Purple Worlds: A Space Fantasy (Planet Origins Book 4)

by Lucia Ashta

  “No, you really don’t.”

  “Ilara, perhaps you don’t remember me and all the time we’ve shared together, but certainly you know me better than this.”

  I waited while she studied my eyes. I waited long enough that I began to lose myself in the swirl of the cosmos in hers. She was calm. The cosmos in her irises reflected her emotions, not those of the universe outside of her. Stars and galaxies swirled slowly, so slowly that they barely appeared to move.

  “You’re right. I do know you.” She smiled, and I realized I was right to follow her wherever she wanted to go. “Come on,” she said, tugging at my hand again. “We don’t want to be late to the party.”

  Wondering if the only appointment we’d be keeping would be one with death, I gave her a boost into the transport machine, and followed immediately after.

  As soon as I’d cleared the door, Aletox jumped up to latch it in place.

  I was trapped inside the vunter can. It was time to plaster false bravado all over my face.

  24

  The machine’s vibrating and squealing ratcheted up to an entirely new level, one I could think of no other word to describe than terrifying.

  Aletox took his time latching the door of the transport machine shut, securing a dozen different clasps closed, then putting his shoulder into it, pushing as hard as he could, before verifying we were safely trapped inside the vunter capsule.

  He walked around our seats, lined in a semicircle against the capsule’s wall, yanking on all of our harnesses, making sure they’d withstand whatever brutal forces we’d encounter during our jump across space. As it was, I had to focus on keeping my teeth apart to keep them from rattling against each other, and we hadn’t even left the launch bay yet.

  When Aletox claimed his own seat in front of the console from which he’d control our flight, he touched a few holographic buttons that hovered in the air, a show of light that looked far too evanescent to have any kind of say on this voyage, to which we’d all willingly—insanely—entrusted our lives. Once Aletox completed issuing instructions to the capsule’s navigation system, he stashed away the control panel, the third of its kind we’d seen today, the last bastion to keep us from our mission to fling ourselves haphazardly through the void of space.

  Then Aletox sat back in his chair. At the same time as the sounds of Aletox clicking his harness into action reached me, the capsule roared to life. If I’d thought its whining and trembling were terrifying before, I had no words to describe what happened now. Everything rattled and shook so violently that I could no longer push thoughts together in my mind. Every attempt at thought my mind put forth was immediately shaken loose from its foundation, to float around aimlessly, without purpose, without any chance of fueling my mounting panic with rational explanation for its cause.

  All I managed was a good, solid Holy fuck, I must’ve been out of my mind to agree to this, before there was nothing more than a despondent sensation expanding to fill my chest. I’d assumed I’d have the opportunity to share some final words with my friends and my lover, in case, you know, we didn’t survive this. I should’ve known better. Aletox wasn’t a sentimental kind of guy. Of course he wouldn’t allow for last-minute expressions of admiration and caring, a shared prayer of protection, even if none of us were prone to prayer. We’d had to rely on our own skills, whatever we could call on, for our survival for too long to believe asking another to do so would make a difference.

  Then that was it. I lost track of every single thought, hope, and disappointment. All that remained was a desperate struggle to hold onto whatever food floated in my stomach. It couldn’t be much. Since I entered the royal palace to do the mind merge with the King there’d been little opportunity for much else than thoughts of returning Ilara to me. Once I’d managed that, then my focus had been on keeping her safe. The last time I ate might have been at the Trilles Tavern with Dolpheus. If so, that seemed a lifetime away. Perhaps I’d have nothing to retch across the pristine floor of the transport machine. But that might not be enough to keep my body from letting lose whatever bile it contained.

  I wanted to swallow back the abundance of spit my mouth was producing. I couldn’t manage even that. My tongue drifted toward my teeth and I had to snap it toward the back of my mouth, lest I lose it in an uncontrolled snap of my jaw.

  The sounds of the capsule preparing for launch intensified, something I would’ve sworn impossible moments before, had I been capable of swearing. I could feel the rumble of energy building beneath the soles of my boots. I lifted them from the floor but then brought them back down. I had enough problems without trying to hover my legs in the air.

  Ilara was to my left, Dolpheus to my right, and Kai and Lila beyond him. Aletox’s stoic back was straight ahead. He didn’t shift or squirm as everything around him did.

  I wanted to look at my friends. Not to offer them encouragement, because I had none of that to offer, but perhaps to share in our mutual commiseration. This might be worse than the anguish of the first times I’d transported, without a machine. When I experienced the process of having every single part of my body torn apart, deconstructed, before it vanished from sight. That had been brutal. This was worse, if only because more than four centuries had passed since the painful causes of those other memories.

  But I didn’t look at my friends, assuming I’d been able to move my head. I had nothing to offer them but the strength to push down bile. Any hope I’d had that this idea of transporting to Sand in a machine might actually go well rattled free and vanished to a place from which I wouldn’t recover it.

  Impossibly, the vibrating and roaring and squealing and the death-rattling shaking grew worse. I heard someone gag somewhere off to my right. It might have been a man, Kai, but it also might have been Lila. When the body became desperate, its sounds all became similar. There was no femininity to be achieved when your body was thinking death would be easier than feeling this.

  Next came the sound of metal snapping against metal, and the capsule tore free of its launching pad with all the ferocity and violence it’d been building.

  We rocketed upward.

  My body was plastered against my seat as if it were a second skin. My teeth chattered so violently that I couldn’t keep them apart and I cursed Aletox for not giving us something to bite on. I scrunched my eyes closed as hard as I could to keep my eyeballs, which felt like balls of liquid goo, inside my eye sockets, where later perhaps I’d have a chance of mending them back into a useful state.

  My stomach lurched toward the nether regions of my body, where there was no cavity to contain it. I swore my brain was literally jerking against the sides of my skull.

  Then… there was nothing. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

  If I was dead, I might’ve preferred it. But I didn’t know if I was dead or alive.

  Where moments before I’d wanted to escape my body because I could feel it so much, every living part of it being crushed in agony and an elusive promise of the grace of death, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Not any of my appendages, not my stomach, not my shallow breath, not the frantic beating of my heart.

  It was dark around me. And inside me.

  It was all one big, giant void of darkness.

  And I was at its center.

  PLANET SAND

  Tanus and Ilara’s story continues in Planet Sand, Book 5 of the Planet Origins series.

  Turn the page for a preview of Planet Sand!

  PLANET SAND PREVIEW

  Chapter 1

  I’d been idly wondering whether I was dead or alive when the drawn out, wobbly words, “You are such a… fuuucker,” reached me. I didn’t buy into the Devoteds’ promises that the Something Greater would be there to receive my eternality once it escaped my body, but if it did, I doubted these would be the Something Greater’s first words to me.

  Still, I felt dead.

  Wait, no I didn’t. My brain finally registered the pain and discomfort that seared every single part of my body.
And then I wished I were dead, I really did.

  “You… fucker, you,” I heard again and this time my brain registered that this was an unusual thing for Kai to say, because Kai didn’t talk like this. Kai was deferent and respectful and careful. “How dare you drag us with you on this infernal trip and not tell us how terrible it’d be? You didn’t even warn us!”

  With each passing moment, the pain receded more, allowing my brain to begin its return to normal functioning. As it did so, I wholeheartedly agreed with Kai and began looking forward to being able to marshal my speech. Aletox was indeed a fucker, a dastardly one.

  Someone to my right groaned horribly, but I couldn’t discern who it was. I was right there with them. I’d be groaning like a crazy man if I could get my throat to work.

  “You…” Metallic unsnapping sounds reached me. “You’re—” Then came a loud thump. “Ugh,” Kai groaned from the floor. “You’re the worst person that’s ever lived.”

  “You’re entitled to your own opinion.” Aletox’s voice sounded a bit less sure than usual, but he was still commanding. Was he even human? I wondered. How could anyone survive what we apparently just did and not feel like crawling around the floor of the cabin to scoop up errant pieces of brain matter?

  “Is everyone all right?” I slurred, sounding more impaired than I would after a dozen pints or an extra large pot of hakusha tea. Still, I was impressed with myself. It was more than I thought I’d manage.

  “No, I’m not all right,” Kai said from the floor, apparently unable to pick himself up.

  I would’ve joined in on the hurl-insults-at-Aletox fun, but I couldn’t even manage a follow-up question. Barely moving my head, I shifted my eyes left. There was the woman that made this ordeal worthwhile. The one who’d talked me into this terrible idea. Her long black hair fanning around her face, she was intact—at least on the outside. Her extraordinary eyes, which reflected the cosmos, looked dazed, as if the universe itself were dazed after our jump from one planet to another.

  She attempted a faint, reassuring smile at me. It looked like she was about to vomit. I attempted a smile back. Undoubtedly, it matched hers.

  My eyeballs jittered as I scanned the cabin. There was Kai, orange-haired and lanky, more composed than the rest of us—save Aletox—even if he was the only one sprawled inelegantly across the transport machine’s floor.

  My gaze took in Aletox’s shoes but refused to examine him further until I verified that my friends were all right. I didn’t care whether he was okay, even if there was a good chance he was my father. If this trip had accomplished anything beyond making me wish for a swift death, it was to provide me with more proof that this man cared only about himself. No one should be so cruel as to allow unsuspecting people to endure what we just did. Not only had he allowed it, he’d been the one to suggest it.

  My eyes found Lila next. She didn’t look much like a she-dragon just then, with her mousy brown hair shaken loose of the tail she wore at the back of neck. She looked very much like she was trying not to vomit all over her lap, something she’d already done based on the wet stains that darkened her lab suit in.

  Dolpheus, my closest friend, who was only in this torturous mess because he was loyal enough to always have my back, no matter how terrible the idea or direction I was heading in was, sat next to me. With a slight tilt of my head, I could see that my friend sat pressed rigidly in his seat, his fingers clenched and bloodless, with his eyes closed, unmoving. I couldn’t make out whether his chest rose and fell from his steady breath or if that was my still-wavering eyeballs that didn’t find stillness no matter where they looked.

  I breathed in long and deep, swallowing the bile and nausea. Then I exhaled, slow and loud. I gathered strength from wherever I could find it, I drew on all my reserves, and then I mind spoke to the only person in this damned metal can that could hear me.

  Olph, man, are you all right? It seemed that even my mind speak was tremulous and distorted. If Aletox had forever ruined me, I’d kill him and spare the world—any of them—from the menace he was.

  Dolpheus didn’t respond. Olph, my brother, talk to me.

  Still no response. I was definitely going to kill Aletox. He’d be the first unarmed man I’d killed. But just because Aletox wasn’t pointing a weapon at me didn’t mean he wouldn’t harm me or anyone else. With a mind as sharp as his and the resolve to carry out his devious machinations, the man’s every breath was a danger to humanity.

  It wasn’t really possible to yell while mind speaking, but I tried. Olph, dammit, answer me right now if you can. I’m really starting to freak out.

  The silence that afterward was nearly as torturous as the sensations that crawled across my body. What we’d just endured had been awful. But my body could endure far more than my heart, and my heart couldn’t lose the man who was like a brother to me, the only person I could truly trust without reservation.

  Olph—

  Stop your yelling already, he said, and my heart began thumping.

  Holy hell, Olph. You scared the shit out of me.

  Well, if the fucking jump we just survived didn’t do it, then you deserve it. I can barely manage to get my mind to work. I couldn’t get words to form in time to answer you.

  Tell me about it. As soon as I feel like I can move, I’m going to kill Aletox.

  Not if I beat you to it.

  The race was on, only it was a race between worms. It would be a long while before either one of us would be a threat to anyone else. Right now, all the threats thumped and rolled and beat within me, where there was no escaping them.

  Relieved that all my friends had survived Aletox’s torture chamber, I rested my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I wished I’d never have to move again.

  “Kai,” came Aletox’s voice, the one I wanted never to hear again. “You need to get back in your seat and snap in.”

  “Fuck you,” Kai said, and I found myself appreciating how far he’d come in so short a time. He was expressing himself, and doing it for all of us who couldn’t manage it yet. “The only place I’m going is to throttle you.”

  “Well, you can wait until we make it through the gaseous layer that surrounds Planet Sand and land before worrying about that. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

  “We aren’t even on Planet Sand yet?” Kai asked, incredulous, while Lila grunted a protest from my right side.

  Aletox chuckled. He actually chuckled! And I thought I’d surely find the strength to kill him right then. The rage that pumped in my veins was potent enough to reanimate the dead.

  “You fucker,” I said, blaming my lack of creativity on what the man had done to us.

  Aletox turned to look at me. His arched dark eyebrows, which looked remarkably like hairy worms right then, dared to suggest that I was crossing some kind of line that I shouldn’t. It made the rage surge even more ferociously through me. I was even more desperate to have at his smug, coldhearted smirk.

  “Be careful, son,” Aletox said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Words won’t change the truth.”

  “Your words are an aberration of truth.”

  Aletox’s nostrils flared with anger, and I wondered at the sudden emotion. It was the most I’d ever seen in him.

  “Not all men have the luxury of being true to their words,” he said.

  And while all sorts of alarm bells joined the chorus of strident sounds in my head, I wasn’t up to the battle of wits that any prolonged conversation with Aletox required.

  I gave up, and when I didn’t fill the silence, Lila did. “Do we have to go through that again to get to Sand?” The inflection of her words aptly reflected the spinning within me. Her tongue was thick and clumsy.

  Aletox chortled again. Apparently, the man got off on playing with fire. Or she-dragons. I knew well enough not to play with either. “No, Lila,” he said, dragging out her name in a way that made me uncomfortable and challenged me to rise to her def
ense and kill him—and I didn’t even think I liked Lila. “We’ve already jumped across space. We don’t need to jump again.” He spoke as if she were mentally infirm instead of a brilliant laboratory researcher.

  I looked at Lila, but she looked too out of it to register or mind his condescension.

  Aletox drawled on, “We only have to fly through the gaseous protective layer of Sand and land. That’s it. It should be a smooth ride from here.”

  I didn’t take any comfort from that. Aletox seemed incomprehensibly unaffected by what had floored the rest of us, and Dolpheus and I transported, free of unwieldy and torturous machines, nearly every day.

  “Your Majesty,” Aletox addressed the woman I loved. “Where do you suggest we set down?”

  Ilara’s eyes, still hazy and unfocused, snapped to attention. “What?” Her word was the sharpest thing any of us had yet managed to express.

  His impassive expression unwavering, Aletox said, “You’re the only one of us from Sand. So where do you suggest we land?” He enunciated each word, skirting the line of disrespect to his sovereign, or at least his possible sovereign. Saying that she was from Sand was probably meant as another jab at me. Aletox was prodding and poking my open wound, suggesting once more that this woman, though I loved her, wasn’t the one I’d first fallen in love with. If Ilara was from Sand, then she couldn’t be from O. Or could she?

  Whether this particular version of Ilara was from Sand or Origins originally, she’d spent more than three years on the planet we currently orbited. Which made her the expert on Planet Sand. None of us had ever been there or even traveled to another planet before. Although, perhaps Aletox had. How else could he be so unaffected by the jump when the rest of us were decimated by it?

  Ilara’s eyes had grown wide.

  “Your Majesty?” Aletox prompted, skilled in making words meant to impart honor sound cheap.

  “They warned me you were a nasty piece of work. Too bad I didn’t believe them enough to stay the fuck away from you, you crazy motherfucker.”

  “Where should we set down?” he continued as if she hadn’t hurled such beautifully emphatic insults at him.