For the first couple of shifts, Alicia had all but given up on keeping accurate track of time outside the largely vibes-based measure of tiredness and alertness that had become the Shift, Lia and Alicia traded places regularly. One of them would be on the outside of the sphere at all times, looking out for potential dangers and occasionally adjusting the trajectory of their vessel by lining themselves up with the distant gleam of Thereafter and leaning towards it. The other, meanwhile, would do their level best to rest and maintain their basic needs on the inside of the sphere. A lot of it was sleeping, or at least it felt like a lot of it was sleeping.

Alicia would at times check the phone in her pocket, if nothing else to confirm that it, to her mounting surprise, was still powered and functioning, well still functioning as well as one could expect a modern phone with no network connection, which is to say not really but the lights were on. Time as it was listed on the phone, however, started to feel nonsensical to Alicia. It was still running on EST as far as Alicia knew, but if that ever had synced up to day and night in a more or less sensical way in Thereafter, it had now long fallen out of syzygy. Perhaps Lex’ suggestion of a twenty hour day (ten in light and ten in darkness, as night and day always was of equal length in the magical city,) wasn’t bad, but Alicia wasn’t going to even start thinking about how they even would get started syncing up their phones to this new measure of time. Perhaps Lex had a plan for that, but Alicia was getting more and more used to the idea of divesting herself entirely of the phone as timekeeper. There had been a time, a time in her life even, when people had to wear a watch to tell time on the go, perhaps going back to something like that wasn’t so bad. Hell, it’s not like there were metro timetables to follow in Thereafter, nor a lunch rush to dodge, so maybe just being agnostic of what time it “actually” was, wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

It felt oddly risky to let such thoughts grip hold, but Alicia couldn’t help being bored on her outside shifts. Sure, they’d experienced their fair share of voidborne peril already, but it also felt like tempting the fate that Alicia didn’t believe in to point it out. Put simply, their route seemed safe. Very safe. Almost too safe, like there was some kind of daredevil shortcut they could take to cut their travel time down.
No, Alicia chided herself. The people of Camp had helped them set their initial bearings, and while they had, to her knowledge, never traveled all the way there, they surely knew the void around their settlement as well as one could expect anyone to know such a landmark-less darkness as the Void. As for the dangerous shortcut, that was her penchant for direct routes and desire paths speaking. They were heading towards Thereafter in a straight line, and even if there WAS some dangerous shortcut, it wasn’t really advisable to go for it. They had vast stores of supplies, albeit not quite as much water as she’d preferred proportion-wise, but then again water WAS quite the precious resource back in Camp. There was, however, one thing that could shorten their travel time quite dramatically, and it was just as much to scout for one of those that Alicia was out here.
Somewhere in Thereafter, Alicia was sure, there existed some kind of map of the network of port crystals that spread from the city into the void. If no such map existed surely some sort of tally of how many crystals there were and their approximate position in relation to the city, or a guestimate of the same. Given the inherent challenges of charting the void, it’s quite possible that such a list was of little use, but finding a port crystal certainly would be anything but useless. Any intact port crystal could take them straight to scavenger HQ at the docks, and be a beachhead for further trade and diplomacy with Camp to boot.
There was just one small problem, the relative scarcity of functioning Port crystals. The exact number the Scavengers were in possession of was some level of secret, it was possible Lia knew, but either way, it didn’t take much reading between the lines to realize that there were less of them than anyone would prefer. With functionally, if not practically, infinite range, a port crystal could take you far, and the Scavengers certainly had made good use of that fact, opting to use a handful of the port crystals they had for scouting, sending out Scavengers to go as far as their bodies would carry them in search of resources, and then use the crystals they left behind as a dispatch point to send out further scouts. Other than these proddings into the void, though, port crystals were only at a location for as long as the salvage was very good, or some other use for frequent access still existed. Alicia hadn’t witnessed it herself, but the hushed tones people still spoke about a row between Eltern and Lia about using a port crystal to secure a cache of research documents that survived the Calamity in the early days of Thereafter tells her it was quite the spectacular disagreement.
In practical terms, this meant there was no real network of port crystals in the way less magical transport methods might have left. Alicia and Lia could be crossing the nonexistent line between two port crystals and be none the wiser unless they encountered an endpoint.
Judging by the relative size of Thereafter compared to the view from the now-destroyed Port crystal that had stranded Alicia and Lia here wasn’t an exact science, at least not by eye, but Alicia was pretty sure, well, decently sure, that they still had a ways to go before they were in port crystal range, especially given how the late crystal had been their deepest incursion in the void so far.
Standing in the darkness of the Void, Alicia felt anxiety rise in her. Sure, as far as either she or Lia knew, getting to the ruined crystal would take time, a lot of time, and while it was probably possible to wait out a rescue, it was not a sure thing either. Then why did it feel like such a risk? Why did Alicia feel so afraid? Part of her noted that this sounded an awful lot like the void paranoia she had heard about, and the part of her that was responsible for reminding her that for all her grandness and ability, she was, at the end of the day a small scared mammal who in part had survived by being scared of the vast and expansive selection of apex predators that was out there. There was, after all, no saying there couldn’t be apex predators out in the void. Sure, it didn’t seem like the kind of environment that could support predation, or life in general, but they had just visited a settlement of humans doing just fine under the circumstances, and while the Beasts had no predators other than the humans that raised them at the moment, that didn’t mean there weren’t beasts out there that still eagerly remembered the feeling of tearing through warm living flesh. Try as she might, Alicia couldn’t help but imagine and speculate how such a beast might look like. Huge eyes or potential nonvisual sensory organs to navigate in the dark of the Void, powerful legs to provide propulsion, sharp claws to provide purchase on void fragments and ice asteroids. Sharp, strong teeth to tear apart void-toughened skin, or perhaps some sort of piercing proboscis to eject tissue-dissolving acid and slurp up the resulting goo. Whatever else a predator might be in the merciless bleakness of the Void, it would have to be recklessly efficient, striking only when a kill was assured, devouring its prey bones and all. It was the kind of predator that existed in part in the mind of its prey. It was too perfect, too cunning, too dangerous to merely exist in the physical world. It was the kind of beast one could summon merely by thinking of it, like how Europeans of old dared not speak the “true” name of the bear lest speaking it summoned the beast.

“Hey, Mountain Wind” the voice crackling into being from her void pearl startled Alicia, but it also came as a welcome distraction from the nervous thought spiral. “You about ready to switch places?” Lia’s voice was quite recognizable even through the faint distortion that Alicia assume was from passing through the wall of the Stone Sphere. The translation field, or so it seemed, was mostly agnostic to traditional acoustics and did not require line of sight.
Alicia cleared her throat. “Oh, yes, it’s about time. You coming out?”
“I’ll be right out, just give me a minute.”
Lia and Alicia had not made the conscious decision to make sure there were people on watch at all times. It just seemed important, especially for the front half of the journey. They had no idea how far they were from the closest port crystals, but sense dictated that they would not be overly far from the destroyed one, and from that it seemed just plain irresponsible not to be on lookout for them.

The shift change was brief and a little awkward, but basically amicable. Alicia was tired, and she could tell Lia didn’t feel all that great either. Sure, it wasn’t the desperate scrabbling exhaustion that they had both felt before finding Camp, but there was a profound weariness to the both of them. They had made do for too long, been strong for too long, postponed grieving and recovering for too long.
It was possible, Alicia found herself thinking as she found a resting place between the sacks and jars of resources, bundling up with a bunch of blankets, that she was projecting. It could be that Lia was doing Just Fine, or it could be that she was doing terribly in her own way that wasn’t all that similar to how Alicia was feeling.
However shared the feeling was, though, Alicia felt absolutely wretched. There was a heavy hollow feeling in her chest, like the physical and mental exhaustion was a physical weight on her. The paranoia from earlier had also left her feeling oddly wired, like the fear being without grounding in reality also made fully resolving it impossible. There would be no catharsis from that fear, Alicia just hoped it eventually would release its hold on her. Maybe when she was no longer in peril. Maybe when she was back in Thereafter. Maybe when she could allow herself to feel anything else than fear.

“Mountain Wind?” The void pearl crackled, snapping Alicia out of her thought spiral again.
“Yeah?”
“I apologize if I woke you,” Lia continued. “I… uh… this is stupid…”
“No no, go on,” Alicia said as she shifted around, trying to find the position that was just right for resting. “I could do with distraction right now. I feel wired as hell but I feel like my body is made out of stone right now”
“You feeling that ‘stay down’ weight on you too, huh?”
“Yeah. Where I’m from we call it Knockout Syndrome, where the body just kinda refuses to keep going no matter how much the mind wants it to.”
“Knockout Syndrome, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s a term from a sport, boxing. It’s basically a fistfight duel. The participants wear these padded gloves on their hands, but it’s more to spare their knuckles than the opponent’s body, so the fights get pretty intense. It’s just as much about taking punches as it is doling them out.”
“Huh,” Lia said. “Pardon my saying so, but that sounds incredibly violent for a friendly contest.”
“Yeah friendly may be stretching it a bit…” Alicia conceded. “Anyway, the knockout is one of the ways you can win a boxing match. It’s when you hit your opponent so hard they fall down and are unable to get up again for a count of ten. It’s the body going “no, we stay down” despite the mind wanting to keep up the fight.”
“I’m not unfamiliar with the feeling,” Lia said. “What other ways are there of winning a match?”
“Well, there’s the TKO, which is when one fighter knocks the other one down three times, even if they get up for the fourth. There’s a point system of some sort too, for matches that go on for the alloted time without anyone winning, but I have no idea how scores are assigned. Then there is the “no contest,” or whatever they call it, I’m not very familiar with the nomenclature. It’s when the referee concludes that one fighter is unable to defend himself. It’s a bit more of a judgment call than the two other ones, but it’s essentially there to stop people who are better at taking it than dishing it out from getting their brains punched all the way in.”
“Brutal,” Lia observed. “Surely a Boxing duelist would not have a very long career?”
“No, it’s on the short side, even for professional athletes. Turns out there aren’t all that many sustainable ways of getting punched in the head for a living.”

“There really isn’t…” Lia sounded like she spoke from experience. Painful experience, potentially. “I’m sorry if this is being indelicate, but some of the things you tell me about your world Mountain Wind… it scares and angers me.”
Alicia found herself chuckling at this. “Yeah… yeah. It angers me too.”
“Really?” Lia sounded genuinely surprised at this. “You always struck me as rather serene, Mountain Wind.”
“I… yeah. I know.” Alicia sighed. “The reason why I can’t be open about how I feel about my world are… there’s a lot there, a lot of context, a lot of cruelty, exploitation. My people, or the people I descend from at any rate, have historically not been treated well, to make a rather grandiose understatement, and while things are better now… well…”
“There still are fetters on you that has its roots in that exploitation?”
Alicia blinked. “… yes. How did you…”
Lia laughed, it was a surprisingly warm laugh. “I keep forgetting these things happened after your time Mountain Wind, but there’s some parallels with what you talk about and the Hill People, my own foremothers.”
“Go on?”
“Well, after the fall of the Dragon Thane and the end of the Brother Wars, the steppefolk flourished, as you can imagine now that they were free of the tributes to the Thane and the horribly desperate wars it pushed tribes into…”
“Yeah, that did seem like The Vibe when I was taken away from y’all.”
“Well, exuberance isn’t entirely without its own risks, we came to learn,” Lia continued. “And the Hill People came to learn that a freshly liberated people aren’t immune from the temptation of doing a little subjugation themselves.”
“Oh no…”
“Yes. The tribes bordering the lands of the hill people went to war, professing that this wasn’t conquest as much as reunification.”
“How did they spin that one you figure?”
“During the reign of the Dragon Thane there were people of the border tribes that fled into the hills, hoping that the inherently more meager pastures and less favorable terrain would render them less likely to be made tributary. Of course, these people didn’t flee into uninhabited wilderness, there were people there already who welcomed them. While the brother wars didn’t ravage the hill folk as hard as their cousins on the plains, having enough hands for the work that needed to be doing was a challenge for everyone back in those days.”
“Yeah, ok, I see, and I take it the Hill People weren’t treated… great after they were conquered.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Lia agreed grimly. “There existed some rather unkind ideas about Hill People being craven, as the narrative that they were all Steppefolk refugees took hold.”
“Even the people who had lived in the hill for generations?”
“If they weren’t themselves cowards and traitors they surely were the descendants of cowards and traitors,” Lia’s tone conveyed the shrug that Alicia was all but certain she made. “And so they were treated as inherently lesser. Exploited for their labor, excluded from hearth and community, ostensibly to ‘pay back’ what they ‘owed’ to the Steppefolk.”
“I see… what happened?”
“Well, there were some rebellions fought, some civil wars, Steppefolk sympathizers started making their voices known. The Hill People made strong arguments for their subjugation being unjust and over time the way Steppefolk understood Hill People shifted. Tribes started banning practices exploiting and discriminating Hill People, and the tight bonds of federation back then helped these bans to spread far and wide. It’s now considered very improper to be caught disparaging Hill People or people of Hill People blood.”

“Improper to be caught, but not improper to dislike them, I notice…” Alicia observed. “And was there ever a Hill People Separatism? Movements to return the lands seized from the Hill People back to them?”
“For better or worse no…” Lia said. “It is… I do not want to compare my situation with yours Mountain Wind, I am sure it isn’t a perfect match, but I am the first person of Hill People descent to ever be Deep Speaker, and I have had my heritage thrown back in my face by people I thought to be wise and right-thinking folk many times now. It’s one of the reasons I do not talk about it much any more.”
“I can see that…” Alicia said. “Thank you for telling me this Lia. I… part of me wishes that the lands of the Steppefolk was a better world than the one I come from. I used to think of it as such after my time there.”
“In fairness,” Lia had a maternal chuckle to her tone. “You did catch us at our best. At a dark time in our history, sure, but there is scarcely a better demonstration of Steppefolk valor than the end of the Brother Wars as far as I know.”
“Well yes, but… it wasn’t as easy as all of that either, I am coming to realize. It wasn’t, you know, idealism and brotherhood winning out over fear and division. Not exactly.”
“Oh? You would know this better than me, since you were there.”
“I mean, I get how it’s the narrative that has emerged about the period, as a child I understood it as the same but looking back at it with what I now know about the world. Well, there was politics to it. Canny maneuvering to play factions and even whole tribes against the Dragon Thane. Lia, that is Of The Fire Eyes Lia was good at that kind of thing, but she wasn’t alone. Half the work in forming the Confederation was convincing prospective members that they could get one over on a hated rival, or establish good relations with a lucrative trade partner by joining up, well, until we called to war for the Dragon Thane at least. Then it became a snowballing thing, making dramatic enough gains in our initial assaults on the Dragon Clan to convince the fence-sitters that bringing the hateful mega-lizard down was a possibility. If the Dragon Thane consolidated his forces a bit better and was better at fighting defensively and we failed to convince the fence-sitters, we would have lost, and badly.”
“Quite possible, but you did not lose.”
“We did not,” Alicia had to concede. “It’s just… I don’t know, the way people talk about war in retrospect is so open and shut. It kind of sanitizes the whole brutal mess of it. I don’t like it”
“The wise one hates war, even when it’s necessary. Especially when it’s necessary.”
“I suppose…”Alicia didn’t like to think of herself as wise. It felt like being called Store Brand Intelligent. She did, however, try to take the implied compliment for what it was. Lia was not one to praise frequently or easily, after all.

“You’re tired, Mountain Wind. I’ll stop digging into your rest time.”
“No,” Alicia said, finding earnestness both a good choice and also somewhat inevitable. “Thank you Lia. I needed to talk, get some of that nervous energy out.”
“It was a pleasure chatting with you Mountain Wind.”
“Hey, actually, while we are talking…” Alicia found herself saying. “Could I ask something of you? I recognize that Mountain Wind is a title that holds some importance but… while it’s just the two of us… could you call me Alicia?”
The moment of silence that passed was long enough that Alicia got to wondering if the void pearls had stopped functioning properly.
“I can do that. Rest well Alicia.”
“Thank you, Lia.”
Alicia felt proper tired in both mind and body after the talk. She still had things to learn about the Steppefolk and their history it seemed, and while the part of her that longed for nostalgia cried out in frustration at the bitter nuance that reality offered, there was no denying there was something soothing about things being A Bit More Complicated Than That. Alicia wasn’t sure if this meant the kind of bullshit that happened both on Earth and in Steppeworld was emergent human nature, or just a very common trap for civilization to fall into, and before she was capable of answering that complex multidisciplinary question, she found herself drifting off to peaceful sleep.

Author’s Note: There sure is a lot of Steppefolk lore at this point. I knew this in part was inevitable, as introducing nuance Alicia’s view on the world she saved is important thematically both to this book and this part of the series as a whole. That said, I really have put a lot of world building into this particular part of Thereafter’s lore, huh? The difference between this book and Souls Of Stone which is next up is quite stark, as Felipe is the sole surviving part of The Eternal Sky. This is a shame, both because it’d be fun to explore the place a bit, and in part because I’m sad I won’t easily find an excuse to show Felipe in his single most deranged possible mind state, Horny For Bird Boy.That said, there’s no saying The Eternal Sky was the only place to house avian humanoids, and there will be more books, but I am, yet again getting ahead of myself. We’re getting very close to the end at this point, and while I am hesitant to share how many chapters there are left, I will say that earlier estimates for when we will be done are likely to hold.

Catch you next time for the next leg of Lia and Alicia’s Long Journey Home

VSD