Nyranna’s impatience strums in her gut, tightens.
A few minutes later, a silver shuttle rockets over the barren landscape and stops before her. A door irises open, and she climbs inside. Her envoy is a sweaver, given their bronze uniform and visor. The Northrite’s law enforcement. He remains seated and makes no sign of acknowledgement.
The shuttle rockets away under autopilot guidance, takes them to the clandestine capital city, a city that roams in unpredictable fashion—for security purposes—around the planet on the largest antigravity bed Nyranna’s ever seen. They fly over the congested city—shuttles, skyscrapers, everything metallic—before approaching an opening in liquid obsidian walls, an opening that is surrounded by heavily armed sweavers.
The infinity-sign-shaped building of government sits beyond the liquid walls, in gleaming wonder. The Northrite’s palace.
The shuttle coasts through the opening, and the raging winds die out.
They land, and the envoy leads Nyranna outside. The air feels cleaner, the oxygen denser. A smell of life and of flowers.
The envoy leads her into the palace and points down a long corridor.
Towering walls of steel loom over and seem to press in on Nyranna. Intimidation, long before she even meets the Northrite council.
Why was I summoned here of all places, alone?
Nyranna hurries through the corridor, her echoing steps seeming to diminish her height as the sounds bounce and rattle in the emptiness overhead.
A vivid image from a recent dream flashes in her mind: some figure of shadow holding something in its hand. A gentle wind caressing her cheeks.
Nyranna dismisses it, wondering instead what the Fiend Slayer of Staggenmoire thinks about seeing her disappear. A witch? Isn’t that what medieval men thought of powerful women? He would spread word, and those backward people would no longer trust outsiders.
The memory of the man’s face pauses in her mind and turns. He reminds Nyranna of her father, from pictures when her father was much younger. Her father, the man who did nothing when the seekers of Uden came and took her from her home. Her father: loving but weak and unable to protect his only child. Now she lives in eternal servitude, if not slavery.
Nyranna dislikes the Royal Father of Uden and her overseer, as they controlled her, but this place does not make her feel any safer or more welcome. The home of the Northrite council, the real power commanding a vast network throughout the galaxy. The Northrite are involved in the manufacturing and sales of every commodity, and they are the governing force of every skilled labor and service sought by humanoids. And Northrite competitors often suffer strange sicknesses or just disappear.
If the Northrite officially utilize Uden’s aid through Nyranna, it will bind the council in a treaty debt—a legal obligation to return comparable or greater aid—to Uden. And Uden, as the richest and most influential single planet, is the most outspoken against Northrite laws. The Royal Father, Medegair, wishes to govern his planet and colonies himself.
Why me? Nyranna Whispers to her overseer, the High Overseer of Uden. Why did you or the Northrite choose me?
A few minutes pass before he answers, his voice choppy and slurred. The Northrite requested our first-ranked Strider-Whisperer amalgam.
That title is Nyranna’s. She can bring most anything she touches on a Stride with her: clothes, people, weapons, ships, buildings. That ability means Medegair desires her services daily and has her overseer constantly monitoring her whereabouts.
Her overseer continues, Supposedly, the Northrite Striders and Whisperers are stretched too thin managing an entire galaxy, and the council desires a source outside of themselves to confirm something of great importance for the galaxy.
Anger seethes in Nyranna’s heart. She has no choice but to obey, and Uden will be happy to accept and hold on to a Northrite treaty debt.
In the palace’s atrium, people lounge on antigravity chairs, couches, beds, reading or conversing quietly. The air is crisp and fresh. Nyranna hates waiting, her impatience a termite chewing at her nerves already. A female sweaver approaches and is followed by a greeter in a maroon dress.
The greeter holds out a bronze v-rim. “The Northrite council is expecting you and will see you shortly.”
Nyranna takes the v-rim and places it across her brow, where it adheres without pain, only a subtle tug. She finds a blue cloud of a seat without texture that molds to her shape, supporting her weight.
Recent galaxy reports and news strobe in translucent sheets across the air in front of her.
Nyranna swipes her fingers through the air, skims three-dimensional information. A bright yellow headline with massive letters catches her eye. Some strange spider has been discovered on a planet in an outer limb of their spiral galaxy. She reads about the arachnid’s desired habitat and how the planet and its native flora and animal species will be lost. That planet is one of the drifters—one of several planets that defies the laws of physics and are slowly drifting farther and farther from the mass of the galaxy. The article mentions that if anyone could acquire one of these spiders, or a mating pair, they would be priceless to a collector or museum. Unfortunately, this species is deadly to humans.
Marching footsteps break the silence like thunder in a cave. A group of soldiers round a corner, enter the atrium, more solid than the newsfeed. The man leading the group is covered in blinding white armor, not too unlike that which the medieval Fiend Slayer of Staggenmoire wore.
The leader’s visor is lowered, the edge of his white cape a hungry serpent snapping at his heels. His soldiers follow in similar dress but in black capes, all carrying black-bladed medieval weapons composed of shadow. Composed of the elements themselves.
Paladins.
Not any random group. Adersiun and his Everblades, a rogue group of powerful Elemiscists who bow to no authority or organization. Elemiscists who are not subjugated, who live according to their own doctrine. Their leader, Adersiun, is the galaxy’s only living Phantom. He carries the shadow of a long axe taller than himself, although he stands three or four heads taller than Nyranna—a tall woman. His svelte figure passes her without acknowledgement.
Nyranna still wears the violet dress designed for visiting the medieval planet, not the glass robes of an Elemiscist, but if anyone could sense others with the power to harness the elements, it would be Adersiun. Perhaps he would know if an Elemiscist is in his vicinity, maybe even feel her exact powers of Striding and Whispering.
The soldiers exit the atrium.
Why were the Everblades here, and what did they discuss with the Northrite? They are no one’s allies.
A voice enters Nyranna’s head, a Whisper. Unfamiliar. An anonymous message from someone she’s never heard before. A new spark.
Hear me, those who walk amidst the shadow of the citadel of death.
Then a moment later, quieter, the same voice: There are some of us who see the world as you do, Nyranna of Uden. Be vigilant. Know that we’re out there, and that we’ll speak more candidly soon.
Seeva
Icicles hang like the crystal fangs of some giant beast, partially shielding a dark opening in the mountain. Footprints in the brittle snow lead inside, the footprints of the hermadore poacher.
Seeva ducks beneath the icicles, the points dragging across her back. Ori squeaks in protest but follows.
Inside, Seeva’s night-vision dynamic lenses show a world of grays: black, white, sixty shades in between. A tint of blue creeps in from the icy walls.
Seeva hurries on, the cold and dark pressing in around her, each sensation growing fiercer in their own right. The massive weight of rock and ice overhead almost solidifies the air around her.
The cavern slithers on, a serpent within the heart of the mountain.
Images of a star beating red and then exploding, engulfing the solar system in its wake of fiery light, replays in short bursts in Seeva’s head. The two inhabitable planets closer to the beating sun are already evacuating. She should be evacu
ating as well.
Seeva sprints deeper into the mountain, clinging to seconds that fade into minutes.
The light ahead grows brighter, the air less heavy with cold. Her dynamic lenses, the visors of energy, shift and retract.
Outside, red light climbs over the horizon like lava over a hill, the temperature soaring from well below freezing to warm. The snow outside steams, a dense mist gripping at her ankles with ghostly fingers.
Although Climice has a near-standard size and gravity, its night lasts two standard weeks because of its slow rotational speed. Sunrise and sunset are prolonged as well. The coming two weeks of day will reach unsurvivable temperatures on the surface, temperatures beyond a scorching desert. In a few hours, the mist will rise as the densest fog, cloaking raging floods across the surface. Plants that seed and root in the ice will quickly push their way up, spore, flower or fruit, and die, their edibles foraged by hermadores and other creatures, to sustain them during the long night.
Such a short existence.
It’s the cycle of life here that’s repeated for millions of years. But the balance is teetering, falling, dying.
Seeva has researched this environment extensively, has been here before, and can feel the planet’s change like a long-term relationship, a lover’s one word misspoken, off somehow, if only in tone, signaling the beginning of the end to the other. The heat has been growing over the last months, the ice receding, not reclaiming with its frosty fingers what it needs to counteract the vicious days. Climice is shifting to something incongruous with its long-established state. Seeva feels it in her blood, her bones, her heart.
A weeping sadness tugs at some emotional string as if she’s its musical instrument of expression.
Something happened even before the sun turned red.
The unseen wildlife feel nervous, shifty, as they seek caves beneath the ice and snow to survive the fortnight-long blazing day of summer, if this sudden change in the sun doesn’t kill them first.
Ori’s wings waft a breeze across Seeva’s face as steam from the snow begins to sing, a soft murmur, a thrumming through the hull of a glacier beneath her.
The energy of Seeva’s lenses shifts and solidifies, becoming sun goggles as she paces outside the cavern, searching for the trail of the poacher. Streaks of dense blue appear from within the ice at her feet, visible through the swirling, blinding white all around her.
Seeva stops and kneels.
A human body.
Skin as pale as fresh snow. Blue teeth and eyelids peeking through the ice.
An orange glow blazes in the distance, penetrating the mist: an unfamiliar ship’s fusion reactor powering up. The lights pivot, yaw, and flare. Then the ship launches from the gravity well of Climice, out into space.
The poacher has escaped.
Opposite on the horizon, the sphere of the altered sun ascends beyond the mountains, an illusion of a ball of fire impaled by cliffs and crags. Red as blood. Pulsing.
A celestial ultimatum.
Seeva is a small cell in the lung of space, witnessing the beating heart of the galaxy’s god.
***
The outer door of Seeva’s cruiser ship irises open.
She rushes inside, the internal environment cool, inviting to her burning skin roiling with sweat. Her lenses of energy flicker and fade as she strips off her gear and fires up the fusion reactor and drive. She sits at the pilot’s seat.
Climice is now veiled by white mist as thick as water, backlit by the pulsing red glow of the beating sun. The eternal chase of fire coming for the fog.
The poacher escaped, fleeing the planet, but Seeva is still the hunter and will not give up so easily.
Did the poacher also murder someone, the strange body encased in ice?
Seeva’s blood turns cold, and emotions and memories swarm her. Her insides become a reaper coming for her self-control, her mental stability. She strokes Ori’s soft feathers, swallowing it as best she can.
Seeva found Ori years ago, as alone as she felt now surrounded by nothing but him and death. His species, however horrifying, mates for life, and when that mate passes, by natural causes or even an untimely end, the survivor never searches for another but becomes a recluse away from the pack—or gathering as it’s correctly called—usually dying from starvation. Ferocious little hunters with delicate hearts, so unlike humans and their kind.
The cruiser lifts off, gliding slowly through the mist suffused with pulsing red light, Seeva relying solely on her navigation console. The engines thrust. They fly along, retracing her route, to acquire the same basic trajectory as the fleeing poacher.
Ori screeches and rises, flapping about her head like a flock of angry ice crows. He hoots and gestures with a wing tip into the mist below.
“What is it?” Seeva asks languidly, her body bent in defeat.
She can’t see a thing, but Ori is the native species here and has acclimated eyesight. He will not stop his rant and hits the landing gear with a talon.
Hydraulics hiss and sputter.
Seeva groans. “If you get us killed just so you can say goodbye to your old home before it’s gone …” She chokes back a tear and veers in to land.
Pressure bolts slide and grate, and then Seeva’s door opens. Tendrils of mist flow into the cabin like fingers of the dead.
Seeva wrenches her suit back on, the coils still frosted by the liquid nitrogen now coursing through its network of thermal regulation. Ori flies out of the ship.
Seeva runs after him. Her dynamic lenses reform.
The dark cracks of figures appear against the white windowpane haze of mist.
The slaughter site. All of the dead hermadores lie like bloated whales in streams of rushing ice and slush.
Tears roll down Seeva’s face to match the melt around her.
Shoots of plants have already grown up. Glacial roses open glowing blue buds in recognition of this massacre—the only place these flowers grow in the entire galaxy, in the soil of spilt blood.
“So beautiful,” Seeva says, her voice a soft breath. Yet so sad that this beauty can only be witnessed after sacrifice. The way of the galaxy, the pain of life.
Whoever or whatever made their galaxy this way is not ever going to see her kneeling in worship.
Ori stops at the backside of the same carcass Seeva inspected earlier, where they found the youngling that was then shot and killed by that despicable poacher.
Does Ori want my heart to implode in sorrow? Yes, I failed at both defending the youngling and apprehending its vicious murderer.
Seeva staggers closer, a suffocating weight tugging her guts downward.
Ori’s eyes are craters of pink and emerald. His wings flap, and he spins in a circle.
Seeva wades through streams flowing down the ravine, water rising to her calves in the shallowest parts, and growing deeper.
Something protrudes from the rear of the dead hermadore. A purple head. Three eyes. Spines. Another infant, a twin.
It blinks. It breathes.
Still alive … its head being shoved out through the vagina by the increasing pressure of gases distending its mother’s abdomen.
The youngling bellows, the sonorous sound of fear. It will be thrust out of the narrow vice of a womb into the pain of the world beyond.
Seeva unsheathes a sonic blade from her waist. Waiting for the gas pressures to increase will take too long and may never be enough. She cuts into the mother’s dead flesh with her humming instrument, lengthening the vaginal opening. The hermadore’s shoulders slide out. The worst of it. She grabs it by its front feet—as large as her feet—then leans back, buries her boots into slush, and heaves.
Ten minutes later, the birth is complete, the long dead umbilical cord severed and treated, a rhiciopore sloshing in the youngling’s mouth, releasing the smell of rotten algae. Soft spines cover the youngling’s body like down.
The youngling follows its new mother to her ship, stumbling through slush and water.
S
omething moves through the alternating red and white mist ahead: a shift, a shadow, the outline of a human figure. Then it’s gone.
It appeared naked, with breasts. Blue markings perhaps on the eyelids and teeth, but Seeva can’t be sure. It may have been her imagination. No humanoid can inhabit this planet; they can’t survive the harshness without shielded cities.
Seeva’s mental trauma sometimes plays tricks on her: mirages, hallucinations. Either way, she can’t go looking now. Not in the swirling madness around her. She has to apprehend the poacher, follow the trail of the spines before it goes cold.
But first Seeva has to get herself, Ori, and this newborn hermadore out of here before the unstable sun explodes.
Elion
Elion’s eyelids peel open, slow and sticky, like the rind tearing off an unripe fruit.
Everything is blurry.
Elion’s ears ring and his head pounds; a stentorian explosion has gone off inside his skull, particles of memories flying about like shrapnel.
A heap of bottles is piled on the table beside the bed, one still standing; a centimeter of brownish liquid waits at the bottom, calling out to him like a temptress in his most desperate moments. Drink is the water of his life, his curse and his death. It soothes him every night, is his only means of sleep, also the only thing that invigorates him and allows him to rise each morning, arise from the dead, resurrected.
A green pill bottle sits beside the drink, calling out to him with a whisper of seduction.
Elion reaches out, but his hands stop, turn back and forth in front of his blurry vision.
Coagulated blood cakes Elion’s skin, is buried under his fingernails like dirt. His head throbs so violently he thinks his teeth are shaking loose at their roots, his hair so drenched in moisture it seems he must have washed it as he slept.
“What have you done this time?” a voice, a girl’s, asks.
The Forgotten Sky Page 7
