After the Flood, Chapter Five

“Take the Burghermeister and his collection of mountebanks to the dungeons,” Gala ordered her friends, who were only too glad to oblige. Meanwhile, citizens all around the courtyard were slowly creeping out into view, to gaze with breathless happiness at the girl who had overthrown their dread oppressor. A hush descended.

Gala’s younger self turned her cutlass around in her hands, knelt, and drove its broken blade into the ground. Brilliant beams of white played across the scene.

“The dark time is over! The old order has fallen!” she cried. “From this day on, I will lead Nottingham to a new age of glory!”

Then the cheering, the laughter and the joyful tears that the world had long been deprived of were heard all across Nottingham, so much so that the rocky foundations of that island shook and the encircling waves seemed to crash in merry harmony. Joe turned to the Gala who had been by his side throughout their whole extraordinary voyage.

“You did all this?” he asked her in a soft voice.

“It was only the beginning,” she smiled in reply. “For the next few years I worked tirelessly as Nottingham’s leader. First we used the Burghermeister’s cure to heal all those on the plague-ships, and then we set sail across the entire planet, bringing the cure to every place it was needed. At the same time we explored, discovering and charting the lands that had resurfaced, and there we built new homes and eventually new cities where whole populations could start anew. It took a long time, but finally the plague was vanquished, the flood retreated, and the dust-cloud covering the planet dispersed. The Dark Advent was over.”

Joe continued to look at her. She had said she hoped this journey would teach him to understand her, but what was in Joe’s eyes now was something well beyond what that word described.

“Are you starting to see who the Next Four truly are, and what we stand for?” Gala asked him, her own eyes aglow with an intent light. “Each of us is from one of the Dark Advents, and each played a major part in bringing that Dark Advent to an end. Apart from Steam. Steam is complicated, we’ll get to him another time. But eventually you’ll know all the contributions the Next Four made to their own eras, and how we steered the course of Nottingham’s retroactive history as individuals. It was only after that we learned we were destined to meet each other, and join with The Four Heroes on the great adventure where you and I met.”

Gala cast a final look at the celebrating townsfolk of her Nottingham, and held up the Time-Shifter.

“On a related note, there’s one last thing I have to show you,” said she.

The F.P. Lightspeed landed silently in a darkened chamber at the top of one of Nottingham Castle’s high towers, and Gala closed the shimmering portal behind them. Her younger self was already there, oblivious to her psychically-shielded company and apparently waiting for someone.

“It’s a few hours later,” the older Gala said to Joe. “My first mission, the one it was said I was born to accomplish, ended on the day we’ve been watching. It was, however, also the day I found my new mission, a cause of far greater significance and moment, which I’m still following to this very hour.”

Her sixteen-year-old self had turned as if alerted by some soft noise, and though there had been no such sound, Joe too found his attention drawn the same way. In the shadows sat a simple stone dais, and from it an indefinable something was emanating. It was not music exactly, nor light, and yet it seemed as if a thousand tiny flecks of luminescence were dancing upon the flat surface, and the singing of many ethereal voices resonated in chorus from that eerie source. Joe stepped silently towards it, following the young Gala. Together they beheld, he for the second time in his life and she the first, an enormous leather-bound book whose bearing on both those lives had proved to be profound indeed.

“The Prophecy,” Joe breathed.

“Safely stored in this uppermost room of the castle’s tallest tower, where the flood never touched it,” the older Gala went on, stepping beside him. Her counterpart had begun to turn the pages, starting with the frontispiece on which the black print of Joe’s own hand was burned, and then moving on to later sections that had all been blank when Joe last saw the book. One documented in colourful illuminations and arcane script the fame of Bendigo and his family, the first foursome of heroes in Nottingham’s first golden age, and others followed that Joe was at a loss to comprehend.

“It’s only two centuries since the Prophecy was begun, and many of the most important pages haven’t been written yet,” said the older Gala. “It took time-travel and several more years before I learned of my destiny, the Next Four and our preordained role. However, this day taught me enough about the true scale of things, and that I was dealing with forces I’d never before imagined.”

The sixteen-year-old Gala was now staring at a double-page spread in an early chapter of the book, her eyes wide and a marvelling expression on her face. The illustration was of herself, plunging her broken cutlass into the pavement of Nottingham Castle’s courtyard and releasing beams of light all around, just as she had done that very afternoon. Even Joe, who knew something of this remarkable property of the book, could not help feeling a sense of wonder akin to hers.

Gala’s older self stood back. “So that’s all for now,” she declared. “There’s much more to come, but we can get to that on our future trips. I hope for the moment this was a sufficient introduction.”

“Far more than that,” Joe told her with great earnestness. “And Gala, thank you. Now that this journey is done, I believe more strongly than ever before that the harmony and accord you seek between our teams can one day be achieved.”

Gala, seeming satisfied by this, opened a time-portal home. She and Joe climbed onto the F.P. Lightspeed and flew back to the present day, closing their ephemeral doorway behind them and leaving Gala’s younger self alone.

The new revelations and discoveries of that day were whirling through Joe’s mind at a dizzying rate, so much so that he had forgotten to inquire why the sixteen-year-old had been waiting in that gloomy and remote chamber in the first place. The question, had he asked it, was about to be answered, in a passage from history that Gala had elected not to share with him.

The door opened and the Burghermeister was led in by two of Gala’s men, who she dismissed. Closing the Prophecy, she turned and walked over to him.

“I’m delighted you could join me,” she said in a genial voice. “Changeovers in the power structure can pose such problems, which is why I want this one to be as smooth and amicable as possible. I must say, it bodes well that you arrived so punctually for our meeting.”

“I had little choice,” the Burghermeister growled. “And let me warn you, girl, you’ll find me more than equal to any terms you may care to dictate!”

“I seriously doubt that,” came back the reply.

All at once the shadowy chamber was awash with blinding white, as Gala’s broken cutlass left its scabbard and its cracked edge gashed the Burghermeister open from his flabby chin to the base of his capacious belly. Blood splattered the walls in thick streams and gouts. Unable to speak, unable to so much as scream, the Burghermeister could only mouth helplessly a few times before falling slowly backward, hitting with an impact that made the floorboards tremble.

“For my mother,” Gala hissed to him, as he choked and gargled his last. “You’ll take no more innocent lives like hers. Think on that as you lie there and die.”

So saying Gala sheathed her sword, and darkness claimed the room.

THE END