by Monte Cook
Once everyone has gone back through the tunnel except her, Aviend stands before the orange stem. She wills her arm to touch it. Overcome your fear, she says to it. Or to herself. She doesn’t know. Thinking about her arm as a thing separate from her is both surprisingly easy and oddly disconcerting. It would be easier if it were actually disconnected, she thinks.
It won’t go. She thinks she could touch it with her other hand, some other part of her body, but this isn’t about that. It’s about fear. It’s an emotion that she despises. It feels weak. And yet. It’s there. All the time. And it has a purpose. An important one – namely, saving her life.
No matter how much she wills it, she can’t make it happen. Her arm will not lift. She feels like there’s a lesson there, but no matter how many times she looks up and counts the stars, she can’t see it.
4. Darkness Comes Without a Gloaming
Dinner never comes. Or rather, Aviend imagines that it comes for everyone else in the Stere. Around the world. And inside the base.
But it doesn’t come for her.
It’s her own fault. She has to touch all the things. Poke and prod. Try to understand the things she doesn’t understand.
Once she was sure that Kyre was all right – he said he was exhausted but fine, and Thorme agreed but made him lie down anyway and he went but not without some disagreement – she slipped out of the clave and went for a mindwalk.
Normally, mindwalks are the kind of thing she and Kyre do together. It’s how they plan, prepare, doublecheck their contingencies. Almost every problem – from as small as their own to as big as saving the world – can be solved, or at least explored, on a mindwalk.
But she wasn’t going to pull Kyre out of bed, so she goes alone. She’s looking for the starroom. Or some sign of the starroom. From the outside. She knows where it is in terms of the base. Or where it should be. The temple, at least from the inside, is huge. Everything about it is bigger than seems possible. And yet, she’s never seen it. She’s been in that spot a hundred times, more. They all have.
She understands that it’s probably not important to the mission at hand, but it’s like a thorn in the padding of her thumb. She won’t be able to rest until she can no longer pick at it. Until the curiosity is excised.
It seems impossible to believe that a building that size could be completely hidden from view. Unless it’s underground, but then how does the ceiling work, that invisible angle to the stars? It is possible that they’ve been looking in the wrong spot. But she doesn’t think so. From above ground, an entire temple is just missing.
How, then, had the Gavanites gotten in? That was the question that she kept coming back to. There had to be an external door. She’d been twirling the pendant as she walked, but she didn’t think that was going to work again. She thought it might be designed for indoor, well, doors.
It’s also possible the space is an illusion, a projection of some kind. But it would have to fool all of the senses. Not just the eyes, but the hands too. It seemed possible, but her gut told her that wasn’t the case. Whatever they were looking at was real – whatever that meant, exactly – and thus it should be showing up right here, in the space that she was walking toward.
She skirts the thin space between the swamp and the base, and steps into the area, based on the angle of the base and the tunnel they went through to get to the temple, where she thinks the temple should be.
And here it is. She’s so surprised she nearly falls back into the swamp. Skist. Something Delgha did in there, something they all did in there, brought the temple into view. Or maybe it just made it possible for her to see it. She’s not sure. But either way, it’s beautiful and ornate and just as Quenn described it.
It’s all shined black. Curves and points, an ebb and flow that seems to constantly be moving. When she touches it, it’s still beneath her hand, but she can feel the swirls that give it an essence of movement. It’s soft like moss, but without the texture.
It takes her a moment to see the outline there. A triangle edged into the material. The color is slightly different than the rest. Grey more than black.
She touches it. As soon as she does, she regrets it. Not because anything horrible happens, but because she’s still recovering from touching the last thing, and she told herself she wouldn’t.
Well, too late now. In she goes.
Between one stride and the next, the dark of the doorway envelops her. Between one blink and the next, the dark becomes a shine that blinds. So bright it makes her eyes close and water in a single action. All she can see is red. Pulsing and shifting. It takes her a moment to realize that’s the light through her eyelids. She can see her own blood in there. It’s both fascinating and disturbing.
She thinks about dropping her zoomscreen over her eyes as a makeshift shield, but somehow knows that it won’t help. She’ll give it a minute standing here with her eyes closed. See if her eyes adjust.
They do. Or the light does. It’s hard to tell. Either way, the pain – she thinks it’s weird that light can cause pain, but she knows it does – lessens and the light softens. She peeks one eye open. And gasps.
She doesn’t know where she is, but she’s definitely not in the Stere anymore. It looks like a forest, though. Sort of. Things that are trees but not trees. The ground beneath her boots is sloped and slanted. She can feel it give and spring, but not like moss or earth. The light feels like sunlight. Heavier and brighter than any sunlight she’s ever seen. As though it has substance. It comes in through the tops of the trees-not-trees, slanting into her face.
The trees are like the devices in the temple but also not. In her first sweeping glance, she can’t articulate why this is true in either place.
When she takes another step, the air swarms around her, heavier but not oppressive. She swears she can feel the parts of the air as they bump against her skin. But there’s nothing to see, and when she sweeps her hand in front of her, the sensation lessens.
There’s no door behind her. No tumbling stones or water. She can’t hear the millibirds either. In fact, there is almost no noise of the forest she knows here at all. It makes her feel like she doesn’t have her balance. She doesn’t know where the edges of her body are. She puts her hands out, but it doesn’t help. They look like dangling things in her field of vision, and not something that she owns and operates.
She realizes belatedly that they also don’t have any weapons in them. Which is stupid. Because who knows what’s here? Wherever here is. This could be something of Rillent’s, filled with traps and hounds and horrors. Or even something from an ancient species. Also filled with traps and hounds and horrors.
The thing is, all of the quiet makes her feel safe. Like, how could something horrible possibly be here when there is no sound, no noise? It doesn’t make sense but it fills her with a sense of peace nonetheless.
There’s a structure inside one of the treelike entities. The tree must be as big around as five of her. She can see it from where she’s standing. Or at least the entrance to it. A hollow carved in the trunk – she decides to keep using tree words because she doesn’t have any other words – that is shaped almost like an eye. None of this is anything she has ever seen before.
Which brings her to the question: where is she?
In an attempt to find an answer, she makes the mistake of looking down.
There is nothing beneath her feet. Glancing forward, beyond her toes, she sees the same spread of moss and grasslike plants. But when she looks down again, there is nothing. Her feet are just hanging in emptiness. She can see stars below her. Or what she thinks might be stars. They’re just tiny dots in a landscape of black. Far away.
Quickly, she takes a step back to where the grass and moss were just a moment ago. Now that’s gone too. Where she just stood, it’s green. But where she’s standing now? Nothing. An illusion? A projection? Perhaps? But she’s not sure which one is real and which one is fake. She hopes it’s the starview that’s fake, because it makes her s
tomach turn to think about it, and she needs to make it at least part of the way across this structure, ideally without being sick.
She decides she will not look down. She will take a step, and she will not look down. She will look at… anything in her eyeline and above. Tree-thing. Hole in tree.
Step. With her balance off due to the lack of sound, she looks. Her foot meets the ground, and still, there is nothing beneath it but the black vastness of the stars.
“Skist,” she says. There is no fire in the swearword, only resignation. Whatever she’s gotten herself into this time, she is uncertain whether she will be able to get herself out.
The trees are planted in a circle. Inside them, through their thick grey trunks, she can see a transparent square plate, framed in stone and steel.
The trunks look like doorways. When she tries to step between two of them, they close in on her, squeezing inward. If she were twice as wide as she is, she thinks they would trap her passage. But this, like so much else, doesn’t seem to be made for humans, and so the trunks constrict but don’t touch her.
In the center of the circle is a square of transparent material, as long on each side as she is tall. The material looks similar to the temple ceiling, but the view is completely different. When she leans over it and looks down – she wants to touch it, she’s oh-so-tempted to touch it, but their recent incident in the temple, and her transport here, are still very clear in her mind – she sees a swath of greens and greys. It takes her a moment to realize that it’s the tops of trees. More specifically, it’s the top of the Steremoss. Part of the Steremoss.
If it’s a map, it seems nearly useless, as it’s only looking at a single section. It’s just looking at a very specific part – which section, she can’t tell. There are only trees. Leaves and branches.
Something catches her eye among the leaves. A creature. Captured in a map? Except that it isn’t captured. It’s moving.
This isn’t a map. It’s a viewer. She is looking down at part of the Steremoss as it is in real life. This very moment. How, she doesn’t know. But she guesses that if the ceiling of the temple can look up at the stars, then the stars can look down at the Stere.
She realizes what she’s said. Pushes herself back from the viewer. Closes her eyes. Holy skist, is she really in the stars? In the sky? She needs a minute. This is big.
Bigger still because if that is true, then she’s stuck here with no idea how to get home. Nope. She can’t go down that route right now because she will absolutely lose it. For now, she has to assume that there is some way to get back to earth, back to Kyre and the others. That she will not die up here, trapped and alone.
All right, then. She needs a plan. First things first. Figure out what the viewer can tell her. Then figure out a plan for getting out of here. Along the way, keep an eye out for food, water, danger, and any tools she might be able to use.
She opens her eyes and pushes herself back toward the viewer. Why did whoever was using this – the Gavanites? someone else? – why did they choose this section of the forest, she wonders. What did it tell them? What were they looking for?
She watches the space for a long time. Sees movement – leaves twitch or a bird hops into view and out again. But nothing that strikes her as worth the attention. Bringing her face closer to the material doesn’t help; it just makes everything fuzzy and gives her a pain behind her eyes.
Her breath fogs up the material. She reaches to wipe it away with her sleeve.
The view moves. Slips sideways at her touch to show a neighboring patch of forest. Skist. It moves. It moves. She tries again with her hand. This time, nothing happens.
When she touches her sleeve back to the material, it moves again. Not sideways this time, but out. Zooming back. Letting her see a larger section of the woods. She tries again, and it moves again. She’s not sure yet what movements of the fabric across the material make it do what, but she is sure that it’s doing something.
She pulls her jacket off and uses her blade to tear one sleeve off at the seam. It makes a glove, sort of. Makeshift. But good enough for her to experiment with. After a few more tries, she gets the hang of using her fingers and the fabric to move it.
It’s backwards. Pushing up makes the view go down. Down is up. A half circle sometimes zooms the view in and sometimes out. She’s not entirely sure what the difference is in the arcs she’s making, but it’s clear the viewer thinks she’s sending it two different messages. No matter. It’s close enough and soon she’s got the hang of it enough to get it to do what she wants.
She zooms it out as far as she can make it – it’s possible that it goes farther, but she can’t figure out how and anyway she has the entire Steremoss in view now.
Looking down at this, if it’s right, makes her realize how close the map is that she has, how careful her mother was in creating it, and how even her own hand-drawn additions are nearly right.
There are things missing from their map. The edges of the forest are shaped differently too. From incorrect mapping or changes over time? She’s going to guess the latter, because if anything, the edges are bigger. The forest has grown outward since she was little. Of course it has.
She has a list of things she wants to try to find: the base, of course. The kubrics. The clearing. Maybe Quenn’s home town. She wonders if the zoom is good enough to see people walking around. It seems likely that if she can see creatures, she can see people too.
After a few false starts, she finds the river, the falls. The treehouse is a simple black square from here. She’s never thought much about the roofs of things. How different they might look from above. There are towns she knows, towns she doesn’t. Dotted in clearings through the forest.
The base itself would be hidden – it’s all underground, of course it is, but now that she can see the temple, she can’t unsee it. From here, it’s a shimmering globe of grey. Shined and glinting as metal. She remembers that she still hasn’t told Kyre and the others about it. How you can see it now, somehow. Maybe they’ve already figured it out. She doesn’t know how much time has passed since she left the Stere but her shoulders ache with bending. The view from her walk would suggest that it’s nighttime – the below was full of dark skies and stars. But the forest she’s looking at is in midday, she thinks. The sun’s shadows are nearly straight down. No slant.
Back to focusing. She slides the viewer around to the perimeter of the forest. Picks out a few of the kubrics, one, two, three. She zooms out and finds all five kubrics. Sees them all in a single view. They’re not very big, but they carry all their power in height. Stretching up toward the sky. Toward her.
They’re in the shape of the star. Not just any star, but Quenn’s star. Or nearly anyway. Five points of the six. So where’s the other kubric? She zooms out, but can’t find it. It isn’t the base, unless the base has moved wildly. Surely Rillent would have found the sixth kubric by now, would have had it dug up the way he’s had the others dug up. Is that what he’s looking for?
She holds the pendant over the viewer. Lowers herself until its points line up perfectly with the map. The very top, the long point that stretches above all others, points up at her.
Not at her. At this place. The pendant isn’t just depicting the five kubrics. It’s showing her that this place, wherever she is, is the sixth kubric. They’re tied together. What does that mean? She doesn’t know. They’re connected, she knows that much. She feels like if she just keeps staring at the viewer, the pieces will come together in a way that she can understand.
Her stomach rumbles. She can’t remember the last time she’s eaten or drunk. She has a lot more questions, a lot more things she wants to see in the viewer, but she has more pressing needs for now. Food. Water. Escape. Not in that order, unless they have to be.
“Where’s Aviend?” Kyre asked. It wasn’t like her to miss dinner. Not showing her face for Thorme’s food offerings was very un-Aviend-like.
“She went for a walk,” Delgha said. “To think.�
�� Her voice showed exactly what she thought of walking around, trying to think without the use of a machine at her side.
A trickle of worry scrabbled at the back of his neck like a creature with too-long nails.
The runners had said Rillent wasn’t coming, but he couldn’t help but feel like they were all missing something. Something obvious and dangerous.
“I’ll go see if I can find her.” His voice was calm, but his throat felt dry suddenly, his tongue too big. He sometimes missed the days before all of this, when they just planned in secret, when no one knew to look for them or even that they were alive. There was some safety in that, in the before.
Too late now. And everything that was before always led to this moment of after anyway. There was no going back.
“Wait,” Delgha said. “Before you also go out in the woods to think – or whatever – I’ve got something for you.”
She held out a small silver disk on the top of her finger. Kyre hesitated.
“I promise,” she said. “It won’t try to kill you this time.”
“I know you wouldn’t mean to,” he said. “But…”
“No, I don’t blame you,” she said. “It’s just a telepathy implant.”
“‘Just’,” he said, “and ‘implant’ don’t go together very well.”
She pressed the disk to the space behind her ear, tilting her head to show him.
And then she held out a new silver disk, identical to the other one, on the tip of her finger. “Just stick it behind your ear. It should let you talk to me while you’re out there.”
He took the small silver disk from her and pressed it to the side of his neck behind his ear. It prickled his skin with tiny points, and then he could feel the adhesive settle in. “Like this?” he said.
No, she said. Like this.
He blinked. “What… just happened?”
“Oh, it worked!”
“You sound surprised,” he said.
“I try to expect the worst,” she said. “I’ve been working on these forever. Either they weren’t working, or Aviend doesn’t know how to hear my mind. Maybe I should have hooked you up to one a long time ago instead. All right, now you say something to me.”