Artifacts, Chapter One: Discovery

Chapter One: Discovery

If they caught Milo out here, it would be the end of him. Milo barely heard his feet crunch through the snow as he wheezed through the confines of his breath mask and ran in a full on sprint through the hole in the fence into the forbidden woods. The cold rain had transformed into a snowy mixture that more and more seemed to stick to his face as he kept sprinting – in no real direction he or anyone else was familiar with – frantically dodging trees left and right. He squeezed his eyes shut, in part to clear his eyes, but mostly to block out the memory of the boy, his eyes bulging out, his face turning bright red, then purple as he toppled over pawing for the breath mask Milo had removed.

I’m no better than the rest of them.

What did it matter anyway? Adam was one of them, wasn’t he? He was a Riv, and like all other Riv – well, all but one – he wanted nothing more than for Milo to be the one on the ground, gasping for air.

With a shake of his head, he tried to resign himself from caring any more. Checking behind him, nobody appeared to be in pursuit.  After a moment, Milo opened his eyes, sighed, and slowed his pace.

The town was now completely out of sight, blocked by foliage and sheer distance. He couldn’t even see the perimeter fence. Surely someone should have been guarding it, but clearly nobody was. Confident nobody was following him, Milo allowed himself to stop completely, continuing to wheeze through his mask.

Milo took a moment to take in his surroundings. He quickly realized that he had never come this far before. And, as far as he knew, nobody else had either, and it felt alien. Compared to the town, this felt claustrophobic. Trees, brush, woods; everywhere as far as the eye could see. There was scarcely room to swing his arms comfortably. Milo wished he could smell what this place was like, but the only thing filling his nostrils was a combination of his breath and the artificially metallic stench of his air filters.

All around him the expanse of the woods sprawled out, continuing for who knew how long. The air between the trees glowed the misty, light purple of the early evening, a deep contrast with the green foliage. As Milo hopped over a log, he pulled up the right sleeve of his shirt to examine his latest wound – the tiny black spot showed where the pencil had been jabbed into his arm. Milo wondered by whose standard he had deserved this particular wound, but he quickly remembered there was no logic about these things.

As he walked around his unfamiliar surroundings, Milo gazed around. And with a loud thud he slammed into an unnoticed thicket of leaves, spread out over several trees. Milo jumped backwards, panting. He immediately groped his facemask, hell-bent on finding the crack that had surely formed. Thankfully there were no cracks, but only a loud pounding in his temples. He shook his head, and focused his eyes on what was in front of him. Was it a boulder covered in leaves and branches?

As if answering his question, the boulder came to life and started humming. Parts of it moved stiffly, creaking like a dead man coming to life after millennia, and deep purple and blue flickers of bright light oozed from the foliage, pulsing almost as fast as Milo’s heartbeat.

Milo stumbled backwards, tripping over a root and falling to the cold, snow-moistened ground, never taking his eyes off the glowing thing. He glanced around, hoping any nearby Riv could not hear this thing making this racket. The branches suddenly cracked and fell off of the structure and the ground shook as the thing broke free from its leafy cocoon. The surface itself was unstained by the green foliage that had likely been growing on it for some time, and yet it did not appear weathered. Instead, it looked smooth, with obviously intentional grooves running vertically in regular intervals.

He stayed on the ground, tacitly allowing the snow and rain to soak into his torn burlap pants. He’d never seen a rock like this before, and yet there it sat as if it had always been on that very spot. It seemed to fit perfectly into the ground, as though nature had grown around it, instead of vice versa.

What is this?

No sooner did he have this thought than the images broke into his conscious and refused to let go. Where before he sat on the wet ground, Milo gasped as he was suddenly higher in the purple sky than he would have ever thought possible – the forest extended across the ground. He even noticed a break in the green expanse, which Milo quickly recognized as his hometown. He was much too high to see any of the people he knew, but he could easily make out the public square and the wooden spire of the Sanctuary, rising high above every other structure. The location of the fence was also pretty evident, as only the forest lay beyond it.

Milo shook his head, remembering what he’d run from. They’d be attending Ritual now. For a moment Milo entertained the notion that they might actually be looking for him. But this worry was quickly assuaged - perhaps Vlad was looking for a punching bag, but that was the likely extent of anyone’s worry.

Milo felt his field of vision being forced outward; across the green expanse lay several other locations that became more focused, as if trying to draw Milo’s attention to them. Milo suddenly realized these must be the locations of more strange rocks, scattered across the entire land. He could scarcely take in the scale of this expanse of land – did this much space even exist? Was the entire forest covered with these things?

Then his stomach dropped as suddenly he was carried even higher, surrounded by black and blanketed by a vastness of the white dots that only appeared at night. Right underneath him was a strange and hug light purple orb. Then, without a sound, a blue sphere exploded out of the black and out of it appeared a group of weird shapes. For the life of him, he couldn’t place them or even hope to comprehend what he was seeing.

When the rain soaked through his underwear, Milo realized he had never left the ground at all. He saw the strange boulder, still staring him down, still pulsing. Milo began to scuttle his way backwards, trying to get away from the thing as quickly as he possibly could, but his head became light, and the mask fogged once again as he began to gag. He forced himself to flip over, sucked in the metallic-tasting air, threw off the mask, and heaved onto the ground. His heart pounded and his nose ran as he brought the mask back to his face, trying not to suck in the toxic air in between heaves. Even as he replaced his breath mask, he realized he was still light-headed.

Gotta change that air filter.

He looked back at the boulder. As Milo shakily stood, he gathered his thoughts and balance, and he looked around to make sure nobody else had seen this spectacle. Then he remembered where he was. He tore a piece of nearby shrubbery from the ground and placed it on the exposed patch of the strange rock, hoping to somehow keep the thing hidden.

Looking back in the direction he came, Milo’s stomach tightened.

Do I have to go back?

But he already knew the answer. Where else would he go? He knew nothing about this place, and he would eventually need to swap out his filters. And yet, it wasn’t a question of whether or not he would be punished for leaving; it was a question of how severe it would be. The other question that racked his brain – what would Lena think about this?

With the plant firmly in place with the rest of the apparent rock face, he sighed, turning back in the direction of town. Maybe he could sneak back in during Ritual without anyone noticing his absence. But as his feet bent waterlogged twigs, Milo knew his absence was already noted.