Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) by Gary Stringer (howl and other poems .txt) 📕

He’s having another one of his moods. He gets like this from time to time. Go on, have a look through the glass.”

Jessica moved aside, close to Sara, and nuzzled her sister’s neck in a Chetsuan apology. Sara licked Jessica’s forehead, and all was forgiven.

Inside the training centre, Daelen was pushing himself like nothing they’d seen before. The reinforced and shielded walls strained under the assault of his cannon blasts. He had conjured a copy for the purposes of sparring, but it was like he thought he was fighting Aden in there. Fighting for real. Their attacks were a flurry of movement, each blow strong enough to flatten a mountain and he was accelerating, hitting harder and faster, using ever more powerful cannon blasts, all the time screaming and yelling unintelligibly.

Cat spotted some technology standing in the far corner. In one of their recent trips into the city, Sara had taken them to something called a ‘rock and roll bar’ which had a music player called a jukebox. The device in the corner looked a bit like that, but it didn’t seem to be designed to play music.

“It’s a gravity generator,” Jessica explained. “It’s why we can’t get in. It’s ten times Earth normal, we’d be killed instantly. Of course, Daelen’s not like us so he can take it.”

Cat noticed Jessica’s usual affectations of speech disappeared when she was upset. She missed hearing them, and she wanted her to be happy again so she could go back to using them.

There came another mini earthquake. It felt as though the whole world shook that time.

“What the hell is he trying to do? Break this world in two or just flatten his own house?” Mandalee wondered.

As she spoke, Daelen’s frenzied attack on himself grew in intensity, until he finally managed to knock himself out. At least, they hoped he was just unconscious. His copy vanished. A stray bit of power from his last volley had hit the gravity generator, and the pitch of the hum it was emitting began to rise.

“Oh, no!” Sara gasped. “The gravity’s being turned up higher!”

It was already up to twelve G and climbing.

“How much can Daelen take?” Mandalee wondered. Then, when the house shook again, she revised her question. “Actually, never mind Daelen. How much can this house take?” she worried.

The gravity well was already too strong for them to attempt to step into even if they could get through the door, but Catriona had a ridiculous radical plan. Daelen had shielded the room but had made the mistake people always made: he forgot to shield the floor. She used her stoneshaper magic, weakening the floor until it gave way and the device fell through. Cat encouraged the process still further so that the Earth itself swallowed the machine whole. Then she changed the magic to squeeze the gap closed, crushing the machine within. The gravity returned to normal.

The next challenge was getting inside.

“If you can make a small gap,” Sara volunteered, “I could get in and shut down the shields from the inside to let the rest of you in.”

Jessica backed her up. “My sister’s got a pretty good head for tech skills.”

Cat agreed and reshaped the floor to create a crawlspace underneath the door.

Borrowing a knife from Mandalee that she said looked ideal, Sara crawled inside, prised off the control panel and set to fiddling with its inner workings. After a minute, she got annoyed and kicked the door. Giving up on the technical approach, she reached for a gun that she had strapped to her leg under her skirt.

“We both have them for security,” Jessica explained. “So far, no-one’s ever tried to break in from another world, at least as long as we’ve been here. Still, you never know.”

Sara shot the control panel with what Jessica called a laser, but it was shielded against that sort of attack. Moving on to Plan C, she undid the holster strap from around her leg and used it to strap the gun to the knife instead. It took a couple of goes, but she managed to get the knife wedged into the frame of the control panel, preventing the gun from falling down.

“Guys,” Jessica fretted, “if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, I think we’d best stand well back, just in case.”

Sara fiddled with something inside the gun’s workings and ran away from the door, getting down on the floor to shield Daelen’s body with hers. There was a deafening, high-pitched whine, followed by a massive explosion as the gun blew itself up, taking the control panel, the door and half the wall down with it.

It took a moment for the smoke and dust to settle enough to be able to see again, but Jessica was immediately on her feet, calling out for her sister.

“I’m here, Jess,” came her reply as the air cleared. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

Jessica ran to her and embraced her tightly, then she pulled away, looked at the gaping hole in the wall and quipped, “Hey, Sara, love. You were only supposed to blow the bloody door off.”

The two Tempestrians didn’t get the reference, but Sara obviously did, because they did another of their tail-high-fives.

Cat was in there in a flash, holding Daelen in her arms, Mandalee by her side. When Mandalee’s healing proved unsuccessful, Catriona tried her way, but that also failed.

“It’s not you guys,” Sara reassured them, shaking her head. “There’s nothing physically wrong with him. He’s just drained. Once we get him charging up again, he’ll be fine.”

She volunteered to go and fetch a trolley so they could wheel him to the sickbay.

“Classic hero behaviour, I’m afraid, dears,” Jessica remarked.

Cat and Mandalee shared a smile at hearing her old speech pattern re-emerging, now that the immediate danger was past.

“Every now and then, Daelen gets all het up about his battles, starts to think he’s a monster and pushes himself to the edge to try and get even stronger, so he can ‘make up’ for whatever he reckons he’s done