Weekly: Emotion. Daily: Full of Grace
Shattered Expanse
C’Triar
The Abyss vs. Familiar Voice
Species: Skaniis
Role: Spacer / Crewman
Condition: Abyss-Touched
C’Triar remembered dying. That was the first thing he knew when the stasis field released him. Not his name. Not the ship. Not the faces standing beyond the transparent lid of the medical capsule. Death.
He remembered darkness spreading through the compartment. He remembered emergency lights bending into impossible angles. He remembered hearing someone screaming over the comms even after the comms had gone dead. He remembered looking through a breach in reality and seeing what could not exist; what he did not believe existed – No.
He remember the last moments of the misjump. Foldspace is a finicky bitch, some said. This was C’Triar first time experiencing a misjump. He heard the stories of what was beyond Foldspace. He wasn’t sure believed them. Until now.
They called it the Abyss. The stories say it is left over chaos from the creation of the universe, contained within a veil beyond reality, pushing to get out. Humans call it a plane of Hell. Religious leaders of the Skaniis Faith – the Voicekeepers – called it the Separation. To C’Triar, it was a reality that his ship and crew were experiencing because of one minor miscalculation in the Jump calculations.
And those who survive an encounter with the Abyss are forever changed – Abyss Touched.
C’Triar opened his eyes. For several seconds, nothing made sense. The ceiling was wrong. Too low. There were scratches in the metal above him. Three long marks and a fourth, smaller one beside them. Someone had tried to polish them out long ago and failed.
C’Triar stared at them. Something inside him stirred. You know this place. The thought was not his. Or perhaps it was. That was the problem. He could no longer tell.
Then he heard a voice. “C’Triar?”
His heart began hammering. A small figure stood beyond the capsule. She was Skaniis, compact and broad through the shoulders, her dense fur dark brown along her back and sandy around her muzzle and cheeks. Age had silvered the fur around her eyes. C’Triar stared at her.
Something about the pattern of her face – A stripe of darker fur beside one eye. The pale patch beneath her chin. The way one ear leaned slightly outward when she was frightened. He knew that ear. He knew exactly why it did that. He had been seven. There had been a storm. His mother had – Mother.
The word struck him like a physical blow. Memories followed. Her carrying him through rain. Her shouting at his father. Her grooming mud from his fur while scolding him for tracking it through the house. Her hands pressing warm food into his when he came home from his first training shift. Her laughing so hard at something his uncle said that she threw a drinking cup at him.
“C’Triar,” she said again. It isn’t her.
The other voice was clearer now. Calm. Reasonable. You know what lives behind faces.
C’Triar’s fingers curled against the inside of the capsule. His mother stepped closer. “Open it.”
Someone beside her hesitated. C’Triar could smell antiseptic. Oil. Hot circuitry. And underneath it – Spice. Roasted grain. Something sweet. His nose twitched involuntarily. His eyes widened. His mother noticed.
“We thought you might be hungry.” He knew that smell. The room disappeared.
For an instant he was twelve years old, squeezed beneath a table because he had lost a wager with his cousins. Someone above was stealing pieces of food from a platter and passing them down to him. His father knew perfectly well what they were doing. He pretended otherwise.
His cousins smelled of dust and sweat because they had spent half the day running outside. One of them kept stepping on C’Triar’s tail. He remembered being furious about it. He remembered biting him. C’Triar laughed. It came out as a broken sound.
His mother began crying. False. The voice inside him sharpened. Constructed. C’Triar squeezed his eyes shut. Then another voice came from somewhere behind his mother.
“Still ugly.” His eyes snapped open. His sister stood there. Older. Different clothes. A scar crossing the sandy fur of one forearm that he didn’t remember. But that expression – He knew that expression.
“You look terrible,” she added. C’Triar stared at her. Her ears flattened slightly. Her mouth trembled. “Idiot.”
Something inside C’Triar broke. Not the part the Abyss had damaged. Something around it. A wall. A great knot of fear that had been wrapped around every memory he possessed. His sister called him an idiot again. C’Triar started laughing. Then crying. Then laughing harder because he was crying.
The thing inside him recoiled. Stop. His father spoke. His cousins shouted from the corridor. Someone called C’Triar by a childhood nickname he had not heard in twenty years. Another voice yelled that he still owed money from a game played before his first voyage.
More faces appeared. Friends. Neighbors. People he had forgotten. People he had thought he had forgotten. And every voice pulled something from the darkness. A doorway. A meal. A fight. A first love. A broken tooth. His father’s terrible singing.
His sister pinning him to the floor during a childhood argument and refusing to release him until he admitted she was right. His mother cleaning blood from his fur after his first real fight. The comforting weight of cousins piled together during a cold night when the heating system failed. The smell of home after rain. The particular sound his father’s claws made against the old flooring.
A thousand insignificant moments. A thousand pieces of C’Triar. They are memories, the thing whispered.
C’Triar stopped laughing. For the first time since awakening, he answered it. “Yes.”
Memories can be altered.
“Yes.”
Memories can be fabricated.
“Yes.”
His mother’s hand rested against the transparent cover. C’Triar placed his smaller hand opposite hers.
Then how do you know?
C’Triar looked at her. He couldn’t explain it. That was the beautiful part. He didn’t know because of evidence. He didn’t know because of logic. He didn’t know because some instrument had verified that the Skaniis standing before him shared his blood. He knew because something deeper recognized her.
The way her ears moved when she was worried. The little sound she made before crying. The scent of the oil she worked into the fur along her cheeks. The irritating way she looked away whenever she apologized. The particular warmth in her voice when she said his name. Familiarity. Not one memory. Thousands. Not one sensation. A lifetime.
C’Triar smiled. “Because you’re stupid.”
The voice became silent. His sister barked a laugh. C’Triar wasn’t talking to her.
“You thought memories were information.”
Something moved behind his eyes. Darkness folded through darkness. For an instant C’Triar saw the other C’Triar. The one that had awakened in the Abyss. The frightened one. The angry one. The thing assembled from every terrible possibility hiding inside him. It wore his face. His fur. His eyes. It knew his memories. It knew his secrets. It knew every cruel thought he had ever suppressed and every fear he had never admitted. And it smiled.
I am you.
C’Triar felt rage. Hot. Immediate. Unashamed. Skaniis rage. His people were creatures of powerful emotions. They loved fiercely. They argued fiercely. They mourned without embarrassment and celebrated without restraint. Affection was rarely abstract among them. Family was touched, smelled, heard, crowded around, argued with, protected.
C’Triar had spent years aboard mixed crews learning to restrain that fire. Professionalism. Discipline. Control. Now he stopped trying.
His mother. His father. His sister. His cousins. His friends. His crew. Home. Love surged through him until it hurt. So did anger. So did fear. So did grief. C’Triar let himself feel every bit of it. The Abyss had hollowed places inside his mind. Emotion flooded them.
The other C’Triar recoiled. Stop.
“No.”
You are weak.
C’Triar snarled. “Probably.”
They make you weak.
That almost made him laugh.
“You don’t know them very well.”
The darkness shifted. The other C’Triar stepped closer.
I know everything you know.
C’Triar’s anger suddenly disappeared. Something else replaced it. Pity. That frightened the thing more.
“No,” C’Triar whispered. “You remember everything I remember.” The distinction mattered. “You just don’t understand any of it.”
The other C’Triar lunged. C’Triar did not. For the first time, he really looked at it. At himself. At the terrified creature that had emerged from whatever happened beyond that breach. The creature that had survived. The creature that had returned with him. The creature that hated everything because hatred was easier than being afraid.
C’Triar understood. “You were scared.”
The darkness trembled. No.
“We were scared.”
No.
“You kept us alive.”
The thing screamed. C’Triar didn’t fight it. He reached for it. Not physically. Emotionally. And suddenly the fiery Skaniis felt something he had never expected to feel toward the darkness wearing his face. Compassion. The thing was him. Not all of him. But part of him. The wounded part. The terrified part. The part that had looked into something no living mind was supposed to comprehend and had done whatever was necessary to survive.
C’Triar hated it. C’Triar feared it. And C’Triar forgave it. That was the one thing the Abyss had not prepared for. Grace.
“You can come home too.” The darkness shattered. C’Triar screamed. His mother shouted for the physicians. His sister was pounding against the capsule. His father was calling his name. And beneath them were more voices. His crew. His friends. His family. Every familiar sound became a thread, and C’Triar seized them all.
The capsule opened. He fell forward. His mother caught him. He buried his face against her shoulder. The smell of her fur struck him harder than any recovered memory. Home. He began shaking violently. His mother whispered something into his ear. A meaningless little phrase. Something Skaniis parents told frightened children during storms. C’Triar had forgotten it decades ago. Now he remembered every word.
His sister wrapped herself around both of them. Then his father. Someone else joined them. Then another. C’Triar disappeared beneath his family. Warm fur. Familiar scents. Familiar voices. Hands clutching him.
Someone crying. Someone laughing. Someone stepping on his tail. C’Triar yelped. “Get off!”
His sister laughed. “You’re alive.”
“You’re standing on my tail!” His father started laughing. His mother refused to let go. And somewhere deep inside C’Triar’s mind, something dark remained.
Small. Quiet. Watching. It had not been destroyed. Perhaps it never would be. But C’Triar could feel it now without mistaking it for himself. He could even feel compassion for it. It was no longer alone in the darkness. Neither was he.
C’Triar closed his eyes and listened to the unbearable noise of his family. For the first time since the Abyss, everything felt familiar. For the first time since the Abyss, C’Triar knew exactly where he was. Home.
Blood & Suns
Quinten Viselier
Familiarity — Emotion — Full of Grace
Quinten Viselier had forgotten how heavy Earth was. He had not forgotten intellectually. Ten years working the orbital routes did not erase something as fundamental as gravity. Every spacer knew the numbers. Every spacer knew what prolonged low-gravity exposure did to muscle, bone, circulation, and balance. Quinten had spent enough mandatory hours in centrifuges and exercise cages to understand exactly what one standard gravity meant.
Knowing it and feeling it were different things. The shuttle had not even landed yet, and Earth was already pulling at him. His arms felt heavier against the acceleration couch. His chest seemed to sink into itself. Even turning his head required slightly more effort than his body expected. The sensation was uncomfortable. And familiar.
Quinten smiled. “Something funny?” asked the man strapped into the couch beside him.
Quinten shook his head. “Just gravity.”
The man gave him the look planet-born people always gave spacers when they said things like that. Quinten closed his eyes. Ten years.
Ten years moving from contract to contract, ship to ship, station to station. Utgard one year, Daimler-Ford the next, then some subsidiary whose name existed mostly to keep the parent corporation’s books clean. If a Reich megacorporation needed someone willing to crawl outside a hull and repair something while several thousand kilometers of nothing waited beneath his boots, Quinten Viselier could usually find work. Communications arrays. Radiators. Sensor housings. Hull plating. Docking assemblies. Mining equipment bolted to asteroids that barely deserved names.
He had become very good at living nowhere. There had been a time when Earth seemed impossibly far away. Then Monolith found him. Afterward, Earth seemed farther still.
They had stripped the drugs from his system slowly. Painfully. They had broken dependencies Quinten had never known were dependencies. They had taught him to recognize suggestions that had once slipped effortlessly through his thoughts. They had shown him pieces of history he had never been permitted to see and then, perhaps cruelest of all, allowed him enough time to understand them.
When it was over, Quinten had asked to see his family. Monolith said no. Not yet. He understood.That did not mean he forgave them for it. Instead, they gave him papers.
MEDICAL REPATRIATION — GRAVITATIONAL RECONDITIONING REQUIRED.
Perfectly ordinary. Spacers came downwell all the time for rehabilitation. A decade of orbital employment made the explanation particularly convincing. So Quinten Viselier was going home. Just not home.
The first propaganda transmission appeared while they were still descending. The shuttle’s passenger displays interrupted their entertainment simultaneously. A smiling Reich family appeared beneath a brilliant blue sky, three generations standing together before a flag. The father’s smile was too perfect. The mother’s was worse. Quinten knew that smile.
He had seen it all his life. Security is Freedom. Order is Prosperity. Duty is Peace.
The words rolled across the display. Around him, nobody reacted; neither did Quinten. Monolith had trained him well enough for that, but something tightened inside his chest that had nothing to do with gravity. Ten years away, and nothing had changed. Then came the arrival instructions – identification ready, travel authorization available for inspection , health documentation available upon request, restricted districts listed, prohibited materials listed, and reporting requirements listed.
A reminder concerning unauthorized political activity followed. Then another advertisement. Then another patriotic message. Then a news bulletin explaining how another production quota had been exceeded through the wisdom of the Reich.
Quinten almost laughed. He remembered this too. God, he remembered all of it. The rules. The uniforms. The warnings. The endless insistence that everything was wonderful. There was something almost comforting about its predictability. Almost.
The atmosphere announced itself before the ground did. The shuttle’s circulation system began drawing increasing quantities of outside air as they descended. Quinten smelled Earth. He hadn’t expected that. Station air smelled like machinery no matter how good the scrubbers were. Metal. Plastic. Lubricants. Human bodies. Disinfectant. Every habitat developed its own variation, but underneath everything remained the faint sterile breath of recycled air.
Earth smelled dirty. Moisture. Soil. Vegetation. Industrial pollutants. Something burning somewhere. Too many people. A hundred things Quinten couldn’t identify anymore. He breathed deeply.
The passenger beside him glanced over again. Quinten didn’t care.
The air was wonderfully filthy. He breathed again. For ten years, every breath Quinten had taken had already been breathed by somebody else. This air had come from an entire world. Then he remembered the filtration statistics Monolith had shown him. The poisoned rivers. The industrial exclusion zones. The megacorporate dumping grounds. The districts where Üntermarions and Üntenesser lived beneath permanent layers of smog while administrators discussed acceptable exposure limits from filtered towers.
Even this familiar smell had changed. Or perhaps Quinten had. That realization hurt more than he expected.
The cloud layer broke. Earth filled the shuttle windows. Quinten had seen the planet thousands of times. From orbit, Earth was beautiful because distance concealed everything. Borders disappeared. Cities became patterns of light. Pollution became atmospheric haze. Prisons, factories, labor camps, palaces and slums became indistinguishable patches of civilization beneath clouds.
Earth from orbit allowed a man to pretend. Now Quinten was close enough that pretending became harder.
Industrial towers rose through the morning haze. Highways divided districts into geometric blocks. Security checkpoints surrounded the shuttle complex. Enormous banners hung from terminal buildings, their faces watching arriving passengers. Familiar. All of it. Painfully familiar.
Quinten realized that somewhere beyond those buildings were people who had never left. People who still breathed the chemicals. People who still listened to the broadcasts. People who still believed—or pretended to believe—the world had always been this way.
His family was down there. The thought came suddenly. His mother, sister, nephews, whom he knew mostly through approved correspondence and carefully scheduled transmissions. He could probably reach them within hours. Monolith had forbidden it.
Quinten swallowed. That was harder than gravity. He wanted to go home, not to Monolith. Not to whatever safehouse awaited him. Home. He wanted his mother’s kitchen. He wanted the chair his father used to sit in. He wanted his sister complaining that he never wrote enough. He wanted to discover whether his nephews remembered him.
He wanted something familiar that hadn’t been poisoned by what he now knew. For several seconds, Quinten hated Monolith.
Then the shuttle banked and sunlight broke across the horizon. Quinten turned toward it. The sun rose through layers of polluted atmosphere, scattering red and gold across the clouds. Towers became black silhouettes beneath it. The city seemed almost peaceful.
Quinten stared. He had seen thousands of sunrises in space but for some reason, none looked like this. There was no atmosphere to soften sunlight in orbit. No horizon slowly surrendering to morning. The sun simply appeared, brilliant and merciless. This was different. This was the sunrise he remembered. The sunrise of childhood. The sunrise he had watched through bedroom windows and school transports. The sunrise that had been there before he knew what the Reich was, before he understood castes or propaganda or megacorporations or Monolith. Before someone had told him what the world meant.
For the first time since his reconditioning, Quinten allowed himself to feel everything at once. Anger. Homesickness. Shame. Wonder. Grief. Hope. Especially hope. Earth had not changed. That was the terrible part. But Quinten had. The Reich was still here. The propaganda was still here. The checkpoints, drugs, pollution, injustice and fear were still here. Yet so was morning, the oceans, and forests. So were billions of human beings who deserved something better than the world they had inherited.
Quinten pressed his fingertips against the shuttle window. For ten years he had thought of Earth as somewhere he had left behind but now he understood. It was somewhere he had come back to.
The shuttle descended toward the terminal, and the weight upon his body increased, and Quinten welcomed it. Gravity pulled at his bones but the memories pulled harder. Somewhere below waited a Monolith contact and whatever assignment came next. Somewhere else waited a family he could not yet visit. And beyond both waited something much larger – a world that was still beautiful beneath everything that had been done to it.
Quinten watched the familiar sunrise. He had spent ten years looking down upon Earth. Perhaps, he thought, it was time to stand upon it again and help set it free.