009

Informational Aftermath

“So, Jeh…” Sruo began as he opened up a notebook. A pen was currently latched to his paw via one of his many tools. “How about we just… start from the beginning and try to figure out what happened to you up there?”

Jeh sat at one end of Vaughan’s dining table, filling her face with a recently cooked chicken. Suro, Vaughan, and Blue sat on the opposite side, all three staring at her expectantly. Blue was grinning and nervously tapping her hooves.

Jeh picked up another piece of chicken and was about to throw it down her gullet when she finally picked up on everyone staring at her, waiting. With mild disappointment, she set the piece of meat down and turned to them. “First of all, it was awesome. I was flying and I c—“

“Chronologically, please,” Vaughan said. “So we can try to take this apart one piece at a time.”

“You know, that would make sense…” Jeh cleared her throat. “Well, I started by going up. As fast as I felt comfortable, anyway.”

“Faster than we tested,” Blue pointed out.

“Yeah, but I bet you’ll be glad I went faster before we’re done here!”

“I reserve the right to withhold judgment.”

Vaughan smirked. “Or forget all about it because all the new information overloads her brain.”

Blue clicked her tongue. “I want to argue with that. Really badly.” She let out a noncommittal grunt and turned expectantly back to Jeh. “So… you were going up faster than usual.”

“Yep!” Jeh sat back in her chair. “Actually, quite a lot faster. Kept pushing it and pushing it as time went on, but, wait, you want chronological.” She closed her eyes and stuck out her tongue in thought. “Okay, so, I guess the first thing I really noticed was that the faster I went, the heavier I felt. Any idea why?”

Blue nodded. “That’s an easy one. The drive’s spell is all-purpose, so it only pushes itself, everything else is getting dragged along, including you. You’re not actually any bigger or heavier, you’re just being pushed.”

“Oh!” Jeh blinked a few times. “Is that why we stay on the ground? Is Ikyu moving?”

Blue laughed. “That’s a clever idea, but no. Ikyu is round, remember? People would be flying off the other side if it was moving.”

“Oh yeah… then why can we stand on the ground?”

“Because…” Blue frowned. “Uh… give me a moment…”

“Things fall to the center of Ikyu,” Vaughan said with a shrug. “It’s like water turning to ice. We see it and know what it does, but don’t know why it does. Why does being colder freeze things at certain temperatures? It’s a similar question.”

“Anyway,” Jeh continued. “Kept pushing higher and faster—the faster I went the better the fins helped stabilize. At first, anyway.”

“More speed is more air passing by,” Blue noted. “When you get high enough there’s not much air, so it’s not surprising that the fins didn’t do much at the end of it all .”

“I didn’t even need them, but they did help me go faster,” Jeh said. “Anyway, went up, up, up, found the various winds laughable compared to Vaughan’s horror-show of training...”

Vaughan folded his arms and raised an eyebrow.

“…I got scared for a moment when I hit a cloud before realizing it was a cloud. Nothing weird happened. It was just foggy. Anyway, up about that high I saw C-R’s balloon whale.”

Blue shivered. “Let’s… not record that, it’ll just lead to awkward questions and it has nothing to do with our experiment.”

Suro nodded, striking a line through the note he had just written down.

“What else did you see up there?” Vaughan asked.

“Just some specks of green and blue drifting around the clouds.” Jeh looked at the wizard quizzically.

“Drifters,” Blue answered for him. “Tiny life that lives at the highest altitudes possible. Airborne races know a lot more about them. I think they’re plants. I think.”

Jeh shrugged. “They were the last living things I saw the whole time. Before, well, crashing back down, but we’ll get to that. It was pretty cool to see the entire continent unfold beneath me, like I really was looking at a map… oh, oh, when I started getting high, I noticed that the blue sky vanished! I was able to see stars!”

Blue blinked a few times. “But wait, the sun was up, doesn’t it block starlight with its own glow?”

“Oh, I just think air is blue,” Jeh said.

“It’s clear,” Vaughan said.

“So’s water, unless you have a lot of it.”

Vaughan found this comment worthy of a beard scratch. “We’d need more tests to be sure…”

“Well, when I was up there, when I looked down at the horizon the sky was still blue, just not any other direction. The other directions were where the stars were.”

Blue let out a whinny. “Hmm… so… the sky is blue…” She tapped her hoof a few times. “I wonder why it’s different colors at different times of day, then, I— oh!” She stomped her hooves in excitement. “It’s the distance! The distance determines the color!” She ran outside and dragged in the blackboard and started drawing—a circle that represented Ikyu, and then a bunch of dots all around Ikyu. “These dots represent the air. All together… I guess I’ll call them the atmosphere.*”

*She just made this word up. There was no word for “atmosphere” before this moment. There were words for “sky” “air” and various qualities of air, but none for “atmosphere” in Karli. Most would just say “all the air.” It is a hidden pleasure of frontier scientists to make up words.

“Now, let’s say the sun is shining down on us from above…” She drew a line from the top of the whiteboard to the top of Ikyu. “We have to pass near a few dots for the light to get this far, but not too many. But if the sun were to the side, like, say, at sunset…” She drew another line that hit Ikyu at the same point but came from the side of the board. “As you can see, this line runs near more atmosphere dots. Why? Because it’s at a lower elevation for longer.” She let out a satisfied laugh. “At sunset, the light isn’t coming straight at us, it has more atmosphere to get through!”

“Wait, so…” Vaughan frowned. “Would that mean if we get far enough away from Ikyu, everything’s blue?”

“I’m pretty sure everything’s black,” Jeh said. “That’s the color between the stars.”

“Just simply not enough air up there to color anything, I’m guessing,” Blue said. “But this is still a discovery! Air: blue! But not the same blue as water, a different blue. I wonder if there’s a way to test the color properties of air…”

Jeh decided now was a good time to continue. “Anyway, it actually didn’t take that long to see the curvature of Ikyu. I just… kept going because I was there so fast.”

Blue’s left eye twitched. “What?”

Jeh shrunk back slightly. “I just… wanted to go a little further and I was ahead of schedule, right?” She rubbed the back of her head awkwardly. “But I did go really high and saw a lot of things!”

Vaughan perked up. “Things?”

“Most of them were things on Ikyu, though. The moon didn’t really change up there. Still boring, still gray. Also didn’t get any larger, must be really far away.” Jeh folded her arms, annoyed by this.

“What did you see on Ikyu?” Vaughan asked.

“Let’s see… lots of biomes and forests, a couple mushroom groves that weren’t on the maps, a Purple crystal larger than most cities, a massive swirling storm, some red water, and a moving island.”

Vaughan blinked a few times. “No clue about the red water or the moving island. The other two… the big storm is the Tempest, you’ve probably read about it. The cube…” Vaughan scratched his beard a few times. “Was it to the north of here?”

“Uh… yes, quite a bit actually.”

Vaughan nodded slowly. “I’ve heard rumors that the people of Shimvale are purchasing as much Purple crystal as they can get their hands on. Perhaps this is why.”

“Wouldn’t someone notice a city-sized Crystalline One?” Blue asked. “There’s no way you get a crystal that large without it becoming a Crystalline One.”

“They live amidst the ice,” Vaughan said with a shrug. “If the Shimmers wanted to keep it secret, they could. Their borders aren’t exactly open.”

“But now we know. Because… we went really really stupid high.” Blue was silent for a moment, flicking her tail. “…Did you see anything else, Jeh?”

Jeh shook her head. “Not that I remember, at least not on Ikyu. But my story’s not done!” She put on a big grin. “See, I kept going and going and going. Ikyu got smaller… over time. But then, crack!” She jumped to her feet, using the table as her floor. “There was a hole in the jar! I scrambled in a hurry… I thought I could melt the glass with Red to repair it but uh that didn’t go well.”

Blue stared at her with wide eyes. “Jeh… Jeh that could have destroyed the entire ship in one moment. “

“But it didn’t!” Jeh put her hands on her hips. “I switched to Green and patched it right up.”

“Jeh this still doesn’t excuse th—“

“And then I found what caused the problem!” Jeh pulled out an absolutely tiny, metallic rock and set it on the table. “Found it in the wreckage of my air restorer, which it hit after making the hole.”

Forgetting her rant for the time being, Blue levitated the tiny rock into the air and examined it. Besides being metallic, Blue could tell nothing else, for she was not well versed in rocks.

“So this just… hit you,” Blue said. “At a high enough speed to bore a hole in the Skyseed and then shatter the air restorer.” Blue blinked a few times. “If… if this is normal, it’s going to be hard to design around a danger like this. Random projectiles that could hit you at any moment without warning…”

“The air restorer stopped it,” Suro pointed out as he continued writing. “It clearly wasn’t unstoppable.”

“So there’ll be a way…” Blue nodded to herself a few times, already clearly dreaming up ideas. “Anyway, without an air restorer, how did you get back?”

Jeh smiled awkwardly. “As quickly as possible. I tried to cast the spell manually but I got a little distracted after a bit. So… here’s the thing. I was trying to go down. My air restorer was broken so I’m thinking it’s best to get back quickly. So I crank the drive into maximum and charge back downward. There’s a bunch of clouds in the way but who cares, air is a problem. Absolute speed! I got up here fast, it should be easy, right? Wrong! Oh so very, very wrong!” Jeh let out a series of tense laughs and sat back down in her chair. “I didn’t notice anything was wrong until the ship started to catch fire.”

Vaughan frowned. “Why? You were going top speed on the way up, what’s different with down?”

Blue tapped her hoof. “Two things. One, there’s more air at lower elevations. Two, if the drive was at maximum while pointed down… isn’t it also falling?”

“Yeah, it was really weird!” Jeh giggled. “When I turned the drive around I was suddenly floating, but once I’d turned it around suddenly the floor changed!”

“You were being dragged down just like you were being dragged up. But not only that, but you were also falling. Remember, things want to fall to Ikyu. While you went up you were fighting, but when you went down you were being helped. You probably reached absurd speeds…”

“…Akin to the acceleration on a Blue crystal?” Jeh asked. “Because that’s what I thought after using Blue crystals myself in the midst of it all! Going so fast I caught fire!”

Vaughan snapped his fingers. “Ah, that’s something we forgot! Blue, meteors come from space, do they not?”

“Probably,” Blue admitted.

“And they light up as they fall, brilliant orbs in the sky… I think anything falling from that high up lights on fire.”

“Which is why it should have been taken slow,” Blue snipped.

“Hey, I didn’t know if I was going to run out of air or not!” Jeh huffed, crossing her arms. “And I was able to slow myself down enough to stop the fire with a lot of clever Blue usage! Though I… did light up the inside of the Skyseed for a moment after I cast it on myself and not the ship. That usually doesn’t happen though, I was wondering why?”

“Ah…” Blue rubbed the base of her horn. “The old ‘calculate the effects of Blue acceleration in a moving object’ problem. Ugh, the math on that one… I’ll just try to explain it. Luckily, I already have a blackboard!” With a cheesy wink, she flipped the blackboard to the other side and started drawing on it, this time with a single dot. “Let this represent you, Jeh. Here, I’ll even give it bear ears.” She drew two little circles on top of the dot.

“Perfect,” Jeh said, eyes sparkling.

“Good! So, when you cast Blue while standing still, nothing happens. Obviously, if you accelerate something that’s not moving, it’s still not moving. However…” She drew a boat under the spot that represented Jeh. “Now, this boat is sailing along at some constant speed. What if you cast Blue on yourself while on the boat?”

Vaughan raised a hand.

“Yes?”

“Depends o—“

Blue facehooved. “The standard spell, Vaughan. Assume acceleration factor of two if you need something simple.”

“Two is kind of high…”

“This illustration doesn’t need to be overly realistic!”

Suro coughed. “If you cast Blue while on a boat with no special additions, nothing happens. Because, as far as you are concerned, you’re standing still.”

“Thank you, Suro,” Blue said with a relieved sigh. “Yes, when you cast it, the acceleration occurs in relation to you. If you’re standing still, even if you’re on a moving object, nothing will occur. But if you were moving beforehand, or if you start moving after the acceleration comes, you will move much faster. Not that it will feel very different to you—it just seems like the rest of the world is very slow.”

Jeh tilted her head. “Okay, but that doesn’t explain why I lit on fire. I wasn’t really moving in relation to the Skyseed.”

“Ah, yes, that. So, there’s a difference between when you’re on the boat and on the Skyseed. And that thing is called falling. On the boat, it is the boat that’s holding you up, accelerated or not. On the Skyseed, if you’re in freefall, it’s not holding you up. Both of you are falling, and by accelerating one part of you, you’ll end up moving at different rates.”

Jeh stared at her for a few moments and groaned. “Agh… I don’t think I fully get it.”

“Aside from Magenta, Blue is the hardest Color to understand,” Blue admitted. “To think of it as ‘speed’ is definitely an oversimplification. When accelerated, you age faster, chemical reactions increase… and that’s not even getting into the nature of the boundary.”

“The what?” Jeh asked.

“I don’t know what it means either,” Suro offered.

“The boundary…” Vaughan scratched his beard. “Generally only interests Blue wizards because it refers to the area between the accelerated individual and the rest of the world. I know very little, but I do know that there is a gradient; the speed increases gradually rather than all at once. Apparently, with complex Blue magic, you can tell the boundary to form in other ways and get some really fascinating effects, but those kinds of things are often kept secret by the Blue wizards, as is most high magic.”

“Nobody can cast it, nobody demands that the secret be revealed,” Blue added. “Of course, the definition of high magic is so nebulous… some go as far to say that if you’re a wizard that has a ‘unique technique’ it’s high magic. This definition is stupid and should go die in a hole.”

“Some say no one but Crystalline Ones really have access to high magic.”

Blue nodded. “Yeah that stuff Ashen was pulling… that was definitely high magic.” Blue frowned. “And C-R was able to take her on.”

“Ashen was a newborn,” Suro said. “She had all her power, as Crystalline Ones do, but she had no precision or strategy. She was essentially lashing out.”

“Right…”

“I wonder where she is now?” Jeh thought aloud.

“Somewhere, probably wanting to be left alone,” Suro answered.

“Let’s not worry about her,” Blue said dismissively. “This is report time. Jeh?”

Jeh blinked. “Oh, that’s basically it. After I got the fire under control, I worked as hard as I could to slow down and make it to the right place. Y’know. Since there was an explosion I could see. And then you know what happened. And… that’s that.”

Silence fell around the table.

“…Was it beautiful, up there?” Vaughan asked.

Jeh couldn’t help but grin. “Ikyu looked absolutely amazing.”

Vaughan gave her a wry smile. “I’ll be up there to see it myself, one day.”

“Before we can do that we need to make it safe!” Blue declared. “And we have learned about quite a few safety concerns. The Skyseed is not going to be able to carry anyone aside from Jeh, it’s just too dangerous.”

“So, what do we need to design for?” Suro asked, starting a new section in his notes for future intentions.

Blue closed her eyes, trying to hold it all together in her mind so she could be sure she got it all. “Okay… first of all, the tiny rocks in space. We need armor or protection or something. We also need a way to know where we’re landing for certain, to avoid the cloud problem again. And then… Well, we need to figure out more about this whole ‘falling and lighting on fire’ business. We might be able to determine a maximum safe speed.” She nodded to herself a few times. “We can still use the Skyseed for these experiments when we get the fins repaired, but the next major voyage would have to be another ship, or a revamp of the Skyseed.”

“Hmm. Another ship might be difficult,” Vaughan said. “We can’t remove the drive from the Skyseed without breaking glass.”

Blue nodded. “Let’s hold off on repairing it until we make a decision.”

Vaughan nodded in agreement. “And… I think that’s that.” He turned to Suro. “Got everything?”

Suro nodded. “Naturally, you and I will be writing up something more official, and with fewer side notes and amusing interpersonal interludes.”

“Ah, yes, my least favorite part about being a wizard. The reports.”

“Technically, we don’t have to make it.”

“Eh…” Vaughan tilted his hand side to side. “Someone might find something like the air restorer in it again and we’ll get a lot more money.”

“Or you could wait for more sales to come in,” Suro suggested. “The air restorer is a huge success, people just have to buy more and get more made.”

“So many decisions, so little time…” Vaughan scratched his beard.

Blue stood up, twirling the tiny space rock in her telekinesis once more. “I’m going to go ask around town about this, see if we can learn anything. Jeh, want to come with?”

Jeh leaped up immediately. “Yes!”

“Haven’t we had enough adventure for the day?” Suro asked.

“There are questions I want answered,” Blue said, staring right into the rock. “And you know how I am when I don’t have answers.”

“That’s the only way I know you,” Vaughan said.

Blue blinked a few times. “I don’t think that insult works.”

“I’ll keep trying.”

Blue rolled her eyes. “You do that…”

~~~

Big G picked up the small rock in his big hands, examining it through a magnifying glass. He squished it between his fingers, flicked it with his fingernail, and even licked it once.

This was all done in the full view of everyone in Willow Hollow’s town square since Big G was out of the mines selling wares today. No Colored crystals—those were processed separately—he had a fair collection of high-quality ore and unprocessed natural gemstones that had a beauty all their own.

“Mostly metal,” Big G said. “I’d guess iron, mostly. Which makes sense if you got this from up there.” He gestured up at the sky.

Jeh grinned. “Yep, it attacked me!”

“Darmosil will be able to tell you more about sky rocks than I ever will,” Big G tossed the rock back to Blue, which she caught in her telekinesis. “All I can tell you is that’s some good quality material but there ain’t enough of it to do anything.”

“Aww…” Jeh sighed.

“It really is just a rock.” Blue twirled it around a few more times. “You said Darmosil would know more?”

“Yep. He’ll tell it best. You’ve lived here long enough.”

It did not surprise Blue all that much that Darmosil kept track of how long she’d lived in Willow Hollow. “Well… Jeh, shall we go off to the forge?”

Jeh grinned. “Oooh, I can introduce you to my friends, then!”

“…You have friends? Forest critters?”

“Huh? Oh, no, those are food. I’m talking about friends. You know, people?” Jeh smirked. “Or do you think I don’t have a grasp on Karli yet, hmm?”

Blue held up a hoof in surrender. “All right, all right, you know what you’re talking about.” Blue chuckled. “Guess we’ll go meet these friends of yours. If they’re there.”

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

“They will be!”

The bakery/glassworks/forge was just over a minute away since they were already in the town square. They bid goodbye to Big G and soon thereafter walked in the doors of the bakery area.

“A happy welcome!” one of the Sourdough twins called from the front of the counter.

“From us to any paying customer!” the other finished. She was placing a bunch of bread rolls on a shelf.

There was no one else in the bakery at the moment.

“Sorry Jeh,” Blue said. “It looks li—“

“Rissy and Rona!” Jeh called, running to the twins. The two of them high-fived her at the same time, prompting everyone to start giggling madly.

Everyone but Blue, that was. She couldn’t believe her eyes. “Since when are you friends with the Sourdough twins?”

“Last week,” Jeh said.

“T’was a week—“ one twin began.

“—of amazing adventure and intrigue!” the other ended.

“And of bread.”

“Naturally, truly unspeakable amounts of bread.”

“Absolutely.”

“It was a great day,” Jeh agreed. “Blue, we did science! We discovered how my regeneration deals with being force-fed! It’s quite fun, first you stuff so much bread down my thro—“

Blue held up a hoof. “Rismelda! Ronadale!”

One of them responded. “I’m Ronadale, she’s Rismelda.” The other nodded in agreement.

Blue huffed. “I was referring to both of you together, you can’t get out so easily.” She also didn’t believe for a second that she could trust the names they’d given her.

“It was just a little experiment!”

“And Jeh had the idea first.”

Blue opened her mouth to object—but couldn’t come up with the words. Who was she to tell Jeh what she could and couldn’t do? In their little program, things were different, Jeh had to be told what to do or else things could go wrong. But out here, with Jeh making friends?

Blue wasn’t her mother.

Nobody was.

“You look sad, Blue,” Jeh said. “Do you… not like them?”

Blue decided she needed to tread very carefully here. She may not have been Jeh’s mother, but she was a figure Jeh had become attached to. Her words could change the course of this child’s internal journey to find herself.

So, naturally, Blue said the wisest and most graceful thing she could think of at that moment.

“Uh...”

The Sourdough twins rushed in to spare her.

“I think Blue’s just confused,” one said.

The other nodded in agreement. “Yes. But we can fix that!”

“We can just be more likable!”

“Ten percent discount for Blue and everyone else in her little space program!”

“Oooh, space program, I like that!” Jeh said a little too excitedly.

“It is a good name,” a twin said.

The other chuckled. “But I think it needs more!”

“You’ll just have to figure out what it is later!” The first one winked at Jeh.

“Seriously, though, ten percent off for you fine space pioneers.”

Blue frowned. “Why?”

Both twins grinned mischievously. “We don’t have to explain anything!”

Blue twitched. “That is not how you make yourselves more likable…”

Suddenly, one of the twins grabbed a freshly baked pie and held it under Blue’s nose. “Can we bribe you?”

“Of course not,” the other twin said.

“But would you like the pie anyway?”

“Uh…” Blue blinked a few times, trying to get her bearings. “I think I’ll pass on the pie…”

“Okay!” the twins said with their usual cheery tune.

Jeh glanced at the twins. “Hold on, I don’t think I followed everything there…”

One of the twins shrugged. “Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean we explain everything to you either.”

“Spoopy,” the other added. “We like it that way.”

Jeh clapped her hands together. “You two are a mystery I’m going to find out! Or my name isn’t Jeh!”

“You were found in the woods, your real name probably isn’t Jeh,” the second twin said.

“Jeh sounds so familiar though…” Jeh frowned. “I guess it could have been something else. But I’m Jeh now, so my name’s Jeh! Ha! So there!”

Blue pat Jeh on the shoulder. “Yes. Your name is Jeh. Now, and for as long as I’m concerned.”

For a moment, it looked like tears were welling up in Jeh’s eyes. The next thing Blue knew, the wild child was hugging her leg tightly. A soft hum came from Jeh as she nuzzled Blue’s fur.

“What song is that, Jeh?”

Jeh shrugged, continuing her hum. Blue decided to just let her continue. For once, the Sourdough twins didn’t interrupt; rather they went back to their work, giving the two the moment.

Jeh pulled back. “Well, I’m glad I’m Jeh, but don’t we have something to do?”

Blue nodded. Without incident, the two of them went to the other half of the shop. For once in their lives, Krays and Darmosil weren’t in the midst of passionate debate.

There was a very simple reason for this. Krays was fast asleep, drooling all over the counter. Darmosil was content to quietly work away at his tools.

“Hello, Darmosil,” Blue greeted him with a slight bow of her head. “What can you tell me about this?” She dropped the rock for him.

Darmosil glanced lazily at it. His eyes widened and he immediately dropped what he was doing to pick it up in his hands. “This… you got this from the stars?”

Jeh blinked. “Well, from space anyway.”

“It looks so similar… but so tiny.”

“What can you tell us about it?” Blue asked. “Big G said you might know something.”

“Might is such a strong word to associate with something so certain.” Rolling the rock in his fingers, he gestured for them to follow. “I have something to show you.”

“Oh?”

He led them into the back room which, as expected for a room Krays frequented, was an absolutely disorganized mess filled with half-broken pieces of glass and metallic implements. Several boxes were thrown haphazardly around, each filled with various kinds of glass, sand, and metal. In the back, however, there was another door, and this was where Darmosil was leading them.

The other side of the door was clearly designed to be a closet, but that was not at all what Darmosil had used it for. Here, he stored his most prized possessions. While not everything was a weapon, everything here had been forged. However, much of it was clearly not of Darmosil’s design: there was a metal crossbow with ornamental flowers carved into it, an all-but-perfectly smooth shield with no designs whatsoever, a pentagon-shaped cauldron, and a handful of other things carefully stacked and placed meticulously.

All of this paled in comparison to the sword sitting on the wall.

It was a massive, wide blade that had a curious rippling quality to the metal itself. Its tip was long and narrow and its edges were all sharpened to perfection—clearly a massive chore to maintain. The hilt was surprisingly small compared to the rest of its girth, almost as if it was designed for smaller hands.

Where the hilt met the blade, there were Colored crystals of every kind. None of them were glowing at the moment, but the rainbow weave around the apparently simple crystal core gave promise of immense magical potential.

Curiously, though, in the midst of the Colored crystals was a single piece of obsidian carved into a perfect cube of darkness. It sat at the place of honor in the blade’s design, being the most dominant element.

“What a curious weapon…” Blue said.

Jeh reached out to touch it, but Darmosil held out his hand. “This blade has been in my family for many generations. It was made by my ancestor, Jorn…”

~~~

Jorn lived so long ago that the Piper family no longer knows the exact date. Long enough ago that the Kingdom of Kroan didn’t exist. Short enough that the tales of the Great Crystalline Ones were still legends.

Jorn Piper was a blacksmith. We do not know if his father was a blacksmith as well, but every generation after has been. We also do not know what color his hair and gauntlets were, but as you are not gari this is probably of minimal concern to you.*

*Gari (or garilend, if you use the full term) have very sensitive eyes that can determine exceedingly minor color differences. As such, many gari can identify each other by color alone; rare is a gari with exactly the same color as another one. Different cultures of gari have placed different levels of importance upon the color of the individual. Darmosil and most of the gari in Willow Hollow aren’t all that attached to the almost-religious tradition associated with their color. Other cultures treat color as the determining factor in who a person is. Curiously, this does not tend to lead to racism among gari, largely due to the prevalence of other races around that are much easier to hate.

Jorn had no fame or fortune, he was just a simple blacksmith in a small town. Didn’t even have an arcane forge, for back then they were new and largely not trusted to behave. “Couldn’t he just ask a wizard to maintain it?” That’s what we would do these days. Jorn did not have that option since the practice of the “town wizard” simply did not exist. He was alone with his forge.

And he was happy with his forge. A bit too happy, if you ask me. All the stories and pictures have him smiling and laughing. I suspect his history is being painted in an all-too optimistic light, but I digress. He was a blacksmith.

Then one day a star fell in his backyard.

Naturally, it was a meteorite, one of many rocks that fall from space. Most burn up in the sky as they fall—what, did you think that was new information you discovered? My family has passed down stories of this meteorite for too long for me to not know more about what it is.

Jorn’s meteorite was large enough that it didn’t just burn up. It was almost as large as he was. Naturally, he decided to make a sword out of it. Just a small, test one at first. This blade was the Starcutter, and it is lost to time. Probably broke eons ago, to be honest, the thing was a prototype.

But with the prototype, he was able to do tests on the metal and found that its quality far surpassed anything around. Steel is stronger when done right, but steel was unheard of in his time.

Jorn was suddenly sitting on the purest, most workable metal he had ever seen. Naturally, he decided to make some money off of this, selling smaller swords made from the meteorite. Now, a sword of higher quality does not provide you much of an edge in a battle if you don’t know how to use it, but “sword from the heavens” tends to make people forget about practical concerns for the most part.

That is, until Jorn started to run out. He realized he was making pathetically ordinary swords out of the best metal and he wasn’t going to be able to get more. He wanted to make something amazing, something beyond brilliant. But he didn’t know what, for he was a blacksmith, not a person who used these kinds of things.

Then, one day, a woman came to him. She spoke in strange words that shifted from riddles to in-your-face brazenness. My theory is that Jorn was a storyteller and told the story of his encounter with the woman in several different ways, just to keep everything “interesting.” Thus, we know little of what she was actually like.

We only have the vaguest ideas of who she was. She was some kind of adventurer, and a successful one at that, who managed to convince him to craft a sword specifically keyed to her. See that black cube? That’s her symbol, though its meaning is lost to us.

What he eventually created was the blade for the sword you see before you. Its name is Grinzhyldr. It probably meant something in some long-forgotten language.

The sword is an amazing work of craftsmanship that has been passed down through the Piper family. We do not know why we got it back—perhaps the woman died while using it—we only know the story of its creation. But it means a lot to us, for it represents what has led our people forward: the tradition of blacksmithing. One day, I shall pass it down to my son. Or daughter, I suppose, but that would create some awkwardness in the naming convention. This has always been Grinzhyldr, the sword of the Piper family.

Of course, the sword is far too large for any normal person to effectively use. I suspect the woman in the legend to not have been human and to have had some kind of strength attribute. It’s useless as a sword by itself. However, the rainbow of crystals is fully functional. This is one of the earliest examples of something designed to access all seven Colors of magic at once, just like Vaughan’s scepter.

Yes, it is annoying to keep the sword in mint condition. However, since we never use it, the crystals never decay, only grow and try to reshape. In olden times, the Pipers learned to shave the crystals to maintain them, but I just have Suro come over every month.

And so now Grinzhyldr sits, alone, on this wall. A sword crafted from a fallen star and fused with a crystal core amazingly advanced for the time. A sword that simply cannot actually be used as a sword.

That is what I know about meteorites.

~~~

“You know, Blue has a lot of complaints about academia,” Vaughan told Suro. The two were in Vaughan’s study. Vaughan was walking back and forth in front of a blackboard while Suro was carefully writing things down.

“She was kicked out,” Suro pointed out without looking up from his page.

“I don’t agree with most of her critiques. Academia is not filled with morons or idiots. It is filled with people who like records and documents too much.”

“Vaughan, technically speaking, you did not receive any funding from the Academy, and thus are not required to write up any reports.”

“There still has to be a record of what has been done, something official that gives us merit for when we need more people and funding. Certifying the record with the Academy will go a long way.”

Suro clicked his tongue. “You know, the Academy used to only be concerned with training new wizards, you know, not managing all wizards on Ikyu to some kind of specific standard.”

“All wizards in Kroan.”

“Most Academies on Ikyu are connected and follow basically the same setup.” Suro paused, thinking. “Then again, there are many distant and mysterious lands, so I suppose things may be different there. Jeh did say she saw a massive landmass that wasn’t on any of our maps.”

“You know, last time I went to town was to fix some air restorers for the mines. While I was there, Mary asked me why I was so concerned with exploring what was above us when there was plenty of stuff to find on Ikyu.” Vaughan grinned. “Considering how Jeh discovered a new landmass, I think we are exploring Ikyu.”

Suro smirked. “To plumb the depths of reality is to learn more about where you came from, in every sense.”

“Mmm…”

Suro stopped writing. “Okay, that’s all the procedures. I’ve been careful not to mention the full nature of Jeh’s regeneration. Let me tell you, it’s quite a trick to be truthful without letting the cat out of the bag*.”

*Curiously, this is not a case of translation confusion. The phrase “cat out of the bag” more or less translates directly into Karli.

“Most would just leave it out or lie.”

“You and I both know we won’t do that.”

Vaughan nodded sagely. “…Old friend, the challenges never end, do they?”

“You remember the Eye? How old was she again? So old she didn’t remember exactly? And she still had personal challenges that cut to her core.”

Vaughan closed his eyes and scratched his beard. “How could I forget…”

Suro tapped his pen on the table. “Anyway, I think Jeh’s safe from the King’s men for now.”

“Even then, they might not do anything. She is just a kid.”

Suro nodded. “Still, that doesn’t exactly stop him. Could send her to military training.”

Vaughan turned around, locking his hands behind his back. “…She really does paint a target on her own back just by existing.”

“We’re safe for now,” Suro asserted. “At least from Kroan. C-R… might have just thought it was a normal attribute.”

“…I think, at this point, the town will protect her.”

“Willow Hollow is really, really small.”

Silence fell upon them.

Suddenly, Vaughan clapped his hands. “Well, there’s no use moping around! The girl’s not exactly easy to keep secret, someone will take interest in her eventually. We just have to do our best to watch out for her and be by her side when the day comes. Can’t live like there’s a sword over our heads.”

Suro smiled softly. “You’re right there.”

“What’s next on our report, anyway?”

“We just need the concluding remarks,” Suro said. “I already know most of them, but I do want to know what you want for the ‘future plans’ section? What is our goal?”

“Go to space.”

“We did that.”

“Go deeper into space.”

“Not very specific.”

Vaughan put his hands on the desk and grinned widely. “Go to the moon.”

“…Vaughan that… is going to take a significan—“

“Don’t care, put it in there. We are going there, one way or another.”

Suro chuckled. “If you insist…”

~~~

“So!” Blue called to Vaughan, Jeh, and Suro one day over lunch. “We need to decide what we’re going to do with the Skyseed. It can be repaired, and it wouldn’t even be that hard. The question is: do we want to? It clearly isn’t capable of doing everything we want it to, and voyages any higher than Jeh already went simply wouldn’t be safe.”

“And would be pointless,” Jeh said. “There’s nothing up there. Not even air.”

“Experiments might be able to be run in environments like that,” Blue said. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons we should repair the Skyseed. It’s a simple, functional way to deliver objects we want to experiment on into space. But every time we take it up we have a risk of crashing it.”

“I will not try to accelerate downward this time,” Jeh said.

Vaughan nodded. “And in case of more metal rocks, we can make another air restorer.”

Blue blinked a few times. “A backup? A backup… that’s an excellent idea. We should have put that in the first one.”

“Jeh was the backup,” Suro offered.

“I’m best backup.” Jeh gave them all a cheesy wink.

“You are the only reason we can do this,” Vaughan pointed out. “Had I gone up in that thing, I would be very dead right now.”

“You’d be very dead several times over,” Blue said.

“True.”

“Regardless, what do we do with the Skyseed? Repair? Salvage parts from it for a bigger ship? What?”

Jeh raised a hand. “I’d like to go to space more often. I wanna repair it.”

“I’m leaning towards that myself,” Blue admitted. “The potential of having experiments run in no atmosphere is… great.”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “I’d say we take it down and make a bigger ship. The Skyseed isn’t making it to the moon.”

Suro leaned back. “Hmm… well, as much as I would love to cast a vote and make it a tie, I actually think taking it slow and repairing the Skyseed—perhaps with a few backup air restorers this time—is the good call.”

“Can’t have a backup drive…” Vaughan said.

“We can make another one. It’ll take a significant amount of time and require another order of Magenta conduits—and it’ll be quite pricey—but the air restorers will eventually give us enough income.”

“Do you think selling the plans to the drive would be helpful?” Blue asked.

Suro shook his head. “It’s not a simple device that can be reproduced by the hundreds easily, and the concepts within it are already well-understood.”

“Regardless, that seems like a vote,” Blue said. “Repair.”

“…Are we a democracy?” Suro asked. “I think this is a legitimate question.”

“We don’t really have any hierarchy,” Vaughan said with a shrug. “There’s no… formal arrangement. Voting is as good of a way as any to figure things out.”

“Should we make it official?” Suro asked. “That we vote on such things?”

“Sure, why not.”

Jeh clapped her hands. “Oooh, the space program is sounding more official now!”

“…Space program?” Suro asked.

“We have a program where we try to go to space.” Jeh smirked.

“Space program…” Vaughan stroked his beard, nodding. “It certainly describes what we’re doing, but something’s missing from it. It’s too… generic.”

“We can come up with a name when we need to,” Blue said. “Though, given all the help we ask for from Willow Hollow, it might be a good idea to get a name sooner rather than later. Right now it’s just ‘Vaughan’s project,’ if anything.”

Jeh shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll come to us eventually.”

~~~

“Wizard,” Seskii said.

Jeh whirled around to see Seskii’s fruit stand sitting to the side of a forest hiking trail.

“What are you doing all the way out here?” Jeh asked with a smile.

“Just calling you a wizard.”

“I’m not a wizard,” Jeh chuckled.

“You use crystals way too well.” Seskii patted her on the head. “You’re the best little wizard.” She pulled out a bottle of blue juice and handed it to Jeh. “Have fun on your little forest walk, all right?”

“Pff. These aren’t walks, these are adventures!” Jeh laughed and waved goodbye to Seskii, walking deeper into the forest.

Jeh took these walks often. Not daily, but often. The forest no longer felt like home to her, but it still had its charms. Endless varieties of life, food, and experiences. As the forest was largely an evergreen one, the seasonal change was not easily discernible. However, Jeh was a master of the wood. She knew the kinds of animal calls, what they meant, and what times of year they were spoken in. Some birds had already started flying south for the winter.

Soon, there would be snow. The wood got a lot of snow.

With a random twirl, Jeh left the path and wandered to a random spot among the trees. The forest was large enough that not even she had seen every part of it, and she specifically set out to find distant places. Now that she had to be back home every night, the area of the forest she could explore was limited, and it was becoming less common to see new things.

This did not depress her since there were so many more new and strange things that happened in Willow Hollow that far exceeded anything she’d found in the forest. The strangest thing she’d ever encountered in the forest was… well, the fire. That had been decidedly unpleasant.

Burns were nothing, but that much smoke…

She shook her head, humming to herself a half-remembered tune. As she strolled along, she heard the river, so she turned to it. She was mildly disappointed to find it was a part of the river she had walked hundreds of times already. She could remember walking down to the water to wash—she was always careful when washing, especially of the hair, and this had been one of the few places that had worked well for her.

Her humming stopped when she saw her reflection in the water.

Everything looked different. Her face lacked any dirt or grime. Keeping clean mattered in Willow Hollow, so she had taken more care of her appearance. Her hair was still brown, but instead of being haphazardly thrown into the side-ponytail, now the lopsided hairstyle was smooth and straight. She still had a bone in it, though now it was polished to a sheen. In the past, her bear furs had basically been rags tied around her body. Today, her furs were still made of bear hide, but they were finely sewn and even had a few pockets in them. The furs went all the way down to her knees, and there was a fully functional hood with bear ears on it. She had a simple belt around her waist from which a bag was hung. It held many things, ranging from crystals to coin to food.

Also, there were shoes. Jeh had to admit it, shoes were a great idea. Getting stabbed in the foot by a clever nettle and having to cut the dumb body part off just to leave had gotten annoying after a while.

She had no mitts, though.

Jeh frowned. She missed those mitts. But having easy access to her crystals was more important. They needed contact; the mitts prevented contact.

Suro had offered to look into getting her fingerless gloves, which some wizards were known to use. Jeh hadn’t liked this idea, and she wasn’t sure why.

So now she had bare* hands.

*This pun is unintentional. Best not to think too hard about the puns that are intentional.

With a sigh of mixed sorrow and satisfaction, Jeh looked up to the forest on the other side of the river. It was just as she remembered it… save for one tree that was tilted sideways.

Curious, Jeh forged over the river to investigate. It was further away than it looked—as to be expected for a tall tree in a forest of really tall trees—but it did not take her all that long to arrive.

She had expected to find that the tree had fallen over naturally due to wind or storms or uneven ground. What she found was decidedly not that. There was a massive Red crystal sitting at the base of the tree in the middle of what looked like an impact crater. Numerous Red tendrils from the crystal had intertwined themselves with the tree, supporting it and keeping it from falling the rest of the way.

Jeh blinked a few times. “…Ashen?”

The Red Crystalline One flickered a few times before transmitting a sigh directly into Jeh’s head. “I was hoping you’d just find me ‘interesting’ and leave. Now I’m going to have to move and let this tree collapse into nothing. I like this tree.”

Jeh held her hands up in surrender. “Woah woah, I won’t tell anyone where you are!”

“Mmm… normally I’d think you were just saying this out of self-defense, but the Red Seekers knew of you. I could do nothing to you.”

Jeh rubbed the back of her head. “Eh… yeah. But I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do anything to you, so…”

“Yes, I would indeed be able to trigger an explosion that would send you into Mt. Cascade with enough force to leave a you-shaped hole.”

“That sounds awesome,” Jeh said, eyes lightening up. “Can we do that?”

Ashen was silent for a few moments. “Excuse me, but I did not receive your full perception when I was Awakened. I am afraid I do not understand you as I do the Seekers.”

Jeh shrugged. “It’s fine, I don’t understand me either.”

“Really?”

Jeh nodded. “I don’t know where I’m from or what my original name was, if I even had one. I can’t die, which is apparently really weird, and I don’t know why. Also really good at magic, seem to spend a lot of time remembering things… huh.” Jeh rubbed the back of her head. “Guess I spend more time thinking about my own mystery than I thought.”

“Ah, thinking more than you thought. Can you separate your thought processes as well?”

“Uh… no.”

“Unfortunate, it is quite useful. For instance, the part of me that wants to burn everything to a minuscule crisp is currently trapped in what you might call a ‘dream,’ though in reality, it is more like an imagined world where anything can be done without consequences.”

“Do you like burning things?” Jeh tilted her head.

“I want to purge everything. But, even from my imagined world, I can see it leads nowhere. Purposeless.”

“My purpose is to go to space.” Jeh grinned. “Maybe it can be something simple like that!”

“Why do you want to go to space?”

Jeh shrugged. “It’s awesome! It’s new!”

“I’ve had enough new experiences for a lifetime.”

“…You’re, what, a week old?”

“Maybe? It takes effort to see outside myself, I don’t bother to keep track of the days.”

Jeh shrugged. “I guess some people just want to sit… holding up a tree.” Jeh paused. “Hold on, why?”

“I landed here. I… did not want my first act alone to be to destroy a tree. So I am attempting to keep it upright.”

“You know, I read a book that mentions that sometimes Green Crystalline Ones fuse themselves with nature. Maybe you could do something similar?”

The voice of Ashen suddenly filled with rage. “Do not suggest things to me!” A series of small fires flared into existence around Ashen. “No!” This was spoken in panic, and suddenly all the fire spells dissipated.

Jeh quickly stamped out one of the fires that had caught on the ground cover. “Okay, don’t suggest things to you, got it.”

“I want… my decision of where to go to be my own.”

“Well…” Jeh folded her arms behind her back. “I liked living alone in the forest with nobody around, but I like people quite a bit more. They help me think and do cool stuff. But, I dunno about you, don’t you have this thing where you think whatever everyone around you is thinking?”

“That… has ceased, apparently, since I can only see through your eyes if I attempt to.”

“Oh, right!” Jeh snapped her fingers. “You only do that thought-absorbing thing at the start because you ‘have’ to. Or at least the book said so. Blue says not all books are trustworthy; that they just contain ideas.”

“Books…”

“I could bring you some, if you want,” Jeh said. “Vaughan has a lot strewn around various places.”

“Books would put other ideas into my head!”

“But they can tell you more!” Jeh grinned. “The forest is great and all, but it can’t tell you anything about the cool stuff you can do with Red magic. Or any magic, for that matter.”

“…Bring me something on Red magic. And Crystalline Ones. And…”

Jeh smirked. “You want to learn about yourself?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Very much.”

“Well, I know you’ll have more luck than me! I already know a lot of things about Crystalline Ones that I don’t know about myself.” Jeh turned around. “I’ll be right back!”

“Wait.”

“Huh?”

The Red sparks around Ashen flickered in and out a few times, but no words came.

“Ashen?”

“Can you just… stay and talk, a bit?”

Jeh shrugged, sitting down on a nearby rock. “I should be back by nightfall so they don’t come looking for me.”

“Oh… how far away is night?”

Jeh glanced at the sky. “Several hours.”

“Good.”

Silence fell over the two of them.

“Soooo,” Jeh said, kicking her legs back and forth. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Anything.”

~~~

A large wizard, neither muscular nor fat, sat down at his desk in Kroan’s Wizard Academy, his shimmering Magenta robes billowing with the motion. His beard was stark white, pointed, and long enough to reach his lower ribs. The beard partially obscured the name sewn on his garment, but anyone who knew anything about the Academy knew him as Richard Xerxes, one of the harshest but most successful wizards on staff.

He currently had a bunch of primitive arcane devices his students had made sitting on his desk. They all needed to be graded.

But that time would be later. For now, he took out a special file from his desk. Recently sent over from Vaughan, it was a simple report of the first voyage, submitted for purposes of academic openness.

But Xerxes could read between the lines. He had been on this world far too long and dealt with so many types of people that it would have been unusual for him to miss it.

Jeh. The pilot. Barely mentioned, but extremely capable and definitely more than met the eye. Cleverly taken out of the spotlight in the report, given only the barest description. Most who read the file wouldn’t have found this unusual and were much more likely to fixate on the results of the experiment.

But Xerxes knew.

He folded the file up and placed it in an envelope. He scribbled on it “into the 37th archive, Chippy.”

His secretary was named Charles, but his friends called him Chippy.

Xerxes never called him Chippy on official documents. Only in special cases, such as this one, did he dare. The use of “Chippy” was an indication that Charles should do something other than what was instructed. In this case, it was to put the file so deep into the archives that nobody would hear of it unless they were specifically looking for arcane reasons.

It was a side of Xerxes few knew, because he kept it hidden. The students must suffer to learn to live.

But they also must be protected.

It was simply imperative they never knew they were.

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT

Unfortunately, what we’ve witnessed is not anywhere close to how scientific papers are managed on Earth. You can’t just write something up, send it in, and have it filed away. No, you need to write it up according to specific standards, get it peer-reviewed, and then hope nobody destroys your career for coming up with too many negative results.

To be fair, there’s a reason we have all those regulations, but it would be nice to be in a world where science hasn’t developed as far as it has here, and such regulations simply do not exist. The Academy and its related wizards are essentially the first (or second, depending on how you count) generation of what we would consider a “modern scientist.” It makes for eternal consternation between the last of the old guard resenting the bureaucracy of the new.

Now, as for science:

Meteorite metal is a real thing, and it really was one of the highest-quality weapons you could get for quite some time! Have space refine your metal for you on re-entry!

Granted, not all meteorites are created equal. Sometimes the material simply isn’t suited for use, or are too brittle, or didn’t come in quite right. But space metal is high-quality stuff compared to what you get naturally on Earth since it tends to purify more. The iron-nickel-rich meteorites are the ones you look for. (These do only make up about 5% of all meteorites, but they are far more likely to be recognized as unusual and survive reentry.)

Some people even think the first things humans ever forged came from large space rocks. It is one of the easiest ways to get pure or nearly pure metal. That said, this seems unlikely since pure copper can be found naturally and has been known since antiquity.

Now, a simple question: why are so many meteors nickel-iron rich to excessive degrees? This involves a bit of guesswork on our part, but we do have a pretty good working theory. You’ll recall from science class that the core of the Earth is composed largely of molten iron and nickel. Well, this is also true for most terrestrial objects in the solar system, including large asteroids. If you smash a large asteroid to pieces, the core will break out into lots of iron-nickel chunks.

In essence, all iron-nickel meteorites are likely results of massive destruction.

Also, when you forge meteorite, the nickel content creates cool-looking bands on the product. Which is just amazing.