Without Star Maps from another galaxy, they are confined to theirs in every conceivable fashion. They need to find a way to deal with the Ruin and the beating sun, not fly away like the inhabitants of Haredon.
A door slams.
Jaycken spins around on his antigravity chair. “Kiesen?”
“No,” the voice is tremulous, preceding the person. It’s the mouse-like Nadiri, and following her, that new girl, Rynn. The jumpy one with only one eye.
The beautiful maiden in distress.
“Your shift?” Jaycken stretches and yawns.
Nadiri nods, slinks up to an antigravity chair, and peeks at the monitor. “Watching another galaxy?”
Heat tendrils crawl up Jaycken’s cheeks. “Only for a moment. I was watching the sun and the Ruin most of my shift.”
Nadiri says nothing, adjusts the gold cannon, and motions to Rynn. “There it is. Learning its coordinates is the easiest way to find it. We spend a lot of hours sitting here watching it beat, hoping it doesn’t explode and wipe out an entire system, or worse.”
Rynn holds her head high, her glacial blue eye flicking over to Jaycken then back to the telescope and monitor.
Jaycken flushes. He was looking at her jeweled eyepatch. Did she know it?
Always looking at whatever parts I’m not supposed to.
Does everyone stare, especially here where having only one eye is like a soldier without an arm, without a v-rim? She’d never be able to harness enough of the elements’ powers to rise in the ranks of the Frontiersmen, not with only one eye. People need good eyesight and both windows to the soul to create the best possible connection, to gather the power and let it flow through and out of them. There are no blind Elemiscists. Slyth and the Jasilix Elemiscists often say that.
“I don’t see it.” Rynn’s forehead wrinkles in confusion.
Nadiri points at the monitor. “Right in the center. The big pulsing red star.”
Rynn looks back to the monitor, then to Nadiri. She pauses and looks again. “I swear I can only see what looks like a yellow sun.” Her head droops. “Maybe it’s just because I’m so tired. Every morning, no matter how much sleep I get, I feel weaker.”
That’s the second time she’s mentioned being so tired. Why would she be more tired after resting? Is she sick? Can I help her?
Rynn straightens. “Whatever bells the Frontiersmen use, the ones that sound like stone grating on stone keep waking me up.”
Grating stone? Jaycken imagines the old brass bells in the towers ringing, the ones he was told when he first enlisted that he should never hear ring, but if he did to prepare and come at once. It’s their signal for a red alert. Those bells couldn’t sound like grating stone, and he’s never even heard them ring. Maybe this girl is crazier than most.
Nadiri hovers awkwardly, folding and unfolding her arms and hands.
Jaycken steps up behind them and glances at the monitor: the same beating sun he saw on Iopenia with his own eyes. The sun he’s been watching most of the night.
Rynn blinks, looks again, and again. “I can’t tell that it’s beating … or red.”
Nadiri shakes her head. “Maybe it’s because you only have one eye.”
Is her vision really that bad? An old one-eyed crone’s? Or is she crazy? Why do I find myself drawn to the crazy ones? Or does it have to do with the readings from the sun coming back as normal? Jaycken adjusts the gold cannon. “Look now.”
Rynn looks. “I can see a void, a darkness blotting out the stars and galaxies beyond it.”
Jaycken nods. “That’s the Ruin.”
“Does it move?” Rynn straightens, standing as tall as Jaycken, her silky hair waving like rivers of vermillion stars.
Jaycken nods. “It destroyed a drifting planet nearly as soon as it was first identified. It keeps moving, but as slow as a planet cruiser, coming at the same trajectory for the drifters.”
“Not at this beating sun that I can’t seem to see?” Rynn asks.
Jaycken pauses. Surely, the Frontiersmen must have thought of that, but no one told him. He should have thought of it. He enters the trajectory of the Ruin into a v-rim application and waits for the answer. “No, not for the sun, but maybe for its planets. And for the drifters.”
Echoes from a pair of marching boots carry into the chamber and jostle around the upper dome.
“Where’s Kiesen?” Teschner’s face appears under pale backlighting, deepening her scowl, her wrinkles. She appears two decades older.
“I … let him go already,” Jaycken says. “Our shift was over. I wanted to stay and figure out why Rynn can’t see the sun.”
“She can see it.” Teschner’s posture is impeccable, her hands gripped tightly behind her back. “She just can’t see that it’s beating and red. Which is how all the Elemiscists, Frontiersmen, and people across the galaxy see it.”
Jaycken’s face loses all tension.
Teschner knows what we’ve been discussing. How does she know what Rynn can actually see? Just drop it, it’ll just embarrass the girl more.
Teschner nods, acknowledging the look of suspicion that must be armoring Jaycken’s face. “I have a v-rim link. I can see what gold cannon is focused on at all times, so a change doesn’t go unnoticed. I hear what’s said around it. You, Jaycken, should not be stargazing when the fate of our entire galaxy is at stake.” Her expression shifts to incredulous. “I’m also surprised that you and Kiesen didn’t say a single word to each other all night.”
Jaycken’s head droops, feeling like an antigravity device on his chin has stopped working. He feels her gaze bore into his skull, hunting for weaknesses, emotion, memories. What did he say during his shift? He often mutters things to himself when he thinks he’s alone, usually sarcastic off-color remarks. Hopefully none about her. Is she always listening?
An ember of resentment smolders inside Jaycken.
“If you weren’t so focused on jumping past the basics of Striding and Whispering,” Teschner says, “yearning to Sculpt and Beguile, Jaycken Leonbaron, you may have progressed further by now.”
Jaycken conceals a smile by keeping his head low.
She’s wrong. I think even more of myself than she realizes.
Jaycken spends most of his time dreaming that he’s a Paladin and can wield a weapon of the elements, a sword like a knight from old myths. Or he dreams of affecting time, like Adersiun, becoming the second Sentinel.
Teschner continues, “On Iopenia, I had to get everyone out of that mist before fear got more of our soldiers killed, but you and the others who didn’t forego their own skeleton are going back in two days. This time to the other previously inhabited planet in the system, the one that hasn’t burned yet. Pseidoblane. It may hold some answers. And she seems like someone we’d want to have with us. Someone who thinks differently. A new set of eyes … or at least one new eye.”
Rynn
Rynn feels as if she’s awake but is surrounded by total darkness, her mind bleary. Too weary to be fighting staying awake, too tired to be asleep. Some middle plane between sleep and awareness. Exhausted.
Dreams are her world, the make-believe under her control. She would never feel like this there.
Rynn sits, pulls her knees to her chin, and huddles in a darkness so intense it feels like a wall is pressing against her.
Where am I? And how do I go back to sleep or wake up completely?
Through a haze, the last thing she can remember is Prabel escorting her and Nadiri, the recruit assigned to her, from the telescope chamber. Rynn cannot hold on to a single thought for long, as if she’s intoxicated, poisoned.
Images start to appear in the darkness around her, but they come and fade quickly like figments of her imagination: silver waterfalls resembling the mural in the tower; people kneeling at the falls with jars or beakers, people in shiny robes with hidden faces, worshipping something; a sister moon floating in a sky with thousands of stars, a sky that has long been forgotten.
Then it’s black aga
in. There’s a scratching sound, like fingernails on exposed skin.
Light flickers on and off just beyond the corners of her vision. Something scuttles around, a silhouette in a strobe of light.
Darkness returns.
Rynn shivers and tries to scoot back, but she’s already wedged tight against a corner.
More scratching. A distant bang.
Rynn stands in an open field of white now, almost blinded. A tree with gnarled black bark and lavender needles rises in the distance. She remembers thinking about trolls turning to wood. Something walks from behind the trunk: her dad, smiling, carrying something, a tiny baby in his arms.
She steps closer, trying to call to him, to wave and catch his attention. But she’s a ghost, not belonging to this world.
Within a blue blanket in her dad’s arms lies a baby: smiling, eyes open, glacial blue eyes. A tress of vermillion hair.
A muffled voice calls from across the clearing, as if Rynn hears it through water. A girl in a jacket and fluffy hat stands there, calling for Rynn’s dad’s attention. Her face begins to sag like melting wax.
Scratch. The sound comes again; the snow and light fade.
Then Rynn is sitting on her bed in the bunker house, the bear painting towering over her. A creaking sounds from the common area.
She creeps out of her room.
Something is sitting on the fiber chair, rocking. It’s so black it looks like the lack of light, time, and distance. An abyss of nothingness. Is this the Ruin she saw in the telescope?
A warm breeze lifts her hair.
The chair stops, and the blackness rises, a hunched humanoid with six fingers that hang and drag the floor as it advances.
The creature from her recurring dreams. The creature whose visit led to her dad taking her eye.
Scratch.
“Rynn,” the shadowless creature composed of shadow says from no mouth, its only facial feature a protruding forehead. Its attention seems to settle on her neck. “Schim failed you. Left you to die. You’ll understand soon.”
“You’ll never take me!” Rynn attempts to run, but her feet tread only air, as if she’s stuck. She covers her neck, where this creature appears to be focusing and confirming something.
“Still no linkchain.” The creature halts. “I came that day as a servant of the council, to help you, to save you from that man. Now I am too late. He took most of your power by violence, by disfigurement.”
Voices carry in from some vast distance, whispers she’s heard since arriving at Jasilix, from a group of Frontiersmen she passed, a pair furtively eyeing her, a trio that quickly looked away. “With only one eye, she’ll never amount to much here. She’ll never harness much of the elements’ power. You need both windows to the soul to really feel it, to really control it. What a waste.”
Why would a dad do such a thing to his daughter? Why harm her and make her less powerful? Maybe he feared what she could become. Maybe he wasn’t really her dad after all, as the creature suggested long ago. Before he took her eye, her dad hinted at choosing her out of others, before that long story about the return of the six elements and six kings.
“Why are you here?” Rynn asks Forgeron, her voice cracking with fear.
Forgeron is silent for a moment. “You’re the only one who sees me in the make-believe, as you call it. I want to help you. The merchant is using you, feeding off the power you have.”
Rynn holds her hands out, her only defense.
“Prabel, the merchant, was an Elemiscist years ago,” Forgeron says, “many years ago. Now he’s nearly a hundred and twenty. His body should’ve wasted away, decayed. He feeds off of you, utilized another before you. That one passed away.”
Rynn’s entire body quakes with fear and disbelief as she again tries to turn and run, but she’s a ghost frozen in time. An image of Prabel’s fingernails flashing black returns to her mind. Could this really be why she feels ill every morning?
“How do you know this?” Rynn asks.
“The Northrite enter dreams, Rynn, to learn. They enter the dreams and minds of people across the galaxy, but they can only do so through me. I’ve learned Prabel’s darkest secrets. He uses an ancient technique, tormenting you in this way, the way you are right now, drugged so that you won’t remember. You’re traumatized, to concentrate the elements in your circulation. Then he siphons it out of you, to live, to grow younger. Leave him.”
Could this creature be telling the truth? Did it wish to save her from her dad’s violence, and now Prabel’s?
“If you desire freedom, join me,” Forgeron says. “Assist me in escaping the Northrite’s servitude.”
Scratch.
An ethereal figure in the silver and gold mask takes shape behind the creature.
Forgeron cowers and falls silent but beckons Rynn with its tendrils of fingers as a spectral doorway appears, another doorway resembling a mirror. Droplets of black water run up its surface.
Rynn peers into the reflection.
Another masked figure stands beyond: purple flame with a beaked nose.
Forgeron leads her to another doorway and another until she’s seen five of the six members of the Northrite council, those her dad warned her about: the Messiah, the Savior, the Redeemer, the Emissary, the Apostle.
Not the Herald.
Was the Herald the one who controlled them all?
Rynn tries to speak, but her words will not take shape or make sound, as if she’s completely submerged in her make-believe world of dreams again.
Show me the last councilmember.
Forgeron remains still, his fingers curled, concealing something … again.
Stop hiding things from me!
Rynn opens both of her hands.
Tiny balls of yellow light float out of Forgeron’s opening palms and swirl in the air, spiraling around them.
Rynn grabs one and holds it between her thumb and forefinger. A memory drop. Tiny images of herself and her dad hiking in the mountains burst into her mind. Snow falls from overhead branches and lands in muted thumps. A vision of the other girl in the fluffy hat flashes by. She also has glacial blue eyes.
A last mirror doorway appears ahead.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
The creature stiffens and is sheered into ribbons of black smoke.
The hunched form of her dad stands before the last doorway, scratching at a raw area on his neck, holding something in his hand. He has the same look, the bewildered persona he took on the moment he changed from loving to loathing her.
Rynn screams, and now she can move. She runs. Hits a dark wall. Cowers, burying her head in her arms. Everything is black. She feels it all: every emotion just as potently as she did when living through the events this altered dream state reminds her of.
She trembles uncontrollably, barely clinging to reason, to scattered thoughts.
She sits for what feels like ten minutes before breathing deeper.
Could all of this just be some mind manipulation, forced illusions? Was Forgeron right?
Maybe she has no reason to be scared. Just wake up, return to the real world.
Rynn slowly rises and peeks over her shoulder.
Nothing but more empty space … then a scream.
A face pops up in front of hers.
Her father is there, a knife and needle in his hands. The knife pokes into her eye patch. It stings, burns, and cuts as he says, “Stareyes.”
Real pain.
Rynn shrieks as she falls, and she crawls away.
A light breaks through the darkness. A crack, like someone has opened a lid in the sky.
Jaycken
Jaycken sneaks out from his barracks in the cliffside, into the malignant cold and the dead of night, the night following his late shift with gold cannon. He needs to move swiftly, or he might freeze to death out here.
He hurries across a swaying bridge, the keening wind swinging it in a slithering dance. Then he slips through an archway, around two Frontiersmen guards, down
a slope of sliding scree.
Jaycken’s mind lingers over images of Rynn—her face, her lustrous hair, her lips.
Rynn’s growing weaker each morning and said something about being awoken by grating stone … and she couldn’t see the beating sun for some reason even when she looked directly at it.
Jaycken needs to find out what Rynn is to this traveling merchant and why she’s so tired, so different.
The shale plateau opens before him, Iriad’s statue draped in shadow. In Jaycken’s mind, the hilt of black metal calls out.
A tingling rides across his scalp. Cold suffuses his skin and muscles.
It will only take a moment.
Jaycken leaps up and ascends the statue, using the holds on its back. His palms slicken with perspiration.
A moment later, his numb fingers encircle the pommel of the weapon as he summons all of his concentration. In his mind, he can see a blade arising from the hilt: black as space, gleaming edges, as long as Iriad’s legs.
A Paladin.
Jaycken opens his eyes, but only the darkness of night surrounds the hilt.
He sighs and descends, flexes his gloved fingers to return circulation, and jogs along a winding trail.
How long will it be until Jaycken resembles Lyveen, the woman whose body has been destroyed by the power of the elements?
He imagines himself bent and broken, a young Slyth.
Hobbling around my tower yelling at kids. Yelling at others my age who appear much younger. Yelling at anyone who strolls by.
Jaycken won’t become Adersiun’s equal by studying and occasionally roaming scorched planets. He needs to act when opportunities arise.
Adersiun. A Phantom, a man with the ability to control time. Almost a god.
A story from Jaycken’s childhood replays in his thoughts, a story about a man who led away a group of rogue Elemiscists. Some organization wished to control the Phantom and covertly sieged his order of Everblades on their new home planet. The organization surrounded the Everblades’ country with heavy artillery. Within a minute of the first attack, Adersiun alone traveled hundreds of kilometers and killed the general of each brigade, decimating their leadership. Then his Everblades quickly exterminated the entire organization and wiped it from the galaxy forever.
The Forgotten Sky Page 22
