Chapter 6: The Crash

~~ December - Weeks 51 & 52 - 2094 ~~

The Navigator was surprised to find he was still alive.

He was beat-up, but all limbs were still attached and working sort of. He hurt just about everywhere. When he touched his head, his fingers came away sticky. He had a decent size gash just above his right temple and an egg-sized lump. He also noted the dried blood on the side of his lower leg where something had sliced him when it went past.

He had strapped in an aisle seat towards the back of the transporter when he realised, they were going to crash. He now sat on about a thirty-degree angle staring at the boulder strewed valley. Only one row of seats was still in front of him and then open air. The front half of the ship was missing.

Painfully he disengaged the harness and gripping the seat in front, he made his way to of the ground. He looked up the valley again. He saw the front of the ship about half a klick up ahead. It was on an angle so he couldn’t see it when he had been sitting in his seat. It was a smouldering mess.

Smoke still trailed lazily high into the air from several bits of wreckage. The gear he had stashed on the transported was in the forward compartments of that mess. “Shit,” he said. He doubted he would find anything serviceable amongst that smouldering pile.

He realised it was now early in the morning. He must have been out to it for the better part of a day. His throat was dry and sore. He looked back at his part of the transport. He realised the passenger section he had been in had been ripped off the cargo section which should have been under it. He was even more amazed he was still alive.

He stumbled back into the transport and searched for water, food and anything else he could find. He had been in the fifth seat from the back, and only five overhead cabinets on each side were still intact. He opened each. The first four were empty.

He hit pay-dirt on the fifth. One of the troopers who had been on the transport had left his pack in the locker. He soon found out why. It had bugger all in it that was any good to him, or so he thought at first.

He found a raincoat that was torn, a dirty jumpsuit that was too large for him, some toiletries and a pair of miss-matched socks. Wrapped in the fatigues was a large bag of pills that he knew were banned from the Moon Station.

He swore and tried the other side. He found a couple of space blankets, a small first-aid kit and a half-drunk one-litre plastic bottle of water. He happily broke open the kit and located the pain medication. He hurriedly drank down the warm brew.

He tossed the bag of pills back into one of the cabinets, as they were not much use to him in the wilds, he needed his wits about him. He stuffed the rest of the gear, including the water bottle, into the backpack. You never knew what could be useful.

He made his way back to the ground. He looked around. Back behind him, about 300m to the rise and about a klick away was the cargo part of the transporter. The engines and stubby wings were in about a million pieces. They were spread over about another 800m in width.

He didn’t bother going back to the cargo hold. He knew from when he was looking for the crew there was nothing of value in the wreckage. He slowly made his way to the front section of the transporter. His leg was not happy with walking over the rough terrain, and he realised it bleeding again.

The front of the ship appeared to have burnt hot. If the Captain was still in there, Jahn doubted he would find his remains or anything else useful. He searched around but could not find anything of use.

Jahn had been searching his memories of the island to try to work out where he was. He decided that if he headed east of south-east, he would find the cave. The Island had changed a lot in the last eighteen hundred or so Earth years since he was last here.

His memories were vague. In the scheme of things, he had truly only spent a blink of his eyes on this island even back then. Rah hadn’t been big on him visiting it, in those days.

Jahn had been a wizard in one form or another for nearly 2,500 years. He had seen a lot of changes in those years. When he was unceremoniously dumped back on Earth by the traitorous faerie Queen Bláthín Scoithniamh, he was surprised to find himself in the middle of Stonehenge.

He was able to make his way to the hidden caverns in the Eryri Cave system in what was now known as the Snowdonia region of north-western Wales. The caverns had been hidden for thousands of years by the wizards that preceded him.

It had taken him the better part of three months to get there. He had arrived back with nothing but the clothes on his back. The villagers had steered clear of him, and he had to steal travelling apparel and food on the way. He also had to hide out on several occasions from irate villages. Things hadn’t improved a lot on Earth and food was scarce.

What had worried him most was if he could still get into the caverns without wearing his wizard’s bling. He had felt naked and vulnerable the entire time he travelled without his bling. It had almost sent him mad. He was however surprised that a few of his abilities still worked. He was still able to light fires and purify water. This also helped him to function.

The caverns were his last remaining bolthole. He held on to them being his salvation on the horrific trip. When he got to Eryri, he found he couldn’t access the caves the way he had in the past. As he had feared, the spells refused his entry. Therefore, he had to dig to the cavern and hope the spells didn’t keep sending him in circles.

It took him five long years to finally break-in to a small back cavern. Contrary to popular belief, full wizards did age, just more slowly than the average human did at about one human year to every eighty to a hundred year’s lived by the wizard.

To his consternation, he had aged more like a human during those years. He had been in his mid-eighties when he first became a Mage. For Genteli this meant he looked around their late thirties to early forties in human years of age.

The aging process of novices and mages was reduced to about half of the years of a wizard when they wore the magical items. This reduction took effect once they reached Genteli age of maturity of about twenty-five years.

By the time that he became a mage, very few of the original mage boxes still existed. He knew of only five. All five of the Wizards who had gone to Utopia had previously held them.

Wizards and wizard apprentices generally died due to insanity. It was the loss of the bling sent them mad. If they misbehaved and put their wishes ahead of the Keltrian people or simply got to the point that they didn’t care anymore, the bling returned to the boxes.

After five years he was amazed that he wasn’t totally insane. He decided the fact that he could still feel the spells and do elementary ones had helped him. His other saving grace was that had stolen a young woman as he passed through one of the villages on the way to the caves.

He sensed she had high magical energy, and her presence soothed him. He was delighted when the daughter she bore him also had magical power. While women were not his preference, she at least satisfied his needs and could bear children for him. He had been fond of her even though she was half-human.

When he became the Lord Wizard, he had gotten hold of the book of histories. He discovered very few wizards lived beyond two thousand years. Many had lasted only half this and others even less in the previous ten thousand years.

In the seventy thousand years since the books had first been written into, there had been eighty-eight High Lords before him. This book didn’t look that big but seemed to have endless pages. In recent years, he had decided it was actually a form of a computer. The pages were more like multiple thin display screens that the magic reshuffled, so it felt like you were turning pages.

He also learnt that there had been many long periods when only one or two primary wizards were active. The Lord Wizard and the Gold Wizard dominated. There were many even longer periods when no apprentices were active.

Several of the wizards had used sleep spells to skip blocks of years up to a hundred years or so when they got bored. Some had never woken from the sleep as their bling had deserted them. He was very careful to limit his time in sleep spells over the years.

When he became a wizard, all the wizards were active. Over the next two hundred years, they had lost all the apprentices, and most of the mages and they had not been replaced. He and the other wizards had decided it was time to get out due to the insidious invaders killing them indiscriminately.

They had pooled their resources to build the four new transportation rings. It had taken them nearly a hundred and fifty of those years to find the resources and make the rings in the caverns.

When the Keltria people he had descended from finally made it to the Eryri Caverns, they found they couldn’t get the one remaining ring to work. That had been about ten thousand years, before now. They had lost many of their numbers on the way to Wales crossing several continents, to get there from the Islands now called Indonesia.

Many had simply given up and settled or disappeared as nomadic tribes in the sixty thousand years it took. Many times, they had to stop and repopulate before an intrepid band would once again attempt the journey here.

They had lost most of their wondrous knowledge within the first hundred years or so. They simply didn’t have the resources or the infrastructure here to build or replace them.

Each new attempt at reaching the Eryri Caverns was only undertaken when all ten wizard boxes had owners. Sometimes it took several thousands of years or more after they stopped before an expedition would again set out.

He had learnt over time that many of their predecessors had disappeared into obscurity once the wizards left. The wizards did not know why they were compelled to go to the ring, but each time the decade of boxes was claimed they had moved on.

They found that as they got closer to the British Islands, they met isolated bands that were descendent of the Keltria people, but they had no knowledge of their ancestry. It wasn’t until his predecessors accessed the caverns and found the ring that they discovered why.

Several groups of people had been sent through this portal, but no wizards had stayed. Only five mage boxes were in the caverns. It also appeared they had been there for a long time. One of the diaries indicated the wizards had received a distress call from the portal on the continent now known as Africa. They had stepped back through the portal but had never come back.

He did eventually find the cavern in Cameroon back in the early 1400s. He learnt a similar fate had befallen the people who came through there. He only found the one mage box and the items were non-functional. He never did get them to work again and gave them to various wives and lovers as trinkets.