Skyborn

by Cameron Bolling

  Dark holes in the ground swallowed her eyes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Oleja awoke deep in the mines. There were no torches around, and she couldn’t find any on her person. Cotton still stuck in her throat. She coughed and gagged, trying to free it before it wedged itself deeper. It was too stubborn. Why was she covered in so much sand?

  She shook herself off and looked around. She had to follow the sun. How was she supposed to do that if she couldn’t see it? Panic thrashed inside of her, slamming against her chest from the inside, threatening to burst out. She pressed her palms to her ribcage, reinforcing it, trying to keep herself in one piece.

  The sun. She had to find the sun. In haste, she got to her feet. Silver light exploded in her vision and she fell back to the ground. She needed to breathe and clear her mind. Something stuck to her face, wrapped around her head, keeping her from thinking clearly. For a moment, she sat still. Air couldn’t reach her lungs; cotton still blocked the way. She coughed. Gritty sand filled her mouth. From her canteen, she took a swig, and the cotton dissolved. She gasped for air.

  No stone surrounded her, only darkness. Was it night? She thought she remembered falling asleep, but where, and when? Lights hung in the sky—yes, stars, but too dim. Pink light tinted the sky.

  The sun. That was where she had to go. Was it the east or the west where the sun rose? She couldn’t recall. But she had to go to the sun.

  She tried to stand again, slower now, wobbly on her feet. Rumors back in her village talked about the whole ground shaking underfoot as the earth moved, “quakes” or something like that. Was this one? Were they real? Her leg throbbed. She clenched her teeth. They cracked, shattering, falling from her mouth in shards. She ran her tongue over the sharp remains, slicing it raw. Metallic blood filled her mouth. She spat red-tinged saliva into the sand.

  Footsteps sounded in the sand behind her. Oleja turned, only to come face-to-face with an eclipser.

  He leveled a spear as he charged her. Oleja raised a sword in her right hand, bracing a shield against her body with her left. A jagged line cut across the face of the shield, glowing white-hot. It cast the eclipser in bright light. He blinked and held up an arm to cover his face. Oleja lunged.

  The eclipser fell, a victim of her swift strikes. She bashed him in the head with her shield as he fell, knocking him out cold. She turned back to the sun and ran.

  Two more eclipsers rose up out of the sand. Fangs stuck out as they sneered at her, showing off forked tongues. One swung her spear, but it glanced off Oleja’s helmet. Oleja ducked low and brought her sword up into the eclipser’s stomach. The second jabbed at her. The spearhead pierced her left side. Oleja brought the edge of her shield down hard on the shaft, snapping the wood in two. She kicked the eclipser’s kneecap and he fell to one knee. One quick blow and it was over.

  The skin around her spear wound knitted itself back together until only a thick scar remained.

  She kept moving. The sand around her rippled like the surface of the lake, with peaks of sand rising and falling, making her path hard. She staggered left and right, swaying over the uneven ground. Waves grabbed at her feet, attempting to pull her under, but she kicked them off. Sand sprayed out as she crushed the current under the soles of her boots.

  Someone whispered her name, their voice cracking and hoarse. She looked up. A hoard of eclipsers stood before her. Ude lay at their feet. The ground would not be still—it surged up in pulsing, pounding spikes that grew and contracted with her heartbeat. The eclipsers charged. Oleja stood fast.

  She felled the monsters left and right, taking hits but shedding more of her enemies’ blood than they drew from her. Their blades crashed against her armor. With each one she killed, two more rushed in to take its place. But that was just two more she got to kill.

  When the last one fell, she stood in the center of a field of bodies. Ragged breathing tore at her lungs. Her people stood in a wide ring around her, encircling the carnage.

  “Hero,” voices echoed. “Oleja, skyborn, hero. Hero.”

  Pride swelled in her chest. They were free. She was the hero.

  A shadow swallowed her. Something loomed above. She turned. The largest eclipser she had ever seen stood there, at least twenty feet tall and wielding a sword longer than she was tall. He grinned. Oleja lifted her own blade.

  The giant swung his sword down at her. She blocked it with hers. The force knocked her to the ground.

  Oleja’s sword fell in two halves at her sides, cut clean through by the dominant blade of the giant eclipser. Oleja raised her shield, ready to deflect the next blow, but he didn’t swing at her again, only laughed. He turned to the people in the ring around her.

  With low sweeps back and forth he cut them down, dozens falling with each pendulous arc of his cruel steel blade. Oleja screamed for him to stop, clawing herself up to her feet. The pain still burned in her leg. She didn’t care. She hadn’t come so far for this to be the ending.

  She swung punch after punch at the giant’s legs, but they were as thick around as she was, and he didn’t so much as flinch. Using the edge of her shield, she struck his calves, first with one hand but then using the other to deliver more force. Nothing worked. The giant kept on killing.

  The people didn’t even move out of the way, just stood and let themselves die at the hands of this tyrant. Oleja shouted to them, first to fight at her side, but when they made no move to do so her pleas morphed into calls to flee. None of them budged an inch, at least not until the sword cleaved through their bodies and left them in a crumpled, shredded heap on the ground.

  With a fierce battle cry, Trayde vaulted over Oleja’s head and thrust her sword deep into the giant’s ribcage. He grunted and turned his attention at last away from the people of the village.

  Onet and Wulshe surged forward and struck the leg opposite Oleja. Hylde’s axes arched through the air and imbedded in the giant’s flesh, one in either shoulder. Arrows came in volleys, shot by Kella standing tall atop a pillar of pure white stone. Jeth rode in atop a horse and wound around the giant’s legs, slicing long gashes into his grey skin. The giant roared in agony.

  A shadow swooped overhead. Oleja looked up. Casmia soared past, Oleja’s glider strapped to her back, sword out in front of her. Shouting in fury, she collided with the giant’s face, her sword piercing the soft flesh of his cheek.

  The giant fell to one knee. His palm struck the sand, steadying himself. A glint flashed in his eyes and he dug his fingers deep into the sand and pulled forth a boulder. Without looking, he flung it out to his left. A cry of pain echoed from somewhere out of sight, and then Oleja ran towards it, though she did not know why.

  Pahlo lay at the end of her path, crushed beneath the boulder. Tears soaked his eyes. He looked up to Oleja.

  “We came to help.”

  “I don’t need help.” It sounded like her voice, but she didn’t remember saying the words, or even thinking them for that matter.

  “Raseari!” shouted Casmia’s voice. Oleja turned.

  The giant hunched over, down on both knees. The raiders still hacked at his body, spewing dark blood across the sand, staining it as black as the night. The giant’s eyes focused on her, unblinking, unwavering.

  “Raseari,” said Casmia again, but it was the giant’s lips that moved. “You haven’t won. You never will. Your path leads to me, and you can never bring me down.”

  And then the sand turned to water again. It rippled and shook. A column rose up as if the grains were caught in a vortex of wind, dancing and shaking as it rose higher and higher, and then it doubled back down. Fangs sprouted; eyes gleamed—a rattlesnake. In one massive bite it crashed against the giant and swallowed him down. When the sand settled, nothing remained. Even Pahlo and the boulder were gone.

  A rumble swept in from the horizon. Oleja looked. A blast rose up there, sand billowing into the sky. Light flared, growing brighter and brighter and brighter until it forced her to close her eyes. Even with her eyel
ids pressed shut it was as bright as day. Then the sand hit her, a massive wave of wind-whipped sand pounding against her, cutting up her skin, forcing her down as her legs failed and she collapsed. The light did not let up. The wind howled in her ears. And then it was over just as quickly as it started. Oleja opened her eyes slowly. The world was still. She got to her feet.

  Dawn broke the sky into fragments. Golden light bathed the land. Oleja still had no teeth left in her mouth. She shambled towards the sun.

  Many times, she found herself at the edge of a deep crevice that demanded she scale down one side and back up the other in order to cross. She found Pahlo’s body at the bottom every time. The crevices were so many in number that it became infuriating. At the lip of her ninth or tenth, she became so fed up that she jumped. The pain in her leg got more intense, but otherwise she found that the hundred or so foot drops took little toll on her. What was more, they were just as easy to jump back out of with a single bound. This discovery made her passage much faster.

  By midday she gained the good sense to realize that she could not follow the sun straight up. It didn’t matter for long, because just as soon as the sun reached the top of its arc, it slowed, stopped, and then reversed course back down through the sky. She kept on her path.

  When the sun dipped low to the ground again late in the day, it turned the sky orange, not the pink or gold from before. Hills marked the horizon, and for a while the sun sat atop them until Oleja went up to join it and it ran off to the next ridge. Amongst the rocky peaks she found a pool of water—nothing near as massive as the lake, but it looked to be liquid no matter how long she stared, so she went to the bank and tested it hesitantly with the tips of her fingers.

  It was cool. The single touch drew all the heat from Oleja’s body and sucked it into the water where it sank to the depths. Oleja knelt and cupped some in her hands to splash across her face.

  The chill raced through her body, and when she looked back up, the world came into focus. She groaned. Hallucinations. Hylde had told her about the mutant rattlesnake venom. Instead of outright death, it brought on intense hallucinations—certainly the better option in Oleja’s opinion. She leaned back and looked at the sky. The sun started to taunt her again.

  She looked down at her wound. Two red puncture marks marred her calf. Beneath the heavy coat of sand, the skin around them was swollen and raised, flushed red and splotchy, with a sticky oily fluid now leaking from the holes in place of blood. Hadn’t she covered it? When did the bandage fall off? She could recall only a blur when trying to remember the events of the day’s walk.

  For the first time so far that day she realized how exhausted she was. Her eyelids insisted on sleep. It didn’t help that her head still spun.

  After a few gulps of water from the pool, she immersed her leg in the shallows. Grains of sand floated off and swirled around in the gentle waves. She wiped away the rest of the sand, brushing her hands slowly over her infected wound. Her body shook as the pain bit through her leg anew, causing her to grimace. She could do nothing else to treat the infection, so after a short while in the refreshing water she pulled it out and dried off gingerly. The water that dripped off into the sand caused bright green sprouts to grow. She waved her hand through them angrily and they dissipated just as quickly as they appeared.

  From her touch, blood beaded fresh on her scabbed puncture wounds and raced in two lines down her shin. A quick check through her bag confirmed what she already feared—she had no suitable fabric for a bandage. She did find a family of rodents living inside the pocket, however. She ignored them.

  A bit of wood lay nearby, an old dead shrub that she could be fairly certain was real. From it, she took several sturdy branches and broke them into shorter segments, which she arranged on a flat spot of ground near the shore of the pool. A bit of smaller kindling from her bag and then a few strikes on a piece of flint got a fire going. Oleja took out her pliers and a small sheet of metal. She held it in the fire for a while and watched it glow hotter and hotter. When she deemed it sufficient, she withdrew it, and after a brief second of preparation, she pressed it to her bleeding wounds.

  The metal kissed her skin with a sizzle. A muted grunt passed her lips but nothing more. The fire giggled at her. She had half a mind to douse it then and there.

  With a flick of her wrist, she sent the bit of metal into the pool. It struck the surface with a hiss and a wisp of steam and then vanished below the surface, sinking to the depths. She put her pliers back in her bag and settled in beside the fire.

  In her bag she carried enough food for another two days if rationed meagerly, more if she pushed her daily allotment to precarious levels. She hadn’t seen an animal that she knew was real since the rattlesnake. In her panic and delirium, the thought to take the meat from it to eat never occurred to her. Would eating the mutant snake meat even be a good idea? Rattlesnake meat was safe despite the deadly venom, but what of mutant rattlesnake meat? She had no idea. Questions of that sort were the type that the raiders or Pahlo always knew the answer to. Too bad they were mutinous insufferable cowards.

  She lay back and looked up to the sky again. Darkness had settled over the world, bringing along a few stars. They danced together in the sky, spinning and twinkling and merging and splitting. Oleja let them have their fun; she was too tired to make them stop.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Morning brought little in the way of good news. She had water, yes, but her food supply only got lower and her wound only more infected. There was a special sort of frustration reserved for waking up starving to find a great pile of fruit beside your head, only to take a bite and discover the perfect, juicy, vibrant-colored snack had the taste and texture of a rock—which, as it turned out, was exactly what they were. With that event came the understanding that the venom maintained some degree of hold over her, which fell into the category of “not good news.”

  She ate a bit of salted meat for her breakfast, along with a small handful of nuts—hardly enough to keep up her strength, and far less than she ate even as a slave under the eclipsers’ rule, but she didn’t dare allow herself more without knowing when she’d have her next opportunity to replenish her supply of food. All she carried with her now was a small bundle of rations from the raiders. They ate communal meals, but each of them held onto a pouch containing a few days’ rations to snack on or in case they got separated from the group—or, it seemed, in case they were betrayed and sent on their way without so much as a farewell aside from the less-than-friendly eclipser hunter invited along who seemed all too eager to say goodbye to her quite permanently. Turning the tables on him was the least she could do to show her gratitude.

  After breakfast she went to the edge of the pool and dipped her leg in the shallows again. A heavy layer of heat lay just beneath the skin, but the cool water quenched it and soothed the pain. With the wound cauterized, she no longer feared anything getting inside—nor bleeding though a bandage—but it looked no less infected. Even if she didn’t need it, a bandage added a layer of protection. She looked through her bag again.

  The only fabric inside that wasn’t coarse and porous burlap was her old shirt and pants. Tears and holes riddled the shirt, and even the swaths still holding together bore a multitude of stains—mud, clay, blood. Condition aside, only a slightly finer variety of itchy burlap composed the garment. The pants hardly provided a better option—a stronger material, but rigid in its own right and just as stained and dirtied as the shirt.

  The robe she wore was newer and therefore cleaner by a hair. The fabric was certainly softer as well, less likely to chafe her raw wound. Though she still relied on it to keep her cool and protected from the sun, using some of the material for a bandage seemed like the best option in her collection of bad ones. With a sigh, she took her knife and began cutting strips from the hem around her calves. In order to get enough to cover the full length of the wound and infected area, she had to cut a few inches off, bringing the hem up to her knees. That still
only gave her enough fabric for one bandage after she wrapped it around enough times to keep the sand and other debris from getting in. Knowing she would regret it, but resolving to do what she had to, she cut another two bandages from the fraying edge hanging about her knees, giving her spares to replace the worn one with when they got too caked in sweat, grime, and blood.

  Perhaps she could have opted to leave the robe mostly intact and cut what she needed when she needed it, but the fabric was in desperate need of a wash, especially if she wanted to use it to cover her wound and not worsen the infection. She could wash it now in the pool, but even an hour of walking through the desert promised to have it right back to looking like she rolled through the mud in it, and she couldn’t carry water designated for use in washing her clothes. As much water as possible had to go with her in some way, and every drop of it was for drinking. Cutting the bandages now and washing them while she could, then storing them safely in her bag sounded best. She would just have to suffer the heat later.

  From what little she recalled of the previous day’s journey, she remembered it being hot. Not that that was a hard conclusion to make; she could have guessed as much and considered it correct with a realistic degree of certainty. Mind-melting heat had hounded her steps every day since her flight from the canyon. The farther west she went, the worse it got. She just hoped to leave it behind soon.

  She scrubbed the muck from the freshly cut bandages. Brown and orange dirt seeped into the clear water, turning it murky and opaque. She kept scrubbing until the water around the bandages ran clear, then held them aloft one by one and wrung the water out. Still damp, she tied one around her wound—tight enough to keep it from slipping, but not so tight that it irritated her raw skin. She folded the other two and stowed them in her bag. After drinking her fill and replenishing the water supply in both her canteen and waterskin, she began the next leg of her journey.