The Sunless Hours of Forever

By Greg Cmiel

Laz spends long days toiling in the mine of Darkhán. A bottomless pit that has not seen a ray of sunlight in a million years.

 

He labors in the deep alongside his best friend, Dru. The cruelty of the mine has orphaned them both, and every day is a fight for survival.

 

After shift, they scavenge through the waste mounds left by the crusher machines deep in the gray zone. They search for a legendary grade eleven crystalline starlight oval. A precious jewel to buy passage to Citadel Sol, a golden metropolis overflowing with treasure and bathed in permanent sunshine.

 

To locate a starlight is a preposterous task, but Laz can't live without hope. Murderous rav'ns prowl the gray zone outside the mine, dust devils plummet from the sky to scour the flesh from the living, and ghosts of the dead haunt the plains.

 

May the dead wander no more. Follow the path to the forever light.

 

As Laz schemes a way forward, old legends are upended, alliances tested, and a new reality comes crashing down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Murmuration Publication
• Release date: Feb 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393964186

Book preview

Darkhán MapDarkhán Map 2

Prologue

Transcript of the final communication between Earth Station 40885 and Science Team Alpha Bravo Darkhán, led by Doctor Karen Bailey:

Earth Station 40885: Station 40885 to Alpha Bravo. What’s your status?

Dr. Karen Bailey: [silence]

Earth Station 40885: I repeat. Alpha Bravo, this is Station 40885. What’s your status?

Dr. Karen Bailey: Stay away … [garbled speech] … not … [loud static] … Repeat. The virus has … we have lost containment … Do you copy? I don’t know how much longer … [22 seconds of dead air] … all dead … vitals failing … [loud roaring] … too much damage … aft thruster offline … I’m setting down on … surface … just as well … too late for me … full quarantine … declare off-limits … the Citadel is lost … article sixteen … stay … stay … [8-second delay in recording] … full quarantine … stay away … stay … away.

1

Laz's Dream

My dream in three parts:

---

Part One

The sunrise that never came.

I was standing in a pool of ankle-deep black water. I knew I was dreaming, because there was no water in the mine.

A yellow orb was pinned to the sky above my shoulder. The orb shimmered in the mirrored surface that gripped my feet like a dark vein of jet-black quartz.

I could not move even a single toe.

I dreamed of the sun on my shoulders and back—warm fingertips that smoothed away the pain no child of eleven cycles should have had. I’d have followed the sun if I could have moved even one muscle.

If I could have run, I’d have run.

Run fast as a hopp’r across the plains. Faster even.

I’d sweep Grn’ma up in my arms, light as the ore dust that blankets everything, and I’d show her the thing that I dreamed of. The yellow orb that moved across the sky, across an impossible, never-ending sea of brilliant stars that swim so close I could pluck them like diamonds from a sable field.

And of course, I’d show Dru, my best friend.

My only friend.

I’d lead her toward the golden light, carry her if I had to—sometimes she was just so tired, and her damaged leg twisted into painful knots. But I was strong, and I would lift her up, lift her high and show her the flower of gold that dangled from a string and warmed the nape of our necks.

I’d make sure Dru understood that not all was the dark of the mine. Not all was Darkhán.

Not all.

Not yet.

A fist-size object plummeted from the sky, crashed into the water, and shattered the reflection that held my feet captive. Ripples eddied outward and scattered the circle of rav’ns soaring in the sky above the mine. Their cries were harsh, and they caw-cawed my name again and again. Laz. Laz. Laz.

The rav’ns swooped low and shredded the thin layer of hazy atmosphere. They laughed at me—a cruel, guttural sound. I raged at them, and the battle began. Feathers flew and throats were ripped open, like the last gasp of a dying star.

A galloping cough pounded at my windpipe, and I wondered whether my next breath would be my last.

Detritus

falls

from

the

Heavens.

Like an Ancient Greek god with wings clipped, cast out and forgotten.

A story my dad had told in the last chapter of his life.

Unbound, my feet sloshed about, and I cast my gaze upward. I wanted to pluck at the golden fruit hanging low in the sky.

I felt a painful itch in the middle of my back and watched in dismay as two golden wings unfurled. The wings were a monstrous horror to me, so I leaped, thinking to escape them.

I was a rocket to the stars and howled as I soared up into the heavens. The air was thin and bitterly cold. I shivered and took hold of the golden orb, making a fist around its burning fire.

I peeked down toward my boots and saw the shrinking mine, my Kasha’r home, from a great distance. Seven concentric circles with gates at uneven intervals—a war plan devised long ago to hamper the invading army that never came.

I reached the apex and could soar no higher. My wings collapsed and folded inward into tattered shreds that twisted round and round, and wrapped me like a shroud.

My hand was pressed to my chest. I opened it. The fist of gold shriveled to a small stone and dwindled again to the size of a pebble. The pebble dissolved into dust and was carried off by a devil wind.

Cerulean rays slashed through golden light and shook me from the dream to a different reality. Dust motes fluttered like shaken spice that drifted over my body. A voice called out.

Laz.

I blinked several times, falling, falling, falling.

Grasping at the gauzy echoes of alabaster, I clawed out and touched the cold stone of my granite cocoon.

I felt the deep vibration—the moaning cry of a great beast as its insides were scraped out by digg’rs that ground on, shift after shift, without rest. Great pits carved from the living planet over millennia, and its torn innards spewed out into the sunless hours of forever.

A painful memory tormented me—a thin needle stabbed three klicks into the belly of Darkhán, and a descent by elevator of nearly twenty ticks. Mom and Dad were there in the dark. Alone. In grave danger.

I ran to them.

There was only one way out and shifting rock could close a needle shaft in a blink. And it did.

Just like that, they were crushed and obliterated. I retched dryly, my gut a hollowed-out void.

I imagined the scurrying movement over and under the metal hide of the digg’r as young ones like me labored in the pits to free the small chunks from the cogs and lubricate the grinding parts. It was a deadly dance to dodge the whirring, maiming of the gears that spun and crushed, bringing tons of rubble to the surface to be dumped into the hinterland.

Laz. Up.

I opened my hand and released the dream—feeling myself dragged along toward consciousness.

Wait. Not so fast. I remembered now. I fell back into the vision.

There was a place I needed to go, a mighty fortress, white like the snow that fell upon the heroes in the stories she wove. I spied it in the distance and sprinted toward it while the light faded. The name of the city was lost to me.

But I had to remember, or I would never find my way, and Dru was depending on me.

Sol. Light. Life.

We would all go there one day. The Tána people of the pit would know freedom and light. We would live in peace and forget the dark, the choking black dust of the mine. Bathed in amber, we would rise up.

There! The city was just beyond the third hill. I knew its name. It flashed and burned my thoughts.

How could I have ever forgotten?

Citadel Sol

(Sun City)

No. Do not attempt the journey.

A vision of orange light rose up to meet me. A woman with sad, urgent eyes cried out in an otherworldly voice, not Tána and not of Darkhán. Her voice lost forever in the gray zone. She wandered away. I tried to follow but was startled by a loud noise.

The Klaxon horn.

Shards of my dream exploded upward like so many glittering pieces of waste ore flung into the forever-night sky.

Wide awake, my body trembled with the deep rumble of the digg’rs.

Dust drifted down on me as I contemplated the rocky ceiling above my bed and kicked off my thin blanket. A promising new vein had been opened up near our cave dwelling on the forty-fourth level of sector seven, a vein rich with heavy metals for the off-worlders and their factories. I coughed into the crook of my arm as dust settled into my lungs. I checked my sleeve, no crimson flecks, and sighed with relief.

When the crimson appeared, tick-tock, time was up—you died.

The Klaxon blasted again. Final warning. There was a shuffle of footsteps, and a bony hand poked me in the ribs. A bowl of gray mush was pushed onto my lap, and a metal cup of brackish water thrust into my hand. Grn’ma ruffled my hair with a grunt and a rueful smile.

I tried to eat, but the grits tasted exactly like the mine dust that I breathed every day as I followed the digg’rs down. I drank the tepid water and swung my feet to the floor, wincing as my toes touched the cold stone. Then tugged on my scuffed work boots and cinched the elastic bands down tight.

I pushed aside the heavy curtain that provided privacy from the corridor, and was gone without a word.

2

The Weight of the Mine

Dru waited for me at the end of the corridor like she did every shift. She smiled at my approach.

Pungent odors filled the tunnel, overcoming the badly filtered air pushed deep into the mine from the great oxygen scrubbers on the surface—the smell of cooking stoves and sweaty miners returned from shift, a damp smell of rock and gravel, and dead miners left to decompose in the deepest fissures, lost souls who’d sought escape from the slave labor and vaulted out into the dark, finding only death and forever wandering. Dead spirits imprisoned in the gray zone.

Dru pushed off from the wall and hobbled my way, tilted like an overloaded freighter with a busted wing and a burned-out thruster. She leaned hard on her short shovel and dragged her twisted leg behind her.

I reached out my hand as she neared, and pulled her close. I circled an arm around her waist, the patched and faded rags that covered her gave a false sense of bulkiness. She was whipcord thin, like me. Like all the Tána.

Wrong, I grunted to myself. The Council leaders grew fatter every cycle. I swallowed hard—high treason to think such things.

We walked toward the sorting rooms, where the dust swirled and crimson death waited patiently to claim its next victim—a starving and bottomless gnawing that would consume us all in the end. The crowd of weary miners thinned, and the tunnel echoed at each footfall. Dru winced at the dusted shadows that crouched in the deep with glittering eyes and endless hunger.

Sitting around the glow of the cook stove, also used to heat the meager dwellings of the miners, Dru had been taught the tales, stories of ghosts that wandered the deepest tunnels, the spirits of dead miners seeking revenge for their miserable, wasted lives. Dru held on to those tales, taught to her by her mom and dad, missing and presumed dead. A terrible explosion and cave-in, thus orphaned by the impersonal cruelty of the mine and the Council. An all-too-common story shared by too many of the Tána children.

Laz, she hissed. The grind’rs have been started. Did you hear them?

I nodded. Felt them, and I pounded the hollow of my stomach—the empty hunger clawed back.

Will we go out tonight? Dru’s thick black brows shot up, eyes red-rimmed and with a misty gray silhouette that marked the area where her goggles settled across her face as she labored. Water was scarce, and full bathing a luxury reserved for the Solaré. And the Council, I guessed.

Of course. I said. She leaned against me as we walked. "How else will we find the grade-eleven crystalline oval starlight that we seek? Eh?"

Do you really think we’ll find one?

I grinned. I dreamed it, so of course I believe it. The starlight was a king’s ransom. We’ll buy our own skimm’r and fly to Citadel Sol.

"But, the gray zone," Dru muttered through gritted teeth.

The gray zone. A vast no-man’s-land between the mine and Citadel Sol, haunted by the ghosts of dead miners. Maimed and grotesque, the ghosts kept the Tána from wandering too far from the mine. Mom had explained the sunlight that bathed the Solaré in Citadel Sol faded as it moved in our direction, and created a gray zone of permanent twilight, until finally the light disappeared altogether above the mine. Something about the angle of Darkhán, the axial tilt, I think she’d called it, kept us under a forever-night sky.

I draped my arm over Dru’s shoulders. The spirits of the gray zone are just stories. They are nothing. Dru didn’t look convinced. I told her about a dream I’d had once. I dreamed about the house where we would live—a enormous mansion with lots of windows. Windows from floor to ceiling, filled with light, and rooms stuffed with living plants and flowers.

You dream a lot of things, Laz. Dru shone at me.

I bobbed my head up and down.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. I thought about Mom and Dad, and tried not to picture their broken bodies trapped forever in the rocky depths. But I did anyway.

The walls and ceiling of the cavern closed in. I dropped my arm from Dru, and the blood drained from my face. She frowned at the dull sheen of sweat that glistened on my forehead. Dru understood how the weight of the mine could shatter the spirit into a million sharp fragments of ore.

She took hold of my hand and squeezed it.

We arrived at the entrance to the sorting rooms—a series of corridors where the waste from the grind’rs was unloaded from coffin-size troughs that rattled in on tracks. Debris was scattered across the floor as they tipped their loads. Clouds of choking dust plumed upward. Then the troughs righted