Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Intentional

The sacred mountain was burning, and as soon as her feet touched moss, Sunny was off and running, kicking up moisture from the runnels of recently fallen rainwater, spilling between the moss and wet earth. Inside her chest, her heart pounded with a sick uncertainty that turned her blood to ice in her veins.

Rain clouds clung desperately to the ceiling of sky, extending the wake of the nights recent rainstorm. The land before her was awash in a cold gray light, hemming in a halo of burning blue from the slopes of the sacred mountain.

As her eyes took in the scene before her, her desperate run turned into a jog, and then into a walk, which then petered away and left her standing stunned, at the crest of the mossy hill. The sacred mountain was burning, eerie and blue against the grayness of a rain soaked landscape. Ash spewed into the air as runnels of blue lava poured in waves down the mountain's sides, painting the slopes in azure fire. Below, the rainwashed moss of the lower slopes burned with an acrid smell that choked her lungs even at this distance.

The sacred mountain had always been alight, but it had never burned like this. She scanned her eyes downward across the scene before her and tried to take in the face of the crowd before her, thousands strong. Drev of all ages and clans stood below her, forming themselves into a crowd that stretched out almost as far as the eye could see. Spears jutted upwards like the prickling spines of an alien creature, their capes glittering in a thousand rainbow colors, making up the creature's scales .

And so she stood, the Saint of Anin.

Saint of the Sun.

And watched as their heritage burned.

Against the slow grayness of the morning the mountain was a black monolith hemmed in by a halo of blue, the hot springs continued to send up gouts of steam that obscured the pyroclastic flow, and then the clans of the fertile belt, paused in their warring long enough to stand side by side and watch everything fall down around them.

A hand came to fall against her shoulder.

She didn't look up to see her brother, Kanan standing next to her, trailed by their sister Dzara.

Kanan had called her early that morning to tell her the news, but still she hadn't believed it until she saw it, and still didn't really believe it now.

"Naktan...?" She asked, not for the first time.

Kanan shook his head, "We don't know. No one has seen him, and the mountain is too hot to approach.... If he's up there..." His voice trailed off, but Sunny couldn't take this ending for an answer.

She whirled in place catching sight of Adam as he jogged up the shallow incline.

His expression was grim.

"We have to find Naktan." She said, her words more of a demand than a comment.

Adam nodded to her, his white hair waving in the muggy stillness that was the rain soaked dawn, and took a knee against the moss. He reached out, proffering the palm of his hand to the open air, and inside it sat a small silver ball, just small enough to fit inside his clenched fist.

Sunny recognized it almost immediately as a remote drone, and watched as Adam's mechanical eye flared once with a sharp green light.

The ball let off a chime and then floated sharply into the air, shooting up to about head height.

The expression on Adam's face was distant.

"I'll take a look."

The ball shot off in a flash, towards the distant mountain, but despite its speed, Sunny felt it wasn't fast enough, and began pacing back and forth over the wet moss as Adam knelt blankly in the dirt before them, his head tilted back ever so slightly, rays of UV light rolling in gentle ripples over his striped skin.