After my time in the floating grove, the Drift was a lot less ‘sky island’ and a lot more ‘windswept plain’ than I’d been expecting. If not for Ipoh’s reassurances we were in the right place, and the fact the sky was full of smaller floating rocks – including the occasional one at perilous eye level – I’d have thought we were on the mainland. Two and a half suns shone pleasantly down on the pale grasses, which bent forwards in a stiff ongoing wind. I wasn’t sure I preferred the chilly movement of the planet’s surface to the comfortable warmth of the interior, but if I never had to see a large, empty corridor again, it was worth it.

Our network station sat in the middle of the grasses, pristine and untouched like the others. Ipoh watched in bemusement as I broke a nearby stem in half and dropped it onto the circle. The wind caught it and carried it away well before it landed. I tried again, this time carefully positioning it by hand. The moment I let go, it rolled to the edge in the wind and disappeared into the rest.

“One of life’s curious phenomena,” the Servant pontificated. “You can cover them up; it just takes a lot of effort. It’s one of the reasons they’ve been adopted by the church. Some people won’t rest until they find something to call holy, no matter how many records exist to the contrary. But there aren’t too many people up here. Even the pilgrims don’t find them all.”

He plucked a rogue stone out of the air and passed me the bundle of grass he’d been gathering. “Here. Start separating the seeds out. They hold a lot of water while Second Sun is overhead.” He pointed to the yellow sun. “Spit out the husks, though. They’re poisonous.”

I eyed him sceptically and pulled a seed from one of the stems. Half the length of my finger, it was almost as fat. I bit into it, then bit harder, and was eventually rewarded with a burst of cool liquid. My throat exploded with sudden thirst, and I immediately pulled off another, and another, until I was trying to bite into three at once. I couldn’t get enough.

Ipoh calmly bit into a seedpod and tossed the remnants out into the grass. “It’s not satisfying, but it’ll keep us alive,” he said, biting into another. “Have enough to last you till next Second Sun. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.” Unexpectedly, he raised the arm holding the stone and dashed it hard against the network circle. The piece bounced off at an unintuitive angle, and I ducked barely out of the way before it could smash me in the hip. My inanimate assailant continued to sail through the air, furrowing a hole through Ptokt’s cloud of floating silver dust, a little before rapidly coming to a stop, as still as ever and untouched by the wind.

Ipoh extended his arm in a straight line, lining it up where the barrage would have hit. “That way,” he announced through a mouthful of seedpod, and spat.

“How can you tell?”

“Red lives at the local pole. This trick won’t work on the mainland, but the Drift doesn’t lie. Try it.”

I walked over to the same stone, having to jump a little to reach it, and lobbed it as hard as I could at the ground. It sailed in the same direction as before. “Huh.”

“If nothing else, we won’t get lost.”

Cartography agreed. My mind was rushing to apply this new information to its fuzzy internal maps, of which there were now several disjointed variants, none of which connected. The skill didn’t play well with the network jumps. “Does this work at the other pole?”

“Poles. There are ten. Yes, like the Ancients.”

“And the Grand Stairs.”

“You’re starting to think like the church,” he chided me. “Sometimes a number is just a number. And no, it doesn’t work at the other poles. A stone from the Drift will always point to the red pole.”

I gave him a look.

“I didn’t choose the names.” He turned his head into the breeze.

Since leaving the Razors, a spring had entered the Servant’s step. He seemed a little gentler, a lot less grouchy. It was contagious. Ptokt seemed content to hang low above the long grasses, occasionally dropping into a woman’s shape to converse with Ipoh, or spreading out to explore at a faster pace. I still felt left out being unable to understand the language, but it had never been offered as an upgrade.

Larger islands dotted the horizon in the distance, as windswept as the one we stood on, flat-topped with jagged lower points revealing their full shape underneath. Some had visible ruins embedded in the undersides, tubes and fragments glinting with internal shifting lights.

Very different to the Razors. I copied Ipoh and lifted my face to the breeze. It ruffled my hair.

“Every few hundred years, the Drift goes dark,” the spy volunteered. “They say the next one will be in another three years. I’d hoped I’d be around to see it. Now I might.” He smiled, but it was thin.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I imagined he was remembering the deaths it had taken to get here, both in the prison and Ptokt’s band of elites. It felt like my fault, for dragging people into an arm’s race I hadn’t asked for, for no other reason than that I existed. Maybe it would be better to pick a side early just to shut it down before the conflict could do more damage. Although Orange and Green were still out there reborn in the same position.

Besides, this island was peaceful enough. How bad could Red be?

We walked, the glow of the pink sun seeping up behind us just below the horizon. It took a while before I could stop stuffing seedpod juice in my mouth, and from the ache in my stomach, I’d probably overdone it.

After an hour, Ipoh declared we would rest in three-hour shifts. If we were tracked, he said, we were far enough away to see our pursuit coming. Unless it was Blue herself, in which case it probably wouldn’t matter. But direct incursion into hostile territory would cause an incident if discovered. Doing so risked trouble.

At my companion’s insistence, I slept first among the grasses. I woke to a new banked upgrade, itching arms, shiny insects crawling all over me, and an overwhelming urge to lie back down. But I took my turn, the compulsion to scratch my arms helping to keep me awake. I could have taken the opportunity to run off on my own. But I didn’t.

Ptokt didn’t sleep, I noticed, and probably could have managed on her own. The Sanctioner hovered in lazy circles overhead for the most part, and didn’t seem to get bored. Perhaps the rest of her had more to occupy herself with underground.

Cartography was going wild now that we were up on the surface. The rose sun hadn’t moved, and all three others sat low on the horizon. The yellow sun - Second Sun - was making the fastest progress, having crossed half the sky while I was asleep. The white sun had moved slightly in the opposite direction, and the blue sun was skirting the horizon from where it had half-poked up before.

Thinking about it made my head hurt. I decided to pick one as a reference point, and since Second Sun controlled the seedpods, it won. I chewed on more pods.

In three hours, we did it again. Second Sun had set, the white sun had moved a bit more, and blue was back to half-horizon. I didn’t think pink had moved at all. I wasn’t sure it had moved since the grove, though I didn’t know for sure.

If anyone followed us, I didn’t see them.

Ipoh woke, and we headed on through the grass, bouncing stones every few minutes to stay on track. Larger ones marked our progress, usually in the distance but occasionally in our path overhead. Far in the distance, mottled lumps marked the eventual path to our destination, but we never crossed a road.

Small animals scuttered away at our approach, sending seed pods bobbing at intermittent intervals. I didn’t get a good look at them, but glimpsed iridescent fur. Even the animals couldn’t commit to a single colour. In the white-tipped plains, I had no chance. All anyone had to do to find me was look for the dark, person-shaped void, the only thing that colour as far as sight.

The next time a scutter happened, Ipoh slammed a hand down and brought back a long, whimpering glittered creature, fur ruffling softly in the muted glow of the white sun. It made a squeakily whimpering noise, that cut off as the Servant snapped it brutally in half. It laid still after that.

I felt faintly horrified.

“It’s not big, but we’re starving,” Ipoh said. “We each get half. Take it.”

The creature was very light and very soft. It wasn’t bleeding, but the break in its back felt terribly, horribly wrong, and the eyes staring up at me were far emptier than the sky.

I sat down and buried my face in it.

“Storms and –” I heard a sigh, and footsteps walking back to me. “You’re just a child.”

Ipoh crouched beside me, pushing grass aside to make space. He prised the carcass out of my fingers and put it down in the grass away from me.

“Everything dies,” he said matter-of-factly. Out of the corner of my blurring vision, I could see the blob indicating he was waiting for me to meet his eyes. “Me, you, some unfortunate skret in a forsaken stretch of the isles. What matters is that we make it count.”

“I thought you wanted to live,” I muttered through the lumps in my throat.

“I do. I wouldn’t bring anyone into it, but I didn’t get a choice about that and lo, we’re all here.” He grunted again, and the blur moved in a slow shaking motion. “I’ll tell you now, you won’t make a difference. You all think you can, of course. It’s why you’ve warred and squabbled from now to the dawn of history, seeking to remake the world to your own liking. Hard not to, I suppose, when the universe dangles power at you like a candy. But history tells us it doesn’t work. Try all you like; you’ll still end up repeating the same mistakes.”

“What does this have to do with death?”

“It doesn’t. I thought changing the subject might help. Also, it’s good advice. If life hands me a malleable Ancient, I’m going to make sure they grow up to do the least amount of damage. I can’t kill you, not really, so that leaves education.”

Now I did look back at him. Ipoh’s face was deadly serious. I wiped my eyes. It fixed my vision but not the expression.

“To be clear,” he followed up, hands on knees, “you will have power. You saw that with the razorlings, and that’s just the beginning. You’re going to make changes; big ones. Miracles that exist nowhere else in the world. You might even find a way to bring this skret back to life. I’ve seen stranger. But in the end? Someone will kill you and render all your accomplishments to dust. So, make it count.” He picked up the skret and held its broken body in front of me. “Remember this death. Remember how it made you feel. Remember Ptotk’s colleagues and the sleeper. Remember Orange as he was in the brief window you knew him. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry this had to be your rebirth.”

He tucked the animal away. I didn’t feel like getting up.

“Get some more rest,” he said, and rose to his feet.

Some time later, he pressed a piece of raw meat into my hands. I ate it.

It was delicious.