by Aaron French
I realized then, he hadn’t followed me. I was alone.
For a moment I stood there, unmoving. I considered going backwards; then, realizing I already knew the lack of options in that direction, I opted to go forward instead. Sliding my feet over the stone floor, I walked, one hand on the wall in front of me and behind, as if I were scaling a precipice instead of making my way along flat ground.
It went that way for what felt like hours. I walked through the darkness, feeling like I did when I had those hallucination-like dreams. My mother said those were a product of space too, of the lack of walls beyond the illusion of the ship. I saw monsters in that dark, what looked like masks, giant birds... I knew none of it was real. It was my mind playing tricks, creating color and motion from darkness. But I flinched at the size of some of them. A dragon-like being coiled past my eyes, making me blink.
Again, darkness.
I felt my way around a corner, then around another. I focused on the direction of the stone, trying to keep my sense of where I’d been before, but I soon lost track of the number of turns.
I heard the rustle of fabric, couldn’t quite tell if it had been me. I was freaking out, having some kind of breakdown. I questioned whether I was on the ground at all, if I might still be on the ship instead, caught in some kind of nightmare and unable to wake up, like old Lenny when he was convinced he couldn’t breathe, that he was drifting in space and suffocating, telling us he could feel his eyes bulging out and his blood vessels exploding...
I turned another corner, and light shocked my eyes.
It was far away still, a bare sliver from where I stood. It elongated the sense of distance in the passage, but if I could have run, I would have. I would have run towards that light.
When I finally reached it, the light appeared almost greenish in color.
The passageway ended. I could feel the space beyond, as much as see it.
Afraid now, breathing harder, I pushed my face forward through the opening, peering into the room past its edges.
The space was enormous, bigger than the greenhouse gardens on the largest of our fleet ships. It stretched up so high that shadows encroached from the light’s ability to reach the ceiling above the highest fixtures.
Those lights stood at a height, too. I saw balconies up there, rows and rows of them, a line of those odd, torch-like lamps flickering on each row, like the beaded lights of a landing strip. Ornate pillars of stone decorated those same balconies, with larger ones standing in a square that outlined the inner boundaries of the room, separating the open space from the wide corridors below.
I let my head leave the rock crevasse. The rest of me followed.
I peered down one of those wide corridors. Statues decorated alcoves, more of those flame-like lamps. I saw murals painted with elaborate detail on the walls... details that caught somewhere in my chest, the colors a bright orange and red and green. Animals swam across the stone, like the ones I’d seen in picture books as a child. People rode fire-breathing dogs and lions, and what looked like a great snake. I had seen pictures of all these things, too. I’d been told they were real once, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that.
Did any of those creatures survive? Is that why they painted them on the walls? I glanced around; saw a statue my eyes had somehow missed. A monstrosity of white, smooth stone with paler ribbons of rock, it reached upwards, a man with a serious face and giant stone feet, sitting cross-legged near the picture of another dragon-dog-lion.
Someone had covered his lap in what looked like paper birds, of all colors.
I saw people now.
If they noticed me, there was little or no indication of alarm.
A few glanced at me but seemed to glance through me, too. Their eyes slid past me and around me as if I were one of the giant tables made of hard wood. I focused on a tall man, his face tattooed with symbols that almost looked like some kind of writing. He walked with something in his hand, some long black object I couldn’t quite make out, and he wore a hood. When he turned, returning my stare, I jumped a little to meet the most intense, pale-green eyes I’d ever seen.
“Can I help you, friend?”
I jerked my head around, which, in the thick suit, wasn’t as fast or as sharp of a process as it sounds.
I stared up at a man standing there. He had a smooth face with high cheekbones, deep brown eyes that were nearly black in color, and a faint scar on one side of his nose. He wore a dark red robe; his hands folded over the front of it. He was entirely bald, like the man had been outside.
“Yeah,” I stammered, completely thrown by the fact that he seemed to speak perfect commons-speech. “Yeah, I came to meet with whoever’s in charge.”
He smiled, as if this wasn’t the oddest request in the world... and as if it was perfectly normal for someone in a giant space-suit to come stumbling into their fortress from a burnt-down, disease-ridden forest in the dark and ask to speak to their leader.
No one else from the outside could have come here, could they? Did he think I was from a neighboring tribe? One that happened to have synth enviro-suits and tinny-sounding universal translators?
But he turned, and I followed when he led me in a diagonal line across the massive chamber. We passed to the left of the giant stone man, and I was startled to realize that his lap was filled with flowers, along with the paper birds. I wanted to ask him what it meant, now that I knew he could speak my language... but I didn’t.
I looked up but still couldn’t see where the walls ended.
The cascading rows of balconies with their flickering, flame-like lights made me dizzy, so I focused back on the bare feet of the man in front of me as he led me to another passageway dotted with more torch-lamps. I stared at a few of them as we passed, and saw some kind of gummy liquid inside, sloshing almost with a life of its own.
“Phosphorous worms,” he said politely, glancing at me. “We must do a fair bit of digging, to account for our growing numbers. They are plentiful down below, and live for a long time.”
I nodded to his words, thinking to myself, I haven’t seen a lot of people here, buddy, but not saying it. The structure, despite its massive size, seemed to be nearly empty. Other than those few clusters of men and women in robes I’d seen in the shadow of that giant stone man, the building felt deserted. So much so, I almost felt the urge to whisper.
The bald man turned to look at me again. He smiled a little, his voice carrying an almost cultured tone.
“You will meet more when you return.”
Return? I wondered.
He motioned towards the next lamp, adding conversationally, “Do not concern yourself. They do not seem to mind...”
“Mind?” I said without thinking.
“The worms,” he explained patiently, as though the answer was obvious.
Stumped again, I only nodded.
We wound through another set of passages. The stone bricks stood several feet high, a near white in color, and now it was getting warmer. I hadn’t needed the suit since I came indoors, but I didn’t see that there was an easy way out of it without stopping. I considered taking off the head gear at least... now that I knew I didn’t need the translator wrapped around my throat.
I was still considering it when we reached the end of another hall.
He pushed aside a long curtain of deep red cloth that served as a doorway to the room beyond. I followed him through...
...and instantly pulled up short.
I looked around the broader space. Another of the stone men sat at the far end of the room, but this one was only the size of a regular person. A giant painting covered the high wall behind him, again of fantastical animals with curling, fire-like hair and bulging white eyes. Clouds floated in the distance, with more beings sitting on them, seemingly looking down from their perches at the man sitting cross-legged on the altar. I was so busy looking at the painting; I didn’t notice the people sitting in a circle on the floor in front of it.
They were s
itting so still, all wearing identical robes and with pale, bald heads, that my eyes categorized them as somehow part of the layout of the room. Now, when I looked at them, I saw a woman sitting among them. She was looking at me with great curiosity.
The man sitting in front drew my eyes. Like the one who led me there, he had scars on his face. His, however, were deeper, and there were more of them. It looked almost as though something large swiped a claw at him, catching the edge of his jaw, cheek and neck with their tips as he moved out of the way.
The man who had walked me there from the main floor bowed to the circle sitting on the floor. Without fanfare, he promptly sat down.
Confused, I tried clumsily to do the same. When I bowed, however, my body creaked inside the enviro-suit. My attempts to sit landed me on my butt after two tries, exhaling in a slight oomph as I hit the stone floor.
Then we just sat there, looking at each other.
I cleared my throat.
I was about to speak. I was in the process of forming words, when...
“Shhh,” said the one in front.
He smiled, wrinkling his scars.
I blinked at him.
“You are here for the Yesli,” he said clearly.
It wasn’t a question.
I looked from him to my guide, then shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I came here to meet your people. To ask for your help. I come from a faraway place, but we are relatives. My people come from the same ancestors as yours...”
I was proud of this little speech. It seemed to match the surroundings. I had been practicing it most of the walk there.
At the man’s patient smile, my pride faded.
“The Yesli is waiting for you,” he said.
With a hand, he motioned to the wall at my back, the one I hadn’t seen because it stood behind me when I entered the room. The hand he used to point had thick, deep scars around the wrist, almost as if it had once been severed. I stared at the scars, then turned, suit creaking as I craned my neck to look where he indicated.
On the wall, a giant being covered the stone in shocking strokes of crimson and gold paint. Deep blue sky stood behind the writhing, serpent-like beast with its gold and green scales. But it was the claws that held me riveted, those and the mouth surrounded by teeth of which the door itself formed the opening. Looking down the hallway from which we’d come was like looking down the animal’s throat. The red cloth hung down like a crimson tongue.
“Yesli?” I said, pointing. “That’s the Yesli?”
The man smiled...
...and everything went dark.
***
I stood on a flat, treeless plain covered in snow.
I was breathing too much, nearly high from all the oxygen I sucked in as I took in my utter and absolute aloneness. Occasional boulders poked out through the drifts, but the sun had come out and I could see a long way and not a single soul’s outline broke the endless white. The enviro-suit was gone; in its place I wore a tan-colored robe, like those I’d seen on the alien Earthlings.
I stared at my hand, which wasn’t my hand anymore. A long blade extended from the place where my hand used to sit, a bright, gleaming silver that appeared to have been fused to the bones of my wrist.
I screamed. Staring at my arm, I screamed again.
I tried to move, to propel my body forward, maybe to run away, but one of my legs dragged, heavier than the other. It wasn’t enough to stop the motion of my leg, but it brought me up short nonetheless. I looked down.
My leg had been chained. The metal links led to a thick cuff around my ankle, heavy enough that my ankle bone had already bruised. I followed the other end of the chain until it disappeared into a dense black rock, leaving only fifteen feet of slack in the broad circle made up by the span of its length.
I heard it, then.
The creature’s screams eclipsed mine, rendering them irrelevant.
I didn’t have to ask myself what it was.
Turning around, I began frantically hacking at the chain with the silver sword that had become my hand. It was an awkward angle, but I managed to hit the chain locked in the stone, hard enough to produce a scattering of sparks. Holding it taut with my bare foot, I bashed it again, so that another few fireflies rose around me in contrast to the snow’s white.
I hit it again... and again.
The screams grew louder. I looked around, but saw no sign of the animal to go with them. I yanked on the chain with my leg, bleeding onto the snow, when in a panic I looked up at the sky... and immediately found the source of those screams that sounded like metal tearing in space, and something like a woman’s yell...
...a woman being torn apart, limb by limb, exploding in the dark.
The creature... Yesli, or whatever it really was... began a twisting, spiral dive, curling down upon itself. It spun faster until its shadow grew smaller and darker on the snow, but never so small that it didn’t block the sun and sky from my eyes and face, darkening the circle of movement left by the chain, darkening the snow to a near black.
I thrust my arm up in the air, crouching down as low as I could go, eyes closed, face down. There was a terrible wind, wings flapping as something whipped overhead like a hose ripped loose from a panel wall, spewing gas as it danced out of control. I felt hot breath and clanking scales, a pressure like the air above me had nowhere to go but to force my face into the frozen snow.
I crouched there, my arm thrust up towards the sky, and I felt sick as the blade was jerked nearly out of my shoulder along with the bones of my arm, what remained of my spine. I jabbed upwards with the silver metal flat, and this time, the wind and the air grew heavier... then lighter.
I chanced a look.
The creature danced above me in its own self-generated wind. It darted up and then down again, getting close to the sword, but not actually touching it.
I watched, still crouched down by the ground, in a kind of awe.
“It needs blood,” a voice told me, from nearby.
I jumped, throwing my body over the other side of the chain, panting.
My hat being gone, black hair flowed down from my head. I hadn’t had any real amount of hair since I’d been a girl. I’d shaved it when I was nine, to keep the threat of bed bugs, lice and everything else as far away from me as possible. I’d shaved it every week since, down to an inch or so of straight black fuzz that stood over my head like a pincushion.
It hung now past my shoulders in a dark curtain, thick enough that I couldn’t see through it when the beast’s wings beat at my head, whipping my hair against my skin until my cheeks stung. I looked again for the owner of the voice.
I must have imagined it, I thought.
But as soon as I looked behind me, I saw another of those silent men with the bald heads, his hands folded over the front of a midnight blue robe.
“It needs blood,” he repeated. He pointed up. “Give it to him.”
He stood on the edge of the circle of chain, unprotected even by the feeble means protecting me. Yet he stood unflinching, smiling at me with a kind of open encouragement, as though this were all a great game and he was whispering tips on how I might win from the sidelines.
The beast screamed, this time from so close I couldn’t help but scream back. I held one hand over an ear, once again went as flat to the ground as I could go, except for the sword thrust up in a line from my shoulder. Its wings beat against my back, tying my hair in knots. It screamed again, hovering there like a giant bird.
I looked at the man in the blue robe. Smiling, he melted backwards. I watched him disappear.
The beast dove.
The sword was smashed forward into the snow. I screamed as the breath grew hot on my face and neck, as claws scored the surface of my skin.
I was sure I was dead.
I was positive I was dead.
***
I choked, gasping.
My eyes opened on flashing lights, on a dark interspersed with a gyra
ting light, a slow, pulsating siren. I smelled smoke and burned flesh. I smelled blood, too, but it took a few more seconds before I realized it must be mine. I found myself staring into a flat screen only a few inches from my face. My body couldn’t move inside the metal shell in which I’d been encased.
An escape pod, my mind explained, helpfully.
I choked on the smoke filling the small space, when it occurred to me that I had landed. The pod was stuck in a hard surface somewhere, and the view through the windscreen...
It was snow.
I blinked, sure I was seeing it wrong, then hit the handle to open the door of the capsule. Someone on the radio, it sounded like Tak, yelled at me to stop, yelled that they had to do an atmospheric assessment... but I ignored him.
Jerking the emergency handle up by my hand, I gasped when the door popped open. Reaching over to unbuckle the strap cinching my chest, I hit another sequence in the side and felt the metal recede slightly from around my body.
Still sucking in breaths, I sat up.
Around me, the world stretched black and white and gray as far as the eye could see, broken only by trees and more metal pods sticking out of the snow. Impact craters melted around their dark, pill-like shapes. But so far I was the only one dumb enough to have popped the lid.
I looked down at my arm, staring at the long scores in my flesh, like the claws of some giant hand had reached for me and just missed. I remembered waking up to the ship as the asteroid hit. I remembered when the alarms went off, when the first hull breach alarm sounded.
Then I saw them. Coming out of the trees, they approached the field dotted with capsules with no expression on their smooth faces.
They wore robes, most of them a dark blue in color.
Watching them approach, I felt dizzy, light-headed.
When I met eyes with the one with the clawlike scar on his face, he smiled at me.
***
The captain, Delias Ophren, led the rest of us back to a fortress that stood deeper in the forest than where we’d landed, but not so far that we couldn’t make our way in our enviro-suits through the snow.