Original Elements: A Space Opera Adventure (Planet Origins Book 2)

by Lucia Ashta

  Whether the Devoteds were right or not, I didn’t know, not even in this space that I was in, each breath more removed from the construct of the reality I usually inhabited. I felt Lila’s fingers against my forehead, but nothing greater than that. I didn’t feel a beam of energy that connected me to something larger. If anything, I felt more alone than ever, at the start of a journey into the unknown with the knowledge that I was the only one that could guide myself out of it once I entered.

  From a distance, I heard her say, “We’re going to start now, Tanus. The connection between your mind and the King’s memories should only go one way.” I heard her, but didn’t dissect her words. I didn’t focus on her use of should instead of will. “Because your brain’s the only active system with full life and control of its processes, you alone will be able to explore the memories. They shouldn’t be able to travel back into your mind unless you allow them to. Make sure that you leave the memories where they are and don’t attempt to bring them back with you. If you do, your brain might become confused and think the memories are yours instead of another’s.”

  I didn’t think much of what she said, other than a vague thought that maybe she should have spoken this warning before my mind removed itself elsewhere. I thought this even more when I heard Dolpheus’ voice, urgent behind hers, saying “Tan, do you hear her? You need to be certain to leave the King’s memories outside of yours. Tan? Did you get that? Look into the King’s memories, but don’t bring them back with you. Keep separate from him.”

  I sensed the forceful urging continue, but I no longer made out full sentences. The process was already underway, I knew without realizing I was thinking it. Whatever would be, would now be.

  I’d already taken the first steps on this journey. Before long, I’d be closer to the captured memories of the King than I would be to the living, breathing people that crouched around me.

  “All right, Tanus,” I heard Lila say, but then missed what followed. Then, “We’ll begin,” filtered through my synapses.

  Just as I sensed the crystal strand begin to grow rigid, to press against my head independently of Lila’s fingers, like a dick filling with blood, slowly hardening, coming to life, I registered sounds that wanted to lull me away from where I’d gone. I tried to respond to the sound of a sword being removed from its sheath. I attempted to decipher the clipped calls of alarm and Dolpheus’ succinct orders that reverberated around where I lay.

  But in the end, I couldn’t. I was too far gone.

  The crystal strand achieved its maximum rigidity, as hard as any erection I’d ever been proud of. I had but one second to register that the process was about to begin, in earnest, before it did. Like the ravaging dust storms of the wildest of O’s deserts, the mind merge claimed me. Whether in accordance with or against my will didn’t much matter. I was torn from my own brain and hurtled toward that of another.

  My destination was a wild, dark, and unfamiliar place and, unceremoniously, I was dumped in the midst of it.

  Twenty-One

  In the back of my mind, somewhere beyond where I was now, I registered Dolpheus’ warning. Make sure to keep the King’s memories apart from your own, he’d said. It was wisdom, I knew it, but I also realized that I wouldn’t be able to do much to follow it.

  I’d stood in the middle of violent sandstorms before. Out in the wilds, in the harshest of Origins’ deserts, sandstorms struck fast and with minimal warning. At times, they were as deadly as the Vikas vipers that lashed out, fangs first, in the blink of an eye. When a sandstorm struck, there was little else to do than wrap whatever garments you had tight around you, shielding your face especially, and hunker down, hoping that this wrath of a god or of a planet mistreated or of something else equally inexplicable would pass quickly and choose to spare you, this one time.

  That’s how it felt to be inside the King’s memories. I was an implant, a distinct entity apart from the King’s thoughts. I was there, in the body I saw regularly in a mirror’s reflection, in the middle of a vast expanse of nothingness.

  I was in my usual battle gear—close-fitting pants and boots designed for agility, a tunic and an armored breastplate with a flap that hung down far enough to protect my groin, and a metal-plated helmet that covered my neck in the back and came over my nose in the front. It was what I wore whenever I knew I was headed into trouble. I understood that I was headed toward difficulties now, but these defenses for my physical body couldn’t protect me here. Yet my subconscious mind was more at ease with the regular means I employed to shield myself, even if they were useless against any aggressor I might encounter.

  I spun slowly, taking in every angle and detail, as far as my eyes could cover. I’d done it in preparation for combat hundreds of times. Never had I felt so unnerved in doing it, however. No matter where I looked, my gaze found nothing—no resistance, no imagery to disrupt the continuity of black sand and sparkling sunlight upon it. Finally, I turned my gaze upward, where I knew before looking that there was also nothing. Still, I looked for it, for the nothing. I looked for anything that would disrupt this monotony, more disturbing than the many scenes of violence and gore I’d encountered over my lifetime.

  There was nothing above me but the usual faint yellow sky. There was nothing below me other than black specks, survivors of a time so ancient that I couldn’t fathom it. There was nothing at all where I was save me—at least, not that I could see.

  Where was I, anyway? I’d forgotten. Clearly, I was on my way to a battle. I was dressed for it. I even imagined that I could hear the clinking sounds of clashing swords, reaching me from somewhere beyond this vast nothingness.

  Would the battle come to me? Or would I have to seek it? Perhaps the time had finally arrived when I no longer needed to seek battle. I let the thought hang with me, if only for company. But no, the time when I was free from the need to fight hadn’t arrived. I still had to fight for what I believed in. I still had to fight for good people. And there were good people in my life. Weren’t there? I couldn’t remember any of them just then, but I felt them. Even as alone as I was, I didn’t think it had always been like that. There had been people I loved, even if there hadn’t been many of them.

  Wait. I spun, searching for whatever had beckoned me. Where was it? It was like a whisper, or maybe a wisp was more accurate. It was barely there, but it was. It was a concrete thing, even if it was invisible, standing beside me on the black sea of eternity that sparkled as much as any body of water ever had.

  Whatever it was, it blew by again. As if it were a ghost that brushed past me, I whirled and lunged, reaching a hand out that closed on thin yellow air that dissolved rapidly into insignificance.

  But then, when I opened my hand with an aching disappointment I couldn’t understand, knowing that this thing I so badly wanted to catch had eluded me, it was there, all of a sudden. Like the greatest gift there ever was, like a lover presenting herself to me for the first time, all openness and vulnerability thrumming in her heart and between her thighs, there it was. There she was. What I’d been trying to reach. Who I’d been trying to reach.

  Ilara. I remembered her, just as I believed I always would. It seemed impossible that I’d forgotten her, even in this morass of confusion and desolation.

  Ilara. She was the reason I was here to begin with, wherever this was. Now I remembered: Somewhere in this eternal desert, I could find her.

  A soldier that had finally discovered his cause, I set off to find her right away. I didn’t know in which direction to go. I would try them all if I had to until I found her. I turned one last time to take in my surroundings. Still, there was nothing outside of me that offered guidance. So I did the only thing a man can do when an external compass is absent or broken. I let my heart do the guiding, even though I’d never really understood it.

  Luckily, my love for Ilara led me away from the sun so that it was at my back. I settled into a good pace—not so fast that I would wear out, not so slow as to draw out the inevitable any
more than necessary—and began to relax. I was comfortable heading off to a conflict. I’d done it many times before. I told myself this would be no different than any of the other battles, even though every bit of me knew that it would.

  I walked, doing my best not to think, refusing the visit of any concern that wished to linger at my side. I put one foot in front of the other with no greater thought than Ilara. Thoughts of her were enough to fill me; she was larger than life.

  There it was. Another hint of something tugging at my awareness, just at the edge of it.

  I spun on my heel to catch it before it could escape, and I did. It wriggled in my grip, struggling to break free, but I held tight. When I bent down to examine it, like the wisp of the thought that it really was, it vanished. Yet it shared itself with me before it went, unable to hide its true nature. And I remembered one more thing, crucial to me here where I was, as vital to my understanding as my love for Ilara.

  I was within the King’s memories to retrieve information about where he sent Ilara. It was here that I could discover where to find my one true love—since I was allowing my heart to guide me, I could afford the sentimentality of romantic expressions I’d never before used.

  It seemed more like a dream than someone else’s memories. It was unlike anything I’d expected. But when had life been what I thought it would be? Perhaps never. Why should another man’s memories be any different? Were our minds truly unique? Or did we only believe it to be the case, our egos hungry to think ourselves unequaled and irreplaceable in a world where life was fast and fleeting? No part of our life experiences were free from our impressions of them. I wondered if they even existed independently of my conception of them. Was something that I might perceive as an illusion an illusion regardless of my perception of it?

  The sun beat upon my hair; my scalp tingled with the heat and the reminder that I was here, right now, and that I was alive. Enough with the useless pondering of a dream world, I commanded, knowing that my command was mostly futile in this place. When had I ever been able to direct a dream effectively? Never. It mattered little that this desert I found myself in wasn’t actually a dream; what mattered was that it felt like one.

  This was the greatest battle I’d ever had to fight. It was the most perilous of them too, because it waged war with my mind. This place, the King’s memories, was a master of illusions, if a thing could be a master. In this place, where none of the usual rules applied, I imagined that it could be. A thing could be a master of my fate, and it could rule me if I let it.

  I cast a glance to the hilt of my sword, moved my hand to it. The blue jewel that crowned the hilt glittered as if it were possessed of faithum. I hoped that it was, because in this disorienting place, I would allow myself to believe in faithum—as long as I could have a bit of it.

  I kept my hand at my sword even though there was nothing visible to pitch it against. Like a thumb to a babe that soothed itself by sucking on its own appendage, I gripped the cold metal, a comfort in the hot sunshine.

  I continued to move, all too cognizant of a whirlwind of emotion that swirled within me. It was as if I’d internalized the desert’s sandstorm. A dam that kept all of my usual emotions pent up behind it, and me safe from them, had burst. Without prejudice or measure, my fears and most secret hopes rushed me. As if these emotions were a tidal wave that I could see building on the horizon, with an understanding of its potential for terrible devastation, I ran to move out of its way.

  A lone man, trapped in another’s memories, I ran as fast as I could across the black desert sands. I ran as if death pursued me. I ran to avoid myself.

  There was no shelter that could protect me in the dream world. The deepest, darkest, most hidden recesses of myself, that I’d long ago stopped nurturing, chased after me as if they were demons sprung loose from hell.

  I fled as if I could outrun them, knowing all the while that I couldn’t. We can never outrun ourselves, no matter how fast we move.

  Still, with a part of me that recognized what I was doing, and with yet another comprehending its total and absolute futility, I tore across the desert. I sprinted as speedily as an expert soldier my size could run through a dream that was really another man’s thoughts.

  I must have had a high concept of myself and my physical stamina and agility, for it took a very long while for me to grow tired. When I finally did stop, my breathing labored, I put my hands to my hips and surveyed my surroundings.

  My heart sank. All I could see in any direction was an ocean of black sparkles. I’d not reached Ilara. I’d not even reached her father’s memories of her.

  It took me a long time to recognize what welled within me, so foreign was it. But then I realized what the wave that climbed within me to tickle at the back of my eyes was. And then I wondered if I should deny it, as I had since I was a boy, when my father—Lord Brachius—had walked in on me crying. My mother had just abandoned me, but that didn’t matter. Boys weren’t supposed to cry, my father had said. It was a sign of weakness, he’d told me, and he never wanted to hear of me crying again.

  I didn’t always obey my father—instead, I became skilled in merely appearing to do so—but I did in this regard. I didn’t want to appear weak. I didn’t want to be weak. So I never cried again.

  Until now, I’d never wanted to. But now, oh, it was all I wanted to do. I was lost in a sea of dreams and another’s thoughts that had neither a beginning nor an end. I was terribly alone. It was how I’d imagined the final voyage toward death felt, when you knew there was no one that could rescue you from yourself or the terrible deeds and emotions you could no longer hide from after a lifetime of doing so.

  I wanted to cry. Yet I fought it as hard as I’d ever fought anything for a few heavy breaths, but then, without meaning to and without thinking I would, I simply stopped fighting. Inelegantly, I crumpled to the ground. One foot before me, the other bent behind. My sword and knives clinked against the sand, simultaneously hard and soft.

  Then, I cried. If I’d ever stopped to imagine what it would be like if I ever broke down, I might have envisioned this. It was ugly. It was a torrent of pent up feeling unleashed to ravage me. I’d lived for four hundred and forty three years thus far. The emotions you might imagine from a lifetime as long as this one, ignored and tucked away, spilled, flopped, and burst out, like the intestines of an animal just eviscerated by a predator it couldn’t escape, that was then forced to examine foot after foot of coiled intestine, a bloody mess on the surrounding ground, where what had once been sacred was desecrated, violated, and made meaningless in the final moments before death arrived with its merciful anesthetic.

  I was a mess of tears, racking sobs, and dripping nose. My chest shook and heaved. I cried as if I mourned the sorrows of an entire planet—perhaps those of other planets too—as if wrongs could never be righted, as if hope were a pointless exercise. I sobbed in the deepest despair I imagined possible. I mourned an absent mother, finally. I grieved for a lost love as only a man who understood that she might be lost to him forever in a faraway part of the universe could.

  I cried and I shuddered until, finally, it was over.

  I didn’t move for the longest time, with a complete understanding that time didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at all in the desolate vacuum of my now-empty heart.

  I collapsed into myself. My normally strong posture decomposed into a heap of bones crumbling unstably atop others. I was a ball of the remains of a human. I stayed like this for so long that I experienced a pocket of eternity. I might have found purgatory. It made so much sense to discover that purgatory wasn’t a place outside of us, but deep within ourselves.

  My eyeballs were red, making the green of my irises look as if they glowed with a power greater than any one human life. They shone with a force that seemed to be outside of me, and for the first time in my life, I identified similarities between my eyes and Ilara’s. Her eyes reflected the vast, never-ending nature of the cosmos; mine reflected the vast, never-en
ding nature of one man’s pain.

  My eyelids were swollen. Hiccups overtook me in spasms. I’d been stripped of any artificial construct I’d built in my defense. All that was left of me was my humanity, raw and plain. At the center of it all, of the puddle into which I’d dissolved, was a bloody, beating heart. I was flesh that was born only to die. I was flesh animated by something greater than me, whatever that might be.

  I closed my eyes, thinking that it might be the last time. I was spent. I was done for. I loved Ilara, but I just didn’t care about anything anymore. Not enough to pick myself up from my final resting place to order one foot to move in front of the other. What did one step, or a hundred thousand, matter anyway? In the scope of the infinite, what was I? What could I possibly be but a bloody, bleating disappointment?

  But then… Oh, but then. Something I hadn’t anticipated. Something outside of myself that indicated that, even if I didn’t understand how, I wasn’t alone. I hadn’t been abandoned; I only thought I had.

  One final tear dripped along the bridge of my down-turned nose. What filled me then, I was inclined to call faithum. But I didn’t call it that. Because I understood that it wasn’t faithum at all. If it was anything I could identify, then I would be forced to call it faith. Even in this space of deliverance I was in, I wasn’t certain I was ready for faith.

  Understanding that I didn’t possess the great reserves of strength I’d always thought I had, I allowed myself to feel weak, if that’s what I felt like feeling. I allowed my eyes to remain closed, even if what scared me the most lay within. I breathed easy now, free of burdens I hadn’t earlier realized I carried.

  And just in that precise moment when I relaxed into not caring—about what I thought, what I felt, about myself or anyone or anything else—it happened, the one thing it had become apparent I couldn’t arrive at any other way than this: I accessed the King’s memories. Every one of them, even the deepest and most private of his memories, lay bare and naked before my reach.