Cirx has been at it for over a week, working tirelessly as long as sun or moonlight guides him. Using fire when the light fades. Barely sleeping.
A living fiend of guilt smolders in Cirx’s chest, and it writhes and squirms. His lids scratch his eyes whenever he blinks. His head pounds under a hammer of tension. It’s still the same world; the ship attack was not a nightmare, and time will not go backward.
Kitasha may have been out riding with the children when it happened. They had to be out riding. They are just too scared to come back home right now.
Tears and lamentations from Staggenmoire’s survivors flow freely beside oaks and sea pines, their dwarven, hunchback trunks eternally bowed by unrelenting ocean winds.
Others from the towns and cities of Staggenmoire’s continent arrived by boats and offered aid. King Goldhammer’s body was already uncovered, the primary objective of the search, his throne and the aquatic life inside smashed. All lost.
No one has found the black Sky Sea Pearl.
Dead men, women, brothers, sisters, and children were uncovered in mass graves, having huddled together in fear. One of the outsiders, the diplomat, was among the dead.
Only one of Staggenmoire’s flying ships remains intact, a ship freely given to them by one of the earlier arrivals who possibly called themselves Uden—there are too many outsiders to keep straight. The rest of their acquired flying technology was obliterated.
Kitasha’s, Erin’s, and Enix’s bodies were not found.
Cirx removes another stone in the area of his room of the demolished castle.
A chest of wood with iron braces lies flattened against the scattered remnants of a buttressed wall. His father’s chest. He tosses aside splintered chunks of oak. Sweeps rubble away with a gloved hand and a clatter.
Wedged against the corner of a buttress is his father’s horn, the horn of the Fiend Slayer, intact, thinner than the surrounding stones the wreckage piled onto. Legend said the horn would summon the fiends the slayer wished to put to the sword. His father left it for him before departing on his last great quest, one he probably knew he would never return from.
Cirx’s fingers tingle as he cups the horn’s cracked keratin shell. No new cracks. He never heard his father blow into this instrument and has never done so himself. Maybe soon he would need to unleash its powers for the last supposed fiend.
He places the leather strap cradling the horn around his neck and keeps searching.
They are still out on a ride, just caught on some island in an Eventide storm.
Cirx removes another block. And another.
The bodies of his wife, son, and daughter are crushed against the edge of a wooden bedframe, all in each other’s arms. Bent, twisted, mangled.
Cirx’s eyes burn and drain salty water like a Sky Sea rainstorm. His head falls into his hands. He moans, drops to his knees, and brushes matted hair covered in wet, gray mud and rubble away from their faces.
“Enix, wake up.” Cirx rubs the boy’s hand. His skin is cold. “Erin. Kitasha!”
He touches their cheeks, their hair. As cold as sea water.
Cirx screams into the heavens and collapses.
Guilt consumes him like fire. He ventured out again, after his ordered service to the miners, and took some miniscule chance of finding the last fiend. For what? For this? For his family’s death, leaving them alone when they needed him most? For his own pride and ego instead of restraint. What he kept trying to teach Enix about life, not heeding his own words.
Cirx could not have saved them, but he could have died holding them, comforting them through their last moments of terror.
Castle guards appear around him in a circle, watching the pain flood from him in waves. Sympathy is not seeping from them; their eyes are hardened. They must wonder why their Fiend Slayer was off chasing trealhounds and then a ghost of a fiend the king did not order him to pursue, rather than here defending his castle, his friends, his family.
All Cirx knows how to do is fight. It’s what his father trained him for since he was a child, unlike how he intended to raise Enix, a son that would never become the balanced man Cirx envisioned, a man capable of showing kindness to many, showing a sharp blade only when needed.
Perhaps his father was right; he always taught Cirx to be tough and to fight everyone and everything that stood against them.
Cirx lies still for hours amidst a soft drizzle of rain, rain that taps at his skull like the bony fingers of the dead, reminding him of everything he did not do. The guards around him depart one by one, except for his knights, who stand waiting, arms clasped behind their backs, suffering for their own families along with him.
Cirx begins a song he once heard his now deceased mother sing when his uncle was lost in battle. One short verse etched into his soul, one he later heard in his dreams and saved for the day he would need its comfort. His words crack as he sings, each note a flickering candle drawing him deeper into a dark forest that has come to life inside his mind.
When the willow’s dark, it’s time we part
But until then I ride the Eventide
Along the swells under the rain
Never to hold on this side o’ the sea
For the water in the sky will make us free
Garrabrandt crushes his shoulder in a grip meant for comfort.
Garrabrandt lost his wife and two of his daughters, but his two youngest daughters were playing on the beach and are still alive. Emotionally devastated but alive.
Cirx shakes him off.
All of Cirx’s family’s souls were taken by the Horseman and are now in purgatory in the Sky Sea, lost from him and each other, wandering aimlessly, alone. He must find justice, take revenge upon those outsiders in the space station orbiting beyond the train tunnels. He will take his men and the last flying ship, sail beyond the Sky Sea, find out if these outsiders keep any fiends that did this, or if they are the fiends themselves.
Cirx imagines mounting their last ship like a dragon rider and incinerating all of his enemies with fire.
Jaycken
Jaycken’s hand rests on the back of Nadiri’s shoulder as she stands in line before him on the plateau of the Frontiersmen’s station, Kiesen’s hand on Jaycken’s shoulder. Bruan wasn’t chosen for this reconnaissance mission, given his performance with the bar.
Their unit takes a few steps, matching the pace of the Elemiscist Strider in gray and blue glass robes, the young blonde Osivia, at the front. Another line led by a second Strider stands beside them.
Jaycken can’t see what Osivia’s doing up ahead.
“Here it comes,” Nadiri says over her shoulder, in her mousy voice.
“Kiesen,” Jaycken says. “You’d better have your skeleton stabilized.”
If he’s too distracted when we arrive, his femurs will snap.
Jaycken could do nothing to stop Kiesen from coming or to stop him from learning how to stabilize his skeleton. Somehow, he’d have to keep Kiesen safe, protect him from the mission, from the gravity, from the effects of the elements.
A sucking feeling pulls at Jaycken’s innards, a spiraling sensation, as if he’s caught in a whirlpool. The sensation of a Stride when not inside a ship.
Five heartbeats later, Jaycken’s head swims in fog, but the ground has a different feeling to it. Brittle. An immense heaviness pulls at his bones. Everything is as black as coal.
Iopenia. The closest previously inhabitable planet to the beating sun. The incinerated planet.
“There’s nothing left,” Kiesen says, his voice transmitted through Jaycken’s v-rim, similarly heard by their team of twenty Frontiersmen, two Striders, and two Whisperers.
He must be fine if he’s taken in his surroundings and can talk before I can.
As Jaycken steps, ash crunches and flakes into shavings that drift up and float like black snow. It clings to his gray alloy suit, still the uniform of a recruit even after practicing for two days and mastering the stabilization of his skeleton before departure.
He breathes through his inhalation mask, having been warned of some toxic hallucinogenic compound released into the air when the planet burned.
“It’s nostalgic,” Jaycken replies only to Kiesen and Nadiri’s v-rims. “It looks like the inside of an old fireplace.”
“And I feel like a cockroach looking for crumbs,” Kiesen says.
Around them, the black soot is limned in red, a strobing red that runs across blackened stumps, swirling smoke, and scattered bones. On the horizon, the beating sun is setting, turning the sky to fire, the vastness of space a canvas of throbbing blood.
Will the sun explode and incinerate them as well?
A tingling undulates across Jaycken’s skin, his senses heightened under excitement and nervousness: sharper vision, more acute smell, louder noises.
Stabilizing his skeleton amidst the massive gravitational forces takes less of Jaycken’s concentration already.
Sweat rolls down Kiesen’s forehead, and the inside of his mask fogs before beads of moisture are wicked away.
He has to concentrate harder than I do. He shouldn’t be here.
“Officer Teschner,” a female Frontiersman with prominent facial features and bronze hair, Satrina, says through their shared v-rim comm. “The readings I’m receiving from the sun are as normal as any yellow dwarf star.”
“Are you blind, Soldier?” Teschner asks, her posture as impeccable as ever.
Satrina shakes her head and looks at the woman beside her for reassurance, a blue-haired woman who shrugs.
Satrina says, “It’s emitting the same wavelengths of light, heat, and radiation as it was prior to the change. Wavelengths that’d be expected of any yellow dwarf.”
“Send over your readings.” Teschner stares at the horizon, throbbing red light glaring off her inhalation mask. Between flashes, the wrinkles on her forehead deepen as if she means to strike the sun itself for confusing her, for creating this enigma.
Teschner turns and marches on, and the team follows behind.
“I’ve never seen anything so dead,” Nadiri says, transmitting only to Kiesen and Jaycken.
“You’ve never seen the inside of my stepmother’s heart,” Jaycken says.
Kiesen laughs. “You’re an asshole of a stepson … but it’s so true.”
Something smacks into Jaycken’s shoulder, knocking him off balance. He stumbles but catches himself. Pain spears into his leg and tunnels through his bones.
Too much force. But nothing is broken.
A Frontiersman named Axford carries a pulser and glares down at him with a handsome face, a tall frame. “Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
Axford stalks off.
What the hell?
“Don’t let him get to you,” Officer Ethanial says, marching up to Jaycken and patting his shoulder. “They all saw what you did with the iron bar, and a recruit making Frontiersmen look bad isn’t something Axford can tolerate.”
Jaycken studies Ethanial: black mustache and sideburns, white hair combed hard to the side, his dad’s contact on Jasilix.
“He doesn’t want to be friends?” Jaycken suppresses a sarcastic smirk.
“You harness the elements as a novice Sculptor would.” Ethanial’s mask fogs for a moment. “So does your brother.”
“Could I become a Sculptor?” A compressing sensation grips Jaycken around his throat. Do I want that now? Would the power be worth the sacrifice? To become the second Sentinel …
Ethanial chuckles, his mustache a ripple of black hairs. “It’s not my choice. It depends on if you can control the syorite, one of the six elements. The element Sculptors primarily control. But, as I told you, you’re destined for research.” He pauses for a moment as if churning over some thought. “Your dad asked me to see to that. Teschner just overruled me on this mission.”
Ost doesn’t want him or Kiesen to advance too far and utilize too much of the elements? So Ethanial will make sure they don’t irreparably harm themselves with its power.
“Then you’ll be able to attack enemies by throwing objects at them, and you’ll be able to shield yourself.” Kiesen’s voice is pitched with enthusiasm.
“No, Recruit,” Ethanial says. “Sculptors use their Will outside their bodies, but not to fling objects. It doesn’t work that way. Your control of an object with your Will is proportional to its distance from you. A Sculptor may try to throw something by hitting it with his Will, but as soon as it starts to travel, it’s already decelerating and weak.”
“Whisperers throw their voice,” Kiesen says.
Ethanial purses his lips. The hairs of his mustache appear like the tangled legs of spiders plastered against his mask. “Sending a message or Striding is different. Your voice or body move with the elements. I don’t write the physics. I just have to obey their laws like every mortal.”
They march across the rolling landscape, up a hill of ash, and crest a ridgeline. Everything on the other side is also dead: animals, plants, trees. Humans who did not flee when they should have.
A dead planet.
Could I become a different type of Elemiscist as well?
From his studies, Jaycken knows that only the uncommon trainee can advance beyond the novice level and become an Elemiscist, and the vast majority of Elemiscists harness only one power. A fraction harness two powers to a degree where they are considered adept, but usually only after years of study and practice. And almost all of those are Strider-Whisperer amalgams. Not Sculptors and something else.
Disappointment causes the elements’ power to slip a bit from the intangible fixator-like apparatus that Jaycken imagines holds his bones together.
“Who was the galaxy’s most recent Phantom Elemiscist?” Kiesen asks.
Ethanial’s eyes close as he huffs. “Only one known living person is a Phantom, and only three have ever been known to exist.”
“Adersiun Kromong.” Nadiri breathes heavily as they march.
Ethanial nods. “He’s lived for nearly six hundred years, although no one’s sure if he’s human or even alive as we know it. He’s created his own path, with a group of followers, the Everblades, delving deeper into the power of the elements. We all strive to match the ability of the Phantom, the height of our craft.”
An image of a ghost, a haze of a man enters Jaycken’s head, something unknowable. I’ve heard that name before … a story? Maybe one of Slyth’s ramblings. Maybe something Dad told me as a kid so I’d be too scared to go out at night.
Jaycken imagines Adersiun emitting a challenge to the galaxy, tempting anyone else to become a Phantom. A frisson of energy tingles as it climbs with steady hands up each vertebrae of his spine. He wishes to one day look Adersiun in the eye, as equals, as a Phantom who can manipulate the rate of time for himself in relation to the rest of the galaxy.
“The Frontiersmen are searching for a Phantom of their own,” Nadiri says. “The second Sentinel. They have been for centuries.”
Ethanial does not confirm or deny it, and they march on.
Hours later, Teschner’s voice rings over the comm. “Hurry, Frontiersmen. There’s something here.”
In the distance, the ash blanketing the ground like a new layer of sedimentary rock gives way to hills of excavated dirt.
Their team marches closer.
No sign of human life. Only the wreckage of machines lies piled about, machines blackened, twisted, or broken. Long arms of diggers cracked and fallen to the ground. Although these are not mounds of rehardened steel or titanium that were incinerated like everything else.
Between the hills of dirt, a hole as wide as an intragalactic passenger ship tunnels down through the crust of the planet, typical rock and dirt buried beneath a five-meter layer of soot and dead embers. At the bottom of the gaping crater waits a layer of gray cloud, a fog, a mist.
Tendrils leak out from it but are retracted back into a dome of the substance like snapping whips.
No one says a word for three minutes.
“These mac
hines were brought post-planet combustion,” Teschner says across the comm. “They weren’t burned.”
“No readings of any kind are being released from that mist.” Satrina works with her fingers on some virtual screen.
“Something is calling to me.” Teschner marches past them, down the slope of the crater, sliding along with scree that plunges into the mist beneath the crust.
***
The feeling of something tugging at Jaycken’s bones, his mind, and his desires overrides his thoughts. The sensation is coming from the mist at the bottom of the crater. They have camped for two days, studying its electrical activity and radiation spectrum.
A hundred meters farther down the slope of the crater, Teschner stands before the dome of mist, a detector held aloft. She’s the only one who has ventured down to the vapor barrier.
A gentle breeze rolls over Jaycken’s suit.
A scratching sounds to his left. There against a rock wall in the crater floats … something … what appears to be an armless hand, scratching words into the rock. Jaycken’s breath fogs his mask, his breathing raspy. He gasps. Curiosity draws him over.
Between short bursts of fog clouding the inside of Jaycken’s mask, the hand, or whatever it was, disappeared.
Jaycken approaches the rock wall and runs a gloved hand across the surface. Only scratches. Scratches that could have been from anything: the diggers, human tools, least likely a severed hand.
“What’s wrong?” Kiesen asks, making Jaycken lurch in surprise.
Jaycken shakes his head. “Must be turning into our grandmother: my brain melting into stale soup. I’m seeing things that aren’t there.”
Nadiri scoffs. “There’s plenty here I can’t explain.”
Even a floating hand? What does that mean? He shouldn’t say anything, or they might all think the Stride or the hallucinogenic compounds have affected him.
Someone shouts from deeper within the crater, closer to the mist.
One of the two Striders with the team, the young blonde, Osivia, is now with Ethanial near the mist dome, arguing with Teschner. Osivia is gesturing at the mist with space traffic controller motions. “I can Stride out of there if anything happens. I can feel the six fragments of God inside. They’re calling us home.”
The Forgotten Sky Page 15
