Above the Star

by Alexis Marie Chute

  “No!” Archie wrenches his arm free of his sleeve and twists out of his coat, away from the Maiden, and darts toward his family. He throws his body on top of theirs. Olen’s and Azkar’s flames ignite Archie’s filthy polo shirt, charring it, and he screams in agony.

  Chapter 12

  “We go together, or I’ll jump into that fire!” Archie threatens, pointing at the seething flames at the back of the ship. “Or I’ll… or I’ll jump over the rail! Drown myself. If you want what I know—and believe me, you do—then we three stay together!”

  Olen and Azkar calm their flames at the Lord’s order and Archie drops to his chest and rolls on the deck. His shirt is badly burned but his skin is only reddened, like a sunburn. The Lord nods to the Maiden, then in the direction of a wooden gangplank bridging the gap between the Atlantic Odyssey and the flaming ship, which is towing the ocean liner toward the island of Jarr-Wya. The Maiden shoves Archie’s coat into his hands and gestures for the trio to cross.

  “What kind of magic is this?” Archie gestures toward the black ship with its flaming sails blowing in an invisible wind.

  The Maiden of Olearon looks at him suspiciously, “Do you not know Naiu?”

  “I don’t,” Archie lies.

  “Naiu is the life force of this world, the soul of the elements. It created this island, this world, and everything in in. It lives on, though weakly because of the Bangols. Naiu is sacred. You’d be wise to revere it,” the Maiden warns.

  Archie says nothing, weighing the evil of Zeno as cautioned by the Maiden against the cruelty of the Olearons he observed in the ship’s hallways. “Zeno can’t be all bad if he used Naiu to bring us here,” Archie says under his breath.

  They are guided into a small room below the black-glass deck, where they quickly realize the entire ship is formed with the seemingly fragile material. To both an outsider and someone inside looking out, it appears as a murky, obscure surface—until the outer walls of the ship are touched. Then the glass distortion swims away in an iridescent sparkle for a moment only before swimming back to obscure the view once more. In that moment, you can see the world beyond as clear as if you stood on the deck above.

  The inner walls and floors are flawlessly clear, as if only air partitions the space. Movement on their left draws their eyes to a group of Olearons discussing an aged and delicate map in a neighboring glass room. On their right are vaults holding huge pieces of coal—for the fireballs, Archie surmises. He counts forty vaults housing the carbon boulders that wait patiently for deployment. “I don’t think we stood a chance,” he says, reassessing the malice of the Olearons. For the time being, at least, the passengers that cooperate are still alive.

  Ella kneels on the floor with her hands pressed to the glass. She peers downward into what is obviously a kitchen. A dozen red-skinned beings count food reserves and wield mops. Below them, two more Olearons shovel ash into large barrels. Farther beneath them still, several levels lower, the ocean swirls, lit by some mysterious golden-bluish-greenish hue, as if the core of this bizarre, unfamiliar world is a sun itself.

  “Wait here,” the Maiden commands, and abruptly leaves.

  They are in a room furnished with a small glass table and bench, where Archie plops down. Tessa paces, watching the Maiden navigate along a labyrinth of intersecting corridors and up onto the deck.

  “Hello?” Tessa yells. The Maiden of Olearon does not stop. “Hey you!” Tessa screams again, watching the map-readers, but their heads do not pop up from their worn papers, from their glass nautical instruments, as they discuss matters silent to the humans’ ears. “Good,” she says, turning to Archie. “We need to get out of here. Do you think we could make it to the island if we swam?”

  “Not before they do,” Archie says of the Olearons’ vessel hurtling toward its target. “Tess, can I explain?”

  “Don’t, Archie.” Tessa raises her finger to silence him. “Just don’t. You are more like Arden than I have let myself admit and that scares me, almost more than anything else. Apart from getting us outta here, we are done. Do you hear me?” Archie nods sadly. Ella’s cheeks are streaked with tears. She runs to Archie’s side and wraps her arms around him, turning her face to her mother and shaking her head and mouthing the word no.

  “Why Ella? Why do you always take his side? Don’t you see that I do everything for you? Everything? I work so hard and yet Archie has your eternal affection! I sacrifice my own happiness for you, for what is left of our family—”

  Ella pinches her index fingers and thumbs together, her middle, ring, and pinkie fingers raised and creates a circle with her hands. She points to Tessa and to Archie.

  “Yes, we are family,” Tessa retorts to Ella, “but family are supposed to take care of each other—not walk out on them, not take them to dangerous places following crazy obsessions . . .”

  Ella signs the word stop and Tessa snaps her jaw shut and releases a deep-chested sigh through her nostrils in place of words. Tears fall from her eyes. Her shoulders slump in defeat. With one hand, Ella laces her fingers between Archie’s, and with the other raises her thumb, pointer, and pinkie fingers, her palm towards her mother, and smiles weakly.

  “I love you too, Ell.” Tessa crosses the glass floor and embraces her daughter, though avoids touching her father-in-law. When a moment has passed, she pulls away from Ella.

  Tessa turns to Archie and speaks slowly, though her words cut the air. “Think, Archibald. You got us into this nightmare. You’d better get us out of it—alive.” Tessa steps backward as her words linger in the room. She turns and tiptoes to the glass door and tugs gently. “Locked.”

  One of the Olearons reading the map looks over at Tessa and gestures with a long red hand in their direction. Suddenly, the transparent glass on every side sparkles with distortion. “Fine!” Tessa screams. She runs to the external wall and touches it with a tentative finger. The darkness briefly dissipates, revealing a small section of ocean. “Ha!” she yells again.

  Ella joins her and together they press their hands, fingers fanned wide, against the glass. The area that opens is significantly larger. “Oh, I can barely see the Odyssey,” says Tessa, leaning so that her cheek is squashed against Ella’s hand. Ella chuckles in an awkward croak. “Archie, come help,” says Tessa. “We need to know what’s going on out there.”

  Archie, sitting motionless as he stews over his “tragic fantasies,” as he decides to call them, does not hear Tessa the first time. Finally, when Tessa’s voice breaks through his inner noise, he rises sluggishly from the glass bench to join the women. His mind replays the hundred deaths he witnessed that day and his neck feels tight, strangled by guilt.

  With Archie’s touch, the darkness retreats far enough that the trio can watch the happenings beyond their smooth cell. The Atlantic Odyssey is not far behind them, towed by a mammoth rusting chain near the footbridge connecting the two ships’ decks. The stern is blanketed in flame that creeps toward the ship’s midsection. The passengers, still in their lines and lorded-over by the Olearons, are crammed at the bow, struggling to avoid being burned to death or drowning as the Odyssey floats dangerously low.

  Ella lets out a caw when the door abruptly swings open behind them. Tessa steps in front of Ella, who leans around her mother to peer at the two male Olearon warriors that enter. Their chins are tipped low to their chests and they glare from under ruddy eyelids. When they see Archie, however, their black eyes widen. Their flames quiver. They stare at him with the peculiar gaze of familiarity—and not only from nearly burning him to death on the deck moments before. The Olearons exchange an unreadable glance before approaching Archie.

  “Who are you?” one asks, leaning in close.

  “Uh, Archibald Wellsley?”

  “Wellsley?” the other warrior repeats.

  “Yes.” Archie shrugs at Tessa. “Who are you?” he asks boldly, shoving his quivering hands into his pant pockets.

  “I am Azkar,” says the Olearon with a smile—or sneer—distor
ted by a jagged black scar slicing from his left eye to his collarbone. “This is Olen.” Archie recognizes the names of the guards called by the Maiden on the Odyssey—and he recoils at the close view of Azkar’s grotesque, cauterized wound.

  The Olearons whisper to each other in their own language, their flames joining. “Who’s she?” Olen finally asks Archie after studying Tessa.

  “My daughter-in-law. She is my son’s wife.”

  “Was,” Tessa adds in whisper.

  “Your son?” Olen asks. It is more of a statement than a question.

  “Look there,” he says to Azkar, pointing to Archie’s head. He looks at Archie. “It was once . . . ?”

  “Brown, dark brown,” Archie replies. “Yes, you saw me in the clouds. Yes, I am the one who caused all this hullabaloo. All this death.” Archie exhales deeply. “Tell me, do you have a Tillastrion? Please, I’ll give you whatever you want, as long as you get my girls back home.”

  The Olearons ignore him. “The strong jaw,” Olen says, taking one step toward Archie, who backs two steps away. They maintain distance in this way until Archie is pressed against the outer wall, which blurs at his back. He stares at the black eyes and the steaming form towering above him. Olen stretches his burly arm toward him and Archie closes his eyes.

  “Make it quick,” Archie wheezes. But Olen’s flames do not broil his brain, heart, and lungs, as Archie expects, as he feels he deserves. Instead, Olen traces Archie’s jawline with one elongated finger, leaving a warm, rosy streak on Archie’s skin.

  “We must report,” Olen says as he walks to the door. Azkar bobs his dreadlocks in agreement and turns to follow.

  “Report what?” Archie barks. “Why don’t you let us outta here? I don’t know anything; I was lying before,” he pleads, but the Olearons close the door securely behind them. In that instant—as Archie, Tessa, and Ella watch the guards tread the same route the Maiden walked not long before, in the fraction of a second before the shimmer returns to the smooth surface—the boat runs aground with a crash of glass and sand.

  Archie tumbles backward and knocks his head on the lip of the table. He falls to the floor and does not move.

  ELLA and Tessa, holding hands, flip painfully into the corner of the room. “Awwwk!” Ella whimpers, clutching her left arm.

  “Oh no!” Tessa feels Ella’s forearm and agony creases the teenager’s features. Tessa purses her lips, not wanting to admit there is a break. She pulls her daughter in close. “I’ll take care of you, Ell. It’ll be okay.” Ella cries into her mothers’ filthy pink jacket.

  Without warning, Olen and Azkar barge back into the room. Olen rushes to Archie, Azkar to the outer wall, where he peers out. “I must go to the battle line,” Azkar fumes. “Guard this one,” he says to Olen. “Do not let him out of your sight.” Tessa and Ella follow Azkar’s black eyes to Archie.

  The humans and Olearons barely make out what happens next through the fluttering translucent glass. The Atlantic Odyssey skids along the Olearon vessel, which is already lodged on the shore, and slips sideways onto the gold-sand beach.

  “Oh no.” Olen gulps, then leaves Archie as he runs to watch at the glass. “The Millia . . . Prepare yourself for an ambush,” he barks at the women. “I cannot carry Archibald and the two of you!”

  “Millia?” Tessa repeats. The name does not evoke dread but for the way that Olen had said it: as if it choked him, and once it left his lips, he wished to forget it forever. Tessa watches Olen with suspicion, but the Olearon picks up Archie kindly and hoists him over his shoulder.

  Tessa jumps to her feet. She tears a strip of fabric from her calf-length skirt and loops it around Ella’s arm, knotting it behind her neck. “How about that, Ell? Not too shabby.” She smiles quickly, for her daughter’s sake, while adrenaline thuds through her body in nauseating waves. She swallows hard. Ella looks to her with wide eyes, silently begging for safety and Tessa feels the weight of the stare in every muscle of her aching body. She pulls Ella in close, wrapping herself around the replica of her teenage self in both appearance and naivety. She mutters a near faithless prayer for strength.

  “What language does she speak?” Olen asks cautiously. He tips his chin toward Ella.

  “She cannot speak,” Tessa admits as she struggles to hoist the bench and—before Olen can stop her—hurls it through the cracked glass wall toward the beach.

  Chapter 13

  “It’s beautiful.” The words roll out of Tessa’s mouth without a thought, as she and Ella stare at the sparkling gold village at the far edge of the beach. The structures are spherical on one side, and droop in miniature shimmering avalanches on the other. They have no sharp angles of any kind, but mimic the curve of the sea and the ripples it carves into the shore. To one looking inland from the deep sea, the village would appear as mere sand dunes, short slices of earth and its shifting gold, rising and falling carelessly beyond the tide’s reach. From the beach, however, the intelligible design is evident.

  Curved stairs lead to misshapen doorways, without doors. Raised tunnels—that look to Tessa like the feeding runways of the moles she exterminated from their yard in Seattle—curl between and connect the buildings. Small windows are formed in the outer walls of the gold village where sections of sand have given way, resulting in unexpected shapes. Every window faces the sea.

  “The homes look carved,” Tessa continues, “like the walls of a gorge. They remind me of the sculpted sandstone of the Grand Canyon, where your dad and I hiked before you were born, Ella. Hundreds of years of a river rushing against it, caressed by it.”

  “It may appear alluring, as you say,” Olen begins, “but its occupants are treacherous and bloodthirsty. They have no regard for the beauty of any life other than their own.”

  “Who are they?” Archie asks. He had woken when Olen slid his limp body down an angled twenty-foot fragment of the shining external structure of the Olearon’s ship. The sheet was lodged in the hull of the now extinguished glass vessel, six feet below the section of the outer wall that Tessa shattered. She and Ella had flung themselves out the yawning opening to slip down the smooth surface to the ground; Olen had resigned himself to follow, keeping his watch. Now the four stand on the divide between sea and shore among a graveyard of broken, still shimmering glass.

  “They are the Millia sands,” Olen answers in a whisper.

  “Sand?” Archie repeats, rubbing the back of his head where a protruding welt and small cut dampen his white hair with crimson.

  “I should not speak to you beings—humans as you’re called—so freely, however you are the Wellsley family . . .” The Olearon pauses in thought before continuing, answering Archie’s question and the inquisitive expressions on all three pale faces. “The Millia are formed of crushed seashells. Their name means ‘soul of the shell.’”

  “Sand people?” Tessa says.

  “Yes, sand and selfishness.” Olen puts a hand on Archie’s chest before the old man takes a step closer to the Odyssey. “Hold back. We are safer here, beyond sight for now.”

  “Will you let us go, now that we’ve reached the island?” Tessa demands as she trudges closer behind Olen, kicking up silt. “We could slip under the cover of those trees over there—”

  “You do not want me to let you go on these corrupt shores,” Olen says vehemently.

  “Sand people don’t sound all that dangerous,” Tessa scoffs.

  “The life of the sea creatures is a difficult one. They are summoned by the Star at the center of the sea—beneath Jarr-Wya—but the Star is too bright, too warm, too wicked. The sea creatures never reach it. They spend their lives diving, but it cannot be done. They perish, wretched and unfulfilled, but their encasements remain and crash on the coral and break into countless pieces, more numerous than all the worlds together. They wash up upon this shore. The souls of the shells contain the bitter unfulfillment of their past masters. Many sunsets before, the broken fragments decided to unite and make their golden village, as they could not
reach Jarr-Wya’s sea-Star.”

  Ella signs star and then sea—as a question—which Archie recognizes. “I was thinking the same thing, Ell,” he replies, and Ella offers a pained smile, clutching her limp arm. “Olearon, uh, Olen—”

  “Yes, Archibald Wellsley.”

  “My granddaughter wants to know, I want to know: why is there a star under the sea? Where we come from, stars are up in the sky.”

  “Five thousand sunsets past, the midnight hour erupted with lightning and fire. The blaze was blinding and the crash shook Jarr-Wya; trees split and their topmost leaves burst into flame. The Star . . . it started as a black spot amidst the light, but it grew till it encompassed the sky. I kissed my mother and brothers then, knowing that our flames would soon fail to burn, never to be relit. I bowed low to the Lord and the Maiden. They have been good to the Olearons, leading with wisdom and protecting Jarr-Wya with courage for many ages.

  “Our flames burned blue that night—but the Star had mercy on us, its only mercy. It plummeted into the sea, where it now dwells, below Jarr-Wya.”

  “That’s a relief.” Archie chuckles.

  “Yes and no, Archibald. The Star changed much on the island. The birth of the Millia. The black flyers grew claws from their wingtips. The voice of the trees, when the wind plays upon their branches, now sing a foreign melody. We lost the rain, but for the fewest of days; some places of Jarr-Wya turn from forest green to desert nothingness. The sunlight grows weaker and the nights more treacherous.

  “And the Bangols’ minds—” continues Olen, his flame flaring up behind him.

  “Zeno,” Archie whispers.

  “They have grown mad, wild! They conspire against their own, crushing their leaders to blood, rubble, and bone dust. They are of the earth, but forsake their very nature, poisoning the soil and clay, corrupting the fruit of Jarr-Wya. They starve their kin, hungering only for dominion.”