Flint turned the handle on the door into the comms room in Keila’s Simaru outpost. The blueish lights welcomed him immediately, flashing to life and illuminating the various consoles and data terminals. It was still too early in the day for any Keila employees to be working here, so he was the only person in the room. Flint sat down at a desk in front of a wide dashboard that accessed the only faster-than-light comms array on this side of the planet. Save for hand-written and typed notes to themselves about work that had to be done, the desk had only one personal item on it from the person who clearly worked here—a small platinum statue of a twisted möbius strip with words engraved beneath it:
TEO NORA
THE ONE WHO RETURNS
Flint brushed aside the odd religious paraphernalia from his mind and turned on the computer. Unfamiliar with Keila’s comms systems, it took him a moment to find a way to contact Keila headquarters with an emergency message. He composed the message as such:
EMERGENCY: POTENTIAL TERMINUS SIGHTING ON THE PLANET OF MALIDA, IN THE SIMARU REGION.
COORDINATES:
GA (920.71939, 18466.28565, -42.77148) PL (-26.688, 30.237)
SPECIAL CONDITIONS: PLEASE SEN_
As Flint was about to type the final request to send Tro to Malida instead of a different member of the Big 5, he heard the paralyzing sound of a doorknob turning. The colonel he had talked to the previous day was pushing open the door, a confused and suspicious look on his face. Flint threw himself underneath the console and out of sight, leaving the rotating chair he had just sat on still moving.
“Hello?” the colonel asked the room, whose only reply was an echo of his voice. The colonel quickly noticed and approached the still-rotating chair and the only activated computer in the room, with Flint’s half-composed message still on it.
The colonel squinted his eyes as he read the message, confusion visible through his expression. He was clearly suspicious—it appeared that Flint would have to intervene before the colonel deleted it, and he’d have to intervene by doing what he did best.
Be a ghost.
Flint’s soul left his body underneath the desk behind and he traveled within the large, button and screen-filled dashboard that lined the entire room, hidden from sight. He poked an ethereal arm out of the dashboard and pushed a chair over on another desk behind the colonel. Just as the colonel held his finger over the “delete message” key, the sound of a chair clattering to the floor caused the colonel to jump. Even hardened military generals, it seemed, weren’t immune to the fear of ghosts.
The colonel leapt out of the chair, fists raised, tuned towards the sound. He watched the fallen chair for a long time as if it was about to move again, before investigating and picking up the chair, looking around the room suspiciously. Now was his chance.
Flint poked a finger out from the dashboard beside the computer with the half-composed message and pushed over the effigy of Teo Nora onto the keyboard, aimed just so it would fall onto the “send” key. The colonel whipped towards the sound again, then rushed over to the computer in horror to see that the message had been sent.
The lights in the comms room suddenly switched off, making the only source of light the computer the colonel had been staring at. Flint’s ghost calmly strode in the darkness of the room from the light switch to the colonel’s back, where he tapped the colonel’s shoulder with a single finger.
“Get out,” Flint hissed.
The colonel fled the room immediately, not giving a second glance to the computer or the sent message. Returning to the body he had left, Flint climbed out from underneath the desk and left the room.
The message had been sent to Keila, but he hadn’t been able to specify Tro as the person who should come to investigate. Given that it was sent with the authorization of a Keila colonel, Zero would act on the message and the fake sighting it outlined without a doubt. However, if anyone from the Big 5 other than Tro arrived on Malida in search of the Terminus…
“We might be totally screwed,” Flint said to himself as he left the room.
“Zero! There’s been another sighting!”
“Where this time?”
The Keila officer squinted at the message.
“By the coordinates, it looks like it’s been sighted in the outskirts of our territory. Malida.”
Zero pondered this.
“And there’s authorization on the message?” Zero asked.
“Yes, sir. It’s one of our colonels. The message is real.”
Zero did a mental catalog of where each member of the Big 5 was currently stationed in the galaxy. Iskay and Viisi were still dealing with reports of an intel leak here at the capital planet Nopetu, so sending either of them was off the table. Tro, too, was in the Nopetu star system, having just dealt with a Terminus sighting nearby. Einer, however, had actually just left restricted Keila territory and was to lead a large army to capture some of Talo’s planets. Sending Einer was the most sensible option—he was already close by.
Then, Zero realized, was it really worth spending his most valuable asset and closest advisor to deal with a menial Terminus sighting all the way on the edge of Keila’s territory? The Terminus wasn’t even likely to be that far from the capital, anyway. Tro was further away from the sighting, but given that he was the weakest of the Big 5, he would be perfect for a menial job such as this. Tro’s lack of power had always disappointed Zero, anyways.
“Send Tro,” Zero ordered. “Send Tro to deal with the sighting.”
“How does this work, again?”
“Ease the throttle down. You don’t want to bleed off too much speed too quickly,” Aurein told her.
“Got it.”
“Good. At this point, the atmosphere should slow us down enough.”
Allef lowered the throttle on the Lucre Main. The thick clouds below the spacecraft continued to whiz by.
“Why did you need my Val, anyways?” Aurein asked her once she put the Lucre Main on autopilot. “I don’t know if Flint told you, but I try to use my Val as little as possible. Are you sure this is necessary?”
“Trust me, it’s necessary,” Allef said, monitoring the Lucre Main’s flight path. “Why don’t you use it often, anyway? You have a powerful Val.”
“I avoid it whenever possible.”
“Well, yeah, you said that. But why? Did something happen? You only ever seem uncomfortable when I see you turning something into gold,” Allef pointed.
Aurein was hesitant. “It’s a personal reason,” he answered at last.
“Would you mind telling me?”
“Yes, I would mind, actually,” Aurein replied.
“We’re going to have a hard time working as a team if you won’t even tell me why you barely use your Val. Do you really want to do that, when we’re so close to entering Keila territory?”
Aurein glared at her. The ship shook slightly as it tore through Malida’s atmosphere.
“No, seriously. Now’s not the time to be keeping secrets. I promise, whatever it is, I won’t judge,” she said.
“Only Flint knows.”
“Then could you fill me in, too?”
Aurein took a long, deep breath.
“I want the Terminus…” he began, “so I can erase my Val from existence. I figured, if anything in the universe would have the power to do something like that, it would be the Terminus.”
“Why?”
“I have a younger brother,” Aurein continued. “Or, had, I suppose. He was the only thing I loved about my Tymin-worshiping family. My mother was never around, she always had important business with Tymin. My father was abusive and would always want to make my brother and I do constant work and labor for Tymin. ‘If you two are to be my children, you are to be perfect children,’ he’d say. We had to have perfect manners, perfect behavior, perfect friends… but the hypocritical bastard would come home high or intoxicated every night off the newest off-planet drug he found, or just not come home at all. I was the only thing that protected my little brother from my father’s fists, and he was the only thing that protected my sanity.”
Aurein looked out the window at the top of the sunlit clouds.
“One day, my brother and I got into a fight. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something stupid. Inconsequential. Something that wasn’t worth fighting over. But I remember getting so enraged at him, I saw my little brother as an enemy for a split second. And in that split second, I grabbed him, and he had turned into solid gold before I could even really process what happened. That was the day my Val suddenly developed, and that was the first time I used my Val. I didn’t know what to do. At first, I was so mad at him that I just left him like that. But then I started to regret what I did. I wanted to turn him back, but I didn’t know how. I tried… everything. I didn’t know it then, but there’s a time limit my power has before something I’ve turned to gold stays as gold forever. And my little brother was already well past that time limit.
“My father was so enraged and filled with grief that he put the golden statue of my brother in my room. Bolted him to the floor. He made sure that I would wake up every day and see what I did, make sure that my mind would never escape from the overwhelming guilt, shame, and self-hatred instilled in me that day. I stayed there for almost a year before I couldn’t take it anymore and so… I left. I fled to Talo, a faction I knew my parents hated. I don’t know if my little brother is still alive in there anymore, or if he died on that day, but all I want at this point is to be rid of my Val. I don’t want to think of him every time I turn something or someone to gold. I hope that, if removing my Val is something the Terminus can really do, everything I permanently turned to gold can be turned back. Including my brother.”
“I’m so sorry,” Allef said. “Really. That’s horrible. But you can’t let that hold you back anymore.”
Aurein looked disbelieving. “What?”
“You can’t let that one instance of your Val doing something bad dictate the rest of your life. Your gift is a gift, not a curse.”
“What would you know? You’ve never even had a Val.”
“I know. I’m the only one in my family who hasn’t. But I do know that what you do with your power is up to you, no matter what your Val is.”
“You-”
“My sister’s Val let her turn into toxic gas,” Allef interrupted. “Her literal existence in that form kills people, even people she loves. Doesn’t that seem like an evil power to you? But she saved my life with her Val countless times. I ended up learning not to fear her power, but love it, because I knew that, even though there was a toxic cloud approaching, that was my sister. And I loved her for that. You can’t keep beating yourself up over what happened to your brother. What happened was a mistake, not an act of evil. Use your Val for good, or else what will it all have been for? I’m sure he’d want you to keep using your Val, even if he knew what happened to him.”
Aurein was silent. He looked away, visibly fighting tears from forming in his eyes.
“You still haven’t forgiven yourself, have you?” Allef asked. “You still think it was your fault. But you aren’t the person you were when you got mad at your brother. That doesn’t have to be who you are. Not anymore. Just let that go. If you don’t forgive yourself, if you don’t let yourself use your Val for good, we’ll never be able to get into Keila’s capital. We’ll never be able to find the Terminus. And you will never be able to save your brother.”
Aurein looked back at Allef.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So, what do you want me to do?”
Allef smiled.
“We should be almost there, actually.”
“Where?”
“Over Simaru. There’s only one spaceport there that Tro has to land at—he should be there now, actually—and when Flint baits him into the field—you know, near where we parked the Lucre Main the first time—that’s when you’ll do your thing. But first, we need some setup.”
Allef took manual control over the Lucre Main and reduced its speed through the atmosphere. The clouds whizzing by beneath the craft slowed in their movement, then gradually grew closer to the Lucre Main until they engulfed the entire ship. Once the Lucre Main had slowed to a sufficient speed, Allef pressed a button on the console and a door opened in the ship’s side. Moist air rushed into the craft and it briefly shook, the drag destabilizing its trajectory, but after a few seconds, it stabilized again. The sound of rushing air filled the craft, forcing Allef to raise her voice.
“I figured, since the clouds on this planet are denser than usual, you might be able to use your Val on them. Will that work?”
Aurein stuck a hand out of the door. The whipping wind pushed his hand back at first, but after bracing himself, he turned around and said:
“Yes.”
“Can you turn this cloud into gold?”
The thick grey water vapor rushing by Aurein’s extended hand suddenly began to take on a brilliant golden hue. From his extended fingers, gold spread across the cloud’s interior, trailing behind like a brilliant yellow comet.
From above, the cloud was gradually transformed from a dull grey carpet coating the horizons into a vast, shining sea of gold, starting from within and expanding outwards. The gilded vapor reflected the sunlight in all directions, making the entire cloudscape glow with a blazing luminance.
Allef navigated the Lucre Main upwards again to get a view of the transformed clouds behind them. The golden ocean shone brightly, casting a shadow of Allef and Aurein on the roof of the ship as they looked through a window in the back.
“Not so bad, was it?” Allef asked.
“No, it wasn’t,” Aurein replied, unable to remove his eyes from the spectacle he had created. “And it looks… beautiful.”
Tro took long strides out onto the spaceport in Simaru. He looked up at the sky and rain fell in his face. He scoffed.
“Hate the rain,” Tro groaned. “Where’s this thing, anyway?” he asked one of the high-ranking Keila soldiers accompanying him. But the soldier didn’t reply, fixated on something she had seen in the distance. Tro stopped in his tracks and looked in the same direction.
Tro could see why she was hesitant—the tower of light almost looked like it wasn’t there. Like a trick of the eye. It was barely visible through the rain, and the moist air had scattered most of its light until it was nearly invisible, but it was there, perfectly vertical, a white, radiant beam that connected the gloomy clouds above with some hidden source below, blocked from view by the buildings in the town of Simaru they had landed in.
“Well,” Tro remarked. “I think we found the Terminus.”
Tro walked towards the beam of light, leaving his accompaniments behind.
“Sir,” one of the soldiers said. “Don’t you-”
“Stay here,” Tro ordered. “I got this.”
Tro embarked through the rain towards the source of the light, which turned out to be in the middle of a wide field outside of town. The grass on this planet was short and blue, blowing around in the wind when a breeze came and changed the direction the rain hit him from. While he was still too far away from the source of the light to discern its source, he could see that, where the beam emerged from the ground, there was a bright glare. Tro continued to walk, closer and closer, until he was able to discern the source of the light. And beside it was…
Flint leaned up against the massive beacon Allef had built, bored and soaked with rain. Even though the storm clouds blocked the natural sunlight, just the residual light from the beacon was enough to illuminate Flint as if he was sitting outside on the sunniest day on the sunnist planet he had ever visited.
The sound of heavy footsteps through the rain soaked grass caught Flint’s attention. It was Tro, looking between Flint and the beacon with disbelief.
Flint shot up to standing, pulling the waterproof comms device Allef had given him out of his pocket and bringing it to his mouth.
“He took the bait,” Flint said into the comms device. “Make it rain.”
Flint disconnected the beacon from its portable power source and the beam of light shooting into the sky vanished. Without its glare, it was easier to make out Tro’s baffled expression.
“YOU!” Tro shouted. “You’re the one from The Ray! Flint!”
“Yep. Me,” Flint replied. “But I’m not what you should be worried about right now. Look up.”
The two men looked into the dreary grey sky just in time to watch it change. First, the sky brightened, as if a great light was shining from above that made the beacon by Flint’s side look miniscule in comparison. Then, gold spread across the cloud from one side of the horizon to the other, the color of the sky shifting into a brilliant metallic yellow like a gilded wave. As the two watched the spectacle, the raindrops that fell onto them continued to fall normally until, all of a sudden, drops of solid gold battered the ground. They punched holes in the grass and the damp earth, burying themselves up to a few inches deep. They filled the sky from all directions, the reflections turning everything terrestrial a bizarre, golden hue. The drops fell around Flint in a perfect circle, not a single one ever reaching his body, but the downpour on Tro only heightened.
Each golden drop was only a few millimeters in diameter, but the energy they had gained during their fall to Malida’s surface was substantial. They punctured Tro’s skull and passed through his arms and legs, forcing him to regenerate every wound over and over again. Tro grew hard scales on his head and back, deflecting some golden droplets, the sound of hard metallic impacts punctuating each strike. Flint raised his ghostly guns and shot Tro several times in the head, forcing him to fall backwards and exposing his unprotected front side to the golden torrent.
Tro yelled with frustration, growing more and more scales all over his body, replacing them constantly as each one cracked and shattered.
Tro’s regenerative abilities were monstrous—there was no doubt about it. But the constant golden rain forced him to constantly use his Val, expending enormous amounts of energy without any rest or break, regenerating countless wounds again and again.
Occasionally Tro would lunge at or attempt an attack on Flint, which would prompt him to sidestep and shoot Tro again with his ethereal bullets. Every time Tro launched an attack or bulked up his defenses, the gilded deluge would concentrate further onto Tro’s body, eventually getting to a point where every golden drop in a radius of several feet around the two had been redirected onto Tro.
Finally, Tro fell. Exhausted, his body beaten and wounded by the golden rain, he only looked up at the shining yellow sky, taking labored breaths without even attempting to stand again. Flint scanned the sky for the Lucre Main, which had been stationed by the clouds for Aurein to get a view of Tro, and signaled the golden rain to stop. Eventually, the last golden drops fell to the ground, and the depleted clouds in the sky let in the sun’s light. Flint approached Tro, standing by the defeated man. Even sprawled out on the ground, limbs missing and inches from death, Tro’s size was remarkable.
“You might not believe it, but we need your help,” Flint said. Tro’s exhausted expression broke into a smile.
“Quite the way to ask for it,” Tro remarked.
Flint was hit with a pang of guilt. Why did it have to be like this? In another time, in another situation, the two could have been the fastest of friends.
“My friends and I need to get into Keila,” Flint explained. “We’re looking for the Terminus.”
“Many are, it sounds like.”
“But more specifically,” Flint elaborated, “we’re looking for a woman named Tria. I believe you knew her. Wasn’t she one of the Big 5?”
Finally, Tro turned his head. He looked at Flint with intrigue.
“Tria? Yeah, I knew ‘er. Barely. We Big 5 never really got to know each other as people. ‘S far as I can tell, she was the only one who really wanted to stop this war.” Tro looked back up at the sky, pained. “I did somethin’ on the day she died… that I regret deeply.”
Flint took a moment to ponder. “May I ask what?”
“Yeah,” Tro continued. “Five years ago, in a battle I’ll never forget. Zero ordered me to do something that day, and I listened… but I did a horrible thing. I think I caused her death… indirectly, but I did.”
Flint took a moment to process this information.
“My friends and I discovered that she had the Terminus five years ago. If she’s dead… then where is it now?”
“I wish I could tell you,” Tro replied. “Really. I do. I think that, now, I don’t really care about my loyalty anymore. With how close to death you’ve got me… shoot, I don’t know if I can even regenerate anymore… that stuff don’t matter.”
Tro looked sadly into the sky.
“I think I’m more like you than I realized before,” Tro admitted. “I joined Keila just ‘cause I wanted to make a difference. Do something that means something, y’know? I followed Teo Nora from the beginning ‘cause I thought getting behind that kind of power would make things easier for me. But the differences I’ve made in this world… ‘s not the kind of differences I want to make.”
The Lucre Main landed nearby, and once the whir of its engines stopped, Aurein and Allef stepped out, guards up and ready to fight. Flint dismissed them with a raised hand.
“We want to get a hold of the Terminus…” Flint began. “To stop this war. I want to see my parents again, of course, but I think I’ve had enough of this. We need to get into the capital to find where it is now. What Tria did with it. But we can’t do that without passing the Keila eye scan.”
Tro’s eyes looked solemnly at Flint, then darted towards Aurein and Allef.
“Come,” Tro told the two. They didn’t move. “Oh, come on. I can’t do shit like this. You guys have just about killed me, I won’t bite.”
Hesitantly, they came, standing anxiously besides the massive man.
“Are you the one with the gold powers?” he asked Aurein. Aurein nodded.
“You first. C’mere. Lean down towards me, I can’t move.”
Aurein leaned down, clearly apprehensive, and Tro lifted his remaining intact arm up towards Aurein’s face. At first, Tro’s hand was flat, as if he was about to press his palm against Aurein’s face, but then he extended his middle and index fingers, poking his outstretched fingers suddenly into Aurein’s eyes.
Aurein let out a shout of pain and stepped back. Tro chuckled.
“That’s what you get for the gold rain. You caused me a lotta grief with that.”
“Asshole!” Aurein shouted, taking his hands off of his irritated, red eyes.
“Whoa, Aurein, come here!” Allef said, gesturing Aurein over. Allef took amazed glances at each of Aurein’s eyes, and even Flint walked over to see what had happened. Aurein’s eyes, once a bright gold color, were now a silvery blue with hints of reddish-purple around the pupil.
“Those are the eyes of one of my subordinates who came with me to Malida today. Take his identity, and they’ll let you into Nopetu,” Tro explained.
“What about me?” Allef asked.
“Yeah. You’re next. C’mere.”
Allef approached Tro, but didn’t lean down.
“Lean down. I can’t do it without touchin’ your eyes.”
“Don’t poke me. I didn’t do anything,” Allef warned.
“Yeah, yeah. Lean towards me.”
Allef leaned her head towards Tro and he raised his fingers towards her eyes. However, instead of a gentle touch, Tro jabbed his fingers into Allef’s eyes as well.
“OW!”
“That’s for the fake Terminus,” Tro said, smiling. “I know someone like you had to have built that beacon.”
When Allef took her hands off of her irritated eyes, she first made a rude gesture towards Tro, then found a puddle of gold on the ground and looked into it. In her reflection, she saw that her eyes were now a fiery orange.
“Those are the eyes of my other subordinate. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them after this. If not kill them, I’ll change their eyes to yours so they can’t cause you trouble.”
“Why are you doing this?” Aurein asked. “Why are you so readily betraying Keila?”
Tro turned to Aurein and his devious smile became a heartfelt one.
“Because I wanna spend my last moments making the difference I sought to make. Through you guys. I believe in y’all. I really do.”
“Tro,” Flint said, rushing over. “I can find some way to help you. I know we can. You’re not just gonna die like this, are you? We didn’t go too far, did we?”
“No, no,” Tro said, brushing him off with the wave of a hand. “I don’t go down that easy. But you got me close enough to death to remind me what I actually wanted to do. I was talking about Zero. Once he finds me, I’ll be dead.”
Flint looked at Tro’s damaged body, grief welling up inside him.
“But I’m okay with that. Sounds to me like everything comes to an end, even for immortals like me and you. I’m just glad I got a chance to do what I could for y’all, even if it was just a little.”
“It means a lot,” Flint said. “It really does. Thank you, Big T. Thank you.”
“Thanks,” Allef chimed, joining in even despite her hurting eyes. Even Aurein turned around and quietly said:
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, no problem, guys. Now get the hell out of here.”
The three boarded the Lucre Main and took off from the gold-soaked field, leaving Tro behind, surrounded by gilded puddles and illuminated by a shining yellow sun.
“Hm,” Tro said to himself, looking at the clear sky. “This ain’t so bad.”
