again, faster than before. Vanor and Narev fired spines, but the fog swallowed the attacker, and it was gone as fast as it had come.
“Just one, I think,” Tristan reported under his breath. “Odd.”
Elias nodded, although Tristan couldn’t see him directly. Normally Flyers would attack in groups, from many sides at once. They loved to deceive and confuse, to draw their enemy’s attention one way while they attacked from behind.
Next to Elias, Narev growled low in his throat.
