After a tray full of food was demolished in the mess, Marcus carefully made his way back to his room. Even with a belly full of food he still felt a bit wobbly.
Stumbling through the darkness, he fell onto his bed. And was almost immediately asleep.
Unfortunately for the exhausted young primal, it was anything but restful. Even as unconsciousness swallowed him, Marcus could feel the dreams return with him too tired to hold them out.
They were always the same: either he was watching as something unfolded like it was on a recording. Or he was experiencing it directly, a strange, twisted scene that had no corresponding spot in his memories to tell him that it was him experiencing the events directly.
This time, with darkness coming almost instantly over his mind, the troubled fire primal watched as another section of the recording unfolded. But, instead of finishing and fading away, leaving him drained and exhausted when he woke up, it abruptly terminated.
At the same time, he sensed something from the dream state, something both familiar and alien at the same time. And when he focused on it, he felt a chill rush through him when he recognized it. It was another Descendent in close proximity, somehow in the same dream state as he was.
Adrenaline rushing through him in a fight or flight response, Marcus rushed back to consciousness. And immediately looked around when his eyes fluttered back open.
There, at the foot of his bed, was a mysterious figure shrouded in shadow. But there was no mistaking that outline.
“What are you doing in my room, Valentina?’ he asked in a voice still thick from the depths of his slumber. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here. Barna’s rules.” Instead of answering, the water primal stayed in the shadows.
“Did you just have a bad dream, Marcus?” she asked in almost a whisper.
“Not to be unnecessarily salty, Val, but that’s none of your fucking business,” he quickly replied, roughly scrubbing the sand out of his eyes. A glance down at the smart watch on his wrist said it was three in the morning, nearly nine hours after he fell into bed. Yet it felt like he could use another eight and barely scratch the surface on how tired he was.
“Do us both a solid and get the hell out, yeah?”
“So yes, you had a bad dream,” Valentina persisted, not moving a hair.
“Fine. Yes, I had a bad dream. So what? Everybody does.”
“But not everybody dreams of the First Ones and their invasion into our reality,” she said, her tone quite matter-of-fact.
Marcus slowly blinked as he stared at her. How … how did she know what he called the super powerful aliens he saw in the recordings dreams?? Or what he thought they were doing in those recordings??
“How do you know …” he began before stammering into silence.
“What the aliens are called and what they are doing?’ Valentina finished for him. “Because I’ve dreamt about the same things, Marcus. Over, and over, and over.
Marcus carefully sat up, staring at the shadow-sheathed Valentina.
“Okay,” he finally said. “So we’re having the same dreams. What does it mean??”
Valentina finally leaned forward enough for the light from Marcus’s clock at bedside illuminated her face. And it was dead serious.
“They’re not dreams, Marcus,” she said, her eyes narrowed.
“They’re memories!”
Marcus stopped just short of spitting out a ‘Bullshit!’, his expression hardening. How could two people found in two significantly different parts of the world have the same memories?? It just didn’t make sense.
“Only because I’ve got some questions, how about you lay it out for me like I’m a moron, Val?
How are they memories??”
“Because we, in some way, were there! We witnessed it, Marcus. Maybe not the original events, but we were somewhere where we could see a recording of the events. Events where they invaded our reality, Marcus. The First Ones. Invaded when there was nothing here. They tried to colonize our space by building entire planetary systems here, fuelled by energy from their realm. And they failed, the collapse of their energy font triggering the Big Bang,” Valentina quickly explained. And, the words resonating in his head, Marcus let her. Until she said they triggered the Big Bang.
“Okay that is bullshit,” he said hoarsely. “The aliens didn’t trigger the Big Bang. That was a cosmic phenomenon.”
“Which they triggered!” Valentina doggedly insisted. “The energy and matter they brought from their interdimensional space wasn’t aligned with the physical laws and demands of the original void of our space! It was like somebody rejecting a donor organ that isn’t an original part of their body. Our reality rejected their matter and energy because it didn’t resonate at the quantum level with ours.”
Valentina paused there to fold her arms.
“But, because the First Ones were so powerful, they were able to force their way into our reality anyway, building their star systems out of matter and energy from their realm. And all of it fueled by the Font of Creation, and protected by the Godshield, a bubble of quantum gravity around not only each world and star they built, but the entire section of realm space they created, which they called the Foothold. But the Godshield wasn’t impermeable to the quantum forces of our reality and immediately began to decay. And when it finally collapsed, the Font came under so much duress from the quantum warp…”
“It exploded!” Marcus said in a whisper, his eyes flying wide. He remembered seeing that explosion, time and time again in his dreams.
“It exploded,” Valentina grimly echoed. “The resulting shockwave obliterated the Foothold, ruptured the conduit back to the First Ones’ home realm, and forced the energy in our reality to coalesce into matter. Matter that became the building blocks of our universe. And they survived it by letting the explosion scatter their particles in every direction and across hundreds of thousands of lightyears of distance.”
“That doesn’t sound like surviving to me,” Marcus said with a frown. “That sounds like they got ripped into their component particles and died.”
“The First Ones have absolute control over every particle of matter and energy in their bodies, Marcus,” Valentina deftly pointed out. “Particles of energy and matter that aren’t native to this reality. That control allowed them to program each particle, each neutrino, lepton, and muon to gravitate back to the original body. As soon as that return pull canceled out the velocity the Bang gave them, those particles began traveling back to their original position in a process the First
Ones called ‘the Coalescing’.”
Sliding to the edge of his bed, Marcus did his best to wrap his mind around what Valentina was telling him. But only because it continued to resonate with his own thoughts and dreams about the First Ones. He couldn’t deny the truth in her words. What she was describing actually happened. And he had seen it unfold in his dreams!
“The Coalescing didn’t happen right away. Even with our reality trying to push the First Ones’ particles out of existence. It took billions and billions of years. In fact, some are still coalescing right now. But those that have already coalesced, have used the fact their particles have had some characteristics of our reality imparted to them during their long flight through the cosmos to regain much of their abilities without many of the vulnerabilities their original selves had.”
And with that, Valentina fell silent. Marcus let the silence wrap around him for a moment before finally looking at the water primal with a frown.
“And??” he tautly asked.
“And that’s all I have so far,” Valentina admitted, leaning back into the shadows. “It took me years to put that together.” He could almost see her frown at that. “I’m close to uncovering the rest. I just need the three of you to keep dreaming.” That deepened Marcus’s frown. “The three of us? As in me, Jay and Doug?” “Yes,” was her curt answer.
“And why not you? You told me you had the same dreams as me.”
“No. I said I was dreaming about the same things as you. Not the same,” Valentina pointed out.
“But if you want a boring discussion about semantics, talk to Doug.”
“Okay, fine. No need to be so frickin’ salty about it. So we’re dreaming about the same things, but not having the same dreams. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Precisely,” Valentina confirmed. “I suspect that in the accident that sent us here, the complete record was shattered into four components, with each of us getting a piece. And our subconscious minds review our individual pieces when we dream.” She paused to put a hand on her head.
“I think I’ve completely reviewed the piece in my head. Because none of my dreams are new.
They haven’t been since I was about twelve.”
“Whatever. That doesn’t explain why the three of us need to keep dreaming,” Marcus said.
“Because I need your fragments to put the rest of the record together,” Valentina replied.
“Sure. And you’re going to yank it out of our heads because … you’re a telepath?”
“Yes,” Valentina said without missing a beat. “But better than that, I’m a morpheopath, or dream walker. My telepathy can’t find the record fragment in your subconscious mind while you’re awake. But my morpheopathy can, while you dream.”
“So you can see what I dream?”
“Yes.” Valentina smiled thinly. “Don’t worry, Marcus. Your affinity for redheads in yellow bikinis riding unicorns will be our little secret.”
“Okay, now you need to get the fuck out!” Marcus growled, leveling a glare at her. “Seriously.
Get the gym shoes on and take a walk. Before I punch you in the face.”
Valentina quickly held up her hands in surrender before turning and walking towards the door.
But, just as she stepped through it, she turned and said over her shoulder:
“Remember, Marcus. Don’t resist dreaming about the First Ones,” she urged. “It’s the key to unlocking this whole thing!” And then she was gone, leaving a disturbed Marcus in her wake, staring at the floor as he tried to make sense of it all.
Pushing aside the fact that she had peeked in on some of his more intimate dreams, which was disturbing all by itself, and will likely continue to do so in her efforts to reassemble the record, Marcus found himself pondering Valentina’s assertion that their dreams were actually memories.
It was obvious that she believed it, because she had said more to defend the idea to him than she had in the last couple years in all of their previous conversations combined. To say Valentina Alvarez was reticent, was a monumental understatement. And when she did speak, it was usually to her intellectual bestie, Doug, the air primal.
Yet here she was, basically delivering a college thesis verbal defense on the topic. While mind boggling on a couple different levels, it drove home the fact that she considered her assertion fact. And with how that assertion resonated with truth to him, Marcus was now hard pressed to suggest it was anything but.
The fire primal certainly hadn’t burned a lot of brain energy pondering their origins before. As far as he was concerned, he was Jane Gray’s adopted kid from Schaumberg, Illinois, brother to Jonathan, an avid gamer, annoyed by overbearing authority, and family oriented. Not connected in some way to alien invaders warping reality 13.7 billion years ago and triggering the Big Bang.
However, with Valentina on the hunt for the record and its possible link to their past, he now was finding it dominating his mind. Where had they come from? And why couldn’t they remember any further back than their appearance on Earth?
It couldn’t be a failure of memory; Marcus had perfect recall of every day and every minute since he awoke naked that rainy day in the Colorado mountains to find a stunned Jane Gray looking down at him and baby Jonathan, who he carried in his arms. But not a second before. Before that moment, there was a perfect blankness. Almost as if he hadn’t actually existed before then.
But, if he hadn't existed before then, why was he dreaming about that past??
Marcus groaned as he rubbed frustratedly at his face. Being a lifelong gamer, he was used to hitting points in whatever game he was playing where he would get an info dump that would basically set up the next stage of his campaign. Apparently authors did that in some of their books, too, if they needed to quickly bring their readers up to speed on the plot’s current situation.
What Valentina had done to him was an info dump. Shit, she info dumped the fuck outta him! An info dumpster fire, as it were. What was worse, was that it had nothing to close it off. She had left it open ended so he knew more was coming at some point. So he got the pleasure of adding that anticipation to the handful of unanswerable questions she had also burdened him with.
Unanswerable, but that didn’t stop him from trying to answer them for the rest of the night, so much so, it kept him from falling back to sleep. Thankfully he had nine hours of sleep under his belt already. Or when dawn’s first light hit his window, he would’ve been exhausted.
Still, when it did hit, he was feeling pretty wrung out. Sighing, the young Descendant stood up off the edge of his bed where he had sat for the last couple of hours, thinking. Grabbing his shower stuff, he then headed towards the communal shower the male Descendants all shared. Maybe with his head under the cold water for a few minutes would clear it up a bit, settle his thoughts and nerves.
It was as he stepped back into the hallway leading back to the dorm rooms that Marcus saw it: a faint red network of uneven lines stretching out in all directions away from. A glance down showed the lines weren’t originating at him, but were bending to him as he made his way forward.
A couple of blinks to clear his eyes and he looked again. And frowned when he found the network still visible. Something had unlocked in his head since the day before. Was it because he had finally achieved his flame form? Did that evolution in his abilities now grant him this vision of whatever it was?
He then looked above his head and felt his brow lift in curiosity to see a mirror network above him. Following the logic that he was walking through a three dimensional lattice of some sort, he then looked to either side. And almost nodded in satisfaction to find the network there as well, but in some strange sort of cross section that showed vertical lines instead of the horizontal ones, which still bent towards him.
If anything, that confirmed he was walking through something. What it was, well, the answer to that would have to wait until he spoke with Madam Chenoa this morning. Dropping off his shower stuff in his room, Marcus quickly made his way to the mess to grab a bite of breakfast before making a beeline to Chenoa’s study.
The Navajo wise woman was making her way to her study to begin her day, her tablet under her arm, when she came around the final corner and found Marcus waiting for her. The fire primal was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, looking deep in thought.
“Well, this is a surprise,” she dryly commented. “Usually you have to be ordered to come to a session. Not sitting here, waiting for me.”
Marcus stood and brushed off the seat of his pants.
“Sorry, Madam Chenoa,” he said. “I figured when you said ‘back here first thing’, you actually meant first thing in the morning. So, here I am.”
Chenoa frowned as she stared at him for a moment. Then she shrugged.
“A more literal interpretation of my words than I’m used to from you Descendants,” she said, stepping past him to open her door with a wave of her access card over the electronic lock. When it went green, she pushed the door open and motioned for him to follow.
Inside, after putting her tablet onto the stand with her dried herbs, Chenoa took her favorite seat before indicating Marcus should take the one opposite.
“Okay, Marcus. You are obviously here bright eyed and bushy tailed for a reason. Spit it out.” Marcus pulled in a quick breath to settle his thoughts. Did he relate exactly his visit from Valentina overnight, with her claim that their dreams were actually memories? It would out the water primal for breaking the rules, and may tip RedSky to her morpheopathy, if they didn’t already know. Add to that the strange network that he just saw, and he had a lot he could talk about. Or not talk at all.
Abruptly Marcus grimaced. Fuck it. If he didn’t tell somebody about what he was thinking about, he was going to lose his everloving mind!
“I had a dream last night,” he began. “A pretty intense one. And near the end of it, I felt somebody else in the dream with me.”
“The boy from your fire vision?” Chenoa carefully asked, her brow lifting as her expression was suddenly very intent.
“No. Another Descendant.”
“I see. Go on,” Chenoa urged, grabbing her tablet to turn it on and quickly find Marcus’s file.
“What makes you think it was another Descendent and wasn’t just an echo of you?”
“Each of us have a … a vibration,” he said with a frown. “Or maybe a resonance. I dunno how to describe it exactly. It’s probably related to that spirit fragment thing we talked about the other day. Regardless, that vibration is unique to each individual Descendant and lets me tell whether a person that I can’t see with my eyes is one of us, and which one it is. And the person I felt in my dream space last night was definitely a Descendant and not just my echo.” “Could you tell who it was?” Chenoa pressed, now scribbling notes.
“No, because feeling them in there startled me to the point that I woke up before I could sense their vibration. And found Valentina standing at the foot of my bed.” Chenoa paused in her notetaking to look up at him.
“You were quite certain it was Valentina,” she said with her brow lifting yet again. “And not one of your other Descendant comrades.”
“Yeah, it was her. I mean, she stayed in the dark part of the room for most of her visit, but I confirmed it was her as soon as she started talking.”
“What did she say?” the wise woman asked, going back to her note taking.
“She said she was not just a telepath, but something called a morpheopath, a dream walker. And that she had been walking all of our dreams, gathering fragments of a common memory that we were all accessing.”
Again Chenoa stopped her note taking to lift her eyes and look at him, her expression considering. She then looked down at her tablet for a moment, her fingers dancing over its face as she accessed something.
After studying what she had accessed for a moment, Chenoa then turned it towards Marcus and the fire primal saw that it was security cam footage. Set to night vision, the image had that black and white aspect that the high end night vision goggles that Spec Ops operators used on night missions yielded, the ones that gave a high amount of detail.
With that detail available, Marcus could see the camera was set to watch Valentina’s bed. Where he saw her sleeping, her face clearly visible. Focusing on the camera’s legend, he saw it read ‘Valentina Alvarez’ along with a moving time stamp: 3 am.
“According to the secure and encrypted security footage from her room, Valentina was there the entire night,” Chenoa indicated, studying Marcus’s face for a reaction.
Seeing his expression go from thoughtful to incredulous, then finally to disbelief, she flipped the tablet back around and pulled up another camera feed. Which she then showed to Marcus. And his look of disbelief got stronger when he saw that it was a camera that watched his room, and his bed. Where he could see himself clearly unconscious.
“According to the track from your room, you were alone the entire time,” Chenoa revealed, again carefully studying Marcus’s expression. “The first time you moved all night was to suddenly sit up at around 3 am and move to the edge of your bed. Which is where you sat until daybreak, before getting up and going for a shower. Audio also reported nothing in the way of human speech. So you sat on the edge of your bed saying nothing.”
Marcus pushed aside his gnawing disbelief and sighed again. Was he surprised that RedSky was watching them sleep? Ironically, not especially. They were high-priced assets, a fact of which both Rose and Berna reminded them usually on a weekly, if not a daily basis. The contractor only had government work to sort out special threats to the United States because they employed the Descendants. It was certainly in Rose’s best interest to make sure his silver arrows stayed healthy and in one piece. Which, as he was now witnessing, including spying on them while they slept.
Putting that rather disturbing discovery aside, though, Marcus found the evidence from the camera feeds was pretty stark. Valentina had not actually visited him overnight to deliver her rather impassioned report about the First Ones and their attempt to invade their reality. Then how did he explain him seeing her there and her talking about the record??
Looking over the tablet at an intent Chenoa, he chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. Then he asked:
“Did you know Valentina was a telepath?”
“RedSky did, yes,” Chenoa said with no hesitation. “And that she’s also a morpheopath?” Chenoa frowned.
“There is no such thing, Marcus,” the wise woman replied. “None of you have an ability to travel into other people’s dreams.”
Marcus could feel his hands balling into fists in his growing frustration. He had waited all night to tell the only person he figured would believe him about their dreams being memories and she was telling him it didn’t even happen?? And, even better, that there was no such thing as dream walking!
“Have … any of the other Descendants talked about a shared dream?” It was a last gasp effort to get validation on what he had experienced.
Chenoa didn’t answer right away, flipping the tablet back around to face her before quickly accessing something on it. When she found it, she again studied what it was for a moment then looked over at him.
“Pretty sure I’m not supposed to share this with you, but since it kinda looks like you’re losing your mind and will likely get a psych eval and mandated therapy after our session today anyway, I’m not seeing the big deal.” A glance at the tablet’s screen was followed by: “According to the recent psych evals done on Jay, Doug and Valentina, none of them have reported having dreams that were the same as the others. Furthermore, in transcripts of the various spiritual exercises I have them do here in the study, there also was no mention of shared dreams.” Chenoa looked at him, her expression now sympathetic.
“I don’t know if it’s because we pushed you too hard yesterday, Marcus, and unlocked not just your fire form, but some sort of childhood trauma as well which is messing up your cognitive and recall functions. But something’s going on in your head that the shrinks are going to want to take a look at. To make sure you’re still stable enough to go out on missions.”
“Great!” Marcus growled. “Now you’re making it sound like I’m going crazy. Instead of trying to help me figure out what I experienced last night.” Chenoa held up both hands.
“I’m not saying you’re crazy, Marcus,” she hastened to explain. “And I need you to calm down. Your energy core is starting to spike.” Marcus shot out of his chair.
“I am calm!” he snarled. “I just don’t understand all of this bullshit about nobody else claiming shared dreams and Valentina not walking in and out of our minds. She was there, in my room last night, as solid as I am now!”
Chenoa’s eyes widened with surprise. Then she was carefully standing, again holding her hands out in front of her in the universal gesture calling for peace.
“Okay, Marcus. I really need you to calm down right now!” she said carefully. “I don’t want to call a suppression team to take you into custody. But I will, if you’re going to lose control of your fire form and light all my shit on fire!”
Fire form? Marcus frowned and looked down at himself. And nearly swore out loud to find his body had been transformed back into the living flame he had been yesterday.
“Damnit,” he hissed. At least, that’s what he was trying to say. The word, instead, came out as a series of crackles and hisses, his body having gone full flame mode. Trying to focus on calming the flames only made them dance higher.
“Ops, this is Chenoa. I need an Elemental Fire Suppression team in my study ASAP. Marcus has lost control of his fire form!” Chenoa yelled at the ceiling even as she stepped around her chair to put it between him and her.
“No!” Marcus tried shouting. Instead the flames making up his face danced wildly for a moment before, with a flare of light, part of them arced through the air to touch one of the medicine woman’s bundle of herbs. With a second flare, the bundle lit on fire.
“Damn it, Marcus. I said, don’t light my shit on fire!” Chenoa shouted, grabbing a heavy piece of canvas she had been using to doodle mystical symbols on and made to slap the burning bundle back into somnolence.
The young fire elemental watched her grab the piece of fabric. Then his eyes were tracking back to the flickering flame on the herb bundle, even as he wondered if he truly had eyes anymore, being completely made out of flickering flames.
Then his eyes were falling on the small, lighter-sized flame and suddenly it was the only thing he could see. Its small, orange and red spindle, floating in its heat corona just above the bundle’s actual surface. Tiny, when compared to him, but just as alive in an entropy-filled way. Alive, so alive.
It was almost as if it was calling to him. That he could feel the rush of fuel becoming flame.
All he had to do was reach out to it. Reach. Out. To. It.
Chenoa grimaced as she began to swing the canvas piece onto the flickering flame on her herb bundle. Only to blink in surprise when the heat and light that had been Marcus in his elemental form, abruptly disappeared. Twisting towards where he had been standing in the hopes the young man had discovered his individual off switch, the medicine woman found her eyes widening in surprise instead to find only a pair of charred footprints on the rug where he had been standing. Marcus Gray, against all reason, had vanished.
****