On some level, I knew that I was on a wild trip. That part of me tried to ignore what my senses told me; attempted to beat my mind into submission and force my senses to observe what I knew was there. And yet, a more significant part of me believed my senses without reservation. I wanted to believe that what I saw was real because, honestly, the lie was more comforting than the truth. I desperately hoped that everything I had just been through, dealt with, and recovered from was a dream.
The human mind is a powerful thing: If you believe something hard enough, your mind makes it true—or as genuine a facsimile as possible. Take on too much stress, and you can get sick from it. Convince yourself that your medicine works, and it just might. Delude yourself into believing something, and you’ll find every reason to keep believing the delusion, even when confronted with every piece of evidence to the contrary.
At its core, that’s all magic really is. Mind over matter. But instead of the matter being you, it’s the world.
Once we were whittled down to a handful of people, humans were forced to constantly challenge their preconceptions. All the people who clung to their biases rather than embrace cold, hard facts had perished. Conduits were meant to help with that; we gain insight into people as we connect to the collective unconscious. For a lot of Conduits it's all about about striving to rise above self-delusion and ignorance, which I think is a noble sentiment.
It’s a damn shame that my bane makes it that much easier for my senses to betray me.
“Get her shoulders; don’t grab her arms—“
Shapes danced in the terror-soaked twilight behind my eyelids. I opened them, and the amber lamplight on the ceiling burned down like miniature suns, making my eyes water. I saw cables, braided wires, and hastily connected woven hoses with brass couplings. I smelled lubricant mixed with rich earth and felt a subtle humidity on my skin, masked by a gentle artificial wind.
I was Home.
“—Turn that damn thing off! Shut it down, and start finding—“
I couldn’t pick up my neck; someone was steadying it and holding it tight. I was being moved somewhere. My eyes focused on the connection from the hose attached to the chrysalis, and as we moved, I dimly traced the connection back. I didn’t know whether I was thinking it in my mind or I was muttering it: hose to the aetheric bellows, bellows to the primary camshaft, to the electric motor stack, to the bioelectric transformer, to the biocell array. I saw the rows of containers with their soft blue-green light and felt the effort it took my mind to attach a label to it: starbloom biocell.
Bioelectric battery that generates electricity using algal blooms of Astethra Syncrova. Discovered in a cave network below the Warren, shaped by Alvi Verdomancers to increase metabolism, electrical output, and luminescence. A Human-Tevelish engineering crew that traces their patent lineage back to the late Geferan reformation guilds built the metal and ceramic housing and the alchemical brass couplings to integrate with Fanein electric motors—
“—Recovery couch is right here, get her—“
The blue-green light from the cells reflected off the brass in the room like a treasure hoard, but my mind couldn’t keep hold of a coherent visual. The reflected light started to bleed into the color of the surfaces like watercolors in a rainstorm, the saturation running down to pool on the ground. The sound of dripping water pounded in my ears, first soft, then unimaginably loud. Truth and illusion flowed between each other without form or reason. The ship’s metal bulkheads merged with the stone walls of the testing chamber like the curling patterns of Heshae’s bark-like crest, like the flames in Taga’s eyes.
A steady stream of information poured out of me as my eyes attempted to focus on my surroundings. Things would be as expected one moment before crashing into a kaleidoscope of stained-glass colors like the membranes of Selema-vass’ wings. My psyche hid in the deep recesses of my mind, beyond the outpour of data, asking whether or not I was losing my mind.
“—Heart rate is elevated, get the emergency trolley—“
My body was discarded onto the recovery couch, and the synthetic gossfluff and cultured leather felt amazing. The world shifted from where I wanted to be to where I thought I was: one second, I’d see the bellows, the machine parts, all the combined effort of the Sidereal Pact to get this one ancient machine running, and the next, I’d see the wild, strange mechanical guts of the ship above me as I lay on a grated floor.
Then the railings grew into tree branches and sprouted leaves of luminescent twilight, which drifted to the ground. The leaves evaporated, and I found myself back on the recovery couch in the Warren as they desperately tried to stabilize me.
My eyes drifted to a tall, thin shadow in the near distance: my mother’s figure standing on the stone rise nearby, observing the proceedings with that all-too-common mask of calculating neutrality on her face. An orderly, a boy of perhaps fourteen, jogged up to her and relinquished a clipboard. Papers flipped over the top of it every few seconds as she scanned their contents like a computational machine. She gave him a handful of clipped words and sent him off after jotting several figures on the papers.
A schoolmaster grading papers. A general to her troops. All hail the queen bee.
“Lady Volaire! The engineers are asking for you in the aether reservoir…”
My concentration was broken by the sharp and pungent smell of ammonia and the feeling of someone pouring cold water into the back of my head, like someone delving into my surface thoughts. I instinctively gasped for air, felt the cobwebs dissipate, and watched as the room shifted from the testing chamber to a cramped, dank space on the ship.
Selema-vass was walking away from me, cradling a circular device in her hands that cast an eerie amber glow as she fiddled with it. The amber light transformed into spiraling embers into the air like campfire flame, leaving afterimages in their wake. As each little ember touched a surface, it burned a hole into the paper skin of the world, showing the blurry but enduring image of the testing chamber behind it.
Light flowed out between the holes and widened into a brush stroke that painted the testing chamber in impressionistic blobs of color. It was the day they brought in the chrysalis; when we started working out how to connect to it and make it work. Technicians, engineers, and magi of every species in the pact worked towards activating it.
It was my mother’s—Lady Meralin Volaire’s plan. Unlock the secrets of this ancient magitech stasis chamber and make more of them; use them to wait out the re-greening of our world. The Tevelish and the Fane would join us in slumber, and the Alvi would become the stewards of our world, waiting a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years for the day that we could re-emerge. The Pact would live on: not just for the Humans to whom Terra was their birthright, but all her children, old or new.
And then we would rebuild.
Behind the waves of sensory overload, I felt my body moving again. My mother was pulling me away from Feneska’s cloister, where I had been training to become a Conduit. The day’s training had been brutal; I could still feel dried blood down one nostril and the shadows of throbbing pain in my backside. Even then, I fought with every bit of strength I had left to stay in that room. She continued marching me out, calmly and cooly, telling me what I would do.
I interlaced my right hand with my left while it was still in her grasp and strained against her pull. I told her that I was doing this no matter what. That she couldn’t stop me. That she wouldn’t stop me. She ignored me. Heat flooded my body as I realized that I wasn’t going to let her decide for me, and I drove my foot into the back of her knee. She buckled like a collapsing building, pulling me down with her.
The tumble sent me sprawling, and the world tumbled with me. I came to rest against the far wall in a circular room with an array of doors on the far side of it. Low amber light bars ringed the floor, trailing up the walls and weaving between one another on the ceiling overhead, but then the room’s composition would shift and show me the vaulted ceiling of the cave that formed the mage’s cloister in the Warren. It was like watching two scenes superimposed on one another. Focus one eye, see the past. Focus on the other, see the present.
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Then Taga was there, standing over me like a mother gorilla protecting her infant. He changed to Feneska, the shadow of her imposing form cloaking me in impenetrable night, but I could still feel Taga’s warmth against my skin.
In all of the hallucinations that I had been subjected to after training, I had never felt something like this. It felt like reality was attempting to re-establish dominance over the illusion. It wasn’t me that was superimposing reality on the illusion: someone or something else was doing it.
“YAMOU would refuse JU daughter AVOR birthright?” she and Taga said in a strange unison of their phrases. I shook my head to clear it and felt my temples throb. Whatever Selema-vass had done might be clearing up, but it wasn’t clear.
“I would see her safe,” my mother—no, the Lady Volaire said. There was no emotion, no inflection in her voice. She was always like that. The statement would have had more emotion if my mother had written and mailed it to her. Selema-vass spoke, and the illusion expanded from her voice, swallowing me again.
“Safe? How can she stay safe,” Feneska said, “if she can’t defend herself.” Feneska tapped my mother’s cheek with the metal tip of her cane, pointing out her defenseless position. She’d done the same to me earlier that day when I was on the floor. “And it’s no longer your decision. The council sided with me because we need new Conduits. We need new storytellers at the campfire, explaining the world. She belongs to the Gossamer now, Volaire.”
“She belongs with me. I give myself for the species daily; give me my daughter.”
“Fouza e’ah, e riga du keecha?” Selema-vass said as she backed across the threshold of one of the circular doors just as I saw my mother’s ghost walk through the cloister threshold and out of sight. The phrases overlapped again, but what I saw felt real. My head wasn’t swimming anymore, and I felt my senses sharpen.
“NA FOUZA JU A,” Taga said, inching forward and placing a protective arm around me. His bulk was imposing, but I could see and touch it. I knew it was real. For the first time, I hoped it was real, and I felt my heart skip a beat when I started exploring the implications of that statement.
And just like my mother, Selema-vass turned and limped into the escape pod, closing the hatch behind her. A few seconds later, a set of dull explosions popped off behind the door, and I saw nothing but the endless black curtain of space and gauzy multicolored clouds studded with the light of a million unfamiliar stars.
It was beautiful. Dangerous, but beautiful.
----------------------------------------
Taga and I returned to meet with the other groups that had spread out to search the ship for Selema-vass and me. During the walk back, I spent the last of the stored anima in my engram and got the abridged tale of what actually happened while I was off my nut.
She hadn’t been very circumspect while she worked to get a completely unresponsive me out of my infirmary room and back into the access corridor that she used to bypass everyone else, so the jig was up almost immediately. Taga had been halfway across the ship. If he hadn’t, the door would have been opened in seconds; as it was, it took a few engineers some time to get at the motivators and open it manually, and by that time, we were long gone.
Selema-vass had carried and dragged me halfway across the ship, through access corridors and hidden back entrances, through ventilation shafts and maintenance tunnels while I tripped my ass off and babbled like an idiot. After describing it, I asked Taga whether he could identify Selema-vass’s device, and he told me it was for communication.
You know the drill: tons of questions, not enough answers. If I was going to be stuck here, I needed to find a library.
Anyone who could stand and fight had broken off into groups and started combing the ship for her, driving her away from the escape pods and into the newly reopened starboard habitation. She managed to slip past the dragnet and make it to the starboard escape pods, where I finally came to my senses. In a startling coincidence, the kick I had leveled at my mother’s hallucination had dislocated her knee and broke her hold on me—hurrah for small miracles.
Paramount on my mind was answering how I had come to my senses in the first place. I didn’t do it, and after Taga told me it had been roughly twenty minutes since the whole debacle began (given the conversion between our time scales), I knew there was some exterior force at work. I would expect to be out for at least an hour with a blast like that. The weirdest thing was that I didn’t think she knew she was doing it.
Either that or she was a terrific liar.
Some parts of what she said didn’t quite add up. I had observed Ulketh speaking to Selema-vass through some sort of communication device on his upper torso during our initial push into engineering, and it sounded like she was a superior, not a subordinate.
Then, there were the things that she said that made sense. Keeping Ulketh from killing everyone made sense, but it also made sense that she was doing it to protect someone’s investment. I was more surprised that Ulketh was into killing everyone; it headlined the top of my “really dumb ideas” list. And then what had she said about the last six weeks? How had she been researching me, the chrysalis, and the artifacts they recovered?
“Taga, I’m going to the cargo hold.”
I didn’t see if he would follow me; I didn’t care. What mattered to me was the other things in those crates. I remembered my unceremonious deposit onto the cargo hold floor and what I had seen there. At first glance, I had identified it as treasure, but what if it wasn’t?
My brain replayed my memories from earlier as I ran. The doors to the cargo hold were still jammed open—thanks, Taga—and the room had been returned to some semblance of order, except for a few panels ripped off the wall on the port side. Those panels matched up with the ones used to build the shield for the distraction a few hours back, so I doubted they would be making a return trip.
And there it was, the chrysalis. I looked at it for a long while, standing almost in the same spot my mom would have been standing in. Blessing, or curse? My pulse quickened, and I let my mind drift in and out of memory for a while. It wasn’t why I was here, though. I had other business.
It took a few seconds to figure out how it worked, but I opened the end of the cargo container that held all the “treasure” from before. A jumble of Pact-era technology spilled out and around my feet, with more of it deeper in. Larger shadows in the back hinted at objects I hallucinated earlier: empty biocells, hoses, transformers, mechanical devices, valves, and a thousand different parts for a thousand different machines.
Icy calm crept into my voice as I said, “Taga, where did you get all this?”
It took him a moment to answer, and when he did, his words came out slow and deliberate, “DO NOT KNOW. SOMEONE FAMILIAR WITH MASTER TOKUL’S OPERATION. HESHAE SAID THIS, YES? WE TOLD HER T—”
Holy shit. I was off like lightning, rushing back to the infirmary. I asked everyone where Heshae was until I got a straight answer that she was at the helm, coordinating efforts to leave. Taga caught up with me in the makeshift armory and bolted with me to the helm, where several people had strapped into the control couches and were busy making final adjustments for travel.
The helm looked a lot like the command and control vault in the Warden. Most seats were in a half-circle formation on a depressed platform, surrounding a singular elevated chair in the center. Instead of paper on pantelegraphs and brass dials, those same black glass panels were everywhere. While I couldn’t tell you what was on them, there was something there; technicians glanced at them and rattled off information as fast as they could speak.
“Hello again, Amelin,” Heshae said from behind my left shoulder, making me twitch, “I heard that Taga had found you and was busy aiding you with something. We are about to get underway; did you need my help?”
I assumed an air of dignified calm—or hoped I did—and sat next to her. At a gesture from Messec, Taga’s hands gripped a pair of massive handholds on either side of the foyer just inside the door, which slid shut and clicked to lock.
“The Impellers are going, and the aetherflow is almost to maximum,” a creature of the same species as Veligrusk said while turning to Messec in the primary seat, “I think we’re ready to try this.”
“Okay, let’s spread the word,” Messec said, touching another one of those black panels next to him. “Everyone, we’re about to try and get out of here. Strap in for the transit, you know the drill.”
It made sense as soon as I heard the dull echo of his voice from the hallway. Shipboard radio. Gotcha. I might have been out of touch with the technology, but some things were similar enough for me to understand. While they continued checking and making a show of sounding off their respective stations, I buckled myself in and whispered, “Before Selema-vass took me on a tour of the ship’s bowels, she said that she had spent the last six weeks researching where all of the Pact gear in the hold came from. Most of what she said was bullshit, but that wasn’t, was it?”
Heshae turned to me with a face colored with regret and began to open her mouth before I cut her off.
“So she was telling the truth about that,” I said, “She said that I was ‘recovered.’ From whom or what? From where? What else aren’t you telling me?”
“Amelin, it was a delicate, time-sensitive situation. I didn’t have the time to explain everything that I knew, and—”
“Well, you do now. I gave you the time. So talk.”
The air grew still between us, and contrary to what I wanted to do (which was to force her to spill it immediately), I let her gather her thoughts. As she opened her mouth to speak, a voice from within the ship interrupted her.
In a deep resonant tone full of forgotten sorrow, the ship said, “Prepare for Waycast.”
That old, familiar elastic sensation washed over me, and pins and needles danced across my skin simultaneously. If I wasn’t strapped in to a chair on a ship going somewhere using the conceptual space between the material world and the Gossamer, you could have knocked me over with a feather. You could have knocked me over with a hair. With a look.
I found my voice about a million years later, and blurted out, “What?!”