---Blue Lightning---

---Pawel’s perspective---

I walk down the muddy path through town between the houses of orangey-yellow timber.

Chors rose an hour or so ago and people are beginning to fill the streets.

I pass Tomasz, feeding a bucket of scraps to his Świnioki in their pen. I wave and smile and he waves back.

I see Sławoj, hammering a red hot length of salvaged metal into some tool or other. I don’t say anything to him since it looks like he needs to concentrate.

I pass some people whose names I don’t know but whose faces I recognise and wish them good morning.

I come to the bottom of a gigantic building, a hundred metres tall and hundreds of metres long. Larger than every other building in town put together!

Along its side are the words ‘S.K.Z.K.Z. PILECKI’, in faded, 15m tall letters.

According to all the grown ups, this building flew through the stars once, hundreds of years ago! I’m not sure if I believe that… but it definitely wasn’t built the same way as any other building in town!

The whole thing is made of metal and glass!

I’ve seen Sławoj’s attempts at smelting with iron from Mazury and they look similar but far lower quality! He can’t get his forge hot enough to get the prills to melt together and they always rust really quickly… he says it’s more of an ‘experiment’ than anything else. It’s so much easier for him to just cut pieces off of the Pilecki and get them hot enough to hammer into shape. Of course, if we keep doing that then, eventually, there will be no town hall left(!)

Glass is something I’ve only ever seen either in the Pilecki or salvaged from the Pilecki… not something we can make ourselves!

As I near the tread plate metal ramp, I see a man I really don’t want to see right now!

“Good morning, Ratimyr.” I say, with forced politeness, to the well dressed town Fojtordenter, coming down the ramp.

Ratimyr always keeps a sword at his hip whenever he goes out and dresses in clothes made of zmora leather to show off how many hunts he’s organised.

In his early 40s, his eyes are blue and his hair and skin are both pale, clearly showing everyone who looks at him that he never works the fields!

He keeps a hideous tuft of hair on his chin and a fake smile permanently plastered across his face.

“Well, well, well… if it isn’t young Pawel…” smirks the powerful man “…where are you off to this fine morning?”

“Oh, I just wanted to ask the Bzowy about something.” I say, forcing a smile.

“Is that so? He’s a busy man you know…? He doesn’t have infinite time to entertain the curiosity of young boys.” he says, his eyes narrowing.

“He says he likes it when I come to him with questions… but I’ll try not to take too much of his time.” I say, really feeling the strain of pretending to be nice to the awful man.

He shrugs and then asks “How is Zuzana doing, Pawel?” somehow managing to look like a drooling zmora while he does!

“She’s… getting by…” I answer, carefully.

The man nods, faking concern as he says “It must be hard for her… with Lukas not around…”

“I’ve been helping her as much as I can…”

“Yes but…” he bends down and puts one of his repulsive hands on my shoulder, looking into my eyes with a hungry smile “…don’t you think it would be better if she had a real man again? There could be a lot of benefits to having someone in the family who sits on the Rada Miejska… you could all move out of that hovel and into my home… What do you say, boy? Will you put in a good word for me?”

I would rather die! You bastard! You get my tata killed with your stupidity and now you’re trying to take my mama too… without even waiting for his body to fully go cold in the grave!? I don’t care how nice your house is! Fuck you!!!

Of course… I don’t say any of that… I’d get in trouble if Mama heard I’d sworn like that at anyone but… Ratimyr is a Fojtordenter… he does sit on the Rada… if I make him angry he can make life difficult for me… and, more importantly, for Mama…

“I’ll give her your regards, Sir.” I say, my face cracking.

His expression goes sour at my vague answer and he says “Yes… well… tell her to make a decision quickly… she’s still reasonably young, for the moment, but youth and beauty don’t last forever! It would be such a waste to see her become a lonely, old, unwanted crone!”

“I’m… going to… go and see the Bzowy, now… Sir.” I say, desperately trying to get away from him.

Thankfully, he lets me go.

I don’t turn back but I’m a long way away before I hear his footsteps start back down the ramp. I imagine he was glaring after me!

I make my way upstairs and along windowless corridors, dimly lit by flameless lanterns fuelled by ancient magic called ‘solar panels’.

I make my way to the ‘Kabina Pilota’, where the one I want to talk to lives.

I knock.

“Enter.” comes a voice, ragged with age.

I bring my hands to the handle and, with a heaving effort, slide the heavy door along its tracks, into the wall.

I’m told that that door was able to open itself, once upon a time, but I’m not sure the Ancients didn’t just suuuuuck at designing doors!

I step through and drag the heavy door shut behind me.

Sitting in a chair, facing a large set of glass windows, is a wizard.

His simple robes tattered, his eyes a muddy green, his hair and beard both long, grey and thick, his ancient face very wrinkled.

On his lap is a magical device that shows dense rows of strange writing, which he seems to be done reading as his finger touches the glowing slab and moves the text aside, to be replaced with more.

“Can I help you, Pawel?” the wizard asks, not looking up from his reading but not sounding annoyed.

I point at the writing and say “Why’s it all weird like that?”

“It’s Polish.” he answers, simply.

“That’s not Polish, Witold. I can read Polish!”

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

Turning to look at me, the ancient man cocks an eyebrow and chuckles “What you can read, Pawel, though we informally call it Polish, is, in point of fact, Nowo Mazurski… a blended language that originally formed aboard the Pilecki during the wandering years… before we found our way to Nowe Mazury. Polish makes up its base but around 40% of its grammar and vocabulary come from other languages… This is standard Polish, as it was spoken in the 23rd Century… and that’s Bzowy to you, young man(!)… Honestly, children have no respect these days(!)”

Smiling, I mock “Sincerest apologies, oh wise and powerful Bzowy(!)”

He laughs.

I like Witold. He’s a bit weird but I suppose that sort of what you’d expect of a wizard!

He doesn’t take himself too seriously… except to make fun.

“Something tells me you didn’t come here for a linguistics lesson, Pawel?” he asks, magically rotating his chair to face me “What can I help you with?”

“Err… yeah…” I start, gathering my thoughts “…I saw something strange, earlier, and I wondered if you might know anything about it…”

He smiles impishly “I deal in the ‘strange’, lad(!) Tell me about it…”

“So… I was up before Chors rose… my mama’s… not been sleeping well so I was out in the coop, feeding our jajonosy for her… then out of the corner of my eye, I saw something weird…”

“What did you see, Pawel?” asks the wizened man, leaning forward and fixing his eyes on me in a way that only he does.

“So… I looked up at Veles… and I saw… lightning…”

He gives a disappointed frown and answers “That’s not strange at all!… It’s a gas giant, it regularly has violent storms! Have you never seen Velian lightning before?”

I shake my head “No, I have… but it’s always been white or sometimes yellow… this was… blue…”

His eyes go wide and he sweeps away the wall of text on his magic slab, summoning a blank pane with a blinking line on it and the alphabet laid out at the bottom “Blue lightning, you say? Was it just one flash or did it last for a while?”

“It kept going for ten minutes or so from when I first noticed it… I watched it the whole time. I would have woken my mama to show her but I… thought she needed the sleep…” I answer.

“And… was it only in one place or was it all over?” he answers, tapping the alphabet to make writing.

“Just one place… on the bottom right as I was looking at it…”

“What proportion of the planet that you could see was experiencing this blue lightning?” he asks, somehow still writing while looking straight at me and not at the slab.

“Oh… like… a hundredth, maybe?”

“Exceedingly localised but continuous over minutes… fascinating!”

“That’s… not the weirdest part…” I say, sheepishly.

“Oh? Something even stranger happened afterward?”

“Yeah… the blue lightning ended and then…” I take a deep breath at the unbelievable thing I’m about to say “…a star came up from the place it had been…”

“A star? That’s… not how stars work, Pawel… they’re suns… like Chors, just very far away…” frowns the old man.

“I know, Witold, but I… don’t know how else to describe it!” I say, uncomfortably.

He nods, sympathetically, and prods “Alright, Pawel… what did the star do?”

“It… erm… it moved through the sky, way faster than any of the other stars and in the opposite direction… and it… stopped…” I point upwards “…right above us…”

“What did you do then…?” he asks.

“Well… I wanted to get somebody, to show them, but… by that point Chors was rising and it was getting difficult to see the star… I didn’t want to get shouted at for making things up…”

He frowns “Who shouts at you for making things up, Pawel? Not Zuzana, surely?”

I shake my head “No, Mama knows I don’t lie like that but… well I think you and her are the only ones who’d believe me… at least, you believe that I believe I saw something!”

“Pawel… I know you aren’t a liar and I don’t think you’re mad either! I believe you saw something… just… what that something is… I’m afraid I can’t tell you…”

“You mean it’s a secret?”

He laughs “I mean I don’t know, Pawel! Shocking as this may be for you to hear, age does not bring with it omniscience(!)”

“Do… do you think it might be…?” I look away, sheepishly, and mutter “…the Ratunek?”

He looks at me, his face sad, and shakes his head “I wish I could say ‘yes’, boy… truly, I do! I wish I could see the Ratunek come in my lifetime… It’s just that… it’s been more than four hundred years now that every strange thing in the sky has made people stand and celebrate, believing that help has finally come… At some point, I suppose, it’s just easier not to hope for miracles… It’s much harder to be disappointed if you never had any expectations to dash… Therefore, I think that what you saw was nothing more than a rare, unexplained, natural phenomenon…”

“*sigh*… OK, Witold…”

“Come now, Pawel… don’t be glum! Whether it was the Ratunek or not, it sounds like you had an amazing experience this morning! I dare say you’ll remember that blue lightning until your beard goes this grey(!)” he says, cheerfully grabbing a handful of his thick beard to show me.

I smile and chuckle “I don’t want to grow a beard(!)”

He grins and waves his hand “Young boys always say that… one day you’ll simply decide that the cut you’ve given yourself will be the last time you cut yourself in service of a clean shaven face(!)”

I laugh and shake my head.

Then I ask “Witold… tell me about where we came from?”

He cocks an eyebrow and asks “This isn’t you asking for… the talk, is it? Because I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that(!)

“No…” I giggle “…about the Pilecki… about Earth…”

He purses his lips, cheerily “You aren’t bored of that story?!”

I shake my head.

“Alright… at this rate you’ll be the Bzowy yourself, one day… You’ll need to learn Polish first, though(!)”

He stands (to a towering height of 185cm!) and points to the magic swivelling chair for me to take a seat.

I sit and he starts the performance of the story “Earth is a planet, far, far away… the light of Chors, which takes 16 and a half minutes to reach us here, would take so long to reach Earth that, by the time it did, you and I would have been dead for tens of thousands of years! Unlike here, the plants on Earth were green… if ever you wonder why our crops have green leaves, ask where they come from! Earth had great Oceans, far larger than even the largest lake on Nowe Mazury! Earth had great dense forests, open plains, hot deserts, tall mountains… but none of these were the most special thing that Earth had! Earth produced an animal, alone among all planets known, that could ask itself ‘who am I?’ One of these animals stands before you! A Human! These Humans looked to their fellow animals and sought to tame them, to subjugate them… and, in this, they had some success… They sat astride mighty warhorses, hunted with mighty wolves, herded mighty aurochs! Then… they looked to their world and sought to tame it, to subjugate it… and, in this, they had some success… They built great buildings, they farmed great fields, they dammed great rivers… The Humans then looked to eachother and each sought to tame the other, to subjugate them…” his face goes sad as he says “…and, in this, they had some success… They built terrible empires, fought calamitous wars, enslaved and exploited eachother in the most awful ways you can imagine and more awful still! Then, there came a turning… The animals were dying, the world was dying, the people were dying! The Humans of Earth declared, in one voice, ‘ENOUGH’! They would no longer do as they had done! They would no longer poison their world! They would no longer enslave and exploit one another! They would no longer hate and kill one another! Humanity United to forge the Terran Union! Justice, Peace, Equality, Freedom, Dignity and Unity would be the new reality they shared! They set about undoing the injustices of the past and found the strangest of things… it was easy! The impossibility of this dream that, for all of our history, had been called a fantasy, a delusion, a platitude, evaporated in the face of how overwhelmingly easy it is to live a life without fear when others are not Demony but fellows! A Human kind, cooperating with itself, began to push out to the stars and lay claim to new planets, turning the Terran Union into the United Terran Coalition… Though separated by such distance that we could no longer practically live under one government, our Unity was not shattered! Earth, the Cradle of Humanity, supported Her far flung settlements in the stars and our nation of nations thrived! Alas, this brings us to the tragic point in the story where our story and Earth’s finally sever… the year was 2291 by the Terran Calendar and the Coalition, now 90 billion strong and containing 41 planets, had designated a new world for settlement, Nowe Pomorze… the United Terran Coalition Colony Ship Pilecki was to be among many which would undertake the journey to bring settlers to this lush new world. Our ancestors boarded the Pilecki for the years long journey to their new home… but, the Great Calamity struck… our navigation system failed, leaving us no way to find where we had meant to go, no way to get back to where we had been and no way to let a soul in the universe know what had happened to us… We wandered the stars for decades hoping to, by some miracle, stumble upon help. We found none. The ship, which had never been intended to go so long without proper upkeep, was dying! Its life support failing and its reactor running dangerously low of its tritium fuel. The decision was made to find a planet, that we may survive. Here, on Nowe Mazury, the Pilecki came to rest… never again to set flight. Here, we have survived for all these years. Here we have waited for the Ratunek, when Mother Terra finds Her lost children and brings them back into Her fold!”

I clap, loudly.

I love that story… even if it's a bit of a sad one…