PHANTASIA (18 page)

“The bikes are gone…” S said as they trekked through the desert. “Ugh we’re going to have to pay a fortune for losing them.”
 

“Well, maybe we’re in luck. Let’s see how much we could sell this for,” Butz replied, taking out a giant shard of blue crystal he hid underneath a piece of cloth so no one could look at it clearly.
 

“What? How? When’d you get that?” S asked.
 

“Linx must have swiped it while we were asleep, saw it in his mouth when we were climbing up,” Butz smiled proudly.
 

“Wow…Like owner…like familiar…” S replied. The five of them shared a laugh, thinking back to the dream. Red wondered what Linx would sound like if he really
could
talk.
 

“Good thing we made it out alive,” Butz sighed.
 

“Did you ever have a doubt?” S asked.
 

“At one point, when the steaming umbriel came out.”
 

“The umbriel?”
 

“Yah, umbriel is highly explosive if mixed with methane. I was dying to fart that whole time.”
 

They made camp at the mouth of a cave a few tezras away from the extraction plant. It took them hours to find shelter, but without their TPs, they had no choice but to seek an enclosure to protect themselves from the sandstorm. It was Raven’s turn to keep watch. The winds had died down from earlier, and Red struggled to keep himself awake amidst the quiet of the desert. He was waiting for a chance to discuss everything that had happened in the dreamscape with Raven. The longer he waited, the more of the dream slipped his mind, vexing him with a growing impatience. Butz and Magnus were sound asleep, only S was still awake. He suspected that the snoring of the other two was what was bothering her. It occurred to him that he didn’t know exactly why he was trying so hard to keep the other three from overhearing — but he had a strong feeling that it was the right thing to do.
 

“She’s asleep,” Raven said. “She’s just shifting in her sleep.”
 

“Oh. You knew —”

“I always know what you’re thinking or when you’re talking to yourself.”
 

“You’re not reading my mind are you?” Red asked suspiciously.

“No,” she smiled. “I can just tell.”
 

He debated how to go about the conversation, and then decided to jump right in. He wasn’t fully sure what he intended to ask or find out, but he had a feeling she did. “Do you remember what the shaman mentioned? The Evil Eye?”
 

“Yes, but I don’t remember anything about it. From my childhood I mean. I remember him mentioning it before, but none of the context.”
 

“It’s a part of that story you mentioned —”
 

“The sign of Ikb’Sept. Yah, but I already told you everything I knew about the story, just the part about the Kyrons.”
 

“Is that the entire story? But what’s Ikb’Sept then?”
 

“It’s a who — and I don’t know,” she sighed. It sounded genuine, but Red had a feeling she was lying, or at least omitting a small detail. Oddly enough, he also had a feeling that she knew that he could
tell
she was lying.
 

“Well is there
anything
you could tell me about the dreamscape? I remember falling into a second dream and…swimming through my own mind. I can’t describe it, and I forgot most of what I went through, but I know it’s something I want to remember. I don’t know if I forgot what had happened, or if my mind just can’t make sense of it now. I feel like…it was the happenings of my subconscious and somehow…I was able to go down there myself.”
 

“Want to see something cool?” She said casually, getting up to walk out of the cave.
 

“Are we leaving them here?”
 

“I left a shield cast above the area a few hours ago, it should still hold strong. Either ways, I’ll sense it if it breaks.”
 

“I still want to talk about the dreamscape, there’s something about it at the tip of my mind that I keep trying to remember but I can’t,” Red protested, suspicious that she was trying to change the subject. “And, somehow everything feels different.
Everyone
feels different I mean. Butz, Magnus, S, even you. I feel it.
Especially you
, actually.”
 

“I didn’t say we weren’t going to,” Raven replied. It irked him how calm her tone was, not for any particular reason, but because of its disparity with his own sense of urgency. He realized it was nothing new, he felt this way often — it was the same when he tried to tell her she belonged in WEAPON even if he didn’t make it, and when she stubbornly insisted that they had a punishing practice session only a day before their field test.
 

Outside of the cave, he could hear the distant whir of the extraction plant skirling against the quiet of the wind. They attached their microAIs over their heads as vizors to keep the sand from getting into their eyes. The storm had stilled itself enough to limit the need to stretch their combat suits, but its breeze still carried bits of metal sand with it. The fabric of combat suits were made out of Noirtex, an elastic dark grey material that could be stretched into new shapes. If they ever needed to, they could stretch the hem of their necks over their entire heads to create a makeshift hood or a face mask.

“Where are we going?” Red asked, although Raven didn’t respond. “We can’t go too far from the cave,” he relented after a few more minutes.
 

“Right there,” she said, pointing to a dune nearby. When he got to the top of it, he could see the expanse of barren land surrounding the extraction plant. A single Ignot Gila roamed the desert a few tezras away from them, stranded from its drove. “Have you ever tried looking at the sky with your vizor in its fermi mode?”

“No. The sky is irrelevant, it doesn’t affect my life,” he replied, hoping the irony of his response would catch on to her.
 

“Do it,” she replied. He reluctantly followed, wondering what she could possibly want to show him. The sky was empty, just like the desert, except for the glimmer of its stars.
And there’s no Ignot Gila,
he mused to himself.
That’s something Butz would say.
“Put it on magnitude 9, and then look this way,” she said, gesturing towards a familiar constellation. He did; the cover of black disappeared into what looked like a rainbow cloud. He zoomed in further, magnitude 10. The cloud turned into a splash of colors, an assortment of every dye painted against a canvas of stellar constellations.
 

“What do you feel, looking at it?” Raven asked.
 

“I don’t know…awe?” Red replied.
 

“Just awe?”
 

“Yah. I Guess, what else? What am I looking at?”
 

“It’s the birth of a super nova.”
 

“Is it happening now?”
 

“What you’re looking at happened 130,000 years ago. The light just takes that long to reach us.” It
was
amazing, he thought, but his mind was too occupied to fully appreciate it. “I first saw it when I went to Areopa last year. I had nothing to do during the qualifiers, and star gazing is a famous hobby in their city,” she added.
 

“It’s beautiful. Like a rainbow bursting in the sky.” It really was, he thought, but he wasn’t in a mood to marvel at nature’s miracles.

“It’s from your dreams. Your nightmares,” Raven said, after a long pause.

“What?” The words threw him off.

“I went down there, you asked me to, in the second level of the dreamscape. I went down to your nightmares. You wanted to go there yourself, but it was too dangerous for you. And you made me promise to tell what I saw. That’s what’s been bothering you. Red, it’s like a collection of visions. I couldn’t make sense of any of them. There were hundreds. It felt like an eternity going through each one, but when I woke up, the whole dream had collapsed into one quick moment. I still remember some of them, maybe clearer than you do, but I don’t know what they mean. I know you were expecting more, but that’s all I have.”
 

“You saw a super nova?”
 

“No, more than that. I saw…I saw the star. I saw it dying, being
killed
, if that makes any sense, and then I saw it turning into a super nova.”
 

“What else did you see?”
 

“I don’t know…I saw… a lot. But I can’t describe any of it. You told me you wanted to go down there to see for yourself and I insisted you let me go instead because there was a chance you wouldn’t be able to come back up if you went. I thought it would be like my own dreamscape, and that I’d recall it all as a memory, but it wasn’t. I think I was in another world of sorts. I don’t mean like a dream just…another world entirely. Does that make sense?”
 

“It does,” Red sighed. “That’s how I feel too. When I’m in the nightmare. You can’t remember anything else?”
 

“There was a place. It was important to you. I don’t know if it was from your childhood or from something else. I don’t know where your dreams are coming from, or why you’re dreaming about these things, but I think its more significant than you think. I think they have something to do with why that bladed man is chasing you. And the eye on the blade… I don’t know what The Evil Eye is, and why its mentioned in so many of the stories I’ve heard as a child, but Red, I have a feeling that
was
The Evil Eye. It’s more than a feeling actually, I just know. I just know from your dreams. The same way
you
do.”

“Did you see it in my dreams? The eye?”
 

“I did, but it wasn’t an eye, it was like a part of you. In this other world, things aren’t…
things.
”
 

Red took a sharp breath in, uncertain of what to make of all of it, but at the same time feeling like he had at least made some progress in decoding his nightmares.
 

“There’s something else Red.”
 

“The
voice.”
 

“The voice.”
 

He wasn’t sure what to ask her about it, if anything at all. Hearing it was enough. It was like a whisper from the deepest recess of his mind, but one without any meaning or sense. He gazed up at the sky again, looking at the super nova, seeing if it bought anything out of him. There
was
a sense of dejavu there. He had felt the same way when he first saw the eye on the bladed man, but there was nothing more.
 

“What do you feel?” He finally asked. He felt slightly bad for being rude to her earlier. She had only been contemplating everything in the dreamscape to figure out how to explain it to him.
 

“Insignificant,” she said after a moment of staring at the nova.
 

“Insignificant?”

“Since the Xenosite invasion a hundred and thirty years ago, imagine how much activity there’s been across our star system. From training in academies to all out war in the outer planets. And it’ll continue for who knows how many more centuries, probably for long after we’re still around. Infection, evolution, survival, so much is happening now, so much that we don’t understand. If we use energy as a measure of how much is happening out there, it would be at an all time peak for all sentient life, I bet. Our own live’s, the total amount of energy we breath into the world, they’re just specks of nothing compared to everything happening out there. But what you’re looking at now, the birth of this super nova, releases about six trillion times all the energy consumed and produced in our star system since the beginning of life —
per second.
”
 

“Imagine we were a bit closer. It’d probably be much hotter here.”
 

“Yah, imagine,” she laughed. “Let’s get back to the cave, you need rest. Our debrief is going to be painful. Our exfil shouldn’t be taking this long; that means a lot of people were stranded after their field tests, or there were a lot of injuries.”

They walked back to the cave where Red had difficulty sleeping, pondering everything she had said. When he finally got to sleep, he entered his own dreamscape, which he welcomed because it was absent of the angst he felt during his usual nightmares. The dream was clear — and partially lucid. It felt more like his mind had simply travelled to another place in the astral plane. He was on top of a cloud, and an enormous figure made out of light slowly approached him.
 

“I have the answers you seek,” it told Red. It was a woman’s voice, powerful and illuminating.
 

“Who are you?” Red asked back. “What answers? How did you find me?”
 

“I have been looking for you all my life,” the figure replied. “A life that spans millennia. I found you when you finally revealed yourself in your dreamscape. I am the The Truth Sayer. Come to me, and I will tell you everything you want to know. Everything about who you are, your purpose. How you can end the Xenosite invasion, why you have your nightmares, and why The Evil Eye seeks you.”
 

“Where are you? How can I find you?”
 

“I am where you are going next. The city in the sky. You do not have to find me, I will find
you.
”
 

From a far distance, another figure approached. It looked like a black cloud with crystals of different colors swirling all around it.
 

“
He comes,”
the truth sayer said, her voice suddenly turning into an urgent whisper. “
Run!
”
 

Chapter 8: Areopa

“Is it awake?” Red asked while staring out of the wyvern. The transport ship’s viewing deck was crowded with passengers who had been keeping themselves up for more than a day to avoid missing their chance to see Titanamedusae. The ship’s AI had announced the possibility of spotting the creature since they had entered Nagya, the land of the tree elves.