Outbox: Monday morning

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

To the Conclave,

I don’t exactly know who you are, but I’m supposed to tell you exactly what happened this past Monday morning. I’ll write down everything I can remember, and not leave anything out.

My name is Brooklyn Haupenstaat. I have been working for Darcy Ages (I know that’s not her real name to you guys, but it’s how I know her) as her personal intern for the past six weeks. I’m human (I guess I should mention that, huh?) with no super powers or anything (but I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that I’m a part of what you call “the descendants of the guard” or something like that, which I don’t entirely understand). I’m 19 years old and a junior in college.

On Monday morning Darcy sent me a text message a little before 3:00 AM. She asked me to come into the office right away. I got there around 3:30, when it was still dark and basically empty in that part of town. I was surprised that there weren’t any guards stationed at the entrance like there usually are, but after I came into the building (the lobby was pretty dark) there was a note for me on the front desk telling me to take the stairs to the basement. There were directions to get to a certain area that I hadn’t been to before.

The room was in some sort of sub-sub-sub-basement that I hadn’t known existed. I had to go down so many steps and through so many different hallways that I had no idea where I was any more or even how to get back out if I had to, but apparently I was directly below the middle of the building. (I figured that part out later in the day, after I heard about how the building had collapsed.) After a lot of walking I finally reached the last door, which opened to this huge room with a stone floor and a domed ceiling that glittered and sparkled in a way that filled the whole area with a dim light.

I couldn’t see very much when I came in, but Darcy was standing in the middle of the room wearing her wedding dress. It’s—well, it was—this gorgeous silver-white sheath that looked so delicate that you’d be afraid to touch it. It was also dripping with tiny glowing crystals. I don’t know if they were all crystals or if some of them were glowstones. By the time I knew enough to ask, there was a lot of stuff going on and it didn’t seem to matter very much by then.

Darcy looked amazing. Her skin was practically glowing, her hair was done up, and I don’t know if it was makeup or something else but her eyes had this purple thing going on that I had never seen before. I don’t mean to obsess, but she was standing right there when I came in and I couldn’t stop staring at her. It was like this crazy fixation, and all I could think was, “She’s so beautiful.”

When Darcy saw me, she called me over and kissed me on the forehead. I felt this electric tingle when she touched me, and even though I’ll do my best to tell you everything else that happened after that the truth is that I may as well have been drunk for most of the morning. A lot of what I’ll tell you is stuff that I sort of noticed at the time but didn’t really think about or figure out until later. A lot of it didn’t bother me right away either, but looking back at it I’m pretty freaked out.

Darcy thanked me for coming so quickly. I asked her what was going on, and she said, “I’ve just received the most wonderful wedding gift, and I want to use it right away.” She seemed really, really excited. Then she put her hand around my shoulder and said, “This is very good news for you, Brook. Your role in the ceremony is going to be much less draining now, and I have every reason to believe that you’ll recover from the experience.”

I didn’t understand what she was saying, and I think I asked her what my role was supposed to be. I had been expecting that it would be my job to coordinate with the wedding planner and make sure everyone was where they needed to be at the right times. When I asked her about it though, Darcy just pulled me toward the middle of the room. There were these two clear boxes, like coffins, resting on marble daises just under the highest part of the ceiling. When we got close to them, I started to feel this weird buzzing, throbbing noise in my head.

“These are my parents,” Darcy said when we got closer. The boxes really looked like coffins up close. They were clear enough that I could see the two people inside of them, except that they looked more like corpses than people. Their skin was as white as Darcy’s, but it was stretched so tight across their faces that they could have been dead. Their eyes were set back deep in the sockets, closed, and their hair was silver-white. Both of them wore white robes, or shrouds or something, and I had no idea if they were breathing or not.

Darcy had said before that she was moving the wedding from December to October because her parents were really sick. When I looked at them now I thought they must be dead, so I was getting ready to tell Darcy how sorry I was. I couldn’t understand why she was acting so happy.

She must have noticed the look on my face, because she laughed and shook her head. “No, don’t worry about them. They’ll be fine—now. Soon, they’ll be better than they’ve been for thousands of years.”

It was so early in the morning, and I figured that I must not be as awake as I thought I was. I asked Darcy what was going on, and she laughed again. She said, “Oh, poor Brook. You must be so confused—and I hardly know where to start! No, I do know. Don’t stress out sweetie, but the wedding’s been moved up again. I’m getting married this morning.

“As for my parents,” she was petting one of the coffins, and looking at the body inside with a loving expression, “that’s a longer story. I don’t know if I have time to tell it now. But they’ve been very weak since before I was born, and they’re about to get a lot stronger. All of us are.” She laughed, and then she looked at me like she was considering something. “Almost all of us, I mean.”

The throbbing in my head was starting to feel like a headache. I was still feeling as drunk as when I first came into the room, too. Still, there was something—about the way she was smiling, or maybe about the feeling I was getting looking at her parents in the glass coffins—that made me feel like I should run away. The problem was that I couldn’t concentrate enough to go with that feeling. So instead, I asked her what had happened to her parents.

“They slept too long.” Darcy was walking around the coffins now, checking them or something. “Six thousand years beneath the ice, slowly feeding off the accumulated energy of their chambers for so many long years after they were supposed to be awakened. When they finally realized that their dreamless sleep had gone too long, it took every bit of strength they had left to open the way, to part the ice and return to the surface.

“The poor dears; the world was very different when they were younger. But by the time they were adults, their palaces had all been destroyed in the wars and they knew that their chilling world would be covered in ice for centuries to come. Back then, you humans were barely more advanced than any of the other monkeys wandering around the empty spaces. Imagine their surprise when they awoke and saw the cities you had built, the way you had covered their world with stone and twisted metal.”

Even though Darcy was sort of talking to me, she was staring at the coffins the whole time and speaking in a soft voice—like the kind you might use with a baby. I had a feeling that she barely remembered I was there when she went on.

“They hadn’t meant to sleep so long. They had left behind a league of knights, the Waking Guard, who had sworn to protect them aboveground and to open the way when the Great Winter warmed to spring. And yet the centuries passed, the glaciers receded, and still my parents slept. All of them slept, their strength ebbing with the centuries. The ground above their heads was frozen, yes, but how were they to know that elsewhere in the world green flourished and new civilizations were sprouting like weeds in an untended field?”

While Darcy went on, something really strange started to happen. Instead of listening to what she was saying, I started to feel her story. I could sense the long patience of the… whatever they were… sleeping under the snow, and their discomfort when their power stores began to drain. I felt like I was part of their telepathic conversations as they planned the energy burst that would make their chambers explode outward.

I felt sick with their weakness when they came out onto the frozen ice shelf, barely protected by the thin robes they had worn to sleep. I was as confused as Darcy imagined them to be when the long polar day ended and they saw satellites gleaming like stars above them. Their first months of hardship, as they searched for warmth and watched the weakest among them waste away to nothing made me cry.

“And what had happened to the Waking Guard, to their dedication to serve the sleepers?” Darcy was leaning against one of the coffins, brushing her fingertips along its top just above her father’s forehead. “How many years did they maintain their loyalty, before they abandoned us and turned to embrace the inferior humans?” Except that she hadn’t said “inferior humans,” but just one word that meant both things. I think that was when I realized that she hadn’t been speaking English but for some reason I understood her—even though I didn’t have a clue what language she was speaking.

“How many generations before they began diluting their pure blood, passing their lofty gifts along to half-breed children, quarter-breed children and worse?”

Darcy sounded angry now, and this was the point when she looked up from the coffins and seemed to remember that I was in the room with her. She started walking toward me. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch this ridiculous hero-worship on your news stations, to know that our blood runs through the coarse veins of your ‘supers’? To imagine the ancients copulating in dark corners and dusty alleyways, with inferior humans?” I thought she was going to slap me then, but at the last second she shook her head and smiled. “No, of course you don’t. You sweet, dear little thing. If only more of them were like you.”

I felt this surge of energy from the glowstone pendant I was wearing (long story, and I’m sure that you’ll get that explained to you by someone who understands the whole situation a lot better than I do), and I felt like I was being pat on the head or something. Creepy in retrospect, but it felt nice at the time.

Even though I was still totally out of it, once Darcy had started showing the story instead of telling it, I had understood it all pretty well. So I was confused because, if her people’s Waking Guard had been having kids with humans for thousands of years, I didn’t understand why there had only been supers for the past thirty years or so. I’m not sure how much of the question I asked and how much I just thought, but Darcy seemed to get it.

“How were they to know?” she asked, and then she showed me the explosion of power in Antarctica again. I got a sense of how the ripples of power went beyond the edge of the chambers and traveled over the ocean, across the land, sometimes strong enough to wake up stores of energy inside distant descendants of the Waking Guard. “There should never have been such human spirits to stir awake in the first place. My parents and the others with them would have done things differently had they any idea of the outcome of their escape plan, of course. You know as well as anyone how much trouble it caused, the inferior humans gifted with abilities beyond their ability to control. It’s disgusting. Once I am in power, I will see to it that every one of these ‘supers’ is drained to nothing—except for those who are wise enough to learn to serve their true masters, of course.”

Darcy was in my head enough that I was feeling good about myself and proud to be on her side while she talked. Now, thinking back I’m pretty sure I’d be throwing up or whimpering if she was here right now saying that stuff. I cannot emphasize enough—I was not feeling or acting normal. That will explain why I was just kinda curious when I asked her what the special wedding present was that made her so excited that she was moving up the wedding.

My question made Darcy smile and pull my face closer to hers. “The Waking Guard is still around Brook, but they’ve gone rogue.” I have this phobia of rogue supers, so I almost yelled when she said this. Darcy shook her head, her forehead touching mine with little tingles like electricity. “Not like what you’re imagining, sweet. I wouldn’t even call them the Waking Guard, except that it’s what they call themselves, and they have passed on the title through the generations from the very beginning. That’s what I’ve gathered from interrogations, at least. But they are no more like me and my kind than you are.”

“You mean, they’re totally human?” I asked.

Darcy laughed at me. “That’s not what I mean at all.” She reached between us and picked up my glowstone necklace. Having her touch it felt too personal all of a sudden, like she was touching something inside of me. Not in a sexual way, but… it’s hard to explain.

Then she kissed the glowstone and I felt this whooshing, and I almost blacked out. The next thing I knew I was sort of wavering on my feet and Darcy looked even more gorgeous than she had before. Like, goddess gorgeous. But she had this look on her face like she had just eaten something that didn’t taste quite right.

She kept talking about the Waking Guard, but I was too out of it to listen for the next couple of minutes. I’m sure, looking back, that she must have told me that the rogues who had attacked the building two weeks ago were part of the Waking Guard, and that she had laid a trap and caught them. I do remember at the end that she said something about how, “Their energy, with some help from the stores I have collected, will be more than enough to bring my parents back to their former greatness and to send a clear message to the inferior humans of who is truly in command of this world. When I join my powers with my fiancé’s, I will have enough strength to draw the life-forces of these inept guards into the weave of this chamber, to feed my parents and make them strong. I’m glad I still have you for backup in case something goes wrong, but I am so pleased that this plan allows me to keep you around to serve me. All will go according to my plan, and in a few hours my parents and I will rise to rule this city and bring about a golden age of peace and power.”

Again, I’m looking back and I can’t believe the directions my head was going in. She says that the three of them are taking over the city, and the best response I can come up with is, “But if you’re getting married this morning, isn’t your husband going to be ruling the city, too?”

Darcy scowled. “Perhaps. He will have to prove himself, first. I have begun to suspect that my Da’ashalenne is a bit of a rogue, himself.” Darcy closed her eyes for a little while, and then she opened them and smiled. It was a scary smile. “And he’s here. It’s time to begin the ceremony.”

I want to get the whole story to you as soon as I can, so I’m going to send this part to you now and keep writing. I’ll send you my version of the rest of what happened some time in the next couple of hours.


(Continue to the 2nd email.)