Everything came to an end some 1,282 years ago after the battle of the Black Hill and the inevitable fall of Zagrada, the grah capital, the city of the magnificent ice temples. The cruel Baitar Raman had unleashed his Gondarran assassins, who did an exemplary job of wiping out the grah civilization from Antyra’s surface—proving an effectiveness that scared even the Antyrans, with all the gratuitous violence exhibited by the soldiers in the turbulent times in which they lived.
So fierce was the onslaught that the few grah survivors never recovered to form a nation or even a modest settlement. Not that they became extinct, for some clusters remained scattered here and there, especially the ones already living in the Antyran cities. But the magnitude of the massacre created a huge moral dilemma. The Antyrans instinctively knew that the only feeling a grah could harbor for them was hatred, hatred for their species, for the color of their eyes, for the lack of a tattoo—hatred they were meant to carry in their kyis until the end of time. Therefore, from that day on, no one trusted the grahs. They were expelled from the city centers, forced to live a nomadic life, without education, forced to do the dirtiest or most degrading things that Antyrans themselves didn’t want to do.
Each time a crime or transgression happened, the bloodthirsty crowd took to the streets or forests to hunt grahs. It seemed that the evil escaped from its bindings on that fateful day caused its own ridiculous justification, like a siclide wildfire creating its own weather. It forced them to do more harm to blur the previous one, to enter a loop that would haunt them forever, feeding on the madness that consumed Zagrada’s temples and the defenseless bodies of its inhabitants.
In time, the surviving grahs became miners and metalworkers, skilled artisans—the most famous being Adamonde himself—the blacksmith who forged the sarpan Ucancarul and the Saurra tail-sheaths belonging to Raman’s moulan. These artifacts became the most cherished Antyran symbols of late antiquity, but they were all lost during Zhan’s attack on Raman’s capital, some thirty-two years after the fall of Zagrada.
During the last century, the grahs had disappeared from Alixxor and other large cities—but seemingly not from Ropolis. After all, Antyra III was a mining world, and the grahs were miners and great metalworkers. It shouldn’t be surprising that they found the best hideout in the Blue Crevice, which shielded them from the curiosity of the officials. Moreover, the terrible life in the underground might have forced the residents, regardless of their species, to rely on one another, to share the meager crumbles of flour and the deadly risks they had to face every day; it would have been the perfect environment to erase preconceptions…
Gill didn’t think he had a bias toward them, and yet he felt instinctively that it wouldn’t be easy to trust the female. He suspected the feeling was mutual. Either way, however, he succeeded. He had managed to break Ugo’s web!
He greeted her warmly by spinning his right palm, but she didn’t bother to answer. Not again, he thought, disappointed—but then he remembered he was wearing the dull, expressionless face of the flour dealers, identical to that of the four giants following her.
“Get him!” she ordered in a voice loaded with surprising hostility for someone so pleasant-looking, seeding the certainty that he hadn’t escaped from Ugo’s trap. Could she be one of Ugo’s many faces, even though the voice didn’t resemble his at all? Or maybe another creature under his control?
Two of the four companions jumped forward surprisingly fast for their size and restrained his hands as he frantically struggled to reach the interface. It took him only a moment to realize he had fallen into a trap, his ganglions exposed and at the mercy of the ice monster!
Bewildered, he tried to understand why he hadn’t moved more swiftly, why he was captured so easily. He had allowed himself to be disturbed by the female’s presence. Her childish appearance numbed his reactions, and the attack took him completely by surprise.
“How did you get here?” whipped her question.
“I passed through a tunnel,” he said, looking in the direction of the riverbed through which he descended. “From an isla—”
“You know cheating is punished!” she yelled angrily, cutting his words. “You thought we wouldn’t catch an illegal entry in a game?”
“What are you talking abo—”
“From this moment on, you have lost the right of the bixan. The council will block your avatar!” She turned to the other two creatures. “Find his sphere!” she ordered.
“But I don’t—”
“Silence! You will talk only in front of the council before banishment!”
The two AIs were squeezing him in their palms, as large as the cups of magneto-bulldozers, crushing his arms and forcing him to make un-Antyran efforts to abstain from screaming in pain. The other two were searching for something on the ground—as if a portal sphere could be so small as to become lost in the discoidal grass crushed under the chameleons’ little feet.
Unable to find anything, they pulled ultraviolet laser lenses from their belts and swept the air around, seemingly at random.
“Chameleons!” screamed Gill, writhing in the grasp of the AIs. “You swore loyalty to me! Save my tail!”
The chameleons were staring at him, grinning stupidly when they met his eyes… but predictably, they did nothing to save him from the trap. So much for their Brocat of Loyalty, he thought, angered.
“It’s an order!” he cried in another desperate attempt to mobilize them—unfortunately, just as successful as the first one.
The grah female burst into a crystalline laughter, holding her belly with both hands.
“Are you crazy? You know it’s a game, right?” Then she gazed at him suspiciously. “Who—”
“We can’t find his portal,” one of the AIs interrupted.
“Search again! No, just pull off his interface, and he’s going to fall on the portal island. Wait,” she told the two who held him immobilized. “I’m going to jump first to make sure he won’t escape.” She made a sign to the other two giants to enter the portal, and she turned back to leave.
Gill had no doubt that if they disconnected him, he’d fall into reality and escape. But… that could only mean the female wasn’t working for Ugo! Otherwise, she could have just kept him prisoner until the arrival of the jure. Her intention was to bring him before the Parhontes Council, exactly where he wanted to go.
“Wait! I don’t have a sphere!” he yelled, deciding he couldn’t miss perhaps his last chance to meet the parhontes. “If you disconnect me, I’ll wake up to reality!”
“What do you mean you don’t have a portal? Are you kidding?”
“I don’t have a portal! Why don’t you understand that?” he screamed, exasperated by the pain in his arms. “Aiii! Listen, can you ask your brutes to stop sq—”
“Who are you?”
“Gillabrian.”
“Gilla…” she began. “Ohh!” She opened her eyes widely. “Gillabrian, the one chased by Baila?”
“In spikes and tail!”
She became speechless for a moment, not knowing what to say. Obviously, she wasn’t prepared for a surprise of such magnitude. She quickly regained her posture and exclaimed, in a softer voice this time, “On Zhan’s eye, what are you doing here?”
“I’d like to know who I’m talking to,” he replied, angered by her lack of manners—even though, still being her prisoner, the palm ritual didn’t necessarily apply in his situation.