The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  “I’m only the servant, the Elemiscist slave of the evil one. Wake!”

  “The damsel has already awakened me.” Cirx is almost within sword range. “Give me all the fairy lights you use against those who sleep.”

  Cirx lunges and stabs.

  The creature scuttles back and cringes, but the blade passes through it. “You cannot kill me, not here.”

  Cirx then motions to throw and opens his hand. The ball of talking fairy light that woke him carries out, sailing for the fiend.

  The light strikes shadow, engulfing it in yellow, engulfing it in Cirx’s deepest memories and emotions.

  The coiled fingers of the fiend jerk and stand straight out like spears.

  Thousands of bubbles of light—its tricks and traps—fall from its palms. They plummet and begin to sink into the blackness of the water.

  Cirx grabs one and whispers into it, implanting a memory of this place and his actions. He throws it into the air. It sails far, far away, landing with a plop in the Sky Sea.

  People wandering in the blue fog around Cirx start to call out, to yell in confusion, to cry, to run.

  Everything goes dark.

  Cirx’s mind is fogged again, is clouded in snarls of confusion. He wakes aboard the Moonriders’ ship, grasping at the memories of such a vivid dream.

  Seeva

  Seeva sits on the beach, but this is no paradise. The sun bakes her shoulders, the back of her neck feeling like newly exposed clay, the wounds from her more recent beatings receding but still swollen and painful. Broken ribs. A swollen eye. A battered cheek.

  She’s silent, but a storm rages in her heart. She wonders what the black suits did with Saysana, if they put the filament in her throat and strung her up. If she will ever see her again.

  At least this island is not too hospitable, not comfortable like the Pearl.

  Seeva stares across an endless sea before glancing back at the island she sits on. A few scrubby trees wait with fronds as long as she is tall. She should find shade, the lean-to shelter she’s constructed around a few trunks.

  She’s been out here for several weeks already. There’s fruit in the trees, a sappy red pulp buried inside a shell that tastes like sour apples and burns her throat on the way down. A little fresh water in ponds. Driftwood for fires to purify her drinking water. Probably fish in the sea, but not many around this island.

  She hasn’t even made a spear yet. And she won’t. She’d rather die here, rather starve than break and devour a living creature.

  They won’t win, not even now. Die if I must. Change myself … never.

  Something stirs in her womb. A demon in its chrysalis stage. A demon spawn that feeds off the little nourishment she finds.

  Seeva rises. It’s time to sleep, or at least time to lie and close her eyes, what she fills most of her hours with as sleep eludes her like a poacher. Conserve energy. The fruit is enough to keep death at bay, but not enough to fulfill her caloric needs.

  She’s always tired, feeling like she can barely move enough to find sustenance each day before she sits at the beach and thinks. She thinks at night, her mind running wild, flashing images of her life: Athiera and the convent, the family, the weddings, the streets, the domestic and stray animals she’s cared for, animals that cared for her, that’d always been her family. Learning to shoot a pulser. Ori. What will happen to Ori? He will be all alone, like when she found him. The hermadore. Saysana.

  Images come in fragments and shift and intertwine, becoming meshed movies that do not flow properly. They replay over and over.

  Will she ever be able to take revenge on those medieval barbarians who viciously attacked and killed Silvergarde soldiers? The black suits who took Saysana? Should killing Drumeth be enough? No, all evil should be punished. If only she could accomplish everything with one life.

  Smears of light leap across waves and crests while an empty shadow lingers below a passing cloud. From the time she was dropped off on this island, it seems she’s been trapped beneath that cloud.

  Seeva hasn’t seen anyone else on this island thus far. It’s either large enough to keep prisoners separate, or there isn’t anyone else here.

  She can never build a raft and hope to sail away, not with the surging breakers here and the swarms of sharks that lurk below. They burst from the surface to catch flocks of birds or shoals of flying fish during the day, massive tankers of sleek red skin. Their splashes ring out at night.

  Maybe soon Seeva will sail anyway. Over the past weeks, she’s managed to cut down and lash a few scrubby trees together. Maybe sailing will end it all much quicker, before she gives birth. Maybe she should just swim out there now and let the sharks eat her, provide one last gift, nourishment for those magnificent creatures. Fragments of herself, of her soul, will swim in the blood of sharks and then be passed out into the ocean, eaten by smaller fish. She will become fertilizer for algae and will be consumed by whales. She would swim in this ocean alongside and within its animals forever.

  Maybe today is the day she will go swimming, when she can still think clearly, rather than linger on this island only to waste away. She steps beyond the threshold, where island meets water, into cold froth and sinking sand … and pauses.

  Maybe tomorrow she will go swimming.

  Seeva withdraws her foot from the sea.

  Some darker spot appears amidst the light jumping across rolling waves. A speck against the distant blue. A swell rises to a height of three meters, obscuring this new vision. The water breaks and avalanches over the outer reef.

  There it is again. A brown spot in the vast distance of the sea, flinging white foam in a trail behind it. It’s racing toward her.

  Her skin tingles.

  What is that?

  Seeva waits, watching for half an hour as the spot disappears and reappears between swells, slowly becoming more: a torso, legs, a mane and tail streaming like the flags of some ancient civilization.

  This must be a mirage, a hallucination. She’s become too dehydrated, is delusional, delirious.

  A few minutes later, a chestnut steed lopes over the waves, too big for an easy shark meal, too peculiar to be known food. The horse leaps the breakers and trots across the glass surface of the bay, its hoofbeats the hands of children slapping water. It tosses its head. Snorts. White foam from sweat and the sea rolls over its neck and shoulders, down its flanks.

  Seeva’s never seen anything more majestic, more beautiful.

  Am I dreaming? I can’t hope to trust in miracles. Not ever.

  The steed is even bridled and saddled. It walks on water, as if it came just for her. It stops, nickers, and muzzles through shells and pebbles in the shallows, crunching on a mollusk. Slurping algae.

  Seeva slowly approaches.

  The horse snorts and smells her palm—an equid handshake—its breath warm and damp on her skin.

  Seeva finds the cracked shell of a fruit and offers it. The steed sniffs the sour pulp but turns away, rummaging through the water again, drinking in deep gulps from the sea.

  What kind of equid drinks saltwater and runs across waves?

  Seeva takes the reins, plants a foot in a stirrup, and swings up on its back. Pain lances across her ribs. The horse’s torso tightens beneath her, its girth nearly too wide for her legs.

  She pats the horse’s wet neck and wheels it around. “Take me to the mainland.”

  They gallop off across the sea in a spray of water and foam.

  Seeva hasn’t ridden a horse since the convent and then the dapper father’s family, but she doesn’t remember it ever feeling so freeing: wind lifting her dark hair, caressing her skin, the triad beat of the gallop splashing under her as she seems to soar.

  Dark shapes circle in the depths below the steed’s blurring hooves.

  I ride across water!

  The horse surges on.

  A couple of hours later, the steed having slowed to a walk long before, Seeva’s eyelids grow as heavy as her buried past. She uses a leather
strap to bind her legs and hips to the saddle, leans over, and wraps her arms around the equid’s neck.

  The rhythmic motion of the horse’s gait and the swells, and the deep percussion of the animal’s heart, lulls Seeva into a peaceful sleep she hasn’t found in years.

  ***

  Confusion arcs in disconnecting synapses inside Seeva’s brain.

  Where is she?

  She just saw a man in this world, an armored knight covered in muck. He was awake, talking to her, more awake then herself, searching for something he referred to as a fiend. Something she thinks of as a hunter.

  Another who hunts the hunters.

  Seeva feels dazed. She stumbles through blue fog, treading lightly on a layer of cracking ice over swamp water, a glowing ball of light in her hand. One she recently caught. Wind blows cold, its icy teeth gnawing at her cheeks as the surrounding blue fades to pale moonlight. She’s no longer pregnant, not here in this dream world.

  This place’s not comfortable and hospitable. Another land I prefer.

  Six moons suspend the night sky, shining through the fog. Each moon isn’t a circle but an obscured mask of some type: wood and leather, green scales, purple flame, stone, silver and gold, teal. They seem to line up in an arc across the sky.

  Seeva wanders on, fracturing the ice with her footfalls. Jagged lines lance outward around her heels, throwing out spiderwebs of cracks.

  What would happen if she fell into the cold murk? Would she wake? Would she freeze to death in this dream world?

  Wailing sounds in the distance, the sonorous bellow of hermadores. A herd? She stops, holding her breath. No, it’s only one, a small one ambling through mist, cracking the ice without concern. It’s the youngling, her hermadore …

  Seeva runs to her and hugs her around the neck. Four lips separate. A purple tongue licks Seeva and roots around in her suit for rhiciopores.

  Tears drag down Seeva’s cheeks, becoming beads of ice. “You dream as well.”

  A gentle breeze warms her icy tears.

  “Climice will be the next to be mined, and it’ll be utterly destroyed.” A creature of shadow stands on the ice, veiled in blue fog.

  Seeva jolts and reaches for her pulser. “You’ll leave Climice be.”

  “It’s not me, only my masters,” the creature says. “I’m only the servant, and I’ve chosen to warn you. Climice has a legend that it’s rich in the elements, and no one’s found the source but the hermadores. The animals ingest it, perhaps in those spores they eat. Something must bring it up from the beneath the crust. The Northrite know that hermadores concentrate it in their spines, that there must be a source on the planet. Now that the species is extinct—”

  “Not extinct.” Seeva fires her pulser. Projectiles fly through the creature without stopping and disappear into the fog. “Not yet.”

  “Pseidoblane’s elements were harvested by the Frontiersmen, and Adersiun finally brought in Iopenia’s cache. Climice is only a matter of time.”

  “All this trickery is for nothing more than power? The beating sun, the burned and the poisoned planets? For the power of the elements?”

  Seeva swings a leg over the last hermadore’s back, between rows of spines, wheels her around with hand and leg pressure, and grips the largest spines on her head. The hermadore lumbers forward.

  The creature laughs. “You haven’t learned that I cannot be hurt in this world? I control your human dreams, Seeva. All human dreams. I’ve come to offer aid.”

  The voice of a young woman carries out of the floating light Seeva caught just before awakening in this dream world. “The shadowless creature’s secret is that emotions and memories are its power and weakness. It’s a servant of the Northrite.”

  Seeva leans back atop the tiny hermadore, and the hermadore skids to a stop before the creature.

  “I control the dreams of many billions of beings.” The creature’s fingers wave and writhe below its limp hands.

  Emotion and memory … I’ll use the one whose mother was taken, her entire herd taken, her entire species.

  Seeva slides off the far side of the hermadore, digs her feet into cracking ice, and shoves with all her might against the hermadore’s flank.

  The hermadore teeters sideways and falls into the creature. Her spines of increasing blackness bury into its shadow like knives into flesh.

  The creature shrieks in pain.

  “Why’d they go to such lengths?” Seeva asks. “Why not just dig mines? Look for the elements peacefully? They destroyed an entire system!”

  The creature makes a coughing sound. “You already know that. I’ve seen your mind. You knew when you first came to Climice and saw the beating sun.”

  Seeva thinks back. She was hunting the hunter, the hermadore poacher … She remembers hearing about an ongoing trial. One that was hushed up from the galaxy by the Northrite, but the Silvergarde found out. A trial that dragged on for three years on Iopenia, the locals fighting the Northrite, who wished to be granted legal access to mine the planet. The locals argued that toxins from such activity would leach from the planet’s core into the air and water and destroy their home.

  Seeva presses the hermadore into the shadowy creature.

  Fragments of memories twist and turn in her mind, inserting into each other, a puzzle of missing pieces from a story she knew too well.

  Seeva says, “They lost, didn’t they? The Northrite. They lost the case and weren’t allowed to mine the system legally. That’s why they ordered you to implant memories and illusions in people’s minds of a beating sun, to scare people away from their homes. When some didn’t flee, they burned Iopenia, scorched it and destroyed all life. The beating sun wasn’t responsible for the burning. Then, the Northrite raped and mined the planets for the elements.”

  She walks around the last hermadore to stand beside the shadowy creature, trapping it between herself and the animal. She grabs some of the hermadore’s spines and presses herself closer, pinning the shadowy creature and impaling it against the hermadore.

  The creature screams, and the wind strips it into black ribbons.

  Bubbles of yellow light fall into heaps on the cracked ice.

  “It’ll no longer be able to enter your dreams,” the female voice in the light says. “Not after you defeat it here.”

  Moonlight thickens across the area, a sheen of silver.

  Seeva looks up. The masked moons have shifted positions with each other, have aligned in a different order.

  Seeva palms a bubble of light and shoots the ice with her pulser, taking the rest of the lights down into the icy cold with her with a splash.

  ***

  Every human and humanoid in the port city stares as Seeva leads her horse, her savior, along cobbled streets. Some point: a man in a doorway, a child in a circle of peers, a woman across the way. A group of hover racers shoots past.

  Her horse whinnies and snorts, pulling back against the reins in Seeva’s hands.

  This horse’s not accustomed to a city. Must come from a much different place.

  Kallstrom. The horse’s name is engraved into its breast collar, although in misshapen lettering, an ancient font.

  With the exception of the person who sent the horse for Seeva, no one should expect her to be the first to ever escape the prison island. They wouldn’t know Kallstrom runs on the sea. She shouldn’t be in too much danger as she searches for the one who helped her and for a ride off this planet. Maybe a ride home. To Silvergarden. To reunite with Ori and the hermadore. Maybe she’d rest for a bit there. Maybe one day soon she will find out what happened to Saysana.

  Seeva wanders a maze of stone buildings for hours, unsure of asking strangers, unsure of whom or what she’s looking for.

  But a miracle happened, her life’s first, and she took advantage of it. The first good thing she can remember randomly happening to her at all. She escaped from prolonged suffering and a guaranteed death, rode away on a fucking horse that can walk across the sea. What were the chanc
es? Where’d the horse come from? Saddled and bridled as if someone actually sent it to rescue her. No one has ever looked out for her; she only looks out for herself and her family, the animals.

  “What are you searching for, miss?” an inhumanly high-pitched voice asks, someone in a draping mauve hood with bone-white fingers and silver nails.

  Seeva’s body tenses. She needs assistance, but humans and humanoids cannot be trusted. If only there were a horse that could run through space. “I—I’m looking for a ride off this planet. I’m armed, however, and can take care of myself.”

  “Well, I can Stride you away from here, but using the elements’ powers isn’t easy on my body or on your marcs.”

  “How much?” Seeva asks.

  “That horse you’re leading looks magnificent.”

  Seeva steps back. “No. Not the horse. How many marcs?”

  “You may change your mind eventually.” The humanoid woman vanishes into a crowd.

  Seeva wanders again.

  She has no v-rim, no supplies, and isn’t sure where she is exactly in the galaxy. Even if she did ask someone and they allowed her to borrow their v-rim at no cost and for no favors, which she’s certain would never happen, a message traveling at lightspeed wouldn’t reach Silvergarden for a few days at best. It could take millennia, depending on which system this planet belongs to.

  Seeva needs a lift off this planet or assistance with finding someone who can help. Someone who will not trick her or try to take advantage of her once she’s in their ship.

  How do other people get around the limitations of distance in the galaxy? Whisperers and Striders. Striding. Like the hooded woman suggested. Seeva’s rarely used a Strider and has only ever seen a few Elemiscists on Silvergarden. She has no idea how to find one here. If she asks for help, that person will probably sense her need, her weakness, and turn it against her.

  Seeva arrives at a wharf where planks of sunlight slip between clouds and splash across the sea. Shoppers crowd around fish mongers, shouting and haggling. Scents of sweat, tar, the sea, and fish run like rivers through the air.