Claire Aden insisted on sleeping in Kiera's apartment. The apartments in Spire Lin were spacious and a second room was allocated for Claire. Kiera could not understand why the child wanted that, though she suspected that the Princess was lonely. After all she had no friends in the Spire and her only connection was to Kiera, who was friends with her older sister Lucia.

There were few other children her age, and Kiera empathized with the child. Most oculomancers joined the Spire when they were older, perhaps about twenty. Claire was sent to the Spire because she was a Heritor, and the oculomancers needed future leaders from the ruling class. Also King Edwin wanted to get rid of his sisters for some reason.

Claire immediately began prodding Kiera about the Aviation Club.

"Are the boys cute?" She asked.

Kiera shrugged.

"Then I'll just have to see for myself," Claire said.

"Heritors are forbidden from helping to invent the flying machine," Kiera said. "You should know this."

"So then why are you in the club?" Claire asked. "And you didn't answer my question."

"Seth is cute," Kiera said. "So is Bjorn. I'm pretty sure Vince is gay but I might be wrong. Quinn is a creep."

Claire nodded. "I should like to meet Seth and Bjorn."

The door opened and several servants entered, followed by Fiona. "Fiona of the Morning Mist!" the herald at the door proclaimed.

"Honored ancestor," Claire said with a bow.

"Everything is prepared, you get your eyes now." Fiona said. "We take off as soon as you are ready. Get dressed."

The craft that they entered was fat and looked worn. It had stubby wings and an extremely tall tail fin. Kiera could not fathom what material the craft was made from, though it was painted white on the top and black on the bottom. The flight deck had four chairs, occupied by only the three women. Claire sat behind Fiona.

Like the other flights on the smaller craft, the thing floated up into the ferryway. But unlike the other flights, the craft kept going. And going. And going.

They floated off into the darkness between the planets. The galaxy was like a sunrise, so bright against the darkness of space. At first they flew at the Sister World, and gravity seemed normal. Then the craft flopped over and began to fall in the opposite direction. Gravity returned to normal, but they were falling towards the moon.

Fiona piloted the craft as they entered into the Sister World's atmosphere a few days later. Kiera was horribly bored on the trip. She sat in her quarters and Claire rambled on about her childhood memories with Lucia, which Kiera was certain she had heard before from Lucia herself.

Then the craft began to tilt back and forth. Then it was on fire.

When Kiera arrived on the flight deck she could barely walk. The craft was rocking back and forth and the outside was completely consumed with flames. Fiona was not manipulating ether or sien, so the entire craft was just operating with mechanical or electrical power.

They had become a glider on another world.

Finally the craft smashed into the ground and slowed down to a halt. Even then, Kiera was forced to wait almost an entire day as the craft just sat on the runway waiting for the oculomancers outside to arrive. They needed to dress up in spacesuits to leave the craft. When Kiera walked outside she looked up into the sky.

For the first time, Kiera saw her blue homeworld.

The sky was black, as if the world had no atmosphere. In every direction was arid desert, tall pillars of red rock, and the occasional black lake. But in the sky, where the Sister World would have been, was a great blue disk, with a spider-like continent in the middle.

"The air here is extremely poisonous to humans," Fiona said. Her voice sounded muted, as if they were in a snowstorm. "That is why this place was never colonized. There were plans to terraform this planet, but those plans ended when the Charlatan King dragged all the water across the ferryway and changed the climate of our world."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Fiona looked disturbed.

"Billions died," Fiona said. "Either way, the Water Temple is just ahead. In Lake Rath, one of the few bodies of water left on this world."

The first thing that Kiera noticed about being on the moon was that there was no ether. She felt naked.

Fiona led them to the edge of a lake with no shores on the horizon. The water was pitch black. There was a passageway made of white stone that seemed to lead deep underwater. Soon they were walking through hallways made entirely if glass, with great forests of kelp and terrible fishes on both sides.

Down in the deepest parts of the Water Temple, they found great pools filled with dark water, fussed over by crews of elderly oculomancers. In those pools there were fishes with glowing purple eyes, their bodies lined with glowing teal fractures.

"The fishes here have a very strange life cycle," Fiona said. "They are all female, and the male fishes are tiny. The parasite has a symbiotic relationship with the females. Males attach themselves to the bodies of the females. The parasite releases a poison that literally dissolves the male brain. That is why men cannot become oculomancers, their brains would dissolve."

"Perhaps that would be an improvement?" Kiera asked.

Fiona walked up to the women fussing over the pools filled with fish. She pointed to Kiera. One of the oculomancers began to write notes, and then scampered off to a different pool. After a time several women returned carrying a flopping fish between them.

"Heritor Kiera please drink this sedative," Fiona said, handing her a glass vial. "Unless you want to feel your eyes being gouged out."

Kiera grabbed the vial and drank it. It had a chemical taste to it. Fiona drew her sword and set it against the wall. "This is an ethersteel sword," Fiona said. "You can claim the ether in this blade when you are ready to burn off the sedative."

Kiera began to lose her sight. Then she stopped hearing anything. It was total loss of all sensation, though she could still feel the sedative and, if she wanted to, she could use the ether locked in Fiona's sword to burn the sedative away and regain her senses. That would probably be a bad idea.

After a long while Kiera began to see again. Except the world was just a different shade of darkness, populated by horrible glowing blue and red shapes. Far below her, there was a red light as bright as the sun, and far above her there was a glowing blue light, also as bright as the sun.

Like a second way to focus, Kiera could control the degree to which she saw that other dark world. She focused instead on visible light, and began to see the room around her normally. The oculomancers nearby had a slaughtered fish in their hands, which they lowered respectfully into another pool of black water.

Kiera blinked, and then saw two bloody eyeballs in a jar that Fiona was holding. She drew on the ether in the sword and burned away the sedative. Then she keeled over and vomited on the ground.

"Here," Fiona said, handing Kiera a syringe. "A painkiller, it helps, in my experience. Claire has already gone under, but she will not be able to burn off the sedative. We will need to wait until she wakes up.

"What are red and blue suns?" Kiera asked.

"Ah, you must be seeing the vendark. The red sun below us is the core of the Sister World, which seeps sien into this planet. The blue light you see up above us is the core of our homeworld, which seeps ether. The cacophony of patterns that you see in between the two is the sum of human activity. Auras, flight waypoints, airports. That sort of thing."

Kiera shifted her eyes along the new spectrum, back to the dark world filled with the light of the two planets, a world without the sun, the place that Fiona had named vendark. She could see every single fiber inside Fiona's body, all the bones and muscles, internal organs the state of those organs, as she shifted slowly between visual and vendark."

"Here is a mirror," Fiona said. Kiera looked at herself in the visual spectrum.

She had glowing purple eyes, and the glowing teal fractures had grown all through her face, illuminating her cheeks.

She was an oculomancer.

"When Claire wakes up we will begin talking about how to use your new powers," Fiona said. "I assure you that they will be very useful in your task, especially considering that those fool boys have already discovered three-axis control systems."

Kier left the Water Temple and stood at the shores of Lake Rath, looking up at her great blue homeworld in the sky. Many Spires lined the horizon of the Sister World, mirroring the Spires on her own planet. Material in the crust that worked it's way up along the ferryway as the planet cooled.

Nothing was more disturbing than not feeling ether around her. Instead, she felt something else. Something dark and bloody. Wrongness.

Pure sien. She reached out and claimed it. It seemed eager. This feeling made her cringe.

Suddenly she could feel the whole ferryway. She could feel all the ether on her homeworld, every tree, every cloud, every insect. It was all a part of her. She was complete.

Then she felt the other one.

The other one felt her.

"Bloodraker," Kiera hissed. She felt like she wanted to vomit again briefly. "Mother summer, what is that!?"

Fiona looked over her, glancing up and down sympathetically.

"So you can feel Annatiki," Fiona said. "Remarkable, I was not able to do that right away, though I am not nearly as strong as you are. Thankfully, the child will not be able to feel her. This is something that you must suffer through."

Kiera looked up at that great blue disk in the sky. She did not want to return to that world.