The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Montreal, someone I occasionally thought of as nothing more than a myth.  She supposedly owned my dreams and had, in the past, supposedly saved my mind from domination by Focus Shirley Patterson of Pittsburgh.
    She never left Montreal, at least as far as I knew.  Yet, here she was.
    Haggerty described her heroic quest as I slipped farther into mental shock.  This couldn’t be happening.  The Progenitors were a myth, a tall tale, right up there with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  Anything and everything about the so-called Progenitors reeked of magic and unreality. I had turned my back on the ‘myth hypothesis’ years ago after my two brushes with ‘magical thinking’.  I no longer believed Transform Sickness had showed itself in the past, nor did I believe that we remembered these ancient Transforms and Major Transforms as legends of superhuman and divine events.
    Haggerty’s team, co-led by the Noble Chimera known of as Sir Kevin of the North Wind Noble household, had gone north, following Crow Nameless’s dreams.  Soon they all had dreams, contradictory dreams.  Guided by the aurora (which I found difficult to believe) they found location after location that tested them, minds and bodies, to prove their worth.  Their judge?  The surviving minds of the Progenitors themselves, according to Haggerty.  A primitive intellect, a collective ghost, something rarely roused to conscious awareness.
    Pins and needles covered my arms and legs, and I sat stock still in complete disbelief.  Haggerty didn’t lie, though.  Centuries old ghosts?  This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t be real, not in my world.
    Haggerty’s questers passed the preliminary tests and, after yet more adventures, found a stone cairn, what she called an ‘inukshuk’, near the northwest coast of Hudson Bay.  Inside the cairn they found a spear, and the spear tested them, individually and collectively.
    Were they worthy to wield the spear, a great sacred object of the Progenitors?  In the end, they failed the test and the spear became invisible to them by messing with their minds.  They borrowed a CB radio and called in Lori and Lori’s household, Inferno.  Lori and her best Inferno team came, as quickly as possible (given we’re talking about winter in the Canadian arctic, this hadn’t been easy), and Lori found a way to convince the spear she and the Cause were worthy.
    I shook and my breathing hissed.  This wasn’t my world; I had no place in a world of myths and quests.  I wasn’t heroic, or noble, or adventurous.  I was military , a bloody-minded Arm whose best skill was preparing a small army for battle.  I shrank in my seat, daunted.
    “Though this was our quest and calling, the physical fruit of this quest is not ours,” Haggerty said.  “I now present the Eskimo Spear to Focus Lorraine Rizzari, to keep and guard, and to use to show us the way forward.”  Those words weren’t Amy’s style of speech.  Someone had written these lines for her, possibly Lori herself, or Lori’s friend and confidant Ann Chiron.
    Haggerty reached down, opened a container, and brought out a short stone-tipped spear covered by inset copper, silver and gold wires, all in an intricate pattern.  Once outside of the container the spear slapped my mind, hard, and shrieked in my metasense.  My heart sank to the nether depths of my soul, staggered to see and metasense true physical evidence of the Progenitors.  Because of my extensive work with the Crows, I suspected I was the only Arm able to instantly metasense the chilling truth: the spear was an objectified dross construct, and as far ahead of Gilgamesh’s objectified dross constructs as a modern computer is to an abacus.
    Every Crow on the planet would be able to metasense this as well.  I slunk farther down in my chair, wanting to be anywhere else but here.  I wanted science , not mystical mumbo-jumbo storytelling crap told around campfires to a background of out of tune