Chasing Sparks

Chapter 39.2

Marsh then settled down to his own task and the whole point of the last sorry few weeks, to find out about the banishment of the Dreyma. And in particular, any reference to the demon’s spark.

He had only ever seen one previous reference before. A small set of entries in an old Krill text written by one of the Celestial household administrators, a Krill named Kalidus. Marsh had read the extract many years ago but had memorised the lines.

‘The fourteen gathered. And success! The Horror has been banished. Everyone should offer a prayer of thanks to the Celestial this day.’

But the next entry said.

‘It has been days since the banishment, but there is no atmosphere of joy. Rather the Celestials continue to search for something, as if the job is only half done.’

The next entry in the diary was dated eight days later.

‘I have heard mention of a demon spark. Is this what they search?’

And that was it. The only mention of a demon spark in all of Marsh’s reading but he knew the truth of it.

The demon spark and the Dreyma’s link to Faria. And because the Celestial were unable to find this small spark, they couldn’t complete the banishment. Instead they were forced to simply block the Dreyma’s return by putting a seal around its link to Faria. Marsh knew this because the seal and link were directly below his home. The disc of thrumming energy with the small crimson dot in its centre.

But the little dot was growing. Whether the seal was weakening or the link was just growing stronger Marsh didn’t know but unless he found a way to reinforce the seal, or better still, complete the banishment, he knew Faria was doomed. The tiny crimson dot would one day grow too big to be contained and when it did, well, Marsh didn’t want to think about the consequences.

But there was still time. There had to be time to stop it.

The only things he had to go on were those few passages from Kalidus together with the fact, there were fourteen handles spaced evenly around the seal. Marsh had reasoned early on that in order to empower the seal, fourteen Celestials needed to be holding the fourteen handles.

The closest thing left to Celestials on Faria were the sparked affines, so with fourteen sparked affines holding the handles, maybe he could reinforce the seal. And, just maybe, with fourteen sparked affines holding the handles and the demon spark in his possession, he could complete the banishment of the Dreyma, once and for all. Maybe, maybe.

Marsh even suspected the Celestials had left the fourteen sparks on Faria for this specific purpose. Why else leave a direct link to their Celestial plane? So, with fourteen Seekers gathered together around the seal, Marsh thought, the world had a chance.

Thus his quest to find all fourteen affinity sparks, fifteen if you included the demon’s own spark. He had found five. Just five in two hundred years. Pathetic. Possibly seven, if Tiel was successful. But still pathetic. He needed all fourteen.

But what could he do? He couldn’t give up. All he could do was keep searching and hoping. So with a deep breath, he strode into the main library and pulled a dusty tome from the shelf and started reading.

...

Marsh had been studying text after text for what was well over forty-five hours now and was exhausted. With only a short time remaining he was tempted to ask Gel to help him, but Gel was engaged in something equally important and he was reluctant to disturb the Sneak.

Besides, he suspected his desire, at least in part, to ask Gel was just wanting to share the secret he alone had carried for two hundred years with someone, but he pushed aside his own insecurities. This was his burden alone. Sharing it with anyone, risked everything. If the world found out the truth of what was happening, chaos was the only result. His efforts at order and stability would be destroyed in an instant, so he rubbed his tired eyes and ploughed on alone.