The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  Cirx studies him: cautious restraint. Are these dreams something he would only want to share with his Mir? Cirx grunts and shrugs; he’s been having strange dreams himself. “Who doesn’t.”

  “It’s always some variation of the same: a figure wrapped in a cloak of shadow, the wind blowing lightly through trees. The figure holding something.”

  Cirx hides his surprise. The same dream he’s been having. If he shares this, it will only frighten his Mir before their meeting with the king. He will discuss this later, or not at all. The occult terrifies Garrabrandt, even more so than for most knights who place their trust in cold steel.

  “Sounds like a fiend I’d like to run into.” Cirx forces a grin. “Mayhaps it’s a sign of one’s coming.”

  “Its fingers slowly unfold, and there’s a ball of red fire in its hand. Then I wake.”

  Cirx pats his Mir’s shoulder plate with its raised steel collar. What does it mean if we share a dream? “I’ve dreamt of stranger.”

  The doors to the throne room part and swing open. Knockers rattle lightly.

  Cirx and his Mir enter. Rain hums against the roof and outer walls, a sea breeze and its murmur carrying through open windows.

  King Goldhammer casually walks the length of the grand hall, past towering, lichen-splotched pillars where condensed moisture threads downward in beaded strands. Red carpets flow like rivers of blood through the center of the hall, inlaid with golden triangles. A strange man walks beside the king, sipping from a clear glass bowl filled with brown liquid. Garnish fish swim around a live oyster inside, Staggenmoire’s royal drink of choice for festivities. The unknown man is dressed in cloth with several fitted collars and dangling epaulettes.

  A tall outsider woman follows three steps behind the pair, her straight brown hair shifting in stilted waves above a gown of violet and lace as she paces along. A scent of impatience, of poorly concealed subservience emanates from her. Her blue eyes meet Cirx’s and linger a moment before she slowly glances away.

  A third foreigner is here, a man leaning against a wall as if to convey apathy or calm, but he steeples his fingers and jabs them into the soft flesh under his chin; his hands relax and then his fingertips press together again. He leans forward to observe his diplomat, leans back again, and his eye sockets refill with shadows.

  “Not the same people who traded their advanced weapons and flying ships for the rights to build the space trains and tracks,” Garrabrandt says. “But from the same planet.”

  “What do they want?” Cirx nods as a servant strides by, grabs a drink from the proffered tray, and tips its salted rim to his lips. A live micro eel slides out and curls against the base of his tongue before waves of acrid liquid wash the creature down in a wiggling bolus. He steps closer to his king.

  “We’ll need our men trained to fly such ships and fire such weapons,” King Goldhammer says between sips.

  A hammer of gold is strapped across the king’s back, the weapon of a much younger and fitter man, making his slouching frame appear smaller. He shuffles across the red carpet, continues up the stairs of a dais, and stands before his throne: a glass monstrosity filled with sea water, swimming creatures, algae. An open set of skeletal jaws with rows of pyramid teeth surround the entire height of the throne, ready to swallow it and the king in a single bite.

  The king sets the head of his hammer against the throne—the fish inside dart away—and fingers the razor margins of a single tooth of the surrounding jaws.

  The diplomat speaks to the king in a muted tone, saying something about a red sun that has just started pulsing, that it signals some dark omen and that Staggenmoire’s people would greatly benefit from an alliance now. That this change is Staggenmoire’s opportunity to show their allegiance to the galaxy.

  A beating sun? Cirx imagines it: a ball of fire rioting in the heavens. Seems fiendish, like it’s calling out me. Like something that needs to be slain.

  The woman in violet and lace stops at the base of the dais and says something to her diplomat and the king, something about the beating sun setting catastrophic events in motion. The diplomat motions to her and refers to her as Nyranna.

  “Where’s my Fiend Slayer, Sir Orendain?” Goldhammer says in a booming voice. Only the king calls Cirx by his family name, which always makes Cirx’s stomach twinge as he imagines his deceased father answering instead of himself.

  “Here, my lord.” Cirx steps forward. Although I’ve never slain a true fiend.

  “Ah, you’ve arrived. Our new friends have a mining operation in the Dugnar hills, and some fiend is frightening the workers there. You’ll take your knights and ride within the hour.”

  “Yes, my king.” Cirx drops to a knee on the blood carpet. Staggenmoire was cleared of fiends. This will be a wasted effort, but his duty.

  “They describe a howling, like a pack of sea wolves, but these people remain inland. A mound of bones has been found. Teeth marks the size of swords have gouged out the marrow.”

  Cirx’s heart drums a percussion into his lungs. Could this be true? Was another last fiend hunting men?

  “Try to live up to your father’s name, Sir Cirx Orendain.” A middle-aged woman with long auburn hair and a flowing white gown seems to float past him, up the stairs, to stand beside her king. The queen. “Please return to us if you find this last great fiend. I still await the promise of your father to once again kneel before me.”

  Cirx bows his head.

  His father set out to find another supposed last great fiend several years ago and never returned. No last messages, no trail, no body. The legend of the Fiend Slayer says that when your time comes, you ride away in search of glory for the last great fiend and never return. Did his grandfather do the same?

  Cirx feels expectations throb in the air around him, but the last fiends were slain, the others only tales to scare children.

  King Goldhammer reaches into a chalice on the arm of the throne and pulls out a pearl the size of his head. The jewel shimmers black, veins of jade and teal bleeding through, something like red fire burning in its core. That something flitters around in its depths.

  A pearl has been said to be a tear of the sea, but this is something else. Cirx recalls part of the legend of the Sky Sea Pearl: immortality for its possessor, suffering for his loved ones. And war will be waged between men and gods, and death will fall upon the continent and the Eventide Sea until the pearl is returned to the Sky Sea, where it fell from a thousand years ago, somehow knocked from its eternal abode. It was the wedding stone for the goddess of the Sky Sea, given to her by the god of storms. These gods would no longer aid men as long as humans possessed their divine token of love, but the promise of immortality and the pricelessness made kings mad for it. Goldhammer was alive much longer than Cirx and his father, but there were other kings who came before him. Kings who passed. So did many queens, sons, and daughters. Not immortality, only greed.

  Cirx imagines a beautiful woman with hair of sea water waiting in her abode in the sky, waiting for her lover who will never come. A man built of fury charges through the layer of air between the two seas, dropping bolts of bluish white light in his wake, billowing vapor from his lips, weeping raindrops, unable to locate the one jewel that will allow him to personify love.

  Cirx wheels about and motions for his Mir to follow. If a fiend still remains on Staggenmoire, he will drag it out from under earth or water or fire. He will stand as an equal to the memory of his father, his insecurities abolished.

  He will become the Fiend Slayer.

  Nyranna

  Nyranna scrutinizes a man armored in steel like some ancient upright turtle, a man who calls himself a knight and Fiend Slayer. He strides from the throne room, his cloak of rough-spun indigo wool dragging the floor and leaving a wet slog rectangle in his wake. Another knight follows him, clanking over the murmur of wind and the tapping of raindrops on the outer walls, raindrops the size of fingers; the metallic sound reminds Nyranna of noises coming from the kitchens in her
youth.

  What do these men think of her: privileged, unconnected to nature, too outspoken for a woman? A bitch, like many believe?

  The fireplaces lining the walls of the throne room should be roaring with blazes to dry the air, not empty and black. It is not overly cold on this planet, just sickeningly damp, a moisture that saturates everything with relentless intent: the inside of Nyranna’s ears, her clothed skin, the marrow of her bones.

  This segregated civilization, the scion of highly advanced humans, probably dated back to the crash of a passenger starship, a ship that collided with the Sky Sea long ago. A ship lost to modern records. Over generations, the offspring of those survivors devolved to live as humans had tens of thousands of years ago.

  The Dark Ages is all that comes to Nyranna’s mind. Did they forget about electricity, technology, comfort, or did they choose not to pass that knowledge on to their children, choose to create human suffering?

  What a people.

  Aren’t humans similar to lifeless planets: stubborn and unwilling to change?

  Only the wisest Star Strider, the old seer woman, told her otherwise. The woman once said that every living person, unless locked into some harmonious paradise, must permutate in some way against arising circumstance, even if the sensation is unrealized.

  Nyranna wouldn’t even be here, risking this contact if Iopenia’s sun hadn’t suddenly started beating, distracting the depraved Northrite—the largest and most influential corporation in the galaxy—from these negotiations. What repercussions will her people of Uden receive if the Northrite find out? Sanctions, imprisonment, execution? As a servant, essentially an Uden slave, she has no choice. Unless she can escape it all.

  Nyranna imagines, wishes even, the beating sun exploding, ringing outward like a red supernova, sending out a quasar that somehow lines up with all of the Northrite and Uden planets and colonies and instantly vaporizes them.

  Impossible.

  Her diplomat prods King Goldhammer, questions him about the enormous pearl in his hands. The pearl is an onyx globe under streaks of jade and teal clouds, its molten core dancing about like a glow fly in the night. The murky history of this planet suggests that approximately a thousand years ago, a passenger starship bored through the water of the Sky Sea and knocked the pearl loose from some ancient encasement.

  “What creates the fiery light?” her Uden diplomat asks. Uden, the richest and most powerful single planet in the galaxy, a planet centered within the cluster system—a network of solar systems all within easy reach when traveling at the speed of light, unlike the farther neighboring and outer systems.

  “A minorbi,” King Goldhammer says, his accent thick, difficult to understand. At least these people still speak intragalactic Ridian, although a distorted form of it.

  The king drags his fingers across the shimmering surface of the pearl as if trying to feel its texture, its heat, its worth. “A tiny sea creature is imprisoned inside, one no human has ever seen free in the wild as they only dwell leagues below the sea’s surface or within the Sky Sea.”

  Nyranna conceals a grin of amusement with her hand, as if attempting to stifle a yawn. A creature supposedly survived being entombed when magma and sea combined in a fury of heat and vapor millions of years ago? Even if it’s an actual pearl that formed inside an oyster the size of this chamber … it’d still be hundreds if not thousands of years old.

  Nyranna recalls more from her research into this planet and of the legend of the Sky Sea Pearl, a legend claiming the jewel was a divine gift and could grant immortality to man. But this king appears to be eighty years old. She can almost see algae and lichen growing in the canyons of moist skin on his forehead, his cheeks, his neck. The power of this pearl is as real as fire in Staggenmoire’s skies.

  Her diplomat gazes upon the jewel in unrestrained wonder. He’s supposed to be bargaining for Uden, for Uden’s Royal Father, Medegair—who Nyranna considers one of her two enslavers: the Royal Father of Uden and his High Overseer.

  Medegair wishes to obtain access to mining rights here, to the veins of original elements this planet holds in its crust, in trade for standard modern-day items to make life easier for these barbaric people. Such trade could yield enormous wealth. And Uden does not have the Northrite council’s approval for these negotiations. They need to act swiftly and secretively.

  Nyranna glances to their other comrade, Hullenet: a shifty man in a woolen jacket, trying to blend in, remain unobtrusive, unobserved. He steeples his fingers and jabs them into his lower chin. Something isn’t going well. He’s an Elemiscist like her, able to harness power given off by the decay and energy of the original elements embedded nonuniformly into the web of the galaxy. But he’s a Beguiler, unlike her, sent to influence King Goldhammer’s thoughts and emotions without the king’s notice, for the benefit of Uden and their Royal Father.

  “Can I touch it?” Her diplomat’s eyes almost swirl in hypnotic desire.

  Words echo in her head only: a Whisper, an Elemiscist communication that arrives instantaneously, unhindered by the vast distances of space where even communications sent at lightspeed could take hours or days to arrive in the cluster and tens of thousands of years to cross the entire galaxy. The sender’s voice is different; it’s not her overseer on Uden as typical.

  Her brain becomes a galaxy, her neurons systems and planets, flashing like glow flies, flaring matches of recognition, of Whisperer contacts, of Striding locations. This message comes from someone she’s never heard before. A new spark.

  Nyranna of Uden, Stride to Grendermane at once per order of the Grand Patriarch. We have treated with your Royal Father. Medegair has accepted. I will be your contact.

  A moment later, the stumbling voice of her overseer confirms her orders in another Whisper: Nyranna, the recent Whisper you received is genuine. The Northrite request your assistance, and Medegair’s granted you leave to represent Uden.

  Nyranna reaches for her diplomat’s arm. “Hagair, I’m summoned. We must go.”

  Hagair’s eyes regain focus, a scowl digging into his chin and cheeks. “It’s not time.”

  “This can’t wait.”

  Hagair lets a breath slip past taut lips, a hiss of displeasure. “Okay, Stride us away.”

  Goldhammer grabs one of Hagair’s collars and holds it in a grip of stone. “You must stay for the evening meal. Evenfall on the Eventide Sea is as beautiful as the most exquisite woman you’ve ever seen. And we’ve an important matter still to discuss.”

  Hagair’s lips curl inward as his jaw and posture stiffens. He motions to Hullenet. “We can take the sky train to the station, a ship from there. Nyranna, you may leave. Hullenet will stay with me.”

  Their comrade in the wool coat lowers his steepled fingers and nods.

  Nyranna rushes from the throne room, down a flight of stairs, through a hall, searching for no location in particular. Only privacy. She passes the two knights who are conversing at the end of a hallway, conversing with several other men wearing silver foil garb, appearing like costumed children.

  Nyranna hurries off into a deserted room and withdraws a hidden Star Map—a folded parchment—from her bodice. Lifelike holograms, a three-dimensional miniature of the galaxy, arise in colored lights as she unfolds it. She flicks and tugs on certain systems. Planets expand, zoom up, race away.

  She wishes she could find the secret of the ancient Elemiscist Striders, those who did not have to carry Star Maps to Stride but used some other method lost to history.

  A miniature of the planet of Grendermane, with its raging storms and fires in the sky, rotates on its axis before her. She wonders where she will appear.

  As a Strider, Nyranna can travel to any planet represented on her Star Map, travel light years in a few beats of a human heart, but only to open landmasses in a vicinity, not into specific buildings, and she cannot jump around on the same planet.

  Nyranna indicates Grendermane, feels the elements around her, feels them concentrate in her bloo
d, her bones. Energy flows with a strength like rivers here. She motions, and droplets of golden liquid appear on the air as if on the surface of an invisible mirror. The droplets flow against gravity, creeping upward. A golden fox apparition, the image of her soul and power, appears at her side and walks for the surface. She settles her hand on its neck, the touch not soft but tingling, full of energy, a walking mass of electrons, of emotion, of her inner self.

  Just as Nyranna steps into the rolling liquid on the mirror-like surface, she glances back. One of the men encased in foil stands at the archway, his hand on his sword hilt, his eyes reeking of fear or wonder. The man they call the Fiend Slayer.

  Nyranna disappears.

  ***

  Nyranna steps onto a landmass of Grendermane, outside a sprawling city.

  Cyclones shriek in the distance, and bolts of blue lightning strike vats of gas hovering in the sky, igniting floating blazes. Gales tug at and ripple her gown with ghostly hands. The air feels thin and faint, a whiff of oxygen for the lungs.

  What a planet. Who’d choose to rule the galaxy from this place?

  So much different than beautiful Uden, a planet known for regions of old-growth forests nearly half as old as the planet itself. Trees with lemon-yellow branches and trunks, trunks the width of buildings that grow to the height of mountains. Trees so massive that when they fall, they create earthquakes. Blue leaves that release miniscule oil droplets to repel insects. These droplets swarm the atmosphere of Uden, creating a violet haze that is transparent but gives the very air between people beauty.

  Nyranna’s golden fox is gone, as are the droplets and the mirror in the air.

  She hunts down a pinpoint of light in the galaxy of her mind, the specific Northrite Whisperer who contacted her earlier. Once a Whisper was sent, the sender’s point of contact is forever implanted in the receiver’s mind.

  I, Nyranna of Uden, have arrived on Grendermane. It appears that I’m near—

  Good, the voice replies. The Northrite can see you now. You’re not far. Stay where you are. I’ll send an envoy in a flasher shuttle to bring you to the capital city and the palace.