Free Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals by John Daulton

think?” Despite all of it, he grinned at her. “Don’t misunderstand me, my love. I am entirely for enjoying it while it lasts.”
    The breath of Orli’s resignation was loud in the confines of her helmet. She didn’t want to argue with him. She thought it was too pessimistic a view, though she could admit he was right in a way. But she wasn’t ready to give up on humanity’s chances any more than she was on Yellow Fire’s. No matter what the future held, Blue Fire deserved better than she had gotten since the war came to an end. The only fear Orli really held to was the one in which Altin’s warnings, and those of Her Majesty and Director Bahri, might come true. She didn’t want her kindness to bring about more misery and death. That was the real risk here. Fortunately, Altin’s levity would not allow her to dwell on her concerns, and soon they were making their way again.
    For another two hours they moved farther into the moon. In places, the dead skin of Yellow Fire’s corporeal flesh lay so thick in the spaces they passed through that they had to push through it blindly, the mess of it higher than their heads. It crumbled like the burnt remnants of wood, more easily in places where it turned to powdery ash and less so in others, where making progress was akin to wading through gray popcorn, chest deep and seemingly endless. By the time they’d pushed their way through the clogged arteries of the moon and into a cavern where they could move freely and see beyond their helmet glass, they were both breathing heavily. But emerge they did, and they soon found themselves in a giant subterranean space that opened up all around them in such magnitude that its distance devoured all forms of light.
    “I think we found it,” Altin said, looking about. The beam of his helmet’s light glinted off great formations of crystals clumped everywhere around them on the walls and floor nearby. Some of the crystals were as thick as Orli’s wrists, and the formations of them several feet long, all jagged and sharp.
    “Looks like it,” she agreed. There could be little doubt. This was just like the inner chambers of the two other Hostile worlds she’d been inside. “But how do we find the heart chamber without the help of it being a different color and glowing obviously for us? Everything is dead and gray in here.”
    And it was true; there was no color in the chamber at all. The crystals were as gray as the ashen surface far above. Shining light into the crystals revealed nothing unusual. They were lifeless.
    Altin bent down and let his helmet light shine into a clump of crystals nearby. He peered into it for a time, and shook his head. “It’s not eating the light,” he said. “Like the Liquefying Stones do.”
    She nodded. She understood well enough. He’d been hoping for the light-eating effect the yellow magic-enhancing stones had. The crystal he called Liquefying Stone. He’d used one small piece of it when he’d first begun his journeys into space. Orli had seen the effect too. Light had this odd way of sort of vanishing into it. These crystals just reflected the light back, the gray merely becoming a little bit lighter.
    Altin said that Liquefying Stone ate light. It pulled it in with an inexplicable anti-luminous gravity, an effect that was nearly nauseating to watch for very long. Altin’s mentor, Tytamon, had first found the stones on Prosperion. He’d kept three of them. Later, Altin discovered there were millions upon millions of them lining the caverns that served as Blue Fire’s womb, and there were more on the walls of the tiny chamber where her heart was. The whole of Blue Fire’s inner self was studded with the yellow stones, all of which ate light and all of which could soften mana in the hands of human sorcerers. But here, on this world, that effect was gone. It was obvious they were the same sort of crystal, but these were dead. It was as obvious as the difference between a living human heart