Sometime at the end of May? June?

Don’t know what month exactly. I’m sure I could ask Orv to calculate it for me, but it’s been kind of nice to not know. Weeks have gone by though, that’s for sure. Several of them. Sorry, I haven’t written as often.

A lot has happened.

I think I’m getting the hang of the glitzers. I know I was kind of resistant at first, but I guess when you get a little more practice with something it kind of takes away the preconceived notions you had. I still would feel most confident with a well-forged blade in my hand, but the ability to attack from such a huge distance definitely has its advantages. There’s something satisfying about learning how to hit the target, and that’s not all we’ve been working on. Hitting the target was obviously just the beginning and we then progressed to shooting and reloading while moving. Two weeks ago we started training under simulated enemy fire, and then last week they brought in these little two-person plane-type things so we could practice flying.

Yep. That’s what I said. Flying.

I’ve never flown anything before, I mean I’ve been on a plane but I haven’t personally controlled anything flying. All of us recruits were pretty intimidated, but Orv said it would be a good skill for us to master, so we volunteered. We were the first in line actually.

It was phenomenal.

I can’t really describe the rush of sailing through the air. For now, we’re only allowed to go about half-full speed. One of us pilots does the controls and one of us handles the big glitzer at the back. The flyers (which is the best translation I can manage) aren’t incredibly responsive, but as far as airships go they’re quite a bit more maneuverable than the big transport units. And the freedom of movement—the ability to direct the ship in any dimension—it’s honestly the closest thing I’ve found to magic. I feel it flow through me and my mind wants it to move and my hands move the controls but it feels like it’s all just happening automatically. I’ll write more about the flyers in a moment.

I wish I could express myself better, but, as you may have noticed, I’m trying to write in as much Yarvan as I can. Orv suggested that I may as well try it out, and Yarvan is a fun language to write. They go vertically down instead of horizontally like English or Rilnian.

My Tinarian is coming along. I’ve already learned enough to get through very basic conversations. It’s just very complicated. Yarvan, however, has been much, much easier to pick up. Orv has expressed a little bit of a worry that learning Yarvan will hold my Tinarian back, but I reminded him that “communication is everything” which he couldn’t argue with (Got him there).

Ki has been a good teacher. It’s interesting how someone becomes a whole new person when you start speaking their language. I remember that happening when I first learned Nymic, but it’s easy to forget how much of a person's world is the language they speak in. The more words you know, the less foreign they literally feel, and the recruits like Ki (and a few other new ones like Jik) have definitely become less foreign.

Also, Ki insists on speaking English as much as possible. She’s insanely curious about it, and Orv has spun some (really honestly beautiful) lies about what part of the Republic it’s from. Neither of us thought it would be a good idea to tell her what Earth really is, and though it’s hard to make friends with people while keeping them in the dark, it’s too important to do otherwise.

Speaking of avoiding the question, I think something is going on with Ki. The way she talks about Tinaria, it’s always positive, but like—too positive. You can tell there’s something else under the surface. She insists that she and all the other Yarvans are beyond grateful and proud to be a part of the Tinarian Republic, but it’s easy to tell when someone says something they’re not really convinced of, even if they’re really good at lying about it.

Whatever it is, I can’t blame her. We’re constantly lying about ourselves every day, which weirdly also doesn't feel like a bad thing to do, because of how potentially dangerous it would be to tell the truth. I think whatever is going on with her probably feels the same way, I just hope it's not something she tries to pull us into. I know how the whole ‘rebellion’ thing goes and this all smells a lot like it.

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And then there’s Genys. I won’t call her Commander here. I have to out loud though, everyone does. ‘Utriklaān Genys’ is what it is in Tinarian. ‘Wokyor Genys’ in Yarvan. For some reason, she has seemed a little harder on us compared to the other recruits. To be fair we are quite different. The Tinarians and Yarvans look somewhat alike and apparently, I look like some sort of sickly child—and that’s not even mentioning Orv.

But she seems to go out of her way to ignore our successes. It’s definitely, officially annoyed me, but Orv thinks it’s a good thing—the less notice we can bring to ourselves the better. I just know that when someone works this hard to ignore something they’re probably actually paying quite a bit of attention to it. It would make sense for her to be suspicious, but it doesn’t make as much sense for her to not be obvious about it. Maybe she’s just racist. I know she seems to not like the Yarvans very much, but that’s just all the Tinarians it seems.

Which brings me to the most pressing news. We’re shipping out.

A few weeks ago we got word from Genys that we were heading out to Yarva. The way she spoke about it, she made it sound like we were going on a type of reward vacation. But then she also doubled our training. There are rumors of something big going on in the government. They don’t use the word government though, I should say the Senate of Tinaria—Ik Yorganitl disht Tinariakl. This language has got my tongue twisted, I’ll tell you that much. Anyway, it does seem like Genys is preparing us for some fighting, and we’re not the only ones who have noticed. There are whispers among the other troops that something is happening and there are a lot of guesses as to what.

Whatever it ends up being, we’ll be long gone before any of it happens. Orv and I have identified the next step in our plan.

It was a few days ago when we were up in our first flyer. We were transported to the flight training ground which is up on a hill about an hour outside Izutis. You could see the whole city from up there, but once we got up in the air we could see even more. Because of the way the glitz makes them float, the Flyers are pretty safe compared to Earth planes, or at least that’s the sense I got. Orv was on the glitzer and I was doing the main controls, and as soon as we made it to a certain height we both felt the immediate pull of a gateway.

It was strange. From normal elevations, the feeling wasn’t there at all. Nothing whatsoever. Even in the transport ships, we felt nothing, but those are only a few meters off the ground. Up in the attack flyers, we get to go pretty high, and somewhere just below the clouds we felt the pull of a gateway toward the north.

The temptation was to immediately fly toward it, but Orva and I talked, and we decided it would be a better idea to stay with the squadron for now. They’re heading north anyway, that’s where Ullulia is apparently, and it’ll give us time to learn a little more about how things work there before finding the gateway.

And according to Orv, it’s not just any gateway. There’s something different about this one. Somehow he said you can tell that it’s not temporary, like it’s not one of the ones that’s going to dissipate soon. I’m not sure how, but somehow he can tell. I can say I definitely feel a stronger sort of pull, much stronger than the few I’ve felt before. That would make sense because wherever it is, it’s past the massive mountains that you can see when you’re high enough in the air. Apparently, they’re the biggest mountains anyone knows about. They definitely look like they go forever up into the air, past the clouds and everything.

They call them the Mountains of Athe.

Orv says it’s probably those mountains that blocked us from feeling the signal further down. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I also don’t know enough about it to question it. What’s really weird is that the longer I felt it, the more I became convinced there was something special about this portal as well. Somehow I also just knew it wasn’t going anywhere. I can’t describe why or how—I just knew.

Anyway, tomorrow is the day. We’ll make our way across the open country in several airships and the trip is supposed to just last a few weeks. I hope we make it that long—as a group I mean. If anything is going to happen, anything to do with Genys or Ki or any of this tension everyone is seeming to feel, I hope it happens after we land, and after Orv and I can slip away. I hope it happens after we leave Tinaria far behind.

I want to be well on our way home before we get roped into anything.

Jack went to close his notebook but he couldn’t stop looking down at the last sentence he wrote.

Something about it bothered him. It felt like a lie and he didn’t know why. All he wanted was to get out of Tinaria. He wanted to leave at the earliest opportunity. But as he tried to convince himself—to believe his own words, something was needling him against it.

It’s not my world, he thought. It’s not even Earth. It’s just another one, one of many—too many. There will be others we pass through, and that’s all this is—passing through. We can’t afford to care even if we wanted to, and I don’t even want to.

He tried not to think about how that felt like a lie too.