Lord of the realm

Chapter 261: Family emergency - 2

"I’m not leaving him here, and I’m not leaving you here without supervision. We’re all going to Kharsen."

Sofia looked past Martha at the young man. A dozen emotions crossed her face in rapid succession. Finally, she swallowed whatever argument she’d been preparing.

"Twenty minutes," she confirmed.

Martha turned back to the tent and resumed packing with swiftness. The young man watched her move around the space, still with that quality of absolute stillness, still cataloging everything.

"I haven’t told anyone what I saw in that cave," Martha said without stopping her packing.

"What actually happened. I’m not going to until I understand it myself."

He was quiet for a moment.

"That’s wise," he said finally.

"I have questions. A great many of them."

"I know."

Martha paused with her hands full of equipment and looked at him directly.

"Kate is important to me. More important than any of this. Whatever you are, whatever this means, she comes first. Do you understand?"

Something moved through his eyes. Recognition, maybe.

"Yes," he said simply.

"I understand that completely."

Martha held his gaze for one more moment, then returned to packing. Outside, she could hear Sofia and Dane moving quickly, packing up their stuff.

Twenty minutes later, four people climbed into the research expedition’s vehicle. Martha in the driver’s seat, the young man beside her, and Sofia and Dane in the back, surrounded by hastily packed bags.

Martha started the engine and pulled out of the camp without looking back.

Jolthar looked out the passenger window as the valley fell away behind them. His first view of the modern world, moving at speed, stretching out in all directions. Roads and vehicles and infrastructure built over the years by a world that had forgotten him.

He processed it all with the same quiet intensity he brought to everything. Maybe it was because he had seen the pinnacle of the world; he was taking all of this with a cool head.

Nobody spoke as they drove. The silence held its own weight, several hundred years of history and questions and the particular tension of people who understood that everything was about to change but didn’t yet know how.

Finally, as they reached the main road and Martha accelerated toward the city, Jolthar turned slightly from the window.

"Your wife," he said quietly.

"She will be alright."

Martha glanced at him, startled.

"How do you know that?"

He didn’t answer immediately. His eyes returned to the passing landscape, watching a world he was just beginning to understand.

"I don’t," he admitted.

"But I find it helps to say it anyway."

Despite everything, the impossible weight of the last twelve hours, Martha felt something loosen slightly in her chest.

"Yeah," she said quietly.

"It does."

They drove on toward Kharsen, carrying between them a secret that would crack the world open wider than any quake.

They didn’t go by plane because the young man didn’t have any paper proofs, and going through places run by them would draw suspicion.

*

Back in the forest of the Kreeshan Valley, Andraste felt it before she saw it.

She’d been three miles from the valley when the energy signature hit her like a physical blow. A shockwave of something vast and ancient, moving through the ambient origin energy of the atmosphere like a stone dropped into still water.

She’d turned the convoy around immediately, overriding her second-in-command’s protests about orders and patrol schedules, and authorization requirements.

Something had happened in Kreeshan Valley, significant enough to disturb energy patterns across a three-mile radius. And a Highseer who ignored that kind of disturbance wasn’t doing her job.

They arrived at the dig site to find it half-abandoned. Equipment still present, tents still standing, but the particular quality of emptiness that meant people had left in a hurry rather than concluded their work. A few remaining research assistants stood around looking confused and slightly abandoned.

The western cliff face was dramatically changed. Where there had been solid rock, there was now a collapsed section, debris scattered across the valley floor. The narrow passage Martha had kept secret was now obvious, its entrance partially blocked by fallen stone but unmistakably present.

And the energy coming from that collapsed section was unlike anything Andraste had ever encountered.

She hovered above it, her origin energy blazing as she channeled her senses into the ambient field, reading the signatures left behind by whatever had occurred.

She couldn’t tell what it was; it was completely new to her, and she could tell that it belonged to ancient times, incomprehensibly old. The kind of power that predated the current age of the world, that came from an era when the categories she used to understand origin energy didn’t yet apply.

Andraste was a powerful Highseer; she had reached the rank of Highseer at such a young age with her potential. She was sensitive to the origin and its core energies. So she could tell just by a sense of the mysterious energy.

She could feel the immense energy disturbance coming from the place where Martha had come from.

She descended, landing at the edge of the debris field, and walked carefully toward the collapsed entrance. The stone around it was scorched in patterns she’d never seen. Gold and purple burns that had no origin energy equivalent in her experience.

She knelt and pressed her palm against the scorched rock.

Visions hit her immediately.

Fragmented, incomplete. But unmistakable in their implications. A wall of ancient stone blazing with light. Energy flooding out after centuries of containment. Something waking. Something that made even the Sovereign-level power she’d felt during her career seem modest by comparison.

She pulled her hand away.

Her face was carefully neutral as she stood, but her mind was moving at speed. She turned to the research assistants who’d approached cautiously.

"The lead archaeologist, Dr. Buchanan. Where did she go?"

A young woman with red-rimmed eyes stepped forward.

"She left about four hours ago. Family emergency. She said she was going to Kharsen."

"Who was with her?"

"Three people. Two of her assistants and..."