The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.1

Chapter 2.1: Beneath an Ebon Canopy

Micaiah Ferendin scrunched her nose against the smell as the cultivators in front of her butchered their kills. The entire process bothered her. She watched them plunge their knives into dead flesh, pull back tough skin coated in matted, bloodstained fur, dig past organs and muscles in search of the precious cores buried within. Micaiah winced, not for the brutality of the cultivators’ work, but because they were so gods-damned bad at it.

Threads, she’d wager there was more perfectly edible spiritual meat in the scrap pile than actual scrap. The scavengers would be eating well tonight.

“Don’t worry.” Alice misinterpreted the horror or Micaiah’s face. “They’ll be finished soon.”

Micaiah didn’t bother to correct her. “I hope so,” she muttered. For the third time that afternoon, Micaiah fought down the urge to walk up and show the outworlders how it was done. Her deal to tag along with the Right Eye expedition hadn’t included a cut of the harvest, but that didn’t stop her from grimacing at the waste of it all.

“Garett!” an elderly voice barked from the edge of the clearing. “You’re tasked to keep watch, not fraternize with the natives.”

Alice spun and snapped to attention, her hand rocketing to her forehead fast enough to leave a breeze in its wake. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

A woman who looked altogether too old to be tromping around in the jungle stormed over, her cane sinking over an inch into the moist earth with every step. “And you,” the crone growled at Micaiah.

Several seconds too late, Micaiah remembered to salute. Time and time again her mentor had drilled it into her. The outworlders didn’t like it when you didn’t salute. “Apologies, ma’am.”

“You’re only here as a favor to Jeremiah. We’ll get you to your ruins because that’s what Jeremiah wanted, but don’t you dare distract my cadets from their duties again. I won’t have untrained civilians comprising out defenses, understood?”

Micaiah bit back her groan. “Yes, ma’am. Understood, ma’am.”

The elderly bronze neither smiled nor nodded before stalking away to go yell at some other poor cultivator. Micaiah glared daggers into her back as she left.

Alice exhaled through her cheeks, this time keeping her eyes fixed on the jungle as she spoke. “You picked the wrong expedition to follow, Mica. Berkowitz is a savant at finding things you’ve done wrong.”

Micaiah blinked. “I don’t understand it. She was so polite to Mentor Lee.”

“Your mentor’s two stages higher than she is,” Alice said as if that explained it. Micaiah supposed in the outworlders’ twisted ways, it did.

Some of them had been nice enough—Alice had even gone out of her way to befriend her—but Micaiah could feel the ways they looked at her. They didn’t take kindly to unaffiliated cultivators.

Since a gathering array would’ve wiped out the biosphere that made the planet so valuable in the first place, Ilirian was the only world in the system where the sects didn’t hold exclusive control over the qi supply.

It came with its own mix of prejudices, from the fanatics who saw neutrality as a betrayal of the eternal struggle between the Dragon’s Right and Left Eyes, to the warriors who considered the sects’ militaristic training as critical to proper cultivation, to the bigots who saw Ilirian’s lack of strict hierarchy the hallmark of a lesser culture.

Micaiah had experience with all three. Thankfully, this group seemed mostly composed of the second type. Fyrion was too distant to be embroiled in inter-sect conflict and too weak to consider itself above the Ilirians. They’d sneer and condescend and make snide comments about the pulse rifle on her back, but when worse came to worse, they’d keep her safe. Their honor demanded it.

The thought sent a hand running absentmindedly down the leather strap over her shoulder. Well over two weeks into the expedition, she’d yet to have an opportunity to fire the rifle. It’d only served to reinforce the outworlders’ opinions that it was an inferior weapon for unskilled fighters as the foreign cultivators made short work of every spiritual beast they’d encountered. Micaiah hadn’t even tried explaining how difficult it was to get a clean shot with three dozen allies charging into melee range of beasts that only fought with tooth and claw.

Their stupidity astounded her sometimes.

Still, she couldn’t have made it remotely this far without their aid, and, backwards views aside, their tactics proved devastatingly effective against the local fauna.

A great crash forced Micaiah from her reverie as pair of coppers felled one of the ebonleaf trees to clear space in the canopy. Red sunlight glimmered through the gap for a paltry few seconds before the airship crept into its way. It would take an entire day’s clearcutting to actually land the massive support vessel, but the cultivators only needed a clear path through which the drones could ferry the meat and skin and claws and cores of the saber cats they’d slain.

Micaiah herself had ridden up top for most of the journey, but now that her goal drew near, they needed her expert eyes on the ground. She could hardly spot the theorized Sil outpost from above the canopy, and she certainly didn’t trust the spacers to find it.

So, now she trudged along the jungle floor with the rest of them.

Micaiah pushed a thread of qi from her copper core into her muscle meridian and leapt the twelve feet onto the fallen ebonleaf. The pale brown bark, still very much alive, held firm beneath her boots, offering brief reprieve from the soft and soggy dirt. She shut her eyes and reached out with her spiritual sense, surveying the half-dozen yards around her for any sign of the Sil. She found only the dull glow of the ambient qi and the fuzzy outlines of the various flora that contributed to it.

Micaiah sighed, swatting back the intrusive thought that she was wasting her time. Either the ruins were out here, buried from their satellites and sensors in the dense jungle, or they weren’t. If she found them, she’d be the first archeologist in Ilirian history to explore this particular site. If not, she’d at least disprove the most popular interpretation of the relic stone back at the precursor museum.

In theory, it was a win-win. In practice, Micaiah felt like she was already losing.

With military efficiency—an oxymoronic phrase if ever there was one—the sect members wrapped up their harvest and spread the order to move out. Micaiah hopped down from her vantage to Alice’s side, locking step with the spearwoman as the expedition set out.

“I still don’t understand what you’re actually hoping to find out here.” Alice kept her words quiet enough to evade Berkowitz’s notice, or at least quiet enough to hide behind the other cultivators’ chatting as they walked.

“I told you, there’s an entirely unexplored Sil rui—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Alice cut her off. “But what are you actually hoping to find there? There’s a reason nobody’s ever bothered to come looking for it. The Sil were pre-industrial savages when they were wiped out. They had no tech, no worthwhile enchantments, threads, they barely even had any decent art. What’re you hoping to find?”

Micaiah’s voice fell. “When Elder Berkowitz was yelling at you, she called me a native, but that’s not true. My ancestors came to this system the same time yours did. In the grand scheme of things, we’re all outworlders. But the Sil… this planet was theirs, and they were its, and we’ve been here for millennia, and we don’t even know what they looked like. How could you not want to learn more?”

Alice shrugged. “I know they’re dead, and I know they left nothing of value behind. That’s enough for me.”

“They left nothing that could help your cultivation,” Micaiah said. “That doesn’t mean they left nothing of value.”

Alice didn’t reply.

Micaiah walked on in silence, her mind running through a dozen ways to bitingly retort that not everything worth doing had to make you more powerful. She let the comments die before they even reached her throat. There was no need to antagonize her only friend out here over a simple disagreement.

Micaiah knew, of course, not to expect any world-shaking discoveries from the ruin. In all likelihood she’d find a few crumbling hints as to who the Sil were and what they stood for, maybe even a relic or two for the museum, but nothing, as Alice had put it, of any value.

That didn’t stop her from hoping. She too was a cultivator, after all, and if there was a single prerequisite for stepping upon the Way, it was the ability to dream big. Maybe the Sil had left some secret, some treasure, some ancient wisdom long lost to the ravages of time. From everything Micaiah had learned about the Sil, it seemed incredibly unlikely, but these ruins were unexplored. Nobody knew what may’ve lied buried there.

She’d never repeat such thoughts to Alice. They were a fantasy, pure and simple, pleasant to contemplate but ultimately a reckless raising of foundationless hope. It was best to keep expectations where they belonged.

Micaiah’s eyes wandered about the procession as they trudged ever forward, absentmindedly watching the organized chaos of the outworlders darting into or out of step to stop and gather a shade lily here or a vector’s bloom there. She hadn’t bothered to learn how the expedition intended to divide the spoils between the fifty of them, but the math didn’t work in their favor.

For a single trip into Ilirian’s wilderness, Micaiah might’ve thought their haul a magnificent bounty were it not for the simple fact that most of these outworlders would never return to a living biosphere. They’d take as much as they could lay their hands on over these next few weeks, and that’d be all the divine materials they’d see for the rest of their lives.

For the life of her, Micaiah couldn’t fathom why anyone would choose to live on a barren world.

The hours dragged on as the expedition pushed deeper into the jungle, wading through ferns and jumping over shrubs as they weaved between the towering ebonleafs. Micaiah couldn’t see so much as feel the sunset beyond the canopy, as the crimson glow of the dueling stars faded to first a twilit orange then at last a near perfect black. No starlight could pierce the jet blanket above.

The cultivators didn’t let that stop them. Light across the spectrum—the majority of which came in pale silver or brilliant gold—replaced the fallen suns as the outworlders channeled qi through their weapons. Alice joined in, the tip of her spear shining a bright white that left a tail in its wake, resembling, to Micaiah’s eyes, a comet trailing through the sky.

Micaiah kept her rifle dark. She’d learned from a young age that things hunted the wilds at night, and it went against her every instinct to so blatantly broadcast her position to any nearby predators.

From the outworlders’ perspective, that was exactly the point. Why bother looking for spiritual beasts when a bit of light could bring them out of their own volition?

Mere minutes into the lighting of the weapons, Micaiah noted that the conversations had all but ceased, a tense readiness reducing the otherwise sociable cultivators to hushed commands and quiet vigilance. She thumbed the strap to her rifle, but left it where it hung. She hadn’t needed it yet.

The first spiritual beast to make its play did so within the hour. Micaiah barely caught a glimpse of the thing, eight feet tall and thrice as long on its four legs, before the outworlders charged in and disrupted her view. She listened close to the telltale sounds of combat, of claw against steel, of blade against hide, for the paltry moments the beast lasted. Only as the cultivators stooped down to harvest their prize did Micaiah get a good look at the thing.

The thrixid bled in a dozen places, fertilizing the very soil below it as its killers cut free its venomous claws, stiletto-sharp mane, and three fist-sized golden eyes. Those last especially would fetch a mighty price if they ever came to auction.

The cultivators quenched their weapons as they worked, limiting their light to what little their qi-enhanced eyes needed so as not to encourage another attack while half their number labored off guard. Micaiah took the moment to cycle her own sense meridian, stealing a closer look at the slain beast.

She’d come across thrixid’s a handful of times, seen the way they’d hunted, how they controlled their territory. Of all the spiritual beasts on this hemisphere, they were the masters of their own domain.

Then how had this one been wounded?

Beyond the mortal injuries her companions had inflicted, hundreds of small scabs peppered the thrixid’s dark brown hide. They’d yet to scar over—perhaps, given time to heal, they wouldn’t have—but even taking into account the thrixid’s natural regeneration, the color of the wounds indicated they predated the evening’s encounter by at least a few hours. Micaiah ran through her mental list of anything and everything that might’ve inflicted such damage, and inevitably came to a startling conclusion.

“Something’s wrong,” she muttered just loud enough for Alice to catch.

“What is it?” Alice raised her spear, casting her gaze about in search of danger.

“Those scabs.” Micaiah gestured to the thrixid. “There’s nothing out here that could’ve caused them.”

Alice squinted at the corpse. “Those tiny little things? You’re worried about—”

“There’re only a handful of creatures in this jungle that would dare take on a thrixid,” Micaiah cut her off. “A dewdrop revenant, an ebbstrix, or a black corona all would’ve killed it without much difficulty. A fallowvice might’ve had a close fight, but that’d leave an impression around it’s throat, not a hundred little scabs. Whatever did that, isn’t from around here.”

Alice shrugged. “Odds are it’s already dead if the thrixid founds its way to us. If not… we killed the thrixid and it didn’t. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I don’t like it. Why would an injured thrixid engage us? It should’ve been sleeping off its wounds back at its hollow, not chasing new prey. Either those scabs are older than they look, or…” Micaiah trailed off, her eyes alight with qi as she scanned their dark surroundings.

“Or?”

“Or something’s chasing it.”

From elsewhere within the column, three sounds reached Micaiah’s ear in rapid succession: First, the rush of wingbeaten wind, second, the gentle squelch of claw parting flesh, and third, the formless gurgle of a death cry through a slitted throat.

“We’re under attack!” Micaiah’s voice joined a half dozen others in the call to arms. She slung her rifle off its strap and into her arms, cocking the weapon and raising its scope to her eye. Blades across the expedition bloomed back to light, casting the jungle in gold and silver.

No beasts revealed themselves. No monsters stood poised to pounce. No further blow struck tender flesh.

For a moment, silence reigned.

Micaiah couldn’t see the fallen cultivator through the mass of bodies between them, but she heard his compatriots scramble to his aid, heard their desperate ministrations of healing qi, heard their methods come up short as he breathed his last.

She turned her rifle beyond their perimeter, channeling a thread of qi into the enchantment in its scope. The jungle came to life as her visual and spiritual senses alike focused, extended miles beyond her normal range at the cost of breadth. In a tirelessly practiced motion she scanned the distant dark, finding bark and branch and jet black leaf but no sign of their mystery assailant.

A low murmur arose around her as the outworlders came to the same startling conclusion as she: something had killed one of them and then seemingly ceased to exist.

Micaiah ignored them. It had to be out there somewhere. She continued her sweep, parsing through the fuzzy outlines in the ambient qi in search of movement, of malice. She found no monsters, no evils, no—wait…. was that…?

She panned back, spiritual sense caught on a slight detail, a faint vortex that seemed to drain at the ambient qi. It was bigger—far bigger—than it should’ve been, but that didn’t damper Micaiah’s spirits. Despite the apparent danger, a half cocked grin spread across Micaiah’s face. She’d found it.

A battle cry yanked her from her moment of triumph. Micaiah tore her eye from the scope just in time to watch a black-winged figure swoop down from the canopy, tear an outworlder’s head clean off, and vanish into thin air. A barrage of fireballs and energy bolts and silver spikes shot after it only to pass right through the space it’d once occupied.

“Down a tree!” Berkowitz’s sharp voice pierced the frightened silence. “Cut a path to the airship!”

A pair of cultivators darted to the nearest ebonleaf and raised their axes, ready to cleave through the dozen-foot trunk in a matter of seconds.

Their foe proved faster.

Two more of the avian beasts flickered into existence mid-swoop, talons raking lethally across the would-be lumberjacks. Both hit the ground before their blades could touch bark.

Micaiah fired.

A pulse of hardened, accelerated qi shot down the barrel of her rifle, drilling into the glossy black feathers that lined her target’s body. With a great crack they broke, raining obsidian shards down onto the cultivators below. The beast didn’t even flinch.

Even as the creatures vanished once more, leaving two fresh corpses in their wake, their image lingered in Micaiah’s mind. They resembled crows, if crows had twelve-foot wingspans and barbed talons. Their beaks had been jagged, resembling a carnivore’s teeth more than any bird Micaiah had ever heard of. The feathers that clearly weren’t each ended in a razor edge, glinting in the qi-light.

Worst of all, they’d somehow heard Berkowitz’s order and acted to stop it. A shiver ran down Micaiah’s spine.

The things were smart.

She kept her rifle trained on the air, dumping as much qi into it as she dared to charge a stronger shot. Her heart pounded. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Her finger touched a feather’s touch upon the trigger.

Silence.

“What are you idiots waiting for?” Berkowitz shouted. “Cut a path!”

Murmurs of hesitation echoed through the formation.

“Just do it!” the elder snapped. “I’ll cover you!”

A trio of braver souls leapt to action, hopping past their fallen allies to target a different trunk. On cue, three more of the not-crows materialized.

This time, the cultivators were ready.

A barrier as silver as her hair bloomed from Berkowitz’s cane, rebuffing the nearest two beasts from their dives. A coordinated volley of qi attacks followed, the quickest of which even managed to chip at the monsters’ chitin before they vanished.

Micaiah’s shot pierced the third clean through.

It plummeted, slamming into a pair of cultivators who caught it on their swords. A handful of shocked eyes glanced Micaiah’s way.

Most, though, looked away in time to watch the beasts reappear already at the axemen’s throats. In but a second they were gone, crimson holes blossoming in flesh where talons had existed a moment ago.

There could be no stopping the panic, the disorder, the frightful realization that Elder Berkowitz, the only bronze cultivator in their company, couldn’t protect them.

The expedition routed.

“This way!” Micaiah shouted over the din, gesturing forward with her rifle. “There’s shelter ahead!”

She didn’t stop to check who had or hadn’t listened, who did or didn’t follow.

Micaiah ran.

With her every ounce of qi surging through her muscle meridian, Micaiah sprinted into the jungle. Footsteps trampling the underbrush pursued her as terrified outworlders threw in their lot with the only one who’d successfully slain one of the beasts. At the back of her mind, Micaiah hoped Alice was among them.

She ran and she ran and she ran. With every gasping breath, a swoosh sounded out somewhere behind her, always followed by a shocked and agonized cry, always followed by the telltale crash of a body falling to the forest floor.

Micaiah expected every step to be her last, every swish of air to be their hunters finally choosing her as their next victim. She wordlessly mouthed a prayer to the threads, beseeched them for mercy if not in this life, then the next. Twice she thought she felt the press of a talon against her throat.

But death never came. Even as their number dwindled around her, by twist of fate or chance or answered prayers, Micaiah yet lived when that vortex of qi finally came into view.

A crumbling stone archway with the telltale qi drain of enchantment revealed a dark stairway into the earth.

The Sil ruin sat open.

Micaiah dashed in, leaping down the first two steps before stopping short and pressing her back into the right side wall. She gestured the outworlders follow, at last catching a glimpse of those who’d made it.

Nine in total darted past, each pale with shock and panting for breath. Elder Berkowitz, of all people, brought up the rear, the bronze tier cultivator far spryer than her years. Micaiah hazarded the old woman could’ve been the first through the door had she wanted.

A harsh and palpable silence took over, broken only by the rhythmic thump of Micaiah’s heart in her chest. All around her people clutched their weapons with white knuckles, waiting in numb terror for the next attack to come, for the next of them to bleed out into the dirt.

None came.

Instead, as if to banish any lingering disbelief in the sanctuary they had found, a great stone slab arose from the ground at the archway’s base, sealing the entrance behind them.

Micaiah’s eyes shot open. “Th-that shouldn’t be possible.”

Nobody responded.

“Micaiah! Are you okay?” Alice’s whisper echoed from Micaiah’s right.

“Most ruins are lucky to have functioning lights.”  Micaiah breathed. “An actual door… a working door…” She pressed a palm to cool stone. It held fast. “I knew the qi draw was bigger than it should’ve been, but this level of integrity is… it’s unprecedented.”

Fear entirely gave way to awe in Micaiah’s mind as she pored over the sealed entrance with her spiritual sense, cataloguing every twist and turn in the enchantment with childlike wonder.

Her fellow survivors didn’t share her enthusiasm.

“Those were void beasts!” a man whose name Micaiah had forgotten exclaimed. “Fucking void beasts. What’re blackbloods doing on Ilirian?”

“We have to call it in,” another outworlder—this one Micaiah thought was named Jack—added. “If there’s a blackblood infestation out here, the sect needs to know.”

“I can’t get through,” a third added, frantically tapping at her holopad. “Something’s jamming the signal.”

“The void beasts will be dealt with,” Berkowitz’s voice carried a commanding calm that washed over the frightened cultivators. “They aren’t our problem anymore.” She tapped her cane on the worn stone steps to punctuate her point. “We have a new problem now, one of which I’m sure our resident archaeologist was just about to inform us.”

Micaiah froze. The excitement drained away as her thoughts turned from the archaeological value of her discovery to the immediate implications of the enchantment at which she stared. Without looking away, her gaze still transfixed on the find, she spoke.

“Whatever’s powering this doorway is more durable and more complex than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s incredible. It’s—”

The smack of Berkowitz’s cane against the floor forced Micaiah back to the matter at hand.

“I can’t get it open.” The words rushed out, the bad news almost eager to be delivered. Micaiah took a breath, trying and failing to force calm into her body before she announced her conclusion.

“We’re trapped down here.”

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