Then everything happens in a moment.
The two sweavers holding Rynn step back in surprise.
The Everblades march closer.
Adersiun advances, his axe head rising.
Rynn darts a few steps toward the exit. Then she ducks and lunges to her left, her fingers encircling a hilt at the nearest Everblade’s waist.
The Everblade attempts to leap back, to draw the weapon himself, but is too slow.
Rynn rips the hilt free.
A shadow blade the length of a finger writhes into life above the crosspiece.
Rynn spins to face the Herald and leaps at them, the blade of the elements sinking into the mask, between the flesh at the ear and the scales, as she saw Forgeron do.
The Herald screams.
Rynn pries the mask free with a sucking hiss. It falls to the stone with a clatter and writhes about, a high-pitched squeal coming from the mask itself.
There’s a woman underneath, one everyone would recognize: tall, blonde, collars from a gown of blue and lace. The queen of the deceased Grand Patriarch, the Grand Matriarch Vinessia. She appears bewildered as she stumbles backward, trips, and falls.
A star of light floats from the mask, its rays reaching out to contact the other members. They all shriek as one and draw back, retreating to a rear exit from the chamber, Vinessia trailing behind.
Adersiun stops dead, folds his arms, and acts as a spectator.
Rynn spins about, searching for a way to escape.
Sweavers are tangled amongst Everblades, attempting to restrain the many recruits who are running, yelling, or breaking out of their lineup.
Nadiri and Kiesen huddle together.
Rynn shakes Nadiri and points to an exit that has the least amount of sweavers between it and them. “Go! Both of you! Meet me in the tower.”
They dash for the exit.
Rynn runs at the Northrite to draw attention while avoiding hands meaning to grab her. She twists out of the way of bodies and ducks under arms. Circles back for another exit, slides under and between an Everblade’s spread legs, rolls, scrambles, nearly slips, but finds her feet. She races out of the chamber, through the tunnels, and up the switchbacks.
Shouts of alarm and surprise drive Rynn on, faster, faster.
She feels so tired now. Her back twinges and her mouth hurts; blood flows from her lips.
She heaves for breath as she braces herself against the abandoned tower’s wall, then steps inside.
Everything is quiet, still.
Nadiri and Kiesen should be here. They must have been caught …
The mural on the wall, the images of the neighboring stars, moons, and solar system, seems to call out in a silent language.
A gentle breeze rises inside the confines of the tower.
Then Rynn sees it.
The creature slips out of the shadows, dragging its ropey fingers, turning its protruding forehead to face her.
If it wasn’t destroyed in the dream world, why wasn’t it in the chamber with its masters?
Fear rises inside Rynn like a hand reaching up from the depths of her gut to ensnare her heart with cold, dark fingers.
This thing has finally come for her, for retribution. She sees it more clearly, not with her eye but with her mind.
It doesn’t submit to the bidding of the Northrite.
The masks in the moons and on the slaves in the dream world changed position … The Northrite switch masks to help keep their identities secret, but the masks control them.
It’s not Adersiun who manipulates the council through their masks. It’s this creature.
One will control them all.
“They’re the ancestors of the six ancient kings, after all.” Forgeron takes slapping strides up to her. “I recognized your distinctive control of yourself in dreams, in your make-believe world, when you pushed against me in our first encounter and wished to see what was in my other hand rather than accept the diversion of a beating sun, the implanted memory for the masses to forget what the sky and that sun truly looked like. The insight and ability you showed is why I tried to help you.”
They all forgot what the sun really looked like, thanks to the artifice of the false memory.
“You’re using the Northrite council,” Rynn says. “Controlling them, manipulating their dreams, their desires, their secrets. You’re implanting memories into their psyche without their knowledge. The same as you’ve done to everyone.”
The creature chuckles. “It doesn’t take much control to push men to fight with others, to kill, raid, and pillage in the name of wealth and power.”
Rynn eyes the mural on the wall and looks back for her friends.
Running footsteps and shouting draw closer.
“My kind were much more peaceful before we became the targets of man without sympathy or remorse,” Forgeron says. “There were millions of us on our planet, brought down to only a few survivors. So now man will wage war with himself until he’s erased from the galaxy, distracted until it’s too late, until the Ruin does its work.”
Rynn feels the hilt and small blade of the elements in her hand, its weight growing heavier. “Why didn’t you share your suffering and try to find authorities or allies to help?”
The creature chuckles. “Humans were the authorities. They only watched. And you, for one, do not trust authorities to aid you. Humans never wish to be reminded of their atrocities. They prefer to remain ignorant, to better appreciate the darkness inside of them.”
“Why are you here now? In this tower?”
“Please, Rynn, I’ve tried to aid you in many ways. You must understand that by now. I showed you the her your father mentioned, the one you’ve been searching for. Inside the sarcophagus. Remember? The girl?”
Memories of a girl in a fluffy hat appear in Rynn’s mind, the girl trying to call for her dad’s attention as he carries a baby Rynn across a snowy clearing in the forest.
It’s not her mom that her dad spoke of, but her … sister?
“Together, with our abilities, we can take vengeance on all those who hurt us,” the creature says. “The Prabels, the Ethanials, the Adersiuns. The Northrites. The abusive fathers.”
“The Forgerons.” Rynn steps back toward the exit, the mural and its planets and moons still calling out to something inside her.
“Then I must stop you from accomplishing what you’re about to attempt.” Three of its ropey fingers snap out at Rynn’s neck, ensnare her, and burn rings into her skin.
Rynn cries out in pain and surprise.
“I can Stride us away to any place at any time,” the creature says. “I don’t need a Star Map like your kind, like the map you’re searching for to escape this place. You cannot kill me. No weapons you possess can do that.”
Rynn reveals her knife of the elements, slices, and severs one of its fingers.
The creature snarls in pain and anger. Its remaining two fingers cinch down on her throat like a noose hitting the end of its line in an instant. A jerk.
Rynn swipes again, but the creature’s fingers bow around the blade. Her head feels full, bloated.
She gasps for breath. Collapses. Her grip loosens. She drops her weapon.
It skitters away.
Rynn grasps at the fingers of rope but cannot loosen them.
“It was you who Strode into my dream uninvited,” Forgeron says. “You who also sent the Whisper from Pseidoblane about the decimated planets. You brought this fate upon the Frontiersmen and your Jaycken and yourself, you one-eyed Strider-Whisperer.”
Footfalls pound the paths outside, but no one enters the old tower.
In the fog of Rynn’s mind, memories blur to dreams, to the recent dream where the memory drops were thrown at her from that swamp world. She sees a flash of memory, a flash of a dream: a knight in steel armor who learned to use emotion and a memory drop as a weapon against this creature. Another small, dark woman doing the same with some animal.
Rynn has no item to use against Forger
on, no memory drops in the real world, no animals with spines concentrating the elements.
She falls flat on the floor, both hands slowly clawing at the fingers encircling her neck. Growing weaker. Dying. Another victim of this war, like Jaycken …
Rynn’s fingers slip around one of the creature’s fingers … No, not its finger, her necklace.
The emertel needle necklace. From her dad. Which he was wearing that day in the snowy clearing when he scared the creature away. Emotion. Memory.
Darkness creeps in from the edges of Rynn’s vision, threatening to turn everything black, but she slowly slips the woven needle from around her neck, over her head. At this point, it encircles the creature’s long fingers.
A strong sense of failure and to give up overwhelms her. She closes her eye to the blackness.
Then Rynn recalls something: not this emotion but a similar sensation … when Jaycken forced his emotions upon her after finding her in the sarcophagus.
The creature is Beguiling her, convincing her to give up.
She throws the necklace up the length of its remaining fingers, over its bent arm.
The creature shrieks, its fingers releasing like rope running away, burning and smoking on her neck.
In a moment, the pressure is gone.
The creature falls back and shrieks again.
Rynn lies still for several heartbeats, struggling for breath, sputtering, coughing, rubbing at the raw burns on her neck.
She struggles to her knees, to her feet.
The creature huddles in a ball of shadow, smoking, pieces of its body stripping away into black fumes.
Rynn stumbles over and swings the necklace over its shoulder and head, onto its neck.
Forgeron gives a final shriek and drifts away in a cloud of black dust, leaving only the necklace. And a black pearl.
The shadowless creature is finally gone.
Rynn retrieves the emertel necklace and the pearl.
Dad? You were there for me, your Stareyes, one last time.
Tears slide down her cheek. She strides for the ancient paintings on the wall.
“Rynn!” Kiesen is at the archway with Nadiri and about ten other recruits.
Kiesen … instead of Jaycken.
Rynn examines the mural.
There’s a Star Map here.
She waves them over as she touches a nearby planet. Nothing happens.
The creature said that I’m a Strider-Whisperer.
Rynn remembers her dad, his love, his one act of violence, Prabel, the Frontiersmen, Jaycken.
A rippling mirror forms in the air beside her like a window, wafting a chill breeze, vermillion droplets of rain crawling up its surface. A feathered creature of white light flaps silent wings beside her, its golden eyes unblinking.
She takes Nadiri’s hand, and they form a chain with Kiesen and the other recruits.
Rynn steps through the mirror.
Her boreal owl of light follows.
Cirx
Cirx exits the Moonrider warship of the twin sickle moons.
Filigreed trees of smoke melt into a platinum sky, mirroring the shadows of ivy cascading down the surrounding ruins. From afar, the smoke looks solid, barklike. Shoals of white clouds swim across the cliffs all around them, cliffs that look peeled from tip to base. Inside waits the remains of an old monastery.
Jasilix.
They arrived sooner than anticipated, having located a rogue Strider within a couple of days, a Strider who could Stride one ship for a portion of the goods from their raid. A treaty debt.
The buds of glacial roses poke up between mounds of stone in desolate courtyards and surround the crumbling foundations of one central tower.
The fires must have been smoldering for days, and they arrived too late. Cirx will not find his despised Northrite here. He must now find something to make the journey worth the effort: a clue to the Northrite’s whereabouts, their intentions or reasons for such an attack here or for their attack on his castle, their true identities.
Cirx scales hillocks of rubble and wanders over stone and blackened timber decorated with shreds of bloody clothing.
Riesbold, whose wounded arm is weak but mended, Tegard, and the remainder of the surviving knights disperse around the inner cliffs, studying swinging bridges hanging in tatters. Moonriders enter the ruins for easy pillaging.
What was this place, really? A fortress for people who studied the sciences—something Cirx cannot picture clearly but heard from Ribsnack. The thought brings remorse, as if he and all of the galaxy lost something they cannot regain.
Cirx wishes he were far from here, riding the Eventide again, the spray of foam on his face and hands, salt on his lips, the smell of the sea, the gentle rolling of swells beneath Kallstrom’s hooves. Kallstrom … Enix would be there swinging his wooden sword. Erin would be asking him deep why questions about the ways of Staggenmoire. Kitasha would smile at him and wink.
They are gone forever, their souls wandering the Sky Sea until Cirx can release them all. All gone except Kallstrom …
Cirx’s heart bends like forge-heated steel. He released Kallstrom on some random planet in a system and galaxy he does not understand. A galaxy he didn’t even know existed six months ago. Where was Kallstrom now? Bearing some Silvergarde maiden away to safety? A maiden whose family Cirx may have killed without knowing it. Is Kallstrom now helping the maiden fight fiends in her own way? Or is he dead?
May fields of mollusks always swim beneath you, my friend. And may your hooves always be swifter than sea wolves.
Cirx tells himself he had to let Kallstrom go, the same as he had to release Garrabrandt. To carry on against all the fiends out here. To save his family’s souls and the people of Staggenmoire. This new galaxy of fiends is more than he ever bargained for, more than he ever wanted. Perhaps his father would have been better suited for it. Or perhaps his father would have been more lost.
Something moves in the distance.
Someone is still here on Jasilix. A lone man wanders in a field of roses whose juvenile heads are half unfurled. Glacial blue petals drink from the platinum sky, roots from the blood in the soil. Blossoms emit a faint blue glow.
The man’s head droops like a rose unwatered by death’s hand. But the Horseman had arrived … and blood followed Cirx everywhere.
“Hail, sir.” Cirx stumbles over loose stones and approaches.
The man doesn’t even stop his saunter, his aimless wandering of the field of the dead.
“We’re too late,” the man says in a voice like a gust of wind through a piney forest. “I’ve always been too late.”
Seeva
Seeva steps out of a silver coral forest, the song of the gliders in the branches music to her ears. She leads Kallstrom and rushes to the stables, her legs weak and shaky. Kallstrom trots, lifting his knees high and snorting as he takes in the sights.
The hooded Strider woman actually Strode her and Kallstrom only several kilometers away. Seeva only had to obtain a new v-rim and transfer marcs to pay her, most of the marcs in her account, but only marcs. There were no hidden agendas, no tricks.
Will Ori be at the stables with the hermadore, at my ship, or with my friends?
Seeva leads Kallstrom under an enormous mushroom canopy, glimmering silver in the sunlight, past stalls of coral oxen, equids, and camelids, searching for a stall for her water horse.
She stops. The baby hermadore she vaguely recalls seeing in a strange dream lies in a pile of straw. Its purple hide has faded to more of a gray purple. The spines protruding from the hermadore’s body are black at their base now, although the animal hasn’t grown much. She’s barely larger than a standard pony. A runt. Because she never fed on the milk of her mother.
Seeva finds a tub nearby, recognizing a faint whiff of rotten algae, and withdraws a handful of rhiciopores. She enters the stall and kneels beside the hermadore, opening her palm to offer the meal.
The creature cracks open one of its three eyelids, the
pupil underneath milky instead of black. It sniffs at the rhiciopores and flicks one of its four segments of lips open but only nudges the food and lays its head back down.
Sadness seeps from Seeva’s heart and bleeds through her skin.
The youngling is dying on Silvergarden, dying like Seeva had been the last few months. Probably too agreeable of a climate for a hermadore evolved to Climice conditions.
Seeva will have to take it home, no matter the risk. She cannot let the last hermadore die in captivity.
She rubs the roughening hide of its neck, gently at first, then more vigorously. “Wake, my daughter. Your mother’s come to bring you home. We were both dying, but now we live.”
The hermadore starts to rouse. She slides her legs and clubby feet out from under herself and opens all three eyes. She sniffs Seeva’s hand, her hair, and her face. Her tubular tongue slips out and licks Seeva’s cheek in recognition.
Tears roll out of Seeva’s eyes and intermingle with the saliva of the kiss. “I’ll take care of you now.”
The calf stands and takes a rhiciopore inside a curled tongue, sucking it into its mouth. Seeva guides Kallstrom into the stall and the hermadore out.
She latches the stall and rubs the side of Kallstrom’s face. “You’ll find better health here than the hermadore has, my savior. I can’t take you to Climice, but I’ll return and we’ll race through coral and ride the Silvergarden seas together.”
Seeva kisses Kallstrom’s muzzle and coaxes the hermadore out of the canopy for the nearest Silvergarden port, where her ship will be stored. The youngling’s slapping footsteps follow.
Less than an hour later, after sending a comm ahead and spending the remainder of her marcs to have her ship fully stocked at once, Seeva locates her ship in the port. Still and cold. Lifeless, as if abandoned forever.
Seeva marches up her rampway and scans herself in.
A flurry of white and black feathers assaults her before she can enter.
Ori, in a frenzy: flying in tight circles, squawking wildly, flapping like he’s just learning to fly. His feathers brushing her cheeks, his pink and emerald eyes alight with maniacal euphoria.
The Forgotten Sky Page 46
