My waking moments offer little more hope than my unconscious ones. Adria and I install Alpha’s sphere into Aspect together, but while it tempers their rage against the Daylands and their calls for vicious justice, it shows no signs of having awakened sentience.
Aspect is a comforting presence when I wake screaming. A loyal friend, even in this strange, shadowed inverse of our usual world. But they remain a robot, ultimately an elaborate algorithm.
I don’t stop searching the archives for new installation ideas, but nevertheless, my optimism wanes like melting wax. Did I risk everything for nothing? Did I bring my closest friend to this land of frozen death, put their body through all manner of abuses, and further tinker with their mechanical brain … just to fail them at the finish line?
All I know is I can’t return home until I’ve tried installing absolutely everything (and then some) that the Shadowlands have to offer. Let my mother worry herself sick. Let them raise the ransom to the stars.
My feet are firmly planted here until I know, beyond even an inkling of doubt, that I’ve done everything I can for Aspect’s potential awakening.
My only respite from both the night visions and conscious anxieties is when I’m with Adria. She remains a newly risen queen trying to quell a civil war, so she has responsibilities besides babysitting me—but when we are together, our waking moments land like a steady rain of blows, frequently interrupted by worsening messages on her comms.
FROM GENERAL ISEK: An energy blast knocked out a hunk of the fortress’s front wall. A telekinetic is repairing it as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, we’ve posted a constantly rotating guard.
FROM THAANE: The prisoner you saw fit to release, Eridian, has been stirring the rebels with her firsthand account of the monster queen. I fear she will only intensify Azarii’s resistance. But the consequences of your mercy are yours to bear.
FROM GENERAL ISEK: Our low-torch watchmen caught a solo assassin near the breach, with a shimmering freezeblade tucked securely into the wrist of her robes. The watchmen wrung her neck, left the head staring glassy-eyed at the stars. I can only hope it serves as a meaningful deterrent.
FROM THAANE: I fear Azarii’s influence only grows. A layman appeared at the gate yesterday, white-eyed, staggering, bleeding profusely. He’d tried to tear one of his wings from its socket. Zalel called for a more advanced medic, anyone to help him. Before that could happen, the madman took a freezeblade to his own throat.
Adria insists on rigorous exercise and training, for fear that the shadows will sap the life from my body and reduce my value to the Daylands. Most of it is with the same general who so frequently sendsthe war updates: Isek—a lean, winged statesman with a solemn face and a baritone voice that carries unexpected notes of deep-set kindness. I vaguely remember overhearing his voice, which sought to temper Thaane’s violence, when Aspect and I cowered behind that tapestry.
When Adria is otherwise occupied with her queenly duties, General Isek leads me through fitness routines like stretches and laps. I don’t think he’s supposed to be checking on my health beyond that, but he keeps squeezing my arms and legs anyway, prodding at my ribs, asking if I’m eating and drinking, if I’m sleeping, if the darkness has broken my brain yet. Eventually, I can’t help but ask why he extends such compassion. Cradling the side of my mask with a quivering hand, he whispers that I remind him of his son.
He also tells me that, while Adria would rather I didn’t worry, starships have been spotted deeper in the Passage than dayfolk have flown in generations. Looking for me. Maybe feeling out the Shadowlands’ defenses. Adria’s digital message to the Daylands promised I would return alive in exchange for her needed war supplies, but that doesn’t mean they won’t consider simply snatching me themselves and dragging me home of their own accord, ransom unpaid. It’s no wonder Adria wants me readied for anything under General Isek’s wise tutelage.
The most intense of my training sessions, though, are not with Isek but with Adria herself. Rather than rote exercise routines, our sparring with words extends into drills with fists, the air electric hot between our warring bodies despite the Shadowlands’ permanent winter.
Increasingly, as my courage reignites like a stubborn flare in a sandstorm, I launch questions alongside my knuckles. The innocuous ones, she answers, though I get the feeling half her replies are jokes. Things like, “So how tall can nightfolk get?” (one monster of a soldier was measured at nearly ten feet), or “Don’t you ever get cold in those overdramatic robes you all insist on wearing?” (apparently all the cold is absorbed by Adria’s cold, cold heart), or “What’s your favorite color?” (black, predictably).
Then there are the bolder ones.
“Tell me about your mother.”
“Tell me the first thing you really remember.”
“Tell me where you feel the safest.”
Most of these, Adria deflects as effectively as she does my punches and kicks. But when I cautiously venture, “Have you ever seen the radiation’s source for yourself?” her brow furrows in actual thought rather than reflexive sarcasm, and she tells me we’re going on a little trip.
The path is long, and compared to Adria’s exasperating bulk, my legs are all too short—so instead of walking, she spreads her wings and gestures to the strong, solid arch of spine between them. Swallowing hard, I clamber up on Adria’s back like a small child into her first starship cockpit.
When she, without a word, takes flight, my stomach lurches at the sudden ascent, my vision blurring even through my mask at the speed. I’m forced to wrap my gloved hands around her horns for balance, stray strands of her ink-dark hair tangling between my gloved fingers. Eventually, once we’re high enough to transition from near-total verticality to a more familiar horizontal axis, I hold tight to the ridges of her wings instead.
Despite my gloves and armor separating my body from Adria’s, I swear every sensation burns through me like unfiltered sun. The core structure of her wings feels almost but not quite like bones, more like the cartilage of an ear than anything else. But the wing membranes, which I absently expected to feel leathery, are more like weathered velvet, rough and soft all at once.
As much as I’ve come to fear and flee sleep, I think any rest under such a fabric would be perfectly, beautifully dreamless.
The only sound is the steady, weighty rise and fall of her wings. Gradually my eyes adjust to the endless void around us, and pinpricks of starlight appear, alongside streaks of violet and indigo, the entire galaxy seemingly at my fingertips. I know we’re going somewhere important, but I don’t want this moment to end. If I were to removethe memory, seal it securely in a Morpheus sphere, I don’t think there’s any price or offering, anywhere on this entire planet, that would be worth giving it up.
But, of course, after what was surely many miles but felt like a mere few feet, our journey concludes, and we dive back to solid ground. Then, to my confusion,beneathsaid solid ground. We descend into a massive pit, at the bottom of which we’re greeted by hooded guards, all bearing rifles and blades. Eventually, after a smattering of shouts back and forth (and a few bolder soldiers visibly readying their weapons), Adria waves them away, and we proceed farther into the planet’s mysterious underbelly.
Adria warns me no less than twelve times to keep a safe distance from what I’m about to observe, to squint even behind my mask. And she wasn’t joking.
If Pagomènos had a soul, the Diakópsei is what I imagine it would look like: brilliantly blue, misshapen, perhaps twenty feet long, and pulsing, all but flaming, impossibly bright yet undeniably born of the dark. On either side of it are sealed vessels containing smaller gemlike structures of intricate crystal and rock. Their shapes are alien but also nearly organic, like unholy fruit bursting with cursed seeds.
Involuntarily, despite standing a great distance away, I extend an open palm as if to touch one of the gemfruit vessels, my fingertips itching to remove my glove. Adria catches my hand between barely controlled claws and yanks me back. “After all you’ve already survived, are you trying to kill yourself?”
“No, no, I …” I want to knot my fingers in my hair, but my hands are gloved, my hair secured in a tight braid within my helmet, so I’m just gripping the sides of said helmet, overwhelmed. “I don’t know how to explain. I thought it would be horrible. I thought it would make me afraid. But it’s not, and I’m not.” I stare into the azure light until my eyes sting and water. My vision blurs. “It’s the end of everything that was, and the beginning of everything that is. And somehow … I just want totouchit.”
