Dan Jolley - Five Elements #3: The Crimson Serpent

A round Jonathan Thorne, San Francisco trembled. Buildings shuddered, asphalt cracked, and people screamed in an earthquake of his own making. The horror of the disaster was a delight to him, but these magickal tremors were far more than a bit of fun. They were the final piece in a plan he had been engineering for over a century.

For all the chaos in this quaking city of concrete and glass, it would soon pale against the audacity of Thornes dreama vision of the future that was now so close he could almost taste it. Though he had spent lifetimes planning for this moment, not even he knew precisely what would happen next.

What will be wrought when Earth and Arcadia finally merge?

He imagined commonplace creatures transformed by Arcadias magick into eyeless, skinless beasts. He envisioned grand citadels of twisted stone rising high above the clouds of every city. He dreamed of every nation of the world bowing in submission to him.

Most of all, he relished the shock of the ordinary people of the earth, waking to a world that was no longer their own. Confused. Afraid. Powerless.

He had done all thiswith the unwitting aid of a circle of young elementalists. By manipulating them in his guise as their friend Brett Hernandez, he had twisted a ritual meant to destroy the shadow realm of Arcadia to do the very opposite. Instead of obliterating Arcadia, he had orchestrated a series of events that had fooled the children into realizing his deepest and darkest desire.

He watched with satisfaction as the glass of a nearby skyscraper buckled and showered the street below with deadly shards, and thenhe felt it.

A change in the vibrations of the earth. The tremors of soil and concrete amplified, but it was more than that. The air around him seemed to swell. The colors around him appeared to both dim and deepen.

At last!

Then a pulse of energy jolted through him. Its charge of heat and power was alien to the earth, but very familiar to Thorne.

Arcadia on Earth. Two worlds made one!

Thorne smiled. His teeth grew and multiplied as he thrilled at the fresh Arcadian magick that flowed through him. New strength and power filled his body as he sensed the realms merge into a single reality. He had plotted an aeon to reach this moment! His dream had finally been realized, but there was work to do. There was a new world to buildone in which he was both god and emperor.

He had to find the others. But first, he wanted to look upon his new domain.

He wished for his legs to lengthen, and so they did, stretching into long stilts of black shadow. Thorne could make himself look like a man, but he hadnt been human for many decades. He was darkness and power and hunger itself. On his towering strands of shadow, he rose ten feet, then thirty, then fifty, and soon loomed over the surrounding buildings. He gazed upon San Franciscoonly it wasnt San Francisco anymore. The changes had already begun, some of them most intriguing. Neither Earth nor Arcadia, this was something different. Something new.

Something his.

Thorne rose higher through the air, his shadow stilt legs broadening and lengthening as he soared above the city. He wanted to see it all. What fun he would have here! His gaze swept over Oakland in the east, and the Diablo Range to the south, and...

What is that?

A red circle enclosed the Bay Area. It was only from this height that Thorne could see it. This was not part of his design. Whatever it was, it had no place in his plan.

He bounded over a block of buildings in a single massive stride and then stopped and grew his bright green eyes until they were the size of wagon wheels in order to get a better look at the unexpected sight. The red circle was not simply a circle, he realized. It seemed to be moving. But that wasnt the worst part... the worst part was that the world beyond the red boundary seemed frozen. The hills there still green, the waters and sky still pure blue. Arcadia hadnt spread to all the earthit had not gone beyond the strange red circle. Its magick was contained. Leashed. Trapped.

Impossible.

A spark of anger lit within Thorne and quickly flared into a furnace of rage.

IMPOSSIBLE!

Out of pure fury, he stomped two buildings a hundred feet beneath him. He shrieked his wrath into the amber clouds swirling above.

Stop. Stop. He forced himself to calm down. His dark mind whirred and calculated and schemed. This infuriating red circle was only a minor setback. He had crossed dimensions and remade reality itself. He would not be thwarted by anything. Not now that he was so close.

He adjusted the length of his legs so that he could stalk across two blocks at a time, and then three in a single step. He must find the others. The child elementalists as well. Perhaps their usefulness to him had not expired quite yet.

No matter what, Thorne knew he must break the cursed red circle that stood in the way of his dream. Once this final obstacle was dispatched, the convergence of Arcadia and Earth would be complete, and this world would truly be his kingdom.

T he city across the bay darkened and changed, and Gabe Conway stood rooted to the ground in pure horror.

He tried to focus on the voices of his friends in hopes that it might distract him from the hideous amber streaks burrowing through the sky overhead, the distant calls of the inhuman monstrosities wheeling and diving over San Francisco, and the awful tinge of gold growing slowly but steadily clearer in the waters of the bay.

We failed. The words pulled at the edges of his mind, demanding to be given their full, proper weight. We failed, and now the world is ending.

You guys, look at it, Kaz Smith said. Gabe didnt need to look at his friend to know he was crying. Look at the city.

Already barely recognizable, the skyline was slowly changing. Gabe watched an office tower blacken and torque into a grotesque parody of itself. Then his stomach knotted as the armored, bloated bulk of a leviathan rose from the buildings roof, its dozens of repulsive tentacles reaching for the streets below. The leviathan drifted inland, leaving a slow rain of golden ooze in its wake.

We screwed up, Brett Hernandez said. Only minutes ago, theyd finished performing a complicated ritual to destroy Arcadia. Using their complete circle of five elementsfire, water, air, earth, and magicktheyd hoped to wipe away the corrupt shadow realm forever, but Thorne had duped them. Hed changed the ritual to accomplish the opposite of what it was supposed to do, and now Arcadia had been combined with San Francisco. Thorne played us. Guys... I think we just destroyed the world.

Bretts twin, Lily, silently put her arm around her brothers shoulders.

Jackson Wright, the fifth member of their circle and the wielder of magick itself, had wandered off from the group soon after the ritual backfired on them. Gabe guessed the pale boy was coming to grips with what had happened on his own. Theyd all been through the wringer, but none more than Jackson. He knew better than any of them the kind of evil Jonathan Thorne and his cult, the Eternal Dawn, were capable of.

Gabe glanced over his shoulder at Aria, standing next to Uncle Steve.

My mother.

When Gabe had first met her, in the nightmare dimension called Arcadia, she wasnt quite... well, quite