G.R. Nanda

2200 Blues Chapter 55: Part Two

Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement. 2200 Blues © 2024 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.

Thin candles lit the room, scattered across the floor around rugs on which four priests were seated. They looked up from their sheaves of Thraíha texts, piles of leaf-based parchment spread before them.

Ethra, a thin, middle-aged man, sat cross-legged in the center of the rug, smiling at Nickel. His head was balding, but a rush of gray-white hair streamed over the back of his scalp, and another smooth cascade of hair flowed out from around his mouth in a well-kept beard.

“Hi,” Nickel said, offering a small smile despite feeling awkward for interrupting them mid-ritual.

“Hello, my friend!” Ethra spoke coolly. The other priests watched Nickel carefully. There had been much more focus on him ever since Rishi had appeared, particularly from the elders. Yet, despite the scrutiny, Ethra and the priests before him maintained a calm, welcoming, and collected poise. “Here to fill the incense?”

“Yeah,” Nickel replied. A quiet followed as the priests sat in silent repose, unmoving, watching him. “Oh!” Nickel suddenly remembered. “And… for the new plants.”

“Ah,” Ethra said, standing up, followed by the other priests. “Good, good.”

“The farm is coming along quite well, Nickel,” said a priest to the right of Ethra as he smoothed his simple smock-rope. “You and Farrul are doing a great job.”

“It’s mostly Farrul,” Nickel acknowledged with a shrug. “I just keep the garden clean and cut it. He’s the one who grows most of it and picks the right seeds.”

“You’re both playing your part,” another priest seated to the right of Ethra said, smiling warmly at Nickel. The rest of the priests smiled and hummed in agreement, nodding at the lanky old priest who had just spoken.

“Yes,” one of them murmured to the lanky priest.

“Of course, of course,” another priest said, turning to Nickel. “We’ve watched you, Nickel,” the lanky priest said, his smile widening. “We want you to know—you’re doing great.”

“You really are,” Ethra added with a nod.

A rush of warmth and surprise flooded Nickel’s chest, trickling into his heart.

Nickel opened his mouth to say something but found his voice caught in his throat, feeling slightly embarrassed. He was surprised to hear such praise from the priests. Despite their kind words, Nickel felt undeserving. The memories of his encounter with Steve and his difficult interactions with Farrul seemed to tell him otherwise.

“Listen,” Ethra began. “We know there’s a lot going on, and many of our Thraíha brothers and sisters are difficult with you. They’re difficult because they’re scared. You’re a visitor from the Past World, and then a Rishi appears after a hundred years.”

“A Rishi?” Nickel interrupted, alarmed enough to break into the priest’s words. The conversation between Rishi and Akela flitted through his mind again, and he frowned.

“Akela spoke to Rishi of an order,” Nickel explained, feeling the need to justify his interruption. “Rishi’s order. He said—” Nickel sighed. “He said the word ‘Rishi’ like it was… plural. Why did you say a Rishi? Is there more than one? Is that a group’s name or a title?”

“Rishi,” said the lanky priest. “The last time a Rishi encroached upon our village, it was a different person.” He picked up his book and walked toward the back of the room. “To many of our tribesfolk, it’s the same. Vramung—another Cast-Out—in the same clothes. They hear ‘Rishi’ and think of them all as the same.”

“But they aren’t,” Nickel said, tempted to follow the lanky priest but staying where he was. “That’s not what ‘Rishi’ means—not even to Akela.”

Pausing momentarily, Nickel looked up and asked, “Are you keeping secrets? Are you keeping secrets from the rest of the Thraíha?”

A dry chuckle rolled from the lanky priest’s throat, nearly shaking his entire frame. He looked like a spider in the dark, almost dead but shuddering in its final moments. His smiling face and bubbling mirth made him strangely personable to Nickel.

“You’re doing well, Nickel,” he said through the last bubbles of laughter.

Nickel bit back the next question he had about Rishi, caught even more off guard by the man’s statement. The lanky priest cleared his throat, raising his palm toward Nickel as if remembering to answer his question.

“Yes,” he muttered through the clearing of his throat. “Your question—there’s only so much we can share with the whole tribe.”

“The whole tribe?” Nickel asked. “I don’t understand—why can’t you explain it to them so they stop worrying?”

“Because the cosmology we write and preserve,” the lanky priest said, “is not the literal truth. It’s not in the realm of…” He picked up a bowl of seeds that had been hidden in the shadows beside him. “How many seeds are in this bowl?” He pinched a few between his fingers, letting them rain back into the bowl with a dull clatter.

“You mean you don’t tell the Thraíha what has or hasn’t happened?” Nickel asked.

“That’s for our scribes,” the lanky priest said. “Even then…” Ethra wheezed, catching Nickel’s gaze. “That’s not what everyone looks for.”

“What do you mean?” Nickel murmured, frowning in confusion.

“The Thraíha are a hunting pack,” the lanky priest said. “Only recently have they settled here under the protection of the rock walls, joined with the remnants of the Past World.”

“It’s because of the power plant,” Nickel whispered, mostly to himself, though still audible. Ethra raised his eyebrows but said nothing. “It’s because of all the metal that used to connect to this building,” Nickel said, louder now.

The lanky priest burst into joyous laughter, rubbing his hands together in the air.

“Oh! You’re doing great!” he exclaimed, nearly clapping. “We have a seeker—a seeker from the Past World. He gives me hope!” He turned to the other priests with astonished gladness. They murmured in agreement, nodding.

“The Thraíha came here,” the lanky priest said, “by accident—an accident of the stars. Our culture is still that of nomadic hunters. We staggered from cave to cave, swept by the next windstorm, with the stars to guide us through the remnants of the Past World. We lived as nomads, believing like nomads, until we encountered this wreckage of the Past World—a temple that once harnessed the sun.”

“Nuclear energy,” Nickel muttered, thinking of the book he had stolen from here, now tucked away under his cot in the village far below.

“The language and deities of the Past World have long since passed,” the lanky priest continued. “Our hunters live alongside their old symbols while believing something else. Our greater shelter baffles us, though many fear it’s softening the hunter’s edge.”

The fears and friction among the Thraíha now made more sense to Nickel. It all fit within the backdrop of history shared by Ethra and the tribe. They were searching for meaning, making do in a world that had lost much—just as Nickel had been lost, living in his hovercraft, escaping it, and now living as a Thraíha.

“You’ve given me so much to hope for,” Nickel said. “All of you,” he added, looking at the priests. “The Thraíha have shown me a greater way to live. This is the longest I’ve gone without my hovercraft and the Ether. I’ve never felt more liberated.”

“It was you who did the liberating,” Ethra said. “The Thraíha merely showed you the way. We didn’t give you hope.”

“Why is that?” Nickel asked.

“There is no hope in the canyons or the world,” Ethra replied. “There is only your own being and how you relate to it. Hope created this temple before it was a temple. Being made this a temple.”

Nickel watched as Ethra’s face contorted in concentration, his previously aloof demeanor hardening.

2200 Blues Chapter 55: Part One

The winding stone trail leading up to the temple carried a dampness that streaked the air with coolness and left beads of moisture on the neighboring boulders. The pail in Nickel’s hands clanged against his leg, shaking the metal bell hanging from a chain inside it.

The roar of the bustling Thraíha settlement, with all its scurrying defense measures and the constant shouting of regimented patrol orders, had faded. The frantic calls of the Thraíha, hurried in their practice and duties, were now distant. Nickel always enjoyed this part of the path, when he had climbed high and far enough that the elevation and rolling canyon rock behind him muffled the village noise entirely.

He preferred it even more as of late, ever since the encounter with Rishi had spurred the Thraíha into a daily frenzy. It was a relief to escape the religious fervor and frantic preparations that he, along with the rest of the Thraíha, had been roped into. At least three different expeditions were being planned, and three different debates about them raged among the Thraíha. Nickel much preferred performing temple duties over having an elder breathing down his neck about a new task with conflicting purposes.

It seemed that Rishi’s arrival had triggered a wave of conflict, infighting, and paranoia. Now, the Thraíha were unsure if they needed to migrate their entire village—a prospect that was being hotly debated, as search parties to find a new home were discussed.

The higher Nickel climbed, the more shadows stretched over his immediate surroundings, cast by the rising rock walls. The air grew cooler and damper. Drops of condensation clung to the surfaces around him like crystalline decorations, glistening slightly in the fading fog.

The dank air, earthy with the scent of rocks and mildew, was a sweetness to Nickel’s nostrils. Hidden between the rising rock formations, this part of the canyon held dampness where the land was less windswept and corroded by the harsh windstorms below.

The rocks were smoother, rounder, and more separated from one another, unlike the long, welded structures shaped by an eternity of blasting winds that Nickel had grown used to.

As Nickel stepped fully into the shadows, the coolness enveloped him completely. He was only a few steps away from the ledge leading into the temple, though the walls of the temple were not yet visible.

It was a strange place for a nuclear power plant to have been built. Nickel remembered reading about the corrosion and evolution of the canyons and rock formations in a book he had stolen from the temple. He now wondered if the boulders piled around him in the canyon recess had always been there, even before the power plant’s construction.

With each step up the protrusions of rock and mounds of stone, Nickel noticed the small green plants growing between the surrounding dark boulders. They were encrusted with small ferns, their lengths never surpassing the gaps between the rocks, limited by the size of the crevices.

Nickel frowned as he crossed the last of the stones on the incline. Water was scarce in this part of the Atlantic Canyons, usually sequestered in isolated bodies. Where was the water in this canyon, where the temple stood?

He climbed onto the ledge, his feet crunching on gravel and scattered pebbles. The walls of the temple loomed before him, disappearing into the rising rock walls. Dark and stained with splotches of rust, they were covered in the remnants of old signs, symbols, words, and patterns.

Nickel passed into the rock recess below the walls of the temple. Entering the darkness, he found his way to the pulley platform by the broken shards of filtered light. Walking slowly, he triggered the lever behind the platform.

The familiar grating sound echoed like ancient bones rattling in their graves throughout the vast hall.

Nickel quickly stepped onto the pulley platform as it squealed against the floor. The rattling of the chains holding the pulley clattered from high up in the hall, shaking all the way down to the platform as it began to lift.

He set the pail down beside him and sat. He sighed, glancing around at the dark temple. The eerie emptiness unsettled him. The temple was usually deserted except for important festivals or significant days, like the ones following Rishi’s arrival, when the Thraíha sought new divinations for the consequential days ahead.

On most days, temple priests inhabited the lower levels, milling in and out of the large, oblong Gathering Hall that loomed over Nickel’s rising platform. The hall, nearly invisible in the darkness, had a round surface that Nickel could only faintly track from the vantage points where he had once heard the priests chanting in the Thraíha language.

As Nickel rose through the temple, it was eerily silent, lacking the priestly voices he had come to expect from the towering, dark structure on his left. It loomed like a mountain, casting a shadow every time he came to the temple.

The sound of the rolling chains at the platform’s corners clinked and scraped even louder in the absence of music. The disorienting experience of traveling up the elevator reminded him of the Blackout he had experienced back home, when all Ether technology had shut down. That world was immersed in the Ether.

Here, there was none. The temple, with its dark, hollow insides stretching skyward, was the greatest reminder to Nickel of his distance from everything else—especially when it was as silent as today.

The chains rattled wildly, sending tremors down their length as the platform lurched to a stop. Nickel had reached the level of the temple where he had set the lever.

To the left, a raised platform jutted out from the temple shrine—a large, round room with two gaping holes encrusted with golden apparatuses. The walls were adorned with Byzantine carvings and inlaid with Thraíha letters. In the center were two large openings.

Nickel crossed the elevator platform and carefully stepped over the narrow gap between the pulley and the ledge of the temple shrine. Whispers emanated from the openings across the shrine. So, there were priests here after all. Nickel hesitated at the edge of the ledge, holding the pail at his side, unsure about entering the shrine.

He had been brought here before by Thraíha priests, but never alone. Though he was on a Thraíha duty, he felt as though he were intruding upon this sacred space—the holy brain of the temple apparatus. The shrine resembled a catacomb or a cocoon, like the burrow of some great beast.

Nickel took a few steps forward, halting when he heard murmurs rising from the whispers. Even in the darkness, the faint hues of green and red streaked across the ornate decorations. The painted symbols were partly visible, and the engraved Thraíha letters bored into his sight.

The room was an odd structure, both ornate and ghastly. The remnants of its past as part of a power plant remained in the etched words and symbols, now painted over by the Thraíha, alongside dark scars that looked like old burns.

“Come in, Nickel,” a cool voice called from inside the shrine.

The sound of pages turning followed. “No need to be afraid. I expected you.”

“Oh,” Nickel muttered, chuckling nervously. It seemed that the Thraíha always expected something of him these days. He hadn’t expected a priest to be so nonchalant. Of anyone in the Thraíha village, he wouldn’t have thought one of the adults in charge of interpreting Thraíha cosmology would welcome him so casually.

Especially not after Rishi’s arrival.

Nickel walked into the shrine, still carrying some trepidation. He walked slowly, squinting to adjust his eyes as he passed under the archway, carefully gauging the room and the positioning of its inhabitants.

2200 Blues Chapter 54: Part Four

Rishi’s smile faltered as he turned his head from side to side, gauging the patrolmen. They stood closer to him now. The two at the center held their blades so close that the tips grazed Rishi’s billowing robes. Akela stood slightly behind them. Rishi had stepped back when the patrolmen had drawn their daggers and formed a defensive line, distancing himself from Akela, who, without moving, now stood behind the patrolmen, leaning toward Rishi.

The edge of Rishi’s mouth curled into a smile. He was less visible now, partially obscured by the squatting patrolmen and their hovering blades.

“So be it, then,” Rishi said coolly, giving a soft laugh. Some of the patrolmen stepped closer, bringing their blades nearer to him. Rishi bowed his head and turned around, tucking his robe into folds in his hands. Nickel saw his eyes flicker over the tips of the blades as he calmly whirled and pulled his hood over his head.

The patrolman to Nickel’s left scraped his feet forward, maintaining his stance and adjusting his grip on his dagger, pointing the blade farther out at Rishi as his robes swirled and he walked away. The other patrolmen remained poised, ready to spring into action.

A gentle rustling of Rishi’s robe echoed as he slowly trotted away into the fog, his back turned to the Thraíha as though he had never seen them. The patrolmen stayed still, their defensiveness unwavering. Nickel moved closer, trying to catch a clearer view of Rishi as the fog began to swallow him. Akela still stood where he was, half a foot from the patrolmen, watching Rishi with a worried expression. His mouth was constrained in a small frown, his eyes glazed over, betraying his anxiety.

Nickel edged forward, moving between two patrolmen but stopping just short of the reach of their blades.

Rishi took slow, deliberate steps, each swing of his leg expanding the girth of his robe below his waist, making it appear almost like the skirt of a dancer. With each crunch of gravel beneath his feet, the strange, willowy figure in dark robes—so smooth they seemed liquid—became further shrouded in the orange fog.

Suddenly, the fog rippled behind Rishi, forming a thick curtain of orange air that slipped over him, causing him to vanish.

Nickel flinched, staggering back a few steps, startled. He frowned, squinting into the fog, and rushed forward, stopping where the patrolmen gripped their dagger hilts.

“Where did he go?” Nickel muttered. Rishi was nowhere to be found. There was no sound of footsteps. The patrolmen remained still and silent, their faces strained with concentration, eyes bulging under deeply furrowed brows from paranoia.

The only sound Nickel heard was his own feet dragging slowly against the earth. Before he could turn to see Akela’s reaction, the fog in front of him began to swirl in a violent torrent of air. From beyond, the swirling orange fog took the form of a serpentine column, moving toward the patrolmen like a sea serpent.

“Father Hawk’s mercy!”

The patrolmen cried out in horror. The sound of daggers clattering to the ground filled the air. The patrolman next to Nickel barely maintained his stance, breaking it to skirt backward. Their blades quivered in the air. The formation collapsed into a scraping disarray as most ran back, leaving just a few standing guard at the original line.

The swirling air grew thicker and more solid, drawing in the fog. In its wake, the orange mist thinned around it. Beyond the source of the cyclone, the air grew translucent, losing its orange hue as it morphed into the current.

From within the cyclone, the air cleared completely, leaving behind an emptied world, free from fog. The tan dirt of the canyon rock materialized, lit by a moon high above. A ghostly night sky illuminated the earth below. In the center stood Rishi, unhooded, his long black hair flying back, his chest adorned with a large vest embroidered with strange golden runes and symbols, running down a lighter red fabric than his robe. The ends of his robe billowed behind him like a cape.

The moonlight struck Rishi’s face, transforming him from the whimsical old wanderer Nickel had seen moments ago into a majestic warrior, staring down at Nickel and the Thraíha. His face was hard, with bony lines running along his cheekbones, his beard whipping to the left against his robe.

He frowned, eyes wide and alert, holding his hands out as he harnessed the force of the fog and the cyclone of torrential air.

“You will remember me!” Rishi boomed, his voice echoing throughout the Atlantic Canyons. “I have witnessed the rise and fall of Hedonim. I have seen the transformation of the Past World into the death and rebirth of the Atlantic Canyons.

“I see into and through the embers of the Ether and the spirit of the soul. I’ve traveled to and from the final plane of the spirit.

“I know where the unyielding currents of the world go and from whence they will return. If you don’t return my disciple into my care, the Thraíha will pay the price at the hands of the Death Riders and the soulless pilgrims of the Past World to Hedonim. I will not be there to save you. That is my final warning.”

Rishi’s eyes glinted, reflecting an inner fire as the cyclone of orange fog expanded from his hands, ripping across the earth, knocking Nickel and the Thraíha off their feet.

Nickel staggered back, falling onto his back as the orange fog surged, replacing the purified air in a violent wave. He entered a coughing fit as he rolled onto his side.

“Reinforcements!” shouted Rishi. “Up! Up! On your feet!” The patrolmen, now scattered across the rocky plane, got to their knees, dusting themselves off as they slowly rose.

Nickel bent a knee, turning to face Akela, who still stood, though at a distance.

“Where is he?” called a patrolman from the far right, still on his knees. “Where is he? Where did he go?”

“Rishi can’t hurt you. Up!” Akela roared, waving his hands in the air, motioning for everyone to stand.

“Nickel, Vorum—come with me!” Akela shouted. “Everyone else, stay here until reinforcements arrive. Constant patrol starts now!”

Nickel dusted himself off and ran after Akela, joining Vorum, feeling completely disoriented. “Follow!” Akela called, running toward the Thraíha settlement where a certain disciple of Rishi’s was surely hiding. Nickel and Vorum ran after him.

2200 Blues Chapter 54: Part Three

“Then three individuals traveled in the hovercraft before coming to you,” Rishi said, pointing at Akela. “Bringing the Death Riders to your country… for the first time in over a century.”

A hushed silence fell over the Thraíha. Nickel’s head buzzed worse than ever, as though it nullified his senses. His mouth widened, gasping for air, while his heart lodged like a lump in his throat. The Death Riders sounded terrifying, and the expansion of the Atlantic Canyons was now as frightening as Nickel could have imagined.

“What makes you think this is more than just a coincidence?” Akela asked.

“The Death Riders have become more active than before,” Rishi said. “They’ve regrouped after their greatest defeat. And Hedonim’s calling has grown stronger than ever!”

“All the signs…” Akela muttered. “Our own people have divined a pilgrimage to Hedonim!” His voice was fraught with shock.

“All the signs indeed… my old friend,” Rishi said. “The passage of the Past World has begun. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen in my travels. The exodus to Hedonim has started! Not a pilgrimage! If you don’t heed my warning, your pilgrims will join the indulgence and soullessness of the Past World.”

Akela nodded.

“Reveal yourself, Nickel,” Akela said.

The patrolmen near Akela stepped aside, allowing Nickel to be seen clearly. All the Thraíha except for Akela turned to look at him. Nickel felt paralyzed with fear, rooted to the spot, just as he had been when meeting Steve and Farrul, but this time even more so.

Rishi watched Nickel carefully, his furrowed eyebrows narrowing. His mouth was a thin line, and he looked as if he were studying Nickel’s existence, gauging for a reaction.

“The outworlder?” Rishi asked.

“Yes,” Akela said, waving his hand towards Nickel. “The first.”

Rishi’s frown deepened. His mouth opened just slightly. He held his hands behind him and slowly stepped forward, up the slight incline of the rock. Akela stepped aside, allowing Rishi to approach Nickel.

“It was your hovercraft that crashed?” Rishi asked, though his statement felt like a question.

Nickel struggled to find his words. Rishi watched him thoughtfully.

“Wasn’t it?” Rishi finished.

Nickel’s head felt weightless from lack of sleep, making it harder to respond.

“Y-yes,” Nickel muttered, nearly gasping as he spoke. His heart pounded, and he feared he might collapse under the pressure of his exhaustion and the shocking revelations unfolding before him.

“I’ve known that hovercrafts were adopted by Western culture,” Rishi said, his eyes softening. “But I’m still… surprised to see someone so young crash one in the canyons.”

Nickel gulped. It wasn’t often someone asked him about the gravity of his circumstances or what brought him there. It could have been any of the teenage boys he knew from home or the military academy—any of them could have crashed a hovercraft into the Atlantic Canyons. They’d all grown up exposed to the Ether. They were given hovercrafts at a young age, especially to escape the marine draft and stay off the radar of the U.R. citizenry service probes, making do as engineers contributing to the computer software of the Ether. At worst, they’d be drafted into cyber-warfare protocols. If lucky, they could conduct their digital pogroms from the comforts of their hovercrafts.

Nickel still had a tendency to push away the troublesome realities of the Ether’s influence on his life. It was here, in the canyons, during his time with the Thraíha, that he found himself confronting the absence of the digital domain that had consumed so much of his life. Rishi was the first person in the canyons, besides Nickel himself, to bring this to his attention.

“He’s young enough,” Akela said, turning to look at Nickel. “The younger he is, the more Thraíha he can become—not like our ancestors.”

Rishi’s expression remained thoughtful. His face softened further, the intensity slackening.

“The outworlders of the canyons weren’t always so young,” Rishi said. “I’ve seen more children and teenagers fall from the sky.” He nodded, looking down. “It means the Ether is more powerful than ever.” He looked back up at Nickel. “You must have grown up with a hovercraft, haven’t you?”

“Did you just say other kids fell from the sky?” Nickel asked, excitement tingling through his chest, siphoning through the fear that had laid there until now. “Like, on hovercrafts?” A familiar sense of longing flared within him, roaring like a flame. If he could meet other people like him from the Ether of civilization, but in person, maybe he wouldn’t feel so alone in the canyons anymore. Right?

“Yes,” Rishi said, his eyes steeling. “Though many of them haven’t been granted as safe a passage or fate as you.” Rishi raised his eyebrows, peering intently at Nickel, his mouth forming a tight line.

Nickel’s mouth hung open in surprise.

“What happened to them?” he asked, dread creeping through him as he imagined what could have been, and how narrowly he might have escaped a worse fate. The thought only deepened his uncertainty about the dangers surrounding him.

“He and his friends,” Akela said, gesturing towards Nickel, “are the only outworlders to join us in over fifty years.”

“I see,” Rishi said, stroking his beard. “Peculiar indeed.”

The Thraíha patrolmen stood around, watching Nickel and Rishi.

“What is our task, Akela?” asked one of the patrolmen standing next to Nickel.

Akela frowned, standing still. His mouth formed a small grimace, giving him a ponderous look.

“On guard,” Akela said. “Your task is still to stay on guard.”

The patrolmen straightened, their armor clattering as their boots scraped against the rock.

“We know there are Death Riders about,” Akela said, watching the line of patrolmen as he walked past them. “There will be regular duty. I’ll speak to our leaders and make this effective. You all stay until Rishi leaves. After that, only twenty-five men will remain, rotating shifts every three hours.”

“Tchouṙth!” shouted the patrolmen in affirmation.

“You are not the Cast-Out spirit I thought,” Akela said, turning to face Rishi, who now stood between two patrolmen at the center.

“Ah,” Rishi said, nodding and raising his eyebrows. “But there’s another Cast-Out, ‘Vramung,’ as you say, being kept by your fellow tribesmen.”

Akela breathed deeply through his nostrils and walked through the gap between the patrolmen toward Rishi.

“Is that why you’re really here, ancient one?” Akela asked.

“Is that why you and your foot-soldiers are really here, Akela?” Rishi asked, raising one eyebrow higher than the other, smirking. He and Akela stood face-to-face, mere inches apart, measuring each other. “Why bring such force against,” Rishi tilted his head up, shaking it for effect, “a strange old wanderer?” His smirk widened.

Akela stiffened.

“To the Thraíha, you’re just a Vramung, a Cast-Out spirit sent to haunt us,” Akela said.

“I had to be ‘cast out’ before you could banish me, right?” Rishi asked, smiling wider.

Akela exhaled sharply.

“You must leave, Rishi,” Akela muttered, his tone almost pleading.

“I know you’re withholding my disciple from me,” Rishi muttered in a low tone, stepping even closer, their noses almost touching. “You sent this patrol to intimidate me, yet you greet me by my real name instead of the cursed one given by the Thraíha. You try to walk two paths as Thraíha, but you can’t help betraying loyalty to one over the other.”

Akela remained silent, meeting Rishi’s gaze unwaveringly. From Nickel’s vantage, it seemed that the side of Akela’s face betrayed a hardening of expression. The side profiles of two patrolmen flickered with worry and panic.

Their steadfast leader was showing signs of wavering in the presence of this Rishi. Who was this strange wanderer? He seemed to elude the Thraíha, least of all his history with Akela. This Rishi was the only person Nickel—and presumably the patrolmen—had seen melt Akela’s fast and sturdy resolve. Akela seemed to struggle between accepting this interaction out of past loyalty and fulfilling his role as a Thraíha leader, serving his people.

“I’m asking you one last time,” Akela intoned, his authoritative voice returning, stronger than before. “To leave our borders and not come back until I seek you out.”

“You’re asking me?” Rishi said, his voice lilting.

“I’m ordering you,” Akela said.

“Then you should have chosen your words better, my friend.”

“My friend, I would choose my words very carefully now,” Akela said. He whistled and raised his left hand into the air. “Hák rávouhou!”

The patrolmen unsheathed their long daggers, stepping into a defensive stance—right legs extended, left legs bent back. They hoisted their daggers, tips pointed toward Rishi.

2200 Blues Chapter 54: Part Two

Trekking up the rise and nearing the flat-topped peak, the rock began to disappear ahead, giving way to a flatter surface. As they walked, the rolling terrain vanished, revealing a wide-open sky that seemed to swallow them in a flash of bright gold, penetrating the orange fog from the high sun. The vast expanse above glowed a warm yellow in the afternoon light. The earth below seemed to vanish as the sky unfurled, casting its radiance.

“We have no good news for you, Vramung,” echoed the voice of a familiar Thraíha from below. As Nickel and Akela trekked over the ridged top and down its declining surface, the afternoon light flared above them before fading, shrinking to a dimmer visage hanging overhead as the orange deepened in the air around them—warmer than before.

“I told you,” boomed a loud and austere voice, “I haven’t come here looking for good news. I’m here to bring the next age!”

“We’ve had enough of your tricks!” responded another Thraíha voice.

Wisps of the Thraíha patrolmen came into view—hard, gray backs mostly concealed by the fog but appearing side by side in a flanking formation.

“We’re not letting you through,” growled one of the patrolmen.

“You have a disciple of mine,” said the man, presumably Vramung.

“He left our village six days ago!” snarled a patrolman.

“I know you’re keeping him hostage,” Vramung said calmly. The figures of the patrolmen grew clearer in the fog, yet Vramung was still unseen. “Until you bring him here safely, I will not leave.”

Cries rang out from the patrolmen, some of whom broke formation in agitation, their stone armor scraping and thudding voluminously.

“Your cursed Out-Cast spawn of a student isn’t with us!” shouted the same patrolman. “You can’t come here and make that devil-spawn our problem!”

A patrolman from the left, near the center, stepped forward into the concealing mists. He spoke, identifying himself as the previous speaker. “We will bring the might of the patrolmen down on you if you do not leave.”

“ENOUGH!” roared Akela, walking briskly, his pace overtaking Nickel. “Vráthokk!”

The Thraíha patrolmen quieted, turning to face Akela, their formation now completely broken.

A hooded figure stood still behind the patrolmen, his more distinguishing features shrouded by the fog.

“There will be no violence on my watch!” Akela commanded. “The night of the Red Moon was a hundred years ago and will not happen again.”

Akela hurried down the last slope of the rock. The patrolmen parted for him, and he passed through, his gaze fixed on the dark, hooded figure known as Vramung.

“You all know this man as Vramung,” Akela said, standing in front of the hooded figure. Nickel rushed down, standing just behind the patrolmen, Akela’s back nearly facing him. “But that’s only the name of the Cast-Out in Thraíha legend. I know you from the days of the Hallowed Oaths, beyond the far reaches of my Thraíha brethren’s lands. I know you by the ancient name, Rishi.“

A flicker passed over the stranger’s face beneath the hood—a twitch of the eyes, a glowing flicker in his pupils as he raised his head higher to meet Akela’s gaze.

“What is the real reason you’ve come into Thraíha lands, Rishi?” Akela asked in a low voice.

The sound of a patrolman scraping his armored boot across the earth to the far left broke the silence. A light pierced the fog, casting greater illumination on Rishi’s shadowed face. A smile spread between his thick, glistening black beard.

“So we meet again at last,” Rishi muttered. “I never thought the day would come when another Thraíha would remember.”

Akela stepped closer to Rishi.

“I remember the name Rishi like the last lifetime of my forefathers was a dream of yesternight,” Akela whispered. “So I ask you again,” his voice grew venomous, “for what purpose does a Rishi enter Thraíha lands?”

Wind blew stronger, brushing the ends of Rishi’s beard—the wiry black locks lifting, revealing themselves to be longer than they had appeared. His smile stilled, hardening into a neutral expression.

“A millennium has passed since the subliminal code of my order faced the primordial nature of your tribe,” Rishi said.

“Just over a hundred years, actually,” Akela replied.

“Point is,” Rishi said, raising his head higher and inhaling deeply, “I haven’t forgotten you, and you haven’t forgotten me. Our souls remain intact through our lineage. I’ve been summoned to these canyons.”

“Not by us,” Akela said.

“No,” Rishi said, lowering his head. “The gates of Oblivion have been open for centuries in the Atlantic. There are callings that arrive from time to time, disruptions in the canyons that stir the worst elements of the Atlantic.”

“Enough with your riddles and histories!” shouted a patrolman on the right, immediately hushed by his comrades.

“Silence!” Akela growled, waving his hand at the patrolman. “This is between me and him!”

“The Death Riders are on the prowl again,” Rishi said, turning toward the patrolman who had interrupted, smiling grimly.

“No!”

“It can’t be.”

A ring of shocked murmurs echoed among the patrolmen, their boots scraping once more against the earth. Nickel’s head buzzed, overwhelmed by fear and confusion.

“I don’t mean to frighten you, but if you’re impatient—well, that’s just the most immediate threat among others.”

“The last Death Riders to cross into Thraíha lands were slain by our best warriors a hundred years ago,” Akela said, his voice regaining a fraction of its former surety. “I don’t know what you speak of.”

“A hundred years ago, the Thraíha had warriors,” Rishi said. “Now you only have hunters. You will have to seal your fate with Father Hawk or venture beyond Thraíha lands!”

“That was a hundred years ago, because the Broken Pact hadn’t yet occurred!” Akela said, agitated. “The Shatterings of the Lost World hadn’t been healed!”

“The ruptures of the Past World that created the Thraíha are happening again!” Rishi cried, fury blazing in his eyes beneath his hood.

A patrolman shrieked from the far corner of the group, gasps rippling through the crowd. Several looked up at the sky, hands trembling in shock and confusion.

Rishi sighed, lifting his arms from his billowing sleeves and removing his hood. His face was austere, edged by the hard lines of age and toil. Long black hair flowed from his scalp, gathered into a ponytail along his back. His beard wrapped around a strong jaw, and beady black eyes sat above his broad cheekbones, beneath thick black eyebrows.

“I said before that I bring a new age,” Rishi intoned. “I’ve weathered the tolls of this one. It’s arrived, and I seek your help.”

“I owe a Rishi for the fate of my great-grandfather,” Akela gasped. “But I don’t understand you! The days of the warrior Thraíha are long gone! We are a tribe of hunters now because our lands haven’t been attacked by agents of the Past World in a century! No Death Riders have been seen for a hundred years! We hunt the hawk, along with the rest of the Huntsman’s kingdom!”

“Look to the stars, and you’ll see the finger of the Devil,” Rishi said. “The Huntsman has sent a call for salvation and remembrance.”

“I knew there was something,” Akela said, shaking his head. “I just didn’t know what. The priests have guided us for so long. I thought it was a new turn of the Great Hawk. This is greater than I imagined.”

“How did this happen?” Akela asked, looking up at Rishi.

“It happened as it always has,” Rishi replied. “A change in the fabric. An outworlder crashed just scores from the Death Riders’ valley. A hovercraft—a flying vehicle—was spotted by them before crashing into the canyons.”

Nickel frowned, his mouth widening. His heart nearly stopped. Could it be him?

Exploring Fractal Noise: A Review of Paolini’s Bold Sci-Fi Novel

Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini is a weird science fiction novel, really pushing hard into the weirdness. This is his second published novel in the Fractalverse, his adult science fiction universe, following his epic standalone space-opera, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, which was reviewed upon release four years ago on this blog.

This review won’t be as in-depth because it’s been many months since I’ve read Fractal Noise. However, the book really left an impression on me, and I’ve been meaning to share my thoughts about it in at least a cursory blog post.

Fractal Noise is a better, tighter, and more streamlined novel than To Sleep. To Sleep was the first foray into the Fractalverse, and Paolini made sure to make it worth the universe’s debut. It is chock-full of world-building, truly ripening the epic space-opera format. It also carries a strong philosophical message of optimism and weirdness that Paolini has worked to define his Fractalverse, both on the page and in public, through his online marketing and discussions of optimistic space exploration and the scientific and anthropological zeal behind it.

Fractal Noise is not an epic. While To Sleep clocks in at a whopping 880 pages, Fractal Noise is just 250. Tonally, it is quite the contrast from To Sleep, which is heavily imbued with a Golden Age/Star Trek-styled optimism for the future—specifically, a future of humanity among the stars.

Fractal Noise takes this universe to a different facet. The main character, burdened by the loss of his fiancée, is part of a xenobiology expedition crew. Alex, a talented xenobiologist, is isolated on the crew’s ship, utilizing whatever chemically-induced products he can find to manipulate his depressed nervous system, physiology, and mind into feeling more alert, stable, and able to sleep.

From the get-go, the novel turns into a first contact story, but of a wholly different kind than To Sleep. The first contact in To Sleep spurs a tragic loss akin to one at the start of a hero/heroine’s journey and bursts into a rollicking space opera akin to Asimov, Niven, and the James S.A. Corey folks behind The Expanse. However, Fractal Noise is a first contact story more in the vein of the zany Stanislaw Lem and his psychologically morbid and tormented classic novel Solaris.

In fact, Fractal Noise seems to mine a lot of thematic, tonal, and aesthetic influence from Solaris. Both share a protagonist who is a younger man still reeling from the loss of a female lover. Both books are first contact stories. Both first contact experiences engage the protagonists’ psychological states of depressed stasis and provoke the roots of their depressions. Both use the space-exploration premise and aesthetic of far-future interplanetary space exploration to induce a deep interrogation of the state of the human mind. It’s like an Arthur C. Clarke story, but instead of falling into a scientific anomaly that opens up a spiritual mystery, the mystery is a Lovecraftian, existentially horrifying nature of the universe and man within it.

While To Sleep was a celebration of science and scientific speculation, Fractal Noise depicts a crew of highly educated individuals who are burnt out from their objective and their Enlightenment worldview of productivity and scientific advancement.

Alex is introduced to us as a skilled biologist who is finding himself at a loss to make sense of his feeling stuck in life, with his exclusively STEM-oriented education. The loss of his fiancée seems to serve as a metaphor for the loss of his relationship with humanism and the greater aspects of life beyond the objective and scientific.

This allows the first contact to become a way for Alex to find an alien form of life at a time when he’s struggling to find life within himself—his career, lifestyle, and routine. Addled by melatonin to sleep and a commonly used drug called AcuWake to stay alert on low sleep, he is struck by an opportunity that he knows his fiancée would have been smitten with and loved to jump on.

The novel feels in a lot of ways like a pandemic novel. By that, I mean it’s a creative work that struck in me many of the feelings of malaise and digital overindulgence experienced during the COVID pandemic. This blog was created at the start of the pandemic, and it feels, in a way, like coming full circle to be publishing a review of the first book I would describe that way.

When we meet Alex, he’s barely getting through his work and struggling to find motivation to stick to a routine. He spends time messing around with holograms and holographic feeds to procrastinate. When he’s trekking on the planet emitting the strange pulse alongside his crew, his HUD (Heads-Up Display) in his EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) suit is basically a smartphone or laptop with access to numerous apps, files, and entertainment media, alongside the features he needs for his work.

The novel jumps between two timelines: one of him and his crew discovering the alien pulse and engaging in the first contact mission, and the second of Alex’s relationship with his fiancée leading up to the tragic end. The second storyline is given extra weight when it’s revealed that Alex carries with him a digitally replicated file of all of her memories. During the course of the story, he is tempted to access that file and watch her life experiences, especially the ones with him, to relive what he has lost.

Fractal Noise tells a story of how an individual relates to life when experiences, autonomy, pleasure, and interconnectivity are ubiquitous thanks to technology. It portrays the mundane and meaningless sludge of existence that we’ve all felt when mindlessly scrolling and consuming digital content. It captures an isolated autonomy and weakened spiritual agency in the face of drugs and technology that give us virtual control over the contents of the past, the preservation of the present, and our productivity. When you take drugs to sleep, drugs to wake up, and can superficially preserve the past and superficially engage yourself digitally, you create a cocoon or prison for the mind.

In this way, the typical first contact premise is given its own unique spin through the cyberpunk-infused themes that Paolini injects into the writing. Finding alien life becomes about finding your own life. Finding your own humanity amidst the search for alien consciousness becomes about waking up from your own artificially induced drudgery.

Fractal Noise‘s crisp and lean world-building plays into this, depicting a spaceship, technologies, and character backgrounds that create a vivid interplay of a sterilized hub for scientific advancement. It’s the opposite of To Sleep in many ways. But the balance between world-building and plot feels much more refined and streamlined than it did in To Sleep. Paolini’s science fiction writing is more vividly literary than the stories of Arthur C. Clarke, but it certainly shares the smoothly woven science fiction and scientific world-building of Clarke’s work. Paolini has upped his game for this swing at the science fiction bat.

This dark, dour book is one that I highly recommend, and I promise that it still holds an optimism of the spirit. It’s often the case that science fiction stories portraying how technology has perverted human agency and experience have the most optimistic takes on human spiritual potential. Fractal Noise is definitely not the most optimistic, but there’s still enough optimism to go around.

2200 Blues Chapter 54: Part One

“Stay back!” Li growled at Nickel. 

“I want to see him!” Nickel complained as Li gently shoved him back, sending him staggering and bumping into a few other Thraíha who were shouting and clambering to get through the throng. 

“No!” Li said, pointing a finger at Nickel. “Not today! I’m not letting another outworlder out!” 

“I’m not an outworlder!” Nickel said, seething with anger. He glowered at Li, feeling a rising fume of outrage. He’d had enough of Li and his intimidating behavior. “I’m Thraíha, and I’ve done the work to prove it!”

“Work?” scoffed Aarole, appearing from the bordering crowd of Thraíha. Looming higher over the rock mound next to Li, he stared at Nickel through pitted eyes, his mouth slightly open as if testing Nickel’s response, waiting to see his provocation. 

“You’re not one of us. If you weren’t born Thraíha, you’re not Thraíha!”

“I’m going to kill you,” Nickel snarled, his emotions getting the best of him, his sleepless mind fueling his fury.

“Aah, aah, aah,” Aarole said, smiling and crossing his arms, his eyes narrowing even further. “I knew you were good for nothing. You’re outworlder scum, like the Vramung scum.” He took slight steps over the mound of rock, rising above Nickel, moving his body closer to Nickel’s so that he loomed over him in an aggressive proximity.

Nickel gulped, trying to step back, but only moving his heel ever so slightly across the rock before hitting the legs of the Thraíha behind him. He was cornered; the lower nape of Aarole’s chest was barely an inch from Nickel’s face. Nickel had met thuggish bullies in the Military Academy before—worse ones than Aarole and his friends. He wished he hadn’t spoken his last words to Aarole, as they invited new trouble from someone he had already had trouble with among the Thraíha.

Aarole leaned further over him, causing Nickel to cringe and cower back, pressing helplessly into the restless limbs and torsos of the Thraíha men behind him. Their presence was unrelenting. 

“Going to kill me, eh?” Aarole hissed.

“We have word!” someone shouted from afar.

Nickel edged backward into a narrow opening in the boulders behind him, only to feel his arm caught in a tangle.

“What do you mean you have word?” came a distraught voice from close behind. It seemed the tangle Nickel was caught in was a group of Thraíha wrestling to hold one another back, one trying to stop the other from breaking through while the other tried to push him out of the way. Nickel felt frozen, unable to pull his arms free, largely out of fear, with no other place to hide or escape from Aarole and the physical altercation sure to ensue.

“Akela will know you threatened to kill me, and after you missed the last hunt, you’ll be gone forever!” 

“I know you seek after Kythria,” Aarole muttered, grinning widely.

The alarm turned into a tsunami inside Nickel.

“Who are you talking about?” Nickel asked in a growl, though he already had an idea. 

“The girl who painted you for your initiation,” Aarole said. “That’s a courtship test.” 

“I’m not interested in the rituals,” Nickel said. So that was her name. Kythria. The Thraíha girl he’d passed through the village square, the one who grabbed the young boy, Kyang. 

“But you just said you’re Thraíha,” Aarole sneered. “I’ve seen the way you look at her, the way you go silent around her. If you tried to kill me, I could invoke the courtship rituals over you.” Aarole smiled a large, cruel smile.

Emotions roiled inside Nickel. His heart hammered with anger’s agitation, mixed with his addled sleeplessness.

“What are you talking about?” Nickel husked. His head buzzed with confusion, shock, outrage, and helplessness. He had expected Aarole to get physical with him in response—to shove him off his footing into the crowd and possibly do worse. But instead, Aarole was trying a psychological trick, a manipulative play at a perceived vulnerability. It was seemingly much worse than a physical altercation. What better way to provoke his feelings of belonging—or lack thereof—among the Thraíha than by threatening to implicate him in the courtship rituals?

Before Nickel could respond, a man hurtled into the crowd next to him. Cries rang out in Nickel’s ears as he and the men around him went crashing to the ground. The weight of other bodies pressed on him, causing him to tip over alongside them. Their flailing limbs ensnared Nickel, swatting at him as he fell. Nickel found himself on the ground, leaning against a fallen man, his right eye smarting from an impact with someone’s elbow.

“This is the worst patrol formation I’ve ever seen!” Li shouted over the men. “It’s pathetic!” 

“It’s because we have more men than we need!” shouted a raspy voice from behind. “Out! Out!” shouted an older man from ahead in the crowd. “Too many men! This is why we said we had enough! You shouldn’t have come! Our flank is already filled ahead!” 

“Vramung can’t see us like this!” came the booming voice of Akela. Many of the men quieted at the sound of his voice. Nickel brushed himself off and got on his knees, dragging his upper body across the ground. The men he had fallen with were dispersing, untangling themselves and getting up.

“We can’t let the Cast-Out spirits affect us like this!” roared Akela. “Up! Ohh! Up on your feet and leave! This is not strength!”

Grumbling, the young men around Nickel slowly dusted themselves off and began walking away, down the slowly declining surface of the dark rock plain. Nickel stood up and followed them, the crowd widening as they moved. He craned his neck to the sides, searching for Aarole, but couldn’t see him amidst the other men. The motion of turning his head made him dizzy from sleeplessness. The dark, rocky terrain below beckoned to him, pulling him under, threatening to topple him into the darkness of the rock.

Where is he? Crossing Steve was one thing, but now Aarole? It felt like one bad encounter after another—another slip-up, another knotty entanglement with someone. For the first time, Nickel wished he could leave the Thraíha behind. The emotional entanglements and sources of conflict were becoming too much. An impassive, hardened Farrul. An infuriated, misunderstood Steve. And now a threatening Aarole, after they had already gotten off on the wrong foot. Nickel had threatened him, knowing it could go nowhere good—an act of impulsiveness. Now he feared what Aarole would do. What he could tell Kythria. Or the Women’s Council. They dealt with interpersonal affairs—and the rites of courtship.

Nickel gave an exasperated grunt, gritting his teeth and wheezing. He squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his hands over them. How much worse could this get? He had just gotten relatively accustomed to Thraíha culture, and now he found himself entangled in a potential courtship plot. He had no idea how the rites even worked and couldn’t believe that Aarole might use this as leverage against him. Nickel had to get to the council before Aarole did. But what could he say that wouldn’t make him sound crazy or wind him up in the very situation he was trying to avoid?

Before he could mull endlessly over that thorny goal, a rough hand clamped down on his shoulder. 

“There you are, Nickel,” came the sonorous voice of Akela, a soft tone of his deep, timbered voice sending warm air into Nickel’s right ear. Nickel stopped walking and turned sharply to face Akela. The white irises of Akela’s wide eyes, with their gray pupils, pierced Nickel’s gaze, contrasting with Akela’s lined, worn face and dark features.

“Yeah?” Nickel exclaimed loudly and nervously, scrunching up his shoulders and turning to face Akela.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Akela muttered, still speaking softly. “The council told you to come to the patrol early!” he growled in a quiet husk.

Nickel frowned, confused, looking warily at Akela. 

“No, Akela,” Nickel said, refusing to corroborate any guilt. He had already gotten himself into enough trouble by ditching the farm work Luvele had assigned him and fighting with Aarole. He wasn’t about to have another slight added against him. “I was at the farm. That’s where I was told to go this morning… The council never came to me.”

Akela kept his hand on Nickel’s shoulder, continuing to stare at him with a glazed expression, his pitted eyelids betraying confusion, suspicion, or both. 

“I came here because I was worried for the tribe’s safety,” Nickel added, hoping to justify leaving his farm work.

Akela sighed, removing his hand from Nickel’s shoulder and turning away. His fur tunic fluttered in the soft but steady wind. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Akela said, walking back up the rock at a brisk pace. “This is an emergency, and I need an outworlder to bear witness.”

“Me?” Nickel said, jerking into a trot behind Akela as he gained distance on the rock climb. 

“Yes, you,” Akela hissed, without turning around. He jerked to a stop and waved his hands at the few men who were slowing down as they walked back down the rock to follow Akela and Nickel. “Stay down!” Akela called. “Just the two of us going up. Go back down!” He motioned to the few men milling around, pointing back behind him.

Nickel hurried after Akela as he resumed his trek. The haze of orange flattened into a stiller curtain of fog, thickened by the climbing elevation and the brightening tint of the afternoon sun. Fear swarmed Nickel—a flicker of relief at leaving the Thraíha village behind and, more so, leaving Aarole’s threats behind, was immediately met with a dangerous thrill of fear and uncertainty. He was walking into the unknown. The visitor outside the Thraíha had caused all this commotion, a stark reminder that Nickel was in a foreign land with foreign dangers.

The higher they walked up the rock, the more the men below dispersed, until it was just the two of them climbing. Nickel’s heart hammered in his chest, but he followed Akela, fearful of breaking pattern and suffering a worse consequence. 

“Vruhá ná khelté huurrhá? Korrath ná jhurrú!”” came a voice in Thraíha from far ahead. 

“Sounds like he’s happy,” Nickel said, attempting to recognize the pattern of Thraíha words he was becoming used to hearing. 

“Korrath ná jhurrú means ‘go to hell,’” Akela said without turning around.

Nickel’s mouth opened in surprise, wanting to say oh, but no words could form on his lips. Terror flooded back, drowning the momentary ease.

2200 Blues Chapter 53: Part Three

“If that Vramung slime is back here again, I want answers for where my brother went!” one of the young men said, his friend shouting in agreement.

“I’m not letting Vramung anywhere near here!” shouted another young man, interrupting the old man’s response. “My father nearly lost a leg for him!”

“This is not for you to handle, Hiru!” the old man shouted, though his voice was muffled by the restless young men surrounding him. “Don’t make it your business if it isn’t—aaaaiiiii! Where are you going? Come back!”

A few of the young men stopped shouting at the old man and now shouted at each other, calling on one another to leave, dashing through the opening at the village intersection.

“Get back here! You’re going to lose your heads!”

A mass of children spilled out of the nursery behind the smelting station. Two women rushed out of the hut, frantically herding the children as far away from the village center as more Thraíha folk rushed past Nickel.

“Hey, Nickel, where you going?”

A young boy by the name of Kyang slipped past Nickel. His small, round face still softened by youth, as he hadn’t yet reached the throes of adolescence. His small, narrow body seemed to leap over the ground in the single strides he took. He grinned at Nickel through wide-reaching gums and crooked teeth.

“Where are you going?” Nickel implored. A procession of priests rushed past Nickel on his left, their glittering robes embedded with jewels. They were chanting something in the Thraíha language, indecipherable to Nickel.

“Where everyone else is?” Kyang spoke as if unsure why Nickel was even asking.

“To the sentry-posts?” Nickel asked.

“No, you dumb worm, weren’t you at our hut?” Kyang asked.

“No, I was working at the farm,” Nickel said. Kyang squeezed his face and made a sound that was halfway between a scoff and a giggle.

“You’re always off doing something else,” Kyang snorted.

“Yeah, well, I’m older,” Nickel said, chuckling and waving his hands gently in the air before slapping them on his legs. “You’ll get there soon.”

Kyang eyed him with a tilted face. “Enjoy it while you can,” Nickel said, raising his eyebrows in emphasis. Before he could wait for Kyang to respond, Nickel was distracted by the murmuring of men speaking in Thraíha behind him.

“Háthrú hán gaá, ní chágrá hou.”

“Hátraín ná vakkuru háchú, ní chágrá ní hou.”

“Hátruú thri hána cha, ná háchaarru túrra.”

“We pray for you,” said one of the Thraíha priests chanting. “We pray for all of us, all Thraíha. May Great Father Hawk bless us and keep our spirits together in the face of the cast-out.” He whispered before breaking out into more mutterings in Thraíha.

A string of women walked in front of the men, carrying buckets of water over their heads. Nickel had seen them carry buckets every afternoon, but today they walked in a more hurried manner. It seemed that everyone was moving a lot faster, much more swift and hurried about their tasks—more agitated as they went on about their day. Nickel couldn’t tell where the workers ended and the Thraíha joining the patrol or seeking answers about the “Vramung” began.

“You know, I’ve been here longer than you.”

Nickel turned back around to look down at Kyang. His beaming face held a self-assuredness that Nickel had known in himself not long ago, one he still held within himself today, though with a greater understanding of how he had gotten himself into trouble. Kyang’s smile stretched wide across his face, making his youthful exuberance contagious.

“You just got here, but you act like you’ve known Akela and Father Hawk your whole life,” Kyang said.

Nickel couldn’t help but smile at that. “Really?” he asked, chuckling, his smile widening as he watched Kyang curiously.

“Hurry!” hissed a young woman who slipped around Kyang from behind him. “You have to get inside! You’ll get trampled by the patrolmen!”

It was the same young woman who had dressed Nickel in furs during the initiation rite. He recognized her from her slim, short figure and the dark flowing hair tousled by water. But it was her round face with almond eyes that gave her away to Nickel. She tugged at Kyang’s sleeve, and he followed her.

Amidst the chaos of the Thraíha village square, Nickel watched the young woman disappear into the crowd, his eyes trained on her short, wide-set curving frame—the gentle arch of her lower back through her flowing dress and her curving, muscly legs walking to and fro.

Nickel had never learned her name, and he didn’t know if he ever would. To him, she was as close to the singing sorceress in the flesh as he’d ever met. An enigma, as much so as the visions he’d witnessed.

“All clear out!” commanded a tall Thraíha woman in the formal garb of black dress and headwear from the Thraíha Council of Affairs. Knots of gathered women in similar garb swarmed around her, confronting a crowd of Thraíha amassed around the entrance of a random hut meant for traversing Thraíha miners. Men and women with pickaxes and shovels gathered around the front of the hut, confused by the women’s entrance and their ushering out of the Thraíha workers. It was strange that they weren’t gathering in the Oracle’s hut, where they would normally congregate for Council meetings.

“The end of time is here!” shouted Sybil, a crazed old man with wide eyes and a craggy block of long gray-white hair. He stood to the far right of the councilwoman and workers, daring to step into the fray of wandering Thraíha, standing right in their way.

“The Huntsman has sent another star hurtling towards us! The dying sun has finally met the dying earth. Father Hawk has finally come for the sins of the Past World!”

“Not the time!” shouted a woman rushing around him. “Get out of the way, you sleepy snake!”

More Thraíha rushed past, covering Sybil from view alongside the councilwomen.

“Vramung is the last omen of our demise!” screamed the old man.

“Go back to sleep, old man!” a man shouted.

“Nickel!”

Whirling around, Nickel saw Luvele struggling through the many throngs of Thraíha rushing through the square.

“Nickel!” she repeated. She was glowering, her pale face reddened by exertion and wide-eyed with anger. “Get back to the farm! Get out of here—” she grunted as she was pushed to the side by a running Thraíha. “Come back, or you’ll take a bath with the cows, and I’ll scrub all of you!”

Nickel’s eyes widened, and he cringed, mouth forming a grimace. The disgust took mere milliseconds to settle on him before he decided that he’d had enough of Luvele.

Wagering the risk, Nickel turned around and bolted through the crowd, joining the moving frenzy. Pushing past some Thraíha and being pushed by others, Nickel found the rush of Thraíha heading out through the right, out of the village.

Nickel broke through the crowd in the village circle, running past the opposite line of huts toward the gently rising mound of darkened rock.

Nickel was ready to find out what other outworlders roamed the Atlantic Canyons.

Ecopoetics – Rolling Hills of Grass

A darkened mush

within a vat of mineral,

a ripening rush

descended the bowels of a mammal,

the discovery feels liminal,

scents swim like eels

wafting through the fronds of grass

on a mountain of grazing lass,

the climb harkens of Olympus,

the heavens meet me

and I am beckoned to kneel

only interrupted by a bee,

the altitude fills the lungs with levity

and the prairie with freshness of the soil

grounded by the mountain’s gravity

the ancient flotsam of existence

floats over and through me

each mote and sound

a data for eternity

the green prairie rustles,

rippling into a yellow savannah,

greased by the glaring sun,

bringing death to my bustles.

2200 Blues Chapter 53: Part Two

Nickel frowned deeper at Farrul, who was unassuming, walking across the earth of the garden without so much as giving Nickel much mind. The nonchalance of his appearance surprised and eluded Nickel. Was it possible that Farrul had become accustomed to travel through a passageway or catacomb out of the power plant wreckage that was unknown to Nickel?

While the Thraíha had built and set up huts in their settlement, they had also made do with caves and the recesses of the canyon rock. The Thraíha had built atop and within the land they inhabited. While it was a relatively flat rock plain, it was still winding, providing apertures of concealed holes that emerged in the rising rock the deeper he moved across Thraíha country. And with the anatomy of the remaining power plant architecture enveloping the rim of the settlement and serving as a kind of makeshift border, sheltering from the elements of the canyon windstorms, Thraíha country was even more labyrinthine. Nickel didn’t know where canyon rock began and Thraíha hutments ended. It seemed that perhaps not all those hutments were above ground.

Farrul picked up the tools that Nickel had dropped, keeping the satchel he carried on his arm down to the side. He began handling Nickel’s tools, testing the blade against a whittle he pulled out of his satchel.

Nickel ignored the farm animals milling before him and gently puffing out air through their nostrils. He walked over to Farrul, leaving the stables momentarily.

“Hey, Farrul, you brought a whole bunch of tools with you too, huh?”

Farrul looked up at Nickel as he knelt, a look of passive disinterest on his face.

“I guess you really are serious about farming,” Nickel said. “They told me before, but now that I can see you doing it, I get it more. You got every tool you could need, I guess.”

“Is this about Steve?” Farrul asked coolly.

Nickel pressed his lips together, his eyes steeling over.

“What?” Nickel said. “What makes you say that?”

“Trying to get the band back together?” Farrul said, breaking into a wry smile and chuckling. “Not much of a band to begin with, though.” He looked back down at the earth, pulling a mallet out of his bag to balance the side of a kupernacle stem as he gently sheared at the edge of its leaf with a razor-thin blade from his bag.

“Did Steve tell you about our conversation?” Nickel asked in a trepidatious tone, feeling his heart sink. “That’s actually not what I came to ask you about.”

“What do you want to ask?” Farrul said, still watching the plant closely as he worked.

Nickel sighed, watching the sunlight sift through the edge of the opening in the roof. The orange glowed at the center of the sky, sending warm rays of nearly yellow tones sifting through the sky.

Nickel now wanted to ask about more than just the first question he’d had in mind as he had first walked to Farrul. He couldn’t think of it as much the first question now, though, once Farrul had spoken.

“I have a more important one now,” Nickel spoke almost through gritted teeth. “What did Steve tell you?”

“I barely talked to Steve. I thought I told you how I feel about him,” Farrul said.

“We barely have a way out. Every second we’re not walking to Hedonim is a second moving us further from our goal,” Nickel said.

Farrul frowned.

“I thought you were all good to stay with the Thraíha,” Farrul said.

“I never said that,” Nickel said.

“You said they had it so much better than us—than me and Steve.”

Nickel didn’t speak, frozen by Farrul’s words, struggling to find a response. Where is this going? The sense of alienation that he had been feeling growing inside of him was now turning into a dreadful panic. The plan he had with Steve and Farrul before meeting the Thraíha—when the three of them were just vision-addled stragglers desperate for civilization—was now breaking apart. Or had it been broken from the start? Steve had always wanted to become one with the Ether, and it seemed that he saw Nickel as his means to do so. Farrul had always distrusted Steve and harbored resentment toward Nickel. Even if it had subsided since getting to know Nickel, he had always felt cynical about Nickel and Steve’s plan for the three of them to work together, with Steve as the lead to Hedonim. That cynicism was nowhere more apparent than it was right now to Nickel.

“Do you want to go to Hedonim?” Nickel asked.

Farrul shrugged.

“I don’t know,” said Farrul. “But I want to leave the Thraíha.”

“What will you do after?” Nickel asked. He secretly was asking to know for himself as well—what Nickel could do once he left the Thraíha, what kind of role or place in society he could fulfill once that time came.

“I like farming,” Farrul said, still withholding from looking up at Nickel. Having made notches in the leaves of a dozen or so plants, he was slicing through them one after the other, speedily cutting the halves of the kupernacle leaves’ surfaces. “I’ve always wanted to go back to the Ether, but I have this now. If I could farm and live in the Ether—farm in the Ether—that would be really nice.”

“Do you think it’s possible to do both?” Nickel asked, his heart beating fast. If Farrul was like Steve, then Nickel would have neither of them to even remotely work with to escape the canyons.

“Háthrouu ná chuurhá. Nickel háth gáth jurrá?!” called Luvele in a high-pitched scream. She was hobbling to the farm from the far right, away from the rock plain beyond Thraíha country. She was carrying two stone buckets in both of her hands. Their surfaces were bumpy, with rough protrusions. They were presumably carrying water. She glowered at Nickel.

“Oy! Nickel, what are you doing?” she said, shaking her head. “The cows are lonely while you chit-chat. You should have milked and scrubbed three of them by now!”

“Sorry!” Nickel called, walking towards the village. The panicked avalanche he was feeling from talking to Farrul turned into an unbalanced vertigo, threatening to tip him over with each step.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Luvele drawled as she grunted while chugging the two buckets of water. “I thought working with so little sleep would teach you a lesson, but you’re tripping up over and over.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Nickel asked, attempting a guilty tone, though he secretly hoped she would kick him out of the farm so he wouldn’t have to work.

“No!” Luvele said. “Not so fast.” She dropped the buckets of water at the gate to the side of the garden and opened the gate. “You’re staying in the stables, and I’m staying here to wash, so you work and you don’t talk to Farrul.” She bent over, her butt holding the gate door open as she stooped over and picked up the buckets of water. “If you don’t work on the cows, I’ll put you on patrol.”

“Patrol?” Nickel asked, freezing after taking a few steps away from Farrul toward the end of the garden where it met the stables.

“Yes, Nickel,” Luvele said. “And it’s a whole lot more moving around and work than here. You must carry big weapons, restock, and report. You’ll be running around, and I’m sure you’d rather be cleaning cows instead.”

Nickel stood still, his mind swarming with rushing thoughts and feelings. Patrolling. Sounded more fun than grazing cows. Besides, he wanted to see more of what lay beyond Thraíha country. But he was confused.

“Why patrol this early?” Nickel said. “The sun just got to the top.”

“It got to the top because the Huntsman’s always watching for us. His eyes are our eyes,” Luvele said.

“Is this about the visitor?” Nickel asked, pulling the gate between the garden and the stables a crack, still watching Luvele.

“It’s quite a ruckus,” Luvele said, walking into the garden. “You don’t want a part of it.”

“Did he leave?” Nickel asked.

“For now,” Luvele said. “We don’t know if he’ll come back. If he’s come for you—”

“Come for me?” Nickel asked, aghast. Even Farrul had stopped what he was doing, turning to watch Nickel and Luvele as he was stooped over kupernacle plants.

“Yes!” Luvele said. “If any of the outworlders who roamed these canyons saw you, you’d just be another Thraíha to them. But you must be careful! I don’t want you losing any of the protections the Thraíha council has granted you.”

What was going on at the Thraíha borders? Nickel had stayed with the Thraíha so long he still had no real inkling of what lay beyond. Who were these outworlders?

“So get to work!” Luvele said. “Keep your place!”

“I’m sorry, but I’m joining patrol,” Nickel rushed out of his mouth. Looking away from Luvele, he bolted out of the garden, squeezing past Luvele through the gate.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Luvele screamed at him. “You don’t even know where you’re going!”

Nickel didn’t look back. Instead, he bolted away from the farm, running far away from their metal frames. He passed under the shadows of the looming metal spires and enclaves jutting out of the farming area. The pattering of heavy hunting boots rained down from the opposite sides of the huts he approached.

There was a storm of voices echoing from the farther peripheral reaches of the village. Nickel ventured in between the bordering huts, rushing through the village square while keeping to the walls, vying to stay out of sight.

A stream of men rushed past the square, looking for weapons spilling out through an open crate in the smelting station. They cursed at one another and shouted, trying to hurry through the items and armor hanging loose from a rod at the top of the smelting station, just below the roof.

Footsteps thudded behind Nickel, becoming louder with each step. Whirling around, he caught sight of other young men running. They didn’t seem to notice him as they sprinted, eyes trained on the intersection where the village met the workers’ grounds.

Nickel slowed down, watching them stampede past. They blitzed around the smelting station, toward the mound of rocks that surrounded the front of the village, climbing higher as the land spread out across the horizon. Many disappeared into the orange haze, reappearing intermittently as they ascended the rising plane.

Others stopped by the smelting station, shouting at the men who stooped over the armor spilling out of the crates.

“Don’t go there! You’re not supposed to follow them!” an older man shouted, trying to herd the weapons.

“They want us on guard!” a burly young man yelled back, waving his hand toward the village.

“Don’t listen to your friends!” the old man responded, turning to the frantic, agitated young men who swarmed around him, blocking them from Nickel’s view.

Nickel had never seen the village in this much disarray and frantic movement—at least not since he, Steve, and Farrul had been ambushed by the Thraíha after fleeing Nickel’s hovercraft.