In the Age of Discovery

Skye and Erok

Onto the stage come children, like giants.

“I don’t see houses. Where are the houses, the streets?” Skye asked. He knew better than to say it again, for Erok only growled, hammering one massive forepaw in frustration against the ice. The blow of the saber-toothed cat sent a small avalanche tumbling down the face of the glacier.

They had just come out upon the terminus of a river of ice, with steep, snow-speckled cliffs on either side and a valley, the first rocky, marginally green valley they had seen, stretched out below.

“I thought we’d have seen them by now,” Skye said, “at least by now.” It was hard to keep his voice steady. After so many days on the ice, after snow slide and snowstorm, finding their way home without help seemed beyond reasoning. If his deep set, crystal eyes could have welled with tears, they would have, for Skye knew the concept of crying. If his metal frame had no means for its expression, perhaps the well of his sorrow ran more deeply because of it.

“Stop!” said Erok, her ears suddenly alive and forward. “I hear something.” A long pause followed. Her broad nostrils flared. “On the wind. I smell it.”

The big cat’s voice came to Skye wordlessly. It crossed between them as if by magic, bringing with it every reverberation of Erok’s thoughts and feelings to the metal giant.

Not only thoughts and feelings bridged between them, but physical sensations too. Because of this, Skye knew his senses to be dull in comparison to his companion’s. What he could not yet detect on the thin, cold air, Erok breathed in and tasted thickly. Through his empathy with the big cat, Skye tasted the rusty edge of it: a smell he had never wanted to smell again.

“What is it?” he asked Erok, hoping he was mistaken.

“I smell blood. I hear shouts, a fight!”

Blood was new to them and battle, too. They had seen death only recently in the struggle to defend their home, and now it was here again on the wind. Skye stepped backward without thought. He had no use for this world. Its cold stabbed deep into his joints and muddled his thoughts. The long snows blinded him. The thunder of the ice, when it cracked and opened its gaping maw into oblivion, sent terrors through his brain.

“Come on,” said Erok. “We’re going down. At the least it looks like solid ground there.”

Skye did not argue. His head dropping in a gesture somewhere between weariness and despair, the metal man followed along, placing his steps as carefully as did the big cat ahead of him. Not for the first time, it occurred to Skye that, despite his companion’s stubbornness, she was not immune to the rigors of their journey.

It had been a week or more since Erok had broken her fast. Ice clung to her whiskers and snow matted in places along her fur. She favored paws too long in contact with the burning cold, and her walk had become something more of a hobble than the long, fluid strides she more naturally displayed.

All these pains had become a background noise to Skye, each drifting out of focus the longer they marched down the river of ice. Even Erok had worked at putting them out of mind, but now they were here again, sharp and painful. Whether it was excitement that drew her on, a sense of hope, or the smell of blood, Skye could not know. All three were on fire within her. Erok’s emotions and sensations had become so chaotic, Skye could no longer follow them properly.

There was nothing to do now but accompany Erok and help if he could.

Leaving the pristine white of snow and the deep blue of glacial ice behind them, Skye and Erok angled toward the moraine, making their way over veins of rock and debris.

All around them, the glacier was slowly tearing away the mountains through which it passed. The surface beneath their feet had become black with small stones, soil, and grit.

Here and there the surface of a boulder caught in the patient, glacial surge gave Skye a vantage to climb and better chart their course into the valley below.

“What do you see?” asked Erok.

“There are trees,” Skye said. “Trees!” If the metal man had one advantage over his feline companion, it was superior vision, especially at distance. Shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, Skye focused both gaze and memory toward the forest ahead. “Gymnosperms!” His own enthusiasm surprised him. “And people near them. But I don’t know…”

“Gym what?” Erok challenged, never one to be patient with the giant’s bookish ways.

“Ahhmm. Pine trees. Christmas trees, like Maya used to tell us about. Big ones!”

The clouds ahead hung low, like a fog among the trees tops, obscuring everything beyond. “They’re yelling - excited - but I can’t make anything out.”

Skye squatted down on a nearby boulder and concentrated. The scene before him was like opening a book in a script he could not read, everything a confused jumble of light and figures. Yet he was not without knowledge, and when he thought hard and long, the pieces began to fit.

“More bad men,” Skye confirmed. It was not a general statement, but bitter recognition of one side in a fight that was brewing near the tree line. Here were the same rough and wild men who had broken into their home, into their great sanctuary which was now lost to them, so many leagues behind them. “Bad men, like came to hurt Maya. And the rest… Soldiers. I think they’re soldiers.”

It would be some time before Skye could look back, and in memory fully understand the scene unfolding below them. The “bad men” he referred to were a raiding party of Keltoi warriors, hardened men who made their living by banditry and whose expertise with axe and spear-thrower would be legend long after the advent of the Republic.

And the Republic too was on hand, not yet in the strength these lands of ice would come to know, but in the form of a small troop of Ayelsford soldiery. Here was a vanguard dressed in crimson tunics and overcoats, their officers distinguished by short, heavy capes and black caps emblazoned with a large metal insignia at the crown. The officers moved calmly, using short swords drawn from scabbards at their belts to direct the hurried efforts of their men. There were wagons, caissons, and draft animals drawn into a defensive circle, as well as long firearms bristling out to make a firing square from within the hasty barricades.

“It is a fight,” Erok confirmed as they moved closer.

“Over there,” Skye urged, giving Erok a gentle nudge at the shoulder. “We can get behind that rock. Those rocks, over there.” It was one thing to tangle with a few brash and uninvited men in the depths of their home, but this was none of their affair. Or at least Skye could see no reason to chance an encounter in these strange and uninviting lands.

“Get ready to run.” said Erok, ignoring the nudge. “We can help the soldiers.”

“No,” Skye answered. It was something he was about to say again when Erok precluded even that simple argument.

“Come on!” Her breath came as a steam upon the chill glacial air. With a nod of her head toward the tree line, Erok began an easy lope toward the center of battle, her pace picking up quickly with each step, as did the drumbeat of her heart.

Skye, who had never known a day apart from the great cat, took off after her by reflex, yet found voice enough to argue as he ran.

“They can hurt us,” Skye called after her. “Stop!”

As each of Skye’s long strides began to ease the stiffness of his joints, a shower of ice cracked away from frozen patches on his torso and thighs.

“No,” Erok disagreed. “The bad men tried to hurt Maya. They did hurt Bear. Come on now, run!”

Bear was exactly the reason Skye did not rush eagerly toward another fight. He could still see the frayed and beaten form of Bear, who, in defense of their mother, Maya, had been the first to throw himself at the intruders. Bear, who resembled a strange mix between child's toy and ursine giant, had fallen quickly to the bad men, cut apart by axes and pinned down by their spears.

Skye rushed on. “Wait, wait!” he cried, “please wait,” realizing even as the words crossed the distance between them that he was pleading not so much with Erok as sending up a prayer to stay the hand of fate.

Ahead of him, the muscles of the big cat had warmed to the run and she moved ever faster. Beneath her feet, the ground rushed by, turning from ice to black grit, from white to the grays of mud and clay bound soil. A melt-water stream grew deeper and turned away to her right, but Erok forged ahead toward grassy ground, toward the line of spear-shaped, coniferous trees and the battle.

Where, Skye wondered, were the green lawns and warm homes, the wide, open streets of Maya’s memory? So far, there seemed not even a broken trace of the world she had left behind when the sky fell, and her parents said “Nothing to worry about, my dear. Hurry and finish your studies now.”

Skye could count, and the odds ahead were not even. The men in furs and hide boots, the ones who smelled bad - even to Skye’s limited understanding of scent - these numbered near to fifty, and they had the soldiers nearly surrounded.

Pulling their wagons near the edge of the tree line, the redcoats had been caught in the open. They numbered seventeen, living. Several bodies lay in the short grass, the long shafts of lever-thrown spears embedded in ribs or pooled in the blood of accurate strikes to heart and head.

Suddenly, with a mighty crash and a rise of smoke, the soldiers behind their huddled wagons released a volley of gunfire, splintering branches and sending ricochets among the wood. As best Skye could see, not a single attacker fell. With crazed shouts, the “bad men” rushed even more fiercely to the attack.

As he ran, closing the distance with Erok, Skye’s attention focused on a handful of raiders who, having stripped to the waist and painted themselves darkly, had circled round through the low grass on their bellies. Now, in sporadic movements, they rose quickly to fire their lever-thrown spears toward the defenders’ weakest point.

The throwing stick in the raiders’ hands was a fascinating weapon, and Skye recognized its power instantly. He reached back through ancient memories, struggling to bring forth concept and category, the identity of the thing. Catching up with Erok on the run, he said the name. "Atlatl. That's it!"

"That's what?" asked Erok gruffly.

"Yes, it is. Those are atlatls."

The small group of attackers, having circled into the open, were the first to feel the pounding of Erok’s run as her strides shook the ground, the first to hear the stunning, whip-like scream that no earthly feline had ever before projected so fiercely on the assault.

The first raider to glimpse Erok fell back, as if the sight alone had torn his courage away. Another rose full on to meet the charging cat, shouting at his compatriots to launch their spears at the new threat, even as his throwing arm trembled. When he released his own spear, it went wide.

Another who held his terror in check stood steady, left arm out to balance while the right pulled back, as might a child readying to throw a handball. An unintelligible oath escaped his lips, and then…

The long throwing spear came parallel with the ground, its back notched securely in the throwing lever. The thrower dropped his arm, moving forward slightly with the “pitch” while a quick zipping sound cut the air. In release, the long, flexible shaft bowed as if it might crack, only to straighten in flight a heartbeat later. Its feathered tail kept it straight and true.

Skye spun around, hand to his own shoulder as the spear slammed into Erok. The pain she passed on to him was blinding, but still he saw the effects of the weapon clearly. The shaft had torn through Erok’s left shoulder, protruding from the flesh both fore and aft.

The practiced marksman who had thrown it quickly brought another shaft into position, notched and ready to fly. In trying to run, Skye stumbled. In falling, the metal man fixed his gaze on that one dangerous raider as his second spear - brought into position and released smoothly - now sang on its way through the air.

The shaft dug into the ground immediately before Erok, the wood snapping as more than a ton and a half of charging cat thundered past.

Now the “zip,” “zip” of a dozen or more spears reinforced the efforts of the brave raider, the rest of his compatriots chiming in with their own curses and determined throws. By this time, however, Erok was airborne, launching herself across the final distance to her assailant. Twisting with sinewy grace, the big cat raked one forepaw, claws extended, across the body of a man who, but a second before, had considered himself protected by the spirit of his ancestors.

A spray of blood and flesh erupted into the air. What was left of the raider tumbled through the grass like a rag doll, greasy with ichor and gore. Of the other throws, not one shaft in the volley found their mark, and of those who threw them, not a single man stood his ground.

Skye regained his footing quickly, but not without what passed for pain in the metal man’s blunted sensations. His right ankle seemed locked at first, then slow to respond as he hobbled at best speed toward his wounded companion.

For her part, Erok charged the men remaining in the field, giving them no time to collect their quivers and shafts before scurrying for the cover of nearby rocks.

She stopped short, sending only her Pleistocene cry to shiver their spines as they continued in retreat.

When Skye reached her, Erok was breathing in great, heavy draughts of air. Her muscles were flush with blood and bulging like coiled springs. Erok’s thoughts were all in a rage and without patience for anything beyond his quick agreement to do her bidding.

“Take it out! Remove this thing. Now!” Falling to her belly, Erok presented her shoulder and the bloodied shaft embedded therein for Skye’s inspection.

There was little that could be told from Skye's gunmetal face, yet from his stuttering thoughts, Erok knew the metal man stood close to panic.

“That hurts,” Skye said, touching his own shoulder as though the plating there had become tender and sore.

“No time for that,” growled the big cat. With a turn of her head Erok snapped at the protruding spear. Try as she might, she could not get her teeth around the shaft, and the more she moved, the more the wound burned like fire.

"You won't die, will you?" Skye asked. "Not like Bear?"

“Break the feather, carefully,” Erok growled in her most commanding and guttural voice. “Take it off. No splinters. Get a grip on the shaft and pull it through!"

Skye hesitated, but the maelstrom close at hand did not. They could hear the flight of lever-thrown spears and the crash of gunfire, the droning terror of the draft animals, and the shouts of orders and battle yells, all of it foreign to their ears.

“Quick as you can,” said Erok. “Pull straight through. Now!” With a wicked thought, she sent along her pain, using it like a slap across Skye’s soul.

At least it made him move. The shaft came through, red as death. As it left her flesh Erok screamed, her feline howl echoing from the trees.

“Are you? Are you…” The words trailed off, but Skye’s question was clear.

With an assuring nod, Erok breathed deep and rose, stretching out against the pain. “I'm all right. Keep closer, will you?”

Head down, the saber-tooth turned straight on toward the trees. She lengthened her stride, once again pushing the pain of her wound, her hunger, and all her physical hurts to the back of her mind.

Skye knew Erok feared approaching the soldiers directly. Their weapons, if turned against her, would prove more dangerous than the raiders’ spears. A moment or two, Skye reasoned, was all they had to prove their worth, before both sides joined arms against them.

Why us? It was not a direct question, but rather a whispered undercurrent running in Skye’s thoughts. Why did they have to endure this? Why were they so far from home and the comforts of their sanctuary? Why had Maya let them go?

When first on the glacier, they could have turned back before losing Maya’s voice on the wind. When there was nothing but white blindness before them, why did Erok insist they push on? And here they were, charging into a world they had never seen, with bad men throwing pointed sticks at them and soldiers firing big guns that filled the air with smoke and flying lead.

Why were they running toward it instead of away from it, away as far as they could go? Erok! Skye's beloved Erok! What had the battle to defend Maya awakened in her brain? What vengeance had Bear’s death awakened in her heart?

As they approached the trees, Skye made every effort to reach his feline companion, running at the most desperate speed his damaged ankle would allow. From the circle of wagons, a puff of smoke and its trailing wisps stabbed in their direction. There was the crack of a gunshot. A weapon had been discharged at Erok!

Skye’s vision allowed him to see the bullet rushing toward her, as if it had been slowed to the speed of a fat bee crossing a meadow. Close now, and without hesitation, Skye launched himself into the path of the projectile, taking the force of the impact full in his chest. The power of the lead ball spun the metal man around, sending him crashing to the earth as Erok continued toward the raiders in the trees.

A glance toward the wagons showed one weapon trained on Erok and another in the midst of a quick reload, but even as the first man adjusted his aim, the hand of another interceded. An officer dressed in a cape and black fur cap grasped the barrel, putting it down before the soldier could steady for his intended shot. The leader’s voice drifted across the distance, firm and calming, but Skye could not make it out. For her part, Erok ran on unhindered. At least one of the men behind the wagons had understood.

If a smile could have graced the metal man’s countenance, he would have given it expression, but there was little time to celebrate when the forest stood before them as a dark and light dappled maze, one from which a rain of lever-thrown spears had suddenly taken flight. What exactly was Erok’s plan now?

“Plan?” Erok thought in response, “Bite them. Claw them. That’s my plan.”

Frantic, Skye looked about, from the soldiers to the trees, from the raiders to the clouds. “That’s no plan!”

Looking ahead as she ran, Erok noticed a dapple of light falling through the trees at the edge of the forest canopy. The raiders, for their part, were keeping to the shadows, avoiding the light.

Erok reached the first tall conifer at a run, rising in the last instant to make contact with her good shoulder, using her body as a battering ram. The tree wavered as if the ground itself had quaked.

“What are you doing?” Skye asked, falling helplessly behind.

Spear points cut into the wood. One flying bolt opened a wound across Erok’s forepaw before burying itself in the mossy ground.

“Making up a plan!” answered Erok.

With a deep growl, Erok drew back and hit the tree again, pressing against it with all her weight and muscle until the shallow roots of the evergreen gave way in a groan of snapping wood and tearing earth.

Tree tops and limbs splintered in the fall. Two smaller neighboring were trees caught at their midsections and taken in two. Light poured into the new clearing.

“Do it again,” Skye encouraged, seeing the result.

Erok picked another evergreen, larger than the first and deeper in the concealing woods. Ignoring the chaotic movement of the raiders, the saber-tooth pressed into the trees and fell against the long bole of her new target with a force of muscle and weight only the largest of these evergreens could hope to resist.

The result of the crashing timber was instant. The mist near the treetops dispersed. Light penetrated the remaining trees in a way that revealed the raiders’ positions, and the raiders, caught in an open scramble to avoid their fate, ran headlong into the steady aim of their better-armed foes.

By now, Skye was nearing the tree line, hobbling but determined to help. The metal man pulled a spear from the ground where it had struck, examined it briefly, and threw it overhand with a force no human could have matched. It passed cleanly through the trunk of a tree, penetrating the shoulder of the raider behind and pinning him in place.

From her vantage, Erok watched the struggles of the raider behind the tree; saw the sun glint from a small axe as he raised it to break the tip of the bloodied spear. Without a cry, he lunged forward, pulling himself away from his impalement. After a single backward glance, the wounded man turned toward the shadows and faded into the underbrush, making the best of his retreat.

As Skye reached the line of the forest, he lost sight of first one raider and then another. Erok screamed a challenge at the retreating forms, but it was all over, the raiders having thought the better of taking on giants and soldiers both. Falling back at a run, they vanished into the woods and tangled growth and were gone.

When Erok and Skye came together in the clearing, the metal man was probing a dent in his sternum with one finger and struggling to balance on a badly canted ankle.

“Hurt?” Erok asked.

“Yes,” Skye answered without feigning bravery. “Can we go home now? I won’t complain about the cold. Not anymore.”

“You’ll be fine. Just like when you fell catching that mouse for Maya.”

“And you?” Skye’s empathic connection with the saber-tooth filled him with her hurt, and it was larger than his own.

“Don’t know. I’ve never bled before. It’s very red. The pain’s bigger than it was. Did you get that spear all out?”

Forgetting about his own wound, Skye began to stroke Erok’s blood matted fur.

“Yes, my friend, I was very careful. There’s no part of the thing inside you. Not inside of you, I’m sure.” He paused, nuzzling his head against Erok and inadvertently painting his cheeks and chest armor with blood. “What do we do now?”

“Let’s meet our new friends,” said Erok, with as much enthusiasm as the pain in her shoulder would allow, not to mention the hunger rising insistently again in her middle. “Come on. It’s not so bad as all that.”

But it was.

###

Skye’s mood had not darkened so after their first battle with the humans.

Until Bear’s valiant stand, they had no idea that the world beyond their sanctuary had survived at all. Until a dozen fierce men found themselves deep in Maya’s palaces of gold and light, they knew nothing of the humans who still walked the earth. And yet, as astounding as the arrival of the raiders proved to be, there was no question of giving or accepting welcome. The raiders had come to take and to kill.

Not one of the intruders had withstood the blows of Erok’s mighty paws, not with the saber-tooth maddened at the sight of Bear’s tortured frame and their mother Maya screaming, lost to them in her grief. For his part, Skye had done little, too shocked by the madness of death and dying to do more than stand and stare.

Even before the last of the bloodied raiders fell, Maya had withdrawn to the deepest well of her sanctuary, hiding where neither her voice nor her sobs could be heard for a time. Only later would she return, urging both Skye and Erok out into a world they had never seen, first to remove the stink of corpses from their subterranean home, then to explore what had become of the long-remembered places beyond.

This time, when she came to stand before Skye and Erok, their mother appeared as a frail human, a young female less than a decade old. It was neither Maya’s avatar of the pale horse with its golden horn, to which Bear had sprung in defense, nor was it the fish tailed woman who swam the cavern lakes, nor the storm of buzzing shadows which had fled from the raiders. This was nothing more than a small girl in an amber dress and bare feet, the form that had been Maya truly in the moment before the Great Change.

"These were bad men,” said Maya. “But they came. Maybe others… Maybe Mom and Dad are still out there. I thought we were alone, but maybe… Will you look for me? Will you go see?”

Of course, the answer was yes from Erok, comprising the big cat's immediate reassurance to their mother. When she looked to Skye, he nodded, too. It was an answer Skye regretted from the moment his feet first hit the ice.

At first excited, Skye had hoped to see houses and green gardens, longing for new stories to watch across silvered screens. He dreamt, as metal men do, of new playmates with whom to share secrets beneath a broad, blue sky. But the world outside proved nothing like the memories their mother had carried with her into the caverns.

It was bleak, cold, and filled with pain.

In detail, Skye and Erok knew nothing of the Great Change that had brought the world to its current state, only that something of terrible consequence had happened long ago. Even Maya did not know what, only that she had awakened in the caverns and forever after had made them her home.

“You can stay,” Erok said to Skye, repeating it more than once. “I want to see what it’s like beyond the ice. I really do.”

“We should wait until summer,” Skye proposed.

“When is that?” Erok asked, somewhat impatiently. “I don’t know when that is. Maybe it will happen on the way. You can stay with Maya. I’ll be fine.”

But however tempting the offer to stay, Skye refused, helping instead to make and gather the sled and packs that would carry food and water for the saber-toothed cat.

“Who would brush your coat?” Skye insisted. “Who would feed you? Who would feed you, answer me that?”

“We’ll be back home soon,” Erok assured her metal companion, though it took no more than a single breath of the wild air beyond the cave to make the saber-tooth hope their return would be none too soon.

###

Once outside the tree line, Skye and Erok stopped side-by-side and waited - Erok to renew her acquaintance with the pains of her wound and the gnawing hunger in her belly, Skye to balance as best he could on his damaged foot.

A bustle of activity ruled among the troop of soldiers now, and although not a single weapon was trained their way, half a dozen crimson clad sentinels had been posted to form a protective line.

Skye soon picked out the leaders, a handful of men and women whose heavy crimson jackets were augmented by short capes and upon whose heads rested black fur caps. One of these seemed in charge of all, as everyone proved attentive to his slightest word. At the wave of his hand, wagons were moved; wounded men and draft animals alike were attended to. The dead were gathered and burning pyres prepared.

Skye recognized this officer as the man who had spared Erok’s life, and Skye watched him closely. The leader personally knelt before each fallen soldier, placing his hand upon them, and of the fallen enemy he permitted his men to take no advantage. The raiders' dead too were gentled atop one of the mounting pyres - piles of gathered wood being assembled downwind and away from the trees.

To his wounded, the officer gave drinks from a flask carried at his belt, and his voice carried, so that Skye and Erok both knew it well before this leader found the opportunity to turn their way. Yet it was a voice that puzzled Skye, and he shook his head, the better to understand it.

In time the commanding officer walked across the bloodied field alone, leaving his guards and lieutenants behind, his stride quickening as he approached the anxious pair.

If not disheveled, he was one step back from sharp; his crimson tunic was buttoned but frayed, his close beard trimmed but none too recently. While neither tall nor muscular enough to be imposing, both this officer’s gait and the loose swing of his arms said everything about his energy to command. From a pocket he pulled forth a pair of pristine white gloves, donning them without losing a step. They added a crisp, formal air to his approach.

“Mayhor Ulean Devrees aht ur sevrees,” said the leader, stopping before Skye to reach up with arm outstretched and extending a hand now covered in a glove meant for just such ceremonial greetings. The metal man towered over him but remained motionless, his face and chest still covered in blood. Erok too stood without moving, somewhat taken aback by a development she had not anticipated.

“What’s he saying?” Erok asked. “It’s not…” She reached for concepts that, until now, had found no relevance in their life with Maya. “It’s not our speak. He’s chattering like the bad men!” Here was an obstacle the saber-tooth could not force out of her way. For the first time, Erok felt a stab of panic, passing it on to Skye before she could block the sensation.

“Umm,” Skye hesitated. “Not like them. Not like them, really. I’ve been listening to the others too. It’s not that different from the way Maya speaks.”

Erok growled, expressing her doubt.

The man before Skye took no notice of Erok’s vocalization, but continued to hold out his hand, speaking ever more quickly and expansively. The tones were deep and serious, with no hint of a smile to soften the presentation.

“I almost have it,” Skye assured Erok. “Our words, but changed all around, the sounds out of order. Added to.”

As close as they were, Erok could feel the syllables as they buzzed and hummed within her companion’s thoughts, sounds tripping over one another like discordant notes.

“I think. I think I can talk to—“

“Shake his hand,” Erok interrupted with an urgent realization. “That’s what he wants.” She had seen the hand grasping ceremony a thousand times, played out in the images Maya could project, high across the cavern walls.

“Oh, yes. Of course, of course…” And Skye did so, gently taking the gloved hand into the overwhelming mass of his metal digits. The leader seemed pleased and clasped his right hand firmly within Skye’s own. Afterward the man turned both his attention and his admiring gaze upon Erok, continuing all the while to rapidly and without concern speak sentences neither member of his close audience could understand.

“Where are the streets?” Skye asked in a halting fashion, half convinced he had understood the mutations in the soldier’s speech. “The houses? Do you know Maya’s house?”

Now it was the officer’s turn to stand in silence and consternation.

“We came to find Maya’s parents. There used to be streets and cities. Tall buildings. And jets, she called them… airplanes. Phones. There were phones, and she had one to talk to her parents. Not anymore though.”

These were the words for the world Maya had given them, described in many a midnight tale of the time before. It was a world they had also seen projected in light and motion across the glowing walls of their sanctuary.

“There were grandparents and green lawns…” Skye let the words trail.

The expression on the officer’s face seemed pained, but whether in dissatisfaction or simply troubled by the barrier that mixed and mangled the simple unity of their ancestral tongue, Skye could not tell. But when next the man spoke, and Skye translated the words for Erok, the question the officer posed seemed as clear as any.

“You then… are from the world that was?”