Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Caleb could hear old metal pipes screeching behind the slick tile of the large shower-room. He tilted his head back, eyes open, and peered up into the spray. The water (and it was real water, he had opened his mouth to check and gulped down a large mouthful of tinny, dusty-feeling wash) must be pumped up from underground, then, or otherwise transported from Icehaven Outpost - though if the latter were the case he doubted that the shoddy little run-down dive he had just spent the last three hours and fifty-seven minutes in would be able to afford the import price. But then, he considers, blinking more of the hard, lime-touched spray out of his eyes, there were no potable water sources anywhere on Dwendalia’s surface other than by Icehaven, and he had been unaware that any underground reservoirs had been located even closer to the port towers in Rexxentrum and Zadash. 

That was why he had come here. Rumors of local water held weight on Dwendalia, and he had been quite certain that Alfield wasn't old enough to even have genuine pipes -- and yet during three hours and fifty-nine minutes inside of The Glow he had seen nothing odd, heard nothing out of place, felt nothing crawl up his spine but for the occasional brush of an elbow or drag of someone else’s hair over his biceps. The showers were mandatory here upon leaving; they stood between the cavernous main room of the club and bag check, and while it would not have been the first time he skipped customs and snuck straight back out into the recycled air of a settlement the siren call of real water had been too strong for him t--

“First time?”

Caleb jumped, droplets flying from his sodden bangs and pitter-patting against the wall. There was a blond half-elf standing under the showerhead three or four down from him, their head tilted in his direction, their long hair hanging pin-straight down with the weight of the water falling onto it. They were smiling.

“I’ve seen your type, that’s all,” they continued, running their fingers down the wet fall of their hair. “It can be a lot at first. I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to drown.”

Caleb fought back a grimace. He kept his face neutral and nodded towards the half-elf, though the jerk of his chin was a little more sudden than he intended.

“ Ja, I, uh,” he stammered, looking up towards them and then away. “My apologies. Thank you, I will be fine.”

The half-elf looked at him now with a raised eyebrow. 

“As long as you are certain,” they said, before their eyes closed and they returned to their shower. 

Bag check in every place like this was more or less the same, Caleb had found. He had rolled his gloves back up to his elbows and rolled his shirt back down to his navel. When the attendant had handed him back his coat, he zipped it all the way up, hiding everything below his nose behind its large collar. When they handed him back his COM-piece, he slid it obediently back into his ear.

After spending so much time outside of the colonies, the dark vault of Alfield’s designated-Night still managed to catch Caleb off-guard every time he stepped back out into it. Past the vanguard of neon-streaked buildings and flashing billboards, the black screen that separated habitable civilization from terrible wilderness screamed at him. Fall into me, it cried. Crack me open. Come home. The sky beyond would be deep gold even without light pollution - light pollution that the dome screen swallowed like an ouroboros - and for a moment Caleb’s palms itched.

Chapter Text

Another bust.

Caleb's itchy palms had led him, almost trancelike, back to his fifth-hand junker of a chaff-skiff that he'd docked at the farthest end of Alfield's transition port. Nott had aptly, but fondly, named her WC, and even though her door rolled up with a concerning grinding sound he still patted her softly on the hull as he stepped up into the main hold.

"Guten Abend, WC," he said, walking into the ship's dark interior and accidentally scuffing the edge of his boot on a wayward patch of scraggly metal. Some of the passenger seats had been ripped up haphazardly by a previous owner, and Caleb had neither the money nor the drive to repair, round off, or prune the leftover panels and wires.

“Good evening, Caleb,” the ship chirped, the controls in the center panel flickering to life in front of him. He reached forward, depressed a single button, and watched the back of Alfield’s port tint redder and darker as the blue-light filter slid down from the top of the front shields.

“Manual controls only, bitte,” Caleb said after a moment, finally sliding into WC’s primary control seat. The beat-up synthetic leather chair had long ago conformed to a previous owner’s ass, but after about a year and a half Caleb’s slight weight was finally beginning to pummel it into submission. Nervously, he rolled his palm over the top of one of the yoke’s handles as he waited for the ship to fully wake and pass the controls to him. 

"I've given all of the controls over to you, Caleb," WC piped up after another minute. "Would you like me to set-- t- ttt - l i - ii ke-- m- --ur next destination?"

"No thank you, WC," he said, pulling back on the yoke slowly and sending them into a wobbly lift. "Please alert me when you are running low on fuel."

"Fuel levels in low-priority yellow, Caleb."

Caleb resisted another grimace. If you make that face so much, you'll get stuck that way, he hears, the memory crackling like a degrading radio transmission. He toggled the ship's tether and tilted the yoke anyway, turning WC into a slow glide down the main channel of the port. Before long he's flagged down by a member of the Watch, who waved up at the ship and gestured to the sides of their own head just before the comms began bleating sadly, informing Caleb of their incoming request to open a channel. He ticked the comm dial to 1 and pulled it towards him, and before long a small screen showing the officer's head popped up on the front shields.

"Destination," they asked almost the second that WC registered the connection. It was nearly midnight, and Caleb noted that they were not bothering to hide that they would rather be literally anywhere than here.

"Felderwin," Caleb replied, trying not to tap his thumbs on the yoke. The officer heaved a sigh and flicked drearily through the tablet affixed to the handrail of their scooter.

"Bulletin informs me that I am obligated to warn you of potential anomalies in the Felderwin area due to its proximity to the Ashkeepers," the officer droned, not even bothering to look back at the comm. "Are you aware of the dangers of Dwendalian anomalies and the manner in which they could damage your COM-piece, requiring you to undergo a period of quarantined isolation upon reaching your destination while you are reconnected to the Empire Interface?"

"Ja," Caleb replied again. "My waiver should be in the system already, under Brave."

"Uh-huh," the officer grumbled, flicking through the tablet again. For a moment, Caleb spied a half-finished game of Breakout in the reflection of their helmet visor. "Take Lane 5. Have a good flight, Mr. Brave," they said shortly, before cutting the comms.

Caleb let out a long breath through pursed lips, pressing the comm dial back in and ticking it to 0 while drifting WC along the chipped and faded directional lane labeled with a large, white 5. The lane led the ship down a short, dimly lit tunnel and into the transitional bay. After a few moments, the lights in the bay began to flash red and a steady beeping started coming through Caleb's COM-piece, like a lift transport thrown into reverse. Behind WC, through her hull and past the alarm, he could hear the port's interior doors grinding shut and its vents rapidly shunting Alfield's filtered air back into the city-dome, and after forty-two long seconds the alarm stopped wheedling into Caleb's ear. Five seconds after that the bay doors in front of them finally cracked open, slowly revealing the surface of Dwendalia.

The planet stretched long and amber before him, deep blue flora standing guard at the edge of the eastern horizon and the corners of both suns flanking the edges of the night sky. Even with the filter in place over the windshield, Caleb found himself squinting into the blinding dawn. Regardless, he pushed forward the very second WC had enough clearance and began his way out towards the edge of the colonies.

He couldn't tell if he was getting a second wind, or if he was just manic; he'd been awake for so long that they could even just be one and the same. Something inside felt like it had been pried wide open, and his muscle memory propelled him faster and higher into the pale sky of early morning even as WC clanked and shuddered around him. Flickers of beasts that could crush him without even noticing passed around him and the ship like ghosts, white noise passed in and out of his COM-piece, and with him at the helm they trundled eastward towards the forest and the mountains.

"Fuel levels in high-priority yellow, Caleb," WC chirped just as the top of the low Felderwin dome scraped over the curve of the planet. Caleb swore quietly, swerving her around the side of a ghost that appeared to be belching phantom steam from cloud-high turrets. Far below, a couple of Crownsguard speeders traveled through its feet without pause, heading back towards Alfield.

This would be enough. It would have to be enough.

The official colony path twisted around hill and dale, avoiding phantom houses and spectral farmlands that dotted the open plains of Dwendalia. Caleb sped birds-height over it all, at altitudes neither civilian nor Watch were often willing to chance in their lower-class transports. Catha's waxing radiance felt like it was filling Caleb's skull with pure plasma, calling him and his itchy palms higher and higher again – and yet it was in the waning glow of the dark side of Ruidis that he caught sight of the Anomaly.

It was small; silver and amethyst and barely visible against the shifting blue and black of the forest, and if his COM-piece had been properly keyed in to the Cerberus Network he wouldn't have been able to see it at all. But it wasn't, and he had, and suddenly the middle-sized colony dome not 800 meters away from the Anomaly didn't matter at all.

Fifty meters from the edge of the forest, as Caleb had just begun spiralling downwards into a controlled landing, WC piped up again.

"Fuel priority in Red Critical. Suspending unique actions and capabilities and engaging distress lighting," she peeped, oddly impersonal. Caleb grimaced again,

resigning himself to the idea of having a horrible rictus in his old age. Academy ships had given them a primary warning in Red before suspending unique capabilities, like–

"Ah," he said faintly in the final seconds where WC's wings were catching the air below them. "Like flight."

There was no time for him to scream in the horrifying moments between the inception of freefall and the powerful impact of WC's genuinely ancient system of shock-absorbing gas-filled vinyl cushions exploding out of the center panel and into his face. Caleb was already knocked thoroughly silly by the time they hit the ground, and the extra impact only served to jam his seat cushion into a more comfortable fit against his ass.

After an excruciating fifty-one seconds, the safety cushions began to vent out gas and allowed Caleb to unbuckle himself and squeeze out of the control seat and onto the floor. The interior of the ship was nearly pitch black, barring a thin dashed line of emergency lights leading to where the door was outlined in an anomalous and cheery seafoam green. Caleb crawled carefully along the lit path, taking care not to put his weight on anything loose or jagged. As he got closer, he realized the emergency lighting around the door wasn't actually functional at all, and the strange green color instead appeared to be some kind of glow-in-the-dark paint.

"Du willst mir doch einen Bären aufbinden," Caleb muttered, clambering to his feet and wrenching open the door. Still grumbling, he unzipped his coat from nose to throat, and stepped out onto the surface of the planet.

The forest at the base of the Ashkeepers loomed high over him. It began abruptly, as though someone had drawn a line in the grass and fully-grown flora had erupted, barrier-like, behind it. At this time of morning Catha faced it head on, pushing its shadows deep and away into the underbrush. Not twenty steps from the edge of the first tree, Caleb could see the Anomaly. This one appeared in shape as a swirling galaxy, blue and violet swimming in a whirlpool peppered with stars the size of sand.

He walked towards it. He could hear sounds in the forest - both invasive species escaped from the domes and native creatures not yet driven away by them. The ground remained steady below his boots.

The Anomaly glittered invitingly. 

He could touch it, if he wanted. It was human-sized and barely skimmed the forest floor. If he squinted, he thought he might even see something rough and grey in the eye of the galaxy. He avoided a large root.

Caleb stepped through the Anomaly, and everything all at once upended itself. 

There was no time to steady himself, to prepare or focus or any other motion that could have helped him understand the way the world felt turned inside-out as he passed through the Anomaly. West became East, and he felt for a moment like he was standing upside-down on the bottom of the world, like a traveler on a small comet seeing his home planet from the other side of space.

And, as quickly as it had come over him, it all passed. Before him was a wall of rough grey granite, and his boots scuffled distressingly loudly in a thin layer of loose rock and dust over scrub and rocks.

"Well. You are not who I was expecting."

Caleb spun clumsily, slamming his back against the wall he had been facing. Before him, the land stretched out far and silver, the thin ghost of a winding road threading between houses and farmland alike. A large, white moon rose over the curve of the far horizon, and thousands upon thousands of glittering stars winked down at him from a pitch-black sky.

There was also a single, rather peeved-looking humanoid.

He wore a long cloak of plum cloth and what Caleb assumed were his shoulders were crowned in a web of silver and crystal. He was glaring at Caleb behind a netted forehead veil, behind which Caleb could only discern long, pointed, purple ears and short white hair with patterns that he could not see shorn into the sides. He also appeared to be losing his patience.

"I suppose they think it is funny to send some idiot child in their place," the stranger scoffed, making no attempt to hide the way he raked his eyes over the dirty bottoms of Caleb's boots, the line of visible skin below his shirt and jacket, the long sleeves that entirely hid his hands.

"I am… sorry?" Caleb tried finally, shrinking into the rock behind him.

"Yes, I think you rather will be," the stranger replied. His cloak split down the center and a single arm reached out from about the area Caleb would have expected one to do so. The stranger lifted his hand to his face, and began to speak into a small black square wrapped around his wrist.

"Emergency at the edge of Sector Ф-0L," the man said, not breaking eye contact with Caleb. "Anomaly contained. Requesting secondary confirmation before transport."