The Indivisible and the Void

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by D M Wozniak

“Keep reading,” Reddles says, his arms folded and legs spread apart.

  “Andrej IX was full of wine before the first course of Xian squid was even served. By the time dinner was over, he could hardly stand on his own. The queen had already left the room—she was livid. Before desert and smokes, the servants opened the balcony doors to let the king wave to the commoners, out on the square, five stories below. The cold wind blew in from the north so strongly that it extinguished some of the candelabrum. I had a second fragment hidden underneath my cloak, which I used to weave a subtle membrane. Nobody saw the shimmering in the darkness on the balcony.”

  I collapse to my knees in the sand.

  “What does that mean? A membrane?” Reddles asks.

  “He used voidance to push him over.”

  Reddles flashes his teeth. “Then this all the proof we need,” he says, staring off into the distance. The muscles in his jawline clench.

  Suddenly, he steps around the book and Chimeline, past the shelter of the tarp, and approaches the campfire. Despite the rain, it still rages.

  Reddles throws in the king’s coiled parchment. For a moment, he stands in the rain, watching it burn.

  When he returns, he rubs his palms on his thighs, as if this subtle act of treason has left residue. But he doesn’t say a word. His face is still coiled with rage.

  I am moved by his display of both logic and courage.

  “There is a gap in time,” says the daughter. “A few days.”

  “Most likely due to all the chaos,” I add.

  “Or traveling. The next entry, he is back in Winter’s Baiou.”

  Reddles clears his throat. “You sent him back here?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of these entries are of his searching,” she continues, flipping the pages. “He’s using something called a membrane.” She looks up. “Wasn’t that how he murdered the king?”

  “Same, but different. This type of membrane is used to breathe underwater.”

  She turns back to the book. “He’s using a makeshift buoy as a marker. Some piece of painted wood tied to an old anchor. He moves it every day, as his search progresses further from shore and down Blackscar.”

  She utters a murmur of surprise. “The Lady Marine is mentioned here.” She glances at me curiously. “You left her here?”

  “I did,” I answer with a sigh. “I had to return from my honeymoon when the king died.”

  “But your wife remained?”

  “I didn’t want her trip cut short. She had many dives planned. She wanted to find her cursed Pygmy Seahorse.”

  “What?” Reddles asks.

  I wave the thought away. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I chose the university and the king over Marine. Right after I promised her the exact opposite. It was a profound mistake. One of many.”

  She turns the page and freezes.

  “Oh, my.”

  “What?”

  “An interesting development,” she begins. “Dem’s wife witnessed me today, in my true form. Underwater, fifty yards down within Blackscar. I cannot believe that she was going that deep. Brash for someone of her limited power. I was in my membrane...”

  She pauses.

  “What?” I ask.

  She looks at me with a worried expression, her brow furrowed.

  “Whatever is written down there, you can read it out loud.”

  She swallows, turning back to the book.

  “I was in my membrane, completely naked and undisguised. I had assumed that my dives were the only times when I could be myself completely, without the prying eyes of this world. Such was not the case.”

  She glances at me before continuing.

  “My first instinct was to kill her. She had seen too much. But then I realized that this would only draw more attention to me and my work. Dem would come back here, looking for answers. The man is exhausting.

  “Besides, the young beauty seems like a climber. It’s why she pursued Dem in the first place. Well, I can make her climb a bit more.”

  “Why don’t you move onto the next page?” Blythe softly advises.

  The daughter nods and complies.

  I look away, into the rain, almost wishing I was in it.

  “These are more passages dealing with Marine,” she says. “He told her that he was an empowered. He told her about the Axiondrive. She is agreeing to keep silent. To search for it with him.”

  “Just move on,” Blythe says.

  I’m still watching the storm, barely able to hear the daughter flip multiple pages.

  She clears her throat.

  “It is exactly what I feared. The stone is massive. At least ten yards wide and twenty yards long. It’s at the very bottom. So far down that it’s in complete blackness without voidlight. When I try to move it, with either voidance or brute force, it doesn’t budge.

  “It is the most frustrating feeling in the world to float next to it. On one hand, I can feel the enormous power at my fingertips, through the membrane. There must be billions of resources inside.

  “The problem is, I cannot tap into the stone’s power in order to raise it myself. It’s so heavy that voideath would occur. I need other voiders. I must think on this. Break up a large problem into smaller problems and solve each individually.”

  The daughter shakes her head while turning the page. Meanwhile, I interject.

  “Thus, the war. Ever since it began, the king forced me to send almost all voiders south. They weren’t being used on the field of battle. They were being used to raise the Axiondrive.”

  “He keeps visiting it,” says the daughter. She’s about halfway through the tome. “Every day he dives down.”

  “For what purpose? Is he trying to raise it?”

  She shakes her head, then looks back at me in confusion. “What is voidspeaking?”

  I sigh. “Mander was able to somehow speak to people within their minds. Using voidance. He did it with both Marine and Chimeline.”

  “Well, he’s voidspeaking to others using the Axiondrive,” the daughter says.

  “What is this Axiondrive?” Reddles asks.

  The daughter points out to sea.

  “It’s just their word for it,” I explain, and then I turn my attention back to her. “Who is he voidspeaking with?”

  “I...” She whispers something to Blythe.

  He replies in more whispers. As both of their voices escalate, I realize that they are conversing in their effulgency language.

  “What is it?” Reddles asks loudly, cutting them off.

  The pair looks up at him, and then to me. “He’s speaking with other empowered,” the daughter says. She looks petrified.

  “I don’t understand—what other empowered? I thought he was the only one.”

  “He’s the only one here,” she says.

  “Remember I told you that the Axiondrive powered a great ship?” adds Blythe. “A very long time ago? It crashed here in Xi Bay.”

  “Right,” I answer. “It came from across the sky.”

  “Across the sky?” Reddles asks, ducking slightly to look outward past the white tarp and into the storm. “Are you mad?”

  Blythe flashes him a look that flirts with impatience.

  Colu laughs. “Get used to it.”

  “Please keep reading,” I say to Blythe’s daughter.

  “The problem is the lack of clarity. There is a delay. Not quite a fullbell. It makes it very hard to communicate. The voices are muffled, as if they are being spoken through a wall. They say it is the water. It acts as a dampener. But I barely hear enough.

  “They were waiting for this glorious day. The moment of first contact by one of their own kind. My own kind. Someone who is awakened. The halcyon days are near.”

  “What does all of that mean?” Reddles asks, but I hold out a hand to quiet him.

  “Our ship fell out of a field of time into stars, and from them onto this world. But the original field of time is so immense that they don’t know w
here we are. They only know when we are. They need my help.”

  The daughter looks up, her petrified expression growing upon her face. “He’s promising to help them find us.”

  “How?”

  She flips the pages, and suddenly the words are replaced by dots and lines.

  “What is that?” Reddles asks.

  “Stars.”

  “It’s the painted ceiling in the Celestium,” Blythe adds.

  “They tell me that I must find three pulsars. Special stars that rotate, emitting a beam of energy. Just like a lighthouse, this energy can only be seen when the pulsar faces us. If I locate and measure the three of them, they can find me.”

  “The three lighthouses,” I murmur.

  Blythe and his daughter begin feverishly talking in their language again, while Reddles kneels down in the sand and grabs my forearm.

  “Tell me what is going on.”

  “There are others,” I say.

  “Others?”

  I shake my head, as I try to simplify my thoughts for this man, who knows nothing of the empowered or the enervated. “Even though it was buried underwater, Mander was somehow able to use the power of the stone to speak to his kind. They come from very far away.”

  “Who are they? What do they want?”

  Blythe breaks from his effulgency language and daughter, addressing the commander.

  “They are evil,” he says. “And they want everything.”

  The daughter begins to cry, and Blythe puts his arms around her. Beyond them, a bolt of lightning pierces the turbulent waters, and the canopy ripples in a chorus of crackles.

  Her mouth is open. She’s rifling through the book, turning the pages frantically.

  “The rest are blank,” she cries. “This is the last entry. It’s...” Her finger touches the corner. “It’s from two weeks ago.”

  “It is alright,” Blythe says softly to her. “The Unnamed will provide. Remember, he always provides.”

  “What does it say?” I ask her. “The last entry.”

  She looks up at me with glassy eyes that reflect the storm.

  “They’re coming.”

  To Be Continued...

  Age of Axion

  Book Two

  Coming 2020

  A Note From the Author

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  Narrated from the vantage point of six residents of 1C, The Perihelion: Complete Duology is a work set against the dystopian backdrop of near-future events. As the modern trappings of their bluecore fall apart, each must strike his or her own separate path towards salvation. Their interlaced stories become a compelling exploration of moral deviation and ultimate redemption.

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  The Gardener of Nahi

  Since the mysterious closed timelike curve appeared above the world of Cassidian, nothing has come in or out of it. So when an innership emerges from the celestial cloud and crashes on the beaches of the Still, a Hunion courier named Anon Selfe is sent to investigate. When he lands, he finds the blood and footprints of the only survivor leading away from the wreckage. But inside there is someone else awaiting him in the darkness: his own dead body.

  What follows is Anon’s desperate chase up through the tiers of Cassidian to find the survivor of the crash – a young woman named Myria who is unyielding in her belief that she knows Anon from her past.

  The only problem is that she claims to be from a world called Nahi, which is not known to exist.

  About the Author

  D.M. Wozniak is not nearly as interesting as the worlds and characters he creates, except, perhaps, for the fact that he has six children—three of whom are triplets. He lives in the close suburbs of Chicago with his wife Michele, five daughters, one son, and a massive Labrador.

  For decades, he has been reading speculative fiction novels by the likes of Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons, Neil Stephenson, and Patrick Rothfuss, and somehow found the time to write one of his own. And then one became two.

  A software architect by trade, his interests also lie in photography, independent music, and wasting money on his Porsche 911. Oh wait… forget that. He had to sell it.

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  Copyright © 2019 D.M. Wozniak

  ASIN: B07M7LT1ZM

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  All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One: The Girl from Scorpiontail

  A Letter from the Lady Marine

  A Black Substance

  The Second Ring

  Voidreaming

  Dinner with the King

  A Walk in the Moonlight

  The Laboratory

  Part Two: The Effulgent

  The Rise and Fall of Master Voider Democryos

  Voidreaming

  Cages

  Introductions

  Yerla

  Voidreaming

  The Lesson

  One Does Not Own the Dark

  The Third Shape in Yisla

  Voidreaming

  Something in the Water

  Anaxarchis' Camp

  Leaving Fiscarlo

  Part Three: The Skullman

  The Winds of Gales

  Red Petals

  il-Colu

  The Goodwin Massacre

  An Audience with the Redskull

  Gravestones and Moonspit

  A Chance at Life and Voidance

  Cleanthes' Test

  The Spy from Prainise

  An Orange Line

  Entombed

  Voidreaming

  Giving in the Tent

  le-Sante

  Part Four: The Man Behind the Veil

  The Foundation

  Worchot's Words

  Weeping Willow

  The Edge of a Kingdom

  A New Presence

  The Bell Tower

  They Believe in You

  A Walk in the Park

  Eleutheria


  The Weight of a Soul

  Mander and Reddles

  Temberlain’s Ashes

  On the Way

  The Celestium

  Three Lighthouses

  A Circular Rift

  In Soteria

  Faith is Wrapped in Silence

  Owning the Dark

  She is Both Here and There

  Somewhere

  Halcyon Roadmap

  To Be Continued...

  A Note From the Author

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  Other Works by D.M. Wozniak

  About the Author

  Copywrite

 

 

 


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