A Higher Sky

This story is set on the world of Limnus, a century before Mage Errant.

Ikhail didn’t remember the first time she dreamed about the stars.

It was likely she’d been told of them before she could even speak herself— the tales of the violent old worlds and the stars that gazed down on them were some of the first, and most frequent, stories told to every child in the bromeliad creches.

It didn’t, in the end, really matter to Ikhail where her obsession with the stars came from— only that it was there.

When Ikhail grew older, and she and her crechemates were taught more history and philosophy, she learned of various old cults that had either celebrated or mourned their own lack of stars— who claimed variously that the yellow sky either protected them from the baleful influence of the stars or cut them off from their rightful stellar inheritance.

Limnus was not kind to cults, and their histories were taught as cautionary tales.

It didn’t, in the end, really matter to Ikhail what had happened to those long-dead stellar obsessives— she didn’t need any reason to seek the stars other than the stars themselves.

Ikhail’s teachers and the creche guardians weren’t blind or foolish— they recognized her obsession when she was young, and began slipping her subtle and not-so subtle cautionary tales. Stories of those who had died seeking the stars, or seeking the burning surface of Limnus below the purple clouds below. Stories of those who had lived their lives for singular goals, then found themselves adrift and depressed once they’d achieved them.

It didn’t, in the end, really matter to Ikhail that they tried so hard to dissuade her from her obsession— Ikhail never let herself fear failure, never let herself fear death, never let herself fear purposelessness. She fueled her obsession with every story of the heights she could get her hands on, every journal and travelogue from inside the sulfur sky.

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Ikhail immediately volunteered to join the ascending gatherers when she left the creche. Her parents, her family, the creche teachers and guardians, and even her crechemates all had their doubts, but seldom had a teen leaving the creches been so well suited to become an ascending hunter.

Ikhail had trained relentlessly since she was a child, climbing and running in the bromeliad creche’s play-spaces. The magic of Limnus took long years to fully sink into children, but by the time she left, she was stronger, leaner, faster, and more agile than any of her creche-mates. 

Ikhail had pushed the limits of allowed exposure to air unfiltered by bromeliad, had taken every opportunity to expose herself to sulfur-tinged air that she was allowed— while cannily avoiding the purple-tinged iodine days as much as she could, so there was no risk of her being pressured into becoming a descending hunter or gatherer instead. The creche-teachers were no fools, and in return for her promise not to avoid purple days— a fool’s venture, especially in the case of layer storms— they had eased up on their opposition.

Ikhail knew more sulfur-lore than any other graduating teen, knew more of the flora and the fauna of the heights than anyone not an ascending hunter or gatherer.

In the end, the biggest struggle for Ikhail joining the ascending gatherers was the opposition of the ascending hunters— they wanted her to join the hunters instead.

There was always a bit of rivalry between the hunters and the gatherers— the hunters were more glamorous, and children spent more time dreaming about joining them, while the gatherers were responsible for the vast majority of the food communities on Limnus ate, while being far more efficient.

It hurt the pride of the hunters a bit that such a brilliant candidate was so focused on the gatherers, but Ikhail saw them both, ultimately, as a means to an end, and the gatherers suited her better. The hunters moved in packs, working together to bring down beasts far larger than any one hunter could handle alone. The gatherers, meanwhile, had far more independence in their movement. The hunters tended to stick close to the sulfur border, where most of the prey was, while the gatherers climbed far higher into the skyspear canopy, especially while seeking rare flowers and fungi for the herbalists.

In the end, Ikhail got her choice, and began ascending with the gatherers.

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Ikhail might have been an obsessive, but she never neglected her duties as a gatherer. She dutifully memorized every useful plant in the guidebooks— at least, those few she hadn’t long ago memorized in her studies of the heights. She volunteered for every mission she could, as her body slowly adapted to the cold, lower air pressure, and choking yellow clouds.

Thus began a slow, arduous cycle of years.

A less-obsessive, healthier mind might have given up years before. Might have stopped pushing themselves so hard, might have taken fewer risks, might not have pushed their body so close to the point of breaking, so close to the point where Limnus’ adaptive magic could no longer restore and reshape them. 

There wasn’t a chance Ikhail would give up. She pushed herself with the kind of drive only seen in those who craved Elder-hood, who wanted to grow their bodies into the massive, branch-spanning forms that could rove deep into the purple and high into the yellow, who could physically challenge any beast of either mist, who could battle any monster or magical barbarian from another world.

No amount of deprivation or hardship could stop Ikhail, could slow her.

The true threats to her dream were far more subtle.

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It was hard to tell what changes were occurring deep inside her body, but the changes on the outside grew readily apparent. 

Ikhail’s fingers grew longer and longer, until they stretched three times the normal length, able to grasp and wedge their way into any crevice. Her limbs, likewise, stretched in length, her elbows and knees altering themselves to bend in either direction. 

Ikhail’s eyes and sockets swelled, until they were half-again the size of a normal eye, able to peer deeply through the yellow murk above. Strange changes, for an ascender— more common among the descenders into the shadowy iodine clouds below— but hardly unknown. She grew nictating membranes to shield them from the caustic sulfur mists— though for any ascender or descender to not grow nictating membranes would be unusual.

Ikhail’s ribcage loosened, and her torso swelled and contracted massively with her breaths, each of which came less and less often. Her skin grew thicker, more elastic, and she grew a thick layer of likewise elastic fat to keep her warm as she ascended to higher and higher peaks. 

Her skin began to sprout yellow fur to match the sulfur clouds— only a thin down at first, but it promised to grow dense and thick as she aged.

And all this, by the time she was a woman, by the time most ascenders might have merely grown nictating membranes and extra muscles.

On another world, she might seem a creature of nightmare, something that crawled down from the trees at night to devour children. On Limnus, where extra fingers or color changing skin were as mundane as different heights or hair color, Ikhail was counted by some as a rare beauty, and paid her attention accordingly.

There was the first real trap. Not danger, not hardship, but love. Whispered words of affection, lingering looks, and caresses in the night— these posed more risk of slowing Ikhail, of distracting her from her obsession.

It would be more satisfying for a poet to say that Ikhail ignored such temptations, that she remained utterly focused on her goal. It would be more satisfying to a storyteller to say that Ikhail was drawn deep by such temptations, that she almost lost track of her goals entirely. 

Neither were true, and Ikhail had little interest in most poems or stories. Young romance distracted and slowed her, but nothing could truly stop her. She left a dozen broken hearts in her wake, none enough to compete with the climb that obsessed her.

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The changes of her body kept going as she climbed. She gained the ability to cling to the most precarious barkface or branch underside along the skyspears as she dozed, at no risk of falling no matter how deeply she slept. Her ears expanded, gained the ability to move independently from one another to pinpoint sounds. Her body kept stretching, until she was more than twice the length of a normal, unaltered human— not even counting her extraordinarily long arms.

And her thin yellow down grew into a dense, heavy coat that covered her head to toe, only broken by her immense eyes.

Most of all, though, her insides changed. Her organs reorganized themselves, and their very functions adapted to the more and more extreme conditions Ikhail found herself in. 

Within a few years, she reached the legendary tops of the Skyspear trunks, where the greatest trees in the known multiverse split into a vast, intertwining canopy. Only immense Elders and the strangest, most altered of ascenders reached the canopy, generally only after decades of changing their bodies and climbing.

It was there that the second dangerous trap sprung on Ikhail— duty.

There were numerous rare epiphytes, both plant and fungus, in the canopy that the healers had constant demand for. Some had mundane enough uses, like soothing fevers or easing birthing pains, and were replaceable enough. Others, though, were stranger and rarer. Mushrooms that could prevent the rare cases of a body rejecting magical changes. Ferns that could loosen up the magic of the body, allowing those who hadn’t mutated in years to dive back into the process more quickly than they otherwise might. And, of course, hallucinogens more exotic than the ample varieties extant in the habitable layers.

Lower ascenders could be replaced easily enough, but once Ikhail reached those rarefied heights, her home village came to rely on her more and more. She spent her time leaping between the wide gaps in the branches, fleeing and dodging from slimy shrieking predators, and climbing out onto the most precarious twigs, some no wider than a human arm, to fetch rare epiphytes her village needed.

A moralist trying to share a cautionary tale with a child might have preferred if Ikhail had abandoned her duties, just climbed headlong into the clouds, and were never seen again, as a cautionary tale. A philosopher who doubted the wisdom of their ancestors, who foolishly believed in the primacy of the individual over the community, might have preferred it if Ikhail’s duties had been chains upon her, that she eventually broke from resentment.

Neither were true. Ikhail had no need of simple children’s lessons, and for all her obsession, she recognized the foolishness of those philosophers, for no skyspear trunk stood alone, but were all supported by their neighbors.

No, Ikhail was delayed in her mission by her duties, but slowly escaped more and more of them not through negligence, but by training replacements, by helping others work their way up into the canopy. She established relay chains and waystations, so she seldom had to descend far with her deliveries. She created a robust, busy relay network, to aid her both in her duties and in her obsession. 

There was no money changing hands in the establishment of her network— after all, money was absent and unneeded on a world like Limnus, where the epiphytes of the skyspears provided everything a community could need with only a few hours of work a week. Not to say there was no greed or theft, of course— Limnus is far from a paradise. 

But Ikhail’s network was driven by duty, by loyalty, by ambition among many members to become Elders and gain near-immortality, and most of all, by a grand sense of discovery and adventure among its participants.

And, in time, with the aid of that network, Ikhail worked her way higher, to levels of the canopy none from her village had reached before, save perhaps a few elders.

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The changes that came as Ikhail climbed to this new level were by far the most profound, but also the least visible on the surface.

Ikhail’s bones grew lighter but stronger, built of strange meshes of carbon compounds found in no natural bones. The internal structure of her lungs shifted, grew more intricate, so she could draw more oxygen from the air. She grew an entirely new organ, purely for the filtration and elimination of excess sulfur. Her body lowered its normal temperature, so that she needed less food to survive in the heights. The very hemoglobin in her blood was replaced with a related compound that could carry three times as much oxygen at low pressures and temperatures, but was half as efficient as hemoglobin at normal temperatures.

Ikhail understood few of the details, save for the fact that she could breathe and live easier in the heights, and it grew harder and harder to spend time in her village.

It was an acceptable trade for her.

She wasn’t alone in the heights of the canopy, by any means— she often encountered Elders, attending to their inscrutable business in the heights, and was always greeted with curiosity and goodwill. Rogue elders were, thankfully, vanishingly rarer in the heights than the depths, not that they were particularly common there. Every now and then, she’d meet various travelers in the heights— mostly aspiring elders, with a few wandering hunters and gatherers from other villages, as well as intermittent traveling philosophers. 

Some she befriended, some annoyed her, others became rivals or lovers. All that, always in the space of a few hours, for she re-encountered others vanishingly seldom in the heights.

Soon the plants and fungi she sent down through her growing relay network were largely unknown to the herbalists at its bottom— now not just of her own village, but six others, spread over dozens of leagues. Those they did find were mentioned only in the oldest of books, with few details given. 

The herbalists and the natural philosophers all delighted whenever one of Ikhail’s packages sent down, but her constant discoveries were always a diversion to her— for Ikhail yet dreamed of the stars.

By the time Ikhail reached early middle age, she had entirely stopped meeting other travelers in the heights, rarely even glimpsed elders in the distance, and had few predators to fear any longer. What little animal life she found was small and slothful, conserving energy against the cold and lack of food. None in the village had ever even heard of anyone reaching the heights she had.

Ikhail was so high up that the layers storms barely affected her. She could simply last them out by clinging to a branch or a sturdy section of bark, out in the open, and not a hint of the purple iodine gas being churned and mixed below reached her.

The plant and fungus samples Ikhail sent down now grew stranger and stranger, unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Few had any obvious uses, but the natural philosophers grew especially delighted, hypothesizing that these were largely unaltered organisms, epiphytes that had received little attention from the biological manipulations of the ancestors fleeing their violent homes.

Ikhail read their letters and requests with interest, but her focus remained always, always on ascending. Most of her time these days was spent mapping out routes, trying to find a skyspear that reached all the way up through the yellow sulfur haze. Again and again, she found herself ascending to the very summit of skyspear trees— something that would be a feat of legend for anyone else, but merely an irritation to Ikhail.

She found herself spending several months developing new inks, of all things— none of the inks she had access to could survive the cold of the heights. Most froze or denatured far below where she wandered, leaving her unable to map or journal above a certain height.

Eventually, with the help of the herbalists, bookmakers, and natural philosophers far below, passing messages and samples back and forth through Ikhail’s ever-growing relay network, they managed to brew her new inks that could endure the cold and low pressure. Poetically, the new ink was brewed from a fungus Ikhail herself had discovered.

This is where, in any proper story, the third and greatest trap should have kicked in, the single greatest obstacle to Ikhail’s mission— loneliness. After all, great challenges should always come in threes.

Ikhail wasn’t caught by this trap, though. It was hardly even a challenge for her. Not because she bore some special heroism that made her immune to the basic human need for community, not because she’d mutated beyond that need— no, because she was no fool, and a simple need for human contact was one of the biggest reasons she’d developed her relay network in the first place. Several times a week, she met with one gatherer or another at the highest levels of her network, exchanging stories of wonders discovered in the heights or simple gossip. They brought her letters from her family, her village, her network, and beyond. Letters from villages just outside her relay network, some wishing to join and others rejecting the idea. Letters from philosophers and natural philosophers a hundred or thousand leagues away, or even farther, all asking her to prove or disprove some pet theory, or asking esoteric questions about the heights.

Those letters, those visits with her network members, they kept her going. Still, she felt lonely every now and then, but between her network, the letters, and her obsession, she kept going. 

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There was no grand challenge, no lurking predator at the edge of the sulfur clouds— no, Ikhail simply breached the clouds as she ascended a particularly large branch one day. She didn’t even notice at first— she’d already let herself fall into the mindset of assuming this climb would be a failure too. 

And then Ikhail looked up from the bark, and saw an empty horizon for the first time in her life.

There was no angry yellow haze in every direction, no maze of impossibly huge skyspear trees. Just fields of rolling yellow cloud-tops slowly thinning into haze, with the occasional branch jutting out from below.

The impossibly empty horizon should have overwhelmed Ikhail, should have seized her attention unstoppably, but there, twinkling in the sky above her, were the stars.

Ikhail didn’t take her gaze off the stars a single time that night, barely blinking as she took in the vast swath of stars above her. It was only when the weak, dying sun of Limnus rose that she shook herself and descended once more.

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Ikhail came back up to the top the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. For a week straight, she spent every night watching the stars, drawing and mapping them in her journals, accompanied only by the tiny tree-top crustaceans and a few hardy epiphytes. The relay network began to fear she had fallen, or been taken by some strange predator of the heights.

And then, at last, she descended. Not to the tops of the relay network, though she stopped there. Not at any of the larger waystations or hubs, where sometimes as many as a dozen ascenders congregated, an astonishing number for the heights. She didn’t stop at the bottom of the canopy, only pausing to greet the travelers she met there.

For the first time in years, she descended down to the trunks, which felt like a bustling metropolis to her. She couldn’t go five hours without running into another person, and found herself in several close calls from predators, her old instincts a little rusty.

And then, for the first time in a decade, Ikhail broke out of the sulfur clouds, and found herself in the livable central layer of Limnus’ sky.

It was brutally hot, humid, and cloying to her, the air tasteless and bland without the sulfur. Her fur clung matted along her sides, but Ikhail descended steadily, until she finally arrived at her destination— her home village.

They greeted her with a great celebration, honoring the first Limnan in centuries to see the stars of Limnus. The philosophers and natural philosophers who had moved to her village all squabbled over the order they would get to question her. Her family— her aged parents, her remaining aunts and uncles, her siblings, her crechemates, her nieces and nephews— all rejoiced at being able to embrace and see her once again, even if she had become a long-limbed, almost spidery being now three times the height of a normal human. A couple of the surviving creche teachers and guardians from her youth ruefully and proudly apologized for ever doubting her goal.

Ikhail accepted all of it graciously, but none of it was the main reason she had visited home.

About a week after her arrival, after things had settled down a bit, she visited the creche, visited the children secluded there, and told them her story. Told them of the strange creatures she’d seen in the height, of the deathly chill and the sparse water-plants, and of her adventures in the ascent. 

Most of all, she told them of the stars. Showed them her crudely drawn star charts, told them of how they glowed and twinkled, told them how some were steadier, and moved through the sky— perhaps the other planets the ancients and travelers to other worlds in the multiverse had written about?

And the children clustered around her, asking her question after question, asking to be re-told different stories for her.

During a gap in the interrogation, as a creche-teacher called the children over to eat, Ikhail found herself next to a particularly small, shy-looking little boy who hadn’t asked her any questions before, but hadn’t once diverted her attention away from her.

Ikhail crouched next to him, even still towering over him, and waited patiently.

Finally, the little boy worked up his nerve to speak. “What are you going to do, now that you’ve seen the stars?” 

Ikhail smiled widely at him, the smile only visible around the corners of her immense eyes and by the shifting of the fur on her face. “That’s just it, child. I’ve only seen the stars.”

Ikhail leaned in even closer, and spoke in a whisper. “Next I’m going to reach them.”