Chapter 20

Jacky carefully dug out four small magical crystals from his pack and palmed them.

He also collected the spare baton he had made. He went back to the Major and indicated for him to come with him. Anton followed Jacky a short distance into the bush and out of immediate view and earshot of the others.

Anton wasn’t that surprised when Jacky demanded to see his magical item. Jacky had him bend forward to inspect the diadem that Anton wore. Jacky didn’t bother removing the small, old Quaz crystals that were left.

He just stuck the four new and larger crystals onto the diadem between the other four gems. He wasn’t happy to see that one of the two old Quaz crystals was cracked and was dark green.

Anton shuddered as each new crystal adhered itself to his diadem. He felt giddy as the new, powerful magic invaded every cell in his body. Even his entity sighed in delight in his head as it felt this brand-new source of magic swirl around inside Anton, recharging and healing him.

“You only had to bloody ask!” Jacky scolded him. “You only had one partially working crystal left. If it had failed, you would have gone crazy, you know that, right?”

When the Major had grabbed his arm on the beach, Jacky had felt what was wrong with him. He had been just as pissed at the Major for not asking for help as he was for him keeping his illness and its cause to himself.

“Yes, I knew the crystals were failing. It was one reason why we had to come here. It took me nearly thirty years to work out there was a possibility of a cave with a transportation ring on this island. I have searched all over the world and dozens of islands.”

“I have found several caverns where the ring had been moved from it, or it was broken, so I had to look for an island that the ancestors might have used. My forbears would place them near a volcanic source and very deep in the mountains, making them hard to find.”

“All of the caverns that I have found and that had been used as transport sites were bare of the crystals. Without them, the rings won’t work. For some reason, the crystals seem to deteriorate faster on this world.”

“I also believe that many of the caverns had been robbed, and some looked like they had blown up and thus, destroying the crystals. It has been a long hard search of many years to find a way home.”

Anton sure hoped this cavern had crystals and that the transport ring worked. He wanted to go back to Utopia. He wanted his wizard’s box back. It had been stupid to make that damn deal with Rah.

‘May he rot in the Void,’ Anton cursed.

“Yes, I know the magical caverns can be hard to find,” Jacky responded.

“Tara, the planet I come from, has them hidden all over the place. It has even more islands than this planet. Fortune hunters are always looking for them. From what I have read, I think the Ancients had a couple of goes of settling Tara, long before the settlements ships that my people were on landed on the planet.”

“I also believe that several different wheelships had passed through the system. I’ve read accounts that say that it was their job to set up the portals. They often stayed for some time before moving on if the planet was hospitable, so that is why we have so many portals on Tara.”

Anton nodded. “I understand. Wizards have this thing about hoarding when they get very old and like to build their own safe places. They also move around a lot, and sometimes they can’t get back to where they want to be, like me. It’s their hoards that attract the fortune hunters.”

Jax nodded in agreement. “Tara has had some strange things happen on it, too. I’ve read that some of the settlement ships turned up many centuries after they left the old planets and others that left at the same time came much sooner.”

“The record I read told that the earlier settlers either died out or they dispersed into small enclaves. Tara gets hit with meteorites every century or so. Caverns that were once full of crystals have turned to dust if there are quakes.”

“The upheavals have also affected the development of my world, as it not as far along as this world is or a fraction of what the old worlds were. My people still rely a lot more on magic rather than technology like these people do.”

“Why are you here if you come from a different planet?” Jax had to ask Anton.

Anton sighed. “My people had lived on Earth for tens of thousands of years. About two thousand years ago, we decided that we had to escape Earth because we were being persecuted by the natives.”

“Unfortunately, we wizards screwed up our move to the new planet, Utopia, by upsetting our people. The faeries evicted us, and our punishment was to be sent back here without our wizard’s items.”

“I have also experienced this time shift you mentioned. I came back here fourteen hundred years after I left and not the six years that I believed I was gone for. So that was about two hundred years ago. It was a bit of a shock to my system.”

“I was lucky, and I found this old four-gemmed diadem in a ruined castle in Wales. I have to redeem myself before my entity will let me upgrade my items again. It’s why I volunteer to do rescue missions,” Anton finished.

He was rather surprised he was telling Jacky all of this and once again wondered just how powerful Jacky truly was. He now suspected that the shifter was good at coercion magics.

Jacky nodded in understanding.

“Well, let’s see if your entity will let you have this item,” Jacky said and handed Anton the baton.

Anton was shocked as he took it and knew exactly what it was. The inch wide by ten-inch long baton was known as a wand to him. He even felt his entity accept the wand as part of his items.

Jacky had packed it full of fresh new crystals, and it felt marvellous to Anton just to hold one again. Anton extended it to its six-foot length and whirled it around.