Astraportus

by Lisa Short

Illustrated by Kerry Maire

Evakya Dayseer Myotis straightened up from her hunch, only then realizing how long she’d been crouched over the records of last year’s forage. The light in the Chronicler’s cavern had dimmed with the coming night, the sky beyond the uneven maw of its entrance shading from clear, pure blue to a deeper violet. Her neck ached; she rubbed it absently with her free truehand, unclenching cramped fingers from around the pen in the other. She would have to either light a torch to continue or give over entirely on her efforts to have it completed before morning; the stubborn kink in her neck, resisting all efforts to massage it away, argued for calling it a night. 

She squinted down at the paper roll, half-filled with painstakingly neat rows of characters. Few others could have managed to differentiate one word from another, even if they’d held it a full wingslength away. Only Evakya and her grandfather had the deep brown eyes of a Dayseer in their settlement. 

A shadow fell abruptly across the paper; startled, Evakya looked up. In the long seconds it took her eyes to adjust, all Evakya could make out was the silhouette of the intruder now blocking most of the cavern entrance, tall and broad-winged, if a bit stooped in the shoulders—she relaxed. Even with only a silhouette to go on, she knew that shape better than she knew her own. 

“Gran’fa!” Evakya was ready for affection—fond of solitude as she was, even she found an entire day closeted alone in the Chronicler’s cavern a bit much. But her smile faded as his face swam into focus—his expression was tight and closed. “Grandfather?” she said, more tentatively.

Tzinac Dayseer Myotis, revered Head Chronicler of the settlement, regarded her with the unreadable dark eyes that were so like her own. “Darrow’s back,” he said. 

#

Evakya followed her grandfather back down to the settlement, a little clumsily. She had never been the best of fliers, and her wings had stiffened up even more than her neck had during her long day in the cavern. But her grandfather said nothing of her ragged flight down the mountainside. 

Darrow’s back!

Darrow had left the settlement months before—not to Evakya’s sorrow; she had never liked him. He had made a point of tormenting her when they were children, jeering at her eyes and calling them ugly—turning the pride her grandfather had tried to instill in her, another generation of Chronicler-to-be, into a furtive sort of shame. Jealousy, her grandfather had said dismissively—but he hadn’t been the one that had had to endure not only Darrow’s taunts, but those of the other children he’d been able to convince or cow into joining in with him. 

Darrow had been a big, husky boy and had grown into an exceptionally powerful man, easily the strongest flier in their settlement—but he had never been satisfied with only that. He had bemoaned the limits on their territory, had wanted to push back the centuries-old boundaries they’d established with the pumafolk, the bearfolk—if he could have thought of any possible use, they could have gotten out of the dolphinfolk’s territory, he likely would have agitated for that too. We can fly! he’d snarled impatiently in Council. How could they stop us?

We can’t fly indefinitely, her grandfather had replied, pushed to the limits of his usually limitless patience. We do eventually have to come down to rest, to sleep. How well do you think we’d fare then against the pumafolk?

We could go up higher on the mountain—too high for them to reach—

And eat what, up there? And what reception do you suppose we’d find, when we were forced by hunger to finally come down?

Undaunted, Darrow had turned his obsession for more into a search for some advantage, any advantage that would allow his people—whether they wanted it or not—to expand their settlement. Evakya had been forced to deal with him again as an adult, one on one, when he’d broached the unspoken, but still well-understood, privacy of a Chronicler at work in search of information.

“About what?” she’d asked, annoyed both by the intrusion and by her own thin edge of fear—not that she had believed Darrow would try to physically harm her. He’d have been mad to try it, and she didn’t think he was mad. Or she hadn’t thought so—something in the rigidity of his wings, clamped tightly to his sides, and the focused intensity of his golden eyes gave her pause. 

“Astraportus,” he’d said shortly.

Evakya had stared at him—had realized that her mouth had fallen open in astonishment, and hastily closed it. “Astraportus,” she’d said carefully, “is a children’s story—”

He’d given her a look of disgust. “So you and your grandfather say.”

“There’s nothing in the Chronicle Histories about Astraportus,” Evakya had said flatly. “My grandfather is only the latest in generations of Chroniclers to confirm that.” With well-concealed malice, she had continued, “You’re welcome to go look for yourself, if you promise to be careful with the records.” She’d tilted her head toward the black recesses of the cavern behind her.

Darrow had glared at her. “I plan to,” he’d snapped. So, she’d had to let him—the Chronicles were free to all comers, was one of their strictest tenets. Few ever took advantage of it, though; they were simply too hard for most folk to read. 

But Darrow had persisted, over days that had turned into weeks. She had eventually grown resigned to his constant presence, and she had to credit him that he had not disturbed her in her work or indeed, often spoken to her at all. Eventually he had stopped coming to the Chronicler’s cavern, and Evakya had supposed he had either given up or—unlikely as it seemed—found some obscure reference or other that had satisfied him. She had mentioned his absence to her grandfather, after it had lasted more than a week and she had felt relatively secure in assuming it would continue—her grandfather had known of Darrow’s sojourns into the Chronicles, of course. 

“You hadn’t heard? Darrow’s left the settlement.” There had been an odd emphasis in the way her grandfather had said it. Folk left all the time, for extended hunting or foraging trips or even simply to go wandering, secure in the peace they had with their nearest neighbors—but he had said, Darrow left. 

“Oh? To go…anywhere in particular?”

“I think you know,” her grandfather had said. His gaze was keen and frowning on her face. “If you encouraged him, even in the slightest—”

“Gran’fa, I didn’t!” Her shock had been genuine. “I wouldn’t—Astraportus is a lie—”

“I wouldn’t put it as harshly as that.” Faint humor had softened the lines of her grandfather’s face. “Like all legends, it has some basis in truth. The Originates did have to come from somewhere, and live somewhere—”

“They lived all over,” Evakya had said impatiently. “And they came from the same place all the non-folk do—they evolved from the simplest non-folk to more complex ones, then finally into themselves over the span of millennia.”

“You and I know that, and those in the settlement cleverer than their own forage and prey know that.” His broad shoulders had slumped a little. “But you’ll learn this as you grow older, Evakalyna—folk want there to be more to life than that. They want grandeur, they want mystery—some folk will never be satisfied with only the truth of the Histories.”

#

When they reached the settlement proper, a small knot of folk was huddled around the Healer’s hut—Darrow’s father was easy to pick out, as he was the only person in the settlement even larger than Darrow. 

“Evakya—” It was Darrow’s mother, slight and usually silent, overshadowed by her more boisterous husband and son. But she was speaking now, her wings clamped to her sides so she could twist her truehands together nervously in front of her. “Evakya, Darrow’s been asking for you.”

Evakya had no desire, none whatsoever, to enter that hut—but she could hardly refuse. Darrow’s father was staring at her, stony-faced. Did he blame her for whatever had happened to Darrow? Even her grandfather had thought she might have had a hand in it. Evakya stalked into the hut. 

The light within was dim, too dim for her Dayseer eyes to make out much—the shape of the Healer, seated beside another figure draped across a raised pallet, one wing trailing across the floor like so much shredded paper. Evakya stopped in her tracks, stomach clenching in nauseated sympathy. That wing—how had Darrow ever managed to fly back home? 

The Healer spoke—Evakya shook her head slightly in a fruitless attempt to clear it, then tore her gaze away from that tattered wing. “What?”

“I’ve made Darrow as comfortable as I can,” the Healer repeated. His usually mellow voice was thin and sharp. “But he won’t rest until he speaks to you.”

“In private.” Evakya jumped at the sound of that voice—she would never have thought it was Darrow’s. His voice had been full, resonant, in keeping with the depth and breadth of his chest—this voice had been ground down to shards. “Get out.” 

The Healer did so, quickly. “And close the door—” The latch triggered behind the Healer with a snick. “Evakya.” Darrow sucked in a hitching breath. “Come closer.”

Evakya forced her unwilling feet to shuffle forward. She bent down until the fuzzy blur of his face swam into focus. Darrow’s features were so swollen they was nearly unrecognizable, one of his eyes nothing more than a puffy, blackened mass above the battered shelf of his cheekbone. There could be no doubt that he saw her, though—his good eye widened until the red-veined white showed all around the golden iris. 

“For the Chronicles,” he said, carefully enunciating each word. “For the Chronicles—you were right about the Histories. I never found Astraportus in them. But I did find something else. The mention of a weigh station—” Evakya nodded, lips pressed tightly together. She knew the reference—one that generations of Chroniclers had puzzled over. “Something one of the pumafolk told me, last growing season—their people have a tradition about a weigh station, though he said it as if it were all one word, waystation—and their tradition is that their first ancestors were left there by the Originates, who went on to Astraportus.” Evakya opened her mouth, but Darrow twitched so violently on the pallet that she closed it again. “Promise me, Evakya, you’ll Chronicle that—tomorrow! And this—” He started to turn on his side, tears welling up in his good eye.

“Stop it, you’ll hurt yourself even worse—”

“I’ll be dead by morning. I’m bleeding inside, the Healer said so. And I’ll never fly again anyway.” Evakya was hopelessly silenced. Darrow managed a sharp, jerky nod. “I can’t reach it—in the pocket, hanging on my belt. Open it.”

She found the pocket, and opened it as gently as she could, trying not to jostle him further. A large, crumpled piece of paper had been shoved deep inside the pocket—Evakya pulled it out carefully and unfolded it. It was a map, drawn big and clumsy under the direction of Darrow’s farseeing eyes. Her own eyes traced the lines of it—a forest, then a valley, then more forest—a mountain range, then more forest—he’d made marks showing how far he’d flown each night, dusk to dawn. And at the map’s farthest margin, printed in large block letters beneath a shakily executed square: WEIGH STATION PATH.

“Put it in the Chronicles,” he whispered. “I found it—the weigh station, the waystation. I tried to use it, but I couldn’t—I walked all the way back to the settlement. Walked! But someone else has to go, has to try again—don’t worry, I don’t mean you.” Even in his extremity, Darrow managed a ghost of his old sneer. “But they’ll need my map, to make it there.” He bared his teeth up at her. “And I wanted you to know that you were wrong, about Astraportus.”

#

He had little more to say, after that—Evakya tried to coax some sense out of him: what had damaged his wings so terribly? Why was he so sure that whatever it was he had found, was the weigh station or even had anything to do with Astraportus? But whatever combination of determination and spite that had carried him this far had run entirely out. Afraid to keep him from the Healer’s ministrations any longer, Evakya left the hut.

“He does blame you,” said Evakya’s grandfather, after they had returned to their own hut in the settlement.

“What? Who?” 

“Darrow’s father. He thinks you put the idea in his son’s head.”

“Me?” Evakya was indignant. “I tried to talk him out of it! It was all Darrow’s own idea—”

“He can’t accept that, Evakalyna. It’s easier for him to think it was yours, and Darrow did ask for you specifically.” Her grandfather’s gaze on her face was troubled.

Evakya sighed, then pulled the map out of her own pocket and showed it to her grandfather. While he stared down at it, she related the rest of what Darrow had told her.

“Well,” he said, after a long, thoughtful silence. “We’ll certainly put it in the Chronicles.” Evakya waited, but he said nothing more. 

“And?” she asked sharply.

“And what?”

“In the Chronicles—in the Histories?”

 Her grandfather sighed. “Who knows what actually happened?” Evakya gave him a disconcerted look. “Yes, I know what you say Darrow said—but he was half out of his mind with pain and the realization that he’s crippled and, likely, dying. He could just as easily have tangled with something bigger and stronger than himself or got caught in a storm and struck by lightning—this doesn’t belong in the Chronicles’ Histories; it belongs in the Tales.”

Evakya was silent. “Evakya?” Her grandfather’s tone was sharp.

“I don’t think we can make that assumption,” said Evakya carefully—one Chronicler to another, not granddaughter to grandfather. “Documented evidence—”

“Evakya, you’re a fine Chronicler—for your age. When you’ve reached mine, you’ll realize how few of the stories that people relate are actually fit for the Histories. This is a single source, uncorroborated—” Evakya thought that Darrow’s physical condition should count as some degree of corroboration, but pinched her lips shut over the words. “Put it in the Tales, Evakalyna.”

#

Darrow died two days later. Evakya spent the time writing down everything he had told her and redrawing his map as meticulously as she was able. When she had finished, her grandfather watched her place it all carefully into the repository of Tales, then left the cavern.

Evakya waited until the last shadow of his wings had vanished, then pulled it all back out and began hastily copying it, keeping a wary eye on the cavern’s opening. Not until the final ink stroke had dried and she had tucked the copies away in her own belt pocket was she able to relax.

The Tales—perusing their stacks had been her favorite diversion as a child. She knew all the written legends of Astraportus that her people had, better than anyone save perhaps her grandfather. The Originates were of course featured heavily in them, though they featured just as much in the earliest Histories too—far drier and matter-of-fact retellings, those.

The Originates had been first—both the Histories and the Tales agreed on that. The Originates had looked something like folk—there was agreement on that too, though the Tales were far more varied in what they had to say about the Originates’ appearance. The Histories all made them sound like rather bland, flightless versions of Evakya’s folk. And while both Histories and Tales agreed that the Originates had in fact created all the wondrous variety of folk, not only Evakya’s, but the Histories also refused to say why—only that they had done it.

The Tales, on the other hand, were full of speculation on just that subject. The Originates had lost the ability to bear their own young, and had made the folk to be their surrogate children—the Originates had wanted to be worshipped and had made the folk to be their supplicants—the Originates had killed so many of the non-folk in their godlike revels that they had made the folk in both their own and those lost non-folk images as penance for their crimes— 

But the weigh station—she dug out the reference in the Histories’ stacks and stared down at it. Homo sapiens chiroptera—that was what the Originates had called Evakya’s folk. Weigh station 38, -80, 1558, 6, 30, 2423, 1201. Nobody had ever been able to figure out what any of those numbers might have meant. And no mention, none at all, of the Originates after that. They had simply vanished from recorded history—or at least, the recorded Histories. And never a single mention in the Histories of any place called Astraportus.

The Tales were full of references to Astraportus, though. Why the Originates had gone there, no two Tales agreed—if they were still there or not, no two Tales agreed upon either. What it was, where it was—nearly every possible interpretation of that had been faithfully recorded by generations of Chroniclers in the Tales. And most of them, of course, painted Astraportus as a place of fabulous wonder…all of a seeker’s questions answered, all of a seeker’s delights found, where nobody ever grew sick or old or died…

One thing all the Tales did agree on, though—folk were flatly forbidden to go anywhere near it. On the points of why? and what would happen if? the Tales diverged fabulously once more—but they were all quite clear that Astraportus was, always and forever, only for the Originates. 

#

On the morning of the summer solstice, Evakya left the settlement. She had spent the weeks since Darrow’s death storing supplies and sneaking out during the day to practice her flying—she had been a little appalled at how weak she’d become, spending most of her hours in the Chronicler’s cavern. It wasn’t enough practice—she was no Darrow, and the time it had taken him to fly to the weigh station was likely far shorter than the time it was going to take her to do it. But she had to go. She was sure that Darrow had gone on the journey he’d said he’d gone on—that he had documented, as poor and clumsy an effort as that had been—and if her grandfather wouldn’t allow it into the Histories without corroboration, well. Then she would damn well provide that corroboration herself.

The truth—Darrow had taunted her with it. Had he understood what the truth was to her as a Chronicler, or had he simply thought to insult her, as he’d always delighted to do when they were children? She didn’t know. Folk were fickle, illogical—not unlovable, but often enough incomprehensible to Evakya. Her grandfather was the person she understood best, and he genuinely believed that Darrow had been lying or, the more charitable interpretation, delirious. There was no help for her there. 

She refused to think about her grandfather’s distress when he discovered she had gone. He would certainly guess why, and where—but he wouldn’t come after her. His devotion to the Chronicles was unwavering, and with her gone, he would be the only Chronicler left in all the settlement.

She flew for days, diligently following the route on Darrow’s map, stopping only to forage, hunt and sleep—more foraging than hunting; she was slow, out of practice, and often her small non-folk prey won their escape. Forests, valleys, a mountain range, more forests—she thought of Darrow, walking back through it all, and winced. Their folk were not great walkers. The lower folds of their wings extended unbroken from spine to ankles—they could not take long strides, and the delicate skin and fine, sensitive fur covering their wing membranes were not suited to fighting their way through underbrush. 

#

Thirty-eight days after had she left the settlement, filthy and worn to the bone, Evakya finally set down in the place that Darrow had marked in large, clumsy letters on his map: WEIGH STATION PATH. At least, she hoped it was the place—it was a large clearing a day’s flight into this particular forest’s eastern edge, and the thin river bisecting it snaked in and out in exactly the way Darrow had drawn it. The large boulder on the river’s near bank was the same too—but she could see nothing else that indicated that there was anything about it that set it apart from a thousand other clearings she’d flown over since she’d left the settlement. 

Nothing—she frowned down at the map. She’d been extraordinarily careful to faithfully reproduce every line, dot and flaw of Darrow’s drawing—he had gone over the clearing’s southeastern edge two or three times with his pen, leaving the line heavily blotted, and she’d copied that too. Had that been significant? She tucked the map back in her belt pocket and cautiously approached the indicated line of underbrush. 

Nothing—she crouched down and peered into the overgrown grass and weeds crowding the treetrunks. Wait! Pale new seedlings pushed up from the ground around a thinner patch—a place where the grass and weeds were crushed down, or had been crushed down at some point in their growth cycle—a handful of months past, perhaps? She clawed them impatiently out of the way. Yes—there was a path—hardly big enough for her, much less Darrow—she dropped to her knees and thrust her arms all the way in—

—and nearly topped head-first into darkness. With a muffled shriek she jerked back, truehands scrabbling madly for purchase, and managed to catch hold of a sapling’s slender trunk. She clutched it tight, panting, and stared fixedly at the small abyss that now yawned at her through that innocent-looking hole in the underbrush. There was a passage there—an underground passage, leading down into darkness. Likely it had been far less dark to Darrow’s eyes than it was to hers—but she would have to go in anyway. 

Once she had squeezed herself into it, she found that the passage sloped sharply downward, dank and miserable, but not quite pitch-black—there was a light source somewhere ahead, enough that she could at least keep herself properly oriented towards it. The walls were damp, rough stone, and enough occasional small patters of dirt rained down on her head as she forged forward to keep her in a perpetual state of nervous anticipation of a ceiling collapse. 

She finally emerged into a small cave—small in diameter; if she stretched her wings out to their fullest extent, she might almost have been able to touch both sides with the tips of her truehands’ fingers. But those walls extended up countless winglengths above her head, up and up until they terminated in a tiny point of light. Was that the sky, that clear gray glow from so far overhead? It was impossible to tell.

And she wasn’t quite alone in the cave—something, with the sharp-edged lines of a made object rather than a grown one, occupied the space with her. It stood in the cave’s center, seemingly imbedded in the rocky floor—slim and straight, dully metallic. Near its flat, square top, at her eye level, was set a shimmering rectangle with rounded corners. Its subdued sparkle made her think of water in the sunlight, though it was clearly solid, not liquid— liquid would have spilled out on the ground already, perpendicular to it as it was. 

“What,” she whispered—the cave walls took up the sound and bounced it upward, briefly filling the cool, damp air of the cave with soft echoes—What? Whatwhatwhat—

The rectangle flared white. Evakya flinched back, then back again when it spat out a noise—like a short sharp burst of thunder; she couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. Her gaze darted from the rectangle back to the passage she’d so laboriously come through—should she—

“IDEN!” cried the rectangle, meaninglessly. “IDEN—iden—” Terror froze Evakya in her tracks. “Iden—identi-fy. Identify.” It paused. “Identify yourself,” and Evakya’s numbed brain finally made sense of the words.

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” she faltered—but she was too afraid not to answer; who knew what it would do if she didn’t? 

“Identify yourself,” repeated the rectangle—its voice was metallic, buzzing, sexless. “Identify yourself.”

She might as well try it. “Evakya Dayseer Myotis.”

The rectangle flickered. “That name is not recognized.”

“What are you?” she whispered.

“Waystation thirty-eight. Minus eighty. One thousand five hundred fifty-eight.” 

38, -80, 1558! Darrow must have recognized those numbers too! “Astraportus!” The word burst from her, without her conscious intent. 

And the rectangle flickered again. “Do you wish to travel to Astraportus?”

Evakya could not believe it had said that—so matter-of-factly, so emotionlessly. “Is that—is that possible?”

“Transport to Astraportus is only permitted to unadulterated species Homo sapiens. Retinal scan required to proceed.” It paused. “Warning: This test cannot distinguish between an unadulterated Homo sapiens with protanopia or deuteranopia and a servitor subspecies. If this test is failed, the subject will be given thirty seconds to remove themselves from the waystation entry point before sterilization procedures commence.”

And Darrow must have told it to go ahead—she thought of his blasted, ruined eye, his tattered wings. Servitor—she wasn’t familiar with that word, but it sounded unpleasant, and as for the rest— “What—what is protanopia? Or deut—the other thing you said?” 

“Protanopia is the absence of red receptor cells in the eye. Deuteranopia is the absence of green receptor cells in the eye.”

Evakya’s lips parted. Many of the folk did have trouble seeing colors, most often red—it made little difference in their daily lives. But a Dayseer could always see all the colors. “I—” Did she want to do this? Astraportus wasn’t her obsession, had never been her obsession. 

But Darrow had died for it. And Gran’fa hadn’t let her record the truth of it in the Histories.

Evakya set her jaw. “Yes. I wish to travel to Astraportus.”

The rectangle glowed—then a beam of red shot out of its center, splashing into her open right eye. Evakya stiffened into rigidity, teeth baring involuntarily—but it didn’t hurt; it was only brightness. 

“Retinal scan complete. Unadulterated Homo sapiens subject confirmed. Remain still; transport to Astraportus will commence in: Five. Four. Three. Two—” A deep thrumming had begun, somewhere far below Evakya’s feet. Evakya was shaking, uncontrollably—she hoped desperately that she was still enough anyway. “One—”

Absolute lightlessness descended all around Evakya. For an endless second, she was trapped in it—soundless, scentless, touchless nothingness—she wanted to scream, to run, but it was as if she had ceased to exist at all as a physical being. 

Then—

A loud sound—a voice, similar enough to the Waystation’s that it could have been its twin—was blaring: “Warning! Incoming visitor, please proceed as quickly as possible to the emergency suit locker. Dome has been exposed to vacuum. Warning! Incoming visitor—”

But its voice was growing oddly tinny in her ears, and Evakya’s tongue had begun to tingle in a way that was not quite painful—not yet. She looked around frantically. This was Astraportus? She could hardly comprehend the scene that met her eyes—her feet were solidly planted on the floor, but the night sky was wheeling majestically over her head, a deeper black than she had ever seen it. As she watched, a huge arc of blue swept up over the horizon, slowly filling the sky, swelling to a white-and-brown-swirled cerulean orb of unbelievable proportions. 

She wrenched her eyes, which had begun to throb in a peculiarly unpleasant way, away from that fantastic vista and down, to see that she stood in on a large, shattered gray plain. Mangled debris stretched out all around her to the very edges of its space, and interspersed here and there were the twisted, desiccated bodies of folk, arms and legs bare of wings, sporting freakishly large truehands instead—or not folk? Originates?

“Warning!” She could barely hear that tinny voice now, and she was suddenly, horribly struggling to breathe. “Incoming visitor—”

Was it her imagination, or were her wings swelling grotesquely before her eyes, her dimming, agonized eyes? It must not be her imagination, because she could feel it too, the dreadful internal pressure, as if all of her insides were trying to burst out through her skin. 

Suit locker, the voice had said, but she couldn’t even imagine what such a thing might be, let alone identify it in the debris-choked chaos all around her. She cast around desperately for something, anything that might save her from this waking nightmare—there!  Her frantic twisting about had brought her face-to-face with a now-familiar shape, tall and slim and gleaming in the icy starlight. Weigh station! She staggered towards it, truehands outstretched. “Help me!” she cried or tried to—the words emerged as a bare, choked thread of sound.

The dull gray screen lit with a single word, in blood-red letters—if it spoke, she could no longer hear it, but she could still read it: DESTINATION? 

Destination, what destination? Home, home! But how could it know what that—Evakya sucked in a deep, frantic lungful of what felt like nothing at all, then pushed it out in one long, desperate exhalation, a thin whistle into the hideous void surrounding her. “Thirty-eight! Minus eighty! One thousand five hundred fifty-eight!”

The red letters on the screen dissolved, then re-formed into something else—but she could no longer read them, could no longer see or hear or feel anything but the grinding agony in every inch of her flesh, the collapsing horror of her lungs. Evakya gave herself up to the pounding darkness. 

# 

On the last day of the sixth month after Evakya’s departure, Tzinac Dayseer Myotis sat silently in his hut—his hut, alone, now; he did not look over at the folding screen that hid the hut’s east wall, where a small bed lay neatly made and silent beneath the hut’s largest window. Evakya had asked for that place for herself, so she could watch the sun rise every morning—it helps wake me up, Gran’fa! And the morning breeze makes me hungry for breakfast! Unbidden, the memory of her eager child’s face rose in his mind’s eye. 

Darrow’s round-trip journey, from the settlement to those distant, unnamed woods and back again, had lasted nearly four months. Tzinac had forced himself to wait in patience at least that long. Every morning, he flew diligently up to the Chronicler’s cavern—empty now of life save for himself, and oppressive in a way it had never been before. Evakya had taken on much of the routine recopying of the oldest Histories, fading away even in the cold, dry air of the cavern; Tzinac was glad to have the extra work for himself now, a way to pass the endless waiting hours. 

But Evakya had not returned. Not after four months, not after five, and Tzinac had found it harder and harder to sustain his duty. At first, he had merely skipped a day here, a day there—then as the fourth month had become the fifth, for a handful of days at a time—and now, it had been more than a week since he had set wing outside the settlement proper at all. He must go out eventually, he knew—there were a few other settlements of their kind mentioned in the Histories. He must go and look for another Dayseer to care for their Chronicles, after he himself was gone. But even the thought of such a search was too painful an admission—no. He wasn’t ready. Perhaps, in a month or two, or three—

An inarticulate cry, muffled by the walls of the hut, brought him to his feet, wings snapping for balance. A pause, then a shout, a sharp drawn-out series of syllables that sounded like—

Tzinac was out the door and running into the commons shared by all the huts before the last echoes of that shouted name faded. Standing at the far end of the settlement, dappled by the weak winter sunlight falling between the bare-branched trees arching far overhead, was a ragged, nearly skeletal form. Its huddled wings were striated with ugly black scars, visible even from that distance, as if the complex traceries of blood vessels beneath the fragile wing skin had ruptured all at once in some unimaginable past disaster. Then the figure raised its head, peering out from beneath matted clumps of hair; its features swam blurrily in Tzinac’s Dayseer sight. It coughed, sharply, then tilted its head up—high enough that the sun caught the reflection of its eyes, glittering darkly in the pale light. 

“Evakya—Evakalyna—” 

The figure began to crumple; Tzinac reached her barely in time to catch her impossibly light weight in his arms, cradling her close with desperate care. She stank to high heaven, but all that meant to him was that she was alive—there was no smell of rot about her, nothing a good bath wouldn’t cure, and as much food as she could eat— 

“Don’t cry,” she whispered—her voice was cracked and wheezing. “Don’t cry, Gran’fa. I’m all right.” 

Tzinac was aware of the rest of the settlement pouring out into the commons, and someone calling for the Healer—he wouldn’t believe it, that she wasn’t on death’s doorstep, until the Healer confirmed it himself. “Evakya, you must never do this again—never go away like this, promise me, swear—”

“I won’t.” She sucked in a harsh, gasping breath, then closed her eyes. “I found out—what I went to find. I won’t go again.”

“You found—” The words escaped him without his conscious intent, the Chronicler briefly in ascendance over the grandfather. “Did you find—?”

“No,” she whispered. A shudder shook her; his arms tightened around her fragile form. “No. There was nothing left to find.” Her eyes opened once more, dull black in her grandfather’s shadow.  “There is no such place as Astraportus.”

THE END