Stardreamer

Chapter One

Kuleema—an Andronese word, which in common language translated roughly to ‘the moment when things turned bad’—floated through Eddie’s consciousness.

Shaking it aside as a typical glitch of his mind’s relocation, he opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor of a small room, a perfect cube with four black walls—doors on two of them, a window on one, and a clock opposite the window. Black floor and black ceiling sucked the white light that was bleeding in from the corners.

The room had become a familiar place: it was where he spent the time he blacked out in the real world. He could bring nothing with him, and as such, he had first treated it as nothing but a dream, his mind’s creation. For years, he had visited the room, unable to open the doors, until, with Warrigal’s help, he had learned the true nature of this strange place. And when he had first opened the doors, he had seen the vast plane of Remola.

Beside him, Warrigal got up. He was one of the Shades, and as Eddie’s master he guided him in controlled travel between the realms.

‘I’ve a bad feeling about this.’

‘What is it?’ Eddie said.

‘I will take us down and show you.’ Warrigal sat on the chair in the middle of the small room. Sitting upright, his back straight, he closed his eyes and entered a state where he controlled the space.

The room jerked, and the view from the window changed. Massive black shapes whizzed past their otherworldly cabin as Warrigal flew them over the plane of Remola, a vast cityscape. Under the dark sky stood countless towers which, unlike the boxy buildings of Spit City, were like massive, black, glistening treetrunks, with boughs like muscles. Soon, the tall arboreal structure of the buildings gave way to lower ground, full of moving creatures that resembled ants.

The movement outside the window subsided, and with a slight bump, the cabin stopped.

Eddie hadn’t been to this place in Remola before, but novelty had become the norm, as the plane seemed to be infinite. Also, he had never been so close to the moving things on the ground. They were no ants; they were huge.

He put his hand on the door handle, but before turning it, he glanced at Warrigal. ‘Is it safe?’

‘They are still unable to discern our presence,’ Warrigal said, rising from the chair. ‘Perhaps their senses are unconditioned for the likes of us.’

Warrigal was a Shade and Eddie was a human, but here they were both outsiders exploring a strange land. Eddie took a deep breath and pushed the door open. He gasped at the sight.

In front of him spread a seemingly endless flat space, unlike anything he had seen in Remola before, filled with massive, elongated black structures, which rested horizontally and didn’t seem to have any roots into the ground.

‘What are those things? Ships?’

Warrigal nodded by his side. ‘I was hoping this wouldn’t happen so soon. They have moved faster than I ever expected.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re building a fleet,’ Warrigal said, with an unwavering expression. ‘Let’s move.’

Warrigal returned to the chair in the middle of the room and closed his eyes. Eddie pulled the door shut and the cabin jerked again as Warrigal flew them up and over the infinite alien shipyard. Far in the horizon something glimmered.

‘Did you see that?’ Eddie asked.

‘Felt it,’ Warrigal grunted, and heaved a sigh. ‘This can mean only one thing…’

As they approached, the form of the glimmer became clearer. From the middle of a gigantic convex plate rose a stream of what looked like white energy. It was difficult to estimate the height, and from afar it looked like it reached relatively low in the sky. Where it ended, the crimson sky was black.

All around the structure from which the energy beam originated, the colossal Remola ships were lit with green lights and slowly took off from the ground.

At the end of the energy beam, the blackness revealed stars.

‘It’s a hole in the sky,’ Eddie said.

‘It’s a portal.’

‘To where?’

Warrigal opened his eyes. ‘To our universe.’

‘How is that possible?’

Warrigal stood up and stepped beside him. ‘I can only guess, but the more I think about it, the more I get a sense that their whole existence is about attaching to our universe and coming through.’

‘Why now?’

Warrigal shrugged. ‘We always thought that entropy would rip the universe apart and kill the heat, but that was far, far in the future. I thought we’d have more time, but we don’t. Yesterday’s future is now, and Remola is the ripper.’

‘We have to warn the others,’ Eddie said.

Like the first wind of a storm, the once vague notion of another plane bleeding in had just become real. Kuleema indeed.

END OF PREVIEW