The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  Ten minutes later, the doors to the ship open, and those who walked in lie in heaps, sprawled over each other; green gases pour out of the confines and float off. Bodies are carted out on antigravity sleds.

  Six figures in masks and dark robes stand on the plateau, surveying everything below them. The Northrite council. A creature of darkness sidles around them, dragging its long fingers.

  ***

  Rynn lies in the darkness, broken only by a single ray of light seeping through a crack in the stones overhead. She’s alone, imprisoned inside a room at the Frontiersmen’s station.

  The Frontiersmen officers were long dead, along with Jaycken. Rynn sobs, wrapping her arms around herself. Jaycken was so good in this world, where she was not. She preferred herself in dreams, in the make-believe.

  Rynn wonders if Nadiri and Kiesen are close by, and why the Northrite allowed only Kiesen to leave the officer’s hall alive.

  Tears slip from her eye. She tosses about for hours and hours before drifting off into a fitful sleep.

  In Rynn’s dream, she leaps between stars, moons, and planets, hunting and seeking something. Eventually, she feels like she’s run around the entire galaxy and is tired, broken, and dejected. Then, she sees it: a ball of yellow light floating in a void of blackness.

  She leaps, grabs the ball, and hangs on as if she could plummet through space forever. A tingle runs through her fingers and into her body, the same emotional connection she’s found in past dreams, but this time she has initiated contact.

  A gentle breeze warms her cheeks.

  A robed figure in a green-scaled mask appears, their back turned. Floating lights swirl around them like tiny winged insects. There are so many—millions, maybe billions. Rynn waits until one calls to her before lunging and grabbing it.

  She enters another world, a world where dreams and threads of memories are shared, a world created by something or someone, where people throughout the galaxy are linked by thought alone. The shadowless creature doesn’t know she has come, wouldn’t expect her to be able to go so far in the make-believe.

  Rynn stands inside an expansive room with shimmering walls. Jewels float in emerald, ruby, and sapphire on antigravity stands. Carpets of rich colors and fabrics line the floors below soaring windows of reinforced plexiglass. Night hangs thick and dark outside. A nest sits by the window, out of place in this room, like her dad in a city. Five eggs speckled in blue wait inside.

  Someone sleeps here, on an old-style mattress entangled in luxurious blue silks. A couple, who wear dark robes and masks. A mask of teal, appearing like a young man with a shovel beard. The other is a mask of purple flame with a long, hooked nose.

  Rynn is inside the Northrite council’s private bedchambers in the infinity building.

  She steps closer to the sleeping couple and attempts to remove the Apostle’s mask, but her fingers are ethereal and useless. This is a dream or someone’s memory, and she’s only an observer, a dreamer herself.

  A wisp of a breeze flutters the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. The sound of a door clicking and sliding open comes from behind.

  Rynn ducks behind the far side of the bed. Skeletons of birds now lie sprawled across the nest by the window, the eggs gone.

  I’ve seen something like that before in this world. Where time moves at an abnormal rate. Pyramids were being built and crumbling. Is there a Phantom here? Adersiun. Or is there another Phantom? One of the Northrite council, or Forgeron.

  She peeks out from behind the bed.

  The shadowless creature sidles along a sapphire carpet, dragging its long fingers.

  Rynn crawls back into a corner in horror.

  The creature hunches over the bed, its face flicking back and forth over the sleepers. Long fingers snake out, coil around the mask of the Apostle, slip underneath, and burrow between fleshy mask and human skin, peeling and separating the two with a sucking release.

  A man lies beneath: past middle age, handsome, strong jawline, dark hair cropped short. Someone Rynn’s seen before. She wades through her recent emotional memories and recalls sorrow, a yearning for her dad, and reminiscing.

  Jaycken.

  She saw this man in a picture Jaycken sent her. His father, Ost Leonbaron. Jaycken’s father is one of the Northrite councilmembers …

  Forgeron then peels the Savior’s mask from their face. Beneath is a younger woman of astounding beauty with black curls of hair. Jaycken’s stepmother, Jasmonae.

  The creature wraps long fingers around a black pearl at its neck. Clouds of jade and teal scud across the jewel’s surface, something red and bright darting about inside. Its other fingers creep across the couple’s faces, ensnaring their eyes, ears, and nostrils.

  Forgeron is using the power of the elements in some way. Rynn can feel it: something pulling at her spine, her teeth. The way it manipulates the elements is inconsistent with anything she’s learned at the station. The creature is Beguiling and Whispering to the sleeping couple, perhaps to the entire galaxy, Striding into dreams but only with its mind, linking its mind with theirs.

  The creature stills; the dreamers twitch.

  Does Forgeron also lead the Northrite council through a dream world? To show them things, as the creature does with me? Maybe this is how the Northrite discuss their most confidential information, and Forgeron’s duty is to unite them in that world.

  Rynn suppresses fear, steps forward, and reaches out for the creature, her hand hovering. She cannot harm Forgeron here in this world.

  She grabs the black pearl at the creature’s neck instead.

  Something tugs at her insides with a sucking sensation, as if pulling her inside out, siphoning her into the clouds of jade and teal riding across the jewel. The setting fades.

  Rynn stands in a swamp now, brackish water gurgling around her calves. Tufts of red reeds spring up in clumps. Shapes of people slosh through the water, veiled in blue fog. Other creatures or animals wander the periphery: four-legged, six-legged, hunched, furred, spined.

  A gentle breeze rustles the reeds and pushes against the surface of the water.

  Forgeron stands nearby. The creature glances about as if distrustful, as if disturbed.

  Rynn hunches down in a copse of reeds.

  Others stand near the creature: Jasmonae, Ost, and someone else: a robe, a mask of gray stone removed. A Northrite councilmember, the Emissary. Rynn recognizes him … the Frontiersman, the benevolent officer, Ethanial. The man Bruan said was a survivor above all else.

  Ethanial, a Northrite member. He controls this creature and uses it to manipulate all the minds and thoughts of the galaxy.

  “I’ll spread your message to the others.” Forgeron waves ropey fingers as Jasmonae and Ost stumble off separately, wandering as if unsure of their destination. “Mask yourselves.”

  “Does it have to do with the Shadow Whisperer?” Ethanial asks. “Even though he was Ost’s son, we killed him. The young Jaycken’s dead. We let Ost keep Kiesen.”

  “Jaycken didn’t send the slandering Whisper. The person who did must also be dead or a captive now. We would’ve known their identity when the Whisper was sent if they were a Frontiersmen Elemiscist.”

  A memory, a spark, flashes in Rynn’s mind.

  She freezes, her ethereal blood running as cold as mountain mercury through her veins. Her first Whisper was not to summon help from the Frontiersmen when Prabel came for her, but when she found out and accused the Northrite of destroying those planets. Jaycken thought the Whisper had come from himself, but he wasn’t sure. She felt something at the time too, something similar to what she felt in the grotto. She saw that spark in her head both times.

  The Northrite came to Jasilix to kill the slanderer. To kill Jaycken because of Rynn’s message …

  The swamp shifts as only things in dreams do. Rynn suddenly stands in the open, on a plateau of rock surrounded by soaring cliffs.

  Forgeron stares right at her.

  Rynn freezes in terror.

&n
bsp; “Do you often dream of this one-eyed girl?” Forgeron asks Ethanial.

  “Dream? What do you mean? Why are we suddenly discussing dreams?” Ethanial tilts his head in confusion, looking to where Rynn stands. “Yes, I see her. She’s only a recruit.” He waves dismissively.

  Rocks begin to slide, falling down or upward, as if bringing the dreamer to question the reality of the situation is distorting it all, awakening him, making him aware that he’s being watched.

  Rynn is in Ethanial’s dream, the creature having entered through some connection. Now they suspect she’s there too. She thinks … the thing about dreams is that they make no sense if you evaluate them compared to the real world. She does the first thing that comes to mind to keep her cover. She leaps, falls over, rolls, stands, and pirouettes, then bows and walks through a stone cliff face.

  The scene transpiring behind her is now muffled and obscured in gray.

  The creature looks at something else amidst stone blocks that fall up and down and smash into the plateau, shrinking it. “You humans have the strangest dreams.”

  Jaycken is there on the plateau now.

  Rynn gasps. He’s alive?

  A knife is buried in his back, an axe of black shadow embedded into his chest. No, he’s only Ethanial’s dream.

  “Why did he believe he had a chance against Adersiun, why believe he was the second Sentinel?” Ethanial asks as rocks pound down around his feet, shaking the plateau, his form wavering as if composed of light. “Did solving the mist trial make him arrogant and blind?”

  “His self-importance was the key.” The creature chuckles. “The ominous armless hand I sent into his dreams foretold of death and the future, and it made him believe he could manipulate time, that he was a Phantom. He thought he could kill Adersiun by himself. Marwyn heard the false claim of the Phantom ability in his own dream, from you, he believed.”

  Rynn’s entire body seems to petrify. That’s why Jaycken was so brave and so stupid?

  Forgeron opens a palm and releases a tiny bubble of light. It floats up, contacts the pearl, and dances before Ethanial’s eyes. “You’ll remember nothing of this night, nor of this dream.”

  Ethanial disappears along with the collapsing cliffside.

  Rynn is back in the galaxy, standing on planets. A gust of wind strikes her face.

  The shadowy figure before her spins around. The creature. Forgeron.

  Rynn doesn’t know if this world of Forgeron’s currently involves other dreamers, but she recalls the images of the beating sun in a number of its floating lights, then recalls how many people see the sun in that regard. Everyone but her.

  She shouts to the empty space around her, to anyone listening, to the entire galaxy. “You who are asleep are caught in a shared dream, being manipulated. Something’s entered the private areas of our minds where we’re most susceptible, where our secrets are hidden, inserting visions and taking memories.”

  Rynn leaps closer to Forgeron, grabs a specific light hovering around the creature’s forehead, repeats her cry for help directly into the memory drop, and flings it away.

  Cirx

  A voice rings in the recesses of Cirx’s mind. In his dream.

  Where is he? The sound is distant, muffled, but full of entreaty, beseeching him.

  Fear and hate boil inside his bones as if someone kindled his soul and stoked the flames of emotion. He sees an image of a beating sun and a cloud of darkness, both terrorizing the galaxy. Images of people unlike himself follow, and he’s flooded with hate and fear.

  Cirx’s eyes open.

  He lies prostrate on a bank of red reeds, blackened water rippling against his breastplate and hauberk with soft sloshes. Mud clings to his face. Blue fog surrounds him, fog denser than Staggenmoire’s. Drizzling rain. A sky sea.

  Confusion and wariness float up in Cirx’s mind but are suppressed by calm, a feeling of home. Or a longing.

  Where am I?

  He feels as if he’s just awoken, his mind clouded. Or is he dreaming? It’s as if he’s awoken inside his dream.

  A bubble of yellow light floats in the fog before him. A will-o’-the-wisp? It floats away, the voice inside it receding into whispers.

  Cirx rises to his feet and slogs through the mud after it.

  The voice is there, in the light. Is it a fairy, one of the ancient, tiny people who’d retreated from the world into the mists of Staggenmoire?

  A cluster of reeds clings to his armored shins like tentacles. He reaches out, grasping for the light, but falls with a splash, scrambling on his hands and knees through algae and muck, the water rising over his chin.

  The light floats away.

  The voice calls again, the sweet voice of a damsel, like Erin, but in need of assistance.

  Cirx lunges, springing from the water. He runs and jumps. His fingers encircle the light, entrapping it in his palm.

  The voice is inside his head now, telling him to wake up, to fight something, some kind of servant of a great evil, in different words, but only one comes to his mind: fiend. A fiend of blackness and shadow without a shadow itself.

  Cirx remembers everything: Kitasha, Erin, Enix, Garrabrandt. His emotions pour out, feeling as if they are absorbed by the light in his hand.

  He reaches for his longsword and unsheathes it with a grating of steel on wood and leather.

  Figures stumble in the fog around him. One approaches. A man in garb Cirx faintly recalls, silver and metallic with what looks like a sigil of coral on his breast. The same as those innocent men he killed.

  I am the Horseman riding through the realm of the dead, surveying my domain.

  “Hail, sir,” Cirx shouts, but his voice is a whisper.

  The man stumbles past, two bubbles of light circling his head.

  Cirx nudges his shoulder. “Where do you venture, sir?”

  The man does not even look over, his eyes as glazed as a ghoul’s. He mutters incoherent babble.

  A line of slaves slog past in the muck, chained in a row. Six of them. All wearing bizarre masks.

  Cirx releases the Silvergarde man and marches on.

  Over a period of what feels like hours or days, Cirx passes thousands of others in a similar state: men, women, children, elders all in dress Cirx has never seen; some do not even appear human. Some are more awake then others, chasing bubbles of light, but the marsh is too thick, too heavy.

  A dream world. A world containing all the dreamers of the galaxy.

  Only one woman he encounters speaks to him. She’s short, petite, and dark-skinned. Sable hair wraps around her neck like a scarf. She’s definitely one of the fairy people of old, only drawn in dusty books, only heard of in tales.

  “I hunt the hunter.” She trudges across his path.

  “Where’s this fiend?” Cirx asks.

  “No one knows,” she says. “We track it in our own way. You must find it in your own dream world, in your own mind. It’s connected us all, all the sleepers of the galaxy in a single dream. Only now the Shadow Whisperer is waking us to this dream world the hunter’s created.”

  “Please, come back with me to Staggenmoire when you’ve finished your quest. I’ll show you the mists where your people have gone.”

  She does not turn, as determined in her hunt as anyone Cirx has ever seen. In a moment, she fades into the mist.

  She would make a formidable Fiend Slayer.

  Cirx trudges on.

  The six slaves pass by again, their appearance the same except their bizarre masks are in a different order in the chained line.

  What seems like hours later, Cirx arrives at a bridge of rotting wood. He steps onto it and follows its path across the marsh, wood creaking as if it will break and he will fall through.

  A gentle breeze takes his hair in its fingers.

  A dark form hovers at the far end where the bridge ends, surrounded by nothing but water as black as a sea cave.

  “Fiend of darkness!” Cirx brandishes his sword.

  A hunched fo
rm, a crippled old man of shadow turns. It has only a protruding forehead, no eyes or mouth. Its arms are bent at its sides, its fingers dropping onto the bridge like lines of rope.

  It steps back, as if in surprise, surprised that Cirx would find and face it.

  “Wake,” it says, its tone cool and calm. It clutches at something dangling from its neck, a necklace with a pearl pendant, a pearl of blackness the size of Cirx’s head. Swirling veins of jade and teal play along its surface, the red minorbi churning about inside like a trapped glow fly on fire.

  The Sky Sea Pearl.

  “Remember nothing of this dream!” the fiend says.

  Cirx feels his mind or body jerk, but he does not move, does not become more awake. He still stands on the bridge. Then steps forward.

  “I recall nothing of this place when I wake. People I’d never met but knew to hate, the people who wear the coral. The Silvergarde. I now realize my tolerance for them was lessened in this world, and so I required less evidence to strike out in retaliation for something they did not do. An embryonic fire of hate for them was evoked here.”

  “You cannot cut a shadow, especially a shadow in a dream.” The creature’s voice is cold and harsh, a serpent’s, a fiend’s.

  “Then I’ll wield whatever will slay you.”

  Cirx takes another step. The board beneath him creaks and bows. He steps again. The wood grows weaker.

  A true fiend. I could vanquish it and free souls. “You manipulated us, made us believe that you were never there, prying into our secrets, our weaknesses, manipulating our desires by getting inside our minds as we slept. At first, I remembered fragments: a shadowy figure, a ball of red fire. My Mir remembered you as well. You weren’t that powerful then, fiend.”

  “Now here you are,” the fiend says, “another Staggenmoire inhabitant. If I’d had your dead king’s pearl in the beginning, you’d have remembered nothing. Fragments of illusions, memories that I inserted lingered in the consciousness when my recipients awoke. But no longer.” His ropey fingers slither and wave across the Sky Sea Pearl. “Wake, my puppet.”

  “Your Northrite masters ordered the destruction of Staggenmoire castle. Then, with the power of our Pearl, your illusions, your implanted visions silently became part of us.”