Stormflower
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About this ebook
"The threads of psychological revelation that permeate the action with intrigue and discovery make Stormflower a passionately involving saga. It is complex in its world-building, attractive in its main protagonist's flaws and struggles, and hard to put down." —D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
THEY call and some hear.
On the ocean world Charybdis, two orphans were searching. When the corportacracy found them, they said they had no memory of their family —they lied.
Jade and Ilin Dieza were taken, raised to kill the inter-dimensional monstrosities known as revenants. They excelled at it until quiet PLANS and madness tore open a gate between dimensions and unleashed a tide of revenants. Amidst the slaughter, Ilin was dragged through to the other side of existence.
Jade followed.
She returned minutes later, years older, bent under the weight of her brother's body..
Now Jade lives as a recluse, haunted by secrets, grief, and guilt. Utterly exhausted, all she wants to do is rest.
Except, a revenant speaks to her, an unnatural plague is spreading, and a friend speaks of an alien compulsion he doesn't understand. One he must never explore, lest all that lies hidden drags him below.
Thus, the second PLAN has begun, and the madness that corrupted the first has worsened.
Keegan and Tristen Kozinski
Loves to write, read, walk, play chess, board games, and occasionally online games. He is an active beekeeper when he isn't consumed with writing - luckily bees are self-sufficient.
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Stormflower - Keegan and Tristen Kozinski
A Visitor from the Other Side of Existence
The sound of the rain surrounded her, thunderous in its deluge and soothing in its rhythm. She lay curled within her blankets, swaddled, warm, bleary in her fresh waking, and cuddling a stuffed fish. The air smelled of lavender, tempting her back to unconsciousness and the cotton candy colors of her dreams. She might have heeded it. Should have heeded it. But she knew her house, knew its silences and sounds and functions, knew it from the tiles underfoot to the floor above she never used.
She sat up, shivering as the blankets fell and the chill of night stung her face. She sat there briefly, legs folded beside her, aching head to foot, and heavy with familiar exhaustion. Then she carefully arranged the stuffed fish—one Sir Charles Henry the Fourth—on his perch atop the pillows and stood. A brush of her thumb across her wrist switched her adaptive suit’s functions from sleeping to waking, exchanging the mild sedatives for energy stimulants and nutrients, and causing it to warm. Now fully lucid, she deactivated the ambient music and incense with a snap, the action simultaneously igniting lights along the walls and ceiling, which illuminated the disorganized mess of her room.
She searched for what had woken her but found nothing changed: discarded clothes littered the floor, the main door remained locked and bolted, and her brother’s picture still stared at her from behind its black death-shroud. The two crystalline vases remained atop the mantle beside her brother’s portrait, one housing a mottled scorpion on a bed of sand, the second a dwarf Stormflower with its roots immersed in water and its ruby leaves incandescent with constant streams of electricity. Nor were any of her alarms activated.
Jade stood from the bed, bare toes sinking into the plush carpets, and walked until she stood near the room’s center—beside her settee—and closed her eyes to listen. Apartment, activate sound dampeners.
The rain’s volume diminished, leaving only the atmosphere moderator’s quiet hum. A second later, she heard it: a persistent muffled beep from her closet.
She strode to the right-hand wall and pressed her palm against it. The door slid into its alcove with a swish and her closet lights activated, revealing a jumble of open drawers, overstuffed containers, and discarded hangers. The beeping intensified, issuing from beneath the heaped junk.
It can’t be, not in a retirement district.…
She burrowed into the mound, relocating boxes and ducking beneath what few clean shirts remained until she exposed the back shelves and sleek, grey crate buried there. She shucked the covering mound of faded sweaters and tapped the box’s illuminated touch screen, activating first a retinal scan then a voice recognition test.
A few moments of sustained staring followed by a murmured command phrase satisfied the locks, opening the lid to an immediately louder beeping and a pulsing blue light. She rummaged inside, shirking various armaments that were technically illegal for her to possess, and retrieved a thin wristband device with a console screen: a military-grade environment tracker, also illegal. She closed the lid, waited until it resealed itself with a hum, and then stepped from the closet.
The wristband came alive in her hands, its screen displaying a grid of green lines, blue numbers, and a single red dot. She cursed under her breath and slumped onto her vanity chair. What the hell is a revenant doing in a retirement district? There’s not enough people to attract it here.
She rubbed her eyes, ignoring the wristband’s incessant alarm beeps.
The green lines represented the canals and buildings around her, the blue conveyed the water depth and—during storms—the strength of its currents. The red dot marked the revenant. Just ignore it,
she told herself, the Purifiers will handle it.
Except, the nearest patrolling Core would be miles away, minutes out at the soonest. Minutes might seem like a brief span, but a revenant could kill dozens in that span, leeching them of life to sustain and augment itself.
Activated by her prolonged proximity, the vanity mirror issued a prim female voice, Would you like to change your appearance? It has been two thousand and ninety-six days since you last adjusted your hair color, two thousand and ninety–
Power down.
The mirror dulled, the lines of text and symbols vanishing to leave only her reflection with her awful strip of pink hair. She raked her fingers through it and stood. Purifiers never patrolled the retirement districts because revenants never materialized there, preferring the denser populated city-complexes. In a hundred and twenty years of tracking revenants, the governing corporations had recorded only two other instances of revenants venturing into retirement districts.
Her hair—mostly a lovely dark purple—fell back over her face, and she raked it back again. Memories broiled in the recesses of her mind, percolating up between her thoughts: indistinct, monstrous shapes prowling through a dirt-colored miasma, corpses shattered and gushing blood, others drained to husks and floating on a serene ocean, her brother screaming as they dragged—No, don’t think about it!
She repressed the memories with a grinding of teeth, and, unlocking the door, strode from her bedroom. "Just act, it’s only one revenant and you’ve killed hundreds. It’s just one."
The rest of her apartment lights powered on as she navigated a short hallway cluttered with dusty boxes, illuminating a sparse kitchen, an attached living room of stone tiles flush with strewn pillows, and a slim, corner stair ascending to the second level. She crossed this space without a thought, unlocked and then opened the closet beside her front door. In contrast to her bedroom, this closet maintained strict military organization, with her shoes arranged along the bottom, and her gray military dress coats—emblazoned with the Purifiers’ skull insignia—neatly arranged on hangers.
She snatched a small emergency protocols disk from the door organizer and pressed it against her chest. It spun awake with a whir and emerald lines projected through her adaptive suit, tracing the contours of her muscles and connecting to her nervous system. Additional, microscopic needles pricked into her skin all over her body, and the adaptive suit thickened, its exterior hardening into something like armor as new blocks of text appeared on her forearms, citing the suit’s improved and added functions. She shoved her bare feet into a pair of advanced combat boots, capable of water skiing and magnetization as well as providing resistance to extreme environments. Only now did she hesitate, gaze falling on an old, faded, button-up coat of red leather, covered nearly head to toe in pockets of all shapes and sizes, some of which were locked. Some of these were locked by keys, others by fingerprint scans, a few by blood tests, and three were hidden. Finally, carefully, she donned it, sliding into the too-large sleeves and pressing her nose against the collar to inhale her brother’s lingering scent. "You can do this." Then she grabbed a pair of training Siphons and attached them to the back of her adaptive suit. Power up.
The dull metal bars warmed against her back and a steady, if faint, white brilliance ignited within them. They were poor tools for fighting revenants, only ever intended to prepare Purifier recruits for true Siphons, but Jade’s Siphon was hidden somewhere distant where it could neither be hunted nor found by accident. This thought stirred a different nightmare, but she quelled it before the memories could surface. Those memories were dangerous.
She stood there for a moment longer, breathing slow and deep to soothe her thundering heart, counting the pace of her breaths until the panic of her mind calmed. Then she steeled herself, spun on a heel and strode to her apartment’s exterior wall. A patio door occupied most of the surface area, offering her a view of the storm outside. Rain assailed the canal outside her apartment in sheets, sometimes so thick it obscured the opposite complex. Jade opened the door with a press of her hand and emerged onto a patio enclosed in transparent duraglau walls, constructed high enough to be above the canal even during flood seasons. This was an uncommon luxury, ocean level housing was reserved almost entirely for retirement districts, which were built on the rare embankments or reefs that rose near enough to the surface to be considered shallow.
Ordinarily placid and knee-deep, the water rushed beneath her, so agitated by the rain and squalling winds it almost overflowed the complex’s stilts. She yanked her hood up and retracted the patio’s central door with another tap. Rain immediately besieged her, dousing her coat and the patio’s interior before spiraling down the drain lines.
She swung out, clutching the support railing as she plunged into the frigid, waist-deep water with a stifled groan. Her adaptive suit warmed further in response, insulating her as she closed the patio door, which blinked once with internal light and turned opaque.
She wiped the water from her eyes with an unspoken curse at having forgotten her goggles and snapped her heels together. Her boots’ water-skates activated with a jolt, heat spreading as their internal mechanisms worked, and propelled her from the water to its turbulent surface, stabilized by thrumming, green energy projectors.
She leaned into the wind and shoved off, skating over the ocean’s surface between raised apartment complexes towards the revenant’s last displayed location. The wristband beeped and sparked a signal against her right hand, directing her. She turned down the corresponding river-alley, ignoring the fluorescent one-way sign, and zipped two blocks before taking a left onto another main canal.
Hovering illumination-bots patrolled overhead, offering meager clarity to her surroundings. Beyond them, however, a golden radiance shone in the canal, almost blinding in the dark. She pushed her legs harder, streaking through parked skimmers and circumventing aquatic flora, their usually soaring stalks now lying flat on the ocean surface from the wind.
The radiance vanished abruptly, provoking a desperate curse and launching her into a full sprint over the last hundred feet.
An indistinct human shriek pierced the rain as she skidded to a halt outside the melted ruins of a patio, its walls still oozing and cherry red from the revenant’s ingress. She hauled herself inside, steam sizzling off her suit’s gloves as she scrambled into the attached apartment over steaming duraglau. The revenant’s radiance blazed inside the living room, almost masking the shapes of a huddled man and the revenant itself: this one long-bodied and vaguely insectoid with a wide-eyed, expressionless, and pale human face.
It spun at her appearance, and the memories flashed across her mental eye: a thousand screaming horrors slashing, biting, and stabbing at her insubstantial body, crawling through and around her. She couldn’t see where she was, she couldn’t find the exit, where was her brother; he’d been screaming her name just a moment ago. She cast desperately about for him, but all was dark and the rain was drowning everywhere she looked. She tried to raise her HUD to pierce the dark and the deluge, but her fingers touched the bare skin of her face and jarred her from the memory. She’d almost always worn a helmet back then, even during the brief interludes between exterminations or hunts.
The revenant, a creature of radiant light wreathed in tattered fabric, blared a furious note and glided toward Jade, effortlessly surmounting an overturned table on a cavalcade of human hands and arms.
She retreated, luring it toward the canal and away from the elderly man cowering in the apartment. Activated by the revenant’s proximity her earpiece clicked on, and a passionless, inhuman voice recited information into her ear, Spirit-level seven, classified as a first-tier revenant. Low threat.
Jade forced a shuddering exhale and detached the training Siphons from her back. They buzzed in her hands and then punctured her skin with minute needles, linking their programming to the implants in her hands. The Siphons blazed alight and deconstructed entirely into gaseous energy, one orange and the other amber.
The revenant flared in response, issuing another furious musical note.
Jade retreated backward through the ruined patio and into the canal, her implanted lenses shading reactively to the creature’s brilliance. It pursued, scuttling out onto the patio and then submerging up to its elbows in the canal. That’s it.
She drifted further back. The Siphons’ energies coalesced and solidified in her hands: one into a thin serrated blade of energy and the other into a tether with two attached stakes, both their respective energies’ hue. This was a training Siphon’s one advantage over a true Siphon, the ability to be transformed at will into near any weapon. Unfortunately, that necessitated the neural link, which in turn risked a vicious backlash should the training Siphon break while linked.
The revenant shot forward with a crude musical note, reaching for her with two of its many hands.
She leapt back, projecting herself into a bound with a burst of energy from her boots and twisting midair to land with her feet against the opposite building’s patio walls. The force of her collision jarred her boots, provoking their reassessment protocols and instigating their conversion from water-skates to magnetized. They fastened onto the strips of metal buried in the duraglau, simultaneously activating the exoskeleton and force emitters in her adaptive suit to support her against the planet’s gravity.
The revenant smashed against the wall just beneath her, and she lunged aside, skating along the metal strips to plant the first stake in the duraglau. The revenant pursued, half-crawling its sinuous body up the wall. She dove, ducked beneath its groping swipe, twisted up and dashed back across the building while impaling the revenant’s hand with the serrated Siphon blade and leaving it there.
It shrieked a terrible note and reeled back, its vibrant essence bursting in the air and dissipating. The serrated Siphon brightened, converting from amber to gold as it drank the revenant’s essence. A true Siphon would have consumed the energy, a training Siphon could only store and vent it.
The revenant shrieked again and leapt after her.
She launched into a dash up the patio front, yanked the string taught and vaulted, soaring over the pursuing revenant, to land back on the water and drag the cord down across its shoulders. Her water-skates snapped on with a disgruntled cough but kept her afloat. The revenant splashed down after her, and she sprinted past and around it, dragging the cord tight against its limbs. It flailed after her, hands and tail lashing wildly, and its mouth snapping.
She cut back across it, completing the first loop and wrapping the cord tighter as she vaulted from the water to the edifice and retraced her steps in another loop. Back and forth she leapt, from water to patio to water, ducking and diving through the revenant’s arms and around its body. Her boots protested with every conversion, but she knew their tolerance and the exact amount she could push them.
Enraged by her ceaseless evasion, the revenant drew itself up and spat golden energy into her path. She cursed and veered up the adjacent building, hurling herself aside, but one of its many hands struck out and clipped her right boot as she leapt.
Pain tore through her foot, and the circuits in her boot failed, disconnecting from the wall and dumping her into the canal. She spun beneath the surface, dug her uninjured foot in the mud and propelled herself forward just before the revenant stabbed one of its multitudinous limbs into her previous location. She surfaced and yanked the tether Siphon taut while retracting the string. It snapped rigid, searing into the revenant’s body and snaring it in the web she had woven. The revenant howled and lashed at her, but its brilliance was already dimming, guzzled by the web of the tether Siphon and expelled in streams of dense mist from the planted stake.
With the second stake still clutched in her hands, she shuffled sideways through the water, ginger on her injured foot, until she could plant the other stake in the wall.
The revenant began to sag, its once strident music becoming thin and stuttering. It still struggled feebly, but the tether Siphon held it fast.
She waded back toward the invaded apartment and hauled herself onto its patio. The elderly man still cowered in the wreckage of an olive-colored couch, his hands pressed against his ears as he whispered a frantic torrent of words, … a revenant and a woman out of nowhere.…
Jade shuffled toward him and spoke slowly lest her voice quiver, Hey, Mr.
He jerked and refocused on her. Is it gone?
Yes. Is there anybody hurt? Anyone else here?
He shook his head.
She nodded and sank into a nearby chair, letting her head fall back. Even as she closed her eyes to rest, however, a memory reared: someone’s gore-stained hands tearing at her coat, the mouth—half melted away—open and shrieking as they struggled to stay afloat in the blood-stained water.
She sank deeper into the chair, wrapping herself in the coat and beginning to count her breaths. The man’s petrified stare reverted to the outside and a sobbing whimper crawled from him. It should not have; the revenant would have withered in death. A tingling cold needled her spine, pulling her gaze up. What is–
Her voice died mid-utterance, silenced by the spectacle of a new revenant crouched over and regarding the remnants of the first.
She surged to her feet, shoving the man toward the front door with a hiss, Run!
And as he fled, she turned and crept along the wall toward the patio.
Outside, the new revenant towered, an immense shrouded mass swathed in black fabric and steaming in the rain, its two eyes radiant amidst the shadows.
She scanned her surroundings, desperate for a weapon of any sort, and found nothing. Her Siphons—left to finish draining the first revenant—either glowed beneath the water’s surface or hung from the wall a short distance ahead, but she could not reach them without alerting the new revenant. She inhaled a deep breath, slipped into and beneath the water and kicked off the patio’s stilts. A retired, and arguably senile, Purifier lived nearby. She knew the codes to his apartment from a previous disastrous party and knew he retained possession of his Siphon. She needed to hurry though. The new revenant had already consumed most of its predecessor’s remaining essence.
Her earpiece hummed on as she submerged, Spirit-level zero, classified as a tier-zero revenant.
She stopped mid-motion and surfaced. Rescan.
No spirit signature.
Jade tapped her earpiece where it clasped the top of her ear and hissed, I saw its essence.
No spirit signature.
She cursed under her breath and started to submerge again, then stopped with a low groan before standing to face the revenant.
It loomed over her in a crouch, a humanoid creature with red hair and streaked skin. Its head cocked to the side as she stared up at it. Why are you afraid?
She almost buckled in shock at the revenant’s words. She tried to muster her voice, to discard her stupefaction and strike, or to at least answer the revenant but she couldn’t. She saw a different image, that of her brother staring back at her, leering from a shroud of brown mists, laughing as he spoke. She reeled back, bile rising in her throat, and flailed at the memory; but it stayed leering at her, the lips moving as a twisted, broken hand reached for her. She fell and cold canal water crashed over her shoulders and head, shocking her from the memory.
The revenant settled back, pulling her gaze up with its eyes until she could see naught but the sky and its luminous, questioning gaze. She finally found her voice and spoke, struggling to shout over the storm, Who are you?
I have yet to decide on a name.
He continued to regard her, his eyes full of too much intelligence, too much life.
She shivered and moved back from the creature, teeth baring in a snarl as she stood again.
The creature straightened, rising to almost four times her height. I see I distress you. I will leave.
And so saying, it turned from her and glided away, soundless beneath the rain’s volume. She watched it depart—watched until it disappeared—then collapsed to her knees and clutched her chest, panting. The current flowed past at chest height, pulling at her, but she could barely feel it, barely breathe. She fastened every thought she had on her breaths, slowing them, counting them.
Calm gradually returned to her, requiring several minutes before she roused herself and staggered back to her seat in the wrecked apartment. The waking nightmares began to fade from her mind, subdued by calming agents from her suit, allowing her to think and control her shudders. The Purifier Corporation hunted revenants, that’s who the man would have called, and they would come. So she needed to wait because they needed to know what she had just encountered.
They announced their arrival with the thrum of hovercraft engines and a flood of blinding searchlight beams sweeping down the canal. She heard a thud on the apartment complex roof as another long, personnel aircraft landed on the opposite complex. Doors opened along its flank and unleashed a tide of officials and assistants in gray military uniforms. They immediately scattered, patrolling the site and searching for injured, while others cordoned off the area with walls of waist-high projected yellow light. As more floodlights activated along the canal, painting the whole of her view silver, residents began parting the curtains of their windows in confusion.
A Core of Purifiers—the typical four operatives—in colorless energy-plate armor dropped from a gunship and spread through the district in search of other revenants. One of them, the leader by the silver bars on her forearms, assessed the first creature’s remnants for a short while before crossing the canal to intrude on the medic and clerk attending Jade.
You the one who contacted us?
she asked, assessing Jade’s bedraggled state with evident disdain. A green halo glowed on the iris of the woman’s lenses, recording the interview and most likely transmitting it to the Purifier Corporation’s database, where Jade’s face would have initiated a sequence of alerts if higher authorities weren’t already on their way.
No
—Jade jabbed a thumb at the front door without lifting her head from the back of the chair or opening her eyes—he went that way a couple minutes back.
The Purifier frowned. Then what are you doing here?
Just passing through.
At this hour?
Yep.
The Purifier stifled a low growl and her Siphon—a true Siphon—darkened in its holster at her side. May I have your name please, miss?
Jade cracked open an eye, regarded the woman, and then tapped the medic tending to her leg. That’s enough, you can go now.
But, miss, I haven’t finished applying the stimulants–
Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.
The medic glanced from Jade to the Purifier, then left.
The Purifier seethed, her Siphon flashing a venomous red. Will you answer me or–
That will suffice, Sergeant Mavis.
The Purifier snapped to attention and spun with a salute. Yes, Prime March.
The new arrival circumvented the Purifier and indicated the patio. Leave us, sergeant, and take the others with you.
Yes, Prime March.
She departed, rounding up the inspectors, clerks, and police officials as she went.
The man, a member of the Purifiers’ Sovereign Cores, reverted his attention to Jade, assessing her as the apartment emptied. For her part, Jade disinterestedly regarded his pale helmet and stiff gray suit—deceptively soft-looking for the quality of armor it actually was—then returned her head to its reclined position. She resumed her breathing exercises, trying to ignore that this man could return her to active Purifier duty with a word and a signature.
Prime March delayed until the last assistants vacated the premise before addressing her, I thought you had retired?
I am; I just happened to be passing by.
Well, at least you’re consistent.
A green halo brightened the lens in his right eye, likely playing back her brief interview with Sergeant Mavis or the medic. You provided little to no information on the revenant and distanced yourself from the whole act, claiming to have been ‘just passing by’ when a vigilante killed the creature.
And what? You don’t believe me? I’m hurt.
She dragged herself onto her aching leg with a groan. The vigilante really was quite attractive too, had a nice scar across one of her eyes.
She drew a line diagonally across her eye to illustrate, then stepped closer and softly added, B.S. aside, there’s something you should know, another revenant–
Prime March spun abruptly about and moved to the patio, barking orders that catalyzed those assembled outside into frenzied action.
Jade rubbed her brow. Prime March … Prime March.
He ignored her, too preoccupied with excising this new revenant to heed her steadily louder addresses. Finally, nerves frayed to razor’s edge by the evening’s ordeal, she barked, Theraan, listen to me!
His commands trailed off, What is it, Jade?
The revenant spoke.
He froze, a single second of deathlike stillness as his mind recalibrated. Are you certain?
Yes.
He tapped his earpiece. Contact active Purifiers in the area.
He waited, then spoke again, You have new orders, return to the site of first contact immediately. Out.
His eyes flicked back to her while his hand implemented a particular pattern on his earpiece. Do you have a description?
Red hair, big, humanoid, and no spirit signature.
The last detail elicited a grimace but nothing more. Thank you. Yes, Serras, rendezvous at my coordinates immediately. Yes, I know you have a date. No, the perfection of his physical appearance does not sway me. Just get over here; we have a speaking revenant. Good; red hair …
Jade trudged past him and dropped into the water. Someone offered her a ride on their skimmer, but she declined and clambered into one of the small rentals docked in a river-alley further along. The door slid shut behind her and the opaque roof cleared to bestow a view of clouded but now dry skies. She sank into the plush chair, which immediately warmed against her body, and brushed her wrist along the console.
Welcome, please state or input your destination.
She typed her address into the console and then slowly stripped off her coat as the skimmer’s low, angular body slipped out into the main canal. The coat’s old fabric boasted enough scars, rips, and patches to bespeak several lifetimes. She turned it in her hands, every new scar a small prick in her heart. She could not fix it, there was no one to teach her how. It had been her brother’s coat and their mother’s before him and so on through generations of their family.
She flipped it front-wise and stroked the lovely gold buttons, each one emblazoned with a creature from myth. One, two, three…. She stopped and counted them again. One, two, three….
God dammit!
Jade leaned over the coat, pressing her forehead against it.
She had lost a button.
She hugged the coat against her chest and brought her legs up. I’m sorry,
she whispered. I’m trying, Ilin. I promise, I really am. Please, I’m sorry.
But still, his eyes stared at her, full of pain and disappointment as she added one more failure to her monumental list. She hadn’t saved him. She couldn’t even protect his coat.
The Artificial Conception
Some Days before…
To experience death was to perceive the breadth of eternity in the confines of a single thought. To reawaken from this purity of being, to reemerge from the trackless current of death, was to fall from that existence and forget everything one had known and experienced while within it. Still, the soul willingly roused from death and relinquished eternity, waking to the world of Aeria and renewed life.
It spent a moment exploring itself, measuring the extent of its being, perusing the memories of its past half-lives and compiling all the knowledge that had awaited it upon birth. As it did so, Aeria gradually materialized to its perception, manifesting as a cracked, slender corridor of worked stone blanketed in the muddy brown mist called La Neblina. Partitions of aged, yellowing paper defined the corridor, stretched between slim wooden poles and painted with exquisite, impressionistic images in black that shifted as if alive.
All of this—everything it perceived—the soul should have recognized and known intimately for it had been traveling these corridors until the moment of its birth. Yet, it did not. The iconography on the partitions had changed, something only specific intent could achieve, and there were new scraps of tattered fabric littering the floor. These were not natural changes. For the soul to have no memories of these events, they would have had to occur while it emerged from death, but that was a lapse of minutes, too brief for something to have stumbled upon it, modified its environs on a whim, and then left.
No, its birth had been anticipated, mayhap even orchestrated. Something had a purpose for it. But why then weren’t they here, waiting for it?
The soul completed its manifestation into the physical world, its consciousness materializing as wisps of transparent, drifting energy without nucleus or source: luce. These wisps the soul accumulated into a spherical shape before directing its attention, unconstrained by nonexistent sensory organs, to the altered partition and the stark images painted there.
These images began as a long-feathered crane streaking across the paper, spinning and shedding feathers in its wake. Where these feathers fell, they became pools of ink—like footsteps marking its passage. From these pools crawled a menagerie of miraculous beings, their forms staining the paper with rivulets of ink before transforming simultaneously into replicas of the same empyreal lion. All of these lions turned to look upon the soul in synchronized motion and, without breaking their stare, began to walk in place. The unpainted space beneath their feet became swelling waters over which they walked, ripples arching from their steps. Still walking in place, the lions stretched and changed, growing taller as they settled onto hind limbs, becoming men as varied as the lions were identical without once averting their eyes or ceasing to walk. Their steps carried them to an empty city upon the water, above which blazed a black sun. The men raised a hand, fingers becoming claws; and the sun scattered, unraveling into a deluge of black flame that fell to the cities and ignited their windows with light. There the iconography paused, the light dimming while the men stared at the soul in silent demand.
The soul slowly recoiled, recognizing its existence had been orchestrated for a purpose, and that purpose bespoke something terrible. Even so, it felt the urge to fulfill that intent, a sense of rightness and instinct compelling it forward, and yet it knew this sensation was aberrant. Souls were not born with instinct and compulsions; they were born with all the memories of their previous half-lives and a single ability unique to them, something shaped by their essential nature. Except, the soul could already feel a second ability coded into its essence, something roughly spliced into place and itching with discord because of it, a connection to read and manipulate the luce of other souls. It would need to transform and choose a physical shape to allay the itch. The alien instinct urged this as well, but in this instance the soul did not disagree. It needed a physical form to traverse Aeria; and if it did not move, those manipulating it would inevitably find it. So, it began shaping itself, condensing the raw energy of its essence into solid matter.
The soul breathed and formed lungs. A heart emerged in the center of its form and began to beat, pushing blood through veins and feeding muscles. It stretched taller, becoming humanoid and inhaling the damp air. Bones formed, followed by organs and nerves. It spread long fingers, tipped with retractable claws, and trailed them through La Neblina, feeling its chill. Skin streamed from its chest and across its arms and legs, followed by horizontal streaks of black and blue fur. It reared back a proud head, and a crimson mane sprouted from its skull.
The soul settled onto broad haunches, its shape undeniably inspired by the lion on the wall, but it was satisfied with the form because, compelled by instinct or not, it had found the lion’s form appealing.
A soft flittering drew its attention to the tatters of black cloth that littered its surroundings, fluttering in stale drafts from cracks in the floor and ceiling. As it observed this fabric, the soul remembered the final moments of its half-life existences as vestiges. It recalled listlessly wandering the infinite catacombs of Palacio—the labyrinth of stone rooms it currently inhabited—of consuming vestiges before being consumed in turn. The memories of these insentient, emotionless existences encompassed a thousand different lives before culminating in the birth of a consciousness beyond base instinct: a soul. And yet, in all those lives there existed no memory of something interfering with it. But there was an inconsistency, a lifetime and energy it possessed but could not remember.
The soul robed itself in the tatters not because it felt shame in nudity, but because its memories always showed it being clothed. This done, it ventured along the corridor, gliding effortlessly over a crumbling floor choked with sprawling roots that felt warm to the touch. These roots were Arbol, a living organism that was vital to and pervaded all of Aeria, though they sprouted from no immense tree or plant. As the soul progressed—ever vigilant for signs of other life—a menagerie of painted creatures and flora trailed it along the partitions, animated and attracted by its luce, like moths to flame.
The soul ascended, sometimes vaulting through fissures in the ceiling, and other times scaling Arbol’s bulkier roots up vacant shafts through dozens of floors. Small rooms and endless corridors transitioned to vast chambers, mausoleums, and vacant throne rooms. These in turn concluded at a wide stair leading to a final ceiling. The soul stilled on the first step, vibrant gold eyes drifting to the left-hand partition where all but one black silhouette stood motionless—a smoldering phoenix orbiting a circle of illuminated paper.
The soul dismounted the stair and navigated around it to an alcove behind a screen of Arbol’s roots. Past those it discovered an archway into a secondary room inhabited solely by an ancient, lightless chandelier of pale stone. La Neblina swirled along the room’s corners and alcoves but refused to trespass on the open space because there, hanging from the chandelier by a wispy green vine, dangled an orb of luce.
The soul crept into the luce’s fiery luminescence and extended its senses, scouring the room for other souls without result. It relaxed muscles that had tensed against potential adversaries and approached the chandelier. Once there, it plucked the orb and swallowed it whole. Life flooded its being, deepening its reservoir of energy and strengthening its spirit. Overhead the green vine crumpled to dust, and La Neblina, no longer denied by the raw, unadulterated luce, billowed inward through the cracks and doorways.
The soul returned to the stairway and was greeted by a chill breeze sweeping away Palacio’s dull warmth. The soul lengthened its stride, mounting one of Arbol’s thicker roots to avoid the cracked stairs. Every step soothed its feet with warmth, but the air turned icy as the soul emerged into the exterior world, stepping into a vast openness beneath a trackless sky. There, the world transformed to a city of soaring stone edifices and waterways drowning in the drifting fathoms of La Neblina, all of it enwrapped in Arbol’s roots. This was Mar, the surface of Aeria just as Palacio was the infinite labyrinth below.
The soul quickly bent low and began gathering scraps of drifting fabric from the cobbled street, wrapping them about its eyes to obscure the empyreal glow of its luce lest it attract a starving soul.
Satisfied with its precautions, the soul lowered itself to the cobbled road and crept through the city on all fours, navigating by scent and hearing. Grit scraped under its feet and desiccated leaves skittered past, tumbling through the open doors of towers and mansions as a stone merry-go-round creaked and slowly spun. It reached a crossroads in the city where the street had collapsed into Palacio, allowing a massive Arbol root to sprout skyward from the labyrinth below. The soul vaulted onto the pale, knotted bark, and scaled to its arching zenith, high above the street. There it crouched low and probed outward, blind from the cloth and La Neblina but infinitesimally aware of all that surrounded it. It expanded its consciousness, scrounging Mar’s every crevice for a flicker of luce.
It waited for a span of days, motionless and unblinking, close enough to the place of its birth to notice if anything came searching, but far enough that it would likely go unremarked upon. La Neblina swirled around it with its inscrutable tides, sometimes rising miles high, and at others sinking until it barely covered the cobbles. Oscuras—little cloth dolls with heads of tiny, flameless lanterns—stumbled upon the soul and, their luce exhausted, huddled themselves against its feet and limbs. Their lights gradually rekindled as they clung to it, and then they trundled about their way, little metal heads bouncing and clinking cheerfully. They tended the natural luce—the life that souls depended upon—that accumulated in Aeria; and in turn, souls kindled them with luce they had absorbed and diluted, for raw luce would shatter their lanterns. Throughout all of this, the foreign instinct—the urge—persisted, gnawing at the soul to follow La Neblina’s flow and find those who had made it. It could feel them somewhere out in the distance, a knot of entwined souls; or rather it knew they were there, like the phantom of a memory. But the lure was feeble and, though insistent, exerted no thrall for now.
Finally, a flash of warmth skittered through a corner of its senses: a vestige, an insensate fragment of life. The soul exploded forward, shucking the newly attached Oscuras, and crossed an expanse of miles in a beat of its heart, vacating the cityscape for a shattered plain of crags and roots.
The vestige sensed its approach but could only tighten its muscles to leap before the soul crashed into and pinned it against a jutting scarp. The vestige thrashed, not for fear of dying—for it lacked a true soul—but from simple instinct. Remorseless, the soul rent the vestige’s form with a swift but detached cut, and consumed its luce. New memories suffused it in a rush, filling it with all the vestige had seen as well as a sensation of burgeoning as its own being expanded. With that burgeoning came satiation, a fullness of being that led to a perilous lethargy. It would need time to digest the new memories and reconcile them with the old, thus, the soul retired across Mar’s cobbled and ruptured floor to recline beneath the eaves of a wide, arching root. Even as it did, however, a new consciousness intruded on its perception as if from nowhere, appearing alarmingly close for all the soul’s constant vigil.
This new soul materialized from La Neblina moments later, slinking down the root’s side with a susurration of indistinguishable speech. It dropped with a swish of fabric and scarce a thud, straightening to an easy, human posture, its eyes blazing with sufficient luce that La Neblina receded from its face and betrayed its power. That it was of small stature meant nothing, for souls could shape and alter themselves at will within Aeria. It could have just as easily arranged itself to the size of a mountain with the luce it possessed.
This new soul exhaled a slow breath of golden light, the particles lingering briefly—like the ejected embers of an open flame—on the cloth swaddling its beaked visage. Greetings, newborn.
It did not speak with words or sounds, or in any language divined by a living species. It conveyed pure meaning into the soul’s mind, and in that meaning there was recognition: this soul knew it.
The soul responded in the same mental fashion, What is your name?
I am Koin. Have you chosen a name?
Again, there was recognition, but also curiosity.
I have not. What brought you here?
"I sensed the presence of a vestige, but it appears you move quick for a newborn."
Why do you linger?
"Because you are a new soul and interest me."
You do not interest me.
The soul moved to depart, knowing this Koin was not one of its creators but concerned with its recognition and subtlety regardless.
Wait.
The soul stalled. Why?
Because I wish to offer you a place and a name….
Koin glided forward, effortlessly navigating the ruptured cobbles and roots on stilted carapace legs. "An infinite reservoir of luce and the protection of an Extranjerra." He swept around the soul and perched on a collection of roots, hands clicking as they undulated and swirled through La Neblina.
I have no need of your name or the belonging you offer.
I do not ask that you decide now, only that you accompany me and witness for yourself what I offer.
Is the journey long?
No, just a sliver of time, and effortless.
The soul hesitated. It did not fear Koin as such, but it distrusted his intent because Koin’s essence throbbed with unspoken avarice and a voracious hunger he concealed. Nonetheless, Koin possessed knowledge it wanted. I will accompany you.
Good.
Koin lifted its beaked head and issued an echoing call, introducing first a moment of pregnant expectation, then receiving an answer in the dull, labored beat of cumbersome wings. The soul raised its gaze to the heavens and extended its consciousness. A leviathan swept into its perception with another wingbeat, causing La Neblina to coil and eddy around its body. The leviathan—a corporal, barely sentient denizen of Aeria that survived without luce—appeared from La Neblina, its dark undersides sleek and legless. It descended, circling until it hovered about a hundred feet over the two souls. It uttered a metallic call and lowered a sinuous tail for them.
Koin mounted it without hesitation and beckoned the soul to follow. They climbed to the leviathan’s vast back and sat in the crook between its wings and shoulders, Koin in front and the soul behind. From atop the leviathan’s head a ralampa, another of Aeria’s natural denizens, glanced back at them. It was humanoid, with a body of hollow wire framing wrapped in faded cloth that squeaked when it moved. A dusky orb filled its midsection, the interior glowing dully with luce and swirling with captured mist. It wore a hard, funnel-like cap of metal upon its square head and concealed its face in layered wrappings that permitted only two beams of orange light to emerge. These beams skimmed over the soul, then returned to the front. The leviathan arched, and its wings swept down with a low groaning call that shuddered all through its length. It rose higher, La Neblina billowing away from it with every wingbeat to expose the ruptured ground far below. It groaned again and turned to follow La Neblina’s tide.
The soul refocused on Koin. Where do you take me?
"To Revenance: a communion place for souls under the dominion of my Extranjerra."
A city?
Of sorts.
A flicker of deceit slithered through Koin’s essence, igniting the soul’s curiosity. The soul manipulated its own essence, consuming a spark of luce to project an illusion of wrath and lethal purpose within its own essence and direct it toward Koin. Koin demonstrated no reaction, either unperturbed by the soul’s murderous intent or ignorant of it. The soul relinquished its deception, confident Koin could not read essences as it did, and focused on the emotions afflicting Koin’s spirit: want, excitement, and fear. It attempted to parse meaning from their presence without success but persisted in this endeavor, heedless of the decaying edifices soaring skyward all around them.
Eventually, Koin disrupted the rustling quiet of La Neblina and the beat of the leviathan’s wings, "Look, newborn, and see Revenance. We have arrived."
The soul shifted its focus at its companion’s prompt and observed the resplendent false glory of Revenance. It occupied a sunken cavity in Mar, smothered with Arbol’s roots beneath a sky choked by smaller leviathans, many burdened with itinerant souls, all of it aglow with hollow luce: a vivid, but lifeless brilliance bereft of everything but its basest physical attribute. La Neblina swirled around the pit’s exterior in a soaring wall as if denied entrance, filling the air with a dull clatter as it struck and flowed through the surrounding edifice.
Is it not beautiful?
No, it is not.
The soul extended its senses, scouring Revenance for a flicker of the Extranjerra that presided over it.
The being’s consciousness responded and ensnared the soul’s mind in its cacophonous depths. Who are—? You!
And again there was that same recognition, but now charged with fury and..., triumph? But also a multitude of lesser emotions, too many to count and many conflicting, as if it were a crowd of minds.
None of your concern.
The soul instantly extricated its consciousness, eluding the Extranjerra’s grasping attempts to recapture it.
Koin shuddered and whirled on the soul, his essence and voice sharp with a frightened pitch. What did you say?
The soul straightened on the leviathan’s back. Its consciousness still echoed with the Extranjerra’s anger and, more prominently, its rapacious desire. Both the Extranjerra and Koin desired something of it, a desire they wished concealed, but neither were they its creators. The soul approached the leviathan’s shoulder and, stripping the fold from its eyes, peered through La Neblina at Revenance.
Koin pursued it to the precipice. Foolish newborn, why did you anger her?
His meaning echoed with rage, but his essence cowered with mounting desperation. He snatched a knot of the soul’s wraps, but the soul brushed his arm aside. It still desired Koin’s knowledge, but the Extranjerra was too overpowering a force to contend with and made the