Invaders: Earth Gate (Invaders Series Book 5) by Heppner Vaughn

Author:Heppner, Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Vesper stopped talking.

I sat there horrified. The Great One sounded like a demon of Avernus. The fight in the alien hive must have been a nightmare. Had the Paragons constructed man-makers to develop soldiers tough enough to battle Brands?

“The Brands sound horrible,” I said.

“I hate them,” Vesper said.

“Yet you plan to slip through the barrier and return deep underground into the home-hive.”

“You said you wish to return to our world,” Vesper said. “Do you know of another exit?”

“Suppose we cross the barrier,” I said. “And suppose we find ourselves deep underground in Mount Formic. Do you have a plan on how to get outside and out of the valley?”

“The two of us alone could not fight our way out. Thus, we must use stealth.”

I gave a bleak laugh. “Could we bargain our way out?”

“With what?”

“Have the Paragons ever bargained with Brands before?”

“I do not know.”

“What about the Great One? Does he sleep?”

“All things sleep at one time or another,” Vesper said.

“Have you seen him eat other than that once?”

“Once was enough.”

“Magus-Brands,” I said. “The concept is hard to digest. Are Brands animal or insect or some horrible combination of the two? They talk, plan and build. They’re obviously intelligent, although they’re not men.”

“They are evil,” Vesper said.

“That isn’t necessarily true, but they are certainly different.”

Vesper looked at me with surprise. “You do not find them evil?”

I hesitated. “They are evil,” I said. Why complicate things between Vesper and me? I would certainly want to destroy Brands if a hive rose near Karchedon. I would also want to destroy a pride of man-eating lions if it threatened my city. That didn’t make the lions evil, just deadly to my existence. Yet why quibble over semantics?

Several things troubled me about the Brands and Vesper’s story. The greatest was the magus-Brands. I’d always believed magic a highly individualistic practice. The very art of meditation, balancing the unnatural power within oneself, and then casting spells, each wizard did it differently. Brands were hive-creatures and that implied a community mind. How could community-minded creatures meditate and balance the accumulated manna? Wouldn’t that create an unnatural tension within each magus-Brand?

The practice of magic would in time change the thought-pattern of a magus-Brand from ‘us’ to ‘me’. What would be the repercussions of that to the hive?

Maybe the magus-Brands did not meditate. Maybe they received their mana from the Great One. Yet they would still need to balance the power in themselves before they cast spells.

I shrugged. Maybe there was a branch of magic hidden from individualistic wizards like humans. Maybe these magus-Brands approached magic from such a different perspective that if I understood what they did it would startle me. Maybe that was a possible bargaining chip. I surely knew spells the Great One hadn’t taught the hive. If the Brands caught us, I might offer to teach them spells in exchange for our freedom. Then again, doing that might ensure the Brands never let me go until they’d drained all my knowledge.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

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