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tmac attack

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Prologue

“Sun’s vanishing unusually fast. We should to return to the capital,” Sirr Aeran Kastiero pressed his concerns for the second time in the evening. She had unheeded every one of them.

“Should we now? These are my woodlands, in case that has fallen short of your memory. And if they feel troublesome, I would know first,” Cecilia scanned the surrounding trees and gave her verdict, “I say these woodlands are ripe with opportunity. The fruits of our labor are at hand, you need only reach out and grab them.”

"Aye, you frequent some woods, I grant you. The woods closest to the capital with their paved, gentle paths. Not here, though. We've trudged a much greater distance in.”

He should have suspected an answer such as. These scholars of the College were always this assured of themselves, he thought bitterly, someone who has their head buried in a tome for days at end conspires to quixotic notions of hazard and safety. This was scarce the time to brood on the subject, though. He had seen her like before, that phlegmatic pride oozed off her body like a perfume.

The acolyte was amused by his misgivings. She let out a coquettish laugh, "is that not why you've accompanied me?"

Of course she'd trigger that gambit eventually. W oe to me for playing the victim. The fault is mine—I should have said no to her absurd request when I had the chance . "This is folly. You're avoiding the point, I take it. Took advantage of my obligation to protect you, and the unfortunate progression of happenings that transpired in the past evening have thrown us into this quandary."

"I should think for a godly man that was rather dully atheistic,” she teased,” An unfortunate progression of happenings? I believed you might suspect something more ... deliberate, being the religious kind that you are. You’d be wise maybe to think this as part of your Lord’s grand plan.”

14-May-2016 09:25:52 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 11:12:48 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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That made him freeze. A rare thing it was, a scholar girl playing swords at scripture with a man who committed his sword to the faith. Sixteen years he had spent in the Sunguard, reading and bleeding in service, and there was little toleration for the witty pinches of this hopeful pedagogue. Such blind confidence. She’s a scroll fanatic, squinting at pages of bygone fantasies. Who is she to speak for the Lord that I serve? He could feel his mouth tighten with reserved aggravation. But he had done the service already, he had kissed her hand on his knees in sight of her ark lord father, as his father so fervently requested, and tradition bound him to her life.

"Omens point us to the Creator's plan. But they have order and meaning behind their peculiarity. What I saw was an..."

He searched the word for it. Sirr Kastiero looked distrustfully about a fading sky as he thought on it, while the autumn murals of reds and russets and honey that decorated the leafy overhang phased into an incipient violet shaded. Night was encroaching from the east.

"An anomaly.” He finally said. "There was no order, no coherence to it.”

The meteorite was strange in every respect a meteorite could be strange. In the Sunguard, he spent modest time in flight, space and sky, for what it was worth. Yet he'd never seen a ship with that flare and travel along such an erratic trajectory. Trader frigates came and went through the Sky Harbor in mass. Should one crash, orbit guardians would swarm the air like flies for the latter half of the evening. Had it been an aero fighter, the legion would have been on it in a moment's notice. But tonight the sky was quiet and unmoving save for the straggling clouds strewn above like reddened threads as the sun receded. Come to think of it, the world seemed unconscious of this spontaneous breach in its ether.

14-May-2016 09:26:04 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 16:36:06 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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"Perhaps it was. Or perhaps it was entirely explicable, and your ignorance warrants your notion, consequently. At this rate, we have to be getting close. You said it fell directly after the ridge?” she asked him from ahead whilst walking astern, “how much further?"

“We need to get higher onto these folds so that I can survey the forest again—not far I suspect," then he said, "and let us say you're right, I am ignorant, and my ignorance creates my reluctance. What do you plan on doing when you see it?"

"That would depend on what precisely what we see and the manner in which it is presented to us." She had that kind of routine annoyance to her tone, which particularly exasperated him. Were it not for the court and his Father, striking her in that dumb mouth with the metal of his gauntlet would serve nicely. Scholar or not, that a woman would speak to me with such insolence…whilst my brothers across the stars stop threats to the Republic dead in its tracks. Here she wastes her precious time peddling abstruse utterances in a dusty book.

"What if treacherous things flock to it before us? Will you read them to death with that big book of yours?" Sirr Aeran asked with a smallest hint of anger.

He could not say why it made him uneasy to see the girl walk with much too sangfroid. "Do you, darling, take me a fool?"

Aeran shuffled some crusted leaves and gravel under his feet to funnel his frustration. "I take you as profoundly intelligent,” he half lied, “which is a problem. The line between something curious and something perilous is obscured through your lens."

"Very well, take my meaning in this respect. If wisdom and enlightenment were the lantern, knowledge is the cryptic shadow beyond its glow, the great forest of black with no face. Should you wish to see it, dispense your fear of dwelling in the dark--the lantern will light the way, so long as you trust it."

14-May-2016 09:26:04 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 08:55:06 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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Sirr Aeran Kastiero could feel the urge to laugh rising in his chest. "Is that little parable meant to impress me? I'll tell you again, look around. A day nearly has passed since I saw it, and not a soul from the city has come to investigate. Is that not strange to you in even the slightest way?*

"Any more than this pair would be a crowd. I would not like such a crowd. It’d make for a hard time to learn with their incessant yammering and questioning. Familiar traits to you, maybe?"

He disregarded the jest. How a great force as the Legion had declined to take notice of something so conspicuous was more worthy of attention. It was conspicuous, right? The more he brooded on it, the more complicated the matter became. How did it come to this? The capital, in all its waking omnipotence, remained idol, and it was unseemly for the city of the sun to not acknowledge so much as a sanderling cross its skyline. For now, they were truly alone.

He remembers it all so vividly. It lasted as long as a breath should. The First Sister's Shrine was an old memory of a place, and seldom visited, but he was high in the mood to pray and the wine had made him bold to trek so far from the city to find the olden half ruins snugged along a wooded ridge that shot a full view of the high forest. Prayer had just begun at the midnight when the flash broke the sky, a meteorite, perhaps, and so short-lived that it was entirely mistakable as an illusion of mind. But this was not pardoned as a mere phantasm, no, this possessed all the qualities of something very much tangible to reject as otherwise.
The strangest attribute to this projectile was the notable effect of its light. In the simplest terms, he perceived it, by the deficiency of any more an eloquent description, as being …, what, black fire that ripped through the sky? Somehow that blackness had a glow about it. How is fire black? How does such a dark thing generate light?

14-May-2016 09:26:04 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 11:15:50 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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A paradoxical twist of nature's tendency, no doubt. And this damn scholar has vested a questionable degree of interest in it. Then and there, he privately agreed to tell his Ark Lord what he had seen ... and why he was delayed. Oath had me by the throat. They shan’t punish me for that. Then I’ll take the Flotilla up top to the colonies where no one can say aught to me.

Sirr Aeran was a relatively young Templar, in his twenty eighth year but on rise to become the rank of Justicator. His mind primarily did not mistake him, nor should it—the Sunguard was not prone to recruit incompetence. This forest had a tightness about its air that drew perilously close to suffocating. He attributed this to the foreign nature of Sunreign’s northern wilderness at first. He had never seen woods like this—the warm climate of Elvira on the Iydes heralded kinder woods. Down south, the red leafed birches were of elegant form with lean, smooth branches colored like silk with vibrant crimson and mauve cardinals teeming through its overhangs.

Not like these monstrosities in the northern half of the Republic—towering, colossal mountain ash trees as silent as the grave with thick trucks that had such weathered, rugged contortions, you could swear they had eyes watching your every move.

When they forded a twisted stream with islands of weathered stones, he inquired, "do you remember what I told you of how it sounded?"

"Silent as death," she was twisting thin curls of spider web thin hair in her fingers. Her nonchalance implied little regard for his questionings.

"I challenge you to name such an object with such an odd property. It's worrisome."

"It's curious to me. The Dean of Scribes tells us in our studies, greatness does not come without inquisitiveness."

14-May-2016 09:26:05 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 09:02:00 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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It was true. The thing had made no sound, left no trail. Not until the impact, but he could scarcely see what fate the trees had when it collided. It had come from nothing. It was a blink that appeared and disappeared as fast as his eyes closed and opened.

And no one in the capital gave nary a clue. Of course, he never found the opportunity to ask.
On his return to the city from the First Sister’s Shrine, he was oddly intercepted by no other than Cecilia herself. She asked excessively about this unknown object:

Did you perhaps witness an abnormality in the sky, earlier this evening? A kind of black flash, if you will… or more particularly, black fire in the sky? You must be forthcoming, and wisest for us both that it remains our clandestine sharing.

No one could have known, he told himself. It was too dark, too far from the city, and so rapid was its appearance and disappearance and so silent its movement that had he been facing in opposition of its descent, he would likely be in his quarters at Sunreign’s grandest temple, offering prayer and then resting for the dawn’s training, with not a single idea in his head about any of this madness.

“Cecilia,” he began with a tint of frustration in his words, “be that as it may, at this rate they’ll likely have noticed your absence at the College, and my own at the Temple,” then he looked worriedly to the sky, “and dusk is falling fast upon us.”

The twin moons of their planet Praeconum bled their radiance into a rapidly approaching darkness. Dampening clouds began to soak up the black ink of nightfall, and the canopy of misshapen branches overhead stirred restlessly in the wind, their leaves rasping like rusted metal sheets. Somewhere off, a flock of midnight ravens croaked inauspiciously. It was the only wildlife he had heard for some hours. These woods need not be in his expertise to realize the eccentricity of such inactivity from the forest dwellers.

14-May-2016 09:26:06 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 09:03:42 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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Sirr Aeran’s crimson gauntlet tightened around the shimmering hilt of his solar broadsword.

“All the more reason to continue,” she was persistent, shining a pleasantly satisfied smile, “with both the cover of darkness and the obscurity of the woods, we’ll be sufficiently camouflaged. It’s only a short while, as you said.”

“Camouflage…” Kastiero could not help but grin, “less the wind qualms you, there’s no one around for some miles. There are beasts in these woods, though. You should know. Bronze wolves and grizzlies, and such...

*Not people, darling, and no beasts either,” she glanced to the sky as if reading the stars for an answer, "the isolative nature of your … I suppose, reverent endowment to the temple has made you forgetful of policy. The Wilderness Affairs Counsel arranged sphere drones through the northern woodlands some time ago. To maintain the sanctity of wildlife, they bolstered. A child could peer through that veil and determine what truth lies behind it. They are looking for spies, I presume, with the conflict arising in the Federation. Or perhaps insurgents in the stars who donned the Scarlet Glove on their hands and call themselves liberators of colonial oppression. All of it means naught to me. The drones are my concern, and the drones possess very powerful cameras. We certainly do not want to be caught in the gaze of their lenses, now do we?"

Aeran chuckled under his breath. That's what has her in such a worry? Some measly drones?

"If cameras are your worry, then the sooner we are quit of this high forest, the better for us,” he struggled to find a softer way of demanding a return home so that he may escape this task, "Your mother is not one to be toyed with, being a Dean and all. I'm certain she'll be looking for you. Gods, I pray they aren't looking for me ."

14-May-2016 09:26:06 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 09:08:57 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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“And where you’re mistaken is that they won’t be looking in the first place,” she casually denounced the possibility, “You see, my mother knows I’m inclined to take long walks at night at and around the courtyards, and then, if the occasion demands, even so far as into the north woods. I study wildlife, darling, have you forgotten? And who is to debate that some walks may simply take longer than others? Maybe I wanted a particularly contemplative stroll this night, and I detoured. Perhaps I'm conducting research regarding an assignment for the College. In any respect, it’s irrelevant. Aeran, your interminable inquiry is rather vexatious."

This pontifical fool is going to be the end of us . He began to wonder whether his father Johann knew just how callous this daughter of his Ark Lord Victor Solaras really was. This was all Father’s doing. Why should I court this page fanatic? I have four brothers, twenty two cousins, all of them equally or more capable of handling this strange lady. I should be deployed in the colonies, serving the Lord’s justice to these Scarlet Glove rebels.

He saw her eyes paint across the forest, scanning like the security apparatuses in the city. Blue eyes rich like sapphires, like that proud Ark Lord with his dazzling sword. I would do best to have me a sword like that. He figured after this mess, after this girl’s mischief, he'd request deployment to the colonies. And put myself as far away from this nonsense. P**s on Johannes, my cousin can do this Solaras girl in. Then I'll distinguish myself, I'll mount their Scarlet heads on pikes and earn me a great big sword like her pompous father.

“Apologies If I offended you, my lady, I simply ask that you comprehend the paramount significance of your safety. A safety that, considering our present situation, I am solely liable for. Keeping you unharmed—”

14-May-2016 09:26:06 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 11:20:19 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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“Which you have,” she interrupted briskly, “and have done well, and will continue to. Our journey is nearly through, and if I must remind you then I shall, that you were adamant on your promise to guide me until we reached the craft. Well, we are not at end, are we my dear?”

“No," he muttered halfheartedly before realizing, “I failed to describe it as a craft. ‘Twas a meteorite, more so. Well, for lack of a better term.”

“Yes, yes, a meteorite. It will suffice. We aren’t going to lecture the scrupulous specifics of categorizing, are we? It was something curiously, importantly. Most curious,” she played the little strings of her silken hair that curled at the ears.

His mouth twisted with suspicion. “Most curious indeed. And its … ambiguity is somehow attractive to you? By what purpose could possibly justify such an impromptu excursion?”

“The purpose, darling, is purely academic. But ambitious, too, a good kind of ambitious.” She rubbed her hand against the bark of a guardian pine, her long fingers meandering through the crevices as she studied a page from her tome.

"What kind of academic?” he forced his case, "what I saw could scarcely be denoted as valuable to any academic cause. It was uncanny and ominous, it was a cause for alarm. The wisest decision would be to report this matter to the Ark Lords, the College, Legator Maxentius, someone fit for these kinds of rare instances. They can send an investigative party with proper tools, and proper armaments, if it becomes necessary. Why do you possess this desire to see it so badly?” he asked, “neither of us have any greater a notion of its form, certainly not its origins.”

She glowered at the question, “I have my own notions, notions I would very much like to see through. But since you are fixed on comfort I will tell you that it is a matter I have investigated heavily in. Old pieces of the archives spoke of black treasures that sometimes crashed into worlds.

14-May-2016 09:26:07 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 11:21:47 by tmac attack

tmac attack

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Quasi religious talk, of course, but it could potentially hold valuable elements in its core. I speculate as to which… but the important factor is that we find it first, and there will be ample rewards for us both, I assure you darling. The excursion will be done before dawn's break. I'd wager all the gold in the Bank of the Advent, and every firm they have from here to the galaxy's end on that. We'll slip right back into Sunreign before any care to notice." With that, she gave a smile and proceeded.

Quasi religious talk? This b****… Bug**r it, I'll play her damnable game and be done with it. Sirr Aeran’s eyes sharpened, “Let’s pray your notions aren’t hazards." he sighed, defeated. There’s no victory to be had here it would seem. "Very well—let’s make quick time of it.”

They were now deep within the heart of the forest ridge, and the low mountains blocked the sun’s final gust of light until the horizon consumed it. Nearly seventeen miles they had covered, but the terrain’s unending crests and valleys made the entire expedition feel painfully lengthier.

Predators of this region had crossed Aeran’s mind more than once. Of course, he had seen and combated worse, and his weaponry was more than suitable to deal with even the attack of a large bear. Bears and wolves were not his concern, though. To this extent in the expedition, the eccentricity dawned on him—the days were of mid-fall, yet in such a presumably active forest nothing moved, no tiny critters rustled the ground leaves with anxious little mitts. Even the night birds had chosen silence.

Then, twilight descended like a black shroud thrown mercilessly onto the earth, and the air grew stiff with suffocating tautness. Kastiero kept his hilt well in hand, and his cannon that was his arm readied.

14-May-2016 09:26:07 - Last edited on 18-Jul-2016 09:56:41 by tmac attack

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