The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.6

Chapter 2.6: I’m Worried About Cal

Hope is the first real casualty of sleep deprivation.

People talk of dwindling energy, of drifting through the days as little more than a specter, a ghost that haunts the abandoned wreck of the person you used to be, but that all comes later, after the will to fight has long eroded, after the future has faded behind the haze in which you live.

The hope goes first.

That’s why torturers so favor the practice. It’s one of the few that actually works at wearing down a rebellious spirit.

To say I’d given up might’ve sounded accurate, but it wouldn’t paint the whole picture. I’d given nothing. The dragging days and the long and lonesome nights, the viscous slush though which everything seemed to move, the churning stomach that never quite settled, and the headache, oh, the headache, that inescapable companion that so defined my sorry state, it more than anything robbed me of my hope, wrenched from my ragged form the very capacity to seek solace in that which had yet to come.

Still I rose each morning. Still I joined the others in our daily hunts, a sword in my hand and qi at my fingertips. Still I gazed at the stars in the early hours, at least for those precious moments of peace before the cacophony took me, and I tried and failed again to reach past it.

The infinite sea eluded me, and in its absence I withered.

The others saw it. They saw my sunken eyes and thousand yard stare, the dragging seconds that passed between their ask and my answer, the way I wilted at the end of each fight as the adrenaline lost its hold.

I saw in them my sorry state reflected back at me, sharper and more clear than in any mirror. I watched their eyes soften at my visage, listened as the gentle hue of worry colored their speech, heard time and time again in cutoff snippets and overheard conversations those horrid words.

“I’m worried about Cal.”

From Lucy they came as a quiet admission, a guilty thing to be spoken softly lest the world recognize her failings. From Charlotte they made a quiet command and a plan of action, as if my very friends conspired against me to return that wellness I’d so struggled to find myself.

Only Xavier refused to speak the words, unshakable even now in his confidence in me. Sometimes I envied his certainty.

Three months into our stay on Ilirian, Charlotte completed her focus and advanced to bronze. Elsewhere, such a pace would’ve marked her a once-in-a-generation prodigy, a prospect brighter than even the Right Eye could handle, destined to be snapped up by the Black Maw for bigger and better things.

Here, we celebrated with karaoke. I participated as best I could, energized thanks to the cocktail of alcohol and caffeine flowing through my veins, but my dreary rendition of a normally yearnful ballad sapped the atmosphere of its cheer.

In truth, we had Lopez to thank for Charlotte’s speedy progress. The adversity we’d overcome in surviving the Elder’s attempt on our lives had left us all primed to advance, lacking but the time and materials to make it happen. It was towards that latter our drunken conversation turned.

“Just use the redrawn sap,” Charlotte insisted, wielding her glass of bordeaux like a scepter, miraculously without spilling a drop. “We could be off world tomorrow.”

“He can’t.” I lay back in the plush chair next to the fireplace, my neck craned to rest my head atop the backrest, leaving my eyes gazing straight at the ceiling rather than at the friends with which I spoke. “The redrawn sap is a last resort. It’ll get him to bronze, but every stage after that will be a struggle. He’d have to either alter his Way entirely or sunder his core to remake the focus down the road.”

“Then he can do that,” Charlotte said. “Getting to bronze gets us a place on the Right Eye. We can procure the ebbstrix feather we need there. It’s a hiccup; it’s not—”

“Cal speaks the truth,” Xavier interrupted from the opposite side of the couch. “I can’t afford missteps on my Way. None of us can.”

“We can’t afford to stay here, either!” Charlotte snapped.

I winced. “We said a year. We agreed on a year. It’s barely even been three months.”

“That was before—” Lucy’s voice carried the same maternal softness as ever, but I was having none of it.

“We knew this was a possibility,” I cut her off. “We knew I might lose my qi; we knew I might fail to invert any spiritual materials. Nothing’s changed.”

“Cal,” Charlotte’s said pointedly, “when was the last time you slept?”

I dodged the question. “We came here for a reason. One year to gather the materials and qi to reach bronze. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we extorted three people to get here. We aren’t leaving because—”

“It’s killing you, Cal!” Charlotte snapped. The room fell silent. She took a breath, her voice falling to a near whisper. “We can all see it. Every day you’re a little bit less, a little bit angrier, a little bit further gone. If we stay here, it’s not going to stop until—”

“Until I find it,” I growled the words, all trace of argument gone from my tone in favor of raw determination. “I can’t spend the rest of my life off world. I won’t. If I can’t survive Ilirian’s qi, how am I going to handle the Right Eye? Or beyond?”

“It doesn’t have to be here,” Charlotte countered. “It doesn’t have to be now. We can find you a way to get to bronze, or further. You can work on your range and your control from the comfort of orbit. We have time, Cal. Just because you can’t handle Ilirian’s qi now doesn’t mean you never will.”

“Right, of course. The moment you get to bronze it’s suddenly okay to leave.”

Charlotte froze. A chill descended over the room, piercing even my thorny mood to send a shiver down my spine.

“Charlotte, he didn’t mean—” Lucy tried her best to diffuse the situation, but Charlotte didn’t let her.

“Is that what you think of me?” Charlotte said without a hint of accusation to her voice, in quiet shock with an undertone of loss of all things.

That should’ve been my cue to stop, to cycle the alcohol from my blood, to take a breath and consider what it was I truly wanted to say. I knew the words which next I spoke were a mistake before I even opened my mouth, but the booze, the moment, the impenetrably foul mood forged in the fires of qi that so bombarded me, it all worked in tandem to wrench free a wretched thought from the corners of my mind where such evil things lurked.

“Any edge, right?”

Charlotte didn’t speak. She didn’t curse me out or fire back with some scathing retort. She simply flinched in a manner frighteningly reminiscent of one of Instructor Long’s students at a strike from his cane. Then she stood, her eyes fixed straight ahead, and calmly left the room.

“Shit.”

“Language,” Lucy chided me.

“Right,” I muttered. “Sorry.”

Xavier rubbed his temples. “You know she only wants to go because she’s worried about you, right?”

“I know, I know. I… shouldn’t have said that. I just… I’m the one suffering here. Shouldn’t I get some choice in the matter?”

“You’re not the only one, Cal,” Lucy said. “Your suffering isn’t just your own. You have people here who care about you, and like it or not they’re going to feel some reflection of what you do.”

“I know I haven’t exactly been the most pleasant person to be around lately. It’s hard. I suppose cultivating is supposed to be hard. The best I can do is try to avoid taking out my frustrations on you all. I’m sorry if I’ve been short with you lately.”

“We all have our battles,” Xavier said. “Apology accepted.”

Ugh, why couldn’t everyone be as easy as Xavier?

“Respectfully, Cal,” Lucy said, “we aren’t the ones who need an apology.”

“Right.” I exhaled. Minutes passed as the conversation faded, Xavier and I locked away in our own thoughts while Lucy went off to talk with Charlotte. I pushed myself to my feet.

“Not right now,” Xavier called after me. “She doesn’t want to—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “I’m going outside. I need to think.”

He let me go.

I stopped by my room to grab Shiver—I was sleep deprived, not stupid—and don a pair of boots before striding out the airlock. Most nights we kept the passage open, the better to saturate Lucy’s interior with qi. It wasn’t like any of the local fauna could wander in. Nothing on this planet, hell, nothing in this system was powerful enough to board Lucy without permission.

I stormed passed my usual stargazing spot and into the jungle beyond. I kept quiet enough, my feet naturally avoiding the dried branches and desiccated leaves after months of practice traversing the familiar terrain. I wasn’t strictly looking for a fight, but I wouldn’t reject one either.

I don’t think I truly meant what I’d said to Charlotte. Sure, I’d considered the possibility, the logical extreme of her philosophy of pursuing any edge to distinguish herself from the chaff, but I didn’t think she’d go that far to push herself at my expense, at Xavier’s expense.

Trouble was, I could never read her. I’d seen her so expertly manipulate the people around her, that I couldn’t help but wonder if she was doing the same to us, if she only acted the devoted friend because she knew ingratiating herself to me could prove the greatest edge she’d ever hope to find.

Xavier was the answer.

When the two of them had first started dating, I’d assumed she’d have him wrapped around her finger by the end of the week. He was too honest for her, too naive. It led to all manner of fights between the two of them, but for a year now they’d always managed to keep their relationship intact.

Xavier saw through her. I think that’s what she liked about him, for all the arguments it caused.

That, more than anything, is why, despite my darkest thoughts, I did trust Charlotte. Whatever strange talent it was that made Xavier so canny at reading people, I had faith in his judgment. I had faith in him.

And he judged Charlotte worth falling in love with.

I continued to turn the past few weeks’ events over in my head, acutely aware of the ways in which I’d let my poor mental state leak into my interactions with my friends. They bothered me. I’d have to do better.

Two hours out from Lucy’s clearing, further afield than I’d intended to wander, Ilirian tore me from my self-reflection.

Somewhere ahead and to the left, an animal wailed its dying cry.

Curiosity got the better of me. I sent qi running through my blood and kidneys to filter out the alcohol, to my lungs, heart, and skin to mask the noise and heat that might betray my presence, and to my senses to better track my quarry in the dark night. I slowly and carefully eased Shiver from its sheath.

I found the blood first. It’d splattered against a handful of trees, dripped in splotches against the forest floor. There was no great pool of it, and no body to be found.

The hunter had taken its meal with it.

I circled the grove where the fight had taken place, finding precisely one set of fresh paw prints—roughly the size of my fist—coming in, and none leaving. It was airborne then, I reasoned, refusing to entertain the possibility of a teleporting monster on such a relatively weak planet. Probably an ebbstrix, if the size of the prey was any indicator.

A surge of hope ran through me. If I’d found Xavier’s ebbstrix, he could advance to bronze. We could leave, our prime reason for staying made moot. I pushed on.

The creature was easy enough to track, for what it lacked in footprints it made up for in the drips of blood from the carcass it carried. I followed the trail with ease, the metallic scent painting the way like an ephemeral signpost. For some thirty minutes I stalked, finding hide nor hair of the elusive hunter.

The trail dried as time passed, my clues growing fewer and further between as the carcass cooled until, at the very edge of my spiritual senses, I noticed something odd.

The forest was dying.

It was subtle at first, hard to pick out across miles of painfully vibrant jungle, but out in the distance, a handful of blazing cores occupied an area strangely lacking in environmental qi.

Animal cores don’t progress in the same discrete stages that humans’ do, so I couldn’t concretely determine the creatures’ strength, but they felt strong. Certainly stronger than Charlotte or Elder Lopez, though nowhere near Lucy’s ancient power.

I crept on.

The smell hit me first. Nearly a mile away from the place it struck like a disease, a miasma that tainted the usual damp and earthy tones with the sourness of old meat and rotting bones.

This was no ebbstrix.

Well before I first laid eyes on the broken copse, the grayed and wilting leaves atop dried and shriveled trunks, I had my suspicions about what I might find. Only one thing I knew of would wreak this kind of damage on an ecosystem, would so drain the environment of qi.

I stepped into the clearing and came face to face with a void beast.

It echoed the form of the crow, albeit an eight-foot-tall one that stood on a pair of six-taloned feet. Blades of black chitin coated its body in lieu of feathers, sharp and brutal things that softly clicked against each other as the creature moved. To even brush past such a beast would cost a dozen bloody gashes. I opted to avoid finding out how my skin meridian would hold up against it.

From above its jagged, toothlike beak it stared at me with a single eye, black as a starless night. Black as the abyss.

Black as Cedric’s.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. My heart had last beat over a minute ago, so not even its pulse could announce my presence. None of that mattered. It could see.

It didn’t lash out. It didn’t flash forward and crush my skull within its beak. It didn’t rake its claws across my throat or pierce my heart with the blades it wore as feathers. It looked at me with intelligence behind its eye, blinked once with a solid chitin plate of an eyelid, and turned its back.

I had no qi to give it, and I bore no threat. I warranted no further attention.

I gulped.

I stayed put as I watched the creature amble away, joining three more of its kin around the mangled carcass of what used to be a saber cat. I watched them gulp down flesh and fading qi alike, tearing the creature apart both physically and spiritually.

Then I noticed the eggs.

Hundreds of them spanned three broad nests of bone and branch, each pristinely kept and protected, each glistening to my spiritual sense with the qi they held.

All except one.

Discarded in a corner, thrown free of its nest by a hateful mother, resting crooked against a shriveled root, a single egg sang darkly with cool and comfortable energy at its center.

For the first time since I’d set foot on Ilirian, I laid eyes upon familiar power, a single drop of the infinite sea stranded in this horrible desert of existence, and I knew hunger.

For three months I’d starved. For three months I’d wasted away siphoning off what qi I had to feed Nick’s apple tree. For three months I’d suffered.

But this was no meal. This was no oasis to sate the dying man’s thirst.

Yet I hungered.

I hungered, and for a horrifying moment, I knew how it felt to be Cedric, to be Nick, to lose oneself to that need. That way lies madness.

However it may have deprived and tormented me, the energy here lacked the endless depth to do more than pester at my psyche. The qi of Ilirian was no infinite sea.

I emerged from my revelation but one thought on my mind, my starry eyes fixed upon a singular focus.

If the void beasts didn’t want their faulty egg, content to throw it from the nest and let it wither and die without access to the qi it so desperately needed, I was more than happy to take it off their hands.

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