Ascendance (The Wisdom, #3): The Wisdom, #3

By Vrinda Pendred

10,000 years after the Great Deluge that inspired flood myths around the world, Earth is about to be drowned again. And this time, it won't just be Atlantis that's lost.

The Descendants and their friends must band together if they ever want to survive. But that isn't easy when they're torn apart by the truth of their origins and can no longer be certain what's real.

Meanwhile, Itzy is about to learn it isn't easy to become a goddess overnight – especially when the universe you created is in danger of being exterminated….

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vrinda Pendred
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370903337

Vrinda Pendred

VRINDA PENDRED originally grew up in Arizona, but moved to England in 1999, where she now lives with her husband and their two sons. Her first novel was The Ladder, a story about two friends learning to grow through their difficult childhoods and find the light that lies inside themselves. She followed this with the YA sci-fi / fantasy series The Wisdom. Vrinda also runs a publishing house for writers with neurological conditions, called Conditional Publications. Their first book, Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD, was released in 2010 (Kindle and paperback), with future books in the pipeline. In addition to her writing, Vrinda also does freelance proofreading and editing, and spent 9 years tutoring GCSE / A-Level English. She holds a BA Hons in English with Creative Writing, a proofreading qualification with the Publishing Training Centre, and has completed work experience with Random House. On the side, she sometimes writes and performs her own music and runs a herbal tea review blog with a friend. Favourite Book Genres: YA / NA, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror Favourite Fiction Authors: Stephen King, Michael Grant, Graham Joyce, Cassandra Clare, Brigid Kemmerer, Holly Black, James Dashner, Margaret Atwood, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe

Book preview

This one is for Lucas and Eliana, invented when I was four.

I have never forgotten you.

PROLOGUE:

Genesis

Standing on that street in west London, Horace stared up at the blackening sky, eyes humongous with horror. His robe flapped like desperate wings in the growing wind that howled like an animal in the throes of death – like his plans, each one crumbling before his eyes.

The Earth had split open and dragged Loki into its depths. The ground quaked. Skeletons dropped into the tarmac mouth that yawned wide for them. The humans had run, screaming.

But Horace just stood watching the sky.

No one else on this backwards world knew what that darkness meant. Only him.

He hadn’t personally witnessed the last time Nibiru came so close to this watery world. He hadn’t been born yet. But he’d learned about it in history lessons as a child. Had it drilled into him not just as a lesson in science or the might of God, but in the impermanence of life. Nothing could be taken for granted when thousands of years of civilisation could be lost so swiftly. Not even knowledge.

Dozens of human tribes around the world had attempted to retell the story of the great deluge through their art and fables. But only the Ancients knew the truth. And as he shivered in the wind, the tale came back to him.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, his home world Nibiru circled the Dog Star, Sirius. For centuries, the Sirians wondered if there was intelligent life on other worlds, or if they were the only ones. They got their answer when the Lyrans attacked.

War ensued, the invading enemy proving to be unbeatable opponents. A flaming torch of hatred for the Lyrans was handed down from generation to generation, burning more feverishly with each successive era.

Roughly ten thousand years before Earth’s Common Era, thirteen of Nibiru’s finest thinkers formed a Council to draw up a plan for survival. The Council was led by a man named Enlil, Nibiru’s first ever Director.

Enlil’s brother Ea – also on the Council – was Nibiru’s leading scientist at the time. It was Ea’s brilliant idea to dig deep, deep, deep under the surface of their world and install an engine, transforming the planet into the greatest spaceship ever conceived – a task of unmatched daring. It took centuries to complete. Luckily, the Sirians lived for millennia.

The next time the Lyrans came, Nibiru jolted awake like a child from a nightmare – and fled, right through a warp in the fabric of time-space. It exited in a distant arm of the Milky Way that contained one sun, orbited by ten planets, beginning with Mercury and ending with Pluto.

In those days, there existed a blue planet called Tiamat, seated unsuspectingly between Mars and Jupiter. When Nibiru careened through space, an invader gatecrashing the system, the great planet-cum-spaceship spiralled out of control and surged headlong in Tiamat’s direction. She cracked like a jigsaw puzzle and split into innumerable fragments, gathered up by gravity and forming what would later be known as the asteroid belt.

But the collision had another effect, too. It flung a smaller world headlong in the direction of Venus, dividing it in two. One half was later named ‘moon’. The other was called Earth.

When Ea saw what they’d done to that innocent world, he appealed to his brother Enlil to allow him to inspect the damage. With Ea’s sophisticated instruments that only he knew how to interpret, he informed his people that the planet registered signs of life. God only knew what they’d done to it in the crash.

Furthermore, Ea claimed he’d picked up signs of oxygen from that world. They had never yet found a planet with the same sort of atmosphere as Nibiru. The potential for such a discovery was incalculable.

Enlil knew from thousands of years of experience that there was nothing he could do to convince Ea to let the subject drop, so he agreed to turn the ship in the direction where Earth had been thrown.

Nibiru edged ever closer to Earth, stopping some way off in space – Ea had warned what might happen if they didn’t take care. When it was safe, Ea drafted a landing crew and they flew down to the smaller world in smooth disc-shaped aircraft.

The first place they landed, they called Sumer.

‘Now, you can imagine what the humans thought of this,’ one of Horace’s early teachers told him. ‘If you have no comprehension of space travel and you see golden beings drop out of the sky...you’re bound to view them as gods.’

Ra, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Zeus, Indra, Thor, Kali, Shiva, Marduk – the list went on. What did they all have in common? They were all from Nibiru, and they all became gods to the natives of Earth.

Horace himself had been named after the son of that first Osiris, known for his compassion and wisdom. When he finally died and was flown back up to Nibiru for a proper burial, his beloved people of Egypt believed he’d been delivered to the star they insisted he presided over – and that when they died, they would follow him there, where he would look after them in the afterlife.

Those Egyptians must have been so disappointed when they passed on and realised Osiris Land didn’t exist.

A vast away team was left on Earth to investigate, while Nibiru flew away to travel the universe. The Council had made a decision never to stay in one place too long, for fear that the Lyrans might find them.

‘You’re in charge, now,’ Enlil told his brother. ‘Watch the natives. Observe them – but don’t change for them.’

Then he was gone – for almost seven thousand years.

At first, the expedition was a success. From Ea’s perspective, Earth was teeming with life he’d never come across before. Even the bacteria were different!

In his personal journals, he wrote of the ennui he’d suffered on Nibiru when it stagnated in orbit around its home star. All he’d ever wanted was to travel, to discover new worlds, new people, new ideas. And Earth provided all of that.

But while Ea may have been in his element, digging into the rock, collecting samples and studying the natives, in time many of the Sirians regarded themselves as stranded on a foreign world.

This bred resentment. They came to regard the humans as tools, workers to help them mine for gold and other precious minerals to fuel projects that were beyond those primitive creatures.

Yet they saw Ea and his sister Ishtar teach the humans to become more than they were. The natives were given lessons in the workings of the universe, its physical structure, science, astronomy, history. In this way, they leapt up the evolutionary chain at an unnatural pace.

Then the inevitable happened. Some of the Sirians – followers of Ea – were attracted to the humans. Unions were formed, children born, and a new race came about.

The Descendants.

The Sirians themselves seemed to forget their origins. They allowed themselves to be renamed by the people of the Earth. They became the Annunaki – the people who fell from the sky.

‘And like the Lyrans of their past,’ Horace’s teacher said, ‘the more prideful Sirians set out to destroy the new race before they could breed more.’

Horace had always hated this part of the story. He didn’t like the comparison to the Lyrans. What was so wrong with defending the purity of your bloodline?

But whether he liked it or not, the history books hailed Ea as a hero who got wind of the other Sirians’ schemes and warned the humans to protect themselves and their children. Every attempt at genocide failed.

Not that it mattered. In the end, something else did their dirty work for them.

Nibiru returned.

‘This is where science comes into play,’ Horace’s teacher told him. ‘You have to understand something about gravity. Nibiru is one of the largest planets in the whole of the Milky Way. That means its pull is also greater than any other force recorded – even greater than the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Ea warned the Sirians of what would happen if Nibiru came too close to Earth. But without him on board, they misjudged their navigation and...what do you think happened?’

Chaos, that’s what. The oceanic tides stretched out to that foreign body in the sky like flowers to sunshine.

It started out harmlessly enough, a few inches further out, a few inches further in. But it built up. The waves rose, liquid walls thirty metres high, charging towards the coastlines like the four horses of the apocalypse, trampling and demolishing everything in their way.

Nibiru’s proximity also affected the magnetism of Earth’s poles, and the planet stopped rotating – only for a fraction of a second, but that fraction was long enough. The cessation of movement threw the plates underneath. They rubbed at each other, pushing and shoving like an angry mob. Land heaved towards the sky, while canyons and valleys formed in the space between those new peaks.

Now, more than five thousand years later, history seemed to be repeating itself.

One thing was certain – Horace did not want to be around for it.

But where was he to go? The only way he’d come down to Earth in the first place was through the power of Quetzal’s damned black cube. It had enveloped them in the atmospheric bubble needed to travel through the black of space without a ship.

But he’d just watched Quetzal launch over the rooftops and away from Earth. The cube was no longer an option.

Horace dug into the thick black leather that clung to his body, beneath his robe, and retrieved a small silver device the shape of an egg. His communicator with Nibiru. He needed the Director to send a landing crew to pick him up.

As he cast his hand over the egg, it emitted a low glow in the unnatural black on that godforsaken London road.

‘This is Horace. Do you read me?’

He waited for a response, but none came.

‘This is Horace. Do you read me? Is anyone there?’

But the egg just sat there in his palm, refusing to answer him.

Something wasn’t right. The communicator had a reach of five hundred million light years. As long as it glowed, his message should be transmitted to both the Director’s personal communicator and each of the mass communication stations on Nibiru. Over a hundred thousand people should receive it. Someone should’ve replied by now.

The fact that no one had suggested they had bigger fish to fry – or they were deliberately ignoring him.

It had to be the first explanation. The Director had never struck him as a human or Halfling sympathiser. She wouldn’t just leave him there....

Would she?

Grunting, he stuffed the communicator back into his pocket and forced down the fear tightening his chest. He couldn’t afford to get emotional. He needed to be practical.

Last time Nibiru had inadvertently flooded the Earth, millions upon millions had died – humans, animals, and even Sirians. Nearly everything Ea had worked for was ruined.

Families were destroyed. Countless species of animals were extinguished. Tomes of literature were devoured by the waters. Pillars of ancient monuments were brought down under the rock and buried for all time. And people’s spirits were decimated.

The only survivors were Ea, fishermen he’d trained in the art of shipbuilding, and those who managed to climb to higher ground.

Well then. Horace glanced around for inspiration. I’ll just have to find myself a mountain.

ONE

On the street, Seth fought for air, his chest heaving. He might not have believed what he’d just seen if not for his fellow witnesses – Oz, Aidan, Melody, Verdi – even Itzy’s mother Myra, who stood in the doorway of her house, gaping up at the sky, mute and white with shock.

Itzy had just...she’d just....

She’d climbed onto the back of an Ancient – an Ancient, who’d looked as though he’d been burned alive – and shot up into the sky, right in the direction of the unfathomable shadow that loomed overhead.

The shadow that had swallowed their atmosphere just hours earlier and was now...moving.

Leaving.

Because it wasn’t a shadow. It was a ship. A really big ship.

And Itzy was on it. Itzy was leaving, too. She’d been taken away to God only knew where and they might never....

Ice clutched his heart.

Itzy...Itzy....

He scoured the sky for some sign of her. But she was gone – gone.

As the ship made its exit, it revealed a sliver of moonlight, the rest of the satellite hidden by thick clouds the colour of smoke. He tried to look away, but it kept pulling him back again, his eyes like magnets struggling against their polar opposite.

When he managed to yank his gaze free, it landed on Aidan, who’d crumpled to the ground, in the middle of the street, face buried in trembling arms.

Whatever bubble had contained them during Itzy’s ascension, it now burst. Seth and his companions rushed over. Melody reached for him – tried to touch his shoulder – then drew back when he flinched.

Oz’s mouth hung open. ‘What....’ He swallowed hard.

Seth finished for him. ‘What the hell happened?’

Slowly, Aidan raised his head, his hollow gaze bouncing between them, processing them as if he’d only just noticed they were there. He looked like a beach ball after all the air had been let out. ‘Itzy...is the Wisdom.’

It was the single craziest thing Seth had ever heard in all his life – and that was saying something. He shook his head, as if that would somehow help the words make sense – or maybe just in denial of what he was hearing.

Oz’s eyes narrowed. ‘What?’ The syllable was punctuated with the sound of thunder striking, too nearby for Seth’s liking.

The sky lit up like Bonfire Night, before plunging them back into darkness – apart from the eerie glow of the light Seth had made to hover just above their heads, wherever they moved.

‘Itzy...is the Wisdom.’ Aidan spoke as if he believed Oz to be some distant voice in his head putting his own disbelief into words.

He’d really said that. They’d heard him right the first time. But –

‘What does that mean?’ Oz’s voice was shrill with anxiety.

Aidan stared vacantly across the street, his eyes no doubt seeing the last five minutes of his life repeat over and over like a bad television programme.

Oz’s face darkened. His sister might have been taken to another world to die – just when he’d finally formed some sort of relationship with her. He leaned down and grabbed Aidan by the shoulders, dragging him to his feet and shaking him. ‘Answer me!’

Aidan’s eyes rounded, his shock reaching down into the depths of his eyes, grey and gloomy like clouds heralding the coming rain in March – or the umbrella of clouds hanging over them now.

Thunder cracked again.

Oz didn’t seem to notice. He kept shaking Aidan, and they all watched – until Seth remembered this was not a dream. This was really happening, and Oz was about to cause some serious damage.

Seth yanked his friend away from the boy he’d come to think of as his rival. ‘Stop it!’

They froze, the three of them locking eyes, all of them reflecting the image of the one they’d just lost.

Oz’s gaze dropped, like a cat losing a staring contest, and he shook himself free of Seth’s grip. He raked his fingers through his jet hair and turned before they could see the emotion devouring his normally stoic face.

This couldn’t be good. Seth hadn’t seen his friend like this since Stephen died. He had to...had to keep him calm...had to keep himself calm...had to....

Out of the corner of his eye, Seth caught sight of Verdi watching through his veil of black hair, and of Melody, who was staring hard at Aidan, her expression pained.

Aidan kept his eyes on the ground. ‘She made us.’ His voice was unnaturally quiet and steady.

‘Aidan –’ Melody stepped forward, reaching for him again.

He jerked back, as if he expected her fingertips to burn his flesh, and she winced – rejected. He stared around at all of them, a wild look in his eyes. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying. She made us. You –’

He pointed at Seth with such force that Seth doubled backward, like he might get hit.

‘– and you –’

He pointed at Oz, before spinning around to point at Melody and Verdi.

‘– and both of you, too. And me. She made us all. Sophia.’

Oz whipped around, his eyes large and trained on Aidan. He looked like he’d just been punched in the gut. ‘What did you say?’ His voice was low, the calm before a storm.

Aidan gave a sad shake of the head. ‘Everything you’re thinking...that’s what I’m saying. Itzy is Sophia.’

No. No, no, no. This can’t be....

Seth turned on his friend, his heart pounding. ‘Oz...does he mean what I think he means?’

Oz had taken a step back. ‘N-no. No, it can’t be.’

‘Who’s Sophia?’ asked Verdi.

The air was heavy with anticipation. A chill stole through Seth’s body.

Oz dragged his fingers through his dark hair. ‘Sophia isn’t a who, but a what. Sort of. It’s a...a name for the creative force of...of God. It’s where we get the word philosophy from. Philo- means l-love of and –sophy comes from Sophia, which means....’ His gaze returned to the sky, where Itzy had just flown off.

‘Wisdom,’ Seth finished.

Melody and Verdi gasped in unison.

‘It simply can’t be,’ Oz repeated. ‘All this time, we thought....’

‘Her stories,’ Aidan said, his voice bland – shattered. ‘She makes things with her stories. They come true. And one day, she made us.’

Seth’s arms rippled with goosebumps as another gust of wind swept down the road. Why, oh why did Aidan have to say such things like they made sense?

Melody’s jaw had dropped. ‘Are you...are you telling us Itzy’s...she’s God?’

Aidan shook his head softly. ‘But she’s our God.’

That didn’t make it any easier to accept.

Itzy is the Wisdom. Itzy is the Wisdom.

Repetition didn’t help it sink in.

Something tickled Seth’s unconscious, like an idea he’d forgotten, which now demanded attention. His eyes found Myra, who remained by the door like an extra who’d wandered onto the wrong set.

Oz looked back at Aidan, his hands tight like he was using all his strength to hold it together. ‘Perhaps...perhaps you’d better start at the beginning.’

Aidan stared at his feet...then let out a heavy sigh...then reeled out a tale that Seth would not have believed had its storyteller not looked like he was being twisted, squeezed and wrung dry, maybe even flattened by a mechanical mangler, with each word he spoke.

When he’d finished, Aidan glanced at each of them. ‘Well, there you have it. Any thoughts?’

Too many to put into words.

Verdi rubbed his forehead. ‘So let me see if I have this straight. Itzy...made us all up...so she wouldn’t be alone. She gave us powers so she wouldn’t be the only one. And now she’s been taken back to the planet she invented as a kid, to save a race of people she imagined, because something about her is killing them. Have I...have I got that right, so far?’

Aidan gave a slight nod.

‘And you were created in some laboratory to be a sort of...homing device to find her.’

Again, Aidan nodded, though he blanched under Seth’s light. He looked like he might be sick on the street.

‘This is madness,’ Oz snapped out. He threw his arms in the air in frustration, his eyes hard with anger.

And why not? After all, if what Aidan said was true...Itzy had left them. What sort of creator forgot what they’d made and, upon remembering, just upped and went?

Would they ever see her again?

What will I do if we don’t?

Anger and desperation bubbled in Seth’s veins, working its way into his fists. He turned his glare on Aidan. ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ It was strange, as if someone else were speaking, not him, despite the words coming out of his mouth, in his voice.

Aidan blinked in astonishment. Then his shoulders squared, some of his fire returning, the grey of his eyes like steel again. ‘Don’t you think I tried? Did you see Quetzal?’

Yes. They all had. He’d been blackened on one side, his hair a ruin and his unearthly robe all but burned away.

Aidan had worked his magic on the Ancient...yet it hadn’t been enough.

Oz’s mouth was parted, his eyes watery. ‘You mean she...she went willingly?’

Aidan stared back, the answer clear in his face. Yes – she’d done just that.

Seth recalled a conversation he’d recently had with her. You said you were afraid of being alone, she’d said.

You want to know why, he’d said. And what had he told her? It’s always bothered me the way our ancestors just left us here. I always thought it was like they just decided we weren’t good enough, then left.

Now Itzy had done the same.

Being that unsure of what made you who you are...it’s really isolating, isn’t it? he’d said.

But knowing exactly who had made you...well, it turned out that was isolating too. Even as he stood there with the others, people somehow like him...he felt miles apart from them...from anyone on Earth. He felt as far away as Itzy was.

Oz pressed his lips together, his attention now on Myra, still paralysed at her front door. ‘We need to talk to her.’

Something in Seth snapped, like a rubber band that had been stretched too far. ‘And just how are we going to do that? You can’t bloody well go up to her and say, Hiya, you don’t know me, but I’m your ex-husband’s other child, and I’m here to tell you my dad was actually an alien, Itzy made us all with nothing but the power of her imagination and now she’s on some other planet no one else believes exists.’

Oz was shaking, his mouth working but no reply coming out.

‘She already knows,’ Aidan said. ‘She heard it all – albeit there were some gaps. She’ll have questions. We need...we need to support her.’ Even as he said this, he looked like someone had taken a huge carving knife and cut his heart right out of his chest.

He let out a breath and exchanged a look with Oz. ‘I’ll go with you.’

Oz nodded – then started across Itzy’s front path, with Aidan at his side.

Seth was glued to the ground, his eyes stinging. When he saw that he was the only one still in the road, he hurried after, more memories filling his head – of other conversations he’d had with Itzy, before she’d...she’d....

I don’t feel in control of my own life, he’d said. It’s like we’ve been put on some predetermined path and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Everything we’re doing right now has already been decided for us.

Well, she’d said, at least then you don’t need to worry about being abandoned by our creator.

Had she known? Had she been laughing at him the whole time?

The wind let out a shriek that made him shudder from head to toe, like the very air was alive and wanted to consume them. Then somehow, they’d made it to the front door and stood before Itzy’s mother.

Out of one storm and into another.

Myra’s eyes flew to Aidan – her mutual survivor of the same disaster. ‘She’s gone,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘She’s really gone.’

Then she threw her arms around Aidan like a second child and cried.

TWO

The young woman who stared back in the mirror looked nothing like the Itzel Loveguard anyone had known before. Even Itzy didn’t recognise her.

Her soft blue dress had been replaced with a long slinking black gown that hugged her figure and dripped down her legs, pooling at her ankles. Over that was a long robe of black silk, threaded with delicate gold hieroglyphs.

She reached out to the mirror, running her fingers along the shapes of those symbols. In some ways, they resembled Cuneiform, the long-dead language of the ancient Sumerians, one of her father’s pet subjects. But they were more primeval – the source of that language, perhaps, from a time long forgotten.

Her black hair spilled down her back, well past her hips, though it was pinned at her temples with gleaming golden combs. Her eyes were outlined in heavy charcoal, intensifying the natural darkness of her stare.

But it was more than just the clothing or makeup that had been thrust upon her on her arrival at this impossible place. Her expression was new. No longer did she look like an uncertain seventeen-year-old girl from Ealing. The young woman looking back at her in the mirror knew exactly who she was – and what she was capable of.

She dusted her sand-coloured fingers across the image that insisted it was her reflection.

Is that really me?

It seemed a lifetime ago that she’d stood in her bedroom and accepted the truth of who she was – that she’d agreed to leave her friends, her family, her planet, and flown into space with Quetzal.

The memory replayed itself in her mind. She’d shut her eyes as they’d climbed up, up, up into the air. Her legs had kicked the sky, meeting no resistance. She could’ve dropped to the ground at any moment, and yet...she’d trusted Quetzal...for whatever mad reason. She’d known he would protect her.

Maybe because I made him.

Then they’d soared higher than the birds, higher than the planes, and the earthly landscape had merged into a pattern of coloured squares, all detail lost. The patterns had grown fainter until all she could see were countries, then continents, and then the world. It sat in a sea of black, a small blue world insisting it was alone amidst a crowd of stars, and she’d thought, Will I ever see you again?

Nibiru had been black too, a giant hidden in plain sight. Then it had emerged in her vision, as if someone had turned on a cosmic light and illuminated all the secrets of time and space. Like leaving Earth, but in reverse, the masses of colour had separated little by little as they’d descended, until she could just about make out the town divisions.

‘That’s not where we’re going,’ Quetzal told her – his first words since they’d left together.

Then he plunged forward, in the direction of the ground. She shrieked, clutching him more tightly, still trusting he wouldn’t drop her. Quetzal’s robe flew behind them like elegant wings – elegant despite the tatters Aidan had left them in.

At the thought of him, her heart panged. Never would she forget the look in his eyes as she’d made her decision – the way he’d stared after her as she’d left him.

But she’d find some way to go back. She would not abandon him. She wouldn’t abandon any of them.

Landing was almost more surprising than flying. When she’d accepted that she was on solid ground, she climbed off Quetzal’s back, standing beside him outside an enormous glass door.

Quetzal passed his hand over the side and the door slid open. He looked at her, his eyes seeking permission, then took her hand, drawing her through the doorway, into a glass box – a lift, transparent on all sides, so she could see the descent they made, hundreds of floors into the core of Nibiru. Images dashed past with unsettling speed, blurring into a wall of flickering colour. Just how deep underground were they going? And how had anyone conceived of such a thing?

How had all of this come from her head?

‘I must prepare you,’ Quetzal warned as they hurtled through the planetary layers.

Her shoulders tensed. ‘For what?’

‘Some of my people...well, I’ve told them who