Chapter Forty-One
Arris circled warily around the girl. She was sobbing heavily, her arms wrapped around her knees. She rocked ever-so-slightly on the ground. Arris was confused. Just a few minutes ago she had been a malevolent force intent on electrocuting him and the island natives, and now she was an inconsolable teen-age girl.
He stopped in front of her and stood up. Arris surveyed the jungle line again, and then turned back to the girl, who had now rolled back over to a sitting position. She was trying to rein in her breathing, laboring mightily to slow down the sobs. She clutched her stomach and grimaced in pain.
“Thank you,” she said, looking up at Arris.
Arris was stunned. He stepped back and roved his eyes around the area.
“Thank you?” Arris said softly. “I shot you.”
Nereika shook her head. “No, thank you. Whatever you did, you set me free.”
The mansion crackled and burst, drawing Arris’ attention. The beam of light had disintegrated into its component colors, light tentacles of the spectrum waving through the air, lengthening into the night sky and bending back down to the ruined structure. Arris didn’t know what to make of it.
“Freed you? From what?”
Nereika gripped her wound and fought the pain. “From him. From Onorien. I’ve been his slave here for years,” she said, her head rolling, her eyelids closing slightly. “The things he’s made me do…”
Tears streamed down her face. “The things he’s done to me…”
She sobbed. Arris stared down at her in disbelief, totally confused.
“I thought … I just …” she said, lowering her head to her knees and sobbing more, “I thought it would never end. The things he did to me. I couldn’t stop any of it.”
The wind across the island picked up, drawn to the light storm enveloping the mansion as it was devoured by the tendrils of light. Arris stared in disbelief, his eyes delivering images his brain could not process as reality. But, there it was, happening. The bright green glow of the jewel on the sword’s pommel caught his attention. Everything meant something, he was sure, but none of it meant anything to him.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, this is all new to me,” Arris said, bending down on one knee and extending his hand out to Nereika. “But I’m going to guess that this is one of those moments where running is required.”
The mansion let loose with another low moan as more of it ceased to be, and several of the waving beams of colored lights whipsawed against the sky and fell back to the ground, licking giant scars in the lawn.
“Can you at least walk?”
Nereika nodded and took his hand, letting Arris help her to her feet. She leaned against him and gripped her bullet wound.
“How’s your belly feel?”
“It hurts, but Onorien slowed the bleeding, so I’ll be fine for a while until I can be healed.”
“Will you last until the supply boat gets here?”
Nereika looked up at him. “There is no supply boat. Onorien said that just to keep you calm for a few days. He was never going to let you leave here.”
Arris helped her start walking, his mind racing through the events of the last few days, trying to fit the pieces into a coherent shape.
“Then how do you get on and off the island?” Arris asked.
The wind intensified quickly, blowing Nereika’s deadened robe against her body, exposing her form beneath. Arris’ clothes sucked close to his body, and he took a forced step away from the mansion toward the jungle, letting Nereika rest her weight on his shoulder. There was a rumbling of thunder from behind them, evidence of the total structural collapse of the mansion as the prismatic maelstrom engulfed the structure.
Arris did his best to hustle Nereika away from the structure, into the safety of the jungle, his eyes scanning through the darkness beyond the tree line. Behind him, the variegated colors had separated into still more strands of distinctive beams, each waving through the sky or whipping across the ground. One beam, a pure cadmium beam licked up into the night air and bent over, falling quickly down to the earth and undulating across the ground, eliminating spots of earth in a series of divots as it bounced along the surface. The end of the beam rebounded up from the ground and struck the black sword mid-blade. For a moment, the light show stuttered and the scores of light beams held fast where they were, frozen in space.
And then they turned off and the island was shrouded in darkness, the pale light of the moon the only illumination. The wind dropped to stillness and silence. For a few moments, the only sounds to be heard were the lingering cracks and tumbling of stones in the mansion as gravity continued its work pulling the structure down.
Arris froze in place, halting Nereika beside him. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The silhouette of the mansion had been turned into a ragged structure against the side of the mountain, a series of collapsed walls and emptiness where once there had been stone. A smudge of smoke floated up from it, fracturing in the breeze above the tree tops, disintegrating into the night. Arris noticed the sword in the moonlight, the green glow gone. He walked over to the weapon and pulled it from the ground, turning it over in his hand and examining the small gem that had been glowing. He turned over his shoulder and glanced at Nereika, as if she might be up to offering some explanation, but she stood hunched over, her hands clutched her gut. Arris looked around at the landscape, his eyes rolled through the scenery. The world was a new place with hidden dimensions and he wondered what to make of it.