Shifting Stars by Gary Stringer (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

this day, even with all our abilities, the Angel’s shroud remains impenetrable to all our scans. I only know what happened through a much later telepathic link with Michael, seeing his memory of events. Our best guess is that they were a future Guardian. Assuming we still have a future by the time I’m finished.

Investigation through Interactive Time travel is entirely out of the question. It’s a Temporal Black Spot where all are forbidden to venture, employing magical wards to prevent entry, and I know better than to try to breach them.

To interfere too often with the same events is potentially catastrophic. Time Intervention is not something the Guardians take lightly. Apart from myself, they are the only ones with the necessary knowledge and skill. Anyone else would be destroyed and scattered in the void like a dandelion in a hurricane.

Yes, I know I’m in the middle of an Illegal Time Intervention at this very moment (relatively speaking), but I assure you I would never endanger reality simply to satisfy my selfish curiosity about my mother’s Angel! Besides, this was the worst day of my mother’s life; Michael’s memory of watching an innocent young girl have her whole world ripped apart was distressing enough. I have no desire to witness it first-hand. I don’t know how she bore it. I’m certain I could not.

It took time to find out exactly what happened to Velena. In all the terror and confusion, keeping track of one individual had been difficult. But there were enough eyewitness accounts to confirm that she, like many others, was simply vaporised.

In later life, whenever Catriona spoke of these events, she always described her mother fighting with a ferocity that rivalled the void storms in the sky. She chose to remember Velena desperately giving her life to save the daughter she loved. While that may not match the account that I have written, gentle reader, I’m sure you can understand why my mother would prefer her own memory of events.

But I promised you that every word of this story would be true, so I shall not sugar coat these events…or those yet to come.

Chapter 3

It was a few years later, and Catriona Redfletching was talking to an old White wizard named Renjaf.

“Oh, come on!” she pleaded, “It’s not like I’m asking for the moon!”

Renjaf was something of a recluse. He lived in a tall tower, as was the fashion for wizards in those days, that sat within several acres of much-neglected land a few miles from the town of Compton, leaving only rarely. Why was Catriona there, gentle reader? The answer to that requires some explanation.

It naturally took some time for Cat to come to terms with everything that had happened, but eventually, life went on, as it always does. Pyrah helped enormously, with her frequent visits.

Who is Pyrah?

Well, not all higher planar beings appear human. They may manifest in all manner of guises. Pyrah, gentle reader, was one such creature, who seemed to be a small, green, highly venomous snake that had been Catriona’s friend and protector since she was a child. Cat first met her while playing in the forest around her father’s Quarthonian home. Pyrah had been injured, caught in the middle of another of Daelen’s battles. That time it was not against Kullos, but rather his dark clone, although that was a distinction without difference when dodging beam cannon blasts.

Cat said, “hello,” and was astonished when the snake said ‘hello’ back.

Well, not ‘said’ exactly, but communicated certainly – communicated sympathically. Let me see…how to explain sympathic communication… More than empathy, less than telepathy. Not that you can draw a straight line through the three. Sympathic communication involves the transmission of concepts. So rather than saying, “I am your friend,” Pyrah simply transmitted the concept, the idea of friendship. It didn’t allow for much in the way of subtlety in those days, but thanks to Catriona’s efforts to nurse her back to health, they managed to develop a powerful bond. Pyrah was sorry she had not been around to help when Cat lost her parents. Catriona was glad she had been absent. Otherwise, she might have lost her, too.

Still, there was no denying things had changed for Catriona. Before the day she lost her parents, the Day of the Monster, the Day of the Angel, Cat had been a promising student at magic school – a relatively new concept at the time, but one that would eventually supplant the old apprentice system. Three years later, her grades at college were mediocre at best. It just didn’t hold her interest as it had before. Now, she was more interested in her Angel.

I should point out that my mother didn’t really consider her miraculous visitor to have been an Angel in the literal sense. It was just that she couldn’t think of another label she could use that fitted any better. She dearly wished for something better, though, for one reason above all others: everybody said her Angel wasn’t real.

To everybody else who was there that day, the restoration of their village was an unexplained miracle, and they seemed happy for it to remain so. Not Catriona. Everybody attributed her imaginary guardian Angel to an expression of her grief. A way of dealing with the trauma and even survivor guilt. Her way of explaining the inexplicable, why she survived when others only a few feet away from her – her father included – did not.

‘Poor Catriona’ people would say. ‘It must be so hard for her to accept that there was no reason, just random chance.’

‘Give her time,’ the experts said. ‘In time, she will see and learn to accept it.’

But she never did.

She knew her Angel was real. How else did she acquire her ‘Crystal Mage Staff’ as she had named her gift, mostly for the convenience of having something to call it. She didn’t want to give it some grandiose name like ‘The Great Staff of Zarathon’ or ‘The Mystical Rod of