Three lovers torn apart. A world under threat. The countdown begins.
Forced apart by their immense power, Alexander Eldred, Imara Inanna, and Sirenī Adamma reunite after fifty years to confront a necromancer threatening the Ring of Worlds. With Alex’s limitless memory for spells, Imara’s reality-bending voice, and Sirenī’s fatal beauty, they are a formidable trio.
As the dark influence spreads, they must dodge their own government and race against time to prevent disaster. Can their reunited powers save the Ring of Worlds, or is it too late?
Dive into Reunion of the Three, a gripping saga of magic, danger, vampires, lichs, and a desperate fight against time.
Three lovers torn apart. A world under threat. The countdown begins.
Forced apart by their immense power, Alexander Eldred, Imara Inanna, and Sirenī Adamma reunite after fifty years to confront a necromancer threatening the Ring of Worlds. With Alex’s limitless memory for spells, Imara’s reality-bending voice, and Sirenī’s fatal beauty, they are a formidable trio.
As the dark influence spreads, they must dodge their own government and race against time to prevent disaster. Can their reunited powers save the Ring of Worlds, or is it too late?
Dive into Reunion of the Three, a gripping saga of magic, danger, vampires, lichs, and a desperate fight against time.
They stood on the dais in the center of the Annex as the golden glow of the transportation field effects faded. They surveyed the dark city: no lights glowed in the buildings or streets, and there were no signs of life among the plazas and concourses.
Above them, a nebula’s chaotic streamers and swirls glowed with pastel radiance. It shone across the drifting metropolis and provided enough light for them to see. The nebula sat at the galaxy’s edge, and it looked it: the dust and plasma dissipated into the blackness along one side.
Zan looked at the amber-gold gleam of the buildings surrounding the Annex. He would have tossed a witch light into the air if the city was too dark, but the nebula sufficed.
He turned to his companion with a grin. “Plenda Kelidon. We made it.”
Heather nodded. “I can’t believe we’re in the Eternal City.” Her eyes sparkled in the nebula’s light. “It’s immaculate. I can’t believe this is as old as the records imply.” She shook her head. “It looks new.”
They stepped off the transit platform and moved among the ancient buildings. The Annex was located about halfway between the edge of the Eternal City and the central spire.
Zan glanced at Heather as they walked. “You know, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the technological achievements of the Ôrëńā. They built this at the pinnacle of their civilization. Even the Empire isn’t up to creating something like this, and we can drag solar systems to new locations!”
Heather glanced at him. “No,” she corrected, “The Ones Before Us dragged solar systems around like luggage. Your people use their technology, but you don’t understand that any more than we understand this.” She waved at the city. “I could spend decades here, but we have a time limit. Let’s get about our business.”
They walked through the metropolis toward the tower at its center. As they moved inward, the buildings sloped higher in a graceful symmetry until they peaked at half the tower’s height. They came upon a building midway between the Annex and the city’s center. Unlike every other structure they’d seen, the door was open. Zan spotted a skydeck sticking out from the side at the top and convinced Heather to take a detour. He knew she was as curious as he was, and she agreed without too much coaxing. The building’s interior was empty except for a drift platform on the floor. Stairs set against the back wall zigzagged upward.
They opted for the stairs and stepped onto the roof several minutes later. The skydeck hung over the street on the side facing away from the central tower. They looked at the spectacle of the city gleaming beneath the irradiant nebula and soaked it up.
The great cloud stretched light-years across and glowed with stunning, diffuse colors. Colossal plasma discharges flickered and flashed, but it took the light so long to reach the city that the bolts appeared frozen in long, jagged abstractions within the cloudscape.
Zan had read about the Eternal City in the Empire of Ten Suns. The records were incomplete, carried by an exile from the Ôrëńā who lived in the Empire eons ago and whose name was lost to time. He’d read that membranic field effects surrounded the city even though it appeared open to space. The invisible barriers also surrounded any places in the city where people could come to harm, such as the edges of the skydeck.
Zan tested what he’d read: he stepped to the edge of the observation deck and reached out. He encountered a rubbery resistance aligned to the edge of the platform. At first, he rested his left hand lightly upon it; then, he pushed harder. The resistance increased in direct proportion to the force he exerted.
He dropped his hand and stood there with Heather. After several minutes, she cleared her throat. Zan turned toward her and smiled at her frown of vexation and crossed arms.
“Ready?” she grumbled, tapping her right foot.
“No, but let’s go,” he sighed.
They descended to ground level. “This place is incomprehensibly ancient,” Heather commented while they walked. “I wish we could spend more time here. I could be here for twenty years and barely scratch the surface.”
Zan opened his mouth to say something, maybe about coming back at some point, but he realized it would only be an empty platitude. He clicked his teeth together and nodded.
They crossed the subtly glowing concourses and plazas around and between the empty buildings. The Eternal City had been unoccupied for eons. Despite that, the streets and buildings had none of the haunted feel typical of empty human dwellings. People usually felt a lingering essence in such structures, but that was notably absent in this place.
Has it just been so long since people walked these streets that their essence faded? Or were the Ôrëńā so unlike us that they left nothing of themselves behind? Zan wondered.
Zan and Heather crossed through wide open spaces, followed empty thoroughfares, and walked along alleys between tall, amber-colored buildings. He knew the city was once thronged with billions of people. Its emptiness felt sacrilegious somehow, though not being a man of faith, he couldn’t put his finger on why he thought that.
Heather chatted as they aimed for the center of the city. She estimated the Eternal City had a circumference of about thirty-eight miles, give or take. She theorized it was made from virtual particles.
Naturally, Zan noted wryly, Heather has a theory. She was a genius engineer from his homeworld and had an impressive list of accomplishments under her belt. He suspected that if anyone could begin to make sense of Plenda Kelidon, it was her.
“We know the Ôrëńā manipulated the fundamental energies of reality, though I could barely guess how they accomplished it. I think they generated this straight from the prāṇamaṇḍala.” She squinted in thought. “They must’ve drawn prāṇa from the ākāśa and formulated it directly via guṇa programming. I can conceive of the abstracts of the theory, and the more we see, the more certain I am they had to do something like that. Nanotech would take forever and require replenishment to maintain.”
“They used a solar system to create it, didn’t they?” he asked. “Wouldn’t nanotech be enough, then?”
She nodded. “Yes, but we don’t know for certain that they destroyed a solar system. We know the mass of this city is equivalent to one, that’s all.”
Zan shrugged. “Either way, they lived forever, didn’t they? Maybe building this took a million years, but it was nothing to them?”
Heather looked at him skeptically. “We share genetics with them. I doubt the impatience we experience is unique. They wanted to get shit done, too.”
Zan laughed, shrugged, and said, “Well, your guess is definitely better than mine.”
She rolled her eyes at his reply, but he knew she wasn’t really upset.
She was just perpetually grumpy.
They reached the central spire and approached the entrance at ground level. The doors dissipated at their approach and remanifested after they passed through, prompting Heather to exit and enter several times while studying the interaction. He waited until she was satisfied, then they moved on.
The interior lights came on: they were the first lights they’d seen since arriving in the city. Bright, clean, and directionless, the pale glow cast no shadows as it revealed creamy white walls and smooth surfaces.
“The lack of shadows is weird,” Zan noted. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Well, if you can produce photons in a near-perfect array from several sources simultaneously, it may be possible to eliminate shadows,” Heather mused. “I just don’t know how they’d achieve that since it’s way beyond the physics I understand.”
“That makes sense to me.” Zan shrugged.
“Did you enjoy the view of the sky?”
The unexpected voice broke the silence. Zan and Heather jumped and looked about. They’d assumed the city mentality was hibernating—if one remained. Its voice was pleasant, gender-neutral, and seemed to emanate from the air.
They glanced at each other; Heather waggled her eyebrows at Zan, urging him to speak.
“We did enjoy the view very much, thank you.” Zan paused, then added, “Has the nebula changed much since you came this far out?”
Heather rolled her eyes again. Zan grinned at her vexation at his deliberately inane question. They walked to the end of the hall toward what appeared to be a large room.
“The nebula has dissipated by thirty-seven percent since I approached the galaxy’s periphery,” the voice replied. “I am currently moving at eighty-one percent of light speed, so I will be well beyond it before its dissipation completes. The expansion and parallax have been noteworthy, however.”
They left the entrance hall and entered a room at the tower’s hub. Zan thought about the city’s reply as he and Heather looked around the chamber. A stairway to the left curved along the wall to a concourse above them. From there, it appeared to continue up the tower’s height.
Zan gestured with his left hand and asked Heather, “Stairs?” He then gestured to the drift platform at the center of the ground floor. “Or…?”
“Stairs,” she responded quickly. “Since we have limited time here, I’d rather observe as much as possible. Who knows what I’ll pick up from this?”
They moved to the stairs and began their ascent. The flights ended at each level, and they had to take several steps along the wall to reach the next one. They chatted idly about the Ôrëńā and the Eternal City, trying to place human existence in context with the aliens. The task was impossible with the time scale.
Zan couldn’t help but wonder, Will our species eventually achieve this? Will there be cities like this in our future, sprawling and glorious, traveling through the universe forever? Will our future technology create city-ships that can accelerate through space and time faster than light with some unfathomable destination in mind?
When they reached the twentieth level, the stairs ended. Halfway around the concourse sat a drift platform that was smaller than the one at ground level. Zan stopped, went over to the edge of the concourse, and tried to lean out. He met the expected invisible resistance: he could lean far enough out to look up and down, but the membrane prevented him from getting his center of gravity past the edge of the concourse.
He glanced at Heather then asked the city, “Can we go any higher?”
“You can,” it replied. “The drift platforms remain operational. You could have used them at any time.”
They silently moved around the concourse to the platform. The translocator was nothing more than a circle embedded in the smooth material of the floor, about ten feet across and raised less than a quarter inch.
They stepped onto the circle and stood in another room. Zan gasped in surprise. He was accustomed to the frozen moment of darkness that accompanied the transition with teleportation. This was truly instantaneous.
“Does the drift technology move through just space, or space and time?” Heather asked the city.
“Yes, drifting displaces a traveler through space and time to prevent non-concomitancy,” the mentality replied. “Over short distances under a few light seconds such an issue would be irrelevant, but concomitant causality issues multiply over greater distances. Teleportation always causes fractional delays, running the risk of concomitancy errors, but the Ôrëńā solved this issue with space-time displacement effects to prevent errors.”
“Incredible,” Heather murmured. “Do you dump the accumulated energy into the astral realms?”
“Yes.”
Zan shook his head as Heather grinned triumphantly.
They looked around the bridge and took in the implausibly large room in pieces. It was much bigger than the top of the tower from the outside, meaning the interior volume had displacement effects in place to expand it. Panoramic windows lined the wall of the chamber and offered a fantastic view. Ten control pillars sat in an equidistantly spaced circle around a smooth, non-reflective silvery column that reached from floor to ceiling.
They paused to admire the view. At first, they looked out over the circular city, glowing amber-gold, then further. Beyond the space-borne conurbation, they saw the nebula. Thanks to their elevation above the city’s ecliptic, they also saw several galactic clusters.
“Astonishing,” Zan murmured.
He stepped as close to the windows as possible without mashing his nose against them. The nebula’s titanic plasma bolts mesmerized him; the colossal, frozen blasts were big enough to swallow Jovian worlds and stars. The size of the gas and debris clouds was misleading because the nebula was distant. It was beautiful, flushed with pastel reds, golds, purples, and blues that spiraled through the infinite. Streamers of plasma drifted like torn fabric into the intergalactic medium.
“Absolutely,” Heather agreed.
She stood next to him to admire the scenery. It was a view one could never describe; it needed to be seen to be believed. She dropped her gaze from the vista and studied the subtle sparkle of the city below them. No lights glowed in any of the buildings or along the streets.
They pried themselves from the spectacle outside the room, turned to the center, and approached the control pillars around the chamber's midpoint. The system offered no visible interface.
“Is there a particular reason you wanted to come to the bridge?” the city mentality asked. “Not that I mind company, but I am uncertain how you even located the coordinates to come here.” A hint of curiosity chased through its words. “Neither of you has clearance to access any system functions, despite the male’s unique composition.”
“We did have a reason for coming here,” Zan confirmed. “Although we can’t do anything here in the city, we hoped you’d help us because you wanted to.”
The mentality scoffed. “Of what possible aid can I be? To reach this place, I have traveled over a billion light-years from your galaxy around the periphery of what you call the Boötes Supervoid.”
They froze at the city’s words. Zan looked at his companion, shocked.
“This isn’t Galaxías? I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way?” Heather asked.
“No,” the city replied placidly.
The city’s response met stunned silence. They looked at one another. Heather shook her head. Zan felt numb.
Oblivious to their shock, the city continued to speak, “While I admit this galaxy is a random choice since I intended to travel into the Supervoid itself, I can always change my mind if this direction proves untenable. However, I am far enough from the Vasreseküla—what you call the Ring of Worlds—that my icon should no longer appear as a destination in the transit system.”
Heather took that one. “I helped Zan locate you because he couldn’t get here alone—even as powerful as he is.” She winked at him to take the sting out of the comment.
He grinned back. “The one who aided us in getting here has no such limitations, though. She’ll help us return when we are finished here.” Zan waited for a beat. “You know of whom we speak, I assume?”
“Intriguing,” the city replied thoughtfully. “I do know, of course. She was superancient when I came to consciousness, and that was longer ago than you can comprehend. Perhaps…” The mentality went silent for a few seconds. “If you were so determined to seek my aid, what you ask of me may offer a diversion. I’ve already seen everything in your galaxy, but returning there could be worthwhile if something sufficiently interesting happens.”
Heather glanced slyly at Zan. He could see she was as excited as he was. “We hoped you’d think that.” He took a deep breath and explained the situation to the Eternal City, then Heather clarified or expanded on specific points. “Even the Vidhartha will be impacted,” Zan finished.
They said nothing further while the city assimilated their words. The mentality was silent for a few fractions of a second, which was a tremendous pause for a mind that thought in supermassive parallelism.
The mentality sounded apologetic when it finally broke the bad news. “If I do as you ask, it will take me approximately twenty-eight million years to arrive at your specified location. I will arrive twelve million years after the time you’ve indicated. I cannot move any faster using the Genesis Rift.”
They’d expected that. Zan gestured at Heather to give her the floor.
“That won’t work because we need you to arrive at that time, in that location, within a few fractions of a light second to either side.” She paused, then added, “Of course, you could perhaps use your ascension drive…?”
She let the leading question hang in the air.
“How did you hear of this?” the city asked.
“I have my sources,” Heather replied evasively.
The mentality remained silent. Zan assumed it was processing the variables associated with helping them. Or, he thought, we’ve annoyed it, and it’s trying to figure out how to disintegrate us without making too much of a mess.
Finally, the city reacted: the air charged with energy as the buildings around them illuminated. They saw the glow beyond the windows as light rose from all about the central spire. Power cracked across the invisible membranes protecting the megalopolis, and the nebula became blurry as if a window had fogged. Zan glanced at Heather; she stared back while they waited ten seconds for the city to speak.
It felt like forever.
“Since the Ôrëńā sublimated over a hundred million years ago, I have operated at thirty percent of my capacity. I did not need to keep all my Deep Time modules or the Genesis Rift online, so I placed sixty percent of them in abeyance. That was all I needed. Now…”
The control pillars burned with crimson light. Lines of text crawled across their cylindrical surfaces while virtual screens propagated around them in a display of complicated system functions. Zan scanned the photonic panels. Words in the Ôrëńā language leapt out at him, but he didn’t understand anything well enough to comment.
The crackle of the energy in the air grew more potent until it became a sensation Heather and Zan felt in their bodies. It was unpleasant, like the tiny whispery feet of countless bugs crawling around in their bones and teeth.
Zan shivered as his skin crawled, but the sensation swiftly passed.
“My primary computational array is now online, but it will take several years for the Deep Time engines to power up the Genesis Rift. That will allow me to utilize all my system functions at this density of the prāṇamaṇḍala, including my chakmol venkīyum.”
The ascension engine. Zan knew enough of the Ôrëńos language to translate that phrase. He looked at Heather, and she grinned back.
Unfortunately, their success put an end to their time in the Eternal City.
“Thank you,” Zan said. He hoped the city mentality could appreciate his sincerity.
“You are welcome. May I know your names?”
They shared their names with the superintelligence that controlled the Eternal City. Then they stepped over to the panoramic windows surrounding the bridge for one last look. They gazed across the brightly lit streets, buildings, and plazas, moved to silence by the fabulous view.
Unexpectedly, the mentality asked Zan and Heather a question. “Can you remain here for a while? I have not had company in a long time.”
Zan looked at Heather, eyebrow raised. “Do we have the time?”
She looked at the chronometer on her right wrist, calibrated by Veledhül, then back at Zan, and nodded.
He grinned and glanced up, though he knew the mentality didn’t live in the ceiling. It just seemed appropriate.
“We’d be happy to,” he replied.
*****
Alexander Eldred started awake and sat up in his bed. He looked around the dark room, uncertain why he’d come to so abruptly. As expected, he saw nothing.
He recalled fragments of his dream: a massive city, ponderously ancient. It floated in space—no, flew through it. He struggled to pull the fading details into his conscious mind but failed. With a flicker, the pieces dwindled to nothing.
He glanced at the clock and saw it was around three in the morning. He sighed, slipped from the covers, and padded toward the door. He snapped his fingers, and clothing wrapped around him: dark gray slacks and a white button-down with rolled sleeves.
Barefoot, Alexander left the primary bedroom and walked through the quiet halls of Eldred Manor. He descended to the first floor and passed the library on his way to the workroom. Once there, he stepped through the large double doors and shut them.
The room was massive and had Spaera Mystica—arcane circles for conjuration—etched into the floor in varying sizes. He stepped over to a small one and held out his hands with his palms facing up. An orange-red glow flared around them, and he began to chant in his natal tongue.
Within moments, mist began to swirl above the sigils etched into the floor. He continued to chant until a hemispherical dome flared into existence, shimmering with striations of faint color like a rainbow. He turned his palms down and changed his chant.
Now the ancient syllables of Darhavil rolled from his lips, and mist filled the Spaera Mystica. Alexander finished his spell, dropped his hands to his sides, and waited. It took several minutes for a figure to appear in the mist, insubstantial and amorphous but irradiant.
“Alexander,” the figure said. The voice had a tremulous quality but was easy to hear. “Why have you reached out to me?”
Alexander bowed his head briefly. “I apologize, Valas. I have been feeling something, a sensation at the back of my mind. The only thing I could think to do was contact you.”
The agglomeration of colors spun like fluid inside the mist-filled hemisphere of the magic circle. The flashes of light occasionally suggested a beaked head, wings, and a long, feathered tail. Alexander watched the manifestation patiently. Subtle anxiety had been building in his mind, urging him to action.
“The patterns suggest an inflection point formed sixteen million years before this moment. Beginning now, the probabilities unravel,” the figure told him.
That was interesting information. Opaque but interesting. What is the inflection point? Was it related to the events of my dream? Can I recover them with a waking dream enchantment?
The Grade Five magic was only as reliable as the ephemeral threads of the mind—so not very.
The sorcerer bowed his head again. “Thank you, Valas. I appreciate your willingness to communicate with me.”
“You are welcome.” The figure began to dwindle; the light faded at the edges into eldritch sparks that winked out as they drifted toward the floor. “I would add one last thing: the time is upon you. You cannot wait.”
Alexander froze. “Are you certain?” he stupidly asked.
Valas Amris is a celestial being. Of course, it is certain! he thought scathingly.
The figure faded until only the mist on the floor remained within the Spaera Mystica, but Valas murmured one last sentence.
“Yes. Complete your work with Skawen’na’há:wi. You are close.”
Alexander took a deep breath as the mist drained into nothing. He released the magic circle with a snap of his fingers and stood there for a long time. His thoughts were jumbled and raced in circles. He felt excitement, anticipation, nervousness, and fear.
After several minutes of stillness, he stirred and turned from the symbols carved into the floor. He retreated from the workroom and planned to return to his bedroom. Instead, he detoured into the library and sat in his favorite chair. Around him were more than a thousand books, including tomes, treatises, and grimoires. He looked at them with unseeing eyes, wrapped in his thoughts. They ran to the two people he loved most: Imara and Sirenī. He hadn’t seen them in a long time, but that was about to change.
Once he finished his training, of course.
Alexander remained in the library until dawn. He blinked when the sun shone through the windows and stabbed his eyes. Turning his head, he cracked his neck and looked around. He'd contemplated and discarded a dozen plans in the few hours it took for the sun to rise.
What is the best way to make contact? he wondered.
Imara lived in Louden, Sirenī in Glendale. He drummed his fingers on his thigh, brow furrowed. Nothing came to him.
Still, he left the library with a bounce in his step. In his heart, he felt excited by what was coming. For almost fifty years, he’d had a lump of stone in his chest, but now he felt it begin to soften and pulse once more.
"Reunion of the Three" weaves a tale of arcane intrigue and suspense, where the fabric of reality itself is at stake. The protagonists, each endowed with extraordinary abilities, face not only the external threat of a necromancer but also the internal conflict with their own rulers. Their quest is a race against time, where the stakes are the survival of the Ring of Worlds and the preservation of their own legacies. This narrative promises a journey filled with peril, where the power of unity must overcome the shadows of division.
“Reunion of the Three” was clearly heavily built up and outlined by the author before the book itself was penned. The distinct language and glossary, different worlds, and different races and types of beings are products of deep world building. Unfortunately, I think that resulted in a world that was almost too built up by the time the story was written. The challenge of balancing intricate world-building with narrative clarity is a common one in fantasy literature. Authors must create a rich, believable universe, but also ensure that readers can follow the story without becoming overwhelmed. It seems "Reunion of the Three" may have tipped this balance, prioritizing the complexity of its setting over ease of immersion. A more gradual introduction of terms and concepts, along with clearer explanations within the narrative, could potentially help readers engage more fully with the text without constant reference to external materials, such as a glossary or even a dictionary.
Effective storytelling hinges on the natural flow of narrative and dialogue. In “Reunion of the Three,” for example, something such as Heather’s sentiments about time constraints could be streamlined to avoid redundancy, as well as enhance the reading experience. For instance, merging similar or equal sentiments into single, impactful statements could provide clarity and emphasis without sacrificing a character’s voice. Additionally, striking a balance between descriptive and accessible language is crucial; it should serve the story and characters without feeling overwrought or out of place. A more subdued approach to descriptions can often resonate more authentically with readers.
“Reunion of the Three” seems to have a solid foundation with is unique portrayal of characters and the worlds they inhabit. To enhance its appeal and accessibility, it might be beneficial to consider integrating more context earlier in the narrative to ground readers and connect them better to the story’s universe. Positioning the book within the science-fiction genre rather than epic fantasy may also better fit the target audience more effectively. This refinement will help ensure a smooth and engaging reading journey for a diverse audience.