Note: all characters are over 18, as established in previous chapters.
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Master of Elements: Chapter 8 - Grief and Solace
"You need to have courage, because tomorrow will be better. While there's life there's hope, and only the dead have none "— Theocritus, Idyll 4, line 42
I was sat in a hotel room in Athens, sunk in gloom. The last week had been horrible and I had no doubt who was to blame. My decision to delay our departure from the 'Aether world', as I now thought of it, had put us all in danger and had been motivated by nothing worthier that selfishness and lust on my part. Athena and Brigit had warned against it and I had forced them to comply, using the control I possessed over them; the fact that they had then enthusiastically joined in the subsequent orgy in no way excused me. My guilt was fed by what had happened afterward, events that had led to Freya and Jenny being hospitalised.
When we had realised we were under attack, Athena had immediately returned our minds to our material bodies and we had awoken back in the clearing on the wooded hillside in central Greece to find our carefully constricted defences cracking under the strain of our enemy's assault.
The first shock was to discover that the Creature wasn't even present. Athena, who wasn't involved in our immediate desperate attempts to shore up the elemental barriers, was able to trace the direction of attack and later confirmed that our enemy was many hundreds of miles away, somewhere in Western Europe. Yet even at that distance it was shredding our defences with ease.
Brigit, Freya, Matsu and Jenny were on their feet trying to patch and strengthen the elemental shields they had created but I could see it was a losing battle. I thought about adding my own feeble contribution, but it was Athena who reminded me what my proper role here was. She grabbed my arm and spoke urgently: "Chris, they can't hold this. If we stay here it will break through and god knows what happens then."
I realised she was right. I needed to give orders to the girls; so what gave us the best chance of survival? If we stayed here as a group we were all going to eventually get crushed. Our only hope was to scatter and try and make our way off this mountainside. At least if we split up we stood a chance of confusing the enemy's attack enough to have a possibility to escape - or at least so I hoped. I gave the order and was obeyed without question, my control over the women absolute, which also meant I was responsible for whatever happened next.
My idea partially worked, but not completely, and the consequences of that failure were traumatic. With six targets instead of one, our enemy's attack did become less concentrated and so less powerful, but it still proved dangerous enough. We were fleeing downhill through the woods and the Creature now used a combination of the elemental powers of earth and air to bring trees crashing down around us. It was terrifying and every one of us suffered at least cuts and bruises from the flying debris.
Jenny and Freya knew instinctively that their elements were being used against us and both stopped to counter it, with some effect. This probably saved our lives but at a cost to them. Freya was hit hard by a branch ripped from a tree and even over the tumult I heard the sickening crack of her arm being broken. Worse, another tree, uprooted completely, hit Jenny a glancing blow as it fell. Had it fallen directly on her she would surely have been killed instantly; as it was she was left unconscious on the ground.
At that point I thought we would all die. There was no way that any of us was going to escape at the cost of leaving Freya and Jenny behind but with all of us stopped to help them we were a sitting target for whatever the enemy chose to throw at us. And yet, in what seemed at the time like a miracle, at that moment the attack stopped. The earth tremors and howling winds that had made this place a potential death trap ended as quickly as they had begun and we were left, battered and bruised, surrounded by wrecked woodland and staring down at our stricken friends.
We did the only thing we could in the circumstances and called the authorities on our mobiles. We didn't tell them the truth of course, not that we would have been believed if we had. The cover story I hastily devised was that we had been hiking and got caught in some sort of freak storm that had coincided with a minor earthquake.
After an anxious wait for the arrival of help, Jenny and Freya were finally taken by helicopter to hospital in Athens while the rest of us slowly made our way down the mountain and back to our hotel. The police accepted my account of events - there was seismological evidence of the tremors and weather reports for the storm - albeit no one could explain either.
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We might have been out of immediate danger but the next few days were hellish enough. Sick with worry for the girls, I took us to Athens to be near the hospital. Although this was her home city Athena spent all the time that was allowed by Freya's and Jenny's bedsides, acting as interpreter with the doctors. We were finding that the downside of the bonds of affection we all shared was the utter terror we felt at the possibility of losing each other. It was just unthinkable.
On the plus side, we discovered another facet of our special status of which I had not been previously aware. It seemed we all healed at an accelerated rate. The cuts and bruises we had suffered were no longer visible after a few days. Even more apparent was the speed with which Freya's broken arm was healing. She was out of hospital within a couple of days, her arm in a plaster cast and sling and the doctors were baffled at how the bone was knitting and healing perfectly so fast.
However, if it was nice to know that we were hard to kill, our worry was not eased. The fact was that although her physical injuries were healing well, Jenny lay day after day unconscious in a hospital bed. The doctors ran all the standard tests to determine the reason why she would not wake, but there was no sign of brain injury or any other cause and they were unable to explain it.
If all that wasn't enough, Athena drew our attention to the brutal but mysterious murder of an American businessman called Jose Tesorero. The description of his death was all too reminiscent of Gwydion Jones and I had no doubt that Tesorero had to have been our mysterious benefactor, the Steward. His death had no immediate effect on our plans as I already had access to plenty of funds, but it was depressing to think that the Creature had picked off another of our allies with such ease.
I'm afraid that I wasn't much use to the others in this period. I blamed myself for what had happened to the girls. If I hadn't delayed our departure from the Aether world things might have gone better and that delay was for no better reason than to assuage my own lust. I sunk into introspective gloom and withdrawn to my hotel room to brood for long periods between hospital visits.
I knew the girls were worried about this; I overheard Brigit and Matsu discussing the question of how to get me to snap out of this mood. Athena and Freya were still at the hospital and Brigit had just reported back to Matsu and me in the hotel lounge bar that the doctors still couldn't understand why Jenny was in a coma. I had set off back to my hotel room to mope some more, but realised I had left my phone on the table in the bar and so caught them discussing me. They stopped as soon as they saw me, but I guess their conversation was the reason that Brigit came to see me later.
