Aurelius shrugged. “No, for her size the
Halcyon Courier
is about as fast as they get, but interceptors and fighters are far faster.”
“Faster than this?” the old man asked as they roared across the lake in mere seconds.
“Much faster, but I’m only using 10% of the
Halcyon’s
potential right now. She could go 10 times this speed had she not been damaged in the crash.” Gabrian gaped at him. “Speaking of speed, Wrinkles, we’d better strap in or we’ll be thrown out of our chairs the minute I change course.” Aurelius snapped his emergency seat restraints into the buckles on either side of his chair, and Gabrian released his death grip on the armrests to do the same. Aurelius noticed that the old man’s hands were shaking violently, and as Gabrian let go of his right armrest, his staff which had been clutched in that hand, clattered to the deck. Suddenly Aurelius felt an enormous weight lift and his mind cleared. He sent the old man a cold look and brought his elbow up in a vicious sideways hook to Gabrian’s jaw. Something cracked and the old man screamed.
“You fool!” Gabrian shouted, spitting blood against the canopy as he reeled in his seat restraints. “Can you not see I am trying to help you?” Aurelius had his pistol trained on the man again.
“I warned you, Wrinkles.” Suddenly everything was clear. The old man had drugged him, that was why he, Aurelius, had temporarily been content to follow Gabrian’s commands.
Gabrian struggled in vain against his seat restraints to reach his fallen staff, but his arm was too short. Aurelius pulled the trigger and a brilliant flash of blue light connected with the old man’s skull. Gabrian slumped in the copilot’s chair, and Aurelius grimaced. “Good riddance,” he muttered as he holstered his pistol.
Aurelius continued flying south over the forest for lack of any better direction to travel. He was struggling to get his bearings. He didn’t recognize any of the terrain was flying over, and for some reason his maps didn’t correspond at all to his actual location. According to the maps, there should have been farms and orchards below him, but all he could see for miles were the twisted gray forms of barren trees poking through a blanket of white mist. Occasionally clearings broke through the trees to reveal clean, white expanses of snow. Icicles glinted off branches as the sun began to peek through the clouds overhead.
Then the forest was behind him. The sun broke cleanly through the clouds and he was racing towards the blue, traversing a broad, rolling expanse of snow-covered ground. To his left, far in the hazy blue distance, lay a soaring range of mountains. According to his map, they were The Cauldrons. They looked just as he remembered them, which was very strange, because if the mountains corresponded to his maps, then everything else should have, too.
They must simply look like the
Cauldrons,
Aurelius thought, reasoning that his
maps had been somehow scrambled in the crash.
The confirmation of that fact was no farther off than the horizon, where Aurelius saw what looked to be a massive metropolis, yet his maps said there should have been only forest there. The skyscrapers rose up like a wall, soaring in places almost as high as the mountains. Sensors confirmed that they were over half a mile high, some more than a mile.
Yet as he drew nearer to those skyscrapers, they began to take on strange, twisting shapes. A frown wrinkled Aurelius's brow as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Before his astonished eyes, those towering structures resolved into a wall of coniferous green trees. He shook his head and checked his sensors, unable to believe it. Surely they couldn’t be as high as his sensors were reporting. No trees in existence were a mile high. It simply wasn’t possible! Yet the closer he flew, the more those trees began to loom over him.
Pulling back on the stick, Aurelius flew higher until he could clear the tops of the trees. He soared out over a canopy of green needles covered in a thick blanket of snow. The canopy was unbroken, and but for his altimeter telling him he was over a mile above the ground, he might easily have mistaken the treetops for the surface. After about ten minutes of flying, the tree canopy fell away sharply, and Aurelius’s stomach fell with it. Far below he could see the snowy white ground. The clearing was large enough that the trees were just a blurry green wall against the horizon, and in the near distance, he saw two very strange things.
The first was what looked like some massive ruins. Old, rusting, tangled webs of concrete and rebar were poking out of the snow and reaching a few hundred meters into the sky. It looked like the moldering remains of a city after it had been bombed, yet the Dominion wasn’t at war except from within, and Freedom had never hit an entire city before. The second strange phenomenon was further off in the distance. It looked like an ancient tribal village. There were wooden cabins and log homes with thatched roofs and smoke curling from their chimneys. Surrounding it all was a high wooden palisade, ringed by a second palisade. The outermost was made up of giant wooden stakes jutting out at a 45 degree angle. It was the most curious thing he’d ever seen. Where in all of the Dominion did such a place exist? Perhaps it was some type of historical site, or an elaborate set for a movie?
That had to be it. He was looking at a movie set.
Aurelius smirked at his own foolishness. For a moment he’d been tempted to believe that old man’s wild story about having been accidentally brought through a portal to another time.
Then Aurelius remembered the massive trees and a frown touched his lips. His head swam dangerously, and he shook it to clear the spots from his vision. Panic crept around the edges of his consciousness, just waiting to pounce, but he managed to keep it at bay by ignoring the questions nagging at the back of his mind.
In a snap decision, Aurelius pulled back on the throttle and began bleeding altitude and speed for a landing. He’d go visit the people on the movie set to get the answers to his questions. There had to be some explanation for all of this. He must be in some part of Meridia he’d simply never visited or heard about before. That’s all it was. Just plain ignorance. He’d never gone to an academy after his primary education, and such was the extent of his ignorance that he didn’t even know there existed a place with such incredibly tall trees.
Once he landed, he’d find someone who could tell him exactly where he was, and then he’d resync his computers to his actual location and everything would line up perfectly with what his ship already knew about the world.
As Aurelius triggered the landing struts and hovered in close to the ground for a landing, the old man beside him stirred and groaned, drawing his attention for just a moment. For the first time Aurelius noticed the man’s clothes: coarsely woven fabric, strange styling . . . and then there was that staff. Gabrian certainly didn’t look like anyone Aurelius had met before.
Something wasn’t adding up.
* * *
Aurelius was just reaching around to unbuckle his seat restraints when he saw the old man stir again. Gabrian was still knocked out by the stun blast, but the effects seem to be wearing off unusually quickly.
At this rate, the old wrinkle bag will wake up before I can get back. Maybe I should stun him again. . . .
No sooner had he thought it than the old man woke up with a start. His head snapped around, pinioning Aurelius with a frosty blue glare. Aurelius's hand dropped to the butt of his pistol even as the old man’s lips began to move.
“Asharta teru aryms alu mer!”
And in that instant Aurelius's pistol flew out of its holster, traversing an arms length of thin air before slapping into the old man’s waiting palm.
Aurelius blinked stupidly. “What?”
“Your skill with self deception is impressive, elder. I can see it's going to take something truly dramatic for you to see the truth.”
“How did you do that?”
“Rational thought is a better blindfold than naïveté. I expected more from you.” Gabrian unstrapped himself from the copilot's chair and stood up. He gestured with the pistol to the cockpit door. “Let's go.” Aurelius hesitated and Gabrian shrugged. “Very well, if you won't go willingly, I'll just shoot you and leave you here until I come back.”
Aurelius gritted his teeth, but then turned and began walking back through his ship. He heard the old man's footsteps echoing softly behind him. “Where are we going?”
“To Dagheim. I sense that Malgore is near.”
“Dagheim?” Aurelius passed his hand over the inner airlock door controls, and the doors opened with a swish of frigid air. He'd left his helmet in the cockpit; he had a feeling he was about to regret that.
“The village you saw on the way here.”
Aurelius nodded. “Right. The
village.
” The outer airlock doors slid open and the cold hit him like a punch in the face. Snow swirled into the airlock, dusting his boots.
“Move,” Gabrian ordered, poking him in the ribs with his own gun.
“I'm moving!” Aurelius shot back. The chill cut almost instantly through Aurelius’s flight suit. He crossed his arms over his chest and hunched his shoulders to keep from shivering. They walked on in silence, their breath forming frosty white clouds as they went. They were crunching across a hardened layer of ice which had formed from repeated melting and freezing of the snow. Every now and then one of their feet would punch through the ice layer and they would sink in up to their knees in the soft powder underneath. The clearing was unbroken and undiminished by trees, as though it didn’t lie in the middle of a giant forest. An icy wind was kicking up hazy clouds of snow that obscured the horizon. Aurelius shot a quick look over his shoulder. He could no longer see the trees he’d flown over. Maybe he’d imagined them. After all, in the crash he had hit his head hard enough to black out.
After about 10 minutes of walking, Aurelius’s nose and ears were frozen to the point that he couldn’t feel them. His eyebrows and lashes were crusted with snow, and he felt shivery. Jagged shapes were beginning to slice through the hazy curtain of snow drawn across the horizon.
“There,” Gabrian said as they drew nearer and nearer to the twisted ruins Aurelius had seen from the air. “These ruins, and all the others like them scattered across Mrythdom are all that remain of your people, elder.”
“What are you talking about, Wrinkles? These aren’t ruins. They aren’t old enough. There must have been some kind of battle and . . .”
The broken spires and crumbling foundations of skyscrapers loomed over them now in all their stark reality. Aurelius couldn’t help but gape as they wove around the broken remains of what had clearly once been a modern city.
Once, a very long time ago.
The twisted alloy frames had all but eroded and rusted away, barely a trace of them remained. The concrete was pitted and pocked, the edges worn smooth by wind and weather. Only synthetics remained reasonably undiminished by the elements. Here lay a wedge of muddied styrofoam tumbling through the ruins, there fluttered a tattered sheet of dirty gray plastic, at his feet he saw a broken piece of colored glass, jutting out of the snow—its edges worn smooth by the wind. Last of all he saw a bright orange placard poking out of the snow, still pegged to a giant wedge of marble. It read:
Fogrim City Brigadiers
.
Aurelius blinked.
Forgim city?
He’d been there only last year to deliver a shipment of arms. The Brigadiers were ex-military, and almost all of them had joined Freedom as a bitter consequence of finally realizing how much they’d done for the Dominion and how little the Dominion had done for them.
If these are the ruins of Fogrim city, then . . .
Aurelius abruptly stopped walking and Gabrian jabbed him in the ribs again with his pistol.
“Keep moving.”
Aurelius ignored him. “These ruins are centuries old.”
“Millennia.”
Aurelius shook his head and he felt his vision blur. The world spun crazily, and snowflakes danced before his eyes; then someone turned out the lights, and his thoughts ceased to trouble him.
* * *
Aurelius awoke with a loud, continuous scraping sound in his ears, like someone rubbing sandpaper on wood to scratch off the flecks of paint. He blinked his eyes open and found himself staring up at a cold, blue slice of sky with fluffy white clouds racing to snuff it out. His face felt numb and his head was throbbing. Where was he? What had happened?
As he glanced to the right and left, he saw that he was being dragged across the snow and ice on a dirty piece of plastic.
“Stop,” he groaned.
“You’re awake.”
The scraping sound stopped. He lifted his head to see Gabrian untying him. “What happened?”
“You could no longer deceive yourself about what has happened to you.”
Aurelius’s brow furrowed as he dredged up his last conscious memory. He’d been looking at a weathered placard which read
Fogrim City Brigadiers
, and then . . .
“So it’s true,” Aurelius said.
“Yes.”
“It’s impossible.”
Gabrian sighed. “Don’t relapse.”
Aurelius blinked up at him for a moment; then shook his head and sat up. He clapped a hand to his face and found he could barely feel the frozen material of his flight gloves against his bare skin. “I’m going to get frostbite if I don’t cover up soon.”