Page 24 of The Crownless King
Amaya smiled. “You’ve never been to the Archive?”
“Not this one. Never had reason to,” he answered.
She nodded. Shifters got their power directly from the moon, so they never had a need to come into the Archive. It wasreserved for scholars and elders mostly. Sometimes they had the littles come through with a field trip. Because this was the main Archive, there was still a lot of traffic, but people walking in off the street was rare.
Speaking of littles…In the middle of the atrium, at her favorite part of the Archive, a full class field trip stood in front of a six-foot black stone. Etched into the marble was a rendering of the Leonid meteor shower that was responsible for the awakening of the Southern USA. Amaya passed it every day on the way to the sacred garden and she always paused.
“Records of the meteor shower responsible for our powers were reported in human newspapers. Hundreds of meteorites fell that evening. So many that a lot of the plantation owners released their slaves in fear that the end of the world had arrived. The Leonid lit the sky as far north as New York, but the Celestials hid the Akachi stones inside of that meteor shower, directing them straight to us in the South.”
Amaya smiled wistfully and continued on to work. She’d been equally fascinated by the story of their awakening. The Celestials had blessed the populace that had come over on the ships with power to defeat their oppressors, and with that power they’d claimed the entire bottom half of what was supposed to be the United States of America. After the war between the states, the country had been permanently divided, with the Northern USA full of humans who had not been gifted by the Celestials and the Southern USA completely taken over with supernaturals. They shared the land with the indigenous humans who had chosen to stay in their ancestral lands, coming to a treaty that had held for centuries.
That’s not to say there were no supernatural beings in the North. The Buru vampires who regularly plagued the Southcame from Europe, but the northerners had tried to use them to overpower the South’s inhabitants. The Buru vampires had at one point worked to undermine the leadership here, but the rise of the Bayi and Levi, king of the vampires, had put a stop to that. She rolled her neck, immediately tense at the thought of Levi.
They reached the interior of the Archive where Amaya worked and she prepared to explain again why she was accompanied by a shifter. It wasn’t as if he could enter the sacred garden, but the security mages here had worked with her so long that they knew her and would ask more questions than the ones at the door.
“You’ll have to wait for me up there.” Amaya pointed to a set of stairs that led to a viewing room of the sacred garden. “You’ll be able to see me from there as I work. No one else is allowed inside. This is the only entrance and exit. No funny business, I promise.”
The shifter inhaled deeply, she guessed checking her for lies. After a long moment, he nodded and walked towards the stairs. Releasing a breath, Amaya used her badge to enter the front room of the sacred garden. Magic filled the small, dark room. The only light came from narrow windows at the top of the wall, which were from the skylight in the garden. At night, muted light would come in the form of the recessed lights built into the ceiling.
Power from the Akachi meteorite behind the iron door of the garden leaked into the space. The small piece that Levi possessed had nothing on the pieces stored here at the Archive. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes, enjoying the feel of it on her skin.
A Mujaji guard stood at the door. Malik was one of the regular guards, his magic being able to withstand the energyfrom the garden. The guards rotated throughout the day, none of them in the room for more than an hour at a time.
“You in trouble, Maya?” he asked with a smirk.
She rolled her eyes. “What have you heard?”
He held up his walkie-talkie. “Heard you came in with a shifter?”
“Uncle Paul,” was her answer.
Malik shook his head. The two of them had worked together long enough for the male to hear stories about the trouble her uncle often got them into.
“If you need help…”
She waved off his offer. “I got it.”
The locker room where she stored her stuff was even smaller than the front room of the garden. There were four lockers and a bench that went the length of them. Going to her locker, Amaya stared at the four clean suits that hung within. The staff there cleaned and replaced them once a week. Though she called it hers, it was highly impersonal; there was nothing of Amaya inside of it. Except for the size of the suits, her locker was no different than the others. No pictures, no trinkets, jut a place to store her purse until she was done working.
Despite that, it was home, and she’d missed it. She loved her job.
Sliding on the white Tyvek jumpsuit and tucking her hair beneath the hood, Amaya closed her locker and headed back out to the front room. She took a deep breath at the iron door that kept most of the power confined to the garden. She nodded that she was ready and Malik pressed the button.
The iron door slowly slid open and the power hit her full force, the chaos feeding her magic. If her hair wasn’t covered, she knew the strands would be glittering in response.
The sacred garden looked similarly to a Zen garden. A stone path wound through the meteorites stored here, sand on either side. Scattered dwarf trees in low clay pots kept the garden from looking stark, softening the lines of the sand and stones. There were also various sized stones scattered around the garden, feeding the magic that most of the mages in the South used as a power source.
The main Akachi piece was at the immediate right of the stone path, the first meteorite in the garden and the most important. It was maybe three feet around, but the punch it packed was indescribable.
The black mass was nothing spectacular, but at certain angles, you could see the magic shimmering around it. The piece that Raven had brought in months ago flanked the other side of the main stone. She stood and tilted her head, probing at the meteorite. The legend surrounding it made her proud. She was standing in front of an important piece of history for the Southern USA.
She started cleaning.
The sand around the stone formed a rippling circle. Each ridge of the sand served as a buffer to the power of the Akachi. For the main stone, ten ridges spread from the stone outward, while some of the other smaller, weaker stones used less. Using her magic, Amaya worked to cleanse the murky energy from the sand. The gray sand that surrounded the meteorite was now black, saturated with power. But, as she worked, the color would slowly leach out, as she funneled the magic back into the stone.
The sand held minerals that kept the rock stabilized, and her work would aid in that. As she manipulated the power, the sand flattened, the color draining, the magic feeding back into its source. Satisfied with the work, Amaya agitated the sand with her power, sweeping it back into the circular shape, the ridges intact.
There was a total of ten Akachi stones scattered across the sacred garden and this was the biggest. She always started here so that she could take a breather after. No one other than Chawi witches and mages were allowed in the sacred garden. Chaos Chawi were rare, Amaya being one of six who worked in the garden on a rotating shift. The other five were all her family. All women, with the same eventual fate. She swallowed and shook the negative thoughts from her head.
