Gambit of the Gods Read online

  Gambit of the Gods

  by

  Angela Ashley

  Dedicated to my grandmother, Gloria Evelyn Blackmore. I wish you had lived to see this dream come true for me, but I know you’re watching from above.

  Thank you, mom, for giving me the freedom to chase my dreams. It means more than I can say.

  A quick note on how to read this book: the name at the beginning of each chapter indicates perspective. As an example, a chapter labeled “Artan” means that chapter will be from Artan’s perspective.

  Name pronunciations (just the ones most cringe-worthy if butchered):

  Artan: ARR-tan

  Ayasha: Eye-AH-sha

  Bu’a, Si’o, Nev’i: emphasis is on the last syllable (ex: Boo-AH)

  Canu: KAY-nu

  Chalaena: Cha-LAY-na

  Civitas Dei: SIV-i-tas DAY

  Daven: DAH-ven

  Jaereth: JAIR-eth

  Jemleyn: Jem-LAIN

  Karyl: KAIR-il

  Mah’ue: MAW-hway

  Malisanth: MAL-i-zanth

  Malyse: Mah-LEESE

  Miklos: ME-close

  Na’e: Nuh-AY

  Naira: NYE-rah

  Niabi: Nee-AH-bee

  S’en: Suh-ENN

  Sequim Wakan: SKWIM Wah-CAWN

  Taini: TAY-nee

  Prologue: Mah’ue

  The sun sets, painting the horizon in soft pinks and corals, resurrecting the memory of great loss.

  It waits, always there at the back of my awareness. Patient in its pursuit, it stalks me. Cunning in its strategy, it attacks when least expected. It could be the sound of distant laughter or the sight of a spectacular sunset and it all comes rushing back, striking like the impact of a dying sun. I wish it would obliterate me with the force of its devastation, but it never does. Instead, it leaves its victim whole—on the outside, at least. On the inside lies a wound that never heals.

  We called our planet S’en’Na’e, and in all our travels, we have never found its like again. Our red sun, our mother, bathed our planet in a warm, red-orange glow, an embrace of joy. We spent our days soaring through vermilion skies, soaking up the heat and light that nourished us. We reveled in the beauty of our planet’s blooming desert, alive with sound, scent, color, and wonder. We never knew true night; only a dimming of our mother’s brilliance until she rose again in glory to hold us close once more in her loving arms.

  By nature a symbiotic race, we dwelt in unity with the S’en, our natural life-partners. To some it would seem like a strange commingling. We, the Na’e, have no true bodies. Instead, we exist as bright spirits, feasting on the emotions of our hosts. The S’en, our hosts, are flightless, bound to bodies with short life spans. They give birth just before their life cycle ends, providing us with a new vessel to indwell. In this way, we continued our symbiotic relationship down through each new generation. Our symbiosis, a dance both races treasured, provided a needed balance to both.

  Unlike the S’en, the Na’e do not ‘die’. Born from our mother the sun like a flash of revelation, we slowly fade away after many centuries. Hence, we have survived the passing of countless S’en hosts. Each lives in our memory like stars in a boundless sky, passing a part of itself on to its offspring. Therefore one did not grieve when one’s host passed, for the new host contained precious fragments of its forebears. Each birth felt like coming home again.

  The S’en community loved and raised each newborn S’en together. We introduced ourselves to our new host as a shining image of love inside of them. As a youngling grew in understanding, we slowly increased our influence. The older S’en always explained to the younger that we lived within them to guide them toward peace and harmony.

  The S’en can live without us, but we cannot survive without the emotions hosts provide. As emotion-eaters, we savor the strongest feelings, syphoning off the ones considered ‘unsafe’ for our hosts to retain. Each Na’e partakes of its host’s emotions primarily, feeding from others only as hunger requires.

  Each emotion we ingest paints our ‘wings’, if you will, with a certain spectrum of colors. The more intense or complex the emotion, the brighter the colors. Food preferences naturally vary, with a wide array of emotions leading to some truly gorgeous combinations.

  Over the span of centuries, we began to tire of a diet consisting primarily of negative emotions, much like humans do when they tire of a particular food. Instead, we began to sample the other end of the spectrum. Always vain creatures, to our eternal shame we forsook our duty to protect our hosts from themselves. We began to eat positive emotions to brighten our feathers, leaving the negative to fester.

  The S’en were unused to experiencing their darkest impulses. Fear, confusion, grief and loneliness in turn begat hatred, jealousy, sadness, and rage. This cycle only seemed to worsen as time went by. Happiness, contentment, joy, and love became rare; delicacies to be devoured before, like snuffed candle flames, they disappeared. Caught up in the loveliness of our feathers, we ignored the smorgasbord of damaging emotions burgeoning from our hosts.

  Then the S’en began to kill one another in earnest. We tried to syphon off their darkness, but were so sated we couldn’t consume enough of it. Hatred and lawlessness had put down roots in the hearts of our hosts. Before long, almost all of them lay dead in the streets. There would be no newborns from those cold, lifeless shells.

  The few S’en who survived utterly rejected us when we tried to feed from them. They blamed us for the decimation of their race. We cannot force ourselves upon our symbiotic partners once joined, nor would we want to. The joining is sacred to us. So, bereft and starving, we had no choice but to leave our beloved planet in search of new sources of sustenance.

  We discovered several planets with lesser beings capable of basic emotions such as fear and contentment, but after the grand buffet of varied emotions we had become used to, this fare seemed bland. Unsatisfying. We searched, mourned, and searched some more.

  Then, at long last, we came to this planet. We have enjoyed the emotions of the ‘humans’ here for several generations now. But because of the rejection of our previous hosts, we have not revealed ourselves to them, nor sought to join with them. Instead, we only consume their outermost emotions so they do not sense our touch. At least, this was the plan we all agreed to when we first arrived, daring to dream that one day, we might make ourselves known to them and be welcomed. Yet now, I greatly fear that some among us have chosen to abandon our path of mutual benefit for a more parasitic, destructive one.

  I will not watch silently as our hosts kill one another yet again. We must do something, soon…

  Chapter 1: Wilde

  We exist on a higher plane of existence than the one we enjoyed when we were simply human. But I long for my former life every day. I would have gone mad long since, if not for the others.

  We no longer hunger or thirst, for we have no cells left to feed. We ache as if we did, as if longing for a phantom limb. Yet the phantoms we grieve for are our bodies, our loved ones, and most of what makes existence worthwhile. We’re like ghosts haunting the living, yet we didn’t die. I would have much preferred it if we had, as so many others did. And we have no one to blame for what happened but ourselves.

  We loosed the great plague some called the “Kiss of Death” upon our island. Our lab, Archer & Wade Associates, had sought a way to extend human life. The six of us were pre-eminent experts in our fields, and in our arrogance, we thought we could discover the secret to eternal life. Instead, we unwittingly unleashed death upon thousands.

  The events of that day are forever etched upon my mind…

  That day in the lab, we had all gathered around the conference table to eat our lunches together. All except Kai. He’d begged off
with his usual dismissive insolence. But we soon forgot about his absence. We were too busy enjoying our lunch visitors—Lark’s fifteen-year-old son, Jacob, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Jade.

  Their school was just across the street, so they often came to eat lunch with their mother. Laughing, Jacob read some lines from a funny story he had written for school. In it, a stick man named Knott encountered adventures as he fled from a dog named Drool.

  I’d jotted down a poem while listening to Jacob read, about Knott being in a tough spot and drowning in a pool of Drool’s drool. That’s when we heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by a muffled curse. Gideon rose first, hurrying from the room in the direction of the sounds. The rest of us stood more slowly, worry etched on our faces. Had Kai just accidentally destroyed months of painstaking work?

  I reached the room that Kai and Gideon were in ahead of the rest. The door stood open. I noted an odd smell, reminiscent of burnt hair.

  Then I saw them, framed in the light of the windows behind them, and froze. The others bumped into me, but I hardly noticed. I’d realized with a horrible, jolting shock that the light from the windows behind them shone through parts of them.

  Turning swiftly, I pushed the others out against their confused protests, closing the door.

  “Go to the room furthest from this one,” I demanded. “Close the door. Keep it shut.” Lark shepherded her children before her, Sera following close behind. Malyse brought up the rear, for once not arguing. Working with viruses, as we had been, teaches you great caution. We knew better than to flee the lab, which would risk infecting others.

  When I heard the door close behind them a few seconds later, I took a deep breath. Looking down at my shaking hands, I noticed that I could see the floor through my left thumbnail. Yet a shadowy outline of my thumbnail remained. What was happening?

  A moment later, one of the children screamed, high-pitched and terrified. By now, my entire left thumb was translucent. Soon my left hand followed suit, then my arm. Stay calm, I told myself. I went to sit down, but my hand passed right through the chair’s armrest. Yet I felt no pain—just a strange feeling, as if millions of bubbles floated up through my legs, my arms, through my torso, into my head.

  I made my shaking right hand reach out for my phantom left one, but felt nothing. By now, half my chest had become transparent except for a strange, warm glow. Then two glowing orbs centered in ghostly human outlines came bobbing through the door.

  I heard a voice that reminded me of Gideon’s in my mind.

  “It’s all right, Wilde. Don’t be afraid.” They came nearer, shimmering as light does on dancing waters. They were breathtakingly beautiful, their supernatural bodies lit from within, their spectral faces aglow.

  Somehow, I could sense their minds in front of me. No fear or pain emanated from them—only wonder. I glanced down one last time, glimpsing only an ethereal, radiant apparition where once my physical body had been. All bodily sensations—cold, hunger, discomfort—had ceased to exist. Instead, I felt strangely buoyant and at peace.

  When I thought about moving toward the other two, I moved somehow, my thought becoming action instantly. We huddled together, grateful that we were not alone in this.

  Suddenly, I could sense five other minds out in the corridor. We moved to comfort them as they came blinking through the door, one after another.

  We eight had been reborn. We rejoiced in that moment, sharing our thoughts and feelings with an intimacy we had never known before. We had no presentiment then of the monotony of years awaiting us, unable to experience the taste of food or the touch of skin on skin.

  The Peacemakers came through the front door of our lab hours later. Our loved ones had alerted them, concerned when we failed to return home. They couldn’t see us, of course. But by then, the chemical compound Kai had unwittingly released had reorganized into a new form. It had degraded into the plague that would ravage most humans within its reach. The men and women who walked through our lab in search of us carried it out in their lungs.

  We stayed inside the lab for several days, afraid we might somehow infect others with our transformation. Our caution was futile. From the second floor lab windows, we watched the bodies pile up in the streets; saw fires raging through nearby neighborhoods. Lark tried to comfort her children as the screams rose day and night. We saw citizens scurrying away as if chased by unseen forces. Witnessing the horrific results of our thoughtless pride broke us.

  When at last we emerged, we were too late to say goodbye to our loved ones. Lark and her children hurried home to find Lark’s husband Benin, the children’s father, lying dead on the floor in their kitchen. Gideon found his wife’s and son’s corpses, then came across his young niece, Ellrie. Somehow immune to the plague, she’d come to check on Gideon and his family.

  Malyse’s parents had died previously; she had no other family. I, having been raised in an orphanage, also had no parents or other family to check on. But I found my girlfriend, Paskia, lying dead on the bed in our apartment. Kai found his pregnant wife Jessa dead. Sera found her brother, Torun, mourning his dead wife and children on the steps of the children’s school.

  Paskia meant everything to me, but I had no physical tears to shed for her. My spirit cried out, the loud silence of the deserted street mocking my voiceless grief. I couldn’t even cradle her in my arms, close her unseeing eyes, or give her body a better place to rest.

  At last I left her, rejoining the only seven souls in the world who could hear me. Together, we mourned our dead.

  Our city, proudly named Haven, was the capital of the Seven Cities of Freedom. Our forebears had fled religious persecution on the mainland just over a hundred years ago, traveling to the island of Avarra. It had formerly been a dumping ground for prisoners and was thought to be cursed, but we deemed it the perfect place for a new beginning.

  Our island’s only other inhabitants lived in two large cities. One lay many days’ travel to the southeast, the other high in the Elusian Mountains to the north. Women who called their domain the Queensrealm ruled the city to the southeast; it held approximately three thousand souls at that time. Descended from former prisoners and exiles, they too had made a fresh start here. The city to the north, Civitas Dei, meaning ‘City of God’, contained approximately four thousand souls.

  Our Seven Cities of Freedom contained a little over thirty thousand citizens before the outbreak of the plague. Less than five thousand survived it. Fortunately, the plague died with our dead. Unfortunately, the virus, though short-lived, was potent and brutal.

  Those who survived gathered in Haven to decide what to do next. The seven cities, gutted by fire, lay stinking, with thousands upon thousands of bloated bodies piled in the streets. Many voiced the belief that the plague still lurked there and would come roaring back unless they fled the cities at once. The few scientists left, realizing they’d be mobbed if they tried to argue that the cities were safe, stayed silent. Eventually, the survivors decided to break into two roughly equal groups.

  “We will journey southeast into the Great Forest to seek aid from the Queensrealm,” one leader declared.

  “We will make our way north to the mountains and Civitas Dei,” said the others.

  The groups made plans to report back to one another about which area to settle in. Might it have been wiser to send two much smaller groups out to survey these areas? I wondered. But no one wanted to stay another moment in a cursed, burnt-out place, so filled with rotting corpses. Surrounded by the constant reminders of lost loved ones, we couldn’t blame them.

  We decided that four of our number would go with each of the two groups. Most of us felt a deep sense of responsibility for helping to unleash this horror upon them. We hoped to find a way to aid those who were left in their bid for continued survival, or at least, to bear silent witness to their end.

  Another reason we wanted to go with them went unspoken. Having transcended physical existence, we could see beyond the physical realm into wha
t was, as Lark phrased it, “the first spiritual dimension.” We hadn’t died, so we couldn’t see heaven or hell, if either existed, or God or the angels, if they existed. But we could see our own souls, and the souls of those still living.

  We found ourselves fascinated by this spiritual appendage, wanting to learn whatever we could about it. Before the plague, I’d scoffed at the quaint notion some held of the soul, but now, there could be no doubt. It looked like a bright, three-dimensional, slowly-spinning wheel suspended in the center of the torso. This was the shimmering light I’d seen in my companions when we’d transformed into pure spirit.

  The ‘heart’ of the soul—the identity, emotions, will, and morality—pulsed at the center of these spinning wheels. We sensed it but could in no way interfere with it. The outer wheel was a different story. Touching each of the seven ‘spokes’ of the wheel, we felt a different force or energy at play in each: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Spirit, Life, and Death. They were like seeds each person carried within them. Two of the seven were always dominant in each person, though they seemed so weak, perhaps only fully manifesting in times of great stress, if at all.

  “They might present as a touch of premonition,” Gideon theorized, “a healing or nurturing touch with people, animals or plants, or perhaps an inkling of an approaching storm.

  Once, so long ago that our memory of that time has long faded, humans must have operated through all seven forces. They may have commanded the weather, healed bodies, or even raised the dead.”

  We soon learned to restore the flow along our own two dominant force-lines. Having achieved this, we wondered: could we not also strengthen or perhaps even fully restore the survivors’ dominant flows as well?

  “Why would the soul be bounded by such mundane forces as Earth, Water, Fire, and Air?” I asked the others, “and why would Death be a part of us? Spirit and Life, I can understand.”

  They shook their heads, baffled, until Sera spoke up. Though she had studied botany primarily, she’d admitted once to delving into spiritualism as well.