DUALITY: The World of Lies (3 page)

Indulu was highly ranked in The Order, and
although he wore no uniform or insignia when he took his leave in
Tulan village, his status was revealed by the way the elders
behaved towards him. As his godfather, Indulu had always shown
interest in Gahre during his annual visit, and the talk of the
village was that Gahre might one day be called upon by The Order,
the highest of honors. Though there circulated more arguments
against this happening than for it. Gahre was smart, but not a good
student. Gahre was imaginative, but curious at times to the point
of folly. Gahre was charismatic, but he spent too much time alone.
Gahre was very strong, but that applied just as much to his will as
it did his biceps. Gahre was bold, but not always rational. Gahre
was kind to people, yet he had spilled the blood of many creatures
in the forest. Indulu was a Dharmaist –and a very devoted
one.

A dear friend of Gahre’s father, Danu, Indulu
was Gahre’s appointed godfather, though he scarcely had time to
attend that duty. During Indulu's passing visits he consulted on
the boys behalf and advocated for him as a potential recruit in The
Order, but had tasked the village Elder Panthus to monitor his
daily progress in his stead. Gahre was delighted to realize he was
being considered for The Order, for there was truly no higher
honor. It was a well-known fact that members of The Order were
privy to all manner of Forbidden Knowledge.

Though he loved to read, he was not the most
focused student according to his teachers, “Gahre’s mind frequently
wanders down flights of fancy.” It was true. He possessed a grand
imagination, and often daydreamed of great hunting adventures in
the western realms, or sat contemplating the enigma of Forbidden
Knowledge to the exclusion of the lesson at hand.

In his heart, Gahre sensed how much
he did not know, how much was hidden from him, and it burned inside
him. All he could know was what he’d been taught, but those secret
truths hidden from him… he smelled the hint of them like a distant
fragrance or a forgotten dream, and the wonder of all that was
unknown enticed him. Part of him knew, just
knew
, that almost all he’d ever been
taught were lies. Lies upon lies upon lies, that they had set to
work upon him from the day he was born.

The common folk were not bothered so much by
what they did not know, and most probably would not care to know it
if they could. That set Gahre apart. It didn’t appeal much to him,
society that is and their ways and their schedules. In his early
years he took up hunting with the other boys of the same
inclination. They became quite skilled with their bows and their
bolas and their traps and their spears, but none so much as Gahre.
They hunted small game of the periphery of the forest, occasionally
making camp to stay a day or two. Over time such challenges failed
to satiate him, and he organized deeper, lengthier excursions into
the wood during the holidays. He took up night hunting. None of the
others were willing to go to that extreme. The forest at night
frightened most rational folk. It frightened Gahre too, but that
fear became a fascination that in the end compelled him to it. The
fear of becoming lost in the arboreal expanse, of dying to the
elements on deep treks into it, attacks by predators, Gahre risked
it all, and he did so alone. The wilds offered him a truth, which
although at times cruel, he clung to. Nature was itself; it did not
lie, for it had no pretension of morality to distort. It did not
spout platitudes or attempt to pervert his mind. As time
progressed, his excursions grew longer and longer -and his school
attendance waned. He lived and breathed survival and contemplated
its dark and alluring beauty. He sought to assimilate himself to
it, and in time the wild was no longer a place of danger, but one
of peace and solitude. He stopped hunting large game, as he had
only himself to feed, and being always on the move could not drag a
large carcass far anyway. His fires were small and his camps were
simple, leaving little trace of his passage. He knew every edible
feature of the wood, every plant, every bud. He ate grubby insects
and frogs. Every moment of the day had one of two purposes,
survival or contemplation, with his imaginative mind to keep him
company, he seldom missed the presence of others.

It was not absolute isolation from the world
of man. He did meet similarly minded folk on occasion: hunters,
druids, rangers, herbalists, outlaws, and ascetic s. It was those
of the last category that intrigued him most. Most were Dharmaists
and he took their company and to some manner their teachings.
Others were followers of the Way, hermits and the like, and still
others belonged to the multitude of sects that flourished
throughout the Pangea.

Gahre was not the religious sort, nor was he
partial toward any particular faith. He read the doctrines and
found them headache inducing. They blurred together into mind-mush.
The Dharmaists held belief in Samsara, the world of false
perception, which was the only religious concept he held any solid
faith in. Daydreamer that he was, he carried a fiercely rational
outlook on the world. What could be seen, what could be verified by
the senses, was real; all else was speculation. Although he reveled
in fantasy, he always knew where the line was between imagination
and reality and switched between these modes
effortlessly.

His love of nature and the pursuit of truth
amply fulfilled his spiritual needs. He could listen to the
proselytizers for only so long. In truth he pitied them, mired and
entangled as they were in those doctrines. He did not seek to
dominate the minds of others, and allowed no one the right to
shackle his. Those females he admired from afar, he stayed weary
of, for he had witnessed enough of his peers be roped down by them.
Pangean society was permissive of young lovers, but not tolerant of
them remaining unwed for long. By sheer force of will he contained
his longings to preserve his precious freedom.

The life of a farmer, a tradesman, or even a
ranger had no appeal to him. One does not need society when he is a
master of the wild. The Rangers Guild was eager to officialize him
after his graduation, but he wanted no part of their order either.
He already worked with them in some capacity, reporting his
observations in the village's surrounding wilds and exterminating
rogue predators that pestered or threatened human
civilization.

The day came where all these skills were put
to the test. Gahre became a local legend when he was 19, and landed
himself on the wrong side of the Law. Or, that is, the filthy
hypocritical side of the Law.

His actions had been nothing less than noble
through and through. He had spotted a small camp, suspiciously
located below a ledge overlooking a traveler’s lodge on the
highway, where a merchant family was boarded for the night. He
stealthed about the outskirts of the camp under cover of darkness
and identified one of a trio of men standing about the fire there.
It was Har Darox, the notorious bandit! His crimes were widely
known, and he was wanted for many counts of banditry, murder, and
ravishing women.

Gahre was alone, and not an ordained lawman.
The sanctioned procedure would have been to warn the merchant
family to flee and then alert the rangers, but there was no time,
for the men were clearly gearing up for an imminent raid, donning
armor and quivers, and sharpening blades. Har Darox even had a rare
and highly illegal weapon at the ready, a rifle! The very first
Gahre had ever seen. These certainly were not the actions of men
preparing for a night’s rest. There was no question in his mind
that the situation called for swift and immediate
action.

Gahre had no tolerance for banditry as his
mother's life had been taken from him by this despicable sort. The
very sight of them made his blood boil. He found his vantage point
camouflaged above their camp, aimed his crossbow, and without
hesitation fired upon Har Darox. The bolt drove squarely into the
highwayman’s knee. The other two men scrambled for cover as Har
Darox lifted his rifle and fired into the darkness. The sound was
so loud it jolted Gahre off his balance for a moment, but with his
bow rebolted he quickly regained his stance and loosed another
round into Har Darox’s forearm. Har Darox dropped his weapon and
collapsed in agony.

Gahre kept solid cover as the bandits sent a
volley in his general direction. They could not see him, so they
could not target him. He waited patiently for their next volley,
and the moment they broke cover, he fired at his second target, but
narrowly missed. His moccasined feet silently crept toward their
left flank as he tossed a gnarled old branch to their right. Just
as they loosed their next misplaced volley he simultaneously fired
back. His bolt flew true, cracking through the man’s crossbow and
driving itself squarely below the collarbone. The man staggered for
a moment in shock and then then rasped out in pain.

Har Darox dragged himself to cover bellowing
orders at the men to advance, but the bandits chose instead to
flee. Darox had by now lifted his rifle by his left arm, struggling
to reload it, and so Gahre spent another bolt into that
limb.

Gahre came into the camp cautiously and sensed
that the two renegades had not doubled back. He approached the
writhing Darox and clubbed him hard with the butt of his crossbow.
Then he bound him to a tree, grabbed the rifle and ammunition, and
set off after the other two. He had never seen or used a rifle
before, as they were forbidden by the Law, but he had heard how to
operate the weapon. He examined it and found the loading mechanism,
placed a round in it, and fired it loudly into the night sky to
announce his intentions.

The wounded man was an easy quarry. Gahre
ambushed him in the dark, wrestled him to the ground and hauled him
bound back to the camp. Then he set off again after the last of
bandits.

The third bandit was uninjured, but even in
the dark Gahre was able to track his path down toward the lowland
roadhouse. The young bandit, not knowing the lay of the land, erred
and found himself at a precipice unable to descend. Gahre’s
imposing silhouette appeared before him in the red moonlight,
weapon aimed and sure. The bandit did not need long to consider his
options, and surrendered.

Gahre dressed the men’s wounds, and gagged
them when they tried to speak. He led them bound together in their
own ropes to the roadhouse where the merchant family lodged and
explained the situation. The family was dearly grateful and praised
him and offered him coin. Gahre needed naught but their horses. And
as the Cearulien dawn broke in the west, Gahre, brandishing his new
rifle, rode through the morning mists into town with three horses
in tow behind him, a man bound to each.

He was met by the Sheriff Janker, who summoned
the Ranger Captain Throjos. Throjos called upon the Venerable Elder
Panthus. They immediately and angrily confiscated the rifle. Har
Darox was identified and the three outlaws were put under guard,
one to the jailer and the other two off to the healers. The
townsfolk gathered and applauded his act his valor, but those in
authority showed no such enthusiasm, meeting Gahre with stony grave
faces. He never could have anticipated the circus of filthy
sophistry that would follow.

C
ommander
Li Meiyang was an accomplished navigator for the Red Fleet, but she
was not born on any carousel, nor did she hail from either of the
twin worlds, not the surreal maroon lands of Calidon nor the
endless ocean of Aq Thalassa. She had not even been born within the
electrospheric domain of Ignis Rubeli. Through an odd mishmash of
circumstances she came to be one the most unique sorts in the
Taiji, the only human of pure Pangean descent to serve as an
officer under the banner of Ignus Rubeli, The Machine Lord
Mnemtech, and the Demigod Logos.

Or more simply put, Commander Li Meiyang was
Blue, and this mission in a Red ship with a Red captain diving into
the flaming heart of the Red Star itself had been assigned to her
by the very highest level of the Cearulein hierarchy.

The Kinetic Dream effortlessly cut its way
through the rarefied but highly energized coronal plasma. Mei
monitored the thermal registers closely as the ionic medium that
surrounded them reached upward of 4 million degrees. She knew they
were at higher risk they longer they sustained this course, and she
worked with System to find the best approach angle towards their
destination: the lower, relatively cooler layer between the solar
surface and the corona.

“Five more hours in the hot zone,” she
announced at the end of her negotiations with System.

“I could have us there in two,” insisted Aru.
“With our magnetics at full capacity in such a rarified medium,
friction ceases to concern me.”

“It’s not the friction, Aru, it’s the rate we
are building charge.” The Kinetic could channel surrounding
environmental current to supplement power to its magnetic shields,
and in this scenario maximizing shield strength was a life or death
necessity. The internal shipwide currents were not enough to power
the shields against the hyper-thermal particles they were awash in,
and the ship itself had to continually build up positive charge to
match its environment. Moving into the lower solar planes under
these conditions in a mid-sized manned spacecraft was untested
territory. Untested in any type of craft, and thus there was every
reason to err on the side of caution. If they were too negative,
one mass discharge could fry their electrics, leading to a full
breach that would raise the Kinetics thermals high enough to broil
them alive in minutes, if not seconds. Mei also understood that
increasing velocity would make the forward probe that provided them
a wake of a second forward bowshock more prone to a breach as well,
which would be followed by immediate meltdown.