Dan Jolley - Five Elements #1: The Emerald Tablet

1906

T he subterranean smell came to Jackson Wright first, thick and damp and dark. His eyelids didnt want to open, but he forced them. When they finally peeled back from his raw, gravelly eyes, he found himself staring at the intersection of four stone arches fifteen or twenty feet above him.

Where am I?

He tried to look around, but... couldnt. When he strained to turn his head, pain ground into his temples. He tried to search out the cause of that pain, but his hand stopped short, halted with a metallic clank. He couldnt move his legs, either. The sharp tang of panic began to rise in his throat.

Im shackled! Someones chained me down to... what?

Jackson could still move his fingertips. He used them to feel around as best he could. He lay, helpless, bound hand and foot to what felt like a massive stone slab.

What hed at first thought to be a distant buzzing in his ears clarified: a soft chanting filled the chamber where he was imprisoned. Jackson felt his panic grow. He didnt recognize the words, but it sounded like dozens of voices, and they were coming from all around him.

He couldnt move his tongue. He could hardly even make a sound. I cant speak! Terror stabbed at him like a knife to his guts. Was he... had someone drugged him? Where had he been, that someone could have slipped something into his food or his drink? The last thing he remembered was leaving the house with his father for an after-dinner walk. Everything else was... gone.

Papa! Papa, help me! The words slammed inside his skull. Desperate. Useless.

The chambers faint illumination shuddered and flickered like firelight. A writhing, dancing shadow fell across him, and only the metal strap holding his head in place kept Jackson from recoilingbut then his heart leaped.

Papa!

Jacksons father leaned over him, his fine, white-gold hair, hair the same color as Jacksons, all but hidden by the cowl of a long black robe.

Papa, help me! Get me out of here! Papa!

But Jackson saw something in his fathers eyes hed never seen before. Something hard and cold, like chips of ice. Without saying a word, his father moved away, out of Jacksons sight.

Another man approached from the other side of the slab. Tall and narrow through the shoulders, he was draped in a hooded robe identical to the one Jacksons father wore. But this mans face looked like old, white leather, and his green eyes shone with an eerie radiance that turned Jacksons mouth as dry as sand.

Mama! He imagined his mothers gentle, dark eyes. Mama! I wont run in the house anymore. I promise I wont! Please! Please help me!

Zxarna vrahmu otvortse. Dvai shvioutei pivuntxa. As the green-eyed man spoke, the words buzzed and vibrated in Jacksons ears, in his skull, as if a swarm of tiny insects had begun digging and gnawing at his brain. His hands longed to scratch, to tear at his scalp, but still he couldnt move. As he spoke, the green-eyed man pulled a stone tablet from inside his robe. The stone was green, not entirely unlike the mans frightening, luminous eyes, and it was crystalline, its color somehow both dark and bright at the same time. It looked like a solid slab of stone, but then the man opened it, and Jackson saw that the odd tablet had pages like a book. Yet the man didnt hold it the way other people held books. He held it in the way someone would hold a live, venomous snake: carefully, and with great respect. Maybe even great fear. Dvaishvioutei pivuntxa, majia povrunshei taigho shviunta!

The bizarre language reverberated around the chambernot an echo, but dozens of voices repeating everything the green-eyed man said. This repetition somehow made the harsh words a thousand times worse.

Taigho shviunta. Taigho shviunta. The unseen crowd chanted. Jackson would have cried out if hed been able to make any noise at all... because he recognized one of those voices as his fathers.

As the incantation continued, Jackson felt the air around him change. He couldnt move his head, but his eyes darted in every direction. His vision went momentarily white as a circle of fire exploded into being eight feet above the slab where he was bound. Its heat made the skin of Jacksons face pull tight. The burning ring rotated slowly above him, an enormous, twisted, ghastly version of the halos hed seen over the heads of saints in church. Is this how Im to die? Like a twig in a bonfire? Red-orange flames danced and licked around a blinding-white core...

... and as the crown of fire spun, a broad arc of water surged up through the air from Jacksons left, climbing in the shape of a rainbow over the flames. The water churned and frothed far above him, suspended in midair as it formed another ring, reflecting the fire in icy shades of white and blue and green. The same hard, cold colors hed seen in his fathers eyes.

Jackson whimpered.

Without warning, a blast of arctic wind channeled its way across Jacksons body, running frigid fingers through his hair. The very slab beneath him trembled and shivered, pulsing like a great, stone heart.

Jacksons muscles clenched as he tried again to free himself. It would have been better to scream his throat raw than suffer this paralysis. His heart thundered in his narrow chest, and tears as hot as lava squeezed out of his eyes.

He watched, stunned, as his tears fell up. They left his face and streaked straight into the broad, terrible arc of water above him, each drop gleaming like glass in the instant before the impossible current swept it away.

I am Jonathan Thorne. It took Jackson a heartbeat to recognize the words as English, and another to realize the green-eyed man wasnt talking to him, or to the assembled crowd. He was talking to the strange green-crystal book itself. The scratching, hungry echoes of the other language still crawled beneath Jacksons skull as the green-eyed man went on. I am the opener of the way. I am the leader of the faithful. I am the author of doom and the wielder of power.

Jonathan Thorne pulled a slim silver dagger from the sleeve of his robe and sliced open the tip of his own thumb without hesitation. Jacksons heart nearly stopped at the sight of the blade. In the firelight, Thornes blood was as black as ink. Thorne leaned over and touched Jacksons forehead, painting something there, Jackson couldnt tell what. Straightening up and using the same thumb, Thorne drew a five-pointed star inside a circle on the cover of the strange book.

I am Jonathan Thorne, he repeated. I am the seeker of magick. I am the explorer of the lost paths. I am the One Above All Others, and with this blood I name myself master of a new world of boundless power!

Slowly, so slowly, Thorne raised the dagger. The knife shifted in his grip, blade pointing straight down. Straight at Jacksons heart.

Jacksons thoughts blurred as panic choked him. Wake up wake up Ive got to wake up! This isnt real. Im having a nightmare. Why cant I wake up? Why why why? WAKE UP!

A flicker of movement from Jacksons left drew his eyes, and for an instant, for just a split second, he thought he had awakened. Because there was his father, coming back to save him! He tried to cry out, tried to force his unwilling tongue to move....

But he could only watch as his father, with that terrible stony coldness in his eyes, slid off the signet ring Jackson wore on his left middle finger.

No! Papa, what are you doing? Why are you letting this happen?