Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  Sham understood only that we were going home.

  And escaping the rain.

  Two nights later, with the skies clearing and the suns burning beyond my sixtieth-floor window, I pushed a glass door open and wandered out to my patio.

  Sixty floors wasn’t much, at least as Arcadian apartment towers went.

  But my apartment, high above the city, suited me just fine.

  As close to the stars as I’ll ever get again, I thought.

  …before pouring myself a cocktail.

  I sipped on the blue liquid and lounged on a chair overlooking the city. Glass towers, gardens so green they looked like paintings, and lines of hover-cars zipping down the streets awaited my eyes, same as they did every night.

  It was no surprise I’d made no real friends since carving my way into Sumer’s grasslands a decade ago. I was an alien, a strange girl with an even stranger story. And Sumer had just survived a revolution. Some great-grandson of some great military leader had only just been deposed, and the entire planet had been in the middle of a grand disarmament.

  Turns out I’d arrived just in time.

  If I’d shown up a few years earlier, I’d have been tossed in a military prison.

  And forgotten.

  I considered my luck as I watched the suns set. Their light glimmered in my eyes, and I sank deeper into my soft chair. The taste of the Arcadian drink—the one true pleasure I allowed myself—lingered on my lips.

  Life wasn’t so bad.

  I could’ve gone to sleep if not for the sound at my door.

  I’d never heard my door-chime ring before. The sound startled me. Drink still in hand, I meandered to the door and pulled it open. I wasn’t afraid of who or what it might’ve been. I’d survived the Vark, Coffin Engines, and Tombspires. Nothing on Sumer, except maybe the heat, much bothered me.

  “Hi,” I said to the tall, athletic man waiting on my door’s other side.

  “Hi.” He smiled.

  The first thing I noticed: his accent, or the lack of one. He sounded nothing like anyone else in Arcadia. In fact, he sounded nothing like anyone on the entire planet.

  The second thing?

  His deep blue hair and glowing blue eyes.

  “Do I know you?” I polished off my drink in one big gulp—I felt a little tipsy already. I hadn’t eaten, and Arcadian spirits were far more potent than any of the weak cordials I’d experienced back home.

  “You might.” The man smiled again. “They say you knew Callista. You might’ve called her Lightbringer, though she hated that name.”

  I made a face. I wasn’t sure what it looked like, but I was certain it was embarrassing.

  “Uh…ummm…who are you again?” I said. “It’s just that I wasn’t expecting company tonight. Or any night, really.”

  Tall and bronze, his suit black and his eyes the deepest blue imaginable, he shrugged.

  “You’re Mina, right?” he said. “The girl from the stars? I can tell you’re not from Arcadia or anywhere else on Sumer. So you must be her. My name is Griff. Pardon my interruption. I hoped you might talk with me.”

  Griff?

  Do I know that name?

  Still tipsy, I stared back at him.

  I didn’t have the faintest idea who he was.

  But if he was going to invade my evening, he was also going to take me to dinner.

  “Griff, I don’t know who you are,” I said. “But that’s okay. I don’t get out much, though not for lack of trying. I’m bored senseless. So if you want to talk, you’re taking me down there.” I pointed out the window toward Arcadia. “I want dinner. And I want two more drinks. Think you can manage that?”

  He looked at me as if he understood everything.

  My loneliness.

  My pride.

  My need for Arcadian beverages to dull my pain.

  “Put something pretty on, Mina,” he said. “I know a place.”

  * * *

  In a blue-lit lounge, in a back room where the music thrummed to a far less maddening rhythm than anything I’d heard since arriving on Sumer, I sat at a table across from Griff.

  I’d figured out why he looked familiar.

  He was like Callista, an AI, only a man instead of a woman.

  “Does any of what I said make sense?” I asked. I’d withstood my third cocktail, but my tact was in short supply.

  “Completely,” he said.

  “They’re all dead.” I swallowed hard. “Gone. Ashes and dust. Even though it happened a hundred years ago, it feels like yesterday. Anyway…Callista never told me she created a brother. And you say you’re the only AI left?”

  “Yes, the only one.” He nodded. “I wasn’t meant to be a brother to her. I was more of a servant, an accidental companion. Before she left, she downloaded most of herself into me. I know everything she knew…until she went away.”

  A tiny hope blossomed inside me.

  If she downloaded herself...

  If she’s alive inside him, then maybe…

  Griff shook his head even before I opened my mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Mina. I can’t bring her back. She gave me her memories, her experiences, but she didn’t transfer her consciousness module. I can’t resurrect her.”

  I wished I had another drink.

  “Ok…” I sat up in my too-comfortable chair. “I’ve told you everything that happened. And you’ve explained how this all started. I understand it now. I get it. But what’s the point? I mean…you and I…we’re not going to be friends. I don’t really do friends. So why’d you find me? What are we doing here?”

  My tipsiness made me blunt.

  Crass.

  Cynical.

  Griff wasn’t fazed.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  I almost rolled my eyes. Almost. I didn’t really want to help anyone. I wanted one more drink, and then I wanted to crawl back into my bed.

  I didn’t realize what I’d become. I’d survived so much, and for what?

  “Ok, I’m listening,” I said.

  “Three galaxies.” He stared at me—his smiles were gone, and his expression deadly serious. “We’ve destroyed them in three galaxies.”

  He means the Vark.

  He means Andromeda, the Milky Way, and Hades.

  “Yeah…and?” My empty glass teetered in my hand.

  “It’s not enough.” He took my glass away.

  “What do you mean?” I felt combative. “How can that not be enough? Haven’t I done my part?”

  “You have.” He nodded. “But there’s more work still. The fleets sent to Hades…only a tiny fraction survived. None returned to Sumer, of course. They went to the other colonies. And here on Sumer—let’s just say only you and I and very few others know what happened.”

  Mother of Sufi, I thought. What’s he asking me?

  “Look, Griff.” I tried to stare him down. “You seem like a good person—I mean…a good AI. But I’m not going back out there. Besides, if no one else knows, and if no one believes, the fight is over. Callista told me if we destroyed Hades, we’d buy humanity a few hundred-thousand years of peace. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Is it?” He leaned closer.

  Shit, I thought.

  Back on Hermes, we’d worshipped Sufi. Our little, remote star had been our only anchor in a galaxy that wanted us dead.

  I’d never believed in our religion. Sure, I’d played the part well enough. As the Calipha’s daughter, what choice did I have?

  But sitting across from Griff, feeling small beneath his gaze, I remembered something they’d taught us when we were children:

  ‘As they’ve hunted us, so shall we hunt them.’

  ‘…until the end of days.’

  It’d been those words, graven into the stones of the first Hermes settlement, I’d believed in as a little girl. They’d driven me to become the best pilot the universe had ever known. They’d echoed inside me with every Vark world I’d destroyed.

  How can I bet
ray them?

  Damnit.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to do.” I continued the argument even knowing I would lose. “I’m what—thirty-something years old. I haven’t flown a ship in years. Other than asking my apartment’s machine to make drinks, I don’t know your technology. Even if I live another hundred years, it won’t be enough. You don’t have a fleet. You don’t even know where the other Vark might be hiding. You have nothing.”

  Griff considered my words.

  Fingers steepled, eyes blazing blue in the candlelight, he never once blinked.

  “What if you could live longer than a hundred years?” he said.

  I wrinkled my nose. I’d seen the Arcadian elderly. Pale, thin, and with skin almost translucent, the city’s oldest citizens pumped themselves with chemicals to extend their lives. To me, they looked creepy.

  They looked Vark-like.

  “No.” I shook my head. “No way. I’m not filling myself up with those drugs. I don’t want to look like them. I’d rather die tomorrow than become a shriveled old ghoul.”

  Griff cracked a smile. He hadn’t given me one in almost an hour.

  “No, not like them,” he said. “Like me.”

  If I’d still had my glass, I’d have dropped it.

  What is he saying?

  “We can make you live forever,” he said. “But on one condition—you help us. No one here believes anymore. No one cares. Everyone with the will to fight the darkness is dead. We need people like you. With Cal gone, with Hermes lost, someone must remember. Someone must plant the seeds for humanity to fight the Strigoi forever.”

  He used that word.

  Strigoi.

  Just like Callista.

  If I’d been tipsy before, Griff had sobered me. We were the last two patrons in the back of the dusky lounge. We might’ve been the last two people in the universe.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I am.”

  “You want to make me become like you,” I said. “You’ll what…download my mind…upload me into a new body?”

  He nodded. “Something like that. It’s a simpler process than you’d imagine. Although—almost no one knows about it.”

  The candles’ lights shined in his perfect blue eyes. The taste of my last cocktail lingered on my tongue. I felt as if I were floating above my body, looking down at myself, judging myself.

  For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do.

  I considered what I’d become, the numb, neutered person I’d let myself be since arriving in Arcadia.

  I don’t want this.

  I want more.

  I owe it to them. To Strope. To Callista. To my daughters.

  “How does it work?” I said. “I agree to fight the Vark forever, and you make me immortal?”

  Griff gave me one last smile. It wasn’t like his other smiles. In it, I saw Callista, Strope, and all the things I’d lost in my short little life.

  “It won’t even hurt,” he said.

  I wished I’d had one more drink. I felt too sober to make such grand decisions, too small to decide on forever.

  “Live a few thousand years?” I said. “Fight the Vark? Make a few shadows into stars? Okay. Fine. When do we start?”

  Griff rose from his seat. His blue eyes were the only lights in a world gone dark.

  I knew exactly what he would say.

  “Let’s go, Mina. We’ve a universe to protect. We start tonight.”

  If you enjoyed Eaters of the Light, please

  consider leaving an Amazon review right here.

  

  A thousand years from today, nearly all of humanity is jacked-In.

  We sleep, connected to machines, dreaming our lives away…

  Read J Edward Neill’s…

  More by J Edward Neill:

  Fiction:

  The Hecatomb

  Hollow Empire

  Machina Obscurum

  Eaters of the Light Series

  Darkness Between the Stars

  Shadow of Forever

  Tyrants of the Dead Trilogy

  Down the Dark Path

  Dark Moon Daughter

  Nether Kingdom

  Coffee Table Philosophy:

  Reality is Best Served with Red Wine

  Life & Dark Liquor

  The Ultimate Get to Know Someone Quiz

  101 Questions for Humanity

  The Little Book of BIG Questions

  Breaking Up is EASY to Do

  444 Questions for the Universe

  About the Author

  J Edward Neill writes dark fiction, sci-fi, horror, and philosophy – all for adult audiences. He lives in North Georgia, where the summers are volcanic and winters don’t exist. He has an extensive sword collection, a deep love of wine and scotch, and a blind cat named Sticky.

  He’s really just a ghost.

  He’s only here to haunt the earth for few more decades.

  Shamble after J Edward on his websites:

  TesseraGuild.com

  DownTheDarkPath.com

  About the Artist

  Amanda Makepeace has been drawing and thinking up imaginary worlds and characters since her childhood days in the suburbs of Maryland. Since those formative years, she's lived in the southern burbs, moved abroad to England, and now calls rural Georgia home. Her imagination is fed by a love of nature, myth and the fantastic. When she's not in the studio, you can often find her wandering the woods, collecting bones and other bits of nature for her ever growing natural history collection.

  Amanda has done excellent cover work for J Edward’s other novels, including Down the Dark Path, Nether Kingdom, A Door Never Dreamed Of, and Old Man of Tessera.

  Her sci-fi art inspired a number of the settings in Eaters of the Light and its predecessor, Shadow of Forever.

  Learn more at amandamakepeace.com