*copyrighted material*
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Sheets of glass snapped to the bitter winds, and the waxen and thickish wash was chipped to a downy baby blue at the edges of the window frames. He dreaded those fainted colors, the crunches of the mansion’s roof and its joints. Crying to whisks every night. The rooms smelled like aged shoe dye and the oils of the gloss varnish the maids used to polish the furniture with. The openings were colossal at this part of the Mulhouse mansion. It all reminded him of the Lodge House hotel, the delicate details foreshadowed by its antiquity and frailness. Yet, cleaner, and everything in its place.
The unenterprising mustard velvet curtains, the furry cream carpets, and the hardwood floors felt like home, somewhat. Not a home he’d experienced before the Rootstocks, but a home sensed as mellow and inviolable for the first time in his life but washed with pampering he did not feel comfortable with. A crescent moon peeked softly through the moving, silk curtains. He sat on the edge of his bed in a room big enough to be the hotel’s lobby decorated with angelic tapestry, a bedroom cabinet that could hold twenty times what he was used to wearing, sheep pelt rugs, and old-time black wood-carved relics amongst other objects, two chandeliers, a window seat with a breathtaking view from the third and last floor of the mansion, and a massive bathroom with its white toilet, shower, and bathtub. His gray eyes shifted away from his algebra textbook towards the wall clock that read 10:38 P.M. He still wore that morning’s sleeping suit as usual. He closed the book with a loud smack and hurried to take a hot shower, dropping his clothes wherever and flinching at the
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pearly-white, terribly cold tiles under his feet. His pale skin got lost under the steamy waters as he rubbed the dirt out from his scalp.
Calvin had been receiving an education with a tutor during his stay, all thanks to Mrs. Mulhouse and her husband Rolf, who’d decided to adopt him when Wyatt was gone once more. At seventeen his ash blonde hair had grown evenly and long enough to touch his shoulders, his cheeks had sunk into themselves and his face bones had taken sharp-cut molded features like those of a growing man. A couple of growing mustache follicles, although he could never put on any weight despite a healthy diet. All of the handed clothes from the family were too baggy for his frame, he had stuck with the sweaters because they didn’t look so bad on him and were quite comfortable. Trousers were a little tricky but he’d managed to pin a few to fit him nicely. His new adoptive mother, Mickey, had insisted his driver could take him out for new pairs of anything he needed with the Rootstocks having recovered Bartleby city almost in its totality in the last few years. But Calvin had been feuding against a severe state of depression for the same amount of time watching his brother transfigure into someone else. Having a comfortable life at that moment while his brother lived an unrepairable mutation—according to Rafí and the rest of the Renou bishops—had been a lethal blow for the teenager. A hit that had left him ill in bed for months and then in total self-isolation.
Calvin walked out of the shower drenched, a towel across his nape as he picked up some clean clothes from a pile on the floor, he was not fond of the bedroom cabinet, to say the least. Keeping his clothes in a jumble reminded him of his old and hungry life at the abandoned hotel. He slipped into an olive green sweater and a pair of gray trousers he proceeded to pin again. He tied his black polished shoes, no socks on. The teenager was combing his hair back when he heard Carol scratching at his door. He twisted and pulled the knob and sprinted towards the bathroom to brush his teeth, the floor was wet enough to have him almost crash over the sink. The fox came in hissing.
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“I know I’m late!” He groaned, foaming at the mouth with toothpaste. When he was done he snatched his books and ran down the hall and downstairs with Carol tailing him like in the old days. Depression or not, they were still the boy and the fox.
Teenage Calvin was smart enough not to blame the Renou tribes and the Defenders of Shine entirely for their apparent miscalculations, as they’d both abandoned the war years ago over the Rootstock’s very same germinating seedbed of self-regard, now easy to see as their true core. His dispute was exclusive with them, who kept pressuring the Renou village to convince the Defenders into sending a new super soldier to fight for them, someone who’d fill their expectations in every aspect, no hiccups. Rafí couldn’t have been any braver to rejoin the battle two years ago when her people’s blood had been shed so furiously while cornered in Mt. Mowaki’s domains, the decisive event that had led to the attack on Fort Yggdrasil months later. After that, the Renou Matriarch with the help of Woodbone and British emissary Cobra Killgore stayed behind to continue the battle while he and Wyatt fled along with Mickey. Nooktown had turned into a combat zone less than a month later, many townsfolk had not survived it between rebellions on their part and those that simply wanted to escape to Norway. Nooktown’s demise occupied a large portion of Calvin’s brain storage too, as he believed he’d brought the war upon them after crossing paths with his new adoptive mother. He’d mistaken the Rootstock council’s welcome as a genuine gesture of fellowship, he’d learned the hard way not everything was done under Mickey’s orders. This council had asked for private sessions with Krishanu after they implied to Mrs. Mulhouse that his new son was being too much of an influence on her decisions.
Beautiful marble fixtures adorned the mansion, old black wood arches with shedding skins, golden candleholders, and dusty cream-color zebra cushions. The boy’s snapping soles echoed against the walls until he reached the kitchen, which occupied most of the first floor. There he found the cook serving his delightful entrées on an oval, silver plate, taken aback as usual as Sissel—his
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teacher—popped in her mouth his honeyed shrimps one after another, humming without a care in the world.
“I’m seriously starting to believe you’d be just fine if I didn’t show up.” Calvin huffed, placing his books on the counter.
“I, for sure wouldn’t climb up to the third floor if that’s what you mean . . . ” She giggled, getting a hold of her textbooks and heading to the dining table. Taller than most women with a narrow waist and ginger, her wavy hair barely reached her shoulders, the clearest pair of blue jewel-like eyes the boy had ever seen. Sissel had been Mickey’s right hand managing the research department within the Rootstocks after being proclaimed leader, a talented mathematician, and engineer that she’d met at university while being just two schoolgirls. It was no exaggeration to say that in this mansion chefs came and went like the months and seasons just like her wardrobe. She loved dresses, cloaks, massive coats, skirts, and tights. Hats like berets and porkie pie hats, and lots of shiny shoes too.
Amongst the subjects, the tall ginger had been introducing him for the last couple of years to all branches of Math. Arithmetics, Algebra, Geometry, and Applied Mathematics like Calculus, Trigonometry, and Physics. The woman picked up her notes as she dragged a medium-sized chalkboard with tiny wheels from across the room.
“Where were we last time?”
“Physics, page 204, Introduction To Wave Equations.” He said, scribbling on his textbook with a 2B pencil and rubbing the back of his neck.
“Well . . . ? What do you think? How was the reading?”
“C—Could I?”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a universitarian, least of all hold a Master’s Degree. If . . . if we find this THING and you make ME put it together someone could die. . . Or . . . Worse.”
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“You think your calculations would be wrong. What else?”
“What do you mean ‘what else?’ Making an opening that big could fuck up everything! Hagan and Kurt—”
“I knew Hagan and Kurt, Calvin. Their notes are crystal clear, they knew they needed a third brain. Mr. Yuudai and his co-pilot came in through one of those openings with Hagan’s letter from that dimension and time—the letter Mickey was supposed to get—which you delivered to her successfully. Yuudai Uemura and his investigation team sacrificed their lives making contact with both Hagan and Kurt. Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know the implications of his words.”
“‘A new mind, yet not born’ . . . ” The teenager paraphrased.
“Exactly.” Sissel caught the moment in which his eyes pinwheeled and stopped at a small-framed picture set on the wall just a few steps behind her. She turned around and carefully took the picture in her hands and gave it to Calvin, who looked sick to his stomach. The picture held the images of two men out on a mizzly night, with big neon letters behind them. From left to right, a balding man sporting wire glasses, and a waxed mustache while next to him was a fellow with oiled-up hoary hair parted to a side with messy ends and a clean-shaven face. The latter was holding a cardboard sign that read, ‘WE ARE IN, BOYS! G.E.D. ON EXHIBIT!’ Carol brushed her side on the boy’s calf, but he couldn’t get his eyes off the photograph.
Mickey had shared their story with the Elsner brothers on that last bus trip, two years ago. The brightest minds of the scientific community of Roanoke had praised these men for their exhausting, yet fulfilling discoveries on the delicate fibers of time and space. They had assured their peers the machine they had put together could detect nearby damages on these webs, once located these could be turned to openings following a very detailed set of steps from which several realities could be
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accessed. Done poorly, however, could cut the webs into a dimensional rift that would act as a warp hole of a ‘C type’ effect—a quicksand type of wound—and bent reality causing several physics damages to that specific area. A tiny bit of mayhem could not be discarded just as deep emotional trauma and probably some casualties without proper emergency protocol. Even so, Hagan Mulhouse and Kurt Stoen respectively could have changed life as it was known had their creation been exhibited as it was intended at the Pegasus Emporium. The Pegasus Emporium was an exhibition facility known to house the best creations of the country per season and catapulted the career of their inventors to the stratosphere, generally, the benefactors received juicy job offers overseas by the end of the campaign as well as national recognition and subsidies. The Pegasus Emporium was massive in size, and also the headquarters to The Pegasus Expo campaign, a fair-like event that took place annually out of the country and more recently in the country as well. The founder of the organization, one of Roanoke’s wealthy henchmen by the name of Fritz Sismore, had passed away months before Hagan’s and Kurt’s application, his only daughter had stepped in to watch over her father’s work of a lifetime and had been who’d approve their participation. The introduction of Porscha Sismore, the definitive successor of the entire Sismore heritage, had revolutionized the vision of the consortium. Some even commented how this young lady had turned an establishment ruled by men upside down, her efforts of supplying the new agricultural, infrastructural and medicinal technology exhibited at The Pegasus Emporium—just to name a few—to the third world, nations was the incontrovertible evidence that a new era was on the horizon. That’s if Roanoke had approved such a motion instead of kidnapping her and assassinating her a year and a half later. Once again, Roanoke had shut down any coming inconveniences to their plans while Hagan and Kurt’s machine had never been shown to the public purposefully after being in a queue as its research and assembly were financially the government’s property. The photograph before the teenager’s eyes had been taken days before Porscha’s
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kidnapping, holding the frame felt like holding a hammering heavy iron block by the tip of his fingers, falling off at any moment.
Mr. Hagan Mulhouse, the father of Mickey Cecile Mulhouse, was a renowned philosopher and cosmologist born in Roanoke in 1855, decades before the civil war. The only son of a couple of harvesters that had resorted to feeding him mashed pears from a small tree as a baby while the whole family faced starvation. At the age of eight, his grandfather built him a telescope out of wood, once a harvester too, he’d mastered woodwork many moons ago. That same telescope took Hagan to greater heights, subjectively, and to wonder what other spaces protracted around the stars he could barely glimpse at with his grandfather’s artifact. His genius did not come right away until he was older and learned about Galileo Galilei’s existence through a demented homeless man called Erik Berntsen who shouted about the end of times and prophesized through Galileo’s research. Hagan befriended Erik and his knowledge grew immeasurably while getting him clean clothes and freshly cut pineapple slices every so often from a market he used to work for. Later on, he’d learn from locals that his mentor used to be a professor at the Grand University of Bartleby and that one of his students, a graduate teaching assistant from the institution, still visited him regularly despite the man’s irrational behavior in public. It was just through this student, Kurt Stoen, and his mentor’s insistence that Hagan’s academic preparation began immediately, yet five years after attending regular school no more, which proved to be a major challenge. Kurt and Erik served him as tutors in the years to come, and even after Erik’s tragic and pitiful passing, the education continued its course until the proper time to file an admission application to the same university presented itself, with the hopes of gaining a full scholarship.
Hagan was admitted, and granted what no boy of his status had ever had the chance to grasp, a spot in the most narcissistically prestigious university—on the only soil he had ever known—with full financial aid. That man would not forget where he’d come from so easily, but alas, ambition is and was a slithering thing that devoured the clearest of minds. No one is or was safe from the choleric pincers
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of ‘The Grip of Modern Men’, destined to haunt all human souls no matter their views, color of skin, or their knowings. Young Hagan’s studies at the Grand University of Bartleby opened for him impossibly locked doors, and his long dedicated essays of the great possibility of multiple universes surging at all times granted him international awards and Roanoke’s of all highest recognitions. The government secretly offered him to work on one of his own most defying projects, completely funded by them. As his only condition to make it happen, he brought Kurt on board as his associate as they’d become the closest of friends ever since they had met, assuring his employers he was a key to this new puzzle and that his assistance would ensure their success. Nearly six years later, Stoen and Mulhouse had finished their prototype, a machine that possessed the capability to further rupture the fabrics of space and time. These wounds would be able to heal rapidly once the machine was turned off according to their research but not before dropping what they called ‘satellites’ into them. These satellites per se were individually manufactured copper balls the size of a snowball that would translate their location into data. Forming a map of whatever was at the other side if lots of them were poured in. They called the prototype G.E.D. or Galileo Ecto Domination. The first word of its name came from Galileo’s inspirational research, then ‘Ecto’ from its Greek form ‘ektos’ which means ‘on the outside’ such as breaking the barrier of their universe to explore the outer spaces out there. And finally, ‘Domination’ the English word, the exercise of controlling these openings in hopes of transcending as a civilization. Hagan and Kurt truly believed transcending were possible with their invention, but even so, it did not belong to them. Regardless of what they believed would be the best way to use it.
Calvin placed the frame on the dining table and sighed as if his lungs had grown small underwater, then turned his attention to another set of objects of great value—walking into another hall—a space Mickey saved for their glorious triumphs. Artifacts enclosed in crystals raised on silver-coated pedestals. The teenager walked straight to the glittering and translucent box that kept the Defender’s marble bow and arrow untouched. The same two objects Marut had gifted him with to stop the
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Visitor’s savage machine back at Fort Yggdrasil. The set held its perfect conditions as if it hadn’t aged a day. The arrow with its crow feathers at its end and its sharp, marble arrow tip carved out to the shape of an eagle’s head—a detail he had only noticed after a Renou warrior had climbed the walls of the Fort to bring it back in a hero’s effort. A year later, Ávrá Kappfjell—head of the Renou Community in Bartleby—had pointed out in one of her visits while looking at these objects that the Renou had come up with their own traditions, even as they were fathered and mothered by the Saami. The Saami had encouraged their children, as a new tribe, to observe the world and create their lore. These children were called an ‘anomaly’ by them, because their existence belonged to a different realm and therefore, were an impact on the arriving universe. The first Renou children had come from a parallel reality and formed two different tribes, the Renou, and the Sea Renou. Found and welcomed by the Saami with open arms, educated them as they came in their purest form to, later on, take on the world or so it was meant to be. The first new tribe had entered this world with notions of their past home, to be more precise land of eagles and crows. These two mighty birds shared, in their history, a deadly interaction. As the Eagle flies up further into the clouds, a Crow persecutes them in hope of bringing them down, assaulting them with their beaks and claws. But the Eagle knows how to fly high, while the Crow can’t take the breathless atmosphere of the heights that does not faze his adversary, who’d done no wrong but to ascend. The arrow Mickey had shot that night towards Fort Yggdrasil had been forged with that piece of history, destined to find a target that would honor the Renou’s identity along with their duty to herd reindeer and make contact with the Defenders of Shine after crossing the realm portal that had taken them to where they were today.
Carol stood up and dragged herself from where she observed the boy she had learned to defend with her own life and had taken in as his child. Stretched towards him and plopped by his side, tilting her head so his fingers would brush the side of her ear, yearning for touch. The teenager had listened to Ávrá’s every word, knowing the Renou’s coming had led to this, but again he had reached a
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crossroad of his own. Like the moment he had decided to enter a flaming barn in a quest for answers. But no matter how many times Mickey, Ávrá, or Sissel had spoken to him to give them the reassurance he needed. He’d found himself with a cross that was too much to bear, just like Ráfi had predicted.
“I don’t think I feel well enough tonight . . . ”
Calvin announced, followed by a sigh. He left the room with those words and went straight up to his room on the third floor, while Sissel began to pick up her books. It did not hurt to try with this boy.
END OF CHAPTER #3