The Prophecy of the Seven by Kyle West

Author:Kyle West [West, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ragnarok Press

20

The atmosphere roared around them, shaking Ethereal as it dove headfirst into the thick, bilious clouds, like a peregrine toward its prey. After a couple of minutes of extreme g-forces, the ship drew up and Khairu took the control stick.

“We’re in, with ten seconds to spare,” she said. “The station never came on our scopes.”

Lucian breathed a sigh of relief. “And the Sanctum?”

“Near,” she said. “Heading down now.”

Lucian could discern nothing through the haze of the viewscreen. They said that before the Mage War, Isis rivaled Earth in beauty. The planet was a key target of colonization during the first diaspora, despite its distance, because of its similarity to humanity’s homeworld. Its citizens had planned great things for its future.

But after Xara Mallis and the Starsea Mages, all of those plans had been for nothing. Such was the destruction, that even after five decades, the League hadn’t allowed for its recolonization, instead designating it as a Mage War memorial.

Fifty years after its nuclear winter, Isis had warmed somewhat, but the world would likely never return to its former glory without a few more centuries of uninterrupted time to recover. The clouds were white, strangely, while the sky was blue, if a more of a slate blue than Earth’s. It was the only difference Lucian noticed as they descended toward the surface.

When Ethereal finally burst through, it revealed a dismal, gray wasteland bereft of life. In the far distance marched a line of mountains, Earthlike in appearance, with lofty peaks reaching into the white clouds above. It was toward these mountains that Khairu veered Ethereal, over a wide river running down from its foothills. Ruins of decaying towers clung to both sides of that river, ruins which had lain undisturbed for the past five decades.

All watched in silence. Though it was hard for Lucian to believe, fifty years was enough time for the atmosphere to be mostly breathable. That said, most of the danger from radiation didn’t come from the nuclear fallout itself. It came from the UV radiation blasted out by Isis’s sun. Xara Mallis’s desperate gambit had not only destroyed the planet’s surface and most of its life. It had also reduced the world’s ozone layer to nearly nothing, something that would take many decades to recover without terraforming to speed it along.

All too soon, Khairu landed on the surface. The surrounding landscape reminded Lucian very much of the cold tundra of Volsung. He felt this world’s gravity pulling down at him—hard. Here, he weighed fifteen percent more than he would have on Earth. They’d had the ship running at that gravity, but feeling the real thing made it seem heavier.

Before them stretched a broken road leading toward a high cliff set before the mountains. The road seemed to extend directly into the cliff without diverging.

“You sure this is the right spot?” Fergus asked.

“My coordinates are correct,” Khairu said.

“Maybe there’s a tunnel or something,” Emma said.

Lucian watched the cliff closely. “We’re in the right place. I just think Vera and Xara buried it.

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