In the Shadows

Note: This story has many references that only make sense in modern English. For instance, the age of characters is given in years: as will become obvious, the characters described would not know the length of a year, or even think in terms of years themselves. For the sake of simplicity, this story will be told in English even though it is very unlikely that the characters would speak or think in English themselves. If this bothers you, just remember that the character’s thoughts had to be translated and that some translation errors, such as references to lengths of time that the characters would not understand, are unavoidable. I have tried to convey my ideas as clearly as possible: please enjoy the story. Thank you.



1: Patience



Samuel stood silently and gazed at the epitome of death.

His face was lit by a dark blue glow which made his sharp and deep features look sunken. The light sloshed around the room like a last breath or a solemn wave from a friend departing for good, thick with the emotions that made Samuel’s face heavy and solemn. Samuel was staring intently at a window occupying half of the ceiling of the small room he was in. That window looked out on a scene so unnatural and distant from life that a thousand civilizations could rise and fall without ever having seen it.

The window revealed a dying star resting on the pitch-black sheet of lightless space. The star had a numerical designation that was twenty digits long: but Samuel would name it as Patience. Patience was the last glowing star known to humanity.

The star shone down on Samuel and amplified the heavy feeling in his soul. He was fifty-nine years old; he had maybe three hundred years left to him, though that hardly mattered. This star would only outlast him by about three million years. His entire race would flicker out with that star; nothing mattered when his descendants were doomed alongside this ball of ash. Without its invigorating flow of energy, life would not be able to continue for anyone or anything. Samuel stood and watched the star burn on.

Patience… what we desperately need now is not patience. We have no use for an emotion begging us to stay still and succumb to entropy.

“But we no alternative, either, right?” Samuel didn’t jump when his son spoke or closed the single door leading to the small room.

“When I am voicing my thoughts to myself, it’s a private conversation.” Samuel turned and smiled. Nirn smiled in return. Samuel’s son did not seem to be stifled by the dark hue spraying the walls: it was as if the star shone on a source of energy deeper than itself. Nirn glowed in a way that inanimate matter had difficulty rivaling. It was only partially due to the fact that he always dressed in pure white.

"I can understand that this room is sentimental to you," Nirn said, "but I doubt I will ever understand why."

"Surely you already understand why the last stellar remnant is important."

Nirn chuckled. "I guess I meant that I would never understand why you choose this," Nirn said as he stared up at the window, "I will never understand why this symbolizes your struggle with the death of our race. Sure, it's the last tenuous thread to conscious existence. But why do you always come to this room to think about it?" Samuel took several seconds in responding.

"You feel that my thoughts should be more internal, right? That they should not hinge upon a room or a star, but only upon myself?"

"Yes," said Nirn, " As mine do. I can think about it anywhere.” Samuel didn’t respond. “My desire to live originates internally."

"As does mine," responded Samuel as if he expected his son's explanation, "and I consider this star a mirror. I am looking into myself when I stand in this room."

Nirn opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it and continued to stare at the dying star. Samuel was not frowning as deeply as before: his son's presence always seemed to inexplicably lighten his emotions.

The two men stood side by side in the flickering blue light. Their faces looked up at the light of the star, but neither seemed to be as scared and alone as most creatures would be under that soft glow. The older man was dressed in black robes: the younger man was dressed in white. However, one could see that a companionship flowed between them, for their demeanor showed how they balanced each other. The young man brought life and joy to the elder's thoughts, and the older man brought wisdom and patience to the younger's words. Their clothes would have reflected these things better if they were dressed in grey robes twined with red to resist the blue light. It was also obvious that the two men were related: the hardness of his father's face was starting to show in Nirn, though he was still only twenty years old.

“There was something else you wanted to tell me," Samuel said, smiling at his son. "I can tell." Nirn smiled back.

"I wanted to tell you about a breakthrough we had today," he said. "The material base affects the machine rate of absorbance."

"Really now?" said Samuel sharply.

"Yes. We found that something about using diamond-based manipulators and a salt-water substrate increased the energy return rate; of course, it is still nowhere near enough to power the process by itself, but is definitely an improvement." Nirn had been working in a nanomachine laboratory for six months and was in the R and D department.

Even having an R and D department was somewhat unusual because humans had used nanomachines for practically forever, and improvements would likely only come once in ten-thousand years. The little devices aided in uncounted aspects of life, from construction to conception. They were the defining technology of any advanced race and were the only thing that allowed for a species' continued existence. Indeed, on small time scales nanomachines allowed human beings the ability to live to be almost four hundred years old (though they could only still have children for less than a hundred years). However, nanomachines required vast amounts of energy. Nirn was assisting more senior scientists in searching for ways to power them. They were tapping quantum energy for the purpose.

Quantum energy was the biggest let-down for the human race thus far. It could only be tapped by expending more energy than it produced: even though there was enough energy in a cubic meter of space to supply Nirn's society with power for ten thousand years, it would take twice that amount of energy to extract it. The pathetic return rate made the entirety of Nirn's people, about five hundred thousand individuals, hit walls in frustration... at least while they were young. Nirn's superiors were experimenting with various ways and various situations for harvesting the energy, but most of the populous thought it was pointless anyway. A few great minds still looked toward quantum energy as the salvation of humanity, but a few million years of complete failure had dissuaded the rest of the race.

Nirn continued his explanation: "It only works with the machines utilizing microbes, of all things, for drivers. And the effect was less than two percent. But it was an increase."

"Two percent? And wait, microbes? Could that be human error?"

"We thought about that, but every test has said it over and over again: a two percent increase in output. It is very exciting. Heh, aren't you glad I interrupted your conversation?"

"Why aren't you at the lab right now?"

"Yeah, who would leave such a discovery, right? But I have already been there for twenty hours straight. I was ordered to go home and rest." Samuel leaned in and examined his son: indeed, there were dark circles under his eyes.

"Ah, that makes it a bit different. Too bad it requires diamond: that has a high energy cost. But microbes?"

"That was the biggest surprise. As you know, they are typically much less efficient than purely machine-based drivers. We are all scratching our heads about this; how could their efficiency improve so drastically?"

"That truly is a mystery," said Samuel, contemplative. "I almost desire to go to your lab and take your place."

"I doubt you'd be able to contribute very much."

Samuel laughed. "Of course not. You are more tired than I thought; you thought you had to explain that to me. I just want to observe this for myself." Samuel opened the single door in the room: it lead to a fluorescently lit hallway. "Do you wish to stay here and contemplate death, or get some rest?"

"As that ancient saying goes, I can sleep when I'm dead," responded Nirn as his eyes twinkled. "Let me show it to you personally." With that, they left the small, blue-lit room.

Samuel and Nirn lived in the last outpost of humanity. It was a ring around their only star: Patience. Patience was a helium star. It had formed when two smaller white dwarfs, remnants of the former galaxy, had crashed together and fused. This was a lucky break for Samuels’s ancestors, as they had only limited amounts of energy left and the rest of the universe was going dark. Those ancestors had set up a colony around the new star and that colony had persisted for over one-hundred-million years.

The colony wasn’t named, but was rather called “the Colony”. It was shaped like a flat ring around the star. The inside of the ring was composed entirely of solar energy collectors. These were tilted to control the ring's spin. The outer side of the ring was ninety-nine-point nine-nine percent stored matter and less than a ten-thousandth of it was devoted to living space for humanity. None-the-less, five hundred thousand human beings had been able to live more or less continuously on the ring. Needless-to-say, they recycled a lot. Even with so much stored matter, forever is a long time to try and make anything last. The colony had effectively survived the universe: the other stars went dark while this new star burned on.

In the height of the universe, intelligent creatures had set up colonies around every single living star. This, of course, was an ancient legend to Samuel's people despite the storage of information for millennia. In any case, as the universe continued to age the number of active stars started to dwindle. Sentient beings had to abandon their stars and join other colonies around more permanent stellar objects. The colonies grew increasingly further apart: interstellar distances became impossible to traverse even with the highest technology in preservation and space-travel. Eventually, when living stars were so few and far between, every dying star represented an outpost of sentience freezing to death. The stars were too far apart for the colonists around one to reach the colonists around another. It was like oasis after oasis drying up in the vast desert of space. Patience happened to be the longest lived, and so while other races died in the cold, Samuel's survived by the luck it had in having the newest star in the universe.

It was somewhat of a scarring experience to live in such a universe. Every young man and woman born to the dregs of humanity would eventually get curious and look up a time-dilation film of the night sky, as viewed from the Colony. The stars in these films were shown over millions of years. As they danced around the sky they all went out one by one, some exploding into supernovae, flashes brightening the universe for mere weeks, and some simply fading from sight over millions of years. Realizing what this meant for life itself always had a deadening effect on the minds of Samuel's people.

Of course, even Patience was not immortal. It had started with a bright-white and living hue, spewing energy out, a gushing tap to feed the thirsting mouths of the living. Finally, after those millions of years, it was turning blue and cooling down. Before long it would turn dark red as its energy waned. And unfortunately, even if there had been other bright stars in the universe, those stars would have been hopelessly too far away for Samuel's descendants to reach them. Patience would turn black and die, like every other star before it. Samuel's race would die with it.

Hope doesn't die as easily as that. Over several weeks, Nirn's research team made an astounding amount of progress. They pushed the nanomachines into making more and more energy, until they were almost self-sufficient. It was as though the human race had worked on a riddle for millions of years and suddenly found that the answer was absurdly simple. Nirn told Samuel that this was confusing, and they discussed it over a meal in one of the Colony's many cafeterias.

"How can it be that no one had thought of this before? Using organic materials seems like something somebody would have thought of." Nirn was whispering as he said this to his father.

"Apparently not," responded Samuel. "After all, if you missed it once, why not miss it five thousand times? It sometimes requires such a larger number of attempts for me to explain a joke to you."

"You'd think that humanity would be so desperate, they would jump at even the slightest chance of finding a non-stellar source of energy."

"I think you are tired from all your work, and you cannot contemplate these philosophical matters. Go back to particle physics and quantum energy," replied Samuel, "and leave psychology to me." Indeed, Nirn did look very tired: he seldom slept much, after the big discovery. But at the same time he seemed more alive.

"I'm not tired. Just tell me how."

"Well, look around..." whispered Samuel.”Do these people appear desperate?" Nirn did as his father asked. Not a face in the cafeteria was smiling. Very few of the people all around were talking: those that were kept their tones soft and faces unexpressive. They also ignored each other. The table next to Nirn's did not seem to care that Nirn was hissing like a snake, confused and excited while so many of those around him were almost still. The room had a heavy and stifled air that kept even the most energetic in it from speaking in more than a whisper.

"They aren't desperate: they are dead," said Nirn suddenly with a look of disgust. "I have never understood why only the children get excited, and the adults are all so still."

"They have forgotten hope," said Samuel. "None remains for them. They are enslaved by the fact that the entire human race is doomed. Children are incapable of comprehending that."

"I could never comprehend that attitude either. I know that the human race is doomed, but I am alive yet. Why should I be sad?"

"It is related to the hopelessness of living, Nirn. A concept that, like you said, you cannot comprehend."

"That seems like a pathetic excuse to me. Someone should have thought of using living materials to get the energy to sustain life. Microbes make perfect sense." Nirn paused when his father did not reply. "It seems so obvious to me."

"I do not think it is a coincidence, Nirn."

"Of course it isn't, it is the only logical..." Nirn paused again, "wait, what are you talking about now?"

"I do not think it is a coincidence that the team found a new potential source of energy shortly after you joined the team. You are the only excited person in this entire colony..." Samuel weighed his words for a moment, "You are the only happy human being in existence." Nirn grinned sheepishly.

"Maybe I'm only excited because I am part of this exciting new research?"

"No, you have always possessed this strange attribute. You have always been too awake, more awake than anybody else."

"I've only slept like ten hours this last week: I'm sleeping standing up. I'm hardly awake. And there you go philosophizing: if I have been too awake, your eyes have been too open."

"Do you understand what you are implying? You know what I can say by extension of what you have just said?" Nirn looked at his father, amusement growing in his face. Both men recognized the steps in the conversation. "It means that you can thank me for your discovery: you inherited my observational skills."

"I doubt I did, Dad," said Nirn, shaking his head and smiling.

"Why?"

"Because everybody here is observing something that I missed, and it makes them all depressed. Why have I missed it, if I am so observant?"

"Heh, you have this backwards. You observed something that they missed."

"That isn’t what you said a few moments ago, but what have I observed, then? What have I observed, if you think I've got something they don't?" asked Nirn.

"How should I know? You observed it!" Samuel said, shaking his son's shoulder. "You are the one who has it; you tell me what it is."

Nirn smiled, but said nothing. After a minute or two, he said "I think I will go try to sleep. This philosophy wears me out."

Time passed as it always does. A pathetically short amount of time, as well: three years of constant research yielded nothing. The machine rate stayed at ninety-nine point nine percent and it continued to cost more to harvest quantum energy than it produced. The discoveries had been made public: for a few blissful weeks, it was like the colony had hope. Dead eyes had a slight glint of fire within them for the first time in many, many years. This hopeful fire smoldered into feverish effort and motivation. However, increasingly common tired moments and pessimism continued to grow in frequency until the end of the third year, when the entire colony had returned to resignation. Their pale faces once again looked as dark as ash or space. The only two people who continued to show hope were Nirn and Samuel, but even Samuel was flagging when it came to optimism. Samuel spent increasingly long periods in the observation room: interestingly, there was only a single such room on the entire colony. Despite this, Nirn was the only other person who joined him in his quiet contemplations.

Nirn explained his experiments to his father, who gazed up at the star with a desperate frown or a sad smile, as he listened to the last intelligent hope in the universe. One day, however, Nirn was unusually excited.

"I have a new theory about why microbes are essential to the working of the machines!" He said, as he walked through the door.

"I am glad to hear it," said Samuel. "What is your theory?" Nirn wasn't put off by his father's direct calmness and lack of excitement.

"Life! The microbes were living. The quantum fluctuations only become available with living things; it isn’t that microbes are good at finding the fluctuations, it’s that the microbes create the fluctuations."

"Are you alright?"

"Of course I am, do you know what this means? The way we know matter and energy is going to be completely transformed!"

Samuel chuckled. "What is the basis for your belief?"

"The microbes were essential for quantum absorption."

"That could be explained by a number of things."

"Like what?"

"Well, I am not a quantum scientist, but maybe the microbes are better attuned to the sizes of random generated particles?" Samuel's observation made Nirn laugh aloud.

"You definitely aren't the quantum scientist. It is the manipulative elements that interact with the particles, not the drivers. Indeed, calling them drivers is something of a misnomer. Don't worry, my theory makes sense to me."

"Heh, I am sure it does. But I am equally sure that the scientists will reason against your theory. New things cannot come so easily after..." Samuel pretended to count on his fingers "three-hundred-million years. I doubt they will agree with you."

"I know they won't, I already talked to them."

Samuel peered at his son. "You never give up that easily."

"Of course not. I have already started a new experiment. Look," said Nirn. He held out his hand.
Samuel bent forward to inspect the offered limb. It looked like Nirn was holding a bead of flesh-colored glass. "What is that?" Samuel asked.

"Biological enhancement nanomachines with their drivers altered to be able to tap quantum fluctuations."


"Unbelievable. You are serious."

Nirn tilted his head. "Why shouldn't I be?"

"This is illegal," Samuel said gravely while releasing his son's palm.

"You aren't angry, are you?"

"No. I am confused. You could get in big trouble for this: these things are outlawed for a reason." Indeed they were. Nirn was essentially holding his own personal store of nano-machines. A person with a nano-machine upgrade could use it for so many things that it made that person too powerful for safety: it was like carrying a gun, a flamethrower, spy cameras, Kevlar, a pharmacy’s worth of poisons and drugs, and a five-inch knife in one’s pocket. These functions were not the danger, however: it was dangerous because biological upgrades of this sort consumed massive amounts of chemical energy. This was frowned upon in Samuel’s culture because of the rareness of energy, but it could also be very harmful to anyone with such an upgrade. Invariably, those who tried to use personal nano-machines always tried to do too much with them. The machines usually ate the person using them alive, even if they had safeguards in place.

“Don’t worry,” said Nirn, “It is safe. It will only harvest quantum energy.”

“How are you going to manipulate the nano-machines?” Samuel shook his head. He could guess the answer.

“A node in my brain.”

“And I will conjecture that the machines building this node are chemical powered?” Samuel said, his voice hardening.

“Of course. But they will dissolve after they do their job.” Samuel threw his son’s hand down.

"That could very easily kill you."

"It won't. I programmed them myself."

"I think you are making a very foolish mistake," Samuel said angrily.

"I think that I am the one who understands this kind of thing."

“You are an imbecile! You only get a single brain!” yelled Samuel. His wide-eyed son did not respond. “Get out of here!” Nirn flinched.

“You won’t tell the scientists, will you?” Nirn said. He looked scared and embarrassed; this was the first time that he had fought with his father in over five years.

“JUST LEAVE THIS PLACE!” Nirn turned and half ran, but stopped at the door for a moment.

“You will see that I am right,” he said before quietly leaving.

Samuel stared at the window. His son had illegally altered his brain. It was a lot to accept at once, especially from Nirn, but he still regretted his outburst. He needed to think: fortunately, he was in the right place. In the observation room it was not hard for him to calm down and come up with a response to his son's actions. Samuel didn't like this development, but Nirn was such a vibrant young man that Samuel couldn't remain angry and certainly had to forgive Nirn. As the minutes fled past, Samuel decided to apologize to Nirn and try to convince him to remove the machines. He thought, however, that from the sound of things they would run down on energy and be absorbed into Nirn's body before long.

Of course, Samuel was wrong. By the next day the machines had finished the construction of the node: by the third day both men had forgotten their fight. The machines were growing at a steady rate. After the initial node was made, the rest of the machines did something that humanity had long since given up: they drew upon the energy of the void.

"One hundred and seventy five percent efficiency," stated Nirn to his father in the glowing room. He described his most recent test. Nirn had been having the nano-machines alter their own design: each new generation produced several variants, and the most efficient were further altered. This technique had improved the return rate by over 70% in just four generations.

"That is very significant, Nirn. But some aspects of your experiment have me concerned."

"Like the fact that the machines have to be tested inside my body?" asked Nirn. The machines, inexplicably, stopped producing energy immediately upon leaving him.

"Yes, son, but something more significant than that. You have continued to keep this hidden from the other researchers. Why?"

"I think they would stop me, and I don't want them to claim the credit. I may be remembered by the rest of the human race, and the rest of the human race might last a lot longer than we expected, thanks to me."

"This still makes me uncomfortable," stated Samuel. He had been feeling nervous about his son's experiment, but this keeping of secrets was so out of character for Nirn that he was much more concerned about it. "That, and the fact that you are supplementing the energy requirements of the machines by injecting complex carbohydrates into your blood."

"Don't worry about it. Let me push the efficiency up a bit and then I'll stop with the carbohydrates, and I'll tell the researchers."

"What level of return would it take for you to feel that you have made adequate progress?"

"I don't know..."

"You know of the other problem that this experiment has with it." Samuel had pointed out a fact to his son: in order for the discovery to be significant, maintaining the machines wasn't the only requirement. Maintaining the life that the machines inexplicably required was also a concern. Neither fully understood why the machines only worked in close proximity to living tissue, and human tissue in particular, but both understood that it was essential and both knew that life was one of the most notoriously inefficient things that existed.

"How much energy does a human being require to continue living?”

"..." Nirn was being unusually silent. He seemed more worried than pleased, recently.

“It requires an enormous amount, right? You promised to look into it during our last conversation."

"Yes. I did... about thirty-five thousand times as much excess energy as the machines are producing now... at least... but that is okay. I will improve them."

"That is why you are waiting. You are concerned that the others will pass your idea off as interesting but meaningless?"

"How could they think something like this is meaningless?" said Nirn desperately.

"They disregarded your previous claim that it would work, and it did work. They are likely to say that this is not enough. Are you afraid that this will not be enough?" Samuel stared at his son. He had never seen him like this: Nirn looked tired and strung out, like he was fighting against a heavy weight. "Are you alright?"

"It's just... I have so much vested in this... I want to succeed, but I know somewhere deep down that I cannot get the efficiency up that high. Fifty thousand percent is an absurd goal." Samuel stared at his son harder. This was a side of Nirn that he had never seen.

"You were certain before that it would work."

"I was only certain that putting them inside a living being would make them maintain themselves. I am not sure if they will be able to maintain a human being." Samuel contined to examine his son. Nirn, for the first time in his life, looked hopeless. Samuel didn't know what to say. Nirn looked like he was about to break down into tears. Finally, he did something that was rare among the fading remnants of humanity: he drew his son into an embrace.

"You have done something unparalleled already, Nirn. A discovery of this kind has eluded humanity for three hundred thousand millennia. That is a truly great accomplishment. I am certain of it."

Nirn chuckled sadly, but didn't end the embrace. "You are only hugging me for psychological reasons."

"You are only speaking because you want to diffuse the situation." Nirn didn't respond. "It is not an insult to your masculinity or anything."

"That stereotype died a long time ago, Dad." Nirn hastily wiped a tear away as he pulled back. Samuel pretended not to notice it. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Nirn's eyebrows shot up.

"Wow. You actually used a contraction."

"Hmmm. You are very observant; I did not think about it," Samuel said. He left the room with his son. It was a moment they would both remember for the rest of their lives.


Unfortunately, a week later their lives were remade by disaster.

Samuel was in the observation room when it happened; a shudder shook the Colony. This, to Samuel, was worse than an earthquake; it was as though the very fabric of reality had begun to shiver. The Colony was not something that should experience tremors. It had been stable since it had been built, and its shaking evoked primal fear in Samuel, like the universe were about to inexplicably tear itself to shreds. Even though this interpretation was only psychological on Samuel's part, it held more truth than he knew.

Samuel was thrown against the ceiling in the room. He landed on the floor with a crash. Th distant rumbling of traveling shockwaves assailed his ears. He was dazed: it took several seconds for adrenaline to kick in and rouse him. He stood up and started toward the door of the room.

At first, as Samuel burst from the observation room, he thought it had been an impact with an asteroid that had miraculously avoided detection. He discarded this theory after a few moments. If it had been an asteroid that big, the Colony and everyone living in it would already have been destroyed. Samuel started to run toward the command center of the Colony. Automatic defenses should vaporize anything with a mass greater than ten grams that approaches..., Samuel thought, and these systems have never failed. It was unlikely that a deep space object had shaken the colony without destroying it. He had no other explanation, however: as he ran down the hallways, he came to the first automatic door.

The Colony had two types of door in it. The first were a metallic swing kind, which opened with a light push and swung both directions. The second type were heavy and air-retaining. These heavy doors were for very small impacts; if a small object poked a hole in the colony, the area could be sealed off and repaired. Essentially they were automatic sliding doors that kept sections of the colony separate in case of eventual repairs. Fortunately, small asteroids that might slip past the defense system were never much of a problem. Even if they did poke a hole, nobody in the area died; the humans nearby simply exited that particular corridor and let the air bleed off over the course of a few days. Automatic systems kept the rest of the colony safe and small holes were not immediately threatening. In fact, some holes took weeks to repair; the repair itself seldom took more than a few hours, but nobody would feel motivated to complete it. Fortunately, the automatic systems of the colony prevented anyone from accidentally going through a door without air on the other side.

Oddly enough, the door didn't open as Samuel approached. He slowed from his run, and stared at the screen next to the door. It indicated...

...no pressure detected on the other side? How is this possible! Samuel was not terribly familiar with the command code for the colony, but he tried the holographic keypad none-the-less. After a few moments he had called up a local map of the colony; six hallways had been de-pressurized, and all of them nearby. He quickly planned an alternate route to the command center and took off

At the next automatic door he hesitated. What if it suddenly depressurized? Before he could worry too much about it, the door opened automatically; the hallway on the other side was intact.

Samuel started to run forward but stopped again. He didn't feel right. Feelings of apprehension were as unfamiliar to Samuel as tremors were to the colony. He had always been confident and decisive. However, as he approached the door at the end of the hallway he felt like something was draining from him. He felt like he was walking toward a ledge, a cliff from which he could easily fall. He hesitated more, but did not turn around: something held him in place. This door automatically opened as well.

Nirn was on the other side, standing to the right with a confused and frightened look on his face. He was facing a man that Samuel had never seen: this man looked like nothing Samuel had ever heard about in real life. Samuel felt his stomach wrench as he examined the stranger. He was wearing a dark brown cloak and leggings, and Samuel noted the waxy-white hair that fell over pale skin. The stranger looked like a standing corpse and his age was impossible to tell. He held a knife; when Samuel glanced down at it, he saw that blood dripped from it like thick wax.

The man was speaking but Samuel understood nothing that he said. It was a guttural language: it certainly wasn’t a language Samuel had ever heard spoken. Nirn turned and watched Samuel walk over toward his son; the man went on speaking, demanding something than neither Samuel nor Nirn could comprehend. The man was silent for several seconds: then he laughed. The laugh unsettled Samuel, who felt that nothing good could come from a man with a bloody knife.

The man drew one hand up in the air, as though he were holding a platter on his hand. He spoke again. Samuel did not believe what he was seeing: the air around the stranger’s hand congealed and grew dark as he spoke. The man smiled in concentration, shouted something as his smile vanished, and threw the dark blot toward Samuel and his son.

If it had hit Samuel, it would have killed him. Instead the magical attack hit Nirn, who threw up his arms to shield himself.

Nirn screamed in pain; he fell to his knees as his arms absorbed the dark energy, but then stood again. Blood dripped from his fingertips, but he was alive; before Samuel could say or do anything, Nirn was charging the man. Samuel could see a small flap of skin hanging from Nirn’s left arm, as though a blade had sliced quietly into him. Samuel didn’t get a very good look as Nirn ran. Nirn’s instincts had taken him to fight or flight, and Nirn had chosen to fight.

The stranger did not expect this, but wasted no time. Samuel cringed as another smattering of energy hit his son, this time in the stomach, but it hardly slowed Nirn. The second blast was more of an orb than a disk, and Samuel found himself immediately hoping that it didn‘t have the power to cut like the first attack. Nirn’s momentum carried him into the intruder, who grappled with the suddenly violent young man as he fell. Samuel barely had time to run toward his son before he was blasted back, his head knocking painfully against the ceiling for the second time. The fallen mage had called forth a blast of air to throw off Nirn, who tumbled desperately away. The stranger was standing again.

If the stranger had been menacing before, he looked utterly demonic now. His cloak was billowing as his long white hair waved in streams that trickled up and out of his hood. Samuel watched, but something wasn’t right: he couldn’t see straight and the world kept suddenly pitching to the left. He tried to stand but couldn’t: he fell, watching the man gather a deeper darkness into both his hands. Nirn was standing again; Samuel watched as his son stood, facing the man with the darkness between his fingers. The shadows in Samuel’s vision grew in from the edges to meet the stranger’s evil and Samuel fell forward into unconsciousness.

Samuel woke several minutes later to an alarm siren. He didn’t know where he was for many seconds. When his memory finally came flooding back Samuel felt like he had been unconscious for moments or years. Samuel stood up; his vision was blurry.

He was standing in the same room, but it was different. It was harder to breathe. The air must be draining, setting off this alarm. I must escape, Samuel thought. He couldn’t see anything clearly. He looked down at his feet, trying to make out a grey shape with red lines through it.

Nirn was lying there in a puddle of his own blood. Samuel felt the world pitch again, and fell to his knees.

“Nirn!” He shook his son, who moaned. “Nirn! We must get out of here! Nirn!” Samuel’s shouts seemed to echo and die quickly, but Nirn lifted his head toward his father. He tried to shake his head, but the movement was almost imperceptible.

“I am.... or nearly... can’t explain.” Samuel couldn’t see clearly enough to tell what was going on: his son obviously had a terrible wound in his stomach, but Samuel couldn’t do anything. He tried to put his arms around Nirn, who groaned. “Don’t move me: I only have... few moments. The machines are... air... they will run out of ener--” Nirn coughed, and red splashed out. Nirn was speaking so softly that Samuel could barely hear him.

Samuels’s tears fell unnoticed on his son’s shirt. He desperately wanted to see, but he couldn’t get his eyes to focus right. It was like a film hung over them.

“Get out... I gave you some 'machines... get out...” Nirn was gasping, but obviously couldn’t breathe. His words were whispers, quickly loosing strength. “No air... the air... you only have a few moments...”

Suddenly Samuel understood. The air was draining: in a desperate attempt to save his life, Nirn had moved some of the nano-machines over to his father, because the nano-machines could carry air temporarily and give Samuel a better chance at survival. He looked down but couldn’t see clearly: his lungs, his hands, perhaps his entire body had a thin layer of machines working to pull oxygen from anywhere and give it to his blood. The air pressure had dropped, making it impossible for Samuel or Nirn to absorb air with their lungs, but the nano-machines were aiding them. In a few moments, there would be so little air pressure that even the nano-machines wouldn’t be able to feed oxygen into his blood. A few moments more, and the vacuum would start to pull him apart. He would die with his son in a few moments, if he didn’t move.

He didn’t want to move.

Nirn seemed to sense this. “Dad,” he said suddenly, strength infusing his words for precious seconds, working past the blood and the lack of air: “Go. I don’t want my achievement... to die here ... with me. I love you... go.” Nirn coughed again, a rattling noise whispering around the blood. He didn’t stop coughing for several moments. The finality of his last hissing breath was like the finality of a leaf falling from a tree that was completely bare, save for that one leaf: it was soft and fleeting, a desperate loneliness hanging around it, as unnoticed and inevitable as that leaf’s tumble to the ground. Samuel knew that his son had just died in his arms.

Suddenly Samuel couldn’t breathe. Without the node in Nirn’s brain directing them, the nano-machines were no longer forcing air past the barrier of pressure into Samuels’s blood. For a moment, his son's death overruled the lack of air: he felt as though he were missing a more precious substance and that the air was only secondary, but his son's last wish rang through his mind and he stood. Once Samuel decided to try and escape the terror of asphyxiation joined his son’s final words and together these two things pushed him to find a way out. He could not distinguish anything with his broken vision. He fell forward: he did not know where he was going, but only that he must try to move. Nothing mattered as long as he tried to move before he died. He pushed against the pain of his body, the loss of his son making him indifferent to fear and suffering: he pushed against the lack of air with a deadened determination. He fell again, and stood, noting grimly that each time it became more difficult. Something was glowing before him. He took a faltering step: the brightness grew, shimmering, drawing him toward it.

He staggered toward this light. A few steps and he felt his consciouness ebbing again, this time in finality. He fell one last time, thinking that he was about to join Nirn in whatever dark place he had gone. The light enveloped him.


Suddenly he could breathe: the light had not dimmed, but the air had thickened. He gasped: he was blinded by an overpowering light, but he knew he was not dead. He felt wetness beneath him. He tried to stand again, but suddenly hands latched onto his arms and pulled him up. He was dragged and he heard someone shouting orders.

The world was becoming more focused, but not much more. Samuel was being dragged through a thick brown substance that he had never seen on the colony. It was mud: the bright light he had seen reflected oily off of it.

A grey sky yawned open, with a ball of fiery energy marking it, thirty degrees up, drawing Samuel’s gaze. He didn’t know what was happening: he didn’t know how there was a star, or a sky, or others speaking the terrible grunting words of the stranger who had killed his son. He didn’t know why he still couldn’t see very well.

He was thrown into a cage, wooden rods an inch and a half thick alternating into a grid as impassable as a steel wall. He didn‘t rise when he fell: he rolled on to his back, his eyes up to the infinity of the sky through the bars of his enclosure. His thoughts were sparse and spread like gas filling an infinite vacuum.

He might as well have been dead.

The sunshine was a temporary thing where Samuel found himself. That night, and every day after his capture, it was overcast. It frequently rained softly. Samuel didn’t connect the mud and the rain; he didn’t make any connections in his stupor.

The first thing that came to Samuel after his capture were voices. As he wandered through the gray fog of the next few days, voices visited him and pulled him around.

The stranger spoke to him in a grunting tongue, senseless as Samuel’s suffering. Samuel always felt the stranger’s presence as a clawed figure tearing up the images that Samuel tried to piece together. He hated and feared the stranger. He wasn’t aware that the real counterpart to his imaginings hadn’t yet approached him in his enclosure: Samuel sometimes heard the stranger’s voice drifting in from far away, but he never tried to learn if it was a real or an imagined sound.

“I don’t want my achievement to die…” said Nirn, a glowing blue disk throwing his face into shadow. Samuel’s blank eyes remained dead. “To die…” The mantra repeated itself in Samuel’s head, tapping lightly like a hammer adjusting a nail, drilling into the center of his skull.

Other voices and figures bothered Samuel. He saw the listless shapes of his fellow colonists, passing through his consciousness like faceless and thoughtless ghosts. He saw other shapes, of people he had never known. Sometimes the shapes weren’t human; contorted figures mirrored the contortions of Samuel’s mind. Very little was consistent in his waking dreams, but some things did repeat themselves.

One small figure kept returning. In a mind filled with black emptiness, there was a single small shape with a sharp outline. He didn’t die of thirst or hunger: the shape brought water to his lips from a shadowy cup and scraps of food from careful, dexterous hands. He didn’t try to seek sustenance, but when he found water raised to his lips he drank, or when he found food in his mouth he ate. The food was crunchy and salty, unlike any he had eaten before.

As the days floated by, another sensation started gaining definition in his mind. It was one of the voices he heard: like the stranger’s voice, it was inarticulate. However, unlike the strangers, he felt like some understanding drifted by when heard the voice. He felt like the voice had some goal or some purpose for interrupting him. He couldn’t quite hear it, though. Even as it grew clearer in his mind, he couldn’t feel the tone or count the syllables as it spoke. It whispered softer and more quickly than his own thoughts. He only passively tried to understand it; it was like wind blowing through the leaves of trees, though he had never experienced either wind or trees.

Sometimes harsh sounds would be produced close by, like the conversation of vultures standing over a dying animal. This was another scene unfamiliar to Samuel. He didn’t know he was hearing the guards of his enclosure.

He spent several days like this, unable to process or accept anything. Sometimes his head ached so much that he thought he was nothing but an ache, a pain waiting to be put out of existence by a relief that existed in reality adjusting its old bones, relieving the spot of tension that was Samuel. Samuel did not know that he was improving: the first two days had been marked by fever and sleeplessness. The third day he rested, but the shapes in his mind didn't go away. The fourth day was the day that he first heard the cool, wind-like voice. His head was beginning to clear by the fifth day. He didn't regain true consciousness until the sixth day of his imprisonment.

He had been drinking: the small shape had brought the cup to his lips. But the cup was suddenly yanked away: the small shape flailed and screamed, pulled from Samuel by a dark being. The stranger’s voice laughed and spoke, clearer than it had ever been before. With the scrape of wood on wood, Samuel’s savior vanished inside the arms of darkness.

Samuel’s stupor receded sharply and suddenly: he knew he had lost something, like he had lost his son. Anger pulled at the self-imposed veils in his mind. He stood for the first time in nearly a week.

Samuel still couldn’t see anything clearly: he screamed aloud that he wanted to see, he willed desperately that his vision would clear, he begged that the former clarity of his thoughts be returned to him. To his amazement, it was; a soft breeze blew through his mind and his vision came into focus. It was like a coat of tears covering his eyes had slid back, causing his perception to miraculously clear.

He was standing in a cage made of wooden bars. The cage was a cube-- ten feet to a side, with a single opening at the top. He could not escape because he could not reach the opening. Samuel looked around. Strewn about in the muck were four other prisoners who were dressed in rags. Samuel glanced at himself and saw he was also wearing rags. The prisoners were all staring at him in horror: he had never spoken aloud before and his sharp, metallic language obviously frightened them. He didn’t waste any more time contemplating the others in his cage.

Samuel stared at the opening in the cage ten feet above. Beyond it the sky was gray with storm clouds. He could not see the sun that this place had. He tried to jump, but felt heavy: he didn’t leave the ground, but fell over instead. He stood again. He heard gruff laughter and turned around. A guard stood outside the cage, and lazily indicated a ladder up its side: the guards had a ladder to get in and out of the cage.

Samuel tried to climb the bars of the cage and found that he could not make it; his torso seemed to be as dense as iron. He was too weak to hoist himself, or weighed more, or something. Despite being able to see, he felt as if he were struggling in a suffocating tangle of sheets. He stood and stared at the guard, who chuckled at his weakness.

Samuel walked over to the side of the cage next to the guard and tried to rip it apart. His arms strained and his anger beat ineffectively against the wood. The guard watched him coolly.

He strained harder. Samuel wanted desperately to escape the cage; he wanted desperately to find where they had taken the person who had helped keep him alive. He gasped and let his arms drop.

Then he heard screaming. A child was screaming somewhere: both he and the guard turned to look. There was a tent set up about fifty yards away. It was the biggest in a group of ten or twelve and the screaming came from inside of it.

Samuel tore harder at his cage. It was imperative that he escape: just the suggestion in his mind of what could be happening to the person who had fed him drove him into a frenzy. Before he was resigned to not doing it, but now he would not stop until either the cage or his very bones began to break. Suddenly he felt the cool wind in his mind again. A curious sensation took over his arms; it didn't quite feel like his arms grew stronger, but that the wood grew weaker. It tore reluctantly underneath his grip, like a stack of wet paper with splinters spraying off as it gave way.

The unarmed guard paused for a moment before running away and yelling for assistance. Samuel ignored him and tore the enclosure apart. He stepped outside as soon as he was able and took off toward the tent without noticing that the other prisoners were escaping as well. The cool wind didn’t leave his mind. He felt it, waiting. It was an unconscious presence, like a hand or a foot: he felt like he could manipulate it if he willed it, but unlike his extremities the cool wind was an unknown. Perhaps he felt this way the first time he had tried holding his breath. He didn’t know what was possible to him or what the consequences would be, now that this presence was helping him, but he couldn’t afford to waste time experimenting with it now.

He slid in the mud as he ran. The guard had roused others: Samuel felt something whiz past him, but didn’t realize that it was an arrow. He kept running.

When Samuel got to the tent, he heard yelling from the inside. The voice was one he recognized: for a moment, fear gripped Samuel and he stood frozen, afraid of the anger that now filled that voice. The hullabaloo in the encampment was apparently an aggravating interruption, driving that deep grumble to vicious shouts. The sobbing that Samuel heard under it renewed his courage, however: he heard a child crying, and anger again coursed through Samuel, blinding him to risk. He threw the flap that served as an entrance to the side and strode into the tent.

The stranger was standing there with a robe hanging around his shoulders. He had been in the process of tying it and was about to leave his tent and see what all of the shouting outside meant. His visible chest was shrunken and pale like his face. There was a small figure lying on the pallet behind the mage, but Samuel hardly noticed the child when faced with the demon. Incidentally, the child was female.

Samuel could guess what had been going on. Rape was not unheard of in his culture, although it almost never occurred. He felt a stab of hatred for the dark mage: however, it had infinitely more to do with his son’s death than the little girl crying softly in the same room.

Samuel’s fingers closed around the stranger’s neck as quickly as his thoughts closed upon the nature of the stranger’s actions. The stranger lifted his hand almost immediately and there was a blast of dark energy. Samuel felt pain ripple across his chest, and with the help of the cool wind in his head Samuel violently threw the stranger through the wall of the tent. Samuel looked down at his chest at the place where the darkness had hit him.

The attack had burned the rags, which fell away. Waves rippled across his skin—the layer of nano-machines…-thought Samuel. The pale layer undulated slowly as it absorbed the energy of the shock, with the waves stopping at his shoulders and neck. It felt like his skin was burning, but he knew he wasn’t injured. The cool wind blew more powerfully in his mind, and he understood. The nano-machines were utilizing the dark energy and had adapted themselves to it. This meant several things to Samuel.

First, it meant that Samuel was cloaked in the nano-machines. He had grown a layer over his skin, like Nirn, and this layer opened several possibilities to Samuel--many more than he could think of instantaneously, but he knew the possibilities were there, unidentified.

Secondly, the cool wind in his mind that didn’t speak with words wasn’t an entity or in his imagination; it was the nano-machines. They may have even built a node in my brain, wondered Samuel. This would have meant that his son had programmed them to build it with his dying thoughts.

As a third step, Samuel’s mind immediately focused on his son. His son had battled the dark mage; Nirn himself must have started using the energy that the dark mage released, or else the machines wouldn’t be so good at it already. This meant that his son probably hadn’t been killed by a blast of dark energy; the more they fought, the better Nirn and his nano-machines would have gotten at utilizing the energy. He came to the conclusion that the stranger had used his knife to murder Nirn, rather than his magic.

This entire thought process only took Samuel a second. He ignored the sobbing child in the tent as he ignored every other impediment to his task and followed the stranger outside. He would kill the dark mage. Samuel didn’t even pay attention to the other people who were standing nearby. The others in the encampment were too flabbergasted by the spectacle of a nude prisoner battling a partially-clothed and powerful mage to attack him.

As he walked toward the mage, who was just now standing up, Samuel’s anger fueled itself. Samuel felt the machines swirling around and within him; he felt the wind in his mind churning. The dark blast had strengthened the nano-machines.

The mage coughed from his earlier choking and helplessly blasted at Samuel: the first attack hit him in the chest, but Samuel absorbed it with a small grunt. The second blast would have hit him in the face, but Samuel caught it with his hand. Before the third blast, Samuel had the throat of the mage in his grasp once more. This time he didn’t hesitate: with a metaphorical nod form the wind in his mind, Samuel squeezed until blood gushed from the stranger’s mouth and neck, until he heard a snap and the body and head fell sickeningly apart. With the help of the 'machines, murder was literately as simple as snapping his fingers.

Before Samuel could even feel disgusted at the sight before him, he felt a flux of energy. It was as though someone had applied an electric current attached at both of his fingertips. The strengthening of the machines after the death was absurd; the dark mage released all of his energy as he lost his life, and the machines were capitalizing on it. They grew hot on Samuel’s skin as they changed themselves and improved. The wind in Samuel’s head became a gale, but before it could overwhelm him Samuel ordered it to stop.

The energy of the man’s death escaped, un-utilized. Samuel would have caught fire if he kept absorbing it. He looked down and willed the machines to discard the blood on his hands. The blood seemed to disappear and instantly his hands were clean.

Samuel looked around and saw that most of the others who had been living in the encampment were running away. They had seen him murder their boss and he didn’t blame them for running. He felt like he weighed nothing: the energy coursing through him made him feel like a giant. He had gone from partial consciousness and a weakened state to super-consciousness in the span of several minutes and he had super-strength to match. However, one battle-hardened thug didn't run away.

Samuel saw the glint of a sword just in time: a moment later and it would have hit his bare shoulder, perhaps splitting him from neck to hip, but he dodged and the sword whispered through air. Samuel had to dodge again: the swordsman made each swing fuel the next, so the swings came hard and fast. Samuel liked how easy he found it to dodge, but almost as soon as he realized how amazingly fast his reflexes had become he tripped over the body of the dark mage. After his stumble the third swing allowed the sword to barely touch Samuel's skin; it sparked as it cut the layer of 'machines, but the swordsman didn't hesitate.

Samuel, however, was scared by the sparking. The machines reported minimal damage, but he knew that such an attack could leave his flesh in rags if it truly made contact. He stuck out his hand and before he knew it, the wind in his mind responded to his distress by taking some of the energy absorbed by the mage and re-releasing it. There was a concussive blast that threw Samuel to the ground. He scrambled to his feet, his hand aching, a strong smell filling his nostrils.

The swordsman lay on the ground in a heap. Samuel asked, and the wind in his mind answered: the top layer of nano-machines on his hand had simply exploded, providing the energy to kill the man, and the lower layer of machines had hardened to shield Samuel from the blast. It was a response to unconscious desires of Samuel's, and Samuel inquired no further. He instead looked at the pile in front of him but immediately regretted it. He tried not to throw up. It all seemed so senseless, suddenly, and he momentarily felt foolish and weak. It was quite a sudden change from the elation he felt before; battle was a roller-coaster of emotions. The nanom-achines didn’t remove adrenalin from his blood and the chemical response left Samuel dazed. After a moment, he moved again.

Samuel walked into the tent: the sobbing child was there. Killing the mage had been straightforward. Killing the mage’s crony had been more unfortunate, but still necessary and obviously the right course of action despite how disgusting the results were. However, at this moment Samuel suddenly didn't know what to do. Samuel went to pick the child up, but noticed some robes on the ground. He remembered he was naked, but then a shock came: he hadn't noticed before that the nano-machines didn't follow his anatomy perfectly. He reflected that having some places smoothed over and concealed probably helped him in this situation, but it still made him uncomfortable to notice that he now appeared androgynous. Immediately the cool wind in his head confirmed that nothing was missing, and that was no small comfort. Samuel decided that changing the layout of machines wasn't his biggest priority, and put on one of the robes.

Samuel bent down. The child didn't resist as he wrapped her in a sheet and picked her up; he wondered if she weighed nothing or if the 'machines were aiding him. The nanomachines made themselves heard in his mind and he found that only moderate assistance was being offered. The child continued to sob, but apparently recognized him, and more amazingly trusted him. Perhaps, Samuel thought, she feels that her situation is too hopeless to necessitate resistance... or perhaps she reasons that I am not male. Samuel stopped wondering about the child's apparent apathy and refocused again. He grabbed an extra robe before quickly exiting the tent.

Samuel wasn't entirely sure what to do. He did not want to leave the child to her fate, however. He walked outside the tent: the place was deserted, but he wasted no time. He walked toward a growth of trees, nothing except escape and safety on his mind.

Samuel had not been walking through the trees for very long when the child tried to elude his grasp. He put her down, and she stood, facing him for a moment. He handed her the extra robe he had been carrying; although it was too large for the child, it worked. She left the sheet on the ground. She tried to speak to him. It was the same guttural language that the evil mage had spoken.

Samuel just stared at her for a moment. She stared back.

We will never be capable of communication at this rate. Samuel indicated himself, and said his name. The child understood immediately: she pointed at him and said “Sa-yule”, then pointed to herself and said “Rooz,”, or what sounded like it. The name involved a deep ooh noise that Samuel had a hard time copying. He said her name as ‘Ruse’, and she didn’t correct him. A few moments passed.

Ruse pointed toward a tree, and said ‘hau.’ Samuel had barely tried to say the word himself when Ruse pointed toward a rock and said another word. She started walking, pointing, and talking. Samuel could barely keep up.

Ruse went on without consideration for Samuel’s understanding. As he tried to keep up with the barrage of new words and the absurdity of the situation, Samuel studied the child that had saved his life. She had long brown hair that was very disheveled; it was in a state that he had never seen on a living person before, and Samuel thought that she must be very uncomfortable with such uncleanly hair. When she turned to see if he was following, he noticed that her eyes were also brown. She appeared to be around ten years old. He didn’t know if the people of this land aged as his had.

Samuel didn’t know the land, either. His colony had no trees or rocks. The farming layers had plants, but nothing like he was seeing in these woods. Samuel tried to absorb everything Ruse said; he had no words for many of the things she named.

They came to a place were water ran over the ground in a small stream. Samuel had not seen a stream before, but Ruse named it as “krahl” and immediately bent down to it. Samuel was shocked to see her drink from it. Before he got over his shock she straightened up and offered something to him.

It was a small cup made from a hard, white material. It was full of water. “Kra,” said Ruse. She pointed to the stream and said “krahl” again, then offered the cup and said “kra” once more. Samuel took the cup and remembered: Ruse must have used this cup to give him water in his earlier stupor. Samuel imagined her small hand clasped around the edge of the vessel and was amazed that she had managed to hold onto it through her whole ordeal. He drained the cup before continuing to study it. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by sensation.

Apparently, his curiosity had translated into an analysis by the nanomachines. He had instantly become aware that the cup was made of a complex of many carbon molecules and various minerals, predominantly calcium. He knew the molecular make-up of the parts of the cup he had come into contact with, but he also knew that the analysis was only very basic and that most of the structure’s molecular contents were unknown to him. He became aware that calcium itself was present in his own body, mostly in his bones, and that the cup was composed of a material much like his own bone.

A bone drinking vessel, Samuel thought. It wasn’t that the nanomachines had related terribly complex information; it was that they had relayed it in less than a tenth of a second. Not only that, but the composition of the cup wasn’t explained to Samuel in words but rather in sensation, which he never-the-less understood to mean certain elements and compounds. He thought about how the machines must have built wires out to many parts of his brain, and was amazed at their complexity and intelligence in their ability to make themselves understood. He could not fully understand how they did it; unfortunately, the machines tried to appease his curiosity. Sensations that he could not describe, even to himself, filled his mind and he felt that he would soon fall down.

Apparently Ruse had noticed his sudden dizziness, because she quickly snatched the cup out of Samuel’s hand and refilled it to offer him more water. He took the water and sat down, his mind clearing now that he had stopped wondering about it.

As Samuel sat contemplating the potential usefullness of his new form of perception, an animal appeared. He nearly jumped up in fright: it was only a few inches tall, but it was something Samuel had never seen before. It was a rabbit.

Samuel was just starting to calm down from his shock when a stone bounced off of the ground near the rabbit; it hurriedly jumped away. Samuel looked at Ruse incredulously, but she had jumped up to chase the rabbit. Samuel ran after her, but within moments the furry creature had totally escaped them.

Ruse seemed agitated. Samuel didn’t know why, but she when she saw him she started speaking quickly. He didn’t understand her until she pointed to her mouth.

Samuel was hungry too, though he couldn’t imagine eating the animal he saw. He had never seen anything like it, and since he had only ever eaten plants on the colony, he wouldn’t have thought to eat it. Indeed, the only living things he had been familiar with were human beings. He pondered it as they started walking again.

The nanomachines told him that he had been eating a material other than plants for the last several days: as Ruse sadly led him further into the woods, Samuel realized he had probably been eating bits of other organisms. He didn’t waste much time wondering about whether it was okay to eat other living things. Hunger stifled his objections.

Incidentally, he had been eating mostly bugs. If he ever learned this, it would not disgust him: only intrigue him. He didn’t know of any animals, so far, except for the rabbit.

The next time they saw a rabbit Samuel killed it with a rock. He could throw a lot harder with the aid of the machines and his aim was impeccable. However, after killing it, he was at a loss. Ruse tried to explain something to him, but he couldn’t understand her; she kept rubbing two sticks together and indicating the rabbit.

Some of the colonists had known how to cook: even though it was completely unnecessary, they learned the archaic skill. Samuel had spoken with them before and he knew that cooking required heat. He decided to try an experiment with the nanomachines.

A few minutes later Samuel had learned some things. First of all, he could heat things by willing the machines to release infrared radiation. Secondly, fire was quite an amazing thing. Finally, burning rabbit smelled terrible: he hadn’t taken the fur off of it, so it stank. However, with the help of Ruse he eventually found a part of the small animal he could eat.

As he gnawed on a leg of the creature (which Ruse had dexterously and also slightly disgustingly tore the skin off of), Samuel learned from the nanomachines that they had been aiding him in digestion, so that the various microbes in the meat didn’t kill him. In fact, he sensed, the air was positively teeming with small organisms that would kill him without the interference of the nanomachines. He was glad that the machines had stopped this threat without his input.

That wasn’t all that the machines had done. Apparently, rather than bother him with having to void himself, the machines simply broke down everything that his digestive system couldn’t and absorbed the material from his intestinal track. He became aware that the machines were releasing excess elements into the air as gasses: the gasses were largely inert, so no smell was produced. Samuel wondered why Nirn had not told him about the nanomachines’ ability in this area.

Thinking of Nirn gave Samuel such a pang of regret that he immediately thought about something else. Samuel decided to name the nanomachines. He was going to be dealing with them for a very long time, so naming them seemed prudent. After several minutes of walking with Ruse he decided to call them his Acid Mantel, after the layer of acid he knew to cover every human being’s skin to protect them from infection. Considering how the nanomachines have been aiding my immune system, this seems like an appropriate name…Acid Mantel. Samuel thought that people seldom treated their acid mantel like an arm or a leg, but his situation warranted special attention. He continued to follow Ruse.

As the day wore on, Samuel’s state of mind continued to be nowhere near stable. He was caught between the distress of being in a completely foreign environment and amazement at the lushness of that environment. He was filled with wonder, and the sadness of losing his son and his home only overcame him when he stopped wondering about his new location. He very seldom, over the next several hours, stopped wondering.

When they passed through a clearing, Samuel looked toward the sky. It was still cloudy, but a bright spot could be seen among the clouds. He pointed to the sun: Ruse offered the word “Ahl”. This was the easiest word for Samuel to learn, as the sun was the most fascinating aspect of his situation. Samuel knew of only one living star, yet found another one above him. He had no explanations for this.

Ruse and Samuel continued their trek, though Samuel had no idea where they were going. Eventually, as night set Ruse did a very strange thing. She made a circle of stones, filled it with small sticks, and kept redirecting Samuel’s attention toward it. It took him a long time to realize that she was imitating the motions he had made when he set the rabbit on fire: when he finally set the sticks alight, Ruse was gleeful. She hugged him and sat down. Samuel sat down next to her.

Samuel marveled at the industrious nature of this child. Despite being so young, she obviously knew a lot about surviving in this place. He wished he could ask her about her age, but he felt that such a complex concept would be impossible to convey. Instead, he eventually stretched out beside the fire and stared at the sky. There were many, many shimmering points, all unfamiliar to Samuel.

The stars kept him awake that first night.

Ruse and Samuel traveled for the next several days. Ruse seemed to have an idea of where she wanted to go. The sun always set at their backs, and Samuel supposed that it would set on the same side of the planet every day.

Samuel had guessed that they were on a planet of some sort. He had never seen one himself, but the colony had many histories and he remembered the concept. He vaguely felt that a planet perfect for human life occurring randomly was extremely unlikely, but since he had a human being leading him and that human being’s existence was probably equally unlikely, he didn’t worry too much about how absurd his predicament was. He also avoided thinking of his son’s death: he couldn’t face that aspect of the new reality he found himself in.

Instead, he learned the names of everything he saw. Trees, rocks, animals and everything else: it was a lot of information to absorb immediately. His AM were helping him remember the words, as they could store information temporarily using their own systems, but he wanted a more permanent and massive place to store information. He had decided to build a storage place in his skull. With a cubic centimeter of space he wouldn’t forget anything ever again. Unfortunately, accessing the new device gave him a headache: he tried to learn the words as fast as possible, the old-fashioned way, so that he could avoid accessing the device.

He learned fast. He still couldn’t talk to Ruse in her own language, but already he could name a great deal of things which he encountered. He felt vaguely proud about it.

He also was starting to enjoy hunting and cooking, which he improved at. By making a fire, he could heat the animals at a more time-consuming but also more pleasing rate. He killed rabbits and birds with ease: Ruse ate very well, and Samuel found that he didn’t have to eat much. The nanomachines which helped him hunt also made him hunger less than average. However, before Samuel could really become enthralled with the sport something happened to change his view on it.

He encountered a deer. The deer itself wasn’t inspiring. It was just a bigger version of the rabbit to Samuel. A bigger and faster version: before Samuel had straightened himself with a rock, it was running wildly away. No small amount of luck was involved in Samuel hitting it with a rock, but the deer was much stronger than a rabbit and it kept running even after the impact. Ruse and Samuel chased it for a time, but they both knew it had escaped.

Later that day, they encountered it again. Ruse elbowed Samuel and slowly indicated the deer; it was standing on the other side of a clump of bushes and it was the same one as before, as evidenced by the bloody wound it was licking on its side. Samuel immediately understood that Ruse was trying to be stealthy and that the deer had not noticed them. Samuel slowly bent and searched for a rock. He found one and tried to raise it as silently as possible. He pulled his arm back and willed more power into the nano-machines: by taking his time, he was building the energy and required force to kill the deer. The cream-colored nano-machines swirled and a thick tendon formed, rippling silently under his robe. The tendon looked like a coiled snake prepared to strike.

Something alerted the deer, however, and it jumped to escape just as Samuel let the his own energy flee, convulsively snapping his arm down and forward to cause the rock to shoot toward its target. Instead of striking the deer in the head, where Samuel had hoped to hit it, the rock smashed into the deer’s front leg. The deer landed and the leg crumpled.

Samuel’s arm hurt: he had yanked it too forcibly. Even with the AM attempting to minimize the effect of the movement, the speed had been too much and his arm had been injured. It felt like a bruise was spreading over his shoulder and his joints ached after the attack.

However, his pain was nothing compared to that of the deer. Its shattered foreleg hindered its first few steps and the creature bellowed in pain. The deer started lopsidedly hobbling away while stifling its cries. It could not outrun Samuel, who began to chase it the moment he stopped considering how much his arm hurt.

Just as Samuel was approaching the deer it kicked viciously, but missed. Samuel felt the leg that could have punctured his skull slide past his cheek: the deer fell down forward, unable to support itself on it's broken leg, and lay on the ground. It foamed at the mouth as it wheezed and stared up at Samuel, wide-eyed.

Samuel stared back at the creature. If its final attack had landed, had hit him in the eye or even the forehead, the AM would not have been able to save him. The deer would have killed him and lived. As he stared back at it, he realized the amount of pain he had caused it: his own arm hurt, but the deer was facing a lot more than a simple sprain. Yet, it had nearly managed to kill him. He kept replaying that idea over in his head: the deer, a creature he had never encountered before, had nearly killed him. The full irony of the situation hit him like a hammer.

It wasn’t until several moments later that Samuel realized all that had passed through his mind. He had stomped on the deer’s head reflexively as it doggedly tried to stand once again, never giving up on that chance of living until Samuel literately ended the its life. Samuel stared at the blood on his foot and thought about the situation and why he suddenly felt so sick. The nanomachines silently cleaned the blood, but offered no consolation.

The deer had died at the hands of a strange being coming ruthlessly to kill it. Just as Nirn had; was Samuel any different, in this situation, when compared to the dark sorcerer? Was his intention of eating the deer any better than whatever had prompted the dark fiend to kill his son? Samuel fell to his knees. He suddenly felt very numb. The deer’s life energy brushed against the nanomachines as it dispersed, much softer than the mage's, but still detectable.

Samuel felt like he had committed murder. It was strange to him; to think that he had killed the dark sorcerer and his henchman with less sympathy. He had seen each of them merely as a willful enemy. The deer, however, had been in the same situation as Nirn and Samuel. The deer hadn’t chosen to kill or be pursued. This deer brought it home to Samuel how terrible death was, how terrible the loss of his son was, how terrible random chance was to those who had to face it. He broke down into tears.

Ruse didn’t approach the bloody scene until she saw Samuel start to cry. He felt her small arm around his shoulders and looked toward her face: her eyes were closed, and she was obviously shaken as well. He let his head fall again and continued to sob. She slowly encouraged him to stand and walk away. They left the deer for whatever animal would come to get it in their absence.

Ruse went without meat for several days after the event. She silently understood that Samuel did not want to kill. She ate what plants and berries she could find and did not encourage Samuel to hunt, but after a few days of hunger the pain in each of their stomachs was mounting. Their pace did not slow, but their hunger grew to match it as days stretched.

Finally, Samuel accepted that he and Ruse had to eat. He might be able to outlast starvation for a very long time, but Ruse did not have nanomachines and would succumb soon if Samuel did nothing. The next animal they encountered was a bird; he gave a silent prayer to himself and to the creature for forgiveness as he bent to retrieve the stone.

One day after weeks of travel, Ruse suddenly knew where they were. They had chanced upon a road; Samuel thought of it as a river of rock, as he had no idea what roads would be used for. Ruse seemed very excited when she found it. She led Samuel to the right on the road and Samuel guessed it's purpose. Their travel was so much easier upon it that he supposed roads were meant for travel. Periodically Ruse would suddenly run from the road to hide in the trees. Samuel would follow her and he would notice caravans passing. The caravans consisted of wooden carts being pulled by animals even bigger than deer and Samuel didn't know what to make of them; he remembered how powerful the deer was and decided that keeping one's distance from such creatures was a good idea. He could only gather that the people he sometimes saw walking beside the carts were evil, because Ruse avoided them as much as possible. He also noticed that no matter how well he hid or how silently he stood, the other travelers would often glance toward the woods in his direction with unease.
Samuel was starting to feel uneasy himself. They had passed a great deal of people, and yet Ruse still seemed concerned. Was he really in a land where the people were that dangerous?
They followed the road, and others connected to it, for four days before Ruse led them off onto a trail that swished into the setting sun. Ruse had named directions: this direction, the West, was the direction they had come from. They had been traveling to the East until now, and Samuel was confused about why they turned around, but his limited vocabulary didn't allow him to voice his question to Ruse. It wasn't that he couldn't get his question across: he knew the answer would be spoken in words he could not understand. This had happened a few times before and he had learned to avoid it.

Night fell, but Ruse didn't stop to make camp. The going was rough by starlight, so Samuel figured out a way around the darkness.The nanomachines could glow, and he cast a soft beam of light forward with his right palm. As he concentrated to make the machines produce the beam the definition and brightness of the beam increased until it was quite easy to continue traveling.
The sun was starting to rise again when they finally reached a small stone hut. Samuel was intrigued: it was his first chance to observe architecture other than the colony he had lived in, and like the road he couldn't guess it's purpose. He supposed that it was artificial because his experience with rocks suggested that they could not stack themselves or lay mortar. Also, he saw a man standing just outside the door.
Ruse eagerly ran toward the man. He was very old; Samuel had never seen a person with so many wrinkles. Samuel had started to walk up when the man shouted a barked order; he didn't understand the word but he stopped. The old man seemed satisfied with this and embraced Ruse, even though the frown never left his face. He started conversing with the child in their language.
Samuel didn't understand, of course, but he would have been very interested to hear that first conversation.
"I am glad to see you alive. Who is the demon?"
"He is not a demon. He destroyed the evil men."
"How did he do that?"
"Magic." The old man glanced at Samuel for a few long moments, then looked back at Ruse.
"Of course. Are you sure he is not a demon? Is he a slaver? What does he want?"
"I don't know. He doesn't speak."
"Has he done anything to you?"
"He gave me food. He hunts." The old man stared at Ruse for a few moments before beckoning to Samuel. When Samuel was three paces away, he motioned for him to stop. The old man began to examine him, but wouldn't get closer than a few feet. "You should see him throw rocks and light," added Ruse.
Samuel recognized the word rock. He pointed to the stone hut and said the word: he didn't know how to pluralize it, but even if he did the old man still would have flinched.
"I thought he didn't speak!" said the old man.
"I have given him a few words..." said Ruse.
"I can see that," replied the old man. He watched Samuel start touching the mortar between the irregularly shaped bricks.
Ruse and the old man talked for several minutes while Samuel examined the house. He was intrigued by the mortar and its chemical contents, and he spent several minutes just touching it. He then noticed wooden slats arranged in a square, but before he could get around to the door Ruse was shouting at the old man. Samuel watched; he supposed that she trusted the old man, and felt that if she were in trouble he would be able to step in at any moment anyway. Sure enough, the old man calmed Ruse. A few moments later, the old man opened the door and showed Samuel into his hut.

OOC: I am sorry for the delay that my story has experienced. Due to the lack of feedback, I theorize that only two people ever read this thread, so to you two readers I offer my constant travel, lack of internet, and overall business as an excuse. I will write on this story whenever I feel like it and may never finish it but who knows. Thank you for your understanding.

The hut had only a single room: within moments Samuel had observed every aspect of it from the low bed to the table covered in strange objects. The objects were candles, a knife, a bow and drill, a tanned hide, and other common utensils that never-the-less confused Samuel. He didn't continue to examine them.
The old man gestured to the floor several times and eventually made himself understood: Samuel should sleep there. Samuel had no objection to that. He was exhausted, so falling asleep between the two woolen rugs he found on the floor was not difficult. He preferred the rugs to sleeping in the open air.
Samuel awoke late the next day. The child and old man were gone. Light crept in unhurriedly through the single window as Samuel stood up. He hesitantly walked outside the door.
While waiting for his two mysterious benefactors to return, Samuel examined the mortar on the house again. It puzzled him; the chemical make-up was basically that of dirt, with a variety of organic compounds, but many more chemicals appeared in it as well. It contained calcium and silicon; the mud was hardened by the addition of these two elements. He could not accept it being a natural phenomenon, and yet had difficulty imagining the old man possessing the knowledge to utilize the chemicals' strength.
Ruse and the old man returned with a dead rabbit and an armful of plant stems and roots each. They walked past Samuel to deposit these things in the hut, and he patiently watched them busy themselves. Ruse ran outside, but rather than follow her Samuel watched the old man. It became evident that the old man would continue to remain busy when he started chopping the stems with a flint knife. He slowly and methodically tossed the stems into an iron pot. Samuel interrupted him.
"Rock," said Samuel in the alien tongue. He scraped some of the mortar off, and said "mud" questioningly. His vocabulary did not extend much beyond that. The old man smiled at his curiosity.
"This is too difficult to explain," said the old man. Samuel only looked tentatively confused. "Here, look at this:" with that, he named the tool he was using. "This is a knife. This is cutting." He handed the knife to Samuel.
Samuel recorded everything that the man said. He looked at the knife.
"Knife," said the man. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, "Cutting."
"Knife..." said Samuel. He ran the blade along his finger-tip with no pressure. "Cutting."
"Not cutting," said the old man. He handed Samuel a stem, "Cutting." Samuel cut it.
Such was learning a new language. Unlike Ruse, however, the old man started explaining verbs that went along with nouns. The knife would cut, the bow and drill would bore, the candles would burn. Samuel found that it was easier to learn with the old man. After about thirty minutes of inept exchange, the old man named himself.


"Creet." he said. "I am Creet."
Samuel pointed at the old man and said "I am creet."
"No. Sayul." Samuel didn't catch on immediately. "I am, Creet," said the old man, emphasizing himself with each word. He then indicated Samuel.
"I am... Samuel." Despite being over fifty years old, Samuel had a gleefully childish look on his face for several moments. "I am Samuel."

Samuel spent the rest of the day following Creet around. He was grateful that the old man tolerated his presence and named so many things, but he did notice one peculiar thing; Creet would never stand closer than three feet away from Samuel. Samuel thought of it as a bizarre social custom and didn't worry too much about it, but he took special care once he noticed to remain distant from the old man.

By the second day, Creet had obviously grown somewhat weary of Samuel's constant questioning. When Samuel awoke, Creet gave him a very simple job. He was to gather wood. So far they had used a crude fireplace in the hut twice; both times to heat water and make a soup of the vegetables that Creet and Ruse gathered every morning. Samuel set out with Ruse to gather wood for this fire.

Samuel had been chemically analyzing every substance he encountered, including firewood. He found that its water content could vary greatly, so he looked for sticks that were dry so that they would burn better. He also realized to avoid rotten sticks when Ruse led him to a toppled tree. She hefted a small fallen log and struck the tree's corpse, knocking its limbs to the ground. Ruse enjoyed battering the branches off while Samuel and his AM anaylzed the rot forming on a branch. He decided to try an experiment; Samuel and his AM chemically scrubbed the branch, removing water and many simple compounds from the wood, with the intent of making it better for combustion. He was impressed by the wide variety of poisons and alcohols even a simple branch produced, though in minute amount.
It made him hungry, though. The work of the AM required energy; before he knew it, he had accidentally dissolved the entire piece of wood, sapping the energy that normally would have allowed it to burn. He absorbed the stick like a tissue would absorb a blot of water; the nano-machines pulled it in and apart without hesitation. He saw a slight shimmer as the atoms that had been the wood evaporated out, now carbon dioxide and water.
Ooops... thought Samuel, I'm glad Ruse didn't see that. None-the-less, Samuel couldn't help himself; he hefted a rock, and tried to absorb it too. He found that the rock, though containing interesting silicates and even some carbon compounds, had no energy for him. It would take more energy to break down than he would get out of it... and yet he was curious about its contents.
At this point, Ruse started to pick up the sticks she had knocked to the ground. Samuel quit his experimentation to help her.

Over the next several days Samuel learned how to do several small chores. He cleaned the fire-place, gathered wood and food, even helped re-apply some mortar for the house. Samuel didn't know it, but his added effort justified the pains that Creet went through in order to try and teach him the language. However, it wasn't until the eighth day that Samuel truly gave Creet and Ruse a benefit.
He had an experiment that he had been planning for the better part of a day. He asked Creet and Ruse to sit with him at the table, and began.

"I can have onion, and knife?" asked Samuel. He didn't understand the grammar of the new language, but he would get there eventually. Creet indicated the items on the table and Samuel took them. He then pulled out several small white rocks he had gathered from the surrounding area. Samuel had chosen these rocks specifically; they contained both iron and titanium.
Samuel didn't know how to warn Creet and Ruse, so he didn't. The AM slid off of his right hand and enveloped the onion; Ruse leaned in with fascination while Creet's eyes narrowed. Samuel did not see their expressions, however; his eyes were closed in concentration.
Quickly, he took the knife in his left hand, and brought his hands closer together. The AM thinned over his entire body to surround the onion, rocks and knife in tan-colored sacks that vaguely resembled their contents. Veins of nano-machines formed, connecting the onion to the rocks, and the 'machines flowed as invisible blood linking the two. Ruse and Creet saw fins rising off of his hands; the fins dissipated heat, and the bulge representing the onion diminished. More veins formed. These veins linked the knife with the rocks; as the onion disappeared, material steadily dripped through those veins to the waiting knife.
Samuel had studied the knife; he knew that it was mostly iron, but it was very impure and prone to oxidation. A red stain that was too reminiscent of blood already plagued it. He also knew how Creet used a crude whet-stone to sharpen it when it grew dull.
Samuel thought that he could improve the knife. Ruse and Creet did not see it, but he was dissolving and burning the onion to gather the energy needed to dissolve and burn the Ilmenite rocks, and then purifying the knife with the minerals. He coated the new steel knife with titanium, knowing that it would not rust as quickly, and he dissolved and released every other element that he found unnecessary. Controlling the machines on such a fine level was mentally exhausting. The five minutes that it took to remake the knife felt like an hour to Samuel.
The look on Ruse's face when he presented the improved knife, however, made the hour worth it to him. The new knife glinted like a precious stone; Samuel could detect no menace in it, but Ruse (though inspired) did not try to take the wickedly sharp knife. Creet took it instead; he examined the blade for a few short seconds before turning toward Samuel. Creet studied him quietly.

Despite how hard he was searching, Samuel could not see what Creet wanted him to see. He had been looking and analyzing the stone for the last three days; he knew it's molecular structure and the presence of any atoms within it, but he couldn't explain this to Creet anyway. Creet only told him that he would learn a lesson from the stone, and that his training could not continue until he learned it.
For the past five months, Samuel had been learning from Creet. He had not merely learned language: Creet was teaching Samuel the basics of survival, and about magic. Samuel knew that Creet understood the energies that Nirn had tapped, and Samuel respected that. He had become Creet's apprentice. So far, Creet's efforts had only succeeded in confusing Samuel.
The past few months had been exceedingly enjoyable for Samuel. He missed his son dearly... but he strangely did not miss anything else about his previous life. It felt to him as though he had waken from a strange dream, a dream in which he was half-zombie, and now he was in the real world. On the few occasions where he burst into tears while remembering his lost son, he was quickly comforted by the knowledge that he had succeeded in both avenging his son's death and preserving the technology his son created. Even so, at other times he felt a strange loneliness and foreboding that had nothing to do with his son. At these times he distracted himself with the AM and learned as much as possible about the chemical structure of everything around him. He also tried experiments on a small scale. After the knife, Creet had warned him about trying anything too large.
The warning came in the form of a challenge. As soon as the idea could be communicated, Creet had challenged Samuel to repeat the demonstration on another knife. He had given Samuel the exact same ingredients and set up, except for two differences. First, the onion was much larger. Second, Creet yanked it out from Samuel's grasp halfway through the procedure; the long stem enabled him to do this.
While Samuel watched the partially dissolved onion fall apart into a mass of twisted veins and sheets of tissue, he felt a vast but short-lived nausea and pain. The nausea came from the gases emitted by the onion. The pain came from the sensation of a part of his AM dying as it starved without the source of energy. It was only a few moments' agony, as the machines corrected the problem as quickly as he thought that they should stop. "This could be you," Creet said while he indicated the onion. He tapped his forehead fiercely and left the hut, his meaning obvious.
Be careful while playing with your magic.
Samuel himself had warned Nirn of this risk involving nano-machines. It smarted to have to be reminded himself, but he supposed that it would hurt much more to forget. He was more careful, and less comfortable, after that lesson.

Samuel pushed the memory from his mind and tried to focus. The stone was a whitish gray, like many other stones he had found. It was made of carbonates and calcium; unremarkable. It lay in small piles in front of a gray cliff face. He had so far found no use for the substance in three days of experimentation and chemical analysis.
Today, Samuel contented himself with simply looking at the lackluster material. He turned several specimens over in his hand, contemplative. The chemicals were commonplace and worthless and the stone itself was somewhat weak. It might work as bricks. Samuel thought hard, and decided that perhaps the stones had aesthetic value, like the feathers that Ruse sometimes hoarded after taking a bird. He knew that some feathers were more interesting than others, so he began to examining one gray rock after another.
The chemical analysis had not required that he examine more than two of the rocks. After a few minutes of just examining the stones, he found something he hadn't noticed before. He had been looking at the rock on the wrong scale.
A pattern of lines rippled across one gray stone. Samuel quickly bombarded it with nano-machines; the stone was the exact same composition as the others, and yet had a shape unnatural to them. He continued to examine it, and he noted the similarity between the markings on the rock and the spread of veins across a leaf. And yet, Samuel thought, this rock has no need of veins... do plants spring from rocks? The spread of strange lines wasn't quite like a normal leaf either, in that the veins looked grainy and too thick.
Samuel searched and found many other examples. It was not until he found an animal's shape inside of a rock that he noticed the faint trace of energy left in the stones. It certainly wasn't evil magic. As his AM analyzed the stone, the energy felt like a slight itch against his fingertips; a coating of dust on a long-unread tome. It tingled, and not entirely pleasantly.
***
Samuel showed his findings to Creet, who explained that the rocks contained long dead animals that got trapped in the stone before it became stone. Such a long dead creature was called a fossil. This explanation made little sense to Samuel, but he had no other. Creet seemed grimly pleased with Samuel's discovery, but urged him to look harder. There was more that Samuel had to see.

Samuel started studying the cliff once he had exhausted his ingenuity on the rocks themselves. The outermost edge of it was worn in many places, but wherever the rock had broken off sharp edges made themselves known. Samuel decided to send tendrils of nano-machines between the cracks in the rocks. When the cracks ended he bored a tube into the rock, and carefully marshaled his energy while doing it. As long as he was careful, the sugar in his blood would be the only cost of his actions.

There was another sheet of rock behind the first, right at the extent of Samuel's control over the nano-machines. The second sheet was composed of the exact same material as the gray rock, except crystallized. With much concentration, Samuel managed to get a chunk of it pulled out. The stone was harder and icy white. Its crystals contained much more chemical energy than the commonplace rocks that Samuel had found on the surface. In fact, he found that the nano-machines could not reliably produce this material because the forces required were too great. He could make small crystals, but even to make a pebble such as the one he had retrieved would require more energy than he had.

It irked Samuel that he could not produce this material himself. He had gotten used to the AM being easily capable of making any chemical he desired: when it came to organic compounds, there was not a problem. This crystal was beyond him, however. He did not attempt to produce very much of it so as to avoid a loss of energy.
Over the next several days, Samuel bored out the first layer of stone. He did not tell Creet about his discovery until he had dug the cave back 80 centimeters, and he came across the layer of white rock. He wanted to examine it himself, and he wanted to find what had supplied the energy for the creation of the second layer. He could not find it despite revealing almost a square meter of the surface.
Finally Samuel brought Creet to see his discovery. Creet immediately sat down in front of the hole, where Samuel joined him.
"The lesson here is one that is difficult to see by yourself, but you have found all of the parts." A pause. "What is the difference between the rock on the outside and the inside?"
"The atoms inside the inner layer are closer together. The inner layer is stronger than the outer layer because of this. It is much harder and more... like water in... the way they shine..." Samuel hadn't learned a word for lustrous.
"I am not concerned with the adoms that you keep mentioning." Samuel had as much difficulty explaining chemistry to Creet as Creet had explaining magic to Samuel. "You are correct in what you haven't said, however."
"What haven't I said?"
"That the rock in the inner layer is the same rock as the outer layer."
"Er, they are made of the same..." Samuel's voice dropped off before he said atoms. He wasn't sure where Creet was going with this.
"The outer rock is limestone. The inner is marble. But they are the same rock, except marble is older. There are other differences between them. What are those differences?"
"The outer rock... limestone is more vulnerable to rain. Marble is made of more in less space..." Samuel was describing density. Creet looked expectant, and slowly turned a small gray rock over and over in his hand. "Marble does not have any stone plants or animals in it," Samuel said suddenly. "It also has no magical energy in it."
" That is right. It has no living magic in it. But it is stronger." Another pause. "The limestone formed when many creatures died. Their bones weighed heavily, and were buried in the ground. The ground transformed them into stone, then threw them back up. Later, they sank again, deeper and with more weight and age. The ground transformed them yet again, and squeezed them so hard that the echoes of the life they had before vanished. They became marble.
"The next time the stone falls into the ground, it will fall so deep and with such weight that it is destroyed. That is something different; right now, you can see how the earth has changed them so far. At first they were soft and dead. They hardened once with pressure and became living stone, with whispers of their past existence. Of a life before they died, and of a new life as stone. They hardened again with pressure and heat, and became dead stone with a heavy beauty and strength." Creet let Samuel think in silence. Samuel broke the silence after several minutes.
"How do you know all of this?"
"I asked the stone."
"How? And how can you hear its reply?" Creet sighed.
"It troubles me that you can eat this energy and not taste it..." Samuel remembered the dusty sensation but did not try to correct Creet; that sensation was far from coherent. "The reply is in the energy, the asking is in taking it. I knew that you would not get the answer so quickly and by yourself, but I do not have years to teach you this lesson. I let you find the body of the answer, and explained the spirit, to which you are deaf."
Samuel understood. The things he had noticed--the fossils, the differences in the rock and their similar composition, and the nature of the rocks themselves all supported Creet's explanation. Samuel had found the 'what', and Creet had given him a 'why'. Samuel went on:
"The animals and then the stone changed every time it died. The pressure made them different in appearance, but they are just further along. They are different ages, and are different stones, but they are the same thing. Also, it took a lot of energy to change them. This energy... it came from the ground?"
"Yes. From the earth, and from being buried. In fact, when animals and humans die, they are buried in the same way. There is another thing I must tell you." Samuel waited expectantly. "Marble and limestone are valuable. Limestone was used to make the mortar holding my home together. I am surprise you did not notice. Beyond that, however, others like to use these materials in making bricks for their homes. Marble in particular is valuable; if other people suspected it was behind the limestone in this cliff, they would tear it open--as you have done--and then cart it away."
Samuel asked "Would that prevent the marble from being destroyed?" Creet laughed.
"What does destroyed mean..." Samuel knew of rhetorical questions. "No. Water would eventually destroy it, if the earth did not get it. But you know that either way, it isn't really being destroyed." Samuel smiled--he had indeed thought that there was more after the rock fell deep into the ground. He had a dozen more questions to ask, but Creet stood up. "I will offer no more explanations. Consider what I have shown you. It took you five days to see the body of this lesson, and I have given you some of the spirit. In five days more, you will tell me what else you have discovered. There is another place I would like to have you look at."

The new place was also a cliff of white stone. Within the first few minutes Creet left and Samuel learned that this stone was made of silicates and water, not calcium and carbonates. He examined it for fossils and found none. It was completely unlike the marble and limestone in composition.
Samuel tested to see if this cliff was layered like the previous outcropping of limestone and marble. He found that, although the line indicating the different layers was less defined, the rock changed quickly as he examined deeper within the cliff.
Rather than boring into it with his AM, Samuel was simply hitting the cliff-face with a heavy stone. The rock chipped away as he did it, and his quick analysis had indicated that boring into it with the AM would not be worth the effort.
As Samuel cracked the stone open, he found that several centimeters into the cliff face the stone's color had changed to a wet-looking black. It became darker and denser. The hidden stone chipped in small teardrop shapes as he smashed it. Samuel examined some of the chips.
The deeper rock contained less water. It had not crystallized at all, which was unusual for the rocks Samuel had found. That single difference gave him quite a bit to think about. He was examining volcanic glass.

"This rock is heading the other way," said Samuel. Creet listened expectantly; Samuel had not asked him for help or advice for five whole days. "The limestone and marble are destined to fall into the ground, but this stone is destined to scatter on top of it. Great heat formed it. It was violently thrust from the earth, and will likely become sand that coats the surface. It is going to be destroyed by the water in the air." Samuel stopped.
"You have seen much, and perhaps you are not as blind as I supposed. I have a story that goes with this rock as well."
"Tell it."
"This rock contains the anger of the soil. It is sharp and dangerous. One time, before men had metal to shape, this rock was precious to them as the sharpest they could find. It is called obsidian.
"The obsidian was used to tip arrows, and hunters rejoiced at its existence. It could bite through tough animal hide and kill, bringing those who could shape it and use it much food and happiness. But humans are also animals; it wasn't long before they turned the weapons upon each other, fighting to keep such stone to themselves." Samuel listened expectantly. Something about the story made him shift nervously as he listened.
"Arrows do not work as well on men as on animals; animals are distant, whereas humans are near and do not leave much time for notching an arrow. In mind of this, obsidian was made into a new form. Many long points were gouged from it, and these points were embedded in a club which then became a toothed sword. The glass blades produced this way would not merely kill a man; they would saw through him and leave a corpse unrecognizable, broken. Such a blade would only get three swings. Obsidian, despite its anger, is very brittle toward such violence. The rock contains the same energy that transforms limestone, and destroys marble, so neither the stone nor its victims can survive when that energy is unleashed by the hand of man." Samuel shivered. This story was making him very uncomfortable.
"The coming of metals, bronze and iron, was rejoiced as fervently as the coming of obsidian. These metals are hard enough to form armor and the armor resists the angry glass, even if the metals can never be as sharp as obsidian. Men could forget, and no longer needed, their ability to cleave with the frustration of the earth. Obsidian is now only used for arrows again." Creet paused for several moments and then continued in a different tone of voice.
"You are right, it will be destroyed by its exposure. The water dilutes its anger and turns it into placid sand, or thick clay. It is truly the opposite of the limestone, but this part of the lesson is secondary." Creet stood up. "There is one final thing I must tell you, but not now. Tomorrow. You will think and dream on this tonight." He walked away, leaving Samuel in a cold and confused huddle. Samuel carefully held a small shard of glass. He didn't know why the story had moved him so, but he wanted to find out.

Samuel tossed and turned that night. He had been unable to fall asleep for several hours; Creet's words bounced around in his head alongside visions of obsidian swords and strips of flesh wrapped around glass shards. His skin tingled beneath the AM, and his head pounded. He knew that Creet had been talking about more than mere stones.
He dreamt that a long thin spike of black glass had broken off in the back of his head.

"Good morning, Samuel. You did not sleep."
"No." No response. "I am ready for what you have to tell me."
"Before I tell you, I would like to ask you a few things. I know the answers already, but I want to ask."
"Alright."
"Do feel cold when you use your second skin?" Creet wouldn't and couldn't understand that his 'second skin' was not a part of Samuel. Samuel felt his spirits sinking.
"No. Not usually."
"What do you see when you look at you at it?"
"A copy of my skin."
"Is your second skin keeping you alive?"
"Yes. Without it, I will be killed by..." he was going to say bacteria, viruses, poisons. Afflictions of the flesh, infections, starvation, anything but what he now said-- "..by the nature of your world."
"Samuel. When I first saw you, I thought about notching my bow and killing you before I knew you. But you brought back my granddaughter: I thought I might have to pay a price for her, or bargain with a demon. I waited and you asked neither, and Ruse insisted on your innocence."
"Creet--"
"You do not see what I see, but you obviously have felt it. Somewhere. I can see that you know it in the way that you frown. You are a brother to the obsidian. What your son thought would be an arrow to bring happiness and food to your people is instead a sword being hefted against another world. My world. Everywhere you walk, you leave tatters behind you. You cannot see them or feel them. I can. And yet you are not like obsidian, which is just the anger of the earth before the sky can dilute it. And you are not like a sword-- you have been too gentle and too mindful for that." Creet did not speak for a few moments, but Samuel had nothing to say. Creet continued; "I have let you sleep in my home, and I have taught you words. You are also a brother of the limestone and the marble... you can take once-living material and turn it into dead, but beautiful stone. You can shape existence with that second skin, but you have only satisfied your curiosities up until now. You have done nothing malicious at all. You learn faster than any man or child I've met. I cannot bring myself to believe you are evil."
"Thank you."
"There is more. I will not be the only one to feel and see... the tatters. Even now, there are magi in this world that know something is amiss. They will eventually know where you are; these scars you leave behind will grow deeper in the consciousness of every living being."
"But when they see what I can do--with knives and with stones, and when they see how I can cast light from my fingertips, won't they accept me as a blessing as you did?"
"You are not a blessing. I have let you live, but the shreds left in your wake are not justifiable."
"...they will come to kill me, won't they? I have to fear constant death..." Samuel's head hung.
"As any other creature. But, more even than those who would destroy you, fear those who wouldn't." Samuel looked up. "There are always those who would bargain with demons. Or try to use them." This comment gave Samuel pause.
"What can I do?"
"There are two things you can do. You can leave, and you can fight. If you are to survive, you will have to do both. And I will help you prepare for these things."
"Why?"
"You are not evil. And one day, you may even make it back to your home... to be doomed alongside your people. I will not deny you that, just as I would not keep the marble from the earth or the obsidian from the air. I will help you to leave this place."

Samuel spent the greater part of a year living with Creet and his granddaughter, learning the language and learning about the abundance of life that Samuel's people had never experienced. He left them, after a year, before his fate could meet him and pull him away. It caught up to him short weeks later and dragged him on to another world as the dark mage had dragged him on to this place. Samuel expected it; he had learned how to respond to it from Creet.
The nano-machines, which Creet could see as a dark veil and anyone could sense as a feeling of foreboding, were a curse and a blessing. A blessing in that he lived, a curse in that Samuel would never fit into any place he traveled. His nano-machines were a tear in the fabric of reality. Creet warned that he would not be the only person to see this tear; with his foresight he was able to predict that Samuel would be pursued by others less wise with their perceptions. He would appear as a demon to anyone who could see magic; and there are only two ways to deal with demons. Samuel accepted that if he were pursued, he would have to run.
And he would be caught. Such conflicts could only end in blood, but this aspect of his existence was one that Samuel could not easily accept and so he continued to flee. Creet gave Samuel two gifts before he left the world where Ruse and her grandfather lived. Samuel could understand anything said to him from the first gift--and escape from any world with the second. He fled that first world. He fled from the reality that wherever he went, he would look and feel to most living beings as something that had to be destroyed, or worse: as something whose only capacity was destruction.
He fled from the fact that he, no matter where he traveled, would always be surrounded and infused with the void.