Chroxic

Chapter 1

thrill of possibility filled Nedra with excitement as he departed from Groluvont, admiring the intuitive interface of his new Groluvontian spaceship. It was a metal ball with wings and a tail, with a sleek coating that had a gelatinous, but metallic texture. He wanted to take it for a spin, but Lyra was already sleeping in the backseat within minutes. Nedra rolled his eyes, switching to autopilot.

While Nedra gazed at the stars around him, a large shadow dashed in front of his window, blocking the stars from his view. He could’ve sworn he heard a loud sound, like the whooshing of a cloak. Unease crept up on him as he realized sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space. But the shadow was gone at a moment’s notice.

“No,” Lyra whispered.

Nedra’s muscles tightened and all of his hairs spiked up at once. He turned around to see that Lyra was still asleep. He let out a long sigh of relief, thumping his head back into the chair.

“Don’t trust Egleesta,” Lyra mumbled, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

Nedra turned around, staring at her with wide eyes and an eyebrow cocked up with amusement. “What are you talking about,” he laughed.

“Hmm?” Lyra responded.

“Who’s Egleesta?”

“What are you talking about?” Now Lyra made a silly look of amusement mirroring his.

“You said something about Egleesta,” Nedra said with a frown.

“Oh, I don’t remember that, I was probably sleeping.”

“Hmm? Actually, yeah, that’s fair.”

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As the ship entered Groluvont’s vast dust ring, the planet Heirlikond came into view. Despite technically being a moon of Groluvont, Heirlikond was slightly larger than Earth and was treated as its own planet, complete with life and many moons of its own. Shrouded by Groluvont’s dust cloud, Heirlikond was cast into perpetual darkness—the only light coming from reflections off its moons and from Groluvont itself.

The ship glided smoothly along the runway of Heirlikond Academy with a phantom hovering sound, stopping in a large ship garage on a mountain top.

The garage housed giant space buses—each resembling large yellow segmented trains with a pair of plane wings on each car, while the front end had a spaceship-like appearance. The garage contained twelve buses in total, and enough extra space for a few hundred small ships.

They stepped out onto the frigid snow capped mountains, noticing a large array of striking red auroras in the sky above them. The sky was dense with brilliant stars, and the moons were very large, casting an aura of wonder over the planet’s continuous gloom.

They made their way to the school down a long trail, forested with frosty pine trees that dipped down the mountain from the ship garage, climbing up again to the larger mountain supporting the massive school. They could see the school clearly from the garage, but it disappeared after entering the thicket.

The trail was long, and they almost got lost, but Lyra remembered seeing a constellation in the sky that helped guide their way. It stood out to her because she thought it was interesting how the constellations here were so similar to the ones you can see from Earth. But here, they were much clearer and more exaggerated. They resembled the same shapes, but there were more stars connecting the images together—especially the zodiacs.

“I thought this was going to be a straight path,” said Nedra. He looked for landmarks on the trees around him. “Maybe I should start marking the trees,” he said, brandishing his claws.

“I don’t think that will be necessary! Check out how goat-like this aries looks. It was directly above the school earlier.”

“Oh wow, you’re right actually. Regular aries look like they half-assed it.”

“Who would’ve half-assed it?” Lyra asked, amused by his silly comment.

“Like, I mean metaphorically the Gods of course.”

“Oh okay.”

“So we can literally just follow the goat?”

“That’s not what literally means Nedra, but yeah we can just follow the goat.”

“Aries is the G.O.A.T.”

“Pff, right,” she chuckled.