Commencement

The universe is vast. It’s so vast that the very concept of it–the sheer beastly immensity of it–thrashes at the fabric of reason itself, and to our mortal minds, it appears chaotic. Stars flare into existence while others perish, great stones hurtle through the empty dark only to crash into one another and be obliterated, and life pervades everywhere.

All of this activity carries on seemingly without direction or purpose, but such appearances belie a strange truth: the veil of chaos conceals a subtle order which governs all things, a queer music that suffuses and binds, pulsing through the glittering stars and clouds of burning gas, over crystalline shores and fields of shifting sands, weaving all of creation into a single unbroken whole.

There is harmony, though we lack ears to hear it. There is order, and in its intricate majesty, that order is divine. There is music among the spheres, and all the petty toils of men are but the transitory notes and cadence of its forever wandering melody.

The song evolves and the gears of time churn ever onward, leaving a trail of aeons that stretch deep into the shadowed abyss of antiquity. Thus do we find ourselves now in the Fifth Epoch, called the Age of Hammer and Blade for the towering heights of its achievement and the bloody spectacle of its wars. It is the 1,106th year of his excellency, Emperor Spiritus LXX who sits upon the Throne of Thorns, and hallowed is his silent dominion over the many scattered stars.

The Age of the Corruptor fast approaches and with it, The Lord of Shadows and Light. Legend tells us a Grim Legion will ride riot in his wake, plunging the kingdoms of men and beast into infernal war, but what may rise from those ashes simply cannot be known. At least, not yet…

This is the chronicle of how one age ends and another begins, and it starts with a single naive boy. It begins the day he dies.

Book I — First Fragment

My dearest Lisbeth,

It no doubt beggars belief, but during these long months of my travels among the stars, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to write. Much to my dismay, life aboard the Imperial Dragonslayer Ashkalon is endlessly tedious and taxing, and I find myself pressed into one mindless labour or another from the instant they rouse me in the morning to the moment I collapse at night.

Nevertheless, the journey has been simply tremendous and I will no doubt cherish memories of it until the day I die, for though I’ve traversed only the barest sliver of the universe, I have borne witness to countless weird wonders beyond imagination. I have seen the raw essence of new stars coalesce and spark to burning life, and watched the luminous beam of a pulsar whirl about in a nebula’s roiling haze. I have climbed quartz mountains wreathed in living flame, and crossed miles-long bridges hewn of nothing but ice and prayer.

Our vessel, the Ashkalon, isn’t at all as I once imagined she would be. I first spied her through a cramped porthole, and her three hulls appeared against the stars as a tremendous gleaming trident bound together by a wing like a scimitar’s blade. As she approached, I was amazed to discover her entire surface engraved with twisting motifs and arcane sigils, revealing her to be a potent artifact of most elaborate manufacture.

Unlike most starships, the Ashkalon travels completely without the shimmering sails we’re so familiar with. I’ll spare you the gross technical details of her drive mechanism, but it’s enough to say that she is far swifter and more agile than any clipper to have ever made port back on Mydora.

My quarters, which I share with another apprentice named Bibbs, are a simple stark chamber with two straw cots. Walls are featureless steel, and light comes from an oil lantern suspended from a hook. We’re quartered with the workmen a mere deck above the livestock pens, and were I not completely exhausted by day’s end, I would surely find it impossible to sleep amid the ceaseless braying of goats and squeal of pigs.

Still, I mustn’t make too much of my hardships. This externship has proven invaluable, and I am thoroughly blessed by the opportunity to study under such masterful practitioners as the Ashkalon’s crew. Of particular note is the Physicist, Magus Henning Karst, whose immense skills of force manipulation are held in high regard throughout the Imperium. I’ve assisted him in steering the ship on occasion, and simply being in his company is both an honour and an inspiration. I would also mention Magus Delmarus, the ship’s Astrometer whose task it is to plot our course from one star system to the next. He seems to have taken quite a liking to me, and with a small measure of luck, he may just provide me with a letter of recommendation once my tour is complete.

Only the ship’s Invictus, a man named Malcolm, has remained perfectly distant from me, but he’s a solitary sort and I doubt he calls anyone aboard the Ashkalon friend. He spends the bulk of his hours alone in his atrium and only rarely tours the ship’s halls, strutting about like a proud rooster. He’s a practitioner of frighteningly immense power and, as is so often the case, also most somber countenance. His complete isolation is evident and were he a lesser man, I might even pity him.

Alas, it saddens me to think that my time aboard the Ashkalon is nearly complete. I will miss the vigour found within her halls, and the boundless adventure of wandering the limitless void as one of her crew. Yet, as I have sailed across this sea of stars, only one thought possessed me, and it was that of returning home to the lovely forests of Mydora and your tender embrace.

We’re to rendezvous with the Mercy Ship Cladius at Humaira in two weeks, and that vessel shall carry me during the final week of my journey home.

I count the days left until I return to you.

With all my love,
Caleb

“So, what do you think?”

“Well.” Bibbs stroked the stubble on his chin and eyed Caleb’s letter like some unfamiliar variety of snake. “It’s just… It’s a bit flowery, isn’t it?”

Caleb nervously adjusted his spectacles. “I don’t… What do you mean exactly?”

“Like here,” Bibbs said, waving his finger at a wide swath of the parchment. He kept a safe distance, careful not to let any of it rub off on his finger. “You wrote ‘mindless labour’ whereas I’d write, ‘shoveling pig shit.’”

“That’s rather coarse,” Caleb said. “My Lisbeth’s a pressed flower. She ought to be handled with the utmost care.”

Bibbs chortled. “Alright, alright. Precious, delicate little lily, surely. What about all the damn lying?”

“What?”

“The lies,” Bibbs said incredulously. “Bald faced lies. Old fashioned mendacity. Nine tenths of this thing is pig shit. I’d know; spent all yesterday shoveling the stuff.”

“I may’ve stretched the truth a smidge…”

Bibbs gave him a cold look. “Watched new stars spark to life, did we?”

“The Ashkalon passed right through a stellar nursery…”

“It did… while you and I were below decks shoveling pig shit,” Bibbs said. He shook his head in condemnation. “How about the part where you climbed a mountain bathed in living flame or what have you?”

“Aye, we did that.”

“Ah, but you conveniently skipped a few details, like our being half-blind in those ridiculous helmets, or being loaded down like bloody pack mules.”

“Unimportant minutiae,” Caleb said.

“Unimportant,” Bibbs mock agreed. He scanned further down the page. “And old Magus Karst allows you to steer the ship now, does he? Suppose you two have been sipping ale together while I’m asleep? Gabbing about girls and the latest fashions in facial hair?”

“Minor exaggeration,” Caleb said with a grumble. After a moment of defeated silence, heavy with Bibbs’ growing judgment, Caleb added, “Look, I brought him tea once. Saw the inside of the impeller room while I was there. Part of it, at least. The entryway. Sort of.”

“I see.” By then, Bibbs’ disappointment had miraculously transformed into self-satisfaction. “And Magus Delmarus… how much of a liking has he taken to you exactly?”

Caleb grew quiet as a dormouse. “He knows my name,” he said.

Bibbs shrugged. “Guess that’s something. Look mate, you don’t have to try so damned hard.” He shuffled the papers idly while his eyes wandered over Caleb’s flowing cursive. “You love this girl, Lisbeth, right?”

Caleb nodded.

“And she loves you?”

“Yes.” The word was simple and sincere.

“Then you write, ‘Dear Lisbeth. Miss you terribly. Be home soon. Caleb.’”

“That’s it?” Caleb asked.

“That’s it. Though… I guess you could leave in the stuff about Malcolm. ‘Proud rooster’ puts a nice image to it.”

Caleb smirked. “That’s the sanitized version. The rough draft said egotistical cock.”

Bibbs squinted at him then exploded with laughter, his barrel chest rocking violently. He reached over and messed Caleb’s hair with his calloused hand. “Now that’s the Cabe I know, ya silly sod.”

Caleb recoiled and began to fix his carefully composed imitation of messy hair. “Alright, I suppose I get your point,” he said. “Can I have my letter back now?”

“This?” Bibbs asked, waving the pages in the air. “Sure,” he said. He motioned as if to hand it back, but then a small pulse of subtle energy–a minute crackle of multi-coloured light–skated along his hand, and the parchment burst into flames. With a wave of his fingers, the remaining ashes tumbled to the floor. “Oh,” Bibbs said, “sorry about that. Bloody unpredictable talent. You’re better off without it anyway.” He finished with a wink and a grin.

Caleb groaned and shook it off. It’d taken him hours to compose that letter, and his bunkmate immolated it on a whim. The worst part–the part that truly stung–was just how utterly beyond him such a tiny parlour trick was.

While attending academy, Caleb had done well enough with history and theory, but application had been a constant struggle. Where other boys managed to awaken their second sight after a few weeks in the echo chamber, it took Caleb more than six months guided by a gaggle of flustered elderly professors whose collective wisdom amounted to, “Just keep trying, lad. You’ll get it eventually.”

From then on, he was always behind. Everyone else enrolled in applied studies where they learned to manipulate energies and bend the very fabric of the universe. In short order, they all became skillful practitioners and were shepherded into vocational schools appropriate to their talents, while Caleb continued to fumble, bumble and make a right mess of things. He just didn’t have the synaesthetic coordination needed to excel as a practitioner, and he eventually came to understand he never would.

The few subjects he did well enough at–linguistics, geometry, theoretical metaphysics, energy dynamics–were the domain of research librarians. Thelosophers. He was doomed to spend the rest of his days stashed away in a musty Imperial archive, translating old texts or scribbling out equations, expanding the theory real practitioners relied on to do real work.

Practitioners like his bunkmate, Alexander Bibbs, who proved to be an immense natural talent right from the start. The way Bibbs told the story, his second sight practically awakened itself, and he was so gifted at energy manipulation that graduate school accepted him a year early. And not just any grad school either, but the Elder Norn Academy on Kallistia, the most prestigious damned school in the bloody capital of the blasted Imperium.

Bibbs had trained to become an Interfector, a slayer who wields destructive techniques in battle. With his talent and dedication, he’d no doubt be assigned to a respected ship like the Ashkalon, and perhaps even rise to the station of Invictus like Malcolm, conducting ship-to-ship combat as a living lightning rod for powers of almost unthinkable magnitude.

To Caleb, it seemed an odd twist of fate that Bibbs and he should be quartered together, one a natural talent and the other inert as a pile of dust. It was a rather obnoxious twist made all the worse by the fact that Bibbs was such an outstanding fellow. Good humored, friendly, supportive. As usual, Caleb did his best to bury his jealousy beneath a few layers of self-loathing and snuff it out. As was also usual, his best wasn’t quite good enough.

He was still deep in the less pleasant regions of his psyche when the call came. The blue-green jewel beside their door lit up; lights swirled inside and resolved into a peculiar face, angular and strangely featureless like a stone carving brought to life. It was the Ashkalon’s Synod, the synthetic persona who commanded the ship.

Something about the Synod made Caleb’s skin crawl.

“Apprentices Bibbs and Gedley,” it said in its chorus of voices, each as hollow as the next. “Your shift has come on the duty rotation. Report to the assembly hall for assignment.”

There was nothing left to say. The last scrap of Caleb’s free time was gone in a puff of duty, and he imagined its ashes tumbling to the floor like the letter burnt just moments before.

With harmonized groans, he and Bibbs got to their feet and straightened their clothes. They both wore the same uniform consisting of a simple white shirt and dark leather jerkin, loose trousers made of some coarse fabric, and a pair of buckled boots. The only difference was that Bibbs somehow made the ensemble look good, heroic even, while Caleb was so scrawny that his clothes looked as if they were still hanging on the rack.

Caleb stepped to the door and cracked it open, and a wave of noise washed over him, thick with countless voices and the rhythmic clang of hammers. The smells of burning charcoal and hot steel scarcely concealed an undercurrent of animals and dung, touched here and there by sweat, ale, and roasting meats.

The two apprentices stepped out into the torchlit hallway lined with black steel doors like their own, and followed it until it dumped them onto the Ashkalon’s main concourse.

The concourse was a cavernous chamber, a road with an open level above it and a handful of thin walkways crossing the span, lit in imitation daylight by strips of faceted orange sunstones set into the vaulted ceiling. The place was a ramshackle village, a chaotic bazaar where the ship’s mundane workers–blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors and the like–went about their business. Most worked out of wooden stalls and booths, while the more successful among them rented recessed storefronts or the sumptuous suites on the second floor.

Caleb and Bibbs cut through the shuffling crowd with practiced ease and made their way to the crossroads at the aft end. The wide chamber narrowed there and split into several service corridor, and traffic thinned enough for the two apprentices to jog the last few yards.

They slipped through a pair of double-doors and once again found themselves in the Ashkalon’s austere assembly hall, a half-circle auditorium with row upon row of pews converging on a sunken stage. The hall served dozens of functions, from services venerating the Emperor (dreadfully boring things which Caleb attended just often enough to avoid suspicion), to duty briefings like the one currently being convened.

It was a packed house. Mundane crewmen and apprentices with disgruntled expressions filled the bulk of the seats, while a group of adept practitioners in sharp formal robes constituted an island off in the far right wing. Conversations in hushed voices flowed everywhere, filling the hall with a churning murmur.

Bibbs grabbed an empty seat and Caleb grumpily dropped down beside him. To his left was Kalman, an apprentice artifex who always seemed to be deep in thought and chewing on something. Noisily. Caleb briefly considered switching places with Bibbs until he noticed Salvador Rainer on the other side. Rainer was another interfector in training, but unlike Bibbs, he was an egotistical loud-mouth jackass. And those were his virtues.

Kalman’s chewing had already begun, grind after gritty grind, punctuated occasionally by a brief suck at his front teeth which whistled tunelessly, the bloody Emperor forbid he miss a scrap of whatever it was.

Meanwhile, Rainer was telling a story that the man on his right was struggling to ignore. “…and I blew the wretched thing’s head clean off,” he said, thoughtlessly jabbing some poor workman in the back with his elbow. “Didn’t skip a beat, either. Just BANG! And off it flew.”

There would be no escape, and so Caleb resigned himself to enduring the obnoxious hell that was his life.

He nudged Kalman. “Any idea what this is all about?”

With a start, Kalman emerged from the deep fog of his concentration. “Oh, Gedley. Come again?”

Caleb spun a lasso with his finger. “The meeting. What’s going on?”

“Haven’t the faintest,” Kalman replied. When Caleb failed to immediately chase his question with another bit of intrigue, Kalman descended right back into his fog, grappling with whatever problem was troubling him and chewing on something that Caleb had begun to suspect didn’t even exist.

After a few minutes, the sunstones dimmed and all the idle chatter died away. A green focus jewel the size of a man emerged from the stage floor, and the Ashkalon’s Synod took form within it. The luminous ghost floated as if in an aquarium, rhythmically waving on some unseen current and slowly pulsing with light.

Its dead black eyes surveyed the room, and contented, it spoke. “In the name of Spiritus LXX, hallowed is his dominion, let this meeting come to order.

“Our planned rendezvous at Humaira has been delayed indefinitely in order to investigate the disappearance of the Imperial Prospector Eurisko and her 32 crew. The Eurisko last made contact fifteen days ago while en route to the system designated Alendra 5742, our present location. Cursory efforts to locate the vessel have led us to the system’s second world, an uncharted planet known locally as Zayin.

“While in orbit, we have observed five surface aberrations which could be the wreckage of the Eurisko. Ground teams will be shifted to the planet’s surface by means of the slip and will then proceed to search on foot, while the Ashkalon remains in orbit and continues to investigate from above.”

Caleb stifled a groan. He hated the slip, and by the squirming evident throughout the room, he wasn’t alone.

“Relevant scripture describes Zayin as a habitable world with a predominantly herbivorous ecology and few natural hazards. We have thus assigned this operation a neutral posture, requiring minimal arms and armour. The Revenant Cohort will remain aboard the Ashkalon, standing at ready should their services be needed.”

“No green hoods,” Caleb whispered. “That’s some small blessing at least.”

In reply, Bibbs let out a tiny sigh of relief.

The Synod continued. “Adept Tarkanian, stand and be seen.”

Off to the right, a dark skinned man with sideburns stood crisply and offered a curt bow. He wore sleek modern robes in shimmering grey, and on his right wrist was a silver bracelet adorned with a scrying crystal. Adept Tarkanian was a Seer, and from everything Caleb had heard, a damned good one.

“By the Emperor’s will, you are charged with leading this investigation and are hereby granted authority over all ground operations on Zayin. These,” the Synod scanned the room quickly, “142 crewmen are now yours to command. May His divine grace shine upon your travails.”

“His eternal wisdom illuminates my path,” Tarkanian replied, offering another bow.

The Synod turned back to the rest of the assembly, and Caleb had the sickening feeling the apparition was looking directly at him. The weight of its gaze filled him with nausea. “There may be survivors, so time is of the essence,” it said. “Gate anchors are already en route. Report to the slipway immediately and prepare for shift procedure.”

Book I — Second Fragment

The slip facility sat at the lowest level of the Ashkalon’s keep, far from the noisy concourse and the prying eyes of its workmen. It was a large, hollow chamber with particularly ornate architecture; its ceiling and walls were obscured by a series of fluted arches like some massive creature’s ribcage, and a raised platform dominated the space within.

The platform floated a few inches above the floor and was itself the slip device. Twisted iron pedestals surrounded it, each cradling a blue stone at its top that glowed and flickered like an open flame.

Their light revealed the platform’s dark metal surface, which was engraved with six concentric circles, each containing its own unique string of geometric shapes and Urskrit runes. These glyphs together formed a single Theloglyph, a lens through which arcane energies could be directed and focused to perform a task. This was easily one of the most complex Theloglyphs Caleb had ever lain eyes on, and attempts to analyze it made his head spin.

He and Bibbs were standing with the rest of their group in the antechamber; ahead of them, Adept Tarkanian and his men were already on the platform and ready to go. The unflappable Tarkanian sat atop a bleakhorse, a construct of metal and flesh that had once been a living thing, while the rest of his team were on foot and uneasily waiting for the inevitable.

On the far side of the chamber, an unfamiliar physicist in a dark blue robe stood at an altar above the platform. His voice low and slow, he chanted and dragged his arms through an intricate series of forms, performing the technique that would initiate the slip.

Caleb could see the immense energies in play even with his second sight constricted. They swirled about the physicist in surging waves and eddies, while their colours shifted and throbbed. The man was in deep concentration, using every last muscle in his body to slowly stoke the eldritch fire, gradually building a waveform that would slice open the skin of reality.

A low moan rose up from the emptiness and the slip platform crackled with resonant power. The flickering of the blue stones came faster and faster, and beyond them, the physicist’s whole body began to glow with ethereal light.

Then it happened. There was a low tone, as if the mouth of a giant glass bottle were suddenly cuffed, followed by a rush of wind from elsewhere. Tarkanian’s team was gone.

“First team away,” the physicist said. He looked toward Caleb’s group. “Second team, proceed to the slip.”

While the others walked past him toward the platform, Caleb stood still and whispered, “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.” His shoulders collapsed in on themselves.

Bibbs gave him a half-hearted pat on the back. “I hate it too, but what choice do we have?”

Caleb looked at his teammates as they passed and found a sea of faces as pale and sweaty as his own. “I don’t know,” he said. “I could tell them I forgot something and then scamper off to retrieve it.”

“Fine idea, Cabe. I’m sure the proctor’s never heard that one before.”

“Proceed to the slip,” the physicist repeated. His tone was perfectly even, but somehow conveyed a deep annoyance.

Bibbs took a step forward, but stopped when he noticed Caleb still rooted in place. “Come on, damn it.”

“I can do this,” Caleb reassured himself. He took a deep breath, slapped himself in the face and only then began to slowly amble toward the platform.

As the team approached, the nearest pair of blue stones dimmed and the edge of the platform dipped to the floor, then the men mounted it one by one. When his turn came, Caleb stepped lightly onto it as if it might suddenly give way. His rational mind understood how the device operated (more or less) and knew it to be perfectly safe and sturdy, but something deep inside him nevertheless distrusted everything about it. Absolutely everything.

He and Bibbs shuffled along to the back of the circle, and everyone else filed in with as much enthusiasm, the last a pair of massive workmen holding either end of a heavy chest. It took more than a minute for the entire team to mount the platform and get settled, after which the physicist once again began performing his complex rite.

The chanting grew swiftly in strength and intensity this time, and Caleb could feel a charge in the air. It was the needful ache of unspent lightning. He felt it pressing in on him from all directions, slapping against his damp skin like ocean waves crashing ashore.

The quickened throb of the blue stones told Caleb that the moment was near. Then, standing right on the cusp of the dreaded moment, he dilated his second sight for a reason even he couldn’t guess. As he did so, his every sense deepened and the air around him came alive in colour and motion. Great charged currents flowed every which way, bounding off of and swirling through the carved symbols in the floor.

“I can’t do this,” he said one last time.

But it was too late. Blue lances of pure light emerged from below like the claws of a beast, and they slashed hungrily at the air. The pressure built to an immense level and Caleb felt himself pushed sideways. What side, he never could tell, but he was always sure it was sideways.

There was silence. There were stars. The darkness thumped with a steady heartbeat. He was inside a living scream, a wounded shadow, an endless sadness, an echo with no source. Layer after layer of living membrane ripped away before him, and the taste of blood spread everywhere.

And then he was on the ground. Green grass. Morning sunshine. Pink clouds. A pleasant spring breeze accompanied by bird songs.

He was shivering, his heart was in his throat, and he could still hear the universe screaming behind his eyes.

“You alright?” Bibbs asked.

Caleb picked his spectacles up from the grass and put them on, then glanced around and took stock of his situation. He was splayed out on the ground as if a very large man had struck him in the jaw, and perhaps stomped on him a few times for good measure. The rest of the team was nearby, all visibly shaken but upright.

“I think,” Caleb stammered. “Yeah, I think I’m alright.”

He willed himself to sit up and cleared his ear with a finger, but the inhuman scream insisted on fading at its own leisurely pace. In another few seconds, he had his boots under him and was standing again, unsteadily but under his own power at least.

“It really put a wallop on you this time,” Bibbs said.

“I made a stupid mistake,” Caleb replied. “Opened my sight up for some reason. Curiosity, I guess.”

Bibbs looked genuinely amazed. “See anything interesting?”

“Just the usual horrors at twice the volume.” He shook his head but a few of the cobwebs refused to be dislodged. “Bloody hell.”

“For such a smart fellow,” Bibbs said with a smile, “you sure are a dumb son of a bitch.”

That wasn’t the first time such charges had been leveled against Caleb, and he was once again hard pressed to deny them.

Their landing site was a small valley surrounded by softly undulating hills, covered in a velvety carpet of grass that stretched to the far horizon. Caleb had never seen a landscape so charmingly barren; some low hills were capped by tufts of awkward looking trees, and a jagged rock-outcropping loomed a hundred yards off, but there was otherwise little to spoil the view.

He surmised that the rocks were the Synod’s supposed “surface aberration.” So much for that.

The gate anchor jutted out of the soil a dozen paces away like a bronze javelin still buried in its victim’s back, and Caleb eyed it with suspicion. Beside it, the two large workmen were busy unpacking their heavy chest, which contained the team’s field equipment. From where he stood, Caleb could see that its contents were fairly common for a search expedition: compasses, tonality pendants, dry rations, medical supplies and a handful of bows in case of emergency.

Their troop commander, Harvid, was busy surveying the horizon. He was old and sinewy, with a slender but powerful frame and skin marked by a lifetime of hard labour and punishment. His face was riven by a motley collection of wrinkles and scars, and no matter how dim the light, he always seemed to be squinting.

Like all the workmen, Harvid was mundane and thus belonged to the servile class, but Imperial society didn’t follow its usual rules aboard military ships. Any apprentice technically had noble standing but was regarded as something of a cross between a tourist and an indentured servant, while Harvid was a loyal crewman with years of experience and respect.

This arrangement could sometimes be problematic, especially when less commanding crewmen encountered particularly snot-nosed apprentices, but it was never a problem when Harvid was in command. No one would ever think to question his authority.

“Pair up,” the old salt said, still looking into the distance.

The group split into partners quickly. Everyone there had been on dozens of away missions, and like Caleb and Bibbs, each had long ago settled on a regular partner. Once paired, they lined up at the chest and were assigned equipment.

Caleb and Bibbs came to the head of the line and the two mountainous workmen filled their hands with baubles. They gave Caleb a compass, a brass disc that fit comfortably in his palm, its surface covered front and back with branch and leaf whorls, while Bibbs was handed a comparitavely plain looking tonality pendant which appeared to be little more than a simple silver necklace clutching an oblong crystal.

Despite their appearances, both items were rather clever artifacts. Besides indicating cardinal directions, the compass could lead its owner back to the chest from which it was taken, and also had the ability to detect stores of energy that might otherwise escape notice. The tonality pendant served only one function, but it was an important one: it allowed distant communication without any need for a Seer.

Before the two apprentices could step away, Harvid caught them in his sights and halted them with a gesture. “Bibbs and Gedley. What are your fields of study again?”

“Interfector,” Bibbs answered while rocking his shoulders back and puffing up his chest. “Specializing in fire techniques, sir.”

Caleb hesitated. “Thelosophy,” he said finally with a shake of his head.

“I see,” Harvid said. He took a moment to appraise Caleb, and didn’t appear pleased with what he found. “D’ya have any talents at all, boy?”

They’d already had this particular conversation before, and Caleb had grown tired of it then. He said, “Lux.”

“Come again?”

“I can summon light. It’s called lux.” It was a child’s technique, but Caleb didn’t feel the need to say that aloud.

“I see,” Harvid said again, and stroked his ragged chin. After a bit of thought, he lifted a bow and quiver out of the chest and handed them to Caleb. “I assume you’ve had some training with these?”

“Some,” Caleb said modestly. This wasn’t the time to brag about archery competitions, not that Harvid was likely to be impressed at second place anyway.

“Good. I expect your interfector friend will keep close guard over you, but you never know what you’ll find on these uncharted worlds. There’s something foul on the wind.”

With that, Harvid strolled away to attend some other matter, and left Caleb scratching his head. He didn’t know whether the old man’s concern was a sign of friendliness or disappointment, and he settled on assuming equal measures of both.

It took a few minutes more to outfit the entire party, after which Harvid sketched out the plan in broad terms. They’d follow a simple search pattern radiating out from their camp site, and anyone who found anything of interest was to report in immediately. Then he gave each pair a direction and sent them on their way.

Caleb and Bibbs set out toward the West following a slight depression which wove a path between the many soft hills. Creatures with wide, fan-shaped wings wheeled about in the cloud dappled sky and drifted lazily on the intermittent breeze, while small furred things in blue and green darted about in the feather-soft grass. Purple buds grew atop long curving stalks, and their cottony seeds hung in the air everywhere, bobbing up and down like bouys in calm seas.

Both apprentices had saucer eyes. After most of a year locked up in a dark starship, the fields of Zayin were like a precious gift. There was life and light everywhere, the smell of sweet flowers, and the sedate calls of wildlife.

The one thing they absolutely didn’t see were signs of a crashed ship or its crew.

“As far as fool’s errands go,” Caleb said several hours into their trek, “this one is oddly pleasant. No cramped vapour helmet, no hundred pound backpack, no hulking, tentacled beasts trying to eat my face…”

Bibbs said, “Hush.”

“Afraid I’ll jinx it?”

In harshly rasping whisper, “I said shut up.” Bibbs waved two upraised fingers to draw Caleb’s attention, then pointed toward an odd little hillock. It was shaped just like an upturned bowl and sat amid a small stand of trees which cloaked it in patchy shade.

Caleb took Bibbs’ hint. The ache in his head had thankfully subsided, so he slowly dilated his second sight and watched the emptiness become full. Streams of luminous colour swirled and flowed like ribbons of dye in still waters, but none approached the hill. They instead broke around it, leaving it almost totally untouched.

“Now that’s curious,” Caleb said.

“Precisely.”

He drew the compass from his pocket and pried it open it like a clam, and with his heightened senses, he could now see the device’s complex inner workings. The massive streams of energy outside collided with the compass’ case, where they seeped inside and branched into thousands of tiny swirling rivulets. Those rivulets threaded around three floating crystal shards, and dragged their tips this way and that.

Of the three, the green crystal pointed convulsively toward the hillock. Caleb took a moment to watch its motion, noting the speed and distance of its wavering. A few quick mental calculations later, he said, “Quite a bit of power locked up there. Second order, maybe 130 jun.”

“What do you think? Boobytrap?”

Caleb pried his sight wider, near to the point of no return. The world became a nausea inducing kaleidoscope of light, sound, flavor, texture, and odor. It was like staring into the sun, except with all his senses at once; the strain battered his concentration, and he only managed to maintain it for a few seconds.

As his second sight reflexively contracted, he was left with an image burned into his mind. Along the surface of the hillock, energies tinted unnatural shades of purple and red sat nearly still in overlapping crenellated patterns.

He pinched the bridge of his nose against a suddenly resurgent headache and said, “No, not a trap. Some kind of barrier construct. A very old style.”

Bibbs’ eyes flared bright amber as he widened his own second sight, and returned to their normal blue a moment later. “Hmmm, that’s not familiar at all. How old exactly? Which reign?”

Caleb almost laughed. “Which reign? I’m not talking millennia, Bibbs. It dates back to well before the first emperor. Try eons. Millions of years. This design pattern hasn’t been in fashion since the Age of Two Seas.”

The full gravity of that thought didn’t even strike Caleb until the words were already out of his mouth. This kind of barrier was already old when the planets themselves were in their infancy, and floated like islands within two conjoined seas. The technique of creating it had been conceived and mastered while the lesser gods still wandered the universe in flesh and blood.

“Really gods damned old,” Caleb mumbled absentmindedly. And just like that, he had to know what treasures it protected.

Bibbs scratched his head. “Do you know how to open it?”

They were apparently on the same page, and that page didn’t include reporting back to basecamp.

“Maybe,” Caleb replied. “These archaic barriers are usually built to open in response to a sound. A passphrase or something of the like.”

“You can figure out the phrase?”

“Not a chance,” Caleb said. “Well, I mean… there’s always a chance of anything, but this one’s pretty much insignificant. I’m more likely to be struck in the head by a meteorite made of diamond-studded gold than to just stumble across the key.”

Bibbs nodded and looked on expectantly.

Caleb closed his eyes and the image of the barrier was still there in his mind, fresh and vibrant as the moment he saw it. The barrier itself looked deceptively simple, and he knew there was more going on beneath the surface; an arrangement of sigils hidden within guided the energy flows, giving the outer barrier its structure, and that system held the key to cracking it open.

He opened his eyes and retrieved a notepad from his jerkin’s inner pocket. With a few smooth pen strokes, he sketched out the hill and the barrier, then followed with a few tentative doodles of its innards. All the while, a bitter voice haunted the back of his head, chiding him for not paying more attention during Magus Roussain’s lectures on fortification theory.

“Why’d you have to be so monumentally boring?” he asked.

Bibbs frowned. “You’re talking to yourself again.”

“I know, I know. Sorry.”

He looked down at his drawing, squinted and let out a sigh. The diagram was simply inadequate. He needed more information, and that meant giving himself a splitting headache.

Much to his disappointment, there was no other option.

Caleb tore a strip of parchment off and wrote down a series of Urskrit runes. He’d always loved the look of the twisting glyphs even before he learned to read them, and that love only deepened once he mastered the skill of writing them. With practiced grace, he linked one glyph to the next, his hand flowing through their forms, until the scrap was filled end to end.

“Here,” Caleb said while handing the paper to Bibbs. “When I give you the signal, read this at the barrier.”

Bibbs glanced over it, and Caleb could see his lips moving as he read. With anyone else, such a quirk might have been a sign of ignorance or dull wit, but neither of those described Bibbs. He was a thorough and effective orator with the sort of deep and powerful voice that would surely make the universe quake someday.

“Ready?” Caleb asked.

Bibbs gave him a nod.

He flared his sight and simultaneously pointed to Bibbs, who looked down to the note and began to chant. There was nothing half-hearted about Bibbs’ performance; he read the ancient language with uncanny accuracy, producing the syllables, rhythm and tone as Caleb had written it, and he linked them together with deft improvisations that strengthened and reinforced their power.

Caleb, with his vision once again amped up to dangerous levels, watched the words tumble out of his friend’s mouth. They became oscillating patterns of light that radiated out toward the hill and its waiting barrier, only to crash against it and be annihilated in a rippling cascade.

This was the key moment. Where the chant struck, the barrier churned into action, swallowing up the writhing waves of energy, digesting them, and ever so briefly illuminating the structures within itself. The barrier rejected the passphrase, but it was never meant to work; it was simply a probe.

Caleb released his second sight and it snapped shut with a flash of pain. It was nearly enough to knock him on his ass, but it didn’t matter because he’d seen what he needed to see. His head began to throb and a bit of blood trickled from his nose, but he ignored them and went to work filling in the details of his diagram.

He scribbled here, jotted there, scratched out a mistake that was so obviously idiotic that he wondered how he’d ever thought of it in the first place, and finally found himself staring at a reasonable facsimile of the barrier that protected the hillock. The flow chart was littered with tiny collections of glyphs, each set organized into its own circle or tree, and surrounded by notes describing their inputs and action.

“Well?” Bibbs asked. He was a patient sort, but not infinitely so.

“I’m getting there.” Caleb waved his companion off and tried to focus. With pen in hand, he traced the workings of the construct from link to link, looking for the chink in its armour. He knew there had to be a weakness somewhere. The challenges was in finding it, and when he reached the start of the loop, he still wasn’t any nearer. Was he missing something? Maybe he could feed it another passphrase, and find whatever he’d overlooked.

“Feed it another passphrase,” he said under his breath, and there it was. He’d found the weakness.

The plan came together in his head quickly, practically forming itself, and his hand was only a short step behind. A minute later, a new line of Urskrit glyphs sat at the bottom of his page, which he checked and double-checked just to be sure.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said, while slipping his pen back into his pocket. He handed the new page to Bibbs, saying, “Read this on my signal, just like before.”

Bibbs skimmed over his new script, but looked perplexed when he reached the end. His brow was knitted tightly together, and he looked to be doing ten-digit long division in his head. “I don’t think I understand.”

“Good news, my friend: you don’t have to. Ready?”

“I guess. Ready as ever.”

Caleb gave him an amiable smile. “Excellent. Now remember, on my signal.”

This time, Caleb squared up, looked to the hill and began to chant. His words were nonsense, just a repeating pattern that superficially matched the sort of phrase the barrier expected. He counted off his repetitions until he hit six, and at that moment gave Bibbs the signal to start while he continued on.

Beside him, Bibbs immediately launched into his performance, speaking the old words with such vigour that the very air around them began to hum in response.

They went on like this for more then a minute, then returned to silence. It was done.

“Nothing happened,” Bibbs said. He sounded like a child with a broken toy.

“Just wait.”

They waited and still nothing happened. Bibbs, having grown bored in the intervening lull, formed a tiny flame in his hand which he made dance from finger to finger. He was no doubt brainstorming other more direct methods to crack the seal.

Caleb meanwhile counted off minutes until the time was right. “You’ll want to watch this,” he said.

With a skip in his step, he approached the hill and stopped a mere foot from where the barrier stood. There, he raised his arms and held them outstretched, took a deep breath, and brought his hands together in a quick, comical clap.

Bibbs gasped. “It collapsed,” he said.

With a creak and a groan, a hidden stone door opened in the face of the hill, chased by a cough of beige dust.

Caleb cracked a wicked smile.

“You figured out the passphrase?” Bibbs asked in disbelief.

Caleb stepped up to the doorway and cautiously peeked inside. “No, I already told you. The passphrase was a dead end.”

Bibbs came up beside him, still juggling the small flame in his hand. “Then how?”

“You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

“Fine, the idea is simple enough. When the barrier receives potential passphrases, it boxes them up and tests them; if a phrase is wrong, it’s shuttled off to a destructor, a sort of rubbish bin where it can be safely dispersed. That’s where the weakness is hidden. The barrier was only intended to accept a passphrase of a certain size and shape, and it only has a limited number of bins.

“So, I fed the barrier a likely passphrase, which it happily trapped, tested and discarded over and over again, filling up those bins. When you began to chant something that very much didn’t sound like a passphrase, the barrier tried to send it straight off to another bin… one which didn’t exist.”

Bibbs looked oddly concerned. This stuff clearly wasn’t his forte, but he did his best to follow along. “And that did what exactly?”

“Allowed us to slip a new pattern directly into the barrier’s internal structure, one designed to terminate the whole thing on command.”

Bibbs nodded. “And the clap was the command.”

“Wasn’t strictly necessary, of course, but I enjoy a spot of theater every now and again.”

Bibbs smiled and shook his head. “Caleb, my friend,” he said. “For future reference, the concept wasn’t really that simple.”

“I know,” Caleb replied, “but I’d sound like a right ass if I came out and told you how brilliant I am, wouldn’t I?”

The two stood on either side of the open doorway, peering inside with little luck. It was just past midday and bright outside, and aside from a glimmer of dull light shining within the cavern, the place was otherwise too dark to make out. Second sight was even worse, inhibited by something that allowed only a vague impression to squeak through.

There was no telling what treasure–or horrors–waited them inside..

“Who goes first?” Bibbs asked.

Caleb glanced at the flame still dancing in his friend’s hand, then gave him a look of weary stupefaction. It was the sort of expression a dirty beggar might give a wealthy gentry who asked to borrow some spare change.

“Oh, right,” Bibbs said, and he instantly stoked his tiny flame into something larger, crackling and dazzlingly bright. Brandishing it before him, he moved cautiously into the breach.

Caleb followed and unshouldered his bow, stepping across the threshold into dense darkness and the smell of dust long untouched by man. There, for just one instant in those shadows, the world was empty but for the sound of his breathing and the flickering glare of synthetic fire.

His eyes adapted to the dim confines, but even in the light of Bibbs’ flame, he could make out little. It was a large cavern carved from natural stone, with a few dozen stalactite columns bridging the ceiling and floor. At its center, a small earthen rise covered in grass sat within a radiant shaft of sunshine.

Caleb needed more light. Despite the throbbing in his skull, he forced himself to relax, then focused his second sight inward, feeling the familiar stir of fundamental energies within; the motion of fluids, flexion of muscles, and jagged thrum of electricity were all there, as well as a bevy of more subtle forces that defied simple description. In a practiced motion, his awareness danced across nerve, muscle, tendon and bone, fomenting a wave that he further shaped and moulded with imagined glyphs.

The wave swelled to ripeness, and in the ancient language, Caleb spoke its name.

A quick series of tones rang out like a clatter of wind chimes, and a sparkling point of light burst into existence in the air before him. With a tiny shake, the wisp leapt into motion and began tracing small circles, singing a queer melody and alighting wherever Caleb’s attention roamed. The wisp was lux, a fountain of light given pseudo-life by his imagination. Much to his continuing chagrin, it was the only technique in his arsenal.

Bibbs circled along the wall and Caleb followed. In the bluish light of his wisp, he could now clearly see that the cavity was a natural formation with uneven floor and bulbous chambers carved out of the walls. Where the ground wasn’t covered over with moss, there were shallow pools of clear water that shimmered in the light, no doubt fed by a spring somewhere nearby.

Caleb dragged his fingers over the rough wall, and though he was sure the cavern had originally been hollowed out by ground water, there were also marks carved by an intelligent hand. As he leaned in for a closer look, the wisp zipped over and bathed the wall in its cool glow.

“What strange markings,” Caleb said while examining the countless tiny scrapes.

Bibbs looked to the wall beside him, revealed in the orange glow of his flame. “Maybe something was trying to claw its way out.”

“Don’t think so,” Caleb replied quickly. “Too ordered. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were hash marks.”

“Do you actually know any better?”

Caleb looked out across the chamber, trying to estimate how many of the marks there might be. “I suppose I don’t.”

Just then, he saw a streak of light in his peripheral vision but it was gone in the instant it took to whip around. Instinct lifted his bow and readied an arrow, while at his side, Bibbs stood at guard with hand engulfed in flame. Both glanced about manically for the source of the light.

“Did you see it?” Bibbs asked.

“Corner of my eye.”

With his other hand, Bibbs motioned for Caleb to circle, and Caleb begrudgingly obeyed. He stepped lively around the edge of the cavern, hopping over puddles from one dry patch to the next, the soft moss completely absorbing the sound of his footfalls. All the while, his mind’s eye filled with hideous abominations and he fitfully tried to predict what horrific fate awaited him.

Would it have fangs? Claws? Dozens of beady eyes that beamed terror directly into his soul? Maybe the beast would feed through a long proboscis that could suck his brains right from his cranium with a sickening slurp. Would it have thousands of tentacles, or only a few dozen?

The endless stampede of beasts pounded through his head as he reached the other end of the cavern. He scurried up to one of the stalactite columns, leaned against it and peaked around, only to find nothing in particular on the other side.

“Nothing here,” he shouted back to Bibbs. “You?”

“Same,” came the echoing reply.

“Why couldn’t you just be a sensible treasure trove,” Caleb grumbled, “one with treasure, as the bleeding name implies?”

Another light streaked in Caleb’s peripheral vision, the size of an apple and blue like his wisp, but a more vibrant shade. He caught another glimpse of it as it approached Bibbs, halted, came back around, then ducked behind a column and was once again gone.

Bibbs’ burning hand brightened from orange, through yellow and finally into a viciously hot blue, and Caleb could feel the sudden draw of energy like a riptide.

“Hold,” Caleb shouted. “Whatever it is, it’s afraid of us.”

He needed some way to lure it out, and letting his partner cut loose wouldn’t help. With the kind of power Bibbs was channeling, he would raze the whole cavern to ash and lava, and they still wouldn’t be any closer to finding their quarry.

While Caleb was trying and failing to come up with a plan, his wisp danced jauntily in front of him like a bored puppy starved for attention. With a glimmer in his eye, he said, “That might just work.”

He made the sign of the guide with his right hand, his index and middle fingers extended, the others curled into his palm and held in place by the thumb. He lowered the hand and felt the wisp’s umbilicus, the immaterial tether that bound it to him, wrap around his fingers and draw taut. Then, by force of will, he guided the tiny construct out towards the grassy mound and gave it enough slack to move about.

In its own curious way, the wisp bounced from one side of the mound to the other, never waiting anywhere for long, and singing its funny little song the whole time. Sure enough, the other light peeked out from behind its stone a moment later and drifted up into the air.

“That’s right,” Caleb whispered. His soft touch sent the wisp upward, pantomiming surprise and alert, then he guided it swiftly back toward the earthen mound and made it take cover on the far side.

He’d aroused the other’s curiosity. The rich blue light bobbed back and forth, trying to get a clear view of Caleb’s wisp, but he kept it just out of sight. The other inched forward, cautious but deeply interested, until finally it drifted down to the mound and came to rest.

Caleb waited a beat then commanded his wisp back out of hiding, and the other immediately took notice. It approached, circling in one direction and then the reverse, apparently sizing up Caleb’s playful construct.

He allowed the other to perform its inspection, and when he feared it might grow bored, he drew his wisp back. It returned slowly, bobbing at the end of its line until its pale light illuminated his face. Now in full view, Caleb waved and said, “Hello?”

Much like his wisp had done only a moment before, the blue ball of light jumped up in surprise, then ducked back toward the small grassy mound. It seemed confused, a little agitated, but mostly calm. Mostly calm would do.

Caleb reshouldered his bow, told Bibbs to remain in place with a gesture, and began his slow approach. His heart was racing but he ignored it. He kept both hands in the open with palms outward to show he meant no harm, and he adopted the most placid expression he could muster.

He paused when he was yet a few steps away, partly out of caution and partly in surprise. There on the grass in the golden shaft of sunlight lay a tiny creature with azure skin. She was hardly larger than a finger, her upper body a perfect scale replica of a girl, but ending in a long, segmented tail instead of legs. On her back were two pairs of shimmering, membranous wings that twitched anxiously.

“Hello,” Caleb said again.

Her large, multifaceted eyes stared back at him, and she quivered in suppressed fear.

“My name is Caleb,” he added while leaning closer.

At his approach, she ducked back behind her arms, only to peek out a second later. She looked to either side, perhaps on guard for the attack that wouldn’t come, or maybe in search of an escape route.

“I mean you no harm,” he said very gently.

She cocked her head to the side and spat out a load of syllables that splashed over Caleb without managing to deliver any particular meaning. He was fluent in a few major languages and several of their dialects, and familiar with the sound of dozens more, but this didn’t resemble any of them.

With a genuine smile, he said, “Afraid I don’t understand, little miss.”

She reacted as if his answer were somehow appropriate, and burst into an endless babble of words. Her minuscule hands flew about as she gabbed and gabbed, reciting some impenetrable story with the utmost melodrama. Caleb, now with a look of utter surprise and some small measure of mirth on his face, simply listened and watched.

Then he heard something familiar. It was just one word buried in the middle of a dozen others, but it was quite unmistakable. He was sure of it.

“Slow,” he said in scholarly Arkesh, and she gave pause.

Arkesh was an ancient and potent language used widely throughout the universe in antiquity, but which had long since died out within the Imperium. Some knowledge of it persisted but only among academics and practitioners; it was maintained by academics in order to read old and moldy texts from bygone ages, and by practitioners as an alternative to Urskrit, being nearly as versatile but much easier to grasp.

Caleb seriously doubted a conversation in Arkesh had occurred in Imperium space for more than ten millennia. In his estimation, that made this something of an event in bookworm history, but he tried not to let it swell his sense of self-worth.

She tilted her head in that slightly alien way again and spoke. The accent and song were strange, giving the language a vibrance and vigour that Caleb’s professors never approached, but he could understand much more than he’d expected. It took some effort and thought, but he could pick out quite a lot of meaning.

Bibbs crept forward and stopped a few yards away, wisely hidden behind a stone column where he wouldn’t appear intimidating. “You understand that gibberish?”

“I do,” Caleb said. “It’s Arkesh. A variant I’ve never encountered… some of the retroflexes have become trills, and the vowels appear to have shifted downward. Something funny about the tense structure, too…”

“Caleb!”

“But yes, it’s Arkesh.”

“So what did she say?”

Caleb smirked back at him. “She says I talk funny.”

He turned his attention back to the tiny creature and cleared his throat. “I am referred to as Caleb. What is your appellation?”

Her great eyes squinted. “Do you [designate / mean] my name? Hmmm… Oh [plural noun and adjective], it’s been so [distant / long].”

He gave her another very warm smile, and realized this still wouldn’t be a walk in the park. “I apologize. I did not intend to ummm… apply undue pressure.”

“No, silly human,” she said while holding either side of her head. “It’s just so [mathematical / circuitous / difficult] to remember.”

“How long have you been here?”

She held up a finger, then flew off in a blur. Caleb watched the little streak of light race around the chamber several times, and then return. “8,831,882 days.”

Caleb ran the words through his head a second time and then a third, making sure he hadn’t made some vast error in translation. No, she had said eight million. He performed a quick and sloppy calculation, and mumbled in Imperial, “23,000 years? That’s… nearly the age of the Imperium.”

“What’s that?” Bibbs asked.

“She claims she’s been here for more than 23,000 years.”

“Is that even possible?”

Caleb shrugged and thought back through his theriology courses. “Maybe. Some species can live indefinitely given the right conditions. The Grim, aurem, dragons, creptids, bronzemen, risek, anguish, pixies…”

He halted sharply mid-list and looked back down at the curious little creature. “I mean no offense, but are you a pixie?”

She smiled and her head bobbed up and down. “Yes, yes! Pixie.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Caleb said. “She’s a pixie. Whole race was supposed to have died out during the third emperor’s reign, but here you are, holed up in cave on some planet in the middle of nowhere.”

“For what reason are you imprisoned here?” he asked.

She looked flustered again. “I [am obligated to / must] remember,” she said.“Not imprisoned. There was [anger / fire], and [wailing / screaming / modern poetry], and [smoke / ghosts] everywhere.” Emotions danced all over her face as she fought to recall. “My brother? Yes, my brother [hid / buried] me here to keep me safe. He said, ‘Too dangerous outside. I’ll return for you once the [purge / massacre / harvest] is past. Stay here, Alia…’”

And her face lit up. “Alia! My name is Alia Sarkady. I remembered!”

Caleb offered a stately bow just as he’d been trained in the academy, and summoned a line from a very old play. “I am exceedingly honoured to make your acquaintance, Lady Alia Sarkady. The universe’s provenance smile upon you.”

At that, Alia seemed quite pleased. She offered her own miniature bow in return and said, “And I am honoured to make yours, Caleb Human. You…” With a flutter of her glistening wings, she floated up into the air and peered first into Caleb’s left eye, then his right. “You are a good man. A funny talker, but good. I’m not yet certain about your [decoy / clansman / body guard].”

“Cabe,” Bibbs said from behind his column. He held the tonality pendant up and Caleb could see it dimly pulsing in the darkness.

“I’m afraid duty requires our attention, Alia. We must evacuate this place. You should accompany us.”

“Hmmmm…” she said, momentarily transcending language barriers. “I’m [supposed / oath bound] to wait for my brother… but it has been a long time. Will you [surround / protect] me, Caleb Human?”

He thought for a moment, and with reasonable confidence he’d understood her correctly, said, “With my life.”

Satisfied, Alia landed on his shoulder and whispered into his ear. “Then it’s [settled / decided / divinely ordained]. Just know, I will hold you to your [blood pact / promise].”

Caleb gave the cavern one last wistful look, still searching for some hidden treasure and still finding only treasureless-trove. A lot of work had gone into cracking that door and his disappointment was hard to cast aside. He even heard Bibbs, the eternal optimist, let out a dejected sigh.

Bibbs finally allowed the flame in his hand to die, and he walked by Caleb in shadow. Caleb too severed his wisp’s umbilicus, causing it to spin, sputter and finally die in a shower of sparks. Then, after a moment ripe with longing for treasures unfound, he turned and followed his partner to the door.

As they stepped out of the cavern, the light of day was blinding. The cold and dank gave way once again to the warm of Spring and the scent of abundant flowers. Alia, perched on Caleb’s shoulder, was in a state of total wonder as if she’d never seen anything outside the cavern before.

Caleb looked down at her mesmerized expression and couldn’t help but feel it too. For just a moment, his disappointment faded and there was only a childlike joy at the natural world.

Bibbs was a few steps away, holding the tonality pendant up in front of him. He waved his hand above the jewel and the air there shimmered and twinkled, then Harvid’s grizzled visage emerged from the light.

“Apprentice Bibbs, kind of you to check in.”

“We were exploring a small cave to determine if the Eurisko’s crew could have taken shelter inside, and it must have blocked tonality.”

“Hmph,” Harvid hmphed, then was silent for some time. “No matter. Adept Tarkanian and his team found parts of the wreckage at the Alpha site. We’re being redeployed to help gather what’s left. Return to the basecamp at once.”

The image of Harvid blinked out of existence.

Bibbs looked concerned. “Parts of the wreckage. What’s left. Doesn’t sound very promising.”

“No, not at all,” Caleb agreed. “Didn’t mention survivors, either.”

They both turned toward the East and began to walk back the way they came, while Alia delighted in all the sights and sounds that surrounded her.

“I have a terrible feeling,” Bibbs added, “that today’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

And as they walked, Caleb worried that Bibbs might have some talent as a Seer as well.

Book I — Third Fragment

The two apprentices made good time on their return to the landing site. The sun drifted toward their backs and tinted the world in amber while the air acquired a pleasant chill, and the pixie named Alia Sarkady flitted about, discovering the entire world anew.

Alia’s antics–the way she stalked up on unsuspecting flowers and the occasional hopping mammal like a hunter on safari–were a constant source of amusement for Caleb. These excursions all ended the same way: in surprise and an inordinate amount of fright, after which she sought shelter beneath Caleb’s wide collar. When she was finally calm again, she’d venture out and repeat the entire process beat for beat.

While she was off examining a particularly ordinary rock with the utmost concern, Caleb looked to Bibbs and said, “You don’t like her, do you?”

The truth of it was obvious enough. Whenever she was near, Bibbs’ shoulders drew together and his jaw tightened, and each time she moved out of earshot, he breathed a sigh of relief.

“I don’t know,” Bibbs said while watching her with suspicious eyes. “I have a lot of questions.”

“Such as?”

“Why was she locked up like that, and why on this boondock grass ball of all places?” He gave the landscape around them a perfunctory look and continued, “Do you see any ruins, Cabe? Roads, walls, anything at all?”

“Not a thing,” Caleb replied, “but a lot can change in twenty millennia. From what she described, I think something terrible happened on this world. Something positively horrific. Perhaps it was enough to wipe out any trace of civilization.”

“I don’t know,” Bibbs said again. “There are just too many loose pieces and none of them fit together. We… never mind.”

“What were you going to say? Out with it, man.”

Bibbs leaned closer and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “We should leave her behind. Cut her loose.”

“That’s damned heartless.”

Bibbs looked melodramatically wounded. “For her sake. Have you considered Doctrine?”

“What of it?”

“Don’t be dense. Her species is intrinsically potent, and hasn’t been seen in how many thousand years? If she’s discovered aboard the ship, they’ll lock her up in a laboratory and vivisect her… or worse.”

Caleb had trouble imagining what could possibly be worse, but he took Bibbs at his word. Not that it mattered; his mind was already made up. “I’ll just have to make sure no one discovers her.”

Bibbs’ exasperation swelled to epic proportions and began to waft across the landscape, while in the distance, Alia had tired of interrogating her rock and was slowly wandering back in a zig-zag.

“Look,” Caleb said, “I made a promise and I intend to keep it, for better or worse. I thought you of all people would understand that.”

Caleb watched carefully as the words struck his friend, and the reaction was swift. He looked at first like a man splashed with ice cold water, and that was followed by a flash of fury and then begrudging agreement, all in the span of a second. A heavy burden stirred just beneath the surface where Bibbs kept it secret and safe.

Caleb didn’t even have to say the word sister. His argument was already won.

“Alright, and how do you intend to smuggle her aboard.”

Caleb lifted a glass vial from his pocket. “Hermetic specimen bottle. Should shield even something like her from detection.”

A smirk overtook Bibbs’ frustration. “Just like the mandala blossoms you picked on Potessa.”

“Exactly.”

The muscles on either side of Bibbs’ wide jaw flexed, and he pursed his thin lips. “Alright,” he finally said. “I don’t like it, but I’m on board.”

“Just what I wanted to hear,” Caleb replied.

Then something strange happened. The tonality pendant around Bibbs’ neck flashed a few times and turned black as tar. They both stopped in their tracks, and Bibbs lifted the pendant up in front of his face, then he peered into the stone with a look of deep consternation.

“What’s that then?”

Bibbs shrugged and said, “Don’t know.” He waved his hand in front of the device several times without effect. “It’s just dead.”

“It’s not like these things to burn out on their own,” Caleb said, looking for and finding a familiar ridge nearby. “We’re nearly back to basecamp, though. Maybe someone there can fix it.”

Despite his unusually optimistic outlook, the situation struck Caleb as awfully peculiar and he couldn’t put it out of his head. He’d heard of tonality pendants dying but only in the rarest conditions. During the Anabasis Stellarum, Victor the Deceiver’s second legion managed to pierce the Blackened Casket on Shinkuma, and all of their tonality devices spontaneously burst like dropped wine glasses, along with every other artifact on the bloody planet. Caleb also vaguely recalled a research vessel that reported its entire collection of tonality equipment ruined after passing through a solar flare.

The two incidents had one thing in common: an instantaneous release of immense stored power.

He turned and saw Alia approaching, moving slowly through the air and weaving a drunken pattern. “Oh, my head hurts,” she said.

Caleb watched her with growing worry, then pulled the compass from his pocket and flipped open its lid. The three needles within were moving erratically, seeming to lock onto something one moment, only to wheel about in another direction the next or spin aimlessly around. “I think we have a problem,” he said.

Bibbs raised an ear skyward. “Agreed. You hear that?”

Caleb focused, then he heard it too. It was a throaty howl like a ruptured steam pipe, or a wounded mammoth with impossibly large lungs, and it was coming from the direction of the basecamp. It went on for nearly a minute, then stopped with a thump that echoed repeatedly off the rolling hills.

“What in the dragon’s name was that?”

Caleb shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest.”

As the last word escaped his lips, Alia set down uneasily on his shoulder, groaning all the way. “I don’t feel very good, Caleb Human,” she said.

He considered for a moment, then once again retrieved the specimen bottle from his pocket and unlatched its lid. He waved its open mouth in Alia’s direction and said, “I believe it will be safer for you inside of this vessel.”

He expected more argument from the tiny blue pixie, but she was so groggy and sore-headed that she simply climbed inside and waved for him to seal it. With a couple quick motions, he locked the lid back in place and Alia immediately looked relieved.

Caleb gently placed the bottle back in his pocket and looked to Bibbs, who was staring into the distance. His stance seemed outwardly relaxed and his face peaceful, but his hands were in motion, fingers curling and stretching in an exercise Caleb recognized as the Nine Blades of Dariesh. Bibbs was preparing for a fight.

Caleb followed his partner’s gaze and saw a plume of smoke on the horizon. The charcoal tufts of it churned and coughed up into the empty sky.

Nothing else needed saying; they both turned toward the camp and set off at a quick pace. For long minutes, Caleb heard nothing but his boots crunching in the grass and his own metered breath, somehow distant and detached.

There was no imagining of horrible creatures. No litany of curses. No questions without answers. There were only the two sets of sounds in syncopated rhythm–grassblades mashed down and splaying underfoot, and the needful rush of air through lips and over teeth–together wrapped up in a dulling layer of gauze.

Bibbs and Caleb crested the final ridge and came to a halt, looking out over the small valley beyond. The landscape swooped down beneath them in a steep curve that led to the basecamp, and there at the foot of the swelling plume, in the patchy shade it created, lay two dozen wounded men amid a scattering of bronze shrapnel.

“Spiritus have mercy,” Bibbs said.

Their caution shattered and they covered the final stretch at full sprint. Thighs burning and chests heaving, they came to the ruined basecamp just as the last embers of their stamina sputtered and died. Their crewmates littered the field, a few silent and still, many others moaning wordlessly as they clutched at ragged, bloody gashes.

The bronze shards were everywhere like the fallen leaves of an oak in late Autumn, and at their center sat the husk of the gate anchor, broken and split like a tree trunk struck by lightning. A silken ribbon of black smoke rose out of it that rippled and curled a few feet on, then bubbled and branched ever upward.

With his heart thumping in his chest, his throat, his eyes, Caleb stared in disbelief. “What in the Grim hell could do this?” he asked on laboured breaths.

Bibbs merely shook his head.

Caleb’s brain scrabbled at possible answers, slipping off one after another without managing to find purchase. His focus moved swiftly from the shrapnel on the ground to the smoke, all across the empty landscape and back again, but there were no more clues in sight. There were no attackers, no marks of battle, nothing but the wounded men and the destroyed gate anchor.

Bibbs had an unerring presence of mind; he snatched up an armload of medical supplies from inside the chest and began treating the wounded as best he could, while Caleb floated about, lost in a twilit wasteland between confusion and terror.

“Gate anchor.” Caleb’s lips formed the words but his throat gave them no voice. He stumbled toward the hateful device in a daze, one foot and then the other placed aimlessly like a sleepwalker or a drunk. He glimpsed the artifact through the twisting smoke, the torn edges of its bronze skin glinting in the low evening sunlight, and in his head he once again heard the long, horrid cry that was somehow part of this massacre.

Smoke enveloped him as he approached and all the world grew dark. On that shadowy canvas, he saw fleeting images dredged up from his memory, technical diagrams of the device’s innards and operation which flitted away as quickly as they appeared. Its core was just a set of tuned metal rings suspended in an oblong resonance chamber. Such a simple design. So elegant. So elementary.

So false.

His eyes burned. Smoke filled his mouth and nose, the acrid taste of burnt oil and molten metal smothering his palate. There was a hint of something else there, a familiar tang which didn’t belong, but it was subtle, buried and near impossible to grasp hold of.

He penetrated the darkness slowly and the open end of the gate anchor loomed up before him, its shell torn into radiating blades like battered flower petals. Their surfaces bore ruined sigils that once had been wards of protection. Of containment. And there within the gaping cavity, suspended in a webwork of fluid-filled tubes, sat one half of a human brain.

The subtle smell was blood.

Caleb choked back a scream and toppled over in horror. His tailbone met grass and he clawed at the soil, lurching away from the anchor in fits and starts. His mouth twitched around incomplete words while a terrible new knowledge infected him, puzzle pieces tumbling out of the shadows and slotting into place, and he understood.

Both hemispheres of that brain belonged to a singular consciousness that had been split in two and imprisoned to prevent any deviation. The bifurcated mind acted as an anchor across time and space, one reality that existed in two separate locations simultaneously, allowing a gateway to be opened across its corpus collosum. It was a slave toiling away forever in permanent isolation, its full potential a mathematical product of its perfect horror.

As this realization took hold, Caleb attempted to shout for help but only produced a malformed bark, a sickly, convulsive thing that even he found unintelligible. His breaths came and went chaotically, and the mad pistoning of his heart once again thrummed throughout his flesh. Cold sweat beaded on his skin, and electric fear strobed across his muscles like a rolling thunder storm. The idea of standing occurred to him, but his legs wouldn’t hold him.

Within seconds, he found Bibbs standing above him with concern and confusion knitting his brow, and all Caleb could do was shakily point toward the anchor with a pale, tremulous hand.

Bibbs could see that something was wrong but couldn’t tell exactly what. He gave a look to the wounded men still scattered across the clearing then turned with reluctance toward the damaged anchor, and it was at that moment that Caleb and Bibbs both heard a deep and furious sound out in the distance, like the lowing of some demonic beast.

“What fresh hell,” Caleb croaked.

Bibbs turned away from the anchor and toward the source of the noise, and in that instant, Caleb saw something in the young interfector’s eyes that he’d never once seen before. It was naked fear. In another breath, it was replaced by cold resolve and determination, but its damage was already done.

Caleb somehow managed to stand and he followed Bibbs’ gaze toward the North. There upon the distant ridge waited a party of Kremak braves mounted on Ronthir, agile beasts which looked like nothing so much as massive panthers with great tusks and glistening blue-black skin.

Their chief paced out ahead of them on the back of a shaggy, six-legged monster with a face full of tentacles. Like his fellows, the chief’s body was encased in a jagged bony carapace whose plates overlapped like a suit of armour, and his head appeared as a great horned skull, a death’s head with hollow eye-sockets and two bulky rows of teeth. He’d been painted head to toe in primary colours, broad strokes of childlike vibrance, a garish match for his battle-standard which whipped about in the growing wind.

His mount reared back on its hindmost legs. The tentacles surrounding its maw churned and the horrible call again echoed out across the valley. As the beast came back down, the chief’s dark gaze seemed to lock onto Caleb, and the boy could feel the weight of it like the judgment of an angry father.

“Stand fast,” Bibbs barked. His right arm burst into blinding blue-white flame up to the shoulder, and his eyes burned like amber stars in the dead of night. The instaneous draw of energy was like a sudden whirlpool, so fierce it nearly knocked Caleb back to the ground.

Quaking, Caleb unshouldered his bow and nocked an arrow. “We should run,” he said without pride or hesitation.

Bibbs thrust back his shoulders and the last emotion washed from his face. Hot winds twisted up and away from his blazing arm, and in Caleb’s eyes, he suddenly looked for all the world like a wrathful god made furious flesh and bone.

“Our men need us,” the god of hellfire said. “We have to hold until help arrives.”

It was madness, of course. Two green apprentices–one a virtual invalid–couldn’t stand against a Kremak warparty. These were the ancient enemy of the Imperium… heretics… bloody DragonKin. A band that size could overcome a full revenant cohort; two boys wouldn’t even slow their rampage.

It was madness but of the most heroic sort, the kind a boy like Bibbs had no doubt dreamed of since he took his first stalwart breath. As Caleb lifted his bow and shakily took aim, he knew deep down inside that this was the right thing to do even if it meant certain death. A solemn oath had bound him to this duty, and the lives of his friends and compatriots now depended on his willingness to shoulder it.

The shaggy beast’s tentacles once again surged and its terrible call sounded across the valley. Upon its back, the Kremak chief urged it on with a lash of its reins, and together they charged, battle-standard held in one armoured hand and curving bonesword at ready in the other. A blur of many legs galloped down the grassy hillside and the rest of the warband followed close in the swelling cloud of dust.

“Steady,” Bibbs said.

And Caleb remained as steady as he could, despite the thumping in his chest, the quaking in his knees, and the inescapable feeling that shards of glass were flying at him from every direction. He sighted down his outstretched arm and the vicious monsters awaited him there, inhuman and hungry for blood, swiftly approaching while sparks rose up around them like the embers of crackling campfires.

Just as steady as he could…

There was a curious thing about Caleb Gedley, a personality defect of which he was acutely aware and not altogether proud: simply put, he didn’t always do the right thing. Sense frequently got the better of him and rather than doing what was right and just, he often found himself doing what was sensible instead. Sometimes, the sensible choice was holding his tongue when virtue might demand he speak up. Other times, the sensible choice was turning a blind eye when honour suggested he intervene. And at times just like this one, when a more courageous man would stand and fight, the sensible choice was to run and hide.

Before he even realized he’d made the sensible choice, Caleb’s feet were again crunching in the soft soil, his lungs were churning at full tilt, and the craggy rock formation loomed up in front of him. Safety. Stone sanctuary. Behind him, he heard the roar of open flames and a plaintive cry that sounded like his name, but they seemed so very distant across the vast expanse of his total panic.

He never looked back. He just pressed on through the stone columns, riding a wave of adrenaline that held his mounting exhaustion temporarily at bay. Stumbling, veering wildly from one rock to the next, he wound his way deep into the maze-like formation until he found a secluded nook just slightly larger than himself, then he hurriedly curled up inside.

That hole became his entire world, a small and safe harbour from the dangers outside. He could hear the release of arcane energies like the rumble of nearby thunder, and nothing else but his own ragged breathing and the hollow silence of his immense cowardice.

With his pulse still racing, he hugged his knees, closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the raging battle outside. He deliberately metered his breathing in an effort to calm his spastic heart, but it was no use. The fear was still there. Still hounding him. Still haunting him.

And so he waited, but for what, he couldn’t be quite sure. Some small part of him held out hope for rescue but he tried not to think on it too hard, for fear that logic might begin to shine through its cracks. He momentarily imagined that the Kremak could just turn and leave, deeming the small band of humans not worth their effort, but that didn’t jibe with what he knew of the monsters and their hatred for his kind. As for the possibility of Bibbs defeating them, the very thought of it was so absurd that Caleb almost laughed out loud. So he simply waited, shook uncontrollably, and tried as hard as he could not to think at all.

Eventually, a quiet as deep and impenetrable as an ocean came. Even the winds were still as if the entire planet held its breath in rapt anticipation, and for the first time in many long minutes, Caleb breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe it would be alright. Maybe, just maybe, Bibbs had held his own against the inhuman menace, and the two of them could return back home.

Only silence.

Then light, heat, sound and confusion. Caleb’s safe harbour was gone, replaced by a body-rocking boom and the feeling of weightlessness. Shattered stone battered him as the world tumbled end over end, until finally he slammed back into the waiting soil. More rock fragments smashed into him like hammerblows. Bones snapped and erupted into throbbing lances of pain.

The dust settled and Caleb was presented with nothing but empty, fading sky. He twitched and quivered, his arm pinned beneath the immovable weight of boulders that pressed him helplessly to the ground, and all he knew for sure was that it was all about to end.

He heard a clatter of bone on bone, and the rattle of armoured footsteps approaching. He tried to crane his head to see who was coming, but a sharp pain at the base of his neck stopped him cold. And besides… he could guess who.

The Kremak chief appeared before him, a hulking skeletal abomination in erratic splashes of primary red, blue, yellow. The sharp eyes within its deep dark sockets scrutinized Caleb, and its wide mouth seemed permanently locked in a demonic grin.

It spoke, and the lower jaw of its helm moved in unison with the soft flesh it protected. The language was familiar to Caleb, a dialect of Subwyrma, the lesser dragon tongue. “I pity you, heretic,” it said.

Caleb’s mouth was slick with blood, and his swollen tongue had been bitten several times during flight. “Then spare me,” he begged weakly.

The Kremak’s eyes registered momentary surprise. “I cannot. You are human, fleshbender, perverter of life. It is for the good of the universe I do this. May the afterlight have mercy on your soul.”

The Kremak lifted his bonesword–a living weapon made of sinew, muscle and hard chitin, with a single, unblinking eye–and Caleb whimpered. He tugged at his trapped arm but there was no escape. There were no options. There was only this eternal moment, burning brightly in a flash flood of emotion.

Then the blade fell, and all was dark.

First Interlude

Here it’s Spring eternal. Storms roll in, storms roll out. The sky is a patchwork of silver and blue, and the landscape laid out beneath is evergreen.

“Always Spring,” his father would say. “Always the beginning of something new.”

Even in the happiest of times, there had been a shade of sadness in it. His father grew up on a world with real seasons, and as beautiful and temperate as this new world was, there was always a longing for the life he’d known. For the right and natural cycle of wither and bloom.

His father isn’t saying it now. The boy stands alone in the study listening to the murmur of hushed voices in the next room. Serious faces with averted eyes offer little but sideways glances. They bear shame alloyed with reproach over something left unsaid. Something best left unsaid.

The boy stands alone and he watches, breathes, and wonders. He recognizes the curled hats, long coats and purple armbands of special investigators, agents of the Duke’s Praesidium. Pretium Pacis Vigilia say the armbands in flowing script. The price of peace is vigilance.

The study is cold and drafty. It smells of old books, dust, and jasmine candles. His father’s spectacles rest on the small table beside his green leather chair, half-folded and catching early evening light with their carefully ground lenses, and through the doorway, past the investigators, he can see his mother’s quilted apron hanging neatly from a hook.

He knows he should feel something, but he doesn’t know what. Instead, there’s only a profound emptiness, a hollow that aches to be filled. More than anything, he simply wishes someone… anyone… would come and tell him what’s supposed to fill it.

With his silence, he pleads to the adults in the next room for help, but it washes past them perfectly unheard. They continue their mumbling, their glancing about and the comparison of their notes, while he waits for attention that will never come.

And for just one brief moment, he feels despair’s caress before it becomes too subtle, too cunning to ever detect again.

Minutes pass like days beneath a sky that shifts and writhes but never truly changes. No rain today, but maybe tomorrow. Maybe for days on end for all he cares.

The front-door’s handle creaks and clatters. Hinges moan, and hard boots clack crisply on wood panel floors. Investigators dip their hats and part to allow the newcomer through.

This man isn’t an investigator. Slender, sleek, a razor thin build like modern sculpture given motion. Flaxen hair slicked back and a sharp, hawkish face. His coat is the dark red of dried blood, with tails like the curved feathers of a diving bird.

Even as he pauses midstride, he’s the illusion of action. He’s fast lines and sharp angles, somehow controlled, contained, given elegance and grace.

His head held high, he passes through the doorway and into the study where his eyes lock onto the boy. There’s an instant of cold calculation, of thoughts and impressions colliding and reforming, then they fade before a simple smile.

He steps forward and kneels before the boy so they’re eye-to-eye, then looks the child over from head to toe. With fatherly warmth, he says, “You must be the young master.”

The boy nods, the fortifications of his silence remaining firmly in place.

“Well then… a proud thing you appear to be. Good posture, clean shoes, and you strike me as a bright young fellow. Know how I can tell?”

The boy shakes his head.

“It’s simple, really. Fools always announce themselves, but silence is a symptom of consideration. That’s all there is to being bright, you know. Either you’re in the habit of considering things or you’re not. And it’s quite a blessing that you’re a bright one, because you have a great many things to consider.”

The man looks one way and then the other, and in those two quick motions, he absorbs his surroundings. The boy watches the way he moves, the way his eyes so quickly dissect the room, and he’s astounded at the speed and efficiency of it.

“Do you know what my job is?”

In response, the boy does his best to imitate the man’s method. He looks quickly over him, analyzing, dissecting. He picks out every small detail he can find, categorizes it and files it away. Strong hands, but smooth and uncalloused. Wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and between his brow, as of a man who spends hours deep in thought. On his lapel, the Circle of Thorns, the symbol of the Emperor.

With all that information rattling around in his skull, the boy is confused. He doesn’t know the answer, but a thought occurs to him and he leans in close. Caught up in the moment, his fortress of silence crumbles, and in whisper he says, “Are you a hexenhunter?”

The man’s smile is wide and warm. “No, no,” he says with a laugh. “No, but I do work for the Imperium. My name is Kreutz, and I belong to the Office of Exigent Affairs. Do you know what that is?”

The boy shakes his head again, and the muscles responsible begin to grow tired.

“We deal with issues that require quick judgment, ones which the law is poorly equipped to handle. When such an issue arises, an adjudicator such as myself is dispatched and authorized to make decisions on the Emperor’s behalf. I’m like a referee. Do you understand?”

The boy nods and is glad for the rare opportunity.

“I happen to be a senior adjudicator, which means that I’m only brought in when the situation is very important. And that’s precisely what this is: a matter of utmost importance. Not least of all because it concerns your whole future, young man.

“Let me be clear. A truly terrible thing took place here…”

At that, a memory rushes up and overtakes the boy. There are loud crashing noises, flashing lights, and laughter. His mother pushes him and screams, “Run! Don’t ever stop!”

And just as swiftly, the memory is gone. The boy is covered in cold sweat, and his hands are shaking, but he’s right there, safe and sound in the study with the man called Kreutz. And it’s alright. It’s alright.

“…but I believe some good may yet come from it. I didn’t think it fair to make any decisions for you, though, and certainly not before I’d had a chance to look you in the eye. Not before I saw what a bright young fellow you are.”

The boy tries to smile, but it’s a strange and unfamiliar mask. Better to be empty, he thinks. Better to feel nothing at all rather than feel false.

“Here’s the challenging part. Like me, your parents were mundane, part of the servile class, which means they couldn’t own land or possess any real wealth. That wasn’t the case for Count Baston; he was not only awakened, but also a man of some considerable standing here on Mydora. He was the Duke’s brother, and his fortune was… well, quite a bit beyond someone like you or me.

“In situations of this sort, there isn’t usually any redress. The Count’s wealth would be divvied up amongst his bloodline, and you while away your days in an orphanage waiting for some kindly couple to find you and take you in. It would all be forgotten and no one would ever speak of it again… But I believe I can do better here. I’ve discovered a loophole that, as I said, could deliver some small measure of good out of such a terrible tragedy.

“The only thing I need to know right now,” Kreutz says, “is if you think you’d like to attend the Academy?”

“I think,” the boy replies quietly, “I think my father would’ve liked that.”

“But would you like that?”

“Always Spring,” he hears his father saying. “Always the beginning of something new.”

He nods again and says, “Yes.”

“Excellent.” Kreutz removes a roll of parchment from his coat and lays it out on the table, then he retrieves a silver quill and inkwell from another pocket. “I just need you to sign this letter of intent, and we’ll get the process under way.”

The boy looks at the letter, and though he can read the words, he understands very few of them. He takes the quill in hand, dips it softly in the ink, and signsCaleb Gedley at the bottom of the page.

A Letter From the Author

The story you’ve just read is the first part of a full-length novel called Arcana Universalis: The Hanged Man’s Revelation, which I’ve chosen to break apart and release episodically. My current outline calls for five episodes roughly the same length as this one which will each be released as they’re completed, and then finally together as a full novel later this year.

You might wonder why I’ve decided to go this route. The truth is that I’m a curious kind of guy, and I’d like to see how different publishing models can work with ebooks. This particular method was inspired by the way science-fiction was often released during the ’50s and ’60s, first in several parts through magazines and then as a finished novel afterward.

Will it work out? Maybe not, but I certainly won’t know until I try.

If you enjoyed reading Terminus, please drop by my website at http://oktopods.wordpress.com where you can follow the book’s development, and all of my other weird adventures in epublishing.

And since you’re still here, why not email a copy to a friend? This entire novella is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which means you’re allowed to share it with friends, and so much more. For more information about the license and the abilities it grants you, please visit the Creative Commons website at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Thanks for reading!

Chris J. Randolph
Oktopod Digital Press

From the same author on Feedbooks

Vengar the Barbarian in... The King, His Son, Their Sorcerer and His Lover (2010)

Welcome to the Hyperbolic Age, a prehistoric era when men were mighty, women were buxom, and neither could be trusted in the dark. Into this melodramatic yet somehow lost epoch strides a mighty figure, a king cursed to never again remember his homeland who wanders the thousand and one kingdoms in search of what he's lost. His name is Vengar, and he's a barbarian.

Shudder with terror as our hulking hero faces unearthly creatures from the furthest reaches of possibility. Thrill as he seduces luscious ladies and wages war against vile sorcerers, and shake your head in dismay as he makes far too many decisions with that certain part of the male anatomy.

In this episode...

When Vengar comes to the sandstone city of Tensara, a mysterious maiden begs him to rescue her sister from a wicked sorcerer. He accepts the mission but it quickly turns into more than he bargained for, leaving him tangled up in a dastardly plot to start a civil war. Can Vengar prevent the coming war? Will he bed the maiden? What's the deal with the ridiculously big sword, anyway?

At roughly 30 pages, The King, His Son, Their Sorcerer and His Lover is a ton of fun in a bite-size package. "The perfect afternoon read," says the author's mother, and we think you'll agree.

Vengar the Barbarian! The mighty strange adventures of a strangely mighty man!

Vengar the Barbarian was brought to you by Oktopod Digital Press, a new idea in independent publishing. Drop by and visit us at: oktopods.wordpress.com

Stars Rain Down (2010)

Meet Marcus Donovan; astronomer, day dreamer, and smart ass. He was just another researcher in a jumpsuit until he saw something that didn't fit. At the time, it was nothing but a blip on a sensor read-out, an asteroid that wasn't an asteroid, but it became his obsession. He named it Zebra-1, and now he's hurtling through the solar system on a mission to see it in person.

Meanwhile, the Earth has its own visitors. Seven massive vessels appear out of nowhere and rain hell down from orbit, reducing civilization to a pile of ashes and rubble. Our world is conquered before anyone even knows we're under attack.

Enter Jack Hernandez, a search & rescue specialist and true blue everyday hero. After crash-landing in the wasted ruins of China, he links up with the scattered resistance and begins to fight back. Having witnessed the invaders' cruelty first hand, he's driven to do whatever it takes to make them pay in blood.

Neither Jack nor Marcus ever could have predicted it, but humanity's future now depends on them both. One will be bonded to an ancient warship and asked to lead, while the other is imprisoned, tortured and forced to submit; before it's over, they'll each face challenges beyond imagination in a savage war as old as time.

When the stars rain down from the sky, who will rise up to meet them?

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Food for the mind

Table of Contents

Commencement

Book I — First Fragment

Book I — Second Fragment

Book I — Third Fragment

First Interlude

A Letter From the Author