Another Sky - 1

Chapter 1

“And thusly I did grant this world peace and tranquility. A lasting peace no mortal lord could offer.” -The Book

Where was I?

The sky was a swirling mass of purple clouds, roiling and bubbling in a way I knew clouds shouldn’t. Standing up, to take in my surroundings, things only got worse. The landscape around me was a nightmare. There were great structures that looked like the bones of giants. Rocks that were watching me with unsettlingly human eyes, scattered about with no accord for what a face was. There were other things, as well… other sections of organic material that seemed they had grown out of the very earth with little understanding of how it was a human went together.

To say it was terrifying would be an understatement, for I am saving you mention of the worst of it.

My stomach was somersaulting as I turned, trying to find whichever part of the nightmarish landscape seemed to end the nearest to me and ran towards the rocky desert landscape visible in the distance.

My feet were bare, and the rough ground dug away at them as I ran, but I was too terrified to care at that moment.

I can not say how long I ran. My mind was in no state for such calm analysis as I fled, driven by animalistic instinct. I do know I eventually escaped the cover of the purple clouds, and stumbled out into sand dunes and the heat of the beating sun.

Still I ran.

Still I fled, in hopes of getting as far from that terror as I could.

I continued to run until my legs gave way from exhaustion, and my head began to spin from the sun and lack of water. I collapsed on a dune, rolling and tumbling down the side of it. Then I crawled, as best as I could. A small part of me told me I needed to find water, but the larger part of me cared only for escape.

Crawling, though, was not the most efficient mode of travel, and I made it only a few more dunes before collapsing, mind now too swimming in confusion to manage much in the way of coherent thoughts. I can say that, in that moment, I felt no great fear of dying, but it may not have yet crossed my mind that death was possible. You must remember that my memories were not what they are now… my brain was like a soup of only half formed connections.

How long I lay in the desert, delirious with few thoughts more complicated than those of a lizard, I do not know. But, eventually, a figure stood over me.

The first thing I saw of her was a silhouette, the bright sky behind them.

“Now what’s a naked human doing out here?” a deep, yet feminine, voice asked.

I blinked a few times, but was still too out of it to manage to form any words, let alone a coherent reply.

“Mhm, well, you’re interesting, whatever you are,” the figure said, just as I finally lost my grip on consciousness.

-

A long and narrow thread hung from the heavens above, glinting in the light of the setting sun. The Zanzibar Space Elevator, making even the Dar’s skyline between me and it seem insignificant. It was my first time seeing a space elevator, having grown up in the distant north of Uppsala, in the Nordic Federation.

Just a backwater compared to the great space ports of the tropics. The bustling hubs of humanity as we reached out into the heavens.

I felt quite confident, then, that I had made the correct choice in deciding to head so far from home for university.

-

I woke inside a tent. Taking in my surroundings, I realised it was a sort of a yurt. I was laying on a simple cot, and there was a small table beside me. On the table sat a bowl filled with a thin broth. Parched as I was, I leaned over, picking it up and taking a few sips. It didn’t taste much of anything, but it helped with my thirst.

Placing the bowl back down, I then took in more of my surroundings. The yurt was rather minimal, few decorations and even fewer furnishings. I wondered if my rescuer was poor, or simply prone to travelling.

Despite the quiet, and being out of the sun, I was still more than a little out of it at that point and unable to focus on much of anything. I think I dozed while sitting there. The memories were disconnected. My mind continued to spin around the vague memory that had slipped into place. A great city of towering buildings. It had been in… Tanzania. Dar es Salaam. Where I’d… where I’d done my masters in physics.

“Ah, you’re awake,” the woman from before said, causing me to jump slightly.

I hadn’t noticed when she’d reached the doorway.

Turning to look at her now, as she entered the room, she was striking looking. Her features were a mixture I hadn’t ever quite seen before. Perhaps the closest fit would be San people? Her skin was a bit paler than the San folks flitting in the edges of my memories, but not to a great degree. Her hair definitely seemed closest in texture to theirs.

Still, there were other differences that made her not only not quite a match, but not quite look human. She was smiling, and that smile displayed fangs more prominent than I’d ever seen on a human. Her ears, as well, were somewhat pointed. Her brow was also a bit heavy, and her jaw was square while her chin was quite receding. There were also two dark marks running from her tear ducts down to her chin, akin to the markings of a cheetah, though I suspected those were tattoos rather than natural.

Now, despite the way she didn’t quite seem like someone I would describe as ‘Homo sapiens’, I would still say she had a sort of beauty about her. A somewhat… elfen look, I supposed? Though in a wild and nomadic sort of way. Especially when you factored in her clothing, that seemed reasonably akin to images flashing in my mind of Mongolian clothing.

Those isolated flashes of knowledge were odd, but useful.

“Not much of a talker, though?” she asked.

“Oh… I… sorry. I think I am still a bit out of it from… from whatever happened,” I replied.

“Mhm. What were you doing out there?” she asked. “Humans don’t tend to be out here much. Certainly not so close to a mana storm. And certainly not naked.”

“Na—oh,” I muttered, realising I was indeed, and that that was something to cover.

I pulled the sheet of the bed around myself, covered my chest as best as I could.

She was staring at me, clearly a bit confused by my actions. Then she cleared her throat, reminding me that she’d asked a question.

“I don’t… I don’t remember. I simply woke up there. In… well, I would guess I was inside what you called a ‘mana storm’?” I replied. “It was…”

I shivered, and she gave a small nod. I wasn’t sure if that meant she knew what the inside of that place was like, or if it meant she believed my story.

“Which prince do you serve?”

I blinked, turning to her. “Pardon?”

“Which godling? Ursin? Zajan? Astrid?”

“I don’t… I’m not sure I understand?” I replied.

“The sun must have truly cooked your brain… or the mana,” the elfish woman said, placing her hands on her hips and raising an eyebrow.

Realising I needed to give her some sort of information, I hoped my brain would offer up something useful. “I… my name is Kasja Andersson. I am from the Nordic Federation.”

She stared at me. “Never heard of it… well, I suppose the oracle should sort you out. Come on… let’s find out if we’re going to eat you or not.”

“I… pardon?” I asked, as she walked over and held the door flap open.

Confused, I pulled the sheet around me as my only modesty. “Is that some sort of joke?”

She began strolling off, and I realised we were in a small encampment, with a dozen or so yurts gathered about. There were some other folks around, working with camels, standing to chat, or feeding cheetahs tied up on leashes. Several of them stared at me as if I were meat on display… not just the men, and I felt like it wasn’t just for my lack of dress.

“You’re in a free orcish encampment. Why would I be joking?” the woman asked.

Walking alongside her, I realised she was short, no more than 160cm tall, perhaps a bit smaller. The way she moved left me with little doubt she was a warrior, however.

What she was not, though, was a match for what one pictured when they heard the word ‘orc’.

“O—orc?” I asked.

She turned to me and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Instead she continued to lead me out of the encampment, towards a large pile of rocks. Or, perhaps it was a stone hut? There was an entrance, covered in a tattered sort of flap, but it was disorganized enough that calling it a hut felt like overly high praise of the order of it. The woman lifted the flap, indicated with her arm for me to head in.

“W—what’s in there?” I asked.

“The Oracle, Miss Andersson,” she replied, before grabbing my arm and pulling me in.

Her grip was like a vice, and any thoughts to resist were crushed by it. Instead, I stumbled into the darkness of the artificial cave, realising there was another figure in there. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw another there. She was elderly, and seemed to be the same type of person as the others. So, an ‘orc’.

However, once my ‘rescuer’ had sat beside me, my eyes had adjusted enough to realise the Oracle had no eyes… not to say that she had empty sockets, but seemed to have no sockets at all.

The sight sent a shiver down my spine.

“We don’t all have the blood of the Empress to grant magic,” the younger woman said. “Sometimes you have to make a trade with the mana.”

The Oracle asked a question in a language I couldn’t understand, which left me wondering how it was I could understand what the woman who rescued me said. As they exchanged a few quick words, I supposed that maybe the translation was the result of the mana storm? Whatever that was?

As I was feeling like I’d finally figured something out, the Oracle’s rough and boney hands grabbed my own. She squeezed and then—and then…

I was somewhere else. There was a crowd, dressed in skins and furs, gathered around a single figure. It seemed akin to a sermon or a speech.

Then the landscape shifted, a city was growing, grand monuments being erected, and, while I couldn’t make anything out about them, I swore one of the figures was the one that had been giving the speech.

The world spun again, and the figure was now leading a great army. A city was burning. Then the fires stopped, and great statues were raised. That repeated. One. Twice. A hundred times. Flames from the previous cities still burning as we saw the next be pillaged.

The fire was surrounding us now. The Oracle and myself were alone in a great sea of fire. However, when the flames attempted to reach my skin they turned to ice and fell away.

And then the figure emerged, still a featureless darkness in the shape of a human. I felt menace from them, and shifted, instinct telling me to protect the frail and aged form of the Oracle. The figure reached out, grabbing my neck. However, as it tried to tighten a grip, it seemed to choke instead. It did not stop trying to crush my throat with the one hand, but it reached the other hand up, grabbing at its own neck as it clearly struggled to breath.

“W—what are you?!” I asked, staring at the dark horror before me, confused.

Then I felt the Oracle’s hands release from my arm, and the vision ended.

“It is her,” the ancient woman said in a raspy voice. “She is the one I have waited for.”

“Her?” the younger woman asked. “The naked woman with the sun-baked brain?”

“She is not of this world,” the Oracle replied. “None from this world could make the mana defy the Godly Empress… she was brought to bring about our salvation.”

“I was what?” I asked.

“The magic spoke to me many winters ago. Telling me there was hope coming for our people… for all people,” the Oracle said. “That hope is you. You shall overthrow the great empire, and let the world know freedom once more.”

“Her fate is really that great?” the younger woman said, pulling a small item from her pocket. It looked a bit like a bracelet?

“Indeed,” the Oracle replied.

“Well, then,” the woman said, clasping the bracelet around my upper arm, “I, Yabana, place my claim upon you in the name of the house of the Free Xahans.”

I stared in confusion at the bracelet around my arm, then watched as she, Yabana, drew out a dagger and sliced her thumb. Just enough to make it bleed. She then applied her thumb to the bracelet, and I heard a small click.

“W—what just happened?” I asked, my best guess being that it may have been some sort of engagement ritual.

That seemed the only way to bring someone into one’s ‘house’ or family, no? Or… maybe an adoption?

“I just made you my slave,” Yabana replied with a sharp toothed grin.

“What!?”

[I swear, I just wanted to get this one chapter out, to get the basic idea of the story out into the world. I’m going to finish other wips before I work on it anymore.]