Amber's Enchantment Epilogue

Epilogue

Dreams and Visions

Silene started casting a movement spell to push Tyrene away from the shadow, and Amber threw up her hands and screamed, "No! Go away!" Amber's unconscious spell forced not just the shadow in front of her away, but every shadow on Destran too. When the shadow's weapon was suddenly pushed back to its nothing realm, the drain on Amber's mana stopped being a steady stream of energy, but an abrupt yanking of her entire body of mana in one fell swoop.

The shadows had a good reason for not designing their weapon to do just that from the beginning. In living creatures, their mana was tightly bonded to

who

they were; their soul, for lack of a better term. Amber's entire being was jerked out of her body intact; and still aware. Across Destran, sentient, but not fully conscious entities grasped at the opportunity for which they had been waiting for over a decade of centuries as they protected the lives of their charges. No one noticed that every slave across the face of the planet stopped what they were doing for a second, as their collars worked a desperate magic; a magic that might well stop the destruction of their own existence.

*****

"Don't give up hope."

"Has there been any change?" Garth asked.

"No," H'Renith replied. "There's no sign of life, yet her body remains warm and isn't decomposing. It's as if she's in some kind of suspended state. It might be the collar, or some unexplained interaction between the spells Silene described. There's just no way to be sure."

"Is there any hope?"

"As long as her body remains viable, there's hope; especially for Amber. She woke from a collar sleep. If anyone can manage to find her way back to life, it will be our little slave."

*****

"Remember..."

At the moment Amber vanished from the caverns of House Grantlo, she faded into existence in the past. Her form was insubstantial and unseen by those who existed in the past; she was only an observer. At first she was confused, looking around at the unfamiliar familiarity of her old home in Billa. {Remember what?} she thought as she took in the scene before her, watching herself and her best friend.

"Amber! Amber! My mom said yes!"

"That's great, Jezebel. It's next week, right?", said the other Amber.

"Yes, Friday night. Even better, that's my actual birthday. It's always better to have your party on your real birthday."

Amber's face fell. "I just wish the lottery wasn't so soon after your birthday."

"Your birthday is closer to the lottery than mine."

"Yeah, but I'm not turning 18 this year, you are. I'll miss you."

"Amber, I might not lose the lottery."

"Jezebel!" Amber spouted in exasperation. "12 girls turned 18 this year and only one is being chosen."

Amber watched the older girl take hold of the earlier Amber's shoulders and looked her in the eyes. "I know how unlikely it is. If I'm not the one chosen to stay here, I'll just go to another to town."

Amber stifled a sob. "You might be cast out into the void."

"Yes, I might." Jezebel paused with her eyes closed. "Amber, if I'm cast out, I'm cast out. It's the way it is. Worrying about it isn't worth it. Please, be happy for me."

"I'll try, Jezebel, I'll try."

"So...We have to make plans. I want this to be the best birthday party ever."

The two friends planned and giggled for another hour; the upcoming lottery forgotten for the moment. The future Amber had the sense of time passing. She remembered that the party was the success Jezebel hoped it would be. Her own sadness had increased after the party as the lottery approached. Amber had lost four sisters to the lottery; three to other towns and one to the void. Now she was losing her best friend.

Underage girls were not allowed to watch the lottery. Actually, they weren't generally allowed out into the town at all. As she watched in confusion, the earlier Amber was determined to sneak out. {I don't understand, I don't remember this. I cried myself to sleep that lottery day, didn't I?} After her parents left, she activated the portal. The portals allowed children to visit other houses without going outside. Amber knew that no one would be at Jezebel's house during the lottery. She walked through the portal and looked around. The door to the adult rooms of the house was across the room. She reached under the sofa and retrieved the key that Jezebel hid there. The layout of the adult rooms wasn't complex and Amber soon found the door that led out of the house.

Amber watched herself as she walked outside for the first time, seeing the streets extend in every direction. There was an increasing sense of familiarity as she watched herself. A memory, long suppressed, was reforming in her mind as she watched the events in her past. Above she saw the screen, the only sight that was familiar from her times in her own walled yard. In one direction, she saw an end to the fences that surrounded the houses. Walking that way, she found stores, all closed. From there, she could hear a raised voice in the distance. Following it, she found the lottery site. From the distance she was at, she couldn't tell who was still standing on the stage, but there were only three left. There was some wailing and the voice she had been following was silent.

Amber tried to move closer, but was afraid of being seen. When the three remaining girls were led away, she skirted around a building and tried to follow. As she feared, they were walking towards the barrier. Two of the girls were crying while the third seemed less moved by their fate. Amber sped up to get closer and was able to make out that one of the three, the non-crying one, was her friend, Jezebel.

The girls and the man leading them reached the screen. Amber gasped in horror as he unbound their hands and pointed towards the barrier. Jezebel took the hands of the other two girls and walked through the screen, vanishing from sight. The man turned back towards the center of town, walking slowly with his shoulders shaking. Amber could have sworn he was sobbing.

As she watched, the youngerAmber ran for the screen, desperate to try to save her friend. She had no idea what she would do if she did get Jezebel and the others back; she didn't even let the issue enter her mind. She burst through the shimmering barrier, running 10 feet before the kaleidoscope of color that made up the void impinged itself on her eyes. She stumbled to her knees and shook her head. Everywhere she looked, there was color; every color of the rainbow and many the rainbow had never imagined. She couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction. Her friend was nowhere in sight.

Future Amber rushed after her through the screen, her mouth opened in shock. {That's mana, all the colors of magic. The void is mana?}

Younger Amber, climbing to her feet, spun around, trying desperately to see something, anything, that looked familiar. It wasn't helping that her head was beginning to hurt. A throbbing pain was growing that created flashes of color that had nothing to do with the void. As she whimpered in pain, a shape formed at the edge of her vision. A man, wearing something over his eyes, was leading three people towards her on a rope. As the man stopped in front of her, she recognized Jezebel with her hands tied behind her.

"You're an unusual one, aren't you?" her said He reached for Amber.

Amber shoved against his chest, screaming, "No! Let them go!"

The insubstantial Amber watched in amazement as her younger self flared with active magic. {I could already do magic! I remember!}

The pain in past Amber's head flared and the color around her started to fade. The man staggered back a step and looked at Amber in shock. His glasses, which filtered the void light to let him see relatively normally, showed the substance of the void vanishing before his eyes, while Amber's body glowed with iridescent color that grew in intensity. What neither Amber nor the slaver could see, but the watching Amber could, was the black hole in the void that was forming next to Amber.

Amber's fear for her friend had her lashing out emotionally at the slaver. As she screamed, "Go away!" again, streams of color leapt from her body to strike the man. He gave an agonizing cry and vanished. As the three girls looked on in shock at the sudden turn of events, the black hole started to encompass Amber herself. Amber felt herself unbecoming, though she didn't comprehend just what that was, and panicked. Her intense desire to get herself and the others to safety manifested and they vanished from the void.

Both Ambers reappeared in her home, the younger one unconscious. The future Amber watched as powerful magics worked themselves on her younger form. {That must be why I didn't remember any of this until now.} Confirming her suspicions, the younger girl woke with no memory of her trip to the void, her subconscious recognizing that her briefly awakened magic was a threat. That same subconscious knew that Jezebel and the other two girls wouldn't be safe in Kafta and sent them somewhere else entirely; a forest. The forest was a dense tangle of trees, vines and ferns that nearly blocked the sunlight. Huddling together in fear, they quickly moved away from the strange sounds that called out from the depths of the plants. Fortunately, Amber's subconscious had placed them near the edge, and the unprepared girls escaped being found by the dangerous denizens. When they wandered out, they found a small village on the edge, they were welcomed as lost girls from a village on the other side of the forest.

*****

"It begins."

Amber watched Carlos Margenna tinkered with the settings yet again. {Who is this? What's beginning? Who's talking to me?} He knew there was nothing to really change; he was just nervous. The first void portal would be generated in an hour; and it would happen in front of an audience of

important people

. There were perhaps ten people on the planet who could understand the mathematics responsible for the ability to travel to other planets for the first time. Carlos was the only person who could apply it to the real world.

By the time the officials had arrived, his nerves had settled. He looked out over the crowd and saw a mixture of expectant and doubtful faces. "If we can get started," he called out. Several of the witnesses cringed at the volume of his voice. "Sorry," he added in a more normal tone. "I'll never get used to being on a microphone." He tapped the heavy, reinforced glass that was between him and the observers. "The barrier will contain any unexpected radiation from the experiment. The portal doesn't produce any radiation, but we don't know the conditions that will be in effect on the other end. So, if you would all take your seats, I'll start the generator and open the first doorway to another world."

As the crowd of people quieted and took their seats, Carlos continued with his mini-lecture. "The target of today's portal is the star system Halicon. Measurements of its wobble tell us that there are planets of some kind in orbit around it. The nature of the void portal is such that it will only open on the other end if there is a similar gravity field; within 5% of ours. The passage through the void, or null dimension, can't exceed 2 meters, the diameter of the entire dimension. This will allow our robot probe to cross over, collect a few samples, and return, in a matter of minutes."

"Well, enough of lecture, let's do it." Carlos flipped a switch on the machine and a low hum filled the air, carried by his microphone to the watching officials. A point of light formed in the middle of the wall and began to expand, forming a circle. The circle grew in size until it was ten feet across. The circle was filled with swirling colors that were hard to look at. There was a strange, unexpected curvature to the portal, as if it was part of a larger roundish structure of some kind. Carlos tore his eyes away and started the probe towards the portal. The device surged forward on it's tracks and vanished through the portal.

Amber's faced scruntched in confusion. {That's not a dimensional portal. That's a void screen. It's too small though. Kafta had a much bigger screen.}

"It's programmed to spend only two minutes on the other side before reversing and coming back to us with samples of the atmosphere and ground near it." Carlos had turned back towards the observers and his back was facing the portal when the faces of the officials showed shock and fear. Carlos turned around to see a man collapse to the ground, half on this side and half on the other side of the portal. After several seconds of shocked immobility, he grabbed the man's hands a pulled him clear, only to gasp as he recognized the facilities maintenance man, George. The robot trundled back through the portal, as if nothing was amiss and Carlos shut the generator down without thinking, his mind on autopilot.

Amber joined everyone else as they stared in horror at the barren earth beyond the hole in the wall where the former portal had been. They saw what made up what used to be an extensive portion of the facility. A couple of the mathematicians realized that the empty space was a hemisphere 500 meters across. 32 million cubic meters of the world had simply vanished.

*****

"The first time."

Amber faded into non-existence in a non-place that only had existence because shadow creatures were there. She was aware of the hunger that infused the beings around her. A great need filled them, an overpowering need that made Amber's non-existent body double over in pain. She had never felt such a lack of mana since the strange device tried to steal her mana.

A light flared in the nothingness. Sweet mana flooded the non-space, causing it to take on a semblance of reality. Amber looked around as the pain faded and was shocked that the entire universe was only two meters across. {Didn't the man say the null was only two meters?} The point of light expanded rapidly, engulfing Amber and the shadows in a matter of seconds. The shadows seemed confused by the sudden imposition of time into their non-domain. It didn't stop them from soaking up the admittedly meager quantities of mana that were now there. As they fed, Amber looked around at the sudden reality that now surrounded her. It had grown. It looked like some kind of grassland, though it was obviously maintained by someone. In the distance she could see the familiar sight of the screen that protected Kafta. Again, she noted that it was smaller than the one around her former home; the curvature was too step, though she wouldn't have been able to put it in just those words.

Unnoticed by the shadows, Amber wandered towards some buildings in the distance. As she neared them, she saw a couple of people wander out a door, looking confused. She called out a warning about the shadows, but they seemed as oblivious to her presence as the shadows. Shadows converged on the stronger mana sources of the living beings. As the shadows reached the people, they drained them, leaving empty husks to collapse to the ground.

Tears filled Amber's eyes as she watched people dying in the worst way imaginable. She wandered in a daze, unsure why nothing nor no one seemed to see or notice her. Inside a building she looked around, seeing a partial room with the screen covering the otherwise open end. A small mechanical device rolled through the screen It took several seconds befor she realized that this was the device she had seen before. {This is the other side. I'm seeing the same thing from inside the screen. Is this the first time the shadows escaped their own world? They're eating the mana from the people.}

She watched the robot pause, doing incomprehensible things with some of the attachments, then reverse itself and move back through the screen. A man, running from the unseen wave of death afflicting those around him ran towards the screen, only to be caught by a shadow and collapse partway into the screen. Something dragged him the rest of the way through and the screen dropped. Amber briefly saw the lab she'd been in earlier before it faded from view.

Amber spun around to see shadows absorbing the mana from everything in the surroundings. As they did, the landscape took on an increasingly unreal appearance. Soon the nothingness of the shadows' home had reasserted itself. Yet, Amber could see a small, almost too small to see, pinhole in the edge of this small universe, and the faintest wisp of a trickle of mana seeping in. The last thing she noticed before moving on was that the nothing universe seemed a little bit bigger than when she first arrived.

*****

"Your past

"Well, what have you found out?" the officious gentleman asked impatiently. The others around the table mirrored his feelings. Kevin Groll was not a man used to waiting; neither were his councilors.

"It's an automated colony ship, sir," the General answered. "Apparently it's one of the old slow ships that were launched from Earth centuries ago."

"You're kidding." When there was no reaction from the officer, he continued. "One of those things actually made it? I thought they were all lost in the depths of space."

"Apparently not, sir. Even stranger, the cryo-modules are still viable. There are 30,000 colonists on board, just waiting to be woken up."

"Good God, man! We can't inject 30,000 technically backward people into our society. There are limits to what we can control, information wise," Brian Justil exclaimed. The minister of information was well aware of how delicate the control of a world's information systems was.

Actually," George Hellfire commented from the foot of the table, "this could be instrumental in solving a couple of our problems."

"How so?"

"We've been having increased difficulty with the annual slave culling. People want the advantages that state run slave brothels bring, but are increasingly unhappy with the potential of losing their own daughters to slavery as they reach adulthood. We predict that the system will collapse in 50 years. Additionally, banishment to the void is increasingly seen as unusually cruel a punishment, even for heinous crimes. All those who are brought back are permanently changed by the experience."

"How will 30,000 off-worlders solve either of those problems?"

"We know that opening one void inside another establishes a bubble of normality. If we settle these colonists inside these bubbles of normality we can use them as breeding pens of slaves. It would be simple enough to introduce a genetic modification to produce an abundance of female births. We'd have to create a suitably believable cover story of some kind, but the inherent lethality of the voids would lend credence to anything we come up with."

"Let me get this straight. You plan on eliminating the slave culls and using these refugees as the source for our slave brothels. At the same time, we stop banishing criminals to the void. By doing so, we eliminate two sources of unrest from our people."

"Not quite, sir. I fully intend that we'll still banish criminals to the void, but we'll do it in secret. We'll tell the people that we're using a secure prison facility in the outlands. We'll have a banishment void facility there where no one can see it. It wouldn't do for one of our criminals to accidentally wander into one of the lost colonies."

Amber, unnoticed again, felt her anger burning as she watched her home, Kafta, being planned with such utter callousness. She wanted to lash out at these evil men and strike them down, but was beginning to realize that she had no real existence here. Somehow, she was seeing events in the past. Was she dead? Was any of this even real? What was the point? Who was that voice she seemed to hear as she entered(?) each vision. Still wondering, she faded away again