The War of Elevens| Book 1 of the Space Thief Chronicles

Prologue

The Shifter World

This is a story about how a storm and a space thief ended the world. 

It begins with a psychic who loved red lipstick and diamond chokers.  

Upon entering the garden, the psychic shed her leather trench coat. It fell, liquid leather at her heels. The ground swallowed it up in the way magical gardens swallow everything up: soil-skin absorbing, leaf-lips kissing, root-fingers tugging. The jacket was gone before Lydia Canassa stepped into the heart of the garden. 

The garden was shaped like a snail's shell: It spiraled, a circular mass of labyrinthine hedges and brightly colored petals that could kill you with a look. Orange lichen soared up the north side of spindly trees. Boulders staggered over one another, sharp edges hiding beneath pink moss. Shaggy limbs shivered overhead, and things shaped like forest creatures shrank into things that looked like forest shrubs. In the very middle of this spiraling garden was a set of eleven cards, fanned out just-so on a dirt-caked brick path embedded in the soil. 

Lydia said to the garden, "Clever man." 

The garden replied Shhhh shhhh shhhh. 

Psychics are energy-readers, feelers of the invisible. Vibrations quivered out from nine-year-old girls, stop signs, angry old women with cat-shaped glasses, and wedding dresses, and psychics cupped those vibrations in their palms and read them like a textbook; but Lydia, however, was not a typical psychic because typical was boring and psychics were too prissy to venture into the erratic unseen world of vibrations, so instead of simply reading vibrations from other objects, Lydia turned what she read into physical manifestations. Over the course of her life, she had taken a nine-year-old girl's sadness and turned it into a storm cloud, a stop sign's indifference into a dog obsessed with mayonnaise, an angry old woman's vigor into a hundred moldy strawberries, and a wedding dress's excitement into a birch tree. 

She turned vibrations into tangible things simply because she could, simply because she would be bored otherwise. 

She was going to destroy the world simply out of boredom. 

Lydia knelt down in front of the brick tile, brushing her fingers against the cards. The size of playing cards, each were new, with razor edges and sheens on their dazzlingly handsome faces. Their surfaces bore paintings of monsters...beaks and claws and tongues and venom. Every monster had vengeful, hungry eyes, down to the last wretched one. 

Lydia stretched long olive fingers over the cards to get a read on them. 

Anger death catastrophe revenge cataclysm carnage 

Lydia snarled, "This isn't going to be pretty for the world." 

The garden replied Shhhh shhhh shhhh. 

And then she began to morph the vibrations she held in her hands into something real, something tangible. The energy poured out of her in a steady hot stream like water from a teapot. Invisible butterfly wings fluttered between her fingers, up her arms, down her legs, and as her energy waltzed with the vibrations emanating from the cards and the garden protested shhhh shhhh shhhh 

Lydia grinned a shark-sharp grin; she was certainly no longer bored. Millions of people were going to die and all she had to do to make it happen was transform formless vibrations into something with a shape. Abstract to concrete. Mental to physical. 

Cards to monsters. 

How fun, how interesting. 

The garden around Lydia began to die. Flowers dulled into black papery heaps, hedges crumpled, a leather coat was vomited back up by rippling soil-skin and puckered leaf-lips and twitching root-fingers some thirty feet behind her. Foliage choked and gagged and turned the ugly brown of sewage. If one were to see her in this cataclysm of dying life, one would think she was just as much of a shark as her grin: Sharp eyes, sharp nose, sharp mouth, sharp jawline, sharp fingers, sharp sharp sharp and warm warm warm as everything around her went cold cold cold. 

Lydia rocked back on her heels, wiping her hands on the skirt of her scarlet dress. She spat to the garden, "Don't be so dramatic." 

Dead things cannot reply. 

This was the result of a not-typical psychic transforming vibrations from hand-painted cards into something tangible: 

First, the stars whispered.

Stars had only ever whispered twice to each other in the history of the world; both times were during an era of cataclysm. Disaster had unfolded slowly during these two tragedies, like music on the steady rise of a crescendo or a flower as it unfurls into full bloom. During these cataclysms, oily shadows claimed the sky, so that night was everlasting and suffocating. The blood of pointless wars had painted the ground red, and flares from a too-close sun scorched every mountain black.

But not even blood-soaked grounds or a blazing sun compared to this.

On the night of the third cataclysm in world history, the electrical current of magic flipped inside out and shattered to pieces.

The stars watched as the shattered current ate people alive.

I smell catastrophe.

And then every star convulsed as eleven beasts revealed themselves to the world.

Three beasts fell from the sky, everything about them a black-purple blur of wings, legs, and tongues. When they crashed to the ground, cities crumbled. There were bloody streaks in the sky; they looked like red cirrus clouds, and the stars screamed when they realized the beasts had ripped the sky open. The sky was bleeding.

I smell catastrophe.

Four more beasts clawed up from the ground of the continents of the Shifter World. In their wake, earthquakes groaned. Landslides roared. Entire forests heaved and collapsed. Honey seeped through the earth, gold and sweet as it choked every bit of greenery that grew within a fifty-mile radius of where the beasts had unearthed themselves.

The stars began to shake. Their whispers turned to raw, broken protests. This was wrong and wrong and wrong—

The last four beasts rose from lilac-colored oceans. Silver rivulets shivered down antlers and long satin necks. They were prettier than the other monsters...they were also the angriest. Salt piled up along the coastlines, and the fish drowned in the shallows.

I smell catastrophe.

The beasts began their killing spree, and the stars could only watch and whisper, watch and whisper.