Undefined, undefined, 224 AE, undefined, undefined, Phyros

  A younger Vilithe Callethe and her dragon soared through the endless Phyroan sky. Although she was ensconced inside the protective amniotic fluid of the rider’s sac, her body curled peacefully into a fetal position, she felt nothing of her body for her sensations had traveled along the many tendrils that plugged into her skull, interfacing through long filaments that extended at least six centimeters deep into her cerebrum, and into the very dragon itself, her first dragon, Quetzalcoatl.

  She was directly connected to Quetzalcoatl’s many noses and eyes all along his body, reading the eddies of the wind and processing thousands of streams of visual information through the spirits to give her a near total perception of everything around her – from the roiling bands of thick, sulfurous gasses that streamed across the thick depths, atmospheric rivers of acid, to fluttering motes of ash that drifted up from the infernal surface of Phyros, carried by twisting thermal columns – even as she and Quetzal hurtled along at mach speeds.

  The one sense she was missing was sound. It could not reach them, for they were moving faster than sound itself, having hit the sonic boom a little while ago, and her and Quetzal’s coiling dance across the Phyroan firmament seemed, to her, blissfully peaceful and serenely quiet, even though an aerial spectator caught in her wake would have trembled and tumbled from the thunderous roar of displaced air.

  Woohoo!

  Her body did not move as she psionically whooped with joy but inside the sac, behind closed eyes – the better process the dragon’s senses – she was beaming.

  Rider, I sense a pocket of helium at twenty kilometers below cloud top depth.

  Build me some speed, Quetzal, and we’ll dive.

  Indeed.

  Quetzalcoatl’s wings – flaps that let out the immense combustive forces and exhaust of the various fissional reactions harnessed by the combined spirit-gryphantene-organic chemical engines in his body, which ranged from Quetzal’s the molten salt – dragon’s blood – energetic reactions, to the hydrogen fusion basis that fueled his wind – opened up to vent ten-thousand-degree ionized gas, or plasma. The amniotic fluid held tight but softened to brace Vilithe from the impact of the severe gravitational force equivalents as Quetzal hit mach two.

  Quetzalcoatl was a gas huffer, a dragon designed to capture rare pockets of gasses that floated through the infernal lower depths of the Phyroan atmosphere. The rarer the gas, the lower the rider had to fly her dragon to catch it, and the only way to avoid incineration was to skim through the burning bellows of Phyros fast enough to catch the entire pocket in the dragon’s gaping maw – Quetzal’s had yet to open – a triangular funnel, a pocket to catch gasses, that was bigger than the dragon itself.

  2,362 kilometers an hour, Vilithe. The helium pocket is directly below. But Vilithe could sense just as easily as Quetzal where their prize was, for they were connected.

  Double back at five clicks – shorthand for one kilometer – then we dive.

  Indeed.

  The inertial swing of enormous Quetzal curling back in less than six seconds flat flung Vilithe’s body to the wall of her rider’s sac, but the amniotic fluid balanced the pressures upon it. Since the dragon’s wings were all along its segmented body, it could bank through the air without losing any speed, in fact the compressive forces of a turn acted like a slingshot, propelling the dragon even faster out of the turn.

  2,579 km/hour. Aerodynamic hindrance of my suction flaps prevents me from reaching any greater speed. Dive?

  Dive, Quetzal!

  Quetzalcoatl shot beneath the thick, obscuring clouds. The displacement force of his entry opened up a vortex in the clouds that spun out, spitting wisps of thick, coiled, sulfuric acid haze.

  At these speeds, the simple frictional force of the thick air smashing upon Quetzal’s hull was enough to generate immense heat. It took picoseconds to shoot through the first layer of sulfurous acid vapors. Quetzal and Vilithe then smashed into a shuddering wall of invisible repulsion as they entered the troposphere, the air so thick to Quetzal that it felt like viscous soup. The gryphantene plates heated immediately, absorbing the close to five hundred degree ambient heat and using that energy to rejuvenate Quetzal, but if they stayed a second too long at these depths and his gryphantene plates heated past four hundred degrees, then the plates would start to burn and damage Quetzal’s spirit-flesh buried deep underneath, destabilizing the molecule splitting reactions inside, and then if that continued, Quetzal’s body could likely trigger a cascading chain of thermonuclear reactions that would rip him and Vilithe apart, atomizing them into bits of star-forged matter, same as all the entropically decayed matter across the void.

  But Quetzalcoatl trusted his rider.

  Inside the sac, the amniotic fluid began to absorb the extreme agitation of mach speed vibrational force, it was all the spirits could do to keep the rider safe. Cavitation bubbles and ripples formed all throughout the fluid around Vilithe, a three-dimensional matrix of pure, mechanical energy.

  Pocket is thirty six percent captured, composition: carbon dioxide (89%), sulfuric acid (7%), helium (4%)

  The crushing force began to reach into Vilithe’s body, pushing past the strained fluid. If she kept going, she and all her dreams would burn down.

  But this was the dream.

  Pocket is seventy eight percent captured, composition: carbon dioxide (87%), sulfuric acid (6%), helium (7%)

  The fluid was now beginning to grow uncomfortably hot. Beads of sweat bubbled out from her skin and floated upwards through the fluid. If Vilithe had been present in her own body, she would sense that the shuddering impact of the speed was shaking and quaking her roughly.

  Pocket is ninety-five percent captured, Rider, heat levels are dangerously high!

  Hang in there, Quetzalcoatl!

  Indeed!

  There was a daredevil inside Vilithe that loved this, this feeling of toeing the line between life and death, dancing on the edge of danger. It was the freedom of knowing she was still fully in control, that it was she who chose whether to step across that line.

  Life or Death. Do or Die.

  Now or Never.

  Ninety-seven percent captured. Rider, we must pull up NOW!

  Just a little bit more, Quetzal!

  The cavitation bubbles now expanded to exploding effervescence as the amniotic fluid itself began to boil into steam. It was nearly unbearable now, just short of scalding her skin.

  PULL!

  And then Quetzalcoatl shot up and out through the clouds, a billowing column of displaced sulfuric acid vapor climbing up behind him like a sprout. To cool off, they shot higher, ever higher now, into the upper stratosphere, and now Vilithe was laughing with joy for she felt such absolute freedom! She felt like she was in a different place. A place of purest freedom, untrammeled freedom, raw freedom, and not just some semblance of it. Here, in the unfamiliar nowhere, where there was nothing but the here and the now, was true freedom!

  Vilithe.

  The expanse of cloudtop stretched all across in every direction, a chaotic, constantly changing landscape of vapor trails and cumulus tufts and wide, stretching planes of strato, while the lofty cirro ringed her and Quetzal’s compound, overlapping fields of visions like endless haloes. She was like a God of the Sky.

  Vilithe. I can’t take it anymore.

  Rayleigh and prismatic scattering threw hue blankets of tangerine and marigold and daffodil all across the horizon like celestial drapery, a kaleidoscope of color, as the warm hues of Phyros turned to the cool ones of the void.

  Vilithe! Please!

  The foreignness of the Knight Leader’s thought voice – for he was not a part of this memory and never had been – cut to Vilithe’s distracted heart, and she realized from the shrill urgency of his thinking that he was in distress.

  I have a fear of heights!

  Oh, she completely forgot!

  Instead of dilating the passage of time in her memory, so she could more fully remind herself of this frozen moment of joy with Quetzal as they hung, slow motion but soaring, in the now deep cerulean gradient to cold black of the void, far past the Phyroan atmosphere, she instead fast forwarded, past her joyous ride back home to her nimbus, through the landing dock airlock, until she was now standing on the lowest level of the dragon docking nimbus, smoothly ejecting from Quetzal in her skin tight, spirit-laced, gryphantene weave dragonrider’s jumpsuit. Members of Clan Callethe milled about, crystallized in mid-action as Vilithe put pause on her memory to check on Knight Leader.

  She could feel a nauseous, confused, and paralyzed presence within her. She realized that if his mind had not been separated from her own experience, he would continue to feel intense motion sickness, so she extracted the Knight Leader’s psionic presence and formed it into his own psionic projection of his body.

  The Knight Leader seemed to apparate from nowhere, collapsing into the memory like he was dropped in from another dimension. But this was the Knight Leader’s psionic projection crafted specifically for him by Vilithe, so it was much like his real body but he was now perfectly cleaned and groomed, wearing nondescript garments – a simple, white, cotton tee-shirt and long pants of woad-dyed, warp-faced, heavy duty cotton – and fattened up a bit from his lean, gaunt, muscular frame so that he didn’t look like some craven animal but rather a well-fed member of Clan Callethe. It was a classic look indeed.

  “Holy…” he picked himself up, woozy. Since they were firmly in the hallucination of the memory now, instead of telepathy his thoughts were expressed as audial speech.

  “Heh- I’m… uh, sorry?” She wasn’t that sorry. When was the last time she relived this moment?

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s my fault for asking.” He doubled over, his hands thrust against his knees, trying to steady himself. “Is it okay if I vomit?”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Well, it’s just a psionic projection, so of course! Real puke might spill all out inside your bacta tank though. If you don’t mind.”

  The psionic projection of the Knight Leader promptly puked, but the puke seemed to disappear into an invisible hole floating halfway between his face and the ground. He wiped his lips but not a drop stained them, and he shrugged. Eh, the bacta would clean it up. He still had nothing in his stomach, it was the bacta that was infusing nutrients in him, so really, he was just puking bacta into a tank of bacta.

  “Hah! Uh, I can’t say I understood what’s so exhilarating about…”, quite a long pause, “-that.” He looked up at her with a grin, scratching the back of his head. “But I could feel how much fun you were having!”

  “And I gotta say,” he added, “The sunset is spectacular up there. Better than Aryss that’s for sure. We saw the stars!” The recollection of the sight filled him now with giddy excitement that completely distracted him from his recent distress, for the stars could only rarely be seen on Aryss, and only faintly, for there simply wasn’t enough atmosphere for the light to reflect on.

  Vilithe beamed.

  Now that the grime had been cleaned from his snow-white hair and face – Vilithe had taken the liberty of fixing his crooked nose too – he looked so good! His flowing chin length hair swooped down to frame his eyes, giving him the charming look of a sly rebel. And in that outfit, standard for the affluent Clan Callethe, that she picked for him herself - a classic fit. Oh Gods. Vilithe felt the figment of her knees grow weak.

  It was the first time he set eyes on what Vilithe looked like too. He was entranced. The ports along her scalp glistened in the light of the nimbus, which passed through the nimbus’s translucent hull, like gemstones woven into her intricately braided cornrows. She looked cool and sleek in her dragonrider’s jumpsuit. The curve of her nose, the wispy, sultry eye line that swept back into her broad face, the way that broad face tapered tall to the chin so attractively…

  Now it seemed that it was no longer Vilithe who was alone in being smitten with lust as much as love.

  Then he looked down to marvel at how comfortable his clothing was. “What’s this?”

  “Oh, it’s just something that we Calletheans wear. Thought it would make you feel more at home!”

  “But I’ve never worn this, am I wearing it now?” he still did not totally grasp that in the paradise of the inner mind, the fictions were as malleable as clay.

  “Would you prefer this?” She snapped her fingers. His clothes vanished, and now he was covered in sticky, viscous, oozing black bacta goo. He covered his torso with his arms and shivered, as the sensation of wet coldness was overbearing. Since it was cold in the memory – the Nimbus they were in was bobbing quite high above the clouds – he, and the bacta covering him, would feel cold too, even though in reality bacta was warm.

  “N- n- n- no- th- th- thank you!” His teeth were chattering now as he stammered his words, “C-can I g-go back t-t-to the outfit?”

  She cackled, but not before checking him out, the contours of his muscles fully defined and flexed in his shivering, which was her ulterior motive to begin with. “Sure,” she drawled slowly, taking her time as she summoned the clothes back on him, piece by piece.

  “There ya go, all toasty.”

  He rubbed his shoulders. Wow, damn, he did feel good. Nothing like a quick, dopamine firing cold dip followed by comfortable, dry warmth. Now he truly felt refreshed, even though he had technically already slept eighteen hours straight.

  She took his hand, “C’mon, follow me! I have so much to show you.”

  The Knight Leader now looked all around him in wonder. So, this was the famous Callethean Nimbus! It was tremendously large, an ovoid dirigible – its gryphantene frame lined up all along the walls of the nimbus like ribs – filled to the brim inside with breathable air, the composition of which was of low enough density that it glided effortlessly above the Phyroan troposphere. A motile isle, a floating castle ringed by what looked like flying buttresses above a kingdom of clouds.

  For a nimbus to support the amount of weight in its interior it needed to be truly massive, so the ceiling of the nimbus stretched far and high above them like the soaring vault of a cathedral for the Gods. It had to be at least a kilometer up! The gargantuan curved walls of the nimbus interior were bare; indeed, the only usable space was a comparatively small circular platform and structure in the middle of the nimbus, serving as the core spine of the rigid frame. The Knight Leader, a creature of Aryss, had never seen – or rather, his mind’s eye had never seen – so much breathable space in his entire life.

  There couldn’t have been more than twenty elvans, all workers, all frozen in Vilithe’s Time Stop, stranded in mid-motion milling about the enormous central platform, supporting the core structure, dragons on the smaller end of their size range nestled around the edges, as Quetzalcoatl now was, cold and coiled up, all sat in a great ring around the nimbus core. The Knight Leader looked out through the translucent nimbus hull, to see the blurry delineations of uncountable numbers of these flying habitats, all connected to each other like a mobile, and in the tint of the hull it looked like a grand abstract, giving the impression of quarks straddling a mega molecule. It wasn’t just one floating castle; it was an entire celestial city of them!

  Vilithe led him to the central spire. Spiraling staircases, wrought in pure gryphantene, wrapped their way up the spire, but inside the core of it was an elevating platform. The Knight Leader craned his neck to try and catch a glimpse of the thin spire’s pinnacle, where it branched off into the spokes of the nimbus frame.

  “C’mon, you’ll get a better view up here.”

  Phyroans moved so fast across their atmosphere with their Nimbii and Dragons, that spirits very often did not bother to keep track of their exact positioning coordinates unless it was needed.

  They didn’t even really keep track of time with revs or rotes on Phyros, they could fly with the sun. If they did need to measure time it was strictly in seconds, minutes, or hours, akin to using a stopwatch or timer instead of a clock. ‘I’ll see you in twelve hours’, or ‘Give me thirty minutes’. It just felt like one long inexpressible moment. But they did keep track of the grander passage of time relative to Reathean revolutions, so she was forty-eight Reathean revolutions old.

  But the time traveling psionic ghost of the Knight Leader could only think, where am I?!

  When Knight Leader started to comprehend and looked down upon the clouds of Phyros, he felt at first he would instinctively defecate immediately out of fear, so traumatized already was he by his ordeal with Avecia. But after a second, he realized it was quite peaceful. It was impossible to even see the ground from this high, and the clouds looked soft and fluffy! And he was suspended in surging inertial momentum with no relative frame of reference, so he did not know just how fast he was already going, and not falling. This wasn’t so bad!

  The Knight Leader thought, wait-

  The Knight Leader thought, wait! Wait!

  The Knight Leader thought, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH-

  The Knight Leader thought, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY-

  The Knight Leader thought, SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT-

  The Knight Leader thought, OH GODDESS MOTHER, PLEASE, NO! NOT AGAAAIN-

  The Knight Leader thought, FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK-

  The Knight Leader thought, THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS-

  She’s effortlessly cool but circumstances can be cruel. And sometimes you must accept that you can’t always get what you want.

  The Knight Leader thought, MORE LIKE A NIGHTMARE!

  The Knight Leader thought, WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?

  The Knight Leader thought, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY-

  The Knight Leader thought, YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE GOING ACROSS EITHER!

  The Knight Leader thought, HOW ABOUT ENOUGH?

  The Knight Leader thought, THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A PLEASANT MEMORY?

  And the Knight Leader, unable to control it anymore, immediately emptied his bowels right into the bacta tank. Malevolent took immense schadenfreude from the poor bacta daemons that had to clean that up, but they did so dutifully, unequipped with Malevolent’s ever growing self-consciousness.

  Floating in and out of time, in and out of space. No one can touch us; we’re in a different space.

  Sinking into unknown beauty for a day, living everything as it comes and goes. The only times you know have passed away.

  But the heroes are gone and all that’s left is you and me.

  My thoughts are undecided. I think it so I hide it. And the train rushes past like a day gone too fast.

  A little bit relieved after taking a shit, the Knight Leader was able to pull himself away from his fear and finally start to appreciate the true meaning of freedom, finally transmitted to him in its purest possible form. It gave him a resurgence of psionic power so he could finally get Vilithe to let him off this damn ride.

  First you look so strong, then you fade away. The sun will blind my eyes. I love you anyway.

  As they continued to ascend, the Knight Leader, who had never experienced suborbital height, now truly knew the meaning of the word ‘heights’.

  Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, Hera, Selene, Eos, Horus, Indra, Anemoi, Helios, Astraeus, Enlil, Hemera, Shu, Perun, Boreas, Varuna, Caelus, Surya, Ushas

  All these words that I have said, float around you, fill your head. All the times we laughed and cried. I never thought I’d change your mind.

  Weightlessness and lack of reference frame meant that the Knight Leader could somewhat start to conquer this phobia. But he could not help but admit, peering through the dragon’s side eyes, that the horizon of the sun setting on Phyros from here was truly a sight to behold. But enough was enough.

  But this was by far the most foreign sensation to the Knight Leader. While the Knight Leader had indeed dilated time perception himself before unknowingly – he chalked it up to the heat of battle – he had never once contracted through compressed memory time. He felt sick now.

  Help me learn, until I know too much, I’m still without. These circles pulling near. Hold me in my fear. And sleeping I can’t hide. I’m paralysed inside.

  Known in the Lost Age as denim.

  Her last dragon ride. Malevolent quickly sensed something was amiss. Her last? But how could he question his host, whom he revered so much, what she should be thinking.

  Oh, it already had, and worse, Malevolent noted.

  A bacta daemon spirited enough to unsilence itself had to retort, and we had to clean up your poo, too! But Malevolent shushed it mid thought-sentence.

  Emptied out both ways.

  Malevolent, who had never experienced having physical form, felt tremendous envy.

  Are you trolling your loverboi or bullying him? What are you doing? How is this going to make him like you? Malevolent felt like Vilithe was blowing it, but what the spirit could not understand, and the elvan understood, was that soldiers loved to be a little whipped. Because they had mommy issues. All elvans had mommy issues, practically by default.

  What is this, a reverse striptease? Malevolent thought.

  Because you’re in love, moron! Malevolent couldn’t suffer this oblivious fool.

  And high too, but honestly, that just made him feel even better.

  And Malevolent couldn’t help but add, this world, shining, shimmering, splendid. The spirited little bacta daemon that taught itself how to thought-speak snarked, quite the Disney fan I see? And Malevolent replied, shut up, little bacta!

  But now Malevolent and the little bacta began thought-singing the earworm together, so infectious was it, even to spirits, tell me princess now when did you last let your heart dec-iii-de?

  I can open your eyes.

  Take you wonder by wonder!

  Over, sideways, and under…

  On a magic carpet ride!

  A whole new world!

  A new fan-tas-tic point of view!

  They broke into a duet. Malevolent - no one to tell us no!

  The little bacta - or where to go!