Demonhome Read online

  Demonhome

  By

  Michael G. Manning

  Cover by Amalia Chitulescu

  Editing by Grace Bryan Butler and Dorothy Zemach

  © 2017 by Michael G. Manning

  All rights reserved.

  For more information about the Mageborn series check out the author’s Facebook page:

  https://www.facebook.com/MagebornAuthor

  or visit the website:

  http://www.magebornbooks.com/

  Chapter 1

  Matthew watched Moira and the others leave with a feeling of relief. His sister frequently irritated him. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but if asked, he knew he could come up with a list of reasons on short notice. None of the particular reasons he might list would be the full truth, however, the reality was that it was just her presence that annoyed him.

  Too many questions, too much talking, he thought to himself.

  She was constantly trying to figure him out. Even when she kept her thoughts and questions to herself he could almost feel her watching him, curious. The same was true of his parents, but they weren’t as close, as present, as always there, as Moira was.

  In general, he felt the same about most people, although to a far milder degree. His friends didn’t press or pry as much, so they were tolerable. Strangers were even better, they wouldn’t bother you at all, unless you gave them a reason. For the most part, he preferred the company of his own thoughts. Those were interesting, and other people rarely had anything to contribute. In fact, they usually just interfered by trying to inject their own interests and opinions into his mind.

  Gram was an exception to the rule. He listened, without pretending to understand, whenever Matthew felt a need to air out his ideas. Repeating that thought to himself, Matthew realized it might be construed as an insult, but to him it wasn’t. It’s a really rare trait, and valuable, as far as I’m concerned.

  If only people were more like books. Books didn’t force you to read them. They waited, with their knowledge clearly displayed and summarized in a title and short description. If you were interested, they revealed themselves at whatever pace you desired, never forcing themselves into your attention.

  Moira and the others had passed beyond the limit of his magesight now. He was alone, except for his dragon, Desacus.

  What now? asked the dragon, his voice resonating inside the young wizard’s mind.

  “Now we see what we can discover about where our strange visitors came from,” said Matthew aloud.

  The cave is too small for me to enter.

  “Wait out here. I don’t need you at the moment,” said Matthew as he returned to the cave entrance. Slipping inside he worked his way back to the chamber they had discovered.

  There it was. He felt it immediately, a strange sense of blurring, as though the world was ever so slightly out of focus. It wasn’t a new sensation, but he had discovered over the past couple of years that it seemed to be something unique to him. Neither his father nor his sister had ever mentioned it, and during a number of conversations he had slowly come to realize that what he experienced wasn’t a regular aspect of magesight, at least not for other mages.

  His private exploration regarding the sensation was what had led him to experimenting with what he called ‘translational’ magic, magic that manipulated not the world or the environment, but the very fabric that existence was built upon.

  His father had created enchanted bags that allowed him to store items in faraway locations, using a variation of teleportation magic, but Matthew had improved upon the concept by creating bags that stored items in other dimensions. Even Gram’s enchanted sword, Thorn, was stored that way. The tattoo his friend used to summon the blade and his armor simply connected him to another dimension.

  But Matthew had long suspected that he was just scratching the surface of what translation magic was capable of doing. There were times when he caught glimpses of things that hadn’t happened yet, usually events that were close, in the near future, but also in the recent past. The visions weren’t limited to sight either, and on one or two awkward occasions he had caught himself answering questions that hadn’t been asked yet.

  A casual consideration of his experiences might conclude that he was somehow accessing the future or seeing through time, something that would be properly called ‘precognition’, but he had decided that that interpretation was fundamentally flawed. He had learned to keep a firm grip on his perceptions, but when he relaxed his focus he often saw multiple versions of the near future, as well as multiple pasts.

  It was like living in a world that had thousands of different copies of itself laid on top of one another. Taken together those copies created a blur. Some copies were in sync with the present, but others were slightly ahead or behind, and none were truly identical.

  He wasn’t seeing the future, or the past, he was seeing the vast infinity of alternative realities that lay close to his own. That was the truth of the Illeniel gift; it was the mechanism that had once allowed Illeniel krytek to avoid almost any attack, dodging blows before they were even begun, and it was the source of the visions that his mother’s prophetic dreams had once shown her.

  Exploring his gift had taught him that it was more than just an ability to perceive other realities however, he could touch them. Using enchantments, he could connect them permanently, as he had done with the pouch that now hung from his belt. Fashioned properly they could even be weapons, like the extraplanar triangle he had used to destroy Chel’strathek.

  And now something had crossed over.

  The strangely flavored aythar that his sister had sensed, the blur that he still experienced here, was a result of that crossing. Their world had briefly been connected to another dimension at this point, one that was much farther apart from it than the usual closely related ones that Matthew always felt hovering close at hand. That connection had created a local disturbance, a strange resonance.

  He could study that, if he opened his senses to it. Matthew thought he might even be able to follow it.

  So he did.

  It began with a rush of vertigo as he allowed his perception to be swept away from the close layers, from the reality he was anchored in, the reality he lived within. It was like jumping into a fast-moving river, or perhaps the ocean when the tides were moving out. Reality boiled around him, shifting and roiling so rapidly that understanding was no longer possible.

  He was guided by nothing more than a feeling, or some ephemeral instinct. His perception passed through countless planes, and he could feel others even farther out, some so strange and alien that he knew that peering too closely at them might destroy his sanity, or perhaps even his body, if he were to touch them.

  That feeling led him to the origin of the crossing, but it wasn’t a single point. Like his own world, the one he found was a vast collection of closely related dimensions, many of them with disturbances that indicated a crossing. The crossing had happened from a multitude of closely related dimensions and touched an equal number of those planes that were near to his own.

  It was like any other event he supposed, repeated over and over through a great number of similar realities.

  As a result, finding the exact one that had touched his own was probably impossible, if not pointless. Far more important would be finding one that was compatible with his own nature. But how to choose?

  Relax.

  It was another mind, or was it his own? The thought was communicated to him almost as a feeling, if it held words they had probably been supplied by his own brain.

  And then he saw it, or felt it, he couldn’t say which. It was everything, the space between planes and dimensions. It was what lay between, the source of consciousness that underlay all reality, or perhaps it was reality,
and the dimensions that surrounded it were merely its dreams and fictions. Both interpretations were valid.

  We are Illeniel.

  Another truth, and one that Tyrion had never been able to see in the knowledge given to him by the loshti. The name, Illeniel, was merely the term his brain supplied, but the vast consciousness truly had no name. It was every mind, every perception, every point of view, gathered together here, in the timeless space that lay between.

  Illeniel might be better used as a more specific term, a name for those creatures, like himself, who were capable of transcending their locality to reach the heart of infinity. In that sense the original Illeniels were not She’Har, but some of the She’Har had been Illeniels—the ones he had inherited his gift from.

  Width and breadth of the experience was beyond what his mind could comprehend, beyond what any mind could comprehend, but it carried no shock or discomfort with it; he had merely shifted points of view. In that instant, he was simply more, more than he had been, and within that other self the knowledge of infinity was not a strain, it simply was.

  The planes of existence that rode upon his surface were infinitely varied, but some were dark, black and invisible to his limitless vision. The collection that he had been examining before was among those. They were different somehow, they were apart, even though they floated upon the same overarching consciousness, they were devoid of its mind, like dead stones sinking through a living sea.

  As he considered traveling to one of them again, he felt fear.

  But you must. You were born of them, of the darkness, and you must return.

  Couldn’t they just ignore them? Why not leave them alone?

  They will not be ignored.

  Matthew felt the truth of it. His own world had once been one of them, long ago, before Tyrion’s time, until the She’Har had visited it, until they had transformed it. As he watched he could see the effect of the crossing around him. Some planes went dark, changing from glowing jewels in the sea of existence to dark stones, but at the same time some of the dark worlds grew bright and began to glow with the light of consciousness.

  It was an endless battle that played out, over and over, and he no longer had the option of ignoring it. His world was connected now. Either his world would return to the darkness or the other would be brought into the light. Those were the only choices, and he would be the arbiter who decided, either through his action or his refusal to act.

  Very well, Matthew responded, and with that thought he withdrew. A maelstrom swirled around him and finally resolved itself, leaving him standing once more in a cave in the Elentir mountains.

  Desacus stood waiting faithfully outside when he emerged, Did you learn anything?

  The dragon’s question startled him. What he had experienced was impossible to articulate. He had gained some knowledge, but most of it was gone. What was left was like a short summary; the human mind couldn’t possibly contain all of what he had seen. Perhaps it was something like what his father underwent whenever he used his abilities as an archmage.

  Mordecai had tried to explain it to him on several occasions, but the main lesson he had managed to convey was that he couldn’t express it because as a man he couldn’t fully remember what he experienced when he merged with the larger world around him.

  So an archmage merges the self with the greater consciousness of the world around him, but what did I do? I went somewhere else. He needed to talk to his father. If anyone could shed light on the strangeness of it all, it would be his dad. But that wasn’t possible, not until they found him.

  “We have to travel there,” he told the dragon.

  You can do that? asked Desacus.

  Matthew nodded, “I can. If we’re to find the answers we need, we need to examine the other side of this puzzle. The side that our visitors came from.”

  The dragon’s mental answer held a note of disapproval, That does not sound wise. There are too many unknowns. You should discuss this with your mother and sister, as well as the other wizards.

  “They won’t understand,” said Matthew. “Dad might, but he’s what this is all about, isn’t he? He might be over there now, and if he is, this is the only way we’ll find him.”

  Then you should bring some of them with you; alone, the risk is too great.

  Matthew stared at the dragon, “That’s what you’re for. I can go and return with ease, but the others can’t. If we were separated, or if something happened to me, they could be trapped. I can’t risk bringing anyone else until I understand what we’re facing.”

  Desacus snorted, and his next thought came across with a heavy sense of sarcasm, Glad to know you worry about me as well.

  “You wouldn’t let me leave you behind anyway, besides, what could pose a threat to you?”

  The dragon used one claw to score a deep groove into a large piece of granite before examining the undamaged talon. There is truth in that, he replied. How will we do this?

  Matthew approached him and reached out with one hand before laying it against the dragon’s massive forelimb, “Brace yourself. This will probably be very disorienting. Just keep still until the world starts to make sense again.”

  What does that mean…?

  Desacus’s thought cut off abruptly as everything shivered and began to blur around him.

  Chapter 2

  It was easier this time, despite bringing the dragon along. Matthew already knew where they were going, and the actual effort of translating them from their original location to a new dimension seemed to involve only a small amount of aythar. He felt a faint resistance as they entered the dark dimension that was his target.

  It felt like falling into an icy lake, the shock drove the air from his lungs. As the world resolved itself Matthew found himself in absolute darkness, not merely the metaphorical darkness he had seen from the place in between, but truly black; devoid of all sight or sense.

  He could feel nothing; it was as though his magesight had utterly vanished, along with his eyesight. The air seemed to press in against him, making him feel claustrophobic as he drew deep breaths to compensate for the horrifying feeling that he must be suffocating.

  Matthew wasn’t prone to panic, however. After the first disorienting shock passed he realized that his magesight wasn’t truly gone, he could still sense his body, and Desacus was there, beside him. Beyond that, though, there was nothing, just a black emptiness. Bending down, he felt the ground beneath his feet. It was rough stone. The cool air smelled of damp earth. Despite his dragon enhanced eyesight he could detect no hint of light.

  We are back in the cave, he realized. That’s why there’s no light. No light and no aythar.

  That was why the world he had chosen seemed dark when viewed from the place in between, because it lacked aythar. It was dead and empty as far as his arcane senses were concerned.

  His thoughts were interrupted as the dragon by his side began to issue a deep rumbling growl. Desacus was disturbed by their unusual surroundings. Brilliant yellow light blossomed in the cave as flames began to shoot from between bared teeth.

  “It’s alright,” said Matthew. “We’re just underground.”

  “I cannot see!” came the dragon’s seldom used voice. “I can’t hear your thoughts!”

  “There’s no ambient aythar here,” Matthew soothed, “but you can still see. Your flames lit the darkness for a moment.”

  “How did we get underground?” asked Desacus. “We were outside.”

  “I was aiming for the cave,” said Matthew. “I’m still new to this, but I don’t think it would have mattered where we were in our world. The spot I was aiming for in this one was this cave.”

  Another flare from the dragon’s mouth illuminated the rock walls for a moment, “And how do you propose we exit this place? I see no openings around us.”

  Matthew wasn’t so sure of that. If this dimension was a close analog for their own, then the cave should be very similar to the one in their world. He needed more light to
be sure, though. Concentrating, he focused his aythar to create a light globe above his outstretched hand, “Lyet.”

  It was something he had done a thousand times before, but it was much harder now. All of the aythar had to come from within. Slowly the light built as he put forth his strength, and after several seconds he had a brilliant ball hovering over their heads.

  There was no exit.

  “Well this is inconvenient,” muttered the young wizard.

  “I could dig us free, given enough time,” suggested Desacus. “My flame would be faster still. It can melt stone.”

  “I’d be dead from the heat or lack of air before you got through all that rock,” said Matthew. Briefly he wondered which would kill him first, or which would be the most unpleasant. Burning, definitely, he decided before turning his thoughts to more practical solutions. “It will be safer, for me at least, if I do it.”

  “I’ll never understand how your race survived so long,” commented the dragon. “Almost anything can kill your kind.”

  Matthew smirked, “You were built to be resilient.”

  “You only underscore my point,” said Desacus. “Your father created us. If he could do that, why not create stronger bodies for himself and his offspring?”

  “Gareth Gaelyn tried that once,” rebutted Matthew. “Eventually he decided it was better to be human.”

  “For what reason?” snorted the dragon.

  “Apparently, he ate most of his friends, and that put him off the whole thing,” explained Matthew.

  Desacus laughed, a disturbingly deep barking sound coming from his throat, “I can hardly blame him for that. Your people smell delicious.”

  The wizard gave his companion an odd look, “Compared to what?”

  “Sheep,” returned the dragon immediately, “or even worse, goats. They smell terrible, although honestly, I’d take a cow, or better still a horse, over a human any day. I’ll never understand why your family insists on feeding me goats. There are so many better options.”