Outbox: Monday morning, continued

To: The Second-Age Conclave
From: Brook Haupenstaat
Subject: Monday morning, continued

To the Conclave,

Here’s the rest of what happened, all the way to the end. To continue….


Just then, the double doors to the room slammed open so hard that they hit the wall on both sides and just sort of hung there, wide open, for a few seconds. There was a guy standing in the doorway and I recognized him as Darcy’s fiancé even though I had never heard his name before.

Da’ashalenne was dressed to match Darcy, in a white-tie tuxedo with a silver cummerbund. His hair was kind of mussed though, like he had just gotten out of bed. He just stood in the doorway for a few more seconds, until Darcy twitched her fingers at him and he stumbled and started for us.

When he got closer I realized that his arms were clamped straight down along his sides, with his hands in tight fists. His posture was way too good, too. It wasn’t until he got closer to us that I realized that if I blurred my eyes just right I could make out some sort of glowing, half-visible ropes all along his body.

Even thinking back I can’t judge what the expression was on Da’ashalenne’s face. He looked around the room, and when he reached Darcy’s side he asked her what was going on. “Until the day of our wedding I am still a guest in your house, and I know that you honor the old ways so that you would never misuse a guest in this way.”

Darcy turned her back to him. “You ceded your guest’s rights last week when you attempted to contact the Waking Guard, Shelly!” His eyes widened, and I think he would have taken a step backward if the bonds had let him. “That would have been a clever trick, one traitor using another to destroy my family.”

“I have no idea what you’re—”

“I intercepted the message, Shelly. It was beautiful, by the way. So heartfelt and honest, I didn’t want it to go to waste. So I sent it out myself, only I changed the location for the meeting.”

Da’ashalenne’s tan skin had gone pale.

“The little idiots that the Waking Guard sent to stop my plans thought it was a sweet message, too. It took some work on my part, but by Friday night I was able to lure them in here. And now I have them—and you—and I’m looking forward to the wedding ceremony.” Darcy giggled and stepped closer to Da’ashalenne. She slapped him across the face and then looked down at her hand to check her manicure. Then she smiled at him and said, “I love my present. It’s better than anything I could have asked for.”

There were columns along the walls, which I’m pretty sure were helping to support the rest of the building. Two of them near the front of the room—by front I mean the farthest from the exit—were darker and thicker and didn’t seem to match the others. After Darcy said, “It’s better than anything I could have asked for,” she wiggled her fingers at these two columns and they started to glow blue. A few seconds later the columns were translucent, and we could see that each one had a person tied up and trapped inside of them.

The people inside were both humans, teenaged girls. They were wearing black, but covered with the same glowing ropes that were on Da’ashalenne. I couldn’t see them very well though, so I turned back to Darcy and Da’ashalenne.

Da’ashalenne looked like he was trying to speak, but it took him a little while to get any words out. When he did, his voice sounded strained. He just barely managed to say, “You can’t do this! The conclave—”

Darcy was rolling her eyes, and she interrupted him. “Every single elder on the conclave is as drained and weak from their long sleep as my parents or yours, Shelly. And not one of them will ever show the courage that we have, to take the rude, barbaric half-breed power and shape it into a surge of life to return them to their former glory.”

“You can’t think that they’ll agree with what you’re doing!” Da’ashalenne was starting to look frantic.

“Shelly, Shelly, you still don’t get it, do you? Good thing I’m not marrying you for your brains. Once these two little pathetic Waking Guardians have given their lives for Mommy and Daddy’s recovery, this room will start pulling in power from half-breeds all over the city–and then the conclave will be in no position to disagree with anything we do.”

It was around here that I started to understand what Darcy was planning. I asked, “You’re going to kill them?” and looked at the two girls. Maybe it was some sort of perception skill I was picking up from Darcy or all the power in the room, but I could see them clearly now even from so far away. They were gagged, but their eyes were open wide and I could see the fear in them. And they were so young, too—just teenagers. It made me feel sick more upset than I can say, but I didn’t know what I could do about it.

Darcy and Da’ashalenne had been arguing while I was staring at the two girls, but it wasn’t long after that when Darcy said “Enough chitchat!” like she was really mad, and then she said, “Come” and started walking toward the head of the coffins, between her parents and the blue columns. Even though I was so upset about what she was going to do I still felt like I had to follow her, and Da’ashalenne staggered after her too, still tied up.

Darcy pulled Da’ashalenne to a spot on the floor that was in the middle of an elaborate mosaic. Once they were both there Da’ashalenne’s legs buckled and he landed on his knees. Darcy called him by his name and added a lot of titles I can’t remember and she called him something I think like a vassal lord and that he had been promised to her since infancy, and then I remember she asked, “Do you honor your family’s obligations and give yourself willingly into my keeping?”

I think I saw Da’ashalenne’s face twitch a little in the next couple of seconds, before he looked down at the ground in front of him and said something quiet. Darcy asked him, “What?” and he looked up at her and said really loud, “I bring no dishonor to my family. I willingly fulfill the obligation of becoming your husband.”

Then Darcy said “That’s good enough for now” and she used her magic or whatever to pull Da’ashalenne back up so that he looked like he was standing but his feet were actually dangling about a foot off the ground. Then she put her hand about on the middle of his torso. At first Da’ashalenne was yelling, but then all of a sudden he stopped and he fell onto the ground where he stopped moving. Darcy looked bigger now, and maybe she really was glowing. Maybe I just imagined that part—I’m not sure. Anyway, then she looked over at me, and even though she didn’t say anything I knew she wanted me to go over to where she was and even though I had never been so scared in my life, I couldn’t stop myself from coming closer.

When I had reached just about the edge of the mosaic circle (I could see that it wasn’t really a mosaic but millions of crystals—or glowstones, probably—refracting light in different colors) she smiled and said, “Don’t worry Brook, I can still use your help.” She put her hand on my pendant and again it felt like something too personal, like she was touching a part of me that nobody else had ever touched. Then she lifted the chain over my head and wrapped it a few times around her wrist, so that she had the necklace and it wasn’t attached to me anymore.

So then I felt this whooshing feeling again, like everything about me that was awake and energetic was spilling out of me, and I could even see this glittering string running from me to the necklace and then seeping into Darcy. It felt so, so terrible, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t even talk to Darcy. Standing up was feeling too hard, and so I sort of stumbled down to the floor and curled up in a ball, just a few feet away from the crystal circle.

I think it was a few minutes later when I heard Da’ashalenne call my name. I was so weak I could barely move my head to look at him, and I was so upset that Darcy was going to kill those girls that I didn’t want to talk to him or anybody else, but I turned my head a little toward where he was lying on the ground. His eyes were barely open, but when he saw me looking at him he said my name again. This time I noticed that his mouth hadn’t moved, so I knew he was actually contacting me mind-to-mind somehow.

All I could think was Ohmygod she’s going to kill them, she’s going to kill them, so I don’t think I could have had much of a conversation with Da’ashalenne except that he got my attention by thinking, You can stop her. Only you can save them. So I listened. He was in my head already, and since he understood what Darcy was doing he showed me. How she was using her power—and his, and mine—to drain energy out of the Waking Guardians, to collect the energy from both of them and pour it into the walls of the room so that it would go into her parents and make them stronger and stronger while the Guardians got weaker. Da’ashalenne imagined how it would happen, when the final life-sparks were pulled out of the two girls to feed Darcy’s parents, to make them strong enough to rise and start sucking energy out of every super and sensitive in the city. He imagined all the fear that they would cause, how terrible it would be. How this room would grow into a tower and then into a huge palace, stretching out over miles and obliterating everything in its way. But then he thought the words again, You can stop her.

I don’t think I believed him. I felt too weak to even stand up, and he was trying to get me to—what? Fight Darcy and all of her power? The room around us was starting to buzz, and the columns around the Waking Guardians were glowing. There were thick, glowing lines between Darcy and Da’ashalenne, Darcy and me, and two more lines reaching from her toward the Guardians. And then a tiny, tiny, faint thread between Da’ashalenne and me.

Through that thread, Da’ashalenne let me see how Darcy had changed the power of my pendant so that it would suck up all of my energy in the past few weeks, making me feel weak and drained but storing up all this extra stuff she could use for her resurrection plan. And he let me see how he had tracked me down and put a little something extra into her spell, just a little tweak so that I could pull the power back in if I knew what I was doing, or even change what the power was being used for—if I really really knew what I was doing.

And then, he showed me how to do it.

It really wouldn’t have worked if we weren’t connected mind-to-mind, but he sort of stayed with me and helped me get a sense of it all while I slid my awareness through the glowing rope and into Darcy’s space. I could kind of tell that she had shielded herself off from Da’ashalenne but had left herself more open to me, which made sense because how on earth would I have known how to stop her, right?

But anyway, by this point she had opened up the connections between the Guardians and the center of the room, and I could sense the energy pouring out of the girls. The energy was spilling out, faster and faster, and the girls were starting to slouch and hang down from their bindings. I was almost too terrified to do anything, but I made a point of keeping my cool and following the instructions that Da’ashalenne had whispered into my mind. I followed the power all the way out to the Guardians, and I reversed the connections Darcy and made so the energy poured back into them. Then, before Darcy had a chance to react, I pulled my power back into me. I don’t know if Da’ashalenne expected it to work this way or not, but when I pulled I felt this flood of energy—not only everything I had accidentally been storing up in the past few weeks, but all of Da’ashalenne’s energy and all of Darcy’s too. I could feel it all—like 3 different strong flavors—all bunching up tight inside of me.

The feeling was such a surprise that at first all I could do was just lie on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. I heard Darcy start to shriek, and I saw the lights change a little around me, but I was so fascinated watching the ceiling that I ignored it all. The ceiling was interesting because it looked like it was folding in toward the floor.

Then Darcy was yelling, “You fool! We’ll all die!” Cracks were running through the walls and up toward the top of the room, and now there were these loud, thundering creaking sounds all around. I had a feeling that I should get out of there, so I stood up. Darcy didn’t look so bright now, and she was shaking all over. She reached out toward me, but just then there was a booming sound and something was flying toward me and a second later my head hit the floor.

The thing that had hit turned out to be Da’ashalenne. He must have seen the big segment of the ceiling falling toward us all and acted really fast. We both collapsed in the narrow space between the two coffins, so when the giant piece of stone hit we were safe by just a couple of feet. I’m not sure how hard I hit my head on the floor, but it did hurt a lot and make the edges of my eyesight turn dark. It hurt more when Da’ashalenne helped me to half-sit up and felt around the back of my head, probably to make sure it wasn’t bleeding or anything.

I think I realized that if the ceiling was falling here in the middle of the room it could fall on the Waking Guardians next. I tried to get up, thinking somehow that I could save them or something, but Da’ashalenne wrapped his arms around my shoulders and told me to stop. Da’ashalenne looked pale and woozy, but he was still strong enough to hold me down—at least for a couple of seconds—and tell me that if I trusted him, we could still save them. Then he apologized, promised this was the last time he would take advantage of me like this, and he kissed me.

The kiss was crazy weird. It felt amazing (in a normal kissing way) for just about two seconds, but then he put one of his hands flat against my ribcage, just between my breasts, and pulled out the energy that had been his and the stuff that had been Darcy’s. Then he started to glow, his dark eyes almost sparkling. We could still hear parts of the ceiling falling all around us, and a funny tinkling sound whenever a glowstone fell and shattered, but after a huge flare of light the stone above us and the crushed coffin daises shifted back a few feet so that we had room to stand up together. Then Da’ashalenne wrapped an arm around my side and yelled, “Let’s go!”

He was half carrying me when we started moving. Stuff was still falling while we ran, but the protective shield he had made around himself kept us both safe. A huge pile of rock and steel had fallen just on top of where Darcy had been standing the last time I saw her. A few lumps of concrete and twisted metal fell toward us, but they all bounced off the shield and fell to the ground somewhere else.

We didn’t make it to the Waking Guardians. Before we got all the way across the room the whole ceiling, everything, caved in. The whole building had fallen on top of us. The shield held, but just outside of its influence there was no free space anymore. Just building pieces.

We waited what must have been an hour or two for the building to settle around us before we tried to find a way out. During that time Da’ashalenne told me a longer version of your history and convinced me to keep all of this a secret from everyone I know. Believe me, even if I wanted to talk about it (which I so don’t), nobody would ever, ever believe this story. I would sound like a lunatic if I tried telling it!

During that time Da’ashalenne told me about how he had been sent here to marry Darcy, but during the engagement he learned that she was planning to drain the life-forces of a “half-breed” or 2, combined with some heavy glowstone action and spell work, to grow this inner sanctum place and replenish her parents’ power so that they could start taking over the world together. Now that I know how she feels about humans, I am very glad that her plan failed (speaking as a human, that is).

After Darcy decided that I had the power she was looking for, she had borrowed my glowstone necklace (it was made from a piece of the drained glowstones from Antarctica) and reconfigured it so it would fill up with my own energy. Then she went home and bragged to Da’ashalenne about what she had done, so he apparently stalked me for a while until he found a chance to sneak in and add his own touch, a little secret way that I could follow after my energy if it ever got pulled out. My being so worried about Darcy’s substitute victims made it even easier than he expected it would be to convince me to cross her and pull the energy back.

Once all the rocks and pieces had settled and the building had more or less fallen as much as it was going to, Da’ashalenne forced a tiny tunnel up toward the surface and we crawled out. There were a bunch of rescue workers on the scene, so he added some sort of invisibility illusion (you guys have some nice tricks up your sleeves, you know) so we could sneak out to where I had parked my car. I was really fading by this point, so he drove me home and tucked me into bed. I’m not sure how he got back to wherever he was going after that, because I was practically passed out, and by the time I was awake again he was gone. I’m guessing he called a cab service.

So, that’s what happened. Da’ashalenne said he would go back later and “take care of” (don’t want to know what that means!) the remains of Darcy, her parents and the WGs. I’m sure you’ve seen the news reports on the building collapse and heard Da’ashalenne’s—or, ahem, David Ages’s–statements to the press.

So, that’s all I know. And I’m telling nobody about it except you guys. Email me if you have any questions, but I doubt that I have answers. I’ll do my best, though.

Brooklyn Haupenstaat


(Continue to final denouement.)