The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.13

Chapter 2.13: Ticking Down

I knew I couldn’t stay out there forever. I didn’t need forever, much as I shrouded myself in it like a security blanket. Behind its frigid pall, sapped of humanity as it left me, I could look at things objectively. I could look, and I could understand.

Lucy’s actions made sense. She’d taken a chance, her only chance, to save the one person she’d ever come to care for, a man she’d practically raised. I could respect that. Threads, in her position I’d probably do the same.

The thought left me reeling, sent me searching for the source of that sense of betrayal that’d driven me out into the wilds, into infinity’s cold hands. It took some hours before I found it.

For all this time, the RF-31 massacre had lacked for a true culprit. Cedric had done the deed, but he’d been as much a victim of VIP as the rest of us. I might’ve raged against the universe itself for breaking him so, but I knew better than any how little the universe cared about such trifles.

That left Lucy, who’d once been my savior, as the architect of it all. She known. Out of everyone involved, she’d been the only one with any actual choice in the matter. And she’d hidden it from me.

Looking back, it explained why she’d stayed, why she’d sworn a debt to me rather than safely dropping me off on Fyrion and going back to her life. She bore more responsibility than for simply abandoning me on roofie, and from the sound of it she had nothing to return to.

Did that help her case? Did her justifications and attempts at penance pave the uphill road to absolution? Did it matter? I knew I was playing a willing role in her grief as much as her remorse, practically eager to bear the mantle of a surrogate Cedric. Threads, I was even wearing his clothes.

At the end of the day, I benefitted. Lucy’s guilt and loss alike left me with a powerful benefactor, one I desperately needed. Putting the past behind us, my relationship with Lucy was, but with a single hitch, a good thing.

Which led to the complication, the one other person who bore some indirect responsibility for RF-31. I searched up her name on my holopad, albeit through an eight-year-old press release about tariffs with the coalition for fear that even this would deliver her some path towards finding us.

Alabastria Velestria Ren managed to look exactly like the kind of person who’d order the deaths of an entire mining colony. She had the same peerless beauty as all high level cultivators, the same flawless physique and impenetrable mask that marked her somehow above the rest of us. The resemblance to Cedric was uncanny. That she so resembled a man deep in the throes of homocidal psychosis I think spoke somewhat of her character.

Here was the woman that’d driven Lucy to atrocity. Here was the woman who had so alienated her own son that he’d felt the need to escape.

The memory of my own mother bubbled up unbidden, of Brady’s and my own desperate flight into deep space, albeit with fewer consequences and nobody who’d cared enough to chase us. I let it pass me by, skimming like a stone across the frigid waters in which I tread. The recollection hurt no more than a barely remembered paper cut healed a decade past. Nothing did.

The longer I lingered up in that tree, cut off from the emotional turmoil that so complicated such things, the more I understood. I understood Lucy’s decisions and my reactions to them. I understood Cedric and his need to flee. I understood, to some lesser extent, Alabastria herself, and how the distance of power at scale could make individual lives seem so meaningless. A few striking miners didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

I opened my eyes. I surfaced from cold uncaring to colder reality to find myself sitting in a tree on a strange and hostile planet, the tears long dried on my cheeks as the first glimmers of dawn trickled in through the canopy. I took a breath. Moisture from the cool morning air, ever so slightly sharper and more acidic than it should’ve been, filled my nose. The cries of birds, the buzzing wings of insects, the faint crunch of dead leaves below footfalls in the distance all reached my ears.

None of it mattered, yet here it was. The petalwasp flitting from bloom to bloom didn’t care for its own mortality nor the vastness of the universe nor even the schemes of the most powerful cultivators. The ebonleaf, completely oblivious to its own ephemeral nature, still reached ever further for the heavens, still fought to crowd out its brethren around it.

In the shadow of my despair, I emerged from the infinite sea to look upon Ilirian with a clear head for the first time since our arrival, and for a brief moment, I saw beauty. I saw an insect, a jungle, a world standing in open defiance of its own inevitable end. In the grand scheme of things, everything around me would only last for less than a blink of an eye, but that blink… well, it could be nice while it lasted.

I breathed deeper. I leaned my head back against the tree. I watched. I listened. For a minute—only a minute, I could handle a minute—I lived in the moment, and maybe once that minute was done I could move onto the next one.

I heard Xavier coming. Already I was listening intently to the world around me, and quiet had never been in Xavier’s repertoire. I kept still as he approached the trunk, circled around it once, and leapt to grasp the lowest branches. Before long he sat beside me.

“Lucy…” he led.

“She did what she had to do,” I preempted him. “I may well have done the same.”

Xavier didn’t argue with me. He didn’t chastise me for admitting I’d make the same selfish decision Lucy had, nor attempt to validate my sense of betrayal. Those would’ve been clever things to do, empathetic things to do, exactly the kinds of things I would’ve expected to come spilling out of Charlotte’s mouth.

Xavier just nodded. “There’s little nobler than to be raised a vicious killer and choose instead to become a fierce protector.”

From anyone else I might’ve scoffed at the platitude, but from Xavier, with the overwhelming sense of sincerity and belief that accompanied his every word, I couldn’t help but take it heart.

“Yeah,” I muttered after a moment’s silence. “I suppose you’re right.”

Xavier clapped me on the shoulder, nearly knocking me clean out of the tree in the process. “Now come on,” he announced, completely oblivious to me scrambling attempt to catch myself. “We have a jungle to search.”

By the time I could think of a reply he was already climbing back down. I followed automatically, not even realizing how much impact Xavier had been able to make with two paltry sentences before I made it to the forest floor. He was right, after all. Lucy was trying her best, and we did have a hell of a lot of jungle to search.

Charlotte remained aboard Lucy as Xavier and I spent the morning combing the area, meticulously marking off the ground we covered on our holopads. I had little doubt the two of them were engaged in exactly the kind of long and emotional conversation I might’ve had if anybody but Xavier had come to fetch me. Instead I listened absent-mindedly as he recounted the details of a semifinal duel from the inter-sect tournament six cycles ago in remarkable detail, all the while checking his holopad for what I was sure were messages from Charlotte.

It was shortly after one such not-so-subtle glance that Xavier stopped dead in his tracks and announced, “It’s lunch time.”

I wasn’t hungry, but I followed him back nonetheless.

I walked up Lucy’s gangway without a word, silently weaving through the halls until I arrived in the dining room to find a steaming-hot bowl of soup at my usual place. I sat down in front of it.

At my entrance, Charlotte looked up from her own lunch. “Find anything?”

“A pack of angry rellos,” I answered. “Xavier chased them off.”

“They couldn’t stand against my ever-greater might!” Xavier declared, raising his soup spoon in the air triumphantly.

I hadn’t expected to be able to keep up with Xavier once he reached bronze, and the local wildlife certainly couldn’t.

“We’ll just have to keep at it,” Charlotte replied. “It’s gotta be out there somewhere.”

“Not like there’s much else to do,” I said. “Neither of you are anywhere near iron, even if we had crucibles for you to reforge your bodies with, and I’m stuck at copper until this egg hatches.”

“Growth is not a race,” Xavier said.

“It might be,” Charlotte countered. “With the Arcadian Gardener, we already have more eyes on us than I would’ve liked. I haven’t seen anything of it on the localnet, but sooner or later word’s going to get out of our fight with Elder Lopez. The clock isn’t just ticking down on the Gardener’s request. We need to be as powerful as we an get before people start realizing exactly what it is Cal can do.”

I shrugged. “There’s nothing for it. I have to wait for the egg anyway, and it isn’t going to hatch until it’s time to leave Ilirian. In the meantime…”

Xavier leapt to his feet, raised his bowl to his mouth, and downed his soup in a few gulps. “Let the search continue!”

Charlotte glared at him. “Let me finish eating, at least.” She turned to me. “And you’re taking the afternoon off. I’ll rend my core if you got more than three hours of sleep last night.”

I raised a hand defensively. “I was going to. I was going to. You’re right. I need a nap.”

“Good.” Charlotte spooned the last of her soup into her mouth and delicately swallowed. “Alright.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Let’s go.”

I lingered at the dining table for a few minutes after they departed, forcing myself to eat another few spoonfuls of the soup than my stomach strictly wanted. I’d skipped breakfast, after all. Lucy left me in silence as I stopped to feed Nick’s tree on my way back to my quarters, doubtless reflecting on the night’s events and heeding Charlotte’s advice to let me do the same. I didn’t raise the matter. I simply trudged back to my room, channeled some of the qi that had eluded me so long into the void beast egg, and fell into bed. Even now, I felt safer there anywhere else.

——

Days passed. The clock ticked down. True to our hopes, no searchers came looking for whichever cultivators the void beasts had attacked, leaving us undetected until the looming deadline of the hatching. We spent it as well we could.

Back and forth and back and forth we trekked, keeping together as we relied almost entirely on Xavier to locate our quarry. I’d yet to really isolate Ilirian around me from the nothing around it whenever I opened my qi senses to my surroundings, so whatever strange talent that’d allowed Xavier to notice the Arcadian Gardener to begin with remained our best chance. It proved little use.

At times he seemed distracted, sparing the odd glance off in the direction of the void beast nest. I couldn’t blame him. I was doing the same. I checked it every evening, sneaking up under the cover of my Vac Suit to confirm the eggs there followed the same timeline as the one in my room. Thus far, they did.

A part of me worried that Xavier’s distant looks meant something more, that perhaps our target lay within the nest itself, but I’d spent enough time out there to know no mysterious “entity” hid there. The void beasts themselves certainly weren’t our target. I couldn’t imagine the Gardener having any trouble locating them.

Still we searched. I took to practicing my stealth as we did, prowling through the periphery and taking every opportunity to spook an increasingly unfazed Charlotte. I was getting pretty good at it if I say so myself, even if I’d yet to get the jump on Xavier. Someday, I swore, I’d manage it.

In the evenings, once it grew too dark to reasonably continue looking, I engaged in the miserable task of sparring with Xavier down a stage of cultivation. The sheer difference in skill had always made him a nigh unbeatable opponent, and his bronze core to my copper left him faster and stronger than I could ever hope to match. It felt like fighting Lopez all on my own, an effort which predictably led to my defeat within the first few seconds. That said, the work did wonders for my reflexes, and I sincerely doubted our brush with Elder Lopez would be the last time I fought a more powerful foe.

I capped off my days with an hour of meditation in Lucy’s core room, no longer dependent on the semblance of unfettered access to reach the infinite sea. I filled my core to brimming and stretched it ever so slightly before dispelling the excess like a soft exhale in the hopes it might better prepare my foundation for my next advancement. I had no idea if it would, but I felt I might as well try to accomplish something with my extreme surplus of qi.

By the time the suns set on our fifth month on Ilirian, our search had turned from hopeful to forlorn. We brought Xavier back over ground Charlotte had already covered, making the effort to continue looking even as we all quietly realized we weren’t going to find what the Gardener couldn’t, not by conventional means. The trouble was, none of us had the slightest idea for unconventional means to try. The days passed. We kept looking. We found nothing but jungle.

One hundred and forty-six local-time days after we smuggled ourselves down, just over two months after we discovered the nest, I spotted the void beast egg twitching of its own volition. The hatching had begun.

We were out of time.

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