Soul of Stars

by Ashley Poston

  The grass was smooth under the shield, and a laugh bubbled up out of her throat despite herself. She threw her arms out to keep her balance. As the wind whistled past her ears, the towering bones of the ship rose into the crystalline sky, curving inward like a rib cage. It was longer than any ship she had ever seen before—as big as the dreadnought, but not nearly as frightening. Slowly the shield came to a stop at the base of the ruins. She glanced back to see how Robb was faring, and he . . . had sat on his shield and was bobsledding down, a little slower than the rest of them but with a triumphant look on his face.

  Well, Jax had never claimed Robb was cool.

  She found Elara standing in the mouth of the ruins and retracted her shield, snapping it to her belt. “How will this Koren Vey help us defeat the HIVE when we can’t kill it because of the Metals inside—”

  Elara huffed. “You are relentless. You love him that much, huh.”

  She paused, surprised. “Who?”

  “That Metal of yours. The reason you’re doing all this.”

  “I’m—I’m doing this for the good of the kingdom,” she quickly replied.

  The silver-haired young woman gave her a knowing look. “Princess.”

  She winced and gave up the pretense. “It . . . was my fault he was HIVE’d, so I have to save him.”

  “I actually know the feeling. About a year ago, Xu and I ran into some trouble. This was back when the kingdom, under the late Grand Duchess, just HIVE’d rogue Metals and not all of them. We got into a bad lot, and our employer, the bastard, ratted on us. Xu protected me. They let me escape and . . .” Elara trailed off, then put her shield back on her belt. “What if you can’t save him? What’ll you do then?”

  “I’ll try anyway.”

  “And if you have to choose? Between him or the kingdom?”

  “I don’t believe in choosing,” she argued, but when the Solani girl rolled her eyes, she grabbed her by the arm tightly to stop her and said in a sharp voice, “Enough people have died for me, and it stops with Jax.”

  “And if you die?”

  “Then I’ll have tried—”

  “Bullshit, Princess. You know that if you die, it’s over, right?” Elara asked angrily “The kingdom will follow you if you just tell them you’re alive. That’s why everyone’s protecting you and you can’t even see that—the C’zar, that Ironblood, the nefarious Captain Siege.”

  “They want to do the right thing.”

  “Because they believe in you,” she snapped, and threw her arms into the air. “Argh, whatever! It’s no sense arguing with you.” She shoved open the green curtain of vines and disappeared into the ruins.

  Why do they have to follow me to do the right thing? She bit her tongue so hard, she tasted blood. Why am I their conscience?

  Robb came to an inching stop in the shadows of the ruins and stood, brushing the dirt off his trousers. “Well, that was exhilarating—where’s Elara?”

  She jabbed her finger into the ruins.

  He minimized his shield and put it on his belt. “Did . . . something happen?”

  “No,” she said quietly, wanting to ask Robb if it was true—if he would die for her, too, like Jax had, but she thought better of it. She’d rather not know, because she might just strangle him if he said yes. Together, they pushed back the vines that hung in the mouth of the entrance.

  Her anger quickly evaporated.

  “Oh, Goddess,” Robb whispered.

  They stared up at the ark in awe. It was hard to be angry in the midst of something this overwhelming.

  The ancient ark stood in all its ghostly glory. It was so much larger than Ana could have anticipated, its crystalline structure reminding her more of fossils found in the earth than a ship at all. Great vine-covered pillars curved inward, reaching five hundred feet in the air to make a sort of rib cage for a great beast. The ark spread out in both directions, so long it faded into the trees on either side. It was like nothing in the Iron Kingdom because it wasn’t made of iron or copper or gold. It was ivory and ancient.

  Elara walked up to one of the enormous ivory pillars and tenderly placed a hand on it, as if it was dear to her.

  Home, Ana realized. An ageless part of it.

  “The allahlav,” Elara began. “The ark. It brought us here a thousand years ago. My grandmother used to tell stories her grandparents told her, and theirs before them, of how our galaxy used to be. Stories of cosmic beasts who protected our worlds and kept us safe. The allahlav were our ships. Living organisms with wings and teeth and circuitry as their blood. But then the Great Dark came, the stories say, and we couldn’t stop it. This was the last allahlav. It helped us flee, and then it died here.”

  “So it was an animal?”

  Elara shrugged. “A tech-creature? A bio-automaton? I don’t know. They’re fairy tales, Princess.” She patted the pillar and added, “We just have the bones now. Come on—Koren Vey is through here.” She nudged her head into a darker part of the ruins and traveled on.

  For a moment, Ana let the image sink into her memory, the sun-drenched bones of a gaping rib cage, eaten by time and trees and ground. There was so much of it, she felt small. A dust speck in the great expanse of the universe.

  Beside her, Robb stared up at the ship with his mouth agape. “I wish . . . I wish Jax could see this.”

  “Me too,” she replied as they followed Elara into the depths of the Solani ark, so overwhelmed she didn’t notice the plume of inky smoke rising across Zenteli from the Iron Shrine.

  Robb

  The ship was dark from the vegetation and old trees that had sprouted between the remains of the ship to form a canopy above them. It smelled of moist earth. Elara took out an egg-shaped flashlight and shook it to illuminate the ruins around them. Ropes of creepers, ivy, and moss hung draped across tree branches and the ruined structure of the ship. There were remnants of doors and furniture and staircases and long-petrified wires, and some of the collapsed walls had a strange glittering, scaly texture to them. The longer he walked, and the crunch of leaves and roots and ancient ship dust echoed under his feet, the more he felt the distinct sensation that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

  He hadn’t actually believed Elara when she said the Solani came here in creatures—it sounded like a fantastical story, something out of a fairy tale—but the longer he followed her into the bowels of the ark, the more he began to doubt his own judgment. The Solani weren’t from this galaxy. Their skin glittered as though they’d had been sprinkled with diamond dust. Jax could read the future.

  Just a year ago, he’d thought the most fantastical thing that existed was an iron ore that rusted between his fingers, but as Elara raised her light to illuminate the heart of the ark, he began to realize just how little he knew.

  Perhaps Ana was the Goddess.

  And perhaps there was magic in the galaxy, after all.

  In the center of the ark sat a platform with a gigantic crystal at its center, as tall as a person and the color of clouds. It made him uneasy as they approached. The crystal sat in the middle of a great spherical astrolabe. Or maybe it was an armillary sphere? Robb didn’t really know much about ancient navigational contraptions. Once, the spherical framework of rings would have turned around the giant crystal in the center, twisting as they rotated to map the coordinates of the stars, but centuries and vegetation had frozen them in place. There were words—letters—in the Old Language written on each circular band, but they were too faded for Robb to make out.

  Elara slipped between the rings of the astrolabe and made her way toward one band that had come to a stop at her height. The bands dipped into troughs in the floor so they could rotate around the crystal at its center.

  “What now?” Ana asked, her voice echoing in the cavern as she caught up with them.

  Elara reached up to the ring and gripped it tightly. “Now,” she said with great bravado, “we wake her up.”

  “Her?” he asked.

  Ignoring him, Elara pulled down on
the band with all her might. The ancient structure gave a groan, but with all the vines and vegetation woven through the rings and into the joints, it barely moved.

  Elara gave them an annoyed look. “Well? Smolder, help a girl out!”

  He shook his head, the hairs on his arm standing straight. The crystal in the middle made him uneasy. “I’m not sure—”

  “Come on—the sooner we help her, the sooner we can leave.” Ana went over to the same ring as Elara and reached up to help her pull it down.

  The contraption gave another loud groan, vines popping apart, leaves sighing off, and with a hitch, the ring broke free and glided down into a trough in the floor, the other side of the ring rising like a seesaw. The first ring knocked against the second and began to spin it, and the third, until all seven of the spherical bands moved around the crystal in a rotation that rattled Robb’s chest.

  He took another step back.

  Ana jumped out of the way before a swirling ring caught her behind the legs.

  The rings began to move faster and faster, trapping Robb and Ana and Elara inside.

  A gnarled, terrible knot of panic began to fester in his stomach.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he shouted over the noise of the contraption. “Didn’t you say it could explode?”

  But if Elara heard him, she didn’t reply.

  In the center of astrolabe, the crystal, buried under a thousand years of vegetation and dirt and dust, began to glow a beautiful starlit white. The light fed across the rings, igniting the words on the bands, and traveled across the floor under their feet, awakening designs that, to Robb, looked like constellations. Beside him, Ana stared up at the machine in wide-eyed wonder. Didn’t she sense something was wrong? It couldn’t be just him. He rubbed his arm, smoothing down the raised hairs, trying to calm himself down.

  You’re just spooked. It’s nothing. It’s not going to explode—

  The crystal shot out a series of lights into the words on the rings, and through the other side the words projected stars and planets and entire constellations. The air became thick with a map, clouds of holographic galactic storms and sweeps of astral gases. Nothing looked familiar, but he recognized it from the tapestries in the Spire.

  It was a map of the Solani home kingdom.

  “Ak ven’na nat Elara.”

  Robb jumped at the voice.

  It came from everywhere at once, rebounding through the ancient hull. He reached for the Solgard shield he stashed in his waistband and froze.

  The blue image of a Solani swirled to life in the midst of the projection, glitching in and out like a weak video signal. Although the tech was ancient, the image was much crisper than the hologram used for the Iron Council. The Solani was tall and thin, with long hair and obsidian armor that reminded him a little of the Solgard in the Spire, carved with swirling filigree. When she spoke, her tone was soft and sweet.

  “W-what is she saying?” he asked, concentrating on the ancient Solani’s lips, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. “And who is she?”

  “The C’zar,” Elara said in a little more than a whisper. “Koren Vey. The one who led the arks here. Her light is trapped here. Koren Vey is the one who led me to you, Princess.” Then she told the hologram of the Solani something in the Old Language.

  The image glitched and replied quietly. Elara’s eyebrows furrowed. She listened more intently.

  “What’s she saying?” Ana asked, and then turned to the projection. “Do you know how to defeat the Great Dark? Or at least how to find it and—”

  “Yes,” the hologram replied.

  Robb blinked. The words felt fuzzy and strange, like when his foot went to sleep and left it tingly. “Do you hear that? I understood her.”

  The hologram turned to him with an unwavering violet gaze that reminded him so achingly of Jax. “Your C’zar had his light stolen.”

  Robb felt gooseflesh ripple across his skin. “How . . . how do you know that?”

  “I have foreseen it a thousand years ago. I have been waiting for you—and you, daughter of the moon,” she added to Ana. “We do not have much time.”

  Koren Vey raised her arms. “You want to save your kingdom, but to understand how to, you must understand how we have come to this moment. The entity you wish to destroy has no beginning, and no end, but the story of the D’thverek is the same in every galaxy.”

  The D’thverek—it was the Solani word for the Great Dark.

  “It is a creature that feeds on light—life. In each galaxy, the Goddess is born to stop it, but in each galaxy she fails, and the D’thverek drains their light, destroying all living things, and moves to the next. It cannot survive without light, for it has none of its own. When it came for us, our C’zars had foreseen that we could not defeat it, so we fled. This ark was the only one to escape. And here it rests, where you stand in its bones.”

  The holographic galaxy morphed into a set of constellations Robb knew well—the Iron Kingdom. It looked so different, though, from all the maps he’d studied over the course of his life. It was the Iron Kingdom from the C’zar’s perspective. Eros was not the shining planet that the maps depicted, and Iliad was not dark and damp, and Cerces was larger than both of them combined, all wrapped together, surrounded by the asteroid belt that kept whatever lurked outside from coming in. The kingdom looked so small and delicate. How could it defeat something that had lived lifetimes by feasting on the lives—even worlds—of others?

  Looking at the map of his home, he realized just how terrified he was. The Great Dark had always been a myth—a bedtime story to tell naughty children—but now that he knew it had taken his ma’alor, that it was coming for the rest of them, it suddenly felt viscerally real.

  It wasn’t a myth anymore, but a nightmare he could put a face to.

  “We took our final stand here, where the Goddess was reborn, and she joined us in the fight. She was barely older than you are now. In our scrying, we could not find a path to a future where we survive the D’thverek—save for one.” Koren Vey stood straighter, raising her chin. “Instead of trying to defeat the D’thverek, we stole the mechanism that allowed it to feed off the light of others. The D’thverek called it its heart. We couldn’t destroy it—we didn’t know how to. So the Goddess buried it with her in an unmarked tomb, and we would be safe, but only for a thousand years.”

  The planets in the map swirled, again and again, one year to the next, faster and faster until the planets and their orbits were a blur—and then everything stopped, and the map was the galaxy Robb knew—the Iron Kingdom just after the Holy Conjunction six months ago.

  Koren Vey put her hands calmly behind her back.

  “We gave you a story—a prophecy—to warn of its return.”

  “The Cantos,” Robb realized.

  “So now the Great Dark’s looking for its heart,” Ana said quietly, shooting a cautious glance at him. “It’s burning shrines and HIVE’ing Metals to amass an army—”

  “No. It is simply staying alive. It has found a way feast off people’s light by transfering their souls into machines. It needs Metals to survive, but the more it gathers in the HIVE, the more energy it takes to control them. The D’thverek is dying still. It must die,” said Koren Vey. “You must not let it find its heart.”

  Ana hesitantly exchanged a look with Elara. “But . . . if the Great Dark dies, then it’ll take all the Metals in the HIVE with it.”

  The horror of what Koren Vey was asking them to do slid across his skin like icy fingers.

  To save the kingdom, they had to let tens of thousands of Metals perish.

  “You are asking us to kill them?” Ana’s voice shook.

  “Do not let the darkness find its heart,” Koren Vey replied. “I fear that if you try to save the Metals, you will fail.”

  He watched as Ana’s hands slowly bunched into fists. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “She might be right, Ana,” Elara said, crossing her arms over h
er chest uncomfortably. “I’ve done countless computations on the code used on Xu. I’ve tried everything. We don’t have the resources to get them all out of the HIVE, and we’re running out of time.”

  Ana didn’t say anything.

  “Where is this heart?” Robb asked.

  “The heart is hidden in a tomb in an ancient ruin on Eros.”

  “There are hundreds of those. That certainly narrows it down—”

  Koren Vey raised her hands again, and up from the ground came hills and valleys that reminded Robb of the backs of those scaly lizards Erik used to put in his bed as a child to scare him, but then he recognized the strange-shaped pool of water in the valley. “Hold on. That’s Lake Myriad. And that pass in the mountains is the Rigid Bone. I know these landmarks. It’s in the Bavania Range”—Robb motioned to the mountains—“because that’s the valley near . . .” He went very quiet.

  “The valley near . . . ?” Ana prodded.

  “Near the Academy.” His gaze lingered on the dot where the tomb was located, pulsing at the base of the mountains. He . . . he knew those coordinates, the town nearby, Resonance. The memory scratched at the back of his head, but he couldn’t quite place it. “There’re ruins there where students used to run off to before the Plague came.”

  Before he could try to remember any more about Resonance, the image rippled again and burst into bits of stardust, startling him out of his thoughts. “You must keep it safe. The Goddess will help you—”

  Ana jerked ramrod straight. “I am the Goddess reborn. I’m the first girl born to the Armorov line in a thousand years—”

  The C’zar looked at her sadly. “You are not the Goddess.”

  “But the prophecy—your prophecy—said I would be!” she argued. “If not me, then who? Who is?”

  “I am sorry. I do not know that answer, but—” She cut herself off with a gasp. The crystal in the center of the giant astrolabe gave a flicker. Fear crossed the woman’s cool, sharp features. “Elara, I fear we have spoken too long.”