The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  She’d chosen fire.

  Rynn stumbles out into soft, natural light. “Why today, why right this minute?”

  “The sun in a nearby system has become something no one’s ever seen before. It suddenly altered its physical properties and is beating like a living heart. The change I’ve been waiting for is here. The galaxy has irrevocably shifted as of a few hours ago, and now it’s time for you and me to go out into the wild. All the astronomy I’ve taught you will mean something very soon. We must celebrate, make a connection.”

  A beating sun in a neighboring system? What does that even mean?

  Rynn’s dad clearly saw it as some sign that should be heeded, a call for action, a shifting of loyalties, as if the time has come to choose sides on some interstellar debate. Rynn can only imagine this beating sun as a massive glow fly floating above the limbs of the spring forest, calling out to others of its kind, for aid, for companionship, for nourishment.

  At least Rynn’s years of learning about physics, of space, and the stars might be of benefit. Maybe that knowledge could help her make her own way in the galaxy, get her out of their bunker and into civilization.

  She hugs a pack tightly to her chest. She already wanted to be done with this day’s excursion and crawl back inside the warm bunker, if they weren’t going to visit people.

  Rynn blinks as her eyes adjust to the glare of morning sunlight reflecting off fresh snow. She can make out individual overlapping needles on the spiral cedars at a hundred meters. Three years ago, her dad told her she could see things more clearly than any person he’d ever known.

  “Why don’t we go into the city, or at least to town?” Rynn asks, wishing to meet others her age, a friend or two, maybe a boy her age—nearly an adult. “If this is such a big deal, can’t we go out and celebrate with other people?”

  Her dad leans his head back in the gilded light and takes a long breath, as if he hasn’t stepped outside in days. “We celebrate the woods, the earth, the rivers.”

  “Can’t we be with other people once in a while?”

  “Civilizations can be dangerous places.” Her dad turns to her: a beaming grin, clean-shaven face with pale skin, just past middle-age, eyes like glacial ice—her eyes—but his appear to be melting, nestled between a thick hat and raised collar. “You’re too young to understand, and that’s the way it should be.”

  Rynn inches outside, shading her forehead with a mitten of soft fur. “I’m almost eighteen.”

  Her dad grabs her wrist with cracked leather gloves and tugs her along. “You still have a few months, Stareyes. Everything I do is to make sure you stay safe, forever. You’re my princess. Always have been, always will be.”

  Rynn stumbles along through a half meter of fluffy snow that barely whispers against her carbon-alloy boots.

  Rynn’s dad often made her angry these past years, but she was always his entire world and he’s still hers, the only person in her life. Her mom left them before Rynn was old enough to form memories. She often worried, grew terrified that at any moment, without warning, something would happen to her dad, that he’d be gone forever and she’d be all alone. She doesn’t want to hold on to anger too long now, doesn’t want to remember the feel of it. She has a sort of eidetic memory, but only pertaining to emotions, and she doesn’t want to look back on this day years later and relive this irritation.

  Yellow light drenches Rynn’s face and warms her cheeks. She looks to the mountains, familiar with the deep blue shade even snow acquires at a great distance. “I love you, Dad.”

  Her dad squeezes her hand. “Today, we’ll see something special. I know it.”

  He’s said that on many occasions. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just feel it. The pulsing sun has set something in motion for us.”

  Rynn’s heart flutters in her chest. Her dad’s obscure proclamations always make her anxious, and he likes to spout them off but keep her in suspense.

  She swings her pack against her back and jogs to keep up with him, clomping through the white. Following her dad’s trail of oval imprints.

  Rynn senses her dad’s thoughts shifting. He’s deconstructing a maze in his head.

  He leads the way through a copse of pine trees whose branches droop, laden with snow that plummets down in soft thumps. They climb over steep ravines and across ridges, up the slopes of a mountain range behind their bunker—their home, buried into a hillside and camouflaged with dirt and brush. The sharp smell of fragrant cedar and crisp mountain air comes in waves.

  Sweat drips down Rynn’s forehead and cheeks, her breath heaving in labored rasps as she follows his tracks, her dad at least a hundred meters ahead. Maples with a thousand hands of red and yellowing leaves stand sentinel on either side of his trail. The white wind of her breath expels outward in rolling mist, dissipating into the chill air.

  Rynn is used to these hikes, often without destination or direction, experiencing the open air and solitude of the forest. Her dad often leads her out here, altering his course as if playing fire, wood, water in his head with some imaginary companion. They usually never settle at an endpoint, no lake or stream or highest peak, only trek about until he finally descends and returns home.

  Hours later, Rynn pulls her pack off, unzips it and mutters, “Getting hungry. I’d like a nice hot—” She runs into her dad’s shoulder.

  He’s locked in place, staring dead ahead. A whispering song carries out, like wind shuffling in the trees, only the sound is more beckoning.

  Rynn cranes her head around him.

  “There.” Her dad points at the far end of a clearing.

  Across a field of unbroken white, a short pine stands alone, black bark so twisted and gnarled it looks like it has bowline knots in its trunk. Lavender needles as long as arms spiral around branches. Halfway up, the tree has two distinct trunks, each diverging but stretching skyward as if they could not decide to become one body.

  Rynn imagines two trolls turned into wood and, with the acuity of her eyes, can see into the dark folds of their skin. It’s nothing, unless you are entranced by the hideous, the diseased. The wind murmurs around her, speaking through the needles, the leaves, the snow, the swath of open air. A smell: pungent, mint, evanescent.

  “That’s an emertel tree,” her dad says, his breath wafting out of his throat, barely catching the words, losing his senses in wonder.

  “Looks wicked … but wise in its own way.”

  “They say there are only six of them left.”

  “In this forest?” Rynn imagines six trolls hiding around her, lurking.

  “In this entire galaxy. They say these trees do not abide by the laws of physics. Their atoms are one and the same, existing in six different locations on different planets, or even on one planet, all at the same time. And their locations can change at any moment.” He lifts his foot as if wading through quicksand. “I knew it would visit us today.”

  He did? Rynn visualizes six trolls appearing on different planets across the galaxy, living in multiple locations during the same instant. Ridiculous. It’s just a tree … and another one of his fairy tales.

  Small silhouettes swirl in the sky, arriving like a cloud with a hundred wings, dividing and reforming. They create shapes and complex symbols, an art in the wind. A twisting oval, an elongating pillar. A cascade of avians.

  Rynn laughs and points. “What are those birds doing?”

  Their wings flare as they land in the branches of the emertel tree, engulfing it in white. Boreal owls. So white they are hard to focus on directly. Each feather unblemished, pure. They hop about, rubbing against each other’s heads. All of their golden eyes settle on the human pair across the clearing.

  Her dad laughs, a deep throaty sound releasing from some locked trunk inside the slats of his ribs. Unrestrained merriment.

  Rynn laughs again, louder.

  Her dad lifts her as if she’s still a child, and then she’s eight again, lifted under her arms, up to his face, kissed
on her cheek and spun in circles. She giggles although she does not know why or how he can still lift her, as she’s almost as tall as him. Flakes of snow drift down in clumps the size of maple leaves and blur into white lines as everything but her dad’s face fades into his rotations. He’s younger.

  Her dad slows and raises Rynn over his head, holds her there for a moment—a moment that freezes.

  The snow stops falling, the wind dies, the blurring of the forest does not crystalize. Ghostly silence.

  Rynn settles to the ground. Her dad studies her for a moment with one eye closed, as if trying to see through her, his vision lost in some middle space.

  They are themselves again, past middle-aged and nearly an adult. Snowflakes gather on her eyelashes and melt on her cheeks, caressing her skin with cool droplets. Her dad shakes his head, then dashes across the clearing for the tree.

  Rynn follows, her knees unhinged, her smile so encompassing it almost hurts her cheeks; the feeling is like sunlight in her heart.

  The boreal owls flutter and leap to higher branches. They do not abandon the tree.

  Rynn’s dad stops before the gnarled trunk, his breath spilling mist across a patchwork of cracked bark. He reaches for a pocket inside his coat and pulls out something green, like a crystal. He places it inside one of the hollow knots in the trunk. The green starts to fade into congealing blackness thicker than shadow, like something sucked every stray photon of light out of this minute area.

  Rynn’s skin tingles, and cold fists squeeze her spine. Ice runs through her eardrums and teeth.

  The bark of the tree wavers. Her dad turns to her, takes a clump of newly fallen snow from inside a fold of her coat’s collar, and places it in the darkness of the knot. “Can I give the tree your locket?”

  Rynn glances down hesitantly. She pulls a hand out of a mitten and slips a necklace over her head. Her dad gave her the heart locket when she was born—an old-fashioned gift, but she treasures it. Now he wants to give it to some tree?

  She holds it out, her hand shaking.

  He smiles. “You must understand, though, that if you let it go, you’ll never get it back.”

  The cords in Rynn’s throat tense. She snatches the locket back to her chest and wraps both arms around it. A moment later, she pops the locket open. Old-style printed pictures of her and her dad, when they were both much younger, stare back from opposite pieces.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to give it up.” His chin slumps as he turns to the tree. “I only wish for someone special to see what they meant to me, and I don’t own any comparable, sentimental tokens. No real memory drops. But, Rynn, you’ll always be my princess.”

  Does he mean her mom? The one who left them. And what’s a memory drop?

  Rynn stiffens, looking at the increasing blackness of the bark and the knot slowly growing tighter around her dad’s offering. It’s the weirdest thing she’s ever seen, but her dad does not act shocked, not even surprised.

  A moment later, Rynn kisses the cold silver of the locket, leaps forward, and thrusts it inside the closing knot. Her hair in the picture illuminates and turns dark and brown. Her features elongate. This girl smiles back at her.

  Rynn gasps and stumbles back. She falls over. Bark snaps closed with a creaking of wood and time.

  Then everything appears frozen again. The snow, the wind, the branches. The owls.

  A stabbing pain runs the length of Rynn’s back. She’s lying in the soft snow, a scattering of flakes dancing around her. The pain in her back couldn’t have been from falling into the white cushion. She raises her bare hands.

  Where’d my mittens go?

  A darkness appears at the base of her fingernails but quickly vanishes, possibly a shadow.

  Her dad kneels beside her, his mouth agape as if someone severed the muscles in his cheeks. The melting ice appearance of his irises seems to freeze solid. He is silent, mortified, unrecognizable, judging her as he never has.

  Rynn sits up and scoots away. The soft fur of her mittens rests atop the snow close by. “Dad?”

  “No.” He shakes his head as he tries to stand. His knee gives out, and he topples to his side like a felled tree.

  “Did I do something wrong, Dad?”

  His complexion takes on a sallow hue. His lower lip trembles. He’s afraid. He hates her, his own daughter, one he’s loved more than anything his entire life. Now in an instant he despises her.

  Rynn’s hands shake. “I gave up my locket, just like you wanted.”

  He turns and tries to crawl away on his elbows, fleeing a most hideous beast in any way he can.

  “Daddy, stop!”

  He pauses. Glances around. Everything is as it should be. The tree with the black trunk is still there, the knot closed, sealing off whatever strange thing he placed inside, and her locket. Their locket.

  “Maybe it’s okay.” Her dad’s voice lacks conviction. A moment lingers, and then several more. His rigid arms slowly relax. He stands, surveys his surroundings, and studies the emertel tree. “It’s fine. I’m just jumpy because of this beating sun situation.”

  Her dad holds out a gloved hand, his fingers spread.

  Rynn clasps his hand as she’s done so many thousands of times, but something is different. A harshness, a solidity. His heart has turned into a black rose, dried and crumbled to dust at the sight of his own daughter.

  “Dad?”

  “We’ll be fine.” He takes in the tree one last time.

  The owls’ golden eyes peek out from behind lavender needles without ever blinking, the twisted bark and the knot still.

  “Now our gifts can be found wherever the trees are,” he says. “Real memory drops for our intended recipient. Any item that elicits or contains a strong emotion or memory can become a memory drop.”

  He reaches down, retrieves a feather as white as the snow, and twirls it between his thumb and forefinger. He hands Rynn the feather. A moment later, he plucks a lavender needle, as long as Rynn’s arm and as thin as thread, from the nearest branch, quickly bends and weaves it into a circlet, and places it over his head. It drops around his neck, contouring to his curves.

  “There.” Her dad smiles, beaming at his new necklace, then studies her feather, hiding something he’s thinking. The overwhelming sense of contrived emotion seeps through his exterior, like black oil through water. “Now you have a much better memento, Stareyes, and we’ll always have something to connect us, our own memory drops, no matter where we are.”

  He pulls her along, back across the clearing, guiding her by the hand, their boots whispering through untouched snow. When they approach the far tree line, he stops cold.

  The wind hasn’t changed, nor the falling flakes settling softly on her hair. No other sound, no smell. But he has stopped as if filled with overwhelming dread. He forces her back, behind him.

  The boreal owls explode from the emertel tree: a flurry of white feathers, wings, golden eyes. They scatter as if they were never a flock flying or resting in harmony, shrieking as their wings flap silently away.

  Then quiet descends like a winter night.

  Something slides around a tree trunk in the distance.

  A figure in all black—as if formed of shadow—very short, hunched like an old man. An elongated face and jutting forehead but no eyes or mouth. Arms bent and held close to its sides. The three fingers on each hand are like ropes, fingers that drag through the snow. Six swaying lines from its fingers crystalize in the white behind it as it takes slow slapping strides. Rynn’s keen eyes cannot grasp the finer details of this thing as she’s so accustomed to. Its form blurs and wavers, like something in a dream.

  “Hello,” the shadow says in a merry voice, as if arriving for a picnic in the clearing.

  Rynn’s dad’s sinewy muscles tense.

  “Schim Platinay,” it says, although it has no mouth to move, “you may never have amounted to much, never come close to glory in this galaxy, but you excel at finding others.”

  Her
dad takes a step back. And another. Steps on Rynn’s foot, trapping her in the snow.

  Rynn notices something as the shadow steps out into the veiled sunlight. She glances at the snow beside her and her father. Shadows. The creature has none, as if it did not exist.

  “Do you tell her that you’re her father as well?” Its voice shifts to a hollow timbre, echoing as if coming from inside a tunnel, a chill rising in its tone. “Or did you give that lie up this time?”

  The words are lost on Rynn, terror and disbelief crushing comprehension.

  The shadowy figure stops its advance. “You never thought they’d find you here. Not on this lonely planet, lost in the billions of stars. No one with anything to offer lives here, not with the forgotten.”

  “Leave us alone,” Rynn’s dad says in such a trembling voice Rynn can see fear creeping across his body like black fungus. “I know you’re only in apparition form, not physically on this planet, Forgeron. Seeking, maybe, but you cannot do anything now. Your masters aren’t here either. You’ll not frighten us.”

  The shadow shifts a bit. “They are coming. Every breath you take is one less before they arrive. There’s no hope in running; they will find you no matter where you hide. I have your scent … and hers now. Hold each other close while you still can.”

  Her dad’s torso twists as if he’s waving something or winding up to throw something, but she cannot see what he’s doing.

  The shadow flickers and starts to dissipate in response to her dad’s action. “I’ll return soon.” It pivots, shuffles away, rounds the trunk it appeared behind, dragging its long, ropey fingers through the snow. Then disappears into the swaying leaves and needles of the woods.

  “Daddy?”

  Her dad turns and scoops Rynn up in his arms, her arm around his neck. He glances back and sprints for the far end of the clearing. His breathing sounds as faint wisps.

  Rynn feels the pursuit around her: a roaring gust, gray clouds running ahead of the wind, riding after them, branches swinging and jutting out, scraping, searching for skin. Snowflakes plunging. All of the wild world seeking her.

  She twists her neck to see back across the meadow. Nothing but the taunting white cloak of snow. No shadowy creature. No emertel tree.