The father-daughter superhero duo of REDEMPTOR find little peace following their defeat of the wicked wizard, General Gorchen. Little do they know that the prison city they left behind has descended into civil chaos. And it's about to get worse. Onl...
Rene's eyes narrowed on the clouds approaching in the distance. He picked her up and held her in his arms.
"Color is color, daughter. We don't know if a spirit is good or bad, sylva or boggi, until we see what it does, remember."
"Should we wait and see? If it's shoal or bode?"
"Well, whether good or bad, that's a lot in a row."
Closer crept the clouds, roiling forward, unstoppable. Colored lightning crackled within them, and with thunder did rumble. Shadowslider swooped up and down, onward and away. It disappeared behind a cloud. Rene said, "I'm sure he'll be right back."
Cuddling to her father's armored chest, clutching her arms tight around his neck, Nariah whispered, "I think we should go."
"My thoughts exacto." He peeked over the edge of their white cloud. He furrowed his brow.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"We're not where we were when we went to sleep. We were close to Tetrapolis before, a bit past the Western Wilds." Yesterday the tops of the pyramids of Tetrapolis were still visible to them peeking over the Western Wilds horizon. Now, Rene pointed, there were different mountains on the horizon. More square-shaped.
"We're going back to Tetrapolis to rescue everyone from Gorchen, and plus find and save my mother," Nariah cheered. "What? Are we still going back to Tetrapolis? Daddy? We're still going back to Tetrapolis. Right? You promised. A shinseon 'represents his word as bond to world,' that's the rule we have to do."
Nodding, Rene crouched and peered out, hand over his eyes to shield from the weird sunlight. "We're still going back, yes, but now it looks like we're at a different starting spot." Far below trees and strange colors stretched as far as Rene could see. He did not recognize what place it could be.
"Did the clouds move while we slept?" Nariah asked. "Well that was rude of them. Is it safe to go down?"
"We are a superhero of two," Rene smiled, reassuring her and gesturing grandly to her rainbow braid of seven beads in her hair. Each bead housed a different powerful sylva, but that was about as much as Rene knew about the rainbow braid so far. He was the hero, adult that he was, but she was the super, heart that she had. "We've got to remember, Ria, sylvas are on our side, whether we're close, far, near, or..."
Suddenly a swarm of streaking lights rushed past them—urgent, terrified. Nariah pulled on her father's arm.
"Let's go, let's go," she urged.
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On the horizon, closer than ever, those ominous colored clouds unfurled. Were they laughing? Were those faces in the clouds? Rene stared, "The sylvas? It's like they're running from the clouds. Like they're scared." But how could good spirits be scared of bad spirits? What kind of bad spirits could be so powerful as to have so many hundreds of sylvas racing away?
"They're running from the bad clouds, Daddy. They're boggi clouds. I know it. Should we run, too?"
Rene smiled at her, calm and confident, for she gave him strength. He said, "We don't run."
Nariah smiled back, took a deep breath, and narrowed her eyebrows at the oncoming storm. As her rainbow braid began to glow, she said, "We are Redemptor."
"Look, but they're turning," Rene rejoiced and pointed. Like a herd, the storming clouds were turning toward a different direction. "That's fortunate. You see? We've got to have..."
Yet from the red cloud in the back of the bode, out lashed a bolt of lightning with a bellow of thunder and exploded the white cloud out from beneath the Nazas. Its parting gift. The blue sky took them, pulled them straight crazily down toward hard doom below.
And the morning had been going so pleasantly well.
