Empyrean Iris

Chapter 3

Note, Chalan = Sunny in the Drev language 

Theoretically, a human can survive in the vacuum of space for approximately 15 seconds before passing out from oxygen loss through the blood.

This fact assumes that the human has evacuated all the air from their lungs PRIOR to exposure to vacuum conditions

Chalan felt the cold steel of the spear in her upper left hand, and when she flexed it, she could feel the pressure of the spear as it bore down on all four fingers.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head: listening to the distant sounds of the alien launch field. She could feel it too: the rumbling of their powerful engines thrumming through the ground and into her set of lower hands, which she had rested on the mossy stone beneath her.

Something soft brushed against her cheek, and she opened her eyes glancing up at the sky where large flakes of ash were beginning to slowly drift from the darkened atmosphere.

She would have to move quickly. The dark season had come early this year, and the face of Anin would soon be covered in great clouds of billowing ash, which would blot out the sun and turn the land cold.

No ships would enter their atmosphere then, for fear of complete engine failure.

Now would be her only chance.

Chalan closed her eyes again pushing her back up against a blue-grey and white striped coiltree. It wasn't a big tree, but it wasn't a sapling either, and its spiraling branches protected her from the worst of the ash fall.

Delicate white petals glowed in the darkness about her feet. The tree had began to shed its petals leaving only the mummified corpses of the coiltree berries dried and clinging to the branches overhead.

"Ready yourself! We have no time for weakness."

Chalan opened her eyes slowly looking up at the looming figure above her.

General Kasna glared down at her through the slowly falling ash, her narrowed golden eyes glittering like the fires on the distant volcanic horizon.

Using her spear, Chalan dragged herself to her feet drawing her ragged cloak tighter around her shoulders. Overhead Kasna's imposing shadow weighed heavy on Chalan's shoulders.

Chalan had born the weight of her mother's shadow all her life, at only seven feet tall compared to her mother's nearly eleven feet, that was only to be expected.

General Kasna stepped forward through the darkness, and Chalan followed after, the two of them hunched low against the horizon for fear of being seen. Though, Chalan was not convinced her mother was capable of feeling fear. As the longest standing General of the mightiest Drev clan on Anin, General Kasna did not doubt, nor did she fear anything – a fact which made Chalan's failures as her daughter all the more poignant.

Drev were supposed to be tall, with colorful carapace, and a talent for fighting. And while Chalan was colorful, sheathed in a striking lightning blue carapace, she had always been small -- embarrassingly so: a fact which led to disadvantages on the battlefield where her clan and ancestors cut their teeth and proved their worth.

Together, the two Drev warriors cut across the landscape feeling their way over the colorful moss discolored by darkness. Chalan could feel the slowly accumulating ash slick and warm between her two-toed feet.

She followed her mother's shadow, a hulking figure of darkness just deeper than the surrounding landscape. The Drev shape consisted of: two two-toed feet, the toes on which they walked and a heel rising into the air, knees bent forward connecting into large powerful thighs and a thick trunk, two sets of arms extending from either side of the chest one positioned just above the other, the lower arms slightly smaller than the upper and a thick neck connected an almost birdlike head to the body.