The Ten Guardians: The Mother Tree©

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sparrow found himself standing next to a marble pillar in the corner of a large room with a high ceiling, similar to the receiving hall of a large castle. The suddenness of what had happened and the change in scenery was so surprising that his previous feeling of panic melted away. He walked around the pillar and found light flooding the room from a massive stained-glass window. The light felt artificial, as if it was being generated from the glass of the window instead of the light of the sun shining through it. As he looked around, he was surprised by the uniqueness of what he saw in the window’s light.

The room was a large, open square. A few paces into the room from each corner stood a marble pillar, with flowing red and white curtains cascading between the pillars. There was a door on each wall behind the pillar, with four doors in total. In the center of the room was a very large, round table with ten ornate chairs set around it. The chairs were all well-made in some form of dark wood, almost black. They appeared sturdy, comfortable, and equal in size and shape. The table held a round garden box about half the size of the table in diameter, with a small stone basin of water at its center. It seemed to be recessed like a pool so that the flowers and the basin were short enough not to block the vision of people sitting across the table from one another.

The garden box had living flowers in full bloom ringing the basin, with ferns and moss growing between the stems of the plants like a carpet of greenery. The flowers were indescribable, unlike anything Sparrow had seen in the world around him, including the magi’s garden in Dule Van. They seemed to know he was in the room and were turning slightly to show him the full view of their stunning petals. There appeared to be small fish in the basin’s water, but it was hard to tell from his angle next to the table.

An oddity was a small patch of the garden where nothing grew. It didn’t detract from the scene’s tranquility, but it was noticeable and didn’t appear to hold an apparent purpose. It wasn’t very wide, maybe the width of a person, but the patch ran from the edge of the water basin to the end of the garden box, with nothing framing in the garden to prevent it from growing into the empty space. The discoloration of the area suggested there was once a darker material there, perhaps soil, but nothing remained except an empty patch where nothing grew.

Between the simple chair and table, and the incredible decorations, the room radiated tranquility. On opposite sides of the room were dozens of chairs of various sizes along the walls. It looked like humanoids of many different sizes could find comfortable seating, from as large as Stein’s stone construct, to a small human child. The purpose of the chairs around the table made sense to Sparrow as some form of council for the ten guardians. However, the chairs along the two walls were an oddity.

Sparrow turned fully towards the stain-glass and looked closer at the image on its surface. At first glance, it appeared to be an image of the world they were currently occupying, with green and blue representing the land and water. The world was set against the darkness of space, with a distant sun coming up over the horizon, casting a large shadow over the world to indicate where night and day were divided. Stars shone around the planet, and Sparrow could see they were accurately placed. He also realized the world was moving, if ever so slightly, and decided the window was a timepiece depicting the world in real time.

Sparrow felt something deeper in the magic of the stain-glass and enhanced his vision to see its source. He found that the image of the world was made up of thousands of smaller images. Some of them were filled with solid colors to fill in the larger image of the world, but many of them held depictions of events. He could read them as if reading a story in picture form, seeing the message each square represented. He quickly realized that he was looking at major events involving a guardian that impacted the world as a whole.

He was in many of the images before and after separating from Ultaris. Sometimes he was painted in his dragon form, and sometimes in his human form. There were also just as many images that held stories of other guardians impacting the world, from events as small as an elemental guardian introducing a new climate to an area or as large as Life and Death killing one another in their epic battle.

Then Sparrow heard a soft knock as if someone was rapping their knuckles on one of the doors. After a moment, the knock repeated itself, and a door in one of the room’s corners began to glow a faint yellow. It was not the door Sparrow had entered, but Sparrow approached the door anyway. He was unsure what he would find when opening it but knew there was only one way to find out.

As he approached, he looked at the doors for the first time. They were made of an impressive red oak with intricate carvings along the door’s edges. The carvings were mostly words of some kind in a language completely foreign to him. At first, the writing seemed to be moving, but he quickly realized that the words were standing still while the wood of the door was what was moving. The door remained whole, and touching it felt like nothing was moving, but the movement was unmistakable. Images of four-armed humanoid creatures with wings expanding from their shoulders were among the words. The doorknob was made of simple gold, and Sparrow reached out and turned the handle.

Stein was standing in the doorway with the landscape of the hill and a few members of their party behind her. The projected image of the hidden room was gone, and the mortal members of their party all stood unmoving with odd looks on their faces. Stein looked exhausted and didn’t exactly push her way past him as she entered, but certainly walked into the room as if she wasn’t asking permission to be there. She considered sitting in one of the chairs in the middle of the room but thought better of disturbing the tranquility of the image and took a seat in a large chair along the closest wall. After a moment, she sighed deeply and continued looking at the floor as she spoke to him.

“That was rather impressive. I sharply underestimated your strength. Forgive me for that judgment. I almost succumbed to the suspension spell you activated when you called the doorway into our world. If I hadn’t seen you start the spell and ready myself, I wouldn’t have been able to stop its effects. Eventually, I would have broken free, but still.”

“Are you saying the entire world is frozen?” Sparrow asked in disbelief.

Stein was stunned by his lack of knowledge concerning the control of time but remembered the fracturing of his soul she had just witnessed and realized he couldn’t help it.

“I thought you summoned this room intentionally,” was all she said.

Sparrow looked perplexed and shook his head, saying, “I can correct a temporal paradox for hundreds of timelines but have a panic attack at the thought of opening a portal. I can’t even remember the purpose of a room I summoned in the first place.”

“All true …” Stein said with a thoughtful pause, “… but remember what happened when you were correcting the paradox in the ring of time you had separated from reality. The Ultaris of that timeline couldn’t recognize that he was part of a ring, something you had strong control over. So maybe your strengths and limitations are the opposite of his? I could be wrong, of course, but that makes the most sense to me.”

“Possibly,” Sparrow said as he looked around the room. He didn’t want to admit that Stein’s words had made him feel better as if the fault for his limitations could be laid at someone else’s feet. His eyes were again drawn to the stain-glass window as he contemplated the room’s purpose. Stein continued speaking in a haunting tone as he walked around the table again, taking in the beauty of the flowers. Her voice sounded as if she was reliving a bad dream she wanted to forget but was unable to stop herself from speaking.

“I doubt this room has been used in thousands of years, at least not for the purposes the guardians used it for. You found it, or rather, Ultaris found it. We added the table in the center of the room, and the depiction of the world, but the room itself was already here when we arrived on this planet. We assumed it was a gift from our people to aid us on our journey, but it could just as easily be a leftover part of an ancient people that once lived on this planet. Although what they would do with a simple room removed from reality was anyone’s guess.”

“Ancient people?” Sparrow asked softly as he felt the curtains in one corner of the room.

The material was completely foreign to him and seemed to shimmer with the light of the stain-glass. As he held it, the threads seemed to be purposefully brushing against his hand, although he could see no movement with the naked eye. He suspected it was aware of him, similar to the flowers in the center of the room.

Stein indicated the chairs around the room. “Yes, there are chairs here for people half the size of a human and twice the size of a kanidian. The chairs were also here when we arrived in this world before we created anything at all. We also never created anything of those proportions, so their existence is a mystery.”

Sparrow was stunned by the thought that this room, and the magic of it, was already in this world before they had arrived. It never occurred to him that mortals were here before they arrived or that they held magical abilities. He thought that the guardians had been the ones that had instilled such powers into life forms, mostly by accident during their creation process. Either way, what had caused this ancient world to die? Stein interrupted his thoughts as she continued speaking.

“We called this the Grand Council room. We used it regularly at the beginning of our sojourn on this planet but less often as we slowly forgot our purpose. If new life were needed, then Lebine would use portions of the flowers and the water to craft lifeless samples to examine, not unlike Drock in our party, to be honest. That concept is most likely how Ultaris learned the technique.”

Sparrow had roamed back to the impressive stain-glass window when he suddenly realized that the world was moving in the mural, which reminded him of his previous unanswered question.

“Wait, you never answered my question. Did this room freeze the entire world in time?”

“No, of course not. I said suspend, not freeze. Suspension is when you remove something from the flow of time, not halting time itself. And the effect of the suspension is about twenty paces from the doorway. It’s a safety measure to prevent mortals from entering this room. Honestly, I am astonished that you are strong enough to summon the council room yet unable to recognize the difference between controlling time and a simple suspension.”

“I’m sorry … I don’t understand the difference,” Sparrow said with defeat as he rubbed his hand through his hair in frustration. He knew it should be a concept he grasped, but the knowledge seemed just beyond his understanding. “Up until recently, I have felt like I was growing. Expanding … if you will, with knowledge and power. Now I’m starting to feel unfillable holes in my existence. I feel … stretched. Unstable even.”

“Is your reluctance to make a portal for your companions to travel to this meadow part of an unfillable hole? Or a decision? Conscious or otherwise?”

Sparrow remained silent, knowing they both knew the unspoken answer to her questions. Guardians didn’t naturally use portals. They could fold space and instantly travel to visible distances or simply fly to their destination at incredible speeds, so they never needed the method of travel. At one point, he suspected he could simply teleport anything to any location at will, even mortals, but that knowledge was far beyond him now.

Sparrow learned how to create a portal by studying and recreating Jareth’s portal spell. Yet, in his fractured memory, that was the only time he had opened a mortal’s portal, and somehow Ultaris had been able to influence the spell and alter the destination. The method of his influence is still unknown. More importantly, Ultaris is now free from his restrictive prison, so he could do something worse than simply redirecting the location of the spell’s destination.

Sparrow finally admitted to himself that he was simply afraid to try. He was afraid that what happened last time could happen again, and he would suddenly find himself facing Ultaris before he was ready. There was so much he didn’t know about himself, his memories, and his powers, from things as grand as this council room’s existence to the simplicity of a suspension spell. Sparrow would be consumed if he had to face Ultaris now, which would doom Lebine to live as a prisoner. Not to mention, Ultaris could potentially continue his plan to reverse time and kill humans, altering the future of this world for countless life forms.

As he silently brooded in his embarrassment, Stein spoke.

“When I was first trapped within the Great Road, unable to free myself, I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid of death, or the unknown, or what would happen to me … I was afraid that Ultaris … you … would think I abandoned my stewardship. I was afraid that no one would come for me, so I could never set things right by reassuring my loyalties.”

“Because you are the rock,” Sparrow said with a twinkle in his eye.

“Exactly,” she said firmly, ignoring his attempt to lighten the moment. “And I know my passionate rant on leadership contributed to your flight, but I swear to you that I will journey with you until you are made whole or I am asked to leave the party. You should also know that I believe your mortal friends are an impressive group. Even the sarcastic one has merit … when he can control himself. They will not judge you harshly for showing an emotion they so readily deal with themselves because it resides in us all. Trust them with the truth.”

“Thank you, sister, for your oath, as well as your strengthening words. Sometimes I feel confident and godly in my wisdom, logic, and knowledge. Other times I feel like I am a fraud hiding from judgment. I know you are right, though, and I will follow your advice.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said as she stood up from her oversized chair. “You are literally half a being trying to fit into old shoes while creating new ones as you go from bits of scrap you find. You will be whole in time, one way or another.”

“I understand the expression and its application, but old shoes?”

“Yes, I know. Besides developing an uncomfortable level of amiability, my bonding with Grey imprinted idioms into my language patterns. I find myself using expressions I barely understand, even in my thoughts. It is an odd sensation.”

Sparrow laughed softly at this unusual piece of information before saying, “Well, it must go both ways because Grey was deeply stabilized and strengthened by the experience.”

Stein said nothing as she rose to her feet, not wishing to claim ownership of something so personal. “Are you ready to return to our party? They are probably quite anxious about their suspension. It can be a little … uncomfortable.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize they would be aware of what was happening. Yes, we should return then. First, though, where do these other doors lead?”

“Nowhere. Occasionally they would open to the same area we entered, but just as often, there is nothing but the stone wall. Curiosity and exploration of the unknown was not a strong trait among the guardians as we funneled our focus into our stewardships. Except for maybe Lebine, I suppose, but only when it involved her creations. The bottom line … ‘bottom line?’” she whispered the second part to herself before shaking her head and continuing, “The bottom line is we didn’t bother exploring deeper than that as it seemed unimportant.”

“This is the second room we have discovered that exists outside of the reality of this world,” Sparrow said thoughtfully with a hand on his chin. “I’m starting to suspect a pattern here, and as little as I trust my own mental faculties, I feel this could be important to our plan to reach Dule Van.”

It was then that someone started pounding on the same door that Stein had used to enter the room. The pounding paused for a moment before resuming with a frustrated pace. Sparrow reached forward and opened the door, revealing the same scenery as before, except Grey was standing in the doorway. Her runes were alive with electricity crackling all over her body. Her eyes glowed brightly, matching her runes in color and strength. She was sweating from her forehead and still had her pack on as if she had forgotten it was there. She put a hand on the doorway as she panted, trying to speak as she caught her breath.

“If you, ever … suspend me again … I’ll test … that immortality thing … which you claim … you have going for you. So, help me!”

“I’m sorry, Grey, I didn’t mean-“

“Just … turn it off!”

Stein realized that if a Guardian was having that negative a reaction to being suspended, the others in their party were probably having a much harder time with it. She grabbed Sparrow’s hand and pulled him from the room, shutting the door behind them. They looked around and could see the members of their party did appear to be in distress, and it was disconcerting seeing their frozen faces of pain. It was like gazing upon an upright corpse screaming endlessly. The human’s faces were even tinged with blue.

The only exception seemed to be Drock, who was unaffected by the spell. Sparrow quickly realized this was logical since Drock wasn’t technically a mortal. They then noticed Izreea was not standing with the party but was lying on the ground. She appeared not to be suspended, as her breathing was plain to see, but that also meant she was not caught in the suspension spell.

“Izreea freed herself from the spell? Although it appears the effort knocked her unconscious,” Stain said, and she seemed genuinely stunned.

“Probably without using her mathenetal as well,” Sparrow chimed in.

“They can’t breathe, you fools! Remove the spell!” Grey shouted, her runes flaring as if she was about to try and remove the spell herself.

Sparrow realized she was right. The Bruno brother’s faces were indeed darkening, the dark blue tinge spreading across their faces. It spread very slowly, but eventually, they would perish from lack of oxygen. He quickly looked back at his own history to see exactly how he had summoned the door, then reversed the spell perfectly to make the door and spell disappear.

All around them, the party dropped to the ground, gasping for breath, coughing as they tried to suck in too much air all at once. Even Lone Wolf, the most resistant to magic in their party, was panting softly on one knee. It was Grey that came to their aid, altering the air around them to concentrate the oxygen they were breathing. She knew too much would be harmful, so she cut off the spell after a few moments when it appeared they were recovering. The party then slowly came to their feet.

“Well, their heads will hurt for a few hours, but everyone should recover. Even Izreea is coming around,” Stein said, pausing to gesture towards Jareth, helping Izreea to her feet. “There must be something wrong with the suspension spell, as that shouldn’t have happened. They should have stayed outside the flow of time entirely, not partially. I wouldn’t recommend summoning the Council Room again without a grave need.”

“No kidding,” Jonathan said with unbridled sarcasm from his seated position on the ground, clutching his head with his hands.

“Unfortunately, we may need to summon the council room again sooner than that. I suspect there is a connection to the council room and the room in the garden and Dule Van,” Sparrow said as some of their companions gathered around them.

Izreea had recently been declared the party’s leader, but she had been worn down from fighting the suspension spell and was moving very slowly. Jareth supported her at the waist, holding her left hand in his as they walked over to join them. As they approached, Jaya entered the conversation, one hand on her head, the other holding her staff tightly.

“Unless you are absolutely positive that this spell you just unleashed upon us can get us to the garden or Dule Van faster than traveling to one of those locations on foot, then I do not want you to attempt it again. If you won’t open a portal to the garden, then let us depart on foot without delay.”

“Izreea is exhausted. She needs to rest,” Jareth said firmly from his place by Izreea’s side.

“We haven’t even left yet!” Jonathan shouted in exasperation, still clutching his head.

“It isn’t her fault, Jon!” Jareth snapped back, betraying his own pain as he winced at the sound of his voice.

“Be still, mortals,” Stain commanded with authority.

The constructs eyes went dark as Stein separated herself from her crafted body, rising into the air above them. The air seemed to sing around them as Stein cast a spell stemming from her pure guardian soul. Waves of light washed over them all, infusing them with energy and strength, washing away their pains and infirmaries. Everything from the headaches and exhaustion from the suspension spell to injuries as minor as Jareth’s blisters were soothed away in moments. She ceased her spell and sunk back into her stone form. The light in her eyes seemed slightly dimmer, but otherwise, she acted as if nothing had happened.

The adventurers were stunned into silence. Some flexed muscles that were no longer sore, while others stood taller and seemed free of their afflictions. Izreea looked fully restored, including her confident presence, as she bowed deeply to Stein. Jareth seemed stunned, knowing that dardwain rarely even bowed to their own royalty, but quickly followed his wife’s example. The others murmured “thank you” or nodded appreciatively.

Stein seemed oblivious to their praise and simply nodded at the group. Sparrow could tell Stein had an emotional response to the mortal’s reaction but wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Was she embarrassed by their praise? Or felt superior because of her abilities?

Before he could dwell on the answer to those thoughts, Izreea took control of the group again, directing people to grab their bags and ensure they left no trace of their camp to soil the earth. Within moments they all were gathered again, and she gave final instructions before they started their journey.

“As a reminder, we will be moving quickly, but our journey has a purpose. Walking to the garden on foot will only happen if we fail our first goal of Lone Wolf opening a portal for us. So, there will be assignments to ensure we have the highest success rate. Jareth is an excellent teacher, and Jonathan is highly knowledgeable on tactics for getting spells to work and the history of magic in general. They will rotate teaching Lone Wolf about making portals, starting with whatever lesson they see fit. Stein and Sparrow should discuss whatever this … incident for lack of better words-“

“I could give you a few choice words,” Jonathon said under his breath, earning him an eye roll from Grey, although there was a smile on her face.

Izreea completely ignored him and repeated herself, “Stein and Sparrow should discuss what happened and its connection with the room in the garden. Myrum and I are going to discuss the glyph on her heart, as well as the basic properties of using arcane magic. Hopefully, we can make some headway before she gains control of her abilities, whenever that may happen in the future.”

“Grey and Jaya, both of you have knowledge that could aid multiple groups, so I thought it best you control your purpose as we travel. I’m sure any group I mentioned would be happy to have your aid, and rotating could be beneficial.”

She spoke openly, without any obvious meaning, but knew in her heart that she would prefer Jaya not to join her and Myrum. She felt that her presence would not only distract Myrum but undermine Izreea’s attempt to teach her. She also knew that voicing such a concern would not only be rude but possibly coerce the Mother Seeker to join them anyway. Jaya seemed to sense the unspoken preference in Izreea and opted to Join Stein and Sparrow. Grey gravitated to Jonathon and joined him and Jareth in their lessons with Lone Wolf.

Izreea didn’t want to split her attention between trying to find the path they had taken to arrive at their most recent campsite and teaching Myrum as they walked, so she opted to appoint Lone Wolf as the guide for the group. He was more than capable of keeping them on course as he discussed portals and magic, and Jareth was the slowest in their party, so putting him in the front with Lone Wolf would help set the pace for them.

“Lone Wolf, would you and your group mind taking point and guiding us toward the garden?” she asked politely.

There was only one last thing to do before they left. Izreea knew that it was unnerving for some of their party to look at Drock now that they had seen him with Mantorine’s apathy, hatred, and fury on his face. They were struggling to see him as an empty, soulless shell now, so she decided to keep him close to her. He was a vital part of their mission, so keeping him in the center of their caravan made sense. In a firm voice, Izreea turned to Drock and commanded him to match her pace and stay by her side. Drock obeyed instantly, giving no indication that he heard anything or cared in any way.

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