Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Chapter 16, Part A

"What did you just call me?" Valens asked, amber eyes narrowing over his shoulder.

Domi's cheeks heated. "Nothing. I meant Dae."

His aedificans studied him for a long moment from within his furred hood, before finally snorting and turning away. Then he cursed, shoulders tensing.

"What?" Domi asked, twisting his head to the left to follow the line of the older worldholder's gaze. For a moment, he expected to find a cloud of golden light barrelling toward him. Valens had told him to keep an eye open for rogue promenia shining like campfire light in the black afternoon.

What he beheld was, arguably, far worse. Domi's breath stalled in his chest as he gaped at the crimson orb hovering in the black star-studded sky. "That's not the sun, is it?" he asked in a small voice with the little air remaining in his lungs.

"No."

Of course it wasn't. The sun was not small and ice-fringed. The sun did not have a dark smudge in it's heart, where wondertales claimed alien oceans flowed.

Domi gulped, unable to tear his gaze away from the Devouring Eye. Did any people live on the malign planet, or maybe strange creatures, stranger even than a clivia or a magically-modified cattus? Maybe the mythological whale, with fangs as big as houses and a great geyser in its back, swam those crimson seas?

None of your cetaceans dwell among us.

Domi froze. "Oh no," he breathed.

"Don't look at it," Valens said, voice grim.

"B-but--"

"Practice your breathing, Alumna."

Domi tried. Really, he did. At least the Eye stopped talking to him. Maybe it had been just his imagination? But how was he supposed to breathe calmly and clear his mind with a nightmare planet leering down at him and the pain of Daedalus's wounds wending through him?

Though, as minutes bled into an hour, then two, at least the latter faded. Instead, as pain leeched away, an odd sensation filled him. Squirming, Domi glared, uneasy, up at the crimson planet adrift in a black sea of stars. Was the Eye making him feel things? Although, why would it be making him feel this?

Domi's big toe seemed as heavy as a mountain. Yet nothing hurt.

He dragged his gaze from the creepy planet to his twin's back where Daedalus, still perched ramrod straight, bounced along in his sled a few paces ahead.

"What is he doing?" he grumbled.

Manipulating the tiny machine-cells within him.

Domi froze. "V-Valens?" he whispered, voice trembling.

He cannot give you the answers you seek.

"Valens!"

"Yes, Alumna?"

Domi tried to jerk his gaze away from the Devouring Eye and couldn't. The marbled crimson and white sphere filled his vision and his mind. A presence crowded into him, filling the space between each thought. We have much to tell you, Liberator.

"Alumna?"

Realizing he failed to answer his aedificans, Domi gathered his tattered thoughts. "Do you, um, hear that?"

"Hear--" Valens whipped around to look at him, eyes wide, then followed Domi's gaze up to the looming planet. "Aix!" Domi's aedificans turned to the dogs, shouting, "Halt," and the huskies circled to a jarring standstill, barking to alert the other sled and its occupants to the stop. Valens leaped from the sled. "Aix!" he snapped again, already stomping through the thick snow.