(Lux City, Protea; October, Rebirth Era Year 29)
Her sleep had stopped being restful.
A familiar power kept drawing closer. It burned like Fire, chilled like Ice, sparked like Thunder . . . It seemed as if every Flower Element she knew steadily drew down toward her. Under it pulsed the wild and potent force that she knew could not be magic, but instead surely was majik. The gift from Destiny to those called witches.
That pressure of elemental majik drove her to fidget in her sleep, and it kept her husband awake as well in the process. She had never been a restful sleeper, so he wouldn't have minded it much except for the way she was not actually getting any rest. It disturbed her during the day as well.
When it was finally too much, Sherry Yamamoto left her bed in the middle of the night and went to the quiet of her living room to kneel and attempt some divination. She had the rare Future Sight thanks to being the Dual Cultivator of Aster, and she could use divination to pull information from the future. The bit of the Sensing skill she had absorbed from her husband after over five thousand years also allowed for her to feel the flow of energy, and that had strengthened her divination skills greatly.
She closed her eyes as she sent her mind out seeking the answers she needed. It came with surprising speed, and her eyes opened sharply to reveal the yellow irises had consumed her pupils entirely. Behind her eyes, she watched the vision of the future unravel. Two figures riding on the back of a multi-colored dragon that felt vaguely familiar. One figure could not be wholly seen, the one directing the dragon, but the other looked tack sharp: the unexpectedly familiar figure of Sherry's best friend and partner Yvonne Notesong, wearing her Mask and armor as a Defender Cultivator of the Iris planet. The dragon dodged something, and shadows shifted barely enough for Sherry to determine the first figure may likely be female, and then shadows overtook everything.
"Sherry!" Justin Yamamoto knelt next to his wife and shook her shoulder gently. "Fiera, come back to me now. It's all right."
She blinked her eyes rapidly and realized that she was now sprawled on the floor of the living room. She carefully sat up and then turned into Justin's arms and simply held on. She didn't need to tell him what she had seen because he saw it the minute he touched her. He had enough mental strength of his own that meant her visions could invade his mind when they touched; he had even gotten a slight hue of Sight himself as her lover. The sharing of visions could happen between any two with Sight—if their Sight overlapped—but was particularly strong between lovers.
Yet as their eyes met, they both knew that even if they had both seen it, neither of them understood what the fiery hells it meant.
* * * * *
It had been only five years since the last 'official' meeting had been required of all Cultivators and Commanders, Shana Toulume thought as she studied the light fall colors all around the backyard of the Castlera house. It was early October, and the city had begun to shift from summer to autumn. The temperature itself did not change much, but nature itself still went through its cycle of death, sleep, and rebirth. She had always found it rather ironic that the shift to fall usually brought a shift to danger; it was nearly always October when evil decided to strike out. She couldn't even say why.
She was one of the few in their circle to have any Sight at all, and only one of two total to have All Sight that encompassed past, present, and future alike. She had been feeling the same pressure as Sherry, though it had been invading her days more than her nights, making it near impossible to concentrate on work. Being co-president and owner of Chivanti Corporation was more than a title: it was her passion. The company oversaw the operations of Lux directly, and the entire landmass as a whole, so she had plenty to keep her busy, even if she wasn't also an international fashion and theatrical photographer on the side.
In a way, having Sherry put out the call for everyone to assemble for non-standard family get-together reasons had been a relief to everyone involved. Sherry and Shana had been the only ones directly suffering, but everyone else had been worried for them—as well as aware of what the rising premonitions might mean.
The only place that had enough room for all ten Dual Cultivators, all eight Commanders, and the two Ruler Cultivators—and the reluctant Captain—was the backyard of the Castlera house affectionately called 'Memory-Time Central' since only Clara Castlera had the Memory Flower Element and only her husband, Samuel, had the Time Flower Element, which derived from Memory.
Shana perched on top of a picnic table and stretched out her long legs. At six-foot even, she was taller than the majority of her friends, with only her twin soul mate, her husband, her husband's twin soul, and Captain Rubeo Chance being taller. Only Commander Nathaniel Matica matched her evenly; everyone else was varying levels of shorter, which made things all the more amusing when they tried to bodily protect her. "So did your Sight finally show you something, Sherry?"
"Yeah." Sherry sat perched on the back steps with Justin, as well as Sam and Clara. "Brace yourselves, because this is a damned weird one: I saw Yvonne in Mask and armor riding on the back of a dragon with another woman."
Yvonne Notesong shook her head hard enough to make her purple ombre hair fly. "Wait, what? That . . . is very not logical. Dragons still live solely on the Plane or in the Realm, other than Siana and Sicily, or Haeth—who we haven't seen in five years. And you'd have recognized any of them anyway, or any of the other dragons we came to know personally during the Realm War."
Rocky Toulume had been sitting beside Shana, and when he felt his wife's elbow land in his side, he half winced. The gesture drew lifted brows from everyone, and he sighed deeply. "Okay, so maybe I've been Seeing things, too, but until you mentioned the dragon, I didn't think they were related!" He had Future Sight as well, and actually had the strongest gift for Sight other than Shana. "I just kept having this vision of a woman surrounded by dragons, okay? The one I could see clearest had a wing around her protectively. I figured maybe it had to do with—with what happened five years ago. That maybe it was some sort of promise of hope, you know?"
Five years before, during the last skirmish against evil that had come into the Blossom Field galaxy, the ultimate price had been paid by a Defender Cultivator: their life. It had not actually been a Blossom Cultivator, however. It had been paid by the honorary member of the team, Byron Rancul, who had come from Ranunculus in another galaxy and stayed on Protea to be with his soul mate and Caretaker, Jean Kinsley, the High Priestess of Protea for the Rebirth Era.
Cultivators were normally immortal, though none had ever lived a normal lifespan, but Byron had sacrificed that immortality because Jean could not become immortal even though normal Caretakers always did. They had both therefore been aging at a normal human rate, and they had been in their early to mid-fifties though the others had frozen in maturity and aging at forty. It had not slowed Byron or Jean down, and when needed, Byron had grabbed his Mask and joined the fight. This last fight . . . had been unusually terrible. Almost a full war. Byron and Jean alike had sacrificed themselves to protect Shana, and all left behind had known they would not return. A Cultivator could, if they had not fulfilled the need Destiny had of them, but Byron and Jean had not only borne three children together, the lineage of Byron's world of Ranunculus had been successfully carried in his sister's children. Perhaps in sad irony, Byron and Jean—the most likely to see their grandchildren of any pair—had missed seeing their first grandchild born by just one year.
Losing Byron had been painful enough, but losing Jean as well had hurt. The High Priestess of Protea had been deeply beloved to all Cultivators. They had been accepting of losing her eventually to old age, but losing her early had not been easily handled. She had been the most powerful witch of their Era, the leader of the Faith of the Goddess, and companion to Haeth. So, Rocky seeing a woman in his Future Sight as companion to dragons could have easily been a promise of the continuation of Jean's lineage, something they knew for fact had to happen for, someday in the Resurrection Era, the third and final direct descendant of her line would be born.
"What did she look like?" Diaz Francisco asked Rocky gently. He was one of the four Commanders directly assigned to protecting Rocky as a High King, and as much his best friend as a bodyguard, just as all the Commanders were.
Rocky rubbed the back of his neck. "Really beautiful, actually. We're talking Shana-type 'people stop in the streets' type beautiful."
"They do not," Shana muttered.
"They do TOO," more than one voice retorted.
Rocky had to smile. "She was definitely at least an adult, though I couldn't guess how much over twenty-five she may be. Chocolate colored hair that looked like a mess of straight and curly locks chaotically blended, and eyes that changed from caramel to chocolate and back depending on whether light or dark crossed her face. Mocha skin tone. She . . ." He took a long breath. "I could see it in her eyes. I wanted to cry. She's been through hell. She reminded me so much of Shana!"
Softly, Shana asked, "You could see the places inside her soul where she had been shattered and put back together?"
"Whether she did it herself or not, I don't know, but I could see the scars." He did not argue when his sister, Siobhan Chivanti, hopped up to sit beside him and hug his arm in sympathy. "And she definitely had majik. She had to have it. She was physically beautiful, to be sure, but something inside definitely came out to make her radiant."
"Then she has to be related to Jean," Desiree Andres murmured. She felt her husband, Uwe, lace their fingers together and held on tight. "Brown/brown coloring, companion to dragons, and beautiful beyond the surface? I can't imagine she would be anything else. It's got to be a definite future descendant, though, as all three of Jean's daughters have relatively lighter skin tone."
Edgar Chivanti hesitated and then said, "Jean said something to me and Shana, about a year before she died. She said she just felt as if it would not be long until we met the last in her lineage. Which made us both wonder if we would encounter another Paradoxal Pivot, but then nothing at all happened, so we just sort of let it go as wishful thinking. Clara?"
Clara shook her head. Her lavender eyes held sadness and regret alike. "I've seen nothing myself, nor felt any sort of fluctuation in the Hall of Records that implies either my future self or future daughter have been attempting or intending to send someone back from the Resurrection Era. To be sure, I might not feel them passing, but usually we have some sort of sign of a Pivot approaching."
"I'd call collective visions and the like to be a sign," Tyson Gregori groused.
"It's frustrating," Alexandria Francisco muttered.
"Tell me about it," came the counter mutter from Rubeo Chance.
No one had forgotten he was there, but they definitely had not expected him to speak. He usually tried to avoid the meetings, since he felt he had not as much to contribute for being neither Cultivator nor Caretaker. Shana and Siobhan had nipped that by reminding him as Captain of the future Protea Royal Knights, he had a stake in the outcome of most things. "What hit your path, Chance?" Juliet Matica asked curiously. "You have the most unusual gifts out of anyone here, having Dark Shadow magic, so you might be more sensitive to things we don't see."
Unusually had magic, actually, for not being Caretaker or Cultivator, let alone that he had the exceptionally rare Shadow Flower Element that blended Light and Dark. He had Dark Shadow, though, meaning his skills limited to where darkness touched light instead of the other way around. No one had True Shadow, the literal perfect blend, for it would take a Gray core—something else no one had.
"Effectively," Chance admitted, "I've sensed around town lately at least one other person who can use some form of Shadow power. It's not Aldan—not only would I recognize him, but Clara would have noticed him coming through time—but whoever this person is, is at least able to move through shadows the same way we do."
"Hmm." Michael Donohue frowned thoughtfully in the way that meant his legal investigator's mind had started working. "So are we dealing with three different people across all this, or is there overlap? Is the Shadow user the same as in Sherry's vision, or Rocky's? The same person across all three? We always thought a witch would have the best chance of being True Shadow, and I think if any line would do it, it'd be Jean's! She skirted the edge anyway with her core."
Not a witch. The voice murmured across Shana's ears, oddly familiar yet not identifiable. Something more. Something stronger.
Shana ignored the voice. "I think we need to operate on the assumption of three different people, and then see if overlap occurs. I don't want to be looking for one person and miss something else important." She almost instantly felt as if her ear had been nipped, and she shook her head quickly. Whoever you are, she thought firmly, you're not funny. Out loud, she added, "We need to be on our guard either way. Multiple premonitions at once is never a good thing."
Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, she felt a slimy familiar sensation through her soul. She shot to her feet. Sherry had felt it too, and also stood quickly. The signal from them both underscored that evil had done something somewhere, and close enough by to be picked up quickly. Though normally only Aster Defenders like Sherry felt evil—it was the entire reason they had Sight—Shana herself bore a powerful and disturbing connection to the movement of evil thanks to an ancient enemy of the Protea Kingdom it had taken her two lifetimes to destroy.
A quick seek via divination told Sherry, "It's not far from here. The closest park. I don't think it's too terrible? I don't think it will need all of us."
Virginia Donohue looked at Shana with a lifted brow. "Well?"
Shana eyed her. "Well, what?"
"I'm waiting for you to tell us what to do and then I can determine if I agree with it and then we can get the inevitable fight out of the way before it takes too much time," the Carnation Cultivator told her dryly, earning her grins from everyone else.
As Lead Defender, she was the strongest and most powerful of her generation's team and served as the leader. Cultivators as a whole by nature deferred to a hierarchy of strength, and Defenders especially did. Unfortunately for Virginia, Shana was actually the stronger of them and did in fact also possess Lead skills. The Defenders' driving need to protect Shana and Siobhan as High Queens directly conflicted with Shana's equally driving need to act and fight in all battles. She and Virginia had been butting heads over it for five thousand years, and would keep on fighting over it until the inevitable day when Shana hung up her Mask and stopped serving as a Defender entirely.
Shana did try to be accommodating for the Defenders' need to protect her even though as the Apex of Dark she very did not need them, but she honestly could not stop herself from taking charge because that was just the type of personality she had. Siobhan tended to be far more agreeable since as Apex of Light she was heavily magic-oriented and therefore squishier in battle, so she better accepted needing protectors to keep her alive. Strictly speaking, she was stronger than Virginia as well, but, again, acquiesced easier.
Shana just sighed. "Okay, fine. I'll call it as you, me, Sherry, Kellie, and Siobhan going as primary offense as Defenders, and we'll bring the according Caretakers for all of us, meaning Rocky, Edgar, Mike, Justin, and Ty. The three Commanders will make sure Rocky and Edgar don't do anything stupid trying to support me and Siobhan, as usual."
Virginia grinned. "See, I can entirely agree with that." Which was not that unusual, really, as she and Shana tended to be the same sort of Lead. They really only clashed over Shana's personal defense, and Shana had accounted for that this time. "Masks on for Defenders, and Caretakers grab weapons."
It honestly took only a few minutes for the team to arrive at the scene in the park, but they found to their surprise that the fight—whatever it had been—had already ended. Nothing remained on the scene except sparks of possibly static fading in the sun, and a line of lingering flames not yet burned out. The line looked like the effects of a shield, and Shana walked over to kneel beside it. After a pause, she stuck her hand right into the flames. Neither her exposed finger tips nor her armored glove took any damage or felt any pain. "This was made by a Defender with a Fire Flower Element." Defender magic could not hurt other Defenders unless being aimed at an enemy, which meant anyone who got in the way could be in risk. Only area-effect type magic did not harm allies—Defenders or Caretakers—with or without being aimed, and neither did leftover magic from shields.
"That can't be possible!" Sherry protested. "I was at the house the entire time!"
"Yeah, well," Virginia had also knelt beside the fire, "the plot thickens because the flames have an orange base, and only Aster fire whether Ruler or Defender has an orange base because of the namesake orange aster flower. It's also not corrupted magic, because it feels and smells clean, so . . . damn. This is weird."
"Is possible to be a Defender from another world far away that maybe has an orange flower of its own?" Siobhan asked on a frown even her Mask could not hide.
"I guess. That's the only thing I can think of. I think as much as the visions from Sherry and Rocky, and my premonitions, this is going to be a situation more than any other where we're going to have to play it by ear," Shana admitted.
"Well, shit," Tyson said on a sigh.
"Couldn't have said it better, dear," Kellie agreed ruefully.
* * * * *
"You know," the slender woman said with a musing tone in her voice, "this is more fun than I thought it'd be."
"You're definitely more like your father than even he wants to admit," the man next to her said dryly. "So why exactly are we doing this again?" he asked the other woman who stood on his other side. "I mean, pyro almost got us caught."
"Stuff it," was the proclaimed pyro's mutter.
"Because we don't want our enemy to know we're here yet," the distinct leader of the group said in amusement. "And you have to admit, it's definitely been fun to poke at the Elders."
"Every time you say something like that, I'm still not convinced you and my mother aren't related," another woman said dryly.
"Honestly, we're not convinced of that either."
* * * * *
Yvonne's mind was a whirl of thoughts as she left her design studio the next day. She had bought the company ten years before, from the previous owners who had hired her right out of university. She did interior design for any number of buildings and homes, and turned her lack of personal style into extremely stylish living spaces. Her mind had barely been on work all day though. It was a frustratingly familiar sensation to be forced to wait for more information before they could do anything, and this had begun to show the warning signs of being more like a war than a skirmish.
Her husband was waiting for her outside, and seeing him raised her spirits. Douglas Notesong was her Caretaker and soul mate and her dearest friend and companion. She could never not be happy to see him. He worked as a composer and musical director for the local studio that produced film and stage theatricals, so he always waited to walk Yvonne home when there were no evening rehearsals he had to attend. If he had those, she went to the studio and waited for him instead. It was almost sunset when they met up on the sidewalk, and hands linked, they started toward home.
A scream pierced the quiet of the evening and made them both stop dead in their tracks. Yvonne grabbed her Mask off her bracelet and it grew to full size so she could put it on and call her armor. She would rather show up in armor and be wrong about the level of danger than show up unarmored and find a mess. Even if it turned out to be someone in danger from a common rabble rouser—rare in Lux, but plausible—the presence of a Defender could turn someone from a life of crime really fast.
In fact, everyone in Lux actually knew now who the Defender Cultivators were, though they did not know that Shana and Siobhan were the hidden High Queens. Their identity as Defenders was known, though, because once they had stopped aging, it had to be revealed. Blessedly for all Defenders, no one treated them any differently, and no one outside the city but the interim world leaders knew. People who left Lux kept the secret covetously out of sheer respect. The leaders did actually know all ten Defenders were actually Dual Cultivators, and that two were the High Queens, but they had understood that until Delphinium was restored, neither queen wanted to rule.
Therefore, Doug felt no issues with not having a mask of his own to conceal his identity. He simply grabbed his lance from where he kept it magically and followed closely on Yvonne's heels. As an Ice Flower Element of Iris, she possessed only defensive magic and no real physical skills; he did have an Ice attack magic skill as her Caretaker, and the physical skill to be a perfect shield for her even without armor.
As before, however, neither armor nor weapon nor magic was needed. They skidded around a corner to where the scream had come from only to discover that they were again late. No one was in the area, and ice slowly melted off the ground and building wall alike.
"What the . . .?" Doug looked around sharply. "This is getting ridiculous."
A sound suspiciously like a soft snort of laughter reached him and Yvonne, and they looked up quickly into the tree over their head. Shadows seemed to conceal the entirety of the leaves, and only the vague form of a woman's body could be seen. A second figure stood beside her, and was only vaguely identifiable as a man. A hint of light pierced the shadows and glinted off the man's incredibly powerful-looking sword. It then shimmered across the woman's pupils and revealed across both what looked like a shadowy galaxy of power. Both man and woman looked lethal and capable, and it almost seemed as if they had been born from the very shadows that hid them from sight.
"What the hell?" Doug asked.
"Here, take this girl." The voice that spoke was a beautiful contralto that had a rich and crystal clear music. Power. It vibrated out of her very voice with a force as mystical as the shadows that surrounded her. The shadows shifted enough to show that she gently held an unconscious girl's body, and when Doug stepped closer, she let go so that the girl fell safely into his arms. "I didn't want to leave her lying on a cold sidewalk until one of you old-timers finally sensed danger."
"Old-timer!" Yvonne repeated in astonishment. "Now wait a minute!"
The man murmured something in a low voice that only his companion heard. She laughed, and the sound lifted and welled on the air with pure music. "Spoil my fun." She got to her feet with the lithe grace of a true warrior. "Stay on your toes, Elder Iris!" The shadows shifted and they were suddenly gone.
Neither Yvonne nor Doug said anything for long moments as they tried to figure out what was going on. An enemy clearly targeted people again, and mysterious strangers that might be Defender Cultivators kept getting there long before the Blossom Field Cultivators noticed any danger at all.
As Doug gently put the girl down against the building to recover, Yvonne pulled out her Personal Communication Assistant—PCA for short—and started rapidly tapping out commands on the screen. The small device, as the name implied, allowed for communication in varying formats, and the ones owned by the Cultivators and Caretakers had additional built-in functions that Rocky—the inventor—had added to take advantage of the owner's magic.
"What are you doing?" Doug asked.
"Rocky recently started rolling out upgrades to our PCAs," she explained. "He gave me and Kellie a scanning function that allows us to process signals and energies in the area. Sort of like adding a Sensing skill to the device, which will be very handy because we can't take Justin everywhere."
"Yeah, he'd get cranky over that." He looked over her shoulder to watch. It took only a moment for a scan to come back. "Huh. Interesting. Confirmation of Defender Cultivator magic from the Ice Flower Element of Iris, but it's also reading the Shadow Flower Element of Aria? That is . . . really damned interesting. I've only ever known Shana and Siobhan to hold two totally different Flower Element magics inside them, and both Shana's come from Protea and Siobhan's from Delphinium. How is possible a Defender can be from two planets, and two so very different ones?"
"I think we need to be more focused on the Shadow Flower Element part," came Chance's voice as he stepped out of some darkened shadows near them, causing both to jump. "I tried to track them, but she knew I was there and led me on a merry chase before losing me entirely. She's True Shadow. She has to be. She led me through dark-based shadows and then lost me by jumping to light-based ones."
"So," Yvonne said softly, "we have at least confirmed that the Shadow power you've picked up is very probably this duplicate Defender we just met, but that doesn't tell us whether she is the person in either Sherry or Rocky's vision—though maybe Sherry's seems plausible since she saw me there as well. I can't scan for majik; the PCA doesn't have that skill. Someone is going to have to manage to get very close or touch the Shadow user for that."
"Good luck with that," Chance said in frustration. "That man with her? He's True Shadow as well."
"Of course he is," Doug sighed. "It couldn't get simpler."
Chance raked both his hands through his short red hair in a rare show of agitation. "Why is it always October when everything goes bad? Just once, can't we have trouble in . . . May or something?"
Yvonne and Doug shared a wry smile of agreement. Truthfully, they all disliked fall for the same reason.
©Stacy J. Garrett. Do not reprint or redistribute without permission.
