7 - Fireside

Between Kornos gathering firewood and us finishing our meal, I’d had plenty of time to think. Mainly about how in over my head I was with this whole situation. We could turn back, leave, and face whatever punishment awaited us, but that was the coward’s way out. I didn’t want to be known as the kid who wussed out after getting so far. And yeah, I’d probably end up dead before we could find anything of value, but that level of consequence was to be expected when the potential rewards were so massive.

I just wished I wasn’t so useless in a fight. I’d only won against Dimitri because he hadn’t been expecting that level of ferocity or strength from me. Here? Every being in this place was a deadly predator, always alert, ready to pounce.

And I had almost got my foot snipped off by an oversized crab.

Humiliating. Here I was, nursing a nasty bruise from a crustacean smaller than a dog, while Kornos had taken on several of them without so much as breaking a sweat.

I wanted to be better than that. Next time, I would do better.

Anyways.

The crab had been tasty, Kornos prepared the meal with a practiced efficiency, and despite the lack of seasonings or other embellishments, he did a good job. We washed the meal down with distilled seawater, which we used to keep our canteens topped off. Nothing approached the fire while we ate, thankfully, but we decided to put it out anyways, not wanting to risk attracting predators while we slept in shifts.

The sand was quite pleasant to sleep on, and the gentle lapping of the waves put me right to sleep.

At some point during the ‘night’, Kornos woke me for my shift, which passed without event.

A few hours later, judging by my timepiece – a thaum-based pocket watch that had no gears or springs or such, just a simple mechanism that rotates at an extremely precise rate – I woke Kornos, and we prepared to head out. I had thought about drawing a rudimentary map during the night, but immediately realized that it would be pointless, considering the bizarre terrain of the Anomaly.

A compass would have sufficed, but when I went to check mine, it had been spinning erratically, which wasn’t that surprising for an Anomaly. Most navigation devices, when in an Anomaly, typically behaved the same ways; either entirely non-functional or erratic, due to an absence or perversion, respectively, of whatever it was supposed to measure.

To compensate, I would forge a device that would serve the same function. I took a thin ring of metal from my pack, tightly coiled a bit of copper wire around roughly a pink’s width of the length ring, threaded it through a bit of twine, and tied both ends to make a necklace. I combined essences, several attempts ended in straight failure or were too far off the mark, until I got featherweight companion (other-half) seeker. Seeker caused it to point towards its companion, and featherweight lowered its weight to allow it to move freely. Without an additional thaum to increase the pulling strength, it was limited by the seeker essence, which had underlying essences related to strength and effort.

Companion had been a peculiar thaum, in that by breaking the object that housed it in half, each piece would have a unique connection to each other. I stored the unworked half on the boat, so the thaumatic device would always point there, no matter our location. I attached the completed essence to the copper wire. To locate the boat, I simply let the ring hang from the string, infused it with some of my stamina, and it would move toward the boat.

With that taken care of, I took a bite of leftover crab, tested my ankle, and felt good enough to walk on. Which meant it was time to head out.

Kornos told me to keep the earring until my foot fully healed. He kept his moon earring while I tapped a metal rod twice against my foot, causing it to light up with a warm glow. Until the sun came back, we would refrain from exploring the floating rock nearest us. For now, we would search the narrow stretch of forest for any thaums or artifacts, as unlikely as the prospect of finding one would be. For reasons yet unknown, thaums and artifacts were found more frequently the closer one gets to the core of the Anomaly, whether it be a central location or a powerful artifact holding the Anomaly together.

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Our trek through the forest was, other than the sounds of trampled undergrowth and rustling leaves, filled with an eerie silence. Absent was the chirping of insects and the buzzing of flies. If I hadn’t had my wristband – maybe I should name it? I thought to myself – I would have felt fearful instead of just unsettled and anxious. I occupied that worried part of my mind with coming up with names for my creation. As silly as it might’ve been, I very much felt that it deserved one, considering just how useful it was.

The silence was broken by Kornos. “See that?” he asked. He pointed just off to the side at a patch of grass that, now that I looked closer at it, hid a faint glint of… something. A thaum or, Leviathans willed it, an artifact. We let out a muffled word of joy and immediately crouched down to investigate.

Beneath the tall strands of grass were forest-green chunks of hardened sediment. I reached out and ran my hand over them, and found a mix of various essences.

A few voice (sound, communication, identity), slithering, and prey thaums, among miscellaneous ones like leaf and dirt. I packed them away in my bag. A good first haul, voice in particular would fetch a good price; communication devices were always in demand, which included the thaums to make them.

We continued on, not finding much of anything. A few hours later, the sun came back, or turned back on, it didn’t matter. We had light, which meant it was time to explore this Anomaly for real.

Now, how in the depths were we going to reach the island? I hoped Kornos had a plan.

***

Kornos, in fact, did have a plan.

“Just jump.”

I didn’t think it was a very sane one.

“No, don’t look at me like that. Think about it.”

“I don’t think we’re on the same ship, Ko. We’d never make it, blessing or not,” I fired back.

Kornos shook his head. “Look, just follow me, ok?”

I sighed, but did as he asked.

We approached the ledge, and I got my first good look at the abyss. An infinitely deep hole in the world that swallowed all light. Water cascaded from all sides, never to be seen again. Which, now that I thought about it, was another oddity. There had been no currents pulling our ship towards the abyss, and the water never ran dry. How did that work? A question that could never be answered, in my opinion. Anomalies were not required to adhere to things like logic and common sense.

Kornos stood there, a stone in hand, eyeing the massive slab of rock and greenery that floated not more than twenty feet away, from its edge to the edge of the abyss. He nodded to himself, then threw, underhanded, the rock. It sailed through the air, and from what I could tell, it would hit the side of the slab and fall right back down. To my shock, and then embarrassment, while it did hit the side of the slab, it did not fall back down; it bounced, then stayed where it was.

“I must have anchors for brains,” I said. The gravity applied to the entire chunk, not just the surface with greenery. As long as we reached a certain distance from it, we could just fall towards it.

“Nay, you’re just focused on the salt for the ocean, mate,” he said as he pat my back. He stretched, then crouched down in a runner’s position. Then he shot off in a sprint towards the edge. My breath caught in my throat, I watched with rapt attention as Kornos leapt at the last moment and flew through the air.

For a moment, I feared that he wouldn’t make it. That the altered gravity wouldn’t take hold for any number of reasons. That Kornos would be lost to the abyss below.

My fear evaporated as Kornos let out a whoop of joy as the island’s gravity took hold of him. His downward trajectory ceased, and he began to fall towards the rocky underside. A loud thud made me wince in sympathy. That must have hurt, considering he had technically fallen at least fifteen or so feet, if, by my estimation, the gravity field extended roughly fifteen feet from the island.

Kornos laughed, and I felt a smile creep into my expression. “Clear the deck!” I shout, before copying Kornos, making sure I got enough of a running start to safely clear the gap.

The moment my feet left the ground, my instincts were screaming in primal terror. YOU JUMPED TO YOUR DEATH! they screamed. WE ARE GOING TO DIE! they claimed. Gravity changed, and everything felt weird. My instincts had a conniption fit, threw up their hands, and gave up. Forwards became down, and my insides moved in such an unpleasant way I hadn’t thought possible as I went from horizontal to vertical. I laughed so hard I almost didn’t brace myself in time.

It hurt. I’m sure I’d find some new bruises tonight.

But…

“WOOOO!!”

I could only shout in pure elation. I rolled over onto my back and stared up – across? – at the sky – ground. My lungs were desperately crying out for air, and my heart thudded in my chest like a caged animal. But by the Leviathans, I was thrilled.

Was it strange to be so excited over a simple jump? Maybe. But a part of me knew that this was only the beginning. We had an entire Anomaly to traverse in this manner, practically flying from island to island. Unless I got my hands on an extremely rare artifact, this was the closest I’d come to the act of soaring through the skies for the foreseeable future, and I’d be damned to the depths if I didn’t let myself enjoy this just because it might not have been normal. Not like there was anyone around, other than Kornos, whom I knew felt the same way, to judge me.

And damn, was it a Leviathan-sized blast!

It almost made up for the monsters that were peeking over the edge of the island at us.

“Look alive!” I shouted to Kornos in as serious a tone as I could muster at the time. “We’ve got a welcome party!”