His thirst overrode his caution. Furtively, Montague lifted the note with his fingers, up his sleeve into the fold of his homemade wool coat and chugged the sweet plum liquor. As hope faded, the farmer chose to let fate determine his future.
After a few sips, Sam pulled the mug from Montague’s mouth as he was drinking and ran back inside the gate.
“Now off with ya. Better luck with the spring harvest, farmer,” Gums said.
On the way home Montague stopped at the broken wagon to see if Earl was still wandering around somewhere close, but there was no sign of him. He’s better off free than living with me now.
There were no immediate effects from the wine: hallucinations, sudden blackouts, or any illnesses whatsoever. If anything, it helped numb the pain. Fortunately, it wasn’t poisoned. Or maybe, he thought, he was a dead man already. He’d woken up late, crashed his wagon, been ambushed by wild pigs, and failed to deliver his precious herbs. Not even a trace of them were left, the swine had eaten every leaf, stem, root, and seed. The possibility of losing everything now became a probability; his land, his home, his animals. Without speaking to the king for a pardon, he couldn’t pay his taxes and The Temple would seize his land.
The Temple, Montague thought. He cringed at the sound of the word. In the summer months when priests amass for the annual pilgrimage across the mainland and pass by his farm on their way south, he felt paranoid. Although Montague had never been accused of any crime against the kingdoms of Naan, he had a secret—a secret that would cause the rest of the world, including the king of Men, to turn on him and cast him out of civilization forever if it was exposed. And The Temple had eyes and ears everywhere.
Montague was anxious to read the letter that Sam, the gate tender, had placed in his palm. It was still in the fold of his sleeve. When he opened the parchment it read: We need to speak.
Everything suddenly made sense. There was no name attached to the writing, but Montague knew that the letter was from his mentor, Burton Lang, and he knew exactly where to meet him. Burton had been banished from the three kingdoms of Men almost forty years ago for speaking against the word of The Temple. Illyrium must know his secret, Montague thought. That was why the guards acted so harshly to him and why Sam couldn’t look at him. The farmer believed that The Temple knew he was consulting an exile.
Montague La-Rose stepped into the darkness. A cold wind screamed from the belly of the mountain, carrying black sediment that thickened the air. Rain from the surface dripped down through the cavern’s stone ceilings. With the dwindling light of his torch, he listened to the black space around him and followed the running water, knowing that with each step he was descending closer to the core of Planet Naan, where an underground network of tunnels reached across the lands. This network was connected to the heart of the planet where a message station, created long ago by entities of the higher dimensions, enabled communication with the heavens and the other four known worlds. Each planet had been equipped with these intricate machines, as delicate and powerful as the human mind.
Just beyond the cave’s entrance were a series of possible tunnels. Fire-light twinkled from the one. Montague followed it and found his teacher, Burton Lang, kneeling in front of a wall covered with ancient paintings. The fall air was much too cold for the skinny old man, bundled in layers. He had short, curly, snow-white hair with white and gray scruff. But he was no mere man. Montague’s teacher had come from the sky. Burton was an incarnated angel, a wizard.
At first, Montague didn’t speak. He listened and watched his mentor ramble on about arbitrary what-ifs and what-nots while tracing his fingers across the pictures. Recently the old man had been telling him the same old stories over and over again. Montague was getting worried about him, especially since he’d summoned him far west to the Kejin Mountains, a rocky range of steep cliffs and deep caverns. They hadn’t met here for decades. But he had to tell Burton about what happened at the capital gates today.
Without any physical indication that Burton was aware of Montague’s presence, he spoke. “It feels like yesterday I sat just here explaining the great deception of Man to those who were willing to accept the truth, yet it was centuries ago,” Burton said. He stopped his finger on a small circle that represented Naan’s second moon.
Montague was well aware of what it represented. It was a rogue sphere unnatural to their sky.
A dotted web was drawn out from the foreign moon and across the circular world map, encapsulating the whole picture. Burton had called it the mouth of the beast; a symbol for the artificial quarantine placed around the planet by an invasive alien species called the Nekrums. The second moon was the home of the Nekrums, a craft capable of supporting millions of beings. And the quarantine was meant to keep any divine being from intruding on the Nekrums’ arcane affairs. With this veil of darkness in place, spiritual beings of light, or angels as they were called, could not penetrate the barrier and descend into the physical
