He nodded. A radiant stream twinkled under his eye.
Sapphira tried to wipe his tear, but it was no use. This poor boy had only recently escaped being trapped in a phantom state, but now he had lost his physical form once again. She tried to hear his thoughts, like she once did when he was first transluminated back in England, but nothing came through.
She stepped around Gabriel and tiptoed up to Roxil. “Uh, Roxil, I assume you can hear me, too, right?”
The dragon nodded. She opened her mouth as if trying to speak, but only a few white sparks dribbled out. Her pulsing outline made her expression hard to read, but she seemed frightened, more of a vulnerable appearance than her usual tough demeanor.
Sapphira raised her hand and tried to pat Roxil on her neck. “Don’t worry. I’ll try to figure out what happened. Mardon’s obviously up to something, but I can’t begin to guess what we saw on the screen.”
She looked back at the spot on the floor where the portal column had been, now dark. What could possibly make the path to the world of the living vanish like that? It was almost as if Mardon somehow intentionally moved the interdimensional passageway. But why?
She snapped her fingers. Maybe that was it! She dug her hand into her jeans pocket and withdrew the candy-bar-sized timer she had taken from the mobility room years ago. The digital counter read “0001.”
Sapphira rubbed her chin. It was so close, maybe this explosion was the first step in awakening the giants, and Mardon was finally making his move to bring them to the world of the living. Maybe somehow they had already been transported to Earth’s dimension, which would explain Roxil’s and Gabriel’s change to an energy state. Roxil had been killed centuries ago and was now an escapee from Dragons’ Rest, so she had no living, physical body, while Gabriel only regained his body during his time in Dragons’ Rest or one of the Circles of Seven.
Snatching up a lantern, she strode to the chamber’s exit. “If you want to come with me, please hurry. I have a hunch.” Without looking at the lantern, she said, “Ignite.” The wick burst into flames.
As the light brightened, she picked up her pace. Slapping her bare feet against the stone floor, she dashed through the familiar underground corridors that led to the mobility room, the chamber where Mardon trained the Nephilim to walk and gain strength.
She leaped over the bones of the long-dead Nephilim carcasses that lay strewn next to the mobility room’s entrance, then burst inside. Marching along the row of growth chambers, she eyed the giants suspended within the recessed cavities in the wall.
She whistled at the sight of these massive men, still amazing, though she had seen them countless times. The process that put them in these growth chambers seemed more miraculous than scientific. How could hulking giants begin as tiny humanoid plants, engineered from the genetic material of fallen angels? Who could have designed a scheme that would uproot those plants at a young age and place them into magnetic fields that suspended them in midair until their limbs were strong enough for walking? Why would anyone want to take so many years to train them as mighty soldiers?
And now they slept, awaiting a slumber-ending call that Mardon had programmed long ago. The digital counter embedded in the rock underneath each growth chamber carried the same “0001” reading as the counter Sapphira had taken more than eight decades earlier from under Yereq, the spawn she had nurtured as a seedling until he was ready for mobility.
She stopped in front of Yereq and gazed at his stern, bearded face. Although he was asleep, he seemed anxious, as if suffering through a bad dream. Even as a seedling, he had often dreamed, his tiny green face twitching and frowning, and she would wake him up with a soothing song. But those days were only a memory.
Although they had enjoyed a caring relationship when he was a mere spawn, the last time she had seen him awake, he scowled at her, having been trained in hatred by Morgan in preparation for his role as lead Naphil, the general of her conquering army.
With Morgan’s death, however, and Mardon’s disappearance, who could tell what was in store for him? Once the counter ticked to zero, would Mardon return from the strange precipice they had seen and