Kaleb swallowed behind his mask as he looked over the edge of his perch and out into the dull orange mists that turned and swirled about the pillar. Out in the orange, he could see grey gulls twirling and looping through the currents and eddies of the air. He had climbed down below the settlement, claiming as always that he was foraging for food. But today was the day he would finally enact his desire, and escape. He wanted out. He had known every face that surrounded him from the time that he was born, and while he was comfortable here, and he liked those that surrounded him well enough, it did nothing to stop the rising and unbearable tide of dissatisfaction that he felt with his life.

The pillar he lived on had been named Haethea by those that had first settled upon it, the ancestors of all those, including him, who lived here now. It was completely isolated in the sea of mists. Perhaps it was this very isolation that had stimulated his desire to escape. He had gone to the top and the bottom of the pillar by himself to verify the fact of this isolation, or in hope of finding a way off, only to confirm what others had told him: there was no adjoining pillar, no support structure, no pathway that led away from it on any face of the pillar. Haethea, the lonely pillar, was suspended against the parallel field, the force that pulled everything downward, and hung amongst the mists in motionless isolation, keeping him prisoner.

There were other pillars. Kaleb had heard that there was apparently a whole world of pillars. They were innumerable, and dense as the shrubs that grew on the windblown rocky surfaces of Haethea. But these pillars were so far away from Haethea that they couldn’t be seen through the mists, and that world, the world of cable city and all its people was too far away to be reached by the limited resources he had available to him.

There had been travellers. Only one ship in Kaleb’s lifetime so far. They had come by mistship; huge metal constructions that swam through the air like the monsters did, the tingling of the field the generated sensing shivers up Kaleb’s young spine. He had first heard about the other pillars from those intrepid souls, and his imagination had been caught, ever since, in the possibility of visiting that world. They spoke about the place they had come from: Cable City – and it was this place which from that day became the goal of Kaleb’s fantasies and dreams. The wires and walkways and buildings that extended endlessly between the other pillars of the world, all of which were much closer than the Lone Pillar was to others. He loved to imagine it: all those people he had never met, walking around in an endless world that didn’t have a limit on its height or depth. A world of freedom, where you could travel as far as you wanted in any direction… In short, Kaleb was filled with an ache: a maddening and infuriating ache to visit places that he could not, and might never, be able to go – and Kaleb would close his eyes every night and dream of the walkways and wires of cable city and the endless fields of pillars he could climb over. Maybe one day he’d even find the source of the mists, or perhaps, he speculated wildly, whatever it was that might lie beyond them…

He had tried to stow away on that ship, young as he’d been. The chiefs of the settlement had come and dragged him away by the scruff of his neck, throwing him in the cells for the night, where he’d cried and whimpered, but not from the hard floor or the loneliness, but for the ship that had sailed away to that fantastic land without him on it.

The ship and its crew had what Kaleb and the entire settlement lacked – capacitance spikes. They were implants, embedded into the bodies of people in the pillars by surgeries and such things. On Haethea it was spoken of in the hushed tones of something illicit, but Kaleb had seen the men on that ship move through the air as if the parallel field didn’t bother them. They simply rose from the deck on will, the mist rushing through a conical shape of pressure beneath their feet. Everyone possessed a natural field, it was possible to generate small changes, but to stand in midair like that… It was not something that could be achieved with only one’s body and its natural field, no matter how hard you tried, and Kaleb had tried. He leapt and jumped and even managed to form that cone of pressure, but it was feeble and embarrassing compared to the elegant pulsion that those travellers achieved.

The use of fields wasn’t ruled out, though. Kaleb was, at this moment, wearing his windsuit, one of the things that gave him the most joy in his life. The rings of coils wrapped comfortably around his arms and legs and torso, sewn into the fabric of the suit, and they extended and controlled the field generated from his body, allowing him to fly through the mists – and to experience, briefly, freedom from the parallel field that kept him trapped on the pillar. He could navigate in the air like the grey gulls that wheeled about the pillar on their leather wings, filling the damp air with their shrill cries. But, without capacitance spikes, even with the windsuit, he could hardly cross the lateral distance that separated the pillars from Haethea.

Other than waiting for another ship to come, a possibility that wouldn’t necessarily ever arise, and even if it did, a possibility that he would have to contend with the chiefs in order to embrace, there was a second much more risky option. This option was the reason Kaleb was wearing his windsuit today, and the reason he was uneasily looking off into the mists. This option was to simply let go – to jump off the side of the pillar, to embrace the parallel field, and let it determine where you could go. He’d prepared himself for this day: over the course of weeks he’d gradually sequestered a series of supplies in a gap he’d covered with brush. Ropes, hooks, sleeping roll, clothes, dried food, water, and a bag to put it all in. He’d got everything together in preparation for his secret departure.

Kaleb had grown up on stories told amongst children about people, driven mad by the mists, who’d jump off the edge of the pillar … of neighbours vanished and odd folk disappearing from the settlement. The official reason was monsters, and being as they were not an uncommon occurrence, it seemed unlikely that a monster attack would be greeted only with silence and with only a single disappearance – though Kaleb supposed there must be monsters that hunted like that too.

On his journey to the bottom of the pillar, he had extended himself down on a rope below the edge of the structure, and had felt more strongly than ever the desire to simply detach his harness, and fall through those soft swirling shapes to wherever they might lead. But he had resisted that time. He had feared, after all, the endless ocean that extended in every direction from Haethea.

Logically, he reasoned that falling would be the easiest way to avoid getting tired from using his field. That way, he could traverse the distance to the nearest pillar using the parallel field rather than his own, and could simply activate his field when he approached whatever pillar was under them, and guide himself towards it. But any voyage like that was sure to be one way: there was no way for someone without spikes to easily fly upward against the parallel field. And another issue was that none who had supposedly fallen off the pillar had ever made it back up again…

Between his dissatisfaction with his life and his fantasy of the world beyond, his fear stretched like a thin bowstring.

He was afraid of the possibility that he might not make it across the sea of mists; that he would simply disappear into the abyss. He was also afraid of the monsters that lived out there too. People say they used fields as well –used them to hunt. A lone person was bound to be easy prey to one of those beasts. Occasionally one of the monsters attacked the settlement, and Kaleb had helped defend against a few of these encroachments; the settlers would brandish crude adapted farming tools and try to convince the enormous beasts that it wasn’t worth their time. The beasts could use fields as easily as humans, and projectiles were hardly useful in such circumstances. They had once managed to kill one. It was a huge creature, something like a larger and far more vicious grey gull, with many more limbs and it had killed a number of the settlers too. He vividly remembered its huge carcass, black and twisted in strange directions, with too many arms and legs alongside its wings, being pushed off the edge of the pillar and out into the mists. Yet mostly it was some indescribable fear that he couldn’t put his finger on that kept him on the pillar – which someone probably could guess at as the fear of things unknown. But the weight between his desire and his fear had changed slowly in favour of his eventual escape. Freedom, to him, was gradually becoming worth more than the possibility of a few broken bones, or even death.

And so Kaleb had made a decision. He decided he was going to let go. He didn’t have the ability to procure anything beyond his windsuit to help him, and so he was just going to have to fall until he found something to land on. He would be able to slow down enough by using his windsuit to land safely – this he had tested over the length of the pillar, at least. But other than this, he would have to simply put his faith in the possibility of finding somewhere to land. He lowered his goggles over his eyes, and breathed in deeply.

He reflected on his life so far. In amongst his nerves he could hardly get a good view of it, he couldn’t clearly see the faces of his parents – dead from monster attack years hence– he couldn’t picture those of his friends, nor those that he’d even seen this morning. Rather, it was a rush of emotions and expressions that swirled around like the mists, insubstantial and eluding his grasp. He would never see them again. He hadn’t even told them he was leaving. He figured that the chiefs would try and stop him, and he hadn’t wanted to put up the fight, or have his windsuit confiscated to hinder him. He would just become one of those people who had mysteriously disappeared from the pillar one day, and there might be a service, or there might not. But it didn’t matter, in the end. He needed to go. He took one last breath, emptied his mind, and then plunged off the side of Haethea, and into the ocean of mist.

The mists immediately closed around him and the air whipped the sounds away from his ears. He plugged them with some bits of cloth, and the dull roar lessened. Now all he could hear was his own breath and his heartbeat. The pillar whipped past him, the thirty kilometers that it extended below the settlement would take some time for him to traverse. He carefully activated his windsuit, and fellow clear of Haethea’s sides, but staying close enough to know where the pillar was.

The wind whipped at his clothes and hair, and he felt the vibrations through his body. The pressure of the air was palpable to him now, resisting his fall, but spreading and escaping around his body. It had always struck him that air was a substance with resistance whenever he fell through it and even now, he could feel it pushing back, the occasional gusts and turbulence spinning him or moving him around.

It took fifteen minutes for him to build up velocity and then whizz past the end of the pillar. He gasped when it happened. It was so abrupt. He could tell that he was travelling very fast, but the sudden disappearance of the ground meant that this was it. There was no way for him to return. Without finding another pillar. Instead, all around him the mists extended.

He flipped upside down and watched as the pillar he had lived on for his whole life disappeared into the mists above him. Just like that, it was gone.

He returned to facing the downwards vector of the parallel field. He felt the rushing of the air all around him, and the swirling patterns of the mist rose up around him. Travelling at this speed, he could see the various dimensions that they had, vast waves and huge towering structures of mist, turning in upon themselves and revolving about him. This was a world he had never seen before, a world separate from the effects of his home pillar, he came to see the mists not as a backdrop to a place, but the way that they filled up space. This was a view that only those who had gone before him had seen.

He free fell onwards, but no sight of another pillar appeared before him. All was orange in varying shades of luminescence. As he fell, he began to feel less anxious and more uneasy. Sweat had gathered on him under his clothes, while the mists had moistened his outer garments. The light in the pillars was all from the mists, an unchanging glow, and the only darkness was had by closing the curtains. In the settlement the bell was rung and a mechanical device kept time. But there was only the time that everyone agreed upon. Yet out here, among the mists, Kaleb felt the oppressive sameness of the mists even more clearly.

His mind, beginning to lose its focus of searching for land, began to wonder when those in the settlement would discover he was missing, would perhaps send out a search party. He tried to turn his thoughts to his current endeavour, to regain focus on finding a pillar, but there was nothing to see. He knew that the danger of collision with a pillar was escalating as he fell, yet his attention was drifting. The wind was burning against his temples now, and he pulled his scarf up and wrapped it as best he could around the entirety of his face. The intensity of falling was not something that he had considered, nor the strange boredom that joined with it. He began to wonder, as time moved on, if this was how he would die: just from the oppressive wind, pressing against him.

He abruptly decided to use his field, and let the transparent wings spread out from the windsuit slowly. He felt the familiar tingling as his body was shrouded in its force. Suddenly, he felt the wind change its flow around him, and when he looked off to his sides the mist was being cut as if by a knife, streaming out and making vortices behind his passage, and he began to experience the feeling of lift. He was still too heavy for his field to generate a significant enough span for him to go up easily, but as his destination was below him, he simply angled himself and glided on, and the unbearable wind abated. He remained, circling lower like this for some time, allowing himself to regain some of his composure. He had not expected the incessant mist to be such a horrible weight. He had thought that he would have found another pillar by now. He looked around. There was nothing to do but go on.

He let his field lapse and continued to fall.

***

He knew not how long he had been falling, but he felt it in every muscle and bone. He’d slowed and circled using his windsuit several more times, but even that added to his muscle’s crying pain. He was shaking all over, shivering from the bombardment that his body was undergoing, and the need to stay with a posture that would allow him to remain steady against the changes of the wind, that wouldn’t send him spinning off and make him unbearably dizzy.

But the truth was that he was getting tired. He could feel himself losing control. If he wasn’t careful, he might just die here.

He decided to strike out on an angle. While it was unlikely that it would change anything, perhaps he was just in a space that went downward for a long way, and there would be walls of pillars not far out of his trajectory that he just couldn’t see.

He activated his windsuit again, feeling it pull against his field once more. He couldn’t do this too many more times. He was already nearing his limit. He moved out of the line of his fall, and swooped out over the mists. Travelling like this, even if it didn’t relax his body, which was still pressed flat with hands out in a poor copy of a grey gull’s flight. He gritted his teeth against the trembling of his muscles.

Kaleb fell for what seemed to him to be near on ten bells– the entire length of a day and night in the settlement. He had never felt so sore in his life, and desperation had reared its head. Death now seemed like a real option. It wasn’t something he had concerned himself with before, thinking that he would drop for a few bells at most. But this unbelievable distance sent him into spirals of giddy delirium and terror. He feared he had made an enormous mistake.

Just as the faint touch of madness was creeping into his mind, Kaleb’s eyes suddenly saw something dark outlined against the mist. He turned quickly to see it, but it seemed that he when he focused on it, it disappeared. Kaleb urged his sore body on once more, and extended his field out. It felt as if he were ripping his very bones out of his skin, and he could have screamed or vomited. He closed his eyes, prayed it was not a monster, though at this point he probably would have been happy for a quick death, and then looked again to where he’d seen the shape.

And there, appearing out the mists like some glorious apparition was something miraculous, – or, more probably, the wholly coincidental. It was another pillar! It was tiny, to be sure. A single rock. But it was a pillar, and that was all Kaleb needed to know. He used the last of his strength to extend his field further, and slowed to a pace that would allow him to land.

As he approached the form, he noticed something peculiar: it wasn’t staying still relative to his position. He frowned and watched it closer, but it was undeniably the truth: this pillar was moving. It had both spin and rotation and, he realised as he drew closer, and unless he was being tricked by the parallax of the mists, movement as well. No adventurer or traveler had ever mentioned that pillars could move! Yet what he was seeing here was undoubtedly a pillar, it had the exact same colouration as his home, and the same strange shape that was somewhere between hardened melted wax, coiled rope and hard edged geometric construction, and it was undoubtedly moving. It also seemed, much to his surprise, moving perfectly leisurely in a perpendicular fashion to the parallel field’s influence. While Haethea’s suspension in the middle of the mist gave him pause due to its apparent ignorance of the rules that everything else followed, he took it for granted – it was firstly, his home; but it was also possible to believe, while looking at one end, that the other was attached to something – essentially, the pillar he lived on was too large for him to conceive of effectively. Seeing this pillar illustrate the improbable reality of the situation was what gave rise to Kaleb’s shock.

Kaleb approached the pillar with gladness though. No matter how difficult it would be to stay attached to a moving pillar, he would be endlessly grateful for anywhere he might be able to rest, even if only for a moment. The pillar seemed to be about two kilometers in diameter, with a rough oblong shape. As he approached the surface, he noticed a peculiar sensation, as if something was tugging him in a different direction – a breeze perhaps? He looked around, but the mists were undisturbed for the most part, though they were behaving oddly, particularly in the direction that the pillar had come from. He ignored the sensation, and spiralled down before collapsing on the surface of the pillar. Due to its slow rotation, he supposed that eventually it would be the bottom. He would have to be careful of that. But all he could experience at that moment was the beautiful feeling of release from the buffeting winds, and the strain that the fall had put on his body. He crawled forward, his legs and arms on fire with every movement, gasping at the hot needles of exhaustion in every crevice of his flesh. But he had made it. It might be tiny, barely even a pillar, but he had made it to a new place. Somewhere that wasn’t Haethea. He’d escaped.