The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  “Recruit!” a strong female voice carries over the keening wind. A woman marches before the new recruits with impeccable posture but is speaking to Jaycken. She’s a gaunt woman: short brown hair, wind burnt face, wrinkles.

  “Officer Teschner.” Jaycken salutes.

  “Frontiersman, Officer Teschner,” she corrects him. “Jaycken Leonbaron, you’ve returned with the supplies? And with another potential recruit?”

  “This is my brother, Kiesen,” Jaycken says.

  “Do you believe that your family affiliation will get him into our ranks? We don’t work that way, Recruit. No matter how rich your family is.”

  Kiesen stiffens.

  “No,” Jaycken says. “I only wanted my family to visit. I don’t even—”

  “Well, these are strange times,” Teschner says, pursing her thin lips, “and we need all those who show potential. He may stay with you, but you’re responsible for his training and to the assignment of his duties. His actions, whether positive or negative, will reflect on you, Recruit.”

  Oh, fuck. “Yes, ma’am, but he’s not staying. Have you heard or seen of a recent visitor, a businessman named Ost Leonbaron?”

  Teschner shakes her head and turns to the other recruits.

  “We better hurry and find Dad.” Jaycken shoves Kiesen, and Kiesen scowls back. Little bastard. He’s not going to stay here.

  Jaycken leads them through an archway and down the switchback trail system along the cliffs.

  They pass a leaning tower, where Jaycken prefers to study alone, its cracked old doors open. The inner round chamber is empty, save for clumps of dirt and dust and shadow.

  Quar is ahead of them again, almost gliding across the creaking ropes of a cable bridge that dangles between segments of trail.

  “Watch your foot placement here.” Jaycken shuffles onto the bridge, the planks of wood alive with the wind beneath his feet. His hands are vices, sliding along the cable handrail.

  Kiesen takes a deep breath and follows, shaking.

  Maybe I’ll get lucky and fall through the clouds all the way into a mercury river and get pulled under and die twice. Then I won’t have to worry about Kiesen anymore.

  Jaycken eases off the bridge and takes Kiesen’s hand, Kiesen’s palm lacquered with sweat. Kiesen teeters as if he’s going to pass out. His face flushes a shade of green. Jaycken stabilizes him by squeezing his hand and a shoulder until he’s on solid ground.

  An enormous cylinder of brass or tarnished gold projects from a crack in the rock cliffside ahead, extending like a tower, as tall as the cliffs, into the clouds.

  “That’s the largest telescope in the galaxy,” Jaycken says. “Meant to watch the dead zone beyond our borders and keep tabs on everything. We make sure no outside beings are out there reconnoitering our galaxy without our knowledge.” Which has never happened.

  They enter a cavern below the telescope and wind through tunnels before emerging into a room aglow with monitors and overhead lighting. It’s warm and quiet. Antigravity chairs suspend two dozen men in slate gray and blue suits as they make hand motions at whatever they are seeing on the virtual screens of their v-rims.

  Ost isn’t in sight: not gathered at a conference table discussing the implications of this beating sun, not conversing with a Frontiersmen officer, nowhere.

  “Hey, Jaycken!” A man in his thirties approaches, his long, pale hair swinging. Bruan. He arrived in Jaycken’s batch of newer recruits. “We’re so glad you made it back so quickly. I thought if anyone could help our group figure out this beating sun phenomenon, it’d be you. You can solve this and help us all become full Frontiersmen.”

  “Keep your voice down.” A mousy-looking female recruit with shoulder-length brown hair nudges Bruan with an elbow. Nadiri, another of Jaycken’s peers.

  Nadiri points to the far wall and motions to her v-rim. “You have to see this.”

  A screen the size of cruiser ship is embedded into the rock. A dot of light blinks in the center, and an image springs to life.

  Stars emerge across the screen: rivers of light in whites, yellows, and reds, backgrounded by darkness, the most vivid and contrasting image of space Jaycken’s ever seen. The image swivels and zooms in. A yellow dwarf star is centered and magnified to the size of Kiesen.

  “That’s what the sun of the planets of Iopenia and Pseidoblane looked like when you left,” Bruan says more quietly as Frontiersmen work around them.

  Over a lapse of seconds, the yellow sun darkens and turns red. Then the sun ejects curls of red mist—solar flares—and the mass starts to contract, to expand. To pulse.

  Jaycken cannot look away. What could cause such a change?

  “There’s something else, too.” Nadiri motions.

  The field of view on the monitor shifts, focusing on a distant sea of stars, zooming in on a dot, which becomes a system. Then closer. Galaxies beyond the dead zone are distant spirals of color: yellows, purples, oranges. Something blacks them out.

  “Something’s moving out there,” Nadiri says. “Something we can’t quite make out even with gold cannon here.”

  “What is it?” Kiesen’s dark eyes turn to pools of curiosity.

  “She just told you, we don’t know.” Bruan studies Kiesen for the first time. “You think you’re going to join the military of the mind, the Frontiersmen?”

  “Easy.” Jaycken places a palm against Bruan’s chest. “This is my brother, Kiesen. He’s brand new, so cut him some slack. If anyone tries to mess with him, they will have to go through me first.”

  Nadiri elbows Bruan in the ribs, and he grunts.

  “Your brother?” Bruan steps away from Nadiri. “I had no idea. Sorry, little Jaycken.”

  Kiesen shrugs.

  “With all the fear this event has incited across the galaxy,” Nadiri says, “Bruan’s trying to protect his seniority from the soon-to-be arriving masses of new recruits. We’re all working without much sleep, trying to show the galaxy we’re here to help and can help even with this unprecedented situation.”

  “I’ve been reading up,” Kiesen mutters under his breath. “The Frontiersmen have been researching the elements for as long as they’ve been around and haven’t learned anything new in centuries. They’re unable to pull any more energy from the elements or to control them any better than an Elemiscist a hundred years ago.”

  Bruan’s face flushes a shade of crimson. “Why are you here then, little Jaycken?”

  “I figure I can’t do any worse,” Kiesen replies. “If I accomplish nothing, I’ll fit right in, little Recruit.”

  Bruan’s upper lip wrinkles with anger.

  Nadiri clears her throat and points back to the screen. “Look at that darkness. It’s like a void in space.”

  The blackness swims across the monitor, seen only because the distant galaxies become obscured.

  Cold lances up Jaycken’s spine like electric currents, jolting his brain. “I’ll catch up with you guys in a bit. We have to find someone first. C’mon, Kiesen.”

  Jaycken turns back to the winding tunnels and steps into dim lighting.

  A hunched figure stands before him, almost touching him, supporting a sunken face.

  Jaycken’s stomach sucks downward, pulling at his throat as he lurches back.

  A woman with hair streaked in white and gray hobbles into the light of the chamber, smirking. She wears a gray and blue suit and falls into a violent fit of coughing. Officer Lyveen. She looks eighty and has frightened Jaycken every time he’s seen her. Because she’s only forty-one years old.

  A young female Elemiscist in gray and blue glass robes assists the old, or old-appearing middle-aged woman, by taking her arm and guiding her past Jaycken.

  “Officer Lyveen.” Jaycken nods. “Elemiscist Osivia.”

  Jaycken looks for Kiesen. He has wandered off and is looking at monitors, at Frontiersmen, bored already.

  Kiesen and I must have some benefit. The Frontiersmen must see us as walking piles of marcs, probably
why they keep me around even though I have minimal control of the elements. Why they will probably keep Kiesen around.

  Lyveen speaks to the Elemiscist at her arm in a haggard voice between bouts of coughing that sound like a tide stirring shells in her lungs. “We had units hunting for new sources of the elements, but now, with that blackness and the beating sun, our objectives are changing quickly.” She coughs and takes a drink from an antigravity bottle. “We’ll send a team to investigate the system in question.”

  Jaycken marches over to Kiesen and taps him on the shoulder. “It’s time to go.”

  Kiesen nods and turns. He shivers as he sees Lyveen. “Look at that broken old crone. How is she still walking? And who’s the woman beside her, she looks nice.”

  Lyveen looks over as if she heard, the trenches of wrinkles running across her face twisting into a strain.

  “Kiesen, now.” Jaycken grabs him by the arm and marches him to the exit as he smiles politely at Officer Lyveen.

  “Did you bring the updated equipment for gold cannon on your race back here?” Lyveen asks Jaycken, stopping him dead. She coughs.

  Jaycken glances back, having forgotten for a few minutes. The antigravity crate is still following behind him. “Yes. It’s all in there.”

  Lyveen motions to a Frontiersman, who claims the crate and hauls it away.

  Jaycken marches Kiesen out into the tunnels, his grip firm on Kiesen’s arm.

  “Okay, okay,” Kiesen says. “I didn’t think that old witch could hear me.”

  “She’s younger than Dad.”

  “What? She looks like she’s on the wrong side of a century.”

  Jaycken turns and takes Kiesen by both arms. “That’s why I don’t want you here. You don’t understand. Everyone who continues on with the Frontiersmen and uses the energy released by the elements will die. Not from natural causes.”

  “It makes them old?”

  Jaycken focuses and calms himself. “Basically, energy is released by the atoms of the elements when their electrons jump orbits or when protons are ejected, creating x-rays and gamma rays. The energy can be harnessed by minds with the ability to recognize and manipulate it. Elemiscists and Frontiersmen. But the radiation and oxidative damages act like an infesting disease in the human body.”

  In the dark, Kiesen appears to nod.

  Jaycken continues, “Damage from harnessing this power often takes hold in the disc spaces between the vertebrae, eating away at the margins of the bones. That’s why many Elemiscists and Frontiersmen end up walking like Lyveen. For those proficient with the elements, the damage outweighs their bodily strength. Fortunately for recruits, we’re like the street magicians in the city, who barely affect the elements. We won’t be able to see any effects for years, but damage still occurs. Only the most adept of all Elemiscists can use their abilities to limit their deterioration.”

  Kiesen is silent for a full minute.

  If that doesn’t scare him off, I’ll drag him away. “Let’s go. Dad’s here somewhere, and we have to deliver this.” Jaycken holds up the package.

  Jaycken leads Kiesen down winding trails along the cliffs, across a shale plateau, the largest outdoor gathering area at the station as it extends into the side of the mountain, partially under a massive granite overhang.

  “Who’s that?” Kiesen points to a statue of a bearded man in the center of the plateau, a statue five times the size of a normal man.

  “Iriad, the first and only Sentinel of the Frontiersmen. The founder of the military of the mind. He could control the powers of all six of the original elements. One of only three Phantoms in all of history.”

  A hilt of black metal, like an ancient sword, is encased in the statue’s grip. The weapon of a Paladin Elemiscist.

  A tingle of excitement rides out over Jaycken’s skin. This place isn’t what he ever imagined his life would be like. It’s not work, is not traveling for sales. Maybe Kiesen feels the same way about seeing it all.

  “New recruits sometimes climb to his hand and try to see if they can summon a weapon of the elements from the hilt,” Jaycken says.

  “Have you tried?”

  Jaycken shakes his head.

  Kiesen sprints over and uses holds fashioned into the back of the statue to climb. In a minute he reaches out and touches the pommel of the massive hilt. He closes his eyes and grunts.

  Nothing happens.

  “You try it.” Kiesen descends.

  “I want to find Dad before he leaves.”

  “I’m not leaving until you try. It took me a whole minute. If Dad can’t wait that long, he doesn’t care to see us anyway.”

  Jaycken groans but scampers up the back of the statue. His throat seems to suck his skittering heart upward.

  A Paladin. What dreams are made of.

  Jaycken reaches out and grasps the hilt. A shiver runs across his skin, and he imagines a blade of black shadow emerging from the other end. He wills the weapon into existence, can see it growing in his mind.

  The hilt remains cold and still, the air before it lifeless and empty.

  Jaycken’s heart plummets back down into his chest.

  Kiesen shrugs. “Who used to stand there?”

  An empty plinth rises across from the statue.

  “No statue.” Jaycken climbs down. “It supposedly held the original cache of the elements Iriad brought to the station, something resembling a giant black boulder. It’s long been used up though and has yet to be replaced.”

  Jaycken leads Kiesen away from the plateau and stops outside a tower with Frontiersmen stationed on either side of a doorway.

  “I have a package for Officer Ethanial.” Jaycken sends his identification over via his v-rim. “And I’m looking for Ost Leonbaron.”

  “You may enter,” a guard says and opens an old wooden doorway that creaks on its hinges like something Jaycken imagines was used five millennia ago.

  Inside, the temperature is comfortable, controlled by heat shielding as most buildings here. Modern lighting and antigravity chairs and desks clash with the ancient stone walls.

  A man in a gray and blue suit clears his throat. His white hair is combed hard to the side, his sideburns and mustache as black as empty space, his countenance rugged. He grins amiably. “Recruit Jaycken.”

  “Officer Ethanial.” Jaycken salutes him. “Is my dad, Ost, here?”

  Ethanial shakes his head. “Sadly, no. He had to Stride off a few hours ago, already far behind on his schedule. I’m glad he visited though. It’s always a joy to see a good friend and such a kind and successful man.”

  Dad’s not here? Again. Did Ost really hope that he and Kiesen would make it in time to see him?

  Kiesen huffs in disappointment. “That settles it. I’m staying now. Not going back to waiting on him forever.”

  “We’d be happy to enlist someone of your station, Kiesen,” Ethanial says. “Only people who show some ability to affect the original elements are offered positions with us, even if that ability is minimal. We need people like you right now. The Frontiersmen and the galaxy need you.”

  Oh, no, don’t play to his ego or his sense of wonder.

  “I can control some of the elements?” Kiesen asks.

  “The ability often runs in families, but it takes a lot of dedication and determination to be able to do anything useful with it.” Ethanial tugs off a blue glove with gray fingers and holds up the back of his hand. His fingernails are black at the base, tendrils stretching toward the tips like paint. He bares his teeth; his gums are lined with black, and a touch of the darkness stains the whites of his eyes. “You must know the hazards, however. Our commitment to learning and advancing the galaxy comes before personal needs. This place’s not meant for most.”

  Kiesen is silent.

  Ethanial lowers his head, catching his chin between thumb and finger, pursing his lips as if in pain. “I will look out for you two. As will Slyth. The sons of my friend are not typical recruits. Jaycken, will you show your brother
how we operate?”

  Jaycken’s head falls into a stiff, reluctant nod. He absently places the package on a floating desk between them.

  Ethanial studies the wrapping for a moment, then studies Jaycken.

  Does he know that I peeked inside?

  Ethanial places the package into a safe without opening it as Jaycken exits with Kiesen, imagining Ost being Strode away to meet Jasmonae and Jennily, to oversee the rest of the shipping at the port city before being whisked away somewhere else.

  Doesn’t their dad care to see what work Jaycken and now Kiesen are doing? What they are sacrificing to help the galaxy? Ost would be proud of them if he took a moment to look.

  Rynn

  Rynn dreams.

  She walks on stars, hopping from each point of light across the galaxy as easily and as quickly as she would walk a cobbled street. Step, jump, land.

  In her most vivid dreams, Rynn feels as if her soul parts with her body and travels to a different world, a make-believe world. In this world she’s a wraith, a spirit.

  Step, jump, land.

  The gentle fingers of a breeze stroke her hair.

  Something looms up from the darkness, from the black of space before her: camouflaged, immense, growing. It fills the void, a bit darker than empty space, eclipsing all the points of light beyond.

  Rynn grows cold and trembles, one foot balancing on a star, the other on a moon.

  The form before her rotates, a cape of darkness twirling aside as a figure draped in shadow emerges. It extends a hand large enough to hold ten of her, its ropey fingers curled around something.

  A biting chill avalanches down her spine and across her ribs, a mountain of fear pressing against her lungs.

  The creature of shadow? In apparition form as her dad said? In her dream?

  Rynn leaps back, lands on a moon, and sprints away along a path of stars.

  The wind pursues her.

  The enormous shadow rises before her again.

  More of a feeling than a sound echoes inside Rynn’s skull rather than through the emptiness of space. She cannot run. And she must see it, whatever it is the creature holds. Someone is commanding the creature to show her.