Free The Resuurection Fields by Brian Keaney

to my summons. They arrived here by a longer path. Watch them. Try to see where they go.”
    Bea did as he suggested, but however hard she tried to watch any of the figures that emerged from the earth, there was always a point at which she found she looked away, without even being aware she had done it. And when she looked back, the figure had disappeared, though another was busily digging its way to the surface nearby.
    Tzavinyah smiled. “You cannot see where they go,” he told her, “and it is no different for me. Some things are hidden from all of us. All we know for certain is that this is where they begin their new journey.”
    “But I don’t understand. If I’m not dead, then why have you brought me here?” Bea asked.
    “Turn around,” Tzavinyah replied.
    Bea did as she was told and saw that behind her the plain stopped abruptly as if a giant knife had sliced through it. Beyond the edge was a pale blue nothingness that was neither sky nor cloud nor even air.
    “Behold the abyss!” Tzavinyah said. “It lies between the Nakara and the Resurrection Fields. Now look through the telescope.”
    Beside them, on a stand, was a telescope similar to the one that Bea and her father had used for stargazing when she had been a child. Bending down, she looked through the eyepiece. At first she could see nothing but a vague blue blur. But as she turned the focusing knob, a picture began to emerge of what was happening on the other side of the abyss.
    “What do you see?” Tzavinyah asked.
    “It looks as though someone is building a bridge,” Bea replied.
    Tzavinyah nodded gravely. “You gaze upon the edge of the Nakara. The bridge that you see is the work of Orobas. But he must not be allowed to succeed.”
    “Who is he?” Bea asked.
    “He is our enemy,” Tzavinyah told her. “Yours and mine and every living creature’s. In my tongue his name means hunger, and in truth that is all he is—an appetite that can never be satisfied, an emptiness that can never be filled. He must be stopped, and you are the one who must do it.”
    “Me? How can
I
stop him?”
    Tzavinyah gave a slight sigh. It was a sound that filled Bea with so much sadness that she felt as if she would never be glad again. “As I told you, some things are hidden from all of us,” he said. “The path of our enemy’s defeat is just such a thing. I do not know what you must do, only that no one else can do it.”
    “But how will I know what to do?” Bea asked.
    “I cannot say,” Tzavinyah said. “But your task may be moreobvious than you think. Sometimes the answer is right in front of us though we cannot see it for looking. My advice is this: look for the hardest choice, the one that everyone seeks to dissuade you from. That is the path you must choose.”
    There were so many more things Bea wanted to ask, but instantly the scene began to grow faint. Once more she began to hear the shouts and cries of a panicked crowd. In the blink of an eye, she was again curled up on the ground in Leader’s Square while people surged past, driven frantic by the smoke that billowed all around them. Boots thudded into her ribs as people stumbled across her. Somebody kicked her on the head, and the pain arched through her like a lightning bolt.
    Suddenly she felt someone grip her arm and pull her to her feet. “Are you all right?” Albigen asked.
    “I think so.”
    “Come on, we have to get out of here!”

ENIL’S TREE
    It took Kidu over a week to recover, a week during which Dante turned over and over in his mind the words that his mother had whispered to him in that panic-stricken moment before he had fled the Odylic realm.
    On Enil’s Tower there is a message for Bea
.
    He did not dare to return to the Odylic realm to ask his mother what she meant. Orobas would be waiting for him, like a wild beast prowling outside the mouth of the cave where its prey has sought refuge.
    In the meantime, he kept thinking about the black hole that Kidu called