Rain fell pattering to the ground, splashing across the street and sidewalk alike. Zane liked rain; he liked thunder and lightning. The smell, the feel, the wind, everything the elements could throw at him.
Zane’s school didn’t like rain, so he used an umbrella as he walked. Splashing through the streets. Zane enjoyed his walk to school daily; it was better than riding on a bus any day. He had an innate love of nature and a hate of metal.
Zane wasn’t exactly sure why he hated metal, but he did. It sent buzzing signals through his body or left strange rashes on his palms. Whenever he cooked anything in a frying pan, it had to have a non-metallic handle; otherwise, he used oven mitts. Even as he walked across the sidewalk towards his school past bustling cafes and picturesque shops in downtown Stella, he could feel the iron rods in the concrete, and walked a distinctive pattern between them. They didn’t hurt the way metal usually did, probably because they were buried under concrete.
Zane paused in his march to take a deep breath and switch the umbrella to his other hand so the metal in it wouldn’t leave a mark on him, just another reason to hate umbrellas. He didn’t have a watch (they were made of metal), but he did know he wasn’t walking fast enough. If he didn’t get there in time, people would be angry. People were always angry, which was another reason Zane liked nature.
Something moved behind him; he sensed the presence of metal coming closer. A lot of metal. He usually couldn’t sense metal on people because the living person covered up the buzzing of the dead metal. Whoever was behind him must have loads of metal all across their bodies. A punk star? Someone with a million body piercings?
Zane turned, peering through the heavy downpour. Someone crouched on the sidewalk next to a street light, which wasn’t working correctly and only flickered occasionally.
“Hello?” Zane asked. He didn’t like talking to strangers; it freaked him out a lot. He cautiously took a step forward, however. The thing let out a hiss, not like a snake, and not like anything living, more like steam from a boiler. It stood slowly, and Zane only then realized its size. The creature was almost as tall as the street light. It stepped towards Zane, who mirrored the action, pulling away. “Ex-excuse m-m-me?”
A red light flared to life on what Zane thought was the head, turning out to be anything but. The robotic creation before him was formed entirely of metal, seemingly one solid piece in the rough shape of a man. It had a bulbous oval head set deeply into its neck and massive shoulders connected to thick, steely arms.
Its hands were relatively small, having only three fingers, but the main feature of its hands was the immense blades sticking out of them. Zane had a strange feeling that it used the blades more often than the fingers.
The bleeding red light swept like a prison searchlight and focused on Zane. Another noise, something like a groan of anticipation, escaped from a grill just below the head. One arm bent back the blade, lengthening, ready to strike. Zane ran, leaping to the side. This monster spent no time explaining, but instead just began unceremoniously hacking at Zane, who yelped in fear and ran faster.
It was early morning, and only a few shops on this block were open. All those were behind Zane while the street ahead remained empty of cars to Zane’s distress. He sprinted away, the beast of metal lumbering after, shaking the pavement. Zane glanced around desperately. There had to be someone somewhere, somehow! No one showed as the metallic menace closed the gap between them.
Zane’s foot hit a puddle, sending him crashing to the pavement. The robot above him raised his blade to stab the prone boy below him, but thought better of it. Instead, the beastly thing flipped Zane onto his back so that they faced each other. Zane glared up through the rain, which steamed off the monster above him, flying off to cool and become droplets once again in a cycle of water, the cycle called to him. The beastly thing shrugged slightly, deciding on a course of action, and stabbed down to bury its blade in Zane’s chest.
Zane lashed out with his hand, instinctively drawing in lightning from the sky and channeling a blast into his opponent. A thunder clap that shook the world threw Zane backward to the pavement. Electric shocks traveled across his body randomly, leaping in arcs from hands to toes or ear to shoulder.
Zane’s vision fuzzed, making it hard to see anything around him. A car pulled up screeching to a halt right next to him. One of Stella’s many old-fashioned coffee shops spewed its customers into the rain, and soon, voices and people clustered around him.
“Are you okay?” someone asked. A car door slammed nearby, and then he could distinctly hear someone calling 911. Zane tried to answer. He tried to sift through the information around him, but it was too much. He had a strange feeling that only one person was with him and everything else was an illusion. Someone called out his name, trying to get his attention. Zane willed himself to wake and pull out of the noises and people pressing around him.
“Zane!” It was his father, he could’ve sworn. Nothing was making sense. The rough, wet pavement seemed to pull him up, or maybe someone was lifting him. More talking of the crowd, more thundering of rain. Zane stopped the downpour to be able to hear, but his mind faded just as someone new, an older boy, called his name again.
• • • • •
Zane heard someone muttering nearby. It seemed like maybe a nurse speaking with a doctor who was exiting the room.
“He wasn’t struck by lightning, no matter what the witnesses say, but maybe the flash from striking next to him managed to damage his eyes; they aren’t responding properly.”
Zane opened them, trying to take in his surroundings, but his head pounded fiercely whenever he moved. He lay in what he could only assume to be a hospital bed. Zane had never been in a hospital before and didn’t recognize anything he saw, not that he could see much anyway; a grid of bright light seemed to waver in front of his eyes.
Zane sat up slowly, clutching his head. The sheets fell away from him, thin and weird-smelling. The room was mostly empty. No machines or doctors, but that made sense if he was truly uninjured. Zane lay back down again, blinking rapidly to clear his vision. He surely didn’t feel uninjured. His whole mind was muddled horribly. The white lines covering everything didn’t go away; they actually got worse.
If he focused on any object, small thin blue lines finely sketched on his view of the world raced out covering everything, branching off and creating splits in turn duplicating themselves. He couldn’t stare at it for more than a few seconds before whatever he focused on was covered in blue, now invisible to him.
It was pure guesswork that he was supposed to be in bed and not standing up, so he lay down, closed his eyes tightly, and tried to sleep. The monster of that morning flashed before his mind, and for some reason, the symbol burned into its bladed arms and stuck in his mind. A pentagon with five lines coming out of each corner, each a different length, intersecting at odd angles. It was chilling, terrifying even, Zane couldn’t really put a finger on why.
Something smacked into Zane’s window in the small room and knocked it open, flying in and crashing to the floor with its cloak flapping. Zane started, yelping in fear. The man on the floor sat up and pressed his fingers to his lips. He was young, maybe eighteen at the oldest. Zane was only fourteen, which he realized again upon thinking this. Something about the man, though, exuded a sense of childishness despite his apparent age.
The man stood, dusted himself off, and proffered his hand, “Hi, I’m Lee. You are Zane, right?”
Zane was too surprised by the situation to say anything; he stared at Lee through the grids of lines and glowing light. Lee shuffled uncomfortably for a moment and then grabbed Zane’s hand, forcing the boy to shake hands with him.
More silence ensued. Zane could tell this was not how Lee expected this conversation to go. Lee finally cleared his throat, “You’re busy, seeing I can tell.”
Zane peered through the lines of light at Lee’s uncomfortable face. “Seeing?”
“Yeah, viewing the world as made up of energy and interconnecting charges. Something that Elemental Aetherion do a lot. It’s true, right? That you fried an Onyxian before he could stab you using a lightning bolt!?”
Zane shook his head hesitantly. “Yes? Was the metal man an Onyxian?”
Lee nodded emphatically, then motioned to Zane, “Let’s go, man!”
Zane was still sitting in bed. He blinked a few times and cocked his head. “What… are you? And why on Earth should I be going somewhere with you?”
“The real question isn’t what I am, it is what you are, an Elemental Aetherion! Someone in deep contact with the energies of the worlds! It is totally awesome, come on.”
Zane stood. “That still doesn’t give me a good reason to trust you.”
Lee raised his eyebrows, “Skeptical, are we? Well…” He paused, frowning. “Can you please just cut out the seeing? It is kind of unsettling to talk to someone with glowing eyes.”
Zane squeezed his eyes shut and finally got the lines to go away by slamming his head into the wall. Lee watched. “That isn’t exactly how I imagined you doing that… You know you, Elemental Aetherion, are supposed to be more majestic, but never mind! We have exciting things ahead of us.”
Zane turned dizzily away from the wall, not noticing he’d put cracks into it. “Explain, please.”
Lee headed for the window. “I will explain on the way. For now, though, you, me, your parents, and lots of your relatives you’ve never met are all Aetherion! Your dad was supposed to come pick you up, but I got too because he was busy killing a dragon or something, business that couldn’t be delayed. He will be here in a minute. We are going to meet him on the street.”
He paused, fishing out a bag. “Oh, I nearly forgot, you should change.” He hurled Zane a bag with a change of clothes in it. Zane quickly changed behind the bed curtain. The clothes were strange, like a vest with coat tails, though the tails were in the front. It actually looked kind of cool; they whipped about as he walked. The vest garment came with a pair of light material pants and a similarly light cloak. Zane pulled the hood on the cloak over his head and stepped out.
Lee snorted. “You look strange with the hood on. Come on.”
Zane followed Lee to the window, pulling his hood back, “Why is it on the cloak then?”
“For those who can actually look cool with them, like your dad,” Lee commented, leaping out the window. He popped his head back in. “Your dad is really cool, by the way, he taught my fifth-year blade class.
Zane did comment on this; he’d long ago decided to take everything Lee said with a grain of salt (or rather an entire pinch of it). He sat on the window ledge, looking around for whatever handholds Lee had used to climb across the smooth wall. Lee whistled, “Hey, Zane! Yuhoo! Right here!”
Zane looked down to see Lee lounging against the wall in mid-air. His arms were folded, with each hand going up the opposite sleeve. Zane fairly jumped in surprise. “How are you doing that?”
“With no small amount of skill,” Lee grunted, stepping away from the wall and swaying slightly, obviously using much effort.
“And how am I supposed to stand in mid-air?”
“Just try it, and hold my hand, that should keep you up.”
“Should?”
“Fine! Will! It will keep you up.”
Zane held onto the sill with one hand, extending the other to clasp Lee’s hand. Nothing happened, the air didn’t feel any more solid. Yet… Yet Lee was standing there. Zane began to sweat, considering his options. It didn’t occur to him at the time that he was holding his entire body up with one hand on a windowsill ledge; he wouldn’t have been strong enough for that naturally. “The air doesn’t feel solid!”
Lee rolled his eyes, “Well, of course it isn’t going to feel solid! It is going to feel like air! Now stop holding onto the sill and let go, surrender.”
Zane gripped tighter, “Surrender?”
Lee groaned again, “Why do I have to pick my words so carefully around you? Okay, maybe surrender isn’t the best word, but relax, give in, have faith, trust you can do it.”
Zane let go of the sill, dropping two feet to the same level as Lee. They stood mid-air, Lee relaxing suddenly as if it took less effort to keep two of them in the air. Zane didn’t understand that. However, he followed Lee as the older boy strolled forward mid-air. It was a strange sensation, as if it were the world and not they moving, sliding by, and tilting. Lee held firmly to Zane’s hand until they dropped unceremoniously to the ground across the street from the hospital.
It was the middle of the day with the sun shining down searingly, thankfully, though no one was about, probably because of the heat. It would have been rather strange for a passerby to notice them dropping out of the sky like a belated stork delivery.
Lee stood up from the crouch he had landed in. He glanced around cautiously, fingering the hilt of a sword under his cloak. “That was far too easy, I thought they would try to shoot us out of the air.”
Zane spun to face him. “You thought what?”
Lee waved his hand dismissively. “Well, it obviously didn’t happen, let’s move.”
Zane walked after Lee between two different buildings through an alleyway to a large parking lot full of cars but empty of people. “Wait! Aren’t you going to tell me anything? Where are we going? What is going on? What is an Aetherion?”
Lee pointed Northeast. “The compass monument in the city’s center is our objective; your dad should meet us on our way there. Then we’ll use the monument to travel to the Aetherial City.”
The Compass monument was in a mostly deserted park in the center of Stella. As the city grew, green areas disappeared, and parks were less frequented. Despite his love of nature, Zane disliked going to the park because it was downright depressing.
“But what are the Aetherion!?” Zane asked again.
Lee looked down, folding his fingers together. “That is a difficult question… Well, in all simplicity, an Aetherion is a human with immense power who serves the true master and preserves light and truth throughout the universe. Comprendo?”
“Like galactic warriors?” Zane said sardonically.
Lee didn’t notice the tone. “Intergalactic, actually. We serve the true ruler, our master, who gave us this mission to preserve what he represents. Only… well, these days, none of us has heard from him in a long time. His throne is unoccupied, but we believe he is still with us, giving us strength for the fight.”
They began to walk through the cars. Zane waited for Lee to continue speaking, but he didn’t. Zane was just about to ask a new question when the metal monkeys invaded his world.
The first one smacked into the car beside him, screeching and showing its giant fangs. It dented the hood and gave the windshield a kick to shatter it for good measure. Lee spun on his heel and thrust his blade out. Unexpectedly, the blade wasn’t metal, but instead it appeared to be of flame; it glowed with an aura that flexed and spun around it, obscuring the small, hard crystalline center. Lee’s blade pierced straight through the creature, dropping it to the ground.
Three more dropped to the pavement on the edge of the parking lot, a dozen yards away. Zane looked to Lee, “What are those things!?”
“The Onyxian’s minions, probably sent to stall us until he can arrive,” Lee said grimly.
There was no more time for talk as the hideous beast charged at an alarming speed straight for them. Zane got a quick but good look at one as it leapt for his throat, bearing its fangs. It was primarily humanoid, incredibly thin with papery skin that showed some of its muscle and bone. It wore faded rags sown together into a ragged cloak that didn’t cover its forearms. Its teeth and claws were metal, and welded to its body were plates of the stuff instead of skin. Its face was piggish, more like a boar than a monkey, like he first thought, but still horrifying.
Zane ducked, smashing the beastly thing into the ground with a horrible ‘metal on pavement’ sound. It stood somewhat dizzily to its full three and a half feet of height. Zane kicked it back, smacking it into a car door and sending it skidding across the wet pavement.
It sprang up as he ran at it, raking its claws across his arm. Zane caught its body and slammed it down into the ground, shouting in pain. It didn’t stand up again. Zane looked over his shoulder to see Lee battling expertly against two remaining creatures. Their claws and teeth met Lee’s glowing, multicolored blade every time. Despite the non-solid appearance of Lee’s blade, it struck against the metal claws as if it were made of metal itself.
Zane bounded back towards Lee at an unbridled pace, unable to control his new strength. He smacked into one of Lee’s opponents and rolled with it across the ground and into the wall of a building outside the parking lot.
A bystander came out of one of the surrounding buildings, glancing curiously at them over the cars. Zane remarked this to Lee, who agreed they had better hurry.
“How do I stop this?” Zane called out in frustration as he accidentally threw him and his enemy another fifteen feet away from Lee. He couldn’t get a handle on his raw power coursing through him, and he wasn’t even tossing around lightning, just wrestling hyperactively.
“Rip all metal out of it and it should wither to dust. These guys aren’t strong; they’re just here to distract us until their master returns,” Lee called out.
Zane rolled his eyes, decking his opponent. “No! Not that, this super-strength! How do I not leap ten feet with every step?”
“I’ve never heard of anyone with that problem before,” Lee muttered. He fainted, left, and struck right. His opponent saw this coming and leapt back. That gave Lee the opening he’d been waiting for. He jumped back, traced a complicated symbol in mid-air, and in a flash of brilliance, cracks of light spread out and away from him, disintegrating the two creatures as they touched them.
Zane spun in surprise, “What was that?”
Sweat fell off Lee’s forehead. “I’m a metatechnic.”
Zane looked around for more foes, returning to Lee after a moment. He noticed that his uncontrollable strength seemed to have dissipated. Hopefully, that meant that it arrived when he needed it. “What is a metatechnic? Please tell me it is not yet another being I have to remember. Onyxians, metal monkeys, Aetherion. How do you keep it straight?”
Lee shrugged, “A lot of memorization, but the schema is easy. There are two sides, the Aethrion and the Hytoike. The side of the Aetherion is us (Aetherion) and our various allies, though… these days we’ve run low on them. The side of the Hytoike is the Hytoike and their minions, the Onyxians and other monsters. Each monster has its own minor minions, like the Scraplings we just fought, they’re minions of the Onyxian.”
Lee began to walk off through the parked cars. “Come on, hurry, we need to meet up with your dad; the Onyxian isn’t as damaged as I thought, and now he’s hunting us–he’ll be stronger.”
Zane followed, “So what is a metatechnic?”
Lee answered him on the move, “A metatechnic is a gift; each Aetherion has two or three gifts. Being a metatechnic is fairly common, I can open rifts between separate… realms, you might say. I make openings between the physical and metaphysical and use said openings to absorb enemies, create portals, or even to heal. As a weaponite (another common gift), I have natural skill and strength with any weapon I use. However, I still train because the skill from the gift adds to what I already have through training, and more importantly, the more I use my weaponite powers, the weaker I become. It takes from my strength to increase my strength.”
They were almost across the parking lot now; the pieces of this seemingly impossible puzzle were fitting together. “So when you fight with extra skill, it wears down your stamina more.”
“Exactly, so when I fight, I try to use bursts of skilled attacks mixed in with my normal level of fighting. My last gift is that I am an air-walker. I can fly in one sense, although it is exceedingly difficult and more often is better for breaking my falls than for lifting off into the air. Unlike you, of course, that was really skilled how you set us down.”
Zane started in surprise, looking at Lee, “Me? What did I do?”
It was now Lee’s turn to look surprised. He whistled long and low. “You did that all without realizing it. That’s really good, man. I thought I’d have to guide us both down, but you summoned the winds to aid you and guided us down.”
“But I wasn’t even trying, and I don’t feel weak like you do or anything.”
“You are an elemental Aetherion.”
Zane stopped, frustrated, “How is that any different?”
Lee looked down at him seriously. “You are the most powerful Aetherion to be born in a long time. Your Aetherion gift is the control of the elements, like storms and rain. Some other gifts may be comparable in power, like air walking and your wind, but the main difference is strength. I draw my power from inside myself and therefore can only keep it up for so long. You draw your power from the elements around you. The more you use your powers, the stronger you get. That is also probably why you react more to metal than most Aetherion. None of us likes it, but it couldn’t burn us in small amounts.”
Zane didn’t know how to respond to this. He waited for Lee to keep talking, but Lee continued walking silently. Almost broodingly. It was weird to have someone tell you suddenly that you had powers that someone like Lee might envy. Then again, he’d seen how Lee had struggled with the simplest of powers while Zane had flown without trying to. It could be easy to get discouraged at a beginner doing so much better than you, just by pure luck.
They entered another alleyway, and the air grew cold and smelled of iron like blood. Lee shivered, and he looked at Zane, frightened. “The Onyxian is coming.”
They arrived at the street. Cars drove past and people bustled along the sidewalk. A few dark clouds hovered in the sky, but none covered the sun; there was no reason for it to get so dark. No reason, that is, except for the minions of the Hytoike hunting them: the Onyxian.
Lee began to panic, looking left and right. “No, no, no, no.”
Zane grabbed his shoulders and spun the older boy around, “What is it?”
“Your father! He isn’t here! He said I should go ahead, and he’d be waiting for us here. We don’t stand a chance against the Onyxian without him.”