The image stopped again as Ammu paused the video.
“That, unfortunately, is all I have been permitted to show you. The helicopter crashed not long afterward, killing the soldiers on board. The military believed this to be some kind of bizarre mechanical failure, as they could not see what you have all just seen for yourselves. But suffice it to say they were soon convinced there was more going on than modern science could account for.”
“What was that thing?” Kaitlyn asked.
“You saw it?” Sketch asked in surprise, looking across Daniel and Sam to catch her eye.
“Yeah,” she confirmed.
“We all did, Sketch,” Mackenzie assured him.
“I didn’t, actually,” Christina said, her soft voice sounding troubled. “But I’d like to know what you all saw.”
“Sketch?” Ammu prompted. “Would you be willing to draw what you just saw for Christina?”
Sketch looked around nervously. He had not shown anyone any of his dark drawings since the whole Mr. Lockhart incident—not even Rush—and he didn’t want to start now. They all said they saw something, but was it the same thing he had seen? What if they thought it looked different? What if his drawing made them scared of him? Or made them think he was crazy?
“I don’t have my drawing stuff with me,” Sketch protested. “Maybe everyone else could just describe it?”
“Sure, Sketch,” Daniel agreed immediately, and Sketch gave him a small but grateful smile. “It looked like a body made of wind. Like a tornado sort of, only more like the size of a person. And it had a face, with dark holes for eyes and another hole for its mouth.”
In truth, Daniel was extremely nervous about describing it for Christina, especially given how strange Ammu had seemed yesterday. But Ammu wasn’t behaving oddly now, as though showing people videos of wind monsters taking down helicopters were a perfectly normal thing to do. And, anyway, Daniel had promised Rush he’d look out for Sketch. If it had been his own little brother in the hot seat, Daniel would have jumped in for him, too.
“It had lightning in its hands,” Kaitlyn added, not wanting Daniel to have to describe it alone, “but I didn’t see any feet. Just a tail that narrowed at the bottom.”
Sketch quietly exhaled a long sigh of relief. That was exactly what he had seen.
“That’s how Ammu described it,” Christina admitted. “I just wanted to know how it looked to you.”
Just wanted to check Ammu’s story, you mean, Sam thought, but Ammu didn’t seem troubled. In fact, he smiled at her comment. Probably glad he finally has someone to back him up.
Ammu turned the television off and began speaking again.
“What do you know about Alexander the Great?” he asked, seeming to change the subject entirely.
“He conquered Persia for the Greeks in something like three hundred BC, more or less,” Sam offered.
“He was a brilliant strategist,” Mackenzie chimed in. “They still teach him in military history, even today.”
“Excellent!” Ammu agreed. “History remembers him as a conqueror, but he was much more than that. Persian mythology of Alexander’s day describes a vast, spiritual realm made up of both light and dark forces that had claimed our own world as its battlefield. There were good spirits and bad, as well as a whole host of marvelous animals and even plants that could fight for the forces of life or death, depending on which side controlled them.”
At these words, Daniel and Kaitlyn shared a surreptitious glance over Sketch’s head, remembering the gryphon in the workshop.
“This spiritual world was invisible to most people, but Alexander had been a student of Aristotle, who had taught him to master the pathways of his mind. As a result, he could see that these myths were more than just stories. There was a great war between good and evil taking place all around him, and he vowed, when he succeeded his father to the throne as a young man, that he would fight here in our world with the forces of good, taking back those lands in which evil had been winning the battle, unbeknownst to most of mankind.
“He learned how to summon the forces of good to aid him, and he taught others to do so as well—to see through the eyes of the unconscious mind. These men became his most trusted generals. Together, they held the forces of darkness at bay, not only in Greece and Persia but throughout as much of the ancient world as they could protect. Unfortunately, Alexander died while he was still relatively young. Without his leadership, the forces of darkness pushed back against his army, exploiting the weaknesses within his generals to turn them against each other, creating a rash of civil wars that threatened to tear apart all that he had built.
“But Alexander’s true mission had had nothing to do with conquering lands or expanding the Greek empire. He had dedicated himself in every spare moment, in every brief respite during the war he was waging against the forces of darkness, to divining the ultimate weapon he needed to end the war once and for all: the secret to banishing all the invisible spirits, both good and bad, back to their own world. The forces of darkness ended his life, but not before he had completed his work and shared it, cautiously, with only the most trusted of all his generals.”
With these words, Ammu reached into his satchel and produced his leather-bound book. He opened it to a spot near the back and pulled out several photographs, which he handed to Mackenzie. Glancing through them, she saw a myriad of statues—some of real animals and others of strange, mythological creatures—engaged in battle throughout a cavernous space, with what looked like an Egyptian pyramid in its center.
Not wanting to miss what he was saying, she handed the photos to Sketch, who pored over each one for a long time. When he came to the photograph of the seal on the tomb itself, his eyes widened in surprise, and he glanced up at Ammu to the symbol that glowed over his heart. It was, indeed, one and the same. He chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, deciding to go through all the photos again before finally handing them on to Daniel.
“These generals took his body from its resting place and secreted it away,” Ammu continued, “hiding it from all the world. They buried him in a sacred tomb, concealing it within an ancient Zoroastrian temple that had long been abandoned, and there, they performed the ritual he had taught them just before his death, sealing the rift between the worlds, so that no summoner, no matter how great, could again bridge the gap between this world and the other, for as long as the seal remained unbroken.