Exodus Nebula

Chapter Thirteen

During his first few days in the Kinsuo surface settlement, Gireiah couldn't be sure exactly where on the planet he was. Through the nights, he attempted to measure the angle of the celestial sphere--he would need only to spot the position of two stars, perhaps even one, considering his intimate familiarity with each of their distinctions, to get a decent gauge. Nightly cloud cover and snow storms made this impossible, and going beneath the surface to the Holy Orepesh certainly didn't aid his matters.

Now, however, the conditions were right: the Kinsuo population was located in the highest latitudes, a mere hundred or so kilometers from geodetic north. Gireiah folded his sextant and placed it in his bag of belongings. The lights were startling in their frequency and clarity, no longer the whispering suggestions they had begun as. Every few minutes, one of the amorphous illuminations would blink in some random region of the sky, fractionally. Every hour or so, a good one would stand the stage, staggering beautiful and yet so deeply terrifying was the clarity of it. In the most prominent flares, he saw structures... clouded structures that did the lighting, other clouded structures that seemed opaque, like dark, dense storm clouds masking the source of lightning strikes. They had become protuberant artifacts of the night sky, violating its sullen gravity over the world.

Gireiah realized that he hated them, yet, he wanted to know all that they were. He wanted nothing less than a whole understanding.

From their high northern latitude, he could see only a couple stars: Teryk and Oli, with Akenhymer's hole somewhere below the horizon. As it happens to be, more stars are visible from the southern hemisphere than the northern, giving to the fact that almost half of the known stars weren't commonly documented and named until a few centuries ago during the Greater Expansion. Their solar system, their sun, sits near the edge of the elevenfold cluster of stars occupying the known universe, with the southern hemisphere more so facing inward the star cluster. There were a few stars Gireiah had never seen with his own eyes--namely, Stabi, Bantam, and Sad--only in photographs either taken by uneasily dispelled expeditioners of the south pole or surveyor satellites whose orbits cross near the lower latitudes. Soon enough, in a few weeks' time, he may well see those elusive stars for what will likely be the first and only time.

The southern hemisphere is known by many cultures for its hellishness. Their world was seemingly born bipolar: one half to life, one half to decay. Although Eulliam and his associate Cheung claim their travel there will be safe and guarded, the older legends of great ships and great men who have perished there linger. Even currently, men or groups of men challenge the south pole, either returning defeated and partial or never returning at all, their bodies and equipment lost to the continent, tossed about and forgotten to its ever-changing landscape.

Gireiah retreated to the helm of the ship where Eulliam and Cheung convened about a circular table. Sitting at the center of the table inset in a circular hole was a large globe about a man's height in diameter. The globe had shaded regions where there were landmasses. Most land rested like a crown atop the globe. Three petal-like continents--Norland, Hijakat, and the noticeably smaller landmass of Hinket--extended from the north pole and stretched down to near the equator. At the bottom of the world, visible whenever the globe was rotated or angled significantly, was the uninhabited southern continent, Anteland. Anteland was not much larger than the largest continent, Norland. A lot of solid surface area surrendered to such horrendous conditions, and its shape... The continent looked deigned to uphold the planet, a fivefold pedestal of the world; triangular landmasses jutted out from the main body of Anteland, each reaching northward over a thousand kilometers, yet, none terminating below the line of tolerable seafaring climate.

The globe was textured with exaggeration to the topology of the world. Deep valleys and waterways of land and rifts and trenches of sea were inset to appropriate depths. Mountains, wider regions of prominence, plateaus, and jagged arêtes protruded with high relief. The Spine of the World, the several thousand kilometer chain of uplifted land, seemed out of place compared to the other protrusions, setting them bas-relief comparatively.