by Kyle West
Copyright © 2021 by Kyle West
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
About the Author
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Also by Kyle West
1
Lucian had been walking for hours, and night was falling.
He stumbled on a rock, almost face-planting on the rugged ground. The only reason he caught himself was due to Psyche’s lower gravity. He panted, trying to catch his breath. The air was thin up here, but maybe it would be thicker at a lower elevation.
He was following a trail, but it was impossible to tell where it was leading. For now it led up a set of broken steps carved into a cliff. Those steep, shattered stairs would have been impossible to climb in standard gravity.
Climbing hand over hand, his muscles strained under the exercise. He had done nothing for months besides sitting in his cell. Coupled with the low transit gravity of the prison barge, he was the weakest he had been in his adult life.
Pulling himself up the final step, Lucian gasped for breath. Once standing, he peered beyond a precipice before him. It fell hundreds of meters, the trail crisscrossing down before it was lost to darkness. Even in low gravity, it would be hell going down that. But there was no other way to proceed. And the lower he descended, the darker it would become. He just couldn’t catch his breath. He needed to find shelter before night fell. And he needed to find water.
Wherever his escape pod had landed, it was far from any sort of life, human or otherwise. Maybe this part of the moon was isolated, and he was the only living person within a thousand kilometers. If that was true, then it almost certainly meant his death. He would be doomed to wander this moon until he collapsed from thirst, hunger, or sheer exhaustion.
He tried pushing these dark thoughts from his mind, descending deeper into the rift. He tried not to think of what threats might be lurking in the gathering darkness.
One thing was sure. The further he descended, the dimmer the sky grew. Was that due to the onset of evening, or the twisted mountains blocking more sunlight? Those mountains didn’t look right, anyway. Through the violet mist, they were warped like some lurid vision of hell. Even Volsung hadn’t been as bleak as this. The only life were low, stunted trees clinging in rocky crevices. There was no wind whatsoever, while the air was cool, dry, and . . . dead, for lack of a better word. If there was water, it had to be at a lower elevation. And with water, hopefully, there would also be life. And where there was life, there was food.
The mere thought of water made his throat feel even more parched, but it was almost too dark to proceed. Of course, he could stream a light sphere and search late into the night. But light might attract unwanted attention. It would be better to find water without it, but for all he knew, that would be impossible. And of course, it would mean dismantling the block he’d formed around his Focus all those months ago. Lucian had never been afraid of the dark, but the darkness of this moon terrified him. Anything could be lurking behind the copious boulders, crevices, or pits he passed.
In the end, Lucian had to stop because he was tripping over every stray rock and crack. And now, the trail was skirting the edge of a mountain, and one false step could send him falling hundreds of meters. He needed light, but first, he had to see if it was even possible to stream.
He reached for his Focus. There was no sentimentality as he worked to dissolve the block. It was a knot he had practiced untying countless times in his head during the long journey here.
And just as it had been in his imagination, the block was unraveled with a simple streaming of Psionic Magic. A strange heaviness departed him. It would take some time to regather his ether, so to stream a light sphere, he would have to overdraw. There was little choice unless he wanted to stumble over the side of the trail and into the fissure.
The image of his focus, the Septagon and its seven colored points, formed perfectly in his mind. He reached for the Radiant Aspect.
He siphoned ether directly from the Manifold. The energy that powered all magic entered him, shocking him like cold water. But it also burned him at the same time, as if there were acid mixed in. He hadn’t expected so much ether to enter him so quickly, especially being out of practice so long.
There was little time to wonder at it. He created a thin stream, and a dim light sphere manifested before him, illumining the area up to five meters.
Now, he had to get that light to follow him. And for that, he would need to test his Binding. His heart pounded a bit, not knowing what to expect. He would have to stream Binding at some point, so he might as well do so now, when he wasn’t under any immediate threat.
While holding the Radiant stream, he reached for the Binding Aspect. He bound the light sphere to his right shoulder so it would follow him. He didn’t notice any discernible use of ether – it was as if his pool had remained at the same level. Granted, such a simple tether didn’t use a lot of ether anyway, but at the same time, it should have used at least some. It was evidence that the Orb of Binding was real, and the Oracle had not been lying to him.
He kept the luminosity of the light sphere low, just enough to see by. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold it. He was tired, weak, and didn’t relish having to draw more ether than he already had.
The light revealed the trail sidling down the mountain range on his left. It dropped deeper and deeper into the rift with no sign of ending.
This was some mess he was in. Would they really have dropped him on some random part of the moon? Or would they have put him where there was at least some human habitation nearby? He thought back all those months, to what that prison guard had told him. The Treaty of Chiron stated the League only needed to get the exiled mage to the surface. He’d said the Treaty had ensured nothing about the mage's survival, so Lucian had to take that into his own hands.
Lucian’s train of thought was broken when he stepped on something organic and squishy. He pulled his boot away with a squelch, looking down at what appeared to be a pile of mud. A pile of mud that was warm.
That was when the smell hit him.
His mouth twisted. “Disgusting.”
He wiped h
is boot on a nearby rock but couldn’t get the residue completely off. There were two piles of it, not quite steaming, but hours-fresh.
He supposed that answered his question about whether there was animal life on this moon. This observation was not helped by the fact that the creature was bigger than him. Far bigger, and nearby.
Shelter was sounding like a better idea every second. Turning back wasn’t an option. Up above were only dry wastes. The area he had come from hadn’t held so much as a snowbank for water, despite the freezing temperature. That told him little precipitation fell here.
Whatever life was here had to live below, between the mountains. But other life also meant competition for resources. He had to be prepared that the natives were not friendly.
Lucian proceeded cautiously, rounding a bend that wrapped around the mountainside.
That was when he saw a light in the distance, the unmistakable orange glow of a fire.
He immediately cut off both of his streams and crouched. His mind hummed with the positive afterglow of magic. How he had missed this feeling. And because of that, Lucian understood more than ever why magic was so dangerous.
He kept his attention on the fire. It might have been a hundred meters away, but he couldn’t see anyone around it. He thought about reaching for Radiance to home in on the infrared spectrum. Doing so would allow him to see any heat source besides that fire. A heat source like another human. But he already felt strained from holding his light sphere. If there were people around, he needed enough magic to defend himself. It was a risk he couldn’t take.
The best way to proceed was to move carefully, to watch his steps, and not make any sound.
He edged along the trail, keeping the rock wall on his left. If he veered too far to the right, he would fall into the rift. Even with the lower gravity, a fall from this height would be fatal.
As he approached the mouth of the cave, there didn’t seem to be anyone within a few meters of the fire. But from the even burn of the flames, it was clearly manmade. The only question was, where was the man?
Lucian crouched in the shadows, waiting for what seemed half an hour before moving in. He felt exposed, stepping into the light like this. He reached for his Focus; he needed to be prepared for the worst. He stood a few meters from the fire, which was almost burned down to coals. Beyond the firelight, he could see the cave went even deeper.
What was he doing in here? Half of him wanted to turn around and head back out into the night, and the other half wanted to explore further.
A sudden crashing noise emanated from deeper within the cave, like metal falling on rock.
“Hello?” he called.
He winced. Why had he given himself away? After a few seconds without a response, he creeped deeper into the darkness of the cave. He really should be turning around right now, but there was no way he was going to spend the night out in the darkness. Not with whatever had made that gigantic pile of crap. He needed shelter, or at the very least, directions on where to find food, water, and his own safe place to hole up.
At a bend in the tunnel, he heard a woman’s voice, singing softly. He strained his ears to listen, the hairs on his arms rising. If there was anything he’d learned from watching horror holos, now was the appropriate time to leave.
As soon as he started backing away, there was a witchy female cackle. “Leaving so soon? We haven’t even started, yet.”
Lucian ran, but tripped over a rock. Footsteps approached from behind.
He tried to get up, but he was so heavy, as if he weighed ten times what he should have. The ground below him glowed silvery. With horror, he realized it was a gravity amplification disc. As the disc pulled him down, hard, it was impossible for him to budge. Even his lungs fought for breath.
Well, he’d made a poor showing of it. After only a few hours on the surface, he was going to die.
2
It was Lucian’s first fight with a rival mage with his life in the balance. And from the way things were going, it was probably going to be his last.
If he wanted to survive this, then he knew he needed utter calm and to reach for his Focus.
He reached for Gravitonics, fumbling for a counterstream to extricate himself from this situation. But he couldn’t even feel his ether in the first place. Whatever this mage was doing, it was far beyond his abilities to fight against. He realized he knew nothing, that he had had barely any training at all.
He was completely at this woman’s mercy.
Still, that didn’t stop him from trying to reverse the Gravitonic stream. He tried to brute force through the block around his Focus, but again, there was nothing. He struggled to lift his arms but gave up after a few seconds. They were like leaden weights in Jupiter’s gravity.
“Let me go,” Lucian managed, fighting for breath. “I won’t hurt you.”
From the sound of her breathing, he guessed the woman stood about a meter behind him. A strange chortle escaped her throat.
“You’re a rotting poor Hunter,” she said. Her voice sounded young, probably around his age. From that earlier maddened cackle, he had expected an old hag. “Either that or you’re fresh off a barge. Either way, if you don’t cause any more problems, I might not kill you.”
Lucian had no choice but to be at her mercy. She ran her hands over the length of his body. He tried to squirm away but couldn’t; she didn’t avoid the areas he wished she would. Those probing fingers were like eels, seeking any sort of weapon. He groaned as he fought to escape.
“Now, now,” she said. “Can’t have you stabbing me with a surprise shockspear, can we?”
“Hands off,” Lucian said. “I don’t have any damn shockspear.”
The sheer weight of his body was almost enough to suffocate him on its own. His vision was getting dark – blood and oxygen were not reaching his brain efficiently. If she didn’t let him go, and soon, he would pass out. And if he passed out, he would never wake up again.
The weight suddenly released, and Lucian scrambled free. He whipped around to face the woman and was surprised by what he saw. Even in her raggedy clothing cinched together with a rough piece of rope, she cut a striking figure. Her pale, blonde hair fell just past her shoulders, while her eyes were intense and blue. Her bare feet were filthy and heavily calloused. How she got around on these rocky trails, Lucian couldn’t begin to guess. She looked the part of the quintessential cavewoman, and the local make of her clothes told him that she was no prisoner from a barge. She was most likely born and raised here.
Last of all, he noticed part of her left arm was mottled with sickly pink patches. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from that skin, of which he had only read and heard about.
She was a fray.
“Don’t mind my arm,” she said. “I’m not far gone, yet, whatever the Elders of Kiro would have you believe. I’ve still got my mind, of that you can be sure.”
Lucian backed up a step. Any moment now, she could lash out and end his life. She had so easily overpowered him. Worse, he couldn’t even stream his own magic to undo her block.
“If you unblock me, I won’t hurt you,” Lucian said.
She seemed to consider for a moment. “Not a chance. Of me unblocking you, or you hurting me.”
Lucian hadn’t expected that to work, but it had been worth a try. “I was only looking for a place to stay. I can leave you in peace.”
“You are fresh off a barge,” she said. “No fray-hunter would be as incompetent as you.”
Despite the insult, Lucian almost breathed a sigh of relief. She no longer saw him as a threat, which was exactly what he needed.
“I just landed here. So what?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “How long have you been here, exactly?”
“Six hours, maybe? It’s hard to say.”
Lucian wondered why she was asking him all these questions. She probably wouldn’t be going through the trouble if she planned on killing him.
“That explains it. Being fresh off the
barge is the only reason you’d be dumb enough to go out there at night. I’m just trying to help.”
“Help? You almost killed me!”
“I wasn’t sure of you at first, but I’m reasonably sure you can’t kill me. I can’t let you go back out there. It would be irresponsible of me.”
“Okay. Well, why would you want to help me?”
“Well, why wouldn’t I? You’re a lost little puppy out in the wilds. I’m not a cold-hearted bitch.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m pretty cautious after you attacked me.”
“You were trying to run. I thought you were here to kill me. And if I’d let you go, that would’ve been the end of you.”
“Why is that?”
“Wyverns.” The firelight lent her blue eyes an intense appearance. “They hunt the rifts at night. Doesn’t matter if it’s pitch black. They have large eyes that catch the smallest amount of light, and where there’s no light, they can smell your warmth. Failing that, they can use their shrieks to find their prey. They always hunt in pairs, husband and wife.”
“That’s romantic,” Lucian said. The joke didn’t do much to take away the sick wrenching in his gut.
“Only caves are safe, with a bright enough fire to keep them away. They hate the light and will only fly in it if you really piss them off.”
“I thought you said they like warmth. Fire means warmth.”