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

Seth and Oz stood in their front doorway while the Earth screamed in its birth pains. Oz’s eyes were closed as if in deep meditation. With each movement behind his eyelids, there resounded another crack in the ground outside.

They never knew what Oz would raise from underground. His was the power of raising the dead, but that depended upon what dead there lay to work with. It was always a little frightening using his power. For instance, Seth knew his friend entertained a deep fear that one day he might see a child come rushing at him.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen now. Instead, what came up were the fossilised bones of an enormous mastodon. Its tusks protruded eight feet and concluded in hard points. It reminded Seth of when he watched reruns of Power Rangers, as a kid. In the first series, the black ranger’s spirit animal or whatever they were supposed to be – he’d never known – had been the mastodon. Oz even had the black hair.

Seth had the urge to shout, We need dinosaur power, NOW!

‘Nice,’ Seth breathed in awe. ‘Keep it up, mate!’

A whirlwind of bones rose from the ground, from one end of the street to the other, dancing together and assembling into skeletons. There were mostly mastodons, no doubt part of one herd – but at the end of the road something appeared that was over twenty feet tall and twice that in length, from head to tail. It was a biped with great arms. Its jaw was almost as big as its head and filled with rows of shark-like teeth. Even in death, its roar commanded terror

Suddenly, dinosaur power didn’t sound so mad. Seth had the urge to make a joke about being petrified, but he thought perhaps this wasn’t the time for nerd humour. ‘What the hell is that thing?’ he asked instead.

Oz opened his eyes and surveyed the fruits of his labours. ‘Oh wow. I don’t even know. What have I done?’

‘You’re saving the day,’ Seth told him, amazed his friend’s power was actually coming in use for once. ‘Look how the giants are reacting.’

The giants were facing up to the mastodons, but while the giants had brute strength and working hands for lifting things, the mastodons’ tusks came for them, goring one giant completely. It slid easily over the tusk, as if it were a kebab.

Seth made a disgusted face.

The mastodons came again and again. The giants jumped and dodged, leaping on top of cars and instantly crushing them. One even jumped on someone’s roof, caving it in and collapsing inside the house. It was like something out of a Roald Dahl book.

There was the sound of screaming as people – humans – ran out of the building. When they saw the skeletons walking around like something out of a Ray Harry-Hausen film, they screamed even more.

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to thank us,’ Oz remarked with his usual dryness as he gripped the doorframe and struggled not to be knocked down by the tremors under their feet.

‘I think it’s a gigantosaurus,’ came Seth’s non-sequitur response. The ground thumped beneath him. The door swung into him and banged his head. He really wanted a break.

Oz gave him a bemused look. ‘You made that up. Admit it.’

‘No I didn’t,’ Seth argued. ‘It’s a real dinosaur. It was on a poster I once got at the Natural History Museum, when I was a kid. Swear to God.’

‘So that’s what happens when palaeontologists decide they don’t need to learn Latin,’ Oz joked. ‘Anyway, I can’t do anything with it, can I? You know I don’t control what the skeletons do.’

‘Shame,’ Seth mused, ‘because if you did, I’d say use it on him, right over there.’

He pointed to a place across and a little way up the road, where an old man stood rocking on his cane.

‘Are you having a laugh?’ Oz said.

Seth shook his head. ‘He looks far too calm to be real.’

It was true. All around them, chaos reigned, yet the man didn’t seem fazed by it. Under him, the world was breaking, but he didn’t seem affected by the jolts and jerks of the road.

‘He’s well dodgy looking. My guess is he’s not an old man,’ Seth decided.

‘So he’s what, a shape shifter?’ Oz asked. ‘Hang on. I just remembered something. They actually had those.’

‘Who did?’

‘Norse mythology. Odin and Loki. Mostly Loki,’ Oz amended. ‘He had all sorts of guises, to trick people. I think he even started the end of the world or something.’

‘Huh,’ said Seth. He braced himself for another tremor, but it didn’t come.

Now that the giants were dying off, the ground fell still. Oz’s skeletons had a way of floating rather than touching down. They made for a surreal sight. Even stranger were the noises they made, despite not having the bodies to produce sound. The science of it was all off, like a child had thought up the rules.

Seth and Oz watched the old man stagger into the road. He was making his way to the humans, who still stood in the street, staring wildly and probably wondering what universe they had just dropped into.

‘Still think he looks innocent?’ Seth asked his friend.

‘Not even slightly,’ Oz answered. ‘I’m not sure a gigantosaurus is going to help things, though.’

‘No worries,’ Seth said. He pushed up the sleeves of his blue and white striped t-shirt, like he meant business. ‘I’ve got this one.’

He dashed his hands through the air just as the old man reached the humans. A wall appeared out of nowhere. It stretched from one side of the street to the other, dividing the humans from the staggering stranger.

Oz stepped away from the doorway. ‘Nice work,’ he said.

‘I try,’ said Seth. ‘Now let’s see what this geezer does.’

They had been right: it wasn’t an old man. He morphed into something that might also have been a giant, but he was thinner and had a more intelligent face. He was just so tall. He wore a long flowing cloak and a menacing expression.

‘Yeah,’ said Oz, his voice hushed now that it had grown so suddenly quiet. ‘I think that’s Loki.’

‘So an archaeologist is reliving some of his favourite stories,’ Seth guessed.

Oz disagreed. ‘I don’t think he looks like an archaeologist.’ He pointed at yet another imposing figure lurking in the shadow of a tree.

Seth said, ‘Let’s shed some light on things, shall we?’

He looked up at the sky and drew his arms in a huge circle. The moon grew so large and full that it was almost as bright as daylight.

‘Wow,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t think that would work.’ He thought maybe he could try that when it got to January and he started to feel depressed at the extended darkness England suffered.

In the fresh illumination, they saw the figure was tall with golden skin, an elongated head and a beak-like nose.

Seth’s eyes widened. ‘Is he from Norse mythology?’

Oz shook his head quickly. ‘No, he looks more…Babylonian.’

Seth blinked. ‘You’re right,’ he realised. ‘Like one of those carvings we saw in the British Museum, of the Ankuwhatsits.’

‘Annunaki,’ Oz corrected.

‘That’s what I said. So who are they?’

Oz pursed his lips. ‘Some translators say Annunaki means they who from the heavens came. They were supposedly gods or angels.’

‘Or aliens,’ Seth jumped in.

The two friends shared a look. ‘The Ancients,’ they said in unison.

A noise caught their attention. They watched Loki transform himself into an enormous rattlesnake. He was brown and covered in shadowy stripes that contrasted with the green of the trees behind him. He was at least twenty metres long, but wrapped in tight threatening coils that slid slowly apart with intimidating ease. The tail shook menacingly.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he hissed unnaturally through his fangs. His tongue darted in invitation.

Seth and Oz immediately shut the door.

Without discussion, they hurried up the stairs into Seth’s bedroom, which overlooked the street. They crouched on his bed and looked out the window. Seth produced net curtains so they could see outside without being seen in return.

The snake slithered up the road. Its head shifted suddenly from side to side, examining every inch of the street – trying to find them.

‘I know you’re in there somewhere!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t hide from us! This is what we want! We want you to come out and play with us!’

‘I’ve never much liked games,’ Seth muttered from behind the window. ‘Even as a child.’

‘What do they mean?’ Oz wondered, all business. ‘Why do they want this? Are they testing us?’

‘Maybe they don’t like Descendants.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Oz argued. ‘They made us.’

‘Not all of them did. Or maybe they’re fine with us, but they want to test our powers and take the strongest of us with them.’

‘You watch too much telly,’ Oz decided.

Seth threw him a look. ‘Fine. What’s your theory?’

Oz grinned. ‘I think they just don’t like Descendants.’

‘You’re impossible,’ Seth told him. ‘Uh-oh.’

They ducked below the window as the snake’s head loomed in view. Loki pressed his narrow serpent’s eyes against the window and peered inside. His gaze cast a bright yellow glow over the room within, like a second moon.

‘I smell you, Halflings,’ he said in the most sinister voice Seth had ever heard. ‘Horace! I found them!’

Seth lifted his head just enough to peer out the window. The bird creature from across the road was there too quickly – and judging from the way he hovered at eye level with their second-storey window, it seemed he could fly. Seth ducked down again.

‘Excellent,’ Horace said. His thunderous voice made the floor boards in the house tremble anew. ‘You’re in luck, Halflings. My companion wasn’t concerned with you. He was too busy stalking some girl. But I didn’t forget you. After two thousand years, the Ancients have come back for you.’

Seth felt his heart in his mouth. Death by shape-shifter snake wasn’t how Seth had ever imagined he would go. He refused to believe it was his destiny. Somehow, they would get out of this.

‘Do something,’ Oz whispered to him.

Seth thought a moment. Then he used his magic fingers to throw a sheet of steel over the windowed wall. The snake chose just that moment to ram head-first against the window. It cried out in pain upon impact. Seth managed to laugh. He wanted to shout some witty one-liner, like the heroes always did in bad action films, but he couldn’t think of one.

The boys stood. Oz coughed out the breath he’d been holding and said, ‘Thank God.’

‘He’s still outside,’ Seth noted with unease. ‘They’re still outside.’

They stared at each other, each thinking the same thing, and then hurtled out of the room and down the staircase, into the lounge. Seth hastily drew the curtains over the back window and snapped on the overhead light.

‘We have to come up with a plan,’ Oz decided. ‘Let’s think what we have.’

‘Right,’ said Seth. He started ticking off items on his fingers. ‘Mastodons running wild on the streets of West London,’ was the first item. He said this as calmly as possible, as though this sort of thing happened every day. ‘A gigantosaurus roaring and ripping up trees with petrified claws. My magic. A lot of terrified humans. Two Descendants.’

It was that last item that sounded most hopeless.

‘If only there were more of us,’ Oz said.

Seth’s hand was already in the pocket of his jeans, pulling out his mobile. He ran his finger down the screen to locate Itzy’s number and rang it, while Oz paced the room in circles. He accidentally stepped on Eurydice’s tail, without noticing she was there. She yowled and darted behind the curtains hanging over the windows to the back garden.

‘There’s no answer,’ Seth finally said as he clicked off the phone.

‘Aidan?’ Oz suggested.

Seth gave him a look. ‘You really think I’d have his phone number?’

There came a loud hissing sound from upstairs, followed by an unsettling pop!

‘Alright,’ Seth said. ‘That might be a problem.’

Upstairs, there was the sound of beating wings.

‘Now’s the time to make one of your boxes,’ Oz told his friend.

Seth shook his head. ‘We’ll be fine, but what about the humans?

‘Box them in too,’ Oz suggested in a terse voice.

The wings were finding their way out of Seth’s room.

‘I can’t do it without boxing in Loki,’ Seth said.

A screeching pterodactyl rushed headlong down the staircase. Jurassic Park had just got real.

The pterodactyl opened its mouth to speak to them. Its voice sounded like it had been processed through flange, like the 1970s prog-rock Seth loved so much. ‘So you like dinosaurs,’ it said as its eyes found them.

It made to lurch at them, when Seth’s hands flew through the air and one of his invisibility boxes instantly wrapped around him and Oz.

‘A pterodactyl is not a dinosaur,’ Seth corrected from within the safety of the box. He looked at the invisible walls he had placed around them. ‘I suppose at least it buys us some time,’ he relented with a shrug as they watched the pterosaur fly at the box.

It seemed to go right through it, but they only saw it hit the box and come out the other side; it didn’t touch them. Seth recalled the same thing had happened when he’d sent Itzy to her vestibule in the museum; the samurai armour that had been coming for her had fallen right through the place where she’d disappeared.

‘Interesting,’ Seth said.

‘This is all wrong,’ Oz muttered.

‘Of course it’s wrong,’ Seth said, not understanding his friend’s meaning. He wished he could make everything disappear, but he could only erase things he had created in the first place.

They watched through the walls of invisibility as the pterosaur reshaped itself into a tall stooping man. Loki swept through the lounge, fuming. He left the room, but Oz and Seth didn’t move from their places.

They were right not to get comfortable, because Loki came back. And this time he brought company.

At last, they got a clear look at Horace. He was a man, after all, but not like any they had ever beheld. His forehead was too tall, and his hooked nose made him look like a falcon. His irises reminded Seth of wet tar, threatening to entrap and destroy you. His body looked young and strong, but his long slanted eyes looked older than anyone ought to be. They spoke of battle upon battle, victory against tragedy, and the timelessness of existence.

‘Where did they go?’ Horace demanded hoarsely.

‘They vanished,’ Loki informed him. ‘But I think they’re still here. Watching us. Listening.’

He twisted his long bony head in their direction, as though he could see them after all, and they flinched.

Horace looked disgusted with the situation. ‘They’ve only hurt themselves – as I always knew they would. The humans will work it out, soon enough. Who were they more frightened of? Us? Or their…creations.’

He lifted his great head and scanned the room, speaking to them, wherever they might be.

‘Do you hear me?’ he said. ‘Your humans will never accept you for what you are. You were a mistake – a weakness of the flesh – a deformity,’ he pronounced, as though he’d just struck upon the right word. ‘I don’t know where you got these powers from, but they won’t last. And you’ll never be as great as your ancestors, because you’ll always be too human.’ He spat out this word like a piece of rotten fruit, sickening in his mouth.

‘They won’t thank you,’ he went on. ‘They will fear you. The only time you were ever safe was when we protected you. But that was long, long ago. Don’t expect it to happen again.’

Seth marvelled at the fact that even the Ancients, who had purportedly gifted their genius to the Earthlings so many millennia ago, had still not moved beyond basic racism.

All his life, Seth had wondered about the Ancients. He had been taught to revere them like gods. After the fall of the old city of Atlantis, his ancestors had migrated over many generations, finally settling in the mountains of Scotland. They had been great Celts, warriors.

Seth had always been more artistic than fierce, but the legends had spoken to him. He’d felt special amongst his human friends; many of them didn’t even know who their fathers were, but in Seth’s house there was an old bound book listing every generation of his family for the last fifteen thousand years. It had begun on clay tablets and been transferred to its present state at some point in the 1600s, his father had once told him. Not even the Queen could boast of such things.

But now that he was standing four feet away from a real life Ancient, he only felt disappointment. He was ashamed of his heritage, if this was the truth of it. In his head, Seth had built up an image of the Ancients to a point of fantasy. He supposed it was like that with all history: how much of it could be trusted as fact, and how much was the wild imagination of the archivist?

He glanced sideways at Oz and could see the same thoughts reflected in the lines of his face, the haunted look of shock in his black eyes. Yes, this was what they had come from.

But that didn’t mean it was their future.

Knowing the Ancients couldn’t hear them speak from within their protective bubble, Seth said, ‘I say we take them out.’

Oz merely nodded.

Then the box vanished, and they were standing face to face with the Ancients.