The Wanderers

[Bygonehero]

Just a short story I wrote for fun. It follows a father and his son the day before the first Lii'dra Invasion.

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     The last time that I went fishing with my father was when I realized that I had an instinctive thirst for adventure. That day, when we set out from the city was dimensionless to me, just another day lost in the heat of mid-summer. As I recount the story in my mind, I can’t help but wonder if there were other things I could have done if I had honed my father's natural inclinations or abilities. If I had known something of survival beforehand, perhaps my father would have survived. 

 

   Adventure, that is what my father called our exertions to the separate parts of the Serene Republic, where he would try his hardest to shape my upbringing. Museums of xenobiology and Earth historical “safaris” were among his favorite sorties to which I was his captive wingman. 

 

    Styling himself as an enlightened exo-naturalist, he impressed upon me the majesty of the natural despite my very natural inclination to spend my time elsewhere. Time spent glossing over taxonomic minutiae could have been spent with the latest thing with my friends but my father never understood what I wanted, or if he did, he supposed he knew better than me. Knowing what I know now, about all of the adventures we had, I wouldn't trade the memories for anything regardless of the smudges painted across them by time. Despite the waning years since, I remember the day of our last fishing trip clearly, the time perfectly. Perhaps it is because of how all of my memories are organized. From Before, and After the Bursa invasion.

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     Even traveling on foot upstream to the isolated fishing spot my father had picked for us, there was an air of unease amid our riverside wanderings. The calm river waters were mirror clear, with their depths revealing the bottom-dwelling creatures that scuddled into the deeper darkness as our noise frightened them to burrow. As we traveled, the trees grew higher and thicker, eventually self-segregating themselves against the older primeval boughs of the alien forests of Elyra, a forest older than any human colony upon the planet. Their alien amber bark hung loosely from its trunk oozing a thick pulpy substance that smells like vinegar. Instead of leaves, the ‘trees’ grew nodules that lined their scraggly branches that seemed to pulse ever so slightly.

 

      Disgusted at the smell and repulsed by the view, my father asked if I wanted to hear a story as a distraction. Maybe it was my attitude that unmoored my father, which sent him back down that silver thread of memory.  But whatever the case, he spoke of ancient things from the earliest records of humankind; embodying a narrative as if our lives outside the woods had become myths that occurred centuries ago or perhaps that wouldn’t occur for centuries yet.  I was so entranced by the legends that I had hardly noticed when we finally reached our fishing spot. Amidst the alien vegetation was a clearing that had obviously been used before. Charred markings of a campfire lay at its center, with detritus free areas for our tents. In retrospect, I understand how much preparation went into planning our adventure, that despite the unequal burden each of us carried, my father bore it with the hope of easing me into enjoying myself on our expeditions.  

 

     It comes as no surprise then that he set up our tents. I, however, did achieve a successful ignition of our campfire just before the darkness of Elyrian night enshrouded us. My father roasted our dinner while I searched for a signal for my wireless device and found none. The whispy crackling of burning branches sounded behind me as I sat frustrated, mulling in silent contemplation. As my eyes adjusted to the settling gloaming I cast my gaze across the reflected starfield within the river-stream. Lifting my eyes outward into the darker darkness between the amber trunks of alien foliage.

 

    “When I was a boy,” my father suddenly began from behind me, “I grew up about ten miles from the bridge where we set off.  You know how I’ve told you before about my best friend Aleem? Well, he and I did this same trip that you and I are doing.  Aleem and I went in at the same spot – although it was a different bridge back then, an old one made of bricks that they tore down when the magline was built.”

 

     The catch about my father's stories that I came to realize is that I could never really tell if they were true, or if the felt true. They felt real then, but as time wears, it blurs the true and untrue, twisting expectations of that memory into yarns that could not be sewn back together as they were before. So I guess the only thing that did matter about my father's stories was who remembered them and how they felt when they heard them.

 

     He went on:  “When Aleem and I made this trip, though, it was winter.  It was cold that year, so damp in the air, that do you remember that little waterfall in the rapids we saw after lunch?  Well, he and I tried fishing from it and those creatures in the river never tried to resist us or run. It made for poor sport, but great fishing. There was a grace to this place then, where the land held an innocence and assumed that we meant it goodwill. I wonder if it changed its mind.”

 

“Was the forest the same as it is now, though?” I asked.  “Because it feels, maybe, strange?”

 

I couldn’t quite put what I felt into words, but from the slight drip of a frown that escaped him, I could tell he knew what I meant, but that he hadn’t been planning on taking his story down this path. At least, not yet.

 

   “Yes” my father answered curtly, stumbling in his speech afterward, trying to piece together his thoughts. “There’s not many places like this left on this planet. It's like that you can feel that there aren't people or roads, but despite the absence of those things, you can feel that there is something here.”

 

     It took me a moment to respond. Because I could also feel something under that black dome of the sky and all the million flyspecks of distant light above us that peered through and then were swept away in the current of clouds.  Some enormousness that seemed to both pull me up and press me down at the same time. Out in the distance, the soft yellow bruise of light pollution over far-off cities seemed like dapples of light on the river bottom, obscured by layers of sediment that my father and I were now suspended in, just like the bottom feeders that lived within the river we traveled beside.

 

    “I feel it,” I said simply, searching as my father did for the realization to convey what the feeling was. My father nodded, looking out into the night of the alien deep wood, “Sometimes, I think of all the worlds we could have lived in, that we live in the one where I am your father and you are my son. It brings to mind the improbability of it all and I think, are you real? What miracles exist that allow us to live as we are, instead of other things?” 

 

     As if to understate his point, the wood crackled sending up curling embers that drifted away from us like a phoenix on the breeze. The ember faded into the wooly darkness just as another light bled itself from between the trees, opposite from our campsite across the chuckling river.

 

“Another fire?”

     But I already knew the answer. As the corridors of night moved away, I could see two inky shapes around a campfire, their forms obfuscated by the complex battlelines debating the silhouette of the entities. The surroundings they inhabited grew darker in the presence of the flame, as if a veil woven of a new kind of darkness had fallen.  One that wasn’t the absence of things, but rather the richest depths of possibility. A fertile darkness from which anything could emerge.

 

     In that night before, and ever since, I have made theories on what we saw before the invasion that night. Was it just two other campers? A trick of the light, an anomalous atmosphere above and water below caused by just the right circumstances? An echo of form from another dimension cast into reflection and shadow into our world? Or was something sinister, a malefactor that forboded the situation we would find ourselves come morning? Was it proof that in our universe that such a strangeness can exist that defies consciousness but relies on feeling?  

 

     Whatever it was, the shapes in the light did not approach us, and their forms did not clarify as we ate and prepared for sleep. In the lucid moments between unconsciousness and waking I thought of situations everywhere, of how many times does a Father take a Son out fishing? My mind's vision exited myself and in my imaginings, the expanse of my vision saw a river of stars that encircled an island of dirt our camp rested upon. Outside of this circle unbroken, I could see repeated millions of fires within the manifolded darkness,millions of islands separated by the same rivers of reflected sky. All Wanderers traveling along the rivers they occupy.

Edited September 26, 2019 by Bygonehero