by Mick Fraser
Drenno cleared his throat uncomfortably as Guin reached Gaelan. She stroked one black nail against the young girl’s face. “Little one. Your splendour grows each time I see you.”
“Highness,” Gaelan responded with a slight smile.
Finally Guin focused on Angela with her expressionless eyes. “So, Drenno. What calamity have you brought to my hearth this day? The Catalyst. That is what they call you, is it not?”
For a moment Angela was unsure whether or not she should answer, but Shimmer gently nudged her elbow. “Um. My name is Angela Strange... Highness.”
Guin turned back to Drenno without replying. “I heard about Rathe Massai. My condolences to you all. He was the best of you. Is that why you have come here? To lick your wounds?”
“Solid ground,” Drenno replied. “A friendly face. Maybe some supplies.”
“And all the while you leave a trail like muga grub all over my doorstep. Go. Eat, rest, refuel your ship, recycle your oxygen. I would speak to the Catalyst alone.”
With a suddenness that made Angela start, the lights went on, revealing the room they were in to be a huge throne-room, only at the top of the steps was a large divan couch instead of a grand and stately chair. Statues of Faraan, male and female, lined the walls, interspersed with tall candelabras and tapestries that seemed woven from silk.
The Shadowstar crew were led away and, apparently in response to an unspoken command, the Kal’mani rose and dispersed, too. Guin swung away, presenting Angela with a view of her perfect form framed by those colossal black wings. Up close, the feathers didn’t look like feathers at all, but blades of charcoal-coloured slate. She climbed the stairs on her hooves and perched on her couch, arching her wings above her. As Angela approached, the back wall behind the couch echoed with a single chiming note, and all at once fell away, revealing a heart-stopping view of the forest canopy beneath the moonlight, pierced here and there by a towering spire or a curved dome. The sparkling river by which they had arrived wound through the forest, shimmering in the silver glare like a discarded necklace. A cool night wind whispered through Angela’s hair and caressed her neck as she gazed up at a blanket of alien stars.
Guin spoke. “Everything you see before you, the valley, the forest, the buildings and the towns nestled amongst the trees – I built. This system has a self-contained government which I installed. Its people look to me for protection, for guidance. Oraclus is mine, and it is mine because I built it myself, from nothing. I did not take it by force nor deception, I did not usurp the throne on which I sit; I crafted it with my own hands. Even Tess Evayne respects this, because the Founders respected this. But there is now an... unease in the Reach. There are ripples in the lake. The Weave is fraying.”
Angela found she couldn’t take her eyes from the view. In the distance a great winged creature rose into the sky, then swung, dipping its wings to dive back towards the trees.
“And at the centre of it all,” Guin continued, “is an Earth-born girl whose people have yet to travel beyond their own moon. What am I to make of that?” Angela turned to face her. “Of you?”
“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I don’t even know why I’m here. Not really.”
“I do.”
At the possibility of answers Angela’s pulse quickened. Guin seemed to sense it, her neck straightening almost imperceptibly, like a predator marking its prey. “Can you tell me? Please?”
“In time, yes. But first, you must understand why you exist at all.”
Angela’s throat was painfully dry as the Faraan Seraph rose from her elegant seat and joined her on the precipice overlooking the forest. Standing beside her, Guin seemed even more intimidating. She emanated power, a heated, almost physical energy that caused the tiny hairs on Angela’s arms to flicker like static. Guin released her grip on the bladed weapon she carried and it remained upright without support as she opened her arms wide. The view of the forest shimmered and changed as though Angela was seeing it through a rippling lake surface.
“Behold,” Seraph Guin said softly, “the birth of Calamity.”
The forest vanished, to be replaced by a velveteen darkness within which stood a triumvirate of alien creatures. The first was a male Faraan with great dark horns crowning its head; its body impossibly perfect, the wings greater even than Guin’s. Beside it was a tall, slim humanoid with long arms ending in three-fingered hands. Its elongated face was oddly rectangular, its large, dark, sloping eyes gentle and, to Angela, endlessly sorrowful. It was wearing a white robe that almost shone against the golden brown of its leathery skin, and its black hair was pulled into a single arcing plume, like something you’d see on a knight’s helm. Angela knew this creature was a Founder; she recognised it from the carvings in the reliquary on Nix.
The final creature was different, in more ways than just the physical. It was as tall as the Faraan, just as broad and just as lithe, but its flesh seemed composed of cold blue light, as though a fire the colour of moonlight had been lit beneath translucent skin. The face was barely visible through the glare, but Angela could just make out a powerful jawline and wide, sloping eyes. It’s hair, by contrast, appeared made of stone, and its jagged white armour glistened like something secreted and left to go solid. Its hidden eyes radiated menace, and an air of barely concealed contempt ringed it like an aura; the way it stood, the way it seemed to stare directly at her. It faced her head on, shoulders up, arms slightly out at its side, a universal sign of challenge. She doubted it could see her, doubted it was anything more than an image conjured by Seraph Guin – and yet it hated her with a fervour that took her aback. Beside the Faraan, the contrast was strong and stark. It was like seeing a twisted parody of angel and devil, side by side. In comparison, the Iniir should have seemed weak or frail, but its endless eyes seemed full of wisdom and compassion for the other races.
“At the dawn of this age, three Celestial races remained,” Guin explained, walking forward and beckoning Angela to follow. She took a tentative step forward, aware that a moment ago this had been a hundred-metre drop onto a forest canopy. Guin moved between the frozen figures, gesturing to each in turn. “The Faraan, the Iniir, and the Hexen. For a time, we existed together in a sacred trinity. To a people such as yours, we would have been as gods, what you might call demons and archangels, higher beings. The Iniir were the wisest, the Hexen the strongest, the Faraan the cleverest. What the Iniir could envision, the Faraan could build and the Hexen could protect. As we began our journey into the stars, our unity was strong. We believed it to be unshakeable. We were wrong.”
Angela reached up, waving her hand in front of the Iniir. It didn’t flinch. She peered closer, then reached out to gently touch its face. She recoiled: it felt warm, vital. She glanced uneasily at Guin.
“It is false,” the Faraan told her. “They are impressions only.”
Angela let out the breath she’d been holding. “I’ve heard of the Hexen,” she said. “Shimmer says they were evil.”
“That’s reductive, but largely true. Sooner or later, we all succumb to our nature. We revert to type, no matter how we rail against it. But it was not the Hexen who sowed the first seeds of the Calamity. It was the Iniir themselves.”
Angela moved closer to the Hexen. She could feel its rage, its hatred. It made her cold to her bones.
Guin continued. “Our Trinity endured for thousands of years after we found the Reach but, alas, as with any marriage of equals, there was inevitable dissent. The Iniir, in their philanthropy, made it their mission to educate the more primitive races of Melrasi. They used our technology, our resources, our knowledge, to interfere. For all their wisdom, they were monumentally arrogant. When the primitive races began to worship them, they grew magnanimous, and the Faraan grew envious.”
The space they were in shimmered again, the figures fading as though made of smoke, and Angela found herself on a mountainside in the sunshine. A cool breeze stirred her hair. Strange trees, their leaves green, yellow and copper, cove
red the mountain’s flank like a blanket. The sky was blue, like Earth’s, but the sun was a darker shade and larger than she had ever seen. Nestled among the trees in the valley far below was a great citadel, its walls marble white, the high domes of its towers burnished gold. Huge birds wheeled and dived around it, swooping down towards the glimmering silver lake beyond it.
Realising that Guin was beside her but facing the other way, Angela turned, gasping as she saw the vast fleet of warships that filled the sky. They were gleaming white and wreathed in shimmering blue fields, some huge and terrifying, others smaller, built for faster travel. It was clear even from here that their target was the city. The sound of their distant engines grew steadily louder as they drew closer.
“The circle had become a triangle,” Guin told her, “with the Iniir at the pinnacle. By now the Iniir had led many other races to the stars; among them Humans, To’ecc, Ri'in, and Avellians. My people, pushed aside in favour of the mortals, grew uneasy and warlike. We tricked the Hexen and attacked the Iniir, challenging their position atop the triangle.” She fell silent and the image changed again, this time showing a landscape of golden sand dunes pierced by bone-white trees, illuminated by three suns that hung like baleful eyes in a sky of such pale blue it seemed almost white. The air was hot, arid, and as Angela turned to take in the landscape she suddenly froze, throwing up her arms to shield herself against the tidal wave of sand and rock that erupted from the earth and blocked out the sky above. As she prepared for the crushing weight of a thousand tons of sand, she felt Guin’s warm hand on her arm and realised the cacophony had gone silent. She opened one eye to see that the tidal wave had frozen in place at the height of its arc. Vertical streams of tumbling sand hung in the air, as though they were pillars supporting the greater mass. Angela, feeling suddenly foolish, straightened.
Guin gave her a hard-to-read smile. “We were slapped down like children by the other two races. This is Pannai, the great desert of the Faraan’s adopted homeworld, and that—” she pointed at the wall of sand “—is the result of our hubris. We were out-manoeuvred. The Hexen came to the defence of the Iniir, and punished us for our treachery – and as we licked our wounds, we realised that we had been manipulated. The Iniir were on their back foot, the Faraan military fleet was in tatters... It was precisely what the Hexen wanted. As we recovered from a sound defeat, they launched their own war on the Iniir, far more ruthless than ours. And of course, far more terrifying.”
The desert fell away and they were back in the hollow black space, though now only one figure stood before them – the Hexen. Guin approached it, and Angela realised that it was not just emanating an aura of negative energy, but a faint light that seemed to radiate from within.
“The Hexen were immortal, truly immortal, and all but invincible. If you were to stab a Hexen in the heart and kill it, for example, every other Hexen alive would enter a state of change almost instantaneously, emerging with tougher, stronger hearts impervious to your knife. Drown one, the others grew gills; burn one, the others became fireproof. After millennia of war in defence of the Iniir, they were all but indestructible. And worse, they had secretly developed a devastating weapon, able to destroy entire worlds with a single blow. They called it ‘Sunbringer’.”
Now Angela saw a field where children played in the sun, where a line of parents lounged and watched them, where warm summer sunshine poured like honey across the treetops and the golden shores of a nearby lake. She realised she had seen this place before, in her dreams. Worse, she knew what was coming, but still flinched when the column of golden light speared the surface of the lake, and that terrible wind tore across the field, enveloping the children and their parents in solid, choking crystal. Angela covered her mouth as she saw the little girl reaching for her mother, saw their fingertips come so heartbreakingly close before both were swallowed by the nightmare wind and petrified in gleaming black rock. “I saw this,” she said, fighting tears. “I dreamed it. This was Nix.”
The Faraan seemed impressed. “Yes, it was. It was the Hexen’s first human target. They decimated the entire population of the moon – three million souls – with a single blow. This destruction prompted the human government to take action. They and the other races formed an alliance against the Hexen, and helped the Iniir devise a terrible weapon of their own. They called it the ‘Resonance Engine’. How they conceived of it, I do not know, but they developed a device attuned to Hexen DNA, able to kill every last one of them in a single, retaliatory strike. It was somehow able to counteract their immediate evolution, shutting down their nervous systems and halting their adaptations. It was terrifying.
“When the Hexen Emperor, Illumiel, learned of it, he sued for peace. The Iniir, now all but destroyed, were prepared to accept terms – but a human named Warden Skye activated the Engine, believing the Hexen would never, could never, peacefully co-exist. The Hexen were destroyed – all but Illumiel, who alone fled into Purespace with the Sunbringer. Bereft of choices, the Iniir re-purposed the device to form a lock and key, activated by Iniir DNA, and sealed Illumiel away in a pocket of Purespace. The device they dismantled, spreading it around the worlds of the Reach. Its power source they synthesized into a single strand of their DNA, which they seeded on a world as far away as they could find. You know to which world I refer.”
Angela realised she was breathless as the image changed again, revealing the Earth, gently turning within its pale corona. Her stomach lurched and she felt suddenly homesick.
“Your ancestors, Angela, have always carried the seed of the Iniir, passing it from child to child for two thousand years, until you were needed.”
She felt a chill in her blood. “Needed?”
The illusion fell away, and they were back in Seraph Guin’s throne room. The Faraan sat, beckoning Angela to join her.
“Needed, yes. Tess Evayne murdered the remaining Founders. I know this, even without Rathe’s lost evidence. But she is not evil.”
“How can you say that?”
Guin looked her in the eye. “Because her actions are not her own. She acts of another’s volition. Illumiel the Unavenged, the fallen God, acts through her. He has gathered his strength for two millennia, testing the Veil, weakening the Weave, honing his power – and he has found a way to reach out, to manipulate from afar. He arranged the murder of the Founders, revealed your location, and now urges Evayne to reassemble the device and free him. He longs for his vengeance.”
“On who? The Founders are dead.”
“On everyone, Angela. On the Reach entire. We killed his species. Revenge is all he has left.”
Angela slowly lowered herself onto the couch. She stared out over the night-time forest of Oraclus. She couldn’t process everything Guin had said, not yet, but certain things had a way of sinking in. “Can we beat him? If he comes back, I mean?”
“No. We must ensure that does not happen.”
Her heart sank at the finality of Guin’s words. “We have a piece of the... Resonance Engine, you know?”
“I know. The so-called ‘Radiant Heart’. You took it from the ruins of Nix. Find the other pieces, bring them to me. I will assemble the machine and destroy it.”
Angela rose from the couch. “Assemble it? Why?”
“Because it is the only way. The Iniir designed it to be almost indestructible, but it has a weakness. If you put the wrong Catalyst inside it, a pure Celestial for example, it will consume itself. Bring it to me and I will destroy it.”
“The piece we have—”
“Cannot stay here. Keep it with you, find the other two components.”
“But—”
“It cannot stay here. Evayne will look for it. If she descends on Oraclus with the Scepterist Fleet, even I will be overwhelmed. I have a responsibility to these people. I will not abandon that; nor will I condemn them. Keep the Engine with you, find the other two pieces, and bring them to me.”
Angela had never liked feeling vulnerable. Some people sought it out, revelled
in their weakness, wallowed in it. The last time Angela had felt this helpless she’d been eleven years old, cornered on the street by a dealer named Wacko. He used to follow her around, always sniffing after her, offering to pimp for her. Sick fuck. He was the reason she’d been arrested. He was the reason she had met Frank Strange.
She moved away from Guin, walked right to the edge of the room, so that her toes peeked out over the drop to the treetops. Wind whipped her hair. In the west, the sky had begun to brighten, and wisps of pale mauve and golden light rose from the horizon like vapour. Angela looked down, her mind still swirling around memories she’d spent years repressing. A thought occurred to her as she stared at the trees far below. She wondered if she had the courage.
“You could not do it then and you will not now,” said Guin suddenly.
Angela flinched, half-turning, filling up with rage. “You don’t know me. None of you do. Stay out of my head.”
“I know you well enough to know that you are no coward. That is not the answer.”
Angela sagged and stepped back, her anger falling away. “It’s the path of least resistance,” she muttered.
“And of least surety. Who knows what the Founders thought of when they conceived of this plan? Who knows what they accounted for? Destroy the device, Angela. Defeat Evayne.”
Angela looked into Guin’s white eyes and saw the will in them, the determination. The reassurance. It was the way Rathe had looked at her. She reached up to the Amp, felt its cool, smooth surface under her fingertips. Immediately afterwards she clutched at her Saint Anthony, and its touch seemed to wash the Amp’s residue from her hand. Beside it, on its leather strap, dangled the medallion Rathe had given to her. It seemed like a lifetime ago. She looked up at Guin. “I met Evayne, you know? She... came to me. On Nix. She told me she isn’t evil.”
“She is not. She is ambitious. But that kind of ambition will yield the same results as evil. What else did she tell you?”
Angela hesitated, and the Faraan’s eyes narrowed. “She told me not to trust Drenno.”