D. MacHale - Raven Rise

I was shaking with anger. For a brief moment I thought I heard the sounds from down below. I heard the screams. I felt their fear. It was the final horror. I couldn’t take it anymore. Somebody had to pay.

I shoved Naymeer out of the helicopter.

The man screamed. He plummeted down, headed directly for the flume. Our eyes locked as he fell. I could feel the surprise and terror that gripped him as he plunged to his death. For that brief moment, I embraced revenge. It felt good.

And then Saint Dane laughed.

“Finally!” he declared in triumph.

I spun back to him, holding on to the edge of the doorway, the rush of blood and adrenaline still pounding through me.

“Pendragon, it is now truly over.”

I couldn’t find the words to ask what that meant. Saint Dane found them for me.

“It all came down to this. This was the final test, Pendragon. As I predicted, you have failed.”

Those words will haunt me forever.

I glanced down to see the final, excruciating moments of Alexander Naymeer’s life. He fell directly into the flume. Out of sight. A moment later, a ball of light and smoke leaped from the flume, shooting straight to the sky. Straight toward us. We were hit with a blinding flash of light and a rush of energy that could only have been powered by some demonic force. The helicopter buffeted wildly. It started spinning out of control. It felt as if we were caught in a tornado. I held on to the helicopter’s frame to keep from falling out. Nevva did the same across from me. Saint Dane didn’t move. He stood there calmly. Laughing. The pilot no longer controlled the helicopter. We were moving, that much I could tell. But to where? Between the smoke and the bright light outside, I lost all sense of direction. We could have been flying higher, or about to crash to the ground. Outside, there was nothing but white and light. The g-force increased, pushing me against the side wall. Then, there was a break. I saw something solid through the smoke. We had plummeted down to the same level as the top tiers of the stadium, and we were falling fast.

“And now,” Saint Dane yelled through the sounds of the whining motor and the terrified screams. “At long last, we can begin.”

A moment later we dropped into the flume.

Lightblew inthroughthe windows, blindingme. The helicopter spiraled down so violently it made me dizzy. I braced myself for a crash that I felt sure would come at any second, either on the field or on the edge of the flume.

It didn’t. Instead of hitting something solid, the helicopter accelerated. It was as if we had been caught in the pull of the flume. The sudden movement threw me against the ceiling. Or maybe it was the floor. I had no idea. Everything was white. I grabbed on to something for support, but the helicopter lurched again, and I lost my grip. I was thrown through the air, out of control. I grabbed my head for protection, ready to be smashed against one of the helicopter’s walls. Seconds passed. I didn’t hit anything. That was impossible. The helicopter wasn’t that big. I thought maybe I had been launched through the open door. Was that a good or a bad thing? Was I free? Or about to get chopped by the spinning rotors? All I could do was hang tight and prepare for the worst.

I was surrounded by a torrent of sound. The whine of the engines, the squeal of twisting metal, the screams of the people from the stadium…and the music of the flume. I couldn’t tell whether I was falling or floating. Had I been caught in the power of the flume? There was no reference.

The sounds slowly diminished. The noise of the doomed helicopter blended into the people’s screams until it all became white noise. Moments passed. How many? No idea. The white noise slowly faded, leaving only the music of the flume. I no longer thought I would crash into something. I was definitely floating. For the longest time my eyes had been closed, with my arms wrapped around my head. But for how long? Seconds? Years? I had lost all sense of everything.

I slowly dropped my arms and cautiously opened my eyes. What I saw at first made no sense. I was free floating. Alone. The helicopter was gone. Saint Dane and Nevva were nowhere in sight. It seemed as if I were traveling through the flume, but it wasn’t the same. Surrounding me were the floating images of Halla. It was a mess of images so dense that I couldn’t see through them to the star field beyond. I saw faces I recognized from the different territories. Not individuals, but different races. Batu, Novans, Africans, gars, klees, Asians. It was a swirling sea of a billion faces, all folding in on one another. I heard their voices, too. Nothing specific though. It was more like a random chorus of words, and even song.

I was strangely calm, and more curious than frightened. What did this all mean? Unlike a normal flume trip, I didn’t get the sense that I was actually moving. It was more like floating in this sea of faces. Did they see me? Was I just another one of the billion faces? Was this my fate, banished into a limbo of souls? Is this where Naymeer had exiled his enemies?

I saw my first star. Then another. The ghostly faces were slowly disappearing, as if being blown away on a celestial breeze. The star field beyond was being revealed. Order was returning, yet something was wrong. As the faces melted, I realized I wasn’t looking out through the crystal walls of the flume. I was free floating in space. That was impossible. How could I survive that?

A new image was revealed. Many, in fact. They weren’t clear at first, because of the many faces that still surrounded me. As the faces disappeared, more detail came clear. They appeared to be long white streaks, like clouds. There were several of them, crisscrossing one another in no particular pattern through the star field. They reminded me of the contrails left by jets as they streak through the sky. There were dozens of them, at all different angles. Some crossed in front of me. Others went past me and on to forever. I was floating through a three-dimensional maze of infinite lines.

As the last of the faces of Halla disappeared, I recognized the streaks for what they were. They weren’t clouds. They had substance. They seemed to be made of brilliant, clear crystal. Light from the stars bounced off their multifaceted surfaces, making them sparkle. I knew what I was seeing. I had seen it many times before, though from a different perspective.

I was looking at the highways through Halla. I was seeing the flumes…from the outside. All of them. It was a complex maze that seemed to have no beginning and no end. I knew that wasn’t the case, of course. The flumes connected the territories of Halla. They were the conduits that allowed us to move between time and space. It was an awesome, humbling sight.

It also raised the question of where I was. I wasn’t in a flume, that much was clear. I didn’t feel like an astronaut floating in space, either. I know this makes no sense, but it didn’t feel as if I were actually there. It was more as if I were imagining what I was seeing, as if it were a vision. There was no physical sensation of any kind. It wasn’t as if I were lying down somewhere and dreaming either. I was really there, but I wasn’t. I was part of what I was seeing, but I was a ghost. I don’t know how else to describe it. I also don’t know how long I was there. A minute? An hour? A billion years? It was a calm, almost spiritual feeling of being a part of the continuum of time and space, but not being bound by it. I’m not sure if I liked it or not. It just…was. Then it all fell apart.

The flumes started to glow. Like neon tubes full of charged gas, the crystal flumes lit up. I heard the music return as well. Unlike every previous trip through the flume, where the music was a calming travel companion, this music sounded harsh. Angry. Chaotic. It was muffled, as if the sound were contained inside the flumes. It grew louder. More frantic. The lights grew brighter. So bright I had to squint. The music grew faster, building to something.