G.R. Nanda

2200 Blues Chapter 50: Part One

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.

Coming down the canyon cliffs from the entrance of the temple, the surrounding spires were illuminated in their ghastly skeletal forms through the bright orange of the morning fog. It was early enough in the day that their colors were more visible in the fainter orange of the fog. They were stark white walls and cleaved towers stripped of their surfaces and anatomy. Belts of disused fueling panels wrapped around the white and gray surfaces patched with rashes of bloodred rust. The cemetery of nuclear infrastructure quickly disappeared as Nickel was prodded along, traveling quickly down the cliffside, leaving the structures far from sight.

Theren left them with a wave, disappearing around a bend in the cliff consumed by the orange. Finding their way down was easier than climbing up, notwithstanding the dimness of the early morning they traversed to climb up. Following the young man across the short plane from the cliffs to the stone huts bordering the encampment, many dark silhouettes formed between the huts, drawn to the sight of Nickel and the man he followed.

“You haven’t met the missionaries yet, have you?” asked the young Thraíha man. His voice was a crisp sound against the gravel crunching under their footsteps in the dead air.

Nickel frowned, looking up at the young man. He didn’t turn around. Nickel could only see the back of his neck, thick and wideset, with locks of hair spilling over his skin. He was beefy, large, another anathema to Nickel, Steve, and Farrul among the Thraíha.

“Missionaries……… no, who are they?” Nickel muttered. The young man kept walking ahead of him without turning around.

“I don’t know what else you’ve seen of the canyons,” the young man said in a quiet voice, huskier than before. “Or who else you’ve met.”

Nickel’s breath nearly caught in his throat. The dark silhouettes grew in number against the nearing horizon of huts. Nickel frowned in confusion, startled.

“Who else have you met?” the man asked.

“Your friend Steve and Farrul sure have been living here,” the man said. “They can’t be the only ones who know how to survive,” he said, turning his head to eye Nickel with a smirk. He turned back around, never missing a beat in his steady footsteps.

Nickel chuckled, looking down at the earth.

“I’ve met them. We help each other survive,” Nickel said. “I’m not so sure they were surviving that much before they met me.”

Now the man chuckled, still watching ahead.

“Just another collision—a bigger collision with the Past,” he said, stopping short of what Nickel surely thought would be followed by “World.”

Nickel gulped.

“Me or them colliding?” he asked, looking up at the man’s back.

“Both,” he said. “A bigger wave from the Past hitting what stranded from the Past.”

“Oy! Háthrouu ná chuurhá. Nickel háth gáth jurrá?” called a distant man standing at the edge of humans in the fog. He stepped out of his line, waving at the man.

Theren laughed, returning the wave.

“Ná, háth ní thraumun jurrá. Háthrú háthú há houu, thraá háthrá Farrul!” he yelled back, cupping his hand to his mouth. The Thraíha standing far away began to disperse, falling behind away from the huts.

“Everyone else is going to expect you to follow us,” the man said. Nickel opened his mouth to respond, feeling an uncertainty of words and thoughts weighing on his lips, causing them to hang open. “Everyone else sees only the part you can play for Thraíha.”

“I see more, though,” he continued. “I’ve paid attention to who you are and what you do. Farrul wants to leave us, that’s clear from how often he dismisses our practices.”

“You want to leave too, but I see what you do, Nickel. You follow our customs, but we all know you itch for the Quest.”

“What do you mean?” asked Nickel.

“You look for what you seek. You don’t leave us like Farrul, but you’re impatient for Hedonim.”

“I haven’t talked about Hedonim in a long while,” Nickel said, chuckling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t have to talk about it,” the man said.

“I haven’t even heard anyone say the word Hedonim,” Nickel muttered. “Until now, why did you bring it up?”

“Easy, Nickel, no need to come on so strong,” the man said in a light-hearted tone. Nickel hadn’t even realized that he’d raised his voice.

“Are you sure it’s… Hedonim you care so much about?” Nickel implored.

“You talk this much to your Thraíha elders?” the man asked, laughing as he spoke.

“No,” said Nickel.

“Didn’t think so.”

“That’s because they feed me.”

“Oh! And I only take you on hunts—or away from them when you’ve earned it!” Theren turned around further than the first time, looking Nickel directly in the eye, a glint of amusement shining directly over his. He turned around, leaving Nickel to face the back of his neck and his silky, tousled black hair once again.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” he said, speaking without nearly missing a beat. “I know the real reason why you went slipping inside the wind tunnels behind the priests’ backs.”

Nickel froze, clutching the side of his robe once again. His eyes ceased blinking, watching as the young man continued walking, moving further away without noticing Nickel.

“What are you talking about?” muttered Nickel. “It was an accident.”

“You were looking for secrets where you were told not to look,” the man said.

“Told not to—” started Nickel. “No one told me not to go in the wind tunnels!”

The man turned to respond but looked away, far ahead of him. A commotion had broken out within the courtyard. Two darkened figures stood close to one another, standing opposite to one another in the middle of the yard while children ran around them.

“Ay Ay Ay,” the Thraíha man muttered. “You’re part of the chaos, Nickel.”

“What?” Nickel gasped, flustered. He gripped his book tighter against his chest, looking up at the man. The Thraíha man still didn’t turn around to look at Nickel. Instead, he just held out a beefy hand towards Nickel as if to hold him back.

“The Huntsman’s chased the rooster out of the pen,” he muttered. “Spirits are loose today,” he said, finally turning to look at Nickel with a wide smile. “You’re looking for forbidden fruits from the sky… and we have a new visitor.”

Nickel squinted at the man. Forbidden fruit? It seemed the more he talked to Theren, the more his speech sounded like riddles. The commotion was rising.

The figure of the two standing off in the yard with his back to Nickel and his accomplice shoved the person facing him. More children emptied from the neighboring nursery building. They ran out, many screaming as the fallen figure rose up and lunged at his attacker. Men standing off at the corners of the buildings closest to them rushed to the sides of the man who had pushed the person who must have been a violent heretic to the Thraíha—or an intruder?

“Is that one of the missionaries you were talking about?” Nickel asked, pointing in the direction of the altercation.

Theren didn’t respond right away. After a long moment, he cleared his throat.

“I don’t know, Nickel,” he said. His voice was lower-pitched, more even in tone, having lost his aloof playfulness. He exhaled sharply from his nostrils. “I didn’t think this would be this violent.”

Shouts of the men rang through the courtyard as they huddled, frantically advancing upon the outsider, whoever he was.

“Should we go back to the temple?” Nickel asked, squinting at his guide, his mouth hanging open. He couldn’t help but also consider restoring his book to the wind tunnel and the possibility of discreetly ridding himself of the object marking him a culprit.

“No, no, no,” his guide said, shaking his head. He stooped ever so slightly, groping his waist where the belt was with one hand. He pulled out a dagger from a small, narrow scabbard hanging from his belt, so dark as to blend in with his robes. He held the blade out, its very tip visible past the gentle billow of his robe.

“They won’t let us in. Priests work. If you’re not on the hunt, you have to attend the mass.”

“But it looks pretty bad,” Nickel said. The children had dispersed, and the mass of men clustered closer against each other, shouting at the intruder. They rummaged against each other, pushing further into the throng.

“You have no choice. We have to help them,” the man said. “Stay close at my side to my left but keep behind,” he said. They crept through the outskirts of the Thraíha encampment, walking around rock and stone. By the time they’d reached the encampment, the crowd of men had been pushed back towards the smelting station where Nickel and Farrul had been initiated mere hours ago.

Women carrying stone pitchers of water from the western grounds stopped around the scene, calling to various men caught in the frenzy.

“Where did he come from?” one of the women called. She was unheard over the din.

“The rat!” shouted a man emerging from the crowd. His clothes were rumpled, and the bindings of his robe undone. “Vramung sent him!” His long hair cascaded all over his head, disheveled by the tumult.

“This is Vramung’s doing!” shouted another man.

“Spirits are loose! We never should have brought him in!” a woman shouted, pointing at Nickel.

2200 Blues Chapter 49: Part Three

“What are you doing in there, boy?” asked the man. He leaned back and stooped his head through the opening and the shaft, directly facing Nickel.

“Nothing!” Nickel said. His heartbeat was a metronome, its palpitations coursing throughout his skin. His eyes were wide with fear, but he purposely relaxed them, breathing through his mouth. “Nothing, I just got lost in the dark, just slipped because it’s hard to see in here.”

The man scanned the interior of the wind tunnel, shaking his head.

“Hurry up,” he said, waving his hand at Nickel through the opening. He stepped back, pulling his head away. “I wasn’t supposed to wait for you, but I did,” he said. “Everyone else left for the hunt.”

“Are they going down the platform?” Nickel asked, ducking under the opening of the wind tunnel and following the Thraíha back out onto the ringed roof, now awash with more sunlight than when Nickel had entered the narrow tunnels.

“They’ve left the temple,” the Thraíha escorting him out said sharply. “I don’t know where you were when they called after the omen.”

“The omen,” Nickel repeated, attempting to show understanding. “Where did it go?” he asked. “The machine.”

“We’ll find out later today,” said the man in front of him.

“Or this morning,” came the voice of another Thraíha man walking in front of the men Nickel followed. Seeing him and his trailing scraggs of brown hair trailing over his neck, Nickel recognized him as Theren.

“Have you seen the other men?” asked the man facing Theren.

“Our men have all left the temple,” Theren said.

“That’s what I thought,” said the man facing him in a dejected voice. “Why are you still here then?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Theren responded coolly.

“I stayed behind because I escorted him,” the man said, waving at Nickel. “Shouldn’t you be watching the hunt?”

“Akela granted me a special provision,” Theren said. Nickel stood behind the man facing Theren, standing at his side.

“Special provision?” asked the younger man. “The hunting masters agreed to—”

“The hunting masters have been granted a shorter watch,” interrupted Theren.

“By whose orders?” asked the young man.

“By Akela himself,” responded Theren.

“What about Farrul?” Nickel asked.

“Your friend, Farrul, has shown great disinterest in our affairs,” Theren said.

A sinking feeling dripped through Nickel’s chest, coupled with a guilt-laden feeling of triumph and relief that Farrul wouldn’t hinder Nickel’s path.

“And great aptitude for other tasks,” finished Theren.

Nickel’s eyebrows raised, feeling genuine surprise at what he heard.

“Farrul will stay in our farm,” Theren said.

“He’s not out on the plain for the next hunt with the rest of the men?” asked Nickel.

“He has been taken aside,” Theren said. He walked closer to Nickel. “Before you can join the first ranks of our hunters, you must learn to pole the canyons.”

“Pole the canyons?” Nickel asked.

“Yes,” Theren said. “And in order to do that, unburdened by walking, you must reveal what you’ve hidden inside your robes.”

Alarm jolted through Nickel, sending him buzzing with fear. He smacked his lips, opened them, moving soundlessly with fear.

“W-what do you mean?” stammered Nickel.

“The material sticking out of your robes,” Theren said, pointing at the lump protruding from Nickel’s left side against his tunic and his robe. Looking down, Nickel observed that the lump was bigger than he’d first thought. The furry folds of his robe formed against the protrusion of the object, enlarging the protrusion.

“Ah,” exclaimed the young man, turning around to stare at Nickel, frowning. “So that’s why you were in there so long!”

“No!” exclaimed Nickel. “I wasn’t looking to steal anything in there!”

“So, let’s see it then!” said Theren, smiling. He walked closer to Nickel, standing still a few feet from him. He crossed his arms in an expectant pose. The flaps of his sleeves fluttered gently in the breeze.

“Let’s see it,” he repeated, raising his eyebrows. Nickel stood, awkward and undecided on what to do, or reveal from under his clothes, if he should reveal anything at all.

The younger Thraíha man turned on his feet, facing Nickel closer. “Let’s see it, Nickel,” he added in a softer tone, frowning and crossing his arms as well.

“All right,” Nickel husked, chuckling nervously. He rubbed his sleeves, distracting from the hidden book with nervous motions. “I didn’t take it from the wind tunnel.” His own lies smarted as he said it. He suppressed a wince as he felt one arise.

“You came with naught but your ceremonial garb,” intoned Theren in a bellowing voice. “Take it out!”

Nickel’s fingers shook as he buried them underneath the folds of his robe, hiding their fearful shivers as he wedged them under the fur. Not the book. He dared not touch the book pressing across his ribs. It was hidden, concealed by the folds of his robe billowing wider around his hips. He grabbed the knapsack whose edge stuck out at the front.

He pulled the sack out, staring at its brown leather surface instead of Theren or the younger man.

“Hmm!” Theren stepped closer to Nickel, his bulky forehead and his scraggly strands of brown hair looming over Nickel. Nickel met his eyes only after Theren had swiftly removed the article, pulling the small pouch of stone tools out of Nickel’s grip.

Theren squinted at Nickel, thumbing the pouch. He knows I’m hiding the book too.

The younger man scoffed.

“Really?” he asked in a voice of dull disappointment. “Nickel, I didn’t expect you to be thieving. I thought you were the Past Worlder we could count on.”

“Disappointed, but not without indication,” muttered Theren. He smirked lightly, tossing the pouch into the air, catching it, then clutching it close to his chest. He turned away.

Nickel pressed his left elbow deeper into the book pressed against his chest. Wedged just above his hip, where his tunic was tucked into his waist, it was yet to be noticed, or noted upon by either of the two Thraíha.

“I don’t know if I can trust you, or if I should,” Theren started. “But the hunt is not ready for you.”

A mix of feelings rushed through Nickel. He was disappointed at losing the prospects of joining the hunt, but his stolen book went undetected—a priest’s book at that.

“Am I losing my hunting privileges?” Nickel asked.

“Not just your hunting privileges,” Theren said, “but your right of quest—temporary probation period.”

Nickel’s eyes widened.

“But the quest!” he exclaimed.

“The quest can wait,” Theren said. “When I tell the priests—” he waved the pouch that he carried, “you won’t be allowed back in here until you’ve learned your lesson. No rites will be done for your quest until the priests have agreed to it.”

Nickel felt resigned, unresponsive to the news. He slowly pressed his arms closer to his body, together, making sure to conceal his book. He felt a crackle of nervous excitement coursing over his disappointment. Leaving the hunt behind, if he was sent back to the encampment, he could safely hide his book underneath his cot.

Theren started to turn, slipping the pouch under the folds of his robe. He walked across the roof towards the elevator hatch.

“Farrul will do,” he said, turning his head to look at the younger man standing across from Nickel.

“Farrul?” the younger man exclaimed. “He’s to take Nickel’s place?”

“I know Farrul couldn’t tell hawk from an unfriendly Thraíha, but we need a witness from the birthing ceremony. The Huntsman has taken the shape of a gazelle this morning. New beginnings await.”

“If I’m beginning with that boy, I’d rather begin again,” the young man said, turning to follow Theren.

“Enough said,” Theren replied, stepping over the elevator platform, his footsteps thudding and echoing loudly with each step. He bent his knees, squatting next to a lever, pulling it towards the floor. “Lead him to Oreve,” Theren said. The grating of the chugging elevator chains ensued, echoing from below the surface of the roof. “I don’t have time to teach him this lesson, but she can. Be quick, I have a hunt to attend to.”

2200 Blues Chapter 49: Part Two

The rest of the Thraíha hurriedly followed a procession around the bulky shafts crisscrossing the open-air roof, heading back to the pulley platform. Farrul was nowhere to be seen, likely hidden amongst the bustling Thraíha.

“Chung jurra! Chung jurra!” shouted many of the Thraíha. Their voices were lost to Nickel as the sound of wind chimes filled the air, clinking in a delicate but frenetic melody. Inside the gaping maws of the rectangular shafts, chiming trinkets sparkled in the rising sun.

Nickel ran over the roof, passing the twisting shafts snaking around it. He ran along a curving wall formed by the shafts, his ears tingling with the sound of wind chimes flitting from the gaping, pockmarked openings. He barely noticed their intricate shapes and patterns, welded to form letters of a cuneiform Nickel assumed to be of the Thraíha language. The trinkets were held together by string and rope in weblike matrices, spinning with the trinkets as points of cohesion, supporting the structures.

“Chung jurra! Chung jurra…”

Nickel found himself at an intersection of two lines of shafts meeting at a narrow opening. A bulky protrusion in the shafts on the right stuck out where Nickel stood.

“Hurry!” rasped a distant voice. “We must meditate before the hunt!” The winds thickened, and the chimes jangled around Nickel in a swarming melody.

The Thraíha were nowhere to be seen. Nickel ran around the protruding shaft, searching for them. Stepping into the narrow opening, he found himself in another open space surrounded by interweaving tunnels, their encircling rectangular plates punctured by more gaping holes, jagged along their edges, filled with melodious trinkets, their sounds lilting from one octave to another, often playing against each other in a rippling rhythm.

The trinkets were bright flashes of reflected light amidst the darkened, rusty shafts. He paid more attention to their patterns and shapes. Sharp protrusions ran along their tops. Their faces were inset with patterned marks of colors, flashing and darkening as they flitted away from the sun, revealing finer details of their engravings and embossed patterns. The rough edges of a crumbling texture spoke of a handicraft that Nickel could only imagine in the Thraíha.

The faces flitted to and fro, shaking in the wind, brightening and darkening as they shook on their pendants, jiggling the chains and beads hanging below, creating gentle but fast music.

Nickel found himself a few steps from a large opening in the shafts. He ducked under the jagged opening, avoiding the sharp edges of the cleaved metal. The delicate tremors of the instruments hanging beside his head chimed in his ears. Several strings of beads brushed his cheek, forming a flatter musical note as the beads slithered against each other on Nickel’s skin.

Expecting to feel the oncoming wall, Nickel was surprised at the length of the gaping hole in the shaft. More darkness beckoned where he expected a surface jutting in front of him, creating vertigo that threatened to topple him.

New clusters of jangling music emerged in the darkness, unseen but resounding from various points within the shafts, hanging diagonally to Nickel from the right and left.

Nickel stepped in that direction, walking to the right, stopping when he felt the pain of remonstrance at not finding the Thraíha. Where did they go? Nickel turned around, finding another opening tucked away in a corner before him, spilling light onto the edges of the wind chimes to the right. More pressingly, what was this place? And why was Nickel drawn here?

He stepped closer to the new wind chimes, despite the growing alarm at leaving the Thraíha behind. A tingling sensation and a patch of goosebumps rose over his flesh. The tingling slithered over the nape of his neck, even after the chill of the goosebumps had settled.

He hadn’t had that lingering sensation since his dreams of the singing sorceress. A growing flare of constriction rose through his chest, threatening him with the fear of becoming overwhelmed by another vision or similar trance. Yet nothing came, no vision sweeping him away from the earth and the dank atmosphere of the foggy canyons. Even as the tingling sensation remained, slithering over the nape of his neck, threatening to course over his spine but never going past mild tremors that started to slide down his neck onto the small of his back, but never actually making it down.

The music was a collection of islands in space, rippling with a rising timbre, lilting and soft, before jangling in a loud crashing note, deep and striking. The notes fell at different paces across the darkness, each cluster of hanging wind instruments finding their way to the crashing sounds at different times.

The wind instruments closest to Nickel to the right were beginning their expanding rise in their music as the beads and chains expanded outwards on their strings, driven apart by their resounding crash just moments prior.

Nickel could discern the features of one of the trinkets holding the musical matrix together, the largest in fact; a large copper pin. It was carved with a round head and two large wings stretching outwards to the left and right. Narrow depressions were curved along the wings so the viewer might discern feathers.

Father Hawk.

The beads and trinkets withdrew into one another, sliding over each other as their strings and chains brought them together.

Rough footsteps scraped outside the opposite end of the shaft, sending skidding echoes through the faint opening behind the wind instruments. Shadows formed outside the opening, causing the faint light coming through to withdraw, darkening the wind instruments further.

The razor-edged echoes of grunts and murmurs sounded at the lip of the opening.

“Where did he go?” came the voice of a Thraíha, a deep voice heaved through the opening, only the initial words heard before the rest were obscured by another crashing melody of the wind instruments’ trinkets rustling against each other in a loud, chiming melody.

Nickel swallowed, slowly testing the ground he walked over, gauging its surface for a reasonable path towards the light, free from any unseen obstruction. He wasn’t Farrul. He couldn’t leave them behind or make them search for him. If Farrul was as unreliable as he was, Nickel could only see him continuing to be. He had to show the Thraíha that he, Nickel, could be relied on.

Nickel walked faster as the ground proved itself to be smoother in the darkness. He couldn’t hear his footsteps amidst the cacophony of crashing music behind him.

Did he want to leave Farrul behind? The thought sent a pang of guilt through him. No, he wanted to distinguish himself from Farrul.

A loud grunting of sounds came through the shaft of light, rendered indecipherable by the crash and melodies behind him, erupting in a jangling chain reaction of music.

Why did he want to distinguish himself from Farrul to the Thraíha? To prove he was better and more fit for the quest to Hedonim? No, no, he reassured himself, feeling unsure of his own footing, physically and mentally.

Running through the shaft, he felt like he was rushing to the afternoon bell from recess during his long-ago school days. But he wasn’t. That was then, before he’d left the Ether. He was running back to the Thraíha, not the proctors of the engineering corps he’d once belonged to with his father.

Yet, he had to compete. He had to show, or else his labors would be for naught. And after losing everything, becoming a recluse on a hovercraft, and finding unexpected shelter and harshly defined social rules and routines within the Thraíha, Nickel couldn’t let the social ladders slide past—

A sharp flare expanded over the toes of his right foot as it hit a rising object that blended into the darkness. Nickel closed his eyes, feeling a burning sensation grow all over his feet. His knees buckled and Nickel found himself falling to his toes, grabbing a hold of his right foot. He clamped down on the foot, sliding his fingers away from the front of his foot awash in its throes of bristling sensitivity.

The shrill sound of the grunting Thraíha language echoed around the walls near Nickel, warbling and resounding across their surfaces. He was closer to the opening of light within the shaft but only saw darkness through his closed eyes, pressed onto his knee.

“If you don’t come, Nickel, you’ll lose your hunting privileges!” came the sharp deep voice of the Thraíha leader. “No quest, no extra food!”

The rising melodies of music had fallen, allowing for the Thraíha’s words to become audible. Interrupted from all thoughts, Nickel could barely brace himself to hear the import of the Thraíha’s words. He tried very hard to make it through quick enough, with only a bruised foot to reward him.

Farrul had probably left down the shaft by now. Farrul couldn’t go on the hunt without Nickel. The thought seemed to drag his left leg across the floor as he extended his knees. He’d lead the Thraíha astray just as he was trying to lead Nickel astray. He needed to come out on top, lead the way as he couldn’t at the engineering corps.

His foot continued to throb and ache, flashes of pain that distracted from his thoughts. He fed himself consolations, trying to understand where his thoughts were coming from, where they were going.

He shifted his weight as he walked, slowing down to readjust his motion.

Staggering on his left leg, it hit an object lightly, pushing a part of it away from him. The object fell off the one below which only shifted slightly. Nickel stepped back, frowning. He stared at the ground as a clinging noise echoed from down the roof, weakly drumming outside the shaft wall.

“Gthu, rrororoh!” shrieked a Thraíha far across the roof.

“Kfff mmhuh jurrah aí!” responded another Thraíha with a deeper voice.

Were they leaving without him? The shafts of light coming through were warmer and brighter, illuminating the interior walls of the ventilation shaft, wrought with its rusted pallets and protruding lines. Fuzzy protrusions of ice coated the walls inside the shaft. Nickel would be able to see the rest of the men as they traveled down the temple in their elevator shaft. The light was now strong enough. But would he be able to see how they went down the shaft?

If he was left alone up here, he’d be stuck without a way to—

His left foot hit the objects again, sending them shifting away. A soft clattering and gentle fluttering caught Nickel’s ears, prompting him to look down.

He’d hit a collection of books and binders. The books had been stacked on top of one another, but they’d fallen, now strewn across the floor, a few lying lopsided against one another.

God knows what those are.

There was a clanging noise of metal objects hitting one another, one after the other. The elevator platform, no doubt. Nickel couldn’t tell if it was being summoned from the depths of the temple or if it was being lowered into the lower parts, carrying the Thraíha without him.

Either way, its sounds and their raised concerns were a dull chatter playing at the back of Nickel’s mind. The dusty leathery surface of the books before him caught his attention, reveling in their mystery.

Why were there books inside the shaft? Books were from the Past World, from Nickel’s world. The Thraíha were an oral culture, speaking from inscriptions in stone and loose collections of parchment made from leaves. That was all that Nickel had seen of them inside their encampments and huts.

Nickel squatted, bending his knees, ignoring the pain as he pressed on his foot. He extended his right foot, letting it rest on the heel, keeping his left leg bent, situated on the floor. He grabbed the first book, closest to him, rubbing its cover, feeling the weathered indentations running over the surface, the engravings torn at the edges, caked in grime at certain parts.

Footsteps started outside the shaft. Sitting low, Nickel could see two men standing outside the opening, one with his back to the opening, standing a few feet outside while another stood in front of him, several feet away from the shaft.

“Eeerra, muhkakee,” rasped the man several feet away.

“Hussé, huusse, muhreé,” responded the man with his back to Nickel.

Nickel’s heart began to hammer. He looked away from the men, back down at the books, rubbing the spine of the one he held, moving closer to the books and the wall, to conceal himself from the two men outside, blending in the darkness.

His fingers quivered, feeling the rough worn surface of the spine, its leather filled with bits and pieces of crumbling material, chewed by the weathering of air, wind, and time. The last time he’d seen a book was before he’d been plugged into the hovercraft. Before the Ether Realms equipment had been integrated. He was seven or eight?

The time and age seemed negligible to him. Fear and awe struck at him, his eyes unable to leave the cluttered books. He shifted his left knee further into the pile, stooping over them. He found artifacts of a pre-Ether time, a time he’d known, but was slipping away in his memory as that past in his early childhood moved further away.

What was this temple, this building? Nickel cracked open the book in his hands, revealing pages darkened by stains, elsewhere filled with countless words, more words than his mind could process at once, line after line in a sea of text.

These words. English. His own language jumped out at him, an oasis of inscribed words, line after line.

He scrambled through the pages, finding more of the same.

These artifacts, the building itself. The architecture was unlike the huts and stone structures of the Thraíha encampment. They all climbed the canyon rock, high enough to meet the skyline of empty, broken spires and walls that loomed over the West of the Thraíha encampment, “barriers left by the Past World.” Yet the temple was isolated amidst the rock outcroppings. Nickel had seen it wasn’t a peak, but a rusty appendage of a building wedged inside the rock. It was only at the elevation he was at that Nickel could see a vast emptiness of air around it below the roof.

What was this building? Nickel picked up another book lying to the side, letting the first one fall off his lap, cluttering on the floor next to the rest of the books. A title was embossed on the cover of the second book:

“Nuclear Energy.”

“He’s inside the wind tunnel,” rasped the man standing farthest from Nickel outside the shaft. Startled, Nickel’s fingers loosened around the book and he snapped his head up, staring wide-eyed at the light coming through the slanted diagonal opening across the shaft wall.

The man standing with his back to him shifted on his feet, turning around, looking over the wind tunnel, his gaze drifting below to Nickel. The wind instruments chimed louder again, their freefall of music broken.

“What are you doing in there?” he called to Nickel in a quizzical tone. Nickel started shifting his legs, rummaging the books on the floor. He stooped over, pushing the books against the wall, trying to hide them. “Are you trying to lose your hunting privileges?”

Nickel grabbed the book with the “Nuclear Energy” title, gripping its narrow spine and shoving it underneath his robe.

“We can still see you in there,” the man called. “The hunt will start without you.” Nickel ripped open the collar of his tunic, letting the string clasps pop free.

“I’m sorry!” Nickel called. Bending over more, Nickel squatted on both feet and started to stand up as he shoved the book inside his tunic, against the bare skin of his chest. “I got lost in the wind tunnels.” His voice echoed dully against the wind tunnel walls.

“You mustn’t go inside the wind tunnels!” said the man standing directly outside the opening. He started walking closer. “It’s a sacred space only for priests.” Nickel tried to bring the opened edges of his tunic together again, reconnecting with their string clasps. But they had already been quite undone. He pressed them as close together as he could. When the strings still stretched unbound, he tried pulling at one of their hanging strands, only pulling it looser, falling even further out of the clasp, loosening his tunic even more.

“You’re lucky Murrak didn’t see you in there,” the man said, stepping even closer to the opening. Nickel shoved the book further back around his ribs, pushing the book from the outside of his tunic.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Nickel said, as unassuming a tone as he could muster. He stood up, still leaning against the wall of the shaft.

“He’d have your hunting privileges revoked,” the man said, standing just outside the opening, his frame blocking the light coming through. His head was cocked to the side, peering down at Nickel and frowning at his movements.

Nickel frantically rummaged the two folds of his tunic hanging loose, the sleeves of his robes tucked underneath. He still bent over, barely stepping over the edge of the shaft’s wall and floor. He slipped a leather pouch on his belt through the edges of his tunic tucked around his waist, slipping it underneath his tunic, around his rib cage, next to the book, to make the lump under his tunic less defined. Feeling the gaze of the man, Nickel tucked the two ends of his robes together as close as he could, tying their leather clasps together, close enough to his chest to cover the protruding objects as best as he could.

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2200 Blues Chapter 49: Part One

“If you look, you see mountains.”

Large looming structures stood out in the distance, shadowed but shimmering with a crystalline reflection. Their tips were glowing lines, snaking across their edges and protrusions in reflected starlight. Below, snaking around the lower halves of their bodies, were pools of orange fog, sinking to the depths below like clouds shrouding the glaciers.

Nickel had strayed far from the path he thought he’d find himself on eventually, far from the confines of the student account his hovercraft was running on.

“Are those mountains?” Nickel asked, turning to face the husky-voiced Thraíha, only to find him gone, having blended into the pack of Thraíha leading themselves back into the pulley platform they’d traveled.

Nickel turned, looking for Farrul, finding him missing amongst the Thraíha stationed around the roof. Thin wisps of light arose from the flat, rusty turrets encircling the roof.

Starlight gleamed like watchful eyes, pouring an awareness onto Nickel like none he’d ever felt before. He felt watched, a rawness like he’d never felt before under the starlight. Countless stars dotted the sky, tremors of light stilled by the cosmos. They appeared like thousands of hovercrafts, frozen by time.

The orange fog was a lake, slowly swirling around these mountains of ice looming in the distance under a cosmic sea of suns Nickel knew he couldn’t reach. The days of spaceflight and voyages to the stars and neighboring planets were long gone.

Nickel’s ancestors, humans across time, had turned Earth into an unknowable alien planet. They created vistas and frontiers of pollution and escapism, from the orange fog to the hovercrafts of the Ether.

The Past World.

Nickel turned around, looking to the Thraíha grouped together in a broken line behind him. They wore multicolored necklaces of kupernacle leaves, chanting.

There were other Thraíha tending to the wisps of light—flames emergent from candles that they carried and pushed across the floor.

“We joined the Huntsman tonight,

Seeking light and the strength of might,

Show us the constellations Of our present,

hiding From our shallow selves.”

The chanting continued, turning into mumblings of the Thraíha language that were incoherent to Nickel. These people lived outside of the Ether and had been living so for generations. They were healthier, stronger than many Nickel had known to live in the Ether, including himself.

Their lives were more meaningful in the tapestry of their religion and mythology. Yet, several of them wanted to attend to Hedonim.

“The wretched soul catcher of the Past World!” Nickel remembered the words of Akela and the priests he’d seen. It was a repressed dream. A dream he hadn’t had since arriving at the Thraíha encampment, yet his presence brought the very visions he’d had to the Thraíha.

Quest to Hedonim.

What was Hedonim except for a vestige of the Past World, the ocean of orange fog far below, and the Ether that Nickel now found himself free of?

He’d found refuge within the Thraíha, refuge from the numbing reality of the Ether. Now, many of them wanted to return to the Ether with Nickel.

“I thought they were going to ask us to do something for them.”

Nickel whirled around to see Farrul behind him, dark hair rolling over his forehead in the wind. His eyes were pale and gleaming over the shadows that stretched down his face.

“I think they’re doing this more for them than us,” Nickel said, nodding towards the line of Thraíha who were kneeling, whispering with eyes closed, bringing closed palms from their chest to their chins, back and forth.

“Bringing us here?” said Farrul.

“And living,” Nickel muttered.

“Living?” rasped Farrul, clearing his throat.

“They live for themselves, not for a token,” Nickel said.

Farrul squinted his eyes.

“I’d rather look for a token if it meant I wouldn’t die in five years,” Farrul said.

Nickel frowned.

“That’s how long they live?” Nickel asked.

“That’s how long they have to live,” Farrul said.

“What—”

“When I found Steve,” Farrul cleared his throat, “or when he found me… He told me that the expedition craft he sailed was searching for the meridian where the storm breaks.”

“Breaks?” Nickel’s frown deepened.

“When it breaks glaciers.”

Nickel turned around, studying the shapes of the looming structures gleaming with starlight. The gleaming light looked brighter, shinier than what he’d expect of a large mountain. Not just around the top, either. They formed below, fainter and smaller, yet still present, losing color to the omniscient orange, joining its dull darkness.

“Those aren’t mountains, are they?” Nickel asked, a foreboding feeling rising over the back of his scalp. He sniffed the air over the rusty turret flat he leaned over. The flat-scented air of their high elevation invaded his nostrils. It still held a sliver of humidity, a chill feeling of dampness that coated the insides of his nostrils.

“No,” Farrul said, “they’re glaciers… and they’re going to break in five years.”

Nickel turned around to Farrul, his eyes and mouth wide with fear.

“Five years?” Nickel exclaimed. “Steve never told me that.”

“Steve’s mad,” Farrul said. “He can’t even tell his left foot from his right.”

Nickel just looked at Farrul in disbelief.

“I told you this, Nickel,” Farrul said, sighing. “That’s why we said we could jump ship, drop him off somewhere… but here we are… and you don’t have a hovercraft anymore.”

The import of his words sank into Nickel’s mind, conveying the distrust and accusation leveled by Farrul’s words. Nickel found himself struggling to process his actions, finding himself struggling to find a mediated response.

“You don’t care about the Thraíha,” Nickel said, nodding.

“I want to—”

“Or Steve,” Nickel said, raising his voice. The feeling of isolation that he thought he could leave behind on his hovercraft returned, slowly creeping down from his chest to the pit of his stomach. Yet, he didn’t want to lose it.

“What do you care about, Farrul?”

Farrul’s face became stony, resolving to a grim expression.

“Fall in!” called a Thraíha man. “Fall in, fall in.”

Nickel rushed past Farrul, eager to leave the conversation behind.

“We prayed, now we fall back,” called one of the Thraíha.

The Thraíha began to glow red. The light of the sky grew behind Nickel, crawling the edges of his fur sleeves. Turning around, the burgeoning sunrise beckoned to him.

It was a warm orange ball of light cascading over the glaciers, the yellow fire shimmering over the mountains of ice like rippling waves in an ocean.

A churning grinding of metal echoed across the space from the far left, reaching far around the temple. As the growing sunlight dipped over the horizon, it touched a giant sphere of dilating metal shapes shifting over a silvery surface of antennae and metal arrays, pockmarked by netted grids and flashing lights.

A gasp rippled through the Thraíha.

“Omens of the Past World!” called the deep-throated Thraíha leader.

The young Thraíha man who had brought Nickel and Farrul up the rock climb staggered out of the amassed Thraíha, the ends of his robes whipping past his legs.

“Did you bring that beast here?” he called, pointing at Nickel and Farrul.

“No!” Nickel shouted. He hadn’t called anything here. That machine—he took a better look at it, leaning to the side to look at the machine, the first real one he’d seen in a long time—since leaving the hovercraft.

“You brought the spirits here!” the young Thraíha rasped.

“We wouldn’t even know how to!” exclaimed Farrul.

“I don’t know how to control probes!” Nickel said.

“Probes!”

“Probes.”

The Thraíha repeated the word, speaking it like they were testing it for the first time, trying to make sense of it, like a foreign incantation.

Just when it seemed we were getting along.

“He speaks truth!” called the husky-voiced Thraíha. The rest of the Thraíha quieted. The man knew him, he seemed to know Nickel from a previous lifetime, understanding more of his perspective than the others of the Thraíha. He walked around the huddled mass, the young man watching him with a craned neck. The husky-voiced Thraíha walked around and put his hand on the youth’s shoulder.

“Calm, Jovik,” he said, “the machines are a sign of crossing paths.”

“With us or with them?” Jovik said, motioning his hand towards Nickel and Farrul.

“The machine—them,” the husky man said, motioning at Nickel and Farrul. “—All brought by the same winds that brought our forefathers together from the Past World.”

“I hope they leave the Past World behind on the hunt!” called another Thraíha from the crowd. Murmurs of agreement resounded through the mass of Thraíha.

“We’ll make them hunt the Past World out of them!” said another, receiving more noises of agreement.

“Do we hunt for machines or for souls?” asked the husky Thraíha. Jovik said nothing, and the rest of the Thraíha quieted.

“We hunt for the Hawk,” said the husky Thraíha. “For Father Hawk,” he added.

“Just leave as dawn sends the stars away,” said the deep-throated Thraíha. “Let us not leave the sight of our squabbling be the last thing the Huntsman sees of us.”

“His constellations are disappearing,” Jovik muttered, almost in a whisper as he stared up at the morning sky.

“Did you chart the stars?” asked the guttural Thraíha.

Jovik turned to look at him, mouth open, unanswered. His eyes lingered on the deep-throated Thraíha’s hairy face, then darted to and fro, as if he was looking for the answer.

“Well?” asked the older Thraíha.

“I did,” said Jovik, “but I missed the southernmost ones.”

“Why?” grated the guttural Thraíha.

“Because I was distracted by the omen.”

The omen chugged on by, churning in its vibrating frame. It passed closer to the edge of the roof, whizzing past the turrets in front of Nickel, Farrul, and the Thraíha, drawing their looks as they turned to look at it, many of the Thraíha flinching as the machine passed the roof in its wake.

Narrow spindle-like extensions protruded from the body of the satellite. They were arm-like robotic extensions, circling the air out of gyroscopic sockets sticking out of the spherical body like bulbous eyes.

The arm stuck out, hovering over the turret of the roof. Nickel and many of the Thraíha gasped, jerking back in unsteady steps. Was this the world that Nickel’s father helped create? He remembered the empty flagpole he’d first seen in the canyons—his first look at the corroded wasteland of an environment, which reminded him of his father’s industrial complex premises, the infrastructure it helped create in the world.

The spindly robotic arm plopped on the surface of the turret, causing a loud clank and scraping voluminously over the surface.

The Thraíha took further steps back, exclaiming about the machine.

“Omen!” Many of them shouted.

“Demon! Demons under the Huntsman’s watch!”

The scraping arm created bright sparks against the turret, shooting out from its surface, a stark contrast to the slowly brightening color of the sky and the scenery before the glaciers.

If Nickel returned to the student account, finished the engineering program, he’d be struggling to make and maintain more of those probes, engender the satellites, and clean up after the ghostly remains of their larger apparatuses.

As the arm scraped over the surface of the turret, it caused the spherical body of the machine to wobble, pulled by the force of the arm’s friction. The sphere slowly revolved to the left, even as it continued to move forward, around the roof.

“Kill it!” shouted a Thraíha behind Nickel.

“Calm yourself! Have you not seen elements of the Past World before?”

If Nickel returned to the path still waiting for him in the Ether, he’d be a reject, too unfit for its engineering corps, left to clean up after shoddy probes like the one floating before him, barely functional and wandering another one of Earth’s wastelands. If he traveled to Hedonim, what then? Would he just be going back to the Ether?

If he stayed with the Thraíha?

The glaciers poking over the horizon glowed a fiery yellow, their upper bodies appearing aflame under the bursting sun. If he stayed with the Thraíha, he could live without the Ether, but he’d face the flood with them in five years.

Even Chickel and Arolé would have to run for their lives with Nickel.

He’d have to—

“Nickel!” came the booming voice of the guttural Thraíha. Nickel whirled around, facing the impatiently waving man who was waiting for him to come.

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2200 Blues Chapter 48

Nickel’s feet caused a noisy ruckus on the metal he walked on. metal.

“Is this a hovercraft?” Nickel blurted out.

“Shhhhhh!” Hissed one of the Thraíha.

They don’t know what that is, Nickel remembered. He sighed, following for what movement he could discern through the dizzying darkness.

The shafts of light created shards of illuminated pockets within the cavernous space.

Vertigo threatened to dizzy him, the unknowingness of what lay a step ahead overwhelming him. He didn’t want to hit anything by mistake, but he wanted to make it to the end of his initiation process before dawn broke.

“Where are you?” bellowed Nickel.

“Would you be quiet!” hissed a voice, A different Thraíha. Too deep to be Farrul.

“Where am I supposed to go?” Nickel asked in a quieter tone, his voice still echoing and resounding through the space. “I don’t know where any of you are. I thought I had to be up for the stars before the sunrise!”

He spoke that last sentence with an agitation and anger that surprised him. His head pounded as he desperately tried to orient himself in the darkness. His chest roiled with a growing knot of outrage.

Why was he angry? He’d come this far with the Thraíha after falling into their encampment by accident. He’d met with Steve and Farrul by accident too. But they were helpless, two crazies stuck in the canyons with no larger goal than surviving the next day. Only when they’d met him had they wanted to go somewhere else, to Hedonim to escape.

“What then?” Nickel muttered under his breath.

“Then what?” asked a man he couldn’t see.

Nickel, startled, doubled back. The surprise melted some of the rising anguish, tapering the bubbling outrage. It still fizzled in him, choking through his lungs, gulping for air.

He breathed heavily.

There were solid thumps on the platform, ricocheting through the frame. Nickel turned to the right where he heard them come from. The metal was a disorienting anomaly, reminding Nickel of his time in the hovercraft in the flimsy floors of the military decanting stations.

The darkness beckoned him, an empty shell of what he’d once known, walking over the hovercraft.

“Without real answers, you can’t get anywhere,” said the husky Thraíha.

“What does that mean?” asked Nickel.

“The Huntsman points the way,” said the Thraíha, gently pulling Nickel’s wrist. Nickel started after him, looking for the way out he was being led to, not finding it.

They walked in a humdrum manner, climbing over leveling platforms, dappled by shifting rays of light. They reached an inclining surface of a platform, held by a long pulley chain that clinked in the gentle air of the darkness, it’s surfaces glinting with the reflection of starry light shining from above, through shafts of opening light as minuscule as the drops of moving air itself.

The Thraíha had let go of Nickel by now. Nickel followed him and the huddled mass of Thraíha onto the platform. They grouped together, a large huddled mass of men, the edges of their fur robes brushing roughly against one another.

“Will I ever see my hovercraft again?” asked Nickel. “Or leave the canyons?”

The husky Thraíha man with the straw beard turned to look down at him, a strange glint in his eyes and an upturned smile on his face.

“Pull the ignition!” Shouted the younger Thraíha from the farther edge of the huddled group.

“The ghosts of the past world have finally led us here,” muttered another Thraíha.

“And they will lead us out,” muttered the hollow voiced Thraíha from behind the Thraíha standing to the side of Nickel.

“Ignition?” Nickel muttered, looking around in awe and surprise. “What’s being ignited?”

“A skeleton of the Past World,” muttered the husky voiced Thraíha man, “showing us where the ancestors of the Past World searched for stars.”

Four Thraíha men standing at the corners of the platform started to pull the chains holding it causing them to grate against the mechanism of the platform.

“The Past Worlders tried to create the power of the stars on earth,” whispered the husky Thraíha, stooping over to speak in Nickel’s ears. “Now we move through the skeleton of their dead star, moving where we were always meant to shine— under the stars of the Huntsman sky.”

Nickel frowned, looking around at the darkened space. As the chains kept grating and the platform kept elevating, they passed walls and jagged protrusions sticking out against the walls, emerging out of the shadows.

They passed a large pattern of bright colors splotched across the rustic bronze and copper of the walls surrounding them. It was a patterned strip of yellow rectangles, interspersed with black, arranged diagonally on top of each other.

“How long has this building existed?” Asked Nickel. “Before the Thraíha?” The black and yellow pattern was faded, cut off, splotched with rusty streaks, yet still distinct.

“This is the world we inherited,” said the husky Thraíha. “Before humans found the way of the hawk.”

They passed a large metal ledge hanging across from them. As Nickel and the Thraíha passed the platform, similar black and yellow patterns encircled the edges of the platform. Elevating higher, Nickel could make out the words embossed on the platform:

WARNING TOXIC WASTE

There was something else scribbled below it, but it had largely faded away.

“As to your first question,” said the husky Thraíha. “There are many ways in this world. We live and pay for the sins of the Past World, living with it orange embers around us.”

The platform jerked to a stop, causing the chains to jangle against one another and the platform to make a clinking noise. The platform wobbled slightly and more Thraíha men walked out from the group, moving towards the Thraíha pulling the chains, rushing to their side to assist them.

There are more Thraíha here than I came with, thought Nickel. Now closer to the gaping shafts and the ceiling, the mass of huddled Thraíha was further illuminated.

There were Thraíha already inside of this building, waiting for Nickel and Farrul. Thraíha living and working here? There were at least seven more Thraíha standing apart from the ones who’d escorted Nickel up the canyon impasse. They didn’t all wear moccasin fur robes like Nickel and the Thraíha who brought him here. Many of them, including the ones pulling the chains, wore long leather vests donned like aprons, hanging over their torsos, dangling over their legs.

“We pay for the sins of the Past World by searching for the grace of the Huntsman’s light and we are blessed with vision and crops by mother Hawk, enriched by our toil,” said the husky Thraíha.

The pulley started up again. They passed a wide window made of cracked glass. If not for the swarming Thraíha behind the cracked glass and the adornments of multi-colored leaves woven into shrouds and adorning the space, it may have looked like a control room on a military station.

“We are blessed in the canyons,” the husky Thraíha had told Nickel. “Mother Hawk blesses us through the fog, her warmth as radiant as the sun. On this morning, we will now show you the blessed natures of the cosmos, where Father Hawk carved a world for us.”

“Will there be fog?” asked Nickel.

“The perch is the only part of the canyons where you can see the cosmos without the orange embers, said the Thraíha. Where only the stars of the Huntsman shine through.”

There was a loud banging and scraping overhead, a thunderous cacophony that threatened to break Nickel’s ears drums.

As their platform lifted closer to the ceiling, one of its chain mechanisms hit a separate pulley embedded in the ceiling, creating a louder rumbling as entire plates in the ceiling came apart. It was an unraveling of metal plates, clanking and twisting as a starry space beckoned them, opening wider and wider. Nickel’s breath caught in his throat and he squeezed his eyelids without closing them, bracing against the chilly wind that wafted through the widening opening in the ceiling. Where am I going? thought Nickel. The chains wobbled in the cacophony, jerking the platform.

Nickel scrunched his limbs, holding his arms tight against his sides. He grabbed the arm of the husky Thraíha in an instinctive grip, tightening his fingers around the thick layer of fur and the stringy arm underneath.

“Where are we going?” Nickel exclaimed. The grip he held felt like a last anchor against the searingly dark clearing emerging above him.

Nickel heard no answer in the growing din of the ceiling. He didn’t dare look around him to see the Thraíha’s reactions. The expanding clearing of stars was like a blanket of clear cold threatening to smother him.

Months in the hovercraft’s screens and later in the orange fog had not prepared him for the vista of nature he was being raised to.

The speckles of glowing white peeked at him, one by one as he moved closer to the ceiling and its metal plates moved apart. He’d seen them before. Clear as day, wrenching the memory of a starry sky that he’d visited or that had visited him in a large grassy expanse. A meadow he’d run through as a young child. The bespeckled face of his father looming over him like a moon, his glasses glinting in the night light and his beard wide, dark and enveloping.

Each hair as pitch black as the night sky blanketing the stars. The shadows of a past before the Ether splayed out in all their clear darkness over the sky, threatening to engulf him.

Had he seen stars in a real meadow? Or was it the Ether? Nickel’s heart hammered in his chest, only becoming noticeable as his throat began to clamp onto itself. The thunderous dismantling of the ceiling was so close it was like a looming ocean wave threatening to crash onto him. Nickel was about to get closer to seeing if that memory was real or not. The real nature of what he remembered was awaiting him just mere feet away.

2200 Blues Chapter 47: Part Two

The robed figures broke their vertical procession, moving past one another to stand in front of the rising canyon, standing next to one another. Nickel and Farrul stopped walking, standing behind by a few feet.

The robed men removed their hoods, shuffling their feet before the rock, a few taking meager steps over its inclining surface looking into the rising darkness.

Nickel walked a few steps closer to them, going unnoticed as they shuffled inside of their robes, removing objects from under, clinking against one another, handing them to each other.

Nickel turned around, looking for Farrul’s reaction. He still stood farther away, eyes glazed, mouth firmed in an impassive expression. His scraggly hair blew over his eyes in the soft wind, obscuring them. When they whipped aside, flattening against the side of his head, his cold eyes met Nickel’s, unmoving, like he was watching him.

“You good?” Nickel asked him.

Farrul didn’t respond, just continuing to watch him and passively.

Nickel turned around, feeling disconcerted. He could always rely on Farrul to be sordid and lacking in cooperation. The thought flared the pang of loneliness once again.

The Ether didn’t guarantee familiarity. Nickel was discovering that through Farrul, the only other young person he’d met in person who was from the Ether.

The robed men stood at a wayside, some squatting next to the rock. One of them rummaged at his hip, pulling out a bulky object that clanged against the metal of his belt.

Two other men standing next to him rushed to his side to support the object that he carried. First holding it in place, the robed figures extended large cords from the insides of their robes. Another man to their left walked around all of them, squatting above them on the rock, holding out a large piece of stone flint.

The four men stood close together and the three remaining men stepped up onto the rock, kneeling and standing right at the edges of the four Thraíha men working with their tools.

The three men moved from side to side, the two on the opposite ends pulling back and forth in their directions as the man in the middle, moved with their force, rocking back and forth. His hair fell over his neck, cascaded over his dropped hood. It was dark and tousled. The man standing above him stayed close to them, but his contributions were largely hidden. The remaining Thraíha men stood at their sides, holding them in place with their hands.

Nickel frowned. What the four men huddled together were doing with their tools was hidden to him.

The men grunted and heaved, their swaying robes ruffling the earth and clattering against its sediments of rock and dirt.

Wisps of fog thickened around their bodies as wind picked up, a short howl bringing an obscuring tan haze that made them look like a giant bear huddled on the ground eating at an animal’s carcass.

A spark of light billowed in the middle of the four huddled men, bringing a glow that emanated between their bodies, highlighting the contours of their individual selves once again.

Orange flared around them, illuminating the fine textures of the grainy rock ledge.

“Follow,” said a robed man in a hollow voice, turning to face Nickel and Farrul from the left of a man dismantling the cord. As the cord holding man turned around, the cord revealed itself; a long twiny rope, corded in consecutive knots, fraying, burnt at the end.

“What are our names to you?” asked Farul in a low voice. Nickel whirled around to stare at him. Those were the first words Farrul had spoken since the end of their initiation rite. His body appeared dwarfed by the fur robe he adorned, highlighting his frailty. His sunken chest seemed to sink below the sides of the robe that covered him. His eyes were sullen, peering at the robed men. His mouth was stretched in an unwelcoming line.

The other three turned to look at Farrul from their tools. Swinging aside the glowing object, the Thraíha holding it frowned at Farrul. His eyes were darkened shadows, hanging over his firm cheekbones and the searching glow of the flaming lantern he held at his stomach.

The three to the right of him tore off the cord tethering it, allowing the man holding the lantern to pull it closer against his chest.

All the ceremonial three men turned to look at Farrul, their faces revealed by their fallen hoods. All of them had dark bands wrapped over their foreheads, shadows dancing across their faces as the lantern bobbed in the air, falling against its carrier’s stomach as he adjusted it. The Thraíha stilled, staring at Farrul as they adjusted to turn to him.

“You are nameless to us,” said the lantern holding man. Fires danced inside of the glass case, melting a wicker material at the bottom of the black case. The man’s voice was cool.

“What are your names,” said another man, pivoting on his feet as he turned to look at Farrul from the side of the three already facing him, “what are your names to us?” His voice was higher pitched and smoother, speaking of youth. “Your names are—

“You were following us to be given names,” interrupted the lantern holding man. The shadows deepened across his eyes, sinking over his cheeks. “By the light of the Huntsman where all names come from.”

“Stars?” breathed Farrul. His expression loosened, betraying a hint of surprise and of being overwhelmed. His gaze widened; eyes stretched in an overwhelmed gaze. “Is that where we’re going?”

“Normally, you’d find out when we finally brought you up there,” said the younger Thraíha, his hood still shadowing his face.

Ferrule’s mouth widened in a small o.

“I’ve never seen stars before,” he whispered. Catching Nickels eye, he glanced at his feet, almost seeming abashed.

“Not just any stars,” the young man said continuing to look at Farrul as the rest of the robed men turned, the ones at the foot of the rock, taking steps to meet with the three who’d climbed further up. “The stars that the Huntsman wants to show us on the morning you were born Thraíha.”

“Hurry up!” grunted a throaty man already started up the rock on the left. “Enough explaining. We have blessings to see!”

The lantern holding man turned and waved at Nickel and Farrul, motioning for them to follow. Turning, he climbed up the rock, moving up one step at a time, briskly following the rest of the Thraíha.

“Quick,” muttered the gravelly voiced man, charging up the rock, leading at the front as he grabbed at the rock with his hands, bending his knees towards his chest. “The sun will break soon.”

The Thraíha moved at a brisk pace, climbing up the inclining surface of gravel in wide strokes, stepping across with a practiced balance, shifting their weight according to the oncoming rises, fallings, and protrusions in the rock. They climbed with ease, indicating an accustomed ease to the path.

Nickel and Farrul followed them, scrambling over the sharply changing elevations in the canyon, occasionally slipping over its changing surfaces.

The ground gave way to gaps, the path turning into mounds of boulders, and large rocks with uneven surfaces for them to grab onto and step over.

The growing a lightness of the morning air dimmed as they made their way deeper into the canyons, climbing further to its heart.

Stars.

Nickel couldn’t help but feel a strange anxiety about what they were to see. He couldn’t remember the last time in recent memory that he’d really been able to pay attention to a field of stars in the night sky. He’d remembered faint memories of looking up from orchards before his parents had bought the industrial hub. He’d seen stars then, but he’d been so young. There had been occasional stars in the flights he’d been on, across the U.R. with his parents on a commercial air terminal, and now and then, sparsely populating the dark haze of air pollution that he’d flown through on his hovercraft.

Did the Thraíha see the stars often? They hunted often, so they must have seen the stars. How else would they have been able to find their way back from the far distances they traveled across the Atlantic from their encampment to hunt for hawks and other food?

The procession of leading Thraíha paused. Nickel frowned, pausing at the stilled back of a robed Thraíha. Farrul stopped short behind him, standing aside on a rock outlet.

A hushing murmur spread through the Thraíha in front. They rustled against one another, then the men at the front of the line crunched over gravel, disappearing into the darkness of a gaping opening in the inlet they stood in. They disappeared in between the narrowing walls.

Solid footsteps occurred on an unseen surface. They clanked, producing a dull padding sound, as though on metal.

Nickel couldn’t see much through the darkened opening and the bodies of the Thraíha in front of him obstructed the way. They stopped rustling against one another, standing in a half hazard arrangement, huddled against each other diagonally, across the entrance of the cove.

Nickel shivered, feeling a chill sweep through him. Without the insulated dankness of the egg’s interior, his bare chest raised gooseflesh. Even with the robe, he felt shaking tremors of coldness.

“What happens if I don’t go in?” said Farrul. The Thraíha still standing outside of the entrance turned around to face him, frowning in consternation.

“Then you make do in the canyons,” husked the Thraíha man with the hollow voice. “Without us…….without any of the Thraíha…………or the grace of the Huntsman.”

Farrul’s mouth was firm, a grim line. His eyes betrayed fear. The boy who had once held a retort or grumbling for nearly everything, now had nothing to say.

Watching for his usual retorts, and hearing none, the Thraíha turned around, waiting for the men inside the cove.

Their clanking footsteps were no longer audible. Farrul’s question dawned on Nickel. Could Nickel make do in the canyons? Or was he always to live by the map of the Huntsman? Did the map of the Huntsman go far beyond the Thraíha hunting and water grounds?

The clanking sounds resumed, faint at first. Creaking emanated from the points of impact, like jagged cracks splintering at the bottom of the darkness.

The clanking sounds grew louder and one man returned from the cove.

There was a loud high-pitched creaking that echoed from the darkness. A shaft of light broke through, falling from the inner ceiling, illuminating the two Thraíha men emerging from the darkness.

The light grew wider, and the creaking grew louder, expanding the high pitch of its timber.

The Thraíha men came out, ushering the rest of the Thraíha inside, waving with their hands.

They followed, bustling together once more and resuming their shuffling movement of robes brushing against one another and the ground as their bodies swayed with their huddling movements.

To keep warm, thought Nickel. He frowned as he followed them from behind, once more feeling like the out of sync straggler that he was, his movements clumsier and less assured compared to them. As he gained footing on the even surface, he regained a better sense of balance.

Farrul bounded lightly over to the remaining boulders behind him, his feet tapping against the stone and jumping to Nickel’s side.

Farrul may not be Thraíha, but he’d spent more time in the Atlantic Canyons, if only the rock plain of the deserted flagpole that he’d squatted on.

Nickel had never truly found out what that flagpole had once belonged to. He hadn’t seen any hovercraft wreckage around the site. Presumably that was how Farrul and Steve had ended up in these canyons as Nickel had.

Farrul slipped in front of Nickel, tagging behind the last three men who entered the cove. Startled, Nickel came to a halt. He looked around, noticing the greater shadows that wrapped around the site than from the incline where they first started trekking. The rock walls had enveloped them at this point, reaching far behind Nickel, like the jagged walls of a staircase reaching far down below, snaking over innumerable boulders and rock formations. The walls had first beckoned him, standing in front of him along the top of the canyon. Now they surrounded him sending cascading shadows that Nickel nearly forgot it was morning.

Nickel stood still, looking out below. The windstorm had thickened, and the obscuring haze had risen once more, tanned by the canyon shadows. The incline they had started from and the rock plain behind it was now invisible, a distance beyond the immediate fog and the steep drop of crushing rock that appeared like a frozen avalanche.

This world was getting to Nickel. Without the distractions of his hovercraft, it’s ever-present screens, flickering to life at his presence. This was a world of haze and shadows. This is what we’ve done to the world, Nickel thought. The screens of the Ether Realms were a window away from the earth. While the Ether Realms kept running and men built more places inside of it, the real world became a hollow mirage.

Yet there was a beauty to the loneliness and the emptiness of the canyons. It had been so long since Nickel had been in the Ether. A month at least. He noticed how strangely clear his mind felt. Even with the clear pangs of desperation at being at the whims of the strict and foreign Thraíha. And the fear of losing out on his parent’s dreams. His mind was a vista as large as the canyons, uncluttered by the Ether.

A loud scraping echoed from within the cove and the shouts of grunting Thraíha ensued.

Nickel flinched and turned around, jolted by the immediacy of the noises. He ran into the cove. Slowing down inside of the darkness, he realized he was the last one in it.

Farrul had rushed in before him so that he wouldn’t be afraid of being left behind.

2200 Blues Chapter 47: Part One

“And thus the creation of the universe came to a standstill,” the old man croaked. The windstorm came to a still, quieting just in time for him to bring the Thraíha creation story to a close.

Nickel had nearly forgotten his positioning in the egg and his initial feelings of claustrophobia, numbed by his stillness and the ever-present darkness he inhabited inside of the egg.

“Father Hawk rescued the Flower of Life, vanquishing the coyote as he fell forth from his own cliff, his tumbling crash to be heard across the Huntsman’s Soul, shaking his very being.”

“Running through the canyons and into the jungle, Father Hawk was beckoned by the Eagles and the monkeys. His victory ushered a new age where he reigned as God once again, becoming the God king he was destined to be.”

“Rushing to Mother Hawk, her wounds were dressed by the petals of the flower. She was never to be in her original physical form.”

There was an orchestrated gasp from the choir, sounding like a mass of onrushing eels.

“The seeds of the Flower of Life pollinated the newly broiling Life.”

“The roiling embers of this child became the planet Earth and where the pollen salvaged life, it became the creatures and plants made in the face of the Great Huntsman and his Soul.”

“The Huntsman drew forth across the constellations, drawing a map of the stars and planets from which to hold life and its home planet Earth. He brought the first point of the constellation to the center of this, marking the sun by which life shows its face and the Thraíha hunt.”

“The Huntsman swung his lasso through the cosmos, bringing a star towards Life, becoming its sun, the light by which we Thraíha hunt.”

“Life was made in the image of the Coyotes, the Lizards, the Eagles, and all the animals and plants of the huntsman soul. Finally, the Monkeys were recreated, remade by the powers of the flower they extracted by aiding Father Hawk in his quest.”

“This time, they gave way to a new creature called Humans.”

A steady drum beat ensued from the encircling vantage points of the Thraíha compound, echoing from the far-off openings in the surrounding walls and spires.

“Like the Monkeys who built the logs and timber surrounding the canyons, Humans were destined to build new worlds from the roiling embers of Earth, giving to Life, sometimes taking away.”

“Of all the creatures made from life, they were the most similar to the Huntsman, searching and hunting for food, mastering their souls, satiating themselves until they could build new worlds.”

“When that happened, they took from the roiling embers of Earth, giving to Life. The embers came from the yoke of an egg that hatched prematurely, before the hawk child of Mother and Father Hawk could be born.”

“Sometimes, they took too much from the roiling embers, causing for destruction of Life, taking away from it.”

“When that happened, the Huntsman summoned a hunt of the Hawk once again. That took the form of the Thraíha, the hunters and travelers of the Atlantic Canyons, a land rife with the embers of earth.”

“Once again, the embers of earth threatened to engulf our planet and our life once again, humans having sinned as Father Hawk once did, unleashing destruction and waste.”

“We answer the call of the Huntsman, searching for the Hawk, ending the never ending flight from eternity, knowing that Father Hawk will answer with his salvation as he did in the lands of the Huntsman’s Soul.”

“Father Hawk is the answerer, king of the universe. Mother Hawk is the blesser, knowing that her child is premature, and having lost her corporeal form, she must flee from the scene of Life and its Providence.”

“The child must learn on its own, and Mother Hawk will give the nurturing blessings, flying over and rippling through the fields we make our pasture, the water we drink from and use to grow our crops, and the nests we form with our brothers, sisters, and children.”

“Father Hawk is the answerer king of the universe. Mother Hawk is the blesser, guarding the nests for the future and the Huntsman is the atcher, pointing the way to our salvation from amongst the stars.”

“Thraíha chung jurra!” chanted the choir of women encircling the old storyteller, Nickel and Farrul.

“The elements of Earth have brought two souls from the Past World, ripped from the yoke of life and its raging fires,” shouted the old man.

“Thraíha chung jurra! Muhagh yeeooh houvrah!”

“The stars of the Huntsman have shown these two souls to us and us to them!”

“Yeeoh houvra!”

“Cast aside from the shadows of the Past World, born under the light of the Huntsman’s cosmic grace, I give you two new members of Thraíha!

“Rise hatchlings!”

After a few nearing steps crunching the gravel of the earth, and a pit-pat on the cement of the pavilion platform, a loud screeching occurred above Nickel as the lid of his egg scraped off of the top, pushed by arms darkened by the sleeves of heavy robes.

The dimness of the murky tan fog was a blinding flash of light intruding upon the darkened space of the egg. Nickel grimaced, eyelids flickering over the new light.

The cool stillness of the egg was broken by the slithering currents of air blowing above the egg. Its chill wafted through the opening, causing Nickel to shiver.

“Thraíha chung jurra!”

“Muhagh yeeooh houvrah!”

Nickel slid his back along the softly curving interior of the egg, pushing up with his arms.

“Thraíha chung jurra!”

“Muhagh yeeooh houvrah!”

“Enter the world of light!” crooked the old narrator, “Awaken to the stars, embrace their arms.”

The screeching of the lid intensified as it slipped off completely, letting the chilliness of the night sink over Nickel. Nickel extended his knees allowing himself to stand. When he arose from the darkened state of the chamber, he emerged to see, not the lights of the hovercraft screens blinking to life, but the eager expressions of his fellow Thraíha men and women, standing around him, separated by gender, all standing erect, noble and proud.

Their eyes glinted in the dull tan of the fog, an orange dimmed to the browns of a twilight still waiting on the morning sunrise. Their feathers adorning their tunics, wrapped around their collars and waists fluttered in the gentle thrumming of the never ending winds. Robed ceremonial figures had left Nickel’s egg, now clustered around Farrul’s egg. They were stooped over, pushing the lid off. The echoey warble of Farrul’s grunting escaped the opening of the egg. One of the ceremonial figures reached his arm inside, ushering Farrul to silence by slapping the inside of the egg and whispering, “quiet!” Pushing off the lid the robed figures turned aside to carry the heavy lid, scraping it along the rock hewn floor of the platform.

“Thraíha chung jurra!”

“Muhagh yeeooh houvrah!”

Finally visible, the storyteller was an aged mosaic of wide reaching skin and wrinkles stretching over his face. His eyes were a dull white, glazed with no pupils or irises, just a ball of murky pale grey.

“With dawn nearly upon us, Father Hawk has nearly left his nest,” the old man spoke, his voice crisper in all of its croaking outside of the egg. His voice lay over the air like sandpaper on wood or steel. “Follow the ceremonial leaders to the last path the Huntsman left tonight.” The fog flickered, betraying a warming complexion. The bear skin of the moccasin clothes adorned by the Thraíha grew brighter, its brown fur growing in contrast to the red and gray feathers wrapped around their chests and waists. The sun was slowly rising. Under the growing light, the features of the old storyteller became more alight. It revealed faint grey irises and pupils within the pale eyes, streaked with the same grey, as light and near imperceptible as the wisps of hair laying over his scalp in loosely hanging strands.

“Where are we going?” Nickel asked, breaking the ordered procession of language since the initiation rite began. He looked at the old man for an answer, just barely noticing Farrul arising from his egg to the side.

The old storyteller opened his mouth in a slight smile, withholding from spoken words. The mass of Thraíha were a dusty folk. The scene before him was like many an AI-induced learning module, only the people were dustier, of courser skin, their clothes of jagged make and the air of greater velocity and spontaneousness.

This moment was what the Thraíha had promised him. Was it back to the hovercraft after this? Soaring like Father Hawk? Or would the Thraíha even let him?

“You go,” croaked the old man, a shard of sunlight glinting white across his empty looking eyes, “where every Thraíha has gone. Up the steppe of the Past World and into the light of the Huntsman.”

Nickel’s mind coiled around itself for a response, finding none he could decide on. The mass of the Thraíha standing before him suddenly appeared like a pack of animals in their bearskin, like Nickel was caught in their den, and their words were part of a language he couldn’t quite be a part of completely.

Quivering chills laced Nickel’s chest, raising goose flesh, raising nearly every corner of his skin above his waist. Feeling more conscious of his bareness in that moment, it seemed to him that he was bereft of his former life at the hands of the Thraíha. Would they let him return to his hovercraft in an expedition or quest to Hedonim?

The robed figures turned, their robes furrier than that of the rest of the Thraíha, their thicker moccasin fur brushing against each other, a rattling percussion of thick moccasin fur.

After the feeling of awe Nickel had felt listening about Father Hawk, a heavy uncertainty rose through his chest. Was he to live within the confines of the Thraíha customs and abide by their values and myths for the rest of his life?

Farrul bucked his head as the robed figures reentered the platform, stepping onto its surface, he averted their gazes as they came over to him with a long robe made of moccasin fur.

Would Nickel ever see civilization again?

The men around Farrul draped a robe over his shoulders, beckoning for him to put his arms through. He did while barely looking into their eyes. Three of them standing in front of Farrul walked over to Nickel, holding a clumped bundle that was his robe.

They helped put it over his shoulders, two of them standing behind Nickel to do so. The fur was prickly against his bare skin, scuffing his back before the material sunk over his flesh, blanketing him with a warmth that melted over the airy chill on his skin.

A clearing was formed in between the groups of men and women behind the storyteller. They walked in between and around one another, breaking their parallel symmetry so that the ceremonial leaders could escort Nickel and Farrul out of the pavilion space.

One of the robed figures waved a hand at nickel, motioning for him to follow. Nickel followed him, hearing Farrul join behind him.

They passed through the opening in between the men and the women. To the left were the men, several of them holding candles casting warm orange halos amongst them.

Father Akela stood aside, separated with the rest of the of men, his ceremonial role having ended. He watched Nickel with eyes that glinted in the nearby candlelight of a man standing next to him.

To the right, amassed in front of the nursery were the women of Thraíha present for the ceremony. Several women held candles as well, illuminating solemn expressions within the halos of light. They appeared to be more somber than those of the men looking at Nickel.

Passing through the opening Nickel spotted the Thraíha girl who had inducted him in the ceremonial rituals painting over his chest. He caught a glimpse of her frowning face. She looked distressed. When Nickel’s eyes met hers, she averted her gaze, withdrawing within the gathered women.

Nickel craned his neck to see where she went, but robed figures behind him and Farrul nudged him to keep moving. Nickel turned around, confused at the expression he saw on the girl. There was more to the Thraíha folk than their customs. That both elucidated him, filling him with both curiosity and hope to sway any of the Thraíha to see his perspective, but a dreadful anxiety. How could he hope to find the meaning in his interactions with the Thraíha through the confines of their customs and the complexity of their individual lives, made generation by generation in these radiation infested canyons?

They’d never seen the U.R. like Nickel had, never lived amongst its citizens or within the Ether Realms. How could he explain to any of the Thraíha how he could find a way back into the Ether to a people who had completely forgotten about it many generations ago?

These questions swarmed his mind as he was led out of the clearing, past the huddled masses of men and women. The pocketed glow of the candles dimmed as they gained distance, led past the winding curvature of the low roofed nursery, until its curvaceous rock walls joined the earth. While twinklings of morning light slithered through the fog, the world became dim and a jagged step of dirt and stone rose before them, forming a horizontal protrusion in the earth.

2200 Blues Chapter 46: A Hootful Harvest

Introduction: Dawn’s light peeks through the jungle, awakening a chorus of hoots to signal the start of a harvest. In this latest installment, we join Father Hawk as he emerges from slumber into a jungle buzzing with activity and ancient tradition.

After reading, please share your thoughts and feedback. Your comments and insights are eagerly awaited, as they help sculpt the final form of this tale. Engage with the narrative and leave your mark on the 2200 Blues saga.

The distant hooting was like an overhanging apple, suspended from a branch weighing down towards father hawk, but always out of reach in his dream. Slowly, the hooting turned crisper and its bouncing branch stiller. Dreamed images turned half-forgotten as father hawk blinked awake.

A veneer of opalescent light spread over the rocky roof, brightening his father hawk’s eyes followed its path to the lips of the cavern.

The dark green of the forest trees faded to a hazy lighter color as there tips bordered the blue dawn of the morning sky. The sensations of prickling sand under his butt emerged in his morning consciousness. He stood up to shake it off and found that his legs were stiff. Looking down, he saw green wrappings of grass and leaves, twisted, interwoven around areas that ahad once been brittle, injured from his flight from the Shadowlands. His wings had been wrapped as well.

Father hawk turned to look into the darkness of the cavern’s deep interior far behind. Unlike the rest of the cavern ahead of him, the deep interior corridors were just as dark as they’d been last night—— or at least the last night he could remember.

Morning illumination just barely lit the interior corridors of jagged rock, slithering from the cave entrance until it was swallowed by the darkness of the catacombs behind. A narrow shadow of Father Hawk emerged at his feet, rising behind on the earthen floor, but cutting off abruptly.

He’d seen that shadow splayed across the sediments of dirt and pebbles encrusting this dark stone floor. At different lengths and places in the cave.

How long had he been here? No Eagles had wrested him from the cave as they would have from the nests of their homestead amongst their canopy of the Shadowlands to train.

There was another hooting from outside. It was a mellow sound, punctuating the gentle rustlings of the jungle.

Place to place, he traveled. Moving closer to Coyote Rock.

The green leaves outside of the cave glowed as a growing sunrise dappled the thickness of the jungle air. Shafts of sunlight grew warmer as they searched into the cave. The rock lips were illuminated, revealing a pale grey granite. Father Hawk stepped across The Cave floor, stopping at the lip, feeling the warmth of sunlight caress his feathers.

Did he want to reach Coyote Rock? Or was he meant to be somewhere else? Father Hawk sighed, the noise drowned by a sudden swelling of winds. Once it died down, a cacophony of hooting monkeys replaced the din. Frowning, Father Hawk stepped over the lip of the cave, feeling dried grass for the first time since being rescued by the Eagles. The wet, grassy, soil encrusted feel of the earth came into contact with his claws for the first time since being rescued.

The abrasive feel of dirt scraped his claws while the grass caressed his feet with a damp texture. The din of hoots grew louder as the winds died down. Red and orange fruits shot up into the air, followed by yellow bananas. monkeys erupted from the thick jungle canopy. Rust colored creatures, jumping off of thick leaves and branches, hollering at the fruits shooting and cascading over the jungle canopy.

They grabbed at the fruits tossed up into the air, knawing them with their mouths and hands. A monkey hooted in close proximity to Father Hawk, jumping down from a large branch in thickets of trees to the night of the cave. The monkey landed on his long dangling furry arms, his narrower stubby legs hovering above the earth, held out extended across the jungle floor. The monkey immediately tucked his legs in and flipped his body backwards, using his bristling arms to somersault towards Father Hawk.

Flipping his body in the air, he landed on his feet, stamping on the ground next to father hawk and The Cave. Startled father Hock flinched, scooting to the left. Bits of dust and dirt popped from the earth in the wake of the monkeys landing.

“Hoi, hawk!” spoke the monkey in a shrill hoot. Father hawk said nothing, frozen by surprise.“Have you grabbed a fruit?” asked the monkey.

“Grabbed a fruit?” said Father Hawk, looking up at the sky of raining apples, oranges and bananas falling over the jungle trees.

“Surely, you aren’t missing the harvest?” said the monkey. “You’ve been asleep long enough now. You can’t miss the day of the harvest!”

“How long have I been asleep?” asked Father Hawk. “How long have I been in the cave?”

“The monkeys let you rest until the day of the harvest!” shouted the monkey. “The time for feasting has arrived!”

“How long was I resting in The Cave?” repeated Father Hawk, speaking in a more irritated tone.

“You were in The Cave for as long as we were building the great Harvest Log,” the monkey said. He bounced on his toes, padding at the ground with his hands. He was distracted, his interest taken by rustlings coming from the jungle at the border of the grass clearing before father hawk. His head swiveled around as oranges and bananas came whizzing out of the bordering plants from the left and right.

“Wait!” shouted father hawk, holding out a stiff, bandaged wing. The monkey ignored him, stooping over to sniff at the parts of the earth and circling the falling fruit.

“Where have I been for the Huntsman knows how long? Father Hawk complained. as the sun grew brighter, his pensiveness and uncertainty about his whereabouts grew stronger. The memory of the ghastly lake of Shadowspawn and Mother Hawk’s turmoiled predicament still held forth in his mind. It was a fainter, yet still painful memory that contrasted the bright rays of the sun and the cascading colors of fruits.

The monkey turned to look at Father Hawk as he crouched on all fours over a clump of bananas and fruits fall into the left of the clearing.

“You’ve been here since we started building the harvest log and you’re here today once we’ve finished it,” the monkey said. Father Hawk felt his spirits crushed if he had been resting in the cave for as long as the monkeys had been preparing for a harvest, then he would have been away from his quest for the Flower of Life for a long time.

The monkey’s eyes widened as an even larger clump of bananas crashed into the front of the clearing from the tall jungle stalks.

“How long have you been bur—,” started Father Hawk.

He was interrupted by the monkey breaking out into a series of indecipherable hollering hoots:

“OOOOH-AAAAAAAH—”

The monkey’s eyes bulged out and he stood up on his legs. His chest of gray-brown fur splotching his red hide rippled as he jumped up and down in excitement.

“OOOOH-AAAAAAH-EEEEEEEH-OOUII-”

As more fruits rained down from the trees higher in the jungle canopy from all sides, other monkeys dived out of the large leaves overhead, chasing after the fruit, rippling several large pal leaves apart as they crashed into the clearing.

one monkey was tall and gray, landing to the right of the rust colored one, while the other was short and brown, landing to the left of the red monkey.

Stopping short of grabbing the fruits before them, the three monkeys slowly extended their torsos, craning their necks to peer at each other with eyes that stretched with suspicion.

Father Hawk’s heart thudded and he slowly inched backwards on his claws towards the entrance of the cave, anticipating a brawl between the monkeys he didn’t care to find himself caught in. the last one between himself and the shadow spawn snakes had left him asleep in a cave for what seemed like the better part of a whole season. The monkeys slowly shifted their bodies to each side, leaning further on one side, moving in a sluggish circle to the left.

They slowly extended their palms and fingers, elongating their arms and grazing the grass, sifting through its needles so as to gauge and mark their territory.

Father Hawk said nothing, standing still and silent fearing A brawl over the clumps of fruit littered over the ground. He feared for any movement or word of his to trigger the first action of a fight.

He need not worry for the monkeys began in what seemed a ceremonial ritual of hollering like high pitched banshees and jumping up and down.

With each jump, the monkeys opposite them flinched and jerked backwards. Finally, the jumping became so frenetic and frequent that the monkeys stopped responding by shifting their weight or placement of their feet. They stopped reacting to each other’s testings for territory by testing engaging in response. The red monkey grabbed at the apples before him, stuffing them into his mouth letting a few apples in his hand roll off, he grabbed a clump of bananas next to him, lugging them under one arm as the sides of historically furred mouth swelled with the number of apples wedged inside.

The grey colored monkey lunged at the even larger clump of bananas at the front of the clearing. He jumped at them, pulling them back with a hand. The brown and red monkeys raised after the grey monkey and his bananas, the red monkey reaching them first period he tucked the bananas he already held underneath his armpit and running into the gray monkey. Kicked him squarely in the chest, with all the force of motion he could muster

He grabbed the clump of bananas fallen from the gray monkey’s grasp. Jostling the bananas so as not to let their weight tip themselves over, he scrunched them with his fingers, holding them tight under his armpit, before waddling forth, stumbling and letting the bananas dangle by his left hand.

All the while, the brown monkey hollered after the red monkey, chasing him as he bounced across his two feet, running into the forest. Pressing past some small bushes whose thin branches snapped under his weight, he turned to look around as it drooped and sagged over his lower lip.

The grey monkey rolled over on his furry legs, following the brown monkey as they both lunged after the monkey carrying their stolen goods. The red monkey’s eyes bulged, and he blew out his cheeks, sucking the drooping apple further back into his mouth. Turning back around, he waddled further through the forest undergrowth as his monkey pursuers crossed through the bushes, he squatted and jumped in a swift motion, landing on his hind legs, grasping tightly with his fingers as he wobbled. The branch twanged with the vibration of his pressure.

Without turning around, he bent his knees at a slight angle and jumped high into the air, disappearing into the forest. The brown monkey raced after him. He jumped into the air, grabbing a hold of the first branch the red monkey had jumped on. Swinging across the branch, the brown monkey flew into the air after the red monkey.

The grey monkey clambered of trees, using the smaller branches as rungs. There was the sound of a loud thud further in the forest presumably of the red monkey landing on another branch. It was followed by a clamor of rolling fruits smacking against one another.

The red monkey fell onto the forest floor. His crash, the thudding fruits and his flailing scream were heard, but he himself was disappeared within the thickness of the forest. Father hawk winced at the sharp cluster of sounds, imagining how painful the impact must be. He held his breath, waiting to see if he would hear any more of the red monkey. The brown monkey grabbed a hold of the second branch that the brown monkey had landed on. Swinging from it he released himself, shrieking as he plummeted towards the site of the red monkey’s crash. Space before Father Hawk could scrunch his eyes in dreaded anticipation, the shriek of the red monkey emanated from the forest floor, joining the descending shriek of the brown monkey. The grey monkey dropped to the floor as well, joining the fray of shrill shrieking as he did.

Thrashing limbs against leaves and fruits, stamping against the forest dirt.

“OOOOH-AAAH-AAHHH-OOOH-AAH-AH-AHHHH!”

The hollering rose above each other, becoming more and more frantic. The monkeys scuttled away in a chase, the sounds of the earth and foliage rupturing at their feet and their screaming fading into the forest as they did. Father hawk stood dumbfounded, pondering what had just happened. The monkeys, however impulsive and frenetic they were, we’re clearly all heading in the direction of the Harvest.

A newfound stillness seemed to permeate over the forest scene, save for a gentle swing of large green leaves around the trees. Then, more fruits flew out of the canopy, punctuating the slowly swaying cluster of leaves as they dropped at the clearing, rolling to Father Hawk’s feet as he flinched back.

More monkeys tore through the forest canopy, chasing after shooting fruits. They caught them in the air with their mouths and hands diving into the canopy or bounding from tree top to tree top. They all moved to the left, turned towards a distant horizon diagonal to father hawk.

“The harvest begins!” Shouted a big baboon jumping into the air. “The Goings and Happenings from the Huntsman to the coyotes. Here, here! He called out to smaller monkeys popping behind him. “Come here. Food and affairs! Follow to the Harvest! The baboon dived into the canopy, rustling the tree top leaves, and leaving in his wake a series of shrieks and hoots splitting the sky. The furry creatures behind bounded over the treetops, creating a rippling froth of shaking, upturned leaves. They dived after the big-mouthed baboon, in the same direction as the three monkeys fighting over fruit.

The low register of a conch shell blew across the forest, its blare rising high in volume, turning to an echo through the trees.

Father Hawk’s heart thudded. He was closer to Coyote’s Rock, the closest he’d ever been. The animals of nature were coming together unlike they’d ever been before.

Nature could change forever, and the Harvest was the great meeting and feasting of the Animal Kingdom Father Hawk had heard of.

It was all coming together for him to restore the Flower of Life. Would the monkeys let him use it to save his wife? Father Hawk grabbed a clump of bananas with right hand and an apple with another.

Looking around for any hurtling monkeys to avoid, Father Hawk waddled around the clearing. Finding more in his vicinity, he raced into the forest, following clusters of littered fruit splotching the deep green in a brightly colored, half hazard trail.

All the while, hearing hoots and the spongy flattening of his claws on the earth, Father Hawk wondered if he would meet Sunjata and the other Eagles at the Harvest.

FANTASY NOVELLA EPISODE #3

Siona was flinging her arms around herself in a slowly controlled manner. Her fingers and hips grazed the air and the fellow dancers around her, in a titillating manner.

The changing lights above her were like the spasmodic and ever changing canvas of a sky and its weather sped up to an eternity whizzing past in a miniscule pocket of time.

Life and all of its storms and cloudy days— naught but mere flashes of bright and darkening colors— now exploding alongside her dance of eternity. No longer a prolonging of vibrant mood coloring a monotony of flustered existence. But now a phantasmagoria of feeling and passion— gyrating her body and sending the thrill of exhilaration and adrenaline coursing through her chest. Beads of sweat bloomed all over her body. The catharsis of drudgery and livelihood.

In her trance, free from the pressures and heartbreak of the day, she but barely noticed the string of red-clad faces that whizzed past the green-stained windows on the two walls on opposite sides from her.

The old man gently rocking in his wooden armchair was draped in faded green and red fabrics. He was to visit the site of the birthday party for the sake of his granddaughter and of family siesta tradition.

His long leathery, drooping brown face was so wrinkled and his eye-lids were so dazed and close to each other that he looked about to sink into a slumber within the forlorn edges of his armchair, closed off from the excitement around him.

His daughter, the middle aged mother of the teenage birthday girl, had just left his side to retrieve some dishes.

Alone, the old man looked about to sleep. Just when his heavy eye-lids suddenly paused in their slow descent, his murky brown eyes, warm with sleepiness, but now turning to the icy grimness of hardened earth. His eyes opened wider and his snowy eyebrows creased together.

He stared at one of the dully dark green windows adjacent to him.

He’d seen three moving blurs of red like rosy splotches of paint against a green tint, seeping outwards. They were only to be replaced by the dimness of night, returning to the dark green. The only things he could discern through the window were small green plants bordering the edge of the window below and the rolling darkness of the fields beyond.

The old man opened his mouth to make a noise, but was silenced by yet another sight of a red blur. It was a fast-moving entity, wrapped in an aura-like bundle of red cloth. Swinging limbs propelled the body, flapping cloth before disappearing again.

Another blur of a man ran past. This time, the old man saw a narrow band of dark skin and white eyes poking through a red headwrap, making an appearance before vanishing along the trailing red cloth into the confines and dark recesses of the night.

The old man wheezed, sounding like cracking ice. He choked around the words of warning he wanted to shout.

He shifted his shoulders ever so slowly to his right, looking for his daughter.

“V-vinika?” he muttered.

His voice was drowned out by the warble of the party.

“Vinika?” he repeated in a louder voice.

The lights of the room dimmed ever so faintly, before returning to their normal colorfulness and luminosity.

FANTASY NOVELLA EPISODE #2

“You’re saying they left for religious reasons?”

The question and his voice was drowned out by the cacophony of a siesta that had bled into night.

In the courtyard of the building perched atop the lone grassy hill, the stars expanded against the canvas of the open-air roof.

The sky flashed in color, turning from a pitch black to a bright green. The stars dilated, swarming like bubbles, expanding and frothing in explosions of hot white that spilled across the edges of the open-air roof.

The green of the sky melted back to a pitch black. The white auras of dilating stars became fading ghosts of flashing lights, dimming, but impressing their phantom flashes of color onto Karvhael’s eyesight as they died.

The two young women near Karvhael darkened against the swelling colors. Their thick locks of black hair swung to and fro. The one on the left had thickly curled hair, bouncing amidst her dance. The girl to her right had straight and luscious hair that sayed like a pendulum of fluid water.

A breeze grazed Karvhael, touching the right side of his face. The black masses of hair in front of him rustled. They were all surrounded by solid walls. The wind was coming from inside.

“I had to save up four months for this!” shouted the minstrel. He was a short stubby man standing over the cauldrons of foaming green liquid on a long black table standing at the right end of the room. He and his table were on a slightly raised platform of dark wood, looking over the crowd of entranced dancers. Bubbling green liquid oozed past the edges of the steaming black cauldrons, fizzing, popping and secreting a substance that dripped over the sides of the cauldrons. He hurriedly wiped off the spilling green. He muttered something unheard over the party’s noise and turned to a cabinet, opening it, fishing around empty cauldrons and packets of potion chemicals.

“Give us a bold one!” shouted Tivie, a large thick-armed young man standing to the corner of the room. “Give us Love Cauldron!”

“Uh, that one might be too strong for the kettle to handle,” the minstrel said. “And….we’ve heard that before……..too many times for me to hear.”

Karvhael could still make out these people through the lucid visionscape induced by the consumption potion he’d drank hours ago. The minstrel looked swarthy, his face’s rotund features and their sweat gleamed against the changing kaleidoscopic lights of the ballroom. Green— bright green upon yellowing hues turning to a bright orange and then bright pink, bleeding into a deep red.

Amidst the swaths of washing colors, young men stood with their eyes dancing over drinking cups they brought to their lips, coolly viewing the ballroom and its delights.

At the center of the room, vivacious young girls danced together in slim-fitting, loosely flowing robes. Their eyes were alight with mirth and ecstasy, illuminated by the glowing and changing colors of the room.

Long flowing hair and many limber limbs bounced, jiggled and danced in many other ways across the floor and around their own faces.

The limbs were of smooth youthful skin, flashing the bright reflecting colors. The girls’ curves were highlighted in the crevices and bumps of their narrow robes and dresses.

“What a pity,” thought Karvhael. “What a pity, here, tonight. What a pity that these lovely souls have to face slaughter.”

Karvhael’s conscious burned with the flaming sadness of his own inability to correct the course of events waiting outside in the darkness of night. The flames grew brighter and brighter, becoming pangs that pressed on his chest from within.

The world, however small, or however large had been teetering on the cataclysm of this very night.

The dancing was already underway. The Bloody Red Mystics were on their way.

Debauchery and warning. Pleasure or fear. Karvhael had found himself caught in the delights of the siesta. His focus teetered between the pleasure of his experience and the looming fear that he knew awaited them.

The room expanded so far that the sky began to enlarge. If Karvhael didn’t start moving his body faster, he would then feel like the ceiling was pressing in upon himself.

It was already happening.

Karvhael sputtered, feeling like too little and too much air was filling his lungs at once.

He heaved forward, feeling his panting press up from his chest to his face which felt like it was constricting.

Karvhael pushed himself back, lying against the wall. He leaned to the right, grabbing at darkly painted pots and pans with gold linings. His hand touched moist food and drink. Hot and cold. Yellow, steaming, brown. His face fell forward, enveloping in watery mush. Blackness seeped forth. He saw nothing and he blacked out.