by B.J. Keeton
***
Saryn was the first to vomit. Then Chuckie did. Ceril, Harlo, and Swinton followed closely behind, tying for third place. The team had walked maybe five or six steps from the portal and immediately fell to their knees. They retched as they quickly emptied their stomachs.
The place stunk. And not just a little stink, either. The air smelled like sulfur, tasted like sulfur. The smell was almost thick enough to chew. Ceril thought, as his dry heaving finally began to subside, that if he had ever smelled something more rank, he couldn't think of what it was.
Harlo was the first to regain her composure. She rose to her feet and walked a meter or two from the rest of her team. Ceril stumbled after her, barely able to speak.
“Wait, don't…go…far,” he said to her.
“I'm fine, Ceril,” she responded.
Ceril thought that she obviously was not fine, because she was bracing herself against the rock wall of the canyon they were in. But for some reason, she seemed to be breathing better than any of them, and when she turned back around, Ceril knew why.
Her mouth was completely blacked out. Two black tubes ran from each nostril into her mouth. Ceril was impressed—she had Conjured herself a breather. Ceril wished that he had thought of it.
“Everyone,” he coughed, “C-conjure yourself a…” He dry heaved. “A breather. That's…an order.” Ceril followed it, too, and he felt the nanites from his skin coalesce across his mouth and into his nostrils. He did his best to focus on the design Harlo used. He took a few breaths to test it out. The smell of sulfur was still there, but it was bearable. It was just a slight annoyance through the breather, rather than an overwhelming force.
Every single Charon Apprentice was trained in basic Conjuration. They would all learn to mentally manipulate a sleeve of nanites which could be worn under their clothes like a second skin. To outsiders, that manipulation seemed like magic, and the term technomage entered people’s vocabularies.
As Ceril took a couple of cleaner breaths, he was thankful for the failsafes programmed into the nanite sleeves. He had no idea how to actually make a breather, and he was fairly sure that no one else knew the ins-and-outs, either—well, Harlo and Saryn might, but they were exceptions. For the other three (at least), Conjuring their breathers seemed like magic, and it gave Ceril his first real experience with why the Charons became known as technomages in the first place.
Conjuring seemed downright magical. However, the task itself had to be realistic, had to be possible. Nanite Conjuring was bound by the laws of physics, but if a Charon could imagine an outcome, the nanites were programmed with enough intelligence to find a way to make it happen. The Conjuring Charon didn’t need to know the details.
Which was lucky for Ceril and his team—the only thing they had to do was concentrate on the air not making them sick. The four of them directed that desire to their sleeves, and each felt the slow tingle that meant the tiny machines were forming a filter for the acrid air.
After a few breaths that did not induce vomiting, Saryn said, “Better. Good idea, Ternia.”
“Wasn't my idea. We can all thank Harlo for this one. I think she saved us more than a bit of sickness here. But we should be careful; we probably don't want to use these constantly.”
“Thanks,” Harlo said. “The air is breathable, or we'd be dead right now. There may be something in it that makes us sick, but I'd be willing to wager that we can acclimate to it pretty quickly if we have to.”
“But what if we don't want to?” Chuckie asked. He stood up and braced against the rock wall.
“Doesn't matter,” Ceril said. “I don't want to breathe it, either, but if there are inhabitants here, the last thing we want is for them to know we’re Charons, that we can Conjure, right? At least immediately. We don't know anything about this place. The natives might know about Charons already, and that means they could love us or hate us. The less we let on about who we are, the better off we are. For the time being.” Ceril inhaled deeply. He pushed the residual sickness down. “So as soon—and I mean as soon—as we meet someone, these breathers dissipate, you got that? Just be prepared for the shock.”
Chuckie was silent.
“Got it,” Swinton said. Saryn and Harlo chimed in, too. Chuckie never did.
“Are we going to have a problem already, Chuckie?” Ceril asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Chuckie as he breathed deeply. “No breathers around natives. Got it.”
“Thank you,” Ceril said. He turned his attention to his surroundings. The portal had dropped them at the lowest point in a roofless, stone canyon. The ground sloped down to them, but the entrance was a few hundred meters up the ramp. The walls were sheer and fifteen to twenty feet high, with about that much space between them. There would be no climbing out even if they had wanted to. They were at one end of the canyon, and the other end opened onto what looked like open fields, maybe a plain of some kind.
“Okay, folks,” Ceril said, “let's move out of this trench and see what this place has for us.” He figured they all needed to walk the sickness off and find out where they were. Without looking back, Ceril pushed himself away from the wall and stalked toward the entrance to the canyon. He knew that if he did not set the precedent of being in charge now, he would not be able to expect them to respect his leadership in the future. He never looked back at his team as he reached the mouth of the tunnel.
When he got there, he stood amazed.
If he hadn't known better, he would have assumed he was wearing tinted glasses. In Ternia, most things were green, but the soil was brown, so were trees, and the sky was a marvelous shade of blue that swirled with the yellow-red from the planet's twin suns. Even in Yagh, the drab gray was broken by occasional blue skies.
Here, though, everything—everything—from the rocks and dirt to the sky, clouds, and trees, all of it…was purple. He assumed the sun was purple, too, but he couldn’t be sure. It was hidden behind a purple, overcast sky. It was like whichever Charons created this Instance had purposefully deleted every other color from their palettes.
As he watched, lightning struck in the distance, and his reverie was shattered. The bolt had been a sickly green color, stark against the muted background. It made his stomach roil.
The rest of the team had followed him up, and they sat their bags down at their feet and looked around.
“This…is odd,” Saryn said. “I don’t like it.”
“Me, neither,” Swinton agreed. “It’s just too much.”
“Yeah,” Ceril said. “Too much purple. You ever seen anything like this?” He was talking to Saryn.
“No. Yagh’s not lush, not like Ternia,” she elbowed Ceril, “but it’s not…this.”
“Neither’s Bester,” Swinton said. “The Sigil was just fine, you know? When you grow up in a place like Bester, you get used to being indoors, and you don’t really think about the color anymore. You decorate what you can, splash some color here and there, maybe, to open things up. Even on the Sigil, we had the blur.” He paused. “This is almost too much outside.”
“Ferran’s a desert,” Harlo offered, “so I’m used to stretches of the same, boring brown where everything looks the same. But this is different. I don’t like this. It’s unnatural. Makes me kind of sick.”
“It’s probably just the air,” Chuckie said. “Ain’t no color gonna make us sick.”
“It might,” Saryn said. “We don’t know anything about this place.”
“We know this is the place where color comes to die,” Swinton joked. “Is that not enough?”
They all laughed uneasily.
Plains stretched in front of them, knee to waist-high grasses grew as far as they could see. There was a tree-line in the distance that probably bordered a whole forest. There was one tree to their right a short distance away, and it was stunted and gnarled. Ceril noticed that a purple liquid dripped regularly from the ends of its leafless branches, like a thousand spigots that were ju
st barely left open. There were small pools of the liquid circling the tree trunk.
“Harlo,” he said as he pointed, “can you take a sample of whatever that tree is dripping and test it?”
“Sure thing,” she said as she rooted through her pack for a testing kit. The Charons did not use ranks the way the various militaries on Erlon did. Ceril was no more her boss than he was her father, but if giving him some kind of title helped her, then so be it, he thought.
“Thanks.”
“Saryn?” he said. She didn’t answer. He looked around and scanned the immediate area. He couldn’t see her. “Where’s Saryn?”
“She was right behind me a second ago, Ceril,” Swinton said.
Ceril looked at the small canyon they had climbed out of. He scowled. “Would you go back and find her? She’s not out there.” He gestured to the plains. “There’s only one direction she could have gone.”
Swinton trotted back toward the Instance portal as Ceril and Chuckie watched another sickly green bolt of lightning strike the ground. It was closer than the bolt Ceril had seen before.
“I think a storm's brewing, boss,” Chuckie said. “We need to find shelter, a cave or something. And since this one don't have no roof…” His voice trailed off.
“You may be right, but we’ll do it together. Once Swinton gets back with Saryn, and Harlo gets that sample, we'll talk about it.”
Then, as if on cue, Swinton and Saryn came running from the Instance portal.
“It's gone, Ternia,” Saryn said, out of breath.
“What's gone?” Ceril asked.
“The Instance. We don’t have a connection back to the Sigil.” Saryn breathed heavily before continuing.
“That’s the plan, Saryn. We’re on our own for a while. They can’t keep the portal open. They just don’t have the power.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that sucks. I didn’t know that.”
“Neither did I,” Chuckie said. “I didn’t realize this was a one-way trip.”
“It’s not. We’re going to get back to the ship as soon as we can, with help, once we get ourselves back to Erlon, to Ennd’s. I thought you were all briefed on this.”
Saryn ignored him. “Also, I thought you should know that I can't find a way to access the portal again. There isn’t a pad or a dial, no kind of device at all that we could use to get back to the Sigil. We’re completely cut off, Ternia.”
Ceril swallowed. So much for giving a leadership pep talk on the other side, he thought. “Look, I knew we weren’t going to have connection with the Sigil, and I just assumed you guys did, too. I can’t say I like not having a connection device, but we don’t know this place, don’t know how it connects to any other Instances. For all we know, that could be a one-way portal that only allows travel in.”
“They don’t work like that, Ternia. I—”
“Either way,” Ceril interrupted, “we have a mission. We have our orders. We’ll find some way to connect somewhere eventually. Just not here. I mean, if this is a free-range Instance like Roman and Nephil seem to believe, maybe the connection the Sigil was able to get was more random than it should have been.” Saryn gave him an incredulous look. “Could there have been a shift of some kind that shunted where the portal came out as it traveled away from Erlon? If the Instance itself is moving, and the Sigil is staying still, could that account for not being able to reconnect?”
Saryn thought about the possibility for a moment before she answered, “It's possible, Ternia. Not very likely, but it's possible.”
Ceril nodded. “I guess we’re all just lucky we didn’t pop through in the middle of one of those rock walls. The entrance seems random to me, especially if there’s no way to use it again.” Harlo walked up as he spoke and handed him a lid with half a glass vial attached to it. The bottom had been cleanly sheared off at an angle.
“What's this?” he asked.
“What your tree sap did to my testing equipment. I put it over the edge of a branch and it burned clean through the glass.”
“I see,” Ceril said. “Thanks for trying. At least we know to stay far away from those trees.”
“That we do,” Chuckie chimed in as lightning struck again. “Now about that storm? If the tree sap is acid, I don't really feel like getting caught out in the rain. I doubt it’s gonna be gumdrops falling from the sky.”
Ceril turned. “You’re right. We certainly don't need to get burned to death by acid rain, and if there’s no way to even access a portal here, there’s no reason to stick around out in the open like this.” Thunder cracked hard overhead, and a sickly green lightning bolt struck the ground a few hundred meters away from them. “I guess our first line of business will be to find a cave or at least something with a roof on it.”
The team agreed, and Ceril took off walking to the left and the others followed him. Ceril turned the vial over in his hand and thought it was a good idea to put as much room as they could between them and the acid tree. He just hoped they could find a roof to sit under just in case Chuckie was right about the rain. With their current luck, though, he didn’t count on that happening.