Remembrance - Warts in the Plaster (Part 1)
25 Nov 2024Astraeius
Elus Dionis – 10th of November, the Year 3306
It felt as if though every step were made on snow, the ground offering some faint resistance the moment my boot grazed it, yet it was but an illusory thing, and at first I had often slipped, before learning that I was meant to push my foot down into the soil before it would truly support my weight.
Adding to that the significant discomfort of having to wear a space helmet for even the shortest of walks, the annoyance of seeing it fog at the first attempt at a jog, and the slight but constant stress of a vision clouded by a myriad of indicators keeping track of every possible source of danger… after a few weeks spent on a planet-side outpost, the planet-part of it had lost much of its charm, and I found myself spending most of my time indoors. Even the childlike glee of jumping around in low gravity had only lasted a couple of days. Ankles can sprain even in a faint atmosphere, it seems.
On Emerald, I had loved the wonders of nature. I could not wait to get out of the city, and even at home I cherished our garden most. My mother would bring me with her at the unveiling of some new architectural marvel but, to me, nothing compared to the perennial novelty that can be found staring at a tree, each of its leaves similar and yet so different, its bark twisted by the years into a canvas of a thousand different pictures. On a moon where the ground is made of iron and dust, there were no such wonders. No such novelty. Wherever I stepped, everything looked the same.
Not like space. In space, every jump brought on new stars, new constellations that no man had ever yet drawn. In space, that wonderful, unruly, chaotic artistry with which fate, or gods, or pure chance, had crafted the trees of my youth showed its true power, as it build a galaxy of blues, and whites, and reds, each more eye-catching than the other. And landing on this desolate moon had felt like staring too closely at a frescoed wall, loosing sight of the scene and seeing only the warts of the plaster.
Had I been older, and wiser, perhaps this would have been a call to reflexion. But, being young, I could think only of how easily we could slip back into space, and spent my time either begging Janus to free us from this hellscape, or sulking after he would inevitably refuse me. I would have contented myself with a lesson in piloting, with being free in the sky – if not amongst the stars – but even that he deemed too dangerous.
We were meant to lay low for a couple of days, but those days had turned into weeks, and now into months, and still we received little news from the outside world. My anger at my father had died off, as I opened my eyes to how it had been ill luck, and nothing else, that had brought us into exile. But that did very little to alleviate the boredom that outpost life brought on. I tried my hand at painting, but even acrylics dried weirdly in eternally recycled air. Then it was the turn of poetry, but I could not hold a rhyme to save my life. And so, at last, I settled into writing, but even in that I found myself lacking inspiration, every story I tried to pen turning into a sad cry for a more vibrant landscape.
I was sitting at my desk, over describing the green hues of some tropical tree, when Janus had come to fetch me. At last, we were ready to take off. My father’s patron had managed to send out a message, and whatever reassurances Senator Torquatus had offered seemed to have sufficed for both Lord Sallus and Lady Aura. What these reassurances were, Janus affected not to know, and I was once more left wondering about who the man truly was, as the brash combateer now comfortably slipped once more in the guise of the obedient servant, to avoid my questions.
And then, as if he knew that I would never cease questioning the servant, he put on his Commander’s grin once more. “And kid: take the main chair, once you reach the ship. You’ll be taking us out of orbit today.”
And with that, he made me forget that there ever had been anything else to worry about. I was a twenty-three-year-old kid who dreamed of the stars, and he had just offered me to pull that dream into the waking world.
How easy it had been, to fool me into silence. Not once did I think that we were simply fleeing once more.