The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  “We’ll work with the Frontiersmen, assemble a party and investigate that sun. Your task is to track the poacher’s employers or buyers. I assume that cause still drives you?”

  Seeva kicks a trunk of coral, her anger twisting in her gut like a knife. She reaches out, as if to stroke Ori’s feathers. “I desire nothing more.”

  “Yet you have no likely suspects, and the trail grows cold. Tell me, who desires these spines?”

  Seeva shrugs. “Hermadore spines are beautiful in an eerie sense, but who knows what disgusting humans do with resources they don’t understand and consider mystical.”

  “She brought a hermadore back with her, my lady,” a soldier in silver garb says, a pulser strapped to his back. Yeadon. He glowers at Seeva. He hates her, maybe for her temperament, abilities, rejection of his advances, or for her confidence. “That’s why she stopped here before pursuing the poacher.”

  “She would’ve died out there alone.” Seeva lifts a closed fist and extends her pinky in an insulting gesture indicating the size of his manhood. “Quintanilla and Precht can help care for it until I return.”

  “You shouldn’t attempt to save nature from itself,” Timberlace admonishes her. “From us, from man, yes, but not from itself.”

  Fuck that. A lone infant hermadore was the product of man, not nature.

  If nature did that to its children, I would fucking save nature from itself.

  Seeva needs to get out of here and find the buyer of those spines, the source behind the massacre, definitely more significant than a single poacher in need of wages.

  “I said the trajectory didn’t lead to any other planets of interest,” Seeva says, “but the Majestic Space Pearl is passing through. I’ll start there.”

  Timberlace nods slowly. “If the spines were taken there, that supposed Supreme Emperor, as he calls himself, would know about it. He has very bizarre tastes.”

  The air stills, a charged silence building in the floating particles around them, arms of coral eclipsing the sky, the soil, the horizon.

  Seeva struggles to breathe.

  Yes, if only I could forget.

  Rynn

  Rynn raises a hand to her face and feels the scarred closure of her right eyelid. She sees only half her world now.

  Weeks have passed since the night Rynn’s dad came to her room. He took one of her eyes that night. She still has no idea why and could not comprehend her situation for days, still does not understand it or her father. It took weeks to recover physically.

  Now with the pain of her missing eye gone, all Rynn feels is hunger. She hasn’t eaten more than a meal a day for the past week, and there’s nothing but a few sealed packages of instant meals in the bunker.

  Her dad lives slumped, nearly comatose in his chair in the living area, afraid to open the outer door, afraid of the outside world.

  Almost everything Rynn fears is still inside.

  She has to leave her dad, if she can manage, if the part of her heart that already died that night was the smaller fragment of her soul riven in two.

  Run to the nearest town. Or the to the city.

  Rynn lies on her bed, scanning her room, and sees monsters everywhere: fangs and eyes within the shadows created by an open door, movement in the corner of her closet, shapes crawling out from under her bed, creatures made of shadow coming for her. The bear on the wall has eyes that move, that watch her.

  She’s six years old again, afraid of the dark.

  This flood of loneliness and fear, of uncertainty and bemusement will never escape her emotionally oriented eidetic memory.

  What could have made such a loving, kind father irreparably harm his own daughter, a daughter he once loved beyond his own life? Who is the man in the other room? What drove him to drink so heavily that he hurt her? Disfigured her.

  Rynn slides from her bed, grumbling pains of hunger rolling through her belly, and stuffs a pack with clothes, water bottles, and toiletries. She creeps out into the living area, to the cabinets of rusted metal, and fills her pack with the remaining sealed meals. She stops, instead leaves one container for him, along with the few bottles of alcohol.

  Rynn pauses and stares at the person who was once her loving dad. She pulls the white boreal owl feather he gave her from her pack and lets it float down, drifting back and forth, back and forth before settling gently onto his lap.

  “We’re no longer connected, haven’t been connected even in the same house these past weeks.” Rynn kneels at his feet as if her real dad is dead. She mourns and acknowledges his passing. “Have we ever spent a single night apart?”

  A rubber hose lies on the floor, coiled into a noose.

  A sharp intake of air surges through her dry mouth.

  He’s contemplating a quicker suicide.

  Her dad rocks forward on his chair, snatches her wrist, and holds her fast.

  Rynn screams and pulls away, but her dad’s grip holds.

  He stands, teetering, swaying over her like an ancient cedar, his breath as rank as rotting wood.

  “You cannot leave me.” Her dad runs a fingertip across her scarred eye socket. “We’ve never been apart, will never be as long as we still think of each other.”

  He extends a hand, uncurling his fingers one by one, and forces what he’s holding into her trembling palm: a leather eyepatch as red as her hair, a centered gemstone, the jewel as glacial blue as her iris used to be, and of similar size. Then he removes something like thread from around his neck, the necklace he wove from the emertel needle. He lays its lavender ring over her head. It settles gently onto her neck and shoulders and molds to her shape.

  “Find her, Stareyes. Save her. Do what I couldn’t.”

  Rynn pulls away, clambers backward to the exit, knocks over his telescope with a crash and a clatter, and hits the release, the hissing of compressed air and the outside light not coming fast enough. She scrambles out and crashes into a bush, tearing at its branches before sprinting away.

  Stareyes? I’m only Stareye now. Did he hurt someone else, too?

  ***

  Rynn stumbles over a downed log armored in ice, the murmur of flowing water ahead. The forest around her is crystal: pine needles now blades of jade ice, the streambank ahead an overhanging ridge of diamond, icicle spears dangle from the eaves.

  How much farther is the town, the one her father took her to every year when she was younger?

  Rynn ran and hiked for a couple of days. Then she slugged along, which gave way to wandering. Now her food and water are gone.

  Frozen branches grasp at Rynn’s feet. She falls to a knee and smacks into the ice with a dull thud. The water ahead seems to smoke, spewing swirling vapor into the frigid air.

  After crawling to the water, Rynn drinks, sees a black minnow swimming against the current in a shallow pool, and scoops it out with cupped hands. The water’s so cold, she’s so cold. It’s a tadpole. It beats its tiny tail against her frosted palm. She lifts it between thumb and index finger, swallows it whole, and digs for roots in the hard mud—concealed by the overhanging ice—with a rock, as her dad taught her.

  After a few minutes, she crunches into an orange tuber the size of her little finger and lies down, too tired to stand. She imagines herself a child lying with her dad, holding hands at a campsite as they gaze up at the stars. She was the glowing ember of his life, the center of everything he was. Every word she spoke he listened to, genuinely wanted to hear.

  Are you still there, Dad?

  Had that kind, caring man been buried by another, stronger personality? Had he gone through with his plans of suicide?

  Rynn will try to find the “her” her dad referred to just before she ran away, and Rynn will attempt to help that woman in any way she can. Her mom? Maybe her mom left them because her dad did something unspeakable to her. Rynn only knows her mom’s face from pictures, similar to her own but harsher in some way. More serious, sterner. Maybe she lives in the city.

  Rynn’s eyelid feels heavy, a sheet
of snow slipping down a window. Her eye is gritty and dry. So tired.

  Her breathing slows. Her eyelid grinds shut.

  Sometime later, Rynn is awakened. Her limbs are cold and wet, her fingers and toes numb or missing. All the world around her is lost in fog.

  She’s moving, sliding along on a sled of wood. The white of snow and brown of jutting branches whisk by.

  Rynn tries to scream, to sit up, but is so tired, and leather straps bind her to the sled. She manages only to groan, fearing that Forgeron, the shadowless creature, has caught her.

  Or her dad.

  “Don’t fret,” a male voice says from beyond the sled, his back a pile of furs. “I’ll get you warmed up, washed up, and fed. Then we’ll find your family.”

  Tree branches laden with snow skim by overhead, then open sky.

  An hour later, the man stops, unstraps her, and carries her into a wood cabin. He lays her before a roaring fire. Animal heads are mounted on the walls and seem to stare at Rynn, seem to watch her when she’s not looking. Footsteps pound in quick succession in other rooms, then stop.

  Rynn’s nerves siphon all the moisture from her tongue and throat and release it onto her palms.

  Who are these people, and what do they want with me?

  She’s had little contact with strangers and was warned to avoid them all, to never engage them in conversation.

  Her abductor removes pots of steaming water from over the fire.

  Lumbering footsteps approach. A woman as wide across the hips as she is tall leans over Rynn, proffers a bowl of brown liquid and a hunk of dark bread.

  Rynn shies away, pulling her now burning fingers and toes up to her body. Blood is returning to her extremities, and it feels like fire.

  “It’s okay, just tryin’ to help,” the woman says and laughs before lifting the bowl to her own lips and drinking a bit. She wipes brown liquid from the hairs of her upper lip with the back of a hand. “It’ll warm you up. Name’s Gritchon. My partner, Nelm, found you.”

  Rynn sits up. Maybe she should eat, regain some strength and get warm. Then she can sneak away before they do something to her or force her to return to her dad’s bunker.

  “My hands aren’t working.” Rynn holds them out. They are white as snow, thick, puffy, and barely bend at her command.

  “I’ll feed you, then, dear.” Gritchon dunks a spoon into the soup, guides it into Rynn’s open mouth, and manages to dump most of it inside, but hot threads of liquid roll down her chin. “What happened to your eye?”

  Rynn swallows, thinking. She stumbles over words, some story her dad once told her. “Had a worm … one that migrates from your intestine into the back of your eyes.”

  The woman appears stupefied, horrified. Maybe that was too much. Maybe she should have gone with a tumor, or better yet, an alternate trauma.

  “Take some wine.” Nelm reappears at a doorway with a clay cup. He’s as hairy as a cave gorilla in winter: bushels of black and gray cover every bit of his exposed face and head except for his eyes and a hint of adjacent cheek. “You look a bit young for drink, but we’ll make an exception.”

  Nelm kneels beside her, sips the wine first, then holds it out over her head. Rynn tilts her chin back. He pours a bit into her mouth, but some streams over her cheek. It burns her tongue, acid on flesh. She coughs it up, sputtering and hacking for nearly a minute.

  “Too strong,” Nelm says. “We can wait till after a hot bath. Come.” His hands are bare now, his sleeves rolled up, hair sprouting in copses from each knuckle as he motions for her to stand.

  Rynn finds the cabin’s exit with her good eye and tries to stand, but her feet and knees shake. She cannot rise. Nelm braces her under her arms and guides her through a hall into a back room where a metal tub sits, whirling mist rising from the water inside like clouds.

  “I’ll help you,” Gritchon says. “Nelm, go.”

  Nelm retreats from sight. Gritchon helps Rynn undress and slide into the swirling heat. It scalds her skin like hot oil, reigniting the pain in her fingers and toes. Rynn whimpers.

  “You’ll get used to it in a moment.” Gritchon turns and leaves.

  Rynn leans her head back against the edge of the tub. Her one eyelid grows heavy again and closes.

  Rynn hears voices and wakes. The water around her is tepid, her skin puckered and full of goose pimples.

  “Probably abused.” Gritchon’s raspy voice carries in from beyond the doorway. “Old enough to run away, too young to survive on her own.”

  Nelm’s throaty tone answers. “We need to wake her, or she’ll end up just as cold as when she came in.”

  “Let her rest.”

  A pair of plodding footsteps recede, and Rynn drifts off again.

  Then she wakes.

  Someone is in the room with her, reaching out for her with both hands.

  Rynn screams and lurches. A mirror-like area appears in the air before her, vermillion water droplets running up its surface like rising rain.

  Nelm leaps away and hits the far wall with a crash.

  Rynn’s fingernails flash black. A moment later, the intangible mirror and rising droplets dissipate like steam.

  Nelm grunts in pain. Gritchon stands in the doorway, glancing from Nelm to Rynn, tiny pig eyes bulging as much as they can from beneath a mound of cheeks.

  “She just made some kind of—” Nelm is cut off by a swift kick to his side from Gritchon.

  Blood surges through the dark corridors of Rynn’s limbs.

  What just happened? A mirror with droplets of water in the air? It must have been carried over from a dream, from waking too abruptly.

  “Everything is fine, dear.” Gritchon smiles at Rynn and seems to inspect her neck, as if expecting something to be there, some mark or deformity.

  Rynn sinks deeper into the cover of water; ripples wash over her lips.

  Gritchon helps Nelm to his feet.

  Bubbles gurgle while Rynn waits.

  “Take your time, dear, just don’t get too cold,” Gritchon says and exits with Nelm.

  A few minutes later, muffled voices carry through the walls. Then a few moments of silence follow, and the voices return.

  A comm? They are probably getting someone’s opinion about what to do with her.

  Cirx

  Cirx and his knights ride for the castle, for home.

  They found no glory on their quest for the last fiend. Nothing of interest was discovered after riding about the hills for days. No more roars. No teeth. No tracks.

  Cirx trots Kallstrom along a soggy road, the gravel footing long buried by mud or washed away.

  The jouncing of a score of knights follow, heads sagging like their damp hair and banners. They are hungry, wet, and tired. Tired of everything being soaked: their food, cloaks, undergarments. The cold face of the day barely peeks through the Sky Sea.

  Cirx feels a small sense of accomplishment. Not one he can show his son, but in the deeds he and his men performed. They helped some miners overcome their unsubstantiated fears and saved a couple of harmless beasts. He will use that as a lesson for Enix, the type of man everyone should be. Restraint in the face of temptation and glory.

  Kallstrom strides onto the Eventide Sea, the shallows, leaps over the breakers, and out onto the swells. Cirx’s knights and their destriers follow with a squelching of hoofbeats.

  Half an hour later, rumbling rolls over the waves of the Eventide. Rumbles like thunder but deeper and more continuous.

  Kallstrom trots on, his ears flicking back and forth, his nostrils starting to flare. His eyes widening.

  Cirx feels it in the air, pulsating, like waves of water against his face and hair. Too unnatural for wind. Waves where no waves should roam. Pressure of some kind.

  A chill creeps in cold fingers across his wet scalp.

  Something’s happening to the castle.

  Cirx shouts and spurs Kallstrom on.

  His knights follow, and hooves churn up a spray of sea foam.

&nb
sp; A darkness appears in the sky ahead, around the castle.

  Usually there are only banners of fog.

  But the fog has been blown away, replaced with black clouds. No, not clouds—columns of oily smoke stain the turquoise sky, melting into the sea above.

  Flashes of light dance along the horizon. Massive stones from the castle drop over the cliffs, creating sea geysers as they land. The walls of the castle are already gone.

  The sensation of a weight the size of Kallstrom falls through Cirx’s chest and lands in his guts.

  Three flying ships sail overhead in phalanx formation, just under the Sky Sea, roaring like dragons. Their outer metal is blood red, their shape as if two crescent moons are locked together at the thickness of their backs. The front and rear wings are thin, sharp extremities. Porpoise-shaped objects fall from their undersides and disappear in flashes of white light when they strike the remaining sections of the castle.

  Roaring blasts of wind follow, ringing Cirx’s ears, pulling his hair back by its roots.

  Kallstrom rears in fear. Cirx buries his spurs into tense flanks. They race over the sea, leaping waves.

  Kitasha, Erin, Enix! Get out of there!

  Cirx can feel the Horseman, Death itself, there waiting far above the Eventide, before the castle’s portcullis, his black cloak snapping in the ocean gale, atop his red-eyed horse. Reminiscing with the cragcats. Gathering souls like sheaves of grain.

  The attacking ships roar in for another pass, target the area above the cliffs where Staggenmoire’s new collection of flying ships sits idle. More porpoises fall and explode.

  The red ships blur, then fade as they pass through the Sky Sea and disappear.

  ***

  From scattered lunge whips comes a pop pop pop as the survivors of Staggenmoire’s castle, the men in the tunnels mostly, and Cirx and his knights drive their horses on, pulling stones the size of small houses away from the rubble atop the plateau of plunging cliffs. Men and women carry smaller stones off to create unstable piles of wreckage impaled with splintered timbers: barrows for the dead. Ash falls like hot, black snow.