Adventures of Jacko the Conjurer
The Dawn
By Jamie Ott
Copyright Jamie Ott 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used without written permission.
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The Dawn
Chapter 1
“Where are we?”
“The dawn,” Lucem replied.
Jacko looked around, trying to see some form of something, but all he saw was white haziness all about. He was closed in by clouds through which bits of golden light randomly broke through sections. Looking down, he saw that he stood not on ground, but upon the same cloudy substance.
From all around, there was a loud humming noise. The hazy clouds shifted about him as well as under his feet, yet he stood without tumbling.
“Why are we here?”
But Lucem didn’t respond.
A soft voice came from all around them.
“Lucem?” it said.
Jacko looked for the source of the voice when, from his left, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen floated toward them. She was wearing a gauzy white robe, and her hair fell down to her waist in long white curls. Her eyes were the color of bluish crystal. She reminded him of the many paintings he’d seen of goddesses from the dark ages.
“Meet my mother, Aurora.”
Briefly, Jacko had a flashback to a time when his mother told him a story about the goddess Eos, or as Lucem introduced her, Aurora.
She was the dawn.
“Son,” she said.
“Hello, Mother.”
She leant over and kissed Lucem on his porcelain white cheek.
“I see you’ve brought Jacko.”
She, then, bent over and kissed him with her ruby red lips that, unlike Lucem’s skin which was like cold stone, were soft and warm.
Such was the plight of a god that wasn’t born out of the chaos, which was another universe that died so long ago that man didn’t have a way of measuring such distance yet. Gods like Lucem were another sort of half breed god. As they aged, their skin would harden, turn white, and then slowly lose corporeal form, leaving behind pure consciousness. Not Aurora, however, for when she kissed him, he felt life flow into him. She was an essence form that was above the realm of physicality.
They all stood motionless for a moment. Aurora peered eerily into Lucem’s eyes, yet they said nothing. It occurred to Jacko that they were communicating without him. Then Lucem disappeared without a word.
“Lucem? Don’t leave me alone. Come back!” he panicked.
“He’s got work to do. Someone or something has disturbed his place of rest.”
At the moment, the gods were engaged in pre-war. Much of the fighting was taking place in space. Lucem’s place of rest was Venus. To destroy Venus would be to destroy Lucem, as some gods were tethered to their place in the heavens.
Jacko looked up at Aurora’s enormous form. She stared back down at him with the eyes and face of a ghost come to life. There was something about these figures whose supernatural life gleamed from their pores, making their beauty just as frightening as it was eye catching.
“Please don’t look at me like that; it makes me uncomfortable.”
From the corner of Jacko’s eyes, something gleamed at him. He ignored it at first because he was waiting for Aurora to speak, but the gleam turned to a bright shine.
He looked left and right and saw a strange silvery substance bleeding inward and soaking up the white clouds. The substance spread out, snuffing out the light.
“Aurora,” he yelled. “What’s going on? Stop it!”
She remained motionless and unblinking.
He backed away from the silver liquid which got too close to his feet. It looked as though it would swallow them both up. Jacko tried to back up more, but there was an invisible wall that kept him from getting further away.
The silvery substance caught up to Aurora and coated her supernatural form, blotting out her bluish eyes until she was like a hardened statue.
When Jacko screamed in horror, her voice came back.
“In the rise of my time, we were nothing but dimensional matter. The Earth was a molten rock.”
The scene changed.
“This is what it was before the gods.”
His heart jumped in his chest as he looked around and saw they were no longer in the hazy cloud that was Aurora’s form, but instead stood upon a bright orange-red runny substance that he suspected was magma. There were no land forms and, in the distance, he saw a herd of black cherubs galloping across the land.
Thankfully, the scene changed, and next, they were standing on floors so white that they pained Jacko’s eyes. He looked left and right and saw the walls weren’t walls at all, but a fluffy white wispy, cotton-looking substance.
To their right there was a grand dining table that Jacko couldn’t see the end of. It appeared to go on forever, yet at the end closest to where he and Aurora stood, sat an earlier version of Aurora and several other majestic looking gods.
“My parents,” present-day Aurora said, “Pallas and Styx.”
“Eos,” said the largest figure of them all. He had curly brown hair pushed down his forehead by the weight of a gold crown. He sat at the end of the table with an extremely large goblet in front of him. “Why do you want to save the world? It’s not your problem.”
“Why would you do nothing as the demons destroy her?” asked the younger Aurora.
“Gaia’s old, and she’s strong. If she doesn’t want the demons there, then let her expel them herself.”
“She’s lost in unconsciousness, as is what happens to our kind over time. When the demons first inhabited the Earth, there was progress and the crusts were forming into something beautiful. Why, didn’t you see those patches of green and brown substance near the Eastern divide? They were spectacular! Now it’s nothing but red liquid heat everywhere! Do you think Gaia would be happy in such misery?”
“I don’t care,” said Pallas. “You need to mind your business. Focus on your nuptials and leave the Earth to the demons.”
“And what about your son, Helius? How long will you keep him exiled?”
“Forever!” he shouted at her. “Once a son turns on his father, he must start his own house. Helius is, now, his own man.”
“Because he doesn’t agree? Because he has different ideas of what his life is supposed to be?”
Suddenly, Pallas stood up, knocking over his goblet. “Be quiet! I’ve had enough of you!”
“Mother!” Aurora cried to the woman who sat across from her.
But the woman merely bowed her head, looking intently on her plate of grapes and bread.
“That is enough! To your room!” shouted Pallas.
When she wouldn’t leave willingly, he flicked his arm and she was whisked away by a large funnel of wind.
The scene changed once more. They were in a misty chamber of some sort. Aurora was there and, by the looks of it, she’d been confined for some time. Over a large stone structure with a basin she leant, looking into some silvery substance it was filled with. Images played themselves across the surface, though Jacko couldn’t make out what they were. All along the structure were strange carvings of snake like beings.
Although he couldn’t see inside the stone basin, whatever happened in there upset Aurora. She ran to a side of the room, for there were no doors, and commanded the white cotton looking substance to allow her through. When it didn’t yield to her, she called out to Ananke to help her.
“Who’s Ananke?”
“She’s our goddess: the very beginning of time and fate. If it wasn’t for her, I would’ve never been able to do what I was destined. Watch.”
Ananke must have heard her cry, for the montage-Aurora was bathed in a golden light that shone down through the white cotton substance ceiling. Aurora glowed golden light out of her pores and eyes, and without further hesitation, she ran through the walls.
The scene followed her as she ran down an endless hallway of doors, and then suddenly seemed to be outside where the ground was nothing but clouds, and the sky was space, itself.
She ran across the cloud-ground up to a set of enormous shiny silver gates. Instinctively, Jacko knew it was heaven’s gates.
Just like his mother told him, she pulled back the gates, allowing copious amounts of the cloud-ground to spill down into the next viable absorbing source: the Earth.
Jacko and both Auroras’ stood at the gates and looked down as the substance fell into the Earth’s atmosphere, turning the sky from red to a blanket of fluffy white.
He saw something move from out of the corner of his eye, and turned his head.
“Helius!” the montage-Aurora screamed.
“Your brother is the sun?” Jacko said with surprise.
Helius was as large as the star, itself. Just like legend said, he steered a chariot of galloping pegasus’ across the dark matter of space. With his mouth wide opened, Jacko watched as Helius cantered toward the Earth’s atmosphere. Trailing behind him was a large gold beam of light that streaked across the atmosphere, blending in with the clouds.
Then a roaring sound came from behind Jacko. He and both Auroras’ turned and saw that a mass of sparkling blue substance moved toward them, leaked around their ankles, and spilled down. Instead of blending with the gold beams and clouds, it blasted through them, revealing the magma earth.
Jacko’s heart sped as the substance met the magma, cooling it and filling the craters of the Earth.
Someone stood behind them; Jacko turned. A man with skin as blue and fluid as the water: Oceanus. He gently hugged Aurora.
“Good job, little sister,” he said, and then walked across the dark matter of space, through the clouds, and descended down to Earth where he cooled the surface and blended into the ocean.
Even from where they stood, Jacko could hear the demon cries coming from the Earth. Light and warmth wasn’t conducive to their genetics.
Although Jacko and Aurora remained dry as the substance continued to wash around them, montage-Aurora stood there, drenched in water and watching the Earth’s atmosphere turn to a crystal blue color.
The atmosphere was fresh looking unlike the dullness of today’s sky which was so heavily polluted.
Helius, continued, on his golden chariot, west ward across Earth’s sky; gold trails still following.
“So what happened to the demons?” asked Jacko, feeling completely awe stricken.
“They died.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because it’s important that you know your family’s history.”
“Why didn’t Pallas want to help Gaia?”
“She’s an outcast for leaving her husband, Ouranus. Her demon defilement was a punishment.”
A large grumble sounded out from Jacko’s stomach. One thing the gods kept forgetting was that he needed rest and nourishment regularly.
Aurora must have understood, for the scene changed to the same room that she dined in with her parents. There, as before, was a grand dining table with chairs that went on for miles.
“How far does this table go?”
“As far as the heavens stretch.”
The table was laden with food and drink that went on for just as long as the table. Jacko looked for the point where the food would begin to repeat its order, but there didn’t seem to be one.
His oral glands salivated at the sight of the suckling pig as big as a horse, the vine that held grapes the size of apples, and the bucket sized carafe whose ruby red liquid gleamed with certain richness.
Hungry though Jacko was, he was uncertain about touching one bit of food, as in heaven, it had a funny effect on the mind and body. His first time eating, he became extremely giddy and shoveled pizza, burgers and fries into his mouth at an alarming rate. It took immense concentration from a living human to eat such food without getting what they called “the helium effect.” At the moment, he wasn’t sure he would be able to keep control of himself, and especially since he was dead tired.
Just as he was considering excusing himself, so he could return to Earth and eat, she said, “Don’t worry, Jacko, you’ll be fine. This place isn’t the same as the place where the demigods rest.”
“Why do gods eat?”
“As Althenio said to you, one needs to live off of something that lives, in order to live. We like to take something that lives in food form because it’s pleasurable. We invented eating.”
“But what about meat? It’s dead when we eat it?”
“Yes, but only recently. The molecules live, though they slowly die. It takes much time to consume, and literally snuff out life force energy, than you realize. More than fire or your digestive system has.”
Not wanting to wait anymore, Jacko shuffled into a chair and reached to pull a leg off the pig.
“One moment, Jacko.”
He froze with the pig leg meat just touching his lips.
Suddenly, bodies began to appear around the table. Immediately, he recognized two of the figures from the montage.
“This is my brother, Helius.”
He sat directly across from Jacko.
Instead of hair, flames danced on his head. As he nodded, the fire momentarily lost its balance, making it look as though it had extinguished, but appeared again once his head set upright.
To Jacko’s relief, Helius looked away quickly, because in his eyes, flames danced across the surface showing no regard for the boundaries of his pupils, irises, or scleras.
Gesturing to the man who sat to Helius’ right, she said, “And this is my other brother, Oceanus.”
He was much easier to look at, as he seemed to be made of sparkling blue fluid that moved about inside his bluish-clear skin. In a way, his appearance reminded him of a human shaped water globe. In his eyes, Jacko could see the oceans of the Earth sway and sparkle.
“Gaia,” Aurora said, sounding surprised.
Left of Helius, three seats over and across, sat the ghost child he’d met some weeks ago.
“I heard you’d awakened but I didn’t believe it.”
She stood, walked over, and kissed her on both cheeks before taking a seat next to Jacko.
Right as Aurora sat, they were joined by one more guest.
A bright light shone right beside him, even more blinding than the white of the floors.
“Aah!” screamed Jacko. He covered his burning eyes with his hands.
“Lucis!” said Aurora. “It’s okay, Jacko, you may look now.”
“What was that?”
“This is Lucis, the infamous light demon.”
Where the white light was, a moment ago, stood a man with skin and eyes as black as coal, like the skin of the demons from the red lands; only their skin was shiny black like patent leather. When not luminous, this demon appeared to be absent of all color and light.
“If he’s a demon, then why is he here? Shouldn’t he be on the other side?”
“Unlike the others, he cannot survive in the dark. Ever hear stories of burning bushes and men being blinded by lights? What they really saw was light demons, like Lucis.”
Like marble statues, the gods looked strangely mechanical as they chewed hill sized bits of food that they shoveled into their enormous mouths with their ruler sized forks.
The size of the dinnerware was also a problem for Jacko, who had to scoop water from a mug with his hand because it was made with a material that was very heavy. Finally, Oceanus was
kind enough to summon an angel to serve him.
“Actually, Jacko, this is a putti; they’re not angels.”
“What’s a putti?”
“Servents of Cupid. They’re lesser gods that were made to serve Eros. Eros is long gone into unconsciousness, so sometimes we borrow the putti; otherwise they’d have nothing to do.”
Jacko observed the little winged baby-like creature. It was almost exactly like the bat babies Jacko saw in the red lands. Bat babies were little black leathery infants, except with the head of vampire bats with chubby cheeks. They were actually quite cute, despite that they’d tried to eat him and stuck their fangs, repeatedly, into his body.
The putti didn’t have a bunch of eyes in their wings, like the angel he saw at Oganat’s, the African god of war and ambassador to the red lands.
“That was Sam,” Aurora said, reading his thoughts. “He’s an angel from the tribe, Seraph. They’re smaller but proportioned like a man. I warn you, though, don’t ever refer to any angel or god as a baby. You will regret it!”
“What kind of angel was the one that dropped me from sky? The one that flew me to Ouranus?”
“They serve the Seraph; they’re called ophan. They’re smart creatures, and they’re great for transport. They usually travel in herds.”
Another problem in dining with gods is they could eat forever. After a while, his eyes began to droop.
“Jacko, wake!” said Aurora.
“It’s rude to doze at the table,” Helius said grumpily.
“I need sleep!” Jacko snapped.
“As I was saying,” said Oceanus, sounding impatient, “when souls were discovered, they were simply intelligent little flecks of light, similar to the tadpoles you’ve seen in the fountain of youth. When we turned them to the Earth and watched them grow to form, they were like interesting pets, but they grew in the image of the gods. Perhaps because of the energy they absorbed from us.
Still, their evolution took much more time then did other species. In the early days, they were primitive, beastly, and went from bad to worse. That is why some agreed to turn over the Earth to the control of the Titans. The other gods had given up, except for a few of us who fought for humanity. That is what my father and I were divided over, and that’s why he disowned my brother and imprisoned me. Wake up!” he shouted.