As he sailed, Kaleb dropped further and the light he’d glimpsed disappeared above him, but he was not concerned. Gradually, peeking through the mists, he began to spy the enormous shapes of the pillars.

They were similar to that pillar he had spent his life thus far on. They had the same peculiar forms and strange structures, and they all stood, perfectly immobile, while the mists roiled around them with their strange glow. The pillars loomed up before him, and below him. They were everywhere! He could see yet more faint suggestions of pillars in front of him. The scene delighted him like nothing else, and he let out a guffaw. One of Iowara’s warnings had been about wires in the pillars, and Killim kept a close eye out for them. They often had flags on them, he’d said, but where there were fewer people sometimes these things were neglected, or taken for granted. As he approached the pillars, Kaleb felt a new world beginning to open up before him. This was it! This was the reason that he had decided to go on a journey, to see the pillars! He wanted this feeling, this feeling of soaring through the towering trunks, in between them as if he was a child, no, an insect running through a crowd of enormous legs. He thought he might have been in love.

He reached the first pillar and slowed down, plummeting further. He charged the suit and his weight decreased relative to the wind resistance, driving him upward slightly. He slowed and circled around the structure, spiralling slowly downward, and then continued on through the large black shapes. He could see occasional lights all around him now, small twinkling things and larger glaring ones that cast enormous triangular shapes into the comparatively dark mist.

Suddenly, his first encounter with a cable loomed out at him from the dark, unmarked. He gulped as he narrowly avoided it. They were hard to see travelling at speed. Kaleb slowed himself by angling upward, using the parallel field to decrease his momentum. Then he drifted on through the pillars, looking around him. So this is what it’s like. It wasn’t a very populous area, it was mostly just occasional lights, and a few more brightly glowing settlements. He flew between them, avoiding their ambiance. He wasn’t quite sure why, but their appearance seemed so abrupt and immediate that he didn’t trust himself to stop and see what these other places were like. Those that he flew next to were different from his home though: they were steel and cable, and had obviously been built more recently. There were no structures built in the old style that he was used to. He thought of his own room, its clay-like walls, lumpy and thick but warm and welcoming in their curves and soft contours. Here everything was sharp. It felt like he would cut himself on it. Everything was also flimsy – or perhaps it was better to say light. It seemed to float alongside the pillars, rather than rest on them. The walkways weren’t adhered to the pillars, but seemed to be stuck into them with various barbs and poles. There was no need to care about the support that the pillar was providing for them, they had simply been driven into the surface of the pillars. It must have taken a lot of effort, he thought, thinking of the durability of pillars.

He flew on, and before long a strange feeling began to overtake him. This was the place he’d wanted to visit, the world that he’d been seeking for years. The pillars were close enough to each other that you could move between them, and there were people, other people, people he didn’t know or didn’t recognise on sight all around him. But he felt a pressure laying itself on his chest. He looked behind him and around to his sides, but there was nothing threatening him. Yet as the pillars kept extending before him, and the lights glimmered and disappeared around him, he realised that he was afraid. It was one thing to think of a larger world, and it was another to experience it, and he hadn’t reckoned on the overwhelming size of it. Not the pillars themselves, no, they were large, but they weren’t unimaginable based on his experience of his home. Rather it was the mists and the whole collection of the pillars that weighed down on him; there were so many, and they just kept rising up before his vision, looming up out of the pale luminescence. They came and went and came and went, and he couldn’t tell one way or another which way he’d come. He realised that he was already lost, unable to tell where on earth he might be. He blinked rapidly, and felt his heart rate increase. He breathed in deeply and tried to calm down. He remembered Iowara telling him about the system that had been implemented in most places: a series of numbers that determined position in a three dimensional grid. These numbers were pinned to the pillars, or even carved into them, but they were sometimes hard to find. Iowara said that he should look for red lights. He slowed his pace further and looked around, swooping and curving in slow loops. He descended for about a kilometer, and finally, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw a red glint. He turned and moved off towards it, and slowly approached a light on a pole on a small ledge. He descended below it and then swooped upward, negating his forward velocity at the same moment that he reached the ledge. He stumbled and fell on his landing, but he could pick himself up. His muscles felt sore, and seemed to release all their tension on his return back to standing. He sat for a moment, panting. For the first time in his life, he felt truly alone. Even when he’d gone on his trip up and down the pillar he’d still been sure of his location and where he was in relation to everything. But out here… he still didn’t understand the first thing about it all. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing more. He was calming down. He’d wanted an adventure, hadn’t he? And he wasn’t lost. Kaleb stood and stepped over to the light. On the ground was carved a set of numbers, etched into the extremely hard pillar. That must have taken some effort, he thought. The same numbers were printed on the lamp. It was a sequence of three numbers, each five positions long before the decimal point and representing kilometers from the arbitrary 0 point that Iowara had said was in the largest settlement in cable city. There were another three numbers after the decimal point. This is where I am, Kaleb thought. He drew out the small terminal that Iowara had given him, and input the numbers. Immediately, a spot showed up on a grid. There were a few other stored locations in the device, and he scrolled between them. They were listings of towns, settlements, and other such things. Little information was provided on them. There was, pinned to the top of the list, the location of the Independent Meteorological Institute. It was nearly 10,000 kilometers away, and upward. It would be a long and hard journey. Still, Kaleb thought, at least I know which way I’m going.

He pulled some of the foods he’d collected on the fragment out of his bag, and snacked idly, waiting for his muscles to recover. He’d never had to use his field for prolonged periods of time before, it was always in short bursts. Without capacitance spikes the load was thrust completely on what his body could produce and emit at any given moment, and this, just as Iowara had warned him, would result in soreness – both muscular and skeletal – until his body adapted and got used to it.

Now that the fear had abated, excitement returned to Kaleb. It was extraordinary, really, to be amongst the pillars like this. He’d never had the chance to really watch them from a distance before. They were truly impressive structures, enormous and chaotic, yet seeming to be possessed of some internal order and structure. He watched the mist curl around them. The silence… It reminded him of home. The mist dampened all sounds, and here he could hardly hear a thing. It was so quiet and peaceful. He lay back against his pack, and looked upward at the point where the pillars all faded to a kind of pale orange.

Kaleb rose again on the currents of air, moving slower than he had when he began his journey, watching the air carefully for any cables, but as this was a largely uninhabited zone there weren’t many about.

He glided forward through the mists, looking at the glimmering lights that showed up in the distance. He hadn’t seen any people yet. Then, looming up in front of him he saw a far denser arrangement of cables than he had so far encountered. Kaleb slowed his approach to try and get a good look at the obstruction. As his vision of the structure grew clearer, he saw it was a settlement, arranged along the rise of a set of pillars, but there were no lights in the houses or on the walkways. It was entirely dark. He flew forward slowly, fear climbing back up his throat. There was nobody moving through the settlement, and he saw that all the buildings were dilapidated and abandoned. He drew closer to the pillar and swooped to a landing on the walkway. It teetered ominously, and he threw his arms out for balance, managing to retain his place on the side of the pillar. The structures around him creaked and groaned in an ominous fashion. They were sounds he wasn’t used to: the sounds of metal and steel. He wondered if this was the settlement he was supposed to find. Was it no longer a place where people lived? Kaleb took out the terminal that Iowara had gifted him, and scrolled through its menu. The little light that it gave off from its screen made him feel an overwhelming loneliness in the otherwise dark shapes of the settlement. He found that the settlement he was bound for was still a distance away. This was some other place, unlisted. What was this place? He found no indication on the terminal, and so decided to stay true to his desire to have an adventure, and have a look around.

He heard a sound of clattering metal from behind him. He turned and looked, but saw nothing. A shiver moved up his spine. He looked closer at the structure, as he approached the place he had heard the sound come from. Perhaps there were people here still? The town seemed to have been destroyed and reconstructed several times. The walkways showed the evidence of bending and warping, and the metal sheeting had gouges clawed out of it. At the sight of them, Kaleb gulped. This was the sign of a monster attack. They must be long gone now, Kaleb thought to himself, this place has been abandoned for years. The dust had settled in the claw marks, and he used the evidence to try to convince his shuddering heart to calm itself. Still, he wondered what kind of monster could do something like this? It was certainly something more powerful than any he had encountered before, and he was worried by the spaces between the claw marks, larger by far than his hand width. He reached out and traced the rent metal sheeting before him, his teeth clenched in his jaw. But it was only a monster attack, he thought, I wonder why the people left? His home had endured many attacks over the years, though perhaps none as aggressive as this, and they always managed to overcome the invaders and rebuild anything that had been broken.

He kept on moving along the walkway, and eventually came to a large structure made of the same thin sheet metal as many of the others. It looked incredibly fragile to Kaleb, who was used to the thick and dense material used in construction on Haethea. It was a very large building, though, far larger than any individual structure on the Lone Pillar. To Kaleb it looked like a still and unmoving version of Iowara’s tent, so thin were its walls and so delciate were its reinforcing bars. This was a different world to the one he had grown up in. He approached the door of the large building. It was warped and buckled, and he bent down and moved through the opening. Dust had settled deeply all on the floor of the building. He looked at it, and saw the imprints of many different boots, some recovered with dust, others fresher. But despite that there had obviously been people moving around in the building, there was still too much dust to suggest inhabitation. It lingered in the air, caught in shafts of light it drifted slowly around. The buildng was full of debris and crates that had been dismantled or broken, shelves that were empty and a variety of objects he couldn’t identify. Kaleb turned and looked over the door he had come through.

“What are you doing here?” He nearly yelped as a voice sounded out from behind him. He turned again, wondering how he had missed someone in the room – it was quite dark, he supposed. He peered through the dust and saw, off in a corner, sitting on a chair, a man. As he glanced towards the man, a feeling rose within his stomach and then up through his chest and out along all his limbs and up to the very tip of his skull, and that was the feeling of absolute terror. This man is dangerous. Thought Kaleb. He had never had such an overwhelming feeling of fear from an individual before. Perhaps it was the circumstances of their meeting? Perhaps it was the place? Or was it something about the man? But as Kaleb’s mind raced to try and figure out what had caused his immediate reaction, his eyes settled on the man’s right hand, which was clasping his left and propped under his jaw.

Except it was not a hand. While the man had white skin the hand was black. It had the appearance not of skin but that of an insect’s carapace. Was it a glove? But Kaleb had the overwhelming feeling that this hand was not a glove. As Kaleb’s adrenaline excited mind raced along, attempting to both figure out the problem of his fear and its origin, his mouth opened and closed, and then he simply bolted. I need to get the hell out of here! Was the only thought that crossed his mind. Except as soon as he moved, launching into a sprint as hard as he could, hoping he could reach the door and escape, he was suddenly faced with the man again. His mind couldn’t register exactly what had happened, as the sound of an enormous crack and then something whistling through the air reached his ears, he realised that he was hearing the sound of the man’s passage after his appearance before him. As he came to terms with the unnatural speed the man had moved at, that same man’s fearsome black right hand loomed up before him, pointing directly at his face, seeming now less like a hand and more like a dagger, and his left hand –which seemed like it was just a regular hand– reached out and grabbed his throat, lifting him off the floor as easily as one might lift a jar off a shelf.

“I asked you what your business is here?”

Kaleb struggled briefly, futilely, against the overwhelming and incredible strength of the man. There was nothing to do. Escape was useless. He thought, as his vision darkened around the edges, that maybe, just maybe, his adventure would be over before it had really begun.