They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

The cloaked giants stood under a large tree, still outside the strange blond boy’s house. Quetzal had been preoccupied with his cube for a half-hour, while Horace had taken to criticising everything about the planet they had been sent to.

‘It stinks of mortality,’ was his latest conclusion. ‘I can actually smell – no, I can feel – everything around me rotting and dying with each passing moment.’

Quetzal shrugged his hulking shoulders. ‘Time is relative. What seems short to us feels like a long time to them.’

Quetzal had often thought it was one of the great tragedies of existence that even those who lived for thousands of years still felt the swift passage of time; their longer life spans felt no longer than that of the uncanny cat Quetzal was now monitoring. For all creatures, life was a fleeting, precious thing.

Horace ignored his companion’s philosophy. ‘They take no pride in their world. Look at this.’ He kicked a small aluminium can out of his way and sent it flying.

Quetzal’s eyes darted sideways and watched the can land across the street. ‘Hm,’ was all he said, though he agreed with Horace on this point.

The opulence and grandeur they had bestowed upon humans so long ago had faded. Now, it seemed they took pleasure in the plain. The colour had been stripped away. The valuable stones and precious metals were gone. Everything was concrete, tarmac, brick.

Quetzal had been born five thousand years earlier, in a village in the heart of what he’d learned was now called Mexico. At that time, it had been lush with vegetation, surrounded by mountains, vines creeping their way across the ground, and waterways. His father had died in a great battle when Quetzal was merely 100 years old, a child. His mother, though, had lived long enough to see the changes that swept over the landscape.

Shortly after Quetzal’s 2,998^th birthday, the people had completed Teotihuacan, a thirty-mile complex of grey stone pyramids, and pyramidal living quarters to house their civilisation during its epoch. It had been magnificent, the avenues running with streams of fresh water, the sky perpetually blue, the grass a luminous green, giving way to trees of staggering beauty. Nothing of its splendour had been seen since Egypt – and Quetzal knew, for he had physically flown to Egypt many times.

Teotihuacan had been a city of unification: there, humans and Ancients had lived together, as one. Some had even mixed their blood together through rituals of love, resulting in new life, a new race none of them had considered.

Some people had spoken in whispers about their dislike of the Halflings. Humans came and went every fifty or a hundred years and made little impact on Ancient life. But these new offspring…there was something unsettling about them, a diluting of the Ancient genetic code. Some had even spoken of the inevitable day when there would be no such thing as Ancients and humans, both replaced by this new breed that might have been better than human but could never touch the glory of the Ancients.

Then Nibiru had returned for them.

The last time it had approached Earth had been a few centuries before Quetzal’s birth. Its size and proximity had resulted in a devastating flood that swiftly became the stuff of legends as Quetzal grew. The damage this time wasn’t as great – or so Quetzal had been told. He didn’t stay on Earth long enough to find out; Charon personally selected him to leave with her.

It was a great honour. In their own way, Quetzal’s people had been like Descendants worshipping the Ancients, themselves, and then there they were, stepping right out of the old mythology. His had mother urged him to go. She’d had a dark feeling about the future of their Earthly civilisation, anyway. She’d thought hope lay on Nibiru.

He had been on the ship, in the middle of one of his many scientific experiments, when he’d received the news that there had been an uprising within his former city. It seemed there had been one too many Halflings for people’s liking, and the city had been burned from the inside out.

And it wasn’t just his home that had been destroyed. It was every Ancient civilisation around the world. Millennia of development – gone in under a decade.

That was the only time in five thousand years that Quetzal had cried – and not so much for his mother. He had known her time was drawing to a close. No, he’d cried for the beauty that had been so easily discarded by those who had taken it for granted. There would never be another city like that of his childhood.

That was the trouble with extremists: they never looked beyond the now and visualised the chain of events they were setting in motion. They prattled on about all the possibilities that frightened them because they didn’t understand them, but they never stopped to think about the future as a real place in time. To them, it was all just a story, words.

Which was why, while he might have been able to appreciate Horace’s distaste for what Earth had become, Quetzal could not bring himself to share his views on humanity. Inside, he felt certain that had Horace been on Earth, and not Nibiru, at the time of collapse of the Ancient world, he would have been the one to strike the first torch.

‘What are you doing?’ Horace asked. He didn’t sound particularly interested in Quetzal’s work, so much as bored with his own line of thought.

Quetzal didn’t look up from the cube. He had moved on from the quizzical cat and was now studying the inexplicable Halflings. Still cloaked in their protective bubbles, the giants had watched from outside and been astonished to discover the boy wasn’t the only one who could perform magic.

‘I’m trying to learn about that girl,’ he said.

‘Is she that important?’ Horace’s tone suggested he didn’t think this was likely.

‘Anyone who can do what they do is important.’

Itzel. It was a strange name to find in those parts. It belonged to his world, though it hadn’t come from his people.

Even stranger was the deep scarlet pulse the girl had triggered in his cube. The darkest signal previously registered was his energy reading – a sun-like orange. He didn’t like to admit to Horace just what this red might mean.

Now that he’d identified her signal, he was able to dig into the energy with etheric waves. They were different from sound waves or light waves or even electromagnetic waves. They delved into the mental sphere, where all creatures dwelt.

Anyone could travel with their minds – could hold unimaginable power – if they believed it. In Quetzal’s experience, most humans, at least, didn’t believe. They were conditioned to think the material world was their reality and nothing lay beyond its supposed boundaries. They thought there were only four elements: air, fire, water, earth. They had forgotten the fifth: the ether, pure existence, is-ness.

But Quetzal understood this element. He knew how to operate upon it, like a surgeon, cutting through the layers and seeing into the mind of anyone he wished to examine. And this was what he did now, with the girl.

The results were frightening.

Even more concerning was what Quetzal learned about her father.

‘What now?’ Horace demanded. He was pacing with a vengeance, almost pressing holes into the front garden.

Quetzal was surprised. ‘Surely it’s obvious. We follow the girl.’