“OK, OK, Cyrus, you got this,” he said, closing his eyes to calm himself. “Cyrus, you don’t fail. Go back to the ship. Get supplies. Figure out what happened here. Have Cortanus analyze material. Grab a bone? Grab a bone.”
He reached down and took a skull, still with its teeth attached, from one of the skeletons. He nervously glanced around in preparation for a trap. He laughed to himself when nothing happened and hustled back to the ship. He had no idea if either woman would accept him back, but at the least, he knew Celeste would give him supplies to survive.
He just hoped he got more than that from both Crystil and Celeste.
19
Tears poured out of Crystil. Rage boiled inside her. Disappointment coursed through her.
All of the feelings trapped her in the commander’s seat. Even if she could get a grip on herself and make a decision on what she needed her and Celeste to do, she didn’t feel like she deserved to have the authority to do so. She’d failed in her mission with Cyrus’ departure. She’d failed Emperor Orthran, Celeste, and even Cyrus, as much as she wanted to break him most of the time. Perhaps worst of all, her failure served as a bitter reminder for another man she had lost, creating a terrible sense of nostalgia.
In a fit of rage, trembling, she kicked the console, prompting a yelp from Celeste, followed by two more kicks. She stood up and kicked the commander’s chair so hard that it came unmoored from the floor.
Slowly, she came down from her anger as she looked at the younger Orthran, the one person on this trip who seemed capable of making no enemies. Crystil breathed heavily as she put her hands on her hips.
“Sorry,” she said as she squatted while fixing the loose chair. “I lost my cool. I kicked your brother out. I should not have done such a thing. That goes against direct orders for the mission and from your father. I failed. I failed you, your father, Cyrus, the mission, and myself.”
Celeste said it was OK, and the two of them turned out to face Cyrus, by now barely a speck on the horizon. He never once looked back. Crystil felt like this was his way of putting them out of mind forever, at least symbolically. She knew if that was the case, she had to do the same. A soldier mourned the dead but did not let grief affect mission planning and execution. Cyrus, at this point, was as good as dead for their purposes.
Crystil accepted this as her fault. Yes, the older Orthran did things his own way, putting the group at unnecessary risk. She did things by the letters of the word of the paragraphs of the book, never missing any detail, upset if someone had fired one bullet too many in a machine gun round. She nosedived into the granular details of the mission, preferring to take action one atomically-sized step at a time, trusting it would lead to whatever ultimate goal was set out. He looked at the peak of the mountain without thinking how to scale it and gave up when he didn’t see the intermediate steps. But she also knew the commander’s motto—“You always take full responsibility for the actions of your unit.”
If Cyrus rebelled against her, that was her fault for not adjusting. If Cyrus ran away, that reflected her failure to connect with him.
He did not have the onus of following her orders. She had the onus of properly instructing him to follow her orders. Unfortunately, he was the first person who had so openly defied her, and she failed to adjust in time to save him.
Farewell. I’ll look after your sister. I will protect her until the end.
“So, what now?” Celeste said as Cyrus disappeared from view.
“The same thing we were doing before,” Crystil said. “We search for drinkable water. Then we figure out which game we can hunt for food. Then we build sustainable shelter. After that… we’ll figure out what to do next. Does that work for you, Celeste?”
Celeste, taken aback, quickly responded yes, but hesitated. Crystil allowed her the space she needed to give a complete answer.
“I just, I think, that’s good and all, but we can’t miss the main point of this, which—”
Celeste stumbled over her words, starting several sentences and getting no more than two words into each.
“I get it,” Crystil said, standing up. “I do. I’m frustrated, like you, wondering if this is even going to work. But the best way to do this, in my years of experience, is to take it one actionable step at a time. If this weren’t so much about our lives, it’d be easier to see.”
“I know,” Celeste said. “I know. I’m just rambling. I’m nervous and scared.”
“We all are,” Crystil said. “I’ll guarantee you anything Cyrus is.”
Celeste smiled as she leaned back on the control panel, facing Crystil.
“I know he is. I could tell the minute he walked into that airlock he was a wreck. He’ll never admit it, but he’s scared. He just figures if he embraces defeat and failure as he does, he doesn’t have to go through the fear of the unknown.”
Crystil nodded and was silently amazed at Celeste. Celeste didn’t speak confidently about much but had an incredible intuition for reading people. Maybe that’s why I’m comfortable not acting so official all the time. Because I know she’ll know the truth.
“Well, regardless, I do hope he comes back,” Crystil said, which brought a knowing smile to Celeste. “We need all the help we can get. As long as he’s not the fool he usually is.”
“I think I slapped it out of him,” Celeste said, which brought a short laugh to both of them. “In any case, though, I’m with you all the way, Crystil. I’m not quitting until we die. It’s what my father would have wanted.”
It was a nice feeling to have no worries about how an Orthran would respond to her.
“Our next step, then, is to get water,” Crystil said. “I suggest we head to the mountains. So, shall we head through the forest to do that?”
“We shall,” Celeste said with a pump of her first.
Crystil stood up, said, “Good,” with a smile, and headed to the armory, with Celeste behind her. Inside the armory, Crystil grabbed an assault rifle with two hundred rounds, a knife, and food and water for five days. The forest was only a two-hour walk, but everything beyond that was a guess. Crystil could easily imagine finding water in the first cavern, or spending the rest of their lives searching for the non-existent elixir. But five days seemed like plenty of time to get a good start.
Crystil headed to Celeste’s quarters and knocked gently on the open door. Inside, she found Celeste looking at a photo on the wall. Crystil recognized it as the one Celeste had looked at before only to remove it per Crystil’s implied request. But Crystil did not look away this time, absorbing the picture in as much detail as she could.
Cyrus, Celeste, and Emperor Orthran stood in the emperor’s throne room, with Cyrus, probably no older than fifteen years old, standing to the emperor’s left. The emperor sat on his throne, his body relaxed, his robes fitting snugly. Crystil figured this was when he became emperor but couldn’t remember the timing of it.
“When was this?” she asked.
Celeste turned back, a nostalgic and weary smile on her face.
“About nine years ago. Crazy, isn’t it?”
Crystil nodded and walked up next to Celeste. In studying the photo, she was reminded of a question she had wanted to ask upon becoming Emperor Orthran’s bodyguard but had never felt appropriate inquiring on. With just her and Celeste, their relationship resembling sisters more than soldiers, she felt she could ask.
“Your mother, tell me about her. Where is she?”
Crystil watched Celeste carefully for a reaction, but Celeste seemed to have expected the question and seemed unperturbed.
“I never knew her, unfortunately. My father said she died giving birth to me. It was rough on me for a while, I felt guilty, but my father told me not to worry. He said there was no greater sacrifice for a mother than to die for her child. Took me a while, but it got through eventually. Here, I’ve got a photo of her.”
She went through some files and displayed a photo of a woman with a younger looking Emperor Orthran. The woma
n had long, flowing, dark red hair, striking blue eyes, clear cheeks and a joyful smile. She wore white and looked like the kind of woman who gave Celeste her cheerful, social disposition.
“I always asked my father about her. He said he met her when he was just out of school. A chance encounter, he said, but he just fell in love with her almost on the spot. She had Cyrus almost right after that. Then I came, and…”
Crystil knew better than to press. Although she knew she’d ask Cyrus if she ever got the chance.
“She’s a beautiful woman, Celeste. I’m sure she gave you a lot of good things.”
“Dad said the same thing,” she said as she got a curious expression. “What about you?”
“Sorry?”
“Your family? What’s their story?”
“Oh,” Crystil said, stalling. “Nothing really much. Never knew my father. Mom worked two jobs to support me and my little brother. Which meant that we had to take care of ourselves. I made things orderly all the time, and he…”
Crystil hedged on whether or not to continue, but her decision was made easier by Celeste’s honesty.
“He made a lot of poor choices. Fell in favor with the wrong crowd and would skip school for drugs. I kept trying to help him, but I think I rode him too hard.”
The patterns between her brother’s story and her current situation did not escape Crystil’s conscience.
“I came home one day to tell my mother, who had a rare off day, that I had gotten recruited into the special forces of the empire’s military. I heard her sobbing quietly in her room, and when I went inside, she had Jordyn’s body on the bed. Found out later he intentionally smoked too much cyraline and died on the spot.”
“Crystil, I’m so sorry.”
Crystil put her hands up, signaling she was fine, but also to guard against her own emotions.
“It was the kind of thing where we all knew the day would come, we just didn’t know when. It’s why my mother didn’t lose her mind, and I just threw myself even deeper into the military stuff. If you focus on the mission, you don’t have time to worry about the tragedies you can’t control.”
Crystil sighed and gave a slight smile. It was the first time she’d spoken about her brother to anyone except Dyson since the day of the funeral.
It felt strangely good to talk about him. Crystil also knew telling Celeste would bond them tighter than anyone she’d been friends with since Eve. She began to suddenly feel a lot more optimistic about the situation. Even if they had no water, Crystil wouldn’t die alone.
“But yeah, that’s my story. Do you think you’ll be ready soon, Celeste?”
“Oh,” Celeste said, laughing. “Totally forgot that after this conversation. Yes, I will be. Thank you, Crystil. This was good.”
“Likewise,” she said sincerely as she ducked out and headed to the airlock, quietly reflecting as Celeste passed her to grab weapons and supplies.
In the moments of solitude, with the thought of Jordyn rekindled, she thought about him. Truthfully, she thought about him every day, but always just as “him” or “my brother” and rarely as his real name. It made his death seem less real and easier to cope with. Even if she’d seen the loss coming from miles away—Jordyn talked constantly about seeing monsters and hearing voices shouting in his head—Crystil still had trouble facing it, no matter how she spun it to Celeste.
As she thought about it, she wondered if there was anything she had missed. There was no note. But she wasn’t that old when he killed himself, only eighteen, and he only fifteen. If their mother had decided to keep silent on anything, it wouldn’t have been hard to do so. But Crystil’s mother died three years later, leaving Crystil with just Dyson and with no other family. She was now alone.
Well, maybe not quite.
20
With the distance Cyrus had gone and the time he had spent at the graveyard of ashes, he could not make it back to Omega One in one night. He would, once again, have to risk an evening with the monster.
The hunger and thirst pains had begun to kick in severely for Cyrus, whose legs wobbled when they shouldn’t have on his walk back. He could run in spurts, but at the end of those spurts, he needed to lean against a tree to recover the energy needed just to put one foot in front of the other. Visions of rain, lakes, or even just ocean water tormented him. Every animal looked like a delicacy, just waiting to be torn into. Even cold eggs and vegetables seemed like the world’s greatest treasure.
It’s just one more day. I bet I could make it tonight if I tried! Don’t do that. No fighting monsters. Don’t be that stupid.
But as he time went by, he began to think he should try it. Was Omega One really that far? He decided it couldn’t be, and thus, even as the sun disappeared on the horizon and the sky filled with dotted stars, he kept going, close to the edge of the forest.
Suddenly, he heard an awful shriek that sounded like a hungry arachnia, followed by the scooting of numerous legs. He quickly bailed for the closest tree, dropping the skull on the ground, and climbed about fifteen feet with the quickness a man of his dehydration and starvation could only pull off with adrenaline. He could hear the shrieking even up on the branch, but the footsteps came from different directions. The creature’s cries echoed off the trees, making it impossible to pinpoint its exact location.
Cyrus remembered how he had promised Celeste safety, and wished he had something similar—Crystil’s toughness to push him. It was easy to defy orders in a simulation where death just meant hitting the reset button. Outside, Cyrus wanted nothing more than his commander to tell him to shut up and for her to kill the arachnia.
Eventually, the cries settled down, but the point remained. Cyrus knew he needed Crystil when he got back to the ship—provided she gave him that chance.
He slowly crawled down the tree, his eyes constantly bouncing from left to right in search of the arachnia. He quickly grabbed the skull and darted back up the tree. He pressed himself against the trunk and placed the head about three feet in front of his outstretched feet.
“You better be pretty valuable, you know. I just risked my life to save your sorry skull.”
He laughed as the remains faced him, unmoving and without a sound.
“You probably have a lot of great stories, don’t you? The things you’ve seen, the things you’ve heard. What kind of stories do you have?”
Nothing else made a sound. The monster was not present. Cyrus had as close to unadulterated silence as possible at that moment.
“Well, let me tell you my story. I’m Cyrus. I came from a planet called Monda, where I was the son of the emperor. I have a sister, Celeste, who is just… she’s awesome. She’s super cool. She’s the one who gives me my confidence and keeps me in line. She’s pretty much the greatest person I know, if I’m being honest.”
Cyrus paused.
“And I miss her. I don’t think I could go on without her if she were gone forever. But good news! That’s not the case! I’m going to see her soon, so it’ll make things right. Anyways, while on Monda…”
Cyrus rambled for a good five minutes to the skull, telling it his life story, from his childhood to coming to Anatolus.
“So yeah, that’s me. Awesome, I know. You’re talking to the son of an emperor!”
Again, Cyrus laughed.
“What’s your story, Mr. Skull? Do you got one?”
The sound of an aviant flying overhead provided the only sounds before the ensuing silence.
“Oh come on, I know you got one.”
“Ahh, you got me,” the skull “said,” its scratchy, croaking voice added by Cyrus. “I used to be a skull for a giant lupi. And then some big mean monster came and burned me to a crisp! Can you believe that? I was just trying to protect my food!”
“I knew you had a story!” Cyrus said, snapping his fingers. “You’re a shy one.”
“What, me?” the skull “said.” “Nonsense, I just need to know who I can trust! When you’re a skull you have to be careful, si
nce you don’t have a body or muscles to move you around. You get tired of being picked up and tossed around.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Cyrus said, moving forward and lying on his belly. “I know a bit about being pushed around, but it’s not really the pusher’s fault. Well, it is, but it’s my fault for encouraging it.”
“Oh, you, Cyrus? I never would have guessed.”
“Geez, got a nasty tongue, don’t you, Mr. Skull?”
“It’s the teeth. I’m just sharp like that.”
“Oh, hahaha, you’re a funny one, Mr. Skull! Funny guy! What if I pu—”
The sound of a giant crash quieted Cyrus immediately. He braced himself on the branch and looked ahead in horror at the feet of the monster. The feet sported four toes with sharp claws, which had the size to clutch him and anything else he’d seen on the planet. Maybe not Omega One, but that was about it.
Cyrus bit down on his lips and breathed very slowly through his nose. He closed his eyes as the rumbling produced by the monster’s breathing surrounded him. He opened one eye and looked up to see the creature looking down from the top of the trees. Cyrus closed his eyes and buried his head, praying for either a quick death or his luck to continue.
The creature flapped its wings and took off without even a grumble. Cyrus couldn’t believe his luck. The monster had shown up without any warning, growls, roars or tremors. But it had also left the same way, without any threatening sounds. He half expected his mind was playing tricks on him.
It did have the effect of shutting him up and throwing ice on the previous 15 minutes, which, much to his embarrassment, he’d spent talking to a freaking skull. A lifeless, inanimate skull.
He was losing his mind. Whether from stress or physical malnourishment, it didn’t much matter. He slunk down on the bark, closed his eyes, and begged for sleep which he would wake up from, just well-rested enough to continue home.
Kastori Revelations (The Kastori Chronicles Book 1) Page 9