The Dominion

By Malachi Mata

Deelo Con, a birdman from a medieval Beta Earth of swords, shields and spear lines, is dead. Living inside his body is another man—an Alpha human from the Emergency Earth Union. Or is it someone else?

Confronted by his torturer and adopted brother, Novak Vaskillian who has killed everyone Deelo has loved, Deelo Con jumps from Vaskillian Day Bridge and disappears into Extraction Falls. But this is not the end of Deelo's experience. In fact, his journey has just begun.

Travelling through the moments of his life, reliving events from his past, Deelo Con's search for the Portal, the magical source of all future weapons pouring into the medieval landscape, is renewed. He must stop Novak before he carries out his plan of controlling the minds and eyes of every soldier and citizen in the empire.
Will Deelo find the Portal before Novak does? And what must Deelo Con do once he finds it? The answer lies somewhere between the past and the future, between Alpha humanity and Beta humanity, and between our very ideals of good and evil.

--- excerpt ---
I grunt uncontrollably as my stomach drops into my chest and my insides push on my head. I'm upside down, falling head first towards the raging white water. I wish I could shift before I hit the water, but the pain will only be momentary. When I go, I'm shifting to Lilac, directly to those missing months, just me and her in the Facility. That's how I save her. And I can learn to shift her like Novak shifted me. We can travel back in time together and re-live those blissful months over and over again, closing out the world forever, until the universe collapses in on itself.
My body catches up with my stomach and I'm floating. The grey light of the overcast sky grows dimmer and the mist and darkness of the falls grows deeper. The physical world gets cold and cruel, but inside I'm at peace. Like a star finally coughing out its dying breath, I'm enveloped in the churning water, my body smashed to pieces, my spirit set free to roam where it pleases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malachi Mata
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463690307

Malachi Mata

ABOUT THE AUTHOR As a child, Malachi was too shy to speak to anyone except his sister. In order to communicate with others, he would whisper in his sister's ear and she would answer for him. "What do you want to drink, honey?" his mother asked. "He'll take milk now, Mommy," answered his sister. Malachi didn't begin to break out of his shell until he entered his first year of college where he accidentally performed onstage for one of the most prestigious drama departments in the country, the drama department of Southern Oregon State University (then Southern Oregon State College) in the southern Oregon town of Ashland, Oregon, famous for its Shakespearean festival. Malachi was visiting a friend at the time, a drama student, when he decided to look around the prestigious theater. He wandered out onto the main stage. The two men sitting in the middle of the empty theater stopped talking, looked up from their clipboards, and stared in disbelief. Was Malachi trespassing or something? After several tense moments of silence, Malachi blocked the stage light that was blinding him to get a better look at the men and spoke. "Hello?" “Do you believe in serendipity?” the director said in a half-whisper. “What does serendipity mean?” Malachi was 18 years old and had a lot to learn about life, and a lot to learn about the English language. It wouldn't be until he became an ESL teacher that he would gain an appreciation for the English language. “It’s the belief that things happen for a reason,” the kind, older-gentleman explained. It turns out that at the moment Malachi wandered out onto the dust-filled stage, the two directors were in the middle of discussing what to do about an actor who had just quit. The part was for an Australian aboriginal watching the boats come in and the European new comers disembarked and set up their town in Australia in the stage play, "Our Country’s Good." Enter Malachi stage right, the closest thing that school had to an aboriginal. The director and co-director exchanged looks, like they were talking to each other telepathically. “Should we do this? Yes, let’s do this.” Still crushingly shy, and despite the great couching of the director, Malachi did not have a stage voice. His lines we dubbed by a real actor and played over speakers while Malachi stood there on stage, like they were his thoughts, like they were his sister speaking for him at dinner. "He'll have milk now, Mommy." Malachi transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio and changed his major from art to politics. After graduation in 1999, he returned back to his home town of Portland Oregon, but ever the middle child, Malachi ran away again, this time to a place much farther away. He moved to South Korea to become an English teacher. There he met a woman and got married and after more than 15 years of teaching English, Malachi returned with his wife and son to settle down in Portland Oregon. Although Malachi has always loved to read, his favorite author being Steven King, he never imagined in his wildest dreams that he would write his own story. When he first started studying books on story making, he had only intended to use the knowledge to improve his YouTube channel videos - a series of webisodes that followed the hardships of raising his son, and in the tradition of magic realism, his son's strange and mystifying powers. But as he studied in preparation for season two, a sinister thought wormed its way into his head. A novelist, unlike a video maker, doesn’t have to be in front of a camera or try to coerce others into performing for him. Nor is a novelist constrained to limit his ideas to things physically possible in the real world. Perhaps he could finally release the imaginings he had kept caged inside his head and find his artistic expression. Maybe, through writing, Malachi could find his voice. So Malachi wrote a novel. He is now working on the sequel to this novel, and he hopes to have it out soon.

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Copyright © 2018 by Malachi Mata

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SPOILER WARNING!!!

This book is part two of a trilogy. I have tried my best to catch the reader up in this book, and I believe that I have. Feel free to start from here, but if you do, the plot twists in Book One will be spoiled for you. The trilogy will be enjoyable no matter where you start reading, I believe, but if you don't like spoilers, just remember that Book One is free to download and Book Two reveals plot twists found in the first one.

BOOK ONE: Visit your favorite online retailers and search for The Portal Malachi Mata. If you can't find it, visit my website for the links to your favorite store.

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THE PROOF READER’S CHALLENGE

It costs about $1,600 to proof read (not edit) a 50,000 word manuscript, which is about how long this book is. And that's just a once over. Most professionally produced books have their manuscripts proof read several times, as well as edited, by different proof readers and editors. And they still end up with mistakes. As a self-published author, I don't have that kind of money.

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Go to my website and fill out the form at the bottom of the page in the section called, Take the Editor's Challenge.

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Please give the characters, the setting, and the events of the story a chance to win you over on their own terms, (or lose you because of their own shortcomings) no matter how flawed or idiotic their creator may have been in describing them.

Sincerely,

Malachi Mata

To my niece, Chaelin Shin

because she asked

and she’s a great kid.

CHAPTER ONE

The Battle of Black River

An explosion rocks my hammock and a horn blares. Through the haze of my dreams, I think I'm the one who did it.

What happened?

We don't have time to discuss that right now, Lilac says from across the room, We're under attack.

She pulls a string. A curtain made of leaves and twine rolls down and blocks the window. Three of the walls are made of what looks like thin boards, but the fourth, the one behind me, is the outside of a tree. This entire floor is built around it. We are in Black River, the main hub for the empire’s horn relay message system, and a town full of such tree structures scattered amongst the forest on both sides of the river valley.

A rope ladder slaps hard on the trunk of the tree and a burly man enters through a hole in the roof. His name is Gain, and he carries two sacks, one large and filled with swords, hammers, and axes, and the other small, clutched tightly to his body. We've got to get going, he says. We're under attack.

Gain crosses the room to another rope ladder on the opposite side, this one leading down, and motions for us to hurry. He holds out the smaller sack for Lilac to take, eyeing me suspiciously, and she takes it, putting the strap over her head and around her shoulder. She enters the hole and disappears underneath. Gain opens the larger sack full of weapons to show me my officer's sword and sheath, still with the belt.

I left that in my tent in Bajok, I tell him.

I know. We have people on the inside. Don't look so surprised, Redeemer. There are more of us than you think.

That's how I got here. For several months I was with Novak and the new army of the New Daylon Empire, searching for the Portal through my time-traveling ‘shifting’ ceremonies, but when I finally did shift to my past to encounter the Portal again, it was in the shape of a demon who told me that I had to discover my true identity if I were to have the ability to summon the Portal and control it with my mind. When I told Novak that that was why I had to leave his army, to discover my true identity, he went mad and tried stabbing me to death. Lilac and her guardsmen rescued me and brought me here.

Ka-boom.

The boards of the thin, wooden structure rattle and Gain’s eyes nearly pop out of his head. That was close, he says.

And they're getting closer, I add.

Lilac yells from below. We have to move.

After you, Gain says.

When I exit under the floor, I take it all in. Hundreds of gigantic trees line the valley on each side of the river, some large, some small, many of them with three or four levels of houses wrapped around the tree. Wide spiral staircases corkscrew their way up and down between the floors, but ours, however, as large as it is, is not large enough for a staircase. Our tree is tall, and the distance to the next house is long. Lilac is hurrying, but still, she’s only halfway down the rope ladder to the roof of the next circular structure. I'm trying to catch up to her, but it's taking all of my concentration to place my feet securely on each rung.

Out of the corner of my eye, a thin shaft of red light shoots out of the canopy of the neighboring tree and rises into the clouds—the targeting beam of a laser cannon. In a few seconds, it’ll super heat the molecules in the air, and push them along a current that will quickly burrow its way into the center and blow the tree apart.

There's no time. I let go of the rungs, fall, and grab Lilac, ripping her loose, and we tumble through the air, straight for the roof below, but the angle of the roof below us is too steep. We're going to roll off.

A tornado of wind and hot air rakes the structures of our tree. We hit hard and Lilac and I collapse through the crumbling boards of the roof. I quickly recover, but Lilac is winded and she fights for air as the floor beneath us undulates like the waves of a sea. I pull Lilac to her feet and hurry us over to the next rope ladder, riding the unsteady floor like it's a shifting ice-sheet. We reach the ladder and I hold her tight to the rough bark. The blast of hot air and wind dies down, and the shaking boards come to a tenuous halt. The tree that was struck, the one that had been nearby, is completely gone. Only a blackened crater remains. I can see it through the gaping holes in our structure. How did they miss? They couldn't have. They missed on purpose; they're trying to flush us out.

What happened? she asks, breathing heavily.

We're under attack, I reply.

We continue down to the forest floor. When we are a safe distance away, her eyes fixate on the large splinter of wood sticking out of my leg. I pull it out and let it fall. The blood nanobots in my body are already healing it.

Where is Gain? she asks.

I don't know, I say.

Lilac rushes to an outcrop overlooking the river. A large chunk of tumbling boards and burning tree parts cracks its way down the hill in a riot of popping branches and rustling leaves until it rests with a splash in the river below. Above us, several of the floors to the tree structures are missing and the rest of it is on fire.

I don't see him, she screams, her face flush and covered in ash.

We have to get going, I say.

Gain came to visit me in jail with Lilac and her sister when Lilac was just a little girl, and I was a bandit about to face justice. I saw Gain's death even then. But still, the moment of his death has come and gone, and there was nothing I could have done about it. I cannot change the future or the past, because it's already happened—I’ve learned that lesson already—but there must be something else I can do to save the people around me. Perhaps if I could control my shifting through time I could...

A tree on the other side of the valley explodes, bursting into flames, and like the one that tore our building apart, splinters of flaming wood parts fall to the forest floor and start fires on the ground.

We will have more time to grieve later, I say, putting a hand on her shoulder.

You're right, she says, wiping her eyes and pulling away from me, we have to go.

I’m not sure how I got here. I have inside my head the consciousness of an Alpha human, a race of men evolved from apes who inhabited the Earth millions of years ago. One of them, Dr. Frank, is in me. He downloaded himself into the implant they put in my brain. But since that day, I've been living my life out of its normal order. Disjointia, they call it; shifting, we call it. But I also remember being on a mission with Lilac and her Resistance fighters to rescue my friends and her sister who were being held captive, but I can't tell if what I am experiencing now takes place before or after the rescue attempt. I still haven't gotten my bearings on this memory.

Which way? I ask.

That way.

As we move down the trail, the processor in my head, both just under my scalp and inside my skull, along with my senses as inputs and my brain as memory, is calculating what it thinks is ahead of us, and a blinking sword-and-shield icon appears in front of my eyes—soldiers.

I stop.

What's wrong? Lilac asks.

Shhh

I don't hear anything, she replies.

The calculations