The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  Jaycken, Kiesen, and Nadiri slide down over tumbling dirt and shale to join the team.

  “The elements are not gods,” Teschner says. “They are nothing more than parent compounds.”

  “Compounds that initiated the big bang, the universe itself,” Osivia says with wonder, her glass robes whipping in a wind ridden by specters of smoke, her mask rolling with beads of moisture. She sticks a gloved hand into the wall of mist. “The commencement of what you consider time and distance. The six fragments of God only permit Elemiscists to bring the galaxy together, to separate its fibers—time and space—in ways others cannot understand.”

  Teschner shakes her head, her wrinkles thickening. “We’ve waited long enough per protocol. Then, enter, Elemiscist, and I’ll follow with half our unit. Ethanial?”

  Ethanial is silent for several heartbeats, probably skeptical. “We’re here to discover what happened to the sun and this planet. So far, I’m more confused than before we arrived, and we have to return soon.”

  Ethanial turns and addresses one of the Whisperers, ordering him to send a message back to Jasilix of what they are about to do.

  Osivia steps into the mist. She disappears.

  Teschner picks half of their unit, including Jaycken and Kiesen, and motions for them to follow.

  Something pulls at the imaginary fixator frame Jaycken’s placed around his bones, tugging, drawing him down the incline into the dome of mist with the others.

  If I wanted to suffocate, I would have dived into that mercury sea.

  A minute later, the fog whisks away, clearing around Osivia, who is standing on a precipice near the bottom of the crater.

  “It’s only about thirty meters down,” Osivia says, and a Frontiersman approaches with a winch, unrolling its steel cable.

  The cable frays like twine, and the winch clunks and stops. The Frontiersman curses, hits the winch, and punches buttons.

  Osivia peers over the precipice.

  Another Frontiersman steps forward with an antigravity sled. “Take this. It’s our only one.”

  Osivia shakes her head. “It won’t function here either.”

  The Frontiersman switches on the device. A blue glow from beneath the sled lifts it a meter into the air. A moment later, the light fades, and the sled crashes back onto the dirt.

  “I must leap.” Osivia closes her eyes, lifting her head skyward as if praying. “But I’m terrified of heights.”

  “You’re not jumping!” Ethanial shouts. “You could die.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Osivia says, “but I’m a Strider. I’ll harness a basic control of the elements and repel my body from the ground. Float down like a feather … when I’m close enough to the bottom.”

  Teschner grabs Ethanial’s shoulder, her toned masseter muscles tensing around her jaw. “She can do this. You wanted to see what secret the mist holds, remember.”

  Ethanial falls silent.

  Osivia’s hands shake as she leans over the precipice, peering down into darkness, to a flat of rock below.

  “You can do it,” Axford, the handsome soldier who pushed Jaycken, says.

  “The elements are concentrated within you.” Teschner inches onto the precipice.

  The Frontiersmen gather around the margins of the ledge and study the rock flat below, then the jutting precipice Osivia stands upon.

  “I can’t do it.” Osivia bows her head and shivers. “Heights. If it were something else … but not this.”

  “We’ll never discover what happened to this planet if you don’t.” Teschner advances onto the jutting precipice. She holds something in her hand. “The galaxy needs to know, or we’re lost.”

  Osivia looks back, focusing on Teschner’s hand, her eyes widening in surprise.

  “A bit of encouragement.” Teschner tosses something spherical at her.

  Osivia spins away from the object in fear and leaps over the precipice.

  Time seems to slow as her body plummets into the abyss. Jaycken holds his breath.

  Osivia falls.

  “It’ll happen near the bottom.” The other Strider’s voice is slow and drawn out, a living dream.

  Osivia’s robes flap like wings from a great bird and shimmer. She will take flight. Jaycken smiles, awed, mystified.

  There’s a sharp crack, like glass shattering. A soft groan.

  Osivia has stopped falling.

  She lies on the rock in a twisted heap, her limbs shortened and lying at impossible angles, her bones having slid inside each other under the impact and immense gravity. Blood crawls outward from her skull and pools around her body in a dark sphere.

  Jaycken slaps a palm over Kiesen’s visor.

  Three Frontiersmen shout in fear. The whites of at least one pair of their eyes flash black, their concentration, the strengthening of their skeleton, wavering.

  All three turn and run—their legs snap and twist and become mush.

  Their upper bodies topple.

  “Strider.” Teschner’s voice rings out amidst the chaos as she hunts for their other Elemiscist Strider. “Get us out of here, now!”

  Nyranna

  Nyranna steps through a mirror of air on which golden droplets run upward, her fox at her side. She feels a sucking sensation, as if being drawn through a funnel, then disappears, leaving Staggenmoire behind … again.

  King Goldhammer’s castle has indeed been flattened, decimated.

  Nyranna visited Staggenmoire to confirm the details of a Whisper she received as she left Anihelios. Staggenmoire was attacked by Moonrider corsairs, a group of would-be Vikings who flew around the galaxy, raiding and pillaging without remorse, taking valuable captives or new recruits if they proved their worth.

  The Moonriders must not have desired any of that castle’s people. Everyone who had been inside was dead.

  Often, Moonriders coerced the leader and a second-ranking officer of a conquered people to duel, the Moonriders’ favorite method of forcing captives to decide between life and death. Life was only permitted for the conquered if they joined the Moonriders’ ranks.

  The body of Nyranna’s diplomat, Hagair, was found in the castle, but the Beguiler who accompanied them, Hullenet, was gone. Did he flee before the attack or escape as the bombs fell?

  The primary matter: an ambassador of Uden and the king of Staggenmoire were murdered. The incursion sounded like the work of Moonriders, and their ships were identified, the symmetric crescent moon design.

  Nyranna steps onto the nose of a boulder poking out of rust-colored dirt. Blue wings of flame burn in the sky over her head. Vapor pockets. They are always burning on Grendermane.

  Nyranna sends a Whisper across the planet: I, Nyranna of Uden, have returned to relay information from Anihelios directly to the Northrite council.

  A Northrite Whisperer answers, You’ll be picked up in a blue recon shuttle. Stay outside Ecthilian.

  Nyranna impatiently runs her fingers through her hair. She realizes she’s a bit lucky that Striding and Whispering are much easier on the human body than the other four Elemiscist powers. And her abilities and training make the reciprocal damage of the elements’ energy have even less effect on her.

  Other Elemiscists are not as fortunate. Their bodies age and succumb much sooner. Like the mysterious Whisperer boy on Anihelios—if it was the power of the elements killing him—on the brink of death, wishing to die, to be put out of his misery by that swirling black madness.

  A shuttle matching the description lands. A side door opens. Nyranna steps inside the small fuselage, takes a comfortable seat near a window. Looks out as a robotic pilot lifts off. No sweaver this time.

  Images of that black mass of destruction flood Nyranna’s thoughts, and she decides to give it a name, to demonize it. The Ruin. That is how she will refer to it with the Northrite. At least it moves slowly enough for now, at the extremity of a spiral galaxy tens of thousands of light years across.

  Has Anihelios already been destroyed, all of the marvelous
moving flora, all of the insects? She taps the container in her bag. Not everything.

  Could she use the deadly spiders in another way? Other than selling them to a museum or collector? A tool to help her escape her servitude? One for Medegair—her Royal Father—and one for his High Overseer.

  She won’t be able to control who the spiders go after, so any plan utilizing them could fail completely. Although the authorities should have difficulty pinning spider-related deaths on her.

  The shuttle judders through raging winds, holding course but dropping and rising in the turbulence like a sparrow in a storm.

  Nyranna recalls a similar but more comfortable sensation, and a memory unwinds like a ribbon of silk waving in a breeze: as a girl, sitting on the upper branches of a stalactite tree—a tree growing downward from the ceiling of a cavern. A green fluorescent glow surrounding her. Soft and comforting. Emitting from the cavern walls. A cavern draft lifting her hair with gentle gusts. Warm. Chirping cave swallows, humming bees. Wonder all around her. Here her worries and concerns, thoughts about what she should be doing each moment melt into the sweet, unfettered air. She smiled, rode the conifer swing, kicking her legs and holding tight.

  Too soon now, the shuttle trails the moving antigravity bed of the Northrite’s city. The robotic pilot, consisting only of an upper torso, relays passcodes. They land with a soft thud outside the glistening monstrosity of the palace, and Nyranna is let out.

  Nyranna sends Whispers ahead of her. Waiting Elemiscists and sweavers allow her into the building unhindered.

  A Whisper sounds in Nyranna’s head, a more recent spark in her contact galaxy of neurons and axons. The anonymous sender who spoke of an insurgency. Elemiscists: Whisperers and Striders of the galaxy.

  She glances about. No one watches her.

  We control the real power in this galaxy. We, as Elemiscists, shouldn’t be slaves for the ruling planets, servants demeaned by providing the unrecompensed labor of communication and travel for the privileged, at the expense of our own lives and bodies.

  Nyranna winds down the intimidating halls to the atrium.

  We have the ability to gather strength, numbers, to become equals with all others in the galaxy. To individually decide if and when we will assist with travel and communication. To be compensated for our efforts and labor. And we have procured a major ally, one of the organizations, one sympathetic to our cause.

  Nyranna wonders which organization that could be. Which one would be sympathetic to Elemiscists? Not Uden. Not the Northrite council. Probably not one of the lesser planets or any of their Royal Fathers or Mothers, not the corporations or planet alliances in or near the cluster. It would be too dangerous for them to oppose the Northrite and Uden.

  The only established organizations left then are much smaller: the Frontiersmen, who value research and rights but still have bound Elemiscists of their own; the Silvergarde, whose few Elemiscists live as equals, but they are peaceful, planet-loving pacifists; the Angelwians, the fastest growing, most populous religion, who show no pious interest in the matter. Surely, Adersiun and his Everblades are far too small to be considered an “organization.”

  Nyranna wonders if this message is a trick, a ploy to oust her if she’s thinking similar thoughts of treason, an attempt to place her in jeopardy, to place Uden in jeopardy. She would be put to death.

  Could there be so many others of her kind who are tired of their treatment? This anonymous Whisperer is playing it safe. He desires to become equals with the common people. Is that all these insurgents desire?

  Why not show the Royal Fathers and Mothers, the Northrite, all the people of the galaxy what it’s like to live as an Elemiscist? Then they would know. Then they would understand her suffering, the suffering of her people.

  A fleeting image of her mother manifests in Nyranna’s head, but she quickly suppresses it.

  We’ve grown resilient and powerful over the last decade, and our membership is increasing. Now, we’re asking you, another selected group of Elemiscists, to join us. To join our cause.

  Nyranna takes an antigravity seat in the atrium, looking about suspiciously. Someone familiar is waiting, an Uden doctor whose presence she requested this time. This doctor bounces around Uden colony planets to diagnose strange causes of death.

  Another man enters the atrium and walks toward the corridor leading to the Northrite’s chamber. He stares at Nyranna. A gorgeous man in a sexy, dangerous model kind of way, if not overly tall. Nyranna can imagine him swimming in the ocean and coming out with soaked hair, droplets of hot, salty water rolling off his naked abs as he comes for her.

  “You may enter the governing chamber,” an attendant says, making Nyranna flinch and flush.

  Nyranna motions for the doctor to follow her and paces toward the man who is still staring at her with eyes as soft as starlight, staring as if she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Typically, men consider her pretty but only in a subdued or plain sense. She’s never been glamorous.

  Nyranna averts her gaze, feeling a tension build in the air as she approaches the man, his attention overwhelming her like waves of gravity from some gas giant, a tethered line. She angles to veer around him. Focuses straight ahead. Wonders if she knows this man from somewhere. She glances back over her shoulder.

  He watches her go as if she’s the only thing in the hall, the room, the world.

  ***

  After asking the doctor to wait outside, Nyranna slips under the archway into the governing chamber of the Northrite.

  Ahead, voices alternate in a congested discord of echoes. There are many more here than just the council.

  “The ambassador of Uden was in the castle when the attack came?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Nyranna enters the chamber. The Northrite, on their raised benches, and a cluster of diplomats standing on the audience floor fall silent. Forgeron stands quietly. Sweavers in bronze uniforms ring the outer walls. Breman sees her; his face suffuses with contempt. Nyranna’s upper lip twitches like a dog about to snarl.

  “Please hear me,” Nyranna says.

  These Northrite may be vile subjugators of men, but they would assist with this new danger to the galaxy. The Ruin. A few sweavers approach Nyranna, carrying truncheons and small shudder round firearms.

  “Let us hear what this Elemiscist has to say,” a Northrite member says in a distorted voice, the Messiah, the one wearing the shield mask of gold and silver halves. Only five of the council are again in attendance. This time the Apostle is absent instead of the Herald.

  “I found destruction,” Nyranna says. “Out at Anihelios, there’s a vast force I cannot pretend to describe. Impossible strength, a nothingness, a storm. Death. The Ruin. It started to demolish an entire planet.”

  Nyranna waits for a gasp of surprise or shudder of fear as she studies the masked faces. The Herald, the green scaled mask is present, probably Queen Vinessia.

  No one seems particularly shocked or intrigued.

  “The planet Anihelios is gone?” the Messiah asks, his metal lips pursing like liquid skin.

  Nyranna nods. “Surely by now.”

  “This Ruin’s speed and trajectory?”

  “I’m unsure.”

  “Not at the speed of light, or even of sound, however?” the green-scaled Herald asks.

  “No.”

  “Then we have months if not years to prepare before this Ruin reaches the stable planets of the galaxy. The drifters have been lost to our control and protection long ago.”

  Nyranna bites her lip. She has another surprise for these councilors. “I’ve asked an Uden doctor to join me, per our last agreement. We request to look upon the Grand Patriarch, if only for a quick health assessment.”

  “An Elemiscist does not make demands of the council,” Breman shouts. “Silence this Manipulator bitch!” He motions for his sweavers to take Nyranna by force.

  Nyranna backpedals.

  “Stop.” The Messiah weaves his finge
rs together on the bench as if considering how to deny her request without insulting the Royal Father of Uden. The sweavers stand still. “Audience granted.”

  A minute later, a bald man with a hunched upper back enters the chamber, an antigravity case floating beside him.

  “Take your doctor up the stairs and through that rear door.” The Messiah points.

  Nyranna leads the doctor up past the benches to a far wall where two sweavers stand guard; the veins in one’s forehead throb lightly. Pure hate seeps out of their skin like virulent pheromones. Trained to hate Elemiscists, or were they bred for it?

  The door before Nyranna is open. Inside waits a quiet chamber, an old mattress type of bed made of spindly gray fibers, an antigravity bed, a chair. A woman in a dress. Another person under the antique bed’s covers.

  Sleeping? Or deathly sick?

  On the chair is a crown, the crown of the Grand Patriarch of the galaxy, the Crown of Dreams. Opalescent and blue fire, cold flame, ripples as a band beneath the raised points of the organizations: blue flame creating a tree of coral for the Silvergarde, a mask for the Northrite, several others. Miniscule blue dots of stars and clusters for their systems create a hologram of their spiral galaxy. The image floats above the center of the crown.

  Grand Matriarch Vinessia stands beside the person under the covers, her head bowed.

  She’s not the Herald, is not one of the council.

  Nyranna steps closer. The sleeping body is a corpse of stiffened skin, Vinessia’s face a track for falling tears.

  “Now you see.” The distorted voice behind her makes Nyranna jump. The purple-flame-masked Savior with the beaked nose follows her. “This is why the ambassadors of Kwixbore, Tilimoth, the Viminraide Alliance, the Angelwians, the Frontiersmen, and the Silvergarde are here. We were awaiting Uden’s representative, you, before we broadcast the tragic event to the galaxy.”

  “His familial disease shouldn’t have killed him so young,” Nyranna says, waving the doctor over to inspect the body.