Magus Star Rising
Chapter Forty

The Outskirts of Frenati City

Sometime after Mid-Sun

She hid behind a large statuary, watching from a distance. She focused her secretive gaze on the woman who knelt at what had, very briefly, been the watcher’s grave.

How strange, she thought. How very strange.

“Goodbye, sister,” the woman said, one hand placed on the freshly placed dirt. “I love you.”

A strange sensation coursed through the watcher. Yes, she thought, a sudden ache in her chest. I love you too.

The woman got up then, stood for a moment with bowed head and then walked away. In the distance, a man, a Terran, waited for her at the side of a parked ground-car.

Her throat tightened at the sight of the man. He had once played a part in her previous life, a part that had enabled her, however convoluted, to reach the next level.

The two talked briefly. The man held the passenger side door for the woman who looked back quickly at the grave and then got in the car. The man went around to the driver’s side, got in the vehicle and drove off.

She watched the car disappear around the curve in the road. When she sensed no one else in the area, she walked out from behind the statue and moved to the grave. She stood there, wrapped in the cloak she had stolen from the caretaker’s shed, looking down at the dirt.

There, resting against the small marker stone, sat a bouquet of flowers. Dayoths, once her favorite. She knelt by the grave, picked up the bouquet and smelled its heady fragrance. But instead of the aroma bringing back memories of a time long past, recent events filled her mind’s eye instead.

She smiled at the remembrance of her encounter with the Puman. With her meta-abilities growing by leaps and bounds, it had been easy to fool the Puman. He, too, possessed power, such that she would never have been able to convince him she was dead if she hadn’t attained the next level.

She hadn’t been sick. She wasn’t dying. Her body wasn’t rejecting the change within her.

She had been evolving.

She knew that now as she had suspected then. She sensed the Puman coming up the stairs to her room, knew what his ultimate intentions were.

Like before, she intuited what to do and how to do it and so had created the illusion of death. An illusion so convincing even the Puman had believed it beyond a doubt.

Later, within the makeshift wooden box that had served as her coffin, under the few feet of dirt, she had revived, stronger, more powerful. She broke the box and had clawed her way to the surface. After replacing the dirt on her grave, she had clothed herself as best she could and rested.

She breathed the precious air. Her body was different. No longer thin and dirty, she had filled out, looking much like she once had in her previous life. She felt no ravenous hunger, her flesh radiated a slight glow, her hair moved of its own, as if wavering slightly in the breeze.

More importantly, the hate had gone. The killing lust and rage that had been part of her first stage no longer existed. She grieved over those she had killed and caused harm to. It would take her a long time to forget that and to forgive herself.

Even that was a necessary part of her evolution. She had to go on. She suspected there were more like her, ones who had metamorphosed into another level of existence as she had done.

They were the ones who had truly Turned, and she must replace them. For they had a higher purpose, a destiny to fulfill. Of that she was certain.

Until that destiny was discovered and put into play, indeed, until her own powers were brought forth completely and until they could understand exactly why this had happened to them, she must continue to allow those who knew her in her previous life to believe her dead. She could not reveal herself as she was now to her sister or to the others she once knew and loved.

(To beg their forgiveness. To see what she had become. To prove to them the good she could do.)

Not yet.

Above her, the Magus Star glimmered faintly, its bright path now receding from the skies. Taking a deep breath, she turned and walked into the small glade at the end of the cemetery. For now, she would rest some more, gather her strength, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Then she would emerge to begin her next life.

THE END