The Huntsman of Adamos (Quartet)- draft
NECESSARY DECEPTION

CH NECESSARY DECEPTION

Hours later Daisy woke to the feeling of someone familiar holding her hand. “Good afternoon, daughter.”

“Mina?” Kaleth’s mother was holding her hand. Her heart hurt that she would know her late husband’s mother more than he ever had.

“I am here, Fluer,” Mina answered gently, with such kindness and worry in her voice.

“Fluer?” Daisy asked quietly

“A kind of white flower that grows in the mountains near our Winter Castle. We do not have a word for the bloom you are named for, little flower.”

Daisy smiled, “Fleur is nice... I guess I’m Fleur now.

Mina touched the oracle stone around her neck then touched Daisy’s oracle stone, the stone that she had once believed to be Yurieth’s, belonged to his sealed one. In a moment, they shared the vision of the battle in the timestream. Daisy didn’t realize that she was projecting as the images flashed around them in the room. Adamos, Regulus, Odinus and Odini, stood with mouths gaping open at the sight. Shadz looked around with mild curiosity.

“My daughter oracle, I did not realize the journey would be so treacherous when I sent for you,” Mina apologized.

“No, my Lady Oracle,” Fleur squeezed her hand as the images faded from around them. “The Darkness tried to lay a trap for us. I had suspected as much, but not the fierceness of it. Shadz?” She hesitated, her mind was numb from pain relief potion and that was why her magic was leaking out.

“I am here, my lady,” Shadz held out his hand to her, “I have informed the elders of how the sons of Adamos have no memory of my being here with you. I am going to be presented as a son of Odini and nothing more.”

Daisy nodded then she asked, “How are you doing with being so far from your sealed one?”

She felt his keen pain before he could hide it from her, “I am... managing.”

“Really, Shadz?”

“Oshay, my lady, Lord Odini has suggested that I go by a moniker similar to this generation, before we leave so it is not suspected. The brothers have already been made to forget that I arrived with you.”

“It is a necessary deception,” Daisy nodded, “Looks like we both will have aliases. You will be Oshay and I will be Fleur. Have you informed them of the attempt to change time?”

“No, my lady, you are the War Oracle; it is not my place....” He hesitated for a moment. “My lady, you realize who you are to him now?” Shadz/Oshay added softly in her birth language.

“It can’t be helped, my magic did something to his when he used the heart heal on me, just like with the guardian.” Whispering, she could feel her widow’s token, around her finger under her bandages.

“What has happened with you and my son?” Mina asked in ancient Aetherian.

Shadz/Oshay answered in Aetherian, “My Lady Oracle, the Huntsman sealed himself to the War Oracle in his attempt to keep her alive. Lady Da... Fleur’s magic is not like a normal oracle. Her power is more closely bound to her soul and any magic that touches her, affects her at the deepest level as happened when she saved the Guardian of our time from... My Lady, should we be revealing too much?”

“Oshay, they will all be dead, except Adamos and Odini, and the others don’t remember.” Her lips twisted into a smirk as she reminded herself.

“You may speak plainly, Mage Oshay, we are aware that our little flower will be sealed to our son Kaleth and that he will be lost,” Adamos stated. “And that now she is sealed to our eldest. Please, Dahzee, tell us everything.”

She could feel Shadz smile at Adamos attempt to say her name. “Just call me Fleur, please my lord. After you and the remnant arrive on Terrearth, many things happen. I meet Kaleth the day I tried to save his sons from the Darkness. In the time I was born into, we discovered that the Darkness had placed a device on the planet in our past. It was corrupting the flow of time and covering the surface of the planet with a strange ice. The Shadows were using these devices to age the planets to death and shatter them so the resources could be harvested without the effort of stripping the surface away. I journeyed through time with four others to stop it. I met Kaleth there for the second time and on our journey to safety after destroying the device, he almost succumbed to time poisoning. It was the first time I used my power as an oracle, I didn’t know what I was doing, and our soul fused together. His death would have taken me with him had I not been pregnant and trying to save the people of a planet being harvested by the Darkness.”

“What do you mean? The Darkness harvest planets?” Odini sounded shocked.

“Lady Fleur, perhaps you should show them the Thanos 4 event,” Oshay suggested.

Fleur reached out her hand to Mina who took it, “Prepare yourself, I will shield you as much as I can.” To the others she said, “This is the abomination Xelusia will become and how it will continue to destroy life.”

The room swirled dark and they were looking down from a spaceship of strange design. Below an ice-covered world turned; it began to shudder, tearing itself apart. Then a strange rift opened in space and the debris was sucked into it. The vision faded, leaving Fleur panting in pain and Yllumina sobbing. Adamos and Odini were both shaking, as oracles, even only feeling ten percent was horrible.

“For how horrified we all were at your scars, my lady. They are nothing compared to that,” Odini exclaimed. Oshay squeezed his shoulder.

Fleur explained. “In our time, we barely defeated it. Worlds were lost, the populations of two sentient species decimated. We knew that if we failed, the universe as we know it would have been destroyed and consumed. That is why when Mina sent the message to me in the book, I checked. Four of the Shadows, the entities of Darkness, escaped the final battle. Two are destroyed, two are here in hiding. I believe their goal is to start the next war under their control by indwelling someone here, and to stop you for saving the remnant of Aetheria. If the Aetherians become extinct, there will be no one to stop the Darkness from shattering reality and consuming not just to overworld, but every race in every dimension.”

Oshay added, “We discovered that if we tried to change time to prevent it instead of protecting it from being changed, all will be lost and even the armies of the Celestial Warriors could not help us.”

Letting the horror of the last war sink in for a moment, Fleur took a deep breath before continuing, “Yurieth, Abrieth, and Serapha become trapped in the Dimension created by the destruction of Xelusia, the shock wave of the cataclysm destroys Aetheria and strips away every living thing on the surface. It traps the entire system in pocket of strange time lasting 10,000 years which is why the biomes are mostly healed when the Aetherian remnant returns."

She sipped the tea Mina offered then continued. "We need your help to figure out the protection magic I will use to save their souls and how Oren built the device that restored their bodies and cured me of Dark Dust contamination in the future. They come out of their imprisonment with almost no memories of this time. When we meet again, they do not know me. They know who they were, and they vaguely remember Fleur, the blind oracle, but only bits and pieces of their lives and very little else. Only strong emotions bring out the hazy memories. They will spend nearly twelve thousand years real time as ghosts in the dust of Xelusia before they are restored. Over a century after the war, they still have not remembered anything clearly.”

Shadz turned his head suddenly and looked into the wall. “They are returning.”

Adamos frowned, “I did not send for them. Yurieth is curious about who arrived after we did. Quickly my lords, to my study. Lady Fleur, can you pretend to still be asleep?”

“Of course, Lord Adamos,” Daisy agreed.

Shadz gave her hand a quick squeeze. In his soul, she could feel the pain of being separated from his Asha. It was the same pain she had felt for the first several decades after Kaleth’s death. “We’ll get you home soon.” She whispered to his mind.

“It is my honor and my duty to serve you, I will remain as long as I can,” he answered.

Daisy settled back into her pillows, and Mina took her hand as Daisy asked. “They couldn’t save my sight, could they?”

“No, my daughter, I am sorry. We healed them so you would not lose your eyes, but your vision could not be restored fully. Perhaps over time you will see something of the world, but for now you must rely on the sight of an oracle,” Mina explained kindly.

A frown marred Daisy’s expression. “But I don’t know how to be an oracle, I had no one to teach me anything about my magic. Honestly, I can barely control it.”

Mina nodded, then offered softly. “I shall teach you how to sense the world around you, training you should have had as a child. Sleep now, and tomorrow we will begin.”

Yurieth found his father in a meeting with the Lords of Odini about their project to save the lives of several thousand Aetherians from a cataclysm his mother foresaw, and the younger Lord of Odini had seen the day of Yurieth’s birth. They did not know what was coming, only that it was coming and that Aetheria was at risk of being decimated. Yurieth would rather fight for their world, but his mother had only cryptically told him, one cannot fight the death and rebirth of darkness.

Abrieth knelt on one knee next to his mother and she pressed a kiss into his fiery hair.

“Soon, she is drifting in and out of wakefulness. We shall wait upon your father, my son.”

Abrieth bowed his head, he carried her coloring and features, while his twin bore the traits of their father’s house. “I am worried for Yurieth. It was by accident, but he says he is sealed to this oracle, and he does not wish to be.”

Yllumina scowled, responding, “Your brother has become too comfortable living in the shadow of his pain. She is here to save our future from a threat he cannot hunt. He does not like to feel out of control, but the closer to the last days we get, the more he will have to surrender his willfulness. Some nights are longer than others, my son, and sometimes the sun only shines for a few moments before the next storm.”

“Do you ever tire of your riddles, Mother?” Yurieth demanded in a quiet but grumpy voice as he stood in the door.

The stranger stirred. “You shouldn’t sass your mother, Yuri,” she scolded as she yawned then pleasantly she said, ” Good morning, Lady Yllumina. It is my honor and my duty to serve the House of Adamos.”

“Good afternoon, Lady Fleur, it is the honor of our house to be served by such as you,” Mina answered.

“Fleur?” Daisy pretended to be curious about the name.

“It is a small white flower that grows in the mountains, since my husband says we do not have a name for the blossom you are named for,” Mina explained.

Daisy smiled, “Fleur is lovely, thank you. It is so nice to meet you beyond the Light.”

Mina squeezed her hand as Adamos walked in, Fleur turned her head toward him, “My Lord Adamos.”

“How are you feeling, Little Flower?” He frowned in concern at the blood seeping from her bandages.

“From your concern, I fear that I feel the same as I look, but I had to come.” She said.

“And why did you have to come?” Yurieth demanded. “You almost died.”

“Because the message your mother sent me was correct. The shadows, the servants of the darkness are trying to change time. I am here to ensure that they do not succeed.” Fleur declared firmly. “I am from the far future, the final war against the Darkness that was Xelusia has been won but at great cost. Worlds have been lost. After I got Lady Yllumina’s message, I discovered that four emissaries of the darkness had escaped the battle that destroyed their realm. The trail lead back through time to the birth of the dark nebula. I have killed two but two remain and I believe they mean to stop the launch of the Tear of Heaven’s Hope.”

“How can you be sure?” Abrieth demanded.

“Because the Darkness cannot allow your baby brother to grow up, or for his eldest son to be born. The only way the Darkness can win then, is to change now. We need to prepare the Tear to launch within a year and we will,” Fleur declares without a doubt and Yurieth is astounded at her presumption. “The future is never set in stone.”

“The Tear will not be ready for a decade, or at least several years,” he argued.

“It will be finished because I have come to help finish it. The Darkness may have struck me blind, but I will overcome. I will not fail. I do not quit on a task once I have begun it. I promise you, my lord, the Tear will launch in a year and your brother will be on it,” Fleur declared boldly.

If her eyes had not been bandaged, Adamos was sure she would have been glaring at Yurieth for doubting her.

“How will you work? You cannot even see?” Yurieth scoffed.

“I can work with the House of Odini, they have a particular affinity for magic infused technology, and you, my dear Yuri, will help me. We have shared the link between our minds to work in tangent before and we have no choice. We do this or Aetherians become extinct this generation, and the Darkness destroys the overworld and all the dimensional realms beyond. Failure is not an option.”

“How did you end up exactly where we found you?” Abrieth asked trying to divert his brother from calling the oracle insane.

“Once I scanned the message your mother left for me in a book, I discovered the coordinates in time and space. I used our technology to scan the timestream for dark energy movement and the use of the Relic of Time to verify the I did come here.”

“Where is the son you bore?” Yurieth demanded, sifting through her fragmented memories.

Fleur knew he was fishing for information, but the question made her heart ache for her son. Her chin trembled a moment, but her voice was firm. “Spending the summer with his uncles and brother.”

“You mean with Abrieth and I, and Kaleth’s eldest,” Yurieth challenged since she tried to evade the question.

“Yes, I left him in my time with you, my lord.” Her answer had a slight hesitation.

“How did we meet, in your time, so far in the future?” He demanded but she didn’t answer.

“Why won’t you tell us?” Yurieth demanded angrily.

“Yurieth....” His mother’s tone held a warning.

“No, Mother, I want to know. I will not endanger the future, but I will not play the games of Oracles,” Yurieth practically growled.

“She cannot say, the timeline must be preserved,” Mina declared but Fleur patted her hand with her bandaged one.

“It is fine, he won’t remember anyway.” She turned her bandaged face to Yurieth, “I met you when we were all held hostage in the dark dust dimension that will be the remnant of the kingdom of Xelusia. You, Abrieth, Serapha, and I were all prisoners of the Blood Mage Prince, Dark Oracle Queen and their evil entity called the Devourer.”

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