Василиса Чмелева – Parasomnia (страница 10)

"An aesthetically pleasing designation," Skyla noted. "Rationale for selection?"

"Because he’s my friend."

"Entry archived. Recording terminated."

Chapter 5. The Wind of Eternity

You will meet the light—only to freeze from its warmth.

Trudging through the dense snow—where spray from the thawing waterfall glittered like shattered glass—I couldn’t tear my gaze from the figures waiting behind the ice-veiled cascade.

They moved like a waltz of light and shadow. Each step I took echoed dully, as if I were trapped inside a glass flask, pounding against its walls. Or perhaps it was them tapping the ice in time with my footsteps. The sounds merged, indistinguishable, my human ears too crude to parse where the knocking began.

When Sharius nudged me toward the Sisters with a command to advance, they appeared deceptively near—a mere handful of steps away.

Yet with every movement I made, the waterfall receded. The harder I strained forward, the farther the figures drifted, until I turned to find the crew and Coldborn now distant specks behind me.

My body stood frozen at the heart of a glacial lake, where time and space had crystallized solid. I hovered between past and future, unable to grasp the present. I was nowhere.

The ice waste where I’d come to rest became the axis—the focal point through which Blokays unveiled its true nature.

I stretched my hands into the void before me. Each habitual step forward only hurled my body backward—proof that turning to flee toward Sharius would yield the same cruel reversal.

So I sat.

At the center of the frozen lake, eyes shut, I exhaled a single plume of breath—the only motion the ice would permit.

"Could use your advice right now, Skyla," I murmured, knowing the hologram wouldn’t answer.

"Advice is for those who already know the answer—but crave an excuse to linger."

"Who refuse to move forward, chasing false landmarks."

"Wrong, yet seductive in their illusion of ease."

I opened my eyes and scanned the emptiness. No one. Silence draped over my mind like a veil—yet behind it, whispers slithered.

The creatures spoke in a tongue unknown to me, my Linguatron stubbornly mute. And still, I understood.

"Astral Sisters," I greeted, bowing my head. "The honor of standing before you humbles me."

"You sought us, Ethan Kendes." The words reverberated in chorus, a thousand voices threading through the frozen air. "Yet your search was blind. The lost cling to lanterns, though darkness holds more truth than light—which only paralyzes fear."

"I need your help." No more flattery; I cut to the core. "Decipher a letter. That’s why I came."

"We know." The reply came not as sound, but as ice forming in my veins. "We are unbound by moments. All that was, still is. You cannot deviate from what has already unfolded."

"Will you aid me?"

"The living weave their own nooses. We are the scales, not the hand that tips them. What you seek already stares back at you—will you meet its gaze?"

A faint vibration passed beneath me, and the snow began peeling away from the ice like parchment, revealing a translucent gap. I looked down—and froze.

There, beneath the ice, floated two figures. The Astral Sisters had taken the form of Kallinkorian women, their eyes fixed on me in silent appraisal. Their faces held no fixed features, instead flickering through countless human visages—as if every possible expression existed within them simultaneously.

Across their bodies danced intricate, distorted patterns: a living tapestry of hieroglyphs, sigils, and ancient scripts. Some I recognized—forgotten languages once known to starfarers, now preserved only in history’s dust. Others seemed alien, their symbols unborn, as if waiting for civilizations yet to rise in the cosmic dark.

"You possess every possibility—as do all who crawl between the stars. Your path unfolds as we’ve foreseen, yet it remains irrevocably yours."

"My path led me to you, Sisters—and it cannot end here on Blokays."

"Destruction takes many forms," their voices wove through the ice. "Liberation. Punishment. Purification."

I drew the letter from my suit’s pocket, its edges brittle with cold. "This text matters to countless beings. Even now, hundreds of ships may be converging here, desperate to decode it. If you see all possible outcomes, then you’ve glimpsed futures where Blokays knows no peace." My grip tightened. "You can’t stop those like me. And after me? Murderers. Smugglers. Worse. How many innocents will freeze before you act?"

"The constant tide has ruined more cities than the ebb, which brings only temporary drought," the laughter of the Astral Sisters echoed, and an energetic ripple spread across the lake. "Life is not manipulation, Ethan Kendes. Life is energy—it cannot be locked away. You may wish to keep everything under control, but you forget: sometimes control is a prison. And you, of all people, with the life you’ve lived, should know that prisons have destroyed more prospects than free choice ever could. We can only show you how wrong you are, and you will decide where the end lies—or where a new cycle begins, as you choose."

"Show me,"—I gripped the letter tighter, unfolding it before the sisters, and met their gaze.

At that moment, I found myself in the icy water of the lake, with a sheet of ice looming above me, blocking my escape to the surface. My blood froze painfully in my veins, locking my entire body in paralysis. I wasn’t breathing, yet life still clung to me.

The Astral Sisters stood—no, floated—opposite me. They had merged again, taking the form of a creature I did not recognize, with a single, unblinking eye. I stared into it, unable to look away.

Inside it, I saw a reflection of myself holding the letter. Gradually, the shifting text stilled, solidifying into symbols I could understand. The letter was written in the Kallinkor language.

I frantically raced to read it before the Astral Sisters changed their minds. As I finished, another wave of unbearable, searing pain tore through me—like the agony of flesh thawing after frostbite.

“Will your path now be clearer, straight to the caisson?” the sisters asked, their voices tinged with disappointment. “You see what we are becoming—but can you say for certain what you yourself will become?”

I saw my past—but not as it existed in my memory. Alternate forks of the same event flickered before my eyes, and soon, I could no longer distinguish the forgery from what had truly happened. I had been granted the knowledge of how that day might have unfolded differently—the day I had willfully chosen to mutilate the Coldborn with Tevin. Yet every version led to the same end. The encounter with the creatures was inevitable. So was their verdict. Runes began to surface on the sisters’ necks. They formed the names of the crew—men already condemned to execution in the eternal ice of Blokays. The last rune to appear on the creature’s throat was my own name, as though hastily scrawled in ink.

"Ethan Kendes—" The sisters' voices erupted into a shattering scream, hurling me back to the surface. "You shall become chaos. You are the rupture. You are the horde."

The sounds of the planet rushed back, dragging reality—and me—into focus. I lay on my back, completely dry, my fingers clutching a crumpled sheet of decoded text in a white-knuckled grip.

"What is your final verdict, Astral Sisters?" Sharius's voice reached me from afar.

"We gift them death," the entity shrieked as I struggled to my feet. "Receive our blessing!"

I took a few steps and felt a wave of relief as I regained control over space and my own body within it. But that relief was short-lived. The Coldborn turned toward the crew, their weapons locking onto them with lethal precision. "You are sentenced under the law of Blokays," the judge declared, his voice devoid of all emotion, merciless. "You will be entombed in the eternal ice of this planet. The sentence is to be carried out immediately."

"Wait!" the bald man shouted desperately. "We have the right to seek clemency! Why should we suffer for this Kallinkorian's perjury?"

"This is clearly a mistake," Rovan protested, his voice cracking with urgency.

"This is obviously a mistake!" Rovan's protest hung in the air.

Sharius didn't even listen, giving the Coldborn a curt nod. A shot rang out – that distinctive crack of fracturing glacier ice – and instantly, Rovan and the bald man froze mid-motion, their bodies transforming into rigid, frost-coated statues.

"Ethan!" Tevin lunged toward me as a Coldborn's targeting beam painted his chest. "You owe me, Ethan. You fucking owe me, you hear?" His voice carried the raw edge of a man bargaining with death itself.

I recoiled as the frozen man's rigid body came to rest near me, his hands still clawing toward my throat in final, desperate reach. The Kallinkorian's glassy eyes had clouded over, his last breath escaping in a wisp of vapor that hung briefly in the air before vanishing.

"Kendes!" Sharius's voice cut through the silence, sharp and inexorable. "There's no use fighting fate. Yours is already written."

My eyes darted across the barren landscape, searching for any sign—any trace—but the Astral Sisters were gone. An eerie stillness had settled over everything, broken only by the frozen waterfall looming behind me like some grim monument to all that had transpired.