Path of Dragons-Chapter 35Book 8: : A Familiar Face

Elijah leaned against a tree and bit down an apple. Only a few feet away, Lucy nearly leaped out of her skin. She was scrambling away in an awkward crabwalk before her expression changed. It went from fear to surprise and then to anger. She threw her shears at Elijah, who caught them without issue.

“Hey, Luce. What’s going on?”

“You asshole!” she shouted. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

“Are heart attacks even a thing? I mean, they must be, right? But for anybody with even a little Constitution, it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Then again, some people might be predisposed to –”

“Shut up. Just shut up. How did you get in here?”

“I’m sneaky.”

She narrowed her eyes as she pushed herself to her feet. Brushing off the dirt, she glared at him. “I am not in the mood, Elijah. Answer the question. This is one of the most secure places in the city. You should not be here. Not without an invitation.”

He sighed, shoving the apple core into his satchel. That was the wrong move, as he discovered when Lucy held out her hand and said, “We compost. Give it here.”

Elijah rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

Once Lucy had the offending apple core in hand, she once again demanded to know how he’d gotten into the complex known as the Silo. The story wasn’t that complex, though he did embellish just a little as he described his harrowing journey past the guards. When he was finished, Lucy summed it up, “So you climbed the outer wall and came in through the roof access.”

“I mean, if you want to break it down to the core –”

“We need to shore up security, then. I’ll talk to Isaiah about it,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“I can’t just want to see a friendly face?” he asked. Then, seeing her expression, he amended, “Well, not friendly, exactly. More annoyed. But we’re friends, right? Or we used to be.”

“Elijah, I’ve seen you precisely twice in the past ten years. I know we have a history, and I’ll always care about you, but I’m not an idiot. If you’re here, you want something. What is it?” she asked.

In truth, Elijah could understand her attitude. He certainly hadn’t been a good friend to her over the years. Plus, she was right. He did want something from her. Did it matter that she stood to benefit from it as well? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time would tell on that particular front.

“Okay. Guilty. I do want something from you,” he said, reaching into his Ghoul-Hide Satchel and retrieving the reason for his visit. He tossed it in her direction, and she caught it.

“What is this? A seed?” she asked, holding it up.

“Not just any seed. I think it might be the answer to all our problems,” Elijah answered.

“In what way?” asked Lucy, inspecting it. “There’s a lot of ethera in here, so it probably came from a natural treasure. But it doesn’t look particularly special.”

Elijah was a little disappointed in her lack of vision – or maybe he just wanted to see the same reaction he’d seen every time someone visited his grove – but he squashed that disappointment. Instead, he said, “It’s from what’s called an ancestral tree. Probably the strongest natural treasure in this world, and not by just a little bit. It doesn’t seem like much right now, but I can almost guarantee that little seed is worth more than this whole silo.”

“Is that what this is? You want to sell it to me?” she asked.

Elijah shook his head. “No. I want to change it.”

“You’re going to have to explain, Elijah. And I don’t have time to tease it out of you. This whole city depends on me for food, and I can’t waste –”

“Fine, fine. Here’s my pitch.”

And he launched into it. Ever since he’d helped conquer the Desolate Reach and discovered that the reprieve was only temporary, Elijah had been considering how to tackle the problem at hand. Sure, they could create a schedule where qualified people could conquer each Primal Realm and keep them under control. To Elijah, though, that plan was full of holes. What would happen if they missed one? Or if the team failed? Thousands of people could die before anyone could respond to that failure.

He'd seen just how dangerous that sort of situation could be, and as a result, he’d spent a little time researching the situation. There were countless examples of Primal Realms that had broken whole worlds, and in far less time than he’d have thought possible. And considering that he planned to one day – perhaps soon – leave Earth for the Empire of Scale, Elijah wouldn’t be there to bail the planet out.

He needed a safety net to protect the people he cared about.

With that in mind, he’d given the problem quite a lot of thought. But it wasn’t until he’d revisited the nuclear site that he realized that the answer was already staring him in the face. The sunflowers fed on radiation – or whatever the corrosive mixture of nuclear runoff and ethera was called – harnessing it to fuel their own growth. At the same time, they acted as filters, slowly cleansing the area. Maybe the region would never fully recover. From what Elijah could tell, it would always be toxic. But the sunflowers kept it under control, which was exactly what he wanted to do with the Primal Realms.

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He knew it wasn’t as simple as growing a few mundane plants, though. To accomplish what he had in mind, he needed a powerful natural treasure as a base. And when he discovered that the ancestral tree at the center of his grove had produced eleven seeds, he realized that he’d found his answer.

Those seeds held nearly infinite potential.

The problem was that Elijah didn’t have the time or expertise necessary to truly analyze them. “So, I came to you,” Elijah said. “Your class is all about this kind of thing, right?”

“I’m an Ethereal Engineer, Elijah. Not a Botanist.”

“I know. But this is just another machine, isn’t it?”

She sighed, then massaged the bridge of her nose. “You would just bring me more work, wouldn’t you?” she complained. Then, she gestured to the Silo, which was a vertical farm with hundreds of acres of arable land. “A hundred-and-twelve floors, and I’m running everything here. I have almost a thousand people working for me, and that’s just the Farmers. The lab has more than a hundred dedicated Botanists who –”

“Very impressive.”

“Shut up, Elijah. I’m just trying to tell you that I have an entire city depending on me to feed them. None of this works without me. Even with the elves providing water, surviving in this desert is not easy. And now you put this on me?”

“It’s the fate of the world, Lucy.”

“I know. That’s why you don’t hear me refusing, even though this is the last thing I need. I already have so much on my plate that I’m going half-crazy. And then Isaiah decides to put on this Summit…I mean, I know it’s necessary. We all need to work together, or the planet will be excised. But most of us don’t even know what that means.”

“It means being cut off from the World Tree.”

“I know that much, Elijah. But what does it really mean? Will the system quit working or something?” she asked.

“Seattle didn’t send anyone to the Trial of Primacy, did it?” he asked. She shook her head. Elijah continued, “I saw what happens when a world is excised. I think that was the whole point of the Trial. The system wanted us to see what would happen if we don’t learn to take care of ourselves.”

After that, he went on to explain Ka’arath’s state, including the wraths, the enormous monsters outside the barrier Yloa had erected, and general fate the planet had experienced.

“It’s hell, Lucy. Like, real-life hell. I don’t know any other way to describe it,” Elijah said. “If we don’t conquer these Primal Realms, the planet is done. Maybe a few escape, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not Isaiah’s biggest fan or anything, but what he’s doing right now, it might save humanity.”

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“Until the next crisis comes.”

“Which is why I’m asking you to look into this,” Elijah said, reaching into his Ghoul-Hide Satchel and retrieving a notebook he’d filled with his thoughts on ethereal flows within the seed. He’d spent some time studying it, so he expected that his theories would prove valuable in the endeavor.

“So – you want me to bioengineer a tree that will drain the Primal Realms just enough to keep them from erupting?” she asked.

“Pretty much. I just need plans, though. I can use my abilities to actually change the seed. Or the tree it will become.”

“Tall task,” she said.

Elijah shrugged. “That’s why I came to the smartest person I know,” he said with a grin. In addition, he had reason to suspect it was possible. Mostly, it boiled down to the fact that each one of his seeds were indelibly connected to their progenitor, and by extension, to his grove. Given that his grove kept the local tower from bursting, he hoped that Lucy could figure out a way to replicate that feat with Primal Realms. Nerthus had told him that the idea had merit, though he wasn’t sure how to accomplish what Elijah described. More than anything, he wished he could bring Nerthus to Seattle and let him work with Lucy, but the spryggent couldn’t survive that far away from the ancestral tree. The best he could do was provide Elijah with his own thoughts, which were also contained in that notebook.

Either way, a lot of changes needed to be made before they could accomplish what Elijah had planned. Hopefully, Lucy – with all of her expertise and support – could figure it out.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said. “Come on.”

After that, they headed to her office, which was on the ground level and looked more like a robotics laboratory than anything else. Elijah offered to share a bit of his coffee, and they spent the next couple of hours catching up. She described the explosive growth of the city, saying, “Once we had water and everyone was on the same side, things got a lot easier. You’d be amazed at what people with appropriate classes can accomplish when they’re not worried about where their next meal is coming from.”

And Elijah was amazed. The trip from the resort to the Silo took a lot longer than he’d anticipated, largely because he’d kept stopping to admire one sight or another. The city looked nothing like what he’d experienced before or after the world’s transformation. Not only were all the buildings brand new, but most of the people looked happy, healthy, and well-fed. In addition, the focus on technology was more than evident, with most people carrying personal tablets and making copious use of a well-developed public transportation system.

“No phones, though. They haven’t figured out how to get them to connect yet,” Lucy explained, taking a sip of her third cup of coffee. “This is amazing, by the way.”

“My special recipe. Grow the cherries myself,” Elijah announced proudly. “Just wait ‘til you see my soap. I think it’s going to be a big hit at the auction.”

“Soap? We have soap.”

“Not like this.”

She rolled her eyes, then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “So, this Sadie woman. What’s going on there?” she asked.

“Truthfully, I’m not sure,” Elijah admitted. He knew that there was nothing romantic between him and Lucy anymore, but he couldn’t deny the comfort he felt in her presence. She’d always been his best friend growing up, and being reunited brought with it a level of ease that he didn’t have with anyone else. Not even Carmen. “She’s great. Perfect in so many ways.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know. I just feel like the world won’t let us be together for long. We both have responsibilities. She’s just as strong as I am. Maybe stronger in some ways,” he admitted. He leaned back on her ratty, old couch and tilted his head toward the ceiling. “It’s complicated is all.”

“Most relationships are,” Lucy stated.

Elijah didn’t disagree with that sentiment, but he felt like comparing what he shared with Sadie with anyone else’s relationship was missing a lot of the nuance of their situation.

“Any advice?” he asked.

“From me? About relationships? Oh, no. I’m not going down that road. The only thing I’ll say is that making excuses for why something won’t work is pointless. At least let the problems manifest before you let them derail you,” she said.

“Good advice.”

“Not advice. Just an observation. Don’t come crying to me when you screw it up.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said with a laugh.