Ascent of the Aliomenti Page 0,1

there to rescue me, mentally and physically, from Arthur’s schemes and mobs.” She’d shaken her head, her face resolute.

They’d still seen each other, still shared in those Energy-enhanced embraces. And though it wasn’t what he’d become accustomed to in their days of marriage, it was, somehow, enough.

Now she was leaving, severing even that bond.

He couldn’t keep the look of shock off his face.

“A thousand years is a long time, Will,” she said, and he could see tears rolling down her face. “We can each help half the planet in our own way. Don’t forget, that in the end, I will always be there for you. For now, though, at this point in this journey, I must be much farther away.”

She put her fingers to her lips, then reached out to trace them across his. “I love you, Will.”

And then she vanished.

I

Argument

1021 A.D.

The last screams of the dying had finally faded, the horrors carried away with the smoke rising from the still-smoldering remains of the inferno. Fifty men and women had perished in the blaze, their deaths ensured as the arsonist used his special skills to ensure they’d remained in a deep sleep, unable to awaken and escape their fate. Only in the final moments of life, as the voracious flames began to consume their very flesh, were they permitted to regain consciousness. Their final minutes were a nightmare of terror and agony, pain the entirety of their existence for those final smoke-filled breaths they inhaled.

Adam stood, alternating his gaze between the flames and the man whimpering on the ground at his feet. Arthur had deserved to die more than any of those executed in his stead. They’d suffered judgment and penalty at Adam’s hands for partaking in the deaths of three women, allowing their raw emotion and greed to goad them into destroying what they themselves could not have... or could not have first. Adam might have overlooked the death of Arthur’s late wife, Genevieve, a woman he’d not seen in a decade. But the beating death of the only child the village had known was unforgivable. The cold-blooded murder of his sister, Eva, however, had sent him over the edge of sanity into a mindset focused solely on vengeance. Eva had been sent away from the village, only to be stabbed in the back at Arthur’s command by a man whose body was now ashes.

Adam had gotten the truth of what had happened in this fledgling village from Will, the only one who’d worked to improve and then save Eva and Elizabeth’s lives. Will had been spared for that reason, sent out of the village on an errand in the middle of the night before Adam unleashed the inferno of death upon the others. Adam had elected to spare Arthur’s life as well.

“Why?” Will asked.

“Why?” Adam snorted. “Men and women who cannot bear to see anyone get the better of them, who so easily allow themselves to be sold a story of scarcity in a village grown so wealthy? Men and women who speak of learning, of sharing knowledge, who have a building named for just such a use, who then destroy those who are making progress? Men and women who will commit murder and stand by to allow others to do the same?” He shook his head. “Such people do not deserve the answers they seek, for their judgment in small things suggests they would be untrustworthy in large things. Better to eliminate them now, both as punishment for past wrongs, and to prevent the future tyranny they’d impose if given what I’d returned to provide them.”

Will stared at Adam. His experience and impressions of the man had come from a thousand years in the future, when Adam still lived through the advances they were now unlocking, when Adam would teach a confused, distraught Will how to mold and manipulate Energy to do as he wished. Will knew Adam as a patient man, a kind man, a practical man. Those impressions had not prepared him for Adam as he was now, an angry and impulsive man who acted upon his anger to murder the guilty.

“They all acted because that man” – Will nodded toward Arthur, prone and writhing on the ground – “manipulated them into their behavior. But for him, they would have done nothing of the sort. Genevieve, Elizabeth, and Eva would still be alive.”

Adam shook his head. “They were weak-minded, fearful people, Will. Had Arthur not come along, someone else would have manipulated them just as