image [https://i.imgur.com/LsQYyFa.jpeg]

The girl with fire eyes ran her thumb along the back side of the dagger. It was a beautiful tool, a striking weapon. "Was this yours?"

"No, it belonged to an elf."

"An elf? Really?" She was shocked. She didn't realize she'd be so close to an elf so quickly. "Where did he go?"

"He's the one who tied me up here," Jason said with a sigh.

More howls pierced the night air. She heard them getting closer. She realized that she didn't have a choice. This was a strange land. A dangerous world down here on Lokar. If she wanted to live, she only had one option. Take a risk with this guy tied up to the tree, or make it on her own. The thought of putting her fate into the hands of this guy tied up to a tree amused her. Who releases a prisoner? People don't get tied up to trees for no reason, she thought. A rush of laughter overtook her.

"Why are you laughing now?" Jason asked.

"Oh never mind," she said. "You wouldn't get it."

"Release me," Jason screamed. "We don't have time for these games."

"And what if you kill me?" the girl with fire eyes asked.

"It will be a better death than what's coming for us."

The howls were no longer in the distance. They echoed in the trees right behind them. She could feel a danger watching them. A breathing, live danger.

She took the dagger to the hemp rope that Rudra used to tie Jason to the evergreen trunk. This is not how she planned her landing. She didn't know how far off course she was, but she calculated that these forests were at least two or three hundred kilometers north of Limnosos, the city that she was aiming for.

She knew that she was lucky to be alive, though. The crash completely wrecked the ship she had commandeered. All the supplies, instruments, and artifacts that she meant to deliver to Limnosos and its leader, the Commissar Santaros, were gone. Worse still, she lost all of her radio equipment that could keep her in touch with her cell on Elovia. At least she had life, which meant that the odds of delivering the message was still possible. The fate of Lokar, the humans there, and the factions in Elovia, depended on her ability to fulfill this mission. If she hadn't ejected, she'd be dead, and so would all hope for the future in this Seventh Aeon.

As she ran the dagger up and down the hemp rope, cutting through its fibers, a pain swelled in her heart and a tear ran down her cheek. Jason turned around and saw her standing there, holding the dagger to the hemp rope, hesitating with its cuts.

"What are you waiting for? Cut faster!" Then he saw the tear. The sadness. Pain and loss. "I don't know why you're here. It doesn't matter. I want us both to live. I know you left behind something up there. Get me free and we'll figure this out together."

Two more tears broke. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. "I just wanted to tell them I landed. That's all." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her comrades wouldn't even know if she survived the landing, let alone if she fulfilled the mission. This brought her a great pain. "Never mind. I'll cut you free. But don't try anything funny. I'm keeping the knife."

Jason nodded. "Just hurry. We don't have time."

She stuck the dagger under the rope, nudging it against the evergreen bark, and after a few more cuts, he was released.

Jason stepped forward and did a jump and little spin. He was free. Well, not quite. "Aren't you gonna cut my hands free?"

"A foolish mistake this is," she said. "Against my better judgment, come here."

She settled the dagger between his wrists, then moved the dagger back and forth, cutting through the rope cleanly. Jason's arms spread up in one quick motion. Now he was free. He opened and clenched his fingers into his palms. The blood rushed back and tiny pricks ran down his hand.

"OK, let's go," Jason said. "Come on, we have to hurry."

Jason didn't waste any time. He started running south. The only thing on his mind was getting back to the cottage. He'd be safe there, at least from the dangers of the forest. His legs moved faster than he ever thought possible. He only turned back to make sure the fire-eyed girl was following. She was, but she had a hard time keeping up. There was something different about her. The way she was built. The way she tried to run. It was strange, she wasn't weak necessarily, but it was like she had never ran on the ground ever before. Her gait was awkward and she stumbled as she tried to keep up with Jason.

He ran a little bit further ahead, and when he turned around this time, he saw she had collapsed. Jason ran back to see what was wrong. She wasn't winded, it didn't seem like she was tired, but rather her body couldn't move that much. She just stopped, curled up on the ground, her knees tucked in with her arms around the shins.

"Can you keep up?" Jason asked. "We don't have too much further, but we need to keep moving. If we stay here too long, we'll be found. If it's not the goblins, then it will be the direwolves. It seems that we've outrun them for now. Now, do you think you can make it on your own, or should I help carry you?"

She didn't answer at first. She didn't even respond to his question at all. Jason knelt down and tried to lift her up from the ground, but that only upset her. She pushed his arms away.

"Don't touch me," she said. "I can do this myself. You don't understand, it's going to take a while for me to acclimate. You were right, I'm not from this world. Up above, we don't have gravity in the same way as Lokar. It's artificial, we use centrifugal force in our satellites. They spin at a constant rate, depending on their size, to mimic the effects of gravity. Not too fast, as it would result in the Coriolis effect. Not too slow, otherwise there's not enough gravity, and our bodies fall apart. Even when we calibrate these rotations just so, it's not the same. The gravity, it's different, and we don't exactly know why. We are still human, after all."

"You've lost me," Jason said. "What's this gravity? Spinning? What's that have to do with you getting up and running now?"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Gravity, it's gravity," she said, disturbed by his lack of knowledge of something so basic. "You're riding a horse, fast as the wind, but you stay on its back. That's gravity holding you there. It turns suddenly and you're pulled back and to the side, that's artificial gravity."

She saw that Jason still didn't get it. He took the basics of physics for granted, of course, without a glimmer of knowledge of the mountain of experiments and endless equations that showed how the Cosmos worked.

"You drop a stone, and what happens?"

"It falls," Jason said. "Is this a time to joke?"

"It's no joke," she said. "That's gravity. It's what keeps you and I here in place on this ground instead of floating away to the heavens. It's what we, the Elovians and the rockets we built, fought to escape Lokar in the First Aeon. It's what binds our satellites in orbit to this world. It's why you see our lights in your night sky, dazzling as we pass by, in an endless procession, time and time again. You've seen us, haven't you? It's why you called us the sky people."

"I've seen your lights," Jason said. "I believe. Others don't. But I knew you were real. I knew it. My father heard the stories from the wandering merchants. I never doubted. I always believed."

"I should be fine in a few hours," she said. "This is according to our calculations. It's all theoretical, of course. The difference between Lokar-like gravity and the actual gravity down here. We're talking rounding errors, but over a lifetime, it makes a big difference. The application of this physics hasn't been tested in thousands of years, however."

"You mean the last time the sky people came?"

"Call us Elovians," she said.

"Elovian, I can do that," Jason said. "But I don't even know your name."

This warmed her. She stood up and brushed off her knees. "You can call me Morse."

Jason mulled over the name and repeated it silently on his tongue and lips. He smiled and then laughed. "Morse, a name I've never heard," he said. "You mean like horse, but with an 'm'?"

"It's not so funny," Morse said. "If you knew the history of communications in the First Aeon, you'd find it to be an honorable name. All of us Elovians are named after the pioneers in science. They're what drove humans forward, up and away from the darkness here."

"It was just a joke," Jason said. He took a step back and leaned against a pine tree. The sliver of the moon had moved behind some thick plume of clouds, so that an eerie metallic darkness had covered the sky, which blanketed the forest. He wondered why this fire-eyed girl was so serious, and how she was so brilliant. It must've been a whole different world up there in the stars, in Elovia. "Tell me, since we're talking."

"Tell you what exactly?" Morse asked.

"So all of it is true," Jason said. "You're from the sky, and that ship that crashed, that was yours. When's the last time one of the sky people, one of your kind, I guess I mean you, one of you Elovians, when's the last time you came here to Lokar?"

Morse sighed. There was no easy way to explain or answer this question, but she wanted to try. "It's been a long, very long time," she said. "Can you count the years that have passed over the seven Aeons?"

"I cannot," Jason said. "They're as many as the sands."

"That's a poetic way to put it," Morse said. "Elovians stopped coming to Lokar in the 839th year of the Second Aeon. If you'd count back from this year, the 4,329th year of the Seventh Aeon, it would be 72,343 years since an Elovian came to Lokar."

The darkness on the forest floor was complete now. The moon hid away with none of its silver, milky light to spare. A soft, brisk wind picked up and stirred the leaves and rustled the arms of the pines and evergreens. Jason was stunned by the vastness of time that stood before him. A little ripple of goose flesh went down his neck. A gnashing of teeth, a low growl. His ears perked up to listen closer. The direwolves were back on the trail of their scent.

There wasn't any time to waste.

"You have to listen to me," Jason said. "Don't turn around. Follow me up this tree. We have to go now. The direwolves, they're behind you."

Jason barely finished before the direwolves showed themselves and their attack began. There were four of the beasts, their bodies tall as a grown man and twice as long. They rushed forth from the darkness.

"Run! Run to this tree," Jason said. He grabbed hold of the trunk of the tallest giant pine tree around and boosted himself up to the first branch, grabbed hold, and swung to the next, high enough to be out of immediate danger.

Morse followed and tried the same, but she didn't have the strength to get up the tree. Jason encouraged her, giving her instructions to push as hard as she could, but he realized it wasn't going to work. She needed help. There wasn't time to mess around, as the direwolves rushed forward through the darkness. Jason jumped down from the branch and landed on the forest floor. He quickly got behind Morse and lifted her up from under her feet, giving her enough of a boost to reach the higher branch and safety. He quickly followed, and just in time, as the direwolves came snapping, their jaws hungry for human flesh. The two moved up another branch and then another, high enough where even the biggest direwolves couldn't reach them. The pack of four beasts huddled around the base of the giant pine tree, jumping and cracking their teeth at the chance to rip into Jason and Morse, but they were just high enough to be out of reach.

"You saved my life," Morse said, out of breath. "Those are terrible beasts."

"Nothing like that up in the stars?" Jason asked.

Morse was silent for a moment. She sat with the question as she caught her breath. "I can't say yes or no," she said. "We have our own terrible beasts up there. The problem is, they look like us. When the danger of beasts is gone, humans become the beasts painted with a veneer of civility."

"I think I understand," Jason said. "Look, we won't have much time up here. The night's still long, at least another couple hours until dawn, and packs of direwolves don't move alone. Where there's more than one direwolf, a troll's soon to follow."

Although the two humans were high enough up the giant pine tree to stay safe, the direwolves weren't discouraged from trying to find a way to shake them out. Two of them kept retreating about a hundred feet to get a running start and a higher jump, but kept coming up short. The other two beasts slammed their thick canine skulls against the base of the giant pine to shake them out. The impacts were rough and hard, enough to cause Jason and Morse to cling to their perch.

"Hold on tight," Jason said. "Lay down flat and wrap your arms around the branch. We'll be safe if we just hold tight."

"For how long?" Morse asked. She did as she was told. Their position in the tree made it so the two of them were right on top of each other. She felt safe with Jason.

"These beasts disappear at dawn," Jason said. "They're a Morlogian species, they fear the day like nothing else."

"I know of them," Morse said. "We study them from the Archives. But do you think we can last up here that long?"

Jason was about to answer but was interrupted by the dancing notes of a bugle. That only meant one thing. It was a worse prospect than the direwolves below, which they could outlast perched on the branch until dawn. But what came for them now? There was no escape from it.

Morse saw the gloom spread over Jason's face. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but before she could, her question was answered with the shrill yelps of a downed direwolf, struck in the neck by an expertly loosed arrow. Seconds later the other three canine terrors met the same fate, their blood pooled at the base of the giant pine.

A retinue of a dozen horses trampled onto the scene. The men riding them were large and brutish and wore black leather armor, painted with the head of a red dragon, their faces and heads covered by black leather and iron bascinets. Some carried torches, others bows and quivers, and the rest kept their maces and swords at ease. One rider lifted an emerald green flag emblazoned with that same red dragon head as their armor. He trotted around in a circle, waving the flag, and laughing. The others raised their voices in unison, "Victory to the Tyrant Rayos!"

"Victory indeed," one of the riders said. He dismounted from his horse and stepped through the muddy pools of blood that had formed around the downed direwolves. He looked up and pointed at Jason and Morse. "You two up there, you funny pair, why don't you come down now. You're safe from this Morlockian scourge."

Jason kept his mouth shut and his grip on the branch tight. Morse did the same. On the horse in the back sat the elf Rudra, tied up and bound with chains meant for attack dogs in the castle. It was time to meet their destiny.