Daeva: Black Diamond Chrysalis - Danielle Bolger (essential reading txt) 📗

in a rescue service to investigate."

"Security? Wait! You mean there were cameras in there!? You mean that people saw us fighting those shades? Using our erosreavers!"

"Hey, quit freaking out! Ordinary people can't see dark energy, remember? And cameras can't pick it up either since they're only calibrated to frequencies from this world."

My eyes were still wide. "But we're still from this world, what about us!? It may look like we're just waving around empty hands but we were still conscious in there and I was bleeding!"

"All a result of the dark energy you were fighting. Sure it happened, but that won't be for long. If it hasn't already done it yet then soon Gaia will wipe all traces of that away. All signs will literally disappear. Your images on the surveillance cameras just like all that blood you spilled. It'll all turn to dust before deleting from our world."

"Ah..." I frowned. "Huh?"

"It all disappears?" Abigail echoed.

Lara sighed as she came and sat on the bench next to us. "Well, I suppose the other two are capable of calling aura back into the plaza on their own..."

"Hold the phone!" I cried. "You can't be serious that my blood there will disappear!? But that's what happens to shades and... once we chrysalise. It can't happen to my blood. No way, not yet!"

"It wouldn't, if it was blood from normal wounds. But these were caused by shades, condensed dark energy. You know already that injuries caused by them are different, when they heal they leave behind crystal gifts. Well that's because it poisons your aura at the contact and it's not just your flesh that is affected by them, your blood too gets converted to dark energy."

"No way..." I breathed as I stared at the rain drops cascading onto the bitumen road. From in front of it I pulled up a hand and observed the pale white flesh touched by an ebony crystal on the wrist. "So I'm already disappearing."

"So they can't see her blood but they can still see her body!" Abigail yelled passionately. "They're hardly going to forget seeing her run around whilst everybody else there is sleeping!"

"That's right!" I declared. "I can't disappear so long as I'm still part human!"

Lara sighed. "You know daevas are a very confusing concept for this world to bear. It doesn't like having to deal with substances from other dimensions and that's why it created laws to shut them out. We have laws of motion, magnetism, electrical charges, of conservation of matter to keep us separate, but our laws aren't always perfect. Gravity, for instance, is a force that other dimensions manipulate so that they can tear into our world and distort the balance. So that's when Gaia has to step in to reorganise. It washes away the darkness' debris as well literally rewriting history so that it would seem that it was never here in the first place. And anything that's spawn from its aura she has full control over."

"Christ!" I exclaimed. "You're saying that the world is what makes the darkness twinkle and disappear when we destroy it? And that, even if people do perceive something that's off, something affected by Noein, or whatever that colliding world is called, that they just forget it?"

"Everyone." Lara confirmed. "All but those with darkness residing within them."

"But if the world can make darkness disappear then why doesn't it just make all those shades go away?"

Lara shook her head. "Don't you realise now why the shades crave aura so much? It's because they need it to stay in this world and deny Gaia's will. So long as some of the world's energy lies within them then Gaia can't destroy them, but also it cannot remould it to its choosing. That means that any substance that is a blend of the two suddenly becomes exempt from her laws. It means it can be powerful, capable of breaking every law that we know, even the ones concerning life and death, but she doesn't like it and she won't allow it without a fight."

"Gaia... What's that? It sounds like you're describing some chick with the control panel to the world."

"Yeah, you could call her that, but a more common name is Mother Earth." Rain was pounding heavier on the road as shouts sounded back from the plaza.

"The world has a soul?"

Lara smirked. "Not a soul, but the soul and it's so dense it runs rivers deep down within the earth's solid core. It springs life to everything that exists above it and is so powerful that it reaches across the cosmos even and extends far into the universe. It's so powerful that it can even repel the chaos of black holes that sail through space like mere asteroids. It likes its creation, it's stable and despises outside influences so when they come it tries to correct them but unlike Noein, Gaia does not have its minions that can navigate the surface so it is forced to wait until deletion does not affect its own creation."

"Well I'll be damned..." I murmured. "Mum sounds pretty scary."

"She's just doing what she must to protect her creation. If it wasn't for her we wouldn't have these peaceful lives we lead."

"Except, of course, that's it's not so peaceful. Not when you look beneath the rugs she's thrown over the top of this other world's interference." Gazing aside I watched what appeared to be stretchers carrying unconscious people into white trucks. "Lara... how do you know all this?"

"Well, have you heard of something called string theory?"

"No, is that a nickname you've given your erosreaver?"

Lara renewed her smile but with weak zeal. "I haven't named my technique like Vanessa but I suppose that would be an apt one. String theory is a concept that particle physicists have come up with. Through it they suggest that everything is created by one-dimensional strings. Everything that exists on Earth appears to be originated from these strings however limited to ones that just stretch through the four dimensions of height, width, breadth and time. So, in our world, it would seem there are just a few that govern our laws, but in reality there are more strings reaching into many more dimensions, the total number may ten or eleven, or their numbers could be more. No one is really too sure but one thing I've learnt is that through them other worlds are birthed. However, since they utilise strings that move in different directions we can never usually access these worlds, even though we may be in fact overlapped with them right now."

"You know how we're not meant to feel pain as daevas unless we're emotionally upset, well that theory isn't working right now - my head hurts!" I complained.

Lara chuckled. "Confusion isn't the worst of emotions to feel, but it's still one that can cripple people."

I rolled my eyes. "All I wanted to know was how you learnt all this, I didn't want a physics lecture."

"Well, I won't go into any more detail about the specifics then but as you noticed my erosreaver takes the form of strings and, since the fabric of universes are composed of strings then I'm able to detect any abnormalities over a large distance. That's how I know what's going on, it's because I can feel it. I can feel her - Gaia. I feel her will, her desire to protect her organised creation, but the other worlds keep trying to break in to steal her massive energy source. And it's not just Noein, there's many of them wanting in, Noein is just the latest scammer to play its hand."

"Well if Gaia is so powerful then why doesn't she destroy the shady bastards?"

"Like I said she doesn't destroy..."

"Right, right, right. She doesn't destroy aura because that's like cutting off her own hand, or something, right?"

"Yeah, one of a trillion, but still, since the other worlds keep stealing her energy she's hardly about to let any go unless she has to."

"Right, so as long as we carry aura we're safe." I murmured as my fingers trailed over the rock design on my wrist. "But if we lose it to the darkness growing inside us she'll turn us to dust. Even though we're fighting to save her world."

"Gaia is the source of the world's aura but she doesn't think like we do. She just... feels. So when she senses something dark she makes it disappear, regardless of intent."

"No common sense, hey? So Mum is just completely ruled by her emotions? Now I get why guys can get whiney about girls' emotions, even though I've always thought that very ironic..."

"She is doing what she can to protect her world, just as we fight to protect it too."

"All until..." Abigail's small voice broke through. "Until we disappear, just like Pearl has."

"Abigail!" I cried. "How... You know!?"

As the brunette girl was shaking beside me I hoped it was because of the cold stormy air. There she closed her eyes. "I didn't... not until just now. But her time was running out. The heavens accept death and then the rivers of life don't care for a heart of darkness. So then nothing was left to her, nothing saved her from all those dark crystals." Abigail turned to Lara with despair. "Yours are worse than hers. Yours too, Bethanie. Please, don't explain what happened and don't soothe me that this is all okay. Just tell me that you'll stop it. I don't care if it's not possible, I just want to hear that no one else is going to die, no one. I think, that I wouldn't be able to handle it if anyone else was to disappear."

I waited for Lara to come up with some reassurance but the moments stretched long and were only filled by the falling rain and thunders overhead. Eventually I made my statement, "That's right, Abigail. We're going to fix this. I promise that no one else is going to die."

Chapter 26

 

Abigail

 

"A gas leak in the plaza!?" Amy exclaimed as we sat around our usual tree during Monday lunch time. "No way, that's crazy!"

"So what?" Kieran muttered sullenly. "You think me and fifty other people just passed out because, what, we all got a little sleepy in the middle of the day?"

"Cool it, Kieran!" Louise implored to the boy's monotonic response. "It's just that it's strange. You hear about things like that in the city but not here up on the mountain!"

"I was almost so gonna be there!" Bart cried as if dodging a bullet. "I had planned to go see a movie and everything but that fell apart at the last minute. Talk about fate protecting you from disaster..."

"Fate saved you, did it?" Kieran countered. "So Courtney turning you down is fate saving your arse?"

"You were going to see a movie with Courtney!?" Amy shouted.

Eric winced. "Oh crap, this is gonna get ugly..."

"What the hell!?" Bart defended himself. "I could have been killed by a gas leak, doesn't anyone care that I could have almost died!?"

"Courtney?" Amy repeated. "She's not even pretty!"

"Dude, I was there!" Kieran pointed out. "Bethanie too even though she disappeared..."

"Hey!" Bethanie piped up. "I started to feel dizzy so I went to the bathroom. I even told you that, though you say you can't remember...