Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (2 page)

It was then that Almara, his heart broken and his children motherless, had developed the plan to take the wizards who remained on his council and quest across the planets to find a way to end the destruction once and for all.
 

They disappeared. Stories of their travels were few, and all that anyone knew was that conditions had improved a few years after the quest had left Riverstone.
 

But all of that was a long, long time ago. We had no idea what life was like on Aria now, or what may have happened during the time since.
 

So I had insisted on caution as we made our way down that hill and into the port village. After a day of watching the ships from a distance, quietly asking around about their destinations, Jade chose one to take our chances on. I had decided to let her take the lead, here on her home planet, sure that she would recognize the best ways to get what we needed. Upon seeing the sailors of the chosen ship up close, however, I was somewhat alarmed.

“Jade,” I hissed behind her as she approached the men on the dock. “I don’t think this is a good idea. Can’t we just, I don’t know, find our own boat? I don’t like the looks of these men.” Up ahead a group of enormous brutes shuffled goods onto the ship.
 

“It’s this one that will be going by Riverstone,” she said. She gazed up at the hull and a shadow of concern crossed her face. “I was surprised that none of the others were going in that direction, actually. Riverstone was a center of trade when I was a child.” Her eyes remained unfocused for another moment, but then fell from the ship and met mine. “Besides, any boat that you and I could handle alone would be swallowed up by the sea on our first night out. We need to travel by ship.” She walked away towards the men.
 

I watched her go, so confident now compared to the child I had first met. Her worn nightgown from the caves had long since been replaced with rugged traveling clothes, pants and long sleeves. On her belt her powerful jade knife stuck into its sheath. Her fingers rested on her upper thigh as she walked, ready to grasp the handle of the blade with the slightest provocation.
 
If it weren’t for her long, white-blond hair she would have looked just like a teenage boy, too small to be mistaken for a man, but too bold to be treated as a child.

I looked up at the wooden craft doubtfully as Jade strode away. From the bow that towered over our heads, a skull carved into the wood stared menacingly down.
 

“Does it have to be the one with the skull?” I mumbled under my breath. I glanced around. Other ships lined the port, and none of them had skulls. Smartly outfitted and with slim young men working on their docks, they seemed like much friendlier options.
 

Jade returned, impatient at my delay, and grabbed my arm, dragging me along towards the death ship. As I peered back and forth over our shoulders, on the lookout for attack, she struck a deal with the largest of the men on the dock. She slid him a neat handful of silver coins and hopped onto the mounting plank without bothering to wait for his permission. I eyeballed him, and as he glared down at me from his towering height, his head slowly nodded once. I dashed up the plank after her.
 

It hadn’t taken long for me to realize that I was not the seafaring type. Within ten minutes I was feeling dizzy from the tiny ripples of water that skirted under the boat in the harbor. By the time we set sail I was fully green. After the dinner fiasco I made my way down to our tiny room to ride out the rest of the trip in isolation.

But it was so hot. The sun had set many hours ago, but the heat from the day was still trapped down below. I considered that the men I had embarrassed myself in front of at dinner might have mostly retired for the night. A soft waft of salty air, just slightly less stifling than that in the cabin, came through the swinging door and teased my nose. Finally, I forced myself to sit up. When walking didn’t seem possible, I settled for crawling from the bed to the door and out into the narrow hallway.
 

The ship knocked me from side to side as I scurried down the tiny corridor like a mouse. Then, from an opening above my head, cool night air gently blew down over me. I raised my head and closed my eyes, relieved at the fresh, sweet smell. A slim set of stairs, more a ladder than a proper staircase, snaked down the wall beneath the opening. I eagerly climbed out of the wooden tomb I had been holed up in.

I hated to admit it, but Jade had been right. The instant I heaved my miserable body out from the depths of the ship I began to feel better. The deck was all but deserted. One man sat at the controls of the ship, bare feet propped up on the wheel, tankard propped up on his stomach. He flashed a toothless grin at me and raised his ale in a drunken salute.
 

“Where’s Jade?” I asked. He raised the mug in the direction of the bow and I nodded. Then he tilted his head back at a sharp angle and poured the remainder of the beer down his throat.
 

The night sky was moonless, and the heavens sparkled down on the ocean like glittering rain. I walked unsteadily towards the front of the ship. Up ahead Jade’s dim outline was cut against the dark sea beyond, her mane of hair flying out behind her. As I came closer I heard her humming, but the words I couldn’t make out over the roar of the waves.

She turned at the sound of my footsteps, and her face broke into a wide smile.

“Ah! I told you you would feel better!” she said. “You do feel better, don’t you?”

I smirked at her and nodded.

“Mmm, hmm,” she said, and turned her gaze back out to the ocean.
 

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Two days. They’ve agreed to let us out on one of the lifeboats when we’re near.”

“You mean they’re not even stopping at Riverstone?” I asked.

“No, it appears not,” she said. If she tried to hide the worry on her face, it didn’t work. Suddenly I understood her desire for speed, to get to Riverstone as quickly as possible. As I had been searching for Almara so that I could return home, she was returning home now, and hoping to find him already there. Maybe, with our arrival at Riverstone, our search for Almara would be over. And she would finally have her father back.

“How do you know these guys will take us where they say?” I asked.
 

“Because I know the way. I can read these stars as well as any map.”

I looked up at the blazing night sky. Where I saw an impenetrable mass of twinkling lights, Jade saw roadmaps, street signs. We were in her neighborhood, and it was the first time she had seen it in two hundred years.
 

“Does it still look the same?” I asked. I remembered visiting our old neighborhood back home once, the apartment block we had lived in before my dad left. Things had changed. Paint colors and traffic signals were different than I had remembered, and everything looked smaller.

“The stars don’t change so much,” she said. “But the harbor wasn’t the same. The people were cold. When I was a child, the town was friendly, lively even. And passage to Riverstone was common, with ships leaving daily. It concerns me greatly, the lack of options we had today.”

Yes, I was concerned about that, too.
 

Months ago, when I first met Jade, I had been searching for the links Almara had left behind. Each time I found one I would use it to jump to the next location, and each jump would bring me closer to finding him. Together, Jade and I traveled for a time, and we had succeeded in finding several more of Almara’s links.

But then our trail suddenly evaporated. The last link we found, which brought us from the forests on Aegis to the plains of Aria, had failed to give us any further guidance. Unlike the other links, no map had appeared, no driving heat or howl had shown us where to go. It had simply deposited us here on Aria, and no further instruction was revealed.
 

Not knowing where, exactly, to journey to find the next link, we chose to move on to the only place on Aeso we could think of where we might find it: Riverstone. It was a guess and a gamble. Almara had originally left these links for Brendan. Had he hoped that his son would know to find the next link in Riverstone, his home?
 

As the ship jerked up and down with the swells of the ocean, I let the spray mist across my face. In the distance the faintest glow of sunrise was beginning to light the horizon. It was hard to feel fearful about what awaited us in Riverstone just at the moment. I was too caught up in the relief I felt in this delicious, cool air. I leaned slightly over the railing, lifted my chin skyward and breathed long, slow breaths.

But my respite was short-lived. Before Jade could say another word, a shrill whistle pierced through the night. I guess that the few men up on deck weren’t all as drunk as the driver of this great, lumbering boat. The lookouts high up in the sails had seen something, and several alarmed shouts echoed against the surface of the water.
 

I turned, staring around for the cause of the disturbance. No other ships revealed themselves. Land was still out of sight. I couldn’t see any threat at all. What was the commotion about?
 

Jade had gone silent amidst the chaos. I turned and saw that her hands gripped the edge of the railing, and her eyes were wide and fixed on a point in the distance I could not see.

“What is it?” I asked, squinting in the same direction. She stayed silent, her mouth hanging slightly open. I searched and searched, but the darkness, still hanging on to the last hour of night, revealed little.
 

The night had suddenly turned black again, whereas moments before the moonless sky had still been bright with stars, the promise of sunrise teasing the horizon. Now it was as if half of those lights had gone out. Where had the stars gone? What had happened to the early morning light?
 

Then, with a sickening twist of my stomach, I suddenly understood. The stars hadn’t gone out or moved or changed in any way at all. The sun hadn’t sunk back down below the waves. The light was being obscured by something, something massive and black.
 

Water.

A great, enormous wave rose up ahead of the ship, much larger than anything we had voyaged over since coming aboard. Much larger, in fact, than any wave I had ever seen. And it was headed, fast, in our direction.

My jaw dropped open, and for a moment I stood there, still as the statue my friend next to me had become. Through the fog of panic that quickly stifled my brain, a single thought floated up to the surface.
 

Stay on the boat.
 

I wrenched myself away from Jade and the sight of our approaching death. My eyes found what they were searching for quickly; a long twist of rope was spun into a coil on the deck, and a good, strong rope was exactly what I needed.

I grabbed Jade’s arm, yanking her from the railing, and flung her ahead of me towards the closest mast. She only made it a couple of steps before I had to prod her along again. Her face was still frozen in terror, her mouth moving but no sound coming from her throat. I knew she would be useless in the effort to save even herself. This was where Jade’s abilities always faltered. When faced with horror, time after time, she crumbled.
 

I pushed her closer to the mast and began uncoiling the rope. I unwrapped several feet of it and then draped it around Jade’s midsection, tying a clumsy knot and then taking the end and wrapping it around myself. If the ship went down, we would be in trouble, tied to it like bait to a fishing line. But if it stayed afloat, we might have a chance of surviving. We each wrapped our arms around the great wooden post and turned our eyes to the new horizon line, which was now towering a hundred feet over our heads.
 

The wave didn’t hit the boat as a slap might, but instead crept up on us, surging up like a mountain rising from the ocean. As it rolled underneath the ship, it lifted the vessel up with it until we were nearly vertical. We were tossed like children’s toys, no hope of holding onto the mast against the great force of gravity. Screams and shouts came from all around, and then were lost to the thunderous rush of water below.
 

The rope cut into my side as I dangled below Jade. I couldn’t see. Saltwater choked in my throat and stung my eyes as I flailed at the end of the rope. Jade was screaming, the sound nearly lost against the angry roar of water colliding with wood. The boat creaked and groaned as several long beams of the deck split in two.
 

And then it was over. As quickly as it began, the ship righted itself on the backside of the wave. The sky was suddenly bright with morning once again. We both hit the deck hard, panting for breath, sobbing dry tears. Jade moaned three feet away, where she lay sprawled on what remained of the deck. It had all happened so fast.

“Are you ok?” I asked hoarsely. She didn’t respond. “Jade!” I reached out and grabbed onto her foot, shaking it to get her attention. She turned her body over and crawled towards me, weeping like a young child. When she reached my side, she gripped onto my arms and buried her head in my chest.
 

She was ok. We were alive.
 

Shouts broke out as the sailors from down below came up to the deck. When they realized the men who had been up top had vanished, they began to search the waters. The shouts and screams I had heard still rang in my ears, and I remembered how the sounds had stopped so abruptly.
 

But the crew found nothing. The men I had heard had been swallowed up. And in the distance the giant wave rippled away from the ship, now darkening the sky along a different stretch of ocean.
 

I sat up and began to untie the rope with my wet, shaking hands. I was cold from the drenching of icy water, but I was in one piece.
 

“What was that?” she said, trembling.

“I don’t know,” I panted. “Rogue wave?” She looked at me, confused, so I went on. “You know, one of those giant waves out at sea that develop from thin air and sink ships.”