The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  Fingers of darkness unfurl. Something sits there, something red like an apple. Then it starts to beat, the thudding of each contraction a rumble that shakes Rynn’s skull, concussing her brain. Drawing her attention.

  The beating sun.

  This is a dream, a nightmare. Rynn knows it. She doesn’t need to run. She can manipulate her dreams, her make-believe world. She can make conscious decisions, act, and alter the course of events.

  So instead, her attention settles on the creature’s other hand, also concealing something.

  Let me see that.

  Rynn points, feeling the presence of something powerful in its other palm, something she’s not supposed to see.

  The creature’s posture becomes corrupted with shock: straightened, stiff. Shocked that Rynn ignored its beating present or that she requested something else in this make-believe world.

  The fingers of the creature’s other hand tighten into a nest of tangled rope. A feeling or thought, a warning, is implanted in her mind. A second chance to ignore this hand and remember the other.

  Open your other hand!

  Rynn uncurls her fingers, as if showing the action here in the make-believe will force the creature to comply.

  The creature’s coils of fingers hesitantly unravel. In this palm lies a mask resembling a shield of gold and silver, halved surfaces dissected by a jagged lightning bolt. Small holes for eyes and a mouth.

  A winding image slithers into Rynn’s thoughts: a master controls this creature of shadow.

  The metal mouth of the mask creases and protrudes like skin. A laugh carries out into the vacuum of space that should not carry sound. Hunger on its breath, abyss in its tone.

  Rynn is pulled toward it, a meteor ensnared by colossal waves of gravity.

  She shouts and wakes.

  Rynn lies on her bed in the bunker.

  No one comes for her.

  Typically, if she has a nightmare, her dad will be in to check on her within five heartbeats. Not now. Since the hike in the mountains, since the emertel tree, since the apparition of that creature, he’s grown distant, agitated, preoccupied. And days have already passed since that hike.

  Rynn wonders what that creature was and if it really wanted her. If the fading memories of her dream mean anything. Or was it just a nightmare, a reenactment of her terror that day?

  A single spike of light shines from a dot in the low ceiling. Fabricated moonlight. Dust motes float in the beam like tiny moths. Rynn runs her hand against the control mechanism on the wall. The light intensifies.

  The image of a winter bear stands on the far wall, something her dad painted for her when she was a baby. Her guardian. As long as she can remember, the bear appeared peaceful, standing to inspect something, curious, inquisitive. Now, shadows have sunk deep into its eyes, its teeth stretching into fangs, its claws no longer tools but weapons seeking blood. It stares at her without blinking, its dark shadow hunting her.

  Rynn shivers and scoots against the far wall. Still her father is not here.

  She’s alone.

  She slips off her fiber mattress, takes a blanket and wraps it around her shoulders before stepping out of her room into the living area.

  A light is still on there, her dad splayed over a fiber chair, his arms hanging limp, his head drooped, stains from food and drink strewn across his blue shirt. Bottles scattered about the metal floor. His telescope is coated with dust, what he loved so much, forgotten.

  “Dad?”

  He grumbles in his sleep and slides a closed hand behind his back, concealing something.

  “Dad!” Rynn touches his shoulder, her hand shaking, unsure of what he’s become; this loving, gentle man without a vice is now someone else. His skin is cold, his bones resting beneath a thin layer of tissue.

  Her dad groans, sits up, and blinks. He focuses on her. Then keeps his hand hidden and kicks the bottles beneath the chair as if he thought she wouldn’t notice.

  He used to be so intelligent.

  He mutters something to himself.

  “Dad, I had a nightmare again. Can I sleep out here?”

  He nods and points to a spindle-fiber couch. “What was it?”

  “I was in space and that creature found me. It held something in its hand. A mask.”

  Her dad’s arms stiffen, and his voice croaks. “A mask? What’d it look like?”

  Rynn steps back to create distance from this stranger. “Like a gold and silver shield.”

  His eyelids sink, and for a moment he appears to have fallen back asleep.

  “Dad?”

  He jerks, a small contained seizure. “The one who refers to himself as the Messiah, the leader of the Northrite council. The largest and most influential conglomerate in the galaxy, those who acquire everything in their path and destroy what can’t be purchased. Their one goal: to become the only business, the only organization. You see more than dreams and figments of your imagination now, Stareyes. Something happened to you that day, or it was already there hibernating, and I unlocked it.”

  Rynn takes her dad’s hand. His eyes remain closed, but now tears scuttle down his cheeks, droplets of water hunting for the crevasse of each wrinkle.

  Rynn asks, “What happened to that creature of shadow? What was it?”

  “That creature you saw, Forgeron, is theirs, the Northrite’s. A slave Elemiscist who does their bidding. Forgeron is nothing by itself, only inhuman, alien, to instill fear, yet a masterful manipulator of the elements and of human emotion.”

  “What did you do to make the creature leave? Is he coming back for me … or for you?”

  Her dad snatches his hand back, grumbles and rises, grabs a half-empty bottle and drinks, a long, loud guzzling sound as he stomps away to his room. Still he will not answer her.

  A minute later, Rynn creeps to her dad’s doorway. He lies prone on his bed, tears pooling around his eyes and trickling out over his cheeks or slipping between parted lips. Now more than ever he reeks of uncertainty and desperation.

  “I always wanted to be the best at something, Rynn. It didn’t even matter if it was the best ship mechanic in the galaxy, the most intuitive doctor, the greatest explorer, or if I could simply cook a coldeye smore that hands down tasted better than anyone else’s. I just always wanted to feel like I mattered, like I was the one everyone looked up to for this one thing.

  “Of course, I’d have preferred my expertise to be understanding the planets, the true creation story of the universe, or astrophysics, but for all my trying I never won the respect of many people, was never the popular one. That takes a different flair.” He swallows, a moist click of a sound. “Simply being a good dad would’ve been more than enough at this stage of my life, except that’s impossible now as well. There’s something I must do, something …”

  An unsettled feeling sloshes through Rynn’s stomach, as if she just gulped a liter of sour juice.

  What does he think he has to do? It’s something sad enough that it makes him cry. Is it because of the shadow creature? This Forgeron hinted that the man before her isn’t really her dad. Ridiculous. He’d always been there for her.

  She should distract him, has never seen her dad like this, this open. “You’re already a great dad. Tell me again about the reports you heard, about that new planet they just discovered, the one hidden beneath an ocean in the atmosphere. I love picturing myself living there, more than in any of your other stories. Knights and castles and a sky sea. Romance hidden from the galaxy.”

  Rynn takes her dad’s hand, patting it like some grandmother consoling a child with a scraped knee.

  He sobs.

  ***

  Rynn’s room is dark. Only a single beam of artificial moonlight shines from her low ceiling. Something woke her, but she hasn’t dreamed of the shadowy creature in several days.

  Something shuffles near her doorway and scratches.

  Rynn sits up, pulling her blankets up to her neck. She reaches for her lighting control, imagining Forgeron
lurking in the dark. She slides her finger over the sensor.

  The lighting intensifies, a sliver to a full moon.

  Something is at her doorway. Something hunched and wobbly. Her heart seems to leap from her chest and pound in her head.

  “Daddy!” Rynn screams, lurching against the far corner, smacking her head against metal.

  “I’m here, Stareyes,” the stooped figure at her doorway says, scratching a red welt on his neck. He lumbers forward, his footsteps dragging with intoxication. “The last time I wasn’t ready. They caught me off guard.” He trips over something and stumbles. “How I loathe our society. I wanted to leave it all behind, to hide. I did. I tried.”

  Rynn is silent, shaken, scared.

  “When I chose from those children,” he says, “the odds were against me, but we saw each other, you a babe, me a younger man. We locked eyes and it didn’t matter, you picked me. How could I say no? At that moment you were my girl.”

  “Daddy?” Rynn says timorously, unsure if it’s actually her father in her room.

  “Time’s gone too fast, always too fast. You’ve grown so much, so tall. I can’t hide you any longer.”

  Rynn shakes with terror as her dad sits on the edge of her bed, trapping her in the corner. His words sprawl into one of his stories: something about six theories, six elements, six kings, but Rynn’s not listening. Her pulse thrums and whooshes in her head, muffling his words, as if she has the heart of a small bird. So fast. So fast she cannot listen to her dad, cannot think. But his words burrow into her brain and settle there, to be contemplated later. Tears of sweat form on her face and around her eyes.

  What is he doing?

  Finally, after her dad’s story is over, he turns and prods her with something. Rynn feels a bite on her shoulder. Then he withdraws. Something shines in the moonlight—a length of metal, a slender needle. A syringe now empty.

  Rynn gasps and shoves against him. The ceiling spins, the single light now a hundred stars rotating around her.

  Her dad takes her by the arms, pinning her to the bed.

  Rynn sobs and wails. “Daddy.”

  He holds something else that shimmers, something that hums. Something with an edge and tip, a blade. A sonic scalpel. Her dad’s hands shake as he directs its point at her face. He pauses and breathes.

  Rynn drifts off.

  Her heart slows into a tranquil sedation.

  Rynn sees herself running through a field of blooming flowers, skipping and laughing. Except her vision of this dream is different, cut in half.

  Nyranna

  Nyranna passes under a tunneling archway, pacing into the governing chamber of the Northrite council.

  She wonders about the cryptic and anonymous Whisper referring to others who see the world as she does. Should she contact the sender, his specific unidentified point of light blinking amongst the contacts in the galaxy of her head? Ask for more details? No, he said to wait. But Nyranna was never good at waiting.

  Voices carry out of the governing chamber before Nyranna sees anyone.

  “The three-thousand-year-old sanctions against creating robots for military usage,” a distorted voice says, intentionally masked so no one can determine the identity or even gender of the speaker. “Adersiun may not understand the legal ramifications.”

  Nyranna knew of the sanctions against robotic militia. Robots are used for services only, with the exception of nanobots packaged into pulser rounds—projectiles that explode after puncturing tissue, the explosion creating concussive damage but also releasing hundreds of nanobots that swarm inside a victim, targeting and slicing regional vasculature. Silent killers finalizing an objective if the round itself failed.

  What type of robotics were they discussing with Adersiun?

  Nyranna enters.

  Voices fall silent. Five masked faces, bodies covered in cloaks and dark robes, stare back at her from raised benches. There should be six Northrite councilmembers. The Herald is absent. The Northrite maintain anonymity for safety’s sake, claiming managing a galaxy is far too hazardous on one and one’s family’s lives. Only the Grand Patriarch of the galaxy holds more power than this council.

  Cowards.

  Meanwhile, they gather intelligence on the identities of others to help destroy their adversaries.

  If only Nyranna could force them to experience the life of an Elemiscist, make them understand how Elemiscists, her people, live and are treated. She feels small under their stares, an insignificant insect summoned to the queen’s chamber.

  A dark shadow of a creature sidles across the central floor carrying a tray of covered plates, bottles of red wine, silver decanters, a creature that appears as a shadow itself but creates none under the overhead lights. Forgeron, the servant of the council, the tireless one who does all their bidding.

  “The Uden Elemiscist has arrived,” a balding mustached man says from a lower bench before Nyranna. He scowls, looks her up and down, disapproving of her lace gown, the lack of typical Elemiscist robes to mark her position. He wears a blue and bronze uniform decorated with waving epaulettes and gold medals. The police commissioner of the Northrite, Breman, a man known to despise all those who could control the elements’ energy. A man who joyfully arrested and punished Elemiscists without reason. All of her kind knew Breman. His eyes blink independently of each other in small flutters.

  Nyranna ignores him.

  “Manipulator bitch,” Breman says under his breath.

  “My council.” Nyranna knits her fingers together, resting them against her thighs. “My Royal Father, Medegair, wishes for me to converse with the Grand Patriarch. How does our great ruler fare?”

  Nyranna knows the Patriarch carries a familial disease. The genetic disorder causes males of the line to grow sickly at a young age, although with proper care they live for decades.

  “He’s here,” the person in a teal mask resembling a kind-looking young man with a shovel beard says. The Apostle. The mask moves with the movements of the cheeks and lips beneath, even blinking, some kind of second skin of concealment and comfort.

  The Redeemer shifts in their seat: a mask of brown wood and leather, an open mouth barred with steel. “His sickness has progressed rapidly since his return from Jasilix. Unfortunately, against our advice, his curiosity drove him to the moon with his personal Strider and Whisperer. Since the day of his return, a couple months ago now, he’s not been the same.”

  Convenient for the Northrite that the only person with more authority than them is sick. “And his Strider’s health?”

  “Is fine.”

  Suspicious that only the Patriarch is sick. “What are the royal doctor’s assessments?”

  This time another councilmember stands: a mask of purple flame with a hooked nose as long as the beak of a shorebird. The Savior. “Unfortunately, the best doctors in the galaxy cannot find a treatment.”

  “He’s still so young,” Nyranna replies, a subtle accusation that his familial disease cannot be the culprit.

  The Grand Patriarch, Roznicek, is only nineteen years old and still without son or daughter. The disease progression struck sooner and sooner to the line: the great-grandfather twenty years into his reign, the grandfather ten years, the father five years in, and now just before the first-year mark for Roznicek. The line could end with him, very soon, a line that’s prospered and ruled during opulence, recession, war, poverty, disease, and peace for possibly fifty generations, for more than a thousand years.

  “If he hadn’t visited that damn planet with those dregs of people, the Manipulators, he wouldn’t be sick,” Breman says. “Our Patriarch would still be virile and ruling with an iron fist.”

  The Emissary, concealed in a mask of gray rock beneath a draping hood, and the Apostle nod in agreement.

  “I’d like to see Patriarch Roznicek,” Nyranna says. Her voice feels small and tinny against the Northrite’s animosity. “Per my Royal Father’s request.”

  Forgeron, the three-dimensional shadow, stops
in front of her, proffers a glass of red wine. She shakes her head and waves to dismiss the creature as she would an annoying fly.

  “He’s not accepting visitors at this time,” the Messiah says, the member who held the final vetoing power, a person in a mask resembling an angled shield composed of silver and gold halves split by a jagged lightning bolt, the eye and mouth apertures the only other distinguishing features. “He’s not feeling well.”

  “Medegair will be upset if I don’t see him,” Nyranna replies. “He and the people of Uden wish to see their Patriarch well.”

  “I bet they do,” a voice slips out from the barred mouth of the Redeemer.

  Nyranna bows her head in submission. “Then I must request an audience for myself and a third-party doctor, to assess the Patriarch’s health, soon.”

  A young woman appears behind the benches. She’s draped in a shimmery dress of white and silver, her long, blond hair cascading beyond small breasts. The Grand Matriarch Vinessia.

  “I thank you, Strider-Whisperer Nyranna of Uden, for coming to my home and for your concern for my husband,” the Matriarch says, her face a taut mask of naked skin. “We look forward to your next visit, a visit following the completion of the affair you were summoned for.” She wipes at her eyes as if the Patriarch is as good as dead, gives Nyranna a forced smile, then retires through a rear exit.

  Is she genuinely sad? “Was I summoned to look into this beating red sun?” Nyranna holds her head high like some military officer.

  The Savior shakes their purple-flamed face. “That’s not the biggest issue at hand.”

  Not the biggest issue: a sun in our galaxy turning red and pulsing, waiting to go nova?

  The Messiah clears their throat and speaks in distorted, wavery tones. “You know of the drifters, the planets and systems near the extremity of the spiral that are moving away from us. Jasilix is a drifter but is allowed to be inhabited because of the Frontiersmen’s requirements. A distress Whisper came from another drifter, calling for aid. This planet should’ve been abandoned fifty years ago, a decade after its unorthodox movement was first detected and then confirmed.”