Suddenly, he felt confused again, as if the gray fog of the deep valleys found shelter under his skull. Am I handsome with two spines or what? The other Antyrans have the same? Gill couldn’t remember for sure. He was so tired and dizzy… In the next moment, he forgot the problem and moved his eyes from the icicle, obeying Ugo’s conditioning.
Far away, hidden in the morbid fog, he could see something—a large glacier. In the bizarre world sunk in the brown-gray atmosphere, the ice tongue had borrowed the same decomposed hues—which made it barely visible. Gill had no clue why he was staring at it or what was supposed to happen, but he knew he wouldn’t have to wait for long.
Then, he heard some strange reverberations coming from a great distance, behind the peaks surrounding the glacial trough. Search sonars! Their pitched ringing echoed endlessly through the horrid valleys of the world of the damned. They were searching for them! The oasis of clarity that appeared in his thoughts allowed him to recognize the familiar presence of the Sigian, the god of the bracelet.
His companions from the other rescue module hid their vessel in a large crevasse in the glacier’s tongue, priming the antimatter canister. After they finished, they spread out in the glacier grooves, prepared to detonate it near the enemies to allow the other shuttle to escape—hopefully unnoticed—from the planet. The Sigians on the glacier didn’t have much of a chance to escape, but each of them knew they weren’t allowed to get caught alive. Kirk’an didn’t tell them anything, convinced that it wasn’t necessary to do so, knowing all too well that everyone would do his duty to the bitter end.
A laser salvo lit up the glacier. The deadly dance had begun!
Several gray light-assault shuttles were hunting the Sigian fighters, believing they had cornered them on the unstable ice. Their flashes shredded the brown mist, concentrating around the crevasses where the landing craft was hidden.
The pursuers reached the crevasse, their laser lenses digging shiny grooves and raising clouds of hot steam in their wake, when the powerful explosion of the antimatter canister briefly lit the world of shadows, lighting every little detail of its surface. Taking advantage that the sensors of the enemies were blinded by the electromagnetic pulse, the Sigian-Gill turned to run to the other vessel camouflaged nearby to escape from the planet. But a huge surprise awaited him: instead of the access hatch, he stumbled on the door leading to his prison room in Ropolis…
After a brief moment of confusion, he understood that he had lived a piece of memory stored in the bracelet that he didn’t have time to see in Alala’s dome—a part of the Sigians’ odyssey on Antyra! Yet the sky wasn’t Antyran; it was the sinister mist from the realm of the dead. He was trapped in a mixed vision, an amalgam between Uralia and the memories of the Sigian god… which meant they were interacting. There was a link between them… How is that possible? The revelation cleared his kyi like a fog reductor: Ugo! Ugo not only stole his secrets, but he was playing with the bracelet, using his kyi as a bridge!
His revolt didn’t last long, though, for in a few seconds, he forgot the problem, bewitched by the outside vista and by Ugo’s amnesic smog.
The brown whirls began to squirm vigorously; the glacier disappeared, and he could see how the world of shadows was falling apart at the horizon. After all the torture he had been through, the prospect of dying actually felt better than that of rotting forever in a dead world. He was hopeful that when the decay reached him, everything would be over. His kyi, left without support, would burn like Beramis’s wall of fire…
But then he realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy. The reality didn’t simply decompose; it folded in intricate patterns while the sinister screams of the vortex burst with even greater intensity. The purpose of the folds could only be one: to get inside his kyi!
Neither his Guk training nor the bravery of the Sigians could prepare him for what was coming for him. Paralyzed by terror, he wondered what kind of abject entities were crawling in the folds and what they were going to do once they got inside his skull. In the next instant, he felt the shreds of reality hitting him with unimaginable power. He screamed in pain, his voice drowned in the noise of the storm.
Gill closed his eyes tightly, deciding not to see the turmoil around him. Instead, he began to live fast flashes recorded by the bracelet, some known, others new. When he opened his eyes, he saw something incredible: wherever the shreds of reality were breaking off, others were growing in their place. It seemed, however, that the vortex was gaining ground due to its monstrous appetite, swallowing the world faster than it could regenerate. After some time, the reality almost wiped out, he sank in a sea of colors resembling the columns of the official air-jets, fast and noisy. This is how Uralia’s unseen face looks, the face-from-the-inside?
A warm voice called him softly… Sandara’s voice?
“Gill, you have to resist! The exit is close!”
The pain in his head became unbearable; he felt he could no longer keep his thoughts from becoming one with the madness. Then, he fainted again.
He woke up at the contact of his head spikes with a cold metal, and the feeling of sickness overran him instantly. I’m still alive! he realized, dismayed. After the disappointing thought, he remembered who he was. Gillabrian, echoed the familiar name in his alveoli. That’s my name.
The awful pain was coming from a nasty fog in his kyi, although it didn’t seem to be a simple mist. His tattered memory was littered with holes, as if he was lobotomized.
After a while, his eyes cleared enough to notice a gray spot moving in front of him.
“Kaya naga te cuik?” the creature growled.
He couldn’t be mistaken… he had heard the strange language before… the language of the gray gods!
“Cuik, cuik,” Gill mocked him, convinced that it was another memory of the bracelet, dug out by Ugo’s curiosity. “Ugo, how long are you going to torture me?” he shouted. “Make him disappear!”
“I don’t think anyone can make him disappear,” answered a hologram materialized in the room.
He recognized Baila’s squeaky voice, and his spikes wrinkled at the mere possibility that it wasn’t a hallucination but the sinister reality. “The temples want you,” Forbat had told him. And now, Baila was there—with a god. The apparition had the effect of an electric shock, convincing him he wasn’t dreaming.
He felt broken. Broken and betrayed by the whole Antyran world, by Colhan and the other ancient gods, for the first time truly convinced that his whole un-Antyran struggle was in vain. The bracelet! He desperately tried to look at it, but he was tied up tightly in a vertical device placed in a wall niche. A metallic wire mesh was fastened on his head.
“My son, I have extraordinary news for you: the gods have returned!” exclaimed Baila, opening his arms in a ritual gesture. “The true gods are back, and this time, they will get what they waited a thousand years for!”
Gill didn’t bother to say anything, beginning to realize where he was. A brown, moist room that appeared to be made of flesh, warped walls, curved to the inside toward the ceiling… one of the godly ships! There’s something on my head. A neural probe, maybe? he realized, frightened by the prospect. He remembered the terror of the Sigian god at the mere reference to the deadly device.