"Monster"
Invader, Part 4
By Mike Christopher
Read Part 3 "Prisoner"


"You say it called you Eliwan? Could you have been mistaken?" Delia’s brows were furrowed in consternation. Shimmer nodded respectfully, but secretly she was becoming tired of answering the scholars?endlessly repeated questions.
Nimbulo finally stirred in his seat. Shimmer had begun to suspect he had fallen asleep with his eyes open, so long had he remained motionless. He leaned forward, draping his long arms across the polished starwood table.
"I think we have learned all that the adept can tell us." He addressed the assemblage of Arderian Scholars, subtly scolding them in his usual manner. The Elder magi turned to face Shimmer and Kalius. "Too, I believe that all of us here know exactly what it is we are faced with, even though we could never have expected this to come to pass."
"Um?i>I don’t know what we’re facin? Somebody mind tellin?me what’s goin?on?" Shimmer turned to place a restraining hand upon the young scout’s arm.
"Now just a minute Nimbulo," blurted Lasada, blatantly ignoring Kalius?questions. "We all must surely know what the situation looks like, but let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions!"
"And you would rather sit idly and debate about it for another day or so? How about a week? A month, perhaps?" Nimbulo’s patience had reached the breaking point. Shimmer was all too aware of the terrible tempers the Arderian Elder was capable of. She hoped he could restrain himself a little longer—the last thing needed now was a battle of wills. They needed action.
"Don’t be ridiculous, Nimbulo! You can’t seriously expect us all to believe that an ancient enemy, almost a myth, has suddenly reappeared in our midst after what…more than three thousand years?" Lasada turned to confront the other scholars. "Well, I cannot speak for the rest of you…but I stopped believing in bedtime stories long ago, and I’m not intending to start believing them now! No! There has to be another explanation!" Lasada turned and floated up and out of the great hall through the upper balconies.
"Hmmph" was all Nimbulo said.
"I agree with Lasada, in sentiment if not in his ill manners." Nimbulo turned to glare accusingly at her, bushy eyebrows raised challengingly. Delia hastened to add, "Now, now. All I am saying is that we should do what we can to glean additional information." Turning to Shimmer, she asked, "Are the Healers with the creature at this time?"
Shimmer nodded again, trying to remain respectful while also keeping an eye on Kalius, who was fidgeting irritably beside her. "They will do what they can, I am sure, Scholar." Delia turned back to the gathered Scholars. "If this thing truly can speak, then we must speak with it as soon as it is able. Meanwhile, I suggest we send a team out the the North Cloud Forest to inspect the site of its appearance. Perhaps there are clues left behind which Shimmer and Kalius failed to notice."
"Now just a minute?" began Kalius. Shimmer dug her nails into his arm, willing him to be silent.
"No disrespect intended, young scout." Delia added, sparing a brief nod in his direction. "We shall ask Kalius to guide us to the spot so that we may have a look around." Now the elder woman looked at Shimmer. "And I should like to see this "creature" with my own eyes, Adept."
"As would I," growled Nimbulo. Delia nodded curtly in reply, her eyes remaining upon Shimmer.
"Let us go at once, then." She rose from her chair, her stately robes falling gracefully to the floor, fluttering slightly as she stretched her wings.
"But?i>what are you all talking about?" Kalius was beyond restraint now. The mood of the Scholars had frightened him, and he would not be calmed until he knew the truth.
Delia nodded to the scout. "You have a right to know, although if you had paid heed to your lessons, young man, I should think you would already know what we are talking about! You are an Arderian, after all—not one of those uneducated groundlings mucking about below!"
Kalius?face began to burn with shame at the scolding. He visibly restrained himself as he muttered, "Yes, ma’am."
Delia lifted her chin, glaring down her long nose at the young Arderian and added, "Very well. When you return from leading the expedition into the Cloud Forest, we shall convene with the members of the Arderian Guard—apparently the least educated of our people—as well as Jaela and her councilors to have a little refresher course in Moonland history."
Kalius kept his eyes to the floor, but Shimmer noted the furious blush in his cheeks, his jaws tightly clenched in anger. To his credit, though, he kept his thoughts to himself and replied instead, "That’ll do. Now, who’s goin?to the forest with me?"


v


Delia stood with Shimmer and Nimbulo, gazing down upon the unconscious creature. Its damaged tentacles had been carefully wrapped in fluffy cloud-gauze, and shone dimly with the light of a lingering healing spell. The burns upon its torso had been washed and spread with soothing balms and oils, giving it an unpleasantly slimy appearance.
Delia looked upon the beast with unveiled horror. She turned to Nimbulo, even paler than usual, "You have the book?"
With a solemn nod, Nimbulo withdrew an ancient text from within his robes. Silently he opened it. The pages were tattered and yellowed with age, far too brittle to be handled by anything so clumsy as fingers. Nimbulo held the open book before his face and gently exhaled a short spell. The pages began to turn in the gentle breeze from his lips, until they reached the proper page. He then laid the book upon a floating patch of cloud vapor and stood back for the others to see the pages.
Shimmer gasped as she beheld the ancient illustration depicted upon the brittle paper. There, illustrated in the highly stylized manner of the ancients, was a being which undeniably resembled their new guest. Consisting mostly of a single great eye, with a cluster of tentacles dangling below, the beast bore an unmistakable look of hostility. Upraised in its large flipper hands, it held a vicious-looking staff, with a scythe-like blade arcing from one side at the top. Below the baleful eye of the beast, its tentacles were bright with sparkling yellow energy, holding it several feet above the ground below. Worst of all, beneath its hovering tentacles, was heaped a pile of several bloodied and bruised people; either unconscious or dead, Shimmer was unsure of which. Either way, the implications were chilling.
"And these are the ancient enemy?" Shimmer asked, looking to Nimbulo—undoubtedly the most knowledgeable of all the Scholars of Arderial.
The elder magi nodded, his face carved into a stony frown. "Yes, young adept. These are the vile monsters which destroyed the civilization of our ancestors, which forced them to flee to the Moon."
"And wasn’t there some sort of shield or wall put up to keep them from getting to the Moon?" Shimmer knew that her peoples?knowledge of such ancient matters was very limited, but if the information were recorded anywhere in the Moonlands, it would have been in the great Hall of Scholars in lofty Arderial. Knowledge was prized above all else among the aerial citizens of the sky region.
"Yes, that’s right. Although it doesn’t seem to have been a physical or even a truly magical barrier—at least not in the way we think of such things." Shimmer raised her eyebrows in interest, nodding for the elder to continue. "Well, the histories seem to indicate that the ancestors traveled from world to world by somehow using the Dream Plane to travel swiftly from one place to another. That is where they encountered these terrible monsters in the first place. After the monsters were discovered, they began to destroy the worlds the Eliwan had settled one by one."
"Wait—you mean there were more worlds than just the homeworld?" Shimmer questioned in awe.
Nimbulo tilted his head in agreement. "Hard to believe, isn’t it? The histories briefly refer to the existence of at least seven other worlds, connected to El by some strange manipulation of the Dream Plane." Nimbulo’s voice became more impassioned as he recounted the wonders of the ancient world. "There must have been millions and millions of the ancestors to populate so many new worlds. Just think of the wonders they must have seen!"
Shimmer’s mind reeled in awe, her imagination filling with grand images of glories past. Delia disturbed her reverie by prompting Nimbulo, "But this shield…how did they do it?"
"Apparently they discovered some way to make travel through the Dream Plane impossible, at least locally. Although the histories are terribly vague on the topic, my guess is that they made a sort of "bubble" in the Dream Plane, cutting the moon off from its connection to the rest of the Dream Plane."
"Magic of that magnitude must surely have been impossible—even for the ancients!" Delia scoffed in disbelief. Shimmer shook her head in wonder. All those grand accomplishments—all lost to the descendants of the Eliwan.
Nimbulo shook his head. "Not impossible, Delia. How else can you account for the fact that the monsters never followed our people to the moon?"
Delia shook her head in exasperation. "Alright, alright. Let’s say for argument’s sake that you are correct in your ‘guess’—so how did this monster," she gestured to the unconscious form on the bed, "manage to get past this Dream Plane barrier?"
"I don’t know," was the somber reply.
"You…you don’t know? The great and mighty Nimbulo doesn’t know? Ooh-hoo-hoo!" crowed Delia. She turned to Shimmer and added, "I never believed we would see the day when this old bird would admit he didn’t know everything!"
Shimmer noticed the creature shifting slightly in its resting place. She placed a finger to her lips and said, "Shhh. We should not wake it up. The healers placed a sleeping spell upon it, but no one knows how effective the magic will be on a being such as this."
Delia looked back to the "monster" sleeping nearby. Her momentary mocking glee faded to be replaced with heavy concern once more. She nodded silently, then turned and left the room. Nimbulo, carefully closed the ancient tome and concealed it within his robes once more. He then placed a heavy hand on Shimmer’s shoulder.
"The greatest danger lies in what we do not know." Then he, too, was gone, leaving the adept alone with the strange creature. She turned her gaze back to her unwelcome guest, studying its alien features and wondering what secrets it might possess.

What happens next? Read Part 5 "A Walk in the Clouds"


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