We were moving across one of the Pale Lands, the violent, unmapped tundras that made Northeastern Ivvk the ideal prisoner’s resort. Nothing but white, whipping expanse for as far as the eye could see, melding with a barely distinguishable white-grey sky that seemed to be ever falling into one’s eyes.
With an exasperated, but relieved exhale I remembered my goggles and pulled them over my eyes with numb and aching fingers. Now sheltered from the unsympathetic elements, my lids were suddenly filled with tears- not the result of physical aggravation or irritation, but the unquenchable suspicion of true and imminent ruin. Hidden in my hood and behind the eighth-inch of tinted plexi-glass lenses, the beads of salty water rolled down to the top of my cheek and lingered, trapped, inside the frame. Jakell turned, perhaps sensing my dread, and gave me one of his immense grins. Framed by his fur parka and accented by his similar, but insect-like orange goggles, the sight was as keenly unsettling as it was ridiculous. The more disturbing fact was that he was smiling it all, given what had transpired in the last four hours since we had arrived on Ivvk.
We’d jumped through a charted rift on Serenec.
As we had approached the massive pool of impenetrable black, silhouetted by the planet’s renown fields of golden wheat, I was clammy with sweat and childish with discomfort.
“I mean, my god, Jakell, can’t we just suit up when we get there?” I whimpered, stumbling forward with cumbersome, furred boots. I let out a long, particularly resonant exclamation of distress.
“You’ll lose too much body heat in your normal uniform. Trust me, you’ll be better off in the winter gear.”
“But Jakell-“
“You will thank me,” he snapped, turning and giving me a pointedly annoyed look, “when we. Get. There.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” I mumbled inaudibly “you look like old roadkill that got flattened down the middle.” The statement was fairly truthful; Jakell’s brindle-brown fur parka was somewhat matted and when added to his tall, gaunt frame, he took on the appearance of a tire-mashed cat.
We approached the brink and stood, motionless, at the very edge, toes fixed over oblivion, heels grounded in the existent.
“Got everything?” He asked, still somewhat patronizing. “Picks, extra insulation, rations, climbing gear?”
“I’m sure they’ll lend us their stuff. We are heading to a Mending Outpost, right?”
“Do you?”
I grumbled, slapping blindly at the huge back fastened to my back and listening for the clinking and rustling over the various items. “Yes,” I said after an intentionally long while.
“Alright. Since you’ve never been to Ivvk, you’ll be leaping first.” He said, tugging leather snowgloves onto his hands.
“What?”
“It’s a good learning experience. You’re not always going to be able to leap through after an escort, or first into an area you’re familiar with. Look for the golden reflective circle.”
“…Not if I go administrative.”
“What’s that?” He said, still not looking.
“Not if I run the administrative track.”
“You’re not going administrative, Lauriel, you’re going into the solo core. And if you don’t I won’t write you a recommendation.”
“I know some people in the main division on Dwi. Maybe I won’t even need you.”
“Yeah, okay,” He murmured, before glancing sidelong at me. “But you’d never survive my letter of disapproval.”
“You wouldn’t.” I said matter-of-factly, staring down the rift. “You don’t have it in you.”
“Concerning Lauriel Falenn,” He began very loudly, speaking in his deeper letter-reading voice, “I, Ja’kyellinus, decorated mender of the solo division, teaching division, and recommended potential elder, disapprove Lauriel Falenn for any position in the administrative divisions for multiple reasons.”
“You wouldn’t!” I said again, attempting to drown him out.
“For besides being unbelievably emotional and girly, she is absolutely insufferable in high temperatures, is insubordinate, and is quite possible neurotic to a psychopathic degree.”
“JAKELL.”
“To allow her to continue on her desired path is to put everyone on Dwi in jeopardy of her girly wrath. For these reasons, and many others, I disapprove of Lauriel Falenn in all conceivable respects. Sincerely, Jakell.”
We stood in silence for a second.
“I hate you.” I whispered.
“I know.” He answered, before planting a furred boot in my back and kicking me off the rim and out over the rift. I barely time to fix my gloved hand into the galactic symbol of condemnation before the darkness took me.
Jumping into rifts is a strange action; because of the abnormalities in gravity, mass, and basic physics, most individuals will linger for about a half-second above the blackness before being pulled down into the void at an unbelievable velocity. All light is absorbed at four centimeters beneath the black. All sound is fully dampened at six.
Therefore, it was only too believable that Jakell never heard my initial screamed curses, or much more genuine and short screams of genuine panic as the blackness and void cleared and dropped me above a white and whirling horizon.
Most charted and rimmed Rifts have receiving zones and arrival zones. You will enter on one world, through the fixed rim, and will come through a large hole in the other world’s sky, about four hundred feet above normal ground level. The tear of the arrival zone usually appears as soon as the traveling object is totally immersed in the darkness of the receiving zone.
I had never arrived alone before, and I had never even arrived on Ivvk.
I couldn’t see anything for the first thirty seconds of falling.
The first thing a mending student learns is how to discharge energy and slow your fall. You’re supposed to keep your eyes trained on the ground and consciously repel yourself upwards, canceling out most of your speed and slowing in relation to the ground.
I went from the frigid black of the void to the blinding white of Ivvk’s sky, and the ground was nowhere to be seen.
I panicked, thrashed, and broke the second arrival rule; don’t compromise your feet-down position. When you lose your heading, you can’t control your energy output towards the earth. I entered a wild spiral, turning and turning in the solid white that surrounded me on all sides. The screams and sobs that flew from my mouth were stolen by the whistling wind, the same air that pulled my parka from all sides, tormenting me further as I hurtled what I could only assume was earthwards.
I couldn’t be sure of how long I fell, but it took enough time for the tears streaming from my eyes to form icy crystals at the tips of my eyelashes.
I could never forget the wash of sensation that enveloped my when his arms were wrapped around me. I couldn’t remember the impact of the motion, only the consequential force; I was crushed against his narrow chest, curled up and confined comfortably in his grip. It was impossible, through the layers of fur and fiberweave armor, but I swore, in that moment when we flew, tumbling through the white nothingness, that I could hear his heart beating.
I’m still unsure of how exactly it happened.
Jakell told me later that he jumped through nearly right behind me, but because of the size delay, he arrived a few seconds later and caught a glimpse of my thrashing form disappearing in the sea of white. He flipped, flying head-down and propelling himself towards the ground, and caught up to me in a matter of seconds, wrapping his arms around me and kicking into a topspin. He then sent out a storm of alternate energy, stopping us dead for a moment, before allowing us to drift slowly the rest of the way down.
And there was no gold circle.
As we landed, lightly, my face was buried in his parka, and I emerged wiping the half-frozen tears from my eyes. I didn’t want him to see me upset.
“Y’know, Lauriel, I think you’ve got something in the bag, and yet-“ He clucked his tongue playfully, consciously averting his eyes as I composed myself. “You never fail to amaze. Or fail. It makes teaching you a very demanding job.”
I had never felt so thankful for his feigned lightheartedness. The truth of the matter was that if he had arrived a few seconds later, missed me by a moment, or failed to catch me twenty feet before the surface, I would have been dead by my own hand, and not a single person would have blamed Jakell.
“I aim to amuse.” I mumbled, cracking a trembling smile and thumping my fist at his chest. He took this as an opportunity to set me down softly and glance around.
“So, where is this outpost supposed to be?” I asked, stooping and tying a loose leather strap on my boot. “You think they’d be more considerate, given that their sole charge in this godforsaken location is to aid any student-teacher teams or ambassadors passing through.” I stayed crouching and let out a small chuckle. “You were very right, by the way; I’m more than grateful for the snowgear. I assume you’ve made the trek to the station before?” I glanced up at him and noticed for the first time the concerned furrow between his eyebrows and the uneasy set of his lips. “Jakell? Which way?”
“Here.” He said, turning and glancing around.
“What?”
“It should be here.”
I rose and glanced about; the flying snow obscured most of my vision I could only make out vague shapes. “Are you sure?”
He moved a few feet forward and drew something white and frost-covered out of the snow before returning to my side. I looked up at him. He was staring east with a display of anxiety I had never seen in his maroon-brown eyes. “Wait for the wind to die.”
It took a minute or two of peering about, eyes straining against the whirl of white and grey, blinding paleness and soft shadow.
The howling slowly dissolved into a soft growl, and as the snow fell, more sparse and passive, I was granted a glimpse through the sheets of falling specks.
We were standing in the center of a ruin.
The only color initially visible to my eyes was the striking brown-black of the decimated structures around us; buildings, rising in low, square, and unimaginative half-existence, marred to the edge of recognition. Yawning holes in the walls, made by the bursting flames of several days past, exposed the rampaged furniture and facilities inside. Tables were overturned, couches and chairs were ripped and ruined, and papers, strangely unaffected by fire, were blown here and there by the gusts still confined inside the structures. It was not until a minute later that the snow was still enough that I could make out a new color; the reddish black of blood that covered everything around the decimation, the simple pale beige of forms, small and large, male and female, stripped naked, lying in pools of this deep crimson,
I stood staring, unable to make the slightest sound or motion.
Jakell was not so confined. He silently gripped my hand in his very long, gloved fingers, and spoke in a voice just barely more audible than the sobbing wind. “Northeast, Lauriel. We must reach the next outpost before them.”
I turned and squeezed his hand, staring up and speaking as a broken, terrified child might. “Who?”
“The ones who killed these people, burned the facility, and cooked their dead flesh over the embers.” He extended his other hand, showing me what he had retrieved from the snow. It was a child’s hand, smaller even than my own; the side was gone, the only traces of cause left indented at the red-pink sides of the exposed interior.
Teeth marks.
Human incisors, sharpened to a sinister purpose.
Bite molds I had been asked to study for years, with little result.
I glanced up at Jakell, and my mouth formed the shapes my breath could not flow through, but Jakell’s could.
“Zealots.” He said, as I mouthed the word.
No comments:
Post a Comment