Vadya’s eyes opened again while it was still dark and Vadya wondered how they had come to this point. I feared the spirit once, and I was right to. When did that fear give way to wonder? When did I stop fearing its words and start to hunger for them? The fear was certainly back now – with a vengeance.
“Your world dies, Vadya,” the spirit had said. “Not fast, but one day there will be no air left to breath, no water to drink.”
An image had appeared before Vadya, as if one were high up, looking down on oneself. As Vadya watched, the point of view moved up and up, then moved until the image came to rest on a huge frost covered plateau. Here there were ruins. Stone tents and spires of rock that reached for the sky. Crumbling now, but far too regular to be natural, too big to be of use to anything but a giant. Perhaps the Komagin had lived up there. A Komagin! Something else I would have liked to see – from a respectful distance.
“Beings once lived there.” The spirit had said, as if it could read Vadya’s mind. “Not too unlike yourselves.”
“How could they live there?” Vadya had asked, “You cannot not move a stone tent!”
“They did not need to move, for water was plentiful,” the spirit had answered. “The Rifts were once filled with water.”
“And where did all that water go?” Vadya had asked.
The point of view of the image moved up and up until the whole of K’mora hung in the air. Odd to think of the world as a ball. “This can’t be! How do we not fall off?” Vadya had asked,
“Just one of many things we could teach you and your people,” the spirit had said, “but watch…”
The point of view changed again, moving out even further, and the colors changed. Now Vadya could see faint wisps blowing, like fine sand, from the dark side of the ball, as if The Great One itself were blowing it off of the world.
“What you see is the last of your planet’s air being blown out into the emptiness between the stars. In time there will be no air to breathe, no water to drink. It will not happen fast, but it will happen and, once we are gone, there will be no one to help you.”
“Our empire is vast, Vadya,” the spirit had said. “It has many peoples in it. You and your people could join us. We are not ‘spirits’, Vadya, we are the Čiruk. People like you who have seen what the future can be. You can come with us. Be part of the Great Work. There is more to life than this one world and we can show it to you.”
Vadya was silent for a while. Something disturbed their mind, but they could not bring it out from behind their desire to fly among the stars. Even so, they could not believe that a person could wield this much power, so there was, at least, that one question: why would a spirit pretend to be a person? This alone, had set Vadya’s teeth on edge.