Skyborn

by Cameron Bolling

  Oleja backed up and took aim with her bow. She did not fire, but instead waited for the moment when a weakness presented itself. She now knew she could not puncture the metal armor that the eclipsers wore, and with the other guards it was easy enough to aim for the spots not covered by metal. This figure showed no such weaknesses—at least none that she could see while it remained in the shadows.

  The eclipser lifted one foot and pressed down on a downward-pointing spike at the front of the sled. It plunged into the sand, bringing the whole thing to a jerking stop as the creatures that pulled it struggled against the stake. The eclipser stepped off the sled and flicked a visor on his helmet, revealing his face.

  Oleja fired her arrow. The eclipser put one gauntlet-clad hand up and deflected it. The arrow disappeared into the darkness.

  “There will be none of that,” said the eclipser, stepping into the firelight and revealing his features. His skin was the same white-grey color patterned with scrape-like streaks of raw pink. His hair, silver and white like that of an older human, stuck out from his visor, and looked to be around the length of Pahlo’s, though pulled back. Black eyes like two deep holes punctured his face. Firelight glinted in them, casting shadows across his face that enhanced his menacing appearance. He loomed taller than the guards by about half a foot. Two swords hung at his hips, and he carried a rectangular shield slung across his back. In his hand he held a crossbow, pointed at the ground quite fortunately, though loaded. Still, it was better than having it aimed at her head. She figured it would not be long before she lost the courtesy of such a pleasantry.

  Oleja took another slow step back as he stepped forward. Her fingers itched for another arrow, but she didn’t know where she should aim it.

  “Your attempt to kill me was cute,” said the eclipser, stopping his advance. “It won’t be that easy. Word back at the camp says you killed two of our guards. Impressive. Few of your kind have ever managed even a fraction of that feat.” He stooped so his head was level with hers. “But I’m not some guard. They are trained to watch, not fight. My name is Honn, I am a soldier, one of the best under The Earthtremor. You, a lowly miner girl, could never best me in a fight no matter how many decades you spend training. So, I advise you not to try.” He straightened back to full height. “Make my life easy, and I will bring you back alive. This is your only opportunity for mercy.”

  Oleja stood her ground despite her mind screaming at her to run. Give up? Not a chance. Honn did not move his eyes from hers. Oleja gestured to Pahlo standing beside her.

  “What of him?”

  Honn cracked a grin. “Him? He is a stable boy. Next to you, I don’t care about his fate. If it was about him, perhaps in my place you’d have one of those lowly guards you are so good at besting. I’m here for you.”

  “What makes her so special?” asked Pahlo, his voice a strange mixture of relief and hurt.

  “For one thing, she’s proven herself to be deadly. But she also gave the miners hope, something we have been trying to breed out of them for generations. They’ll get unruly. Start trying to follow in her footsteps. And that’s something we just can’t have.” He turned his focus back to Oleja. “Now, what will it be?”

  Oleja paused for a moment. “Yeah, I’ll go with you.”

  “Wise cho—”

  “Straight to hell.” Oleja swung an arrow from her quiver. Honn flicked his visor down. It made no difference. Oleja fired. Honn’s crossbow flew from his hand as the arrow collided with it.

  And then they ran.

  Oleja took the lead. They sprinted around shrubs and zigzagged across the terrain until they reached the lip of the canyon. Oleja took hardly a moment’s pause before she jumped. It was a drop of no more than six or seven feet down onto the slope of sand and rubble that led to the base. Just as Pahlo landed beside her, the whistle of a bolt sped by overhead. They raced down the slope, struggling to keep their balance on the loose terrain as they descended to the canyon floor.

  It didn’t take a backwards glance to know that Honn was close behind. The sounds of his heavy footfalls in the rubble could have reached Oleja’s ears from miles off.

  At the bottom of the slope, they took off running northwest. They could not outrun Honn—his legs were longer, his muscles stronger, and he’d likely been trained in this sort of endurance. If he caught them, a fight would be no better skewed in their favor. Oleja needed a plan.

  “Up there!” called Pahlo. Oleja looked to where he pointed. Up the opposite slope a short distance was the entrance to a dark crevice. It looked barely wide enough for them to squeeze through—if they got to it and the opening was too small, they would be cornered. But Oleja had no better suggestions.

  They took the upwards slope in bounding leaps, but the ascent was harder than the descent. Rubble shifted under their feet, causing them to slide with each step. A crossbow bolt flew between them and ricocheted off a stone. When they reached the crevice, Pahlo slipped inside first, turning sideways to squeeze through the narrow opening in the rock. Oleja followed. Her bag crashed against every outcropping of the stone, and she had to hold her bow vertically, but she managed to disappear into the darkness just as Honn reached the opening.

  The path ahead slanted down several paces and twisted this way and that so the low light from the moon outside could not find them. Honn tried to fight his way into the passage. His metal armor scraped and clanged on the rock. Oleja followed Pahlo deeper, and soon she waded through thick, muddy water that rose up to her shins. The sounds of Honn’s anger quieted for a few moments, and then came the echoing ca-thung, tck tck tck of one crossbow bolt after another sailing through the opening, only to bounce along the twisting rock walls and land on the ground somewhere behind them.

  Following the attempts with his crossbow, it sounded as though Honn opted for trying to dig them out. His boots and gauntlets crashed against the stone, but it was clear he made little progress by the increasingly aggressive shouts of frustration that echoed off the walls.

  Again, the air fell to stillness for a moment. Then came his voice.

  “You had best hurry through this hole and hope I don’t send my coyotes through after you. Whether I have them drag you out or I find you myself, know that you will see me again. My blades are sharp. You will know them well.”

  And then the night fell to silence.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time they reached the other end of the passage, the sun was rising. They had slept for a few hours at a wide point in the crevice where they could lie down and where the floor remained relatively dry, but nevertheless, they emerged from the dark looking exhausted, caked in mud and sand.

  Oleja’s stomach groaned impatiently. All she’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours was the rodent—hardly enough to constitute a meal, and not nearly enough to sate her. Water still posed a bigger problem. Though initially reluctant to do so, they had each taken a gulp from the silty water they trudged through in the crevice. Thick and muddy, it tasted like metal and dirt, and left a coating of sand in Oleja’s mouth so that every time she brought her teeth together, they crunched in the grit.

  The crevice opening deposited them back on the surface after a tricky steep ascent in the dark. Back aboveground, they turned their course west once more and began the new day’s trek, redoubling their speed now knowing Honn pursued them.

  When Oleja untied her bandage, she found her wound looking better—the only good news of the morning. After washing it the day before with water she wished now she hadn’t wasted, she discovered it was not nearly as bad as expected, and that the blood leaking out made it look much worse. Mud saturated the bandage, and sand clung to the surface, so she discarded it. The wound beneath was scabbed and raw, but ultimately healing, so keeping a bandage around it no longer seemed crucial.

  A few times throughout the morning, Oleja tried her hand at hunting. Her efforts proved useless with each attempt. The first step in hunting—at least as far as Oleja knew—was to find an animal,
and she couldn’t even manage that. Without something to shoot at, hunting got an awful lot harder. A few birds, gliding through the air high above, continued to taunt her throughout the day. Too high to shoot, they stayed out of her reach, and though she watched them carefully they never seemed to land, instead soaring off into distant hills where they disappeared.

  It was not until the sun rose high above that at last Oleja caught her first glimpse of ground-based wildlife. She picked her way across the arid landscape, weaving around shrubs and boulders. A shrill rattling piped up from somewhere unseen and filled the air. Oleja jumped and halted her pace. Her eyes darted across the ground until she saw it. The snake lay only another pace and a half ahead of her, stretched across her path where she hadn’t noticed it previously. Beady black eyes watched her.

  Occasionally, rattlesnakes turned up in the village, though how they got down the cliff Oleja could never tell. Every now and then someone fell victim to their venom, so Oleja knew how dangerous they could be. She took a few steps back to put a safe distance between herself and the creature.

  Only when her arrow pierced the head and pinned it to the ground did she relax. She severed the body from the head with her knife, retrieved the arrow, and showed the catch to Pahlo. It was no feast, but it was something edible to put in their mouths, and they welcomed anything of the sort given how little filled their stomachs.

  Oleja cooked the snake over a small fire, but they took their meal along for the walk. Though she wouldn’t voice the feeling, she feared Honn, and felt no desire to give him the opportunity to catch up with them again. When Pahlo suggested turning their course south to loop back and meet up with the river that ran through Oleja’s village farther downstream, she rejected the plan. Their dehydration might have been killing them, but Honn would kill them faster. Once she knew what to do about the hunter, she would go back—she would have to sooner or later in order to rescue her people. For now, the more distance between her and the eclipser, the better, even if that meant traveling farther away from her village.

  As they walked, the groups of scraggly plants gradually grew denser and denser, the shrubs turning from low bushes around Oleja’s height into taller trees. But the deeper into this expansive landscape of trees they got, the deader everything became. In most places the trees were little more than pillars of grey wood. The trunks cast some shade upon the ground, which brought the temperature down slightly—not enough to be of any great relief, but a noticeable degree nonetheless. All too soon, they reached the other end of the strange landscape, returning to the flat desert land. As she passed through, however, Oleja gathered a few sticks to fashion into arrows. She had lost six so far in her fights with the eclipser guards and Honn, leaving her with only a dozen.

  As the sun set ahead of them, casting the world in a deep orange light, something emerged on the horizon. Framed in the evening light rose structures that stood out against the natural wilds they had been traveling through for the past two days. Boxy things, they clustered together like huddled creatures, all built from grey stone, wood, metal, and other materials—buildings, most likely, though only holding such titles long ago while still in their prime. Now they crumbled to piles of rubble. Ruins, Oleja determined, not unlike those that comprised much of the eclipser camp. Remnants of the Old World.

  Warily, they approached. The ruins bore an eerie resemblance to the ones inhabited by the eclipsers. But when a brook of clear water came into view, glittering in the low sunlight as it fed a wider pool on the outskirts of the ruins, all hesitations evaporated and they both broke into a run.

  The water was cool on Oleja’s skin and cooler on her tongue. She drank her fill and then waded into the water—clothes, boots, and all—washing off days’ worth of dirt and sweat. Dark brown mud, orange sand, and red blood stained the water around her as it all washed away. She remained in the water until it ran clear around her. With her need for water sated, she turned to the needs of her stomach. Where there was water, animals likely dwelled nearby—that she knew. She made her errand clear to Pahlo, who decided to stay behind to start a fire, and set off following the river through the ruins.

  The land to either side of the small river stood out as a strip of green amidst the rusty sand and dirt of the landscape beyond. The air smelled of damp earth, and somehow held a scent she could only describe as “clean,” which contrasted the dusty hot air she was used to breathing. Lush trees and bushes rose up on either bank. In the dwindling light of dusk, insects buzzed, calling out to one another. Even in the dark, the plants displayed a more vibrant green than anything Oleja had ever imagined. This strip of land was alive, more so than she thought possible.

  Scattered buildings—or what once could have been referred to as such—clustered together more closely the farther along Oleja went. The water ran through a gully that grew deeper as she walked upstream, and when the sides became too high to see over, she climbed up from her path beside the riverbed and walked along the ridge.

  The ruins showed no signs of life—or rather, no signs of hostile life. Eclipsers were big, and therefore would struggle to hide an entire camp’s worth of soldiers amidst such meager cover. Few of the buildings had much more than a wall or two left standing, or in some cases even as little as a few metal supports, stripped of whatever material comprised the rest. They looked to have been untouched for ages by eclipsers and humans alike.

  Whether or not humans existed beyond the border of the eclipser camp, Oleja still didn’t know. Pahlo’s knowledge on the matter was equally thin, though he said sometimes he heard conflicts unfolding on the borders of the camp. Whether those noises came from humans, other eclipsers, or wild animals always remained unclear to him.

  A rustle in the brush down by the river caught Oleja’s attention. She stopped walking and crouched low, peering through the darkness, praying whatever moved was more interested in being eaten than in eating her.

  She saw its ears first, standing tall atop its head. It took a few hops on all fours out into the open, looking up and down several times and then standing still, watching. Oleja drew an arrow with the utmost level of slow, nonaggressive movement one can achieve while drawing a weapon. She took aim, then released. The creature fell with the arrow stuck through its neck.

  Two identical animals bounded from the underbrush, panicked after the death of their companion. Surprise held Oleja immobile for a moment. Then she snapped to her senses and drew another arrow. The creatures moved with impressive speed, but she hit a second before it disappeared. The third vanished into the shadows and was lost to her. She shrugged off the loss. Two would be plenty; they had enough meat on them to provide a few meals each.

  With her catch in tow, she returned to where Pahlo waited, triumph carrying her all the way back. She had food, water, and a relatively safe place to sleep. If not for the eclipser soldier and eight angry coyotes after her, she couldn’t have been more successful in her detour expedition into the wilderness—or whatever she should call it.

  Pahlo looked up from where he sat tending a fire as Oleja approached. “Jackrabbits, fantastic! I’m starving.”

  Oleja held the two animals up by their hind legs. “If that’s what you call these things, then yes.”

  “Last I checked, we definitely call jackrabbits ‘jackrabbits.’”

  Oleja dropped them on the ground and drew her knife. “Seems sensible.”

  Pahlo took the knife and set to work skinning the animals and cutting the meat from the bones. Oleja would have preferred to do it herself, but she was entirely unfamiliar with the work. Pahlo, on the other hand, had worked with animals all his life, and done his fair share of preparing them to be cooked. She looked on as he worked, trying to learn from observing. It didn’t look all that hard.

  “Speaking of what you call things,” said Pahlo after a moment, “why do you call them ‘eclipsers’?”

  Oleja looked at him, confused. “What do you call them?”

  “We call them what they call thems
elves—the earthborn. But I suppose they don’t interact with you or your people the same way they do with us.”

  Oleja shook her head. “I didn’t even know they spoke the same language as us until I met the ones at the guard tower. Well, ‘met’ might not be the right word, since I killed both of them shortly after. So no, not quite.” Oleja lifted her bag off her shoulder and pulled out a few odds and ends, fiddling with them mindlessly as she spoke. “Technically we call them ‘sky eclipsers,’ but that’s long so usually people just shorten it to ‘eclipsers.’ I’m not sure why it started, probably because when they stand at the edge of the canyon they sort of ‘eclipse the sky’ or something. But they aren’t that big. It almost seems like more than they deserve. Why do they call themselves the earthborn?”

  Pahlo shrugged. “I didn’t have casual conversations with them. It wasn’t like we all sat around to chat, the humans and the earthborn. Just because we had more contact with them than you, doesn’t mean we wanted to interact with them any more than was absolutely necessary. They told us what to do, we did it, and that was it.”

  “Did any of your people ever run away? I imagine it would have been easier for you, since you didn’t have walls hundreds of feet high keeping you in.”

  “Some tried,” responded Pahlo. “But nearly every time, the earthborn caught them. A few hours after an escape, they always threw the person’s corpse back into the slave quarters. The bodies were horribly broken and mangled. The earthborn said they caught the escapee, brought them before the leader of the earthborn camp, and beat them. Then they showed the rest of us the body as a lesson.”