The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  “I might have too.” Nadiri’s mousy eyes move, searching Rynn’s face for something.

  Why won’t Nadiri talk about it?

  Nadiri sniffs and her head droops, her brown eyes almost burrowing under her v-rim. “I’m scared … and I don’t fit in with the other hotshots here gunning for glory.”

  A pang of sympathy lands in Rynn’s stomach as if she missed a step walking down stairs.

  Rynn slides a stiff arm around Nadiri’s shoulders and gives a squeeze. “We can have each other’s backs.”

  Nadiri nods and attempts to hide a grin as she paces alongside Rynn.

  Will I regret this relationship when it turns on me?

  After marching for nearly half an hour, lights and machinery, functioning machinery, comes into view. Hillocks of dirt, rubble, and rock are scattered about as if a group of giants have been digging for treasure. Working machinery grinds and pounds in the distance. Diggers the size of intragalactic passenger ships rip up chunks of crust and rock and fling it aside. A warship hovers in the upper atmosphere far away, cannons blasting into the planet, launching rock and debris into the air, out into space.

  This must be what happened to that drifter. They are mining something from these planets.

  “Someone was ready to move in fast.” Nadiri nudges Rynn. “Almost as if they expected the sun to start beating and scare everyone away.”

  A Frontiersman shouts, “There’s somebody here.”

  Rynn whirls about: two men in yellow and black bodysuits and masks, pulser cannons at their sides.

  “Stop right there!” one shouts. “This is a condemned planet. Not only are you trespassing, you’re endangering yourselves.”

  The guards approach, one silent, probably calling for reinforcements on his v-rim.

  “Frontiersmen?” the other asks. “What are you doing on Pseidoblane? The beating sun could destroy the planet at any moment. You shouldn’t be here.”

  Rynn wishes she isn’t a recruit now and is back on Jasilix.

  A different type of rumbling grows louder, closer.

  A yellow and black beast of metal emerges from the darkness, shimmering under starlight, crunching across a flat of brown brush and grass on four wheels of plated titanium, as massive as a Jasilix station tower. Cannons protrude from between a head split like a pair of horns.

  Another of the same type of trolling monster machine crashes behind them, not slowing its steady approach.

  “You all need to be detained and quarantined.” A guard marches closer.

  “Prepare to divide and run,” Teschner says through their v-rim comm, stepping forward beyond her team, her hands clasped behind her back. “We’ll meet up in a bit, and our last Strider will take us back to Jasilix. If we try to Stride now, I’m afraid they will execute us first.” To the guard, she says, “We’re not under intragalactic jurisdiction. We investigate for the greater good, for knowledge. You cannot detain Frontiersmen.”

  “I feel a similar sensation to the mist on Iopenia,” their remaining Strider says through their comm. “On the other side of those dirt mountains.”

  The two foreign guards are only ten meters away, still speaking into their v-rims.

  “Run!” Teschner says.

  The team breaks like droplets of falling water, scattering.

  Pulser shots clap and streak past Rynn.

  Nadiri tugs on her arm, and together they run.

  Fleeing Frontiersmen return fire over their shoulders. Then, deafening blasts from the trundling monsters answer. Men scream.

  Rynn looks for Jaycken: to her left, already weaving around mounds of rock. Jaycken yanks Kiesen, pushing his brother in front of himself as they sprint.

  Rynn pulls Nadiri, leading her to Jaycken as fountains of dirt erupt around them, projectile impacts from the monster machines.

  They reach the far side of a rock pile as Jaycken falls and tumbles down an incline, rolling and bouncing. He crashes into a mound at the bottom of a crater.

  Frontiersmen descend the crater in massive leaping strides.

  Rynn jumps over the edge and sprints after them.

  The foreign guards follow in pursuit, the metal monsters like roving prehistoric beasts.

  Detonator cannons fire.

  The two monsters roll closer, then start to crumple inward, their metal folding with creaks and crunches, slowly imploding as if a massive inner vacuum has been activated inside them. Their legs fold and buckle, and they crash and roll onto the bedrock of the planet, immobile.

  What’s happening?

  Teschner’s voice carries through Rynn’s v-rim. “On alert, Frontiersmen, we’ve entered the mist.”

  A pearly gray fog appears along the incline, sealing off the area like curtains.

  Jaycken

  Jaycken walks alone, mist snapping at his feet and back as if it were alive, the tongues and mouths of the dead. A swath of pearling gray parts before him and stitches back together behind him.

  A warm breeze caresses his skin.

  A shadowy man towers in the distance, pointing to a wall where a floating hand severed from any arm or body scratches words into rock. Jaycken knows he’s asleep, that this is a dream. How did he get here? He tries to remember, the last memories of Pseidoblane a blur of fog and confusion.

  I don’t remember drinking with my old friends.

  You will succeed is written in blood on the rock. The hand disappears.

  Jaycken glances back to the man from previous dreams, a man cloaked in shadow. A mirror appears in the air, a reflection: Jaycken is holding hands with Rynn and Kiesen, running. He does not understand it, but the holding of hands creates some bond through all of them.

  The last time Jaycken saw that hand, someone died shortly after.

  “Jaycken!” someone yells.

  Jaycken wakes. He’s sprawled across the bedrock in the looming crater on Pseidoblane, was unconscious from the fall.

  Mist hovers all around him. He’s already inside of it.

  “Jaycken.” It’s Bruan, shaking him. Bruan’s filtration mask is gone, his face as pale as his hair and the fog. “We need to find Kiesen. Axford and a couple others sent him out as the lead, to face the mist. They tried to send Rynn, but Teschner made them pick someone who’d been with the Frontiersmen longer. Axford recommended trying out the weakest link in the group rather than an Elemiscist, as that didn’t work last time. Most of the others followed Kiesen, hoping to watch what he will have to face.” He points into the distance.

  Jaycken’s heart lurches into his throat, catches, and is squeezed there. “Kiesen!”

  If he gets himself hurt, I’m going to kill him.

  Jaycken climbs to his feet and dashes off.

  The landscape fades and changes around him. Bruan is gone. Either Bruan didn’t follow him, or the mist took him.

  Trees solidify in the fog, black ghosts of what once grew on Pseidoblane. A forest. And the sky is clear now, twilight red glowing at some distant horizon.

  Someone grabs him.

  Jaycken leaps away.

  Teschner is hunched over holding her side, talking in grunts. “We continued to slip Elemiscists into the mist of Iopenia after our first mission there, but they all failed. All are dead. We still don’t know what the Northrite are after.”

  Jaycken grabs her shoulder and stabilizes her. She must really be in pain, with posture like that. “Where’s Kiesen?”

  “I don’t know.” She grimaces. “Listen, I’m telling you this to prepare you. Something in the elements is alive here. It knows what men fear and can alter the terrain inside the dome of mist. It’s taking those with control of the elements and subjecting them to what we think of as a trial, similar to how we train Elemiscists to their full potential.”

  Slyth’s mentioned the Elemiscist trials.

  Teschner continues, “Except these confrontations are not for training or advancement in controlled situations. They are lethal. It will throw your deepest fears against you, like the height
and jump Osivia faced and died from. That was her trial.”

  “How do I prepare?”

  Teschner shakes her head. “I’ve seen footage from within the Iopenia mist of several of these trials: an avalanche that buried the challenger alive, lightning striking a victim, a swarm of mortar wasps or nest of slithering death-spike mambas, drowning, burning by fire, choking to death. These are all possibilities. You must ready yourself. Use the elements against this trickery.”

  Jaycken nods.

  “Kiesen’s already in the forest.” She points and falls to her knees. “Go.”

  Jaycken steps into the forest on a mountain slope, a thicket of pine. Sunlight fades behind high peaks as he enters a ravine. Shadows descend out of the branches like fractured fingers, fingers with so many joints. It may as well be the dark of night.

  An Elemiscist from their group stands in the distance, muttering, rushing around. Jaycken creeps closer. The Elemiscist’s glass robes billow as he crouches and slips into a small cave in a cliff beside the forest. He crawls farther in.

  A shriek carries out of the cave, followed by echoes of thrashing footfalls and slapping palms, scampering. Then a groan and crash of rock.

  The entire cave collapses, expelling a billion twirling dust motes through the previous opening into the red-tinged fog.

  Jaycken’s limbs stop moving, stop responding to his commands.

  Another trial?

  Howls carry through the ravine. And other sounds: scraping, footsteps, snapping branches. Crunching leaves. Hooting.

  Dark fluid drips from the canopy in long, sticky strands and drags in beaded threads along knotted trunks. It pools on the forest floor.

  Jaycken’s forehead and palms are damp, his breath a ragged gasp for air. He wipes his hands on his pants, is no longer wearing gloves.

  As scared as a child.

  For a few moments, Jaycken focuses, picturing the atoms of the elements, their decay, feeling for stores of releasing energy as electrons shift orbits all around him. He’s a blind man groping for something in a house with all of its furniture rearranged.

  He steps deeper into the mist, crunching through a humus of rotting needles and leaves. Footsteps pause in the distance.

  Something heard him.

  A scream carries over distant howling. One scream, then another. Other Frontiersmen shout, their words muffled by keening wind tearing at mountain pines. More voices. Someone shouts for everyone to gather together, that the mist is dividing them. Their v-rims are not functioning.

  Jaycken’s boot plops and is held fast in a pool of thick liquid that clings to the alloy, threatening to hold him fast.

  A dying scream carries through the woods.

  Where are Kiesen, Rynn, and Nadiri?

  Jaycken pulls free and runs toward the sound for whatever walking death hides amongst the branches. The reek of rotting flesh, of disease, and of decay paints the air in brushstrokes of black shadow. Dead things. Dead things hunt them in the forest.

  Is this it, his fear?

  Jaycken imagines the original elements and their structures clearly, their energy captured by his mind, his muscles, his bones.

  A clearing opens ahead. A group of dark silhouettes huddle together. They are breathing too heavily, walking too loudly. Rynn is there. Kiesen.

  Jaycken runs for them.

  Rynn

  Screams from dying Frontiersmen pierce a sky that is a blanket of fog. The haze of a red moon hovers overhead as if it swallowed the sun and succumbed to hemorrhagic fever.

  Nadiri, Kiesen, and Rynn scamper through a clearing toward the shouts of officers calling for their team.

  A warm breeze rattles the wooden fingers of trees.

  Rynn warily watches patches of blackness, listens, and smells. Her most primitive cells recall the cries and scents of predators. She stops cold.

  Red moonlight dies at the edge of the clearing. Something is there, something blacker than the night’s shadows. Wavering darkness. It steps forth, dragging ropey fingers through crunching humus, leaving six trails of black streaks.

  “It’s coming for you now, Rynn,” Forgeron says with no mouth. “As well as for the chosen boy. Run.”

  Kiesen gasps, a whistling of brittle air.

  “You work for the evils that created this place.” Rynn reaches a palm out to stop Nadiri from advancing and guides them all back. She whispers, “It’s a trick.”

  “No.” The creature shakes its jutting forehead. “The Northrite didn’t make this place. They only unlocked it. I’m their slave, but I find ways to help others.”

  A winged blackness swoops from the tree line, plummeting down at Rynn and Nadiri. It opens a mouth like a beak, revealing rows of greenish teeth as it screeches and expels a breath of fetid rot.

  Rynn’s legs quake as she ducks, covers her head, and runs with Nadiri and Kiesen back into the pines. They race between trunks as branches whip and claw with many fingers at their faces, at her eye patch, at her good eye.

  A foot slips out from under Rynn, and she lands on her knees; her palms slap against a stream of silvery water. Something burns inside her like lightning through her veins. She pulls her hands back and quickly wipes them on thick grasses.

  She glances back.

  Was Forgeron really trying to help her? Or deliver her to that monster?

  The flapping nightmare swoops around in the clearing, unwilling to fly into the trees. Something slender and winding like a reptile slips from its shadowed talons and scuttles in after them: soft, pattering beats of pursuit.

  “The beast will have trouble following us, but if the newt sees us, then the beast will know where we are.” It’s Jaycken’s voice, steady and controlled. He’s invisible in the trees, amidst the darkness.

  Tiny feet scamper through crackling needles, drawing closer.

  “Take my hand,” Jaycken says. A pale blotch of skin appears in the darkness.

  Rynn grabs hold and imagines herself splitting atoms of the elements, as the Frontiersmen have discussed, to control any power within her, to assist in this struggle.

  “Kiesen, Nadiri,” Jaycken says, “take each other’s hands and Rynn’s. We’ll become invisible to the newt.”

  How does he know? What does he see that all the others cannot?

  They run on through the tangled mass of needles and branches, of trunks and roots, of darkness broken intermittently by the glow of the hemorrhagic moon.

  Jaycken

  Jaycken leads Rynn, Kiesen, and Nadiri through a tangle of snapping branches, sharp, broken edges stabbing his face and neck. A beast flaps massive wings like reefed sails above the canopy, pursuing their crashing flight.

  Flying things. Jaycken’s irrational fear magnified a hundredfold.

  A crunching of branches and limbs rain in rapid succession overhead, falling in clumps of twig and wood, smacking Jaycken on the head. Great wings tear through the pines.

  Jaycken shoves the others behind a trunk. His cells drink the energy of the elements networking in his blood. A surging warmth spreads through his limbs. His heartbeat pounds in his temples. Mint suffuses his tongue. He breathes the universe.

  Jaycken imagines he’s a Sculptor, and a firmness solidifies and then shakes in his bones before percolating through his blood and skin. He reaches out with his imagination and folds the beast’s wings in on itself as if his fingers are made of air, the size of a giant’s.

  Bones snap and break inside the beast. It shrieks in surprise and fear as it falls through the trees like a boulder through twigs, a continued batter of noise with a final thump. Then it moves in a rustle over fallen needles, dragging itself out from behind a trunk with clawed hands, snapping a beak lined with pointed teeth.

  Kiesen grabs Jaycken and pulls him back, away from the terror. They all stumble into another clearing.

  More wings flap beneath the hemorrhagic moon, swoop down, and tear at them with talons like swords. Slicing pain erupts across Jaycken’s shoulder and neck.

 
; Rynn shouts in agony.

  Jaycken solidifies the firmness in his blood now, diffusing it into the air around them as the beast swoops again.

  Its talons scrape and crack on the shield of his Will.

  Pain lances up Jaycken’s back as he focuses all of his energy. Warm blood runs in rivulets from the gashes across his shoulder and neck. He swoons and almost falls.

  Rynn catches him.

  Jaycken reaches out again with his Will, feeling the beast’s brain. Already dead. Its heart slips between his ethereal fingers, not beating. The beast is already dead but is reanimated and attacking them.

  Jaycken drops to a knee. “How do I kill something with no heartbeat and no functional brain? Something already dead?”

  “What emotion is it giving off?” Rynn stabilizes Jaycken with two hands, her blood running across her arms, her suit shredded.

  “It has only one emotion: the determination of the hunter.”

  Maybe the answer comes from Rynn, maybe it’s in his head, but he hears it in old Slyth’s voice. “Destroy their emotion and they will become nothing.”

  What’s the opposite of predatorial hunger or rage? Jaycken’s convinced he could never make this thing feel love for them.

  Jaycken searches himself for a sense of anything, for some other emotion.

  He gathers a feeling of apathy in his heart and floods his core with it. Sends it out in rushing waves through the air, in particles or ocean waves, he’s not sure.

  Emotional energy washes over the beast flapping above and floods the other beast still crawling across the forest floor. Something inside of them doesn’t break, only bends.

  Jaycken feels a shifting of the tension in the air around them.

  One beast hovers in flight. The other stops crawling. Neither desires blood, but, more dangerous to themselves, they care for nothing and no one and turn to fly and wander aimlessly.

  Jaycken’s back throbs with pain as he grabs Kiesen and Rynn. They all race off through the trees.

  The mist parts, creating a trail amidst the brambles. Red moonlight softens to a white hue.